Free trade v protection Author:Harold Cox Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FREE TRADE v. PROTECTION. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS " FREE TRADE." By ERNEST E. WILLIAMS. sT N the original scheme of the ensuing series of articles, i... more »t was 11 arranged that Mr. Harold Cox, the Secretary of the Cobden Club, should begin the attack. But subsequently the sequence was altered, the editor deeming it more in accordance with the established order of things that I, as the advocate of a change in fiscal policy, should open the attack. I should have preferred the earlier arrangement, and should justify its propriety upon the ground that, though the Free Trade system (if so such a one-sided system can be called) is at the present time established in this country's fiscal policy, yet, nevertheless, it cannot be regarded by economists as a really established and settled system. It was not the system of this country from the early Middle Ages up to 1846; it is not believed in at the present day by a large number of Englishmen, including English legislators and economists; it is not the system which obtains in other countries and in our own colonies. It is, therefore, only an experimental system, and is upon its trial; and, in view of the circumstances I have just related, the burden of proof, therefore, lies upon the champions of the system. It is for themto show that the system is not the failure which the verdict of the rest of the world and the experience of all ages declares it to be. This incidence of the burden of proof, moreover, becomes yet more obvious when we consider that the Free Trade policy is part and parcel of a system of political and economic thought—the Manchester school to wit—which in every other department of its activity has been thoroughly discredited in these latter days. The discredit is practically universal. Little Englandism, which was...« less