Generally the interests and necessities of the young states introduce a prohibitory system to exclude the manufactures of the old one; and it is this necessity which England is now experiencing, and vainly endeavours to obviate, by introducing a system of free trade. But in one memorable instance, and one only, the preponderance of a particular power rendered this impossible, and illustrated on a great scale, and over the whole civilized world, for a course of centuries, the effects of a perfect freedom of trade. The Roman empire, spreading as it did round the shores of the Mediterranean, afforded the utmost facilities for a great internal traffic; while the equal policy of the emperors, and indeed the necessity of their situation, introduced a perfect freedom in the interchange of commodities between every part of their vast dominions. And what was the result? Why, that the agriculture of Italy was destroyed--that 300,000 acres in the champaign of Naples alone reverted to a state of nature, and were tenanted only by wild-boars and buffaloes, before a single barbarian had crossed the Alps--that the Grecian cities were entirely maintained by grain from the plains of Podolia--and the mistress of the world, according to the plaintive expression of the Roman annalist, depended for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile.[20] Not the corruption of manners, not the tyranny of the Caesars, occasioned the ruin of the empire, for they affected only a limited class of the people; but the practical working of free trade, joined to domestic slavery, which destroyed the agricultural population of the heart of the empire, and left only effeminate urban multitudes to contend with the hardy barbarians of the north.
[20] Tacitus, Vol. xiv. p. 21; Michelet's _Hist. de France,_ Vol. i. p. 217.
The advocates of free trade are not insensible to the superior advantages of the rising over the old state in agriculture, and of the latter over the former in manufactures. On the contrary, it is a secret but clear sense of the reality of this distinction, which causes them so strenuously to contend for the removal of all restrictions. They hope, by so doing, to effect a great extension of their sales in foreign countries, without, as they pretend, creating any diminution in their own. But the views which have now been given show that this is a vain conceit, and demonstrate how it has happened, that the more strenuously England contends for the principles of free trade, and the more energetically that she carries them into practice, the more decided is the resistance which she meets on foreign states in the attempt, and the more rigorously do they act on the principles of protection. It is because they are striving to become manufacturing and commercial communities that they do this--it is a clear sense of the ruin which awaits them, if deluged with British goods, which makes them so strenuous in their system of exclusion. The more that we open our trade, the more will they close theirs. They think, and not without reason, that we advocate unrestricted commercial intercourse only because it would be profitable to us, and deprecate our old system of exclusion only because it has now been turned against ourselves. "Now, then," say they, "is the time, when England is suffering under the system of exclusion, which we have at length had sense enough to borrow from her, to draw closer the bonds of that system, and complete the glorious work of our own elevation on her ruins. Our policy is clearly chalked out by hers; we have only to do what she deprecates, and we are sure to be right." It is evident that these views will be permanently entertained by them, because they are founded on the strongest of all instincts that of self-preservation. When we cease to be a great manufacturing nation, when we are no longer formidable rivals, they will open their harbours; but not till then. In striving to introduce a system of free trade, therefore, we gratuitously inflict a severe wound on our domestic industry, without any chance even of a compensation in that which is destined for the foreign markets. We let in their goods into our harbours, but we do not obtain admission, nor will we ever obtain admission, for ours into theirs. The reciprocity is, and ever must be, all on one side.