Mr. Balfour of course found it an easy task to
twit the Government with their abandonment of Free-trade viewa. Though he does not say so in so many words, we presume his speech to mean that Tariff Reform is a better instrument kr finding employment for the unemployed than the methas advocated by many so-called Liberals. We should prefer to put it that one scheme is as evil and fatuous as the other, the only difference being that the Tariff Reform remedy is applied on a vaster scale and is more likely to lead to political cor- ruption. The only way to get more employment in a country is to increase its wealth—i.e., its capital—and the only way to increase its wealth is by the encouragement of exchanges which are the sources of wealth. Every exchange is a union of forces which creates wealth. But you will never increase the number of exchanges by forbidding them. Attempts to create wealth through Tariff Reform or the State regulation of prices and industry are in reality, though not always in appearance, the forbidding and hampering of exchanges. You cannot make wealth by unmaking it.
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