Page:Report on Manufactures (Hamilton).djvu/20

 report, will be cited) that certain nations grant bounties on the exportation of particular commodities to enable their own workmen to undersell and supplant all competitors in the countries to which these commodities are sent. Hence the undertakers of a new manufacture have to contend not only with the natural disadvantages a new undertaking, but with the gratuities and remunerations which other governments bestow. To be enabled to contend with success, it is evident that the interference and aid of their own governments are indispensable.

Combinations by those engaged in a particular branch of business in one country to frustrate the first efforts to introduce it into another, by temporary sacrifices, recompensed, perhaps, by extraordinary indemnifications of the government of such country, are believed to have existed and are not to be regarded as destitute of probability. The existence or assurance of aid from the government of the country in which the business is to be introduced may be essential to fortify adventurers against the dread of such combinations, to defeat their effects, if formed, and to prevent their being formed, by demonstrating that they must in the end prove fruitless.

Whatever room there may be for an expectation that the industry of a people, under the direction of private interests, will, upon equal terms, find out the most beneficial employment for itself, there is none for a reliance that it will struggle against the force of unequal terms, or will of itself surmount all the adventitious barriers to a successful competition, which may have been erected, either by the advantages naturally acquired from practice and previous possession of the ground or by those which may have sprung from positive regulations and an artificial policy. This general reflection might alone suffice as an answer to the objection under examination exclusively of the weighty considerations which have been particularly urged.

The objections to the pursuit of manufactures in the United States, which next present themselves to discussion represent an impracticability of success, arising from three causes—scarcity of hands, dearness of labor, want of capital.

The two first circumstances are, to a certain extent, real, and, within due limits, ought to be admitted as obstacles to the success of manufacturing enterprise in the United States, but there are various considerations which lessen their force and tend to afford an assurance that they are not sufficient to prevent the advantageous prosecution of many very useful and extensive manufactories.

With regard to scarcity of hands, the fact itself must be applied with no small qualification to certain parts of the United States. There are large districts which may be considered as pretty fully peopled, and which, notwithstanding a continual drain for distant settlement, are thickly interspersed with flourishing and increasing towns. If these districts have not already reached the point at which the complaint of scarcity of hands ceases, they are not remote from it, and are approaching fast toward it; and having, perhaps, fewer attractions to agriculture than some other parts of the Union, they exhibit a proportionably stronger tendency toward other kinds of industry. In these districts may be discerned no inconsiderable maturity for manufacturing establishments.