We must protect the industry of our country. The people of this country surely are the first entitled to the benefits of the markets of their country. He had been brought up a commercial man, and until lately held to the free trade principles of commercial men. From his youth, Smith's "Wealth of Nations" had been almost as familiar to him as his Catechism, and was regarded with almost equal deference; but practical experience had of late forced upon him the conviction, that that beautiful theory was not borne out by corresponding benefits; he had looked at its practical results, and was constrained to acknowledge, in spite of early predilections, that that theory was a fallacy. He had adopted the views of the American Protectionists as those most consonant with sound reason and common sense. Their arguments he looked upon as unanswerable; with them he believed that economists and free trade advocates had overlooked three principles which to him appeared like economic laws of nature, and the disregard of which alone was sufficient to account for the present position of our country. They say, and he believed with them, that the earth, the only source of all production, requires the refuse of its products to be returned to its soil, or productiveness diminishes and eventually ceases. That the expense of carriage to distant markets not only wastes the manure of animals on the road, but that the expenses of freight and commissions, of charges to carriers and exchangers, are in themselves a _waste_, avoided by a home market whenever the _consumer_ is not separated from the _producer_; and that those productions fitted for distant markets, such as wheat and other grains, are only _yielded by bushels_, while those adapted for the use of the home consumer, and unsuited for distant transportation, as potatoes, turnips, cabbages, are yielded by tons. These were facts well worthy the attention of our agriculturists--eight-tenths of our whole population--and which could not be too often or too plainly placed before them. It is essential to the prosperity of every agricultural country that the consumer should be placed side by side with the producer, the loom and anvil side by side with the plough and harrow. The truth of these principles is well known in England, and practically carried out there by her agriculturists every day. She possesses within herself unlimited stores of lime, chalk and marl, besides animal manures, valued in McQueen's Statistics in 1840 at nearly sixty millions of pounds, more than the then value of the whole of her cotton manufactures. Yet England employs whole fleets in conveying manure, guano and animal bones to her shores; yes, has ransacked the whole habitable globe for materials to enrich her fields, and yet, forsooth, her economists and hosts of other writers would fain persuade all nations and make the world believe, that all countries are to be enriched by sending their food, their raw produce, their wheat, their rye, their barley, their oats and their grains to her market, to be eaten upon her ground, which thus receives the benefit of the refuse of the food of man, while that of animals employed in its carriage is wasted on the road, and the grower's profits are reduced by freight to her ship-owners and commission to her merchants. Behold the inconsistency, behold the practice of England and the preaching of England; behold how it is exemplified in the countries most closely in connection with her: look at Portugal, "our ancient ally." By the famous Methuen treaty she surrendered her manufactures for a market for her wines, and thus separated the _producer_ from the consumer. From that hour Portugal declined, and is now--what?--the least among the nations of the earth. Next, let us direct our attention to the West India Islands. They do not even refine their own sugar, but import what they consume of that article from England, whither they send the raw material from which it is made, in order, he supposed, to enrich the British ship-owner with two voyages across the Atlantic, and the British refiner in England, instead of bringing him and his property within their own islands. Such is their commercial policy; and with free trade the West India planter has been ruined, the prospects of the country are blighted, and discord and discontent pervade the land. Next comes the East Indies: partial free trade with England has destroyed her manufactures. He (Mr. G.) could well recollect when Indian looms supplied the nation with cottons; here in Canada they were the only cottons used: he appealed to the chairman, who could corroborate his statement, and must remember the Salampores and Baftas of India.