UNIONIST POLICY.
[To ram Enrros or THZ "SrEcreros."]
was prevented last week from writing, as I intended, to congratulate the Spectator on its able and practical article on the position of the Unionist Party in regard to Tariff Reform at the next general election. I cordially agree with every word, and am quite clear in my own mind and from what I am told that the idea of again making Tariff Reform the first constructive policy of the Unionist Party, if returned to power, is not only suicidal in itself, but is contrary to the openly pronounced opinion of three-fourths of the Unionist electors; not only Liberal Unionists, but Conservatives denounce the policy—even those who are personally inclined to fiscal reform.
Why are we to be driven to certain defeat, when victory is well assured, by the insane folly of a small minority of the Unionist Party, who happen to have a majority in the ex- Cabinet of the late Government, whose policy was repudiated alike by the Unionist Party and by the nation in 1906, and who are indirectly the cause of all the Parliamentary legisla- tion of the last six years ? Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was too clever to trust entirely to the unpopularity of his Dredecessors in office for success, and very astutely withdrew for a time the nnpopular Home Rule policy and simply fought the election of 1906 against the mistakes of his pre- decessors and Tariff Reform, and thus obtained his astonishing victory, which was repeated in a modified form in conse- quence chiefly of the red herring of Tariff Reform in 1910 I desire also to endorse everything that my friend, Mr. Arthur Elliot, has written in regard to our great leader, the late Duke of Devonshire. I fully admit that our first object as Unionists is to defeat Home Rule by every means in our power, and if Tariff Reform was a means to that end it might be tolerated as a policy in the dim and distant future ; but it is quite the contrary, and is regarded even by its nominal supporters as a stumbling-block unnecessarily placed in the path of victory. We are told that the Tariff Reform policy is that of a majority of those who sit on the front Opposition benches in both Houses of Parliament and of the wire-pullers of the caucus of the Unionist Party, but to my mind that is of little import- ance, as it is most certainly repudiated and deemed absurd and unwise by the large majority of the Unionist electors.
In conclusion let me remind Unionist leaders that it is the Liberal Unionist Free Traders and Unionist Church Liberals who will decide the fate of the present Government at the next election and not the members of the late Government and the advocates of a nebulous policy of Protection, and it is useless for Tariff Reform leaders to think they can alter the opinion of the electorate in favour of Free Trade by specious differentialisms on a Protectionist policy which no one has any authority to enunciate. Let them remember the wise advice of that great master of finance, Mr. Gladstone, that it was not the duty of a statesman to prescribe until he was
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