If we pause for a while to consider this foreign and external economic policy of the European states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, - which it has hitherto been the custom to regard as the essential feature of the mercantile system, - it is not, of course, our purpose to describe the details of its several forms. The general features of its regulations are well enough known. Difficulties were put in the way of the importation of manufactured goods; and their production and exportation were favoured by the prohibition of the export of raw materials, by bounties on export, and by commercial treaties. encouragement was given to domestic shipping, to the fisheries, and to the coasting trade by restricting or forbidding foreign competition. Commerce with the colonies, and the supplying of them with european wares, was reserved for the mother country. The importation of colonial produce had to take place directly from the colony itself, and not by way of other european ports; and everywhere an attempt was made to establish direct trading relations by great privileged trading companies, and by state aid in manifold ways. England promoted the export of corn and the prosperity of agriculture at the same time by the payment of bounties; France hindered the export of corn for the benefit of industry; Holland, in its later days, sought to create very large stores of corn and a very free trade in corn, so as both to ensure a due domestic supply and to encourage trade. But, as we have already said, an account of these several measures would go beyond the purpose of this essay.
The general features are known; the details have even yet not been subjected to due scientific investigation. Our only purpose here is to grasp the fundamental ideas of the system; which, naturally, found varying expression, here in high duties, there in low, here in the prevention, there in the encouragement of the corn trade. The thought pursued everywhere was this: as competition with other countries fluctuated up and down, to cast the weight of the power of the state into the scales of the balance in the way demanded in each case by national interests.
In proportion as the economic interests of whole states, after much agitation of public opinion, found a rallying-point in certain generally accepted postulates, there could not fail to arise the thought of a national policy, of protection by the state against the outside world, and of the support by the state of great national interests in their struggle with foreign countries. The conception of a national agriculture, of a national industry, of national shipping and fisheries, of national currency and banking systems, of a national division of labour, and of a national trade must have arisen before the need was felt of transforming old municipal and territorial institutions into national and state ones. But, as soon as that had taken place, it must have seemed a matter of course that the whole power of the state, in relation to other countries as well as at home, should be placed at the service of these collective interests; just as the political power of the towns and territories had served their municipal and district interests.
The struggle for existence, in economic life in particular, as in social life in general, is necessarily carried on at all times by smaller or larger groups and communities. That will also be the case in all time to come. And the practice and theory of those times, answering, as they did, to this universal tendency, were nearer reality than the theory of Adam Smith; and so also were the main ideas of Frederick List.
We are not, however, concerned just now with this universal tendency; what we want is to understand the particular form in which it then expressed itself, and the reason for it; and why it could, in later times, give way so far before other tendencies.
