THE 17868 PREMISES OF FREE TRADE EXAMINED. BY GEORGE BASIL DIXWELL. niversity C FROM THE BULLETIN OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WOOL CAMBRIDGE: JOHN WILSON AND SON. University Press. 1881. Reclassed 6-12-29 MVP THE PREMISES OF FREE TRADE EXAMINED. As the text-books from which political economy is taught in most of our colleges are generally by English authors, or by Americans who have adopted the English views, it is not surprising that we should meet with a great many highly educated men who believe the trans-Atlantic ideas to be invulnerable. They have been taught that economical phenomena are too complex to be investigated by the a posteriori method, and that nothing can be relied on but reasoning from assumptions; and they have accepted with delight certain most attractive argumentations, in which the wasteful futility of protection appears to be demonstrated, just as the mathematician demonstrates that the three angles of a triangle are in all cases equal to two right angles. But deductive reasoning has its own liability to error. Very eminent authors may change the subject or change the premises or reason from an apparent axiom, which upon careful examination is found little better than a blunder, or an identical proposition. The writer believes that all these logical faults are to be found in the supposed demonstrations above alluded to; and he proposes in this paper to point out a few of them, in the hope that some able minds may be led to review their conclusions, and to read or read again, with a candid spirit, what has been urged by Rae, Phillips, Carey, List, Bowen, Seaman, Thompson, Greeley, E. P. Smith, Kelly, Elder, and many others who have written in favor of protection. Let us first examine Mr. J. R. McCulloch's apparent demonstration that absenteeism is not financially injurious to a country. He argued in this way: |