THE NEW PROTECTION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Sixteen years ago I travelled from Singapore to Mar- seilles on a " Messageries " boat, upon which there were only two other English passengers besides myself. For the first few days excellent biscuits made by a well-known English firm were served with chocolate at the first breakfast. These were afterwards replaced by biscuits of exactly the same size and shape, and even bearing the same marks (except, of course, the maker's name), but lamentably inferior in taste, crispness, and general quality. Everybody complained. In vain the head-steward protested that the new biscuits were just as good as the old; they were, indeed, he maintained, superior, being of French manufacture. But the French passengers were "unpatriotic "enough to prefer the good English biscuits to the inferior French imitation, and by importunate clamour they ob- tained them. It was free flour and free sugar which enabled the English biscuit-maker to produce a biscuit which was preferred by French people on a French boat to a French biscuit made of taxed flour and taxed sugar. Again, I was recently travelling in France, and bought a daintily packed luncheon basket full of excellent things. But the Protected knife was like Sir Edward Grey's figurative weapon, and did not even pretend to cut the chicken, whilst the Protected fork incontinently bent double. They were about as useful as similar articles in a doll's house. As for French matches (heavily Pro- tected, with, I have heard, a fine of one franc for every smuggled match discovered by the Customs), who "does not know them with their horrible fumes! Moreover, it takes about a minute for a Protected match to light a monopoly cigar, which when lit is hardly worth smoking. I do not touch upon the terrible burdens which are imposed upon a nation by a policy of Protection, but I have confined myself to a few instances of the many small personal disadvantages and inconveniences of daily life entailed by such a system of tariffs and trade restrictions as Mr. Chamberlain is endeavour- ing, by an unsparing use of cheap sophistries and crude in- accuracies, to impose upon this country.—I am. Sir, &c.,
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