Because the foreign manufactures are cheaper and better! This phenomenon is easy to understand. The British, French, and Germans each year make discoveries and inventions, each year create new materials and machines. And since the work of a machine is cheaper and more precise, the foreign manufacturers sell things that are both cheaper and better than our craftsmen who do not have machines.
The sole remedy for this is learning. If we learn, we will make inventions, we will raise up an industry which will suffice not only for our own needs but also for trade abroad. But never mind our immediately making discoveries and inventions; we must without delay set about learning, not so much for renown as for bread because, given the present state of things, in a dozen or so years today's craftsmen may find themselves without a livelihood...
It's a very simple matter. Each year brings a growing number of machines which help us work but which require educated people to run them. When there were only wagons and horses, the driver knew enough, if he could properly grease the wagon, tie the traces, and drive the horses. Today, when railroad cars have replaced wagons, and the locomotive has replaced horses, the driver is being replaced by the engineer, who is a mechanic of sorts, above all a good metalworker.
The same is happening in every trade. A steam-hammer operator has to be much more educated than a worker who uses an ordinary hammer. A steamship engineer has to know incomparably more than a boatman. Lathe operators are in general more polished than metalworkers who can only use a file and chisel, and so on.
Every time a new machine is imported from abroad, people must also be imported along with it, because the local uneducated worker cannot manage with the machine, cannot understand its movements, cannot operate it, does not know how to repair it when it breaks down.
