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Show Worried England. In the Contemporary Review Mr. John Gamble makes a vehement plea for a return of England to the policy of protection, and declares that free trade must be set aside unless England is to follow in the steps of Spain and Holland and at an immeasurably quicker pace than either. He thinks free trade has done its work and is no longer in harmony with the altered conditions of international inter-national competition. We suspect that is true. The farmer must have fences to secure his crops against the stock of his neighbors, unless there is a law which compells the stock owner from permitting per-mitting his stock running at large. For a full century England was secure. She had the material, the machinery, the trained skilled labor, the ships to carry away her products, the money to buy any raw material needed, and colonies the world around which naturally looked to her for what they needed of manufacturer's wares. She from her secure place could afford to jeer at struggling manufacturers in other lands and her statesmen were fond of assuming assum-ing superior wisdom in explaining to the world that real freedom meant unrestricted freedom of trade more than anything else. But when the United States began to send coals to Newcastle, cotton goods to Manchester, Man-chester, steel to Liverpool, cutlery to Sheffield Shef-field and to undersell John in his own market, then he began to ask if such things could be done in England what was going to become of English trade elsewhere. So he is naturally worried, and some of his statesmen are beginning to say, "Of course we believe in free trade, but we do not want it too awfully free." The open door which he advocated for so many years does not look so pleasant to him as it did; he begins to feel that the door should be kept open, but that some people should have reserved seats on the inside. As it looks to us, it is already too late for England to gain the ground she has lost. She will have to give up manufactures to a great extent and confine herself to banking. |