you have exhausted these two categories, you will find that you might just as well have adopted the attractive positive ideal of general economic independence instead of being driven from one expedient to another in mere defensiveness. If you attempt to maintain a negative Cobdenism with exceptions, you will, under the conditions of the world that are opening before us, very soon build up a large and clumsy body of merely ad hoc machineries. A general system of low duties and bounties would enable you to deal quickly and lightly with each difficulty as it develops, because you would have the appropriate machinery of control at your hand. But I am not here going into the detail of these questions of machinery; I am dealing with the question of ideal and aim. The Cobdenite believes that international trade is good in itself, and that specialisation as between country and country, provided that
industries. Thus, for instance, aniline dye-stuffs to the value of two million pounds a year were utilised in Great Britain before the War in textile and paper manufactures of the annual worth of 200 millions. The proportion was something like that of a key to the door which it unlocks. Essential industries there are which have not this character of a small key; such, for instance, in this twentieth century is the steel industry. It is well to preserve the distinction, because different defensive measures may perhaps be needed in the two cases.
