The True Northerner

What Free Trade Leads To.

If the policy of free trade were not having a practical application in our own time, if its results were not perfectly plain to us all, it might be possible to explain the action of our farmers, especially in the West and South, at the last election, on the ground that they had been misled by the sophistries of the Democratic leaders and press. But we have in England to-day a practical application of the free trade policy and a demonstration of its results, especially to the farmers.

In our news column we have already given an account of the great farmers' convention just held in England, at which the terrible condition of the country's agricultural interests was shown and a demand for protection made amid the wild enthusiasm of the delegates present. The Republicans have told the farmers that protection helped them. We can understand how the farmers, with that peculiar perversity which belongs to them, would say: "You are mistaken, prejudiced. We can do better with free trade," so long as there was no actual evidence to go by, but we cannot understand how they can say this with the entire farming interest of England exclaiming to the world "We are being ruined by free trade!"