Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

The Protectionists reasoned after an entirely different manner. The doctrines of free-trade, they observed, perfectly just in their application to different provinces of the same empire, are entirely misplaced if extended to different countries of the world, the more especially if placed in similar, or nearly similar, circumstances. The state of smothered or open hostility in which they are in general placed to each other, if their interests are at all at variance; the necessity of sheltering infant manufacturing industry from the dangerous competition of more advanced civilisation, or protecting old-established agricultural industry from the ruinous inroad of rude produce from poorer states, in which it is raised cheaper because money is less plentiful, render it indispensable that protection should exist on both sides. If it does not, the inevitable result will be, that the cultivators of the young state will destroy the agriculture of the old one, and the manufacturers of the old one extinguish the fabrics of the young. This effect is necessary, and, to all appearance, will ever continue; for the experience of every age has demonstrated that, so great is the effect of capital and civilisation applied to manufactures, and so inconsiderable, comparatively speaking, their influence upon agriculture, that the old state can always undersell the new one in the industry of towns, and the new one undersell the old one in the industry of the country. The proof of this is decisive. England, by the aid of the steam-engine, can undersell the inhabitants of Hindostan in the manufacture of muslins from cotton growing on the banks of the Ganges; but with all the advantages of chemical manure and tile draining, it is undersold in the supply of food by the cultivators on the Mississippi.

This being a fixed law of nature, evidently intended to check the growth of old states, and promote the extension of mankind in the uncultivated parts of the earth, it is in vain to contend against it. So violently does free-trade displace industry on both sides, where it is fully established, that it is scarcely possible to conceive that two nations should at the same time run into the same glaring mistake; and thence the common complaint that no benefit is gained, but an infinite loss sustained, by its establishment in any one country, and that reciprocity is on one side only. As no adequate exchange of manufactures for subsistence is thus to be looked for, there must arise, in the old state, a constant exportation of the precious metals, attended by frequent commercial crises, and a constant increase in the weight of direct taxation. Should it prove otherwise, and two nations both go into the same system, it could lead to no other result but the stoppage of the growth of civilisation in the young one, and the destruction of national independence in the old. The former would never succeed in establishing commerce or manufactures, from the competition of the steam-engine in its aged neighbour; the latter would become dependent for subsistence on the plough of the young one. The rising agricultural state would be chained for ever to the condition of the serfs in Poland, or the boors in America; the stationary commercial state would fall into the degrading dependence of ancient Rome on the harvests of Egypt and Lybia.

Had it not been for the calamitous issue of the last harvest, in a part of the empire, it might have been difficult to say, to which side the weight of reason preponderated in these opposite arguments; and probably the people of the country would have continued permanently divided on them, according as their private interests or wishes were wound up with the buying and selling, or raising and producing classes in society. But an external calamity has intervened;—Providence has denied for a season, to one of the fruits of the earth, its wonted increase. The potato-rot has appeared; and nearly the whole subsistence of the people in the south and west of Ireland, and in the western Highlands of Scotland, has been destroyed. Between the failure in the potato crop, and the deficiency in that of oats, at least £15,000,000 worth of the wonted agricultural produce has disappeared in the British Islands. And the appearances which we now see around us are solely and entirely to be ascribed to that deficiency. No one need be told what these appearances are, or how deeply they have trenched upon the usual sources of prosperity in the empire: they have been told again and again, in parliament, at public meetings, and in the press, usque ad nauseam. Government has acted, if not judiciously, at least in the right spirit; its errors have been those of information, not of intention. The monster meetings, the flagrant ingratitude, the broken promises of the Irish Catholics, have been forgotten. England, as a nation, has acted nobly; she has overlooked her wrongs: she saw only her fellow-subjects in distress. £10,000,000 sterling have been voted by parliament in a single year for the relief of Irish suffering. Magnificent subscriptions, from the throne downwards, have attested the sympathy of the British heart with the tale of Irish and Highland suffering. But, notwithstanding all these astonishing exertions, and notwithstanding the existence of an unprecedented demand for labour in most parts of the country, in consequence of vast railway undertakings being on foot, on which at least £30,000,000 a-year must be expended for three or four years to come, distress is in many places most acute, in all severely felt. And what is very remarkable, and may be considered, as a distinctive sign of the times, specially worthy of universal attention, the suffering has now spread to those classes which are furthest removed from the blight of nature, and fastened upon those interests which, according to the generally received opinion, should have been benefited rather than injured by the calamity which has occurred.

That some millions of cultivators in the southwest of Ireland, and some hundred thousand in the west Highlands of Scotland, should be involved, literally speaking, in the horrors of famine, in consequence of the universal failure of the crop which constituted at once their sole object of labour and only means of subsistence, may easily be understood. That this alarming failure should raise prices of every sort of food to the scarcity-level in every part of the empire, is equally intelligible; and that government, in conformity with the universal sense of the nation, should, in such an extremity, throw open the ports to all kinds of food, and thereby let in an unexampled amount of foreign produce to supply the failure of that usually raised at home, is an equally intelligible consequence. It may not be considered surprising, that starving multitudes should issue in all directions from the scene of wo in the Emerald Isle, to seek relief in the industry or charity of Great Britain; and that all the great towns in the west of the island should be overwhelmed with pauperism and typhus fever, in consequence of their being the first to be reached by the destructive flood; although it was hardly to be expected that a hundred and thirty-two thousand applications for relief were to be made to the parochial authorities of Liverpool in a single week; and that they returned thanks to Heaven when the influx of Irish paupers was reduced to two thousand a-week! But the remarkable thing, and the thing which the commercial classes certainly did not expect, is this:—The calamity has now reached themselves, although the hand of Providence has only stricken the producing agricultural classes. Trade never was lower, monied distress never more severe, markets of all sorts never were more rapidly declining, than during a period when importations of all sorts have been most rapidly increasing. Nearly all the manufactories in Lancashire and Lanarkshire are put on short time; the public funds and stocks of all sorts are falling; the rate of bankers' advances in Scotland is raised to six per cent;7 seven per cent is charged in Liverpool and Glasgow on railway advances, and permanent loans are taken on railway debentures by the most experienced persons for three years at five per cent; the Bank of England has raised its discounts; our exports are rapidly declining; and all at a time, when the importation of all sorts of rude produce is on an unprecedented scale of magnitude, and the warehouses of Liverpool and Glasgow are literally bursting with the prodigious mass of grain stored in them from all parts of the world!

Fortunately, statistical documents exist, derived from official sources, which demonstrate beyond the possibility of doubt the coexistence of this vast increase in the amount of subsistence imported, and vast diminution in the amount of manufactures raised or exported in all parts of the British empire. A paper has lately been presented to parliament, showing the amount of imports, exports, and shipping during the year 1846, compared with 1845; from which this important and luminous fact is decisively established, how hard soever it may be to comprehend on the part of a large and influential portion of our politicians. From it it appears that the amount of subsistence imported in 1846 was six times greater than in 1845, although free-trade only commenced in the middle of the former year. It had reached the unparalleled amount in the latter year, of grain or flour, equal to five millions and a half quarters of grain. The tonnage inwards had turned five millions of tons; the custom-house duties, notwithstanding the numerous reductions of duties on imported articles, had risen £700,000 above the preceding year, and still kept above £22.000,000 sterling. Here, then, were all the sources and marks of prosperity, so far as they depended on importations, in a state of unexampled vigour and efficiency. Was this attended, as we were constantly told it would be, by a corresponding impulse given to our fabrics? Has the increased activity of our manufacturing cities compensated for the sterility of so large a part of our fields? The fact is just the reverse. Though free-trade has only been in operation for the last six months of 1846, they were signalised by a universal decline in all the principal articles of our exportation; and, by the unanimous voice of all practical men, trade, so far as exports or production is concerned, never was in a more depressed state than when, so far as imports are concerned, it had attained an unprecedented extension.

Never was a truer observation than is made by the Free-Traders, when they assert that goods will not be sent into a nation for nothing; and that, if our imports increase, something that goes out must have received a proportional augmentation. They forget only one circumstance, which, however, is of some little consequence, namely, that two things may go out, goods or specie. We have melancholy proof, in the present state of the money market, that the latter occurrence has taken place to an inconvenient and distressing extent, and that that is the direct cause of the extravagant rate of interest charged on bankers' advances, and the general scarcity of money felt throughout the country. That the capital of the country is not only sufficient, but abundant, is decisively proved by the fact that, notwithstanding the vast extent of the railway and other undertakings of a public character going on both in Great Britain and Ireland, government has borrowed the loan of £8,000,000 for the relief of Ireland at £3, 7s. 6d. per cent. The three per cents are about 90, yielding about the same return for money. But is currency equally abundant? So far from it, the bankers are charging six, and the persons making advances on railway concerns seven per cent. The holder of capital is glad if he can get three and a half per cent; but the holder of currency will not let his notes or sovereigns out of his hand for less than six or seven per cent. Can there be a more convincing proof that the currency of the country has been unduly drained away, and that the present monetary system, which forbids any extension of it in paper when the specie is abstracted, is based on a wrong foundation? Nor is it surprising that the currency should be straitened when it is notorious that every packet which goes out to America takes out vast sums to that continent to pay for the immense quantities of grain which are brought in. That drain only began to be felt in a serious manner within the last two months, because the great shipments from America took place in November and December last, when the failure of the potato crop in this country was fully ascertained; and consequently, the payments made in bills at three months, required to be made in February and March. And when it is recollected that the quantity of grain imported in seven months only—viz. from 5th July 1846, to 5th February 1847—exceeded six millions of quarters, at the very time that all our exports were diminishing; it may be imagined how prodigious must have been the drain upon the metallic resources of the country to make up the balance.8

Sorely perplexed with results so diametrically opposite to all their doctrines as to an increase of importation being necessarily attended with a proportionate increase of exportation, and of all apprehension of an undue pressure thence arising on the money market being chimerical, the Free-Traders lay it all upon the famine at home or abroad. The potato-rot, it is said, has concealed the effects of free-trade: distress in foreign nations has disabled them to purchase our manufactures in return for their rude produce; the increase of British importation has come too soon to operate as yet on their purchase of our manufactures. Here again the facts come decisively to disprove the theoretical anticipations. So far has the increase of our importations been from being sudden, and come last year for the first time on foreign nations, it has been remarkably gradual, and has gone on for years, having received only a great impulse in the articles on which the duty was lessened or removed last summer. Our general imports have steadily advanced for the last three years; and in particular articles the same progress has been conspicuous.9 How, then, has it happened that this general, continued, and steady increase of imports has issued only in a diminution to an alarming extent of exports? And observe, the countries from which we have imported so largely last year of grain and articles of subsistence, have not only not suffered by the scarcity general on the Continent, but have profited immensely by it. America has been blessed with a splendid crop of every species of grain; and, in consequence of the famine in Ireland and severe scarcity in France, prices of grain have risen to triple their former amount in the United States. It has risen so much in the southern states of Russia, that the Emperor of Russia has prohibited the farther exportation of it from the Black Sea. But all these floods of wealth flowing into the great grain states from the failure of the crops in France and Ireland, have been unavailing to produce any increased activity in our manufactures. On the contrary, they are all declining; and our immense importations of food are almost all paid for in direct exportations of the precious metals.

In truth, the general depression of manufactures in all the chief seats of our fabrics is so serious, that it is evidently owing to a much more general and stringent cause than the decline, considerable as it is, in our exports. It is not a decrease of two millions out of fifty-three millions—in other words, of less than a five-and-twentieth part—which will explain the general putting of mills in Lancashire and Lanarkshire on short time, the fall in the value of all kinds of stock and general decline in the vent for all kinds of manufactured produce. It is in the home markets that the real and blighting deficiency is experienced. And what is the cause of this decline in the home market? The Free-Traders are the first to tell us what has done it. It is the famine in Ireland. The total manufactured produce of the island is certainly not under £200,000,00010 annually, of which somewhat above £51,000,000 is for the foreign markets of the world. What is a deficiency of £2,000,000 in such a mass? If that had been the only decline that had taken place, it would have been scarcely perceptible, and would have left no visible effects on our commercial activity or general prosperity. It is clear that the great falling off must have been in the home market. Nor is it difficult to see how this has happened. Fifteen millions' worth of agricultural produce has disappeared; prices of wheat have risen in consequence to 80s. a-quarter, and oats in a still higher proportion; and an alarming drain upon the metallic resources of the country taken place. It is this which has paralysed the manufactures and depressed the commerce of the country. And when it is recollected that the home market now consumes little short of £150,000,000 a-year, it may easily be conceived what a serious check to industry a diminution to the amount of even an eighth or a tenth of the usual domestic purchases must occasion.

The Free-Traders say, that the famine in Ireland has concealed the effects of the adoption of their system of policy; and that all the distress and suffering which has ensued is to be ascribed to that cause. From the observations now made, however, it is apparent that the effect of the famine has been, not to conceal the effects of free-trade, but to accelerate them. For what has the famine done? It has simply caused fifteen millions' worth of domestic agricultural produce to be exchanged for fifteen millions' worth of foreign agricultural produce. The potato crop, which has perished in Ireland, is estimated at fifteen millions' worth; and, supposing that statement is a little exaggerated, it is probable that, taking into account the simultaneous failure in the crop of oats, both there and in Great Britain, the total amount of home agricultural produce that is deficient may amount to that value. But foreign agricultural produce, to an equal or greater amount, has been imported. Six millions of quarters, between grain of all sorts and flour, have been entered for home consumption in seven months preceding 5th February 1847. Taking these quarters, on an average, as worth fifty shillings to the consumer—which is certainly no extravagant estimate, seeing wheat is up at seventy-nine shillings—we shall have, then, six millions of quarters, worth fifteen millions sterling. The home agricultural produce that has failed is just equal in value to the foreign agricultural produce that has been imported. The distress that prevails, therefore, is not owing to any deficiency of food for man or animals in the United Kingdom, for as much has come in, of foreign produce, as has disappeared of domestic. It is entirely to be ascribed to the supplanting, in the national subsistence, of a large part of home produce by an equally large part of foreign produce. And in the social, commercial, and national effects which we see around us, we may discern, as in a mirror, not merely the probable but certain effects of such a substitution if perpetuated to future times.

This view of the subject is of such vast importance that we deem it impossible to impress it too strongly on our readers. We have been always told that the great thing is to secure a great importation; that such a thing must necessarily lead to a corresponding increase of exportation;—that all apprehension about the imports being paid in gold, and not in manufactures, are chimerical;—that the sooner the inferior lands in the British islands go out of cultivation the better;—that ample food for the inhabitants will be obtained from foreign states; and that the agriculturists thrown out of employment by the change will be rapidly absorbed, and more profitably employed in sustaining our extended manufactures. Well, the thing has been done, and the desired consummation has taken place, from an extraneous cause, even more rapidly than was anticipated. The Free-Traders contemplated the substitution of foreign for British agricultural produce to the extent of fifteen or twenty millions as a most desirable result; but they only lamented it could not be looked for for three or four years. It would take that time to beat down the British farmer; to convince the cultivators of inferior lands of the folly of attempting a competition with the great grain districts of the Continent. Providence has done the thing at once. We have got on at railway speed to the blessings of the new system. Free-trade was to lead to the much-desired substitution of six million quarters of home for six million quarters of foreign grain in three years. But the potato-rot has done it in one. The free-trade rot could not have done it nearly so expeditiously, but it would have done it as effectually. It is a total mistake, therefore, to represent the famine in Ireland and the West of Scotland, as an external calamity which has concealed the natural effects of free-trade. It has only brought them to light at once.

Had British agriculture, instead of being stricken with sterility by the hand of Providence, in the poorest and worst cultivated part of the two islands, been suffered gradually to waste away, under the effects of a great and increasing foreign importation in all parts of the empire, the destruction of home produce would have been equally extensive, but it would have been more general. It would have risen to as great an amount, but it would not have been so painfully concentrated in particular districts. Hundreds would not have been dying of famine in Skibbereen; seed-corn would not have been awanting in Skye and Mull; cultivation would not have been abandoned in Tipperary; but the cessation of agricultural produce over the whole empire would have been quite as great. Low prices would have done the business as effectually, though not quite so speedily, as the pestilence which has smitten the potato-field. Whoever casts his eye on the table of prices given below11 for twenty years in London and Dantzic, must at once see that, under a free-trade system, as large an importation of foreign produce, and as extensive a contraction of home, as has taken place this year is to be permanently looked for. The exportation and return of the precious metals, and contraction of credit now felt as so distressing, may be expected to be permanent. Providence has given us a warning of the effects of our policy, before they have become irreparable. We have only to suppose the present state of commerce and manufactures lasting, and we have a clear vision of the blessings of free-trade.

Nor is there any difficulty in understanding how it happens that the substitution of a large portion of foreign, for an equal amount of home-grown produce, occasions such disastrous effects, and in particular proves so injurious to the commercial classes, who in the first instance generally suppose they are to be benefited by the change. If two or three millions of rural labourers in the poorest and worst cultivated districts of the island, are thrown out of employment, either by a failure in the vegetable on which alone, in their rude state, they can employ their labour, or by the gradual substitution of foreign for home produce in the supply of food for the people, it is a poor compensation to them to say that an equal amount of foreign grain has been brought into the commercial emporiums of the empire—that if they will leave Skibbereen or Skye, and come to Liverpool or Glasgow, they will find warehouses amply stored with grain, which at the highest current prices they will obtain to any extent they desire. The plain answer is, that they are starving; that their employment as well as subsistence is gone; that they have neither the means of transport, nor any money to buy grain when they reach the neighbourhood of the bursting warehouses. But then they will be absorbed in the great manufacturing districts, where their labour will be more profitable to themselves and others, than in their native wilds! Yes, there is a process of absorption goes on, on the occurrence of such a crisis; but it is not the absorption of labour by capital, but of capital by pauperism. Floods of starving destitutes inundate every steam-boat, harbour, and road, on the route to the scene of wo; and while the interior of the warehouses in the great commercial cities are groaning beneath the weight of foreign grain, the streets in their vicinity are thronged by starving multitudes, who spread typhus fever wherever they go, and fall as a permanent burden on the poor-rates of the yet solvent portions of the community.