Page 162 - clra62_0019-(GIPE)

I S4 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
would be about £3,000,000, again much less than 10
per cent. of the total production.
It would be needless to multiply instances, though
there are some even more striking because the new
countries are smaller. In Tasmania we should have
about £400,000 only of manufactures imported of every
kind, and here the smallness of the amount, apart from
any question of proportion to total production, is im-
portant. The least sense of the scale of modern manu-
facturing'production makes it obvious that no manufac-
tures to any great extent, such as will create towns and
promote improvement, can be set up in a new country
like Tasmania by protective import duties or any other·
protectionist device.

The next stage of the argument is that, by the nature
of the case, many, if not most, of the manufactures
which are not local in a new country cannot be estab-
lished there at all because the market is not large
enough. I should define a new country to be where a
population of not more than I to I t millions is spread
over a territory the size of England or more. Such a
population is quite able to occupy a country agri-
culturally, and it is a population of this sort that is to
be found in our Australian colonies, in many parts of
the United States, in Canada, and in the Argentine
Republic. And no such community of a million or so
spread over a territory like England, and a fortiori
spread over a larger territory, can have more than a
few descriptions of factory manufactures if there is only
to be a home market. I t is easy to speak of cotton, or
woollen, or linen, or silk, or iron, or leather manufac-
tures. But each of these designations in reality includes
many manufactures, and for each one of these there
may be no adequate market in a population of a million.
Therefore, such manufactures cannot be locally estab-
lished in a new country however much you try. Take
shipping. Suppose by some monopoly the colony of
Victoria were to endeavour by means of import duties