TOPICS OF THE DAY.
IMPERIAL PREFERENCE.
WE see no* objection to an immediate adoption of the policy of Imperial Preference. The changed circum- stances of the world, and the changes in our own economic point of view, which we make no attempt to conceal or deny, or to cover up by any tortuous dialectic, oblige us to acquiesce in, and indeed to accept, as reasonable as well as inevitable, a scheme for controlling and diversifying the course of external exchange by means of Governmental action—i.e., a Tariff.
We hold as firmly as we have always held that if your prime object is to increase the wealth of a nation, then the maximum freedom of exchange should be your goal. The less the interference the greater the volume of exchange, and the greater the volume of exchange the greater the growth of wealth. If, however, your object is not merely to increase the nation's wealth, but first and foremost to secure its safety and independence from the possibility of destruction, you must, as far as external trade is concerned, abandon the ideal of Free Exchange and use a Tariff as a principal instrument of National Security. In short, you must see that the sound maxim, If a nation wants a thing, it must either produce it itself, or produce something else to exchange for that thing : which course it takes is determined by the economic line of least resistance," is not allowed to direct your trade into channels which may make you dependent for your daily bread and the sheer necessaries of life upon the help of foreign nations. If you do allow that process of discrimination under Free Trade, you may suddenly find yourself in time of war, unless you can secure immediate victory at sea and the maintenance of all or almost all the old sources of cereal and other edible supplies, on the edge of Famine.
There is the State of Siege argument in a nutshell. We confess that, though we always paid intellectual respect to that argument as valid in the abstract, and as denying Free Trade an absolute triumph, we thought that complete security and independence could be secured for these Islands by means DI an Invincible Fleet. Experience has shown that the command of the surface of the sea does not necessarily give command of the regions below that surface, and that the balance of supply is so beautifully adjusted under Free Trade that a comparatively small shortage in cereals will put a non-self-supporting nation in jeopardy. And here we may say in parenthesis that we should always have been willing to give a better hearing to the State of Siege and Defence argument if Mr. Chamberlain and the Tariff Reformers would have agreed to push that side of their case. As a matter of fact, they always kept in front the other and unverifiable side of their case—i.e., that Tariff Reform would make us not safer but richer. It was because it would raise wages and dividends, increase our factories, and bring back to prosperity our starved industries, that we were urged to give up Free Trade. The Tariff was to act as a kind of high-class manure, r.nd on that ground we were exhorted to adopt it.
This fallacious argument has now been abandoned, and the equally fallacious plea that considerations of National Safety have nothing, and can have nothing, to do with National Defence have now been dropped in the new light of altered conditions, and we see that we must not give up growing our daily bread because it is cheaper to make other things to exchange for it. We see that we must keep the key of our own cupboard in our own pocket, and that to allow it to repose in that of the Foreigner is to give up Blake's excellent maxim of "seeing that Foreigners do not fool us."
If we are to be self-supporting, or as nearly self-supporting as we can, we must act as follows. We must grow half our wheat and oats and barley, and have so large an area of tillage that if an emergency arises we can switch off from oats and barley to extra potatoes, and can live on them, even if we cannot make beer or whisky. That and the holding of an eight months' supply of corn in granaries and stacks will be enough to carry us on to the next harvest. That will make us reasonably secure, but a very important and, for reasons of sentiment, per se most desirable Second Insurance is to be obtained by insisting through Tariff Differentiation that the chief sources of our °verses supplies of cereals shall be and remain in the hands of the Dominions, and so within the Empire. This means that in no circumstances will the key of our Home cupboard be out of Imperial Control—sometimes our own, sometimes that of our fellow-citizens of the Dominions. Here again we note that experience has shown us how immensely the task of Victualling these Islands is facilitated if you are dealing with an integral part of the Empire in which the welfare of the Mother Country is just as ardently desired as it is here rather than with a neutral like, say; the Argentine.
The considerations we have just assembled at once demand the establishment of a policy of Imperial Preference based on the following essentials :— (1) We must by a Protective Tariff, by potential Bounties, or by the freeing of arable land from all taxation, local or national, or by a combination of all three, make it worth the while of the occupiers and owners of the soil to keep it for the most part under the Plough.
(2) We must as far as possible see that the bulk of the large supplies of wheat, oats, barley, and other cereals which will still have to come from overseas shall be Imperial grown and shall be conveyed in Imperial Bottoms.
This means in practice a Tariff not so high as to be a deter- rent to other nations to supply us with foodstuffs, modified by a Preference to the Dominions sufficient to make them our chief oversea suppliers. But if Imperial Preference has thus become an imperative policy, as we believe it has, the sooner its adoption is openly proclaimed the better—a reciprocal loosening of Tariff Nino obtained where practical from the Dominions. We should here add that though fiscal arrange- ments less intimate will be appropriate in the case of America, we should like to see a Commercial Treaty with her which would clearly mark the fact of our blood-brotherhood, and be a monument to, and proof of our gratitude for, the never-to-be- forgotten aid she has brought us in the present war. Before she became officially our Ally her generous, gallant, enter- prising merchants heard and heeded the call of the blood, and helped us and brought us the aid without which we should have perished, not because it paid them, but because it saved us. Where we were concerned there was nothing cold or callous in the neutrality of the Traders to whom a Charter- . party, a Bill of Ladinct, or " F.O.B." meant in New York exactly what it meant in the London river. In our Tariff we must underscore our sense of gratitude. Furthermore, we should, of course, be prepared to enter into the fullest reciprocal Commercial Treaties with our other gallant Allies, whose trade with us, though of a different character, will be more important than ever after the war.
It remains for us, while endeavouring to make perfectly clear what fiscal policy the Spectator will support id the future—that is, so long as it is proved expedient, and there- fore necessary—to add something in regard to a General Tariff. It is, we regret to say, apparent that the mass of the electors will not endure taking the Income Tax below its present limit. But if we must impose some taxation on the whole population and not merely on a minority of the people—it will of course in any case be much more severe on the minority than on the majority—the only expedient will be a General Tariff for revenue purposes—a universal Imperial harbour due levied ad valorem on all articles received from abroad. We regret the fact, but we do not see how we shall be able to get a sound national balance-sheet without recourse to this grim necessity.
We have one more word to say in this context. We cannot see why the Liberal Press, or a large part of it, has shown itself so zealously angry at Mr. Hughes's speech in regard to Imperial Preference, and the considerations involved. We find many things said by Mr. Hughes highly disputable, but to try to shout him down and to ask by what right he interferes with our concerns seems to us the height of absurdity as well as of bad manners. Mr. Hughes as an Australian is minding his own business when he is minding ours. Besides, was he not born and bred a Londoner ? Has he lost his citizenship by living under the British flag beside the Pacific waves ? Heaven forbid I " Coeduni,, non, animum, mutant, psi trans mare currunt.—They change the skies above them, but not their hearts, who roam.' Mr. Hughes may correct As, exhort us, and chasten us to his heart's content. If he does so with all the stops in his fine organ out, we shall take it as a proof not of antagonism but of right goodwill. We are surely old enough and wise enough to take criticism in good part. That which we deserve we will gratefully make use of. That which is ill-founded we will reject, but without calling names or mistaking our critic's friendlineis and good intent. Base indeed is he who cannot endure a son's eager desire to help his parents in what he thinks, often no doubt mistakenly, is their clear need.
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