human and national instincts, their theories were as irrefragable as those of our modern bimetallists, and of those ancient economists on whose doctrines they rested. But their lasting usefulness depended on the final achievement of a cosmopolitan confederation. Disraeli presaged with weighty reasons, scouted when they were detailed, that other nations would never fall into the scheme; he analysed the special conditions of France, Germany, and America. He also foretold, concerning corn, in common with all articles of certain and practically unlimited demand (as cotton and tea, for examples), that “the moment you have a settled market, in exact proportion to the demand, prices will fall. This is the inevitable rule.” He pressed further the grave peril, hardly yet realised, of England’s dependence on foreign supplies in time of war. But beyond all, he emphasised the social dangers--the misery for individuals and for classes. In this precipitate measure towards a material class-millennium, he discerned a large element of possible denationalisation, a displacement of labour which must unavoidably deluge the unwieldy towns, and which would to some extent relax the fibre of the nation and weaken its very means of defence, the replacement of excellence by cheapness, and of national welfare by wealth, the substitution for the landed interest which ought to preponderate though never to predominate, not, as seemed for the moment, by a high-toned class of responsible manufacturers, but eventually by an overwhelming clique of irresponsible capitalists with self-interests fluid as their portable property; the decrease of the national, the natural sway of large landowners inheriting a representative sense of accountability to tenants and dependants; a probably great fall in agriculture and its profits, prices and wages; the waste on a large scale and the depopulation of the soil itself; the special aggravation of ruinous elements in Ireland; an ultimate decay, when foreign competition should develop, of that very manufacturing interest the system was protested to advantage and intended to protect; for he divined already in the ’forties that to fight hostile tariffs with “free imports” could only benefit England while continental manufacturers were in comparative infancy.