This difficulty is in itself the standing proof that the evolution of economic policy must both begin and be continued by the protection of separate groups and areas, starting at innumerable points, and growing larger and larger outward and outward to the circum-ference; and not from some single all-dominating policy like Free Trade, co-extensive with the whole world, and attempting to work its way inward through innumerable separated areas down to the last village and cornfield. Free Trade, in a word, is the end of the economic process of world evolution and •development, never its beginning or middle term; and perhaps no better rough and ready shorthand formula can be found for indicating where in any given case Free Trade is to end and Protection begin, than one which would make Free Trade co-extensive or co-terminous with the boundaries of political unity, but with Protection against all the world outside this limit; - all exceptions having to justify themselves before a jury prejudiced, to begin with, in favour of Protection, and not of Free Trade. In the application of this rule, the greatest standing difficulties and complications arise in the case of Colonies cut off from the mother country by wide regions of land or sea, where the effect on the imaginations of men of the soil on which they were born is so potent, that neither bond nor charter, privilege of birth, nor affectionate loyalty, will avail to neutralize the feeling of separate nationality which, this circumstance engenders.

And accordingly, all Colonies lying at a distance from the motherland must be regarded economically as separate nationalities, and bargained with as such, on the same principle of mutual give-and-take as is proper in economic dealings with foreigners. But with this variant, the rule will hold good throughout, namely; - no Free Trade beyond the bounds of political nationality, except for special reasons shown, or except in the case of complementary products, which, as distinct from competitive ones, should in all cases where otherwise possible be admitted free. By following this simple rule, the economic evolution of nations will be kept in line with their political evolution, step by step and from stage to stage; the universal Free Trade of which the orthodox Economists dream, being postponed to the time when the world shall have become a single political entity and unity; - and that, one suspects, will be somewhere in the distant millennium. Meanwhile Protection must be the order of the day for all nations, if their safety is to be in following that law of evolution which is now admitted to be our sole supreme exemplar and guide in all things; and not less so in Economics than in Biology, where each living thing that can in any way subsist by itself is an independent unity, - whether as a mere cell, or group of cells, or as an organism of many different kinds of cells, - and is always equipped with organs protecting it against every other, organs which are never dispensed with until others are ready to take their place.

No bull sheds his horns in emulation of the superior effectiveness of the tiger's teeth, nor ought any nation to pull down its tariff walls in emulation, or imitation, of another whose productive efficiency in some great line of work permits it to indulge in the luxury of Free Trade. Indeed, why those political units called nations, all of them lying somewhere midway between primitive man and the millennium, should imagine that they can jump the element of Time and the law of Evolution, and in face of each other's aggressions throw away their economic defences, and clap each on its own head a quaker's hat of Free Trade, without waiting to consider whether the stage of evolution proper to such an ideal has arrived or not, can only be explained by the influence wielded by the orthodox economy over all nations in the days before Evolution and Sociology had begun to make themselves felt in the intellectual life of the world. So that it all comes back to the proposition with which we started out, namely, that until the millennial time arrives, when all the world shall have become a political unity, the sum-total of the wealth of the world will be greater when each nation works up its own resources and instruments of production behind tariff walls, than under a universal Free Trade where the competitive industries of each nation would extinguish one another more quickly and surely, and at a greater economic cost and waste, than the complementary ones could make good; precisely as at the present time (to use our former illustration) more wealth is to be got from an enclosed field, in spite of the expense of the fence, than is to be got from an open common; more morality from separate families and households, than from promiscuity; more national welfare from keeping separate races apart, than from mixing them indiscriminately on the same area of soil.

Now the effect of this general policy of Protection universally carried out in the present stage of Civilization, - but in ever varying forms and degrees according to the needs and circumstances of each nation, - would be that when the millennium adapted to a full blown Free Trade shall have arrived, and economic ideals be applied as universally as will then be those of the Sermon on the Mount, each nation will in the meantime have worked up its own instruments of production and of transport to the highest possible point of efficiency, so that with the relative strengths of. each sufficiently known to all, all alike can be so reorganized and redistributed that, as with the Trusts in America, only those nations will be selected for the different kinds of production where the product can be grown or manufactured at the least cost, and each, in consequence, will be utilized for the greatest benefit of all. As for the way in which nations can, under Protection, build up from their foundation 'infant industries' which under Free Trade could never have got a foothold at all, the shipping trade of Germany may serve as a passing example.