Page:The New Protectionism.djvu/27

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THE REVIVAL OF PROTECTIONISM
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trade with Germany; individual Britons trade with individual Germans, buying from them and selling to them, just as they do in the case of fellow- Britons, each party seeking and finding his private gain from each transaction. It is, of course, possible to add together all these separate acts of sale and purchase which take place between members of the different nations, and put them under the collective title British trade, German trade, American trade. Our Board of Trade returns do this, thus unintentionally conveying the suggestion that there is something different in the economic nature and value of overseas trade and purely domestic trade.

If this suggestion that Great Britain as a nation trades with Germany and the United States is a mischievous falsehood, still more mischievous is the suggestion that they are hostile competitors for trade with other countries. For this is a double-barrelled falsehood. The first falsehood is the perversion of the actual fact that the competi-

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