“The number of passenger tickets taken at the ports of this country is over 12 millions annually. (Sensation.) Ships’ crews (excluding coasters), fishermen running across to the continent, fugitive criminals, and King’s messengers bring the number up to 18 millions. (Sensation.) Not one of these 18 millions leaves without a sum of money ... many carry away immense sums ... our office can prove that the very clergy in their annual excursions will carry 20, 30, nay, 100 pounds a family. (Sensation.) How many return with any money at all? (Here the speaker made a dramatic pause.) ... I have little more to add. The total sum so lost by innumerable outlets amounts certainly to 200, possibly to 230, million pounds. England is a sieve.”
Witness here left the box, and the Committee rose in a state of seething excitement, several of the more commonplace members repeating mechanically, “A sieve!” “A regular sieve!” “Poor old England is a sieve!”
Mr. Chamberlain looked radiant in a black frock coat and top hat, with boots to match, and a flower of some kind in his buttonhole, while Mr. Balfour was quite cheerful and vivacious. As the Court rose the opinion was freely expressed that the day’s work has given the Cause a great lift forward.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION.
The third meeting of the Grand Committee of Inquest, commissioned under the Privy Seal of Great Britain and Ireland and the Dominions beyond the Seas, met at Downing Street this week to further explore—we mean, to explore further—the Fiscal Conditions of this Realm of England.
The late arrival of the members of the Committee gave rise to some anxious talk in the passage which corresponds to the Lobby of the House in Downing Street. The wildest rumours were afloat. Some said that Mr. Chamberlain had resigned; others that he had committed suicide. The more sober would have it that the inquest was indefinitely postponed, and that the whole scheme for protecting or not protecting native industries, or food, or what-not, as the Inquiry might or might not have shown to be necessary, or unnecessary, or either, was to be dropped. Among the adherents of the latter (or former) opinion were several journalists, a bishop, four diplomats, and an economist.
All doubts were set at rest by the arrival at 3.35 or thereabouts of the first members of the Committee and two members of the Birmingham “gang.” Three-quarters of an hour later Mr. Balfour was towed up in his motor-car, and the Court opened.
The business before the Court this morning was to receive the testimony of some fifty-eight witnesses on the technical details of our chief industries, and to hear their views on special points; especially on the inroads made by foreign competition in matters of construction.
A definition having been asked of where “technical detail” began, the Prime Minister refused to define the matter, but he ventured so far as to ask a question—whether there were not foreigners in the habit of substituting in small but essential parts of machinery patterns to which we, being of a superior race, could not stoop without changing the very conditions of our psychology? It was more or less upon these lines (said the Prime Minister) that the questions—if they could be called questions—were, so to speak, to proceed; and he hoped that the answers they should receive, using the word “answers” in its most general sense, would on the whole conform to some such conception of the duties more or less before them. (Applause.)
The first witness to be called was the Times economist, who refused to reveal his real name. Being threatened with the torture, he confessed to several aliases. He admitted to having signed many letters before this above the pseudonym of “Verax,” and, more lately, above those of “A Conservative Working-Man” and “A Disgusted Liberal.” He was not specially paid for these articles: it was all in the day’s work.