140 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS—SECTION F. 
aggregate is unbounded, and no one can reflect’ upon her grand 
achievements in science, wealth, and progress without admiration 
and pride. The skill and energy of her people are marvellous, 
and our admiration is not lessened, but increased, by the thought 
that her vast resources and enormous interchange of trade have 
been built up by her prodigious energy and industry in spite of 
obstacles of every kind. Her skill, daring, and enterprise have 
given her the command of important lands under every clime. 
This skill and enterprise, however, could not within her own 
borders increase, beyond a certain limit, the necessary supplies to 
meet her rapidly growing needs, as regards food and clothing for 
her people and raw products to supplement her needs for supplying 
manufactures in exchange for prime necessaries, failing which 
she could not support the lives of her people. It is necessity, 
therefore, which inevitably forced her to direct her industries in 
such a manner that her lack in food and other raw products at 
home should be purchased by a surplus creation of manufactures. 
Food, being one of the prime essentials to the life of each person, 
must be secured in sufficient quantity, or the lives of her workers 
cannot be sustained. A nation possessed of all other forms of 
the world’s wealth of exchange could not preserve the lives of her 
people if this one form of wealth—Food—be lacking or insufficient. 
With such a nation—so unfavourably conditioned—her existence 
depends upon her power to command supplies of the food of other 
countries in exchange for such products as food-producing 
countries may think it desirable to take from her. 
The food-producing countries may carry on this exchange as a 
matter of choice or preference; but with the food-requiring 
country the exchange must be effected—on the best terms 
possible—but if necessity presses hard, 7¢ must be effected upon any 
terms forced upon her. 
Fortunately for such a country, all lands capable of producing 
large food supplies are not in the condition of our ideal Euphrasia, 
and hence there is little danger of a stoppage of food exchanges 
for manufactures so long as the food-producing country is tempted 
by cheapness to buy those of the food-lacking country in prefer- 
ence to making them for herself, or of buying them from a rival 
manufacturing country on s/// more advantageous terms. 
FREE TRADE. 
A food-lacking country must therefore favour free interchange 
of trade, for it is necessary to her existence. A country with 
ample natural sources unutilised or partly utilised would only 
sutter a temporary inconvenience by the cessation of imports of 
foreign manufactures, and it is possible that this inconvenience, 
which forced her to supply her own wants from sources and 
agencies within her own borders, might result in increasing the 
