THE UNITED STATES LOOKING OUTWARD.

_August, 1890._


Indications are not wanting of an approaching change in the thoughts
and policy of Americans as to their relations with the world outside
their own borders. For the past quarter of a century, the predominant
idea, which has asserted itself successfully at the polls and shaped
the course of the government, has been to preserve the home market for
the home industries. The employer and the workman alike have been
taught to look at the various economical measures proposed from this
point of view, to regard with hostility any step favoring the intrusion
of the foreign producer upon their own domain, and rather to demand
increasingly rigorous measures of exclusion than to acquiesce in any
loosening of the chain that binds the consumer to them. The inevitable
consequence has followed, as in all cases when the mind or the eye is
exclusively fixed in one direction, that the danger of loss or the
prospect of advantage in another quarter has been overlooked; and
although the abounding resources of the country have maintained the
exports at a high figure, this flattering result has been due more to
the superabundant bounty of Nature than to the demand of other nations
for our protected manufactures.

For nearly the lifetime of a generation, therefore, American industries
have been thus protected, until the practice has assumed the force of a
tradition, and is clothed in the mail of conservatism. In their mutual