Cross-examined: He admitted to having written for the Daily Telegraph; he was not “Maude” of Chit-Chat. Asked whether he were the “Revenue Officer” of pious memory, he denied the imputation—or, as he called it, the “soft impeachment”—with the utmost violence. He also denied any connection, direct or indirect, with the “Times Encyclopædia,” the “Times System of Payment by Instalments,” the “Parnell Letters,” the “Hawkesley Letters,” the “Jameson Raid,” the “Argument upon the Mortality in the Concentration Camps,” the recent “Roman Correspondence,” the Times “Dramatic Criticism,” and “The Industrial Freedom League,” and, indeed, everything else connected with that journal. The witness here swore with some heat, the ingenuous colour mounting to his cheeks, that he had never changed a date, nor forged nor garbled a letter, nor taken South African shares, nor suppressed evidence, nor done any of these things.
Counsel (suavely): My dear Mr. (I really do not know your name), when has there been a bare suggestion of anything of the kind?
Witness (hotly): I could see very well where your questions were driving.
When this little scene had come to an end, the witness proceeded to give evidence that the great mass of imported manufactured goods were loaded with damnable contraptions, with the undoubted object of destroying our own industry, and of supplanting them by that of the foreigner. He quoted statistics to show that the iron trade, the textile trade of Lancashire, the plain chair and kitchen table trade of High Wycombe, the boot, shoe, and slipper trade, the cork trade, the shipbuilding trade, the glue and gum trade, the fishbone manure trade, and the manufacture of cheese had declined during the last fifteen years from 10 to 30 per cent. He ascribed this deplorable breakdown partly to the ignorance of technical detail prevalent among politicians, but more to the devilish contrivances which gave foreign machinery a specious appearance of superiority to our own. He thought it could be proved that no one of these trades would have declined or disappeared had not Britain suffered from this most unjust and tricky form of competition. He was confident of one thing—that unless the greatest attention was given by the Committee to what he called “Spade-work,” uninteresting but essential matters of fact, it was all up with the Empire.
Mr. Balfour (with some hesitation): All this is mere assertion.
Witness (calmly): Upon assertion every great religion has been built.
Mr. Balfour (seraphically): You are quite right. I have always maintained that the analytical function, and even the quasi-postulated phenomena of the senses⸺
“I have always maintained”