TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD RANDOLPH'S OLD CLOTHES.
ONE of the most curious facts about the present political crisis is that hitherto no one seems to have noticed that there is nothing new about Mr. Chamberlain's so-called new departure, and that in reality he is only dressing up in Lord Randolph Churchill's old clothes, and in clothes, too, which Lord Randolph deliberately aban- doned after a trial—i.e., after he had gained experience and knowledge at the Treasury—as shoddy and not fit for a statesman to wear. The essential thing about Mr. Chamberlain's policy as it is being developed by the Birmingham Committee, which works for and under Mr. Chamberlain, is that though food is to be taxed, the total amount of the contribution made by the working man to the State in respect of articles consumed by him and his family shall not be increased. What he will pay on bread, mutton, beef, and cheese is to be balanced by a reduction of his payments on tea, tobacco, and sugar. The workman when he settles his weekly bill, urges Mr. Chamberlain, will pay no more than formerly, but he will pay it through preferential duties on food, intended to help the Colonies, instead of on tea, sugar, and tobacco,—taxes which do the Empire no ,good. This is held to be a very original and striking piece of statecraft. But, as we have said, the so- called Chamberlain policy was set forth nineteen years ago by'Lord Randolph Churchill, though wisely abandoned by him after a brief Ministerial experience, first at the India Office, and then at the Treasury, had taught him a fiscal lesson which he never afterwards forgot. He took off the 'shoddy clothes, and put them away. Unfortunately, Mr. Chamberlain has found them, and has hastened to array himself in them as if they were a brand-new suit of the "very best quality, On November 27th, 1884, Lord Randolph was inter- viewed by the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading of ." The Toryism of To-morrow." We cannot quote the • whole of this long and very interesting interview—why should not the Pall Mall Gazette itself reprint it at length ? —but the gist of it is easily given. Lord Randolph began by declaring :—" We Tories have a great card in reserve in the Fair-trade movement I recognise quite clearly that it will require a good deal of time to bring the boroughs round to Fair-trade or a tax on corn. When the trdth comes to be known—hear, for instance, what Sir John Macdonald has to say of the actual working of the thing in Canada—I am not at all sure that Fair-trade will continue to be regarded as so much of an economical fallacy. But I look on these things, and have always done so. solely from the point of view of revenue for new expenditure you must go to new sources of revenue. • No one need think of putting a tax on corn and a duty on .imported manufactures first by themselves ; Fair-trade would be a part of a general revision of the tariff in the interests of the revenue. What, for instance, if we greatly reduced the duty on tobacco and on tea ? That and things like that would cover a multitude of new duties. • The reductions would be immensely popular with the working classes, and would, moreover, I do not doubt, bring in an increase of revenue itself." Lord Randolph goes on to deal with the Imperial question in a very characteristic passage. "The Pall Mall Gazelle," he says, "is doing an excellent service by keeping the question of the Empire above of [sic] the region of party politics. This is most important in the matter of the Colonies, although all the present talk, by the way, about Imperial federation is mere moonshine. The scheme is altogether .premature, and it is the greatest mistake in the world to suppose that the fussy self-constituted representatives of • the Colonies here really represent public opinion out there." These passages, and, indeed, the whole tone of the inter- view, show that at the moment Lord Randolph Churchill • believed, as Mr. Chamberlain does now, that the working men might be got to consent to a tax on food and on • manufactured articles if a proportionate amount of taxa- tion on tea and other commodities were removed. Very greatly to his credit, Lord Randolph soon gave up these ideas and becanie a convinced Free-trader. year's experience of responsible statesmanship showed hiin that he was cherishing a delusion. Mr. Chamberlain has done just the opposite. He began as a Free-trader, and after nearly twenty years of official experience he has come back and picked up Lord Randolph's discarded habiliments. It is a spectacle from which former admirers of Mr. Chamberlain would gladly avert their gaze. We should like to say of him as we can say of Lord Randolph :— " Thebes did his green unthinking youth engage: He chooses Athens in his riper age."
Instead, we have to admit that Mr. Chamberlain, having found the light in his youth, has deliberately turned away from it. It was in a humorous address to him that the poet of the " Hawarden Horace" said both wittily and. prophetically :—
" When you, once steeped in Socialist sting°, Now sinning wilfully against the light, Embrace the maxims of the jumping Jingo, And scout the school of Manchester and Bright."
It is hardly worth while seriously to combat the delusions and fallacies which Lord Randolph Churchill soon saw through and abandoned, but as we have raised the point, we may note the true answer to the Chamberlain-ei-devant- Churchill fallacy that the transfer of a tax from tea to corn, or from coffee to cheese, makes no difference to the working man. In fact, it makes a very great difference, and for this reason. The tax on tea, of course, raises the price of tea, but the State gathers practically the whole of the increase into its purse, and the money thus raised is spent on objects which benefit the entire community, and so the working man. When, however, a tax is placed only on foreign corn, though the price is raised, only a portion of the increase goes into the purse of the State, and is then redistributed. The other portion of the increase goes into the pockets of the British and Colonial growers of corn and makers of cheese. To put it another way, a great part of the tax is distributed, not among the whole people, but among a special class,—the corn-growers and cheese- producers of the Empire. The essential idea of a Protec- tive tax is not to raise revenue and to fill the Exchequer, but to raise the price of the home article and to keep out the goods of the foreigner. Therefore, even though the workman was nominally only paying a, tax on corn equivalent to the tax on tea from which he was relieved, he would really be paying a great deal more. In order to get as much into the Treasury as was got in by the Tea-tax, corn would have.to be taxed very much more heavily, as none of the increased price of British and Colonial corn would reach the Treasury. The pipe would be leaky, and therefore a great deal more water would be required to keep the cistern full. In other words, to take off a non-Protective tax and put on a Protective one instead necessitates a great increase in the burden of the tax. A Protective tax means giving a subsidy to the Protected trades and industries. But that subsidy has got to come from somewhere, and that somewhere can only be the pockets of the consumers and taxpayers. However, our present purpose is not to argue the economic point, but to show the strange political irony which has made Mr. Chamberlain array himself in the cast-off clothes of Lord Randolph Churchill.
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