THE REAL OBJECT OP FREE-TRADE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR, —In your issue of June 25th your reviewer appears to have involved himself in a hopeless tangle, not only confusing my writings with those of Sir William Cooper, but also attri- buting to me the absurd opinion that " Great Britain should retrace her steps, and by means of Protection become an agri- cultural, and therefore a poor, country." In chap. 16 of my book, " Economic and Fiscal Facts and Fallacies," headed " The Real Object of Free-Trade," I quoted from a speech of Lord Goderich, afterwards Lord Ripon, that the object of Free-trade was " to get the monopoly of all these markets" (the markets of other nations) "for our manufactures, and to prevent them, one and all, front ever becoming manufacturing nations" ; and he went on to say that the French policy of Protection was wise, " because, if it were freely to admit our manufactures, it would speedily be reduced to an agricultural nation, and therefore a poor nation, as all must be that depend exclusively upon agriculture." Lord Ripon has here stated that the abandonment of Protection would reduce France to an agricultural, and therefore a poor, nation, but your reviewer has ingeniously twisted it so as to imply the reverse. May I ask you, in fairness to me, to publish this letter ?—I
[We very much regret that in our article entitled "The Federal System of Political Economy" Sir William Earnahaw
+Cooper's work, " Britain for the Briton" (Smith, Elder, and Co.), was, by an accidental transposition of the printer, wrongly attributed to Sir Guilford Molesworth, while the latter's work, "Economic and Fiscal Facts and Fallacies" (Longmans and CO.), was given as Sir William Cooper's.—En. Spectator.]
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