[To TEE EDITOR 01 TIER " SPECTATOR...1 Sru,—There is no
doubt that the mischievous cry of Tariff Reform will bar the way to a Unionist triumph until it is defi- nitely abandoned. The reform needed is a moral one, a sense of individual responsibility and of a common purpose. The nation has been demoralized by a growth of luxury pervading all classes, incident to a great degree on Free Trade, which by showing how easily our material wants can be supplied by other nations has engendered a loss of independence and of the sturdy spirit shown by Englishmen in past ages. The "spoon feeding" organized on so large a scale by Mr. Lloyd George is so rapidly enfeebling us that other nations are beginning to resume on it. When you suggest that the Chancellor might not really have been impoverishing the Exchequer if instead of piling up taxes he had remitted some of the excise duties and allowed tea and tobacco, the poor man's luxuries, to be more cheaply purchased, assuming that he would be enabled to buy these articles in greater profusion, so that the exchequer would not be materially damaged, you seem to imply that the money thus saved would be expended on the same articles of luxury, and that it would not go, as it ought to go, to the maintenance of the family life of the
home, which should be an Englishman's castle, though its protest against intrusion is now thrust aside in the supposed interests of society. We seem to have lost our love of liberty, and orators declaim on the manifold advantages of slavery to a caucus. But signs are not wanting that a sense of shame is stirring amongst us, and that a Government professing to be Liberal has calculated too blindly on the decay of that public spirit which has been our glory in the past.—I am,
Itadley College, Abingdon.
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