AND this leads us to the last and most important of the principles of Adam Smith with which we have to deal, - and that is the principle of Free Trade itself. Now, the first thing we have to note is, strange as it may seem, that when compared with the Free Traders of the present day, not only was Adam Smith in point of fact very questionably a Free Trader at all, but every one of the arguments by which he defended the principle of Free Trade, would as I have said be rejected by them; while on the other hand, not only would all the actual present day results of Free Trade have been anathema to him, but he would have repudiated all the arguments by which they defend them. So that we have this curious anomaly to deal with, that while earlier generations of Economists and Statesmen accepted the principle of Free Trade from Adam Smith by reason of the arguments by which he supported it, the present generation of Free Traders still hold fast to the principle, while renouncing one by one the arguments which gave it all its power! And perhaps the quickest and most effective way to prove this to the reader will be to imagine Adam Smith reappearing in our own time, and confronted with the modern Free Traders who are his avowed disciples; - time having been given him to look around and see in what the full fledged doctrine of Free Trade, carried by England to its extreme limits since his day, has eventuated.

The first thing he would notice would be that the land, - which with him as we have seen was the very 'apple of his eye,' the chief source of wealth, and the crown of his hierarchy of wealth-producing employments, - was going more and more out of cultivation; that in the course of twenty or thirty years the landlords' rents had fallen a fourth, the farmers' capital a half, and that the population working on the land was now only half of what it was fifty years ago; - and all, by unanimous consent, as the result of the application of the purest principles of Free Trade. And further he would notice that the foreign, the shipping, and the colonial trades, - the monopoly of which he denounced in his own time because they drew capital away from agriculture and the home trade, - were the greatest asset in the wealth of England. And if we should ask him what he thought of all this, can there be any doubt that from his own principles and doctrines carefully considered and developed as parts of a united and harmonious scheme, he would feel obliged to disown and condemn it? For was not this very result precisely what the monopoly of the Colonial trade which he condemned, was bringing to pass? And if Free Trade were to lead to the same result, would he not feel obliged to condemn it? For it was not the monopoly as such that he condemned, as being an infraction of Free Trade; he condemned the monopoly because it led to the universal stimulation of a less productive occupation, to the disadvantage of a more profitable one, - of Foreign Trade, viz, to agriculture and the home trade; and as he thought that there was only a definite amount of capital in the country to divide among the different occupations, the more that was invested in occupations deriving no assistance from the Powers of Nature, the less would be left for Agriculture, the only one of them in which such assistance was freely given.

It was all a delusion as we have seen; for the Colonial trade, owing to the monopoly, was actually bringing home enormous profits which could at any moment have been invested in Agriculture - or any other languishing trade, - had it been a desirable investment. But the spectacle of the enormous increase of the wealth of England through her foreign and Colonial trade, even when her Agriculture was decaying, would have struck the mind of Adam Smith with a kind of despair, and he would have been put at once on the horns of a dilemma. He would either have had to admit that the arguments by which he supported the 'principle of Free Trade rested on a rotten foundation, or if he still stuck by his arguments, - which all hung, it will be remembered, from the doctrine of the Physiocrats, that in Agriculture alone Nature lent her assistance, but not in any other employment, - he would be obliged to admit that a principle which in its actual working out had so upset all his calculations and predictions, must itself be a delusion.

So far Adam Smith, - if he came to life again.

But now let us see in turn what the modern academic Free Traders have to say to the special arguments by which Adam . Smith supports his principle of Free Trade. We can answer at once; - they reject every one of them, not only all his positive major arguments but all the minor negative ones by which in his weak-kneedness, as they love to think it, he sought to limit and modify it. They reject the latter, because Political Economy having divorced itself since his time from the higher considerations of political and social ends, and become a narrow specialism, they can find no place for them in their science. On this ground they reject, for example, his defence of the Navigation Acts; - those Acts which by taking advantage of England's supremacy in manufactures, put so great a pressure on all the nations which were obliged to buy their manufactured goods from England, that the Mercantile Marine of Holland was finally driven from the field; - Acts which as a protective policy Adam Smith defended on the purely political ground that the defence of a country was more important than its opulence.