These considerations point out an important limitation to which, on principle, the doctrines of free trade must be subjected.  Perfectly just in reference to a single community, or a compact empire of reasonable extent, they wholly fail when applied to separate nations in different degrees of civilization, or even to different provinces of the same empire, when it is of such an extent as to bring such different nations, in various degrees of progress, under one common dominion.  They were suggested, in the first instance, to philosophers, by the absurd restrictions on the commerce of grain which existed in France under the old monarchy, and which Turgot and the Economists laboured so assiduously to abolish.  There can be no doubt that they were perfectly right in doing so; for France is a compact, homogeneous country, in which the cost of producing subsistence is not materially different in one part from another, and the interests of the whole community are closely identified.  The same holds with the interchange of grain between the different provinces of Spain, or for the various parts of the British islands.  But the case is widely different with an empire so extensive as, like the British in modern or the Roman in ancient times, to embrace separate kingdoms, in wholly different circumstances of climate, progress, and social condition.  Free trade, in such circumstances, must lead to a destruction of important interests, and a total subversion of the balance of society in both the kingdoms subjected to it.  To be conviced of this, we have only to look at the present condition of the British, or the past fate of the Roman empire.

It is the boast of our manufacturers—­and such a marvel may well afford a subject for exultation—­that with cotton which grew on the banks of the Ganges, they can, by the aid of British capital, machinery, and enterprise, undersell, in the production of muslin and cotton goods, the native Indian manufacturers, who work up their fabrics in the close vicinity of the original cotton-fields.  The constant and increasing export of Britsh goods to India, two-thirds of which are cotton, demonstrates that this superiority really exists; and that the muslin manufacturers in Hindostan, who work for 3d. a-day on their own cotton, cannot stand the competition of the British operatives, who receive 3s. 6d. a-day, aided as they are by the almost miraculous powers of the steam-engine.  Free trade, therefore, is ruinous to the manufacturing interests of India; and accordingly the Parliamentary proceedings are filled with evidence of the extreme misery which has been brought on the native manufacturers of Hindostan by that free importation of British goods, in which our political economists so much and so fully exult.