ey sneer at
the humanitarian cant with which its promoters successfully surrounded
it. One of the leading Socialist books states with regard to this
point: "Protection was no longer needed by the manufacturers, who had
supremacy in the world-market, unlimited access to raw material, and a
long start of the rest of the world in the development of machinery
and in industrial organisation. The landlord class, on the other
hand, was absolutely dependent on Protection. The triumph of Free
Trade therefore signifies economically the decay of the old landlord
class pure and simple, and the victory of capitalism. The capitalist
class was originally no fonder of Free Trade than the landlords. It
destroyed in its own interest the woollen manufacture in Ireland, and
it would have throttled the trade of the colonies had it not been for
the successful resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia. It was
Protectionist so long as it suited its purpose to be so. But when
cheap raw material was needed for its looms, and cheap bread for its
workers; when it feared no foreign competitor, and had established
itself securely in India, in North America, in the Pacific; then it
demanded Free Trade."[769] "Protection at home was needless to
manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, and whose very
existence was staked on the expansion of their exports. Protection at
home was of advantage to none but to the producers of articles of food
and other raw materials, to the agricultural interest, which, under
the then existing circumstances in England, meant the receivers of
rent, the landed aristocracy."[770]

The Free Trade manufacturers, who were chiefly interested in cheapness
of production, cared little what became of the workers. "The
individualist devotees of _laisser faire_ used to teach us that when
restrictions were removed, free competition would settle everything.
Prices would go down, and fill the 'consumer' with joy unspeakable;
the fittest would survive, and as for the rest--it was not very clear
what would become of them, and it really didn't matter."[771]

The doctrines and the boasts of the Free Traders are usually treated
by the Socialists with contempt. "Cobdenites ascribe every known or
imagined improvement in commerce, and the condition of the masses, to
Free Trade. Things are better than they were fifty years ago: Free
Trade was adopted fifty years ago. _Ergo_--there you are. There is not
a word about the development of rail