Mr. Bright has been reading his American friends a much
needed lesson on Free Trade, but remarks, very erroneously we think, " Happily for the Americans this question of Free Trade is not mixed up, as ours was, with a great political question, and with the supposed supremacy of a powerful territorial and aristo- cratic class." If this means that the struggle in America will be shorter on that account, it is probably an egregious blunder. The Free-Trade Peers, Lord Grey (then Lord Howick), Lord Ducie, Lord Fitzwilliam, and others, did at least as much for the Free- Trade cause as any middle-class men,t Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright alone excepted. Read the ineffable trash talked all over the States by the ,popular journals,—say the. New York Tribune—and you will feel almost hopeless of getting the theory of Free Trade, simple as it is, really before them. A Pennsylvanian iron miner writes to the New York Tribune to that, without protection, he cannot afford to pay the wages needed for his labourers at all, and should have to leave off mining, and the Nem York Tribune thinks that an unanswerable argument in favour of protection ;—just as if it did not show in the clearest way that the men engaged in mining are wasting their labour, and could get far more iron by working at agriculture and buying foreign iron with the proceeds than by direct mining ! The democracies are all going wrong about Free Trade.
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