it we, as manufacturers, and traders, have attained a position in the world which is at once the admiration, the envy, and, commercially speaking, the terror of competing nations; yet, because some of our interests suffer from time to time in the fierce competition which has been engendered; and without pausing for a moment to estimate what benefits this same competition may in other respects have conferred on these very interests, they call in question our Free Trade policy; they deny or ignore the results which it has attained for us; and the nation is counselled to reverse that policy.
Each suffering interest has its noisy organs, its irresponsible chatterers. The agriculturist organs suggest duties on grain, but never hint at duties on other products. The manufacturing organs clamour for protective duties on the foreign products which compete with their own, but scout the notion of taxes on the food of the people, or on the raw material they use. Each one wants his own industry protected, while anxious that freedom shall rule in every other department.
It never seems to strike them that if Protection be once started, it must be extended to all commodities, and embrace all interests. It never seems to strike them that to protect one interest to the exclusion of the rest, is to commit a gross injustice. It never seems to occur to them that the interests, or supposed interests, of a class may be incompatible with, or opposed to, the interests of the community; and that when this is the case, it is just and politic that the latter should prevail. They never seem to truly estimate such an elementary proposition as this: that however large and numerous a class may be, it forms only a part, and is not the whole of a nation.
Tried by these tests, what becomes of the cries which occasionally arise from some interest which may from time to time suffer from the universal competition, while the general progress of the nation is one onward march in the path of wealth and prosperity?
The largest, the most important interest among us is agriculture. If any interest could claim protection as a matter of justice or policy, it is this. But, it was seen that
