Georgiana had already heard about the trouble with canals from Jacob, the mayor of Bruges. As long as locks were built upstream, there would be no water downstream, making them basically useless. Railways, on the other hand, were far less constrained by this.
Yet railway capacity was nowhere near that of canals. She thought of the young man Edgeworth had recommended, the one capable of designing high-pressure steam engines. She wondered whether he had arrived. If he truly was as talented as Edgeworth claimed, perhaps one day there would be a place for him in this billiard room.
Just as Georgiana appeared and disrupted things, the Parisian congressmen took the Brussels congressmen and Bowens to another room to smoke, though Georgiana did not mind them smoking indoors.
During America's colonial period, tobacco had been a major export. Cotton, as an emerging agricultural crop, was growing rapidly, but at this stage it was still no match for tobacco. Even if tobacco yields were lower than cotton's, its unit price was far higher. It was another major pillar of the plantations, even surpassing wheat and corn. Yet America was not the only producer of tobacco. To bring agricultural products into the global market, the best method was low prices. In other words, slavery demanded low tariffs. But Hamilton, in order to protect America's fragile textile industry and other industries, had imposed high tariffs.
This was not merely to protect local interests. After Thomas Jefferson abolished the whiskey tax, America's fiscal revenue depended mainly on tariffs. Suppose a factory owner paid a free worker a very low wage to save costs, while the price of a slave kept rising. With an additional twenty-percent tariff, the price of buying one slave could pay a free worker's wages for eighteen years. Was there still any