[759] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 1. [760] _Ibid._ pp. 10, 17. [761] _How to Finance Municipal Enterprises_, pp. 3-5. [762] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 20. [763] _Ibid._ [764] _Nouvelle Biographie Generale_, vol. xxxv. p. 39. [765] Roscher, _System_, p. 227. CHAPTER XXI SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS ON FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION In his thoughtful book on Socialism, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., the Socialist leader, attributes the rise of the Socialist movement in great Britain to various causes, one of which is "the reaction against Manchesterism."[766] Socialists, generally speaking, are opposed to Free Trade. Neither the moderate nor the revolutionary sections of British Socialism have a good word to say for it. The Socialist leaders, looking at the question of Free Trade and Protection from the worker's point of view, have arrived with Lecky at the conclusion that the whole Liberal Free Trade agitation is one of the greatest political impostures which the world has witnessed,[767] a view which, by the by, was also expressed by Bismarck.[768] Socialists are not under any illusion as to the causes which led to the introduction of Free Trade into Great Britain, and they sneer at the humanitarian cant with which its promoters successfully surrounded it. One of the leading Socialist books states with regard to this point: "Protection was no longer needed by the manufacturers, who had supremacy in the world-market, unlimited access to raw material, and a long start of the rest of the world in the development of machinery and in industrial organisation. The landlord class, on the other hand, was absolutely dependent on Protection. The triumph of Free Trade therefore signifies economically the decay of the old landlord class pure and simple, and the victory of capitalism. The capitalist class was originally no fonder of Free Trade than the landlords. It destroyed in its own interest the woollen manufacture in Ireland, and it would have throttled the trade of the colonies had it not been for the successful resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia. It was Protectionist so long as it suited its purpose to be so. But when cheap raw material was needed for its looms, and cheap bread for its workers; when it feared no foreign competitor, and had established itself securely in India, in North America, in the Pacific; then it demanded Free Trade."[769] "Protection at home was needless to manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, and whose very existence was staked on the expansion of their exports. Protection at home was of advantage to none but to the producers of articles of food and other raw materials, to the agricultural interest, which, under the then existing circumstances in England, meant the receivers of rent, the landed aristocracy."[770]