Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Fall of Protection: 1840-1850
Life of the Duke of Devonshire, I had to examine closely the political events of 1903 to 1908, which turned so much upon questions of imperial trade relations.
This book is mainly a study of the decade 1840 to 1850, during which, substantially, took place a real revolution, or, in the more vivid anglo-saxon, a turn right round of the wheel. A long-standing system of trade control and political finance was reversed, the principles upon which it was founded were rejected, and ideas and practice of an opposite kind captured, and still hold, the field. This revolution was no less complete than that which convulsed the sphere of religious theory and ecclesiastical practice during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, nor are the two without some striking analogies. That deep thinker, the novelist Balzac, makes one of his characters remark that the moral world revolves like the physical, so that at stated intervals the same phenomena recur with variations in detail. Perhaps this is true, and, if so, the history of past events does contain, for the observant, some predic tion of those still lying in the darkness of the future, and some guide for intelligent action. The use of history should be to prevent men from wasting their strength in the futile pursuit of impossible ends.
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