The Free Traders were those who said that England would be wealthier, as a whole, if there were no restriction upon exchange at all, whether internal or external. A man having something to exchange with his English neighbour was, of course, free to exchange it without any interference; but the Free Trader’s particular point was that a man having something to exchange with a _foreign_ purchaser should be equally free to exchange it, without any interference at the ports in the way of export duty taxing the transaction. In the same way he said that the foreigner should be perfectly free to send here any goods he had to exchange against ours, and should neither be kept out by laws nor restricted by special import duties at the ports. “In this way,” said the Free Traders, “we shall get the maximum of wealth for the whole country.” The Protectionists, on the other hand, said: “Here are a lot of people engaged on a particular form of production in England. Those who have their capital in it are making profits, those who own the land on which the capital is invested are getting rents, and the working people are getting wages. The foreigner, having special advantages for this kind of production, which make him able to produce this particular thing more cheaply than we can, brings in that cheaper produce and offers it for sale to Englishmen. The people to whom it is offered for sale will, of course, buy the foreign stuff because it is cheaper. The result will be that the English people who have invested their capital in producing this particular thing--that is, who have got implements together and buildings, and the rest, suitable for producing this thing--will be ruined. It will not be worth their while to go on, for no one will buy their goods. Their profits will be extinguished, and their capital will decay to nothing. The rents on the land they occupy will also disappear, and, what is worst of all, the large population which live on wages produced by this kind of work will starve or have to be supported, idle, by other people. Their power of producing wealth will be lost to England. Therefore, let us tax this cheap foreign import so that our production at home shall be _protected_. Let us tax the foreign goods as they come in, so that the cost of producing abroad, with this tax added, comes to at least as much as the cost of producing the same stuff at home. In this way it will still be worth while for our people at home to go on producing this kind of thing. The Englishman at home will be just as ready to buy his fellow-citizen’s produce as the foreigner’s, for the price of each will be the same.”