316 BRITAIN FOR THE BRITON 



These are caudid admissions of Britain's altered position 

 and of her weakness, and the writer, while admitting the 

 serionsuess of the competition between Great Britain and rival 

 countries, seeks to reassure his Eree-trade readers as to the 

 erroneousness of the views in regard to " its real nature and 

 magnitude." 



Feee-trade Idiosyncrasies 



It has been truly said that " man's idiosyncrasies are 

 innumerable and his follies unfathomable," and "The Free- 

 trade Movement " adds its testimony to the verity of the saying. 

 If you know a man has delirium tremens as a result of exces- 

 sive drinking, why attempt to disguise the fact by calling it 

 a " slight aberration of mind, due to worry or sunstroke ? " 

 England has a kind of delirium tremens owing to excessive 

 indulgence in — Free-trade, and she is as surely going to the 

 Devil as a man is who poisons himself with excessive doses 

 of alcohol. Free-traders are perfectly right in affirming all 

 those things of British trade contained in the pithy paragraph 

 just quoted. The advance in manufactures made by other 

 countries in the last quarter of a century is truly indisputable, 

 and that they are now equipped with all the scientiiic know- 

 ledge and mechanical skill to enable them to become formidable 

 competitors of Great Britain in all the markets of the world, 

 and notably in our oioii country, there is not a vestige of doubt, 

 and this fact is so manifest to the whole world that not even 

 Free-traders— as this verifiable excerpt proves — dare dispute 

 tlie fact. This being the case why seek to minimise the 

 enormous importance of the question and its inevital)le effects 

 on British trade, by attempting to show that the great relative 

 progress our foreign rivals have made in their industrial expan- 

 sion, in comparison with ourselves, "give rise to erroneous 

 views as to its real nature and magnitude " and that, in itself, 

 it is not — " an amount of vital significance." 



The reason given in " The Free-trade Movement " for this 

 lucus a non luecndo method of dealing with a matter of such 

 high economic importance is — " that Great Britain retains her 

 pre-eminence as the leading manufacturing and commercial 

 country," but it will be shown presently that this fact, which 

 may to-day serve the Free-trade purpose of bolstering up a 

 tottering cause, is, nevertheless, but a broken reed to depend 

 upon. 



