THE IMPORTATION OF FOOD, Free trade not only reduces the price of our products, hut limits the markets for our agricultural products abroad. The largest amount of provisions we have ever exported is $80,000,000 per annum ; of which less than half went to the manufacturing countries of Europe. During the first ten months of the present calendar year our imports from these manufacturing countries amounted to $186,500,000 in gold. At the same ratio of imports, the amount for the year, reduced into currency, at $1.44 for gold, would be $322,272,000 against $149,328,000 of exports, entailing a loss which must be paid for in gold, or, worse, in bonds at five or six per cent. interest! and not only cause the country this immense loss direct, but indirectly sends into this country five times as much food as we ever sent to the manufacturing countries of Europe !* In this country our free labor spends about one-third to one-half its earning in food ; but the cheap labor of Europe spends two-thirds for the necessaries to sustain life. Now,
nothing can be more plain than the fact that two-thirds of our imports represent im ported food, minus the profits which swell the capital or permanent wealth of the foreign manufacturers. Free trade, therefore, diminishes the markets of our farmers to this extent,—since we import during free-trade tariffs five times as much food as we export, which destroys the home market of our farmers to that extent. Such are the rewards of free trade and cheap labor. They drain our country of the precious metals ; they curtail the markets for our agricultural productions ; they reduce the price of every production of labor as well as the price of labor, without adding one cent to our perma nent wealth, and constantly drain the resources of our country ; and we might continue with a category of evils ad libitum.