And the result has been, as we see, that some industries, - as for example the agriculture of the Eastern seaboard States, which was flourishing before facilities of transport brought it into competition with the West, - have been ruined by the inter-State Free Trade of the Union; while others, like the manufactures of some of the Eastern States, have been driven from one State to another as the chances and fortunes of trade-war have determined; and with this further result, that the wealth of the separate States, far from increasing together and rising proportionately in the wealth columns of each, (as they would if supplied from a common reservoir), are seen to rise to portentous heights in some States and to sink to mud-banks and shoals in others; just as they would if each had to depend, as I contend, on the weight and height of its own reservoir supply, as represented by its own instruments of production; thus proving conclusively, that the axiom of the Free Traders, that under absolute Free Trade what is best for the world as a whole is best also for each particular nation, area, or part of it, - as expressed by the symbol of a common reservoir - is a false one; and that the true one is that each separate area has its own special reservoir in its own instruments of production, and that it can no more draw on any outside source of wealth over and above its own private wealth (as represented by its exports) than can any individual trader.

Fortunately, in the case of the different States of the American Union, the victors and the vanquished, the dumpers and the dumpees, the pinchers and the pinched, although they may belong to different States, are all alike citizens of the same great nation, with all the collateral advantages of every kind which that political fact involves; but did they belong to different nations, none of the advantages of inter-State free trade would exist to console the losers in the industrial and commercial game, or to reconcile them to having their beards thus pulled, like the King in Hamlet, and 'think it jest,' without putting up protective walls to defend themselves. For, that one State forming part of a nation should lose or win from another State forming part of the same nation, is the accepted rule of the game which they started out to play, just as it is with individuals; but it is not the rule of the game which independent nations start to play for industrial stakes against each other, any more than it is the rule of the social game to permit the same familiarities or liberties to strangers, as to friends or members of your own family; and to confuse the game, as the Free Traders do, by professing to play in the interests of your own nation, when you are really playing in the interests of the world as a whole, is not only an intellectual stultification, but is a moral obliquity as well.

Now the proximate source of the illusion which has led the Free Traders in this connection to imagine that if all the world embraced Free Trade, each nation would be able to draw on some common reservoir of wealth in the world as a whole, over and above the products of its own particular resources and instruments of production, will be found to lie in their first detaching and then confounding the mere dead products of industry with the instruments of production from which they proceed, and in keeping their eye fixed on the to-and-fro movement of these products, instead of on the character, stability, strength, and, nationality of these instruments of production alone, - an illusion as great as if they imagined that the to-and-fro movements of the piston of a locomotive could be detached from a consideration of the coal with which it is stoked; the products of a bag of tools from the question of to whom they belong; or the general exchange of wheat or eggs in the central exchange market, from the question of whether they were produced at home or abroad. For the difference in the logical conclusion that may be drawn from the facts when this distinction is not observed, is enormous.

If once you detach the products from the instruments of production on which they depend, they can be logically represented as all mere lifeless things can, (and indeed as the exports and imports of a nation are by the Free Traders), as capable of being interchanged and moved backwards and forwards indefinitely, like water or sand in a trough, by a slight mechanical tilting of one or the other end; whereas instruments of production being, on the other hand, living things as it were, (inasmuch as they embody living powers of Nature which have their roots in definite places) cannot be rocked from their foundations thus, and shifted about here and there by any merely external or mechanical process of tilting whatever, but when they do begin to move, do not stop until they have conquered you, or you them. It is true that it is by the products, - as the visible symbols and effects of these instruments of production, - that nations conquer or are conquered, as it was by the symbol of the cross which Constantine saw in the sky that he was enabled to conquer his opponent Maxentius at the Milvian bridge; but unless we keep our eye fixed on the powers and instruments of production behind these symbols, and especially on whether they belong to ourselves or to other nations, we may easily in the business and bustle of the mart, have our industrial supremacy, under Free Trade, stolen away from us piecemeal in our sleep.