Now as it was the Shipping Trade of England that originally made her fortunes, not only industrially but politically, I have no desire to minimise its significance as a weapon in the armoury of Free Trade. For I came to my views on Protection, if. I may venture to refer to myself in this connection, purely as the results of my economic studies, conducted impartially and free from any tinge of either personal, political, or party bias; and where my reasons for the faith that is in me end, there does all claim of mine to have even an opinion on the subject end. Indeed all my predilections are in favour of Free Trade; I accepted it without question as the economic gospel of my youth; I see its economic superiority to Protection for the world as a whole when once the separate nations, like the separate States of the American Union, shall have become a single political unity; and I deprecate the very thought of the corruption, the shamelessness, the intriguing, and the low tone of political morality which the return to Protection must inevitably engender in public life; - especially in all countries where parliamentary government by Party is supreme, and where the votes which put in and turn out ministries, will no longer be given for political favours only (as they have been in England during its Free Trade regime), but will have to depend on economic favours as well - always more degrading personally to the recipient, as well as more damaging in their effects on the purity of public men.

And hence I feel that this of the Shipping Trade claims a remark or two to itself.

The Shipping Trade, as I have said, made the fortunes of England originally, but it was rather the immediate than the ultimate cause, - the pioneer that engineered the way, rather than the solid phalanx that backed it up. In other words, although it was the means of introducing the manufactures of England to the world, it had afterwards to wait on the fortunes of these manufactures, and so must in the end participate in their decline and fall as it did in their rise and supremacy. In thus rising to supremacy by her shipping trade, England so far resembled Venice and Holland. They, however, had neither a sufficient extent of territory, nor sufficient natural resources at their back, either in mines or manufactures, to give their shipping a base of its own on which it could always support itself in extremity; and the consequence was that the discovery of the Cape route, - as her own statesmen foresaw from the beginning, - speedily effected the ruin of Venice; while the manufactures of England, grounded in her soil and rich natural resources, more gradually wrought that of Holland. Had Holland, however, been equal in natural and manufacturing resources to England, instead of England being able to drive her from the seas, by her Navigation Acts primarily and chiefly, she would in all probability have been able to do little more to this hour than share with her the shipping trade of the world.

But on the other hand, no richness in soil, mines, or manufactures, could in those days give to any nation a world-supremacy, unless they in turn were backed up by those facilities of transport, which a sea-power ready alike to fight and to trade could alone supply. Besides, before the days of railways, how could manufactures except of the rudest kind and with the most restricted home market, exist, much less develop and expand, in any country, however great its undeveloped natural resources might be, unless they could have access to the sea by rivers and canals; and especially when the sea itself and the countries of the world which it washed, were barred to them, not only by the superior hostile fleet of England, - always ready to attack the ships of other nations, - but by the rigid Navigation Acts which practically forbade the products of all other countries being brought to England, their best customer, - inasmuch as it was she alone who at that time could supply them with the manufactures they wanted - except in her own ships? No, much as the shipping trade of England has flourished under Free Trade, from the time that her manufactures had reached their world-wide supremacy, it must not be forgotten that it was by Protection, - by the Navigation Acts, - that all her resources, her shipping trade, her manufactures, her soil and mines, - were for the first time welded into a compact industrial fighting machine and instrument of war, each part supporting and playing into the hands of every other, and all alike animated by the consuming desire not for any merely miscellaneous cosmopolitan benefit, but for the greatness and aggrandizement of England, - and England alone.

But to imagine that the fortunes of the shipping trade of England will not also attend and follow the fortunes of the great industries which gave both to her and it their power, when once these have passed their meridian and are declining gradually to their setting, like those of Venice and Holland before them, is to entertain the dreams of those Spaniards who. still clinging to the memories of their lost greatness, may be seen bowing to each other in dignified solemnity and with perfect Castilian grace, as if each peasant of them were still a hidalgo bending in lofty condescension to receive the homage of a subject world, while their torn and weather-beaten cloaks flap and whistle in the wind. In a word, the shipping trade of England was cradled in Protection, and was only allowed to enjoy perfect freedom when her manufactures had already attained to a world supremacy. Should these manufactures decline and lose their primacy, the shipping trade will again have to be protected like all others, or consent to step down from its imperial position.

And yet, in spite of the importance of this shipping industry to Free Trade at the present time, it is not long since the Free Traders saw a large slice of it detached bodily by an American syndicate, almost without a wince; on the ground, as usual, that if it had to go, there was always something else to which we could turn to make up folks loss; - the only concern which the transfer of the ships gave them, being due not to their loss economically, but only politically, and as a matter of defence in the event of war.