IN the present chapter, and before proceeding to sum up the relative bearings of Free Trade and Protection on the interests of general Civilization, it is necessary to say a word or two on the moral aspects of the problem, in answer to the general question as to whether there is or ought to be any difference between the morality that is proper to a particular nation at a particular stage of economic development, and occupying a definite place in the progress of civilization, and the morality that is proper to man as an individual at any stage of political, social, or economic development, - the ideal morality, in short, which has found its classic expression in the Sermon on the Mount, but which nations as political entities have generally agreed is only to be practically realised in some future millennial time. Now this question, far from being of the nature of an interpolation, grows naturally out of the discussions in the foregoing chapters, and may be more properly formulated, perhaps, as follows; - why, having already given reason for believing that a universal Free Trade would be best calculated to increase the wealth of the world as a whole when once the world has become a single political unity, - however much any particular nation might, owing to its inferior powers of production, be distressed or even ruined by it; - why on ethical grounds, it may be asked, not support a policy of Free Trade, even if attended by an economic loss to one's own particular nation? My answer is simple, and it is this, that so long as the nations of the world exist as separate political units, their purely economic interests must always be subordinate to their national independence and integrity; but as the economic prosperity of each of them is the main pillar and defence of that integrity, it cannot be sacrificed to an economic policy which might be admittedly best for the world as a single political whole, without doing a real injustice to the nation itself in the strictest ethical interpretation of that term.

On the other hand, when once the world shall have become a single political unity, - where all nations alike are the friends and brothers of all, - purely economic grounds need alone be considered; and the economic policy of the world can then be organized on these purely economic grounds alone, without injustice, fear, or afterthought. Or, to put it differently, the game, if we may call it so, which is being played by a world made up of definite independent political units called nations, is a different one from that which would be played if the world were a single political whole; and the cards in consequence will not only have different values in the two cases, but will have to be played under different moral rules, and to be handled in a different way. And the inference from this, again, is that there is no reason whatever why a nation should not carry out a high ideal of political morality, provided always that it can see its way to safeguard at the same time its economic interests; as, for example, was the case with England during practically the whole of the last century, when her unrivalled industrial and mercantile supremacy made it possible for her to indulge her philanthropic moral propaganda of a Free Trade between all nations, - with herself leading the way, - while not merely not lessening her wealth, but actually increasing it.

I insist on this the more strongly, because having now passed under review the main considerations adduced by the orthodox economists in support of Free Trade, and found them wanting, 1 am anxious to remove out of the way as well, all false ethical preconceptions bearing on our supposed duties or obligations to the world as a whole, or to other nations, before entering on the final stage of my argument which will be to show that in the present stage of civilization, and indeed until the millennium arrives and the world has become a political unity, Protection under one or other form is in every way, politically, economically, and morally, both the right and the necessary policy for all nations; save only in the exceptional cases where a single nation or a circle of complementary nations shall have been enabled by the superiority of its, or their, instruments of production, - like the supreme stag of each herd, - to drive all competitors in the same line from the field. I am quite willing to admit, however, that there is no reason why a nation in its economic policy should not take a high abstract cosmopolitical ideal as its standpoint, rather than the apparently lower and more selfish national one, provided always that it realises precisely what it is that it is doing; for, in a sense, there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so; no more reason why it should not do so than why it should not attempt, like the early Christians, to organize the State on the principle of having everything in common; or like the Buddhist ascetics, or the Christian monks of the first centuries, of reducing the wealth of the nation to a minimum, in order the better to live in a kingdom of the spirit; or like the Chinese, of living in the social and moral ideals of Confucius and the sages, to the disparagement of the military virtues - even should that political ideal, end, as it threatened to do (before the rise of the Japanese to supremacy in the East) in the carving up of their nation into spheres of influence for the Western nations, and the consequent destruction of the stability of their own proper civilization.