On Monday the House of Lords gave a second reading
to the Agricultural Marketing Bill by 39 votes to 10. Lord Strachie, a former Liberal Minister of Agriculture, moved the rejection on the ground that the Bill fixed the prices of home produce but not for imported produce. In the Lower House Lord Hartington moved the Unionist Party's vote of censure on the Government for their neglect of agriculture, and advocated a guaranteed price for cereals with the introduction of the quota. The Lord Privy Seal answered, pleading the glut of wheat all over the world as upsetting free trade and protectionist countries alike. Dr. Addison lauded the Agricultural Marketing Bill which would put everything right for the farmer. The motion was lost by 278 votes to 230, and we fear that neither farmer nor agricultural labourer will be cheered by the debate. There was hardly any crude advocacy of Protection on the simple lines of the old Corn Laws. That is dead. To raise the price of corn in order to save the farmer and agricultural labourer will never be an object of our urbanized people. Mr. Baldwin, speaking on Friday, the 18th, at Hull, a grain importing port, left wheat alone in advocating tariff reform. He would convince no economist of the virtues of Protection, but he made the best case he could for the means of preventing some of its attendant evils and the corruption that it brings into politics elsewhere.
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