be _functus officio_.

There are two great administrative instruments available for this work
of repression and national self-sufficiency at the hands of the
imperialistic statesman: the protective tariff, and commercial
subvention. The two are not consistently to be distinguished from one
another at all points, and each runs out into a multifarious convolution
of variegated details; but the principles involved are, after all,
fairly neat and consistent. The former is of the nature of a conspiracy
in restraint of trade by repression; the latter, a conspiracy to the
like effect by subsidised monopoly; both alike act to check the pursuit
of industry in given lines by artificially increasing the cost of
production for given individuals or classes of producers, and both alike
impose a more than proportionate cost on the community within which they
take effect. Incidentally, both of these methods of inhibition bring a
degree, though a less degree, of hardship, to the rest of the industrial
world.

All this is matter of course to all economic students, and it should,
reasonably, be plain to all intelligent persons; but its voluble denial
by interested parties, as well as the easy credulity with which
patriotic citizens allow themselves to accept the sophistries offered in
defense of these measures of inhibition, has made it seem worth while
here to recall these commonplaces of economic science.

The ground of this easy credulity is not so much infirmity of intellect
as it is an exuberance of sentiment, although it may reasonably be
believed that its more pronounced manifestations--as, e.g., the high
protective tariff--can be had only by force of a formidable cooperation
of the two. The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint
prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the
affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to
any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase
of national power or prestige. So that when the statesmen propose a
policy of inhibition and mitigated isolation on the professed ground
that such a policy will strengthen the nation economically by making it
economically self-supporting, as well as ready for any warlike
adventure, the patriotic citizen views the proposed measures through the
rosy haze of national aspirations and lets the will to believe persuade
him that whatever conduces to a formidable national battle-front will
a