predominated to an extent ever more suggestive of increasing political
uneasiness. It is now, as is notorious, more in evidence than ever
before. The tendency to concentrate at Washington, the demand that the
central government, assuming one function after another, shall become
imperial, the cry for the national enactment of laws, whether relating
to marital divorce or to industrial combinations,--all impinge on the
fundamental principle of local self-government, which assumed its
highest and most pronounced form in the claim of State Sovereignty. I am
now merely stating problems. I am not discussing the political ills or
social benefits which possibly may result from action. Nevertheless,
all, I think, must admit that the tendency to gravitation and
attraction is to-day as pronounced and as dangerous, especially in the
industrial communities of the North, as was the tendency to separation
and segregation pronounced and dangerous seventy years ago in the South.

To this I shall later return. I now merely point out what I apprehend to
be a tendency to extremes--an excess in the swinging of our
political pendulum.

We next come to that industrial factor which I have referred to as the
issue between the Free Trade of Adam Smith and Protection, as inculcated
by the so-called American school of political economists. The phases
which this issue has assumed are, I submit, well calculated to excite
the attention of the observant and thoughtful. I merely allude to them
now; but, in so far as it is in my power to make it so, my allusion will
be specific. I frankly acknowledge myself a Free-Trader. A Free-Trader
in theory, were it in my power I would be a Free-Trader in national
practice. There has been, so far as I know, but one example of absolute
free trade on the largest scale in world history. That one example,
moreover, has been a success as unqualified as undeniable. I refer to