It would seem as though we Free Traders had become nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our former opponents were in favor of Protection. Just as they used to say “We are right; why argue the question?” so now, in face of the support of Protection by all the greatest minds in America, all the first statesmen of the Australias, we tell the New England and the Australian politicians that we will not discuss Protection with them, because there can be no two minds about it among men of intelligence and education. We will hear no defense of “national lunacy,” we say. If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue with an Australian or American Protectionist, we find ourselves in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments against the compelling people by act of Parliament to consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as soon as they are urged. If you attempt to prove that Protection is bolstered up by those whose private interests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd Australian diggers and the calculating Western farmers in America--men whose pocket interest is wholly opposed to Protection, and who yet, almost to a man, support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection to me in this way: he said he knew that under a protective tariff he had to pay dearer than would otherwise be the case for his jacket and his moleskin trowsers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing he aided in building up in the colony such trades as the making up of clothes, in which his brother and other men physically too weak to be diggers could gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying Protection of the Australian diggers is of the character of that which would be accorded to the glaziers of a town by the citizens, if they broke their windows to find their fellow-townsmen work: “We know we lose, but men must live,” they say. At the same time they deny that the loss will be enduring. The digger tells you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss, but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old country would be pocket loss, in a new country such as his only comes to this--that it forms a check on immigration. Wages being 5_s._ a day in Victoria and 3_s._ a day in England, workmen would naturally flock into Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell to 3_s._ 6_d._ or 4_s._. Here comes in prohibition, and by increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting into the Australian handicraftsman‘s margin of luxuries, and reducing his wages to 4_s._, diminishes the temptation to immigration, and consequently the influx itself.