admit that the tendency to gravitation and attraction is to-day as pronounced and as dangerous, especially in the industrial communities of the North, as was the tendency to separation and segregation pronounced and dangerous seventy years ago in the South.
To this I shall later return. I now merely point out what I apprehend to be a tendency to extremes—an excess in the swinging of our political pendulum.
We next come to that industrial factor which I have referred to as the issue between the Free Trade of Adam Smith and Protection, as inculcated by the so-called American school of political economists. The phases which this issue has assumed are, I submit, well calculated to excite the attention of the observant and thoughtful. I merely allude to them now; but, in so far as it is in my power to make it so, my allusion will be specific. I frankly acknowledge myself a Free-Trader. A Free-Trader in theory, were it in my power I would be a Free-Trader in national practice. There has been, so far as I know, but one example of absolute free trade on the largest scale in world history. That one example, moreover, has been a success as unqualified as undeniable. I refer to this American Union of ours. We have here a country consisting of fifty local communities, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from tropical Porto Rico to glacial Alaska, representing every conceivable phase of soil, climate and material conditions, with diverse industrial systems. With a Union
