THE first position I am anxious to advance in this important controversy is this, that the millennium of a universal Free Trade which is the ideal and consummation of economic powers and opportunities, and in which all the nations united as brothers shall co-operate in the work of each, and each in that of all-, will be hastened rather than retarded by each nation in the meantime, and as preparatory to it, developing its own resources to the utmost, precisely as if no other nation but itself existed in the world. And this it can do only by protecting at all costs those instruments of production, - whether its land, its mines, its natural products, its special manufacturing capabilities, its facilities for transport, or what not, - which, as we have already seen, are its permanent economic assets, its very life blood in short, and which, like Othello's handkerchief, to barter, part with, or give away, 'were such perdition as nothing else could match.' And the reason is obvious. For the difference between thus protecting its own patrimony, and throwing it open to the incursions of all the world as Free Trade would do, would be economically the same as between enclosing the separate fields of a farm by fences, and throwing them open like a public common for horses and cattle, wayfarers, holiday makers, and robbers, all alike to enter and destroy, or to pluck up by the roots what had been sown or planted, before they had time to grow and ripen.

It would be the same as the difference between a social regime of separate marriages with their children and homes, where the virtues and strengths of each individual member are nurtured, protected, and developed to their highest possible extent, and casual temporary alliances and promiscuities where the growing germs of virtue, with all the elemental passions blowing through them as on a wind swept plain, are reduced to a mere waste and anarchy, without any definite morality or rule of life at all. In a word, the difference is as the difference between the method of Nature herself, and the temporary theories of man. For if there is one thing more certain than another in the general ground-plan on which the world is constructed, it is the determination that each race of creatures, as well as the different races of mankind, shall be protected in its own individuality by all the exclusive agencies in the defensive armoury of Nature - sexual selection, physiological selection, prepotency, mental, physical, and sentimental repulsions and affinities, national and racial self-centredness, etc., - whereas the mere humanitarian theories of abstract philosophers would, as we have seen since the days of Rousseau and the French Revolution (and with the disastrous results which are now only beginning to be felt), mix you up races of men of all countries, colours, and climes, - Hottentots and Indians, Chinese and Europeans, Jews and Gentiles, - to let them prey on each other in the bosom of every community, under the wide canopy of what these humanitarians love to figure as a higher and nobler ideal; and with as much nonchalance and indifference, as they would look at the mixing and seething of herbs in a pot.

And if we consider it, so long as the nations of the world are in that stage of civilization where they are determined to protect their own nationalities, as separate political units, at all costs, the very thought of allowing their economic instruments of production, on which alone they can rely for the protection and preservation of their national integrity and individuality, to be overrun, destroyed, or carried off by the invading Attilas and Alarics of other nations, by throwing down their economic defences and openly inviting them to come in, would, were it not for the doctrinaire abstractions with which men have veiled their sight, be seen at once to be a stultification and madness. This policy, if made universal to-day, would not only wipe out these instruments of production as effectually, - for all nations except the few who should succeed in conquering the rest in their own lines of work, - as if a hurricane had passed over them; but it would strangle at their birth, and before they had time to grow to industrial maturity, those younger nations to whose great but undeveloped natural resources we mainly look for the future economic wealth of the world, as the soils and mines of the older nations are one by one exhausted.

That this is no imaginary picture of what would happen has already been practically demonstrated in the case of the other nations of Europe, Asia, and America, when, during the last century England was at the height of her manufacturing supremacy. Each of these nations in turn tried to get a foothold for its own infant manufactures by admitting English manufactured goods free, but they were so summarily snuffed out one after the other, that these nations were all obliged to put up their tariff walls again for their own protection, - and even their very existence.

And this leads me to the second position I have to maintain, which is this; - that in the present stage of the world and of Civilization, Protection is capable of yielding not only a greater amount of aggregate wealth for the world as a whole, but a greater amount for each individual nation than Free Trade. Now in laying down this proposition, I am only bringing the science of Economics into line with Politics, Ethics, and Sociology; in all of which it is generally conceded that in the present stage of civilization, the existence of separate nationalities (founded on those historical, racial, political, religious, moral, and social affinities which in their combination constitute that unique something which is summed up in the term nationality) is more calculated to further the ultimate ends of Civilization, than the unequal combinations held down by force, and called empires, which have been the result of mixing races too antagonistic in permanent sentiment to do aught but gird at each other and show their teeth, and so to debase and neutralize each other's moral currency when planted together on some common area of political soil, - this primal curse of civilization which even to-day, nations, from pure tradition and ignorance, still indulge themselves in encouraging, as if it were one of the rarer and more commendable forms of Christian charity; and that too with the spectacle of the American Negro problem, the Magyar, Polish, and Slavonic-Austrian problem, the Irish problem, and the South African Kaffir and Chinese problem before their eyes, with their tales of lynchings and massacres, and refusals to do black men's labour; and in spite of the fact that they have as much difficulty in extracting a grain of the very ends for which all politics and civilizations exist, - namely social justice, morality, peace, goodwill, humanity, and mental culture, - as in extracting the grains of gold out of a mass of quartz.