This is a rule absolute, not founded in truth, but contradicted by every day’s experience.  It would be equally correct to assert, that the lower rates of labour in the European foreign market, or the higher rates in the North American, controlled and equalized in the one sense, and in the other opposing, the rates in this country, than which no assertion could be more irreconcilable with fact.  Prices and labour rates elsewhere, exercise an influence doubtless, and would have more in the absence of other conditions and counteracting influences, partly arising from natural, partly from artificially created causes.  Prices, in privileged home and colonial markets, cannot generally fall to the same level as in foreign neutral markets, or, as in foreign protected markets, where the rates of labour are low.  Keen as is the competition in the privileged home and colonial trade among the domestic and entitled manufacturers themselves, it will hardly be denied that larger as well as more steady profits are realized from those trades than from the foreign and fluctuating trade, exposed, as in most cases the latter is, to high fiscal, restrictive, and capricious burdens.  These, pro tanto, shut out competition with the protected foreign producer, unless the importer consent to be cut down to such a modicum of price or profit, as shall barely, or not at all, return the simple interest of capital laid out.  Such is the position of foreign, in comparison with home trade.

The foreign glut, in such case, reacts upon the privileged home and colonial markets, no doubt affecting prices in some degree, and if not always the rates of labour, at all events the sufficiency of employment, which is scarcely less an evil.  But the reaction presses with nothing like the severity, which in a similar case, and to the same extent only, would follow from a glut in the home privileged markets.  The cause must be sought in the general rule, that the inferior qualities of merchandise and manufactures are for the most part the objects of exportation only.  Consequently, in case of a glut, or want of demand abroad, as such are not suited by quality for home taste and consumption, the superabundance of accumulated and unsaleable stock, with the depression of prices consequent, affects comparatively in a slight degree only the value and vent of the wares prepared expressly for home consumption.  But a different and more modified action takes place in case of over-production of the latter, or upon a failure of demand, arising from whatever cause.  For, being then pressed upon the foreign market, the superior quality of the goods commands a decided preference at once, and that preference ensures comparatively higher rates of price in the midst of the piled up packages of warehouse sweepings and goods, made, like Peter’s razors, for special sale abroad, which are vainly offered at prime or any cost.  These and other specialties escape, and not unaccountably, the view and the calculation