Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/636

 was a good thing; not that I had ever thought out the matter, but that I had accepted this conclusion because I had heard many men whom I believed wiser than I say so. But this particular speaker had, so far as one of his audience was concerned, overshot his mark. His arguments set me thinking, just as when a boy my companion's solution of the iron-ship mystery had set me thinking. I said to myself: The effect of a tariff is to increase the cost of bringing goods from abroad. Now, if this benefits a country, then all difficulties, dangers, and impediments which increase the cost of bringing goods from abroad are likewise beneficial. If this theory be correct, then the city which is the hardest to get at has the most advantageous situation: pirates and shipwrecks contribute to national prosperity by raising the price of freight and the cost of insurance; and improvements in navigation, in railroads and steamships, are injurious. Manifestly this is absurd.

And then I looked further. The speaker had dwelt on the folly of a great country like the United States exporting raw material and importing manufactured goods which might as well be made at home, and I asked myself. What is the motive which causes a people to export raw material and import manufactured goods? I found that it could be attributed to nothing else than the fact that they could in this way get the goods cheaper, that is, with less labor. I looked to transactions between individuals for parellels to this trade between nations, and found them in plenty—the farmer selling his wheat and buying flour; the grazier sending his wool to a market and bringing back cloth and blankets; the tanner buying back leather in shoes, instead of making them himself. I saw, when I came to analyze them, that these exchanges between nations were precisely the same thing as exchanges between individuals; that they were, in fact, nothing but exchanges between individuals of different nations; that they were all prompted by the desire and led to the result of getting the greatest return for the least expenditure of labor; that the social condition in which such exchanges did not take place was the naked barbarism of the Terra del Fuegians; that just in proportion to the division of labor and the increase of trade were the increase of wealth and the progress of civilization. And so, following up, turning, analyzing, and testing all the protectionist arguments, I came to conclusions which I have ever since retained.

Now, just such mental operations as this are all that is required in the study of political economy. Nothing more is needed (but this is needed) than the habit of careful thought—the making sure of every step without jumping to conclusions. This habit of jumping to conclusions—of considering essentially different things as the same because of some superficial resemblance—is the source of the manifold and mischievous errors which political economy has to combat.

But I can probably, by a few examples, show you what I mean more easily than in any other way. Were I to put to you the child's