protectionist policy is not less unfavorable to industry as a whole. If the market for most of our export products is restricted, one of the causes for it is to be found in the fact that between 1878 and 1880 France converted most of the nations to protectionism; we set them the example and they followed it. We repel foreign wheat, cattle, and cotton-thread, and they repel our articles de Paris, silks, furniture, and wines. The principal factor in the disproportion between the production and consumption of certain articles is the customs tariff. It acts in two ways: by depriving the export trade of the markets to which it has been accustomed, and by stimulating new manufactures which are destined in their turn to find no market. Finally, commercial treaties having no longer a real existence, because they are almost reduced practically to a clause conferring no fixed rights—the most-favored-nation clause—there results a great instability in tariffs, and consequently in international relations.
Another factor of the crisis may be found in the extravagant public works undertaken by states. The whole European Continent and some distant countries have plunged up to their ears in vast enterprises which are supposed to be of public utility. The thought that great works can not be indefinitely carried out, that their efficacy is limited, that beyond a certain point they do harm to one another, and bring no more aid, no durable stimulus to industry, simple and true as it is, has become strange to the light heads that rule parliamentary countries and democracies. A large country may derive much profit from half a dozen first-class ports; but what real advantage can come from turning the thousand creeks which indent the shores into ports? It would be about the same thing if a man, instead of having one or two outside doors to his house, should cut up his whole first floor into doors. The case is the same with roads and canals. Beyond a certain extent, they serve no other purpose than to withdraw the land they occupy from cultivation. In a country of 500,000 square miles, the first 20,000 miles of railroad are very useful; the next 5,000 miles much less so, while 5,000 miles more would be an excess, a luxury to which we might perhaps afford to apply our surplus profits, but which it would be foolish to pay for out of the capital fund. Every new mile of railway opened in France produces a small income, but three fourths of it is simply so much revenue diverted from other roads, and not the product of a new traffic. This unreasoning activity in constructing useless public works which prevails in many countries adds at once to the burdens upon industry and to its instability. It has contributed to withdraw masses of laborers from the regular cultivation of the soil, to cause abrupt rises of wages, and to make workmen more exacting and more refractory to discipline; it has given a factitious development to metallurgical industry, and it has cast disorder into budgets, hollowed out deficits, necessitated enormous imposts, and increased public debts or postponed the day when they will be paid.
