Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/761

Rh training if he were thoroughly in earnest. Suppose that it were proved beyond his own doubt to be so in the case of any statesman. Would he drop his work and take to the floor-cloth? Would he even spend his idle hours in that way? If a proposition to do so were made him, he would reject it on two grounds. He would not hesitate to say that it injured both himself and the woman. It would reduce his own opportunities for the enjoyment of life, and it would reduce the woman's opportunities for the sustenance of her life.

He is right. In his own case and in the domestic allotment of specialties he gets at the right principle by instinct as well as by reasoning. It is when he comes to apply the same principle to international allotment of specialties that by some strange infatuation he goes wrong. He plainly sees that when the man A leaves to the man or woman B work that he could do with less effort and higher success, both A and B are benefited. What he does not see is that in like manner when the country A leaves to the country B the prosecution of industries in which A might excel, both countries are benefited.

He is not without some excuse for his mistake. The country A always has in it some men and some capital seeking employment. Why not employ these before we generously leave to others work for which we have greater advantages than they? Why not domesticate some foreign industry which will give them work? For the same reason that a man who loses a good job waits awhile and hunts another good one, rather than tie himself to a bad one. There are always displacement and transitory idleness for a part of both the labor and capital of a country which is making progress. It may be painful for a time to the temporarily idle and displaced, but it is part of a necessary process of readjustment and replacement. Hence, it is better for all immediately better for some, and finally better for even the temporarily displaced. This, of course, when the displacement comes as a result of progress, as in the invention of a new machine, the opening of new routes of commerce, or the better organization of industry. If it comes from the exhaustion of mines, a shortage of money, a collapse after over-speculation, or some other cause which is retrogressive rather than progressive, then, indeed, will the idle capital and labor, if given sufficient time, take up industries formerly left to other countries, and will need no government stimulation to do so. Increase of population has this natural effect. A declining or crowded country is forced into less profitable industries, taking them away from the countries where, while not so profitable, they have been the most profitable within the reach of the unfortunate inhabitants. It thus employs a part of the labor and capital thrown out of work by its decline or crowding.

The capital thrown out of work by industrial progress will, if not destroyed, soon find better work, and so will the labor, if accompanied by sufficient energy and versatility to seek it. But, so long as there