Last Saturday Lord Rosebery made a speech at Leicester which,
while necessarily inferior in interest to his great Sheffield speech, is yet a noteworthy contribution to the discussion of the political aspects of the new policy. He showed how inoppor- tune the whole controversy was, how the country needed rest after the heavy expenditure on war, and instead found its com- mercial fabric shaken to the foundations by fiscal iconoclasm. Until the country had an opportunity of giving its vote one way or the other, there was bound to be a great feeling of insecurity in British trade. His chief point in his criticism of Mr. Chamberlain's proposals was the "snowball " character of Protection, which, once started rolling, gathered mass daily, and could not be restrained within the limits proposed by its promoters. Under such a system there must grow up every form of interest and every species of corruption. He then turned to the Imperial aspect of the question, and denied that
there existed the serious desire for tariff revision which Mr. Chamberlain described. The Colonies were rightly more interested in their local development than in theories of Imperial union, and anything which tended to bring the two things into conflict, _as the new policy was bound to do, would be a grave calamity. He was confident, however, that the matter was safe in the hands of the people of Britain and of the Empire, provided they did not allow themselves to be "rushed" by Mr. Chamberlain's crusade.
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