exchange for manufactures? Their existence in this country
presupposes the exit of a proportionate amount of the produce of British
industry. Nobody gives dollars, any more than corn, for nothing. Our
farmers must take to dairy and pasture cultivation to a greater extent
than heretofore. A certain number of agricultural labourers, may, it is
true, be thrown out of employment by the displacing of rural industry in
making the transition from the one species of country labour to the
other; but the evil will only be temporary, and they will speedily be
absorbed in the vast extension of our manufacturing industry. High
prices need never be feared under such a system: a bad season is never
universal over the world at the same time; and free-trade will
permanently let in the superfluity of those countries where food is
abundant, to supply the deficiencies of those in which, from native
sources, it is scanty.

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