A great deputation also waited on Lord Salisbury, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, and Mr. Long (the Minister of Agriculture), on the same day to complain of the depression of the growers of barley. The Earl of Winchilsea, as the chief spokesman of the deputation, professed not to wish to interfere with free-trade at all, but certainly his plan, if not one meant to protect English malt as against the sugar or other materials used in brewing, looks so very like it that even the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer thought it virtually a protective pro- posal. What Lord Winchilsea proposes is to make the duty on beer brewed abroad 7s. 9d. a barrel against a duty of Zs. 9d. on beer brewed from English barley. Sir Michael Hicks- Beach evidently thought that this was equivalent to proposing a differential duty on foreign beer to the amount of 2s. a barrel, and we confess that we see no escape from that conclusion. Lord Salisbury's speech was made rather to defend himself from the imputation of having encouraged the idea that a protective duty might be placed on foreign hops in his speech at Hastings in 1892. The truth is, that he did defend retaliatory duties on foreign articles consumed only by the rich, such as silks and lace, where any foreign country excluded English exports by Protection ; and that when one of his hearers interjected the word "hops," Lord Salisbury care- lessly replied that "a good deal might be said for hops," which in so hop-growing a county as Sussex certainly raised false hopes. But only the malignity of party spirit could have made any one believe that this reply to an inter- ruption was a " calculated indiscretion," as a Gladstonian contemporary has maintained.
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