Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/516

500 are steamboats, railroad-iron, metals, and sugar. These very articles are the most highly protected ones in nearly every country. Too many steamers have been built, and freights have fallen below a paying price. What is there strange about that, when England has gone into the business with all the acquired advantages and prestige of her maritime supremacy, and most of the other nations are encouraging the building of ships with all their might by means of direct appropriations, differential duties, subventions, or special postal privileges? To make the disproportion still greater, protectionism is now at pains to reduce as much as possible the amount of freight which this surplus of ships will have to carry. By its discriminating duties, it tries to restrict, or even completely to prevent, the importation of foreign goods. If you will have a marine, and go to the extent of subsidizing it, you ought to have something for it to carry. Now, it can carry nothing but goods coming from abroad or going abroad. The protectionist policy of most of the countries practicing it can be reduced to the maxim, "Get by means of subsidies and prizes, as large a marine as possible, and secure for it, by protection and prohibitory duties, as little freight as possible"!

The deplorable effects of the protectionist régime are no less evident in general metallurgical industries. Protection is given everywhere by means of extravagant duties. In France, the duties represent from fifty to sixty per cent of the current value of the goods. Yet these industries are among those that are languishing the most. This is because the effort has been made everywhere by means of customs duties to stimulate them to excess. In the United States, Russia, Austria, Italy, Spain, and France, the people have been persuaded that they can not build enough furnaces and machine-shops; and the result has come about that Spain has by great exertions succeeded in sending a locomotive to England, the very home of steam-engine making, for sale. All countries are taxing their ingenuity to build up their export trade. Formerly this was the branch of business which returned proportionately the most profit; now it returns the least.

In no industry does the absurdity of the protectionist system make a clearer exhibition of itself than in the trade in sugar. France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Russia, are each laboring to make their national sugar industry the greatest in the world. Each of them gives premiums, by ingenious devices, upon exportation. The consequence of their efforts is, that this sugar industry, the object of extraordinary favors, has gone entirely astray from its natural ways. Production is pushed everywhere. The cost price is not considered, but only the export price; and the point has been reached that so much sugar is made in every country that the price is going down every day. Governments are induced by this fact to increase their favors, and then the price takes another fall.

While it has a less palpable influence in the generality of cases, the