SECTION F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 
A RETROSPECT OF FREE TRADE 
DOCTRINE. 
ADDRESS BY 
SIR WILLIAM ASHLEY, Px.D., M.Com., M.A., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
A MAN would be singularly insensible who could stand in this place without 
emotion after an absence from Toronto of well-nigh a third of a century ; 
and dead indeed to feeling when, across that long interval, he could look 
back to four years of such experience as fell to me in this City and Dominion 
between 1888 and 1892. The place where a man first makes a settled 
home; where he first knows the joys and anxieties of family life, where 
he meets with abundant daily kindness in unfamiliar surroundings, can 
never cease to be affectionately remembered. And when it is the place 
where, young and English as he was, he was entrusted by Canadians with 
the task of organising a new department in a University already important 
and destined to be great, and in a Dominion where he was the first 
Professor of Political Economy, his satisfaction at finding himself un- 
expectedly in the scene of his early endeavours can be readily understood. 
And how much has happened since then! The material development of 
the Dominion will be the theme of many papers in this and other sections 
of the Association. On the academic side one notes that where there 
were two considerable universities there are now half a dozen or more ; 
that where there was one professorial economist there are now a score. I 
remember with what inward trepidation I confronted my duties, It is 
fortunate that in youth, when one wants it most, one has a better conceit 
of oneself than in maturer years. But this little credit I can take to my- 
self: even in the earliest days of my association with young men and 
women in the University of Toronto, I was never so blind as not to realise 
that here, in Canada, was the future home of a great nationality, with its 
own vigorous patriotism and its own confident outlook on the future. 
Political Economy is now old enough to have reached the stage of 
*retrospect. I shall take advantage of this circumstance, and I shall ask 
you to consider with me a well-rounded body of economic ideas during a 
well-marked period. The body of ideas shall be the general English doctrine 
of International Free Trade. And the period shall be the century approxi- 
mately which followed the publication of the ‘ Wealth of Nations.’ Itis well 
marked in economic literature; for it covers the time which elapsed before 
the new developments made themselves felt which are associated with the 
names of Jevons and Cliffe Leslie. And it is well marked externally ; for 
it came to an end before England had lost the commercial supremacy due 
to its early utilisation of coal and iron, and before English agriculture had 
