FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2390, 30 November 1881, Page 3

FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION.

The London “Times,” of a recent date, says : —“ Wo hear a goed deal said in many quarters as to the breakdown of our free commercial policy. It is attacked by persons who profess themselves the advocates of a greater freedom, but of a freedom which it is not within the power of this country to secure. We must look below the surface if we would see what it is that those over-zealous free-traders are driving at. An imposition of duty on foreign corn comes in pretty generally as an essential part of their programme. It is not hard to judge in whoso interest it is that a measure of this kind ie proposed. A rise in the price of corn would mean a rise in the value of agricultural land in this country. The rent - receiving class would be the only gainers from it, and their gains would be made at the expense of all other classes. But the interested supporters of a measure which is to have these resnlte could do little by themselves. They must call in some other class to help them. If there exists a class in this country badly informed on facts and figures, ready to grumble with reason or without it, credulous, irrational, and indifferent on principle to all other interests than its own, it will be in this that the allies of the new movement may bo looked for with most hope. We do not say that the description we have given is that of the British working man. We say only that he furnishes a good many examples of it, and that it is on his support that the anti-Free Trade movement most confidently relies. The working man knows that wages are high in the United States, and he is told, as a reason for it, that the United States are protectionist. The conclusion, to his mind, is clear. He puts two and two together, and discovers that they make five. The effect of cheap land on the American labor market is a matter of which ho knows nothing. But this, as our own latest Consular reports show, is the one most important factor in the whole calculation. Between a country circumstanced as America ie and a country circumstanced as England is there is no comparison possible. France is an instance much more in point. Franco is protectionist, but with no such results to the working classes as American protection admits. Wages in France are lower than than they are in England j the working hours are longer; and the general standard of comfort among the laboring classes is far below that with which the English working man would be content.''