Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/86

 who went into a shop and asked for a globe, not a terrestrial or a celestial one, but a globe of Prussia.

To return to America. There are plenty of symptoms that protection has done all it can for the United States, and that the sooner it receives notice to quit, the better for all parties. One of these symptoms is the formation of "rings" and "trusts" within the protected industries for the more thorough exploitation of the monopoly granted to them. Now, "rings" and "trusts" are truly American institutions, and, where they exploit natural advantages, they are generally, though grumblingly, submitted to. The transformation of the Pennsylvanian oil supply into a monopoly by the Standard Oil Company is a proceeding entirely in keeping with the rules of capitalist production. But if the sugar refiners attempt to transform the protection granted them, by the nation, against foreign competition, into a monopoly against the home consumer, that is to say, against the same nation that granted the protection, that is quite a different thing. Yet the large sugar refiners have formed a "trust" which aims at nothing else. And the sugar trust is not the only one of its kind. Now, the formation of such trusts in protected industries is the surest sign that protection has done its work, and is changing its character; that it protects the manufacturer no longer against the foreign importer, but against the home consumer; that it has manufactured, at least in the special branch concerned, quite enough, if not too many manufacturers; that the money it puts into the purse of these manufacturers is money thrown away, exactly as in Germany.

In America, as elsewhere, protection is bolstered up by the argument that free trade will only benefit England. The best proof to the contrary is that in England