A short discussion arose yesterday week in the House of
Commons on the Spanish financial proposals for shutting us altogether out of the benefit of the recent reductions of duty on Spanish imports, unless we make a special commercial treaty with Spain, satisfactory to her Government as regards our wine duties. Mr. Gladstone declared that it would give him the most cordial satisfaction to lower the duties on Spanish wine, yet protested warmly against the notion that we ought to buy off Spain from her unfriendly treatment of our exports, by humouring her as regards the wine duties a single day before it would otherwise suit our finance to reduce them. The complaint of the representatives of Spain against this country, said Mr. Gladstone, comes to this :--" They do not think our scale of wine duties sufficiently favourable to Spain. But at any rate, it is favourable enough for this, that under the operation of that scale, the imports of wine from Spain have enormously increased, and for that increase it is proposed to repay us by enacting a tariff against us" which, according to Mr. Monk, will extinguish our export trade to Spain. That is, indeed, a strangely unfair kind of retaliation. "You do a great deal more for me already than I do for you ; but unless you greatly increase what you do for me, I will refrain altogether from doing even the little I now do for you,"—such is the Spanish formula of retaliatory duties, based, of course, on the radically false notion that a nation confers benefits by what she buys, and not by what she soils; but even as measured by that absurd notion, it is a most inequitable style of' retaliation.
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