IRON    HORSE	93
a parvenu without territorial or commercial influence, Disraeli
nevertheless saw with the superior vision of genius the flaw in
the logic of the Manchester School—"a body of men ... eminent
for their eloquence, distinguished for their energy, but more
distinguished ... for their energy and eloquence than for their
knowledge of human nature or for the extent of their political
information.^1 The weakness of their economic reasoning, as of
all logical abstraction when applied to human affairs, lay in its
lack of elasticity. It was too doctrinaire to withstand the shock
of time and the changes wrought by time in human ideas and
circumstances. A nation, however powerful, which staked its
future on a policy so rigid, might one day suffer a terrible
awakening.
The free traders, with their eye on the living individual,
rightly assumed that it was the present interest of the British
manufacturer and urban worker to sell manufactured goods to
a mainly agricultural world and of the world to purchase them
by sending its primary products untaxed to Britain. They also
assumed that such a favourable situation, once created, woulcf
always and automatically continue. But having the historical
sense, and not being tied to a formula like Peel and Cobden,
Disraeli realised that other nations would not always acquiesce
in a British monopoly of industry. They might wish to extend
their own industrial markets just as Lancashire had done. If
they found their British rivals could undersell them at home,
they would put pressure on their governments to raise pro-
hibitive and uneconomic tariffs behind which their growing
industries could shelter.
For, as Disraeli reminded his unheeding countrymen, govern-
ments were swayed by other considerations than the economic
gain of the living individual which Adam Smith had en-
shrined as the wealth of nations. They might deliberately restrict
the course of commerce and limit profits to increase their
country's strategic and military strength, safeguard its health
and social stability or advance some religious or other ideological
conception of national life to which economics were subordinate.
Swayed by such reasons, for all Cobden's confident prophesies,
they might refuse* to follow the British lead and adopt free
trade. In place of a world liberated from commercial restrictions
and growing ever richer and more peaceable, Britain might one
^s *Manypaag & Buckk, DisracK, /, 781.