Another pedestrian correspondent of the Daily Mail has been inquiring
throughout East Anglia, and finds, as the result of eight hundred interviews, that the whole population is opposed to the idea of taxing food. Even a tax-collector, who "would like to see the most drastic kind of Protection in force," agreed that to tax food would be "a fatal step" in East Anglia, while a newspaper reporter in full sympathy with Mr. Chamberlain held that to tax food would in East Anglia be "political insanity." A farmer denounced the idea of food taxes because his labourers would ask more wages, which he could not pay, but did not apparently see that his landlord would also ask more rent. East Anglia was once the very home of Protection, and its dour, quiet, dissident people, who once filled Cromwell's Ironsides, are quite capable of raising bread riots. They perceive that as they cannot " adjust " their consumption of bread, though they can of tea, tobacco, and beer, a Bread-tax is the exact equivalent of an Income- tax upon the poor alone.
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