Dedication

To my wife

PREFACE.

THIS book is based on a series of lectures delivered to popular audiences in Glasgow and Edinburgh during February and March of the present year. I had no thought or intention of publishing them, and I have done so only in deference to the many friends and hearers who urged it on me.

Those—if there are any—who read this in future years, may be reminded that it was written during the universal discussion which accompanied and followed Mr. Chamberlain’s propagandism of Preferential Tariffs, and Mr. Balfour’s advocacy of Retaliation. It seemed to me that both these proposals led back to the system discarded in 1846, and that any adequate discussion of them must begin with some consideration of the theory of international trade and of the principles which underlie the rival policies. Mindful of M. Yves Guyot’s warning that we, in this country, are so used to the blessings of Free Trade that we do not appreciate its merits—“just as a man is in good health when his organs work without his feeling them”—I have given some space to the consideration of Protection, especially to its aspect as delegated taxation. There are two sides to the question now before the nation; the gain or loss, economically and politically, of the return to Protection, and the gain or loss, economically and politically, of the abandonment of Free Trade. It is only, I think, when these two sides are fully considered, that the dangers of the present proposals reveal themselves.

The fourteen teachers of Political Economy who signed the Manifesto for Free Trade in August of last year have been much abused as “men of theory”—as if theory were not the soul of facts. But, although proud to be one of the fourteen, I may claim exemption from the reproach of knowing nothing practically about business. I was a Free Trade manufacturer in this country, and a Protected manufacturer in the United States, long before I became a teacher.

My most grateful thanks are due to the staff of my department for their affectionate help in revising, suggesting, and, particularly, in the collection and checking of statistics. And I am under deep obligation to the anxious care of one who read the proofs with microscopic eye, and let no careless expression pass without a note of interrogation and remonstrance.

WILLIAM SMART.

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW,
April, 1904.