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THE NEW PROTECTIONISM

exchange, and you reverse the current of all civilization and drive back to barbarism.

The full pacific virtues of Free Trade and the constructive policy which it requires have seldom yet been recognized, even by professed Free Traders. This is due to a failure fully to appreciate the profound change that has come about in the economic internationalism of the last half-century. Trade, in its simple meaning of exchange of goods for goods, does not cover the new industrial, commercial, and financial relations between members of different countries. Cobden was admittedly mistaken in thinking that the perception of their obvious self-interest must rapidly lead all other nations in the world to liberate their trade as we had done, and that this universal Free Trade would afford security against future war. His error lay in failing to perceive that, though the interest of each people as a whole lay in freedom of commerce, the interests of special groups of traders or producers within each country would continue