roleum, or gold and silver bullion should
devote itself to its specialties, barter off the results, and get all
manner of goods in return.

_Wastes from Protection reduced by the Fact of Diversified
Resources._--It is true, indeed, that a great nation like our own
makes a much better jack-of-all-trades than an individual can make. It
is far more probable that the nation as a whole can produce without
much waste all the things it wants to use than that any individual can
do so. If we have all climates from the tropical to the arctic, all
soils, and a full list of mineral deposits, why should it pay us to
confine ourselves to the making of only a few things in order to
barter them off for others? Why should we not, with our wide range of
resources, make everything?

Undoubtedly we can make almost everything if we insist upon doing it;
but there are still some things that other countries can make and sell
to us on such terms that we can do better by buying them than by
producing them ourselves. We can raise tea in the United States, but
it pays us better to make something else and barter it off for tea. A
day's labor spent in raising cotton to send away in exchange gives us
more tea than a day's labor spent in producing the latter article
directly. In a static condition we should have found in what fields it
is most profitable to employ our energies. We should be directly
making things that it would pay us best to make, and we should be
indirectly making the other things; that is, we should be producing
articles to send off in exchange for those other things. Wherever an
indirect way of acquiring a thing had proved most profitable, we
should have adopted that method, and we should always adhere to it.
Anything that forced us to make directly something which we could
secure in greater abundance by bestowing the labor that would make it
on making something else, would turn our energies in a comparatively
unproductive direction. It would inflict on us a waste and a loss--and
there are such wastes and losses inherent in the operation of the
principle of protection, and there is no contending against the
argument that demonstrates their existence. Protection and a certain
distortion of the productive system, a certain misdirection of energy,
are synonymous.

_The Argument for Protection Dynamic._--Now an intelligent argument in
favor of protection begins at this point. It accepts the whole static
argument in favor of free t