old rival France, for French imports were only worth £8,000,000 in 1815, and her exports only about double that amount, or less than half England's exports, which in that year rose to over £58,624,550 (official value).1

$254. The Beginnings of Free Trade.

The year 1820 has been chosen for comparison, not merely as showing the condition of our trade at that time, but for the great enunciation of Free Trade principles which it witnessed. The old Mercantile system was breaking up, and the ideas of Adam Smith were bearing fruit. A new era of commercial policy was beginning. For in that year the London merchants in the Chamber of Commerce formulated their famous Petition praying that every restrictive regulation of trade, not imposed on account of the revenue, together with all duties of a protective character, might be at once repealed.2 At last the teachings of economists were being put into practice by men of business. The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce sent up a similar petition; a Committee was appointed in Parliament to investigate the wishes of the petitioners of the Northern and the Southern capital; and it brought in a report 3 thoroughly in agreement with the Free Trade principles of the merchants. From that time onward these principles were gradually, but more and more widely, adopted. In the following year Mr Huskisson, the President of the Board of Trade, proposed the first measures of commercial reform, aud one by one the restrictions upon our trade were removed. The most important of the new measures was the gradual alteration of the old Navigation Laws, finally culminating in their total repeal in 1849. It was also Huskisson who, in 1823, passed a "Reciprocity of Duties

5

1 This is for the U. K., but of course the greater part came from England; Accounts and Papers, 1830, xxvii. 211, and, for French imports, cf. Levi, u. s., p. 152.

2 Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, pp. 150-153.

3 The report was presented on July 18th, 1820.

• An excellent short account of the change of English commercial policy from 1815 to 1860 is given in Prof. Bastable's Commerce of Nations, ch. vi. 5 By a series of five acts, all passed in 1822, viz. : the 3 Geo. IV., c. 41, c. 42, c. 43, c. 44, c. 45; cf. Craik, British Commerce, iii. 234, 235.

Bill," by which1 English and foreign ships had equal advantages in England whenever foreign nations allowed the same to English vessels in their ports. The commerce of our colonies was thus thrown open, under certain restrictions, to other nations. In order to promote free trade in our manufacturing industries, he reduced the duties on silk and wool 2 in 1824, and in the same year the Act fixing wages for silk weavers was repealed.3

The

It is true that in the period 1821 to 1830 the foreign trade of the United Kingdom did not exhibit much material improvement, but still there was a steady increase. official value of imports rose from £30,000,000 to £46,000,000, and the value of British manufactures exported from £40,000,000 to £60,000,000. But the declared value of exports remained fairly steady at about £37,000,000. Yet in the United Kingdom itself trade was growing rapidly, and the increase of wealth gave an opportunity for a general diminution of taxes, so that our sorely strained finances were set in order.

Many of the injurious duties upon raw materials and articles of British manufacture, as e.g., those on raw silk, coal, glass, paper, and soap, were taken off, to the great advantage of our manufacturing industries. The crisis of 1837, however, and the commercial depression which

8

1 The 3 and 4 Geo. IV., c. 37. In accordance with this Act, commercial treaties were made in 1824 with the Netherlands, Prussia, and Denmark; in 1825 with the Hansa Towns; in 1826 with France (for ten years) and Mexico; and in 1829 with Austria. The trade with the United States had been put on a reciprocal footing in 1815. Cf. Craik, British Com

2 See M'Culloch's Commercial Dict. (1844), s. v. silk and wool.

8. v. silk.

4 Ib., s. v. Imports and Exports for exact figures.

Yet many people believed it was decaying, till the evidence taken by a Committee of the Commons in 1833 disproved this idea. Cf. Tooke, History of Prices, ii. 242.

7 For these see M'Culloch's Dictionary of Commerce, s. v. coal, glass, &c. ; and see his most interesting tabular statement of the different English customs tariffs of 1787, 1819, and 1844, s. v. Tariff.

8 Tooke, History of Prices, iv. 269, regards this as comparatively slight; but there were deficits in the budgets of 1838 (a million and a half), 1839 (half a million), 1840 (a million and a half), 1841 (a million and threequarters), and in 1842 (two millions); Northcote, Twenty Years of Finan cial Policy, pp. 6, 12.

followed it, together with continual deficits in the Budget, prevented further financial reforms for a few years, though eventually circumstances rendered them imperatively necessary, and Sir Robert Peel courageously faced the difficulties of national finance in 1842.

§ 255. Revolution in the Means of Transit.

Meanwhile, too, another great industrial revolution was being effected. The introduction of railways, steam navigation, and the telegraph, has done almost as much as the great inventions of the eighteenth century to revolutionise the commerce of the world. The Stockton and Darlington 1 railway was opened in 1825, and the Liverpool and Manchester railway line in 1830. The first steamboat crossed the Atlantic, from Savannah to Liverpool, in 1825, in twenty-six days; and in 1838 ocean passages to New York by steamship were also accomplished by the Great Western from Bristol, and the Sirius from Cork, although ever since the beginning of the century small steamers and tugs had been used for coasting purposes, and on the river Clyde. In 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone patented the needle telegraph, and the Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1846 for bringing the new inventions into general use. In 1840 the penny postage came into operation. Yet more recently the Suez Canal (1869) has shortened immensely the distance to the East. It is obvious to all how incalculably these inventions and appliances have aided the development, not only of English trade, but of the commerce of the whole world. But, owing to this development, commerce has become no longer national so much as international, and commercial history loses therefore many of its national characteristics.

1 M'Culloch, Commercial Dict. (1844), 8. v. "Railroads," and Leone Levi, History, p. 192.

2 Ib., 8. v. "Steam Vessels," and Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, p. 196.

8 Ib.

M'Culloch, Commercial Dictionary, s. v. "Postage," gives an account of its introduction.

§ 256. Modern Developments.

It is not therefore necessary, in the limits of a work like this, to go into a detailed account of the growth of commerce since these great modern inventions. There is ample material for the student in larger works; and the statistics of our progress may be consulted in the invaluable pages of Mr Giffen's and Professor Leone Levi's books. Here we need only indicate in the broadest outlines the chief features of the recent developments of industry. We have followed the industrial history of England up to a period more prolific in commercial events, and more remarkable for commercial progress, than any that preceded it. The experiments and tentative measures of Mr Huskisson and other statesmen paved the way for a bolder and more assured policy on the part of subsequent governments, till at length Sir Robert Peel, compelled to some extent by the deficits in the Budgets of former years to adopt some drastic policy of finance, attacked seriously the great question of the reform of the tariff in his now famous Budget of 1842. In this,2 tariffs were reduced wholesale, but soon Peel went still further. Urged on by the AntiCorn Law League, and stimulated by a great famine in Ireland in 1845, he openly adopted the principles of Free Trade. Under his leadership the Corn Laws were repealed (1846); the tariff was entirely remodelled, and the old protective restrictions were abolished, Mr Gladstone's Budget 5 of 1853 being particularly memorable in this direction. A great increase of trade followed the inauguration of the policy which is always associated with the famous name of Richard Cobden, and this increase was aided by various commercial treaties made between England and other 1 Above, p. 457, note 8.

2 By the Tariff Act, 5 and 6 Victoria, c. 47. M'Culloch remarks: "The passing of this Act forms an important era in the history of commercial and financial legislation " (Commercial Dictionary (1844), s. v. "Tariff "); also cf. Prof. Bastable, Commerce of Nations, pp. 58-60.

3 See Morley, Life of Cobden, ch. xi.

4 By the 9 and 10 Victoria, c. 22.

5 It reduced or abolished imports on 133 articles; Montgredien, Free Trade (1881), p. 171; Bastable, Commerce of Nations, pp. 63, 64.

countries.1 Of these treaties, the most noticeable was that with France (1860), under which the prohibitive duties laid upon English goods were reduced by France to protective duties of fairly moderate amount, while England abolished all duties on the import of manufactured goods, and greatly reduced those on wine and brandy. This treaty, which excited much controversy at the time, as raising the whole question of our commercial relations with foreign countries, was negotiated by Cobden.3 In his efforts to form it Cobden was actuated by the hope that such treaties might lead to the gradual reduction of protective duties and the introduction of Free Trade; but in this, as in other cases, the enthusiasm of Free Traders has received a severe blow, and at the end of the nineteenth century there seems almost as small a chance of universal free trade as at the beginning of it. Some movement towards that enlightened policy has certainly been made, but progress has been very slow. Many wise statesmen deliberately continue to adopt a protective policy from an idea which is far from being altogether baseless—that such a policy, though economically indefensible, is politically advantageous. Time may prove that politics and economics are too closely allied to allow political expediency to counterbalance economic error; meanwhile it is somewhat doubtful whether protection, even from the political point of view, is worth the expense which it invariably entails.

Be that as it may, the wealth of England has undoubtedly increased enormously in the last fifty years.* The revolution in transit, the use of electricity and steam, the freedom of our country from protracted warfare, the growth of population, and the spread of our colonial dependencies, have all contributed to this result. The

1 See list in Appendix to Leone Levi's British Commerce.

See Morley's Life of Cobden, ch. xxvii. This treaty lasted till 1872, when it was denounced by Thiers, but was renewed in 1873, and so far modified in 1882 as to be practically useless.

Morley's Life of Cobden, ch. xxvii.; also cf. Bastable, Commerce of Nations, pp. 65, 66.

4 See Table xxvi. at end of Farrer's Free Trade v. Fair Trade.