"The Free Trade theory was based upon one assumption: that England was
to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. And
the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure
delusion. The conditions of modern industry, steam-power and
machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially
coals. And other countries beside England,--France, Belgium, Germany,
America, even Russia,--have coals. And the people over there did not
see the advantage of being turned into Irish pauper farmers merely for
the greater wealth and glory of English capitalists. They set
resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the
rest of the world; and the consequence is, that the manufacturing
monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century is irretrievably
broken up.

"But the manufacturing monopoly of England is the pivot of the present
social system of England. Even while that monopoly lasted, the
markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of
English manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence. And
new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the
negroes of the Congo are now to be forced into the civilisation
attendant upon Manchester calicos, Staffordshire pottery, and
Birmingham hardware. How will it be when Continental, and especially
American, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities--when the
predominating share, still held by British manufacturers, will become
reduced from year to year? Answer, Free Trade, thou universal
panacea.

"I am not the first to point this out. Already, in 1883, at the
Southport meeting of the British Association, Mr. Inglis Palgrave, the