And the only question is how is this to be done?

Now as all instruments of production which can produce more wealth than is consumed in their making or working, are an addition to the 'use values' - the real wealth - of the world; and as almost any plot of ground, even with the rudest implements, will do at least this; and as, further, the first necessity and duty of each nation is either to find work for its population when they are ready and willing to work, to pay for their emigration, or to maintain them out of its national resources, inasmuch as it cannot frankly destroy them, as it does its horses, when there is no work for them to do; it is evident that the policy of which we are in search must be one which will of itself stimulate the greatest number of men everywhere to throw off their coats and set their brains to work to develop every natural instrument of production, - every rood of available soil, every mine and stream within their territory, - to its utmost possible extent, so as to make a market for themselves; and not wait for a world-market price, which in manufactures, and even in land products and mines, is always fixed, where competition is keen, by the strongest competitors; and which, where trade is absolutely and universally free, stands over all the world like a guard over men under arrest, paralyzing all but the strongest, and reducing them to impotence.

And, as we have seen, such a policy is Protection; - the protection of limited areas which will set all hands in them to work to make their own market prices, irrespective of the world outside, and so leave no natural instrument of production anywhere altogether unutilized; for as the powers of Nature are always there, waiting to help man if he will only utilize them, every day lost is a deduction from the sum-total of possible wealth in the world.

This leads us to the next position which I am concerned to maintain, namely, that in the economic evolution of the world, as in the political, the protection of small enclosed areas has been the policy by means of which alone the nations have reached their present state of development; and consequently that as the world is still in that intermediate stage between the cave-men and the millennium, when the existence of separate nations is a political necessity of civilization, a continuance of that policy, and not a breach with it, must be the economic policy also. Historically, little groups of people over scattered areas began by protecting themselves from one another in little defensive villages and towns, by economic fences and tariff barriers of all kinds, in their rude way, just as they protected themselves, as political units, by their bows and arrows or spears; and it was not until they became politically united into larger and larger groups, and at last into nations, that their economic defences, keeping time with their political, were thrown down also.

And the net result of this was, that each little group being obliged at each stage to work up the soil and material lying under its own immediate control to their highest possible point - by all the instruments of production, however primitive and rude, that were open to them, - when the time came for their political amalgamation into larger and larger groups, it was found that, like thrifty couples who have each saved a little money for their marriage and honeymoon, each had its own thoroughly cultivated and developed patrimony - plot of ground, machinery, horses, cattle, etc., - ready to throw into the union. And the consequence of this, again, was, that whatever economic restrictions were made necessary by the political reconstruction, the nature and potentiality of every rood of ground and of every existing instrument of production being already known, bits of inferior land would be let fall out of cultivation here, old water-mills suppressed there, here an old peat bog, there an old stone or gravel quarry, at another spot an old pit of metal ore, or a rude mechanical or chemical process, or what not; and all because it was now more profitable for the new political amalgamation to be supplied at those salient superior points within its borders where each kind of industrial operation could be supplied at the least cost; precisely as we see to-day in the case of the American Trusts, where the reconstructions which have given to the Trusts their general economy and efficiency, as well as their most formidable industrial fighting power against their foreign rivals, have only been possible through each smaller concern in these great amalgamations having been first independently developed and brought to its greatest point of effectiveness, by being allowed to grow up in security at a time when, from the absence of railway and transport facilities, the effective domination of each of them from any great distance was impossible.

And hence if we wish to realize to the full what would have happened to the economic world had its development not proceeded from small protected economic groups growing ever larger, until as last all alike have to stand the fire of a fierce Free Trade competition throughout the whole mass, we have only to imagine what would happen in America to-day, with the giant Trusts in each department of industry already in the field. It is obvious that, with the exception of the cultivation of the soil, no industry could take root at all. With the sword of market price, fixed by these mammoth industries, suspended over the whole Continent, only the most reckless and adventurous, willing like Arctic explorers to risk all and lose all, would take the field against them. I have assumed here for the nonce that transport facilities are fully developed, but in actual fact the absence of them is one of the greatest difficulties to be encountered in endeavouring to foist a universal Free Trade on separate nations before the time is ripe for their being taken up into one great all-embracing political unity.