Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/87

 not only the agriculturalists and landlords but even the manufacturers are turning protectionists. In the home of the "Manchester school" of free traders, on November 1, 1886, the Manchester chamber of commerce discussed a resolution "that, having waited in vain forty years for other nations to follow the free trade example of England, the chamber thinks the time has arrived to reconsider that position." The resolution was indeed rejected, but by 22 votes against 21! And that happened in the centre of the cotton manufacture, i. e., the only branch of English manufacture whose superiority in the open market seems still undisputed! But, then, even in that special branch inventive genius has passed from England to America. The latest improvements in machinery for spinning and weaving cotton have come, almost all, from America, and Manchester has to adopt them. In industrial inventions of all kinds, America has distinctly taken the lead, while Germany runs England very close for second place. The consciousness is gaining ground in England that that country's industrial monopoly is irretrievably lost, that she is still relatively losing ground, while her rivals are making progress, and that she is drifting into a position where she will have to be content with being one manufacturing nation among many, instead of, as she once dreamt, "the workshop of the world." It is to stave off this impending fate that protection, scarcely disguised under the veil of "fair trade" and retaliatory tariffs, is now invoked with such fervor by the sons of the very men who, forty years ago, knew no salvation but in free trade. And when English manufacturers begin to find that free trade is ruining them, and ask the government to protect them against their foreign competitors, then, surely, the moment has come for these competitors to retaliate by throwing