Page:Karl Marx - Free Trade - tr. Florence Kelley (1888).djvu/9

Rh which England had obtained during the war, was increased from year to year; she seemed to distance more and more all her possible rivals. The exports of manufactured goods in ever growing quantities became indeed a question of life and death to that country. And there seemed but two obstacles in the way: the prohibitive or protective legislation of other countries, and the taxes upon the import of raw materials and articles of food in England.

Then the Free Trade doctrines of classical political economy—of the French physiocrats and their English successors, Adam Smith and Ricardo—became popular in the land of John Bull. Protection at home was needless to manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, and whose very existence was staked on the expansion of their exports. Protection at home was of advantage to none but the producers of articles of food and other raw materials, to the agricultural interest, which, under then existing circumstances in England, meant the receivers of rent, the landed aristocracy. And this kind of protection was hurtful to the manufacturers. By taxing raw materials it raised, the price of the articles manufactured from them; by taxing food, it raised the price of labor; in both ways, it placed the British manufacturer at a disadvantage as compared with his foreign competitor. And, as all other countries sent to England chiefly agricultural products, and drew from England chiefly manufactured goods, repeal of the English protective duties on corn and raw materials generally, was at the same time an appeal to foreign countries, to do away with, or at least, to reduce, in return, the import duties levied by them on English manufactures.

After a long and violent struggle, the English industrial capitalists, already in reality the leading class of