They would laugh, too, at his doctrine that difficulty and cost of transport - the barriers on which he relies for making nations safe from foreign competition under Free Trade, - were to-day any serious or effective barriers at all; for they too are being more and more annihilated by railways, electricity, and steam navigation. They would reject also his doctrine that those classes of manufactured goods which from the smallness of their bulk and consequent cheapness of transport could compete with each other, were so specialised in different nations that they were the subjects of complementary instead of competitive exchange; for in the present day most of the half-manufactured and fully manufactured articles which are the subjects of international exchange are common to half-a-dozen of the richest and most enterprising nations of the world, and are therefore wholly or mainly competitive; otherwise why should these nations fence themselves about with protective tariffs as defences against each other's goods? And again, just as the modern Free Traders reject Adam Smith's doctrine of the supremacy of Agriculture over all other wealth-producing instruments, whether of home or foreign trade, so they reject his doctrine that a home trade has a supremacy over a foreign trade; and especially his fictitious distinctions of the relative importance of the different branches of the home trade; as, for example, his doctrine that next to agriculture in the hierarchy of wealth productiveness stands manufactures, on the ground that they employ more productive labour, and have a quicker turnover than the wholesale home trade; and that the wholesale home trade in turn is more productive than any foreign trade whatever (even if you had a monopoly of the latter as against the world) on the ground that it gives employment to two home capitals instead of one home and one foreign one; that it has a quicker turnover of capital than the more distant foreign ones; a greater number of home employers; and that it is attended with less risk.

All these arguments they would brush aside as, in the present day, mere irrelevancies, and would take their stand on the broad fact that where trade is free, and business men are left to their own devices, they can always be trusted to place their orders and negotiate their sales at the best points for their own advantage; and that it matters not, so long as they see their way to a profit, whether they invest in home trade or foreign, in agriculture or in manufactures; whether their business employs many workmen or a few; whether it employs two home capitals or only one; whether the trade is a distant or a near one; whether it is absolutely free from risk or the risks have to be covered by a higher price; whether they have to lay out of the returns to their capital for a greater length of time, a month, or a year, or in some businesses, as in the laying down spirits or wine, for five or for twenty years. Otherwise how could they stand calmly by, and see Adam Smith's doctrines put to open shame in the market place, and not only encourage manufactures as against the agriculture of their own country, but foreign manufactures (for the sake of cheapness of product) at the expense of the home ones which by competition they have driven from the field?. For, observe, that Adam Smith would only permit capital to be invested in foreign trade when it had overflowed, as it were, from the home trades in a natural way, and not until the land, manufactures, and home trades had absorbed all the capital that could be put into them.

Indeed, as we have seen, his main denunciation of the Colonial trade of his time (even when it was protected by the monopoly which England had over it) was because of its drawing capital away unnaturally (by reason of the monopoly) from a more productive source of wealth to a less one. And it was because he believed, and thought he had demonstrated, that Free Trade would prevent all this, that he advocated it. Had he lived to-day and seen that with Free Trade in its full fruition and bloom, and with no monopoly or tariff to interfere with it, the Foreign Trade has in actual fact drawn a large part of the capital of the country into it and into the shipping trade, and away from many of the home manufactures, - and especially from agriculture, - is it possible that he could have approved of it! From all of which, can it be doubted that Adam Smith was a Protectionist in his heart, and that he was a Free Trader only because he thought and believed that Free Trade was the best instrument or policy for bringing about the ends he had in view; and that had he lived now, and seen each of these favourite doctrines of his in turn belied, and indeed completely reversed, by the actual facts, he would have been as eager to put up tariff fences for their protection as in his own day he was to abolish them? The two principles on which all his political economy turned - namely the supremacy of agriculture and the barrier offered by distance and difficulty of transport - having been completely reversed and almost annihilated since his time, what logical alternative could he have but to discard either his arguments, or his policy, or both? If not his arguments, then logically he must renounce his principle of Free Trade and become a Protectionist; if not his principle and policy, then he must renounce his arguments, each one of which in turn, as we have seen, the modern Free Trader repudiates.