Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/75

It may now be fifteen years ago, I traveled in a railway carriage with an intelligent Glasgow merchant, interested, probably, in the iron trade. Talking about America, he treated me to the old free trade lucubrations: "Was it not inconceivable that a nation of sharp business men like the Americans should pay tribute to indigenous iron masters and manufacturers, when they could buy the same, if not a better article, ever so much cheaper in this country?" And then he gave me examples as to how much the Americans taxed themselves in order to enrich a few greedy iron masters. "Well," I replied, "I think there is another side to the question. You know that in coal, water-power, iron and other ores, cheap food, home-grown cotton and other raw materials, America has resources and advantages unequaled by any European country; and that these resources cannot be fully developed except by America becoming a manufacturing country. You will admit, too, that nowadays a great nation like the Americans cannot exist on agriculture alone; that that would be tantamount to a condemnation to permanent barbarism and inferiority; no great nation can live, in our age, without manufactures of her own. Well, then, if America must become a manufacturing country, and if she has every chance of not only succeeding, but even outstripping her rivals, there are two ways open to her: either to carry on, for, let us say, fifty years, under free trade an extremely expensive competitive war against English manufacturers that have got nearly a hundred years' start; or else to shut out, by protective duties, English manufacturers for, say, twenty-five years, with the almost absolute certainty that at the end of the twenty-five years she will be able to hold her own in the open market of the world. Which of the two will be the cheapest and the shortest? That is the ques-