Smith together. We have strictly to choose between them.
Cobden believed and hoped that Free Trade would be the dissolvent of Empire. He conceived that it was as much to the interest of this country to develop the United States as to develop Canada or Australia. Expecting and approving the dissolution of the Empire, anticipating the universal prevalence of free exchange and the end of war, he was logically a Free Trade extremist in theory and practice. Adam Smith's position was quite opposite. Desiring, like all good men, the political and the economic millennium, his far more circumspect and penetrating mind made him differ from Cobden in thinking neither form of the millennium to be attainable. He did not overlook the supreme significance of national identity. Believing absolute Free Trade to be a perfect policy for an ideal world, he did not hold it to be a practicable policy in the real world. Unlike Cobden, he desired the British Empire not to be dissolved, but to be strengthened and perpetuated, and did not believe that absolute Free Trade was the right means to that end. He desired, on the one hand, Imperial Federation; he thought, on the other hand, that the Navigation Laws were the sinews of sea-power, the necessary economic nexus of the Empire, 'the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England,' and he advocated the continuance of those laws as the concrete foundation of our economic policy.
In other words, the position held by the father of Free Trade as an economic theorist was one thing, but quite another his position as a political thinker and robust citizen—far from regarding, with Cobden, British power as a bad fact and the British Empire as a wicked acquisition. Advocating the closer union of the Empire and the maintenance of the Navigation Laws, the greatest of Free Traders was for all concrete purposes in favour of a federated Empire upon a protectionist basis. The course of events is compelling us once more to stand where he did. Mr. Chamberlain has not
