rated, while it would tend to secure for our own people the employment and wages which we now hand over to the foreigner. It has been further asserted that, if every article of foreign manufacture which now enters our ports were taxed with a duty of 10 per cent. ud valorem, it would not sensibly raise the cost of living to the wage-earning classes, for that the greater part thereof consists of articles consumed by the wealthier classes alone, many of them articles of mere luxury.

By others again it is said that, by a rearrangement of import duties, involving the taxation of several articles in which the foreigner now competes successfully with us, and thereby securing for our own people the wages which we now pay to the foreigner, it would be possible to make equivalent deductions in the duties now necessarily levied for the purposes of revenue upon articles much consumed by the people at large without any loss to the public purse.

These things may or may not be true. They are asserted by those whose avocations and experience ought to enable them to judge.

Lastly, it is strongly urged, and this, as it seems to me, is by far the most important suggestion, that by giving our brethren in the Colonies and British dependencies an advantage over the foreigner in our own markets we could, without inflicting sensible injury upon our population by enhancing the price of the things they consume, induce and foster a freer commercial interchange than now exists between them and the mother country, thereby binding in the ties of a common interest those who are already bound together in the lasting ties of race, and enlarging the narrow limits of the British Isles by the wide lands of every clime that lie under the British Crown.

No one can deny that such a project has a fascinating aspectthe achievement of it might alone suffice to satisfy the ambition of the greatest statesman. We have in the British Isles a redundant population and redundant wealth. Our colonies and dependencies have boundless land, soil, and climate of every variety, and lack nothing but capital and labour to turn them to account. If a market were once assured in this country, it is said, for colonial produce, British capital and enterprise would quickly be engaged in its development. In some places, such as India for instance, nothing is wanted but the means of transit to bring within our reach, at very low prices, great supplies of corn and other grain. There is hardly anything, I believe, which our teeming millions consume that our colonies and dependencies might not produce under the influence of adequate labour and adequate means. They want what we have, and they have, or might have, in their cereal and other produce, the food we so grievously want. We live under the beneficent sway of the same gracious sovereign, speak the same tongue, and look back upon the same ancestry. All that a real 'Free Trade' ever promised, had

the world chosen to adopt it, might be realised to the full, though on a smaller scale, within the limits of the British Empire; and, selfsupporting, self-contained, who shall put a limit to the grandeur, power, and prosperity to which that empire might attain?

To how many of our pressing troubles would not such a scheme, if practicable, offer a cure! The earth hunger of Ireland, the newlyborn passion for small holdings of land in England, might be gratified without trampling under foot the principles of political economy. To thousands of our labouring classes it might offer the employment which the decline of agriculture at home is year by year reducing. To how many of the youth of the educated and more prosperous classes might it not offer a career, and a chance of devoting their energies and such capital as they have at command to an end profitable to themselves and of infinite value to their country! Steam and electricity have bridged the distances that in times gone by would have rendered such a project hopeless. Physical impediments to its realisation can hardly be said now to exist; and though there may well be moral difficulties hard to surmount, it is scarcely credible that, where the means of co-operation to a great end of mutual advantage are at hand, prudence and discretion might not suffice to bring it within our reach.

Above all, there are no feelings of hostility between us and our Colonies to bar the way: witness their generous and chivalrous offer to come to our aid on a late occasion. Their offer met with a warm appreciation by our people here, though the tepid and cautious acceptance of it by our Government did (as far as that acceptance was made public) so little to evince it.

The future of this Greater Britain, I confess, dazzles the imagination, and it may well be that, after all, the rearing of such an edifice is impracticable, for where human concord is an essential element of success there is much to be feared from human jealousies and the promptings of a misdirected self-interest. I do not feel myself competent to uphold or condemn this great project. But there are others -men well competent by their experience in commercial matters to form an opinion-who thoroughly believe in it, and who have devoted much of their time and energies to its realisation. Under the name of Fair Trade' they have endeavoured to promote a tariff which would strongly tend to unite the mother country to her Colonies without increasing the cost of living to the wage-earning classes or diminishing the public income. But they labour in vain so long as the idol of Free Imports' is worshipped in the land, and its unbending precepts close the door upon all discussion. In vain did Mr. Farrar Ecroyd lay before the House of Commons in the Session of 1883, in a speech of singular clearness and force, the details of the • Fair Trade ' plan; the ears of his audience were indeed open, but

their minds were closed to him by the foregone conclusion of the system under which we live.

I think it reasonable then to ask for inquiry. Has not enough been urged in these observations to justify those who are not satisfied with the present state of things in calling upon the Free Traders,' or rather 'Free Importers,' to point out how and in what direction this country is compensated under their system of taxation for the losses inflicted on our working classes by the import of foreign manufactures?

Do they really mean to say that the power of buying cheaply is a full recompense for the loss or diminution of those wages which enable the workman to buy at all? Before expenditure must come production, and production, to be fruitful, must be sold. A man must sell before he can buy. It is his labour and skill which must support him, and it is the sale of this labour and skill which alone provides the wherewithal to buy the necessaries of life. If it is important to his welfare that these necessaries he should buy cheap, it is not less, but more, important that his labour he should sell dear. 'Buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market' was once the shibboleth of Free Traders. Does it cease to be true because the thing to be sold is labour and not goods?

I have said, then, that Free Imports' give us cheapness and nothing but cheapness. Do the Free-Importers' claim anything else for it?-any incidental advantages which the above remarks fail to meet? It is hardly possible that they will rely upon the long-since exploded notion that cheap food will lessen the cost of production by directly inducing lower wages, and thus enable us, in our manufactures, to compete with the outside world; for surely it will not at this time of day be denied that the price of labour, like the price of everything else, is settled by the contrast between supply and demand.

Those who approach this subject of 'Free Imports' with an earnest desire to arrive at the truth (of whom I claim to be one) find their chief difficulty in ascertaining from any authorised source what the principles are upon which the system is founded. If they turn, as they naturally do, to the speeches and writings which preceded its adoption, and the arguments used in Parliament in 1846, they find on all hands the assumption that foreign nations would surely follow our lead, and that the result would be a universal trade free from restriction all over the world. It is the falsification of this hope that deprived us of the benefits then contemplated and so loudly extolled; and it is natural and reasonable to ask that some definition, not to say some proof, should be given of the benefits which the system of free imports is still supposed to secure to us, now that that hope has vanished.

But if the principles of so-called Free Trade are too sacred to be inquired into, let us at least inquire into facts.

For forty years this country has regulated its import duties upon

a system different from that of other nations; has not the time arrived when we may profitably take stock of our commercial position, compute our gains, and see what Free Imports' have done for us. This is all the more necessary because there are many who assert that on a balance of advantages there are no gains at all. Meanwhile not a day passes that the public press does not record some fresh and startling complaint of the suffering and losses that foreign competition entails. In this matter it is more than probable that some exaggeration prevails. When things are going wrong it is almost in the nature of a popular cry that it should be unjust.

But one would like to know the truth-one would like to know, for instance, whether it is true that import of Spanish and other foreign lead has resulted in the closing of nearly every lead mine in this country. Or, again, whether it is the fact that in 1862 there were 110 iron furnaces in Staffordshire, and that there are now no more than forty-one, and as fast as the furnaces are extinguished in England others are lighted abroad to replace them. Nay, more, is it true of the iron trade that those who used to be our purchasers have become our competitors, and not only sell against, but undersell, us not merely in neutral markets, but in the very heart of our ironmaking districts? In Sheffield, the home of the cutlery trade, it is asserted, I know not with what truth, that foreign-made goods (chiefly German) are largely sold at a price with which we find it impossible to compete, and a similar tale is told of many other trades in which we used to enjoy a marked ascendency. What is the truth about watches, silks, ribbons, guns, and even bulky articles like furniture and joiners' work? How many of the complaints daily made are well founded, and to what extent? We ought at least to know the price that we have to pay for the blessing of purchasing cheap.

If our leading statesmen and politicians care not to insist upon an inquiry into these things, depend upon it there are those who will. There is too much intelligence in the artisan and other working classes whose interests are the first to suffer from the competition which cripples home manufacture for them to be content to remain any longer in the dark.

And from official sources they have no light to guide them. For it must be remembered that this system of importing all foreign goods free of duty, without reference to any reciprocal action on the part of foreign countries, has never been recommended or even discussed (after full inquiry into the facts) by any Royal Commission or any Committee of either House of Parliament, still less in Parliament itself. Such an inquiry, if fairly instituted and pursued, will at least set at rest much uneasy feeling that now exists on this subject, and must result either in the confirmation of the present system or in setting us free to establish our tariff upon such principles

as will give the largest aid to our manufacturing industries compatible with the general interests of the community.

In the meanwhile I offer to those who care to think of these things the following propositions as worthy of discussion.

1. That the question of duty or no duty on any import is a separate question for each import, and cannot be rightly answered by the application of any general rule.

2. That no duty should be imposed save for the purpose of

revenue.

3. That in selecting the articles upon which duties should be imposed it is advantageous to the community, cæteris paribus, that the duty should fall on any article in which the foreigner competes in our markets with the labour and skill of our own people.

4. That it may be desirable, if practicable, so to regulate our tariff as to favour, the productions of our own colonies and dependencies in comparison with those of foreign countries.

Lastly. That the rule prohibiting the imposition of a duty on any foreign article the like of which is produced at home, which now goes by the name of 'Free Trade,' has no good reason for its support, and was only adopted by this country as our part of that system of free and unfettered interchange of commodities which it offered to the rest of the world, an offer which, after the lapse of forty years, has never been accepted, and a system, in consequence, which has never existed.

PENZANCE.