This country, at the beginning of the discussion a hundred years ago, was already producing great quantities of manufactured goods: cloth and machinery, ships and so on. It also produced on its fields the wheat and meat and dairy produce with which it fed itself. But as the population increased the amount of food being produced on the soil of England, though getting larger in the total, got smaller in proportion to the rapidly increasing population. Therefore there was a danger of its getting dearer. The Free Traders said: “Let foreign food come in free. If it is produced in climates where for the same amount of labour you can get more wheat and more meat and more dairy produce then, of course, many of our agricultural people will have to give up working on the land. But they can take to manufacturing, and the total amount of food which the English will get for so much labour on their part will be greater. Where an agricultural labourer working an hour, for instance, can get a pound’s weight of food, the same man working one hour in a factory will get, say, by exchange of the manufacture against foreign food, two pounds of food, if we allow all foreign food to come in free.” These Free Trade arguments look, when they are first studied, not only simple and clear, but unanswerable, and indeed most educated men--nearly all educated men--in Queen Victoria’s reign, thought they _were_ unanswerable, and that Protectionists here at home (who were no longer allowed to put their theories into laws) and Protectionists abroad who had kept up tariffs against foreign trade, were simply ignorant and foolish men who did not properly understand the elements of Economic Science. To see whether the Free Traders were right or wrong in these ideas, let us next turn to the arguments with which the Protectionists met them. These arguments were of two kinds:-- (_a_) There were Protectionists who said: “We cannot follow all these elaborate abstract discussions about a science called Economics; we are practical men with plenty of common sense and experience, and all we know is that if the foreigner comes in free we shall be ruined. He can sell his wheat at such a price that our farmers will lose on it. Our labourers will leave the land, the rents paid to our landlords will vanish. You will thus ruin English wealth altogether.”