bring out. The trade goes on; therefore selling is taking place to the same extent as buying abroad.

The truth stands out in clear sunshine. Free Trade cannot and does not injure domestic industry. Under Free Trade, foreign countries give in every case as much employment to English workmen and capitalists as if nothing had been bought abroad. English goods of the same value must be purchased by the foreigner, or the trade comes to an end. There must be an equal amount of English goods made and sent away, or England will never obtain the foreign commodities. Free Trade never does harm to the country which practises it; and that mighty fact alone kills Protection. Let those who are backsliding into Protection be asked for a categorical answer to the question-Can and will the foreigner give away his goods to any country without insisting on receiving back, directly or indirectly, an equal quantity of that country's goods?-let the question be pushed home—and all talk about injury to domestic industry must cease.

II. We come now to the second principle on which the doctrine of Free Trade rests. It is this. All are gainers when each man and nation betakes himself to the making of those articles for which his labour is the most productive. The popular saying that it is wise to buy in the cheapest market expresses the same truth. This principle is identical with that of division or separation of employments. It is supreme over all labour; it is instinctively practised by all that work. Let the women do the sewing and the cooking of the meals, and let the men lift the weights and do the digging-is a universal practice adopted by instinct without reflection, and it is

the essence of Free Trade. If each man were to supply all his wants by his own labour he would obtain miserably few of the conveniences and comforts of life, civilisation would be impossible, and very few inhabitants could maintain themselves in any land. In civilised nations no man ventures to deny that every one is the richer, every one the better off, by the shoemaker making nothing but shoes, the brewer nothing but beer, and so on. But few care to analyse how this universal increase is brought about, yet the process is not difficult to understand. The cotton-spinner produces an incredibly greater quantity of yarn in his mill than he and his workpeople, with the same expense of food and clothing, could produce, if each took to making cotton yarns singly for himself.

It is the same with every trade. By dividing employments and assigning a single occupation to each workman or set of workmen, there is an enormously larger quantity of commodities, of wealth, created at the end of the day. The labourers must have their maintenance in each case alike; but if each does everything very little indeed would be produced. By each confining himself to one article very much more is made. The mass of things to be divided is immensely larger, and each gets a greater share of commodities for his own enjoyment, as the fruit of his own labour. Put countries in the place of individual men— and the result is precisely the same. Each country, by taking a single commodity for its work to perform, makes it better and more cheaply, by the very fact that it concentrates its energy and directs its skill on one single operation. In every country the same principle

is carried out, as if by natural instinct. Particular industries develop themselves in particular towns and disticts, although at their origin no special reason probably guided the selection of that particular business by the locality.

But the principle has a still wider application. Not only is there vast gain by each labourer limiting himself to one single employment, through the skill he acquires, the saving of time, and the having ready at hand the tools he requires, but this gain is further increased by him and his fellow-workmen selecting that kind of production for which they possess special advantages, whether it be that coals are abundant on the spot, or a more fertile soil to plough, or a more beneficent climate to rear up and ripen. The rich pastures of Leicestershire and Ireland are devoted to cattle. The splendid collieries of the Midland Counties send their inhabitants to the iron trade or other businesses dependent on steam engines. No Sussex sheep-breeder complains that he is left unprotected against the woollen manufacturers of Yorkshire, no Devonshire farmer is indignant that his apples have to compete with the barleys of Norfolk. The fruitful fecundity of the principle that each should buy of the other, and those should be allowed freely to develope trade who can obtain the most abundant returns for the capital and labour expended on its processes, is never contested within the limits of a single people; but the magic is dispelled the instant that the hateful foreigner is in sight. Was Sir Dudley North mistaken when he proclaimed nearly two hundred years ago "that the world, as to trade, is but as one nation or people, and therein nations are as persons"? Does the

principle lose its value when it reaches the margin of the Channel or the Atlantic? Does the accident that a man is called an Englishman or a Frenchman interfere in any manner with the nature of trade as an exchange of equal commodities? Does the Sheffield cutler buy bread of the Yorkshire farmer because he is an Englishman ? See in what an absurdity such a notion of the patriotic duty of protection lands us. If a nation enacts protective duties against a neighbouring territory, it is true science and wise policy to prevent native industry from being ruined by foreign competition. But if the nation annexes that territory and makes it part of itself, then it is equally true science and wise policy that the industry should be destroyed, because the destroyers are now fellow-citizens. Is this Political Economy? Is this a description of the nature and laws of trade? Nay, is this a doctrine which protectionists can accept? Yet accept it they must, if they build their protectionist doctrine on the distinction between fellow-countrymen and aliens.

These considerations establish the cardinal truth that trade knows nothing of politics, or governments, or brotherhoods, or nations, or patriotism, or any other feelings and policies. It is the exchange of goods of equal value, because each exchanger reciprocally wants the things which the other has to offer. International trade is by nature, and ought never to be regarded as anything else than a trade between town and town, county and county in the same country. Political Economists themselves, however, have done no little mischief in this matter. Mr Mill and others have discussed international trade as something distinct in kind from ordinary

trade; they have refined about it, and spoken about it as to when it was more, and when less advantageous. Trade being always, and at all times, the giving of one commodity in return for another, such speculation on the international branch of it is superfluous and misleading work. The very word international lets in the narrow end of the confusion. What does trade know of nations, except that tea is produced on a spot called China, and shorthorns in another spot called England? If it is only let alone, and not interfered with by governments, it will take care that equal value shall go across the frontiers, as it does that Manchester shall pay for its meat, and the farmers for their clothes. On the average neither man nor nation does or can win anything at the expense of the other. Who ever inquires whether Birmingham is gaining at the cost of Warwickshire or the reverse? Why ask whether international values are equal between England and America?

But let us consider a little more in detail the principle that every one gains by each nation, precisely as each man, producing those commodities for the use of the world for which it possesses some peculiar aptitude. Even the most violent protectionist would not countenance the attempt to manufacture sugar or wine in England. The folly of such a proceeding is too transparent. The outcry begins only when goods may be produced equally in both countries, and when the difference of cost would not be enormous. Yet the loss is just as certain in the case of the small waste as in the case of the large; it varies only in degree. Free Trade, on the contrary, enriches all. Let us take the instance of ribbons, and let us examine it minutely; for an