Fifty years have elapsed since the adoption of free trade by England. It was hoped that the free entrance of commodities extended to all the world would pave the way to an era of mutual peace and good will. But, judging by the political situation, and taking the armaments as an outward sign of good intentions, the era of peace and good will among nations is certainly far off. To get a trading advantage here and a concession from a semibarbarous country there is still the ambitious striving of the cabinets and the diplomacy of Europe. To give the striving emphasis, industry is taxed to the breaking point and labor to the starving point. Russia exhausts her resources in a railroad through the Siberian waste in her endeavor to obtain an outlet to the sea, which is jealously closed to her at the southwestern end of her dominions by England. The trader of Manchester, fearing for his markets, grows frantic at the prospect of Russian cotton goods being brought to China or to India. The mere acquisition of a port in Manchuria by Russia threatens to seal his doom. But he might look on with complacency. Russia's labor is very dear, capital is dear, wages are on the Asiatic level, famine still stalks through the land, intercommunication is made difficult by the lack of roads, and her wonderful natural resources lie unimproved because the eyes of greed, like those of the dog crossing the stream, are turned on the coveted piece of meat he sees reflected in the water, and to grasp which he drops the one he holds in his mouth. France bristles with bayonets, and is constantly at pains to increase her naval armaments, about whose seaworthiness her own minister of marine expresses suspicions, in obedience to a nervous restlessness for foreign acquisition. England, after her feat in civilizing savages and barbarians in the customary fashion, shown again at Omdurman, is ready to turn her war dogs on France, because the latter has the temerity to demand a slice of Soudanese territory. Well might she have given as hush-money, or for the mere grace of the action, a few thousand square miles of a country closed to access except by the permission of Great Britain, which has successfully pre-empted every desirable bit of land in sight. Germany, instead of using her newly liberated energies at home in an endeavor to elevate the miserable condition of her working classes, taxes their bread and meat, never too freely supplied, to increase the size of her armies and the number of her battle ships. The defense and expansion of her colonial empire is her leading thought. A strange paradox: The workingman and the peasant are overburdened with taxes on the necessaries of life, so as to procure markets for a limited quantity of factory products outside of the field secured in open competition. While professing friendship and brotherly love, they all have their eyes on their neighbor's throat, fearful only lest the other might clutch first.