No remedy to be obtained under free

trade.

it lose heart and hope; capital and talent are gradually withdrawn from it; and as it offers reduced remuneration and a diminished prospect of advancement to skilled labor, the quality of the labor employed in it tends continually to decline, and its productions deteriorate.

124. The depression, then, so far as it arises from the permanent and growing causes just named, cannot fail to recur, after each interval of relief, with equal or increasing force; and this must be endured, unless the nation shall determine to counterwork by active measures the disturbing influences which are artificially produced by foreign legislation.

The commission was divided in stating its opinions upon the remedies which should be adopted to cure the existing evils from which the productive industries of the country were suffering and to restore internal prosperity. The Minority Report recommended a return to a protective tariff, while the free trade members of the commission in the Majority Report, still adhered to the policy of free trade; yet in framing paragraph 82, they distinctly repudiated the doctrine of free trade in the following language:

As regards the future, should any symptoms present themselves that foreign competition is becoming more effective in this respect, it must be for the country and the workman himself to decide whether the advantages of the shorter hours compensate for the increased cost of production or diminished output. We believe that they do and on social as well as economical grounds, we should regret to see any curtailment of the leisure and freedom which the workman now enjoys. No advantages which could be expected to accrue to the commerce of the country would, in our opinion, compensate for such a change.

The evidence given before them, of the calamities which had been brought to the laboring masses by Mr. Cobden's policy of "cheapness," was so appalling that the sense of justice of every member of this important official body, was aroused with the exception of one. The grinding-down process which forms the economic basis of the theory of free trade, is such an important element that Bonamy Price, the eminent free trade economist, who was a member of the commission, dissented from the paragraph quoted, in the following language:

I beg to express my dissent from paragraph 82. It contains a specific repudiation of the great doctrine of free trade. Shorter hours of labor do not, and cannot, compensate to a nation for increased cost of production or diminished output. They tax the community with dearer goods, in order to confer special advantages on the working man. They protect him, and that is a direct repudiation of free trade. The country is sentenced to dearer and fewer goods.

This declaration of Professor Price is a confirmation of the opinion. of those believing in the doctrine of protection, that the practical operation of the principles of free trade is inimical to the laboring masses, having for its specific purpose the maintenance of the lowest possible wage scale, in order to assure cheap production.

While sufficient proof is found in the evidence of manufacturers, business men and laborers, and in the reports from the various organizations

presented to the commission to condemn Cobdenism, the specific question of the relative benefits which might be derived from protection or free trade was evaded, so far as possible, by the free trade members who controlled and directed the action of the commission. That this was purposely done, there is not the slightest question. It has been the design of the Cobden Club and the advocates of free trade in recent years so far as possible to cover up and misrepresent the real causes which are operating to undermine the industries of the country. The failure to specifically direct the investigation which was held, to economic problems, was charged by the Fair Trade Journal to be a part of the free trade plan. Members of the Cobden Club and the representatives of the free trade party refused to participate in the investigation and expose the policy to a vigorous attack by protectionists. The Fair Trade Journal on June 4, 1886, said:

Lord Derby, speaking as chairman of the Cobden Club banquet in 1882, said in effect “That we must by all means avoid even an examination into the working of our fiscal system for fear foreign States should imagine that we entertain doubts.'' Mr. Gladstone, in his famous speeches at Leeds in 1881, gave expression to the same sentiment. Mr. Mundella in the House of Commons, and if we mistake not, Lord Granville in the House of Lords, and various other Liberal politicians have, on different occasions, re-echoed the same notion. The refusal to join in the Royal Commission on Trade was only the outcome of this feeling.'

1 Vol. I, p. 266.

Recent

expressions of opinion by promi

nent En

glishmen.

CHAPTER VI.

THE FREE TRADE POLICY A FAILURE.

To illustrate the growing discontent with the free trade system the following quotations from the writings and speeches of eminent Englishmen are given:

Free trade has produced exactly the effect that was prophesied in 1846, both on trade and agriculture. That is to say, free trade for years succeeded because it failed, and is now failing becuase it has at last succeeded.-E. S. Cayle.

Our free trade friends attribute our commercial advance in former years to free trade. To what do they attribute our commercial decline at the present time?Digby W. Cayley.

I am a rabid fair trader, a protectionist if you like, because the work-people of this country are starving in the streets, undersold by foreign labor.-Mr. Cunningham Grahame.

With regard to free trade, they had the old nostrum trotted out, that they should buy in the cheapest markets, regardless of consequences. If this absolute cheapness were good, then let them import Oriental labor, let them encourage the sweating system, and approve of the slave trade. -George Shipton, President Trades' Union Congress, 1888.

In case of war, no navy in the world can protect the huge stream of food which pours every day into this country.-Admiral Close, February, 1889.

There can be no doubt that we are suffering from the operations of foreign tariffs. Let us boldly say that if these duties continue, England will have to retaliate. -The late Samuel Morley, when M. P. for Bristol.

It is a marvel the people of England have submitted to free trade so long, and it will not be long before there will be a marked change.-Lord Carnarvon, in Australia, 1887.

Great as are the benefits of cheap food, they must be weighed against the disadvantages of paralyzing, more or less, the greatest of our home industries.— Lord Armstrong.

He would go so far as to say that should the system of foreign export bounties be continued any further, he would, as the remedy, meet such unfair competition by means of countervailing duties.-Mr. Wilson, M. P.

In a few years the question of protection in England will be one of the most burning questions with which they have to deal.-Lord H. Bruce, M. P.

What Mr. Gladstone considers the discipline which the Almighty has appointed for us, Carlyle, with deeper insight regards as a voice of earthly profit and loss. "We have," he says, "Hell in England-the hell of not making money. We coldly see the all-conquering sons of toil sit enchanted by the millions in their Poor Law Bastile, as if this were nature's law-mumbling to ourselves some vague janglement of laissez faire supply and demand, cash payment the one nexus of man to man: free trade, competition, and devil take the hindmost, our latest gospel yet preached.” -Fair Trade Journal, Vol. VI, page 50.

I have believed in free trade all my life, but my fear is that it will not last. It prospered when all its conditions were in our favor, but this does not prove that it will prosper when the conditions are extensively changed.-Cardinal Manning. This question of the protection of the industries of Ireland is one of vital importance for the nation. We have to consider the interest of the artisans of the towns and of the laborers in the country, and, as I have already stated, it is my firm belief that it will be impossible for us to keep this portion of the laboring classes at home and in comfort without protection to Irish industries. It is a problem which requires the utmost exertion on our parts to solve. The life of Ireland is dependent upon the preservation of her bone and sinew. Our population has diminished at the rate of a million a decade during the past forty years; it is time that it should be put a stop to, and that it should be possible for the laborers, the artisans and mechanics of Ireland, to live, thrive and prosper at home.—Charles Stewart Parnell, as reported in the Dublin Freeman's Journal, of August 22, 1885. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of English industry you like, you will find mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosopher will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable It is working and struggling: so do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged, twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigor mortis. Well, with this state of British industry, what do you find going on? You find foreign iron, foreign wool, foreign silk, and cotton pouring into the country, flooding you, drowning you, sinking you, swamping you; your labor market is congested, wages have sunk below the level of life, the misery in our large towns is too frightful to contemplate, and emigration or starvation is the remedy which the Radical offers you with the most undisturbed complacency. But what produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure. I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries, much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it. I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury.-Randolph Churchill, Blackpool, 1884.

The only mode in which a country can save itself from being a loser by the revenue duties imposed by other countries on its commodities is, to impose corresponding revenue duties on theirs. -John Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy," Book V.

I know Canada; you do not. I know the marvelous change which has occurred since she adopted a protective tariff; the proposals of the Fair-Trade League to have free trade with our colonies and dependencies, and protection against the rest of the world, were in the highest sense patriotic.-Sir John Macdonald, Prime Minister of Canada, when waited on by Manchester free trade advocates, during a visit to England.

Just as Mr. Bright now piles up his abusive epithets, so in former days the free traders piled up their profuse prophecies. -Pall Mall Gazette, November, 1887. It is a striking fact that during the past twenty years, 67 per cent of our emigrants have gone to the (most protected country in the world) United States, and only 271⁄2 per cent to our own colonies.-Final Report of the Royal Commission, p. 66.

We are obliged to govern our wages and our cost under the influence of foreign markets. I am quite satisfied that in a trade that had to contend with foreign competition fluctuation of wages were absolutely necessary. We had the modern glove trade. It has gone to Germany, and we have no glove trade left. The result was that the glove hands came down to nearly half what they formerly had. They

Attacks on

free trade.

Injurious effects of free trade.

Statistics of British trade.

made for 3d. what they used to make for 25. 3d., and then they could get no employment, and the trade has nearly died out. That was not a satisfactory state of things and one could hardly blame an individual who took advantage of the outrageous license afforded by the working classes of their own country, and who in 1863 established "a factory in Saxony, where we employ 700 Germans." It was not fairtrade for a man to take Nottingham looms to the Continent to be worked by foreigners, and the produce to have free access to the Nottingham market just as if the work had been done in Nottingham.-Vincent.

The rage for manufacture and commerce at the expense of agriculture is a disease which has been the eventual ruin of every nation that has suffered from it. Nor can we hope to escape the consequences of its deadly ravages, unless by retracing our footsteps before it is too late.-Reynold's Weekly Newspaper, September 16, 1888.

It is all very well to be the storehouse of the world, and even its carriers, but the basis of our living, as a people, should be found in agriculture and the home trade. The great industry of agriculture is slowly, but apparently surely, dying of inanition and exhaustion, while our genuine home trade is being cut down, if not killed, by foreign imports.—Kemp's Mercantile Gazette, February 29, 1888.

If a really serious war broke out, in which one or more of the great naval powers endeavored to intervene between ourselves and the sources of our food supplies, there would be a famine in this country in a week. This is a fact which has never sufficiently impressed itself upon the imaginations of the English people, or upon the intellects of our statesmen. But it is a fact, nevertheless.-Shipping Gazette, 1889.

The opinion expressed by the Royal Commission in its report to parliament in 1886, that the depression in trade and industries was due to no exceptional or temporary causes has been confirmed by the experience of recent years which have followed. That system of free trade, or free imports, which in 1885 was sapping the vitals of British industries, was the essential cause of the loss of profits, reduced wages, lack of employment and universal stagnation in business. Since 1885 the increase in the imports of competing commodities which has taken place has intensified the suffering which to such an extent prevails among the masses of the people. It has prolonged and made more severe that life-and-death struggle which has been raging in every branch of productive industry, since the effect of free trade began to be felt.

Notwithstanding the brazen tricks which have been played with figures and statistics by members of the Cobden Club, the truth can no longer be suppressed; the world can no longer be deceived by those statements which have been put out proclaiming the prosperity of the United Kingdom and the benefits of free trade. They have persistently exhibited the large imports and exports of the country as an evidence of its prosperity. After piling up long columns of figures showing the external trade of the country, they at once concluded that this of itself proved their case. Such arguments can only deceive those who have failed to study the character of the trade embodied in the imports and exports. A year of good trade is often compared with a year of bad trade, and the result put out as an indication of industrial growth.