80 The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe
goods. Zollverein in the 1830’s merely indicated the need for haste. Torrens and
James Deacon Hume, among others, had been pushing for importing corn to expand
exports in the 1820’s, before Zollverein was a threat.
Reciprocity had been a part of British commercial policy in the Treaty of
Vergennes in 1786, in treaties reducing the impact of the Navigation Laws in the
1820’s and 1830’s. The French were suspicious, fearing that they had been out-
traded in 1786. They evaded Huskisson’s negotiations in 1828. But reciprocity
was unnecessary, given David Hume’s law. Unilateral reduction of import duties
increased exports. Restored into the British diplomatic armory in 1860, reciprocity
later became heresy in the eyes of political economists, and of the manufacturing
interest as well.
The view that ascribes repeal of the Corn Laws to free-trade imperialism, however,
fails adequately to take account of the ideology of the political economists, who
believed in buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, or of the
short-run nature of the interests of the Manchester merchants themselves. It was
evident after the 1840’s that industrialization on the Continent could not be stopped,
and likely that it could not be slowed down. The Navigation Acts were too complex;
they had best be eliminated. The Corn Laws were doomed, even before the Irish
potato famine, though that hastened the end of both Corn Laws and Navigation
Acts, along with its demonstration of the limitation of market solutions under
some circumstances.
“A good cause seldom triumphs unless someone’s interest is bound up with
it.”^10 Free trade is the hypocrisy of the export interest, the clever device of the
climber who kicks the ladder away when he has attained the summit of greatness.
But in the English case it was more a view of the world at peace, with cosmopolitan
interests served as well as national.
It is difficult in this to find clear-cut support for any of the theories of tariff
formation set forth earlier. Free trade as an export-interest collective good, sought
in a representative democracy by concentrated interests to escape the free rider,
would seem to require a simple and direct connection between the removal of the
tariff and the increase in rents. In the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the earlier
tariff reductions of Huskisson and Peel, the connection was roundabout—through
Hume’s law, which meant that increased imports would lead to increased prices
or quantities (or both) exported on the one hand, and/or through reduced wages,
or higher real incomes from lower food prices on the other. Each chain of reasoning
had several links.
Johnson’s view that free trade is adopted by countries with improving
competitiveness is contradictory to the free-trade-imperialism explanation, that
free trade is adopted in an effort to undermine foreign gains in manufacturing
when competitiveness has begun to decline. The former might better account in
timing for Adam Smith’s advocacy of free trade seventy years earlier—though
that had large elements of French Physiocratic thought—or apply to the 1820’s
when British productivity was still improving, before the Continent had started to
catch up. In turn, free-trade imperialism is a better explanation for the 1830’s
than for the end of the 1840’s, since by 1846 it was already too late to slow, much
less to halt, the advance of manufacturing on the Continent.