obliged more than once to accuse Mr.
Williams of misrepresenting facts in order to bolster up his argument.
That accusation I cannot withdraw. It has been deliberately made because
the facts compelled it. Doubtless in the ordinary affairs of life Mr.
Williams is not less honourable than other men, but in his zeal to
establish a case, which cannot be established, he has blinded himself to
the main facts of the matter with which he was dealing, and has often so
quoted facts and figures as to convey an impression the reverse of the
truth. Even from his own point of view this was a pity, for it throws
discredit upon the whole of his work, whereas several of his statements
are quite true. It is, for example, true that Germany has made great
progress in the chemical and in the iron trades. It is also true that
her commerce is gaining a foothold in Eastern markets once almost
exclusively our own. These, and several other perfectly true statements,
are to be found in Mr. Williams's pages, and might have been edifying to
exalted persons who can only discover a distorted image of the truth ten
years after the main facts have been clearly seen by those common folk
who are primarily concerned with them. To such individuals Mr. Williams,
without his picturesque exaggerations and strange twistings of the
truth, might have been really useful. As it is, he has only helped to
lead them astray. Indeed, it is much to be feared that these hasty
students of a big subject have by the perusal of Mr. Williams's
neatly-turned sentences and epigrammatic phrases acquired an impression
which no drab-coloured statement of simple fact will ever be able to
dislodge.

NOT ONLY A PROTECTIONIST PAMPHLET.

One ground of complaint Mr. Williams may possibly feel that he has
against me--that I have so far treated his book as if it were only a
Protectionist pamphlet. My excuse is that the spirit of the
Protectionist breathes in almost every page he has written. Nowhere does
he show the slightest grasp of the central fact that all commerce must
be mutual, that exports cannot exist unless there are imports to pay for
them; everywhere he speaks as if each useful commodity sent us from
abroad were a net loss to the British nation, and as if the people who
sent it were "robbing" us of our wealth. Nor is that all. I take his
chapter dealing with the reasons "why Germany beats us," and I find that
after examining some half dozen reasons in succession and dismis