The constant creation of unskilled labour in Great Britain causes a great superfluity of that labour. It causes a constant underbidding of workers and a decline of wages among these workers not merely to the level of competing countries, but to the minimum level of subsistenceto the starvation level. The consequence of this state of affairs is that the wages for unskilled labour are considerably lower in Great Britain than they are in Germany. According to the last report of our Consul at Frankfort, the German chemical industries are transferring their works to Great Britain not only because of the Patent Law but more especially because the chemical manufacturers have discovered that general wages are lower in Great Britain than they are in Germany. In its last report the Berlin Chamber of Commerce complained that the ready-made clothes trade was leaving Berlin for London because wages are lower over here than they are in Germany. The Free Traders who, desiring to extol the blessings of Protection, tell us that clothes are cheaper in Great Britain than they are in Germany or the United States, omit to say that these cheap British clothes are only too often made by sweated labour.

Wages are lowest and poverty is greatest among our unskilled workers, who, as dock labourers, porters, carters, &c., live not on production, but on trade, and especially on our foreign trade. Free Trade replaces our home trade by foreign trade; it converts the regularly employed skilled productive worker into a casually employed and miserably paid trader's help, a two-legged beast of burden; and it is a poor consolation for us to contemplate and admire the great growth of our foreign trade, a growth which is due to the decay of part of our industries. Our manufacturing industries must have a market somewhere. Before the time when Free Trade had destroyed our agriculture, our manufactured articles were exchanged for British corn and meat, and our foreign trade was small. Since our agriculture has decayed, British manufactures have to be exchanged for American corn and meat. Through the ruin of our agriculture our foreign trade has become large, and 'Look at our prosperity!'' Enormous foreign trade!''Great Britain is rolling in wealth!' cries the Free Trader.

It must be doubted whether we were wise in lightly throwing away the security of our prosperous and expansible home market in order to gain scattered and precarious foreign markets, especially as international crises, which occur periodically and which seem unavoidable, such as the one through which we are passing at present, affect far more severely the very sensitive foreign than the sturdy home trade, especially when the home trade is protected by welldevised tariffs. Our exports to protected countries consist of raw materials, such as coal, hides, clay, &c., of coarse, partly manufactured goods, such as yarn and unbleached cotton cloth, and of fully manufactured articles. The raw materials and the partly manufactured

articles which we export are necessaries to foreign nations, and they are largely bought in good and in bad times, but many of our fully manufactured goods are luxuries to foreigners. For instance, an American who wants a suit of genuine Harris tweed will gladly pay two or three pounds more in times of great prosperity, but he will buy a cheaper American tweed suit in bad times. The same applies to machinery and many other fully manufactured articles of exportation. In good times, when everyone is making money and cost is not counted, foreigners may cheerfully pay more for British than for domestic productions, and the protective tariff becomes ineffective. But in bad times British exports, and especially exports of fully manufactured articles which are luxuries to protected foreign nations, are cut off as with a knife. Then the protective tariff becomes a prohibitive tariff. In times of international depression our industries can no longer export freely, the British home market becomes overstocked with goods which cannot be sold abroad, prices fall, and, in addition, foreign surplus manufactures are sold in Great Britain at whatever they will fetch and depress prices still further. And whilst our consumers,' the men with money in their pockets, rejoice at the cheapness of things, our producers are thrown out of work by the hundred thousand, and unemployment means distress and starvation for them because the majority of our workers receive such low wages that they cannot save much for a rainy day. They pawn their belongings, break up their homes to provide food and fuel, and destitution becomes terribly prevalent.

The different standpoints and interests of consumers and producers during times of depression are well described in the Report of the Royal Commission on Depression of Trade. We read on page xi of that Report:

Those who may be said to represent the producer have mainly dwelt upon the restriction, and on the absence of profit, in their respective businesses. It is from this class, and more especially from the employers of labour, that the complaints chiefly proceed. On the other hand, those classes of the population who derive their incomes from foreign investments or from property not directly connected with productive industries, appear to have little ground of complaint; on the contrary, they have profited by the remarkably low prices of many commodities.

Unfortunately, our Free Traders look at our economic problem chiefly from the point of view of the trader and of the moneyed private purchaser. They take a greater interest in our foreign trade, which is carried on by the few, than in our domestic production, which is carried on by the million. They take a greater interest in the cheapness of 'commodities' than in the welfare of those men who produce them.

Free Traders have the boldness to assert that there is much less unemployment in Great Britain than in protected countries such as

the United States and Germany. I shall prove that unemployment has become chronic in Great Britain, in consequence of the policy of Free Trade which places cheapness above happiness, private profit above national power and security, and goods above men; which sacrifices the producer to the consumer, and the health and strength of the nation to the profit' made in foreign trade. I shall prove that in no industrial country in the world is there such widespread and such permanent unemployment as in Great Britain, and that the prevalence of that widespread unemployment coincides with the rise of Free Trade.

Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations:

...

The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants. . . . The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements to marry. . . . The demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.

Translating Adam Smith's epigrams into modern language, I would state: The chief cause of emigration is unemployment and ill-paid employment. Workers migrate from countries where employment is bad to countries where employment is good. Hence the state of employment in a country may best be measured by the emigration and immigration returns.-Before the introduction of Free Trade emigration from Great Britain was small. Since the introduction of Free Trade about 12,000,000 British people have left this country, and of these about 10,000,000 people have remained in the United States and in our Colonies. Lately emigration from this country has been growing at an alarming rate. Net emigration from Great Britainthat is, emigration minus immigration-amounted in 1900 to 71,188, and, steadily rising every year, it increased to 139,365 in 1905 and to 237,204 in 1907. The significance of these figures can be seen only by comparison. The Boer war, which lasted three years, cost 20,000 lives. One may therefore say that in 1907 Great Britain lost a Boer war every month. Can Free Traders point to any other industrial country where emigration has taken place on a scale similar to that from Great Britain?

Free Trade means cheapness-especially cheap labour, cheap men. Our record emigration has been caused by record unemployment. Most of our 10,000,000 emigrants have passed through the ranks of the unemployed. Free Trade has meant widespread, acute, and permanent unemployment for our workers.

Whilst people emigrate from Great Britain by the hundred thousand, immigration is habitually far greater than emigration not only in the United States, but also in Germany, although the German population increases by more than 900,000 a year, whilst ours increases only by about 400,000 a year. The demand for men regulates the supply of men. Whilst our population leaves this country in rapidly

increasing numbers, in a veritable flight as from a stricken land, workers from the neighbouring countries migrate every year by the hundred thousand into Germany, where they find temporary work ; for Germany suffers, as a rule, not from unemployment, but from a scarcity of workers. In 1906 600,000 foreign workers migrated into Germany, and in 1907 the number was even greater. During the last few years, the United States have found work for more than a million immigrants every year. Nevertheless, our Free Traders have the courage to assert that unemployment is habitually greater in the United States and in Germany than it is in Great Britain.

Let us now look at our emigration from the financial point of view. Parents and the community jointly bring up children at very heavy expense, and their emigration at a time when they might repay the cost of their upbringing by useful work means in the first place the loss of the cost of their upbringing to their parents and to the community. If we estimate the cost of bringing up a child at 2007., it will be seen that Great Britain has, since 1846, lost through emigration 2,000,000,000l., and, in 1907 alone, she lost 47,000,000l. in that way. We are not man-eating cannibals, still we are paying for our foreign imports with the flesh and blood of our best citizens. The Moloch of Free Trade demands a yearly sacrifice of men. Nations which choose to rely for their food on foreign countries, and which cannot export a sufficient quantity of manufactures to pay for them, have to export men. Men are the largest of our 'invisible exports,' but these are never mentioned by our Free Traders when they explain to us how our foreign imports are paid for. Since the introduction of Free Trade we have presented foreign countries and our Colonies with 10,000,000 of our best workers, and we have saved to them the 2,000,000,000l. which otherwise they would have had to spend in bringing them up from babyhood. Free Trade means cheapness. We pay a very high price for the cheapness of commodities.'

My calculation considers only the cost of bringing up children, and therefore greatly understates the actual loss which this country has suffered by the unnecessary emigration of millions of its inhabitants. The greatest wealth of a country lies not in the possession of coal, gold, a large foreign trade, bank balances, and shares, as the Free Traders try to make us believe, but in the productive labour of numerous well-employed and well-paid workers. Children when grown up become producers of wealth and become taxpayers as well. Our taxation amounts to about 6l. per head of population. Therefore every million emigrants means an additional taxation of 6,000,000l. to the taxpayers who are left behind.

Our weakest industries were the first to suffer from the effects of Free Trade. Agriculture, and especially Irish agriculture, became unprofitable. In 1846 Ireland had about 9,000,000 inhabitants. Now it has only about 4,500,000 inhabitants, notwithstanding the

rise of great manufacturing industries in Ulster which nourish several hundred thousand people. After rural Ireland came rural Scotland and England. Our agricultural labourers went to America by the hundred thousand. Our agriculture decayed. Mr. Palgrave estimated in 1905 the loss of agricultural capital which this country has suffered at 1,700,000,000l., a sum which almost equals the sum total of our foreign investments. Then the canker of Free Trade attacked our manufacturing industries. Since our rural parts have been depopulated, our emigrants consist chiefly of industrial workers from the towns. Rural Ireland, which used to supply the largest quota of our emigrants, supplies now only a small portion, and the majority of Irish emigrants come now from industrial Ulster.

Our emigrants not only weaken our home industry by diminishing the number of skilled workers, but they raise competitors to our home industries in foreign lands. Before the Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade, Mr. Thomas Edward Vickers said: "There has been a great emigration from Sheffield to the United States. The emigrants to America remain there. The new steel industries of America will be chiefly established upon skill imported from Sheffield.' A visit to the great steelworks of America will confirm the foregoing statement. An American author, Mr. Curtiss, wrote on the same subject There cannot be the slightest doubt that the chief cause which has driven out of England so many of her skilled artisans, ingenious and enterprising citizens, has been that fiscal policy which reduces prices to the lowest level, which destroys profits, and, as profits disappear, drives down wages to starvation point.'

Free Trade, the policy of heartless mammonism, does not endeavour to find a remedy for unemployment. The champions of Free Trade and profit comfort our unemployed worker with economic conundrums and feed him with statistics. They bid him behold our magnificent foreign trade and the increase in the income of other people, as shown by the Income-tax returns, instead of giving him work. The only way by which to counteract the misleading teachings of the Tariff Reformers is to give the working man a solid grounding in the broad principles of political economy' wrote the Free Trader of April 1908. Classical British political economy is the economy of the trader and of the capitalist. It is not the economy of the worker, the producer.

Emigration or the workhouse are the two alternatives which the Free Traders offer to our displaced workers. But emigration is no remedy for the fearful amount of unemployment and consequent poverty which Free Trade has created. The Royal Commission on Labour reported on this point:

Depressions of trade produce a relative superfluity of labour for a longer or shorter time. Where an industry is declining without any apparent hope of recovery the temporary condition passes into the permanent. In such an industry the supply of labour may be permanently in excess of the demand,