Sir William Harcourt addressed a large meeting of his West
Monmouthshire constituents at Tredeaar on Friday week. The most effective part of his speech was that, in which, by way of comment on Mr. Chamberlain's " new history" of the ante-Free-trade period, he quoted the lurid pictures of the misery and distress which prevailed. do England before the repeal of the Corn-laws painted by Mr. Chamberlain himself in 1885, when be had been five years President of the Board of Trade. In 1885, again, Mr. Chamberlain declared that a tax on food would mean a, decline in wages, and would raise the price of every article produced in the United Kingdom. 'Excellent also was the exposure of the retrograde character of a policy which, by extending the system of indirect taxation, sought to undo the work of every Finance Minister since Peel. Amongst Sir William's happiest sayings we may note the epigram on Mr. Balfour's position : " The Prime Minister tells us he is determined to lead. His followers declare they are deter- -mined not to follow"; and his description of the new policy as " a leap into the dark, not a leap into the dark of the future, which nobody knows, but a leap into the dark of the past, which we know too well." For himself, he was "a Free-trader out and out," and for the simple reason that he had lived long enough to see Protection at work, and had been spared long enough to see what Free-trade had done for the English people.
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