A. Argument is superfluous here. The very word Protection is an assumption that meets all our requirements. It forecloses argument and shuts off dispute. Who doesn’t wish to be “protected”? And how charming it sounds to say we are protected from burglars, from enemies and from the horrors of trade—that is, trade with a foreigner. It must be always understood that if you could stand near the Canada or Mexico boundary and make a good bargain on the other side—say, the purchase of a horse for fifty dollars less than you could purchase him in your own country—you would inflict upon yourself and your country just so much loss. But if you buy the horse here at a price higher by fifty dollars, or over a tariff, with the fifty dollars added, you enrich both yourself and your country. On this doctrine, which is our fundamental one, we must and can stake everything, and against it the frothy waves of Free Trade will beat in vain. Q. Why is not Free Trade also a felicitous term? A. Things that are in themselves good, and that are made free and abundant, are, we must admit, generally to be approved. Abundant health or abundant friendship or abundant money we have not yet thought it wise to consider objectionable. But there are exceptions to all rules. Abundant trade—or Free Trade—which is trade done voluntarily by shrewd and sane men in order to procure abundant money, is different. To have it otherwise would upset our whole system of philosophy. What was this land of the free made for, if its main purpose were not to put shackles on trade? What we want is to eat our own cake and have it too; to sell everything we can to foreigners and buy nothing from them, and finally to get fat by stewing in our own juice. The term Free Trade—to refer to the original question—is now so asphyxiated by us, by our contempt of it, that it suggests a Pandora’s box of horrors the moment we mention it. To speak of it in this contemptuous way is really one of our strong arguments. What we want is to scream it out as a horror, to make it a bugbear. It is like telling children of some dreadful bogy lying in wait for them in the dark, or like Dr. Johnson’s experiment with the fishwoman of Billingsgate, when he called her a hypothenuse, a triangle, a parallelopipedon, and several other mathematical things of which she had not the faintest knowledge and which she consequently supposed were very bad. No, whatever else we do, let us stick to our insistent and persistent screech against Free Trade. _Monopoly; The Power Behind the Trust_ BY JOSEPH DANA MILLER