And if so, why then should foreign or Colonial trade be necessarily postponed to the home trade, as Adam Smith demands, on the mere ground that, like the tail of the tapeworm, it occupies the lowest place in a fancied hierarchy based on its relative distance from the head? The soil of Attica, for example, was barren: bat did Athens wait until her last square yard of territory was cultivated to its extreme limit before she took advantage of her geographical position to make herself the centre and emporium of the foreign trade with the Archipelago, with her colonies in Asia Minor, and with the Eastern Mediterranean generally? Again Venice, Florence, Genoa, and the other great cities of Italy in the Middle Ages had no territory to speak of; but did they therefore wait to go through the different stages of Adam Smith's formula in the cultivation of their land, or even in the development of their manufactures, before they dared venture on the foreign trade with the rest of Europe and the East which made their fortune? Or again, did Spain and Portugal wait till they had exhausted their available capital in agriculture and manufactures before they could bring themselves to set sail for America to exploit their newly discovered silver mine? And the same questions may be asked of Holland and England.

With regard to the second illusion which I have mentioned, we have to ask; - is the capital of a country so fixed and rigid a thing, as Adam Smith contends, that when any part of it is invested in one or more employments, however profitable, it must be withdrawn from all the rest? Is the distance from home and the slowness of returns of foreign or Colonial trade so great a detriment, that the home trades may starve in the meantime? Or are the risks of these trades so great, that not even the legal monopoly they enjoyed, and the enormous profits which they admittedly brought home, could abate that detriment? To bring it to the test of fact, we have only to ask; - did any one or other or all of the nations and States we have just mentioned find that their distant voyages to the East and West, the length of time they lay out of their capital, and the risks involved in their adventurous journeyings to and fro, added more to their wealth than if they had waited until all their capital could be invested in agriculture and manufactures at home, or did they not? To imagine that they did not, as Adam Smith insists, is to be under the same illusion as if one were to suppose that the heart of a vertebrate animal, which pumps blood to the stomach, is not enriched by the products which the work of that stomach returns to the heart, but is impoverished by it; that it is further impoverished by the blood which it pumps into the lungs and which returns to it with its life-bearing oxygen; and that it is still further impoverished by the blood which it sends to the tissues and limbs which give to the creature the strength and locomotive power on which not only the heart but all the other organs of the body depend for the supply of food which nourishes them.

To imagine this is to imagine that Industry is so lowly organized a thing that its capital when divided into segments can be stretched out so far that however reproductive and life-giving the segments may be, they will become like a useless endless tail which depletes the entire organism by the amount of nourishment it draws to itself; or like the sections of an over elongated bridge without supports, which will fall by their own weight. It is the old symbol of the stick cropping up like a bed-rock through the superincumbent strata with which Adam Smith has overlaid it, and as we shall see presently, is one of the most pervading of the illusions and dangers with which his system is charged.

But carrying these analogies, and the implications we have drawn from them, lightly in our minds for the present as mere analogies, we have now to see that they will be converted into substantial arguments if we discuss in detail the third illusion 1 have mentioned, which also pervades his whole work; the illusion, namely, that what is best economically for a nation standing by itself is best also for a nation trading with other nations, and that what is best for nations trading with other nations is best for the world conceived as a single unity or whole. But before entering on the criticisms proper to this section, I desire in passing, - with the object of giving definiteness and focus to our point of view, - to recall the reader's attention to the fact insisted on in an earlier part of this volume, that the subject-matter of the applied Science or Art of Political Economy is not what will best advantage the economic interests of a nation standing by itself, nor yet again of the world conceived as a single political and economic unity (for the millennium has not yet come), but what is best for nations in trade relations with other nations such as exist at present, and are likely still to remain for some ages.

If, therefore, we can show that Adam Smith's principles when applied to a particular nation must be entirely reversed when applied to a nation in trade relations with other nations, we shall have crone far in weakening the main supports of his system; but if we can also show that while the modern Free Traders agree with him in his principle of Free Trade, they repudiate every argument by which he supports it (as, indeed, they must if our analogy of the worm and the vertebrate animal have any validity): and if at the same time we can prove that he in turn would repudiate every argument of theirs, then we shall have gone a long way in discrediting his system as a whole. To this task therefore I shall now address myself, and shall take up his positions one by one.