serious, civilised Government--I ask for information--ever been to the
pains and trouble of erecting round their coasts a tariff, with all
its complications, with the need of exacting certificates of origin on
every class of goods, with the need of demanding strict assessment of
all commodities brought to their shores--has any nation ever erected
the vast and complicated network which would be involved in such a
duty, simply for the paltry purpose of imposing a duty of 1 per cent.?
I say there is no argument and no reason for such a course, and the
only argument which could justify it is the argument used by Dr.
Smartt at the Colonial Conference when he said (page 514 of the Blue
Book), "The foreigner pays, and we do not." Mr. Deakin felt the force
of the objection which would be entertained in this country to
introducing such a tariff as the right hon. gentleman has proposed,
simply for fiscal purposes, and he proceeded to say that Great
Britain, if she was a party to such a bargain, should be permitted to
raise the money in her own way, and to contribute her proportion to
the common fund. That was a great concession to the self-government of
the Mother Country.
There is no doubt a great difference between subventions and
preferences. A subvention may be raised by a perfectly orthodox fiscal
process. No more money is taken from the taxpayer than is required.
The whole yield of the tax by which the subvention may be raised
certainly goes to the Exchequer, and when the subvention is paid to
the foreign or Colonial Government, it does not go, as a preference
would go, to benefit particular interests in the Colony, but it goes
to the Government of the Colony for the general purposes of State, and
not for private advantage on either side. Therefore it seems to me
that the method of subvention is on all grounds to be preferred to the
method of preference.
It is of course necessary, however, in examining a question of
subvention to look at it on its merits. This proposal of 1 per cent.
put forward by Mr. Deakin carried the support of the official
spokesman of the Opposition. Let us look at it on its merits. Look
first at the proportions on which this new fund was to be subscribed.
Canada was "to dedicate"--that was the expression used by Mr.
Deakin--L400,000, New Zealand L20,000, Newfoundland L6,000, Cape
Colony L40,000, Natal L26,000, Great Britain L4,500,000, and
Australia--the proposing body--what was she to "dedicate" to this
fund? No more than L100,000 a year, or one forty-fifth part of the
contribution which was to be made by this country. And for what object
was this fund to be accumulated? It is hard enough for the Chancellor
of the Exchequer to raise the money to carry on so great an
establishment as this country is forced necessarily to maintain. But
here is a proposal to raise no less than L4,500,000 of extra taxation.
For what objects? For objects not specified, for objects not yet
discovered, for objects which could not be stated by those who made
the proposal. The right hon. gentleman said that there was to be a
meeting of the representatives of the different Colonies in the
different great cities of the Empire--one different great city each
year for seven years, excluding London, where there was to be no
meeting, and they were to search for a method of spending this money.
Such plans have only to be stated to fall to pieces.
The House will see that the real essential fallacy of the
protectionist proposal is the idea that taxation is a good thing in
itself, that it should be imposed for the fun of the thing, and then,
having done it for amusement, we should go round afterwards and look
for attractive methods of expenditure in order to give support to the
project. These are the actual proposals made to us at the Colonial
Conference. These are the sort of proposals in respect of which we
are, forsooth, to be censured because we have not found it possible in
the name of the Government of this country to give our assent to
them.
I will submit a proposition to the House as a broad, general rule. I
daresay the Leader of the Opposition may rake up some ingenious, hard
case in conflict with it; but as a broad, general rule I believe it
will be found true to say that there is no power in a Government to
impose indirect taxation outside the limits of its territorial
sovereignty. Although I am quite ready to admit that, by sudden and
unexpected alterations of the tariff, temporary advantage might be
gained, and some share of the wealth of other people and other
countries might be netted for this or that set of traders within your
own border, in the long run the whole yield of any tax, export or
import, will come home to the people of that country by whom it is
imposed. It will come home plus the whole cost of collecting the tax,
and plus, further, the inconvenience and burden of the network of
taxation which is needed. It will come home to them, if they be
consumers, in the quantity, quality, or price of the articles they
consume, and, if exporters, in the profit, convenience, or reserve
power of the business which they conduct.
There is no parity between the sacrifices demanded of the Mother
Country and the proposals of preference made by the various Colonies.
To them it is merely a fresh application of their existing fiscal
system. To us it is a fiscal revolution. To them it is a mere
rewriting of their schedules to give an increased measure of
protection to their home producers. To us it is a tax on food, and, as
I assert again and again, upon raw material, and thus upon all the
industries of these islands. If the Conference has established one
thing clearly it is this, that none of the great self-governing
Colonies of the British Empire are prepared to give us effective
access to their own markets in competition with their home producers.
That was established with absolute clearness; and even if they were
prepared to give us effective access to their home markets, I submit
to the House that, having regard to the great preponderance of our
foreign trade as against our Colonial trade, it would not be worth our
while to purchase the concession which they would then offer at the
cost of disturbing and dislocating the whole area of our trade.
Therefore, we propose to adhere, and are prepared if necessary to be
censured for adhering to our general financial system, which is
governed by the rule that there should be no taxation except for
revenue, and based on the commercial principle of the equal treatment
of all nations, and the most-favoured-nation treatment from those
nations in return.
Important as are the economical arguments against a preferential
policy, they are in my opinion less grave than the political
disadvantages. On other occasions I have addressed the House on the
grave danger and detriment to the working of our Colonial system which
must follow the intermingling of the affairs of the British Empire in
the party politics and financial politics of this country. To
establish a preferential system with the Colonies involving
differential duties upon food is to make the bond of Imperial unity
dependent year after year upon the weather and the crops.
And there is even a more unstable foundation for Imperial unity. Does
it never occur to right hon. gentlemen opposite that this solution
which they offer of the problem of Imperial unity places the Empire
not on a national, but on a purely party basis, and upon a basis
repudiated by at least half the nation? Some day it may be that they
will return triumphant from a general election. As party politicians
they may rejoice, yet I think a wise statesman would try to win for
the British Empire, our Colonial relations, the same sort of position,
high above the struggle of Parties, which is now so happily occupied
by the Crown and the Courts of Justice, which in less degree, though
in an increasing degree, is coming to be occupied by the fighting
Services. Whatever advantages from a Party point of view, or from the
point of view of gratifying Colonial opinion, may be gained by food
preferences, they would be very small compared with the enormous boon
of keeping the field of Colonial politics separate from the social and
economic issues on which Parties in this country are so fiercely
divided.
It is possible to take a still wider view of this question. If I quote
the right hon. gentleman the Member for West Birmingham, let me assure
the House that I do not do so for the purpose of making any petty
charge of inconsistency, but because the words which I am going to
read are wise and true words, and stand the test of time. When the
right hon. gentleman spoke at Manchester in 1897, not in the distant
days before the great Home Rule split, but when he was already a
Minister in the Unionist Government, and had been Secretary of State
for the Colonies for nearly two years, he used these words, of the
highest wisdom: "Anything in the direction of an Imperial Commercial
League would weaken the Empire internally and excite the permanent
hostility of the whole world. It would check the free imports of the
food of the people. It is impracticable; but if it were practicable,
and done in the name of the Empire, it would make the Empire odious to
the working people, it would combine the whole world against us, and
it would be a cause of irritation and menace. Our free commerce makes
for the peace of the world."
Let us then seek to impress year after year upon the British Empire an
inclusive and not an exclusive character. We who sit on this side of
the House, who look forward to larger brotherhoods and more exact
standards of social justice, value and cherish the British Empire
because it represents more than any other similar organisation has
ever represented, the peaceful co-operation of all sorts of men in all
sorts of countries, and because we think it is, in that respect at
least, a model of what we hope the whole world will some day become.
The House has to-night a considerable and important opportunity. If in
rejecting this vote of censure, which is so ill-conceived and so
little deserved, we choose to adopt the Amendment, we shall have
written upon the records of Parliament a profound political truth,
which will not, I think, soon be challenged, and which, I believe,
will never be overthrown.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Mr Lyttelton.
[5] Prime Minister of the Australian Commonwealth.
THE HOUSE OF LORDS
HOUSE OF COMMONS, _June 29, 1907_
On June 24, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had moved:
"That, in order to give effect to the will of the people
as expressed by their elected representatives, it is
necessary that the power of the other House to alter or
reject Bills passed by this House should be so restricted
by law as to secure that within the limits of a single
Parliament the final decision of the Commons shall
prevail."
This was carried after three days' debate by 315 to 100.
I will not venture at any length into an abstract constitutional
discussion upon this Motion, because, after all, we have an extremely
practical issue before us. It seems to me that this great question
must be looked at from three points of view. There is the issue
between the two Houses; there is the issue between the two political
Parties; and then there is the national issue. The quarrel which is
now open between the House of Lords and the House of Commons arises
from two events--the general election of 1906, and the rejection of
the measures of the new Liberal Government, culminating in the
destruction of the Education Bill by the House of Lords at the end of
that year. Either of these events is memorable in itself, but placed
in juxtaposition and considered together they have a multiplied
significance. The general election of 1906 was the most vehement
expression of public opinion which this generation has known; and that
expression of public will was countered in the December of the same
year by the most arbitrary and uncompromising assertion of
aristocratic privilege upon record.
Let the House think of it. The process of the election of Members of
Parliament is extremely elaborate. The candidates go about the country
for two or three weeks saying all they have to say for themselves in
the different constituencies which they are contesting; at the end of
that exhaustive discussion there is an elaborate process of voting;
the returns are counted with the most scrupulous care; and as the
result 670 Members, representing 6,000,000 of voters and many more who
take a deep interest in public affairs but have no votes, are
returned to the House of Commons in the name of the people of Great
Britain and Ireland. The new Parliament assembles. Scarcely any
question at the election had been more a test question, so far as the
supporters of the Government are concerned, than the question of the
amendment of the education system of the country. A Bill dealing with
education is brought forward as the principal measure of the first
session of the new Parliament. Weeks are occupied in its discussion.
It represents the fulfilment of the election pledges of every Member
who supported it. The Bill is passed by perhaps the largest majority
that ever sent a Bill from this House to another place.
Nor was it a revolutionary Bill, to turn the world upside down and
inside out; on the contrary, it was a Bill which, if vitiated in any
respect, was vitiated by the element of compromise. Immense
concessions were made in it, and rightly, I think, to conscientious
and agitated minorities. It was a Bill which so moderate and
consistent a statesman as the Duke of Devonshire, of whose ill-health
the House learns with grave concern, urged the House of Lords to pass
into law.
Sir, the Leader of the Opposition told us the other day that it was
the habit of his Majesty's Government to introduce Bills which they did
not mean to pass. No one--not even the right hon. gentleman
himself--can say that the Government have not earnestly desired to pass
the Education Bill. Every concession that could be conceived was made,
but to what purpose? After the House of Commons had humbled itself
before the House of Lords, after we had gone to the extreme limit of
concession which self-respect, which a proper sense of the dignity of
this House, and a due observance of the pledges of the Liberal Party
permitted, the House of Lords curtly, bluntly, uncharitably, and
harshly flung the Bill out in our faces mutilated and destroyed. I do
not wish to import an element of heat into this discussion, but I
respectfully submit to the Conservative Party that that act on the part
of the House of Lords places them in a new position--a new position in
the sense that never before had their old position been taken up so
nakedly, so brazenly, and so uncompromisingly.
It is true that we have an excuse put before us with much suavity of
language in these debates--we are told that the House of Lords seeks
to interpret the will of the people, and it is explained that by "the
will of the people," what is meant is the persistent, sub-conscious
will, as opposed to any articulate expression of it. The right hon.
gentleman who leads the Opposition told us that what he meant by the
persistent will was the will of the people expressed continuously over
a period of thirty years. That is what he called "democracy properly
understood."
Having regard to that part of the question which concerns the issue
between the two Houses, we repudiate emphatically the claim of the
other House to what the French call _faire l'ange_--to "play the
angel," to know better than the people themselves what the people
want, to have a greater authority to speak in the name of the people
than their representatives sent to Parliament by the elaborate process
I have described. To dispute the authority of a newly elected
Parliament is something very like an incitement to violence on the
part of the other House. The noble Lord[6] laughs; but we are anxious
to convince him and his friends that we are in earnest. We go through
all the processes which the Constitution prescribes, we produce an
enormous majority, and we express the opinion of that majority, but
still the noble Lord and other noble Lords, less intelligent, but more
remote, tell us that they are not convinced. What steps do they
suggest that we should take in order to bring home to them the
earnestness of our plea? What steps do they suggest that the people
should take in order to assert their wishes? I hold entirely by what I
said that to dispute the authority of an elected body fresh from its
constituents is a deliberate incitement to the adoption of lawless and
unconstitutional methods. The assertion which the House of Lords made
at the end of last year is an intolerable assertion. I believe the
country is altogether unprepared for it; and I wonder it was thought
worth while to risk an institution which has lasted so many centuries,
in the very skirmish line of Party warfare.
I am aware there is a special reason for the temerity of the House of
Lords. It is not a very complimentary reason to the Members or the
leaders of the late Government, but it is argued that the Conservative
Party cannot be worse than they are. No matter what they do, nor how
they are hated or reprobated by the country, the Conservative Party
cannot possibly occupy a more humiliating and unpleasant position than
they did after the last two years of the late Administration.
Consequently, having reached the low-water mark of political fortune,
they think they can afford to be a little reckless, and that at the
very worst they will be returned in their present numerical
proportions.
That is a very natural explanation of their action; but if we for our
part were to accept the assertion lately made by the House of
Lords--an assertion which is the furthest point to which aristocratic
privilege has attained in modern times--that assertion itself would
become only the starting-point for a whole new series of precedents
and of constitutional retrogressions; and worse than that, if by any
chance, having raised this issue, we were to be defeated upon it--if
having placed this Resolution on the records of the House we were to
fail to give effect to it, or were to suffer an electoral reverse as
the conclusion of it--then good-bye to the power of the House of
Commons. All that long process of advance in democratic institutions
which has accompanied the growth of the power of the House of Commons,
and which has also been attended by an expansion of the circles of
comfort and culture among the people of this country--all that long
process which has gone steadily onward for 200 years, and which has
almost exclusively occupied the politics of the nineteenth
century--will have reached its culmination. It will have come in
contact with that barrier of which we have heard so much in this
debate. The tide will have turned, and in the recoil of the waters
they will gradually leave exposed again, altered no doubt by the
conditions of the age, all the old assertions of aristocratic and
plutocratic domination which we had fondly hoped had been engulfed for
ever.
Hon. gentlemen opposite would be well advised to treat this Resolution
seriously. This Parliament is still young, but there are some things
at which they have laughed which have already become accomplished
facts, I could not have during the past eighteen months listened to
their taunts about the permanence of Chinese labour without reflecting
now with satisfaction that Chinese labour is going. Yes, and other
people may follow. We are only at the beginning of this struggle. We
are not necessarily committed to every detail of the proposal; we are
opening the first lines for a great siege, we have to sap up to the
advanced parallels, to establish our batteries, and at no distant date
open our bombardment. It may be many months before we shall be able to
discern where there is a practicable breach; but the assault will come
in due time.
The right hon. gentleman opposite[7] said he welcomed this contest
with great confidence. I wonder if the Conservative Party realise, to
use an expressive vulgarism, what they are "letting themselves in for"
when this question comes to be fought out on every platform in every
constituency in the country? They will not have to defend an ideal
Second Chamber; they will not be able to confine themselves to airy
generalities about a bicameral system and its advantages; they will
have to defend _this_ Second Chamber as it is--one-sided, hereditary,
unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee. They will have to
defend it with all its anomalies, all its absurdities, and all its
personal bias--with all its achievements that have darkened the pages
of the history of England. And let me say that weighty constitutional
authorities have not considered that the policy on which we have
embarked in moving this Resolution is unreasonable. Mr. Bagehot says
of the House of Lords:
"It may lose its veto as the Crown has lost its veto. If most of its
members neglect their duties, if all its members continue to be of one
class, and that not quite the best; if its doors are shut against
genius that cannot found a family, and ability which has not L5,000 a
year, its power will be less year by year, and at last be gone, as so
much kingly power is gone--no one knows how."
What is the position of the Conservative Party when they attempt to
defend the House of Lords? They are always telling us to imitate the
Colonies; they are always telling us that we ought to adopt the fiscal
systems and other methods employed in the self-governing Colonies; but
what is their unprejudiced view of the relations which are held
between the two Chambers under the bicameral system in the Colonies
and as established by their own Australian Commonwealth Act in the
last Parliament? By that Act they have given power to the Lower
Chamber to over-ride the Upper Chamber in certain circumstances. The
Commonwealth Act says that when the Chambers differ they shall meet
together, and that the majority shall decide, measures being taken,
however, that the numbers of the Upper Chamber shall not be such as
to swamp the opinion of the Lower Chamber. Imitating them, and
following in their footsteps, we have adopted such a plan in the
Transvaal and Orange River Colony Constitutions.
The Leader of the Opposition asked us yesterday whether the people are
not often wrong, and he proceeded characteristically to suggest that
he always considered them wrong when they voted against him. I am not
prepared to take such a rough-and-ready test of the opinion and of the
mental processes of the British democracy as that. I should hesitate
to say that when the people pronounce against a particular measure or
Party they have not pretty good reasons for doing so. I am not at all
convinced that in 1900 the electors were wrong in saying that the war
should be finished--by those who made it. Even in the last election I
could, I daresay, find some few reasons to justify the decision which
the people then took; and if we should be so unfortunate in the future
as to lose that measure of public confidence now abundantly given to
us, then I shall not be too sure that it will not be our own fault.
Certain am I that we could not take any step more likely to forfeit
the confidence of the people of England, than to continue in office
after we have lost the power to pass effective legislation.
I will retort the question of the Leader of the Opposition by another
question. Has the House of Lords ever been right? Has it ever been
right in any of the great settled controversies which are now beyond
the reach of Party argument? Was it right in delaying Catholic
emancipation and the removal of Jewish disabilities? Was it right in
driving this country to the verge of revolution in its effort to
defeat the passage of reform? Was it right in resisting the Ballot
Bill? Was it right in the almost innumerable efforts it made to
prevent this House dealing with the purity of its own electoral
machinery? Was it right in endeavouring to prevent the abolition of
purchase in the Army? Was it right in 1880, when it rejected the
Compensation for Disturbance Bill? I defy the Party opposite to
produce a single instance of a settled controversy in which the House
of Lords was right.
[An honourable Member: What about Home Rule?]