Now this last doctrine of the common reservoir, to which I have already so often referred, is so serious a delusion, so real a piece of old perpetual-motion scheming which has come floating down like an iceberg to our time when all else has melted, that I shall have to devote a whole chapter to it; but a word or two on the first two may fitly find a place at this point in our discussion.

As for the first, that there is always some other industry to which a nation can turn when one after another of its existing industries has been lost through the stress of foreign competition; - if we begin with the single isolated workman and his bag of tools, is it impertinent to ask the Free Traders, to what other occupation he can turn when he has sold them, unless indeed it be to searching for berries, snails, or herbs, on which to live? For he is now in the position of the Indian who has sold his rifle or fishing-prong to a rival tribe for some beads or a more dainty morsel of food. Or to what trade can either the shoemaker, the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the butcher, or the baker confined to an isolated village retire, when these trades have in turn been destroyed by competition from a neighbouring village? Or in what capitalist industry could the South of England, for example, find a refuge, if it were destroyed by the competition of the Midlands and the North? What would be left to them, but to crowd into the towns to swell the ranks of the unemployed, and still further congest the docks, the soup-kitchens, the workhouses and the slums? In urging these considerations, I have been careful to keep the purely economic aspect of the question separate from the political, and by confining the discussion to definite economic issues as units of comparison, have endeavoured to show that the economic absurdity of permanently losing an instrument of production for the sake of cheapness, is as great, - however large may be the area taken as our standard of comparison, - as in the simple and palpable instance of a workman parting with his tools.

And if I now extend the same economic law or principle to the nation as a whole in its relation to other outside nations, I am proceeding, I submit, on the lines of a strictly scientific induction. For no economist has ever asserted that as a matter of pure economics there is any difference to be made between the laws which determine the trade relations of one nation with another nation, and the laws which determine the trade relations of one village with another village, one town with another town, or one division of a country with another division of the same country. It is only politically that there is any difference. Whether one part or division of a country gains or loses in reference to another part whether that part be a town, a county, or a group of counties, - makes no difference economically, inasmuch as they are all parts of one and the same nation. But when one nation beats another nation economically, it makes all the difference politically to the loser, as it will soon discover if it has to raise the sinews of war to resist an act of unprovoked aggression or injustice on the part of the foreign, and now superior, economic power.

And that is why the true solution of the purely economic problem of Free Trade versus Protection is of so much political importance; - it is because 'the defence of a nation is more important than its opulence,' and because (until the millennium comes) the independence, dignity, and power of a nation depend on its wealth, as the only means for the realization of that independence, dignity, and power. And it is for the same reason that it is so important not to mix politics and economics together in a conglomerate mass, to the confusion of both, but to first make clear our economic bearings, in order that we may afterwards adapt them in this way or that to the higher considerations of national or international policy; in the same way as you first make sure of the mechanical laws which insure the stability of a house or a bridge, before you arrange the details of its architectural structure or the nature and conditions of the people or the traffic that are to live in it, or pass over it. That nation which can attain to dominion and authority over other nations, - whether by the sword as in earlier ages, or by wealth as at the present time, - can impose on these nations its civilization, its code of morality, and its political ideals also, as the history of the world has given proof; and, therefore, we say again, look primarily to your economic stability, and then your higher and nobler political ideals will be able to take care of themselves; whereas, if you begin by postponing your economic interests to your politics by sacrificing your instruments of production for the sake of mere cheapness, - and that, too, not in the interests of the genuine working man, but of the most hopeless of the incapables in the slums of great cities, - you will speedily end in finding the whole population - genuine working men, capitalists, and all - demoralised and thrown on your hands to feed and provide for.

It is a political madness as great as it would be for an army, in the midst of a complex strategetical engagement, to turn round in the face of the enemy and attend to its wounded first, while allowing its general and organizing officers of division to be captured; and at bottom is part of that organized hypocrisy against which Carlyle so inveighed in the chapter on 'Model Prisons' in his 'Latter Day Pamphlets,' and which in its attempt to mix up Christianity and politics in a 'patent treacle,' ended in building up for its criminals, dwellings with corridors magnificent and spacious as those of duke's mansions, along which the 'heavy ox-faced villains' paced in ease and leisure; while outside the prison walls, the industrious little shoe-maker in the rear of his wife's shop 'with its crossed pipes and herrings in the window' was struggling hard to make ends meet, - with no provision, help, or outlook before him but the workhouse; as deadly and in the end as poisonous a mixture of politics, economics, and philanthropy combined, as that which exhausts the organized ingenuities of Church and State in contriving how specially to provide for the drunkard, the loafer, and the tramp, while but languidly and intermittently making efforts to help the genuine working man back to his work without degradation to himself.