It is of a piece with that prodigy of self-contradiction that, when the
Liberal leaders in the House of Commons expose the absurdity of
professing to rectify the German exchanges by keeping out German fabric
gloves, a tariffist leader replies by arguing that the Paris Resolutions
of the first Coalition Government, under Mr. Asquith, conceded the
necessity of protecting home industries against unfair competition. Men
who are normally good debaters seem, when they are fighting for a
tariff, to lose all sense of the nature of argument. As has been
repeatedly and unanswerably shown by my right hon. friend the Chairman,
the Paris Resolutions were expressly framed to guard against a state of
things which has never supervened--a state of things then conceived as
possible after a war without a victory, but wholly excluded by the
actual course of the war. And those Resolutions, all the same, expressly
provided that each consenting State should remain free to act on them
upon the lines of its established fiscal system, Britain being thus left
untrammelled as to its Free Trade policy.
Having regard to the whole history, Free Traders are entitled to say
that the attempt of tariffists to cite the Paris Resolutions in support
of the pitiful policy of taxing imports of German fabric gloves, or the
rest of the ridiculous "litter of mice" that has thus far been yielded
by the Safeguarding of Industries Act, is the crowning proof at once of
the insincerity and ineptitude of tariffism where it has a free hand,
and of the adamantine strength of the Free Trade case. If any further
illustration were needed, it is supplied by the other tariffist
procedure in regard to the promise made five years ago to Canada that
she, with the other Dominions, should have a relative preference in our
markets for her products. In so far as that plan involved an advantage
to our own Dominions over the Allies who, equally with them, bore with
us the heat and burden of the war, it was as impolitic as it was unjust,
and as unflattering as it was impolitic, inasmuch as it assumed that the
Dominions wanted a "tip" as a reward for their splendid comradeship.
As it turns out, the one concession that Canada really wanted was the
removal of the invidious embargo on Canadian store cattle in our ports.
And whereas a promise to that effect was actually given by the tariffist
Coalition during the war, it is only after five years that the promise
is about to be reluctantly fulfilled. It was a promise, be it observed,
of _free importation_, and it is fulfilled only out of very shame. It
may be surmised, indeed, that the point of the possible lifting of the
Canadian embargo was used during the negotiations with Ireland to bring
the Sister State to terms; and that its removal may lead to new trouble
in that direction. But that is another story, with which Free Traders
are not concerned. Their withers are unwrung.