England is fast failing us as a market for our raw produce.

Every thinking person who has watched the tendency of our trade with England during the last few years must come to the conclusion that its condition is of page 14 itself a sufficient reason to justify a Protective policy. Under Freetrade we produce food and raw material for export to England to be worked up into manufactured goods, and returned. Under Freetrade it has been shewn that this is all we can do; but how do English markets pay us even for our produce? The average price of wheat has been lower during the last three years than at any time during the last hundred years, and now is scarcely worth growing. The price of wool at home a year or two ago did not leave a bare margin to the produce; our frozen meat at three pence half-penny per pound is unremunerative, and tallow is unsaleable. In conversation with a gentleman, a very high authority from Calcutta, only a few days ago, he informed me that in two years time the cheap labour of India, and the completion of railways, would allow of Indian wheat being placed on the market in London at twenty-five shillings per quarter. Russian petroleum, as soon as the steamers with tank accommodation are completed which are now being built, will lower the price of tallow to such an extent as to make it almost worthless; and can there be any doubt that the enormous tracks of South America, now being opened up by English enterprise, and stocked with thousands, I might say millions of sheep, can have other than a detrimental effect on the price of the produce of our flocks?

With these facts staring them in the face, what will our farmers say to the prospect of being shut out from the Home market, and no sufficient population to consume their produce in New Zealand? I cannot do better on this head than quote from a letter in the Launceston Examiner, in 1885, the following remarks: "England's 'closed ports'—and her ports are more effectually closed at the present moment than if she had imposed an ad valorem duty of 20 per cent, on our products a dozen years ago—drive us to the page 15 necessity of changing our system of commerce. Freetraders ought in justice to themselves to propound an alternative. They have pointed us to India and Ceylon; we have been told Japan is a good market; we have been advised to try America and other places, with barren results. Seeing Freetrade has failed us, Protectionists are justified in asking a trial for Pro- tection. If England cannot pay us for soil products, surely we ought to be allowed to consume what food and raw material is required to furnish ourselves with manufactured goods. It may be said there is no hindrance to manufacturers, but there is a hindrance; while English capital and English labour, at the low rates ruling for both, are allowed to operate on Colonial food and raw material at the low rate England offers for them, we are not prepared to compete on equal terms. We are not willing to subject our workmen to the low rates of wages English workmen have to sub- mit to, and capitalists will not invest in manufactories at the low rate of interest English money has to accept. To compete with England, we must descend to English trade equalities, and that we cannot do. To do so we might as well go back to England; in fact, this is Freetrade law."

I am aware that the views that I have put forward here will be distasteful to many of my friends. I shall be told, I have no doubt, that I have not yet learned even the rudiments of Political Economy. Be it so. I err in that respect with many of the most able men, both in this Colony and in Victoria, in America and in Germany, who have broken away from the orthodox notions of the Cobden Club, and have set at defiance the fine sounding theories of Professors, exercising instead a little plain common sense. The theories that have been propounded as suitable for England and English trade, may be perfectly sound when applied to the page 16 circumstances and condition in which England has been placed during the last thirty years. They are valueless, in my opinion, when applied to a different country, differently circumstanced. Common sense tells me that the man who can get skilled labour in India at two shillings a week can place wheat on the London market cheaper than I can, that he can manufacture goods and bring them to New Zealand cheaper than I can make them, unless I can get New Zealand white labour at the same price, (which God forbid); and common sense tells me, too, that my neighbours, however much they may love me, will buy those goods rather than mine; it tells me, too, that we can manufacture goods just as suitable to our requirements as the English maker, if we are not forced out of the market by unfair competition, and that we must protect our manufacturers by a tariff, just as England's cheap labour and capital, her position and resources, answer the purpose of a tariff to protect her manufacturers; it tells me, too, that it is better to take for our example a Colony circumstanced similarly to ourselves rather than an Old World state, and that as self-interest is inducing certain sections of our people to support Freetrade, so the motive of self-interest must be employed on behalf of the people at large for the people's benefit.