Volume Ii Part 16 (1/2)

The workers in silk complain of the decline in their trade.

To satisfy them X excludes silk from B.

B, to retaliate, shuts out iron and hardware against X.

Then the makers of iron and hardware cry out that their trades are being ruined.

So X closes its doors against iron and hardware from C.

In return C refuses to take cloth from X.

Who is the gainer by all these prohibitions?

Answer

All the four countries have diminished their common fund of the enjoyments and conveniences of life.

The open ports of the United States, after the conclusion of the American Revolution, were a source of keen gratification to Franklin. They had brought in, he thought, a vast plenty of foreign goods, and occasioned a demand for domestic produce; so that America enjoyed the double advantage of buying what they consumed cheap, and of selling what they could spare dear.

The following views in a letter from him to Jared Eliot, as far back as the year 1747, sound like a recent tariff reform speech in Congress:

First, I imagine that the Five Per Cent Duty on Goods imported from your Neighbouring Governments, tho' paid at first Hand by the Importer, will not upon the whole come out of his Pocket, but be paid in Fact by the Consumer; for the Importer will be sure to sell his Goods as much dearer as to reimburse himself; so that it is only another Mode of Taxing your own People tho'

perhaps meant to raise Money on your Neighbours.

But then follows what a free trader, using Franklin's own coa.r.s.e phrase, might call ”spitting in the soup.” ”Yet, if you can make some of the Goods, heretofore imported, among yourselves, the advanc'd price of five per cent may encourage your own Manufacture, and in time make the Importation of such Articles unnecessary, which will be an Advantage.”

In another place, he employed language in harmony with the importance that the Protectionist a.s.signs to his favorite system as a means of building up local markets for the produce of the farmer.[48] It may be truly said, however, as has already been hinted, that Franklin was never more friendly to the principle of international free trade than in the latter years of his life. In his letter to Le Veillard of Feb. 17, 1788, he used language which demonstrates that he was still convinced that import duties are paid by the consumer, and in an earlier letter to Robert R. Livingston in 1783 he said that he felt inclined to believe that a State, which left all her ports open to all the world, upon equal terms, would, by that means, have foreign commodities cheaper, sell its own productions dearer and be on the whole the most prosperous.

For export duties, he had a fierce contempt. ”To lay duties on a commodity exported, which our neighbours want,” he wrote to James Lovell in 1778, ”is a knavish attempt to get something for nothing. The statesman who first invented it had the genius of a pickpocket, and would have been a pickpocket if fortune had suitably placed him.”

How thoroughly Franklin understood the principles, which regulate the ebb and flow of population, we have had occasion to note.

With equal intelligence, he laid bare the pauperizing effect of aid injudiciously extended to the poor in too generous a measure. Commenting in his essay on the Laboring Poor on the liberal provision, made for indigence in England, he said:

I fear the giving mankind a dependance on anything for support, in age or sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends to flatter our natural indolence, to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure; thus multiplying beggars instead of diminis.h.i.+ng them.

In his essay, Franklin makes the interesting statement that the condition of the poor in England was by far the best in Europe; ”for that,” he adds, ”except in England and her American colonies, there is not in any country of the known world, not even in Scotland or Ireland, a provision by law to enforce a support of the poor. Everywhere else necessity reduces to beggary.” The whole essay is a highly ingenious argument to the effect that it is a misconception to think of a rich man as the sole possessor of his wealth, and that in one way or another the laboring poor have the usufruct of the entire clear income of all the property owners in the community.

n.o.body knew better than Poor Richard that no help is worth speaking of save that which promotes self-help.

The support of the poor [he wrote to Richard Jackson]

should not be by maintaining them in idleness, but by employing them in some kind of labour suited to their abilities of body, as I am informed begins to be of late the practice in many parts of England, where workhouses are erected for that purpose. If these were general, I should think the poor would be more careful, and work voluntarily to lay up something for themselves against a rainy day, rather than run the risk of being obliged to work at the pleasure of others for a bare subsistence, and that too under confinement.

For Agriculture, Franklin always had an appreciative word. ”Agriculture,”

he observed in a letter to Cadwallader Evans, ”is truly _productive of new wealth_; manufacturers only change forms, and, whatever value they give to the materials they work upon, they in the meantime consume an equal value in provisions, &c.”

His other observations on Agriculture are worthy of being read for the light that they cast on his own character, if for no other reason. It is, he declared, in a letter to Jonathan s.h.i.+pley, ”the most useful, the most independent, and therefore the n.o.blest of Employments.” Another remark of his in his _Positions to be Examined, Concerning National Wealth_ is that there seemed to him but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth:

The first is by _war_, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is _robbery_. The second by _commerce_, which is _generally_ cheating.

The third by _agriculture_, the only _honest way_, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of G.o.d in his favour, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.