My dear fellow! I know your stale arguments by heart. I have looked into your dishonest and fictitious statistics and discovered their imposture. I know you can make glib quotations from Adam Smith and Mill, and misapply them. It is easy for you to prate about Political _Economy_, and at the same time to practise Political _Extravagance_, of the most ruinous description; but I ask you to leave theory for a short time and look ugly facts straight in the face, divesting your mind, if you can, of all prejudice. These facts I will give you in the next chapter. But now don’t misunderstand me. I am not a _rabid_ protectionist. I am not an advocate of Fair trade, Reciprocity, or Retaliation. I hold that Protection, if carried beyond its legitimate limits, is nearly as mischievous in its action as Free trade. And that although “Fair trade,” “Reciprocity” and “Retaliation” are cries that have been evoked by the evils that Free trade has brought upon us, yet they are wrong in practice, as an attempt at a compromise with an utterly false principle; and I am glad that the movement has collapsed. I hold that Free trade is entirely wrong in principle and disastrous in results. Every argument of the free-trader is based on the _misuse_, not upon the _proper use_, of Protection. Every so-called triumphant exposure of the evils caused by Protection has simply been an exposure of the evils of Protection carried _beyond its legitimate limits_. The Corn Laws, to which Free trade owes its existence, were an instance of undue protection; they urgently required _alteration_, not _repeal_. Free trade advocates are unable to distinguish the difference between the use and the misuse of a principle. In their abhorrence of its misuse, they would sweep it away altogether. They are about as reasonable as the man who discovers that too much food will cause indigestion, and therefore proposes, as an infallible law of political economy, the dogma that no food whatever is to be taken. And they stigmatize as “simpletons without memory or logic,” as men “beyond the reach of argument”[1] those who decline to accept the Free trade gospel of starvation. FOOTNOTE: [1] Mr. Bright’s letter to A. Sharp, Bradford, 1879. CHAPTER IV. A FEW UGLY FACTS. I have said that facts are against your idol, let me advance a few of them:-- (1.) The prophecies made by the originators of free trade have proved to be false. (2.) England stands alone as a free-trader. Free trade, at the present time, is either an English, or a barbarous custom. (3.) France made a partial trial of free trade, but has drawn back and refused to continue the commercial treaty. (4.) Increased wealth,--due to improvements in science, steam, and electricity, although dishonestly claimed the work of free trade,--has been shared by all civilized nations. (5.) Protectionist countries have made _greater relative advance_ in prosperity than England.