THE TARIFF COMMISSION'S AGRICULTURAL REPORT. T HE Tariff Commission has just
issued the Report of its Agricultural Committee. The general result of the Report is to represent British agriculture as in an exceedingly unfavourable position. The ordinary farmer's grumble that there is no crop under heaven which it pays him to grow, and that the position of himself and his fellows is steadily going from bad to worse, is everywhere reflected. Throughout, too, there is an undersong of suggestion that all the ills of British agriculture are due to the policy of Free-trade, and that if we could only return to the good old days of Protection and. Preference all might still be well. When we come to the question of remedial measures, the Committee recommend in the first instance the restoration of the is. per quarter duty on cereals imposed by Sir Michael Hicks Beach. A prefer- ence, however, is to be given to Colonial wheat, and this is to be obtained by making the duty on foreign wheat 2s. per quarter. In regard to this recommendation, we are told that no increase in the cost of living would result from the scale of duties proposed. In other words, the proposal would not raise the price of corn. But if this is BO, what possible good will the new taxes do to British agriculture ? It is arguable, no doubt, that the preference might help the Colonies; but the immediate object of the Agricultural Committee is to suggest means for helping the British, and not the Colonial, farmer. The Committee do not agree with Mr. Chamberlain in exempting maize from the orration of taxation, and they desire that the duty upon imported flour and meal should be higher than the Wheat-duty. They recommend, that is, that a duty of is. 3d. per hundredweight should be levied on foreign flour, the duty on Colonial flour to be essentially lower. The exact preference is to be subject, however, to negotiation with the Colonies, provided that the duty as finally arranged gives an advantage to the milling industry of the United Kingdom,—an advantage, remember, over Colonial as well as foreign . mills. The Committee, again, do not favour Mr. Chamberlain's proposal to exempt bacon, as the food of the poor man, from taxation.
It will be seen from these recommendations that the Tariff Reform Party is beginning to move away from Mr. Chamberlain's proposal that we should let the Colonies keep what they have now, complete access to our markets, and only make the foreigner pay a market toll here.
The Agricultural Committee evidently desire to get protection for British agriculture against the Colonial as well as against the foreign importer, though they propose that the former should pay a lower Custom-rate than the latter. In a word, they want to treat the Colonies in the same way fiscally that the Colonies treat us. That is exactly what we have always expected that Mr. Chamberlain's Tariff Reform would end in,— in a blow to the Imperial connexion rather than a benefit. We are to begin by talking about our devotion to the Empire and our willingness to make sacrifices for it, and to finish by taxing Colonial produce. A policy more likely to result in the break-up of the Empire through internecine fiscal squabbles we cannot conceive. As long as we maintain Free-trade with all the world the Colonies suffer no disabilities, and always possess that preference of sentiment which has been defined as "trade following the flag." If, however, Tariff Reform is to end in the way we have just described, Mr. Chamberlain's claim that he is asking the British people to make a great sacrifice in order to unite the Empire falls completely to the ground, and the scheme becomes one of ordinary commercial selfishness of a particularly short-sighted. kind.
We do not, however, wish to reargue these points to-day. What chiefly interests us in the Agricultural Committee's Report is the attempt to show the desperate condition of British agriculture under Free-trade, and the innuendo that the abandonment of Protection has been the ruin of the countryside. Personally, we do not believe that English agriculture is ruined ; but if it is, all we can say is that it was ruined long before we took to Free-trade. If its position is bad now, it was infinitely worse in the heyday of Protection when the growing of corn was encouraged by enormous duties. The first portion of the Report gives a very good résumé of the incidence of the Corn-laws when they were at their highest. The Report notes that the Corn-law of 1828 established a scale of duties ranging for wheat from 24s. 8d. when the price was 62s. per quarter and under, to is. when the price was over 738. From 1832 to 1837, both inclusive, the price was consistently under 62s., and therefore during those six years the farmer enjoyed the blessings of a 24s. 8d. duty. [It should be remembered, also—though this is a fact not always • understood—that in those years there was a system of preference for Colonial wheat, as for most other Colonial products, exactly like that now proposed.] We are able to judge accurately as to what was the condition of British agriculture in the years which we have enumerated. —i.e., from 1832 to 1837 inclusive—because in the year 1837 a Royal Commission sat to inquire into the depres- sion of agriculture,—a depression existing during the six years of a 24s. 8d. duty per quarter. We have taken the trouble to go through some of the evidence laid before the Commission of 1837, and to compare the condition of agricultural England. there disclosed with the pessimistic suggestions of the Report of the Agricultural Committee of the Tariff Commission as to present conditions. It would be difficult to exaggerate the picture of rural destitution laid before the Commissioners of 1837 by almost all the witnesses. One after another they speak of the terrible state to which British agriculture has been reduced.
Mr. William Jacob, Comptroller of the torn Returns, stated in his evidence that two millions of persons who formerly probably subsisted on wheat-flour "now subsist on potatoes," and. thought that was a change which had come on during the last twenty or twenty-five years. The evidence of Mr. George Smallpeice, of Guildford, is specially striking. Mr. Smallpeice was a leading agricul- turist in the South of England. He not only had farmed large portions of land himself at various times, but bad also farmed and managed large estates for others. Throughout his evidence there runs like a refrain the declaration that the farmers were ruined or had very little capital remaining. "I think their capital is gone" and similar statements are of constant occurrence. His account of the condition of agriculture in Surrey is deplorable. He is reminded that in 1833, when there was also an inquiry into the depression in agriculture, he had stated that there was a farm which had gone out of cultivation in the neighbourhood of Guildford which "forty years ago—i.e., before the war—paid 14s. an acre." When asked what it is worth now—that is, in 1836—he says that "the first year it was let at is. an acre, and the second year it was let at 2s., and I think now it has got to 7s. an acre." Questioned whether he attributed the improved condition of the farmers within the last three years to the good seasons, he replies : "I do not think the farmers have improved as to their capital, because I don't think they have got any." Again, he is reminded that in 1833 he had stated that a farm within three miles of Farnham of between 400 and 500 acres was let for is. an acre, and is asked : "What rent does that farm bear now ? " He cannot say, but was informed by the proprietor of the land that in 1833 he had stated it too favourably, and does not think that there has been an improvement. Asked as to the condition of the labourers, he states that the labourers are getting about 7s. a week. He also states that the labourers now subsist more upon potatoes than formerly, particularly the children. Yet another passage in Mr. Smallpeice's evidence runs as follows :—" You stated that land that paid 14s. an acre rent 40 years ago has lately paid is. an acre and 2s., and at the last year there was 7s. asked for it? '—` I am not certain of that ; but I have heard it reported so." Do you think the same profit is made by the farmer giving is. an acre for that land, as was made 40 years ago, giving 14s. an acre?'—' Not half so much : because that man who gave the 14s. made a, very good profit, and this man will not make any.'" It would be easy to quote plenty of other testi- mony from the Blue-book as to the widespread ruin of agriculture. The evidence about Buckinghamshire, Essex, and other counties is equally striking, and in Essex we find the phenomena of derelict farms, and of land not only unlettable but actually going out of cultivation. We must, however, let the Surrey evidence stand as a sample, remembering that Surrey is by no means to be regarded as an exception.
In reading the evidence it is curious to note how the working of Protection had perverted men's minds, and how they dwelt upon high prices for their produce as the only possible source of benefit. The notion of selling what they produce cheap, but selling a great deal of it, and of a commercial benefit being achieved by making a small profit over a large area, seems never to have occurred to them. One witness, indeed, speaks of the evil plight of agriculture as being due to the low prices caused by what he terms "the bounty of heaven," —that is, favourable seasons with large crops. In other words, the witnesses seem to think that they and the world in general are made richer by a, diminution in the product of those things which mankind most ardently desires. But, after all, there is no reason to speak of this view as strange, for it is the view which underlies the whole of the Protectionist fallacy. The Protectionist wants, not to increase, but to diminish exchanges, and so to diminish, not to increase, the things exchanged. We fear this frame of mind will continue until men can be induced to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the object of trade ; till they remember that every exchange is, by the law of its being, a double benefit ; and till they recognise that the buyer gains quite as much as the seller. As it is, the Protectionist regards the buyer as an unfortunate creature bound by an evil fate to be the prey of the seller.
One word more. We trust that those who hanker after Tariff Reform because they are made anxious—and, we admit, rightly anxious—by the diminution of our agricul- tural population will note the facts we have quoted, and realise that Protection, at any rate, will do nothing to cure the ills of the country. If 24s. 8d. a quarter could not save agriculture, how is a miserable 2s. a quarter on foreign, and is. a quarter on Colonial, wheat to accomplish the task ? In our belief, what is most injuring agriculture at the moment, and driving people from the land, is not that food is not enough taxed, but that it is taxed too much already. Even with the relief accorded to the rating of rural land, we hold that the rates constitute a most unjust and a most impolitic burden on one specially selected trade. Agriculture not only has its warehouses and factories, in the shape of its barns, cowhouses, sheds, pig- sties, and other farm buildings, taxed as are commercial factories and warehouses, but also has its raw material burdened by a special impost which falls on no other form of industry. We do not lay a special tax on paper before it is turned into newspapers ; but we tax our pastures before they are turned into milk, and our arable land before it becomes wheat or oats. If the friends of agriculture would only give up following the will-o'-the-wisp of Protection, and would concentrate their efforts on freeing agricultural land from the monstrous injustice it now suffers at the hands of the rate-collector, they might do something worth accomplishing for the tillers of the soil.
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