… is from page 58 of historian Frank Trentmann’s impressive 2008 book Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain; the time and place referenced is very early 20th-century Great Britain:
For A.V. Dicey, the leading constitutional expert of the period, ‘the worst danger of Protection’ was precisely that it would lead to ‘the confusion between public interest and private interest.’ Free Trade held out a mutually convenient if idealized concordat: politics kept out of business, and business kept out of politics.
