Page:England under free trade.djvu/35

 excellent one, and one which is principally due to Free Trade as its great efficient cause. Yet, as you know, you have been called upon, and are being called upon, to disturb this satisfactory condition of things. Two associations, one of them called the National League, and the other the National Fair Trade League, have organised themselves with the view, among other objects, of procuring an alteration in our commercial policy.

I am happy to say that as regards Free Trade, these efforts have met with but little success, and that as time rolls on there is every reason to expect they will meet with still less. As, day by day, we get over one by one our commercial troubles, and, little by little, find ourselves emerging from a long protracted depression, it will be harder and harder for the advocates of Fair Trade, alias Protection, to delude the people into taxing their right hands a shilling, for the slender chance of getting back sixpence with their left. That little game is just two years too late! Had they begun their agitation two years ago, when depression was at its worst, they would have made more disciples, and have given us Free Traders much more trouble to expose their shallow sophistries. Unfortunately for them now, they hardly ever commit themselves to a statement, or venture on an argument, but the next day some most inconvenient fact turns up in the news of the day to confound them. The time they have chosen for galvanising the mummy of Protection is about the worst they could have selected. It is as if some man, undertaking to prove the extinction of the sun, were to choose as the best time for making his assertions and giving his proofs, not the midnight hour—when darkness reigns and seems to lend confirmation to his statements—but the dawn, just when the orb of day begins to brighten creation, and every moment brings with it an accession of light and heat, and serves to prove him either a cunning knave or the victim of a craze.

And now, by way of contrast to our present condition under Free Trade—One-sided Free Trade—let us for a few moments take a glance back to that state of things which existed in the days of Protection, and to which we should