capital, and machinery, have so enormously increased the power of manufacturing production, that they have rendered the old commercial state omnipotent in the foreign market in the supply of its articles.  Nothing but fiscal regulations and heavy duties can protect the young state from ruin in those branches of industry.  Heavy taxes, high wages, costly rents, dear rude produce, all are at once compensated, and more than compensated, by the gigantic powers of the steam-engine.  Cotton goods are raised now in Great Britain at a fifth of the price which they were during the war.  A gown, which formerly was cheap at L2, 10s., is now sold for ten shillings.  Silks, muslins, and all other articles of female apparel, have been reduced in price in the same proportion.  Colossal fortunes have been made by the master manufacturers, unbounded wealth diffused through the operative workmen in Lancashire and Lanarkshire, even at these extremely reduced prices.  This is the real reason of the universal effort made by all nations which have the least pretensions to commercial industry, of late years to exclude, by fixed duties, our staple manufactures; of which the President of the Board of Trade so feelingly complains, and which the advocates of free trade consider as so inexplicable.  A very clear principle has led to it, and will lead to it.  It is the instinct of SELF-PRESERVATION.

But there is no steam-engine in agriculture.  The old state has no superiority over the young one in the price of producing food; on the contrary, it is decidedly its inferior.  There, as in love, the apprentice is the master.  The proof of this is decisive.  Poland can raise wheat with ease at fifteen or twenty shillings a quarter, while England requires fifty.  The serf of the Ukraine would make a fortune on the price at which the farmer of Kent or East Lothian would be rendered bankrupt.  The Polish cultivators have no objection whatever to a free competition with the British; but the British anticipate, and with reason, total destruction from the free admission of Polish grain.  These facts are so notorious, that they require no illustration; but nevertheless the conclusion to which they point is of the highest importance, and bears, with overwhelming force, on the theory of free trade as between an old and a young community.  They demonstrate that that theory is not only practically pernicious, but on principle erroneous.  It involves an oblivion of the fundamental law of nature as to the difference between the effect of wealth and civilization on the production of food and the raising of manufactures.  It proceeds on insensibility to the difference in the age and advancement of nations, and the impossibility of a reciprocity being established between them without the ruin of an important branch of industry in each.  It supposes nations to be of the same genus and age, like the trees in the larch plantation, not of all varieties and ages, as in the natural forest.  If established in complete operation, it would only lead to the ruin of the manufactures of the younger state, and of the agriculture of the old one.  The only reciprocity which it can ever introduce between such states is the reciprocity of evil.