JOHN BRIGHT ON PROTECTION.

Dunstan Times, Issue 759, 3 November 1876, Page 3

JOHN BRIGHT ON PROTECTION.

Mr Bright, says an English paper, has been elected an honorary member of the Boston Free Trade Club, and in a letter to the president acknowledges in the following terms the compliment paid to him “ House of Commons, London, July C, IS7G. Dear Sir, -I thank you Tor the compliment you pay me in electing me an honorary member of the Boston Free Trade Club. I accept the hone* you have confessed on me with much gratification. Your platform is admirable—the third paragraph especially p’eases iVie, Protection has upon it a taint of the great wrong of slavery. It does not steal the laborer, but it steals his labor • it taxes it cruelly, it lessens its result and its profit, and turns it into chaiinels less useful to the laborer. It says to your cultivator of the soil : —‘You must not exchange yon* 1 quarter of wheat or your barrel of flour with an Englishman for the cloth’nr the hardware he would give you for it; you must exchange it Only with ad American, who will give yon so much less for it.’ It Was so with us thirty years ago. Oiir weavers could not exchange with your farmers a piece of cloth for a barrel of flour, but only with an English farmer, who offered him half a barrel. So the protective system has in it much of the evil of slavery, for the labor of the laborer is not free ; it is by force ot law diminished in value. This can only exist in a free country from the ignorance of the people. Happily the fraud is too transparent to live long. I hope your club will do something to destroy it. The existing depression in your trade must teach your people how little protection can do to make prosperity permanent, and how much it can do to add to the severity of the pressure from which industry from other causes cannot perhaps bs wholly freed. With many thanks to the members ot 'your club for their friendly remembrance of me,—l am, with great respect, yours Very sincerely, “John Bright.”