SIR MICHAEL HICKS BEACH ON THE FISCAL CONTROVERSY.
MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S supporters in the Press are agreed in paying Free-traders the best and most sincere of compliments. They are very anxious to ensure that they shall not be heard. This is the true explanation of all the talk about shibboleths and formulas. If the Fair-trade advocates really thought their opponents' argu- ments as weak as they profess to think them, they would delight in drawing attention to them. They would marshal them with the utmost care, set them out in their minutest particulars, take pains to present them in forms which their authors could not possibly challenge. They would have their reward in the completeness of the overthrow which must in the end overtake their adversaries. Instead of this, their object is to hinder as far as possible anything like a fair meeting of opposing reasons. They deny that a Free- trader can have anything to say that is worth listening to. He is unconsciously playing the parrot, repeating by rote statements first uttered half-a-century ago,—statements which in the first instance had life and meaninob because they had been thought out by their authors, and had been evolved out of the circumstances of the time. Now they have ceased to have any relation to the facts in contact with which we have to live, and the only reason why those who make them fail to see this is that they have simply taken them on trust. Of what use is it to listen to cries which are pale copies of passages that once were telling in the speeches of Cobden or Bright? We can read them for ourselves, if we care to do so, in the newspapers Cr the pamphlets of the " forties." As they are presented to us now they have no more life or reality than Burke's denun.ciations of the King's friends, or his protests against the Penal Laws.
For this reason we welcome Sir Michael Hicks Beach's article in the September Monthly Review. It will be a little difficult for Unionist journals to treat with contempt a man who only a year ago was their own Chancellor of the Exchequer. Either he is an authority on fiscal matters, or he ought never to have held the one office which demands special knowledge of this subject. Their satisfaction with his Budgets is of too recent a date to make it possible to treat him with the contempt which they deal out so generously to the common herd of Free-traders. Sir Michael Hicks Beach may have elected to be a king among the blind, but at any rate he cannot be denied the possession of the partial vision which that office demands. Sir Michael, it must be confessed, is not merciful to his opponents. Were he anxious to spare them. he would omit all mention of the Returns of the Board of Trade. This inconvenient Department is the worst enemy that Mr. Chamberlain has to encounter. It insists on bringing out the very facts that he would leave in the obscurity of official pigeon-holes. And in this respect Sir Michael is a kindred spirit. He, too, has the cruelty to ask,: Can it be true that our iron trade is being ruined if the profits of it assessed to Income-tax have increased from .21,840,350 in 1896-7 to £5,380,418 in 1900-1 ? " And then he goes on in the same heartless strain : "The statement that our import of raw wool for manufacture increased from 598,000,000 lbs. in 1886 to 715,000,000 lbs. in 1901 seems incompatible with decay in our woollen manufactures ; while if we can send more than £70,000,000 worth of our cotton manufactures abroad and find that in 1901 our exports of cotton piece goods and yarn were more than in 1872, though values then were more than double the average of present prices, the policy of fighting hostile tariffs by free imports can hardly be pronounced a failure in the cotton industry." These are the facts that call for inquiry, if any facts do. Why, with these figures in front of them, do Mr. Chamberlain's supporters speak as though ruin were on the point of overtaking us, even if it be not already in possession ? How does it happen that all the ordinary signs of prosperity have become proofs of failure ? It is not in the least wonderful that Fair- traders should not be anxious to meet this part of the Free-trade case, nor do we wish to treat their unwilling- ness as an indication that to meet it is impossible. We all know what it is to be confronted by a difficult bit of reason- ing, to feel sure that what we are arguing against is a fallacy and yet not to be able at the moment to prove it to be so. All that we say is that this part of our case is plausible; that it does give the Fair-traders a hard nut to crack; that though we may be deceived, there is real excuse for our hallucination; and that if no serious attempt is made to prove that what we seem to see so clearly has no existence, we shall have a right to trust our own eye- sight after all. If we are a ruined nation, some evidence of the fact must be forthcoming. We cannot be losing our wealth without knowing it. Before we are asked to upset all our fiscal arrangements, and return to a system which we have repudiated for half-a-cen- tury, the need of such a revolution ought to be proved to demonstration. As yet we have seen no proof of it. Various ways of bringing about the revolution have been suggested, various advantages that may be expected to follow from it have been enumerated, but no reason—no trade reason, we mean—the alleged Imperial reason we leave for the moment on one side—has yet been given us for thinking a revolution necessary. We are familiar with this kind of reasoning in politics. We know what blessings; are promised us if we will but nationalise the land or abolish private property. What we answer to arguments of this kind is that on the whole we are content with matters as they are, that it seems wiser to put up with the good things we have than to risk losing them in the effort to reach an ideal perfection. This is, in substance, the advice that Sir Michael Hicks Beach gives us in the fiscal controversy. Before we run vast risks in order to escape from ruin, let us make sure that there is a ruin to be escaped from. So far as we have seen, the only evidence which has been offered in proof of its existence is that our prosperity does flat increase at the same rate as formerly. So might a successful advocate or a 'successful physician bemoan his loss of practice. Time was when I doubled my income each year ; now if I add 20 per cent. to it, it is as much as I do.' A business that is made does not grow at the same rate as a business in the making. We must not expect the trade returns of the next twenty years to show the same rate of advance as those of the last twenty years. We have rivals now where once we bad the field to our- selves. But a prosperity that increases more slowly than it once did is not ruin, and until something worse than this is shown to be hanging over us, we shall remain infidels as to the necessity of any violent change in the principles that underlie our tariff.
We have stopped so long on the threshold of Sir Michael Hicks Beach's argument that we have only space for one more example of his method. He notes the change that has insensibly come over Mr. Chamberlain's ideas in relation to the taxation of food. When it was suggested that the yield of such a tax "might provide for old-age pensions, and would increase our home food supply by indirectly protecting the British farmer it was naturally supposed that the tax would be high." On this point Mr. Chamberlain's own supporters have insisted on a retreat. They found the notion of a Corn-duty high enough to do away with destitution and make the farmer's heart to sing for joy too unpopular to be presented to the average elector. Of these grand- projects nothing more is heard, and, as often happens in such cases, the prospect has lost in attractiveness what it has gained in possibility of realisation. "It is now clear," says Sir Michael, "that no higher duties are at all likely to be suggested than would be necessary to protect, not our own farmers, but Colonial farmers, against foreign competition. All the talk, therefore, about bringing back into cultivation thousands of acres of derelict land,' or 'stopping the decline of our rural population,' may be dismissed as irrelevant, together with similar exaggerations on the other side." Mr. Chamberlain's scheme, it may well be, will neither starve the poor nor make the English agriculturist prosper. What will it do, then ? Draw closer the ties that bind us to the Colonies and the Colonies to us ? If it is to have this result, it can only be by committing us to a policy of which the consequences are necessarily hidden from us. "Readi- ness on the part of the Colonies to accept a small duty at first is certainly no proof that the object of the new policy would be satisfied by such a duty." What if the United States farmers found themselves able to reduce the price of corn by more than the amount of the duty ? Would Canada be content to look on at the failure of the preferential system without an effort to make it effective ? No; she would certainly hold us pledged "to any subse- quent increase of duty that might be found necessary to carry out the object of Protection." The same considera- tions which have lately led to the abandonment of all thought of a high Corn-duty would be equally operative then, and we should find ourselves face to face with a Colony indignant, at our indifference to the interests which she had supposed us pledged to protect. And then look at the inevitable complexity of the new policy. We cannot pick out one Colony as the exclusive recipient of our fiscal favours, least of all "the Colony which Mr. Chamberlain has described as the most backward of all in contributing to the common defence." We must interfere with trade in numberless ways in order to adapt our preferential system to the varying needs of all our Colonies. And what if duties on food should prove insufficient to give this equality of benefit? How will it then be possible to avoid taxing raw materials ? Could we neglect Australia and South Africa when we are showing favour to Canada ? "Could we protect Canadian wheat against Indian wheat, Australian wine or Canadian spirits against West Indian spirits ? Could we even refuse to the tea, the cocoa, the rice, the fruit, that comes to us from India and the Crown Colonies the same protection against the foreigner that is asked for by the self-governing Colonies for their food products ? " However these questions may be answered, it is clear that the effect of the new policy must be con- sidered, not merely on the self-governing Colonies, or even on the United Kingdom, but on the Empire as a whole. If we are to inquire, let us at least inquire thoroughly.
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