A Crucial Tariff Experiment
The Import Duties Advisory Committee, in appointing a committee to prepare schemes for reorganizing the iron and steel industry, has taken the Government at its word. We have been repeatedly assured that the new tariff is to promote efficiency and not to protect and bolster up obsolete methods. The Committee, while continuing the temporary duty of 34 per cent, on iron and steel, has now virtually promised the industry permanent protection if it will put its house in order and supply British users of iron and steel "at a price and quality that will enable them, in turn, to sell their products in the markets of the world." Tariff Reformers have often declared that this is possible, while Free Traders have gravely doubted it. We are now to have the experiment made and the outcome will be watched with interest. At present, it must be confessed, expert opinion is by no means so hopeful as it used to be about the lessening of costs of production by amalgamating separate works into a big combine, apart from the unemployment that usually follows. But our iron and steel industry is in such a desperate condition that it can hardly fail to benefit in some measure by the proposed reorganization.
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