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by formidable triple lines of tariffs, framed with the intention to shut out of an entire country British manufactures, may without dishonour or humiliation acknowledge they have been repulsed. But the claim of foreign manufacturers of cotton goods to be capable now, after lengthened periods of careful nursing by their respective Governments, of walking abroad without the go-cart, of competing on equal terms with British manufacturers, looks inconsistent with their unrelaxing pressure upon their rulers to put up their customs duties higher and yet higher upon all kinds of cotton cloths which this country makes and might attempt to sell in their markets. Our traders are by those protective measures on behalf of their American, French, and German rivals, vindicated from the reproach, should any one venture to cast it, of lack of ingenuity in the making of their cloths, or of enterprise in the disposal of them. At the same time it has to be admitted (however it may seem to tell against our theories as a nation of free-traders), that the cotton trade of several countries which are our most active competitors in manufactures has developed under protection a good deal faster than the British cotton trade has increased within the same period under free trade. This statement is true of cotton manufacturing in France, Belgium, Germany, and in a less degree of some other European countries, as the published returns of the quantities of cotton taken by them in a series of years and other statistics of their manufactures indicate. A more suggestive comparison might be instituted between the record of the extension of the cotton manufacture in the United States of America during the last five or ten years, and the inelastic state of the manufacture in Lancashire during the same period.

Between the British cotton trade and that of each foreign country which prosecutes the manufacture of cotton goods on an extensive scale, there is this essential difference, that whereas the former is immensely more a foreign trade than a home trade, the latter are hitherto mainly home trades. Three-fourths, roundly, of the cotton goods woven in Lancashire are destined for foreign distribution. The export of cotton goods from the United States is only a small percentage of the entire production of these fabrics in the “States.” In France the cotton cloths made for export may perhaps equal one-third or one-fourth of the total product; in Germany the proportion will be much smaller. Belgium does a moderately large foreign business in her cotton manufactures. Other European countries may be regarded as simply supplying themselves with cotton-pieces; their external trade in them is not worth taking into account. The bulk of the Lancashire trade in cottons being an export trade depends for its continuance upon the condition and laws affecting trade of countries beyond the seas, over which the British people have but slight control, or none whatever. The American manufacturer has in his own vast country 62,000,000 of consumers of cotton goods to sell his wares to, and he enjoys, or soon will by the special grace of the M‘Kinley Tariff, an all but exclusive privilege of furnishing those sixty-two millions of people with whatever articles made out of cotton they want, at his own monopolist price. By the end of the century he calculates that the United States will contain fully 80,000,000 of human beings, the supply of whom with cotton cloth,