The Cobden Club, which only dines and talks annually in
honour of the great man after whom it is named, had a rather more instructive talk than usual last Saturday, when Mr. Wells, a Revenue Commissioner of the United States, and the leader of the American Free-trade party, made an elaborate speech on the results of the ten years' Protective policy in the United States. Mr. Wells described it as the view of the most eminent of American Protectionists, Mr. Carey, of Philadelphia, that it would be a good thing for the United States to have the ocean between them and Europe converted into a sea of fire so impassable that "if Dives was in Europe and Lazarus in Pennsylvania, they could not under any circumstances enter into commercial correspondence." The Morrill tariff and its various modified forms had aimed at some similar result, and had gone so far that 50 per cent. duties ad valorem had been not 'far from the average rate on all dutiable imports. What had been the result ? The buying power of labour over the neces- saries of life had diminished by 19i per cent. as compared with
1860, and though the total of the exports from the United States (on which no duty is. Levied.) had of course increased, it had increased almost only in raw products, and hardly in any- thing except sewing machines on which invention and skill had been expended. The commercial shipping of the United States had fallen off steadily under Protection, and the protection on foreign -wool and woollens was so heavy that the American woollen ntanu- lacturers found it impossible to make good and cheap cloth, having no sufficient choice of materials. Protection had not ruined a 'gigantic country which keeps up free trade within its own borders, and is a world in itself, but it had unquestionably wasted its vast resources in futile attempts to bribe American energy into artificial channels, and had so increased the expense of transport, that corn, which would in other times have been sent to the seaboard, had been burned as fuel. Mr. Wells predicted that the United States would soon come to their senses. And then, -when at last they are found clothed and sitting in their right -mind," the material of the clothing, it seems, will be mostly European.
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