FISCAL POLICY AND AGRICULTURE 331 



encing the public administration in favour of agri- 

 culture. Through setting aside or being ignorant of 

 the historical side of the question, modern speakers 

 and writers in their arguments in favour of what they 

 call " free trade " are confusing and contradictory. 

 They first vitally alter the premises of the old masters 

 of the subject, and then try in a narrow-witted way to 

 come to the same conclusions as they did. Let any 

 unbiassed student keep the idea of universal free 

 exchange amongst nations in his mind and go through 

 the writings of the French economists and of Adam 

 Smith, he will find their arguments on the subject of 

 free trade intelligible, attractive, and such as command 

 deep attention and general assent. But let him go 

 through the same course keeping in mind the fact that 

 one nation alone has adopted the policy of free imports 

 and that the other nations have set up strong artificial 

 barriers against free exchange, and he will find the 

 same arguments, for the most part, inapplicable, and 

 the very names and terms used false or misleading. 

 "Free trade," "reciprocity," **free exchange," "leav- 

 ing trade to take its natural course," " natural rights of 

 peoples to exchange products freely with one another," 

 " freedom of competition," " international equality," 

 etc., are the conditions which form the base and cope- 

 stone of the free-trade structure set up by the econo- 

 mists of the eighteenth century, but they are condi- 

 tions that at present do not exist. If the student 

 happens to belong to the one solitary nation referred 

 to, he would probably conclude that though the pre- 

 sent arrangements are good for other countries, yet 

 from a national and patriotic point of view they are too 

 openly altruistic for him to adopt. Cobden's argu- 

 ments in favour of the repeal of the Corn Laws were 



