The Argentine Agreement The clamour against the Argentine Trade Agreement
in the more extreme Protectionist circles is instructive. There at any rate there is no belief in any nonsense about tariff bargaining, or using tariffs to open the way for a move back towards freer trade. The right way to treat Argentine meat, according to Lord Beaverbrook, is to keep it out. The main purpose of the agreement engineered by this National Government is to let it in. Argentina, in fact, is being treated virtually as if it were a British Dominion. Whatever Empire Free Trade means it is not that. So the wrathful argument runs. It is no bad thing that Mr. Runciman and the partakers of his views on Protection should realize what kind of alliance they have struck, for between the two conceptions of tariffs there is a wide, and a widening, gulf fixed, as next week's debate on the new trade pacts is likely to demon- strate. In the eyes of those concerned to see trade freed from fetters the Argentine agreement is a sound piece of work. It opens doors instead of closing them, both for Argentine meat and other commodities in this country and for British coal and manufactured goods in Argentina, and embodies at the same time an arrangement whereby the frozen credits in the Argentine can be thawed and British creditors gradually secure what is due to them. Without that there. can be no trade expansion. With it British enterprise in the Argentine will once more have play. Too much room is left in the agreement for the manipulation of quotas, but that must be considered inevitable till we outgrow it,„
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