TOPICS OF THE DAY.
PHILOSOPHY TEACHING BY EXAMPLE.
'THE great American Republic exhibits that stage of youth in which the stern resolves of young virtue are yielding to repeated temptation. It was firmly resolved, on the advice of the political fathers Jefferson and Washington, not to get into debt; but al- though it has paid off its debts oftener than once, the great Re- public shows a headlong propensity for youthful pleasures which ordinarily involve cost. Fighting is one of those pleasures ; and for all its resolution not to interfere with the affairs of other people, it has just had a great fighting-bout : the report of its Treasury is in part taken up with plans for paying the piper. Mr. Corwin, the Treasury steward, is quite resolved not to get into debt
this time, and he has a very cunning device to let the Republic enjoy its thrashing the foreigner and then to make some other foreigner pay the damages. The chief defects of his plan are, that its credit has been destroyed by repeated exposure, and that it is known to be impracticable. Mr. Corwin's most strenuous efforts are to back it up with ingenious pleas : but the worst of these • pleas is, that they have been exploded both by the science and the experience of the most enlightened nations. Mr. Corwin's argu- ment is a departmental amplification of that which adorns the President's synoptical report to Congress: he wants to provide for the deficit without a vexatious pressure on young Republic ; he therefore proposes to get his money by a higher tariff on foreign importations ; and the interesting part of his argument for us is, that although his pleas are perfectly stale and ex- ploded, they still cling to certain fond hearts in this country, and they%are put by him with a certain freshness of extravagance that imparts a novelty both of handling and of instructiveness.
Protection, for example, is one of the commendatory pleas for a high tariff; modestly put—only a little " incidental " protection, -and recommended with the ardent inventiveness of a schoolboy. For Mr. Corwin has positively found a new argument : he has found out a way of commending protection as a means of securing competition ! " The foreign importer," he argues, obtains admis- sion to the market, home industry first slackens, and is next dis- continued; and then the unprincipled foreigner " invariably " raises isis price—" there being no competition with the foreigner, he has possession of the market, and of course supplies it at the highest price which the demand will give him": so Mr. Corwin's idea is to get up a little protection to encourage domestic industry, espe- cially in working up American cotton ; and in this way to thwart -the machinations of the foreigner. He does not explain by what -process he would concentrate the excessively scattered labour of the United States in creating such a factory system as could rival .lancashire ; or if he did, how it would pay Brother Jonathan to .relinquish his culture of a virgin soil, which is feeding the world with corn, cotton, and tobacco—to abandon his conquests of nature
'in Michigan and Oregon, on the Mississippi and the Missouri, in Utah and California—to exchange these go-ahead vocations, with their rapid and enormous returns, and settle down to crowd some smoky district with a cheap cotton-factory system. He does not fully develop the theory of the 'cuteness which proposes to raise the price of English fabrics to the Californian standard at which they would pay the imaginary domestic manufacturer in order to guarantee cheapness to,the consumer. Mr. Corwin may claim the merit of having exhibited the protection theory in all its parts with a distinctness that it never before received. He magnifies it to Transatlantic proportions ; its inconsistencies stand forth like the erags of the Rocky Mountains—" parla seolpito "; he exhibits it in the oxyhydrogen microscope of Yankee eloquence, and you would as soon think of drinking a glass of water containing the devourer of the Polytechnic as you would swallow a policy con- taining Mr. Corwin's pet monster. The Secretary to the Treasury at 'Washington has a not less in-
genious use of the old "balance of trade ": appealing to the Ame- rican dislike of debt, he argues, that if imports exceed exports in value, in any given year, "to the extent of that excess do we cre- ate a foreign debt," withdrawing precious metals ; and this opera- tion repeated for a few years will cause "accumulated debt," "bringing with it bankruptcy in all the departments of business."
-Such, he says, are "the established laws of labour and trade "!
Again he presents an old delusion with a piquancy of relief enough to startle the last relics of the dogma from its hiding-places. As he puts it, the Oldest Inhabitant can scarcely fail to perceive that imports cannot exceed exports in value, unless the benevolent " foreigner " should send his goods for nothing. The fear of a drain of precious metals, coming from the owner of California, whose most true-seeming fear might be that the domestic gold-market
. should be glutted and swamped, is particularly amusing. We do remember one striking instance in which exports exceeded imports ; it was the case of the British merchant in 1842, when they had , exported such enormous amounts of cotton goods that they had
glutted the foreign market, and could get nothing in return, so that there was a good deal of "accumulated debt "; but at that jaiieture it happened somehow that "the foreigner" bore his ac- cumulated debt with much composure, while the pushing exporter was absolutely in despair. Theoretically, "the foreigner" should have been in despair, and the exporter was precisely in the position which Mr. Corwin ought to covet for his countrymen. The Secre- tary of the Treasury illustrates this "balance of trade" notion for European edification as strikingly as his countrymen have illus- trated the "balance of power" in Mexico. Mr. Corwin thinks it a great stroke of policy, when the Repub- lic wants money, to make the foreigner pay.' This is a notion still surviving even in London. Now is it possible to make the foreigner pay ? In most instances certainly not In Mr. Cor- win's grand instance, most certainly it is not " the foreigner" who would pay, but the American consumer." That " tarnation 'cute varmint" would pay for making up his own cotton, on the same principle that the English country gentleman, to indulge a whim, has grown his own mutton. And if the foreigner can be made to pay, is the idea a handsome one ? is it honest ? Nations, they say, ought to be considered in the same' light with indi- viduals: now how should we rate Jones's elevation of mind, if he, being in want of money, were to set about contrivances by which he could make Brown, next door, pay all his little bills for him ? We can imagine cases in which Jones might succeed, but swill success would be worth less than failure. It is no better than " repudiation " under another form. We can imagine cases in which nations should act differently from individuals, but never on lower motives. If individuals should not swindle and swear their own proper children to strange fathers, most certainly nations had better not do so.
Government on low motives is the most dangerous thing that any nation can meddle with. They have been straining this point of safety in the United States under recent Presidencies, but their vast and productive territory endows them with a degree of im- punity that European states can never have. We may rejoice to have a lesson exhibited for us on that distant ground ; and though we would not voluntarily make "the foreigner" pay for that ex- perience, we need not reject it when it i8 made to hand. Influences, bad and good' are exhibited at work with peculiar nakedness in the young Republic, which hides neither its lights under a bushel nor its shadows. We may learn some useful truths from what we now observe. Wisdom in the supervision of trade, as we know better than the Americans is most necessary for a nation ; but trading motives will not suffice for a national policy. We can tell them that trade should be free ; we may learn from them that trade must not be master of the state. We can value money, we can appretiate its convenience as a medium of exchange; but we may learn the dangers of its vast facility : we can see that with- out it governments would have been unable to rush into that lavish waste of means and credit which has brought insolvency upon almost every state of Europe and America, from Austria to Peru ; that fatal facility is the engine of despotism to Russia— the origin of a debt which taxes the energies of England—the temptation which threatens the virtue, the freedom, and the in- stitutions of the great American Republic.
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