foreign imports as so-called Free Traders go blindly against them, except in the case of articles not produced in this country, some of which the Free Traders are obliged to tax preposterously.  Tariff Reform is not one-ideaed, rigid, inelastic, as our existing system is.  Many people are afraid of it, because they think Tariff Reformers want to put duties on foreign goods for the fun of the thing, merely for the sake of making them dearer.  Certainly Tariff Reformers do not think that cheapness is everything.  Certainly they hold that the blind worship of immediate cheapness may cost the nation dear in the long run.  But, unless cheapness is due to some mischievous cause, they are just as anxious that we should buy cheaply as the most ardent Cobdenite, and especially that we should buy cheaply what we cannot produce ourselves.  Talking of cheapness, however, I must make a confession which I hope will not be misunderstood by ladies present who are fond of shopping—­I wish we could get out of the way of discussing national economics so much from the shopping point of view.  Surely what matters, from the point of view of the general well-being, is the productive capacity of the people, and the actual amount of their production of articles of necessity, use, or beauty.  Everything we consume might be cheaper, and yet if the total amount of things which were ours to consume was less we should be not richer but poorer.  It is, I think, one of the first duties of Tariff Reformers to keep people’s eyes fixed upon this vital point—­the amount of our national production.  It is that which constitutes the real income of the nation, on which wages and profits alike depend.

And that brings me to another point.  Production in this country is dependent on importation, more dependent than in most countries.  We are not self-supplying.  We must import from outside these islands vast quantities of raw materials and of the necessaries of life.  That, at least, is common ground between the Free Trader and the Tariff Reformer.  But the lessons they draw from the fact are somewhat different.  The Free Trader is only anxious that we should buy all these necessary imports as cheaply as possible.  The Tariff Reformer is also anxious that we should buy them cheaply, but he is even more anxious to know how we are going to pay for all this vast quantity of things which we are bound to import.  And that leads him to two conclusions.  The first is that, seeing how much we are obliged to buy from abroad in any case, he looks rather askance at our increasing our indebtedness by buying things which we could quite easily produce at home, especially with so many unemployed and half-employed people.  The other, and this is even a more pressing solicitude to him, is that it is of vital importance to us to look after our external markets, to make sure that we shall always have customers, and good customers, to buy our goods, and so to enable us to pay for our indispensable imports.  The Free Trader does not