Rugby, November 19, 1907
There has been such a deluge of talk during the last three weeks that I doubt whether it is possible for me, or any man, to make a further contribution to the discussion which will have any freshness or value. But inasmuch as you probably do not all read all the speeches, you may perhaps be willing to hear from me a condensed summary of what it all comes to—of course, from my point of view, which no doubt is not quite the same as that of the Prime Minister or Mr. Asquith. Now, from my point of view, there has been a considerable clearing of the air, and we ought all to be in a position to take a more practical and less exaggerated view of the situation. Speaking as a Tariff Reformer, I think that those people, with whom Tariff Reformers agree on almost all other political questions, but who are strongly and conscientiously opposed to anything like what they call tampering with our fiscal system, must by now understand a little better than they did before what Tariff Reformers really aim at, and must begin to see that there is nothing so very monstrous or revolutionary about our proposals. I hope they may also begin to see why it is that Tariff Reformers are so persistent and so insistent upon their own particular view. There is something very attractive in the argument which says that, since Tariff Reform is a stumbling-block to many good Unionists, it should be dropped, and our ranks closed in defence of an effective Second Chamber, and in defence of all our institutions against revolutionary attacks directed upon the existing order of society. In so far as this is an argument for tolerance and against excommunicating people because they do not agree with me about Tariff Reform, I am entirely in accord with it. I am only a convert to Tariff Reform myself, although I am not a very recent convert, for at the beginning of 1903, at Bloemfontein, I was instrumental in inducing all the South African Colonies to give a substantial preference to goods of British origin. I was instrumental in doing that some months before the great Tariff Reform campaign was inaugurated in this country by its leading champion, Mr. Chamberlain. But while I am all for personal tolerance, I am opposed to any compromise on the question of principle. I am not opposed to it from any perverseness or any obstinacy. I am opposed to it because I see clearly that dropping Tariff Reform will knock the bottom out of a policy which I believe is not only right in itself, but is the only effective defence of the Union and of many other things which are very dear to us—I mean a policy of constructive Imperialism, and of steady, consistent, unhasting, and unresting Social Reform.
I have never advocated Tariff Reform as a nostrum or as a panacea. I have never pretended that it is by itself alone sufficient to cure all the evils inherent in our social system, or alone sufficient as a bond of Empire. What I contend is that without it, without recovering our fiscal freedom, without recovering the power to deal with Customs Duties in accordance with the conditions of the present time and not the conditions of fifty years ago, we cannot carry out any of those measures which it is most necessary that we should carry out. Without it we are unable to defend ourselves against illegitimate foreign competition; we are unable to enter into those trade arrangements with the great self-governing States of the British Crown across the seas, which are calculated to bestow the most far-reaching benefits upon them and upon us; and we are unable to obtain the revenue which is required for a policy of progressive Social Reform. I hope that people otherwise in agreement with us, who have hitherto not seen their way to get over their objections to Tariff Reform, will, nevertheless, find themselves able to accept that principle, when they regard it, not as an isolated thing, but as an essential part of a great national and Imperial policy.
Of course, they will have to see it as it is, and not as it is represented by its opponents. The opponents of Tariff Reform have a very easy method of arguing with its supporters. They say that any departure whatsoever from our present fiscal system necessarily involves taxing raw materials, and must necessarily result in high and prohibitive duties, which will upset our foreign trade, and will be ruinous and disorganising to the whole business of the country. But Tariff Reformers are not going to frame their duties in order to suit the argumentative convenience of Mr. Asquith. They are going to be guided by wholly different considerations from that. It is curious that everybody opposed to Tariff Reform says that Tariff Reformers intend to tax raw material, while Tariff Reformers themselves have steadily said they do not. I ask you in that respect to take the description of a policy of Tariff Reform from those who advocate it, and not from those who oppose it. And as for the argument about high prohibitive duties, I wish people would read the reports or summaries of the reports of the Tariff Commission. They contain not only the most valuable collection that exists anywhere of the present facts about almost every branch of British industry but they are also an authoritative source from which to draw inferences as to the intentions of Tariff Reformers. Now the Tariff Reform Commission have not attempted to frame a complete tariff, a scale of duties for all articles imported into this country, and wisely, because, if they had tried to do that, people would have said that they were arrogating to themselves the duties of Parliament. What they have done is to show by a few instances that a policy of Tariff Reform is not a thing in the air, not a mere thing of phrases and catchwords, but is a practical, businesslike working policy. They have drawn up what may be called experimental scales of duties, which are merely suggestions for consideration, with respect to a number of articles under the principal heads of British imports, such as, for instance, agricultural imports and imports of iron and steel. These experimental duties vary on the average from something like 5 per cent. to 10 per cent. on the value of the articles. In no one case in my recollection do they exceed 10 per cent.
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.
I say these are difficulties which any party or any man, who is prepared to do his duty by the electorate of this country, not merely to ingratiate himself with them for the moment, but to win their confidence by deserving it, by telling them the truth, by serving their permanent interests and not their passing moods, is bound to face. For my own part, I have always been perfectly frank on these questions. I have maintained on many platforms, I am prepared to maintain here to-night and shall always maintain, although this is a subject on which it may be long before my views are included in any party programme—I say I shall always maintain that real security is not possible without citizen service, and that the training of every able-bodied man to be capable of taking part, if need be, in the defence of his country, is not only good for the country but good for the man—and would materially assist in the solution of many other problems, social and economic. But being, as I am, thus uncompromising, and quite prepared to find myself unpopular, on these vital questions of national security, and of our Imperial duties and responsibilities, I can perhaps afford to say, without being suspected of fawning or of wishing to play the demagogue myself, that in the matter of domestic reform I am not easy to frighten, and that I have a very great trust in the essential fair-mindedness and good sense of the great body of my fellow countrymen with regard to questions which come within their own direct cognisance. And therefore it was most reassuring to me at any rate—and I hope it was to you—to observe, that that large section of the Unionist Party which met at Birmingham last week, not so much by any resolutions or formal programme—for there was nothing very novel in these—as by the whole tone and temper of its proceedings, affirmed in the most emphatic manner the essentially progressive and democratic character of Unionism. The greatest danger I hold to the Unionist Party and to the nation is that the ideals of national strength and Imperial consolidation on the one hand, and of democratic progress and domestic reform on the other, should be dissevered, and that people should come to regard as antagonistic objects which are essentially related and complementary to one another. The upholders of the Union, the upholders of the Empire, the upholders of the fundamental institutions of the State, must not only be, but must be seen and known to be, the strenuous and constant assailants of those two great related curses of our social system—irregular employment and unhealthy conditions of life—and of all the various causes which lead to them.
I cannot stay here to enumerate those causes, but I will mention a few of them. There is the defective training of children, defective physical training to begin with, and then the failure to equip them with any particular and definite form of skill. There is the irregular way in which new centres of population are allowed to spring up, so that we go on creating fresh slums as fast as we pull down the old rookeries. There is the depopulation of the countryside, and the influx of foreign paupers into our already overcrowded towns. There is the undermining of old-established and valuable British industries by unfair foreign competition. That is not an exhaustive list, but it is sufficient to illustrate my meaning. Well, wherever these and similar evils are eating away the health and independence of our working people, there the foundations of the Empire are being undermined, for it is the race that makes the Empire. Loud is the call to every true Unionist, to every true Imperialist, to come to the rescue.
And now at the risk of wearying you there is one other subject to which I would like specially to refer, lest I should be accused of deliberately giving it the go-by, and that is the question of old age pensions. It is not a reform altogether of the same nature as those on which I have been dwelling, nor is it perhaps the kind of reform about which I feel the greatest enthusiasm, because I would rather attack the causes, which lead to that irregularity of employment and that under-payment which prevents people from providing for their own old age themselves, than merely remedy the evils arising from it. But I accept the fact that under present conditions, which it may be that a progressive policy in time will alter, a sufficient case for State aid in the matter of old age pensions has been made out, and I believe that no party is going to oppose the introduction of old age pensions. But, on the other hand, I foresee great difficulties and great disputes over the question of the manner in which the money is to be provided. I know how our Radical friends will wish to provide the money. They will want to get it, in the first instance, by starving the Army and the Navy. To that way of providing it I hope the Unionist Party, however unpopular such a course may be, and however liable to misrepresentation it may be, will oppose an iron resistance, because this is an utterly rotten and bad way of financing old age pensions, or anything else. But that method alone, however far it is carried, will not provide money enough, and there will be an attempt to raise the rest by taxes levied exclusively on the rich. I am against that also, because it is thoroughly wrong in principle. I am not against making the rich pay, to the full extent of their capacity, for great national purposes, even for national purposes in which they have no direct interest. But I am not prepared to see them made to pay exclusively. Let all pay according to their means. It is a thoroughly vicious idea that money should be taken out of the pocket of one man, however rich, in order to be put into the pocket of another, however poor. That is a bad, anti-national principle, and I hope the Unionist Party will take a firm stand against it. And this is an additional reason why we should raise whatever money may be necessary by duties upon foreign imports, because in that way all will contribute. No doubt the rich will contribute the bulk of the money through the duties on imported luxuries, but there will be some contribution, as there ought to be some contribution, from every class of the people.
And now, in conclusion, one word about purely practical considerations. We Unionists, if you will allow me to call myself a Unionist—at any rate I have explained quite frankly what I mean by the term—are not a class party, but a national party. That being so, it is surely of the utmost importance that men of all classes should participate in every branch and every grade of the work of the Unionist Party. Why should we not have Unionist Labour members as well as Radical Labour members? I think that the working classes of this country are misrepresented in the eyes of the public of this country and of the world, as long as they appear to have no leaders in Parliament except the men who concoct and pass those machine-made resolutions with which we are so familiar in the reports of Trade Union Congresses. I am not speaking now about their resolutions on trade questions, which they thoroughly understand, but about resolutions on such subjects as foreign politics, the Army and Navy, and Colonial and Imperial questions, resolutions which are always upon the same monotonous lines. I do not believe that the working classes are the unpatriotic, anti-national, down-with-the-army, up-with-the-foreigner, take-it-lying-down class of Little Englanders that they are constantly represented to be. I do not believe it for a moment. I have heard Imperial questions discussed by working men in excellent speeches, not only eloquent speeches, but speeches showing a broad grasp and a truly Imperial spirit, and I should like speeches of that kind to be heard in the House of Commons as an antidote to the sort of preaching which we get from the present Labour members. And what I say about the higher posts in the Unionist Army applies equally to all other ranks. No Unionist member or Unionist candidate is really well served unless he has a number of men of the working class on what I may call his political staff. And I say this not merely for electioneering reasons. This is just one of the cases in which considerations of party interest coincide—I wish they always or often did—with considerations of a higher character. There is nothing more calculated to remove class prejudice and antagonism than the co-operation of men of different classes on the same body for the same public end. And there is this about the aims of Unionism, that they are best calculated to teach the value of such co-operation; to bring home to men of all classes their essential inter-dependence on one another, as well as to bring home to each individual the pettiness and meanness of personal vanity and ambition in the presence of anything so great, so stately, as the common heritage and traditions of the British race.