For the same foreign trader whom you welcome to your door as a friend, bringing blessings with him in the shape of cheapness, will when his cowl is thrown back, be seen to be an enemy in disguise; and the illusion which makes the trick so successful is, that each foreign trader is a friend to you, but an enemy to your next door neighbour, while your neighbour's friend in turn is an enemy to you; - the foreign shoe manufacturer not selling his shoes to the shoemaker, but to the tailor, and vice versa; - with the result that all the successful foreigners are at once enemies and friends; enemies, as rivals who will kill you by their competition, friends, in so far as they will give you what you want at the least expense. In other words, for the sake of cheapness you will be found to have embraced not a friend, but a rival who has come to take away your means of living. And so, just as the separate individuals who make up the crowd in a theatre will, on a cry of fire, by the common impulse to escape, each at the least risk and expense to himself, ruin all alike by all being blocked in the gangways and exits; or as in a crowded public place they may be trampled to death by the simple expedient of throwing a number of cheap coins among them; so the individuals that make up a nation, by their anxiety to secure for themselves as consumers everything that comes to their door, indifferent as to whether it comes from home or abroad, so long only as they can get it at a trifle less cost, can under a regime of Free Trade endanger, paralyze, or bring to an absolute standstill the mills, the factories, and the workshops of the nation as a whole; as much so, indeed, as if they had sold themselves to the enemy in war.

Under Protection, on the contrary, the home trade at least can always be preserved up to the full extent of the country's resources, natural and acquired; and need not, unless you so will it, be floated away on this heartless, fated, and in the end - by the dislocation and instability it involves in families and homes - inhuman stream.

And this brings us to the very core of our subject, namely as to whether there is any criterion which will enable us to determine whether under Free Trade a nation is more advantaged in its character as consumer, by the foreigner in his character of friendly dispenser of cheap goods, than it is injured by him in its character as producer, when he comes as a rival to take away its land, factories, workshops, and tools, by closing them down or throwing them out of cultivation and use; in other words, whether there is any principle which will enable us to determine beforehand whether the balance is likely to be on the side of the nation or not? Adam Smith, as we know, decided that the balance would be sure to be on the side of the nation - because of what? Because we could always be sure under Free Trade of keeping in our hands the greatest of all the instruments of production, namely the land; and the reason he thought the agriculture of the country was safe against the attacks of foreign rivals was, as we have seen, because of distance and cost of transport.

As for manufactures, they too he thought were safe under Free Trade against the attacks of the foreigner for the same reason; except, perhaps, the silk industry which could not hold its own, he admitted, without protection, against that of France. But then, what did it matter? If beaten in one manufacture we could always, he said, transfer our capital to another in which no danger was to be feared; the consumer, at any rate, would gain what the particular producer lost, and so on the whole the balance would be in our favour. But how stands the case to-day? The land as an instrument of production has been lost to us through the successful invasion of our agriculture by the foreigner; and so long as the competition lasts, the powers of Nature locked up in the soil, - with the land going out of culture at the rate it has been doing for the last decade or two, - will be lost as a national asset. And if the time should ever come when England can no longer maintain her supremacy in. a free market in manufactures either, the powers of Nature locked up in them, - which since the days of steam, are a free gift of ten times the economic value, as a wealth-producing asset, of those in agriculture, - would be lost to us also.

And the consequence would be that while the free trade lasted you would have the spectacle on the one side, of a nation with its hands tied behind its back, as it were, through having parted with the tools with which it works - its soil, its mills, its factories, and its workshops, - and standing there a helpless mass of mere consumers 'eating their heads off;' while on the other, your foreign rivals, having captured your tools, (the instruments of production, through which alone wealth can be increased), will stand over you like masters over their helpless slaves, or the great Trusts over the small business men whom they are about to crush, and by the shadow of their sword of competition suspended over you, will prevent you from producing until you consent to do so on their own terms: - and these are, that you shall give up your instruments of production unconditionally to them, as you would your swords in war. And so, for the time being, and while your Free Trade lasts, having parted with your instruments of production to the foreigner, you have become a nation of consumers only - mere dead receptacles, pensioners and parasites, - and although, like barnacles, you may once have had the free use of your powers and faculties, you have now become mere sacs, the appendages of foreign nations.