In all trading counties, a more or less exclusive monopoly has been granted, on certain occasions, to some associations of merchants, under the name of Trading Companies. The avowed motive for sacrificing the whole class to this privileged number was the particular nature of the trade thus subjected to a monopoly, which trade it was said could not be supported except by very extensive funds; but governments had often a secret motive besides; and this was, the sum of money for which the merchants bought their privilege. A company's monopoly has never failed to heighten the price for the consumer, to diminish production and consumption, to give the national capital a false direction; sometimes by attracting it prematurely to a branch of trade which was not yet suitable, sometimes by repelling it when fruitlessly seeking an employment. But although companies obtained the desired privilege of buying cheap and selling dear, by nature they are so ill suited for economy and trading speculations, that although amazingly rich, and sometimes sovereigns of counties, these companies, their administrators having no immediate interest in the prosperity of their trust, have almost all been robbed, and very few of them have not ended in bankruptcy.
These different expedients for the protection of commerce, are now generally decried, though almost all governments yet agree in repelling from their states the produce of foreign manufactories, or at least in loading it with heavy duties, to give the national produce an advantage. The prohibitive system of custom-house duties plainly gives to a growing manufactory an advantage equivalent to the largest bounty. Perhaps this manufactory scarcely produces the hundredth part of what the nation consumes of such commodities; but the hundred purchasers must compete with each other to obtain the one seller's preference, and the ninety-nine rejected by him will be compelled to obtain goods by smuggling. In this case, the nation's loss will be as a hundred; its gain as one. Whatever advantage may arise from giving a new manufacture to a nation, certainly there are few which deserve such a sacrifice and even these might always be set a-going by less expensive means. Besides, we must also take into account the weighty inconveniences of establishing the vexatious system of duties, of covering the frontiers with an army of customhouse officers, and with another not less dangerous army of smugglers, and thus of training the subjects to disobedience. We must remember, above all, that it is not the interest of a nation to produce every thing indifferently; that it ought to confine its efforts to such goods or commodities as it can manufacture at the cheapest rate; or to such as, whatever price they cost, are essential to its safety. It ought to be recollected that each merchant knows his own business better than government can do; that the whole nation's productive power is limited; that in a given time, it has but a given number of hands, and a given quantity of capital; that by forcing it to enter upon a kind of work which it did not previously execute, we almost always at the same time force it to abandon a kind of work which it did execute: whilst the most probable result of such a change is the abandonment of a more lucrative manufacture for another which is less so, and which personal interest had designedly overlooked.
If the prohibitive system gives a very powerful, though very expensive encouragement to rising manufactures, it can offer, in regard to such, no advantage to those which are already prosperous; the sacrifice at least which it imposes on consumers, is entirely useless. If the manufacture was destined for exportation, government, by granting a monopoly of the interior market, causes it to abandon its ancient habits to assume others which probably are less advantageous. Every manufacture destined for exportation gives proof of not fearing the competition of foreigners. From the moment that it can support competition abroad, notwithstanding the expense of transport, it has still less reason to dread this competition in the very place of production. Thus nothing is more common than to see goods prohibited which never could have been imported with advantage, and which gained credit solely by being so prohibited.
By the prohibitive system, governments had proposed to increase the number and productive powers of their manufactures.
It is doubtful if they rightly knew the price they paid for this advantage, and the prodigious sacrifices they imposed on consumers, their subjects, to bring into existence an unborn class of producers; but they succeeded much more rapidly even than speculators on political economy expected. For a time they excited the bitterest complaints on the part of consumers; but even these complaints ceased afterwards, because sacrifices in fact had also ceased, and manufactures so powerfully encouraged, had soon provided with profusion for the national wants. But this emulation of all governments to establish manufactures every where, has produced two strange and unexpected effects on the commercial system of Europe; one is the disproportionate increase of production without any relation to consumption; the other is the effort of each nation to live isolated, to suffice for itself, and refuse every kind of foreign trade.
