date for the
sake of testing and developing the latent aptitudes of its land and
its people. At the outset it will thereby sustain a loss, because at
the outset it can gain more goods by the indirect method of exchange
than it can by production; but there may easily come a time when it
can gain more by the direct method. If we learn to make things more
economically than we could originally make them, if we hit upon cheap
sources of motive power and of raw material, and especially if we
devise machinery that works rapidly and accurately and greatly
multiplies the product of a man's working day, we shall reach a
condition in which, instead of a loss incidental to the early years of
manufacturing, we shall have an increasing gain that will continue to
the end of time. It may be, further, that without protection and the
burdensome tax which it did undoubtedly impose upon us, we should have
had to wait far too long for this gain to accrue and should have
sacrificed the benefits that come from a long interval of diversified
and fruitful industry.

In short, the static argument for free trade is unanswerable and the
dynamic argument for protection, when intelligently stated, is equally
so. The two arguments do not meet and refute each other, but are
mutually consistent. It is possible to ridicule the argument for
protection under the name of the "infant industry" argument, and it is
possible for the policy it upholds to continue long after this
argument has ceased to be valid. The overgrown infant will have
sacrificed his claim for coddling, but that will not prove that there
was never a time when he needed it.

_The Policy demanded in View of Facts Static and Dynamic._--Now, there
is an argument for tariff reduction which accepts both the static
argument for free trade and the dynamic argument for protection. In
fact, it bases itself on the protectionist's modern and intelligent
claim. To advance in any form the infant industry argument is to admit
that the policy advocated is temporary. Protective duties are, in
fact, self-testing. They reveal in their very working whether they
were originally justifiable or not. The ground on which they were
imposed is that they would develop latent resources--that they would
enable labor to produce as much by making a class of articles formerly
produced in foreign countries as it could produce by engaging in
industries already established and exchanging their products for the
former art