Supposing people in this country had never heard of foreign wine, but had to make their wine out of their own grapes grown in hot-houses, and at great expense, the wine coming, let us say, to £1 a gallon. Meanwhile we are producing easily great quantities of coal because we have great coal-mines near the surface. We come to hear of people living in another climate who can grow grapes easily in the open, who need much less labour and capital to ripen them than we do in our artificial way in hot-houses, and who can therefore send us wine at 10s. a gallon. Then we can get for each £1 worth of labour and capital twice as much wine as we got before. Instead of wasting our time artificially growing grapes in hot-houses to make our wine, let the people who used to work in the hot-houses become coal-miners, so that more coal may be produced and this extra coal exchanged for foreign wine. A pound’s worth of labour and capital in coal will get us 2 gallons of wine from the foreigner when the same amount of labour and capital used in making the wine ourselves would only get us one gallon. Let the capital that used to keep up the hot-houses be spent in developing mines, and we shall find as a result that we are as rich as ever we used to be in coal and richer in wine. Our total wealth will be increased. In the particular case of the English dispute about Free Trade and Protection not wine but a much more important thing was concerned, namely food; and that was what gave the political discussion its practical value and made it so violent. It is also because food was in question that the Free Traders won, and that England was, for a whole lifetime, up to the Great War, a Free Trade country--that is, a country allowing all foreign produce to come in and compete on equal terms with home produce.