Beyond these, she had a cumbersome system of laws regulating and in many cases prohibiting the exportation of articles which might teach to other nations the skill by which she had herself so marvelously prospered.
When by long experiment and persistent effort England had carried her fabrics to perfection; when by the large accumulation of wealth and the force of reserved capital she could command facilities which poorer nations could not rival; when by the talent of her inventors, developed under the stimulus of large reward, she had surpassed all other countries in the magnitude and effectiveness of her machinery, she proclaimed free-trade and persuasively urged it upon all lands with which she had commercial intercourse.
Maintaining the most arbitrary and most complicated system of protection so long as her statesmen considered that policy advantageous, she resorted to free-trade only when she felt able to invade the domestic markets of other countries and undersell the fabrics produced by struggling artisans who were sustained by weaker capital and by less advanced skill.

So long as there was danger that her own marts might be invaded, and the products of her looms and forges undersold at home, she rigidly excluded the competing fabric and held her own market for her own wares.
FREE-TRADE POLICY OF ENGLAND.
England was however neither consistent nor candid in her advocacy and establishment of free-trade.

She did not apply it to all departments of her enterprise, but only to those in which she felt confident that she could defy competition.

Long after the triumph of free-trade in manufactures, as proclaimed in 1846, England continued to violate every principle of her own creed in the protection she extended to her navigation interests.

She had nothing to fear from the United States in the domain of manufacturers, and she therefore asked us to give her the unrestricted benefit of our markets in exchange for a similar privilege which she offered to us in her markets.