txsm THE ROONOMIC OIROULATION. 809

from province by customs barriers during the same period.
But freedom of internal commerce, whether within an island
Or over & wide empire, is still not the same thing as universal
freedom of exchange. An interruption, at whatever point
in the great currents of exchange, must always remain an
interruption and a disadvantage. England is especially interested
 in any transaction that tends to develope trade
between any nations whatever. We derive benefit from it in
one way or another. The mother country has no interest in
going into a Customs Union with her colonies, with the idea
of giving them any advantage or supposed advantage in
trading with her over foreign countries. :
It is not enough, therefore, to remove our own protective
duties, though Peel may have been right under the circum-Stances
 of the time in saying that the best way of fighting-a
hostile tariff is by reforming your own. It is the business
of the economic statesman to watch for opportunities of
inducing other nations to modify duties on imports; because
the release of the consumers of other nations is not only a
Stimulus to your own production for exportation, but has
an effect in the supply of the imports which you declare to
be the real object of your solicitude.
This was the conception at the bottom of the Commercial
Treaty of 1860. “A treaty with France,” said Mr. Glad-Stone,
 “is even in itself a measure of no small consequence;
but that which gives to a measure of that kind its highest
value is its tendency to produce beneficial imitation in other
Quarters. It is the fact that, in concluding that Treaty, we
did not give to one a privilege which we withheld from
another, but that our Treaty with France was, in fact, a
treaty with the world, and wide are the consequences which
engagements of that kind carry in their train.”

1860.
Ar. 56.