158 PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—-SECTION F. 
Few recognise the truth that individual welfare depends less 
upon the greatness of the aggregate wealth of a country than 
upon the proportion which freedom from excessive competition 
gives each individual over the local natural sources of utility. 
including primary wants; and that the country possessing the 
greatest aggregate of material wealth may, owing to the 
competition of excessive numbers, present the spectacle of a 
small privileged minority absorbing an unparalleled share of 
luxurious wealth, while the masses are struggling for the barest 
subsistence. 
All other things being equal, it follows that in the country 
where Nature’s gratuitous stores of wealth, as regards food and 
other essential products, far exceeds the power of its inhabitants 
to utilise, yet, notwithstanding the comparative insignificance of 
its accumulated wealth in exchange, its inhabitants on the 
average are individually happier, and enjoy a much larger share 
of material comforts than the inhabitants of countries, however 
great the aggregate wealth, but whose natural resources, as 
regards food products, are far below the local requirements of its 
teeming inhabitants. 
Two nations, standing in this relation to each other, would 
correspond to the relation of two iudividuals, where one is the 
privileged capitalist or buyer, and the other the unprivileged 
seller of labour service. In other words, the latter would be in 
the position of the needy Esau in being forced to sell his whole 
birthright to preserve his life; the former would occupy the 
favourable position of Jacob, who had merely to part with a 
portion of his surplus of primary wants (red pottage) to secure a 
large augmentation to his wealth of pleonexia. 
This, unfortunately, for many old centres of civilisation, is no 
overdrawn statement—the creation of enthusiastic declamation or 
sentimentality—for if we take one of the most vigorous countries 
of Europe (England), with its untold wealth in the aggregate, and 
compare it with the young colony of Victoria, we may readily 
demonstrate the verity of what has been alleged. 
Can A HIGHER CULTURE BE MAINTAINED IN ANY ONE COUNTRY 
WirHout REGULATING Its INTERCOURSE WITH OTHER RACES 
oF Men In A Lower PLANE oF CIVILISATION ? 
There is still another difficulty to face, even if one enlightened 
country, by providence, had succeeded in adapting the growth of 
its population to the means of subsistence. And this difficulty 
now presses hard upon the labourers of a higher civilisation open 
by Free Trade to the competition of the labour market of a lower 
or more degraded form of civilisation. The partial exclusion of 
cheap Chinese labour from America and these colonies, may or 
may not, have been in accord with the principle of Free Trade ; 
