strongest, and they refuse to run against her with equal weights. Therefore, we cannot have Free Trade, for there are two parties to the bargain, and while it rests with ourselves to say whether we will be free to buy, it is others who determine whether we are free to sell.

I am almost ashamed to write these words. They have been said in substance so often, and the necessity for repeating them reflects so heavily on our political economy. our political economy. But there is a second illusion as mischievous as this, which it is equally needful to expose afresh every day. We are taught persistently that whatever impediments may be in the way of our export trade, no harm can possibly come from any amount of imports, because whatever foreign produce we may buy is paid for by British produce. The total fallacy of this idea has been exposed by Lord Penzance in the pages of the National Review. No reply has been attempted, nor is any possible. But our leading writers apparently read nothing that has been written on the subject since 1852. The error was repeated in the most uncompromising form by the Times itself so lately as the 15th of last September, in the following words:

We cannot buy anything abroad unless we can pay for our purchases with commodities produced at home, and as the whole object of Protection is to diminish the volume of imports, it follows that it must diminish the volume of exports in corresponding proportion.

Yet our imports are £100,000,000 a year more than our exports. What are the British products with which we pay the difference? We do not pay it in British products, and the belief that there are no other means of payment, which was true in the main forty years ago, is utterly false in the present day. Payment for purchases is now made, to any extent at any moment, by the transfer neither of money nor of goods, but of credit to any part of the civilized world; and credit is obtained, not on our productions only, but on the security of any kind of property, wherever it may be. The property we possess is prodigiously greater in amount than our annual production, and we can buy, therefore, to an unknown extent with that credit, which is, in effect, a mortgage on our estate. To what degree this has been done in recent years it is impossible to know, nor is there, in fact, much reason to think that hitherto we have drawn from our capital more than we have replaced, for there is still another great fund out of which we are able to pay for foreign goods without the transfer of one ounce of British products. We have a vast property abroad, which had no existence forty years ago; a great investment of British capital, increasing year by year, in all foreign states, on which they have to pay us interest. They could pay

it either in goods, or money, or credit, or property. They are paying us now in goods, and it may be that the whole difference between our exports and imports is balanced in this way. There would be no harm in it either if the goods they send us neither displaced British labour nor rendered it unprofitable at home. But while we are insufficiently employed in manufactures, and unprofitably employed in farming, we are spending this large portion of our income in giving work and profit to other nations.

If I have a hundred pounds belonging to me in France, and wish to spend it on furniture, does it make no difference whether I buy the furniture in France or in England? If I buy it at home, I get the furniture, and English workmen get the £100. If I buy it in France, I get the furniture all the same, but it is French workmen who get the £100. Now, if it were certain that because I spent this money in France some Frenchman would spend as much in England, all would be well. We are taught that this is certain, but we know, as a matter of fact, that it is not true. It would probably be true if trade were really free, and Frenchmen were at liberty to do as they pleased; but they are not at liberty, and we cannot make them so. What possesses us that we must either act or reason as if we could?

The truth is that commerce in these days, however peaceful in appearance, is war to the knife, in fact, among all civilised nations. Each separate country is trying to do the best for itself alone; not the best for mankind in general; and in this, as in all other struggles, the method of defence, to be successful, must be governed by the method of attack. We spend a national income on our army and navy, not because we think the general system of great armaments is right or beneficial; we believe it to be wrong and mischievous, but we are not alone in the world, and are not free to choose. It is exactly so in commercial affairs; we must either defend our own interests by such means as are effectual under the circumstances, or go down before the assaults of our opponents, and we must never dream that the defensive weapons of a former generation can be effectual to-day. Our old watchwords ought to be abandoned. The words Protection, Free Trade, and Fair Trade should be erased. What we want is whatever will give us full and profitable employment, preserve our property, and give national support to every national interest whenever the need of it occurs.

Party interests in England stand terribly in the way of common sense in dealing with these questions, and, if action comes too late, it will be on this bad altar that the nation is sacrificed. It is for our great agricultural class to see whether they cannot act with force enough to break through the spell.

The measures that ought to be taken in the national interest at present are plain. Since we are not permitted to compete on equal terms with others, we ought to interfere with and lessen the competition we ourselves encounter; not for the purpose of retaliating, and not from any stubborn idea that such a policy must always be the best, but because we see plainly that it is the best under the circumstances. If our people were all employed, our trading profits good, and our land repaying its cultivators, it would be folly to make such a change, because it would be purposeless. But the reverse of this is true, and one of the chief causes is the patent fact that we are undersold in our own markets; there are other causes which we have no power to remove, but in this we have the power, and what withholds us from using it ?

We ought to put a tax upon foreign food sufficient to make the growth of food in England fairly profitable again; not more than sufficient, because food should be as cheap as we can afford to make it.

We ought to put a tax upon all foreign manufactures, sufficient to turn the scale in favour of English work for home use, where the difference in cost is not excessive; where it is so great that the foreigner can undersell us still, in spite of such a tax, we should let him do so, and abandon that particular manufacture for some other, if this can be done, as in manufactures it can generally be done, without injury greater than the gain.

We ought, at the same time, to offer real Free Trade to any nation that would agree to it without reserve; refusing it absolutely on any other condition. We ought to treat our Colonies on one broad principle. Their commercial interests are not identical with ours, but we should make them so as far as we can. We should give to every British Colony a definite advantage over all foreign. nations in our own markets, without demanding, though doubtless not without generally receiving, a similar preference in return.

We ought, of course, to continue to admit the raw materials of our own industries at the smallest possible cost. Finally, the large revenue we should receive from these taxes should be used in lightening all internal burdens upon home industry. In substance, these are the present proposals of the Fair Trade League. Both the name and the theory of Fair Trade are open to strong objection. In trade as in war the object is success, and most things that lead to it are "fair" unless they are fraudulent. But in their practical views those who call themselves Fair Traders are in the main following the guidance of common sense.

These, I venture to say, are the measures that a sound man of business would adopt in the present condition of the world, if he were acting, under similar circumstances, purely for his own in

terests. We should buy as much foreign food as we do now, with some modifications in detail, because we need it in addition to all we can produce. We should pay rather less for it to the foreign grower, but we should also have to pay part of our own taxation when we took it for consumption. We should pay the English farmer higher prices than now, prices sufficient to make him prosperous again; but much of this increase would be re-distributed for the benefit of other classes, for a farmer's profits are chiefly spent among the tradesmen of his neighbourhood. We should buy much less of foreign manufactures, for of manufactured goods we can make nearly all we want. We should pay rather more for home-made goods; but in doing this we should give a vast increase of employment to British workmen, and should spend upon them the large income which now goes to foreigners. Our foreign debtors would have to pay us the annual interest due to us by methods that would no longer displace British labour nor render it unprofitable. There is no reason why we should lose any of our export trade, for prosperity at home gives strength, not weakness, to our competitive power, and we should have regained that power of bargaining for terms, which our present policy deprives us of.

The immediate result would be a sudden restoration of our entire agricultural industry, and of the value of our land; the relief of eight millions of our people from pressing difficulty; and a sudden increase in the activity and the profit of every internal trade, and a solution of the Irish troubles. Food would be no dearer than twelve years ago; taxes would be lighter, and wages would be raised. Is there any statesman among us with courage enough to stand up before the nation and guide it out of the paths of party prejudice into those of common sense? What is it that, as a nation, we are now proposing to do? The legislative programmes put before us relate solely to details of social arrangement, which all, no doubt, require attention, but which we know will occupy the whole time of Parliament for two or three years before they can be settled. Are we blind to the fact that all these measures put together will not so much as touch the causes of the agricultural distress, which deepens not only year by year but month by month, unalleviated by any new prosperity in any other material form? Do we not see that in suffering them to absorb our first interest, and to take the first place in our programme, we are actually busying ourselves about the internal comforts of a house where the foundations are giving way, and are being left to do so?

Such measures as I have proposed have, of course, their attendant disadvantages. But what disadvantage can equal the de

struction of the value of our land, which has actually occurred; the impoverishment of our farmers, which we see before our eyes; the loss of profit in almost every trade, and the diversion of a great income to the payment of foreign workmen, while our own stand unemployed? A general does not shut up his troops in a fortress willingly, nor without being aware that certain sacrifices are involved. But if the enemy is too strong to be beaten in the open, a wise soldier withdraws behind the walls.

ALBERT J. MOTT.