Page:Karl Marx - Free Trade - tr. Florence Kelley (1888).djvu/8

4 forcibly abbreviating the transition from the mediæval to the modern mode of production." Such was protection at its origin in the seventeenth century, such it remained well into the nineteenth century. It was then held to be the normal policy of every civilized state in western Europe. The only exceptions were—the smaller states of Germany and Switzerland—not from dislike of the system, but from the impossibility of applying it to such small territories.

It was under the fostering wing of protection that the system of modern industry—production by steam-moved machinery—was hatched and developed in England during the last third of the eighteenth century. And, as if tariff-protection was not sufficient, the wars against the French Revolution helped to secure to England the monopoly of the new industrial methods. For more than twenty years English men-of-war cut off the industrial rivals of England from their respective colonial markets, while they forcibly opened these markets to English commerce. The secession of the South American colonies from the rule of their European mother-countries, the conquest by England of all French and Dutch colonies worth having, the progressive subjugation of India, turned the people of all these immense territories into customers for English goods. England thus supplemented the protection she practised at home, by the Free Trade she forced upon her possible customers abroad; and, thanks to this happy mixture of both systems, at the end of the wars, in 1815, she found herself, with regard to all important branches of industry, in possession of the virtual monopoly of the trade of the world.

This monopoly was further extended and strengthened during the ensuing years of peace. The start