Then turning suddenly from his anecdotal style, Crooks would go on to ask his audience how a worthy Imperial race was to be built up on a lack of food?
The Empire begins in the workman's kitchen. The imposition of new duties on food imports, though no more than a penny or twopence, means to many a poor housewife the difference between having and going without.
I know one large family where the recent addition of a half-penny on the loaf robbed the children of a slice of bread a day. Do you know what that means? Have you ever lived in a family where the slices have to be counted, and where every child could eat twice as much as its allowance? I belonged to such a family as a child, and when a clergyman came round once and found my mother crying over an empty cupboard, he said:
"Ah, well; God sends the bread for all the mouths."
"That's all very fine," my mother said; "but He seems to send the mouths to our house and the bread to yours."
The policy of Preference came in for his banter equally with that of Protection. Under any scheme of Preference, the relation of this country, with its large imports, to our Colonies, which take comparatively few of our exports, he used to say reminded him of a boxing-match between a thin man and a fat man. After the first round or two the fat man stops and says:
"This ain't fair; you've got more to strike at than I have."
"Very well, then," says the thin man, "let's chalk my size out on your body, and all blows outside the chalk mark don't count."
Mr. Chamberlain seems to have heard how Crooks was riddling with ridicule his Protection and Preference policies up and down the country. At any rate, the ex-Minister began his favourite policy of Retaliation. At some of his public meetings he supported his argument by representing Crooks as having said at Leith that the poor of this country were worse off than the poor of any other country.
As soon as Crooks heard of this he wrote to Mr. Chamberlain:—
Sir,—I do not for a moment think you deliberately misquoted the words I used at Leith, but whoever sent you the information is absolutely without excuse for the blunder. For what I said I have said in twenty different parts of the kingdom to tens of thousands of our fellow-countrymen—viz. "that even if, as Mr. Chamberlain suggests, the Colonies do desire Preference, it is no reason why the poor of Great Britain should pay more for their bread to help those Colonies which have no poor, or certainly no poverty compared with the poverty we have in this country."
This, as you will note, makes a very great difference in the reading of your quotation of what I really did say.
I am, yours truly,
Will Crooks.
In reply Mr. Chamberlain sent a tardy apology, thus:—