726 KEPORT — 1891. 



municipal type, while writers on political and economic matters ' seemed to assume 

 that the city was the sort of group -to be regulated and taken into account. 



In Tudor times this local and municipal economy was rapidly superseded by a 

 laro-er system. There had begn a decided growth of national feeling and a great 

 deal of national regulation for commerce during the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries, and as this larger economic life developed the old municipal institutions 

 were to some extent superseded. In some cases the old institutions had come to 

 be cramping and positively noxious, so that industry sought other centres and 

 commerce betook itself to new channels. The precise story of the growth of this 

 national economic life in England and the corresponding decadence of the old muni- 

 cipal institutions for industry and commerce is not easy to trace. It may suffice to 

 say that in the time of Elizabeth the change was practically complete ; and the sub- 

 sequent development of economic life can be most easily followed when we look at 

 it from a national rather than a municipal standpoint. From that time onwards 

 there was, comparatively speaking, free intercourse between the different parts of 

 the country ; each district, instead of being an isolated unit organised for itself, as 

 it had been in the time of the first Edward, was treated as contributing its quota 

 to the material welfare of the nation ; the prosperity of England as a whole, and 

 the consequent strength of England as a political power, were the ideals which 

 economists kept consciously in view, and which gave the framework for all their 

 projects and all their writing on economic topics. 



Here, then, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, we have to deal with a larger 

 economic organism — the Nation, not merely the town — but we still find people 

 pursuing the old economic policy, though they applied it on a much more extended 

 scale than before. Their leading economic idea was to render the nation self- 

 suflicing ; to develop its resources, to procure from other countries what England 

 needed and could not produce for herself, and to sell them the surplus of our native 

 commodities. If we were able to open a new market for English exports, we 

 congratulated ourselves that we had got a vent for our surplus. If we mtroduced 

 a new industry, like the siUv trade, we rejoiced that we could now hope to supply 

 ourselves with this article instead of purchasing it from the foreigner. If we 

 planted a colony in some distant region, the trouble and expense was gladly under- 

 taken in the hope that the products of the new land would render us independent 

 of some supplies from foreign sources, and thus subserve the economic self-sufficiency 

 of the English nation : the encouragement given to tobacco-growing in Virginia, 

 so as to enable us to dispense with supplies which reached us from Spain, is a ca«e in 

 point. Just as there had been a keen rivalry in the thirteenth century between 

 neighbouring towns, so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was the 

 keenest rivalry between diflerent nations ; a rivalry which was fundamentally 

 political, but which afl'ected every side of economic life, since it was recognised 

 that wealth supplied the sinews of power. The whole economic skill of the day 

 was devoted to the task of building up the wealth of the nation as an independent 

 economic organism, that it might be able to hold its own in political disputes with 

 other countries. 



II. 



The national scheme of economic policy is not so unfamiliar to us as the 

 municipal scheme which it superseded ; it is still pursued in many countries, and 

 it seems to me to dominate the present economic policy of the United States. 

 That great nation aims at being self-sufiicing, and at dispensing so far as possible 

 with the products and manufactures of other lands. This nationalist policy has 

 found an advocate in List, who has stated the case with wide practical knowledge 

 and careful discrimination of the circumstances of different peoples. But for 

 England and Englishmen that policy is dead. The Anti-Corn Law agitation killed 

 it so far as we are concerned . We no longer contemplate isolation from the rest 

 of the globe ; we only grumble because other people interpose barriers which check 

 free commercial intercourse between all parts of the known world. The free- 

 traders have demonstrated that the world as a whole will be better provided with 



' For example compare S. Thomas Aquinas, De Begimine Princi^nim. 



