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Page 13
But then the opponents of Tariff Reform say: "Yes. That is all very
well. But though you may begin with moderate duties, you are bound to
proceed to higher ones. It is in the nature of things that you should
go on increasing and increasing, and in the end we shall all be
ruined." I must say that seems to me great nonsense. It reminds me of
nothing so much as the fearful warnings which I have read in the least
judicious sort of temperance literature, and sometimes heard from
temperance orators of the more extreme type--the sort of warning, I
mean, that, if you once begin touching anything stronger than water,
you are bound to go on till you end by beating your wife and die in a
workhouse. But you and I know perfectly well that it is possible to
have an occasional glass of beer or glass of wine, or even, low be it
spoken, a little whisky, without beating or wanting to beat anybody,
and without coming to such a terrible end. The argument against the
use of anything from its abuse has always struck me as one of the
feeblest of arguments. And just see how particularly absurd it is in
the present case. The effect of duties on foreign imports, even such
moderate and carefully devised duties as those to which I have
referred, would, we are told, be ruinous to British trade. It would
place intolerable burdens upon the people. Yet for all that the people
would, it appears, insist on increasing these burdens. Surely it is as
clear as a pike-staff that, if the duties which Tariff Reformers
advocate were to produce the evils which Free Importers allege that
they would produce, these duties, so far from being inevitably
maintained and increased, would not survive one General Election after
their imposition.
It is not only with regard to Tariff Reform that I think the air is
clearer. The Unionist Party has to my mind escaped another danger
which was quite as great as that of allowing the Tariff question to be
pushed on one side, and that was the danger of being frightened by the
scare, which the noisy spreading of certain subversive doctrines has
lately caused, into a purely negative and defensive attitude; of
ceasing to be, as it has been, a popular and progressive party, and
becoming merely the embodiment of upper and middle class prejudices
and alarms. I do not say that there are not many projects in the air
which are calculated to excite alarm, but they can only be
successfully resisted on frankly democratic and popular lines. My own
feeling is--I may be quite wrong, but I state my opinion for what it
is worth--that there is far less danger of the democracy going wrong
about domestic questions than there is of its going wrong about
foreign and Imperial questions, and for this simple reason, that with
regard to domestic questions they have their own sense and experience
to guide them.
If a mistake is made in domestic policy its consequences are rapidly
felt, and no amount of fine talking will induce people to persist in
courses which are affecting them injuriously in their daily lives. You
have thus a constant and effective check upon those who are disposed
to try dangerous experiments, or to go too fast even on lines which
may be in themselves laudable, as the experience of recent municipal
elections, among other things, clearly shows. But with regard to
Imperial questions, to our great and vital interests in distant parts
of the earth, there is necessarily neither the same amount of personal
knowledge on the part of the electorate, nor do the consequences of a
mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them.
These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the
visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country
talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious
to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in
their lot with us and trusted us, that, if the British nation had only
known what that policy really meant, they would have spat it out of
their mouths. And I tremble every day lest, on the vital question of
Defence, the pressure of well-meaning but ignorant idealists, or the
meaner influence of vote-catching demagogues, should lead this
Government or, indeed, any Government, to curtail the provisions,
already none too ample, for the safety of the Empire, in order to pose
as the friends of peace or as special adepts in economy. I know these
savings of a million or two a year over say five or ten years, which
cost you fifty or one hundred millions, wasted through unreadiness
when the crisis comes, to say nothing of the waste of gallant lives
even more precious. This is the kind of question about which the
democracy is liable to be misled, being without the corrective of
direct personal contact with the facts to keep it straight. And it is
unpopular and up-hill work to go on reminding people of the vastness
of the duty and the responsibility which the control of so great a
portion of the earth's surface, with a dependent population of three
or four hundred millions, necessarily involves; to go on reminding
them, too, how their own prosperity and even existence in these
islands are linked by a hundred subtle but not always obvious or
superficially apparent threads with the maintenance of those great
external possessions.
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