paid her by the rest of the world. New Zealand or South Australia may
take up a million sterling in London (because they get the loan
placed there at 5 or 6 per cent, while the local rate of interest in
Australia is far higher) in order to make a railway which perhaps
pays the local Government as much as the interest of the money they
give to England. Still, the capital being once fixed in Australia
while (by hypothesis) the stock is held in England, the result is
equivalent to a tribute.

All Liberal stump-orators now agree in telling the agricultural
population that their improved position is due to Free Trade (in
wheat), and that therefore they should vote for the Liberals. Nothing
is done more confidently in politics and history than the settling
the causes of events, or predicting what would have been the course
of events had some result been different, as, for instance, had the
separation of the United States from England not occurred. The truth
is that in politics causes are many; they act and react on each other
in their operations; and to say exactly how much is due to one cause,
or how much that cause acting alone would have effected, is
impossible. To get some judgment how much of the present prosperity
of the agricultural labourers (admitted on all sides as compared with
their position in 1846) is due to free importation of wheat alone,
let us (merely as a scientific artifice) imagine that a regular
sliding-scale duty on wheat were put on now, bringing wheat to 48s. a
quarter permanently. What would be the effect on the agricultural
population? We may suppose that the produce of the duty, were it five
or eight millions, or any other sum, was employed in remitting the
duties on tea or other productions generally consumed by agricultural
labourers. The placing of wheat at 48s. a quarter permanently would
at once recall a good deal of capital to the land, it would carry out