THE WORKMAN'S VIEW OF

'FAIR TRADE.

Is there one man or woman who repents of the repeal of the Cornlaws? any one who has not seen, many times over, that, unless those laws had been repealed as and when they were, semi-starvation and total revolution might have come upon us at almost any harvest-time these five-and-thirty years? That first great step in Free Trade has prevented evils which it is in no one mind's power to conceive of, much less to reckon up. But it neither prevented nor has cured all the evils that flesh is heir to; and who was so sanguine or so lunatic as to expect that it would? There have been money panics, there has been distress, or depression of trade, with other evils and fluctuations inevitably incident to a country and a people like But there has been no famine of bread, nor anything approaching to it, as there had been, over and over again, before Richard Cobden and John Bright were called to the task of taking off a damnable protection from the selfish and greedy corn-farmers, and providing a permanent supply of bread at rational prices for a hungerbitten nation.

ours.

This was the immediate effect of the wonderful labours of those pre-eminent men; but it should have been as surely the forerunner of a great number of beneficial consequences flowing from the same principle, and its establishment as a rule of policy and legislation. Of some of these we have had, as it were, a taste, though not the full enjoyment which we were entitled to expect and to realise. Not only was bread made more abundant in quantity, better in quality, more constant in supply, and, at the same time, cheaper; but the accompanying result was to multiply productive employment at improved wages, and with fewer breaks from incidental causes. It was only too natural, perhaps, that gains so great and palpable as these should make us thankful to contentment; and this was the case, causing us to forget for a time the old maxim which teaches men to regard nothing as done so long as anything remains to be done. In time, however, we have come to see that the monster, sometimes called Monopoly and sometimes Protection, has more heads than one, if not as many as the ancient fable-mongers gave to their hundred-headed serpent. One of those heads was cut off when we induced Parliament to do away with restrictions upon the

importation of foreign-grown corn; but, whilst all the rest remained hissing in our teeth, it would have been a mere imagination to suppose that we had secured Free Trade. That hiss, from all the remaining heads of the beast at once, has been loudly and threateningly raised, and we shall have reason to be very grateful for the horrid noise, provided only that it disturbs us in our foolish dream and wakes us out of our sluggardly sleep.

In nothing does this new noise more nearly resemble that old serpent the Devil, to which Eve attributed one head, but to which the Greek mythologists and their Roman dupes gave a hundred, than in the wily plausibility with which it changes its tone, and, Protection being too deliberately diabolical, seductively substitutes the beguiling cry of Reciprocity. Now, what, in the name of Johnson, is reciprocity? Well, it is a word, as my learned friend tells me, born in old Rome, but not until the legitimacy of original Latin words had been a good deal bastardised. No responsible Latin writer is cited in dictionaries as sponsor for any such expression, yet it may be found in two forms in those vocabularies, the older meaning being that returns by the same way,' if there be any clear meaning in that; and the newer, a verb, 'to bring back by the same way, to fetch back,' or, figuratively, 'to retreat backwards.' This, by the way, is rather ominous; bring back, fetch back, and backwards, look very much as if by the institution of Reciprocity were really intended the restitution of Protection. The Italians, however, who, being lineal descendants of the Latins, ought to know, give the signification of interchangeable to that which they and their ancestors styled reciprocal; and, without question, whether in more modern French or English, the word now revived as a 'backward' cry in political party really means to make a return in kind or in value; in short, mutual dealing. The proposal, it must be admitted, is sweetly seductive on the face of it.

But we old birds are not to be caught with chaff; we must beware lest our feet stick fast through alighting upon a good-looking twig limed with Reciprocity.' Admitted, as facts not to be denied, that trade is dull as ditch-water; agriculture, pending harvest, in some uncertainty; and that, as a consequence of such untowardness, there is more idle labour than remunerative employment. Granted, further, that certain foreign markets are shut against our products by charges upon imports tending to direct prohibition. What then? No sooner is the question put than, chameleon-like, Reciprocity changes colour, and becomes Retaliation. We are urged to exclude those who exclude us, and are promised, as the sure if not the instant result, that trade would revive, profits and wages flourish in equal proportions, prosperity reign in field and factory, and a national millennium forthwith ensue.

Now, as we have said and seen, both farmer and manufacturer

are in the dumps; and, while foreigners are the Obstructives most difficult to deal with, some of John Bull's foes are they of his own household. But how would Reciprocity, in the form of Retaliation, be a remedy? The lex talionis has been often tried since the phrase was invented, and long and many times before. Where would Retaliation end, if, under the guise of Reciprocity, we were mad enough to entertain the proposal? For my part, I know of no end to it in fact or in fiction but that which came to the fight between the Kilkenny cats-a fate, by the bye, which had been long foretold by the apostle Paul to those quarrelsome Galatians: If ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.' They took the warning in time to avoid the extinction; and we shall do well by their example.

But it cannot be disguised that we still have to fight for it, and with all the pertinacity which this Irish tradition attributes to the contending animals. We cannot, therefore, too soon bring the matter down to the details involved in the captivating phrase of Reciprocity,' by which the many heads of the Tory serpent would fain deceive us. What, then, are we to reciprocate? in what way to retaliate? Doubtless there are some materials for such a course. We might begin with Bread, with which, if we did not begin, we must come to it before we reached an end. This, in fact, is the very snake hid in the grass. Call the policy recommended to us so beguilingly by either name applied to it, in whatsoever other things it might be begun or continued, it could not be made perfect until the Corn-laws had been restored.

But, while it may be easily foreseen what these wizards would do before they finished, were the opportunity afforded them, with what, I wonder, would they begin? There is nothing too desperate or too absurd for such projectors, or we might take it for granted that they would not dream of reviving manufactures, so long in a state of collapse, by clapping prohibitory duties upon raw materials coming from abroad. But we shall see. Wines and spirits, it may in the meantime be taken for granted, would be among the objects of their earliest attack. For how could they make an onset at all, unless they doubled the cost of claret and brandy-more especially, if, like the Turks with their pig, they are at odds among themselves as to which should be prohibited and which should not, or whether they both should be alike good? In my opinion at any rate, they will leave the most difficult part of their project to the last, not only because it would be found to be most difficult, but also because its bare proposal would excite a general if not a universal alarm. There is no reason, however, why we should hold our tongues about the matter. Well, then, Omen of light and leading'! supposing you would like, of which no one stands in doubt, to

clap on a good big bread tax again, how, may we ask you, as Cobden asked Peel without getting an answer, would you contrive to secure an advance in the wages of labour equal to the consequent enhancement in the price of that staff of life, the quartern loaf. When bread was at its worst, in quality, in scarcity, or in dearness, how much did the starvation of the people put into the long stockings of the farmers? As little as their landlords could make it, and sometimes, perhaps, less than nothing. Nay, those landlords themselves rarely got what they were promised by the very law which made home-grown bread dear, and excluded foreign corn entirely; the main difference between owner and occupier being that, while the former was simply disappointed, the latter was drawn dry and ruined.

With respect to the foreign tariffs which, instead of responding to our example, persist in adhering to false principles and a bad policy, we are reduced to the position of enduring what we cannot cure. The draught upon our patience may be large; but that evil is not without mitigation in the degree of much already achieved, and in the reasonable hope that prejudice will disperse like the darkness of night, and give place to the light of reason. If we listened to the men who counsel a retrograde action, we should, at starting, be like the fool who cut off his nose to be revenged upon his face. Why do we receive what the foreigner offers? Why, because our own people want his stuffs—in many cases cannot do without them—and in the end are quite willing to pay for them at the present prices. But, it is answered, our own manufacturers suffer by the competition. The argument is similar, whether breadstuffs or manufactures are in question. We must not do evil for all in order that good may come to the few. If our own manufactures are in any minor respect inferior to corresponding fabrics woven in foreign looms, our manufacturers must let the competition stimulate them to fresh efforts, and not sit down in dust and ashes in front of silent and empty furnaces or factories. The only way in which a market can be made for English goods in other countries is by making them better and selling them cheaper than those offered by foreign manufacturers. Nay, it ought to be regarded as a happy circumstance if we are sometimes compelled to acknowledge the superiority of articles produced abroad to the like kind of articles produced at home; for, without the animating influence of such occasional discoveries, we should always be in danger of settling on our lees, and giving all up as a bad job. The consumer,' it has been well observed, is not to be victimised for the sake of the producer.'

6

These questions have, to use Carlyle's phrase, their past and present'; and how do they compare? In 1842, as that remarkable observer puts it, the population of England and Wales was 16,130,326

souls, and the paupers-poor souls!-indoor and out, 1,429,089. In 1879-a very bad year for harvests, as all too well know-the population of England and Wales was 25,165,336, and the paupers, in and out, only 80,426, or not much more than half what their predecessors in that dismal race had been seven-and-thirty years before. The rule-of-three sum to be built upon such figures would take this form: If in the first times of partial Free Trade such were the results, what might not be the case in other seven-and-thirty years, were Free Trade made total, complete, and all round?

Let what we suffer at home from the mere want of market accommodation have one good effect, among others to warn us against shutting our market-doors against the wares of the world. It is bad enough that fish should be six times as dear in London as it is at Plymouth; but why, in the name of all that is not lunatic, should it be fifty per cent. dearer in our own metropolis than it is in that of France? Of what use is the broad and open Thames as a highway to London, when beaten, by long chalks, on the long, narrow, and wriggling Seine, which is the only access of anything by waterway to Paris?

We need not, happily, take fright at the rumoured deficiency in the wheat supply from the United States. This may not be the most bountiful of harvests in that region of the globe. America, both independent and British, continues to draw largely upon the European populations, which, whatever it may say as to the countries thus drained of hands and brains, is no proof of decadence in those which attract half the nations of the Old World. The Canada Dominion will soon number four millions and a half of flocking subjects, pretty equally enriching nearly all parts of British America. Without including Columbia, Canada rejoices in a surplus revenue of three millions and a half of dollars on the year. Meanwhile, the immigration into New York for the advancing year increases month by month, and far exceeds the influx of 1880; while the receipts of the National Government for July present an almost unprecedented total, the inference from which is confirmed by the busiest and biggest trade ever known. On this shore we have the best authority for saying that American progress and prosperity have thus far met with no serious check. The British farmer, indeed, looks as anxiously to the wheat-fields across the Atlantic as to his own, each in its measure influencing the corn markets of Norwich, Lincoln, Wakefield, and the rest. Those of us, however, who are not farmers, have our reasons for wishing no ill to the large wheat-growers of the United States; but, as far as American supplies are concerned, neither they nor ourselves are dependent upon wheat alone for cereals available for food or for merchandise. It does not even take the lead with them. While their wheat harvest is five times the bulk of ours, the maize