The Economic Aspects of International Exchange. 1 5 



under the control of one Government this condition of things 

 might be considered as possible, but not otherwise. Instead of 

 this free trade we had not in this country even free imports, 

 since no less than twenty-six million pounds sterling per year was 

 raised by duties on imported goods for revenue purposes. It was 

 estimated that the inhabitants of this country paid as much as 

 15s 9^d per head per year in the shape of customs duties, while 

 the people of the United States paid 14s n id per head, and the 

 German people 10s 6d per head. The system to which a number 

 of people in this country were still very much attached was, 

 therefore, a system of partly free and partly taxed imports, with of 

 course exports taxed in all directions. At one time the British 

 system had a good many admirers in different countries, but at 

 present their number was diminishing rapidly. If they went back 

 to the beginnings of trade in this country they would see it was 

 probably at the time of the Hanseatic League, and from that 

 time until the middle of the nineteenth century this country 

 possessed a general tariff, and the rise and progress of the British 

 Empire was coincident with that tariff, because they must admit 

 that at the year 1846 this country was the first in the world in 

 industries and in the diffusion of material wealth. Not only so, 

 but at that time we had become the great maritime Power of the 

 world, having wrested the commercial supremacy of the seas from 

 Holland. The abolition of the general tariff began in 1846, and 

 from that time until 1872 we had great prosperity in this country, 

 which had been attributed to the fact that we had free imports. 

 But it had been admitted by many prominent free traders like 

 Mr. Fawcett and the late Duke of Devonshire that the great 

 expansion of our trade and commerce in these years was largely 

 owing to railway and steamboat development as well as to the 

 development of machinery driven by steam power, such as the 

 power loom and the spinning jenny, the discovery of gold in 

 California and Australia, and, finally, to the freedom from invasion 

 during the time of the Napoleonic wars. It was possible that we 

 prospered under free imports of manufactured goods for a con- 

 siderable time as long as we were the great manufacturing country 



