The Sun.
London, England, 1841-04-14 00:00:00

contest shall not continue the same. Indeed
they will not continue the same, for there is no
possibility of withholding from other nations
the advantages of knowledge and skill which we
possess. They are fast acquiring, and even surpass-
ing our knowledge in machinery, so that the
elements of the contest will become, in an ac-
celerating ratio, more and more in their favour,
and bring about the ruin of our national great-
ness the more swiftly and the more certainly,
unless the Legislature relieve our commerce and
manufactures from the great disadvantages
which its suicidal policy has heaped on them.

There is one effect of our present commercial
restrictions, which is too immediately flattering
to our political pride to excite any present un-
easiness, but which seems to us so pregnant with
important consequences that we cannot avoid
calling attention to it. Our colonies are the
themes of much national gratulation, and nobody
rejoices more than we at our possession of those
noble homes for future generations of our coun-
trymen. At the same time we cannot approve
of a system which feeds and nourishes them at
the expense of cultivating friendly relations with
the neighbouring States of Europe and with the
vast republic of North America.
With them, and particularly with our newest
and most distant colonies in the southern ocean,
trade is free, while trade with the United States
and with the neighbouring countries of Europe
is not free. The consequence is that capital and
labour, not finding profitable employment in
trading with Europe and the United States, flow
much faster into those distant colonies than they
would did our Legislature lay no restrictions on
our trade with foreign countries. For example,
were trade with the United States per-
fectly free—could we freely import here the
produce of the boundless plains of the
Mississipi, there can be no doubt a copious stream
of emigration would be directed from England
thither, and that our manufacturers would there
find a large and rapidly increasing supply of
food, and a market for their produce. In like
manner, were trade with all Europe free, we
should find large markets for our goods in
Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and should
take from those countries additional quantities
of timber and food. The result of that pOlicy
would he to form with all these coun-
tries such strong and such friendly com-
mercial ties, that they would defy the
cunning or the ambition of politicians to
involve them in war. They would be as closely
united as England and Ireland, or even more
closely, for there would be no sense of political
oppression on the one hand, and no political ar-
rogance on the other, to keep them hostile and
separate. It does not please our rulers, how-
ever, to adopt so rational a system, and the con-
sequence is, that we have comparatively little
trade, and few friendly relations, with those
neighbouring countries.
As a compensation, however, as some per-
sons suppose, for wanting them, our colonies in
the southern hemisphere are growing rapidly into
power. Companies of merchants and gentlemen
who would gladly trade, if they could make a
reasonable profit on their capital, with Norway or
the United States, become great purchasers of
land at the antipodes, and ship off, under a great
variety of temptations, while the Government
banishes to the same regions a considerable num-
ber, annually, of our people. Our colonies there
are consequently rising rapidly into importance,
and land is becoming of great price. We read of
it selling, in New South Wales, for more than
5001. per acre, when put up to auction, to form
a projected town. Whatever may be the ulti-
mate results of such a system, it has a tendency to
extend and continue. All those who are concerned
in purchasing land there, or shipping emigrants to
go thither, become deeply interested in the con-
tinuance of the present system. A change in it,
which would enhance profit at home, or which
would make it more profitable to invest capital
in a trade with the United States than to invest
it in land and in transporting labour to the anti-
-1 podes, would be partially disadvantageous to
the colonizers and land jobbers, and they,
therefore, will be opposed to such changes.
Thus the artificial system at present acted on
directs the superfluous hands and wealth of
England to cultivate the continents and islands
of the southern hemisphere, instead of extend-
ing, on the system of nature, our commercial and
friendly relations with the neighbouring and
surrounding countries.
At first view we own that this appears benefi-
cial. The colonies belong to us, they form part
of the empire, they are
ours, which
recommends submissivetotlewsaiimcei
Government, they are politically
recommends the s.yt-s stebnelnteofitos. our aßfiu'etcttihonesuhnefitoerde
1
we inquire as to
States did stand in exactlyl tiesnaie
rela-
tion, and now they are a separate and a powerful
people, having a Government of theiil•eoallvtnh.
These distant colonies, as they grow in v
and power, will follow the same course. It has
been so with all colonies. Children are intended
by Nature to separate from parents, and to
become independent parents themselves. Na-
tions are only collections of parents and children.
But when those distant colonists separate from
England, the political tie will be severed, though
the commercial may continue. The only perma-
nent connection, therefore, to which the people
of the mother country can look forward with
these distant colonies, is a commercial connec-
tion, from which, we think, it plainly follows
I
that we are now, by our restrictive system, sacri-
ficing a present valuable, and home or neigh-
bouring trade, for a trade perhaps not quite so
valuable, at a very distant day, with the other
side of the globe. Comparing the two
systems, therefore, of encouraging trade with

many of our neighbours, and a still more anti-com-
mercial, still more jealous, and still more absurd legis-
lation of our own, arc among the obstacles which op-
pose the British manufacturer for foreign sale.
Our capital, our machinery, the excellence of our means
of internal and external communication, our mineral
wealth, and above all the superiority of our artisans in
skill and in diligence, a superiority so great as often to
render British labour at British wages cheaper than that
of the lowly paid continental workman, are the advan-
tages which once gave to us in almost every manufacture a
decided supremacy.
Our advantage in mineral wealth continues. No other
country has been able to avail itself of deposits of iron and
coal so abundant and in such convenient juxtaposition;
and we believe that as respects diligence and skill, with
the exception of the operations requiring taste, our work-
men retain over those of the continent of Europe their
general superiority. The general result of the evidence
collected by the Assistant-Commissioners, by Dr. Bow-
ring, and by the Committee on Manufactures and Trade
of 1833, is that though the continental hours of labour
are longer than ours, yet the daily amount of work done
by a British workman is much greater. This remark.
however, does not apply to America. There is, indeed,
some evidence that American labour is more effective than
our own, and none that it is inferior.
But twenty-five years of peace have made a vast addi-
tion to the capital of our most formidable rivals, the in-
habitants of the north-eastern par is of Europe, and of the
United States of America. The means of internal com-
munication in America are in many respects superior to
our own. We have nothing to compare with their inland
navigation, or with their four thousand miles of railroad.
Central Europe has made slower advances, but Belgium
is already covered by a network of railroads ; many are
completed, and still more are in progress in Germany, and
the mere improvement in the ordinary roads, which from
being among the worst are now among the best in ithe
world, is a change almost as great as that from a good
English road to a railroad. In machinery the advance
both in America and in Europe is still more remarkable.
In 1824 the Americans were considered as thirty years
behind us. In 1833 their cotton machinery was in gene-
ral quite equal to ours, and in the coarser articles supe-
rior, so much so that all our recent improvements bad
come from thence. Such was their progress in nine years.
Again, in 1824, France appears to have been the only
rival that we feared in machinery. She then supplied
Germany and Switzerland, and in a great measure Bel-
gium. In 1833 the machinery in many parts of Germany
is described as equally efficient, though not so durable as
our own. In 1839, our Assistant-Commissioner, Mr.
Symons, found the trade of machine-making flourishing
both in Switzerland and in Austria, vol. i., p. 113-19,
and Belgium bad already not only become independent of
France, but a formidable rival to Great Britain.
These statements do give a painful interest
to the present contest which our manufacturers
are waging against the manufacturers of other
countries, with their hands and feet in legislative
shackles. Our manufacturers begin to feel
that their competitors are outstripping them,
and that they are engaged in a contest
which, 'if its elements continue the same, must
terminate ruinously. This feeling—this thorough
conviction of what awaits them, and what awaits
the country, more than any existing decay,
now excites our manufacturers to demand
from the Legislature that the elements of this