of the
feeblest of arguments. And just see how particularly absurd it is in
the present case. The effect of duties on foreign imports, even such
moderate and carefully devised duties as those to which I have
referred, would, we are told, be ruinous to British trade. It would
place intolerable burdens upon the people. Yet for all that the people
would, it appears, insist on increasing these burdens. Surely it is as
clear as a pike-staff that, if the duties which Tariff Reformers
advocate were to produce the evils which Free Importers allege that
they would produce, these duties, so far from being inevitably
maintained and increased, would not survive one General Election after
their imposition.

It is not only with regard to Tariff Reform that I think the air is
clearer. The Unionist Party has to my mind escaped another danger
which was quite as great as that of allowing the Tariff question to be
pushed on one side, and that was the danger of being frightened by the
scare, which the noisy spreading of certain subversive doctrines has
lately caused, into a purely negative and defensive attitude; of
ceasing to be, as it has been, a popular and progressive party, and
becoming merely the embodiment of upper and middle class prejudices
and alarms. I do not say that there are not many projects in the air
which are calculated to excite alarm, but they can only be
successfully resisted on frankly democratic and popular lines. My own
feeling is--I may be quite wrong, but I state my opinion for what it
is worth--that there is far less danger of the democracy going wrong
about domestic questions than there is of its going wrong about
foreign and Imperial questions, and for this simple reason, that with
regard to domestic questions they have their own sense and experience
to guide them.

If a mistake is made in domestic policy its consequences are rapidly
felt, and no amount of fine talking will induce people to persist in
courses which are affecting them injuriously in their daily lives. You
have thus a constant and effective check upon those who are disposed
to try dangerous experiments, or to go too fast even on lines which
may be in themselves laudable, as the experience of recent municipal
elections, among other things, clearly shows. But with regard to
Imperial questions, to our great and vital interests in distant parts
of the earth, there is necessarily neither the same amount of personal
knowledge on the part of the elec