The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Protection--namely, that no human government can ever be trusted to adjust protective taxation without corruption--is no objection to the prohibitions which the Western Protectionists demand. The New Englanders say--“Let us meet the English on fair terms;” the Western men say that they will not meet them at all. Some of the New York Protectionists declare that their object is merely the fostering of American manufactures until they are able to stand alone, the United States not having at present reached the point which had been attained by other nations when they threw Protection to the winds. Such halting Protectionists as these manufacturers find no sympathy in Australia or the West, although the highest of all Protectionists look forward to the distant time when, local centers being everywhere established, customs will be abolished on all sides, and mankind form one great family. The chief thing to be borne in mind in discussing Protection with an Australian or an American is that he never thinks of denying that under Protection he pays a higher price for his goods than he would if he bought them from us, and that he admits at once that he temporarily pays a tax of 15 or 20 per cent. upon everything he buys in order to help set his country on the road to national unity and ultimate wealth. Without Protection, the American tells you, there will be commercial New York, sugar-growing Louisiana, the corn-growing Northwest, but no America. Protection alone can give him a united country. When we talk about things being to the advantage or disadvantage of a country, the American Protectionist asks what you mean. Admitting that all you say against Protection may be true, he says that he had sooner see America supporting a hundred millions independent of the remainder of the world than two hundred millions dependent for clothes upon the British. “You, on the other hand,” he says, “would prefer our custom. How can we discuss the question? The difference between us is radical, and we have no base on which to build.” It is a common doctrine in the colonies of England that a nation cannot be called “independent” if it has to cry out to another for supplies of necessaries; that true national existence is first attained when the country becomes capable of supplying to its own citizens those goods without which they cannot exist in the state of comfort which they have already reached. Political is apt to follow upon commercial dependency, they say.