Expectations and misconceptions.

17

shows how important it is that a country which desires, in accordance with the principles of free-trade, to place the goods of all other countries on an equality in its own markets, should not, in order to facilitate the negotiations of a commercial Treaty with any particular country, admit its goods on exceptionally favourable terms."

Mr. Bright writes as follows to Mr. Abraham, the miners' representative in the Rhondda Valley, disconsolately enough:

of something

great.

"We can only keep our own tariff as free as we can, and live in Faint hope the hope that foreign nations will in time find it their interest to not very reduce their tariff. I fear one nation can do little for another in matters of this kind. The military system and exaction of European Governments demand high taxes to sustain them, and high taxation is most easily raised by customs duties, and by the customs duties pro- Mr. Bright tection is offered to and conferred upon manufacturers, who are there- United fore rendered more patient under high taxation. In America the high States. tariff comes from the great civil war. When this debt is greatly reduced, and their taxation becomes much less, they will make the tariff more moderate, and will by degrees approach free-trade."

In the Appendix will be found incidental references ad nauseum to the discomforts and disabilities into which we in 1860 noosed our statesmen with our eyes open.

and the

beam" treat

This may not be an improper place to advert to an apology too often heard in defence of the "even beam" treatment, which became The “even inevitable when the great run of import duties was abolished: that ment. the freight payable from France is itself a protection. The name is a misnomer,— call it a defence if you will, but to what does it amount? To very little, and that little got but partially. If the supplying of Newcastle or Hull, for instance, is to be from either Havre or Nantes, the Frenchman can effect it cheaper, as the whole transport in his case is by sea. But what of the manufactures of Ireland, say of sugar from Dublin, or linen from Belfast?

abroad is not

I pause to say a few words in illustration of this point, which Freight from is radical in respect to the place of the principle of protection. protection. Let us in imagination draw a line that will bisect Great Britain from north to south, and what appears is this, that for supplying bulky articles of manufacture to the east coast ports, including London, with a population greater than Scotland! many ports and places on the Continent are considerably better situated than our own ports on the west coast, and the great majority of our inland towns and, be it observed, the whole of Ireland. Sugar refined in Liverpool and Greenock and Dublin cannot be delivered in London as cheaply as what is refined at Amsterdam or Antwerp,

B

Eggs.

Good of the nation

should be supreme.

Solidarity.

Combination.

or Havre or Nantes. A like statement might be made as to the linens of Belfast. It is evident therefore that under what we call free-trade, beyond the most regrettable result it has of putting to a disadvantage establishments already in operation and our fellowsubjects who own them, there is less inducement offered to establish new manufactures, and (taking a different sort of employ) to rear poultry for eggs or the market, on the greater part of British soil than on no small area of the Continent! The system, in virtue of the very equality which it affects, produces inequality between one portion and another of our own United Kingdom, and at the same time is a benefit conferred in an exceptional manner on foreigners, whom it favours by promising them a position on the first line.

The truth is that in this matter of national policy, individual and class interests have, reversing our good old ways, been by the present generation much more considered and promoted than those of the nation-of the people as a whole. These interests do not run parallel, nor are they identical. All we can say, as an exposition of true principle, is that the good of the whole is to be preferred to that of its component parts, and that, in consulting that end, the parts will for the most part receive the maximum of individual and class good. Sciolists of the day would back any stave of a cask in its individualism, whereas our grandfathers would have addressed it thus: No, as long as you were a stave in the woodman's pile, or on the quays of a foreign country, you were entitled to all the freedom, as you bore all the disadvantage, of isolation; but you cannot both keep your place in our firmly bound cask, deriving strength and value from that, and your principal raison d'être, and, at same time, assert a claim such as you incompatibly and self-regardfully raise. We are apt to forget. that in peace as in war there must be such solidarity as is meant in mutual support and a common endurance of burdens or privations. We must bear the constraint of being hooped.

A new practice has been sanctioned, if not formally inaugurated, wherein, on the one hand, the utmost conceivable liberty has been given individually to combine for their particular supposed interests, to the extent indeed of instituting powerful imperia in imperio; and on the other, the involved and implied bonds or obligations or duties which we owe to the State, that is, to one another as a whole, have been weakened, and seldom even asserted boldly. It is the wisdom of rulers, and the strength of a nation, to make a righteous adjustment or compromise between these two tendencies.

To return from our digression: I ask, Is it not a decided France. superiority the Frenchman enjoys? And who is the Frenchman? A good neighbour, who is our rival, yet who pays not merely no duty to our custom-houses, but no income-tax in his own country, and contributes nothing whatever to British taxation, national or local. Of course too he does not benefit us in the indirect ways, which are still better, for he does not employ dwellers in Britain or Ireland as his workpeople, nor does he spend his earnings among us or invest them in new industries within the empire, while he supplants those persons who are doing all that.

patronage of • consumers."

These are circumstances which the Board's manifesto ignores. It The Board's harps upon the interest of consumers. The word occurs six times, that of manufacturers and producers and workers very seldom (I have quoted the only instance): that of the Nation or State not at all. Now who is this consumer who is justly so much made of? Not the foreigner, but every man, woman, and child who lives within the kingdom. Whence derive they the incomes and wages that enable them to buy in order to consume? With few exceptions, from labour or employment. Whence this employment? Chiefly from production, not abroad, but within the empire. To Wage-earnimport goods, manufactured abroad, of sorts that can as well be important made here, is, I repeat, to displace goods that are or would be diture. manufactured by or among ourselves-to reduce the ability to consume and the number of consumers. In an extraordinary manner the expenditure of the people is magnified to the neglect of their receipts that enable them to expend.

ing more

than expen

labour.

With philosophic coolness the Board writes of the men employed in sugar-houses :-"The largest proportion are un- Sugar-house skilled labourers, and may therefore, without difficulty, find employment in other business." Skilled or unskilled, employment is not so easily got. Why (even though it were) force labourers to leave the work for which they have been trained and the localities where they feel at home or the country of their birth? Why deprive their neighbours of so many good "customers"? Our theorists pretend that, leaving things to the natural course men will betake themselves to the work that is best fitted for them, and where they will contribute most to social wealth (they do not add, live most comfortably). They hide the undeniable and sad fact that in order to obtain it, since work does not come to them, and is in truth by our policy sent away from our shores, they must go to the work,-to Roubaix, or Lille, or other places, where a foreign Expatrialanguage is spoken and Protestant congregations, if they exist, do

tion.

Why little from France.

Commendable earnestness of foreign Governments.

not conduct their services in their tongue. They, in large and increasing numbers, emigrate in preference across the Atlantic; most of them there become foreigners and no longer contributors to our taxes, or available as recruits and volunteers, nor to any large extent customers of our shops and contributors to this nation's wealth. Every able-bodied man we lose is a gift to another country of £500, measuring by a pure money standard.

There is little emigration from France. We are told that it is because the Frenchman does not like to leave his native land. This is honourable to him, and an advantage to France. But is not there another cause? The French by means of protection keep and find, and we by our treaty enable them to find, for him increasing work to do at home.

Marvellous is the contrast between the anxiety practically manifested in other countries not in any degree or way, however small, to diminish the people's employment. Most particularly is this the case on the other side of the Atlantic, where, if anywhere, handicraft employment need not be sighed for.

A great, if not the principal, difficulty to be overcome in the negotiations between the United Kingdom and the United States with regard to copyright lies in the determination of the Government of the latter to back the demand of States' book-manufacturers that, even if copyright be conceded, free importation of books shall not be permitted but, on the contrary, the operations of printing and binding must be done there. Even now some of our books are printed on the Continent and in the United States. If the demands of the United States booksellers are conceded, I loss of print- anticipate that we shall see a very large part of our publishing business, and the employments that it occasions, carried to the other side of the Atlantic, and not merely magazines (as is rapidly becoming the case), but the most important and popular books, so far as concerns commerce and manufacturing, brought thence; and so with many, many other things.

Threatened

ing trade.

We have un

employment for the people.

The truth is, we have had for a number of years such an dervalued extent of manufacturing employment (with the help of a shortened number of hours of labour, and general prosperity), that we have not set upon it its due value-notwithstanding the unpleasant sight continually meeting our eyes of poor-houses like palaces, and, what is worse, of emigration, which latter relief has been more or less called for by our not having employment enough. We are apt to forget that in a thriving country population is continually on the increase by births, and it is continually attract

Sir Alexander Galt's appeal to common sense. 21

the United

ing population, and therefore additional employment is continually wanted. The United States have enormous unoccupied lands Example of immediately contiguous to those that are occupied, to which, if states. there were deficiency of employment, surplus population would naturally betake itself: yet they foster industries sedulously. The United Kingdom is not so happily circumstanced; its colonies are remote; the lands there are not under the control of the central government, and yet we confessedly, but, I think, very mistakenly, make light of the advantage of being able by better statesmanship to retain and enlarge the amount of employment within the kingdom and empire. To us it is a matter of necessity, to the States a matter of policy, a piece of shrewdness for which they deserve credit; for, indisputably, the wealth and strength of a country, provided all can be employed in it as contributors thereto, is proportionate to its loyal and well-doing population, and never was there a time when this required more to be attended to.

There is a point of view which we are too apt to forget, that since tastes, talents, ages, and idiosyncrasies mental and bodily, differ, it is desirable to have in every district a variety of kinds of employment. Too little attention has in time past been paid to this circumstance.

Have under

tomers.

Another error, and a great one, of our statesmanship has been to undervalue buyers or customers. In all trades and professions valued cusit is not the providers, but the persons to be provided for, that are sought out and courted, and valued. It is in strict conformity with what happens with regard to individuals that a nation of customers is invaluable to foreigners who supply it. Therefore Sir Alexander Galt struck directly and tellingly home when he appealed to the Associated Chambers of Commerce whether as to our national trade in the aggregate we have not forgotten the fundamental principle of all trade, that of selling to the greatest advantage, when we systematically give the world for absolutely nothing the most valuable article we have to dispose of our custom, and this largely custom which we could keep at home.

value of the

France and

Kingdom.

Here let attention be directed to some figures connected with Comparative the trade between the United Kingdom and France. Our exports treaty to to that country have no doubt augmented since the Cobden treaty the United was negotiated, but the augmentation had begun, and was in rapid progress, a number of years earlier. I have endeavoured to classify these. I leave out cereals and cotton and other raw materials, and divide the remainder into four groups or classes:-1. Goods