He proved the teachings of Ricardo and Mill by what he had learned from the conditions of the country folk about Salisbury and Cambridge. He was wont to base his arguments on some homely, definite fact as illustration for his plain, home-made reasoning; for instance, he objected to a certain increased tax because it meant that every old woman in England would have a lump of sugar the less in her tea. That was the concrete thing on which he based his policy; and surely it is not one to be overlooked by a true statesman. He supplemented his knowledge by studying inexhaustibly the political, financial and economic movements of his time, and delighted in spending a quiet Sunday reading through all the newspapers he could collect. His appetite for them was insatiable, and he felt that he had been defrauded if his friends, when reading the Parliamentary debates, skipped any of even ‘the blow off,’ as they called the peroration. He enriched his mind less by a pre-occupation with the abstract theory of Political Economy than by keeping constantly in touch with the affairs which were in actual course of transaction. [Sidenote: _Free Trade and Protection._] He was keenly interested in all those questions where political economy borders on finance. His book, _Free Trade and Protection_, published fifteen years after his first, assailed the tariff fetish dear to his generation. Terse and masterly, his publication became popular, and was regarded by many of the critics of his day as conclusive. In it he limited the problem to what he deemed its practical viewpoint. To him this was purely a commercial one, a question of profit and loss. Was protection profitable or not? He found that, sporadic evidence at times to the contrary, protection was not a paying business, and that it would only be maintained in the long run by a loss to the community, and therefore he considered it an obstruction in the way of progress, capital, and the general weal. [Sidenote: The Luxury of Light.]