Page:The New Protectionism.djvu/129

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FREE TRADE AS A POLICY
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money to our Continental Allies. It is not merely that Free Trade has developed our industry and commerce on sound and profitable lines, so enriching the nation as to enable it to find for a great emergency the huge financial resources we have provided in the last two years. But the facts that London has been the financial centre for the entire world, and that the financial direction of world-commerce and of the distribution of the savings of the world has been mainly in our hands, are indissolubly connected with Free Trade. Now, this supremacy has been of incalculable value in helping us to finance the war. We have been able to draw in for our immediate needs huge liquid funds of capital laid out in financing world-commerce, and to establish relations of credit and exchange in the United States and elsewhere, resting ultimately upon our financial and commercial prestige. Should we revert to Protection, and break Europe into two rival economic systems — throwing many of the neutrals into close fiscal relations with the

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