Political Science Of The State

404 POLITICAL SCIENCE.
Patent laws are a necessary kind of monopoly in which the
government sanctions the sole right of making, or of selling to
others the right of making certain things, over which by natu-
ral right he, as inventor, ought to have the control. The rea-
sons of justice and of public policy here are manifest. Ought
any other monopoly to be allowed ? And here we refer to
what is called a protective tariff, by which it is intended to
make certain articles produced in foreign countries so much
dearer than competing articles at home, that they will be ex-
cluded or admitted only because a sufficient quantity of the
articles in question can or cannot be furnished by domestic
industry. We call the employments cherished by protective
tariffs monopolies, since if the tariff does its work to the
extent of the home supply, the people of the country are
forced to use these articles because others are made more dear.
And as articles of prime importance, as stuffs for wear, iron,
coal, and the like, will naturally be protected, such laws have
very serious consequences in the way of a tax on all other
industries, and on persons consuming the protected articles.
I shall not enter here into the argument on a protective tar-
iff, as distinguished from a revenue tariff. Happily, all
writers of credit, with scarcely an exception, are agreed that
they are built on a false policy. I will only say that they
involve the tyranny of preventing the producer from sending
his wares to the best market, that they make it necessary in
the end to protect raw material, as well as the products for
which they are needed, and thus partially defeat their own
ends by increasing the price of the former; that they lead to
endless bargains and sectional disagreements in a country
where raw materials are the chief products; that they draw
away a nation's energies from that which it can raise to the
best advantage, and even lay a tax on such products; and
that by lessening in these ways the amount of accumulated
capital, they retard the growth of a country and the success-
ful prosecution of many branches of industry.