other
countries, and lowers the prices of all articles imported from them,
until the increase of importation produced by this cause has restored
the equilibrium. Thus, the country which acquires a new article of
export gets its imports cheaper. This is not a case of mere alteration
in the division of the advantage; it is a new advantage created by the
discovery.

But suppose that the invention, to which the nation is indebted for this
increase of the return to its industry, comes into use also in the other
country, and that the process is one which can be as perfectly and as
cheaply performed in the one country as in the other. The new
exportation will cease; trade will revert to its old channels, the money
which flowed in will again flow out, and the country which invented the
process will lose that increase of its gain by trade, which it had
derived from the discovery.

Now the exportation of machinery comes within the case which we have
just described.

If the fact be, that by allowing to foreigners a participation in our
machinery, we enable them to produce any of our leading articles of
export, at a lower money price than we can sell those articles, it is
certain that unless we possess as great an advantage in the production
of the machinery itself as we have in the production of other articles
by means of machinery, the permitting of its exportation would alter to
our disadvantage the division of the benefit of trade. Our exports being
diminished, we should have to pay a balance in money. This would raise,
in foreign countries, the price of everything which we import from
thence: while our incomes, being reduced in money value, would render
us less able to buy those articles even if they had not risen. The
equilibrium of exports and imports would only be restored, when either
some of the latter became so dear that we could produce them cheaper at
home, or some articles not previously exported became exportable from
the fall of prices. In the one case, we lose the benefit of importation
altogether, and are obliged to produce at home, at a greater cost. In
the other case, we continue to import, but pay dearer for our imports.

Notwithstanding what has now been observed, restrictions on the
exportation of machinery are not, in our opinion, justifiable, either on
the score of international morality or of sound policy. It is evidently
the common interest of all nations that each of them should abstain from
every