een quoted, let it be asked
in what mode her government sought relief. Did it aim to maintain
artificial and unnatural prices? Did it maintain a swollen and
extravagant paper circulation? Did it carry further the laws of
prohibition and exclusion? Did it draw closer the cords of colonial
restraint? No, Sir, but precisely the reverse. Instead of relying on
legislative contrivances and artificial devices, it trusted to the
enterprise and industry of the people, which it sedulously sought to
excite, not by imposing restraint, but by removing it, wherever its
removal was practicable. In May, 1820, the attention of the government
having been much turned to the state of foreign trade, a distinguished
member[2] of the House of Peers brought forward a Parliamentary motion
upon that subject, followed by an ample discussion and a full statement
of his own opinions. In the course of his remarks, he observed, "that
there ought to be no prohibitory duties as such; for that it was
evident, that, where a manufacture could not be carried on, or a
production raised, but under the protection of a prohibitory duty, that
manufacture, or that produce, could not be brought to market but at a
loss. In his opinion, the name of strict prohibition might, therefore,
in commerce, be got rid of altogether; but he did not see the same
objection to protecting duties, which, while they admitted of the
introduction of commodities from abroad similar to those which we
ourselves manufactured, placed them so much on a level as to allow a
competition between them." "No axiom," he added, "was more true than
this: that it was by growing what the territory of a country could grow
most cheaply, and by receiving from other countries what it could not
produce except at too great an expense, that the greatest degree of
happiness was to be communicated to the greatest extent of population."

In assenting to the motion, the first minister[3] of the crown expressed
his own opinion of the great advantage resulting from unrestricted
freedom of trade. "Of the soundness of that general principle," he
observed, "I can entertain no doubt. I can entertain no doubt of what
would have been the great advantages to the civilized world, if the
system of unrestricted trade had been acted upon by every nation from
the earliest period of its commercial intercourse with its neighbors. If
to those advantages there could have been any exceptions, I am persuaded
that they would have b