Now, that I am doing the Free Traders no injustice in charging them with these absurdities, - and especially with their indifference to all other considerations whatever except the equality of the exports and imports of a country, and the gross sum total of the two combined, - will be seen by a simple enumeration of their opinions, with but a minimum of comment. And if we take England as our best object-lesson for the exhibition of the wide range of considerations to which the Free Traders are absolutely indifferent, - for it is mainly around the question of Free Trade or Protection for England that many of the most distinctive arguments bearing on the general principle of Free Trade cluster and focus themselves, - we shall find:

1. That it does not matter to them what industries may be injured, or altogether ruined and displaced under a Free Trade regime, inasmuch as there will always be found others to replace them. Now this curious doctrine which seems so strange and unnatural to the ordinary understanding, together with the academic doctrine with which it is backed up, and which seems equally strange and unnatural, - the doctrine, namely, that it is quite impossible for all the trades of a country to be ruined, whatever befalls, - and especially the obstinate persistency with which these doctrines are held in spite of all protest, I shall endeavour to explain later on; but as my explanation will consist in showing that they are only aspects of the perpetual-motion delusion which I shall attempt to show is involved in all the fundamental doctrines of Free Trade, I shall defer it for the moment to concentrate attention on the fact of the indifference itself, which the Free Traders have never denied, and which is one of their most frequent and favourable devices for avoiding criticism when they are being keenly and hotly pursued.

It is a matter of indifference to them, for example, whether the trades that have been hit by foreign competition are the great staple trades of the country which are rooted in the rich natural resources of the island - its soil, its mines of coal and iron, its shipping and transport facilities and the hereditary skill of its workers - or whether they are the most local, casual, accidental, undistinguished, or recent. It matters not whether they are the trades which originally made the fortunes of the nation owing to the world-wide demand for the articles they supplied, - and the loss of which, one would naturally suppose, would spell ruin; - or whether they are trades that are mere parasites and aliens without roots of their own in the soil, but which still manage somehow to find for themselves a market, owing rather to the insignificance which enables them to insinuate themselves into the weak spots in the industrial armoury of other nations, than to any natural robustness of their own, - trades which unless protected by the existence of great indigenous industries on whose scraps and leavings they feed, would soon become extinct; resembling in this those cruisers which so long as they are protected by the big guns of their own ironclads, can by their speed in darting about here and there between the big ships of the enemy, do marvellous execution at a pinch, but which without such protection are of little value.

Such trades, for example, are those which, like the making of clothes, - whether by ' sweating ' or otherwise, - live and depend on a flourishing condition of the great textile industries; arms and ammunition, tools and machinery, telegraph wires, etc., which live on the great metal trades; jams and confectionery, living on sugars grown abroad, and at the mercy of foreign regulations; carriages, and railway outfits, books and book-binding, depending on the general increase of wealth and of population caused by the great industries, and still largely maintained by them; - and all alike, great and small, depending in turn for their cheap delivery abroad on the shipping industry as the centre and crown of the whole. It matters not a jot, I say, to the Free Trader whether the great industries have been attacked by foreign competition, and are being slowly crippled or ruined, so long as they can be replaced by these parasites; and if not by these, then by other new and unknown ones; - for not only is it, as I have said, their obstinate conviction that there are always other trades everywhere to which they can turn to replace those that are lost, but it is their still more complacent belief that however many of them have gone, whether great or small, those that remain will somehow make good all that is lost: - and strangest of all (now that we know that the separate foreign nations who are attacking our trade form a ring surrounding our harbours, each not only fully equipped in all our great industries, but making a speciality of some one or other of them), that it is scientifically impossible that more than a few of them could be ruined by any individual superiority whatever of foreign trades over corresponding trades of our own, inasmuch as by the self-adjusting principle of perpetual motion which I will presently explain, the more of them that have run down, and the further each has run down, the more rapidly will the wheels of those that remain revolve; so that, like the Sibylline Books, the more that are lost, the more precious do those that remain become! Nor does it matter to the Free Trader by what method of attack our great trades are being supplanted or crippled; - whether it be by great combinations of capital making a dead set at us with their cannon balls, we replying without defences and in the open plain by mere individual competition and dispersed rifle bullets; whether we are injured by legitimate or illegitimate competition; whether by the 'dumping' practised by all the great foreign 'Trusts' or the legitimate cheapness of certain foreign products; whether by the 'cornering' of the raw material of the Cotton trade, which, hitherto a failure, may succeed in the end; or by a superiority in natural resources, as in the Iron and Steel trades of America; or by the greater scientific knowledge applied to Industry, as in chemical processes and scientific instruments, which gives Germany her advantage; or by the finer artistic skill which, as a heritage of her people, gives France her universal supremacy in silks and muslins; and so on.