COBDENISM. Gl 



of tlie results — general and specific — of our free 

 import system upon agriculture, and by conse- 

 quence, upon the other national industries. 



The author starts with the statement that " Pro- 

 tection,'' as he calls it, has been invoked mainly 

 on behalf of farmers. This was doubtless true 

 when the book was first written, but it is scarcely 

 true to.-day. Ke says, too, that the manufac- 

 turers " are mostly free traders." We are all 

 free traders if we can get free trade as Cobden 

 understood it, but our manufacturers — or those of 

 them who have the greatest interest in the trade 

 of the nation — are certainly not believers in the 

 free import system, or we should not have lived 

 to witness the remarkable spectacle of manufac- 

 turers north, south, east, and west asking for a 

 revision of the preseut absurd fiscal system. 



" Farming is the least progressive of our 

 national industries," we are told. It would be 

 no discredit if it were, seeing how capital has 

 been frightened from the land during the last 

 thirty or forty years or more ; but it is simply not 

 true, and both now and in Cobden's time our 

 farmers produce more corn per acre and produce 

 better live stock, vrhetlier horses, cattle, sheep, or 

 pigs, than any farmers in the Avorld. We are 

 told that agriculture employed '* 3^- millions " of 

 '' labourers " in the United Kingdom in (pre- 

 sumably) Cobden's time, whilst in 1895 only " 2h 

 millions " found work upon the soil. It would 

 be interesting to know how the proof upon which 

 this statement vests is obtained, as, according 



