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THE NEW PROTECTIONISM

profitable fifth of the whole inhabited world for our exclusive markets, and had treated the manufacturers and traders of all other rising commercial nations as trespassers, it cannot be doubted that a combination of European nations would long ago have banded themselves against this arrogant monopoly.

Protection is not a good defence either as a normal trade policy or in war-time. If any simple test is wanted, it is furnished in the fact that as soon as the war started the great Protectionist belligerents, one after another, dropped their food tariffs. Italy reduced her duties on food in October, 1914, and abolished her corn tax in the following February. In October, 1914, Austria abolished her corn tax. In September, 1914, the German duties on bread, beans, butter, eggs, poultry, prepared foods, cereals and flour, meat and fish, were abolished. So much for the defence value of Protection in war-time! And yet these countries are comparatively self-sufficing in their food-

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