order to cramp the natural faculties of a people, and to prevent their arrival to their utmost prosperity, is the instrument of their servitude, not the means of their protection. To protect men, is to forward and not to restrain their improvement. Else, what is it more, than to avow to them, and to the world, that you guard them from others only to make them a prey to yourself. This fundamental nature of protection does not belong to free, but to all governments, and is as valid in Turkey as in Great Britain. No government ought to own that it exists for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people, or that there is such a principle involved in its policy.

“Far enough she is still from having arrived even at an ordinary state of perfection; and if our jealousies were to be converted into politics, as systematically as some would have them, the trade of Ireland would vanish out of the system of commerce. But, believe me, if Ireland is beneficial to you, it is so not from the parts in which it is restrained, but from those in which it is left free, though not left unrivalled. The greater its freedom, the greater must be your advantage. If you should lose in one way, you will gain in twenty.

"You obligingly lament, that you are not to have me for your advocate; but if I had been capable of acting as an advocate in opposition to

a plan so perfectly consonant to my known principles, and to the opinions I had publicly declared on an hundred occasions, I should only disgrace myself, without supporting with the smallest degree of credit or effect, the cause you wished me to undertake. I should have lost the only thing which can make such abilities as mine of any use to the world now or hereafter, I mean that authority which is derived from an opinion, that a member speaks the language of truth and sincerity, and that he is not ready to take up or lay down a great political system for the convenience of the hour; that he is in Parliament to support his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opinion in order to get into parliament, or to continue in it. It is in a great measure for your sake, that I wish to preserve this character. Without it, I am sure, I should be ill able to discharge, by any service, the smallest part of that debt of gratitude and affection which I owe you for the great and honourable trust you have reposed in me."

We have placed the important points in italics, as it is evident that Burke had in mind a National System of Commerce from which the people of Great Britain and Ireland could derive mutual benefit from the advantages of which they could flourish together.

If we go by the rules of evidence the position

of Ireland clearly demonstrates that what is best for a community in trade and industry cannot be laid down à priori. Free trade does not, in point of fact, give any freedom to individuals in the choice of their employments. What it professes to give with one hand it destroys with the other. The trade of the country is consigned to the care of the merchants. Free traders love to see large figures in imports and exports, forgetting all the while that the internal trade of a country is of more value than the external: that it is necessary, first of all, to build up a strong national division of labour as a base upon which to build an external trade. Free trade does not leave men free to choose their employments; on the contrary, it deprives them of that privilege. It subjects man to the competition, the changes, and the chances, of foreign trade in fact, to every industry in foreign countries possessing a highly developed national productive power.

Is it too much to expect that our modern politicians may take to heart Burke's simple doctrine; that they will not go to the House of Commons and regard politics as a great game, nor look upon the lives and welfare of their constituents as pawns in the game? The economic welfare of the citizens they represent should ever be their first consideration. Political science, which we contend embraces the economic as well,

is designed for the good it can do to society; and, for this reason, it must ever be regarded as a means to an end. To look upon human beings as being mere fractions of a horse-power, as constituent elements in a process for the development of a science of wealth, and to use them as such, is, in our view, one of the greatest crimes that has ever been perpetrated upon humanity. And Ireland is one of the most glaring examples of this policy-a standing disgrace to British civilisation.

INDEX

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