In France we see native manufactures, free internalintercourse, foreign trade, fisheries, navigation, and naval power-- in a word, all the attributes of a great, mighty, and richnation (which it had cost England the persevering efforts ofcenturies to acquire) -- called into existence by a great geniuswithin the space of a few years, as it were by a magician's wand;and afterwards all of them yet more speedily annihilated by theiron hand of fanaticism and despotism.
We see the principle of free trade contending in vain underunfavourable conditions against restriction powerfully enforced;the Hanseatic League is ruined, while Holland sinks under the blowsof England and France.
That a restrictive commercial policy can be operative for goodonly so far as it is supported by the progressive civilisation andfree institutions of a nation, we learn from the decay of Venice,Spain, and Portugal, from the relapse of France in consequence ofthe revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and from the history ofEngland, in which country liberty kept pace at all times with theadvance of industry, trade, and national wealth.
That, on the contrary, a highly advanced state of civilisation,with or without free institutions, unless supported by a suitablesystem of commercial policy, will prove but a poor guarantee for anation's economic progress, may be learnt on the one hand from thehistory of the North American free states, and on the other fromthe experience of Germany.
Modern Germany, lacking a system of vigorous and unitedcommercial policy, exposed in her home markets to competition witha foreign manufacturing power in every way superior to her own,while excluded at the same time from foreign markets by arbitraryand often capricious restrictions, and very far indeed from ******that progress in industry to which her degree of culture entitlesher, cannot even maintain her previously acquired position, and ismade a convenience of (like a colony) by that very nation whichcenturies ago was worked upon in like manner by the merchants ofGermany, until at last the German states have resolved to securetheir home markets for their own industry, by the adoption of aunited vigorous system of commercial policy.
The North American free states, who, more than any other nationbefore them, are in a position to benefit by ******* of trade, andinfluenced even from the very cradle of their independence by thedoctrines of the cosmopolitan school, are striving more than anyother nation to act on that principle.But owing to wars with GreatBritain, we find that nation twice compelled to manufacture at homethe goods which it previously purchased under free trade from othercountries, and twice, after the conclusion of peace, brought to thebrink of ruin by free competition with foreigners, and therebyadmonished of the fact that under the present conditions of theworld every great nation must seek the guarantees of its continuedprosperity and independence, before all other things, in theindependent and uniform development of its own powers andresources.
