TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DUTY OF UNIONIST FREE-TRADERS. rrchoice which must be made by the electors in the itnstituencies that poll to-day is perhaps the most momentous that British electors have ever been called upon to make, for there can be little doubt that the first pollings will very greatly affect those of later date. To the hard-and-fast party man it is useless for us to appeal. He will no doubt vote with blind. allegiance at the bidding of those whom he regards as his political leaders.. Happily, however, the fate of elections is not decided by men of this stamp. The balance will incline to the will of those who do not make a fetish of party, but who record their votes in what they believe to be the true interests of the nation. To such men, and specially to those Unionist Free-traders who in the year 1906 placed the present Ministry in power, we desire to appeal with all the force and earnestness at our command. In 1906 we did our best to induce Unionist Free-traders, and indeed all those who share the Spectator point of view, and who may be described as moderate or " Left-Centre " men, to vote for the Liberals. We believe it to be their duty to record their votes to-day for the Unionist Tariff Reform candidates,—provided there is no Unionist Free-trade candidate in the field. We desire to set forth as plainly and with as little heat as possible our reasons for urging them at the present moment to take this course. We remain as strongly convinced as ever of the benefits which have been bestowed upon this country by Free-trade, and of the waste of national wealth which must be caused_ by Protection in any shape or form. The fact that in spite of this we are convinced that it is our duty to urge all who are likely to be influenced by our words to vote for Tariff Reform candidates at this Election is the measure of how great in our opinion is the gravity of the present crisis and how tremendous are the issues at stake. Like all reasonable men faced with a choice of evils, we choose the lesser. Great indeed must be the evils which we think greater than those of Tariff Reform. It is true, no doubt, that the obstacles to destroying our Free-trade system are far greater than most Tariff Reformers imagine, and that we deem it exceedingly unlikely that if the Tariff Reformers secure a victory, as we are bound to hope they will, they will be able to frame a revenue-yielding tariff which will also be preferential to the Colonies and protec- tive to the home producer. The difficulty of distinguishing between raw materials which they are pledged not to tax and manufactured articles upon which they desire to place imposts is alone likely to prove insurmountable. But even if we believed that the carrying out of the Tariff Reform policy would prove an easy matter—if we believed, that is, that the inauguration of Mr. Chamberlain's policy would inevitably follow a Unionist victory at the elections—we should still urge our countrymen to vote for Tariff Reformers rather than for Liberals, so infinitely more injurious to the best interests of the country must be the triumph of the Liberal Party. Remember, it will be Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill who will be the victors if the Liberals win.
The best way in which electors may realise their duty at the polls to-day is to picture to themselves what must be the results of continuing the Liberals in power. The first result must be the breaking up of the Legislative Union with Ireland, with all the consequences, political, social, and economic, involved therein. Let them remember that for the first time there is a real and imminent danger of the dissolution of the Union. Hitherto cynical politicians have been content not to feel very anxious about the pledges which the Liberals might give to their Nationalist sup- porters, on the ground that the House of Lords would always be able to relieve the Liberal Party from the dis- agreeable duty of fulfilling their promises. The right of the House of Lords to reject legislation which it believed to be contrary to the will of the country has been the bulwark of the Union. Now, however, the electors are being asked to pledge themselves, first to sweep away this hitherto impregnable obstacle to thedissolution of the Union, and then to authorise what in effect, though not perhaps in name, will be the disintegration of the United Kingdom. If the verdict of the country is for the present Government, the Union is doomed. It is not necessary to do more than remind Unionist Free-traders in outline—and it is to them we specially appeal to-day—what must be the effect of the establishment of an Irish Parliament and Irish Executive, for that is what Mr. Asquith and Eis colleagues have pledged themselves to set up. In the first place, Belfast and those counties of the North of Ireland in which the Protestants either outnumber the Roman Catholics or else form a very large portion of the population will have to be prevented from rising in insurrection by the exercise of military force. In saying this, we are not using the language of exaggeration. Nothing _but physical force, and physical force exercised with the utmost severity, will compel the Protestants of the North to accept the sway of a Parliament in Dublin, in which the vast majority of the Members will be Roman Catholic Nationalists of the typo of Mr. Dillon and Mr. Redmond. If any Unionists or moderate Liberals are under the impression that this difficulty may be got over by excepting Belfast and those portions of Ulster which return Unionist candidates to Parliament—that is, in which the majority of the electors are Unionists—from the operation of a Home-rule Bill, we would. advise them to try to obtain a pledge from Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and other Cabinet Ministers that the principle of Home-rule which is sought to be applied to Ireland as a whole shall also be applied to the North. We venture to say that the terms of the bargain between the Nationalists and the present Government do not include any recognition of the principle that if that part of Britain called Ireland is allowed to leave the United Kingdom, a part of Ireland which desires to leave Ireland should be allowed the same freedom of choice. But the break-up of the Union not only involves the coercion of the Pro- testant North by force of arms. It also involves the abandonment of that protection, of late years we fear not very effective, which has hitherto been given by the Government of the United Kingdom to the Protestant and loyalist Roman Catholic minority throughout the South and West of Ireland. To vote then for Liberal candidates, pledged to Home-rule as they are at this moment, involves without question the creation of a state of anarchy and unrest in Ireland to which the recent troubles connected with cattle-driving and the enforcement of the ordinary law in Ireland will be as water to wine. Add to this that, owing to the policy under which vast sums of British money have been lent to the Irish farmers to purchase their holdings, the dissolution of the Union is bound to bring with it financial difficulties and dangers of a most serious kind. Mr. Gladstone found the problem of disentangling the finances of Ireland and Great Britain difficult enough. The Irish land purchase schemes and the provision of old-age pensions have made those difficulties ten times greater. In practice the tangle will have to be cut, and this cutting is sure to mean a charge of many millions on the taxpayers of England and Scotland.. The next point which the " balancing " elector must consider is the fact that a Liberal victory will so alter the Constitution that in future our lives, liberties, and purses will be at the mercy of a snap vote of the majority of the House of Commons,—e. majority, remember, which may very well, under our present system, represent a minority of the people. Under an electoral system like ours, which does not make provision for proportional representation, there is always the danger of a minority of the electors returning a majority of the representatives. But this danger is accentuated by the fact that Ireland has forty Members more than she has a right to have, and England forty Members less. At present the House of Lords, though no doubt in many ways a weak and inefficient Chamber, can on occasion insist that the people shall be consulted before new and revolutionary changes are made by Parliament. With the veto of the House of Lords abolished we are at the mercy of a single House, for remember that though a few moderate liberals like Mr. Haldane may talk about the necessity of a Second Chamber, it is quite obvious that the ruling men in the Liberal Party do not mean if they win to allow any check upon the House of Commons. They scout the notion of the Referendum as essentially inimical to Liberalism. The Liberals, indeed, as we have pointed out elsewhere, have become a Jacobin party, and the demand that the people shall decide for themselves, which is in truth all that the Lords have demanded in regard to the Budget, is in fact, if not in name, denied by their leaders and representatives.
A third result that must come from a Liberal victory is the weakening of effort in the matter of national defence. We fully admit that Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, and possibly a majority of their colleagues, are at heart as anxious as their opponents to maintain the Navy in an efficient state. If, however, the Liberal Party wins at the polls it is impossible to pretend that the result will not injuriously affect the cause of naval pre- paration. Though they may not realise it, the power to insist on adequate preparation will have passed from the moderate members of the Cabinet, and they will be obliged to acquiesce in what is now being sedulously suggested as a substitute for a supreme Navy,—namely, reliance on some sort of agreement with our chief rival on the sea. ' Instead of wasting such huge sums on battle- ships, why not be sensible and businesslike and do a " deal " with the Germans, and spend the money thus saved on social reform ? ' That is the insidious whisper which has already begun to circulate, and which unquestionably will be acted upon if Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill are victorious at the Election. Friends of peace and advocates of retrenchment in the matter of public expenditure as we are, we do not hesitate to say that such a policy, if put into practice, means nothing short of national ruin. An agreement of the kind suggested might no doubt prevail for a few years, but at the end of it we should lie absolutely at the mercy of our great rival. There is only one road to national safety, and also to international peace, and that is reliance, not upon paper Treaties and agreements, which would soon be found to bind only one side, but upon the fact that we are so strong at sea that we can, if necessary, meet the world in arms. All Governments are liable to neglect their duties in this respect. Happily, if the Unionists are returned to power they are so deeply pledged to the duty of national preparation that it will be impossible for them to act with supineness in the matter.
A fourth result of a Liberal victory is certain to be, not only an unjust system of taxation such as that set forth in the Budget now before the country, under which men are to be taxed, not, as they should be, because they are rich, but because they happen to hold a particular form of property. It will mean also the wasting of the national resources on so-called social reform. Let us say once more that if we believed that social reform—that is, semi-Socialism- could really produce the results which are claimed for it, could raise the position of the poor and could produce a more equitable division of the good things of the world, we should be found among the most strenuous advocates of such schemes. We believe, however, that the social reform of which the Liberals talk, with its vast system of Govern- ment interference and the raising of huge sums by taxation, must instead of helping the poor depress them more than ever, and greatly increase instead of minimising the miseries which we all deplore. Bloated public expenditure, though he may not know it, is the poor man's worst enemy. It is the road to slavery and squalor, not to freedom and social amelioration, which lies through increased Government action.
Finally, the result of a Liberal triumph, paradoxical as it may sound, cannot really be to secure Free-trade. No doubt Government candidates have Free-trade on their lips, but in their hearts the Liberal Party have abandoned almost as completely as their rivals the principles taught by Cobden, Bright, and Bastiat. At any rate, they only retain the principle of Free-trade in respect of exports and imports, while Labour candidates, as was shown on such matters as the purchase of foreign horseshoes and of foreign granite, are not even Free-traders there. Free-trade and Socialism never will, and indeed never can, keep house together. It is by no means inconceivable that, in spite of all the talk, Tariff Reform may only end in tariff for revenue, and a wasteful system of indirect rather than direct imposts. Socialism and semi-Socialism, with their constant attempts to interfere in the right of men to exchange their goods and services at their own free will, involve; a much more complete destruction of the principles of free exchange. If, as Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill bid us, we nationalise first our railways and then our land, and make the Government the greatest, if not the universal, employer and owner of property, the free exchange basis of the State will soon be utterly destroyed. Tariff Reformers want to throw sand into the machinery under the delusion that it is a kind of lubricant. That will hurt the machine, no doubt, but it will not wreck it altogether, as would the action of the Socialists. They want to throw in, not sand, but dynamite.
To sum up : moderate, and Unionist Free-trade, electors have the following alternatives before them. If they vote for Tariff Reform candidates, they clearly run some risk, though perhaps not a very great one, of a dangerous and wasteful and demoralising fiscal system being adopted. If, on the other hand, they vote for Liberal candidates, they will be helping (1) to destroy the Union, with all that this involves ; (2) to place the country at the mercy of casual and wayward majorities in the House of Commons, instead of maintaining a proper democratic system under which the will of the people shall prevail ; (3) to risk the very existence of the nation owing to the neglect of adequate naval preparation ; (4) to inflict untold misery and degradation upon the poor through the wasteful nostrums of the Socialists and semi-Socialists ; (5) to abolish the true principle of free exchange as regards the whole internal basis of the State. With such a choice before them, can they hesitate as to which alternative they should adopt ?
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