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fact that the methods of payments are slightly different is irrelevant to the issue. It is curious that it should be necessary to point this out to free traders. For the most fundamental principle of free trade is that a political barrier has no proper significance at all in the sound economy of trade. For the economic international society, to which both British and Belgians belong, it is clearly advantageous that the rails should be bought in the cheaper market, though it means less unemployment in Belgium and more in Britain, but it is foolish to shirk the stark and obvious fact that, if a British railway has the option of setting to work unemployed Glasgow steelworkers on the one hand, or Belgian unemployed steelworkers on the other, the immediate effect of taking the former course is to increase the aggregate employment in this country. The Glasgow workers will buy as much other British produce by the money they receive, and buy it as soon, as would the Belgian workers, and this act of purchase will have the same stimulating effect upon other British trades in both cases. This is quite manifest, if omitting the machinery of payment we confine our attention to the substance of the trade in question. However the payment is effected, what the railway really buys the rails with is the carrying services which it performs. This process of exchanging transport against rails involves no doubt some intermediaries. Probably in neither cases, whether the rails are bought in Glasgow or in Belgium, will the actual railmakers take their payment directly in the transport service of the railway. The railway will sell transport to various British manufacturers and traders, who will pay for it in goods sent to Glasgow or Belgium for consumption by the railworkers in one of these places. However many intermediary processes of sale may take place, the ultimate fact issues that the railway pays for rails in terms of transport, and there is no ground for supposing that the Belgian purchase sets more capital and labour to work at an earlier time than would the Glasgow purchase. The same amount of employment is brought about. The difference is that in the one case part of the employment takes place outside this country, in the other case it does not. Viewing the transaction quite objectively, one may prefer the Belgian purchase, on the ground that, while it makes no appreciable difference in the volume of world employment, it is better for the railway to buy in the cheaper market, and it conduces to the better