“Free Trade in this country has been the labour of several generations of scientific and public-spirited men; it has been established on principles that have acquired the force of axioms, and is now proved and illustrated by splendid results. It may be said to have outlived prejudice, and to require no vindication. This, at least, is true as regards the educated classes, for it cannot be denied that lower down in the social scale Protection lingers still, in company with many other heresies, superstitions, and manifold forms of unreason. Free Trade requires a man to look beyond himself, beyond his own employment, beyond his own class, to the common right and weal, and this requires a certain amount of moral education. But it would be scarcely possible to detect in any respectable organ of opinion any trace of the old error, however ingeniously disguised.
“The New York Times abuses Free Trade, by charging upon it everything unhappy or disagreeable in the condition of this country, and by asserting that Free Trade cannot be carried out consistently, and is therefore a hollow hypocrisy. Our agricultural labourers work like slaves for a pittance, our women and children make horseshoe nails, or traverse the country in gangs such as would disgrace the kingdom of Dahomey. Our shipyards are idle, our workhouses full, and the most repulsive and incessant toil receives wages just above starvation point. The English labourer pines for Protection; the Irish peasant for any possible escape from the allegiance and laws that keep him poor and degraded. Meanwhile, when the pinch comes, we give up Free Trade. In the opinion of the New York Times, it is an abandonment of Free Trade to provide workhouses for destitution, sickness, and old age; to prohibit the employment of women and girls in coal-pits; to limit the hours of factory children and provide for their schooling; to interfere with any trade for sanitary ends; or to aid any man, woman, or child to be what they ought to be, to have what they ought to have, or to do what they ought to do. Free Trade, the writer says, has produced all this hideous mass of misery, and, having done it, recoils in horror from its own work, and hands the matter over to Protection in the shape of public charity and philanthropy.
“As the writer has taken his picture of England from the columns of its public press, and from its Parliamentary debates and returns, we should be the last to deny that there is in it a foundation of truth. But it is only as if an American were to fill his boxes with the very worst and filthiest rubbish he could pick up in this metropolis, and take it home as a fair average and faithful representation of the capital of the mother country. There is no falsehood so mischievous as truth partially and malignantly selected. As to Free Trade, the writer does not know what it is, and probably does not care to know. It is trade emancipated from all restrictions and burdens which are not in the interest of all the parties concerned; that is, which are for one person against another, one class against another, or one nation against another. As it is in the interest of common humanity—that is, of all the world—that the destitute, sick, and aged should not be left to perish; that children should not be worked above their strength, or left without education; that women and girls should not be made mere beasts of burden, or reduced to savagery, these are not questions of trade at all, free or not free. Little as “Monadnock” seems to be aware, he is himself interested in the maintenance of human nature at its highest possible elevation all over the world. At all events, he must allow Englishmen to indulge the sentiments of benevolence without having it imputed to them that they do it on protective—that is, selfish—principles, and, in so doing, are offending against the great doctrine of Free Trade. But is it Free Trade that has produced the scandals which Protection, this writer says, is invoked in vain to mitigate? They all existed, far worse, in the days of Protection. They are the evils of a crowded country. The population of these isles has doubled since the beginning of the century, but it is impossible to rescue an acre from the surrounding seas except generally at an extravagant cost, or even to reclaim an acre without risk of loss. The land won’t employ all, and the surplus must do what they can. America, on the contrary, has millions upon millions of the best land in the world to draw upon as fast as she wants them. She has all the charm of novelty, as well as its more solid advantages. Till her citizens fell out with one another in the mere excess of youthful energy, and the mere exuberance of wealth and power, they had no need of an army to call an army, or of a fleet to call a fleet. It is folly, if not mockery, to compare such a country with England, as if the circumstances were equal, and laws responsible for all the difference. A septuagenarian may be healthy and strong for his years; his activity of mind and body may speak well for the moderation of his diet, the regularity of his habits and the calmness of his temper. What would be thought of a young man of twenty, of remarkable strength and stature, who taunted the old gentleman with his inability to carry a sack of corn, to throw a cricket ball a hundred yards, to run a mile in five minutes, to leap over his own height, to walk twenty miles in a day, to eat a dish of raw fruit or a quart of oats without indigestion? Should the old gentleman even confess himself unequal to such feats, that would be no disparagement of the habits and plan of life which have made him what he is—healthy for his time of life, strong, with good heart, and with duly cultivated mental powers.”
The following, from the Scientific American of August last, furnishes a present comment upon the value of “Protection” in the United States:—
“The mills are running at a loss in Lowell, Lawrence, and most of the other manufacturing towns of Massachusetts, and throughout New England. The Manchester mills and print works have goods on hand unsold of the value of $2,000,000 (£430,000). The same state of things exists with the Amoskeag Company.”
[57] Since 1865 there is a regularly organised service for the conveyance of ice from Martigny, Sion, and intermediate stations in the Canton du Valais, Switzerland, viâ Lausanne and Dijon, to Paris. As many as fifty tons a-day are during several months in the year, thus carried. As we write we have before us the traffic estimates of the proposed railway from Geneva to Chamounix, forty-four miles long, and one of the items of business expected is the conveyance of ice to Paris, Lyons, Avignon, and Marseilles, to be carried in the first instance on a tramway or siding not more than half-a-mile from one of the glaciers of Mont Blanc, and then to be hooked on to the railway.
Of the value of ice in actual railway transport, we have the testimony of recent American papers. The New York Times says,—“Large quantities of dead meat are brought to New York from distances of 800 to 1,200 miles, by railway. Ordinary covered goods waggons are employed, and the meat, in quarters, is laid upon the ice, the ice being laid directly upon the floors of the waggons. Ice is laid also upon the top, and additional quarters are laid upon this, with a final layer of ice over the whole. At one time a break of gauge existed, and the waggons had to be unloaded, and the meat repacked in ice. This expense and delay are now saved. This mode of carrying meat is found to be very cheap and satisfactory.”
[58] On the death of the Earl of Spencer, father of the well-known Lord Althorp, in 1834, His Lordship succeeded to the Earldom. When Lord Melbourne went to Brighton to receive the king’s commands as to the appointment of a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, His Majesty informed the Minister that, under the circumstances, he considered the administration at an end. This announcement created great surprise and excitement in the political circles and throughout the nation. The Duke of Wellington being sent for, His Grace advised the King to appoint Sir Robert Peel premier, and this was done accordingly.—Haydn’s Book of Dignitaries. The Earl Spencer, whose death is above referred to, died on the 10th of November. The Duke of Wellington held several offices until the return of Sir Robert Peel to England, at the latter end of December. His ministry only lasted until the end of March, 1835.
[59] “Post,” in the middle periods of our Anglo Saxon history, was the man who conveyed a letter. “Haste! post haste!” was intended as an instruction or request to the bearer of it to use despatch in its conveyance, just as in modern days we occasionally see on the envelope of letters, “Immediate,” or on the letters of the humbler classes, “With Speed,” “A Post,” was a character often introduced in the masques and allegories of the middle ages, as well as in the pageants got up for the amusement of Majesty during royal “progresses.”
[60] “L’Hora di Roma is now the time all over Italy. It is 36 minutes in advance of Paris, and 45 in advance of that of London.”