FREE TRADE AND DOGMA

The doctrine of free trade, for instance, has in England, for about half a century, held the field as an unassailable dogma of economic policy.... The doctrine of free trade may, as far as Englishmen are concerned, be treated as the doctrine of Adam Smith. The reasons in its favor never have been, nor will, from the nature of things, be mastered by the majority of any people.... The obvious objections to free trade may, as free traders conceive, be met; but then the reasoning by which these objections are met is often elaborate and subtle, and does not carry conviction to the crowd. It is idle to suppose that belief in freedom of trade...ever won its way among the majority of converts by the mere force of reasoning.... It is easy, then, to see how great in England was the part played by external circumstances--one might almost say by accidental conditions--in determining the overthrow of protection. A student should further remark that after free trade became an established principle of English policy, the majority of the English people accepted it mainly on authority.... What, however, weighed with most Englishmen, above every other consideration, was the harmony of the doctrine that commerce ought to be free, with that disbelief in the benefits of State intervention which in 1846 had been gaining ground for more than half a generation ... The Free Traders of 1846 ... identified the progress of democracy with the acceptance of free trade. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England (1905).