Colonial policy is the daughter of industrial policy. For rich states, where capital abounds and accumulates rapidly, where the manufacturing regime is on the path of continual growth, attracting to itself if not the majority, at least the most awake and lively among the population of manual workers, where the culture of the land is condemned to support industrialization, exports are an essential factor in public prosperity, and the use of capital, like the demand for work, is measured by the size of foreign markets. If there could be established among manufacturing nations something along the lines of a division of industrial labor, a methodical and rational allocation of industry according to ability and the economic, natural, and social conditions of the different producing countries - placing here the cotton and metallurgy industries, reserving for one alcohol and sugar, and for another wool and silk - Europe would not have to look beyond its own borders for outlets for its products. It was with this ideal in mind that they made the treaties of 1860. But today, everyone wants to spin and weave, forge and distill. All of Europe manufactures sugar in excess and wishes to export it. The arrival on the scene of the latest comers to industrialism - the US on the one hand, Germany on the other, the advent of the small states, of sleepy and lazy people, of the regenerated Italy, of Spain enriched by French capital, and of Switzerland, so enterprising and informed - to the industrial life, has sent the entire Occident, except for Russia, which is still preparing and growing, on a slope that cannot be climbed back up. From the other side of the Vosges, as from beyond the Atlantic, the protection system has multiplied manufactures, suppressed old outlets, and thrust on the European market a formidable competition. To defend one's perimeters by raising barriers is something, but it is not enough. Mister Torrens has well demonstrated, in his good book on the colonization of Australia, that a growth in manufacturing capital, if it is not accompanied by a proportional expansion of outlets abroad, will produce, simply through domestic competition, a general lowering of prices, profits, and wages. (Torrens, Colonisation of South Australia). The protection system is a steam engine without a safety valve if it doesn't have as a corrective and a back up a healthy and serious colonial policy. An excess of capital committed to industry tends not only to diminish the profits of capital, it stops the rise of wages, even though that [rising wages] is a natural law and beneficial to modern societies. And that is not an abstract law, but a phenomenon made of flesh and blood, of passion and will, that moves, complains, and defends itself. Preservation of social harmony is, in humanity's industrial age, a question of outlets. The economic crisis that has weighed so heavily on the European working class since 1876 or 1877, the malaise that has followed it, of which frequent, long, and often ill advised, but always formidable strikes are the most painful symptoms, coincided in France, Germany, and England with a notable and persistent reduction in exports. Europe is like a busi-ness that wants, after a certain number of years, to diminish its sales revenue. European consumption is saturated and it [Europe] must now conjure up from other parts of the globe new groups of consumers or suffer the penalty of bankrupting modern society and preparing for the dawn of the twentieth century a social cataclysm of which we cannot know how to calculate the consequences.
