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Page 10
I regret to have had to dwell at such length upon this particular
topic. But it seems to me that we have no choice in the matter. If
the Government succeed in their attempt to divert the attention of the
nation from matters of the greatest interest at home and abroad in
order to involve us all in a constitutional struggle on a false issue,
we must be prepared to meet them. But I do not wish to waste the rare
opportunity afforded to me to-night of addressing this great and
representative Scottish audience by talking exclusively about this
regrettable manoeuvre. There is something I am anxious to say to you
about the future of the Unionist party. I do not claim to lay down a
policy for that or for any party. I am not, by temperament or
antecedents, a good party man. But I want to be allowed, as a private
citizen, to point out what are the great services which I think the
Unionist party can render to the nation at the present very critical
juncture in its history. The Unionist party has a splendid record in
the past. For twenty years it has saved the United Kingdom from
disruption. It has preserved South Africa for the Empire; and, greatly
as I feel and know, that the results of the efforts and sacrifices of
the nation have been marred and impaired by the disastrous policy of
the last two years, South Africa is still one country under the
British flag. And all the time, in spite of foreign war and domestic
sedition, the Unionist party has pursued a steady policy of practical
social reform, and the administrative and legislative record of the
last twenty years will compare favourably with that of any period of
our history.
But no party can afford to rely upon its past achievements. How is the
Unionist party going to confront the great problems of the present
day? The greatest of these problems, as I shall never cease to preach
to my countrymen, is the maintenance of the great heritage which we
owe to the courage, the enterprise, and the self-sacrifice of our
forefathers, who built up one of the greatest Empires in history by,
on the whole, the most honourable means. The epoch of expansion is
pretty nearly past, but there remains before us a great work of
development and consolidation. And that is a work which should appeal
especially to Scotsmen. The Scottish people have borne a great part,
great out of proportion to their numbers, in building up our common
British heritage. They are taking a foremost part in it to-day. All
over the world, as settlers in Canada, in Australia, or in South
Africa, as administrators in India and elsewhere, they are among the
sturdiest pillars on which the great Imperial fabric rests. I am not
talking in the air. I am speaking from my personal experience, and
only saying in public here to-night what I have said in private a
hundred times, that as an agent of my country in distant lands I have
had endless occasion to appreciate the support given to the British
cause by the ability, the courage, the shrewd sense and the broad
Imperial instinct of many Scotsmen. And therefore I look with
confidence to a Scottish audience to support my appeal for continuous
national effort in making the most of the British Empire. I say this
is not a matter with regard to which we can afford to rest on our
laurels. We must either go forward or we shall go back. And especially
ought we to go forward in developing co-operation, on a basis of
equality and partnership, with the great self-governing communities
of our race in the distant portions of the world, else they will drift
away from us. Do not let us think for a moment that we can afford such
another fiasco as the late Colonial Conference. Do not let us imagine
for a moment that we can go to sleep over the questions then raised,
and not one of them settled, for four years, only to find ourselves
unprepared when the next Conference meets. A cordial social welcome,
many toasts, many dinners, are all very well in their way, but they
are not enough. What is wanted is a real understanding of what our
fellow countrymen across the seas are driving at, and a real attempt
to meet them in their efforts to keep us a united family. All that our
present rulers seem able to do is to misunderstand, and therefore
unconsciously to misrepresent--I do not question their good
intentions, but I think they are struck with mental blindness in this
matter--to misrepresent the attitude of the colonists and greatly to
exaggerate the difficulties of meeting them half-way. The speeches of
Ministers on a question like that of Colonial Preference leave upon me
the most deplorable impression. One would have thought that, if they
could not get over the objections which they feel to meeting the
advances of our kinsmen, they would at least show some sort of regret
at their failure. But not a bit of it. Their one idea all along has
been to magnify the difficulties in the way in order to make party
capital out of the business. They saw their way to a good cry about
"taxing the food of the people," the big and the little loaf, and so
forth, and they went racing after it, regardless of everything but its
electioneering value. From first to last there has been the same
desire to make the worst of things, sometimes by very disingenuous
means. First of all it was said that there was "no Colonial offer."
But when the representatives of the Colonies came here, and all in the
plainest terms offered us preference for preference, this device
evidently had to be abandoned. So then it was asserted that, in order
to give preference to the Colonies, we must tax raw materials. But
this move again was promptly checkmated by the clear and repeated
declaration of the Colonial representatives that they did not expect
us to tax raw materials. And so nothing was left to Ministers,
determined as they were to wriggle out of any agreement with the
Colonies at all costs, except to fall back on the old, weary
parrot-cry--"Will you tax corn?" "Will you tax butter?" and so on
through the whole list of articles of common consumption, the taxation
of any one of which was thought to be valuable as an electioneering
bogey.
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