Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 20

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LE NORD
building log cabins to dwell in and felling virgin forest for these
log houses and the timber they also sent to Europe. They neither
had the time nor the ability to build up mechanical industries,
and above all they had not the money. Industrial products had
to be imported from Europe, a fact of which we have sufficient
evidence from both sides of the Atlantic. Two instances, both
supplying irrefutable proof, should suffice.
In 1751 the American statesman Benjamin Franklin published
a paper on questions of population, dealing inter alia with the
problem of emigration, the importance of which from the point
of view of the home countries was then also a subject of con-
troversy. He states that up to that time about 80000 Englishmen
had emigrated to the New England states of North America,
where they and their descendants now numbered about a million
Englishmen; and he asks whether the increase of population in
the mother country has diminished for this reason. On the con-
trary, he replies, it has increased as a result of the employment
given by the colonies to the industries of the mother country.1)
And even a century earlier we find in the posthumous papers
of the great French minister Colbert — 1661—83 — another
statement showing how at this early stage a market was sought
for the textile industry, which was then in its childhood and
whose production, however insignificant measured by modern
standards, France herself had not sufficient purchasing power to
buy. In connection with the decline of the linengoods industry
Colbert writes: It must be assisted by securing for it a market
in America “ou par droit ou par fraude”2), i. e. lawfully by
treaties, or by smuggling. Enter it must, for there is the market.
We might quote several other authentic statements from the
early period; Adam Smith, for instance, says in his Wealth of
Nations — 1776 — that the advantage of the discovery of Amer-
ica lies in an increase in the volume of goods and the expansion
of Europe’s industries. But these must suffice, they are sufficient-
ly precise and lucid to show that we are here at the source of
the power which graduaily raised Europe out of its poverty;
for on this basis European industrial production developed with
*) Benjamin Franklin: Observations concerning the increase of mankind
and peopling of countries in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol.
VIII p. 71. New Vork 1905.
2) Lavisse: op. cit. VII p. 217 et seq.