It has been commonplace to see in the part played by free trade in the making of the Liberal government of 1905 and its electoral victory in 1906 a return to the past, to the cardinal tenet of the Peelite–Gladstonian fiscal consensus which had dominated nineteenth-century politics and policy. Such an interpretation is invited both by the Liberal rhetoric of the ‘hungry forties’ and by the prominence of such self-conscious Cobdenites as F. W. Hirst and G. J. Shaw-Lefevre in the campaign against tariff reform. Such a view of the revival of ancestral gods made clear both the limitations of the ‘old’ liberalism of Campbell-Bannerman and emphasised the importance of the breakthrough to the ‘new’ liberalism of Asquith after 1908, when the ‘old’ prescriptions of peace, retrenchment and reform were finally abandoned in favour of social reform and progressive taxation.

Nevertheless, this interpretation is unsatisfactory at a number of levels, for it implies strongly that free trade's attractiveness lay in its ancestry, both in its ability to act as a unifying device within the Liberal Party after the damaging post-Gladstonian splits, and as an electoral issue, able to counter the ‘modernity’ of tariff reform by an appeal to Pareto-type residues in the new democratic electorate. This interpretation fails therefore to allow both for the extent to which the political language of free trade had developed since the 1840s, and fails to integrate it adequately into the making of new liberalism, of which it formed an essential, not an expediential, ingredient.