rade, and its own assertion begins with a
"nevertheless." It claims that in spite of what is thus conceded,
protection is justifiable, since, in the end, it will pay,
notwithstanding the wastes that attend it. The argument for protection
is entirely a dynamic one. It is based on the fact of progress and
admits that it could make no case for itself under the conditions of a
static state. If every country had certain special facilities for
producing particular things, and if its state in this respect were
destined to remain forever unchanged, it could, to the end of time,
make itself richer by depending for many things on its neighbors than
it could by depending for those things immediately on itself. The fact
is, however, that a nation like our own abounds in undeveloped and
even unknown resources which, when brought to the light, may take
precedence of many of those which are known and utilized. If our
country from end to end were like Cape Nome, and as rich in gold as
the richest part of that remote region, and if it were certain that
the deposits of gold would never be exhausted and would employ the
whole energy of our people, it is clear that we should have one staple
occupation and should depend upon the rest of the world for almost
every sort of portable commodity. We should be stopped from
manufacturing by the great productivity of labor in placer mining. So
long as men could make ten dollars a day by washing out gold from the
sands, there would be no use in setting them at work making two
dollars a day as weavers or shoemakers or what not. By buying our
cloth with gold dust we could get far more of it than we could if we
took the men out of the mine and set them to making the stuff itself.
But--and here is the proviso that makes the supposition correspond
with the fact--if, besides the placers, we had deep mines of other
metals than gold, if we had oil and lumber and loam of every variety,
and if we had people with undeveloped mechanical aptitudes, it might
be that we should do well to develop these latent energies even in a
wasteful way. The condition that would fully establish the similarity
between the supposed case and the actual one is that the placer
deposits should be, as placers are, sure to be exhausted by continued
working, and that producing other things than gold should tend to
become, with time, a more and more fruitful process. We can justify
the attitude of the country that taxes itself at an early