Mill,* even while they call forth the petulance of both, and provoke the ill temper of Mill. Jevons, Cairnes, Bonamy Price, Fawcett, and Thorold Rogers all lose their good manners on no

"So there are two others in which it may sometimes be matter of deliberation : "1. When some foreign nation restrains, by high duties or prohibitions, the importa tion of some of our manufactures into their country.

"2. When particular manufactures, by means of high duties or prohibitions upon all foreign goods which can come into competition with them, have been so far extended as to employ a great number of hands. Were those high duties and prohibitions taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast into the home market, as to deprive all at once many thousands of our people of their ordinary employment and means of subsistence."

The looseness of Dr. Smith's specification will appear when we consider that each of the classes he specifies includes nearly every thing. Woolen goods and therefore sheep, leather and shoes and therefore cattle and tanneries, food in independent supply, medicines, ships, printing facilities, railways, telegraphs, iron and steel roads, bridges, all are important as elements in national defence. As to the second case, taxes are always imposed at home on the products of domestic industry. The general burden of domestic taxation has to be borne by its domestic labor (except in so far as it may, through certain forms of taxes on imports or exports, collect a revenue from foreign producers of our imports, or consumers of the exports of those countries which tax exports). It all rests, therefore, with these exceptions, on domestic products. The third specification is also, universal, since at all times foreign nations restrain, by high duties on importations, certain imports from our country into theirs. England restrains by a 500 per cent. duty the import of leaf tobacco from the United States, and prohibits, essentially, our manufactured tobacco. Hence, under this third specification, we are to at least deliberate whether we should not protect our woolen manufacture against the English.

In his fourth specification, Dr. Smith does not point out the chief evil result of prematurely removing a productive duty, viz., that it may prevent that expansion of the dimensions of the domestic industry, which is found by experience to be often, and always if the country has the proper natural resources, the shortest road to cheapness. * John Stuart Mill, volume ii., page 538, comes very near giving an adequate statement of one of the good effects of protection; he says:

"The only case in which, on mere principles of political economy, protecting duties can be defensible, is when they are imposed temporarily (especially in a young and rising nation) in hopes of naturalizing a foreign industry, in itself perfectly suitable to the circumstances of the country. The superiority of one country over another, in a branch of production, often arises only from having begun it sooner. There may be no inherent advantage on one part, or disadvantage on the other, but only a present superiority of acquired skill and experience. A country which has skill and experience yet to acquire, may in other respects be better adapted to the production than those which were earlier in the field; and besides, it is a just remark of Mr. Rae that nothing has a greater tendency to promote improvements, in any branch of production, than its trial under a new set of conditions. But it cannot be expected that individuals should, at their own risk, or, rather, to their certain loss, introduce a new manufacture and bear the burden of carrying it on, until the producers have been educated up to the level of those with whom the processes are traditional. A protecting duty, continued for a reasonable time, will sometimes be the least inconvenient mode in which a nation can tax itself for the support of such an experiment. But the protection should be confined to cases, in which there is good ground of assurance that the industry which it fosters will, after a time, be able to dispense with it ; nor should the domestic producers ever be allowed to expect that it will be continued to

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other issue but this, and,* singularly enough, their lack of all patience in investigation, candor in analysis, and even honesty of statement, seems proportionate to the fervor of their anger. Of late Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge, C. S. Devas in his "Ground

them beyond the time necessary for a fair trial of what they are capable of accomplish ing."

Again discussing the English navigation laws, he thus justifies their enactment and places the absence of their further need on the protective ground that English ships and sailors can now navigate as cheaply as those of any other country. He says:

"When the English navigation laws were enacted, the Dutch, from their maritime skill and their low rate of profit at home, were able to carry for other nations, England included, at cheaper rates than those nations could carry for themselves, which placed all other countries at a great disadvantage in obtaining experienced seamen for their ships of war. The navigation laws, by which this deficiency was remedied, and at the same time a blow struck against the maritime power of a nation with which England was then frequently engaged in hostilities, were probably, though economically disadvantageous, politically expedient. But English ships and sailors can now navigate as cheaply as those of any other country, maintaining at least an equal competition with the other maritime nations, even in their own trade. The ends which may once have justified navigation laws require them no longer, and afford no reason for maintaining this invidious exception to the general rule of free trade."

*As specimens of perfervid temper, not backed by the least pretence of basis or justification, we cite the following, which indicate that if arrogance and effrontery can successfully continue to bulldoze the British minority, there will never be any dissent in England from views in which, as the Marquis of Salisbury says, the whole civilized world is against the English.

Thorold Rogers ("Six Centuries of Work and Wages in England," p. 522) says: "From sheer folly or from interested motives, a belief that better profits would ensue to cmployers, or in order to serve party ends by giving a false interpretation of economical phenomena, there are persons who are foolish or wicked enough to advocate the return to a protective policy in England under the name of fair trade. Such shameless

mendicancy is in keeping with the conditions of aristocratic government, which has, in the history of English finance and legislation, put the burdens of state on the many and freed the property of the few, but when it is fully understood, it will not serve the men who advocate it, or the party (Tory) which has the meanness to encourage it. Bonamy Price ("Practical Political Economy' p. 300) says: "We are again summoned not by the brilliant fallacies of some clear thinker, but by the renewed vigor and progress of protection in the practical world (p. 299-in Germany, in France, in the United States, in Canada, in most of the British colonies, countries full of men of high intelligence and ability)-to reargue the first principles of free trade. . Protection seems to be indestructible--a weed that no intellectual or social culture can root upa principle that is part of human nature itself."

On p. 315 Price says: "No name of high celebrity is put forward so incessantly, as the shield of their doctrine, by the advocates of protection, as that of Mr. Mill, and so great is the support which it gives to a policy so profoundly injurious to the happiness of mankind, that it may almost be questioned whether Mr. Mill has not done more harm to the welfare of the human race by the countenance he has given, though limited, to protection, than he has done good by all his other writing on political economy"

Price says that "free trade is the one subject in political economy which is susceptible of complete demonstration." Yet in his 40-page chapter he substitutes assumption for proof, and begs the whole question, getting out of the supposed argument without stating a single economic fact with definiteness enough to suggest a conclusion. Prof. A. L. Perry says: "There is nothing original and nothing American and noth

work of Economics," R. S. Moffat in his" Economy of Consumption" have followed in the wake of Judge Byles, Sir Edward Sullivan and the few others who have kept up the battle for the protective policy on English soil. Lord Beaconsfield, in his life of Lord George Bentinck, indicates his own protectionist convictions, and there is no reason to believe he ever departed from this conviction.

The besetting sin of the free-trade school of writers is, that they advance the puerilities of children, with the pompousness of kings, and the unscrupulousness of rogues, and then say this is demonstration, when no intelligent mind sees in it the quality of conclusiveness, and often it lacks all semblance of knowledge, or candor, or economic expertness in thinking. For instance, Bonamy Price, in 1875, writes ("Practical Pol. Econ.," p. 314), "In what state would now be the colossal manufactures of England if the duties on foreign corn had kept bread dear over the whole land?" We infer, therefore, that Bonamy Price believes that the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 caused a large permanent reduction in the prices of bread-stuffs. On the contrary, turning to the Encyclopædia Britannica (Corn Trade), we find that in the seven years ending Christmas, 1846, the prices per imperial bushel

The average gazette prices per imperial bushel in the seven years

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Here are two free-trade authorities, the professor and the 'Encyclopædia," the professor boldly assuming that the repeal of the corn laws made bread cheap, and therefore built up the colossal manufactures of England, and the "Encyclopædia" trying to prove that the withdrawal of protection from the farmers benefited them, for breadstuffs sold higher under free trade than ever! The "Encyclopædia" states the prices correctly, and they

ing continental in the petty and piddling and devilish devices of our protection system." (19th ed. p. 508.) Jevons says:

Protectionists overlook the fact (1) that the object of industry is to make goods abundant and cheap; (2) that it is impossible to import cheap foreign goods without exporting home-made goods of some sort to pay for them."

It is difficult to conceive how a sane man could utter these words of Jevons without shame.

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show that bread was not permanently cheapened. So that which the Oxford professor offers, as a demonstration, turns out to be a falsehood.

Again Bonamy Price says (p. 320) at the repeal of the corn laws "the whole agricultural hierarchy" (with what candor can a minority, that is outvoted on a question, be called a “hierarchy,” especially when it consists of several millions of farmers?) "landlord, farmer, and laborer, believed that the wheat lands of England would go out of cultivation." This was not the exact charge, so much as that the wheat lands of Ireland and Scotland would go out of cultivation. But now we look to see Price show that the wheat lands, even of England, did not go out of cultivation. Does he do so? Not at all. He says: "Parliament was not deterred by this alarm; it persevered with the abolition of the duties on foreign corn. And what has been the final issue? An improvement in the efficiency and productiveness of agricultural labor unparalleled in the kingdom, a growth of wheat per acre unknown to former ages, a rise of rent for the landlord, and better wages for the laborer !

Suppose all this were true, does it refute the prophecy that wheat lands would go out of cultivation ? It has no bearing on it. It does not appear that the landlord, farmer, and laborer predicted that hogs, cattle, or poultry could not be raised at a profit, or that farming of all kinds would be destroyed. They only predicted that wheat lands in England would go out of cultivation, i.e., that enough English wheat would cease to be cultivated, and would give place to foreign grown wheat, to leave the aggregate supply the same and the average price the same. This was a significant prophecy, for, if true, it exploded the whole free trade argument at two points, viz., at the point where it claimed that free trade would cheapen bread, and at the point where it claimed that it would not send wheat out of cultivation. This prophecy Price seeks to explode as false. How? Shades of the logicians! By proving that the English went to raising hogs and cows. Meanwhile the Encyclopædia Britannica concedes that between 1852 and 1867 there was a net decline in cultivation, to all crops, over all gains, in the fifteen years, of 447,000 acres in England, and a net decline in tillage of wheat, oats, beans, peas, and bare fallow of 1,297,000 acres in England alone, while in Scotland and Ireland "the decline was more marked, the production in wheat falling off one-half." And yet an economic teacher, who thus does not even juggle with his facts, but openly mis-states them.

not only asks us to regard his unscrupulous errors as conclusive demonstration, but proceeds to dignify us as "weeds" if we suggest that he is not even bright.

Turning to Mr. Jevons, we would be justified in expecting, from the value of his arguments on other questions, that he would handle this one in a manner that would do him credit. Instead of this we find him shutting his eyes to the pith of the protection argument, and in order that it may be possible for him to refute it, he states it in a manner to drop its entire bottom out in the statement. Protectionists do not claim that buying a commodity abroad does not imply the employment of any home labor whatever. They know and admit that it implies the employment, in this country, of the labor and capital which produce whatever domestic product is given in exchange for the imported articles. What they claim is, that the making of the article sought, in this country, employs, as compared with its importation from abroad, two domestic capitals, and two sets of domestic laborers, instead of only one, viz., that the making it here employs both the capital and labor which produce the article (corn, for instance) which is given in exchange for the thing sought (cloth or iron), and also the capital and labor which produce the cloth and iron themselves, whereas the importing it from abroad gives employment to only one domestic capital and set of laborers, while the capital and labor employed in producing the imported iron or cloth are a foreign capital and foreign set of laborers. This point was stated clearly by Adam Smith, in defining the greater profit of home over foreign trade. Side by side with this, is the claim that the production at home, as compared with the importation, involves two domestic consumptions of products instead of one, viz., the domestic consumption of the corn, and of the cloth or iron for which it is exchanged, while the importation of the cloth or iron involves a domestic consumption only of the cloth or iron, and a foreign consumption of the corn. Hence domestic production, as compared with importation of foreign goods, involves a doubled consumption and a doubled production.

Instead of meeting this point, Mr. Jevons acts as if he thought he had met it, in the following statement: *

"But, it may be objected, what is to become of workmen at home, if all our supplies be got from another country? The reply is that such a state of things could not exist. Foreigners would never think of sending us goods, unless we paid for them in goods,

*Primer of Pol. Econ.," p. 132.