The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886Various
History
The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886
Various
Periodicals
they are already showing signs of deep interest in a matter which
concerns the very means of their livelihood. They are in advance of
Parliament and Ministries on this subject. Mr. Froude is well within
bounds in asserting that 'those among us who have disbelieved all along
that a great nation can venture its whole fortunes safely on the power
of underselling its neighbours in calicoes and iron-work, no longer
address a public opinion entirely cold.' What, perhaps, has tended as
much as anything else to open our eyes is the discovery, that other
nations begin to be able to undersell us, not only in foreign markets,
but even in our own--here in England, at Sheffield, Birmingham, and
Manchester. Carlyle usually defined the Free Trade theory as the system
of 'cheap and nasty.' As we have never had Free Trade, and therefore as
it has never been properly tested, it is impossible to say what effects
it was capable of producing, properly worked out. The great fact which
confronts us to-day is that no other nation in the world, and not even
our own colonists, will have anything whatever to do with it on any
terms. This fact, at least, the English workingmen are beginning to see
and to understand, and results will flow from it at present not
anticipated by 'statesmen,' who know little or nothing about the hard
matter-of-fact conditions under which trade is carried on, and who are
assiduously primed by underlings with statistics which they repeat by
rote, and as to the real value or signification of which they are
completely and hopelessly in the dark.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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