Nor does it matter to the Free Trader what qualities and degrees of technical skill, requiring generations of workmen to bring to efficiency, are being displaced by foreign competition; - whether it is driven from engineering to bricklaying or navvying; from art to house or sign-painting; from architecture to stone-dyking or road-making; from banking to pawnbroking; from medicine to patent-pill manufacturing; from scientific chemical combinations to mixing mortar or whitewashing; from ship-building to ship unloading; from high class cotton or woollen goods to the stitching together of low-class ones in sweaters' dens; - nothing of all this gives the Free Trader the least concern, provided he can prove to you from the Board of Trade returns that the exports, - whatever may be the character or quality of the items of which they are composed, - have up to the present kept up to their average level in money value (and all the better, of course, if they are increasing in amount), and especially if the gross amount of imports and exports combined shows no signs of abating.

Nor, again, does it matter to them what proportion of the trade lost by foreign competition is made up of raw materials, what of half-manufactured goods, and what of finished articles, respectively; - whether it is the raw material and half finished manufactures which have been sacrificed - as coal, iron ore, corn, pig-iron, steel rails, tin-plates, hides, leather, yarns, or what not, all or most of which we can produce ourselves without much disparity in cost - so long as the manufacture of the finished products is left to us; or whether it is the finished products that are being sacrificed, so long as we still retain our raw materials and half manufactured goods as the basis of our export trade. Nothing of all this matters to them; and that, too, in spite of the fact that if you once, - for the sake of mere cheapness in manufacturing the finished product, - permit your raw material and half finished goods to be permanently supplied to you from a far off base in the countries of your industrial competitors, it will only require a little time for them to lay their hands on your finished products and annex them also, - when once they have sufficient collateral support to be able to put forth their full strength, - and so leave you like an army which has its permanent base in an enemy's country.

The loss of the finished product, on the other hand, - however much of raw materials and half manufactured goods you may still retain in your own hands as the basis of your export trade, - is the loss of that which alone enters the homes of men, and on which its trade-mark (as is seen in the preference by our Colonies for distinctively English goods as such) confers that potent wealth-producing asset, which under the generic title of 'good will' endows it practically with all the prerogatives of a monopoly.

So that the result of it all is this; - that on the one hand, no mere picking up of scraps of raw or half-manufactured materials here and there around the world, can ultimately in the face of foreign competition compensate for the weakness in the organic self-sufficingness of any great industry as a whole, when once the bulk of its great subsidiary processes and dependencies are no longer rooted in its own soil and mines and in the hereditary skill and knowledge of its workers; while when once these raw materials and half finished products have been slowly and silently stolen away by the foreigner, and the finished product itself is finally cut from its roots in its own soil, the whole great trade must wither like a tree, - finished product, subsidiary and auxiliary processes and all, - until only its old stump is left standing to mark where it once had been. But nothing of this ever touches the Free Trader, who continues to reiterate with irritating persistency that it does not matter, it is all right; for the cheapness of the picked up scraps of raw materials and half-manufactured goods, by cheapening the finished product, enables us, he contends, to slip our goods magically in between the meshes of the tariff walls which keep out all but ourselves, - as well as giving us full entrance to the neutral unprotected markets (now alas! quickly waning in number) which are still open to us.

And besides, we can always turn to something else. But when you press him hard to say precisely what it is to which we can turn, or have already turned, he will point quite naively and complacently to some of our old friends, - the haberdashery trade, the apparel and slop trade, the cheap East End clothing trade, the whisky trade, the glass and bottle trade, jam, pickles, confectionery, and what not, - parasites all, which never could have made the fortune of England, and in her extremity cannot prevent her from losing it again; or, more triumphantly, to our coal trade, and even unblushingly to our export of Welsh steam coal and china clay, which instead of being kept for our own use, and their sale to foreign nations restricted, by means of an export duty or otherwise, as jealously as if it were diamonds that were being dealt in rather than coal or clay, are through the break-neck haste of rival owners to get all they can out of them, practically given away to the foreigner, with no other result than to strengthen him in his competition with ourselves both in commerce and in war.

How different is all this to the management of a private estate! And yet, I will challenge the Free Traders to produce any living reason which will support them in their practice of managing the resources of a nation on a different principle from that on which they would those of a private estate. As we have seen, they would submit to maceration rather than put a tax on any instrument of production, or piece of fixed capital; and yet it is no exaggeration to say that they will toss to the foreigner these very instruments of production, and these choicest pieces of fixed capital, with as light a heart as they would throw the stump ends of their cigars to street boys. We shall see the cause of this presently; but in the meantime they carry themselves with the easy indifference of men who feel that they have reason on their side, and when pressed they point triumphantly to the Shipping trade as the high water-mark of the success of Free Trade itself.