Here, as in other cases, there are two sides of the shield, and true statesmanship consists in seeing both, and doing the right thing, at the right place, and at the right time. If free trade is, as we believe, ultimately to prevail, it will be an affair of time. The real trial of protection comes when it has stimulated production to a point which gluts the home market and leaves a surplus which must be exported. Exports of articles the cost of which has been artificially raised by protection, cannot compete in the world’s market with the cheaper products of free-trade countries. Vicissitudes therefore of prosperity and depression must tend to become more frequent and more severe, and, if production goes on, a point must be reached where, at whatever cost, it must either be arrested or made capable of competing in the wider market. The United States are probably not far from such a point, and it would have been already reached but for the immense and unexhausted resources of that vast continent. In France the point has apparently been reached, and we find that, with a lower scale of wages than in England, it is becoming more and more difficult every day to maintain that lower scale, and the export trade of its manufactured goods to foreign markets. Protection, leading to higher wages and profits than can be permanently maintained, and artificially enhancing the cost of living to the working classes, threatens, more and more every day, to introduce strained relations between capital and labour in most countries of Europe.