FAIR-TRADE versus HISTORY.* IT is perhaps fortunate for the security
and progress of English politics that the Fair-traders have never yet found their vates sacer. They have had many prophets, but all of the minor sort; and none of them have succeeded, perhaps because of the hopeless badness of their cause, in taking hold of the mind of the nation. Mr. Gill, in his Free-Trade under Protection, has certainly not filled the void. The object of his hook is to destroy the position of Cobden as the Yates of Free-trade, and show that he was but a purblind prophet after all,—and, it may be supposed, to substitute himself as the far-seeing guide to Fair-trade. But both the style and the ideas conveyed in it are so confused, so falsely rhetorical, and so illogical, that we can hardly imagine a single convert being made thereby. As a sample, take this sentence And we submit this relation of distress, with decreasing exports to the consideration of those who, rather than argue from mere facts in the field of economy—a treacherous practice— endeavour to discover the workings of a principle of which these facts or figures are but the indications of its existence." This is a very characteristic sentence. The use of italics shows the weakness which the writer knows to be inherent in his style; while the hopeless confusion of syntax emphasises the equally hopeless confusion of thought which, in the very sentence in which he is endeavouring to appgajto facts, makes him disclaim the appeal to facts. NevertiAT&3s, it must be admitted that, as a general rule, he is right to object to facts which have proved such a stubborn impediment to the progress of his doctrines.
The author makes a terribly windy and long-winded attack on Cobden for having asserted that Free-trade would benefit agriculture; while he ridicules his short-sightedness in having said that the farmer would be secure in the home market by reason of his advantage in saving the cost of transit of corn from abroad, and in not having anticipated the phenomena now to be witnessed in the competition of Manitoba and Dakota. But we are not aware that any Free- traders have set up Cobden as infallible. It is sufficient for Cobden's reputation as a prophet of no mean order, that his predictions remained true for a generation ; and if he could not in 1840 or 1846 foresee the revolution which steam would effect in bringing the products of the New World to our doors, that does not affect the shrewdness of his judgment on the circumstances as alone they could reasonably be conceived by him. And even now the natural protection of the cost of transit ought to make the British farmer prosperous, if it were not that he has been crushed by rents raised out of all pro- portion to the rents paid in the days before Free-trade, and
Pree•Trade under Protection. By Richard Gill. Edinburgh and London : Blaawood and Sons.--(2.) The Economic Interpretation of History. By Thorold Rogers. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
not reduced largely enough or quickly enough at first. But whether Cobden ought or ought not to have foreseen our present difficulties, Mr. Gill fails signally to show how a return to Pro- tection would relieve us of them. He appears to admit that all-round Free-trade would be a good thing; but he complains of "partial "or " one-sided" Free-trade, and of Cobden's stupidity in supposing that other nations would take to Free-trade. No doubt all-round Free-trade is better than one-sided Free- trade, and Cobden was too sanguine. But the very progress of foreign nations, which has enabled them more successfully to compete with our own, is not due, as Mr. Gill seems to think, to their protective policy, but to a Free-trade policy. The immense progress of Germany and Italy has been largely due to their development of Free-trade, through the abolition of the minor States, and the institution of Free-trade among the whole fifty millions of Germans and the whole thirty millions of Italians, previously hampering each other with protective duties at every turn, as goods passed from one petty Principality to another. So, too, the United States and our own Colonies have thriven by the extension of their Free-trade area, in spite of, and not because of, Protection outside it ; indeed, it is well known that in the shipping trade, where territorial extension has had a relatively small effect, Protection has had a crippling result on American enterprise. We can hardly hope that our own Colonies, with their still boundless prospects of territorial extension and growth of population, will soon be forced out of their Protectionist fallacies. But in the States which are com- paratively filled up, the Protectionist shoe has already begun to pinch, and though the Irish vote has stricken Free-trade for a while, there can be small doubt that it will soon become a burning question, for which only one issue is possible.
In any case, how we could profit by retaliation Mr. Gill has signally failed, and hardly attempted to show. He vaguely suggests that more employment would be given in England if we excluded some foreign products which now compete with our own. But this exclusion must necessarily involve an increase of price, which must necessarily involve either a less consumption of the thing increased in price, or, if that is a necessary of life, a less surplus to spend on other things, and that means less production, and therefore less employment in producing other things. It is difficult, therefore, to see where this ultimate benefit lies. Certain it is, too, that while such retaliation will not tend to the adoption of the all-round Free- trade which is admittedly beneficial, but will confirm other nations in their protective policy, it must at the same time lessen their purchasing power, and diminish the total volume of international trade. And, after all that can be said against Cobden's apostolic exaggeration of its effects, international trade undoubtedly tends in the direction of pea,ce and civilisation.
It is pleasant to turn from Mr. Gills' rambling rhetoric to Pro- fessor Thorold Rogers's sturdy common-sense and trelfthastt epigrams. His lectures entitled The Economic Interpreta- tion of History, are as superior to the ordinary common- places, " vacant chaff well meant for grain," which form the staple of College lectures and economical treatises, as the Socratic method was to the declamations of the Sophists. Approaching, in accordance with the genius loci, the study of political economy from the historical point of view, and revealing to us the economic facts buried in the dusty rolls of manors and College archives, Professor Thorold Rogers has indefinitely extended the area of facts from which political economists may draw their con- clusions, and he has given his results and inferences in a style calculated to interest the most inattentive hearer or reader, a style rendered none the less forcible by a somewhat " robustious " egotism. It is difficult to say which is the most interesting of these lectures, those which deal with rents, with wages, with money, with taxation, or with fair prices. It is, for instance, striking to hear that the rent of agricultural land remained unaltered for fully three centuries at 6d. and 8d. an acre, from about 1350 to 1650; while the rent of pasture was even in 1295 as high as 7s. 6d. an acre ; and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the landlords—Colleges at least—indemnified their tenants and paid for their loss of sheep if more than 10 per cent. died in a year. It is striking, too, to find that town landlords did all the repairs to such an extent that New College, out of an estate of £46 a year, cleared only £3 5s. So, too, it is interesting to learn the extent to which the principle of
graduated taxation was carried. In the poll-tax levied in 1377, the Duke of Lancaster was rated at 520 times the payment of the peasant. In 1435 and 1450, a graduated income-tax was levied at the rate of 2t per cent. on small incomes, of 10 per cent. on large. As late as 1600, local taxation still followed the same principle. In the parish of Tandridge, Surrey, occupiers of 10 acres paid a penny an acre once a year, occupiers of under 30 acres not more than twice a year, and all further charges were to be paid by occupiers of over 30 acres, " provided always that our intent and meaning is that those who be owners and men of ability, and have little occcupyings, shall be charged according to their ability by the justices' discretion towards the relief of the poor, notwithstanding the said rates aforesaid."
But most interesting of all, perhaps, at the present moment, in view of Fair-trade arguments, are the facts given as to the relations of the prices of corn and wages. The Fair- traders appear to think that high prices, produced by Protec- tion—that is, taxing the nation for the sake, e.g., of the farmers —will produce high wages to the agricultural labourer. But in Elizabeth's reign, while the price of provisions rose 2* times —i.e., 16.6 shillings went no further than 6s. had done before —wages remained nearly unchanged.
So, in the seventeenth century, "wheat rose 209 per cent. over the comparatively high prices of the first half of Eliza- beth's reign ; meat 184 ; while labour up to 1642 rose only 32 per cent., and for the whole period, owing entirely to the rise during the Commonwealth [for, as Professor Thorold Rogers puts it, the labourer was far better off under the saints than under the sinners before or after the Civil War], 100 per cent." " In 1661, when wheat rose to 100 shillings a quarter, a price unheard of and never paralleled till the close of the eighteenth century," wages were 6s. a week, and efforts were made to reduce them from that. " At the end of the eighteenth century, when farmers were getting 150 shillings a quarter for wheat, agricultural wages were at 7 shillings a week, and farmers were grumbling that they had to pay so much." Why, then, should a higher and fictitious price for wheat nowadays heighten wages ? " Will the farmer give Hodge, from spontaneous good nature, a shilling a week more for his work, when he can get Hodges in plenty, because the price of corn is doubled P" And so the Professor objects, as most of us do, to being taxed under the name of Fair-trade for the benefit of farmers, manufacturers, or landlords, when labourers and artisans will be no better off.
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