Take as a simple illustration the case of an Australian colony imposing an import duty on foreign boots and shoes. There is not a doubt that this is practically taxing the immense majority of colonists who wear and do not make these articles. But, on the other hand, it makes the colony a possible field for emigration for all the shoemakers of Europe, and shoemaking a trade to which any Australian with a large family can bring up one of his sons. Looking at it from the strict point of view of the most rigid political economist, the maximum production of wealth, which is the better policy? The production of wealth, we must recollect, depends on labour, and productive labour depends on the labourer finding his tools—that is, employment at which he can work. A labourer who cannot find work at living wages is worse than a zero: he is a negative quantity as far as the accumulation of wealth is concerned. On the other hand, every workman who finds work, even if it may not be of the ideally best description, is a wealth-producing machine. What he spends on himself and his family gives employment to other workmen, and the work must be poor indeed if the produce of a year’s labour is not more than the cost of a year’s subsistence. The surplus adds to the national capital, and thus capital and population go on increasing in geometrical progression. The first problem, therefore, for a new or a backward country is to find ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,’ for as many hands as possible. The problem of making that employment the most productive possible is a secondary one, which will solve itself in each case rather by actual practice than by abstract theory. This much, however, is pretty clear, that in order to secure the maximum of employment it must be varied. All are not fit for agricultural work, and, even if they were, if the conditions of soil and climate favour large estates and sheep or cattle runs rather than small farms, a large amount of capital may provide work for only a small number of labourers. On social and moral grounds, also, apart from dry considerations of political economy, progress intelligence and a higher standard of life are more likely to be found with large cities, manufactures, and a variety of industrial occupations than with a dead level of a few millionaires and a few shepherds, or of a few landlords and a dense population of poor peasants. If protection is the price which must be paid to render such a larger life possible, it may be sound policy to pay it, and the result seems to show that neither it nor free trade is inconsistent with rapid progress, while, on the other hand, neither of them affords an absolute immunity from the evils that dog the footsteps of progress, and from the periods of reaction and depression which accompany vicissitudes of trade.