On the total survey, then, the case for Free Trade is not only unshaken,
it is stronger than ever before, were it only because many of the enemy
have visibly lost faith in their own cause. The Coalition, in which
professed Liberals were prepared to sacrifice something of Free Trade to
colleagues who were pledged in the past to destroy it, has quailed
before the insuperable practical difficulties which arise the moment the
scheme of destruction is sought to be framed.
All that has resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile
tinkering with three or four small industries--a tinkering that is on
the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent
Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest
surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine of Free Trade is
_science_, or it is nothing. It is not a passing cry of faction, or a
survival of prejudice, but the unshakable inference of a hundred years
of economic experience verifying the economic science on which the great
experiment was founded.
On the other hand, let me say, the tactic of tinkering with Free Trade
under a system of special committees who make decisions that only the
House of Commons should ever be able to make, is a "felon blow" at
self-government. It puts national affairs under the control of cliques,
amenable to the pressures of private interests. Millions of men and
women are thus taxable in respect of their living-costs at the caprice
of handfuls of men appointed to do for a shifty Government what it is
afraid to do for itself. It is a vain thing to have secured by statute
that the House of Commons shall be the sole authority in matters of
taxation, if the House of Commons basely delegates its powers to
unrepresentative men. Here, as so often in the past, the Free Trade
issue lies at the heart of sound democratic politics; and if the nation
does not save its liberties in the next election it will pay the price
in corrupted politics no less than in ruined trade.