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THE NEW PROTECTIONISM

owning class in the Government, especially of Prussia; in France to the widespread but very strongly defined influence of the great peasant electorate. This "balance of power" between two economic forces of producers, naturally opposed to one another, has brought about curious fluctuations and compromises in the protective policy of the two countries; but upon the whole it has worked, politically, for the maintenance and elevation of tariffs.

But this seizure of special financial and economic opportunities is not a full explanation of the success of the Protectionist movement. The whole tenor of political history, with its excessive emphasis upon the nation as the limit of sympathy and corporate obligation for the citizen, and upon the opposing interests and struggles between nations, has furnished an education and an emotional atmosphere favourable to the acceptance of Protectionists' ideas of national economy. In such an atmosphere, even during times of peace, it has been easy to impose on the common mind notions and

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