We do not want, any more than does Mr. Hughes,
to be " gulled " by " parrot talk about Free Trade." We merely want to remind him that, do what he will, neither he nor anybody else can get beyond the plain fact that there are only two ways in which a nation can obtain what it needs—either by producing those things itself, or by making something else to exchange for those things with other nations. Which of these two courses the nation should take must depend upon which is the more advantageous to it from the economic, the moral, the political, and the military point of view, or, rather, from a well-balanced combination of them all. We have never wanted to put the Free Trade case Wirier than that, but here is a fact from which nobody is going to escape by the use of vituperative epithets or of abstractions that beg the question.
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