confusing a problem, in the noble effort to establish the "righteousness" of free trade. It was righteous, we presume, because it was to advance the interests of all classes of the community—not for a time only, but for ever. In what way was this righteousness to become manifested? In the destruction of foreign manufactures!

Afterwards, free trade is found conjointly with the railway system and the gold discoveries-all these separate forces acting simultaneously and concurrently towards the same object. But in different ways. Thus the railway, by shortening the time and cost of transit; and the increased amount of gold in circulation, by tending to increase to the normal, a consumption which had fallen below it. It will be perceived, therefore, that neither of these causes of increased trade-activity tended to force demand. What they both of them tended to do was to satisfy a normal demand by a proper supply. In the period of transition between a condition in which all the demand cannot be met, by reason of collateral difficulties, and that condition in which it is efficiently supplied after such difficulties have been overcome, the trade institutions of any nation would gradually grow; and that growth would be a normal one, in so far as it is the outcome of a normal demand. The extra demand being thus supplied, you would say that there is no further source of its increase. But there is, or ought to be one, nevertheless. And it should be provided by the annual increase to our population. If we look back upon the progress of our industries, with but few exceptions, during the protective period, we shall find that, take any year you please, and compare the exports

1

So they thought, and so Cobden averred. But the reason why labour was so expensive resided, or rather was supposed to reside, in the dearness of bread. It was Cobden who drew attention to the phenomenon, that when bread was dear wages were low; and vice versa, that when bread became cheap wages rose to their highest point. "Only make bread cheap," they cried, and we will compete more successfully than we have ever yet done with the world. Thus it appears that the normal progress of our industries under protection was not sufficiently intense enough for the manufacturers; and this the more especially, when they saw before them fields which, under a new set of conditions, they might very easily make their own. Instead, therefore, of following a demand which, under the then state of the manufacturing industries of the world, they monopolised, and, in all human probability, would have continued to do so—instead of remaining content with this natural demand, they ran after an artificial one. They commenced that pernicious system of underselling, by means of an artifice, their foreign rivals. Such a system may or may not be regarded as a highly moral one, just according as a political or economical bias may or may not procure it.

You may have before you the picture of all races on this globe striving only to excel each other in the arts of peace-a result which more than one enthusiast has imagined (and many still imagine to this day) can only be effected by the universal application of free trade to

1 "We do not want cheap bread to compete with the foreigner. We already do that. We want cheap bread in order to compete 'better' with him."