Free trade is undoubtedly the best, or rather the only possible, policy for a country like England, with thirty millions of inhabitants, producing food for less than half the number, and depending on foreign trade for the supplies necessary to keep the other half alive. It is the best policy also for a country which, owing to its mineral resources, its accessibility by sea to markets, its accumulated capital, and the inherited qualities, physical and moral, of its working population, has unrivalled advantages for cheap production. Nor can any dispassionate observer dispute that in England, which is such a country, free trade has worked well. It has not worked miracles, it has not introduced an industrial millennium, the poor are still with us, and it has not saved us from our share of commercial depressions. But, on the whole, national wealth has greatly increased, and, what is more important, national well-being has increased with it, the mass of the population, and especially the working classes, get better wages, work shorter hours, and are better fed, better clothed, and better educated than they were forty years ago. This is one side of the shield, and it is really a golden and not an illusory one. But look at the other side. Take the case of a country where totally opposite conditions prevail: where there is no surplus population, unlimited land, limited capital, labour scarce and dear, and no possibility of competing in the foreign or even in the home market with the manufactures which, with free trade, would be poured in by countries like England, in prior possession of all the elements of cheap production. It is by no means so clear that protection, to enable native industries to take root and grow, may not in such cases be the wisest policy.