Mr. Gladstone made a very interesting Free-trade speech at Dundee
on Wednesday, in relation to the McKinley Tariff. His main point was that the loss which such a tariff inflicts on England in one way, it more or less makes up in another way. It no doubt shuts out a good many English goods which the American market would otherwise buy up, but by that means it raises greatly the general run of prices in the United States, and so prevents the American exporters from exporting nearly as much as they:otherwise would to those foreign markets in which they compete with us, and we gain in these other markets, perhaps, almost as much as we lose in their own. Mr. Gladstone answered the allegation that the United States have grown rich under a Protective tariff, by remarking that in a country so large as that,—which is a continent in itself,—wealth accumulates even though there be great waste ; and the existence of wealth does not disprove the existence of great waste. The agent of a very wealthy Duke, he said, had thought it his duty to warn his Grace that his eldest son, the Marquis of —, was spending a great deal of money ; to which the Duke replied blandly : " I hope he is ; there is a great deal of money to spend." It was the same with the United States. They had wealth so superabundant that they grew rich without being frugal. And as a matter of fact, they have grown rich in spite of lavish waste on a very mis- taken tariff. The new tariff, which is still more mistaken, is one by which the States will suffer vastly more than any of those countries against whose interests, as they suppose, the McKinley Tariff has been directed.
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