Transcriber's Note:
Two advertisements from the beginning of the bookhave been moved to the end.
| Page | |
| Tariff Reform (Tunbridge Wells) | 7 |
| A Constructive Policy (Guildford) | 34 |
| Unionists and the Empire (Edinburgh) | 50 |
| Unionists and Social Reform (Rugby) | 69 |
| Sweated Industries (Oxford) | 88 |
As this is a Tariff Reform meeting pure and simple, I am anxious notto approach the subject in any party spirit or in any spirit ofacrimonious controversy. The question is a difficult and complicatedone, and though I am a strong Tariff Reformer myself I hope I am notincapable of seeing both sides of the case. I certainly should havereason to be ashamed if I could not be fair to those whom, for thesake of brevity and convenience, I will call Free Traders, though I donot altogether admit the correctness of that designation. My viewswere once the same as theirs, and though I long ago felt constrainedto modify them, and had become a Tariff Reformer some years before thesubject attained its present prominence in public discussion, it wouldill become me to treat as foolish arguments which I once found soconvincing or to vilify opinions which I once honestly shared.
What has happened to me is what I expect has happened to a good manypeople. I still admire the great Free Trade writers, the force oftheir intellect, the lucidity of their arguments. There can be noclearer proof of the spell which they exercised over the minds oftheir countrymen than the fact that so many leading public men on bothsides of politics remain their disciples to this very day. But for myown part I have been unable to resist the evidence of facts whichshows me clearly that in the actual world of trade and industry thingsdo not work out even approximately as they ought to work out if theFree Trade theory were the counsel of perfection which I once thoughtit. And that has led me to question the theory itself, and soquestioned it now seems to me fa