TARIFF REFORM

Tunbridge Wells, October 24, 1907

As this is a Tariff Reform meeting pure and simple, I am anxious not to approach the subject in any party spirit or in any spirit of acrimonious controversy.  The question is a difficult and complicated one, and though I am a strong Tariff Reformer myself I hope I am not incapable of seeing both sides of the case.  I certainly should have reason to be ashamed if I could not be fair to those whom, for the sake of brevity and convenience, I will call Free Traders, though I do not altogether admit the correctness of that designation.  My views were once the same as theirs, and though I long ago felt constrained to modify them, and had become a Tariff Reformer some years before the subject attained its present prominence in public discussion, it would ill become me to treat as foolish arguments which I once found so convincing or to vilify opinions which I once honestly shared.

What has happened to me is what I expect has happened to a good many people.  I still admire the great Free Trade writers, the force of their intellect, the lucidity of their arguments.  There can be no clearer proof of the spell which they exercised over the minds of their countrymen than the fact that so many leading public men on both sides of politics remain their disciples to this very day.  But for my own part I have been unable to resist the evidence of facts which shows me clearly that in the actual world of trade and industry things do not work out even approximately as they ought to work out if the Free Trade theory were the counsel of perfection which I once thought it.  And that has led me to question the theory itself, and so questioned it now seems to me far from a correct statement of the truth, even from the point of view of abstract inquiry.  But I am not here to engage in abstract arguments.  What I want to do is to look at the question from a strictly practical point of view, but at the same time a very broad one.  I am anxious to bring home to you the place of Tariff Reform in a sound national policy, for, indeed, it seems to me very difficult to construct such a policy without a complete revision of our fiscal arrangements.  Now a sound national policy has two aspects.  There are two great objects of practical patriotism, two heads under which you may sum it up, much as the Church Catechism sums up practical religion, under the heads of “duty to God” and “duty to your neighbour.”  These objects are the strength of the Empire, and the health, the well-being, the contentedness of the mass of the people, resting as they always must on steady, properly organised, and fairly remunerated labour.  Remember always, these two things are one; they are inseparable.  There can be no adequate prosperity for the forty or fifty million people in these islands without the Empire and all that it provides; there can be no enduring Empire without a healthy, thriving,