machinery generally, can still hold their own for workmanship. Our wares are more usually reproached for superfluous excellence, by comparison with some cheaper and poorer foreign product, than for intrinsic inferiority.
But why are we beaten? We have an altogether unmatched combination of natural resources, acquired skill, accumulated capital, and commercial connections. We have also had, throughout the whole of the generation in which our rivals have made the greatest comparative strides, the celebrated possession of cheap food. But, as a manufacturing country, we are not only outstripped in extent and rate of progress by the United States and Germany. We do not quite hold our own even by comparison with France—which works on imported coal, which has a stationary population, with conscription in its severest form, and a national debt half as large again as ours, which in the eyes of our orthodox economists is loaded with every fiscal disadvantage the human imagination can conceive.
One conclusion emerges clearly from this preliminary study. It is that Protection is no preventive of progress, and that a policy of tariffs may be accompanied by competitive success. The money-power of France is marvellously sustained under the commercial policy she has pursued with little swerving for two centuries and a half since the time of Colbert. Germany and America absorb into their industrial system year by year a number of new workers twice and three times as large as we can find employment for. These States, therefore, gain upon us in man-power and money-power alike; in fighting-power and budget-power; and, in strict consequence, sea-power itself must ultimately be shared between them, unless we can call in the Colonies to redress the balance, and can maintain as an Empire what as an island we should lose.
