TOPICS OF THE DAY
MR. ASQUITH AND THE COBDEN CLUB.
MR. ASQUITH'S pose as the cheery, nay, rollicking, optimist does not suit him as well as his old character of the self-possessed, cool-headed, strong-minded, moderate man. Mr. Asquith, no doubt, had a difficult part to perform in his speech at the Cobden Club dinner on Tuesday, but we cannot honestly say that he per- formed it well. All Free-traders in his audience worthy of the name—all Free-traders who have the courage to look at the facts, and who do not imagine that they are helping Free-trade and doing 'honour to Mr. Cobden by piling up taxation and by using Government interference to destroy competition and to lower the industrial product in- a dozen directions—must have been curious, nay, anxious, to note how the Prime Minister would meet the indictment which we as Free-traders have been forced to bring against him and his Government. We have asserted, and must continue to assert, that they are killing Free-trade in the name of Free-trade, and are preparing for the Tariff Reformers the very opportunity which they desire, and which they could not have obtained but for the action of the Liberal Party in making it necessary to raise a vast amount of new taxation. This is how Mr. Asquith met our allegations :— " There are many people, and among them I am sorry to say in flume days some faint-hearted Free-traders—my poor woebegone friend the editor of the Spectator is one of them—there are some people who point to what they conceive to be the impending bankruptcy of Free-trade finance, and declare that the choice before us in the immediate future will lie between the abandon- ment of social reform and the adoption, in some form or other, of Protective duties. In regard to that, what I have to say is this, —that in my view there is nothing in our recent experience which lends any countenance or colour to these counsels of despair."
We ask any Free-trader whose intelligence is not bemused by party claptrap whether this is not simply playing with the question. As a preliminary, however, to our comment on the Prime Minister's attack on the Spectator, we must note that Mr. Asquith has not fairly represented our view. We do not suppose that he or his colleagues, or at any rate the majority of them—for we confess that we do not feel by any means sure as to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—will get up either next year or the year after and propose the imposition of Protective duties, and we have never suggested that such a thing is likely to happen. What we have said is that the present Government will go out either owing to their inability to find means of paying their bills by any system of direct taxation to winch the country will agree, or else through the unpopularity caused by the imposition of such taxation, and that they will be suc- ceeded by a Tariff Reform. Government—or shall we say a " broadening-of-the-basis-of-taxation " Government 9— which will find in the need of raising some sixteen millions or so a year of new taxation exactly the excuse they wish for a general tariff. Very possibly if that general tariff is imposed by a Government of which Mr. Balfour is the head it will be called—and in a sense rightly called—a tariff for revenue ; but the result will be much the same, for a general tariff is bound to have a Protectionist character. Once create a general tariff, no matter for what reasons it is imposed, and the Tariff Reformers will find little difficulty in giving it a Preferential twist in one direction and a Protectionist twist in the other. A 10-per- cent-all-round tariff lowered to 5 per cent. for goods coming from British possessions would apparently suit everybody in the Tariff Reform camp. But since it would be primarily imposed for revenue purposes, such a tariff would be extremely difficult for Unionist Free-traders to resist, especially when they were faced with the question : "What is your alternative proposal for getting the money ? " , When they suggest direct taxation they will be told that the Liberal Party tried that expedient, but that the country would not have it.
When Mr. Asquith endeavoured to show why there was nothing in the least to be alarmed about in the Spectator's warnings, be became exceedingly nebulous. He boasted, not unnaturally, of his virtue in paying off Debt, but then proceeded to say that we may have to relax the rate • at 'which we have been reducing our Debt. We nitylia;14, instead of remitting, to impose taxation. When, however, he reached the point of indicating the kind of new taxes which could be imposed without violating Free-trade, he was forced to take cover behind generalities. "I see nothing— and I say it deliberately and after a very careful survey of the whole field—I see nothing which leads me for one moment to doubt that our Free-trade finance is capable of bearing the strain of any reasonable programme of social reform." After reading such platitudes as this, we feel inclined to say that though Mr. Asquith may accuse the editor of the Spectator of being woebegone now, it is he who will be woebegone before very long. There is no more woebegone spectacle possible than that of a Prime Minister with a vast majority behind him unable to meet his financial commit- ments, and obliged either to admit his failure openly, or else to have recourse to dodges and subterfuges to stave off the evil day when he is compelled to own to the country that he is in hopeless financial difficulties.
We desire for a moment to turn from the Prime Minister's speech to express our astonishment at the recent action of the Cobden. Club, or, rather; at its recent want of action. The Cobden Club, as its annual Reporti always tell us, "was founded in 1866, with the object of encouraging the growth and diffusion of those economic and political principles with which Cobden's name is associated." That being the• case, one might have sap- posed that the Cobden Club during the past three years would have enjoyed a period of very great activity, and would have spent its time in protesting against the chief items in the programme of the present Government in rousing public opinion to understand the true drift of events, and in urging the nation before too late to resist a policy so absolutely opposed to the principles of Richard Cobden. In a word, we might have expected to. see it acting as Mr. Harold Cox—once the secretary of -the Cobden Club, and a man worthy in every way to represent Cobden's views—has acted, to his very great honcinr, since he has been in Parliament. Unhappily the Cobden Club does not appear to have had any inkling that it was its duty to offer more than the merest verbal homage to those economic and political principles with which Cobden's name is associated.
How did the Cobden Club support Cobden's prin- ciples when the Trade Disputes Bill was before, Parliament? Does it imagine that such a measure—a measure which has placed the Trade-Unions above the law of the laud, and given them a position of special' privilege—would have been approved by Richard Cobden, who said that he "would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than under a Trades Committee " ? That was, in our view, going much too far, but at any rate it was Cobden's deliberate opinion. Where, again, was the Cobden Club when the Miners' Eight Hours Bill was introduced into the House of Commons by the present Government ? Is that a measure which the members of the Cobden Club imagine that the man whose name they desire to honour and hold in remembrance would have met with anything but the keenest opposition ? Do they think that Cobden would have approved of, or acquiesced in, the Government's treatment of the unemployed ? Again, does the Cobden Club really imagine that it is encouraging the growth and diffusion of Cobden's ideas when it allows to pass without the slightest word of protest the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Home Work,—a Report actually proposing that Parliament should forbid, em- ployers to give, and workers to take, less than a certain wage prescribed by the State ? "If a trade," says the Report of the Committee, "will not yield such an income [i.e., an income sufficient for the necessaries of life] to average industrious workers engaged in it, it is a parasite industry, and it is contrary to the general well-being that it should continue." Does the Cobden Club imagine that Cobden would have fallen in with this wild and begging-the-- question talk about "parasite industries"? If it does not, and if it recognises that Cobden's principles are absolutely opposed to any such policy, why has it not been up and doing? Lastly, where has the Cobden Club been while "a few belated fanatics," as •Mr. Asquith ' genially called the Spectator and those who agree with it, have been attempting to prevent the terrible evil of a vast load of taxation being imposed on the country, with all its attendant perils to Free- trade? Has the Cobden Club forgotten Richard Cobden's words in the House of Commons, words twice repeated in the same peroration with intense emphasis : "Let us once for all recognise this principle, that we must not tax one another for the benefit of one another " ? How does that Cobdenit,e principle square with State-provided old-age pensions ? We must not, however, weary our readers with any more such questions as these. The failure of the Cobden Club to maintain the principles of Cobden is too obvious to require iteration. But this being so, had it not better amend its aims and objects, and make them read that the purpose of the Club is to encourage "the growth and diffusion of those economic and political principles with which Cobden's name is associated, as long as it is able to do so without injury to a Liberal Government or to the Liberal Party,"—for that unhappily is what it has come to ?
While saying this, and saying it with profound pain and regret, we desire to express our gratitude for the good work the Cobden Club has up till now been able to do for the cause of Free-trade in the matter of keeping our markets open to foreign goods. That, though not the whole of the Free-trade cause, is, we admit, an extremely important, if not indeed the most important, side of it. When, however, we see the way in which the Cobden Club has acted in regard to the anti-Socialist side of Cobden's principles when those principles have come in collision with the policy of a Liberal Government, we cannot but feel anxious whether even on the question of free imports the Cobden Club, guided as it is at present guided, would be able to stand the strain. Suppose four or five years hence the Liberal Party under Socialistic influences found it ex- pedient to prevent goods produced by sweated labour abroad entering this country to compete with goods produced under an industrial system which had been cleared of "parasite industries." Would the Cobden Club, we wonder, find that in supporting such a very logical, and indeed necessary, corollary to " anti-sweating " legis- lation or " anti-excessive-hours-of-labour " legislation it was in truth, if not in appearance, maintaining the cause of Free-trade and of Richard Cobden ? We will not, however, pursue such speculations any further to-day, though we cannot help thinking that they ought to be taken into grave consideration by those who are sincere Free-traders and sincere Cobdenites. What we want to insist on for the moment is that if the Cobden Club desires to be taken seriously as representing the ideas of Richard Cobden, it should remember what Cobden's views were in regard to the policy of free exchange. No doubt it still publishes a pamphlet or two recalling some of Cobden's opinions on Socialism, but that is not what we mean by representing Cobden's principles.
We will put a test case. Will the Cobden Club publish and give the widest possible circulation it can to a pamphlet or leaflet quoting, and enforcing by application to such measures as the Government's Eight Hours Bill for Miners and the proposals of the Home Work Committee, Cobden's views on the regulation of the hours of labour and the attempt to settle wages by Act of Parliament ? There is plenty of material for such a pamphlet. Take, for example, the letter on the Ten Hours Bill, in which the following passages are to be found :— "I believe it is now nearly three hundred years ago since laws were last enforced which regulated or interfered with the labour of the working classes. They were the relics of the feudal ages, and to escape from the operation of such a species of legislation was considered as a transition from a state of slavery to that of freedom. Now it appears to me, however unconscious the advo- cates of such a policy may be of such consequences, that if we admit the right of the Government to settle the hours of labour, we are in principle going back again to that point from which our ancestors escaped three centuries ago I yield to no man in the world (be he ever so stout an advocate of the Ten Hours Bill) in a hearty goodwill towards the great body of the working classes ; but my sympathy is not of that morbid kind which would lead me to despond over their future prospects. Nor do I partake of that spurious humanity which would indulge in an unreasoning kind of philanthropy at the expense of the independence of the great bulk of the com- munity. Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes, the love of independence, the privilege of self-respect, the disdain of Wang patronised or petted, the desire to accumulate, and the ambition to rise. I know it has been found easier to please the
people by holding out flattering and delusive prospects of oheap benefits to be derived from Parliament, rather than by urging them to a course of self-reliance ; but while I will not be the syco- phant of the great, I cannot become the parasite of the poor."
Will the Cobden Club take pains to make it known that these were the views Cobden held on the proposals to regulate labour by State action and to prevent free exchange ? It will perhaps be said that the Spectator constantly advocates proposals with which Cobden would have been in profound disagreement. Of a surety we do ; but then we do not profess, and never have professed, to be Cobdenites. Because he is in disagreement with many of Cobden's views on such matters as foreign policy and national defence, the editor of this paper has always refused to join the Cobden Club. On those, however, who do profess to be Cobdenites, and are members of a club pledged to maintain Cobden's principles, there surely rests an obligation such as we have described.
One word more on Mr. Asquith and the Cobden Club. We cannot resist the temptation to point out to those of our readers who have a sense of humour the touch 'Of comedy in the spectacle of Mr. Asquith holding up the editor of the Spectator to "the ridicule and contempt" of the votaries of Cobden assembled from all quarters of the globe because that editor has dared to draw the attention of the British public to the principles which Cobden not only professed but practised.
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