Return on Capital, ------ 7,500
--------
Excess manufacturing profit, L.7500

That is, double the amount, or, as rateably may be said, 100 per cent
greater profit for the manufacturer than the banker. Now, what is true
of banking and commerce, may be--often is, true of one description of
commerce, as compared with another.

It is not meant to be inferred, however, that applied to colonial trade,
as compared with foreign trade, the analogy holds good to all the extent;
but that it does in degree, there can be no doubt, and we are prepared to
show. It will, we know, be urged, that there can be no two _sale_ prices
for the same commodity in the same market, a dictum we are not disposed to
impugn; but we shall not so readily subscribe to the doctrine, that the
prices in the home and colonial markets are absolutely controlled and
equalized by those of the foreign market. This is a rule absolute, not
founded in truth, but contradicted by every day's experience. It would be
equally correct to assert, that the lower rates of labour in the European
foreign market, or the higher rates in the North American, controlled and
equalized in the one sense, and in the other opposing, the rates in this
country, than which no assertion could be more irreconcilable with fact.
Prices and labour rates elsewhere, exercise an influence doubtless, and
would have more in the absence of other conditions and counteracting
influences, partly arising from natural, partly from artificially created
causes. Prices, in privileged home and colonial markets, cannot generally
fall to the same level as in foreign neutral markets, or, as in foreign
protected markets, where the rates of labour are low. Keen as is the
competition in the privileged home and colonial trade among the domestic
and entitled manufacturers themselves, it will hardly be denied that
larger as well as more steady profits are realized from those trades than
from the foreign and fluctuating trade, exposed, as in most cases the
latter is, to high fiscal, restrictive, and capricious burdens. These,
_pro tanto_, shut out competition with the protected foreign producer,
unless the importer consent to be cut down to such a modicum of price or
profit, as shall barely, or not at all, return the simple interest of
capital laid out. Such is the position of foreign, in