And with result, what? This, namely, that your foreign competitors, having got hold of all the trump cards in the pack, now have you at their mercy, and can squeeze you in every business deal, wriggle as you may. But trade, it will be objected, does not immediately cease between nations when one of these nations has virtually been vanquished in its supremacy by foreign competition. Quite true, and we may go further and say that it never really ceases at all. What happens is that the nation having lost the use of its instruments of production, will continue paralyzed so long as the Free Trade last, in the same way as in matters of credit it would, if the Bank of England were to suspend payment; and the great centres of trade, wealth, and population, will be shifted to those nations whose superior natural resources, instruments, and powers of Production were the causes of its original defeat. Nor would this matter so much, did the nations of the world form a political unity, like the separate States of the American Union; but so long as each nation wishes to maintain its political integrity and the dignity and consideration which wealth and economic power give it, it is another question.

For what will happen when once a nation is virtually defeated by foreign competitors, and while Free Trade continues, will be, that having lost its sword when it lost the use of its instruments of production, it will still have to live and be fed and clothed somehow, and on the products too of those very instruments of which it has been deprived; only now it will have to draw on its past savings, foreign securities, and other collaterals, to pay its way. But although ships with their cargoes will still come and go from its ports and harbours as before, bearing their imports and exports with them, still, like the to-and-fro movements of the piston of a locomotive which go on for some time after the last shovel of the coals which stoke it has been thrown in, this trade between a nation and its successful rivals, although it may go on for some time with apparently undiminished speed, must become less and less, slower and slower, as one after another of its savings and foreign securities are handed over, until in its larger operations it ceases altogether.

And then is seen the spectacle, so strange and paradoxical to the Free Trader, with his dream that what is best for the wealth of the world is a single political and economic unity and whole, is necessarily best also for each of its nations as parts, and which is the veriest commonplace of History; - the spectacle, namely, of a nation as completely, if not as suddenly, ruined by Free Trade, while all the time the wealth of the world as a whole is increasing by that trade, as would be the Transvaal of to-day if its gold and diamond mines were exhausted; the spectacle, in short, of wealth, capital, agriculture, manufactures, and population, silently stealing away from one nation and area of the globe to another, while all the time the wealth, capital, agriculture, manufactures, and population of the world as a whole were as steadily and silently increasing.

Such is the modus operandi of the economic rise and fall of nations, or the separate divisions of single nations, under a regime of Free Trade. I have imagined an extreme case for the purpose of bringing out more sharply the central operative factors on which the issue turns; to make it fit the case of any actual nation, the relative strengths of the different factors will have to be considered and allowed for at different stages of its development, - whether at the period of its supremacy or of the successive stages of its rise or decline. With these well in hand, we shall then be in a position to consider, in the language of the physicians, the questions affecting its diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment; with this proviso always understood, namely that in nations, - so long as they exist as distinct political and social units, - considerations of self-preservation, national honour, dignity, and self-respect, must always, as in individuals, take precedence over purely economic ends alone; or, as Adam Smith has it, in his political support of the Navigation Acts, - 'defence is more important to nations than opulence.'