But enough of this for the present, and to proceed. Before we can bring our demonstration of the absurdity of Free Trade as an abstract economic doctrine to a close, we have still to remove one more of the series of veils of illusion within which we must penetrate before we come to the innermost shrine of all. And accordingly I have now to show that when the ordinary Free Trader of the platform and the Press gets there, he will be no better rewarded for his trouble than that Roman Emperor who after the siege of Jerusalem penetrated within the precincts of the Holy of Holies of the Temple to the Ark of the Covenant itself, only to find it empty! Indeed he will be even more disappointed and surprised, for he will find that far from coming to some ultimate scientific rock-principle on which his doctrine can repose in security, he will come down on one of the most discredited delusions in the whole history of human thought, - the delusion of perpetual motion.

But before proceeding to demonstrate this, a word or two is necessary to take our bearings. We have already seen that the ultimate principle on which the ordinary Free Trader reposes when he is making his confession of faith is, that Free Trade, as it is best economically for the world as a whole, inasmuch as it removes all barriers which obstruct the free and natural interchange of commodities between nations, is also necessarily best economically for each and every nation in it. But this - although accepted as an ultimate truth by the traditional Free Trader who has been taught it from infancy, - is by no means necessarily true, any more than is the verbal inspiration of the Scripture which Was generally accepted as an ultimate truth until within the last few decades. Indeed the academic high priests and professors of the Science of Political Economy have all along felt that this doctrine required some still deeper foundation on which to rest, and from which it would be found to be strictly and logically deducible, if it were ever to lay claim to the dignity and authority of a truly scientific dogma.

It may be remembered that Herbert Spencer was not content with the accepted laws of Nature which are final for most people, inasmuch as he thought them not sufficiently ultimate for the purposes of a World-Philosophy, and that he was not satisfied that he had put the coping-stone on his philosophical edifice until he was able to deduce them also as corollaries, each implicitly contained in, and logically deducible from, what he called the 'Persistence of Force,' as the ultimate truth of all. So, too, the professors of the orthodox Political Economy have justly felt that the ordinary ultimate postulate of the political platform and the Press, namely that the Free Trade which is economically best for the world as a whole is necessarily best for each particular nation in it, was neither solid enough nor ultimate enough for the purposes of a thorough going deductive Science. And so the problem for them became; - where to find in the background of their science a principle which would insure that the wealth of the world under a Free Trade regime would be distributed proportionately over all the nations alike, and which would prevent it from heaping itself up in any one of them at the expense of any one of the rest, however much, or by whatever means, the nation or nations whose superior instruments of production were the primary cause of the addition of wealth to the world, should endeavour to aggrandize themselves by keeping that added wealth to themselves.

Or to put it differently; - their problem was to find a natural principle which would automatically prevent any one nation from injuring another under a Free Trade regime, whether that nation were a pure competitor, a friendly exchanger of complementary products, or as is more usual, a mixture of the two combined; and, of course, was precisely the same problem as how to prevent one tradesman with superior powers of buying, superior situation, and superior knowledge and organization of his business, from injuring another, whether he were a rival tradesman in the same street, or a friendly tradesman in a different line of business.

At first sight it would seem rather a difficult problem to solve, but the academical and professorial economists of the orthodox school in the end imagined that they were equal to it, and so were able to announce that any hard-pressed Free Trader who had gone no farther back than the general principle that what was good for the world under Free Trade was good for each nation also, could always appeal to them for a more recondite explanation still, (although one caviare to the general), in support and justification. This esoteric doctrine, like those doctrines of the Brahmins reserved for the elect of their disciples, was and still remains exclusively in the hands of the small knot of economic 'experts,' - University and College Professors mainly, - who a few years ago when the Free Trade controversy was revived, issued their celebrated Manifesto; and is contained in those chapters of their books;devoted to the function of Gold and the mechanism of the Foreign Exchanges in their bearings on International Trade.

The critical examination of this doctrine will afford us yet another opportunity of demonstrating that the orthodox Political Economy of the Schools, far from being the highly developed science which its cultivation as a separate specialty would seem to imply, is still, in its great organic outlines, in the crude primitive stage in which it was left by Adam Smith nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. For there is no better evidence of crudity, either in a science or in an art, than the lumping together of two different things under some common generalized category or image, by the obliteration of all differentiation or distinction in the parts; as is seen in the generalized Cosmogony of Genesis, for example; the generalized Physiology and Psychology of the Middle Ages, with their 'vital principle,' 'vital airs,' 'bodily humours,' etc.; the generalized Art of the Assyrians, with the four legs of their animals all on one side of the body, and so on. It is the same with the orthodox Political Economy where, as we have already seen, exports and imports are lumped together and generalized, as if it made no difference whether the exports were the cause of the imports or the imports of the exports; where the imports again are generalized as if there were no difference between competitive imports and complementary ones; where the economic good of the world as a whole is generalized and confounded with the good of each particular nation in it; where these nations, again, in their exchanges are represented as being fed from some common generalized reservoir of wealth, instead of each from its own; where the very act of exchange itself is generalized as an universal boon and blessing, instead of as a mixed account of profit and loss, of good and bad, - of good to those who profit by it, of bad to the others who are hit, and lose by it; and where Free Trade itself is generalized as being good for all nations at all times and places, instead of only for those which have attained supremacy in their own special line, at particular times and places.

Indeed the main burden of our criticisms of the orthodox Political Economy up to this point has consisted in little else than in our making good these distinctions and differentiations which are of the very essence of a developed and progressive science; and should it be our good fortune to be able to make further distinctions of this kind throughout the rest of our work, these distinctions will be found in effect to have reconstituted the Science of Political Economy from its foundation, as much so, indeed, as the Science of Astronomy was reconstituted when the Copernican system replaced the Ptolemaic; the affectation of scientific elaboration and precision in which the academic Economists indulge, - with their appeal to mathematical formulae, the equations of economic curves, and the like ingenuities, which have seemed to justify them in claiming for themselves the authority of 'experts,' but all of which are built up on and around these undigested crudities and generalities as their foundation, - showing rather, like the elaboration of a Japanese fan or an Indian card case, or the scrolls and curves on a curtain or a wall paper, as mere fantastic filagree than as true science or art.

And nowhere will this be better seen than in the doctrine of the academical economists as to the function of Gold and the mechanism of the Foreign Exchanges, to which I now wish to direct the reader's attention.