Carey’s doctrine, accordingly, cannot be attributed directly to the influence of List. It remains to be seen whether List had any influence upon European doctrines. He undoubtedly succeeded in forcing the acceptance of the idea of a temporary Protection for infant industries even upon Free Traders. The most notable convert to this view was John Stuart Mill.[609] But it was a somewhat Platonic concession that he made. He thought it inapplicable to old countries, for their education was no longer incomplete, and at best useful only for new countries. Can modern Protectionists claim descent from List? In the absence of any systematic treatise dealing with their ideas, it is not always easy to glean the significance of their doctrines from the various articles, discourses, and brochures amid which they are scattered.[610] Neglecting those writers who are merely content to reproduce the old fallacies of the Mercantile arguments concerning the balance of trade,[611] the majority of them appear to base their case more or less explicitly upon two principal arguments: (1) the necessity for economic autonomy; (2) the patriotic necessity of securing a national market for national products.[612] These two points of view, which are more or less clearly avowed and accepted as political maxims, would, if applied with logical strictness, result in making all external commerce useless. Each nation would thus be reduced to using just those resources with which Nature had happened to endow it, but it could get little if any of the goods produced by the rest of mankind. These two ideas were not absolutely foreign to List’s thought, although they never assumed anything more than a secondary or subordinate character. He never considered them as the permanent supports of a commercial policy.