Those who speak of the selfishness of the Protectionists as a whole, can never have taken the trouble to examine into the arguments by which Protection is supported in Australia and America. In these countries, Protection is no mere national delusion; it is a system deliberately adopted with open eyes as one conducive to the country‘s welfare, in spite of objections known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly, it is at all events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice, illustrative of a certain nobility in the national heart. The Australian diggers and Western farmers in America are setting a grand example to the world of self-sacrifice for a national object; hundreds of thousands of rough men are content to live--they and their families--upon less than they might otherwise enjoy, in order that the condition of the mass of their countrymen may continue raised above that of their brother toilers in Old England. Their manufactures are beginning now to stand alone, but hitherto, without Protection, the Americans would have had no cities but seaports. By picturing to ourselves England dependent upon the City of London, upon Liverpool, and Hull, and Bristol, we shall see the necessity the Western men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against New York and Philadelphia. In short, the tendency, according to the Western farmers, of Free Trade, in the early stages of a country‘s existence, is to promote universal centralization, to destroy local centers and the commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with the cost of transport to the distant centers, consequent upon the absence of local markets, that he can grow but wheat and corn continuously, and cannot but exhaust his soil. With markets so distant, the richest forest lands are not worth clearing, and a wave of settlement sweeps over the country, occupying the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once more. Protection in the colonies and America is to a great degree a revolt against steam. Steam is making the world all one; steam “corrects” differences in the price of labor. When steam brings all races into competition with each other, the cheaper races will extinguish the dearer, till at last some one people will inhabit the whole earth. Coal remains the only power, as it will probably always be cheaper to carry the manufactured goods than to carry the coal. Time after time I have heard the Western farmers draw imaginary pictures of the state of America if Free Trade should gain the day, and asking of what avail it is to say that Free Trade and free circulation of people is profitable to the pocket, if it destroys the national existence of America; what good to point out the gain of weight to their purses, in the face of the destruction of their religion, their language, and their Saxon institutions.