Note (return) — COMMERCIAL POLICY—RUSSIA.

We are not of the number of those who would contend that, under all times or circumstances, should a principle, or rather the system built upon a principle, be rigorously upheld in its application intact, sacred equally from modification on the one hand, as against radical revolution on the other. It cannot be denied that, under the protective system, have grown into their present gigantic proportions all the great manufacturing interests of Great Britain. But, with customary hardihood of assertion, maintain the economists—in whose wake follow the harder-mouthed, coarser-minded Cobdens of the League—although manufactures have flourished under such a system to an extent which has constituted this country the workshop of the world, they have so flourished in spite of the system; and, in its absence, left exposed to free unrestricted competition from abroad, must inevitably have progressed at a more gigantic rate of speed still. This is asserted to be in the order of nature, but as nature is every where the same—as the same broad features and first elements characterize all countries more or less alike—we ask for examples, for one example only, of the successful establishment and progress of any one unprotected industry. The demand is surely limited, and reasonable enough. The mendacious League, with the Brights and Cobdens of rude and riotous oratory, are daily trumpeting it in the towns, and splitting the ears of rural groundlings with the reiterated assertion that, of all others, the cotton manufacture owes nothing to protection. What!—nothing? Were general restrictive imposts on foreign manufactures no protection? Was the virtually prohibited importation of the cotton fabrics of India no boon? of India, root and branch sacrificed for the advancement of Manchester? Why, there are people yet alive who can recollect the day when Manchester cottons could not have stood one hour's competition with the free, or even 100 per cent taxed fabrics of India.40 How, indeed, could competition have been possible, with the wages of weaving and spinning in India at three-halfpence per day, whilst for equal quantities and qualities of workmanship, the British weaver was earning five shillings, and the spinner ten shillings per day on the average? In 1780, Mr Samuel Crompton, the ingenious inventor of the mule frame for spinning, such as it exists to this day, and is the vast moving machine of cotton manufacturing greatness, stated that he obtained fourteen shillings per lb. for the spinning and preparation of No. 40 yarn, twenty-five shillings for No. 60, and two guineas for No. 80. The same descriptions of yarns are now profitably making at prices ranging from about tenpence to twentypence per lb. At the same period common calicoes were saleable at about two shillings per yard, which now may be purchased for threepence. Will it be said that the Indian spinner and weaver by hand could not, at the same epoch, have produced their wares at one-half the price, had not importation, with unrelenting jealousy, been interdicted? Was the rigid prohibition of the export of machinery no concession, all exclusively and prodigiously in the interest of the cotton manufacture, to the zealous promotion and ascendancy of which the mining and agricultural interests are unhesitatingly, not to say wantonly, prejudiced, if not absolutely perilled? We say wantonly, because the free exportation of cotton yarn, tolerated at the same moment, was an absurd and mischievous violation of the very principle on which the prohibited exportation of machinery was alone and could be justified. In face of these incontrovertible facts, of which hereafter, and now that the record of them is consigned to that wide circulation through the world which the pages of Blackwood only can afford, misrepresentation remains without excuse on the question of that fostering protection to which, in a larger degree, if not exclusively, the cotton manufacture of Great Britain is indebted for its growth to its present colossal, mammoth-like, and almost unwieldy grandeur. We do not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so incapable, apparently, of appreciating instruction, if not wilfully perverse, as the Cobdens, or of restraining the less coarse but more fluent flippancy and equally unscrupulous assurance of friend Bright, from resort to that stock and stale weapon of vulgar minds which is so readily drawn from the armoury of falsehood. To the end of the chapter they will lie on, until doomsday arrive, and they sink, like the Henry Hunts, et id genus omne, their at least as well-bred predecessors of the popularity-hunting school, to their proper level in the cess-pool of public contempt. Time, which executes justice upon all in the long run, cannot fail to lay the ghost of cotton and anti-corn law imposture, even in the troubled waters of the muddy Irk and Irwell, where first conjured from. And now, having shown how the cotton manufacture of Great Britain was from its birth cradled, rocked, and dandled into successful progress; how it was fostered and fenced round with protection and prohibitive legislation as against competition from abroad; we shall proceed with our review of the rise and career of protected manufactures in Russia. And we would counsel "one who has whistled at the plough," whose "farming notes" in the Morning Chronicle, when confined to such matters of practical detail as may be supposed to lie within the scope of his own experience and comprehension, are not destitute of interest and information, though with distorted and exaggerated views, to ponder well before a next reiteration of the random and absurd assertion that the "corn-law has done to agriculture what every law of protection has done for every trade that was ever practised—it has induced negligence, and, by its uncertain operation, has obstructed enterprise." Instead of whistling at the plough, such a writer almost deserves to be whipped at the cart's tail for so preposterously dogmatic an assumption. It has yet to be demonstrated, and the proof is challenged, that ever a great interest, whether manufacturing or agricultural, was established in any part of the world, since the creation, without the aids and appliances of legislative and guernatorial patronage. The degree, the qualification the practical limitations, which in the progress of time, with social and industrial changes supervening at home and abroad, may be rendered expedient or necessary in the application of the principle, constitute quite a different question, which may be discussed and entertained without any disparagement of the soundness of the policy, as best adapted to existing circumstances, of the system when first applied. The theory of free trade may be, in its entirety, as plausibly it is presented to us, founded on just principle; the abstract truth and perfection of which are just as unimpeachable as that of the social theory propounded by Rousseau in the Savoyard's profession of faith, or that of the "liberty, equality, and community of property" (to say nothing of women) theory preached, and practically developed to some extent, in the paganish philosophies and New Harmony vagaries of the St Simonians, the Fourierians, and of Robert Owen, in these our days. And yet, from the beginning of time—whether from the world before the flood, or since the reconstruction of the world after—never, to this present epoch, has one single example come down to us of the sober realization of either the economical abstraction or the social abstraction. Primeval chaos, chaos existing before all time, could alone have represented the beau-ideal of each. So far indeed as their own demesnes and domains, Laban and Pharaoh were not without their practical proficiency in the elements of economical science—for the one knew how to sell his daughters, as the other his corn, in the "dearest market;" and each to buy his labour and his money at the "cheapest." And never will these free-trade and social day-dreams be accomplished to the end of all time; never until chaos come again; never, unless perchance the Fitzwilliams and the Phillipses, impregnated with the beatific reveries of socialist Robert Owen, should throw open, the one, Wentworth hall, with its splendid parks and spacious domains—the other, his Manchester mills, wonder-working machinery, and million of capital stock, to joint-stock occupancy, with common right of possession of the rural labourers who till the ground, and the urban operatives who ply the shuttle—the producers, in fact, of all their wealth—share and share alike; themselves, in future, undertaking the proportion of daily task-work; driving the "teams afield," or tenting the mule-frame. Should, perhaps, the Phalansterial system of Fourier preferably suit their taste, they will be entitled to enter into the "phalanx of harmony," and share à des degrés différents, dans la répartition des trots facultés—capital, travail, talent, ... with the enjoyment of such an apartment in the Phalansterial "palace" for four hundred families, the minimum of the phalanx being eighty, which may compare with the quality of répartition corresponding to them, as expounded by Madame Gatti de Gamond, the principal legatee of Fourier and his system.