Mr. Bright, in a letter on the American protective tariff
written to Mr. Cyrus Field, puts the case against Protection with almost extravagant force. - " It is strange," he says, " that a people who put down slavery at an immense sacrifice, are not able to suppress monopoly which is but a milder form of the same evil. Under Slavery, a man was seized and his labour was stolen from him, and the profit of it enjoyed by his master and owner. Under Protection, the man is apparently free, but he is denied the right to exchange the produce of his labour except with his countrymen, who offer him much less than the foreigner would give. Some portion of his labour is thus con- fiscated." Yes, but by popular consent, whereas no one ever maintained that slavery was enforced by popular consent. Ac- cording to that argument, every mistaken law which diminishes the produce of labour,—as doubtless a number of our enactments still do,—is but a mitigated slavery. This seems to us, we confess, to confound completely distinct things. If Birmingham, by its municipal council, puts on a bad rate, unquestionably its citizens confiscate for themselves a portion of their own labour; but if they do it of their own accord, there is no more slavery in the matter than there is when, under the same circumstances, they decide against such a rate. A monopoly established by popular ignorance is the blunder of free men. Slavery, estab- lished, as it always is, by force, is the sin of tyrannical men; and there is but little chance of shortening the reign of the former, by trying to blacken it artificially with the deeper guilt of the latter.
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