4" 
 
 *^f 
 
 sx 
 
 
 ^v 
 
 f 
 
 /
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 aaaKia xaiHdwva
 
 COMMERCE, CHRISTIANITY, AND CIVILIZATION. 
 
 VERSUS 
 
 BRITISH FREE TRADE. 
 
 LETTERS 
 
 REPLY TO THE LONDON TIMES; 
 
 BY 
 
 H. C. CAREY. 
 
 '•Oh wad some power the giftie gie us 
 To see oursel's as others see as ! 
 It wad frne monie a blunder free as 
 And foolish notion." — Burns. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 COLLINS, PRINTER, 705 JAYXK STREET. 
 
 1S76.
 
 The first four of these letters were sent to a friend 
 in London, in tlie hope of thus securing their appear- 
 ance in the Times. Replying to this suggestion, he 
 said, in effect, that that paper, in common with nearly 
 all other English journals, was so hopelessly given 
 over to the advocacy of free-trade doctrines as to 
 make it wholly useless to offer them for publication. 
 This will account to American readers for the delay 
 that has attended their publication here.
 
 n 
 
 
 LETTERS TO THE LONDON TIMES. 
 
 LETTER FIRST. 
 
 To the Editor of (he Times : — 
 
 A FRIEND abroad having kindly sent me your paper of 22d ult., 
 I find therein the words "ignorance and imbecility," "folly and 
 iniquity," unhesitatingly applied to persons holding, in regard to a 
 purely scientific question now much discussed, opinions differing 
 from your own ; and myself specially selected for introduction to 
 your numerous readers as the " redoubtable champion" in reference 
 to whom such expressions may most properly be used. Believing, 
 Mr. Editor, that in all this you have made a serious mistake, and 
 that it has resulted from a steady contemplation of one side of the 
 shield to an entire neglect of the other, I propose as briefly as may 
 be possible to present this latter, in the hope of satisfying you 
 that on this important question men may perhaps differ from you 
 without forfeiting their claim to be possessed of sense, and entitled 
 to be treated as almost, even if not quite, equal with yourself in 
 their right to be spoken of, and to, as gentlemen. 
 
 The passages in which these words occur are here given, as 
 follows : — 
 
 "Yet as to the cardinal doctrine of English politioal economy, which is held in this 
 'country as an unquestionable scientific truth, to question which must indicate igno- 
 rance or imbecility, our kinsmen and fellow Bubjects of the Dominion are evidently 
 heretical. It is not the French population alone or chiefly which is protectionist. 
 Some of the leading advocates for the artificial fostering of ' home industry.' are of 
 British origin, and the interests which are to benefit by the proposed legislation are 
 principally directed by men of the same race. Even Englishmen and Scotchmen 
 
 who have grown up in our Free Trade pale, and have been taught to believe that 
 the exploded doctrine could not be honestly held by an intelligent person, Bud ex- 
 cuses for a reconsideration of their opinions when they settle in the new country. 
 Their argument, or, at least, their assertion, is that there is seme essential difference 
 between a new country and an old one, between a large country and a small one, 
 between a thinly-populated country and one where the population is dense as in 
 England. Free Trade is never attacked in principle ; it is always assume,! as the 
 ideal to which the economy of a State should tend; but the friends of Protec- 
 tion are always ready with some exceptional circumstances which make the appli- 
 cation of the theoretically perfect system impracticable in their own community. 
 The late Mr. Carey, of Philadelphia, the redoubtable champion of the protective Bystem 
 in the United States, labored to prove that Free Trade was unsuited to the present 
 condition of his country, but that, if the Americans would only establish a stringent 
 system of imposts upon foreign manufactures, jind persevere in it long enough, they
 
 would call into being an industrial power which would enable them in due time to 
 burst upon the world with a Free Trade policy, and overwhelm all creation with 
 their goods. This theory, repeated in hundreds of magazines and newspapers, and 
 forming the staple of endless orations, has affected the economical policy of the 
 Union up to the present time, and is held by multitudes even of those whose private 
 interests suffer by it. To make the country independent of the foreigner, capable 
 of producing everything for itself, and self-sufficient even if shut off from the rest of 
 the world by a powerful enemy, is a principle of government gravely avowed by 
 persons who on other matters judge and speak with intelligence. . . . There- 
 fore, as a financial policy, pure and simple, as the means of present relief, as the 
 direct path to prosperity, the Canadian Board of Trade recommends Protection. It 
 is not that indirect taxation is the easiest of application in practice ; it is that in a 
 large country and scattered population customs duties are the only means of reach- 
 ing the mass of those who should contribute to the State's necessities ; it is protec- 
 tion for itself that we find maintained as au economical doctrineon opposite sides of 
 the globe, by vigorous communities of British origin, after we have been maintain- 
 ing its folly and iniquity for thirty years." 
 
 Waiving for the moment any comment upon the views thus pre- 
 sented. I ask you to look with me to that fountain-head, or well- 
 spring, of economic science, the Wealth of Nations, a work that has 
 stood a century's test, and stands now. so far ahead of those of its 
 writer's countrymen who claim him as their chief while discarding 
 his most essential principles as to warrant the belief that he will 
 be remembered when they and their works will have been long 
 forgotten. Why should this be so? For the reason, that in his 
 high appreciation, manifested throughout his admirable work, of 
 the superior advantage, material, mental, and moral, of a domestic 
 commerce over foreign trade, lie struck the keynote of a sound social 
 science. Exchanges performed twice or thrice a year were in his 
 eye far more profitable than those which could be but once per- 
 formed. Exchanges with neighboring nations he regarded as far 
 preferable to those with communities more distant. A fortiori, ex- 
 changes performed from week to week, from day to da}', from hour 
 to hour, from minute to minute, must be still more advantageous; 
 and so, in his view, they were. To the end that such exchanges 
 might become possible, it was essential that there should be that 
 diversification of employments to the exposition of whose ad- 
 vantages so much of his work was given. With every step in that 
 direction producers and consumers were, as lie saw, more nearly* 
 brought together; production and consumption followed more 
 closely on each other ; labor became more and more economized ; 
 the various members of society became more and more enabled to 
 find the places for which they had been intended; labor of all 
 kinds became more and more productive, with hourly increase 
 of rapidity in the socictary circulation and corresponding develop- 
 ' of all those faculties, mental and moral, by which the 
 human animal is distinguished from the brute. Such, Mr. Editor, 
 although not precisely so expressed, were the ideas Adam Smith 
 il to impress upon his countrymen; and such, exactly, are 
 • which, as humble follower of ;i man who, in my belief, is en- 
 titled to stand side by side with Shakspeare as greatest, of all the 
 human productions of the British soil, 1 have urged not only on 
 my own countrymen but upon the people of all the nations ol the
 
 earth. What there is therein to warrant an attack like to that 
 above reproduced, I leave you to determine for yourself. 
 
 The British policy of Smith's day was in direct opposition to 
 all his teachings. The colonist Briton was allowed to make no 
 exchanges with his neighbors, of wool for cloth or hats, of iron for 
 nails or bolts, of hides for shoes or straps, except through the 
 medium of British ships, British traders, and British shops. Most 
 righteously was this regarded by our great author as "a manifest 
 violation of the most sacred rights of mankind ;" and as tending to 
 make, of the great community of which he was a part, a mere 
 '•nation of shopkeepers," amassing fortune by means of a policy as 
 injurious to their victims as in the end it must prove destructive to 
 themselves. Against that policy it was that Smith raised his voice 
 when crying aloud for freedom of trade. With what results, how- 
 ever? Has there in the century that since has passed been any 
 single case in which Britain has voluntarily abandoned the system 
 which for so long a period had had for its object that of making of 
 herself the "workshop of the world"? Foreign tariffs and a con- 
 sequent growth of competition for the sale of manufactured goods, 
 opened the eyes of Mr. Huskisson half a century since, and 
 twenty years later those of Sir Robert Peel. But for American and 
 German resistance the Navigation Laws might, and probably would, 
 still remain on the statute book of Britain. In the interest of free 
 trade a reciprocity treaty, so called, was obtained by Canada from 
 us, and the measure was hailed with great delight by all such gentle- 
 men as now constitute the Cobden Club. When, however, shortly 
 afterward, the various British possessions of this Western hemisphere 
 sought to establish among themselves a similar free trade measure, 
 the Privy Council refused permission, on the ground that such 
 measures were not in accordance with the Imperial policy. Re- 
 ciprocity had been regarded as sauce for the goose, but could not be 
 accepted as sauce for the gander. It may, as I think, be doubled if 
 any single measure can be shown as having been adopted by Britain, 
 except as conducive to maintenance of the system denounced by 
 her great economist as utterly unworthy of the great nation of which 
 "he was a part. 
 
 Years after Mr. Huskisson had become in part convinced of the 
 necessity for abandoning some of the various modes of taxation of 
 other nations that had till then been practised, an eminent member 
 of parliament described in the words that follow the real objects of 
 men who were the loudest in their expressions of free trade admi- 
 ration : — 
 
 "It was idle for us to endeavor to persuade other nations to join with us in adopt- 
 ing the principles of what was called free trade. Other nations knew, as well as the 
 noble lonl opposite, and those who acted with him, that what we meant by " free 
 trade" was nothing more nor les- than, by means of the great advantages we enjoyed, 
 to get a monopoly of all their markets for cur manufactures, and to prevent them, 
 one and all. from ever becoming manufacturing nations. When the system of reci- 
 procity and free trade had been proposed to a French ambassador, his remark was, 
 that the plan was excellent in theory, but. to make it fair in practice, it would be 
 necessary to defer the attempt to put it in execution for half a century, until France
 
 6 
 
 should be on the same footing with Great Britain in marine, in manufactures, in 
 capital, and the many other peculiar advantages which it now enjoyed. The policy 
 France acted on was that of encouraging its native manufactures, and it was a wise 
 policy ; because, if it were freely to admit our manufactures, it would speedily be 
 reduced to the rank of an agricultural nation, and therefore a poor nation, as all 
 must be that depend exclusively upon agriculture. America acted, too, upon the 
 same principle with France. America legislated for futurity — legislated for an in- 
 creasing population. America, too, was prospering under this system." 
 
 How the monopoly system thus described has since been carried 
 into practical effect is shown in the following passage from a Report 
 made to Parliament b} r Mr. Tremenheere: — 
 
 •' The laboring classes generally in the manufacturing districts of the kingdom, and 
 especially in the iron and coal districts, are very little aware of the extent to which 
 they are often indebted for their being employed at all to the immense losses which 
 their employers voluntarily incur in bad times, iu order to destroy foreign competi- 
 tion, and to gain and keep possession of foreign markets. Authentic instances are 
 well known of employers having in such times, carried on their works at a loss 
 amounting in the aggregate to £300,000 or £400,000 in the course of three or four 
 years. If the efforts of those who encourage the combinations to restrict the amount 
 of labor ;.nd to produce strikes were to be successful for any length of time, the great 
 accumulations of capital could no longer be made which enable a few of the most 
 wealthy capitalists to overwhelm all foreign competition in times of great depression, 
 and thus to clear the way for the whole trade to step in when prices revive, and to 
 carry a great busiuess before foreign capital can again accumulate to such an extent 
 as to be able to establish a competition in prices with any chance of success. The 
 large capitals of this country are the great instruments of warfare against the com- 
 peting capitals of foreign countries, and are the most essential instruments now 
 remaining by which our manufacturing supremacy can be maintained ; the other 
 elements — cheap labor, abundance of raw materials, means of communications, and 
 skilled labor — being rapidly in process of being equalized." 
 
 Here is "warfare." By whom, and on whom? By the very men 
 whose policy was denounced by Adam Smith. Upon people of 
 distant lands who see and know that what they need is that diver- 
 sification of employments regarded by him as so essential to that 
 increase of mental, moral, and material force of which we speak 
 as evidence of growing civilization. It is a "warfare" for pre- 
 vention of any growth of that domestic commerce which marks 
 the decline of barbarism. Such being the case, and that such it 
 is cau not be denied, where would Adam Smith now stand were he 
 member of any of the communities upon which this war was being 
 made? Assuredly on the side of resistance, that resistance taking 
 the form of protection to the farmer in his efforts at bringing to 
 his side the consumer of his products, thereby enabling him to 
 exchange both services and products with little intervention of 
 trader or transporter, and thus freeing himself from the necessity 
 now imposed 14)011 the purely agricultural nations of the earth for 
 Limiting their exchanges to those made yearly or half yearly and 
 held in so slight regard by Smith. 
 
 In another letter, 1 propose, Mr. Editor, to exhibit the working 
 of the two systems in an old and a new country, meanwhile remain- 
 ing, 
 
 Yours respectfully, 
 
 HENEY C. CAREY. 
 Philadelphia, Feb. 15, 1870.
 
 LETTER SECOND. 
 
 In assuming, Mr. Editor, as you seem to do, that I regard protec- 
 tion as especially necessary for new countries, you are much in 
 error. The societary laws are applicable to all countries alike, the 
 great object to be accomplished being the promotion of that domes- 
 tic commerce held in so great regard by the illustrious founder of 
 a real economic science. In the days of the later Stuarts, when the 
 men of the Rhine were enabled to boast that they bought of the 
 stupid Englishmen whole hides for sixpence and paid for them in 
 tails at a shilling, Britain stood as much in need of protection as we 
 do now. "So, too, was it half a century since when German men 
 exported wool and rags and took their pay in cloth and paper, pay- 
 ing at the British custom house a heavy tax for the privilege of 
 making exchanges among themselves through the medium of Brit- 
 ish ships and shops. So, again, was it less than a century since in 
 the now most prosperous and independent of the manufacturing- 
 countries of the world, as will here be shown. — Almost unceasingly at 
 war abroad or at home; brought repeatedly by political and religious 
 dissensions to the verge of ruin; governed by priests and prostitutes 
 in the names of worthless kings — France, on the day of the assem- 
 ling of the States Genera], in 1789, had made so little progress in the 
 industrial arts that her markets were crowded with British wares; 
 that her workshops were closed ; that her workmen were perishing 
 for want of food ; and that the French school of art had almost en- 
 tirely disappeared. The Few were magnificent — more so, perhaps, 
 than any others in Europe. Of the Many a large majority were in 
 a state closely akin to serfage, and ignorant atmost beyond concep- 
 tion. 
 
 The Revolution, however, now coming, the people did for them- 
 selves what their masters had refused to do; re-establishing the 
 system of Colbert, the greatest statesman the world has yet seen, 
 and making protection the law of the land. Since then, consuls and 
 kings, emperors and presidents, have flitted across the stage ; con- 
 stitutions almost by the dozen have been adopted ; the country has 
 been thrice occupied by foreign armies, and thrice has it been com- 
 pelled to pay the cost of invasion and occupation ; but throughout 
 all these changes it has held to protection as the sheet-anchor of the 
 ship of State. With what result? With that of placing France in 
 the lead of the world in reference to all that is beautiful in industrial 
 and pictorial art. With that of making her more independent, com- 
 mercially, than any other country of the world. Why is this? For 
 the reason that she enables her artisans to pass over the heads ol' 
 other nations, scattering everywhere the seeds of that love of the 
 beautiful in which consists a real civilization, and everywhere 
 stimulating while defying competition ; Britain, meanwhile, seeking 
 everywhere to stifle competition by means of cheap labor, shoddy 
 cloth, cinder iron, and cottons that, as recently certified to by
 
 8 
 
 British merchants in China, lose a third of their weight on their first 
 immersion in the tab. 
 
 But a few months since Monsieur Michel Chevalier gave to his 
 English friends an eulogium upon this shoddy system, saying, how- 
 ever, not a word as to the fact, that the tariff for which he claims 
 the credit is the most intelligently, and the most effectively, protec- 
 tive of any in the world; not a word to show how perfectly it had 
 been made to accord with the views presented in his then, as I 
 think, latest work, and which read as follows: — 
 
 "Every nation owes it to itself to seek the establishment of diversification in the 
 pursuits of its people, as Germany and England have already done in regard to cot- 
 tons and woollens, and as France herself has done in reference to so many and so 
 widely different departments of industry, this being not an abuse of power on the 
 part of the government. On the contrary, it is the accomplishment of a positive duty 
 which requires it so to act at each epoch in the progress of a nation as to fnvor the 
 taking possession of all the branches of industry whose acquisition is authorized by 
 the nature of things." 
 
 Prior to the date of the Cobden treaty, 1860, the regime of France, 
 for almost seventy years, had been that of prohibition so nearly abso- 
 lute as almost to preclude the importation of foreign manufactures 
 of any description whatsoever. Prior to 18(31, that of this country 
 had for a like period of time, with two brief and brilliant excep- 
 tions, been that of revenue, and almost free-trade, tariffs dictated by 
 subjects of the cotton king holding a full belief in the morality of 
 human slavery, and in a sort of right divine to buy and sell their 
 fellow-men. We have thus two contemporaneous systems differing 
 from each other as light does from darkness, and may here with 
 some advantage study their working as regards the great question 
 now before us, that of civilization. The last four years prior to 
 1861 were in this country so much disturbed by reason of the great 
 free-trade crisis of 1857 that, desiring to give every advantage to 
 free-trade theorists, I prefer to throw them out, taking for compari- 
 son the year 1856, one in which the world at large was rejoicing in 
 the receipt of hundreds of millions of gold from California and Aus- 
 tralia; and when, if ever, our Southern States must have been grow- 
 ing rich and strong by means of the policy of which they so long 
 had been the ardent advocates. 
 
 In that year the domestic exports of France amounted to $310,000,- 
 000, having far more than trebled in twenty-five years; doing this, 
 too, under a system that, as we now are told, must have destroyed 
 the power to maintain any foreign commerce whatsoever. Of those 
 exports, $1.40,000,000 consisted of textile fabrics weighing 20,000 
 tons, the equivalent of 100,000 bales of cotton, and sufficient, per- 
 haps, to load some five and-twenty of the ships that, as 1 think, 
 were then in use. The charge for freight was, as may readily be 
 seen, quite insignificant, and for the reason that the chief articles of 
 value were skill and taste, $100,000,000 of which would not balance 
 a single cotton bale. Arrived out, the goods were all finished and 
 ready for consumption; and, as a consequence of these great l'acts, 
 there were no people retaining for themselves so large a proportion 
 ol the ultimate prices of their products as did those of France.
 
 9 
 
 At that elate two hundred and fifty years Lad elapsed since the 
 first settlement of Virginia, and the whole country south of the 
 Potomac, the Ohio, and the Missouri, had then been taken po 
 sion of by men of the English race, the total population having 
 grown to almost a dozen millions. The territory so occupied con- 
 tained, as I believe, more cultivable land, more coal, and more 
 metallic ores, than the whole of Europe; and it abounded in rivers 
 calculated for facilitating the passage of labor and its products from 
 point to point. What now had become, in 1856, the contribution 
 of this wonderful territory, embracing a full half of the Union, to 
 the commerce of the world? Let us see! The cotton exported 
 amounted to 3,000,000 bales. To this may now be added 100,000 
 hogsheads of tobacco, the total money value of the exports of this 
 vast territory having been almost precisely $140,000,000 — barely 
 sufficient to pay for the cargoes of five-and-twenty ships, of a joint 
 burden of 20,000 tons, laden with the beautiful fabrics of France. 
 
 For the carriage to market of this cotton and tobacco how many 
 ships were required? Thousands! How many seamen? Tens of 
 thousands! Who paid them? The planters! Who paid the charges 
 on the cotton until it reached its final consumer? The planter, 
 whose share of the two, three, or five dollars a pound paid for his 
 cotton by his customers in Brazil, Australia, or California, amounted 
 to but a single dime. It may, as I think, be safely asserted that of 
 all people claiming to rank as civilized there have been none who 
 have retained for themselves so small a portion of the ultimate prices 
 of their products as have those who have been accustomed to supply 
 raw cotton to Britain and to France. 
 
 The first of all taxes is that of transportation, preceding as it does 
 even the demands of government. Of this the Frenchman pays 
 almost literally none, the commodities, taste and skill, which mainly 
 be exports, being to be classed among the imponderables. The 
 planter, on the contrary, gives nine-tenths of the ultimate prices 
 of his products as his portion of this terrific tax, doing so for 
 the reason that he is always exporting, in the forms of cotton and 
 tobacco, the weighty food of mere brute labor, and the most valu- 
 able portions of the soil upon which that labor had been expended. 
 
 Throughout the world, as here among ourselves, the exporters of 
 raw produce pay all the taxes incident to a separation of consumers 
 from producers, the manufacturing nations profiting by their col- 
 lection. Hence it is that while the former tend from year to year 
 to become more dependent, the latter tend equally to become more 
 independent, thus furnishing conclusive evidence of growing civili- 
 zation. 
 
 The protected Frenchman, freed from the most oppressive of all 
 taxes, grows in love of the beautiful, in love of freedom, in that love 
 of his native land by which he is everywhere so much distinguished 
 — each and every stage of progress marking growth of real civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 The unprotected men of the South, on the contrary, have been so 
 heavily taxed on the road to their ultimate market as to have pro-
 
 10 
 
 duced a constantly growing need for abandoning their exhausted 
 lands, and a corresponding growth of belief in human slavery, which 
 is but another word for barbarism. 
 
 Since the date above referred to, France and the South have passed 
 through very destructive wars, but how widely different is their 
 present condition ; the one being more prosperous than ever before, 
 the other remaining now so much impoverished as to excite the 
 sympathy even of those Avho had most execrated the men and 
 measures to which the rebellion had been due. 
 
 Such, Mr. Editor, have been the results of thorough protection 
 on one side of the ocean and an absence of protection on the other. 
 Choose between them! 
 
 In another letter I shall submit to your consideration a compara- 
 tive view of the present commercial position of France and Britain, 
 meanwhile remaining, 
 
 Yours, respectfully, 
 
 HENBY C. CAEEY. 
 
 Philadelphia, Feb. 17, 1876. 
 
 LETTEE THIED. 
 
 The strong man, Mr. Editor, self-reliant, moves boldly forward, 
 careless of the comments of those around him, and confident in his 
 power for self-defence. His feeble rival, full of doubts and fears, 
 watches anxiously, hoping to maintain his position yet hesitating 
 as regards his power so to do. In which of these men may we find 
 the prototype of France commercially considered? In which that 
 of Britain? Let us see! 
 
 In the sixty years that have passed since the close of the great 
 war, France has, as I believe, never once attempted to interfere in 
 our affairs; nor, so far as I can recollect, have the French people 
 sought in any manner to influence our legislation. She and they 
 have been content to allow us to determine for ourselves our com- 
 mercial arrangements, confident that, whatsoever might be their 
 form, French skill and taste would so far triumph over such obsta- 
 as Dii'jht be raised as to enable France to participate in sup- 
 plying tin- great market the Union now presents. 
 
 Widely different from this, British interference has been persis- 
 tent throughout this whole period, increasing in its force as the 
 danger to British interests became more clearly obvious. On one 
 occasion, some five and twenty years since, your then minister 
 had tin; bad taste, if not even the impertinence, to send to our 
 Department a lecture on the folly of protection, accompanied 
 by a strong remonstrance against increase in the duties on British 
 iron. Of the course that has been since pursued some idea may be 
 formed after a study of the exhibit, made in a document herewith 
 of the discreditable proceedings of the Canadian Commissioner 
 in reference to that, so-called, Beciproeity Treaty whose adoption he
 
 11 
 
 then was urging; these things having been done under the eye, 
 and, as we have every reason to believe, with the sanetion of the 
 minister under whose roof the commissioner was then residing. 
 The corruption then and there practised may be taken as the type 
 oF the whole British action in this country ; agents being sent oat 
 to lecture on the advantages of free trade; journalistic correspon- 
 dents being purchased; Cobden Club publications being gratuitously 
 distributed; and our domestic affairs being in every possible man- 
 ner interfered with; with simply the effeet of proving that there 
 reigns abroad great fear that the Union may speedily achieve an 
 industrial independence and thus emancipate itself from the system 
 described more than a century since by Joshua Gee when assuring 
 his countrymen that more than three-fourths of the products of these 
 colonies were absorbed by British traders, and that the share allowed 
 to the colonists scarcely sufficed to purchase clothing for their fami- 
 lies and themselves. 
 
 Turn now, Mr. Editor, to your own journal of the 25th alt., and 
 re-read the inquiry there made as to "what possible outlet we can 
 have for our produce in the event of such an important purchaser 
 being lost to us permanently;" following this up by study of your 
 answer to the effect, that "the high tariff so long maintained by 
 the United States has at length brought her producing powers up 
 to her requirements," and that, therefore, "we cannot but great!}' 
 fear that the crisis of depression is by no means past, and it is not 
 improbable that the list of works that have to.be closed for want 
 of orders will be augmented, and many more workmen be thrown 
 out of employment before the year is out." Turn next to your 
 report of the Address of the President of the Sheffield Chamber of 
 Commerce, and find him admitting that although "they had argued 
 during the term of the free trade agitation that protected industries 
 failed, that the quality deteriorated, and the enterprising manufac- 
 turers began to stagnate, that did not seem to apply to American 
 manufacturers;" the general result at which the speaker had arrived 
 being precisely that which you yourself had just before suggested, 
 to wit, that the American market had been lost, and had been so 
 because of a protective tariff such as you have now denounced. 
 
 Turn further, if you please, to your report, a part of which is here 
 below given, of the proceedings of a meeting of the Manchester 
 Chamber of Commerce, now but a fortnight old, and mark, first, 
 the alarm excited by the recent and rapid growth of the cotton 
 manufacture of India; and, second, the admission there made that 
 the duty, trivial as it is, is "a great grievance to Manchester," paid, 
 as it is here admitted to be, by the British producer, and not by the 
 Hindoo consumer: — 
 
 '•Mr. W. E. Taylor, Enfield, strongly condemned the Indian import duties upon 
 cotton*, and attributed the delay in their abolition to the influence of Lord North- 
 brook, with respeot to whom he said that, whatever the causes of his retirement, they 
 would hail the consequences with satisfaction. 
 
 " Mr. J. A. Bremner also supported the resolution, and especially commended the 
 action of the Chamber with respect to the cotton import duties. He said that the 
 £750,000 raised by means of these duties in India fell upon 80,000 employers and 
 work people in Lancashire, its average incidence being at the rate of jL'10 per head."
 
 12 
 
 Had these gentlemen been talking in those Washington com- 
 mittee rooms which their representatives so constantly, and so im- 
 pudently,, invade, or through our public journals, they would have 
 insisted that it was the poor consumer who paid the duty, but here, 
 among themselves, they admit what they and we know to be the 
 fact, that it is they who pay and they who are to be benefited by its 
 abolition. 
 
 Look next to the Cobden Club, a body of English gentlemen, 
 and see it, as we are now assured may be done, in defiance of your 
 own denunciation of the document as unworthy of credit, scatter- 
 ing broadcast throughout Italy a paper by one of its members who 
 claims to be recognized as an American, every page carrying with 
 it evidence of that gross misstatement in reference to the working 
 of the protective policy in this country, throughout the last dozen 
 years, which had led the Times to its repudiation. 
 
 Allow me now, Mr. Editor, to ask if there can be better evidence 
 of weakness than that which is above exhibited? Strong men can 
 always afford to speak the truth. Weak ones only find themselves 
 compelled to resort to falsehood. 
 
 Turn back a few months and study for yourself the facts con- 
 nected with the urgent request made to M. Chevalier when last 
 in England, to the effect that he should urge upon his government 
 some relaxation of that protection of the sugar manufacture by aid 
 of which French refiners were driving'those of Britain out of their 
 own markets; continental beet growers meanwhile threatening an- 
 nihilation of the cane growers of Britain's tropical possessions. 
 Turn next to a file of the Pall Mall Gazette and study the exhibit 
 there made, but few weeks since, of the trepidation caused by the 
 suggestion that Austria had determined upon the adoption of specific 
 duties, thereby putting your shoddy cloth and cinder iron upon a 
 level with the more honest products of Germany and of France. 
 Tui'ii to the Economist, the Manchester Guardian, and other journals, 
 and see how great had been the alarm excited by the statement that 
 Italy was surely bent upon "a complete return to the protectionist 
 system." Look next to the joy that has been since expressed on 
 receiving an assurance from the Commissioner that what was being 
 sought was merely increase of revenue without reference to protec- 
 tion. Had Signor Luzzati been further interrogated the rapturous 
 feeling would, however, have been greatly modified by his assurance 
 to the effect that his government had arrived at the conclusions, that 
 for the suppression of brigandage it was indispensable that employ- 
 : should be found for the Italian people; that for attaining this 
 result it was needed that employments should be diversified; and 
 that, to that end there should he such an increase of duties as would 
 at one ;ind the same time give both revenue and protection. 
 
 Look further in what direction we may we meet with evide: 
 of a nervous feeling of apprehension singularly corroborative of tin- 
 view.- of the great father of economic science when cautioning his 
 fellow citizens against the dangers and difficulties that must inevi- 
 tahly result from an almost entire dependence on the foreign trade.
 
 13 
 
 Referring now to one of the many reports which British min- 
 isters are required to make, each and all proving the existence of 
 great anxiety as to the future, allow me to ask your attention to 
 thai of Mr. Phipps, your representative in Madrid, in which he .so 
 clearly shows how almost marvellous has been the growth of the 
 foreign commerce of Spain consequent upon the adoption, some 
 thirty years since, of a protective system by aid of which an import 
 of cotton, dye-stuffs, and other raw materials, had been substituted 
 for that of cloth and other manufactures. That done, Mr. Editor, 
 mark the astonishment, if not even the horror, he expresses at the 
 rapid growth of the protective feeling ; at the action of the govern- 
 ment in refusing reduction of existing duties; and especially at 
 the " shortsighted and suicidal" measures now likely to be adopted 
 with a view to bringing about those harmonious relations between 
 agriculture and manufactures which were held by Adam Smith in 
 such high regard. 
 
 Passing northward and eastward mark if you please, the alarm 
 that has been caused by reason of the belief that Russian road mak- 
 ing must lead to absorption of the trade of Central Asia by Russian 
 manufacturers. 
 
 Study then the causes of the destructive and useless war of the 
 Crimea, followed, as it has been, by almost endless negotiations in 
 regard to Turkey and to Egypt and its canal, all tending to prove 
 an anxiety in reference to the commercial future from which France 
 seems so almost entirely exempt. 
 
 Proposing in my next to call your attention to the comparative 
 movements of France and Britain, I remain, etc, 
 
 HENRY C. CAREY. 
 
 Philadelphia, Feb. 18, 1876. 
 
 LETTER FOURTH. 
 
 The change of Mr. Quskisson's opinions in regard to protection 
 followed so closely on large increase in the duties on foreign iron 
 and other commodities, that it was, as I think, but six years later 
 in date. Four years still later came the French Revolution of 1830, 
 and by that time the slight changes which had followed his conver- 
 sion may be supposed to have begun to produce the effect desired. 
 Taking that year, then, as the starting point of a comparison of the 
 working of protection in France, and free trade in Britain, we ob- 
 tain results which will now be given, as follows: — 
 
 In that year the French domestic exports amounted, in round 
 numbers, to $100,000,000, or little more than $3 per head of the 
 population. Thirty years later, at the date of the Cobden treaty, 
 under a prohibitive system, they had grown to $400,000,000, or 
 about ^11 per head. Since the close of the German war their
 
 14 
 
 growth, under a highly protective one, in millions of dollars, has 
 been as follows: — 
 
 1871 . . .573 1874 . . .774 
 
 1872 . . .736 1875 . . . 800* 
 
 1873 . . .760 
 
 The population for 1872, Alsace and Loraine having passed to 
 Germany, was in round numbers 36,000,000, and an export of 
 800,000,000 gives $22 per head, or seven times more than that of 
 1830. Seeing this wonderful upward and onward progress in face 
 of the general depression that now prevails, an English journalist 
 has recently told his readers that France seemed to bear " a 
 charmed life." He failed, however, to say to them that the charm 
 would be found in the fact that for eighty years the French policy 
 had looked steadily in the direction of development of that domestic 
 commerce which now constitutes the foundation of her great and 
 rapidly growing foreign commerce. Scarcely knowing it, France 
 has been a consistent disciple of Adam Smith. 
 
 The declared value of " British produce and manufactures" ex- 
 ported in 1830, was, in round numbers, $190,000,000, or about $8 
 per head; being almost thrice that of France. That of the last five 
 years lias been, as here given in millions of dollars: — 
 
 1871 . . . 1115 1874 . . . 1200 
 
 1872 . . . 1280 1875 . . . 1150 
 
 1873 . . . 1275 
 
 these last figures giving about $34 per head of the population; 
 or but about 50 per cent, in excess of the exports of France. 
 It thus appears that under a thoroughly protective system the 
 foreign commerce of this latter has grown with such rapidity that 
 whereas in 1830 it stood to that of Britain as little more than 
 1 to 3 ; it now stands as 2 to 3. 
 
 Were even this apparent difference a real one, the change would 
 still be most extraordinary, in view of the facts, that, whereas France, 
 in losing her Rhine provinces, had lost more than she had gained 
 in Algeria or elsewliere, Britain had not only added in India, Aus- 
 tralia, South Africa, and other of her dependencies, more than 
 100,000,000 to her population, but had so subjugated the hundreds 
 of millions of Japan, China, and other Eastern States, as to luive 
 compelled them to add largely to the markets for her products 
 which she had before controlled. 
 
 That it is not, however, a real difference will now be shown, as 
 follows: — 
 
 The farmer who has sold his crops has at his command, for any 
 and every purpose, the whole amount they had produced. His 
 neighbor, tin; .shopkeeper, having sold a similar amount, has only 
 hi profits, having at his command but a tenth or an eighth of the 
 
 * The last account I have Been showed a considerable increase on ls74, but as yet 
 I have Been do definite flgureu for the yean
 
 15 
 
 amount of sales. That the two men thus described are the proto- 
 types of France and Britain will now be shown, as follows : — 
 
 At the first of the periods above referred to, both France and 
 Britain sold mainly the produce of their own land, and so it still 
 continues with the former; the foreign raw material entering into 
 her domestic exports not exceeding, probably, an eighth of their 
 gross amount. At that date Britain bought her cotton, but she not 
 only sold her own flax and her own wool, but with the products of 
 her soil she fed the people employed in converting them into the 
 fabrics required in distant markets. Now, all is different. Nearly, 
 if not quite, every pound of raw material — silk, flax, hemp, jute, 
 wool, cotton — entering into the composition of the textiles ex- 
 ported has been brought from distant lands, to be paid for to 
 foreign farmers and planters, and not, as in France, to her own 
 people. So, too, with the wheat, the cheese, the eggs, the poultry, 
 and other food consumed by the men who work up such materials. 
 Seeing all this, Mr. Editor, may we not assume that a full half of 
 what is given to the world as exports of "British produce and 
 manufactures," is really but a re-export of the products of other 
 lands Avhose people claim the proceeds, minus the enormous 
 charges made for the work of manufacture and exchange? Can it 
 then safely be asserted that the real domestic export of Britain 
 exceeds, if indeed it equals, that of France? It certainly seems 
 to me that it cannot. 
 
 The policies of the two countries and their results having been 
 so widely different, we may now look to the changes that, under 
 their influence, have been brought about in the condition, material 
 and moral, of their respective populations. 
 
 At the opening of the French devolution the condition of a large 
 portion of the people of France, as has been already stated, was 
 nearly akin to that of serfdom. To-day we have the assurance of 
 your countryman Mr. Thornton, made after a very thorough exami- 
 nation of the subject, that their condition compares advantageously 
 with that of those of the most favored countries of the world; and 
 that to all appearance the prosperity now so generally evident must 
 continue and increase. So much for a system that, in harmony with 
 the ideas of Adam Smith, has looked to development of the domestic 
 commerce, and has been carried into effect in despite of a warlike 
 policy that has not only annihilated millions of men and thousands 
 of millions of property, but has also thrice subjected the country 
 to invasions, and thrice to heavy taxation for the maintenance of 
 foreign armies quartered upon it. The first Napoleon has told us 
 that it was the empty belly that caused revolutions. May it not 
 then be that to the general prosperity indicated not only by Mr. 
 Thornton but by a thousand important facts, may be attributed the 
 extraordinary quietude of the whole French people while waiting 
 throughout the last four years for institution of a government? 
 
 Looking now back in British history, we find the people of Ire- 
 land to have been prospering by aid of a legislative independence 
 which had been then secured: Scotland to have exhibited tens of
 
 16 
 
 thousands of tenants holding, as they supposed, their lands under 
 titles as secure as were those of the great landholders under whom 
 they held : England exhibiting hundreds of thousands of men living 
 on lands of their own, and giving annually to the nation tens of 
 thousands of youths capable of serving, with advantage to their 
 country and to themselves, in the forum or the field, in the work- 
 shop or on the farm ; and presenting as fine and intelligent a bodv 
 of men as had ever been exhibited by any nation of the world. 
 What now has become of these men? In Ireland, says Thackeray, 
 they have " starved by millions." In Scotland they have been dis- 
 possessed to make way for sheep and deer. In England they have 
 been replaced by farm laborers who have before them, says an Edin- 
 burgh reviewer, " no future but the poorhouse;" and who exhibit in 
 the present, as but now described by Mr. C 1 i ft e Leslie, a general sad- 
 ness and stupidity, an absence of intelligence and of energy, that can 
 with difficulty be paralleled in any nation whatsoever, however bar- 
 barous.* Such has been the result of a century of wars for trade; 
 of " warfare" upon all the nations of the world for preventing 
 growth of that domestic commerce whose advantages the illustrious 
 author of the Wealth of Nations so greatly desired to impress upon 
 his countrymen. 
 
 The French people furnish to the outer world their own products 
 to the amount of $700,000,000, the proceeds being so distributed 
 among themselves that the little egg-producing farmer, equally 
 with the great mining capitalist, obtains the share to which he 
 may justly be deemed entitled. As a consequence of this the foun- 
 dations of the system become from day to day more Avide and deep, 
 the societary machine taking daily more and more the stable form 
 of a true pyramid. 
 
 The bankers and traders of Britain, on the contrary, pass annu- 
 ally through their hands property that counts by thousands of mil- 
 lions, retaining for themselves so large a share of the profits that 
 but little remains for those unfortunate laborers who now represent 
 that admirable body of small proprietors who in the days of Adam 
 Smith furnished the youths of whose achievements Britain now 
 so justly boasts. As a consequence of all this the machine takes 
 daily more and more the form of an inverted pyramid upon whose 
 future calculation can with difficulty be made 
 
 Compare now, Mr. Editor, the two pictures that have been pre- 
 sented, and determine for yourself if men should not be allowed to 
 differ from you in opinion without exposing themselves to the charges 
 of" imbecility and ignorance." 
 
 Turning our eyes now to this western side of the Atlantic, allow 
 me to submit to your consideration some important facts, as fol- 
 lows: — 
 
 The cotton here converted into cloth in this lasl year has amounted 
 to no less than lino. oiiiijOiio pounds. Of the (doth produced the cx- 
 
 Thia is taken from a quotation in the Journal </<.-.- Economistes for last month. 
 The original I have not seen.
 
 17 
 
 port was small, and so was the import of foreign cottons, the balance 
 either way being unimportant. The consumption by our own 43 
 millions of people may therefore be taken at 600 millions, giving 14 
 pounds, or an average of probably 50 yards, for every man, woman, 
 and child in the Union; that, too, in a time of serious commercial 
 crisis. So much, Mr. Editor, for bringing consumers and producers 
 into near connection with each other. 
 
 The quantity of cotton simultaneously worked up in Britain for 
 the supply of her own 33 millions of people, and for the thousand 
 millions of the world at large, was but little more than double the 
 quantity here actually consumed, say 1224 millions of pounds; the 
 power of consumption being everywhere limited by reason of the 
 enormous taxes required to be paid on the road between Carolina, 
 Brazil, and other cotton producing countries on one hand, and the 
 various cotton consuming countries on the other 
 
 Of all tests of the growth of wealth and civilization the most 
 certain is that which is found in the power of a people for the pro- 
 duction and consumption of iron. Subjecting the Union to this 
 test we obtain the following results, to wit: — 
 
 In the so-called free trade period which closed in 
 1824, the consumption of foreign and domestic 
 
 iron was, per head, in pounds .... 35 
 
 Under protection it rose in 1835 to . . . . 48 
 
 Under a free trade system it fell in 1842 to . 38 
 
 Under protection it rose in 1847-8 to . . 98 
 
 Under free trade it fell in 1858-60 to 80 
 Under the present moderate protection it has now 
 
 risen to more' than ...... 150 
 
 The capacity of now existing furnaces is that of five and a half 
 millions of tons, or 280 pounds per head. 
 
 Of mineral oils our contribution to the commerce of the world 
 counts almost, even if not quite, by thousands of millions of gallons, 
 little, if any, of which would ever have come to the light but for 
 close proximity of the machine shops of Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and 
 Cleveland. Those shops are as much the offsprings of protection 
 as is the cotton trade of Russia, or of the New England States. 
 
 Allow me now, Mr. Editor, to call your attention to an article 
 of your own this day received, in which are given figures repre- 
 senting the trade of Britain with the nations that more or less 
 protect their various industries, proving conclusively, as you there 
 have said, " that the countries which set the greatest opposition to 
 our iron industry are those from which we purchase most largely;" 
 a state of things which you regard as greatly to be deplored. Does 
 this not, however, prove that the countries which, in accordance 
 with the advice of Adam Smith, look most carefully to the pro- 
 motion of their domestic commerce are precisely those which find 
 themselves enabled to contribute most to the commerce of the world 
 at large ? 
 
 For an answer to this question look to the report of your min- 
 2
 
 18 
 
 ister in Spain above referred to. For farther answer look to the 
 figures here below given representing our domestic exports, and 
 satisfy yourself that it is precisely as we make our own iron, and our 
 own cottons and woollens, we are enabled to become larger customers 
 to the various non-manufacturing nations of the earth. 
 
 In the fourteen free trade years ending in 1860 their amount was 
 $3,400,000,000. In the fourteen years of protection that have just 
 now closed it was $6,600,000,000. The last three free trade years 
 gave a total of $920,000,000. The last three of the protectionist 
 years give $1,985,000,000, being more than 100 per cent, increase 
 accompanied by a growth of population not probably exceeding 40 
 per cent. 
 
 Seeing how fully both American and French facts tend to prove 
 the accuracy of the idea you have now propounded, to the effect 
 that it is the countries which " set the greatest opposition" to 
 your iron industries that find themselves enabled to furnish you 
 most largely with the things you need, may you, Mr. Editor, not 
 find in this important fact some reason for revising the opinions 
 you have "for thirty years" so freely expressed in regard to the 
 "folly and iniquity" of the system advocated by those who, like 
 myself, hold to. a firm belief in the teachings of that greatest of 
 economists, the illustrious author of the Wealth of A T alions? 
 
 Respectfully submitting this question to your careful considera- 
 tion, 1 remain 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 
 HENRY C. CAREY. 
 
 Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1S76. 
 
 LETTER FIFTH. 
 
 Having thus, for the present at least, disposed of the material 
 side of the question now before us, I have here to ask your atten- 
 tion to the moral one, as follows: — 
 
 Early in the free-trade crusade it was announced in Parliament 
 that the smuggler was to be regarded as "the great reformer of the 
 age," and from that hour to the present all the aid in the power of 
 that body to give him has been rendered ; Gibraltar, Malta, Nova 
 Scotia, Canada, and other possessions, having been chiefly valued 
 for the facilities they have afforded for setting at defiance the laws 
 of nations with which Britain has professed to be at peace. It is, 
 however, to a larger field, that of Eastern Asia, Mr. Editor, that I 
 now invite your attention, to the end that you may be enabled 
 fully t<> appreciate the manner in which the "great reformer" has 
 done and is now doing his appointed work. 
 
 Prior to the close of the last century, the Chinese government 
 had been accustomed to regard opium as a mere medicine whose
 
 19 
 
 use was beneficial rather than otherwise. Eminent and observing 
 men, however, having remarked a steady increase in its consump- 
 tion and very injurious consequences thence resulting, the matter 
 was brought to the emperor's notice, with the effect of inducing 
 him, in the first year of the present century, to issue a proclamation 
 absolutely forbidding its import, and ordering the infliction of 
 heavy penalties upon such as might be led to act in violation of 
 the law. Nevertheless, despite every effort at its enforcement, 
 smuggling steadily increased until, as early as 1824, it had attained 
 a value of $8,000,000. 
 
 Nine years later, in 1833, the East India Company's charter was 
 renewed, an express understanding having first been arrived at that 
 opium smuggling should not in any manner be interfered with, the 
 home government thus making itself responsible for all the in- 
 famies attendant upon a trade since described by the editor of the 
 Friend of India as follows : — 
 
 " All the iniquities of bribery, fraud, perjury, and violence, which are inseparably 
 connected with smuggling, are practised ; and, occasionally, bloody collisions occur 
 between them and the native authorities. Sometimes, with a perfect understanding 
 on both sides, a sham fight is got up between the smugglers and mandarins, in order 
 to display greater vigilance and activity, thereby deceiving the government agents." 
 
 Thus sanctioned by the royal head of the English Church, and 
 by those of its illustrious members who then filled high positions 
 in his government, the trade moved forward with great rapidity, 
 the export of 1837 amounting to 40,000 chests and making a demand 
 on China for no less than £25,000,000, or thrice that made but 
 thirteen years before. Alarmed at this, the emperor's councillors 
 were urgent with him to sanction domestic cultivation of the poppy 
 and thus stop a demand that was draining the country of all the 
 silver at its command. To this his answer was given in the 
 memorable words that follow, to wit : "It is true," said he, "I 
 cannot prevent the introduction of the flowing poison; gain-seeking 
 and corrupt men will, for profit and sensuality, defeat my wishes; 
 BUT NOTHING WILL INDUCE ME TO DERIVE A REVENUE FROM THE 
 VICE AND MISERY OF MY PEOPLE." 
 
 So much for a barbarian sovereign for the conversion of whose 
 unenlightened subjects to the pure doctrines of Christianity so much 
 anxiety is felt by many of those eminent Britons whose votes have 
 invariably been given in behalf of the "great reformer of the age," 
 wheresoever found; whether on the shores of the China seas or on 
 those of these United States. 
 
 The five and thirty years which since have followed, present the 
 facts that follow, to wit: — 
 
 1st. An earnest effort at suppression of the trade by means of 
 seizure and confiscation of all the opium that had been introduced 
 in violation of the law. 2d. A bombardment of Canton attended 
 with great destruction of propert}' and life, followed by a treaty by 
 which the poor Chinese were required to pay $21,000,000 for 
 having been so long compelled to submit to the humiliation of 
 being plundered and maltreated by the "great reformer;" and
 
 20 
 
 further, to cede Hong Kong, at the mouth of the Canton River, 
 to the end that it might be used as a smuggling depot throughout 
 the future. 3d. The war of 1857, so entirely unprovoked on 
 the part of the Chinese government or people, that it has never 
 yet, as I think, found a defender even in the English press; 
 closing, however, with a treaty by the terms of which the Chinese 
 government, despite of all remonstrance, was compelled to legiti- 
 mize an annual introduction, counting by millions of pounds, of a 
 commodity that in Britain itself was treated as a poison whose sale 
 was to be subjected to close restriction, and to whose exclusion from 
 Japan the British government had itself agreed. 
 
 Bad as was all this, it was scarcely worse than the injury and in- 
 sult resulting from the fact, that the empire was in a great degree 
 thrown open to the incursions of British agents and travellers, 
 "manifesting," said Sir Frederick Bruce in a dispatch to Earl Rus- 
 sell, "an insolence and disregard to Chinese feelings," greatly ex- 
 ceeding even that which is so usual with those of them who travel 
 in other countries. Confirming this, Lord Elgin tells his readers 
 that he had seldom in the East "heard a sentence which was re- 
 concilable with the hypothesis that Christianity had come into the 
 world. Detestation, contempt, ferocity, and vengeance," as he con- 
 tinues, "whether Chinamen or Indians be the object." 
 
 Unceasing outrages provoking on the part of the poor Chinaman 
 occasional resistance, we find this but three years later, in I860, made 
 the occasion of another war in which the rapid growth of civiliza- 
 tion was manifested in the burning of the wonderi'ul winter palace, 
 and the distribution of its treasures, as loot, among the captors. 
 
 The treaty of Tientsin provided for its own revision at a future 
 date, which arrived in 1869. On that occasion the Chinese govern- 
 ment was urgent for such increase of duty upon opium as would 
 repress its consumption, and to this the British minister consented ; 
 but the home government, with Mr. Gladstone at its head, refused 
 its assent, and the duty remained unchanged. 
 
 Most anxious, the Chinese commissioners, with Prince Kung at 
 their head, addressed to the minister a communication so affect- 
 ing in its appeals for mercy to be granted to a great people now 
 becoming financially and morally demoralized by use of a poison 
 the cost of which to the ultimate consumers can scarcely be less t hail 
 $200,000,000, that I am induced to ask your attention to a portion 
 of it here given, as follows: — 
 
 "From Tsungli Yamen to Sir R. Alcock, July, 18(!t). The writers have, ou several 
 occasions, wheq conversing with hi* excellency the British Minister, referred to the 
 opium trade as being prejudicial to the general interests of commerce. The object of 
 the treaties between our respective countries was to secure perpetual peace, but if 
 effective steps cannot be taken to remove an accumulating sense of injury from the 
 minds of men, it is to be feared that no policy can obviate sources of future trouble. 
 * * * If it be desired to remove the very root, and to stop the evil at its source, no- 
 thing will be effective but a prohibition to be enforced alike by both parties. Again, 
 the Chinese merchant supplies your country with his goodly tea anil silk, conferring 
 thereby a benefit upon her, but the English merchant empoisons China with pestilent 
 opium. Smh conduct is unrighteous. Who can justify it ? What wonder if officials 
 and people say that England is wilfully working out China's ruin, and has no real
 
 21 
 
 friendly feeling for her? The wealth and generosity of England is spoken of by all. 
 She is anxious to prevent and anticipate all injury to her commercial interest. How 
 is it then she can hesitate to remove an acknowledged evil? Indeed it cannot be 
 that England still holds to this evil business, earning the hatred of the officials and 
 people of China, ami making herself a reproach among the nations, because she would 
 lose a little revenue were she to forbid the cultivation of the poppy! The writers 
 hope that his excellency will memorialize his government to give orders in India and 
 elsewhere to substitute the cultivation of cereals or cotton. Were both nations to 
 rigorously prohibit the growth of the poppy, both the traffic in and the consumption 
 of opium might alike be put an end to. To do away with so great an evil would be 
 a great virtue on England's part; she would Strengthen friendly relations, and make 
 herself illustrious. How delightful to have so great an act transmitted to after ages ! 
 This matter is injurious to commercial interests in no ordinary degree. If his excel- 
 Jency the British Minister cannot, before it is too late, arrange a plan for a joint pro- 
 hibition (of the traffic), then no matter with what devotedness the writers may plead, 
 they may be unable to cause the people to put aside all ill feeling, and so strengthen 
 friendly relations as to place them for ever beyond fear of disturbance. Day and 
 night, therefore, the writers give to this matter most earnest thought, and overpower- 
 ing is the distress which it occasions them. Having thus presumed to unbosom 
 themselves, they would be honored by his excellency's reply." 
 
 Compare, now, I pray you, Mr. Editor, the conduct of these barba- 
 rians, willing to surrender a revenue of $8,000,000 derivable from 
 the import of opium, or, indeed, to make almost any other sacrifice 
 in the interests of humanity, with that of those Christian gentlemen of 
 her majesty's council who, with a certificate in their hand from the 
 minister just then returned from China, of his belief in the absolute 
 good faith and sincerity of the Chinese authorities, declined to make 
 any answer whatsoever to this solemn appeal in behalf of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 Almost simultaneously with the determination thus manifested to 
 force a great nation onward in the course of ruin, that same admi- 
 nistration was to the last degree urgent in its desire for a commis- 
 sion by aid of which it should be enabled to obtain, at almost any 
 sacrifice, discharge from claims for injuries inflicted upon the Ame- 
 rican people at a time when it was supposed that, like the Chinese, 
 they were so weak as to be wholly unable to make resistance; and 
 to the end of obtaining such discharge an eminent diplomatist was 
 sent across the Atlantic with assurance of his advance to a mar- 
 quisate in the event of success in his negotiations. Simultaneously, 
 too, that same administration looked on quietly while the Russian 
 emperor reduced to rags that treat}' of Paris by means of which 
 he was meant to be trammelled in his movements toward further 
 power in southern Europe and Asia. 
 
 Having studied these facts, Mr. Editor, you may, perhaps, now 
 allow me to ask the question as to what would be your own opinion 
 of an able-bodied man, in all the vigor of life, whom you had seen 
 day by day, week by week, trampling on one older than himself, 
 and so feeble in body and mind as to be wholly unable to make re- 
 sistance? 
 
 Still, further, what would be your opinion of him when you saw 
 him almost simultaneously "booing and booing" to all the men 
 stronger than himself by whom he chanced to be surrounded? My 
 own opinion I cannot here venture to express. What it is, you 
 may, as I think, very readily imagine.
 
 22 
 
 How the atrocious polic} 7 thus described is viewed by some of 
 the right-thinking among jour own fellow citizens, is shown, Mr. 
 Editor, in the following passage from the Fortnightly Review: — 
 
 " Mr. Gladstone, in speaking of the opium war with China, once remarked that 
 'justice was on the side of the Pagan.' Never was this more true than at the 
 present time, when a Pagan government, in spite of domestic anarchy, of the para- 
 lyzing influence of official corruption, and of the perpetual menace of foreign inter- 
 vention, yet nobly endeavors to exert what remains of its shattered authority on 
 the side of virtue and the good order of the State. On the other hand. I know of 
 nothing more ignoble than the heartless indifference with which the failure of these 
 patriotic efforts is regarded by so-called civilized nations, or the immoral cynicism 
 with which English statesmen not only excuse but justify our share in entailing 
 the greatest of calamities on one-third of the human race. If it were possible for 
 us to escape from the responsibility which must ever attach itself to the authors of 
 the first Chinese War; if we could prove that, in forcing the legalization of the opium 
 trade by the treaty of Tientsin, we yielded to iron necessity ; if, moreover, we could 
 demonstrate that our duty to India compelled us to prefer the temporary exigencies 
 of revenue to the lasting interests of morality — it would still be incumbent on us 
 to face the fact that our position is at once shameful and humiliating. But when 
 we know that the direct responsibility of every act that has led to the degradation 
 and rapid decline of the Chinese Empire lies at our own door, and that the policy 
 which has borne these evil fruits is still being, in a great measure, carried out 
 by the concurrent action of Anglo-Indian administrators and British statesmen, 
 the ignominy demands some fortitude for us to bear it. We, however, do bear 
 it ; and, at the same time, lose no opportunity of ministering to our self-love by 
 pretending that wherever English commerce extends, or English influence penetrates, 
 both confer untold benefits upon the less favored nations of the world." 
 
 So much for the present, and now for the future. That, Mr. 
 Editor, you may clearly understand what is the prospect as regards 
 action in India, I submit for your consideration a passage from the 
 Contemporary Review^ for the last month, which reads as follows: — 
 
 "The motives of our Indian Government, and its policy with regard to opium, are 
 patent and unmistakable. For the purpose of maintaining and increasing our opium 
 revenue, the government lias carefully studied the Chinese market: it has sent 
 messengers to China to find out how the trade might best be advanced. With this 
 view it has been proposed to direct a special inquiry as to the possibility of extending 
 the cultivation of opium in the districts of the northwestern provinces : for this 
 purpose our consuls in t he Chinese ports regularly report on the condition and pros- 
 pects of the opium trade, and for this purpose the Times, in February of last year, 
 called attention to the propriety of appointing a commission of inquiry to ascertain 
 the probable results of Chinese competition with our opium trade. For this purpose 
 it can hardly be doubted the Indian Government are anxious to open up the trade 
 route through Burmah, and so to pour a fresh stream of poison direct on the western 
 provinces of China. It Btanda confessed that, like prudent people, we take o 
 our eight millions a year ; but whilst we do so and maintain pressure upon China, 
 We cannot deny that we are the lineal successors of those who waged the Opium 
 War." 
 
 Saving most seriously demoralized the hundreds of millions of 
 people who could be reached by means of the rivers of the east, it 
 is tee., as we see, proposed to perform a work of perhaps similar 
 lit, by means <»!' roads in the west, and to the end of facilitating 
 the movement, tie; home government would seem to be preparing 
 for another war upon a. people whose defencelessness has been 
 so fully proved; Lord I).. Thy having, in October last, told the 
 people of Liverpool that, " for years past it has seemed probable to 
 careful observers thai some collision of this kind would take place. 
 U has come at last, and we must do our best to bring it to good
 
 23 
 
 account, and make it the means of putting our relations on a better 
 footing in future." Treading on worms whose teeth have been 
 proved incapable of biting, would seem, Mr. Editor, to be a very 
 profitable amusement. That it is not a very unusual one on the 
 part of your Christian government is shown in an article of your 
 own Fortnightly Review, entitled, " How England makes and keeps 
 treaties," from which I take a passage, now recommended to your 
 careful consideration, and which reads as follows: — 
 
 " In the same way and at the same time, we have everywhere obtained that our 
 goods shall be imported into all these countries at duties of either three or live 
 per cent. We are continuing to apply to Eastern nations this double system of 
 tariffs, and jurisdiction of goods and judges. To attain those ends, we use all sorts 
 of means, from courteous invitation to bombardments. We prefer to employ mere 
 eloquence, because it is cheap and easy ; but if talking fails we follow it up by gun- 
 boats, and, in that convincing way, we induce hesitating 'barbarians' not only to 
 accept our two unvarying conditions, but also to pay the cost of the expedition by 
 which their consent to these conditions was extorted from them. We tried patience 
 and politw proposals with Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco. China was so unwilling to 
 listen to our advice, so blind to the striking merits of our opium and our consuls, 
 that we were obliged, with great regret, to resort to gentle force with her. Japan 
 presents the most curious example of the series ; it is made up of ignorance circum- 
 vented, and of indignation frightened. Indeed, if we had space for it, the story of 
 the Japan treaties would be worth telling, because it is a very special one, because 
 it is the newest triumph of our justice abroad, and because it may be taken as in- 
 dicative of our present 'manner,' as painters say." 
 
 The "story" of Japan, so well " worth telling," is this: — 
 A dozen years since that country concluded treaties with Great 
 Britain, France, and other European powers, closely resembling 
 that with Turkey, and those with other Eastern nations, by means 
 of which they have been so largely barbarized, and so generally 
 ruined. Unused to treaty making, however, the Japanese authori- 
 ties wisely inserted provisions by means of which it was supposed 
 to be secured that those now made were to be replaced by others at 
 the close of the first decade. That time arrived some four years 
 since, and down to the last hour it was supposed that new treaties 
 would be made. Not so, however, Britain at once asserting that 
 there eould be no " revision," except with the nonsent of both 
 parties, and that until such consent should have been obtained the 
 original treaty must remain in foree. EVom that time the Japanese 
 government has stood in the position of being compelled to submit 
 to all the provisions of a treaty whose maintenance cannot fail to 
 result in utter ruin; or, on the other hand, risk being involved in 
 war with a nation that has always in the Eastern seas more vessels 
 of war than would be required to close at once all that great do- 
 mestic commerce now carried on by means of boats and ships be- 
 tween the various towns and cities, islands and provinces of the 
 empire. Here, as usual in all cases in which Britain is interested, 
 the question is one oi' might and not of right. 
 
 Sueh, Mr. Editor, is the system against which I have counselled, 
 not only for my own country but for all the countries of the world, 
 that resistance which takes the form of protection to the farmer in 
 his efforts at bringing consumers to his side. Were you a Japanese, 
 would you not do the same? Were Adam Smith, an American,
 
 24 
 
 would he not be a protectionist? Being a Briton, would he not 
 say to his fellow citizens that all their wars were those of mere 
 "shop-keepers;" all idea of either Christianity or civilization being 
 made to give way to desire for the "almighty dollar," however 
 great the "folly and iniquity" attendant upon its acquisition? 
 Would he not thus exhibit himself to the world as one of that class 
 of thinkers which you have just now stigmatized as composed of 
 ignoramuses and imbeciles? Assuredly he would. 
 
 In another letter I propose to furnish an exhibit of the results 
 obtained in India, meanwhile remaining 
 
 Yours respectfully, 
 
 HENRY C. CAREY. 
 
 Philadelphia, March 17, 1876. 
 
 LETTER SIXTH. 
 
 " In the time of its native princes," says Mr. Campbell in his 
 "Modern India," India was a "paying country," and that such was 
 the fact is absolutely certain. Their number was great and their 
 mode of living luxurious beyond anything then known in Europe; 
 but their people, profitably employed, were probably in the en- 
 joyment of an amount of comfort fully equal to what could have 
 been then exhibited by any of the communities of the West. Noav, 
 however, when that great country has for more than a century, 
 Mr. Editor, been subjected to an exclusive British control, we find 
 a picture widely different; the princes and their magnificence having 
 disappeared, and their palaces being occupied by mere clerks chiefly 
 employed in gathering up the proceeds of a most oppressive taxa- 
 tion to be thence transmitted to that "city of palaces," Calcutta, 
 where sits enthroned a representative of Her Majesty the Queen and 
 Empress seriously engaged in contemplation of the unpleasant fact, 
 that if he would avoid public bankruptcy he must still further 
 misuse the power to poison and demoralize the hundreds of millions 
 of Chinese people to whom he stands even now indebted for almost 
 a fourth of the revenue he controls, the actual amount thence 
 derived being in the close neighborhood of $50,000,000. The 
 change thus exhibited is the saddest that history anywhere records. 
 To what has it been due? Let us see! 
 
 Local action, local combination, local expenditure of the proceeds 
 of taxation, domestic commerce, exhibit themselves conspicuously 
 throughout Indian history down to the commencement of the pre- 
 sent century. If the cultivator contributed too large a portion of 
 his grain, it was at least consumed in a neighboring market, and 
 nothing went from off the land. Manufactures, too, were widely 
 spread, and thus was made demand for the labor not required in 
 agriculture. "On the coast of Coroinandel," said Orme,* "and in 
 
 ' Historical Fragments, London, 180. r ), p. 4u!t.
 
 25 
 
 the province of Bengal, when at some distance from a high road or 
 principal town, it is difficult to find a village in which every man, 
 woman, and child is not employed in making a piece of cloth. At 
 present," he continues, " much the greatest part of whole provinces 
 are employed in this single manufacture." Its progress, as he said, 
 included "no less than a description of the lives of half the inhabi- 
 tants of llindostan." 
 
 While employment was thus locally subdivided and neighbor 
 was thus enabled to exchange with neighbor, exchanges between 
 the producers of food, or of salt, in one part of the country, and the 
 producers of cotton and manufacturers of cloth in others, tended 
 to the production of commerce with more distant men — whether 
 within, or without, the limits of India itself. Bengal was cele- 
 brated for the finest muslins, the consumption of which at Delhi, 
 and in Northern India generally, was large; the Coromandel coast 
 being equally celebrated for the best chintzes and calicoes — leaving 
 to Western India the manufacture of strong and inferior goods of 
 every kind. Under these circumstances, it is no matter of surprise 
 that the country was rich, and that its people, though often over- 
 taxed, and sometimes plundered by invading armies, were prosper- 
 ous in a high degree. 
 
 The foundation having thus been laid in a great domestic com- 
 merce, that with the world at large was great ; so great that exchange 
 was then in favor of India with all the nations of the earth. Watt 
 and Arkwright had then, however, given to Britain those means of 
 underworking the world which have been since so unscrupulously 
 used; and the monopoly thereof had been established by means of 
 prohibition of the export not only of machinery itself, but of all the 
 artisans by whom machines might possibly be made. To this was 
 now, 1813, added the imposition of heavy duties on the import 
 of India cottons, coupled with a prohibition of duties of any kind ou 
 English cottons imported into India. We have thus presented to 
 us a course of proceeding the " folly and iniquity" of which are 
 without precedent in the world's histor}' ; yet was it carried into so 
 full effect that when Bishop lleber, a dozen or more years later, 
 had occasion to visit the site of that great city of Ducca, which had 
 been accustomed to supply the courts of Asia and of Europe with 
 tissues so delicate as to be likened to "woven air," he found it a 
 mass of jungle given up to the tiger and the elephant; as in fact was 
 more or less the case with all other of the manufacturing cities of 
 what had till recently been regarded as the greatest of the empires 
 of the world. As a consequence of this unhappy state of affairs, 
 there went up soon after to the Sovereign, the Parliament, and the 
 people of Britain, a memorial so sad as worthy to be placed now 
 side by side with that of Prince Kung and his fellow councillors; 
 its simple prayer being that, as British subjects, they might be 
 placed on equal footing with other Britons, paying duties as they 
 paid, neither more nor less. Then, as now, however, they appealed 
 to hearts of stone — traders' hearts — their modest prayer receiving 
 no attention whatsoever, and the work of annihilation going steadily
 
 26 
 
 forward until the cotton manufacture had disappeared throughout 
 all that great region of country extending from "Bombay to Bok- 
 hara, from Smyrna to Samarcand," with "a ruin," said Sir Robert 
 Peel, "without parallel in the annals of commerce." 
 
 The demand for labor now so far disappeared that Mr. Chapman 
 in his "Commerce and Cotton in India," an ardent admirer of the 
 system to which that effect had been due, was led, some five and 
 twenty years since, to speak to his British fellow citizens in the 
 words that follow : — 
 
 " A great part of the time of the laboring population in India is spent in idleness. 
 I don*t say this to blame them in the smallest degree. Without the means of 
 exporting heavy and crude surplus agricultural produce, and with scanty means, 
 whether of capital, science, or manual skill, for elaborating on the spot articles 
 fitted to induce a higher state of enjoyment and of industry in the mass of the people, 
 they have really no inducement to exertion beyond that which is necessary to gratify 
 their present and very limited wishes: those wishes are unnaturally low, inasmuch 
 as they do not afford the needful stimulus to the exercise requisite to intellectual and 
 moral improvement ; and it is obvious that there is no remedy for this but extended 
 intercourse. Meanwhile, probably the half of the human time and energy of 
 India runs to mere waste. Surely, we need not wonder at the poverty of the 
 country." 
 
 With the decline thus exhibited in the domestic commerce there 
 came, of course, increase of difficulty in obtaining the means required 
 for carrying on the government; and, as a necessary consequence, 
 a taxation so searching as to embrace not only all the instruments 
 required for household uses, but also those, however small and insig- 
 nificant, required for any purpose of manufacture; the land tax, 
 meanwhile, being so increased as, according to your fellow-country- 
 man Mr. John Bright, to take from the wretched laborer from 70 
 to 80 per cent, of the yield of land subjected to a cultivation of the 
 most exhaustive kind. Add to this a rate of interest that for these 
 miserable people ranged between 30 and 60 per cent, per annum, 
 and you will, as I think, see, Mr. Editor, that the causes of the 
 rebellion of '57 lay somewhat deeper than in the requirement of 
 the government that sepoys should bite off cartridge ends that 
 had been dipped in grease. Had there existed no better reason 
 than this the close of that rebellion would not have been marked 
 by those cold-blooded murders by which it now stands so much dis- 
 tinguished. Of all men there are none so bitter as the disappointed 
 trader, and the Indian government had thus far been simply a repre- 
 sentation of that " nation of shopkeepers" whose advent upon the 
 stage was so greatly deprecated by Adam Smith. 
 
 With the close of that rebellion we reach the termination of the 
 existence of the East India Company as a territorial power, and the 
 commencement of that, British Indian empire of which her majesty 
 the queen is hereafter to be styled the empress. From that time 
 forward the people of India were, as might have been supposed, 
 to be regarded as fellow subjects with tin; men of Britain, liable 
 to performance of the same duties, and equally entitled to claim 
 re p id for rights. Eighteen years having now already passed since 
 such change in their political condition had been made, we may
 
 27 
 
 here inquire into the changes in their material and moral condition 
 that have been brought about, as follows: — 
 
 The territory of the empire equals that of all Europe, Russia ex- 
 cepted; and its population now numbers two hundred and forty 
 millions, being more than that of all Europe, like exception being 
 made. Of this vast area a large proportion, probably half, be- 
 longs to the State as land proprietor, the revenue thence resulting 
 being the rent that throughout Europe accrues to the proprietor 
 subject to claims of the State in the form of tax. That rent now 
 but little exceeds $100,000,000, giving an average of twenty 
 cents per acre from 500,000,000 acres; and yet the charge, as has 
 been shown, frequently much exceeds fifty per cent, of the gross 
 produce, and rarely falls below it. What, under such circumstances, 
 is the condition of the poor agriculturist? What can be his power 
 to contribute to the commerce of the world by making demand 
 for the products of other lands I leave it to you, Mr. Editor, to 
 determine. 
 
 Unable to obtain farther contributions from the land, the govern- 
 ment finds itself perpetually in need, and hence it has been that a 
 writei - in one of your public journals, some four years since, felt 
 himself warranted in thus furnishing description of the movement: — 
 
 " In the last ten years the salt tax, already most oppressive, has heen five times 
 increased ; a heavy income tax has heen imposed, and taxes on feasts and marriages 
 have heen proposed; two and a quarter millions of people have died of famine; 
 the debt, including guarantees of badly constructed and expensive railroads, has 
 grown to nearly $500,000,000, the sole reliance for payment of interest thereon being 
 now found in the continued maintenance of the power to poison the Chinese people 
 with the produce of Indian opium fields." 
 
 Salt being a prime necessity of life, and the income derived from 
 its consumption being in the neighborhood of $30,000,000, or almost 
 a third of that derived from the land, I have now to ask your 
 attention to the tax thereon, and its effects, as follows: — 
 
 To a great extent the manufacture is a monopoly in the hands of 
 government, requiring for its maintenance, as we are told, an army 
 of thirteen thousand men. What additional supplies are required 
 might readily be obtained from producers on the coast, and mainly 
 from Orissa; but, as if to prevent development of such industry, 
 the salt there produced is, on free trade principles, equally taxed 
 with that brought from England as ballast for ships coming to load 
 with rice, jute, cotton, and other rude products, and paving, proba- 
 bly, as freight less than would be required for carriage of the home 
 product to the markets of the provinces north and east of the 
 lloogly. As a consequence, these latter are so well supplied with 
 foreign salt that, at times, the domestic manufacture is entirely 
 suspended; poor people who see it then wasting almost at their 
 doors being required to pay for what they need at so high a price 
 that the fish in which their rivers so much abound is merely dried 
 in the sun to be thereafter eaten in a half putrid state. The cost of 
 manufacture is 16 cents per cwt. The tax is 104 cents, and it is 
 said, therefore, to be not unusual to give for a pound o\' salt no less 
 than nine pounds of rice ; thus reversing the order of things here
 
 28 
 
 observed, where the protected salt manufacturer is accustomed to 
 give several pounds of salt for a pound of flour. 
 
 The combined revenue derived from salt, one of the most pressing 
 needs of India, and from opium, the great enemy of China, varies 
 little from $76,000,000 ; or three-fourths as much as the rents deriv- 
 able from a territory more extensive than France, Belgium, Germany, 
 Spain, and Italy combined, occupied by a people who would gladly 
 work were they allowed so to do. Why is this? For the reason 
 that every step taken by the government has tended to the suppres- 
 sion of that domestic commerce in whose absence there can arrive 
 no such thing as a real agriculture. It may be said, however, that 
 railroads have been constructed, and that public aid had been given 
 in that direction. When, however, you, Mr. Editor, shall have care- 
 fully studied the facts, you will see that these are merely intended 
 as aids to the foreign trade, enabling cotton to reach the ports on the 
 way to Manchester, and British goods to make their way more 
 readily to the interior, to the further destruction of the little domes- 
 tic commerce that yet remains. 
 
 What now, under this admirable "free trade" system, has become 
 the contribution of this vast country and its amiable and well-dis- 
 posed people to the great commerce of the world? Of cotton re- 
 ceived last year in Britain, to be there spun and Woven and then 
 to be returned to India, the quantity was 251,000,000 pounds, the 
 equivalent of little more than half a million of American bales. 
 Outside of cotton and of the opium forced upon China, the total 
 annual export, consisting of rice, jute, tea, coffee, and other rude 
 products of the soil, scarcely exceeds $120,000,000, or fifty cents 
 per head of the total population. Such is the grand result at which 
 we have arrived at the close of a period of nearly twenty years, 
 throughout the whole of which the road to a great international 
 commerce for a grand Indian empire was, as the world has been 
 assured, to be found in the direction indicated by the British free- 
 trade system ! 
 
 What now, Mr. Editor, becomes of the revenues thus extorted 
 from the poor salt consumers of India, the degraded opium con- 
 sumers of China, and the wretched laborers on the land of India? 
 For answer to this question, I present an extract from Mr. Torrens's 
 recent work, "Empire in Asia," which reads as follows: — 
 
 " Nineteeii-twentieths of our taxes are annually, monthly, it might almost he said 
 daily, respent among us ; while of the revenues of India a large portion is exported 
 hither to furnish us with extra means of oomfort and of luxury. The manure is 
 thus continually withdrawn from Eastern fields to enrich the island gardens of the 
 West. It has been variously estimated that, irrespective of interest on debt, six, 
 seven, ami even eight millions a year .are drawn from India, to be spent by English- 
 men either there or at home. The process of exhaustion may he slow, hut it is 
 sure. . . . We have laid the people and princes of India under tribute, and after a 
 century of varied experiments, the only Hunt of exaction seems to be the physical 
 
 capacity of the yield." 
 
 Why the yield is so very light, may readily be understood by 
 those who study on the shores of the great Indian rivers, and 
 especially on those of the Mahanadi as shown in Hunter's "Orissa," 
 the waste of animal food; the waste of vegetable food in the Pun-
 
 29 
 
 jaub and other provinces of the North ; the waste of life from fre- 
 quent and destructive famines; the universal waste of labor conse- 
 quent upon an absence of demand therefor; and then look to the 
 fact that all this poverty and waste are consequent upon the pursuit 
 of a policy which imposes upon these poor people a necessity for 
 sending the cotton crop tens of thousands of miles in search of the 
 little spindle by aid of which it is made to undergo the first and 
 simplest process of manufacture; to wit, its conversion into yarn. 
 Under such circumstances need we wonder at the poverty which 
 enforces continuance of the infamous opium traffic? 
 
 Sir Thomas Munro, than whom there is no higher authority, thus 
 described, half a century since, the people of this great country: — 
 
 " I do not exactly know what is meant by civilizing the people of India. In the 
 theory and practice of good government they may be deficient ; but if a good system 
 of agriculture — if unrivalled manufactures — if a capacity to produce what conve- 
 nience or luxury demands — if the establishment of schools for reading and writing — 
 if the general practice of kindness and hospitality — and, above all, if a scrupulous 
 inspect and delicacy towards the female sex, are among the points that denote a civi- 
 lized people, then the Hindoos are not inferior in civilization to the people of Europe." 
 
 Recently Mr. Torrens has described the barbarians of India, the 
 treatment of whose descendants at the hands of British travellers 
 and traders has been so well exhibited by Lord Elgin, in the words 
 that follow : — 
 
 "The governments of Southern Asia, when we began to meddle in their affairs, 
 were strangers to the system of penal laws, which were then among the cherished 
 institutions of our own and nearly every other European State. While no Catholic 
 in Ireland could inherit freehold, command a regiment, or sit on the judicial bench; 
 while in France the Huguenot weaver was driven into exile beyond sea ; and 
 while in Sweden none but Lutherans could sit as jurors; and in Spain no heretic 
 was permitted Christian burial — Sunis and Sheahs, Mahrattas and Sikhs, competed 
 freely for distinction and profit in almost every city and camp of Hindustan. The 
 tide of war ebbcl and flowed as in Christian lands, leaving its desolating traces more 
 or less deeply marked upon village homesteads or dilapidated towers. But mosque 
 and temple stood unscathed where they had stood before, monuments of architectural 
 taste and piety, unsurpassed for beauty and richness of decoration in any country of 
 the world." ... " Though the supreme governments were nominally absolute, 
 there existed in the chieftains, priesthood, courts of justice, the municipal system, 
 and above all, in the tenant-right to land, numerous and powerful barriers in the 
 way of its abuse." ... " Property was as carefully protected by the laws as in 
 Europe, and their infringement sometimes cost a prince his throne or life." 
 
 It is the hundred millions o( an admirable people thus described 
 that have been so sacrificed at the Manchester altar as to have pro- 
 duced a need for three wars having for their sole object the raising 
 of revenue by means that are rapidly bringing about a demorali- 
 zation of the hundreds of millions of Chinese people. May I not 
 be permitted to object to this, leaving you, Mr. Editor, to determine 
 on which side lie the " folly and iniquity" that have been ciiarged? 
 
 May I not be permitted to ask you if the " free trade" proceed- 
 ings of the last twenty years have tended to promote the growth of 
 commerce; to increase the admiration of poor Hindoos for the teach- 
 ings of the Christian church ; or to advance the cause of civilization ? 
 
 Respectfully soliciting a reply to these questions, I am, 
 
 Yours respectfully, 
 
 II. C. CAREY. 
 March 20, 1876.
 
 30 
 
 LETTER SEVENTH. 
 
 Students of Roman history, Mr. Editor, are accustomed to regard 
 proconsular administration as the perfection of all that is discredit- 
 able and destructive in the way of government ; yet is the little 
 finger of British traders in India more oppressive and more ruinous 
 than were the hands and arms of Yerres and Fonteius as exercised 
 in Sicily and Gaul. That these latter largely robbed the subject 
 peoples is very certain; equally so, however, is it that, unlike to 
 what has so steadily been done in India, they never struck at the 
 sources of production. Happily for the provincials the Senate 
 sought dominion, and not a mere monopoly of trade ami manu- 
 facture. Nowhere do we find it following up rebellion, thus 
 provoked, by measures so mercilessly vindictive as those which 
 followed suppression of that Indian one of '57. Among its members 
 there were many who had " itching palms," but nowhere does it 
 stand recorded that they had invoked the aid of law for compelling 
 subject nations to deal with them for pins and needles, cloth and 
 iron. Nowhere does the government present itself as allied with 
 smugglers for forcing, despite all opposition, supplies of poison on 
 a neighboring and friendly nation, thus making itself from hour to 
 hour more dependent on a trade debasing to its subjects and 
 destined in the end to prove a cause of their utter ruin. 
 
 What the Hindoo is now, servile as the men of the so-long-pro- 
 tected Japanese people are independent, he has been made. What 
 he may become, and how he may be led to act, is shown in the 
 assassination of the late Viceroy, Lord Mayo, whose latest expres- 
 sion in regard to dangers to be apprehended in the future is here 
 given, as follows: — 
 
 "A feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction exists among every class, both Eu- 
 ropean and native, on account of the constant increase of taxation which has for 
 years been going on. My belief is that the continuance of that feeling is a political 
 danger, the magnitude of which can hardly be over-estimated ; and any sentiment 
 of dissatisfaction which may exist among disbanded soldiers of the native army is 
 as nothing in comparison with the state of general discontent to which I have re- 
 ferred. . . . We can never depend for a moment on the continuance of general 
 tranquillity; hut I believe that the present state of public feeling, as regards taxation, 
 i^ more likely to lead to disturbance and discontent, and he to us a source of greater 
 danger, than the partial reduction which we propose iu the native army can ever 
 occasion. Of the two evils 1 choose the lesser." 
 
 The danger to be apprehended, as here is shown, is that resulting 
 from a constantly increasing burthen of taxation resulting from 
 an absence of domestic commerce, and a constantly increasing 
 ssity for exporting the soil in the form of cotton, jute, and 
 other raw materials, returning nothing to the land. What, how- 
 ever, in this respect, Mr. Editor, is to be the course of things 
 in the days to comer' For answer to this question turn, if you 
 please, to a quite recent article of your own, and find therein a 
 
 :ommendation to the poor Hindoos to accept, as a great " boon" to
 
 31 
 
 themselves, permission to assume the payment of $4,000,000 of 
 taxes now paid, as admitted by the men of Manchester them- 4 
 
 selves, by traders who have been deluging the markets of India 
 with cottons that cannot stand a single washing, in the hope 
 thereby to crush out a native* manufacture that, under the stimulus 
 of a protective duty of only 5 per cent., is now advancing with 
 such rapidity that the capital invested therein had grown in the 
 eighteen months ending in November last from twenty-two mil- 
 lions of rupees to almost forty millions. Turn next to another 
 article but few days later in date, expressing extreme anxiety in 
 relation to the constantly diminishing value of that silver coin 
 which now constitutes the sole currency of India; and showing 
 that, to the end of maintaining the salaries of officials and the 
 revenues of British creditors it may become necessary, in violation 
 of all existing contraets, to substitute gold for silver in payment 
 of rent and taxes, thereby compelling the already impoverished 
 cultivator to use a metal to which, as money, he has hitherto 
 been an almost entire stranger ; that, too, at a time when the 
 demand therefor increases from day to day, with corresponding 
 decrease in the supply derived from Australia and from our Pacific 
 States, and as steady increase in the power of the money lender to 
 demand payment for its use. 
 
 Less than twenty years since, alarmed at the idea of a deluge 
 of gold, attended with constant decrease in its value as compared 
 with silver, M. Chevalier, as anxious then in relation to government 
 and other creditors as you, Mr. Editor, now are, proposed a de- 
 moralization of the nobler metal, and in this idea he was supported, 
 as I think, by Mr. Cobden. Had their anticipations been realized, 
 and had their suggestions been carried into practical effect, silver 
 would have been steadily growing in price, enabling the Indian 
 government to pay with four or five ounces as much interest as it 
 now pays with six. Would that, however, have led to any such 
 movement toward diminution of rents, as is now proposed in refer- 
 ence to their increase? Not at all, and for the reason that, as we 
 here are told by M. De Tocqueville — 
 
 " In the eyes of the English, that which is most useful to Eugland is always the 
 cause of justice. The man or the government which serves the interests of England 
 has all sorts of good qualities ; he who hurts those interests, all sorts of defects; so 
 that it would seem that the criterion of what is right, or nohle, or just, is to be found 
 in the degree of favor or opposition to English interests." 
 
 That, in face of Lord Mayo's serious admonition, any such 
 measure of confiscation, or, indeed, any one of increased taxation, 
 will be adopted, can hardly be believed ; and you yourself, Mr. 
 Editor, seem to regard it as being doubtful in high degree. Some- 
 thing, however, must be done if the credit of the government is to 
 be maintained. What shall it be? Where- shall we look? To 
 the one and only source tkat, as you yourself so clearly see, can be at 
 all relied upon, to wit, a further development of the infamous 
 opium trade; that being the point at which the Head of the British 
 Church, her ministers, Parliament, and bench of bishops, have ar-
 
 32 
 
 rived at the close of almost twenty years of imperial and free-trade 
 government of the hundreds of millions of people of whom the 
 population of her majesty's Indian empire now consists; and who, 
 before the invasion of your countrymen, constituted one of the most 
 highly civilized and self-supporting [rations of the world. 
 
 Loud and frequent, Mr. Editor, have been the commendations by 
 your journal of the admirable conduct of the government, and of Sir 
 Bartle Frere, in endeavoring wholly to suppress the little remaining 
 slave trade of Eastern Africa. Singularly enough, however, it has 
 rarely, if even ever, called attention to the fact that there had been 
 developed in Eastern Asia, and by Englishmen, a slave trade such 
 as is here below described : — 
 
 " Betweeu the intoxication of ardent spirits and that of opium," says a writer in 
 the Chinese lie/iository, " there is but one point more of difference deserving of particu- 
 lar attention, and that is the lev/old force with which every argument against the 
 former applies to the latter. There is no slavery on earth to be compared with the 
 bondage into which opium casts its victim. There is scarcely one known instance of 
 escape from its toils, when once they have fairly enveloped a man. The fact is far 
 too notorious to be questioned for one moment, that there is in opium, when once in- 
 dulge. I in, a fatal fascination which needs almost superhuman powers of self-denial, 
 and also capacity for the endurance of pain to overcome. The operation of opium is, 
 on this account, far more deadly by many degrees than its less tyrannous rival. 
 
 "It is tlie after or secondary effects of this drug which have such a destructive in- 
 fluence on the constitution. Its continued use destroys the natural appetite— de- 
 ranges the digestive organs — impedes the circulation, and vitiates the quality of the 
 blood — depresses the spirits, and gradually weakens the power of the involuntary 
 nerves as well as the volitions of the mind ; thereby taking away the powers of free 
 agency, and converting the man into the brute. How expressive the remark once 
 made by a distinguished mandariu: It is not the man that ectts the opium, but it is opium 
 that eats the man." 
 
 Might it not be well that the British people should free them- 
 selves from the beam that obstructs their own sense of vision before 
 undertaking to remove the mote that dims the sight of the Sultan 
 of Zanzibar ? 
 
 How this horrible traffic, Mr. Editor, affects the progress of Chris- 
 tianity in the East is shown, says a writer in the Contemporary Re- 
 herein before referred to, by the fact that sixteen missionaries 
 writing in Canton and belonging to different nations and denomi- 
 nations, concurred in the spring of last year (1875) in stating that 
 
 "The fad that people of Christian nations engage in the traffic, and especially that 
 fir' at Britain to a large extent supplies the China market with opium, is constantly 
 urged as a plausible and patent objection to Christianity." 
 
 Even more emphatic was the language used by the Bishop of 
 Victoria ( 1 [ong l\"ii;j) — 
 
 '• I have been again and again stopped while preaohing, with the question, 'Are 
 
 you an Englishman .' 1^ not that the country that opium comes from ? (io back and 
 
 ■top it, and then we will talk about Christianity.' " 
 
 Thai the christianizing and civilizing effects of the system thus 
 
 maintained by the beads of the Protestant Episcopal Church of 
 
 ad an- not. limited to China is, Mr. Kditor, proved by an 
 
 English missionary in Rangoon who states the humiliating fact, 
 
 thai before the I. .one to Burmah drunkenness and opium 
 
 were almosl unknown, but that those evils have now
 
 33 
 
 spread so rapidly that a great part of the revenue of the government 
 is derived therefrom. 
 
 From an Eastern proverb, Mr. Editor, we learn that "curses like 
 young chickens always come home to roost." For evidence that 
 the truth of this is proved among yourselves, and that the "curse" 
 inflicted upon China by the British people and their government 
 has now really arrived at home, allow me to ask your attention to 
 the facts here given as to the growing intemperance among the 
 people by whom you yourself are surrounded, readers of the Times 
 and others, as follows: — 
 
 Consumption of intoxicating liquors in the United Kingdom — 
 
 18fi0. 1869. Inc. p. c. 
 
 Spirits, foreign and domestic. . 26,924,611 30,114,624 11.84 
 Beer, ale, and porter .... 674,170,326 895,004,412 31.27 
 Wine 6,718,585 14,723,534 119.31 
 
 Aggregate 707,814,922 929,842,570 31.37 
 
 The population in this period increased 7| per cent. 
 
 The first of these years was one of great prosperity, American 
 free trade making large demand for the products of British furnaces 
 and mills. The second was one of still continued depression result- 
 ing from the great financial crisis of 1866. None of the increased 
 consumption of liquor can, therefore, be traced to excitement in the 
 demand for labor, or to increase of money wages. All the facts 
 connected with the consumption of commodities other than liquor 
 tend, on the contrary, so far as they have come to my knowledge, 
 to prove a diminution of consumptive power. 
 
 Seeking, Mr. Editor, to understand the causes of the growing 
 demoralization thus exhibited, you need, as I think, do little more 
 than turn to the new Doomsday Book, there to find that by aid of 
 taxes levied upon the people of the world at large 12,000 per- 
 sons have been enabled to centre in themselves the ownership of 
 thirty out of the thirty-four millions of acres of English land in any 
 manner susceptible of improvement. Add to this the fact that half 
 of Scotland is owned by about twenty persons ; thereafter finding in 
 wretched agricultural laborers the descendants of the small pro- 
 prietors, and the cottagers, of the days of Adam Smith and Arthur 
 Young, and you will find but little difficulty in understanding 
 why such things are. The more that land is monopolized the 
 greater is the tendency toward division of its occupants into two 
 great classes — the very poor and the very rich — slaves on one hand 
 and masters on the other. So was it in Korne. So has it been in 
 our Southern States. So is it now in India. How it is in Britain 
 is clearly shown in the following passages descriptive of the ex- 
 tremes of society, from one of the most respectable of English jour- 
 nals : — 
 
 "It is coming rapidly to this — that a first-class leader of society with a first-class 
 fortune, to be ' on a level with his position,' wants, or chooses to think he wauts, a 
 house in Loudon, a house on the river, two palaces at least in the country, a shoot- 
 3
 
 34 
 
 ing box in the Highlands, a hotel iu Paris as costly as his London house, a villa at 
 Como ; a floor in Rome, an establishment in Cairo or Constantinople, a yacht, a 
 theatre, and a racing stud, and then thinks that life is as monotonous as it was 
 when "in his cool hall, with haggard eyes, the Roman noble lay.' " — Spectator. 
 
 "Children of both sexes and of all ages, from five up to sixteen, are, in fact, sold 
 by the wretched laborers to the gang-masters at so much per head per week, gene- 
 rally, we are bound to add, out of the direst poverty. The ganger, having collected 
 his children, takes them away to his job, forcing them to walk, or, if needful, to carry 
 each other, for distances, which often involve of themselves great cruelty. Five 
 miles out and five back is thought nothing of, in addition to almost continuous labor 
 
 for at least ten hours a day The laborers in many English parishes are 
 
 coarse enough, but among these poor wretches civilization disappears. . . . The 
 single amusement is obscene talk, which becomes so shocking that the very laborers 
 are revolted, and declare they would sooner turn out of the road than meet the gangs 
 returning. All the offices of nature, say twenty witnesses, are performed in public 
 by both sexes, without the faintest effort at concealment. Boys and girls of all ages 
 bathe together stark naked, and the most infamous actions are boasted of with a 
 shamelessness rarely found among savages." — Ibid. 
 
 When, Mr. Editor, you shall have given full consideration to 
 the several facts that thus far have been presented, you will, as I 
 think, be led to the conclusion, that, in ascribing to those who, 
 in common with Adam Smith, believe in the advantage of do- 
 mestic commerce as compared with foreign trade an entire mono- 
 poly of economical "ignorance and inability, folly and iniquity," 
 you have made a mistake so serious as to warrant careful recon- 
 sideration of the whole subject matter. The more thoroughly that 
 shall be given, the more must you be led to appreciate the im- 
 portance of looking inward and seeing "oursel's as others see us;" 
 the more, as I think, must you be led to the conclusion that in the 
 views here below presented by the great political philosopher of the 
 age, there is so large an amount of truth as should make it impera- 
 tive on the part of every right-minded Englishman to review the 
 past with a desire to amend proceedings in the future. 
 
 " The Indian mutiny and the Crimean war show the little sympathy for England 
 abroad. ... I venture to affirm that the whole Continent, though it detested 
 the cruelties of your enemies, did not wish you to triumph. Much of this is, with- 
 out doubt, to be attributed to the evil passions which make men always desire the 
 fall of the prosperous and the strong. But much belongs to a less dishonorable 
 cause — to the conviction of all nations that England considers them only with refer- 
 ence to her own greatness ; that she has less sympathy than any other modern na- 
 tion ; that she never notices what passes among foreigners, what they think, feel, 
 suffer, or do, but with relation to the use which England can make of their actions, 
 their Bufferings, their feelings, or their thoughts; and that when she seems to care 
 most for them, she really cares only for herself. All this is exaggerated, but not 
 without truth." — De Tocqueville, Correspondence and Conversations with N. W. Senior, 
 Loudon, 1872. 
 
 Since the date of the letter from which this passage has been taken, 
 little less than twenty years have passed. Have they in their course 
 exhibited any improvement in the modes of thought among your 
 countrymen ? Have these latter become less selfish than they be- 
 fore had been ? For answer to this question allow me to refer you 
 to your own comments, now not a fortnight old, upon Lord Salis- 
 bury's lame defence of his Indian policy, to the end that you may 
 determine for yourself if they exhibit a single liberal or generous 
 word in reference to the poor Chinamen; a single word calculated
 
 35 
 
 for bringing home to the minds of your readers perception of the 
 fact that relief to Manchester could be looked for in but one direc- 
 tion, to wit, to the extension of a trade more disgraceful to the 
 nation engaged therein than any other that stands recorded, the slave 
 trade not excepted. The Africans imported into the British Ame- 
 rican possessions, insular and continental, numbered less than two 
 and a half millions; not a tithe as many as the Chinese who have 
 already been enslaved and ruined by means of an enforced traffic 
 whose long-continued maintenance must for all the future stand ai 
 evidence that, to this hour at least, Britain had had no national con- 
 science whatsoever. 
 
 Begging you now to remark, Mr. Editor, that all the "folly and 
 iniquity" thus exhibited comes as a necessary consequence of a de- 
 termination not to permit the people of India to participate with 
 protected nations in the advantages resulting from growth of that 
 domestic commerce so much admired by Adam Smith, 
 I remain yours, respectfully, 
 
 HENRY C. CAREY. 
 
 Philadelphia, March 25, 1876. 
 
 LETTER EIGHTH. 
 
 I*r conclusion, Mr. Editor, allow me now to call your attention to 
 some important facts that present themselves for consideration on 
 a survey of the world at large, as follows: — 
 
 The Turkish Empire possesses in an abundance almost every 
 natural advantage. Neverthless, having been forced to submit to 
 British free trade policy, her domestic commerce has disappeared, 
 and she herself has become so utterly ruined that foreign govern- 
 ments are now preparing to administer on her estate, to the end 
 that their own subjects may be enabled to obtain some portion of 
 their claims. 
 
 India, forced to submit to a free trade policy, is now, for means 
 with which to pay the mere interest on her debts, wholly dependent 
 on her ability to extend the destructive and infamous opium trade. 
 _ Peru, the States of the La Plata, and other of the Spanish Ame- 
 rican States that have been mainly dependent upon Britain, are in a 
 state of financial ruin. 
 
 Australia, self-governing and determined on the establishment of 
 a domestic commerce, is now, on the contrary, so prosperous that 
 immigration is rapidly taking the place of the emigration that had 
 commenced. 
 
 Prussia, having, after many years of effort, established for Ger- 
 many a perfectly free domestic commerce, finds herself now in the 
 lead of one of the most powerful empires of the world. 
 
 France, always intelligently protective, is to-day commercially 
 more independent than any other country of the world.
 
 36 
 
 I 
 
 Prior to 1860 these United States, as has been shown, with two 
 brief and brilliant exceptions, were subjected to an almost free 
 trade system, as a consequence of which exchanges between the 
 North and the South were effected through the port of Liverpool, 
 which thus was constituted the great hub of American commerce- 
 As a further consequence, all the main lines of road ran from west 
 to east, the absence of domestic commerce making it quite impossi- 
 ble that north and south roads could profitably be made. The warp 
 was there but the filling was not, and the more the former grew in 
 size and strength, the greater became the tendency toward separation 
 of those parts of the Union which believed in the freedom of man 
 from those whose belief in the morality of human slavery became 
 more and more confirmed as the necessity for abandoning their ex- 
 hausted lands, and for transferring their slaves to those of newer 
 States became more imperative. Of all this the late rebellion was 
 a necessary consequence, the offering thereby made on the free trade 
 altar counting in lives by hundreds of thousands, and in treasure 
 by thousands of millions. — Since 1860, the policy of the country 
 has looked in a contrary direction, toward the establishment of do- 
 mestic intercourse; as a consequence of which northern and south- 
 ern roads, by means of which the various parts of the Union are 
 to be tied together, have now been made, with a growth of internal 
 commerce that places the country fully on a par with any other na- 
 tion of, the world. So much, Mr. Editor, for having, although now 
 for only fifteen years, conformed our policy to the teachings of that 
 greatest of economists, Adam Smith. 
 
 Compare now, Mr. Editor, the contributions to the general com- 
 merce of the world made by those countries whose policy tends 
 toward development of domestic commerce, with those made by 
 communities subjected to the British free trade despotism, and then 
 determine for yourself which are the parties to this discussion most 
 justly chargeable with the "ignorance and imbecility" of which you 
 have so freely spoken ; and believe me, 
 
 Yours, respectfully, 
 
 HENRY C. CAREY. 
 
 Philadelphia, March 27, 1876. 
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSIT { OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 58 00562 2849 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 001 165 042