A similar result is found whether we take ten, or twenty, or any series of years during the Free Trade epoch. I have before me the figures for the last twenty-seven years, that is, going back to 1854, and from them I find that in those twenty-seven years, our excess of commodities imported was 1,742 millions, our excess of bullion imported was 131 millions, and our excess of securities imported was 600 millions, making a grand total of 2,473 millions as profit on our last twenty-seven years' foreign trade.
There can be no question, therefore, that as a nation we have become richer and richer. But, while I assert and prove this, I do not mean to assert that there has been at all times, and among all classes, an equal distribution of the wealth acquired. That is another and a totally different question. During the American Civil War, for instance, when there was a cotton famine, our manufacturing interests suffered great losses and privations. Then, during the last few years, the agricultural interest, and the interests which depend on it, have suffered most severely. I do not for one moment deny that some of our interests have suffered. With those sufferings I warmly sympathise, but while I acknowledge them, and condole respecting them, I cannot be driven from the position I take up that the nation, as a whole, is prosperous, the mathematical proof of this being found in the fact that year by year, on the whole, we get in on balance commodities, bullion, and securities.
Let me illustrate this by what is said of space, namely, that it has three, and only three, dimensions—length, breadth, and thickness. Now, no one has ever seriously propounded the existence of a fourth dimension, and I say that, until the existence of this fourth dimension has been proved, and until the existence of a fourth mode of settling international transactions has been discovered—so long as we get in on balance, in a series of years, the three things I have named—we may depend upon it we are getting richer and not poorer as regards our foreign commerce.
From what you have heard you will be able easily to understand how mistakes and fallacies are sure to crop up by doing what the Fair Traders do with the bare figures
