THE INCUBUS OF TAXATION 109 



ously failed to do anything but positive harm to the 

 cause, and we can trust to it no more. If we had real 

 free trade, that is, a free and unrestricted interchange 

 of commodities between the nations of the earth, on 

 broad, generous, well-defined lines; that splendid 

 Utopian free trade that was dreamed of by the ideal- 

 ists of more than half a century ago, it might serve 

 our turn, but the poor, weak, narrow, one-sided thing it 

 pleases us to call "Free Trade," is nothing but a 

 laughable farce, a humbug and a sham, which will as 

 surely fail us in the present and future as it has in the 

 past. 



Fiscal reform may help us, but not if we trust to it 

 alone. 



The prevailing idea is that if we hold out a helping 

 hand to our industries, assisting one of them in this 

 direction and another in that, and generally put them 

 in a position to fight on more equal terms with their 

 foreign rivals by setting them free of those shackles with 

 which they are so sorely hampered to-day, we shall over- 

 come all difficulties, but in this we are mistaken. 



By altering our laws so as to give the country a wise, 

 well-considered fiscal system, we shall, without doubt, do 

 some good, but beyond that — nothing. Our industries 

 may absorb a few thousand more " hands," wages may 

 even slightly rise; in certain industrial sections there 

 may be less uncertainty of employment and less dis- 

 tress, but the main question — the poverty of the general 

 body of the people — will remain untouched. 



It is not so much the thousands that we want to assist 

 as the millions. 



