UNIONIST FREE-TRADERS.
[TO THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Your counsel to Unionist Free-trade Members of the House of Commons is no doubt opportune and most useful (Spectator, May 19th). ButeDulwich is trumpet-tongued, and means that by-elections, and still more a General Election, will strip off the remaining leaves, or most of the remaining leaves, of the once flourishing Free-trade Unionist tree. Mr. Chamberlain has "ruled out" from the Unionist Party all its Free-trade representatives in Parliament. The present Members may hold together, in spite of difficulty and the cold shoulder, and may persist in their Free-trade attitude; but the Unionist constituencies are beginning to waver, and the Protectionist sections of those constituencies are putting pressure, as in Mid Bucks, upon their representatives to induce them to obey Mr. Chamberlain's uncompromising dictatorship.
In one of the constituencies of which I am a plural voter the candidates were a Free-trade Home-ruler v. a Protectionist Unionist. In spite of your pre-Election advice to support Free- trade at all risks, I did not vote at all, because Home-rule seemed to me to be the more imminent and the more deadly danger, in which, I think, and perhaps (in face of the impending Home-rule by swift instalments) you may now think, I was fully justified. In another constituency both candidates were Free-traders, one being a Unionist and the other a Home-ruler. Here my course was simple enough,—to vote for the Free-trade Unionist, Mr. Walter Rothschild, whose majority of over a thousand was made up of Liberals pur sang, Conservative Protectionists, and Liberal Unionist anti-Home-rulers. Mr. Chamberlain did not venture to send down a Unionist in favour of Protection, or the seat would have been won by the Home-ruler. In the next General Election there will probably be a Protectionist candidate for every Unionist constituency, Unionism and Protection being by that time almost convertible terms.
The only thing to be done is to get at the voters,—the "horny- handed," the mechanics, the little tradesmen, the agricultural labourers (who are already being unsettled by the illusory promises of employers), the intelligent small farmers who work with their own hands, the lodgers who appreciate cheap bread, and other such.
The Irish Members will by and by be " open to a deal" with the Protectionist Party. "Protection and Home-rule" will not be inscribed on the Unionist banners, but " Justice to Ireland and Plenty of Employment," "Good Wages and the Sister Island Set Free," or some such device. There are signs in the air already of those developments, signs looming even through the education controversy. There is no counting, never any counting, upon the workings of Mr. Chamberlain's very fickle, however obstinate, mind. If the Spectator's influence could reach the classes I have alluded to, as it reaches educated and wealthy people, the disaster of a helplessly crippled Unionist Party might be averted.
Northszarston.
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