LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE GOVERNMENT AND THE FUTURE.
rTo Toe EDITOR OF Too “Soecmeros."1 SIR,—Many Liberals of long experience argued before the General Election that fair play should be given to Unionist Free-traders in the belief, not that these gentlemen would become Liberals, but that the future of Free-trade would best be secured by the duplicated guarantee of a reconstruction of the Unionist Party on the principles of Peel and Salisbury. As one of those who advocated as close and as considerate an alliance, for this supreme object, as was compatible with inevitable differences on other issues, I hope you will permit me to offer one or two comments on the new attitude disclosed in the Spectator.
(1) The assumption I took to be the common ground was that Free-trade was a question so transcendently important that if it came to weighing one question against another, there is no other question so important as to justify either pressing it or opposing it to such a point as to bring Free-trade in peril.
(2) This contention obviously cuts both ways. Are you quite reasonable in applying it to one side only P It was an excellent thing that thousands of Unionists put the interests of the nation before the interests of party. They did so, not because they believed Liberals would cease to be Liberals and to work for Liberal objects, but because Liberals were pledged to defend Free-trade. The Liberals have done their part, and have carried out vigorously and consistently exactly what was expected of them by Unionists who gave them their votes for the specific object. Is it rational that the minority of a composite electorate should dictate to the majority, or is it equitable for Unionist Free-traders, having got exactly what they voted for, to insist further on what they never bargained for, that Liberals should abandon the Liberal proposals which the vast majority of the electors who sent up the present House of Commons voted for? There must be give as well as take.
(3) Who is endangering Free-trade P Can any one who reads the record of the Colonial Conference deny that Mr. Asquith, Mr. Churchill, and Mr. Lloyd-George have made a magnificent and decisive fight for Free-trade in resisting the most insidious and plausible and dangerous of the phases of Protection ? This is no time for unfriendly criticism or recrimination between Liberals and Unionist Free-traders. But one may ask whether it might not have been wiser if Unionist Free-traders had shown a bolder front. If the defence of Free-trade is the supreme point, and that pledge is being loyally and manfully made good, which is the more reasonable and more Constitutional attitude, as to the other objects this great majority was clearly elected to carry out,— for the minority, who have got the real point they voted for, to insist on paralysing the majority for all other purposes, or for that minority not to press their dissent to the degree or in the temper which, if persisted in, might imperil the great instrument of the purpose they have treated as supreme (4) No sane man can any longer doubt that the machinery of the Unionist Party has been absolutely captured by the Tariff Reformers, and that the advent to power of a Unionist Ministry must mean inevitably and immediately the intro- duction of a Protectionist system. Brilliant leaders like Sir Edward Clarke and Lord Hugh Cecil are destroyed or ostracised. Weaker men are being squeezed into silent acquiescence. Whatever may be Mr. Balfour's own opinions, nobody believes for an instant that he would, as things now stand, abstain from promptly doing the bidding of the dominant Tariff Reform clique, if restored to power.
The tactics of the Opposition are quite transparent. Ministers are to be discredited by the rejection, the emascula- tion, or the talking oat of their Bills. Obstruction in the Commons will do much, the veto of the Lords will do the rest. Votes are to be sought on every issue other than Tariff
Reform. Then, if enough are secured at the next General Election, Protection will creep in and enslave the nation, which on a straight vote would again contemptuously reject it. In the view of the present writer, this charming plot will fail. Liberal loyalty and national common-sense will clear the issues and again ward off the most serious of all threatened perils. But the point of this letter is to ask, with all courtesy and consideration, whether it is either right or worth their while for Unionists who are absolutely at one with us on this supreme issue to run even a risk of playing into the bands of the plotters. Assuming the existence of grounds which to them seem valid for dissenting from old-age pensions, or Irish Devolution, or other things, why press this dissent beyond fair argument, why not stick to the plain truth that the defence of Free-trade is supreme, and that the Liberal Ministry is the only visible existing barrier against the Chamberlain heresies P
You want a Centre Party,—a "Peelite " Ministry. Much may be said for such a state of things, if it could be realised. But where and who are your men, and what would they stand for ? No Unionist Free-trade Ministry could conceivably now be formed at all. The nearest modern examples of the spirit of the Peelite group are to be found in the existing Liberal Minis*. No one who reads the melancholy history of the finance and the administration of the great Departments between 1895 and 1908 could count on getting from the few great Unionist Free-traders left the stern economies or the stringent purity of finance of a Graham or a Peel. And the Liberal statesmen who have at least begun to move on the lines which built up the greatness of modern England are every one of them pledged to exactly the measures which are distasteful to some of your friends, but distasteful in a sense trivial as compared with the deadly peril of Protection. Why, then, remind us of Aesop's fables P Why lose all in trying for what is out of reach ? Why press on worthy men a course which, the closer you look at it, means pretty much in the end straining at gnats and swallowing camels P—I am.
Sir, Stc., FRANCIS A. CHA.NNING. House of Commons Library.
[Our correspondent writes most courteously and moderately, but he has missed our point. We, like him, hold that the maintenance of Free-trade is the supreme political need of the time. We • hold, like him also, that Free-traders must be willing to make sacrifices to uphold Free-trade. But we demur when he seems to think that the sacrifices should be made by the Unionist Free-traders alone. We admit that we Unionist Free-traders, as a minority, must sacrifice most. We do not, however, think that there should be no willingness on the part of Liberals to give up anything for the sake of Free-trade. Putting that aside, however, we further protest against the Liberals adopting a policy which is the very negation of Free-trade, and a policy which is bound to end in the triumph of Protection. We mean old- age pensions. Sir Francis Channing, and with him the Westminster Gazette (which on Monday criticised our view in a most courteous and moderate article, but also ignoring our chief ground of complaint), fail to give any answer to our argument that old-age pensions, with the necessary annual expenditure of some 230,000,000, must prove an even shorter cut to Protection than Mr. Chamberlain's proposals for Tariff Reform. Here is the gravamen of our charge that the Liberals are unconsciously, but none the less surely, betraying the cause of Free-trade. Calling themselves Free-traders, they advocate a policy which mud be the ruin of Free-trade. Against such madness we shall continue to protest, and with our protests we believe that thousands of Liberal Free-traders at heart sympathise. Finally, we cavot admit that the Government's management of the education question, the Irish question, and the House of Lords question is of a kind that entitles them to be regarded as ideal, or even safe, guardians of the Free-trade cause. Their confusion of purpose and" mixed thinking" in regard to these problems are alienating a great deal of sympathy throughout the country. We do not claim any right to object to their introducing Liberal measures, but we do bold that those measures should be handled with circumspection and good sense. By their feebleness and fumbling in the region of legislation the Government are, we again assert, injuring the cause of Free-trade.—En. Spectator.]
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