The free trade controversy has had many vicissitudes in Australia. It has nearly always divided political parties. We used to think of England as the inviolable stronghold of free trade. That thought on the one side and the growing call of nationalism on the other made a clear-cut decision difficult. For many years the Labour Party was in a serious dilemma with the tradition of passionate free trade inherited from British democracy to be balanced against the obvious advantage of a growing industrial electorate; and the official attitude was one of indifference. The safe answer to a heckler was that the difference between protection and free trade was precisely the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee: they were equally capitalistic devices for exploiting the worker.

On the other side the country producers maintained a faith in free trade which was at first fully justified by their economic interests, and was only gradually sapped by the discovery that many of them could get as much out of protection as the factory-folk. To this day the Country Party has been disinclined to admit that when its interests are at stake it can give lessons in high protection before which the efforts of the manufacturers sink into mediocrity. The left wing of the Conservative side had, however, its roots in the cities, and was pushing national ideals more strongly than the Labour Party, hampered as it was by the British tradition of its pioneers.