Letter Second.

In assuming, Mr. Editor, as you seem to do, that I regard protection 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 domestic 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, paying at the British custom house a heavy tax for the privilege of making exchanges among themselves through the medium of British 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 assemling of the States General, 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 entirely 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 at most beyond conception.

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; constitutions almost by the dozen have been adopted; the country has been thrice occupied by foreign armies, and thrice has it been compelled 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, commercially, than any other country of the world. Why is this? For the reason that she enables her artisans to pass over the heads of 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 page 8 British merchants in China, lose a third of their weight on their first immersion in the tub.

Prior to the date of the Cobden treaty, 1860, the regime of France, for almost seventy years, had been that of prohibition so nearly absolute as almost to preclude the importation of foreign manufactures of any description whatsoever. Prior to 1861, that of this country had for a like period of time, with two brief and brilliant exceptions, 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 docs 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 comparison the year 1856, one in which the world at large was rejoicing in the receipt of hundreds of millions of gold from California and Australia; and when, if ever, our Southern States must have been growing 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 $340,000, 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, $140,000,000 consisted of textile fabrics weighing 20,000 tons, the equivalent of 100,000 bales of cotton, and sufficient, perhaps, to load some five and twenty of the ships that, as I 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, $100,000,090 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 facts, there were no people retaining for themselves so large a proportion of the ultimate prices of their products as did those of France.

At that date two hundred and fifty years had elapsed since the first settlement of Virginia, and the whole country south of the Potomac, the Ohio, and the Missouri, had then been taken possession of by men of the English race, the total population having grown to almost a dozen millions. The territory so occupied contained, 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 he 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 valuable 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 collection. 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 civilization.

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 civilization.

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- page 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 who 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 comparative view of the present commercial position of France and Britain, meanwhile remaining,