Lord Grey addressed to the Times of Saturday and Thursday
last, two letters containing an attack on the principle of com- mercial treaties, in which he attributed directly to our treaty of commerce with France the reaction which has been perceptible of late years against the Free-trade cause. We. should quite agree with Lord Grey that if in a commercial treaty either party does what is not consistent with Free- trade, in order to secure some fancied advantage by way of reciprocity, the policy of such a commercial treaty is wholly bad. But it does seem refining a little too much, to assert that a treaty in which all the action of both parties was, strictly speaking, defensible on Free-trade grounds, has injured the- cause of Free-trade, simply because it was thrown into the. form of a mutual agreement to benefit each other. In fact,. we have no belief at all in Lord Grey's hypothesis as to the cause of the growth of reactionary opinion. There seems to be- a much simpler explanation,—the growth of democratic power, and the comparative ease with which the new and greater' constituencies are taken in by the fallacies of Protection.
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