I know that in two or three, more or less, railroads in which I am interested, the pay-rolls cover eighty to ninety thousand people. We have tried all manner of young men—college men, high-school men, and everything else—and I will take a boy at fifteen years old who has to make a living—his chances will be better if he has to contribute to the support of a widowed mother—I will take him and make a man of him, and get him in the first place, before you would get most of the others to enter the race with him; simply because he has to work. He has to work, he has the spur of necessity; he must work.
If there be anything that you can do, I feel sure that you will all put your hands to the plow and help; but you will never build a city faster than you have a country to support it. And that is the first and the most important thing.
FREE TRADE IS VITAL TO GREAT BRITAIN.
Sir Henry Fowler Says that an Import
Tax Upon Food Would Be Ruinous
to the English People.
Free Trade, which has been the policy of England for sixty years, is again on trial, and the battle waxes fierce. There is a growing effort to work in the thin wedge of "a moderate tariff, not protective but defensive," but the opposition are fighting it with every weapon in their armory of protest. England to-day is not self-supporting, her rural industries have been declining for years, and the country receives from abroad the far larger quantity of its food and raw material.
Thirty per cent of the people are underfed and on the verge of hunger. Thirty per cent of forty-one millions comes to over twelve millions.
This significant statement comes from the lips of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the new English premier, in a speech against the proposal for preferential tariffs with the colonies, at Perth, on June 5, 1903. Three years has not changed the situation for the better.
Winston Churchill, M.P., puts the situation thus:
The mass of people are absolutely dependent for the food they eat and the material they employ upon supplies of food and raw material which reach them mainly from abroad. They are dependent on the condition of a crop at one end of the world and the state of a market at the other; and yet, upon this artificial foundation, through this inestimable advantage of unfettered enterprise and of unrestricted sea-communication, they have been able to build up a vast industrial fabric which it is no exaggeration to say is the economic marvel of the world.
In 1904, the amount of merchandise brought into the United Kingdom was nearly $2,740,000,000. For thirty years England's imports have been rapidly increasing, while her exports, comparatively speaking, have remained stationary. The situation can be put in a way readily appreciated by Americans if we realize that the entire British Isles are smaller than New Mexico, and yet contain about half as many people as are in the United States.