FREE TRADE IS NOT THE UNIVERSE.
SoME worthy enthusiasts seem to think that free trade is the philosopher's stone, the inclusive creator of all things human. They ascribe to their formula such omnipotence, that it really becomes necessary to make distinctions betdmen those few things which lie within its scope and all the rest of the universe.
What free trade can do, in a word, is to give the productive resources of a country liberty of action, and thus to increase the riches of that country. Free trade is the exchange of goods un- restricted by distinctive fiscal burdens or prohibitions ; but even in its largest aspect it is still no more than exchange of goods. It is freedom to exchange corn, wine, oil, cotton, silk, timber, metals, and other tangible things which are articles of sale ; and the power to exchange implies a juster division of employments among workmen of different lands, so that each may take that which is most suitable to him, and may therefore produce a larger quantity. Free trade thus increases material wealth. It has certain indirect consequences, which are not different from those of commerce of any kind ; only it is to be presumed that, when free, commerce will exhibit those consequences in the largest proportion. By increasing the productive powers of man- kind generally, commerce tends to foster the natural capacities of man. By multiplying opportunities of intercourse, it tends to promote friendly dispositions, mutual enlightenment, and civiliza- tion. By augmenting abundance, it tends to produce ease, con- tentment, and the good feelings belonging to that condition.
But that is all. Empirically, we may learn that free trade can- not perform many most important functions needed by the body corporate. That it cannot produce political freedom, we see in Turkey; nor social concord, in Switzerland ; nor national inde- pendence, in the Hanse Towns. And theoretically, we perceive at once that it cannot exert greater influences than those which exist in material objects. It is the poet, not the merchant or re- tail shopkeeper, who finds "sermons in stones"—in hearthstones, for instance ; Westphalia hams carry with them no moral convic- tion; rein-deer tongues, however multitudinous, are mute; Baltic timber, however superior to Canadian, is not more edifying, ex- cept in Spenser's sense when he mentions " a little chapel edified" in a wood ; the sweetness of sugar is purely physical, not moral. English hard-ware and delf are good, so are French silks and claret; but the mutual interchange imparts no intellectual virtues either to pen-knives or pale brandy ; and the pictorial instructive- ness of a figured dinner-plate or silk dress does not equal that of an ancient Mexican picture-book or an Egyptian hieroglyphic. Free trade can directly produce no moral sensation which is not the effect of sugar, cotton, silk, earthenware, and such substantial articles : indirectly, it increases such opportunities for mutual in- struction in manners and knowledge as belong to the shop, the countinghouse, the exchange, and the quay—not places the most famous as intellectual or moral schools. Those facilities, too, may exist without free trade : Protective England offered far greater facilities for the foreign traveller, and therefore for intellectual commerce, than Free-trade Turkey. Art, a much higher social influence than trade, rose in Italy as political and commercial freedom declined. Learning flourishes within the circle of the Zollverein ; the savoir vivre within exclusive France. Shakspere wrote without the inspiration of free trade; in spite of tariffs, Rossini's passionate language vibrates from the Baltic to the Me- diterranean; the pulse of love is not dependent on the custom- house-officer; the ethics of Christianity know no fiscal confines. These things exist without free trade, and are not created by it.
But free trade has some positive drawbacks—it may do its share of harm. By augmenting material wealth, it tends to mate- rialize the ideas of a nation. By bringing into greater promi- nence mere commercial success, it tends to exalt the commercial test of " profit " into a standard of worth for higher things ; in- somuch that at this moment we have before us a spectacle incre- dible to the great patriots of ancient Greece or Rome, or of modern Europe—men reducing the question of national safety and hon- our to one of "pounds, shillings, and pence"! Books remain unwritten because they will not " pay ": the devotion which is necessary to art is suppressed by material worldliness ; in English society, no virtue can cause poverty to be " received " except upon sufferance, no vice or meanness can exclude wealth.
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