FANCIFUL FOREBODINGS?
Here I must bring to an end my short, detailed criticism of the Daily Graphic correspondent’s attack, for I have already exceeded the space offered to me by the editor, though I have perforce left untouched a number of points on which I should have liked to enlarge my defence. I have not touched the two concluding articles in the series. The last is a statement (more lucidly and ably put than anything I remember ever to have read) of the Free Trade position in general and the case against a Customs Union in particular; but I have recently elsewhere stated my views on those subjects at length. Regarding the penultimate article, I should like to say a word in conclusion. That article attacks me by a side wind. It does not contest the facts contained in my book; on the contrary, it leads off with an airy dismissal of “Mr. Williams and his fanciful forebodings,” and it shows, by much rhetorical writing and some interesting illustrations, that England is a land flowing with milk and honey and manufactures and money, and generally in a wonderful state of millennial prosperity. My answer is two-fold. In the first place I must congratulate the correspondent on the pleasant surroundings among which alone his days can have been passed; but I should like to take him through some awful wildernesses I know—deserts of “mean streets,” where half-clothed, underfed children shiver for warmth and food at the knees of women gaunt and haggard with the suffering which hopeless poverty inflicts on them; and by way of explanation of these grisly phenomena I would take him to the dock gates in the early morning, where not unlikely he would see men literally fighting for entrance because there is not work enough to go round. If that does not point him out the cause with sufficient clearness I would suggest an examination of the employment returns of the trade unions. There, by-the-by, he would see the greatest want of employment to be in those trades where the pinch of foreign competition—“the harmless growth of the German infant,” he phrases it—is most in evidence.