LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
PROTECTION AND THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION.
To THE EDITOR Or TUN arm-rerm.]
Sin,—I notice, and you will no doubt have noticed, that whenever we Conservatives win a by-election nowadays (we do it tolerably frequently, by the way) the Protectionist Press at once declares that the victory was " won wholly on Protection," or that Protection was " undeniably the main issue on which the seat was fought," &c., &c. The statement is untrue, of course, and people who realise what complex things by- elections are know it is untrue; but that unhappily does not prevent a newspaper from asserting it. Truth, after all, is not what daily papers exist to disseminate, and leading articles are written to enforce opinions, not to be accurate about facts.
Unluckily, the constant assertion of what is untrue does in the end influence opinion. People still tend to believe what they see in print if they see it often enough. That is why it is worth while to advertise patent medicines on hoardings. There is therefore a danger that foolish people in time will actually begin to believe that by-elections are now being won " wholly " or " principally " on Protection merely because they read the statement so often,—whereas everybody knows " perfectly well " that they are being won on a complex mass of issues (of which the frank dishonesty of the Licensing Bill is by far the most important), but chiefly on the widespread and thoroughly well, deserved want of confidence, amounting almost to panic among moderate people, which the present Government have (most foolishly for themselves) managed to inspire, The Conservatives went out at the last General Election because the moderate, humdrum_ voter (who holds the balenee at elections) was tired of them, and thought they had "got stale." Rightly or wrongly, he felt dissatisfied, thought things were not being managed well, and "wanted a change." A year or two of "Liberal" government has convinced him that the remedy is infinitely worse than the disease. He is frightened out of his wits by the rash way in which Cabinet Ministers talk, and the apparent absence of any sense of responsibility with which they approach economic problems of enormous difficulty and bring in measures dealing with tens of millions. He sees that this kind of feather-brained finance, coupled with threats of spoliation against every species of investment, liquor, land, railways, &c., &c., is paralysing trade and diminishing employment by making cautious people put their money into foreign enterprises in preference to English ones. A. Government cannot have a
Chancellor of the Exchequer openly on the look out for ben- roosts to rob " without suffering for it with the moderate elector, and Mr. Ure cannot threaten that if the Lords reject the Licensing Bill.the Government will revenge themselves on them by putting so large a tax on liquor as to close one-fourth of the public-houses at once without making every investor in every class of property in the country feel uneasy about his savings. If you boast that you are prepared to rob one class of investor merely to " score off " the Peers, what security is there for any class whatsoever ? In previous Governments Under-Secretaries have been less dangerously frank in confessing the true motives underlying their• Bills and their finance.
The net result of this kind of levity and folly, then, is a widespread distrust of the present Government and a general and quite feverish desire to be rid of them. And that at the General Election we shall be rid of them I have no manner of doubt. But if the Conservative Party allow themselves to be identified with the Protectionist policy of a section and nail the Protectionist flag to their mast, they will lose a large number of seats which they would otherwise gain, risk a split in the party of the most serious kind, and come in with a small majority containing the seeds of early disintegration instead of with a large majority and a united front. It is lamentable that the obvious economic fallacies of the Pro- tectionist doctrine should still take in people capable of following a logical argument, and that it should be a Radical Member like Mr. Russell Rea, and not a Conservative, who (in that admirably lucid book, "Free Trade in Being") explains the real effects of import-duties on the trade of a country, and thereby knocks the Protection argument out of the ring with absolute conclusiveness. Mr. Rea's Hook deals, not with opinions, but with facts, and those facts are neither disputable nor answerable. Let us hope Conservatives will lay them to heart, for the nation and the party which will not face facts is lost.—I am, Sir, &c., A CONSERVATIVE FILEIC•TRADER.
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