RECIPROCITY AGAIN.
The protectionists ask, "Are we sure that the foreigner will purchase
as much from us, as he will sell to us? What reason have we to think
that the English producer will come to us rather than to any other
nation on the globe to look for the productions he may need; and for
productions equivalent in value to his own exportations to this
country?"
We are surprised that men who call themselves peculiarly _practical_,
reason independent of all practice.
In practice, is there one exchange in a hundred, in a thousand, in ten
thousand perhaps, where there is a direct barter of product for
product? Since there has been money in the world, has any cultivator
ever said, "I wish to buy shoes, hats, advice, instruction, from that
shoemaker, hatter, lawyer, and professor only, who will purchase from
me just wheat enough to make an equivalent value?"
And why should nations impose such a restraint upon themselves?
How is the matter managed?
Suppose a nation deprived of exterior relations. A man has produced
wheat. He throws it into the widest national circulation he can find
for it, and receives in exchange, what? Some dollars; that is to say
bills, bonds, infinitely divisible, by means of which it becomes
lawful for him to withdraw from national circulation, whenever he
thinks it advisable, and by just agreement, such articles as he may
need or wish. In fine, at the end of the operation he will have
withdrawn from the mass the exact equivalent of what he threw into it,
and in value his consumption will precisely equal his production.
If the foreign exchanges of that nation are free, it is no longer into
_national_, but into _general_ circulation that each one throws his
products, and from which he draws his returns. He has not to inquire
whether what he delivers up for general circulation is purchased by a
fellow-countryman or a foreigner; whether the goods he receives came
to him from a Frenchman or an Englishman; whether the objects for
which, in accordance with his needs, he, in the end, exchanges his
bills, are made on this or that side of the Atlantic or the St.
Lawrence. With each individual there is always an exact balance
between what he puts into and what he draws out of the grand common
reservoir; and if that is true of each individual, it is true of the
nation in the aggregate. The only difference between the two cases is,
that in the latter, each one is in a more extended market for both his
sales and his purchases, and has consequently more chances of doing
well by both.
This objection is made: "If every one should agree that they would not
withdraw from circulation any of the products of a specified
individual, he in turn would sustain the misfortune of being able to
draw nothing out. The same of a nation."
ANSWER.--If the nation cannot draw out of the mass, it will
no longer contribute to it: it will work for itself. It will be
compelled to that which you would impose on it in advance: that is to
say, isolation.
And this will be the ideal of prohibitive government. Is it not
amusing that you inflict upon it, at once and already, the misfortune
of this system, in the fear that it runs the risk of getting there
some day without you?