900 REPORT—1890. 
has become, not altogether unjustly, repugnant to men’s sentiments. I propose to 
illustrate this danger chiefly by reference to that point at which it seems to assume 
the gravest form just at present, viz., the relations between competition and com- 
bination in domestic trade. But the relations between Protection and Free 
Trade in foreign commerce have a longer and more fully developed history; and I 
will begin by referring briefly to them, because they throw a clear light both on 
recent changes in the methods of economic thought, and on the warnings which 
the experience of our forefathers in dealing with the problems of their age gives us 
with reference to those problems which are more specially ours. 
§ 2. It is a constant source of wonder to Englishmen that Protection survives and 
thrives, in spite of the complete refutations of Protectionist arguments with which 
English economists have been ready to supply the rest of the world for the last fifty 
years or more. I believe that these refutations failed chiefly because some of them 
implicitly assumed that whatever was true as regards England was universally 
true; and if they referred at all to any of the points of difference between Hngland 
and other countries, it was only to put them impatiently aside, without a real answer 
to the arguments based onthem. And further, because it was clearly to the interests 
of England that her manufactures should be admitted free by other countries, 
therefore, any Englishman who attempted to point out that there was some force 
in some of the arguments which were adduced in favour of Protection in other 
countries, was denounced as unpatriotic. Public opinion in England acted like the 
savage monarch who puts to death the messenger that comes running in haste to 
tell him how his foes are advancing on him; and when John Stuart Mill ventured 
to tell the English people that some arguments for Protection in new countries 
were scientifically valid, his friends spoke of it in anger—hbut more in sorrow than 
in anger—as his one sad departure from the sound principles of economic recti- 
tude. But killing the messengers did not kill the hostile troops of which the 
messengers brought record ; and the arguments which the Englishmen refused to 
hear, and therefore never properly refuted, were for that very reason those on which 
Protectionists relied for raising a prejudice in the minds of intelligent and public- 
spirited Americans against the scientific soundness and even the moral honesty of 
English economics. 
The first great difficulty which English economists had, in addressing themselves 
to the problems of cosmopolitan economics, arose from the fact that England was 
an old country—older than America in every sense, and older than the other 
countries of Europe in this sense, that she had accepted the ideas of the new and 
coming industrial age more fully and earlier than they had. In speaking of 
England, therefore, they drifted into the habit of using, as convertible, the two 
3D? 
phrases—‘ the commodities which a country can now produce most easily,’ and ‘the 
commodities which a country has the greatest natural advantages for producing,’ 
that is, will always be able to produce most easily. But these two phrases were 
not approximately convertible when applied to other countries ; and when List and 
Carey tried to call attention to this fact, Englishmen did little more than repeat 
old arguments, which implicitly assumed that New England's inability to produce 
cheap calico had the same foundation in natural laws as her inability to produce 
cheap oranges. They refused fairly to meet the objection that arguments which 
prove that nothing but good can come from a constant interchange of goods between 
temperate and tropical regions, do not prove that it is for the interest of the world 
that the artisans who are fed on American grain and meat should continue always 
to work up American cotton for American use three thousand milesaway. Finding 
that their case was not fairly met, the Protectionists naturally thought it stronger 
than it was, and honestly exaggerated it in every way. One of my most vivid re- 
collections of a visit I made, in 1875, to study American Protection on the spot, is 
that of Mr. Carey’s splendid anger, as he exclaimed that foreign commerce had 
made even the railways of America run from east to west, rather than from north 
to south. 
England had passed through the stage of having to import her teachers from 
other lands. But her genius for freedom had attracted to her shores the pick of the 
skilled artisans of the world; she had received the best lessons from the best 
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