P.C.; President of National Liberal Federation since 1920; M.P. (L.),
Tyneside Division, Northumberland, 1906-18; Parliamentary Secretary to
Board of Trade, 1911-15.
Mr. Robertson said:--At an early stage of the war Mr. H.G. Wells
published a newspaper article to the effect that while we remained Free
Traders we were determined in future to accord free entry only to the
goods of those States which allowed it to us. The mere state of war, no
doubt, predisposed many to assent to such theses who a few years before
would have remembered that this was but the nominal position of the
average protectionist of the three preceding generations. War being in
itself the negation of Free Trade, the inevitable restrictions and the
war temper alike prepared many to find reasons for continuing a
restrictive policy when the war was over. When, therefore, the Committee
of Lord Balfour of Burleigh published its report, suggesting a variety
of reasons for setting up compromises in a tariffist direction, there
were not wanting professed Free Traders who agreed that the small
tariffs proposed would not do any harm, while others were even anxious
to think that they might do good.
Yet the policy proposed by Lord Balfour's Committee has not been
adopted by the Coalition Government in anything like its entirety. Apart
from the Dyestuffs Act, and such devices as the freeing of home-made
sugar from excise, we have only had the Safeguarding of Industries Bill,
a meticulously conditional measure, providing for the setting up of
particular tariffs in respect of particular industries which may at a
given moment be adjudged by special committees _ad hoc_ to need special
protection from what is loosely called "dumping." And even the findings
of these committees so far have testified above all things to the lack
of any accepted set of principles of a protectionist character. Six
thousand five hundred articles have been catalogued as theoretically
liable to protective treatment, and some dozen have been actually
protected. They have given protection to certain products and refused it
to others; according it to fabric gloves and glass and aluminium goods
and refusing it to dolls' eyes and gold leaf.
Finally, the decision in favour of a tariff on fabric gloves has evoked
such a storm of protest from the textile manufacturers who export the
yarns with which foreign fabric gloves are made, that even the
Coalitionist press has avowed its nervousness. When a professed
protectionist like Lord Derby, actually committed to this protectionist
Act, declares that it will never do to protect one industry at the cost
of injuring a much greater one, those of his party who have any
foresight must begin to be apprehensive even when a House of Commons
majority backs the Government, which, hard driven by its tariffists,
decided to back its Tariff Committee against Lancashire. Protectionists
are not much given to the searching study of statistics, but many of
them have mastered the comparatively simple statistical process of
counting votes.