Preface by Frederick Engels for the 1888 English edition pamphlet

TOWARDS the end of 1847, a Free Trade Congress was held at Brussels. It as a strategic
move in the Free Trade campaign then carried on by the English manufacturers. Victorious
at home, by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, they now invaded the continent in order
to demand, in return for the free admission of continental corn into England, the free
admission of English manufactured goods to the continental markets.

At this Congress, Marx inscribed himself on the list of speakers; but, as might have
been expected, things were not so managed that before his turn came on, the Congress was
closed. Thus, what Marx had to say on the Free Trade question he was compelled to say
before the Democratic Association of Brussels, an international body of which he was one
of the vice-presidents.

The question of Free Trade or Protection being at present on the order of the day in
America, it has been thought useful to publish an English translation of Marx's speech,
to which I have been asked to write an introductory preface.

"The system of protection," says Marx, "was an artificial means of manufacturing
manufacturers, of expropriating independent laborers, of capitalizing the national means
of production and subsistence, and of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the
medieval to the modern mode of production."

Such was protection at its origin in the 17th century, such it remained well into the
19th century. It was then held to be the normal policy of every civilized state in
western Europe. The only exceptions were the smaller states of Germany and Switzerland –
not from dislike of the system, but from the impossibility of applying it to such small
territories.

It was under the fostering wing of protection that the system of modern industry –
production by steam-moved machinery – was hatched and developed in England during the
last third of the 18th century. And, as if tariff protection was not sufficient, the
wars against the French Revolution helped to secure to England the monopoly of the new
industrial methods. For more than 20 years, English men-of-war [fighting ships] cut off
the industrial rivals of England from their respective colonial markets, while they
forcibly opened these markets to English commerce. The secession of the South American
colonies from the rule of their European mother countries, the conquest by England of
all French and Dutch colonies worth having, the progressive subjugation of India turned
the people of all these immense territories into customers for English goods. England
thus supplemented the protection she practiced at home by the Free Trade she forced upon
her possible customers abroad; and, thanks to this happy mixture of both systems, at the
end of the wars, in 1815, she found herself, with regard to all important branches of
industry, in possession of the virtual monopoly of the trade of the world.

This monopoly was further extended and strengthened during the ensuing years of peace.
The start, which England had obtained during the war, was increased from year to year;
she seemed to distance more and more all her possible rivals. The exports of
manufactured goods in ever growing quantities became indeed a question of life and death
to that country. And there seemed but two obstacles in the way: the prohibitive or
protective legislation of other countries, and the taxes upon the import of raw
materials and articles of food in England.

Then the Free Trade doctrines of classical political economy – of the French physiocrats
and their English successors, Adam Smith and Ricardo – became popular in the land of
John Bull.

Protection at home was needless to manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, and
whose very existence was staked on the expansion of their exports. Protection at home
was of advantage to none but the producers of articles of food and other raw materials,
to the agricultural interest, which, under then existing circumstances in England, meant
the receivers of rent, the landed aristocracy. And this kind of protection was hurtful
to the manufacturers. By taxing raw materials, it raised the price of the articles
manufactured from them; by taxing food, it raised the price of labor; in both ways, it
placed the British manufacturer at a disadvantage as compared with his foreign
competitor. And, as all other countries sent to England chiefly agricultural products
and drew from England chiefly manufactured goods, repeal of the English protective
duties on corn and raw materials generally was at the same time an appeal to foreign
countries to do away with – or at least to reduce in turn – the import duties levied by
them on English manufactures.

After a long and violent struggle, the English industrial capitalists, already in
reality the leading class of the nation, that class whose interests were then the chief
national interests, were victorious. The landed aristocracy had to give in. The duties
on corn and other raw materials were repealed. Free Trade became the watchword of the
day. To convert all other countries to the gospel of Free Trade, and thus to create a
world in which England was the great manufacturing centre, with all other countries for
its independent agricultural districts, that was the next task before the English
manufacturers and their mouthpieces, the political economists.

That was the time of the Brussels Congress, the time when Marx prepared the speech in
question. While recognizing that protection may still, under certain circumstances, for
instance in the Germany of 1847, be of advantage to the manufacturing capitalists; while
proving that that Free Trade was not the panacea for all the evils under which the
working class suffered, and might even aggravate them; he pronounces, ultimately and on
principle, in favor of Free Trade.

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under
Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be
full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more
fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes,
capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty
on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever
growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut,
crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of
permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive
forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters,
against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible
solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of
an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from
wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this
historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable
social revolution will be the soonest created – for this reason, and for this alone, did
Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.

Anyhow, the years immediately following the victory of Free Trade in England seemed to
verify the most extravagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that event. British
commerce rose to a fabulous amount; the industrial monopoly of England on the market of
the world seemed more firmly established that ever; new iron works, new textile
factories arose by wholesale; new branches of industry grew up on ever side. There was,
indeed, a severe crisis in 1857, but that was overcome, and the onward movement in trade
and manufactures soon was in full swing again, until in 1866 a fresh panic occurred, a
panic, this time, which seems to mark a new departure in the economic history of the
world.

The unparalleled expansion of British manufactures and commerce between 1848 and 1866
was no doubt due, to a great extent, to the removal of the protective duties on food and
raw materials. But not entirely. Other important changes took place simultaneously and
helped it on. The above years comprise the discover and working of the Californian and
Australian goldfields which increased so immensely the circulating medium of the world;
they mark the final victory of steam over all other means of transports; on the ocean,
steamers now superseded sailing vessels; on land, in all civilized countries, the
railroad took the first place, the macadamized roads the second; transport now became
four times quicker and four times cheaper. No wonder that under such favorable
circumstances British manufactures worked by steam should extend their sway at the
expense of foreign domestic industries based upon manual labor. But were the other
countries to sit still and to submit to this change, which degraded them to be mere
agricultural appendages of England, the "workshop of the world"?

The foreign countries did nothing of the kind. France, for nearly 200 years, had
screened her manufactures behind a perfect Chinese wall of protection and prohibition,
and had attained in all articles of luxury and of taste a supremacy which England did
not even pretend to dispute. Switzerland, under perfect Free Trade, possessed relatively
important manufactures, which English competition could not touch. Germany, with a
tariff far more liberal than that of any other large continental country, was developing
its manufactures at a rate relatively more rapid than even England. And America was, by
the Civil War of 1861, all at once thrown upon her own resources, had to find means how
to meet a sudden demand for manufactured goods of all sorts, and could only do so by
creating manufactures of her own at home. The war demand ceased with the war; but the
new manufactures were there, and had to meet British competition. And the war had
ripened, in America, the insight that a nation of 35 million, doubling its numbers in 40
years at most, with such immense resources, and surrounded by neighbors that must be for
years to come chiefly agriculturalists, that such a nation had the "manifest destiny" to
be independent of foreign manufactures for its chief articles of consumption, and to be
so in time of peace as well as in time of war. And then America turned protectionist.

It may now be 15 years ago, I traveled in a railway carriage with an intelligent Glasgow
merchant, interested probably in the iron trade. Talking abut America, he treated me to
the old Free Trade lubrications:

"Was it not inconceivable that a nation of sharp businessmen like the Americans should
pay tribute to indigenous ironmasters and manufacturers, when they could buy the same,
if not a better article, ever so much cheaper in this country?"

And then he gave me examples as to how much the Americans taxed themselves in order to enrich a few greedy ironmasters.

"Well," I replied, "I think there is another side to the question. You know that in
coal, waterpower, iron, and other ores, cheap food, homegrown cotton, and other raw
materials, America has resources and advantages unequalled by any European country; and
that these resources cannot be fully developed except by America becoming a
manufacturing country. You will admit, too, that nowadays a, great nation like the
Americans' cannot exist on agriculture alone; that would be tantamount to a condemnation
to permanent barbarism and inferiority; no great nation can live, in our age, without
manufactures of her own. Well, then, if America must become a manufacturing country, and
if she has every chance of not only succeeding but even outstripping her rivals, there
are two ways open to her: either to carry on for, let us say, 50 years under Free Trade
an extremely expensive competitive war against English manufactures that have got nearly
a hundred years start; or else to shut out, by protective duties, English manufactures
for, say, 25 years, with the almost absolute certainty that at the end of the 25 years
she will be able to hold her own in the open market of the world. Which of the two will
be the cheapest and the shortest? That is the question. If you want to go from Glasgow
to London, you take the parliamentary train at a penny a mile and travel at the rate of
12 miles an hour. But you do not; your time is too valuable, you take the express, pay
twopence a mile and do 40 miles an hour. Very well, the Americans prefer to pay express
fare and to go express speed."

My Scotch Free Trader had not a word in reply.

Protection being a means of artificially manufacturing manufacturers, may, therefore,
appear useful not only to an incompletely developed capitalist class still struggling
with feudalism; it may also give a life to the rising capitalist class of a country
which, like America, has never known feudalism, but which has arrived at that stage of
development where the passage from agriculture to manufactures becomes a necessity.
America, placed in that situation, decided in favor of protection. Since that decision
was carried out, the five and 20 years of which I spoke to my fellow traveller have
about passed and, if I was not wrong, protection ought to have done its task for
America, and ought to be now becoming a nuisance.

That has been my opinion for some time. Nearly two years ago, I said to a protectionist American:

"I am convinced that if America goes in for Free Trade, she will in 10 years have beaten England in the market of the world."

Protection is at best an endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it.
By protecting one industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and have
therefore to protect them too. By so doing you again damage the industry that you first
protected, and have to compensate it; but this compensation reacts, as before, on all
other trades, and entitles them to redress, and so on ad infinitum. America, in this
respect, offers us a striking example of the best way to kill an important industry by
protectionism. In 1856, the total imports and exports by sea of the United State
amounted to $641,604,850. Of this amount, 75.2 per cent were carried in American, and
only 24.8 per cent in foreign vessels. British ocean steamers were already then
encroaching upon American sailing vessels; yet, in 1860, of a total seagoing trade of
$762,288,550, American vessels still carried 66.5 per cent.

The Civil War came on, and protection to American shipbuilding; and the latter plan was
so successful that it has nearly completely driven the American flag from the high seas.
In 1887, the total seagoing trade of the United States amounted to $1,408,502,979, but
of this total only 13.8 per cent were carried in American, and 86.2 per cent in foreign
bottoms. The goods carried by American ships amounted, in 1856, to $482,268,274; in 1860
to $507,247,757. In 1887, they had sunk to $194,356,746. Forty years ago, the American
flag was the most dangerous rival of the British flag, and bade fair to outstrip it on
the ocean; now it is nowhere. Protection to shipbuilding has killed both shipping and
shipbuilding.

Another point. Improvements in the methods of production nowadays follow each other so
rapidly, and change the character of entire branches of industry so suddenly and so
completely, that what may have been yesterday a fairly balanced protective tariff is no
longer so today. Let us take another example from the Report of the Secretary of the
Treasury for 1887:

"Improvement in recent years in the machinery employed in combing wool has so changed
the character of what are commercially known as worsted clothes that the latter have
largely superseded woolen cloths for us as men's wearing apparel. This change... has
operated to the serious injury of our domestic manufacturers of these (worsted) goods,
because the duty on the wool which they must use is the same as that upon wool used in
making woolen cloths, while the rate of duty imposed upon the latter when valued at not
exceeding 80 cents per pound are 35 per cent ad valorem, whereas the duty on worsted
cloths valued at not exceeding 80 cents ranges from 10 to 24 cents per pound and 35 per
cent ad valorem. In some cases the duty on the wool used in making worsted cloths exceed
the duty imposed on the finished article."

Thus what was protection to home industry yesterday turns out today to be a premium to
the foreign importer, and well may the Secretary of the Treasury say:

"There is much reason to believe that the manufacturer of worsted cloths must soon cease
in this country unless the tariff law in this regard is amended."

But to amend it, you will have to fight the manufacturers of woolen clothes who profit
by this state of things; you will have to open a regular campaign to bring the majority
of both Houses of Congress, and eventually the public opinion of the country round to
your views, and the question is, Will that pay?

But the worst of protection is that when you once have got it, you cannot easily get rid
of it. Difficult as is the process of adjustment of an equitable tariff, the return to
Free Trade is immensely more difficult. The circumstances that permitted England to
accomplish the change in a few years will not occur again. And even there the struggle
dated from 1823 (Huckisson), commenced to be successful in 1842 (Peel's tariff), and was
continued for several years after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Thus protection to the
silk manufacturer (the only one which had still to fear foreign competition) was
prolonged for a series of years and then granted in another, positively infamous form;
while the other textile industries were subjected to the Factory Act – which limited the
hours of labor of women, young persons, and children – the silk trade was favored with
considerable exceptions to the general rule enabling them to work younger children, and
to work the children and young persons longer hours, than the other textile trades. The
monopoly that the hypocritical Free Traders repealed with regard to the foreign
competitors, that monopoly they created anew at the expense of the health and lives of
English children.

But no country will again be able to pass from Protection to Free Trade at a time when
all, or nearly all, branches of its manufactures can defy foreign competition in the
open market. The necessity of the change will come long before such a happy state may
even be hoped for. That necessity will make itself evident in different trades at
different times; and from the conflicting interests of these trades, the most edifying
squabbles, lobby intrigues, and parliamentary conspiracies will arise. The machinist,
engineer, and shipbuilder may find that the protection granted to the iron master raises
the price of his goods so much that his export trade is thereby, and thereby alone,
prevented. The cotton cloth manufacturer might see his way to driving English cloth out
of the Chinese and Indian markets, but for the high price he has to pay for the yarn, on
account of protection to spinners, and so forth.

The moment a branch of national industry has completely conquered the home market, that
moment exportation becomes a necessity to it. Under capitalistic conditions, an industry
either expands or wanes. A trade cannot remain stationary; stoppage of expansion is
incipient ruin; the progress of mechanical and chemical invention, by constantly
superseding human labor and ever more rapidly increasing and concentrating capital,
creates in every stagnant industry a glut both of workers and of capital, a glut which
finds no vent everywhere, because the same process is taking place in all other
industries.

Thus the passage from a home to an export trade becomes a question of life and death for
the industries concerned. But they are met by the established rights, the vested
interests of others who as yet find protection either safer or more profitable than Free
Trade. Then ensues a long and obstinate fight between Free Traders and Protectionists; a
fight where, on both sides, the leadership soon passes out of the hands of the people
directly interested, into those of professional politicians, the wire-pullers of the
traditional political parties, whose interest is not a settlement of the question, but
its being kept open forever; and the result of an immense loss of time, energy, and
money is a series of compromises favoring now one, then the other side, and drifting
slowly though not majestically in the direction of Free Trade – unless Protection
manages, in the meantime, to make itself utterly insupportable to the nation, which is
just now likely to be the case in America.

There is, however, another kind of protection, the worst of all, and that is exhibited
in Germany. Germany, too, began to feel, soon after 1815, the necessity of a quicker
development of her manufactures. But the first condition of that was the creation of a
home market by the removal of the innumerable customs lines and varieties of fiscal
legislation formed by the small German states – in other words, the formation of a
German Customs Union, or Zollverein. That could only be done on the basis of a liberal
tariff, calculated rather to raise a common revenue than to protect home production. On
no other condition could the small states have been introduced to join.

Thus the new German tariff, though slightly protective to some trades, was, at the time
of its introduction, a model of Free Trade legislation; and it remained so, although,
ever since 1830, the majority of German manufacturers kept clamoring for protection.
Yet, under this extremely liberal tariff, and in spite of German domestic industries
based on hand labor being mercilessly crushed out by the competition of English
factories worked by steam, the transition from manual labor to machinery was gradually
accomplished in Germany too, and is now nearly complete. The transformation of Germany
from an agricultural to a manufacturing country went on at the same pace, and was, since
1866, assisted by favorable political events: the establishment of a strong central
government, and federal legislation, ensuring uniformity in the laws regulating trade,
as well as in currency, weights, and measures, and, finally, the flood of the French
billions. Thus, about 1874, German trade on the market of the world ranked next to that
of Great Britain, and Germany employed more steam power in manufactures and locomotion
than any Continental European country. The proof has thus been furnished that even
nowadays, in spite of the enormous start that English industry has got, a large country
can work its way up to successful competition in the open market with England.

Then, all at once, a change of front was made: Germany turned protectionist at a moment
when more than ever Free Trade seemed a necessity for her. The change was no doubt
absurd; but it may be explained. While Germany had been a corn-exporting country, the
whole agricultural interest, not less than the whole shipping trade, had been ardent
Free Traders. But in 1874, instead of exporting, Germany required large supplies of corn
from abroad. About that time, America began to flood Europe with enormous supplies of
cheap corn; wherever they went, they brought down the money revenue yielded by the land,
and consequently its rent; and from that moment, the agricultural interest all over
Europe began to clamor for protection.

At the same time, manufacturers in Germany were suffering from the effect of the
reckless overtrading brought on by the influx of the French billions, while England,
whose trade ever since the crisis of 1866 had been in a state of chronic depression,
inundated all accessible markets with goods unsalable at home and offered abroad at
ruinously low prices. Thus it happened that German manufacturers, though depending above
all upon export, began to see in protection a means of securing to themselves the
exclusive supply of the home market. And the government, entirely in the hands of the
landed aristocracy and squirearchy, was only too glad to profit by this circumstance in
order to benefit the receivers of the rent of land by offering protective duties to both
landlords and manufacturers. In 1878, a highly protective tariff was enacted both for
agricultural products and for manufactured goods.

The consequence was that henceforth the exportation of German manufactures was carried
on at the direct cost of the home consumers. Wherever possible, "rings" or "trusts" were
formed to regulate the export trade and even production itself. The German iron trade is
in the hands of a few large firms, mostly joint stock companies, who, betwixt them, can
produce about four times as much iron as the average consumption of the country can
absorb. To avoid unnecessary competition with one another, these firms have formed a
trust which divides amongst them all foreign contracts and determines in each case the
firm that is to make the real tender. This "trust", some years ago, had even come to an
agreement with the English iron masters, but this no longer subsists. Similarly, the
Westphalian coal mines (producing about 30 million tons annually) had formed a trust to
regulate production, tenders for contracts, and prices. And, altogether, any German
manufacturer will tell you that the only thing the protective duties do for him is to
enable him to recoup himself in the home market for the ruinous prices he has to take
abroad.

And this is not all. This absurd system of protection to manufacturers is nothing but
the sop thrown to industrial capitalists to induce them to support a still more
outrageous monopoly given to the landed interest. Not only is all agricultural produce
subjected to heavy import duties which are increased from year to year, but certain
rural industries, carried on large estates for account of the proprietor, are positively
endowed out of the public purse. The beet-root sugar manufacture is not only protected,
but receives enormous sums in the shape of export premiums. One who ought to know is of
opinion that if the exported sugar was all thrown into the sea, the manufacturer would
still clear a profit out of government premium. Similarly, the potato-spirit
distilleries receive, in consequence of recent legislation, a present out of the pockets
of the public of about $9 million a year. And as almost every large landowner in
northeastern Germany is either a beet-root sugar manufacturer or a potato-spirit
distiller, or both, no wonder the world is literally deluged with their production.

This policy, ruinous under any circumstances, is doubly so in a country whose
manufactures keep up their standing in neutral markets chiefly through the cheapness of
labor. Wages in Germany, kept near starvation point at the best of times, through
redundancy of population (which increases rapidly, in spite of emigration), must rise in
consequence of the rise in all necessaries caused by protection; the German manufacturer
will then no longer be able, as he too often is ow, to make up for a ruinous price of
his articles by a deduction from the normal wages of his hands and will be driven out of
the market. Protection, in Germany, is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

France, too, suffers from the consequences of protection. The system in that country has
become, by its two centuries of undisputed sway, almost part and parcel of the life of
the nation. Nevertheless, it is more and more becoming an obstacle. Constant changes in
the methods of manufacture are the order of the day; but protection bars the road. Silk
velvets have their backs nowadays made of fine cotton thread; the French manufacturer
has either to pay protection price for that, or to submit to such interminable official
chicanery as fully makes up for the difference between that price and the government
drawback on exportation; and so the velvet trade goes from Lyons to Crefeld, where the
protection price for fine cotton thread is considerably lower.

French exports, as said before, consist chiefly of articles of luxury where French taste
cannot, as yet, be beaten; but the chief consumers all over the world of such articles
are our modern upstart capitalists who have no education and no taste, and who are
suited quite as well by cheap and clumsy German or English imitations, and often have
these foisted upon them for the real French article at more than fancy prices. The
market for those specialties which cannot be made out of France is constantly getting
narrower, French export manufacturers are barely kept up, and must soon decline; by what
new articles can France replace those whose export is dying out? If anything can help
here, it is a bold measure of Free Trade, taking the French manufacturer out of his
accustomed hothouse atmosphere and placing him once more in the open air of competition
with foreign rivals. Indeed, French general trade would have long since begun shrinking
were it not for the slight and vacillating step in the direction of Free Trade made by
the [French-English] Cobden treaty of 1860, but that has well-nigh exhausted itself and
a stronger dose of the same tonic is wanted.

It is hardly worthwhile to speak of Russia. There, the protective tariff – the duties
having to be paid in gold, instead of in the depreciated paper currency of the country –
serves above all things to supply the pauper government with the hard cash indispensable
for transactions with foreign creditors. On the very day on which that tariff fulfills
its protective mission by totally excluding foreign goods, on that day the Russian
government is bankrupt. And yet that same government amuses its subjects by dangling
before their eyes the prospect of making Russia, by means of this tariff, an entirely
self-supplying country, requiring from the foreigner neither food, nor raw material, nor
manufactured articles, nor works of art. The people who believe in this vision of a
Russian Empire, secluded and isolated from the rest of the world, are on a level with
the patriotic Prussian lieutenant who went into a shop and asked for a globe, not a
terrestrial or a celestial one, but a globe of Prussia.

To return to America. There are plenty of symptoms that Protection has done all it could
for the United States, and that the sooner it receives notice to quit, the better for
all parties. One of these symptoms is the formation of "rings" and "trusts" within the
protected industries for the more thorough exploitation of the monopoly granted to them.
Now "rings" and "trusts" are truly American institutions, and, where they exploit
natural advantages, they are generally though grumblingly submitted to. the
transformation of the Pennsylvanian oil supply into a monopoly by the Standard Oil
Company is a proceeding entirely in keeping with the rules of capitalist production. But
if the sugar refiners attempt to transform the petition granted them, by the nation,
against foreign competition, into a monopoly against the home consumer, that is to say
against the same nation that granted the protection, that is quite a different thing.
Yet the large sugar refiners have formed a "trust" which aims at nothing else. And the
sugar trust is not the only one of its kind.

Now, the formation of such trusts in protected industries is the surest sign that
protection has done its work and is changing its character; that it protects the
manufacturer no longer against the foreign importer, but against the home consumer; that
is has manufactured, at least in the special branch concerned, quite enough, if not too
many manufacturers; that the money it puts into the purse of these manufacturers is
money thrown away, exactly as in Germany.

In America, as elsewhere, Protection is bolstered up by the argument that Free Trade
will only benefit England. The best proof to the contrary is that in England not only
the agriculturists and landlords but even the manufacturers are turning protectionist.
In the home of the "Manchester school" of Free Traders, on November 1, 1886, the
Manchester chamber of commerce discussed a resolution

"that, having waited in vain 40 years for other nations to follow the Free Trade example
of England, the chamber thinks the time has arrived to reconsider that position."

The resolution was indeed rejected, but by 22 votes against 21! And that happened in the
centre of the cotton manufacture – i.e., the only branch of English manufacture whose
superiority in the open market seems still undisputed! But, then, even in that special
branch inventive genius has passed from England to America. The latest improvements in
machinery for spinning and weaving cotton have come, almost all, from America, and
Manchester has to adopt them. In industrial inventions of all kinds, America has
distinctly taken the lead, while Germany runs England very close for second place.

The consciousness is gaining ground in England that that country's industrial monopoly
is irretrievably lost, that she is still relatively losing ground, while her rivals are
making progress, and that she is drifting into a position where she will have to be
content with being one manufacturing nation among many, instead of, as she once dreamt,
"the workshop of the world". It is to stave off this impending fate that Protection,
scarcely disguised under the veil of "fair trade" and retaliatory tariffs, is now
invoked with such fervor by the sons of the very men who, 40 years ago, knew no
salvation but in Free Trade. And when English manufacturers begin to find that Free
Trade is ruining them, and ask the government to protect them against their foreign
competitors, then, surely, the moment has come for these competitors to retaliate by
throwing overboard a protective system henceforth useless, to fight the fading
industrial monopoly of England with its own weapon: Free Trade.

But, as I said before, you may easily introduce Protection, but you cannot get rid of it
again so easily. The legislature, by adopting the protective plan, has created vast
interests, for which it is responsible. And not every one of these interests – the
various branches of industry – is equally ready, at a given moment, to face open
competition. Some will be lagging behind, while others have no longer need of protective
nursing. This difference of position will give rise to the usual lobby-plotting, and is
in itself a sure guarantee that the protected industries, if Free Trade is resolved
upon, will be let down very easy indeed as was the silk manufacture in England after
1846. That is unavoidable under present circumstances, and will have to be submitted to
by the Free Trade party so long as the change is resolved upon in principle.

The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present
system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us
socialists who want to do away with that system.

Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of
production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along
with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences,
and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in
consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts
and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of
society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically
hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are
at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short,
society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete
remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis.

From this point of view, 40 years ago Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of Free
Trade as the more progressive plan, and therefore the plan which would soonest bring
capitalist society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that
ground, is that not a reason for every supporter of the present order of society to
declare against Free Trade? If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must not all
good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?

If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the
socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial
capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to
cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the
prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing
manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers.
You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.

The wage laborer everywhere follows in the footsteps of the manufacturer; he is like the
"gloomy care" of Horace, that sits behind the rider, and that he cannot shake off
wherever he go. You cannot escape fate; in other words, you cannot escape the necessary
consequences of your own actions. A system of production based upon the exploitation of
wage labor, in which wealth increases in proportion to the number of laborers employed
and exploited, such a system is bound to increase the class of wage laborers, that is to
say, the class which is fated one day to destroy the system itself. In the meantime,
there is no help for it: you must go on developing the capitalist system, you must
accelerate the production, accumulation, and centralization of capitalist wealth, and,
along with it, the production of a revolutionary class of laborers. Whether you try the
Protectionist or the Free Trade will make no difference in the end, and hardly any in
the length of the respite left to you until the day when that end will come. For long
before that day will protection have become an unbearable shackle to any country
aspiring, with a chance of success, to hold its own in the world market.