X - How Protection Affects the Farmer
...let us look now to what would be the effects of the adoption of perfect freedom of trade, as urged upon the world by England. It could not fail to be that of {riveting upon the world the existing monopoly of machinery for the conversion of the products of the farm and the plantation into cloth and iron}, closing the factories and furnaces of Russia, Germany, and the United States, and compelling the people who work in them to seek other modes of employment, and the only recourse would be to endeavor to raise food. There would then be more food to sell; but who would buy it? (p. 100)
....Were it proposed to the people of the Union to make New York or Pennsylvania the deposit for all the products of the Union that required to be converted or exchanged, the absurdity of the idea would be obvious to everyone. The wheat-grower of Michigan would find himself entirely at a loss to know why he should exchange with the neighbouring wool-grower by way of New York; and the cotton-grower would be equally at a loss to see the benefit of a system that should compel him to exchange with the wheat-grower of Virginia, through the medium of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh; yet such is precisely the object of the colonial system....
The producers of the world have been, and they are now being, sacrificed to the exchangers of the world; and therefore it is that agriculture makes so little progress, and that the cultivators of the earth, producers of all that we consume, are so universally poor, and so generally uninstructed as to their true interests...
The object of protection is that of diminishing the distance and the waste between the producer and the consumer; thereby enabling the producer to grow rich, and to become a large consumer of cloth and iron. (p. 101) There is a perpetual complaint of over-production, and it is a matter of rejoicing when, by reason of short seasons, or any other occurrence, the crop is diminished 200,000 or 300,000 bales, the balance producing more in the market of the world than could otherwise have been obtained for the whole. No better evidence need be desired that there exists some error in the distribution.
Over-production cannot exist, but under-consumption may and does exist. The more that is produced, the more there is to be consumed; and as every man is a consumer in the exact ratio of his production, the more he can produce the better will it be for himself and his neighbour, unless there exist some disturbing cause, preventing the various persons desiring to consume from producing what is needed for them to effect their exchanges with the planter, to the extent that is necessary to their comfort. (p. 103)
