308 BRITAIN FOR THE BRITON 



as several of these coautrics, while conserving and developing 

 their agricultural industry to an extent that enables them to groio 

 all their own food, are, at the same time, building up and deve- 

 loping their manufacturing industries, even to a greater propor- 

 tionate extent than we are, it follows that — to sacrifice agriculture 

 in order to give free facilities to manufactures and trade is nothing 

 hut a monstrous fallacy , horn either of ignorance or wilful decep- 

 tion, hut which, anyway, demands the f idlest possible exposure and 

 condemnation. 



The enormous loss of agricultural wealth which the country 

 has sustained, together with the frightful drain on the country 

 of its vigorous manhood and womanhood, and the actual loss of 

 money by the decrease of the purchasing power of these banished 

 millions of our best workers, offer in themselves irrefutable 

 evidence of the elementary economical blunder committed by 

 " Scientific " economists in laying down the " Law " that — 



" If Great Britain devotes herself hy preference to manufactures she 

 ivill he wcaWiier than if she devoted herself to both manufactures and 

 agricidture.''^ 



Adam Smith's Dicta: Adages, not Commeecial Laws 



Of this also we may be sure, that when Adam Smith laid 

 down his system of economics he knew that no system of the 

 kind is, or can ever be, perfect and infallible. " Never attempt 

 to make at home ivhcct it ivill cost him more to make than to 

 huy " * is, on the face of it, a saying, a maxim, the sort of proverb 

 that any business man might give utterance to for his son's 

 benefit, or for the general guidance of his business staff; but to 

 interpret it into a Law, as many Free-traders have done, and 

 moreover a rigid, inexorable law for the guidance and regulation 

 of our national trade, is to go further than Adam Smitli him- 

 self would have gone or ever intended to go. The great econo- 

 mist was more astute than most of his followers, and saw 

 I'urther ahead than Cobden and his followers. Here is a striking 

 illustration of this ; speaking of CobJen's boast about the 

 universal adoption of Free-trade by the nations, we find the 

 following significant passage : " Adam Smith had been more 

 awake to these difficulties wlien he wrote," f and we may 

 depend that his astuteness and foreknowledge led liim to decide 

 that what lie taught in the Ijroad field of economics was more 

 with the idea of enunciating certain general principles which 

 might be found of considerable use in national trade than of 

 aying down rigid economic Laws. Even to-day, with the 



* " Wealth of Nations." t " The Free-trade Movement," 



