“But how can it be otherwise? We share our own home markets with our rivals, whilst they effectually exclude us from any participation in theirs. Here is a constant source of our weakness, our competitors reaping advantages from our errors that strengthen them to contend with ourselves. The true economy of machinery and the only means of selling cheaply is to sell largely. But in Belgium the consumption is the least conceivable, divided and attenuated as it is by importations from abroad. For printing calicoes, for example, the cost of engraving a roller, is the same in France, in England, and in Belgium, but from the same roller, the English manufacturer has a demand for five thousand pieces, the French one for five hundred, and the Belgian but fifty. It is with impressions upon cloth as with impressions upon paper--the book, of which a prodigious number of copies will be sold, can be offered at a price little more than the cost of the paper, and in like manner, the printed goods of England and France can be sold for the bare cost of the grey calico in Belgium. But that which of all else inflicts the most serious injury on the cotton trade of Belgium, is her periodical inundation with the surplus stock of her rivals, which is poured from time to time into her markets with instructions to force a sale at any price, no matter how trifling. Cottons, for which in the season of the spring they asked three francs, are all a few months later exported to Belgium, and sold gladly for one franc and a half or a franc and a quarter, thus bringing the finest and most valuable muslins of France into direct competition with the coarse fabrics of Belgium. These injurious importations take place at the commencement of almost every season, the printers of France, before they bring out their new designs, making a clear sweep of the old, and carefully avoiding to reduce their prices at home, they force them into consumption in Belgium, which affords the nearest and most convenient market for the purpose. The crises and commercial fluctuations of other countries, thus become equally ruinous with our own, but with this aggravation, that prudence may guard against the one, but no foresight or precautions can suffice to ward off the other.”