And that is at the same time the answer to the misleading, and often dishonest, outcry about “taxing the food of the people,” about the big loaf and little loaf, and all the rest of it.  The construction of a sensible all-round tariff presents many difficulties, but there is one difficulty which it does not present, and that is the difficulty of so adjusting your duties that the total proportion of them falling upon the wage-earning classes shall not be increased.  I for one regard such an adjustment as a postulate in any scheme of Tariff Reform.  And just one other argument—­and I recommend it especially to those working-class leaders who are so vehement in their denunciation of Tariff Reform.  Is it of no importance to the people whom they especially claim to represent that our fiscal policy should lean so heavily in favour of the foreign and against the British producer?  If they regard that as a matter of indifference, I think they will come to find in time that the mass of the working classes do not agree with them.  But be that as it may, it is certain that I, for one, do not advocate Tariff Reform in the interests of the rich, but in the interests of the whole nation, and therefore necessarily of the working classes, who are the majority of the nation.

A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY

Guildford, October 29, 1907

I am very sensible of the honour of being called on to reply for the Unionist cause, but I approach the task with some diffidence, not to say trepidation.  I feel very conscious that I am not a very good specimen of a party man.  It is not that I do not hold strong opinions on many public questions—­in fact, that is the very trouble.  My opinions are too strong to fit well into any recognised programme.  I suffer from an inveterate habit, which is partly congenital, but which has been developed by years spent in the service of the Crown, of looking at public questions from other than party points of view.  And I am too old to unlearn it.

For a man so constituted there is evidently only a limited role in political life.  But he may have his uses all the same, if you take him for what he is, and not for what he is not, and does not pretend to be.  If he does not speak with the weight and authority of a party leader, he is at least free from the embarrassments by which a party leader is beset, and unhampered by the caution which a party leader is bound to exercise.  He commits nobody but himself, and therefore he can afford to speak with a bluntness which is denied to those whose utterances commit many thousands of other people.  And I am not sure whether the present moment is not one at which the unconventional treatment of public questions may not be specially useful, so, whether it be as an independent Unionist or as a friendly outsider—­in whichever light you like to regard me—­I venture to contribute my mite to the discussion.