Mr. Chamberlain will, of course, be able to do nothing
of the kind. No doubt he can take part of the duties off tea and sugar and tobacco, but if he does he will not be able to recover the money lost to the Treasury by a bread and meat tax, for the beauty of a Protective tax such as he proposes on food is that while it raises the price of bread and meat, it puts very little into the Treasury. You exchange a drawing tax for one that does not draw. If, then, Mr. Chamberlain is going to tax food and not increase the cost of living, he must find some other tax or taxes to take the place of his remissions. If he does not raise the Income-tax, he must presumably try a tax on imports. But since he is pledged not to tax raw material, and since almost all imports, though they may be one man's manufactured goods, are somebody else's raw material, he will find this a very diffi- cult job. The only other alternative is so small a duty on corn as to leave things very much where they were up till last April. But as the Standard, whose handling of the fiscal controversy has been marked by conspicuous ability as well as by candour and independence, points out in an admirable leading article On Mr. Chamberlain's letter, if this is all, Mr. Chamberlain's responsibility to his party is very heavy. Has Mr. Chamber- lain, it asks, "raised this tremendous agitation, risked break ing the Unionist party to pieces, and plunged the country into an internecine controversy over Protection and Free-trade, merely to leave us where we stood six months ago ? "
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