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which arise from the use of accumulated industrial resources,' and which go to the persons, or the children of the persons, by whom such resources have been accumulated. Theoretically, the State might confiscate all such resources as exist at any given moment, but no one, if it aimed at making this confiscation permanent, would ever accumulate any such resources again. They have been accumulated hitherto owing to the operation of a motive which has its basis in a confidence, hitherto justified by the practice of the whole civilised world, that those who produce and accumulate in the present will have the usufruct of their accumulations assured to them in the future the activity of any one decade, or any one generation, being dependent on a confidence in what will take place in the next. Destroy confidence in the future, and the great driving forces of the economic process are paralysed. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald sees nothing of this. He declares that his opponents are blind to the scientific 'continuity' of events, and do not recognise in Socialists the exponents of the principle of gradual evolution. Mr. Macdonald and his friends absolutely fail to recognise so much as the continuity of two periods of twenty years; and their idea of evolution is to pick out the bricks of an arch, one after one, till the whole structure collapses. If he is confronted with any specific difficulties, Mr. Macdonald dismisses them as 'pettifogging objections,' and as a signal example of such he adduces the question of 'Who under Socialism is to do the bottlewashing?' This, he says, is a petty detail.' Mr. Wells touches on the same question, which he puts in the form of 'Who is to carry round the milk?' He does vouchsafe an answer. It is that of Lord Beaconsfield to the question, 'Who are the critics?' 'The men

who have failed in literature and art.' But Mr. Wells and Mr. Macdonald alike show how feeble is their grasp on the problems which they affect to make specially their own. For what, in their arguments, do the milkmen and the bottle-washers stand for? They stand for the labour-mass-for the great majority of the human race-the men who possess no exceptional energy, and are incapable of any of the higher forms of initiative. When Mr. Macdonald talks of settling who are to be the bottle-washers, he means to take two examplesthe North Sea fishermen and some half million colliers; and the real question, which he dismisses as a petty detail, is why, when a man like himself, having eaten his fish at breakfast, is sitting in a public office with his feet on a Turkey carpet and a warm fire casting its glow on him, other men are to be getting his coal for him underground, or exposing themselves night and day to the perils of the winds and waves? These are questions which are set to the human race, not by social organisations, bad or good, but by the constitution of man and nature. They are the precise class of questions which persons like Mr. Macdonald, when they make their liberal appeals to the simple affections of the people,' promise to solve in a new, in a rapid,

if not in a sudden manner; but the moment they are pressed for any indication, even the most general, of the sort of solution which they practically have in view, they brush the whole problem aside as a petty detail,' which somehow or other will solve itself when the time comes. Meanwhile, says Mr. Macdonald, let us go on blindly, altering what we can in a vaguely specified direction, and never troubling ourselves about any contingent consequences. If we jumped into Socialism, we shall doubtless be jumping into a bog. If we slide into the bog down an inclined plane, we are evolutionists, and the bog, when we get to it, will turn into a foundation of rock.

I have called these observations on Persuasive Socialism "Notes"; for I am not attempting here any complete or systematic criticism. All the points dealt with are discussed in their logical order in the volume which I have just published. My object in these pages has been to show anti-Socialists, critics and workers, by two concrete examples, both provided by unusually clever men, that the more carefully, temperately, and plausibly the Socialistic position is stated, the more surely does everything distinctive of it altogether disappear, or else the more clearly do the absurdities of everything which is distinctive of it emerge.

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LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL used to speak irreverently of those politicians who call themselves Free Traders-a title that is obviously a terminological inexactitude hardly more truthful than its modern variants, Free Fooders and Unionist Free Traders-as 'the chattering and silly brood of Mr. Cobden.' The late Lord Salisbury was more merciful, but not less sarcastic. He derided the cult as this fetishworship of a set of doctrines that are called Free Trade, but which are not Free Trade.' He scoffed at the preposterous assumption that Englishmen should be precluded from entertaining the idea of differential duties in favour of the Colonies as though it were an economical heresy.' And he held out the comforting hope that the country will unlearn the 'fallacies' of Free Trade as soon as the generation has died out whose minds were formed under their influence.'

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The high character and great attainments of some of the politicians who still cling to this superstition would lead one to believe that Lord Randolph was too sweeping in his denunciation, and that Lord Salisbury's milder criticism was more suited to the circumstances of

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the case. But it must be remembered that the Cobdenites have themselves to blame if they are sometimes taken at Lord Randolph's valuation. For, with some rare exceptions-among whom, perhaps, Lord Avebury and the late Lord Goschen have been the most conspicuous they seem to be always trying to shirk the real political and economical points at issue, and to make the controversy an unreal one, by juggling with undefined terms like Free Trade' and 'Protection,' by attributing to their opponents opinions and aims which the latter entirely disavow, and by hiding in obscurity the true economic meaning and inevitable consequences of their own policy.

Very different was the attitude and conduct of their great founder and exemplar, Mr. Cobden. I think it is probable that we know Mr. Cobden's whole mind with regard to the meaning and aims of Cobdenite Free Trade, and wherein it differs from Tory Free Trade; for he has been fortunate in having, after his death, a vates sacer who is the most accomplished of English biographers, who has given us Mr. Cobden's own words on every point of importance. Mr. Cobden's aim was not merely the beating down and breaking up of the power of what he regarded as the half-feudalism, half-militarism of the English landed interest, though that was the motive that provided most of the vast funds that gave vitality to his agitation.1 It was not merely to attack the clergy also, though in 1842 he wrote to Mr. Bright:

Here is a good opportunity for doing justice to the Dissenting ministers. .. The Church clergy are almost to a man guilty of causing the present distress by upholding the Corn Law, they having themselves an interest in the high price of bread.

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But, further, he declared that Cobdenite Free Trade is one and the same cause' with the peace movement.' Most of all, he hoped that his policy would cut adrift all our Colonies, leaving us to be a rich and comfortable Little England like Holland or Belgium: The colonial system, with all its dazzling appeals to the passions of the people, can never be got rid of except by the indirect process of Free

Mr. Cobden's letters are extraordinarily candid on this point. He and his Radicals hated the Whig aristocracy even more violently than they hated the Tories, and all the more so because the Whigs were always trying to make use of them, as they ultimately succeeded in doing. In June 1846 he wrote to one of his most confidential allies: Hitherto they (the Whigs) have done nothing except to revile and oppose us; not a county has been gained to Free Trade but by League money and at a terrible cost of labour to the Leaguers. I invaded the West Riding in November 1844, and held public meetings in all the great towns to rouse them to qualify 2000 votes!' And again, in one of his speeches in 1849, he refers quite pleasantly-and evidently with no qualms whatever as to this method of manufacturing ‘public opinion' and political power-to this huge creation of faggot-votes. He said: 'You know that the West Riding of Yorkshire is considered the great index of public opinion in this country. . . . I went into the West Riding with this 40s. freehold plan. I stated in every borough and district we must have 5000 qualifications made They were made.'

Trade, which will gradually and imperceptibly loose the bands which unite our Colonies to us by a mistaken notion of self-interest.' 'And as to India, he declared, 'It will be a happy day when England has not an acre of territory in continental Asia.' And as to the home and foreign trade of his Little England, when all the Colonies and India had been got rid of, he asserted that hostile tariffs could be successfully fought by free imports, and that import duties should only be imposed for revenue purposes. This was the true theory of Cobdenite Free Trade, as opposed to the Tory theory of Free Trade by Reciprocity and Imperial Preference. I shall show presently how Mr. Disraeli met each one of these points.

Now, I ask the reader to compare this plain and honest creed of Mr. Cobden with the accounts that are given of their doctrines, and of the Tory doctrines on this subject, by the Cobdenites of the present day, and especially by those very curious hybrids who call themselves Unionist Free Traders. For the purposes of this paper I will only quote one of the most distinguished of these gentlemen, Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles. On the 11th of April Mr. Bowles stated, in a letter to the Times, that the Unionist Free Traders were unable to assent to Mr. Chamberlain's proposals because they would not so far depart from the policy of Bolingbroke, Pitt, Beaconsfield, and Salisbury!' This statement is addressed, not to an excited and ill-informed crowd in the heat of a Manchester election, but to the readers of the Times, undoubtedly the most cultured community in the world. With the most sincere respect for the great authority of Mr. Bowles, I venture to maintain that no more grotesque travesty of plain, well-known and admitted historical facts has ever been put before the educated British public. I will endeavour to establish that position. And I very respectfully challenge a reply, only stipulating that I am met by arguments that recognise a definite meaning in the terms' Protection' and 'Free Trade,' that do not skip about from one connotation in the major premiss to a totally different one in the minor, and that do not assume that the question is ended when Mr. Chamberlain's proposals for Tariff Reform have been called Protection. With this object in view I submit the following interpretation clause :

Protection was defined by Lord Randolph Churchill, in his great speech against that policy delivered at Stockton in 1887, as the imposition of such a duty on imported corn as would raise the price of wheat in this country to a point at which the farmer could profitably grow it-he said anything between forty shillings and fifty shillings a quarter. This definition is sometimes made more elastic-and I do not think any responsible Tariff Reformer will be found to quarrel with the extension-by the inclusion of any measure or measures that would make the food of the people appreciably dearer, or that would bolster up any industry for which the country is otherwise unsuited. For

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