DESTRUCTION OF NATIONAL INDUSTRY 23 



In the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth 

 century there was, perhaps, as much need for reform in 

 the fiscal administration of the country as there is to- 

 day; few of us, therefore, would care to carp and cavil at 

 honest attempts to relieve a strained position; but as 

 the best and surest way to arrive at the true value of a 

 thing is to measure it by the amount of success it yields, 

 let us test what our forefathers did for the country by 

 this standard. 



To prove the utter and complete failure of the Cob- 

 denite, free trade, or whatever system we choose to 

 call it, we should calmly view the position from all 

 points, without prejudice and without political bias, 

 because if we attempt to adjudicate on this momentous 

 question with a mind tainted by the faintest tinge of parti- 

 sanship, we shall surely fail. 



There is no need for elaborate statistical tables or Change in 



Agricultural 



reference to official documents to prove our case here. Laws 

 for the facts are patent to all; and these facts, unpala- 

 table though they must be to all those who uphold in 

 its entirety our present fiscal system, declare the utter 

 worthlessness of a policy which was going to give the 

 people of this country full work and general pros- 

 perity, good times all round, and employment for 

 everybody. 



Humbug! sheer humbug, and folly; and fools, indeed, 

 were we to have believed so long in a scheme which car- 

 ried with it, from the period of its inception, the germs 

 of its own destruction. How could any scheme of the 

 kind succeed that aimed at the destruction of a 

 GREAT NATIONAL INDUSTRY, an industry which is as 



