Foreign Goods and British • Whatever the merits of tariff
protection for British trade, there is no question that too much talk about it induces a spirit of fatalism. The British manufacturer decides that without protection the dice are loaded against him and that it is no use trying to compete with industries in other countries where wages may be lower or hours longer or the conditions different in other ways. There is no doubt some modicum of truth in that, but everyone who has ever travelled knows that half the trouble is that the British manufacturer is well behind many of his rivals in selling people the kind of thing they want on the kind of terms they want. Nothing could be more useful in that connexion than the ex- hibition, arranged in London, by the Association of Retail Distributors, of articles of foreign manufacture sold widely in this country by reason of their design and price. The retailers are challenging the manufacturers. They, the shopkeepers, prefer to sell British goods, and they want British manufacturers to supply goods equal in quality and price to the foreign. Consequently, they are showing them the foreign goods and asking them what they can do along those particular lines. In some cases the answer, no doubt, will be nothing, and for adequate reasons. But in others a timely stimulus may just turn the scale. Sir Edward Hilton Young in opening the exhibition described it as a cold sponge to British. manufacturers. Cold sponges are sometimes supposed to damp ardour. Rightly applied, they only invigorate.
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