'Allow me to say,' answered Mr. Clark,' that Europe and America are not Freeland. I certainly cannot regard protection even abroad as rational, for the assumptions from which it starts are under all circumstances false. But neither do I think the foreign free trader is essentially wiser than the protectionist, for he also starts from assumptions which are baseless in an exploiting country. The prohibitionists think they are encouraging production: they are doing the opposite, they are hindering and hampering production; and the free traders, in so far as they insist upon this fact, are perfectly correct. Both parties, however, fail to see that in an exploiting society, which is never able to utilise more than a small part of its power to produce, the influence of legislative interference with trade upon the good or the bad utilisation of productive power is a matter of very little importance. Of what advantage is it to the free traders that a nation under the domination of their commercial system _is able_ to make the most prolific use of their industrial capacities, so long as the continuance of industrial servitude prevents this nation from enjoying more than enough to satisfy the barest necessities of life? More than is consumed cannot, under any circumstances, be produced; and consumption among you abroad is so infinitely small, that it is verily ridiculous to dispute over the question whether this or that commodity can be produced better at home or abroad. 'What alone interests us in this controversy among the foreign commercial politicians is that neither party has the slightest suspicion that what the free traders rightly reproach the protectionists with, and what the latter wrongly defend, is the very thing that gains so many adherents to protection--namely, the hindering and hampering of production. The protectionists have a right to boast that they compel their people to apply two day's labour or a double amount of capital to the production at home of a thing which, by means of external trade, might have been exchanged for things that are the product of merely half as much expenditure of home labour. We, who work in order to enjoy, would have a good right to treat as insane any persons among us who proposed such a course as an "encouragement of home labour"; but among you, where labour and enjoyment are completely dissevered, where millions cry for work as a favour--among you, the hampering of labour is felt to be a benefit because it makes more toil necessary in order to procure an equal amount of enjoyment. Among you it is also a somewhat dangerous narcotic, for protection has a Janus head: it not merely increases the toil, it at the same time still more diminishes the consumption by raising the price of the articles in demand, the rise in price never being followed immediately by a rise in wages; so that, in the end, in spite of the increased difficulty in production, no more labour and capital are employed than before.