s' eyes and gold leaf.

Finally, the decision in favour of a tariff on fabric gloves has evoked
such a storm of protest from the textile manufacturers who export the
yarns with which foreign fabric gloves are made, that even the
Coalitionist press has avowed its nervousness. When a professed
protectionist like Lord Derby, actually committed to this protectionist
Act, declares that it will never do to protect one industry at the cost
of injuring a much greater one, those of his party who have any
foresight must begin to be apprehensive even when a House of Commons
majority backs the Government, which, hard driven by its tariffists,
decided to back its Tariff Committee against Lancashire. Protectionists
are not much given to the searching study of statistics, but many of
them have mastered the comparatively simple statistical process of
counting votes.

THE "NEW CIRCUMSTANCES" CRY

In a sense, there are new fiscal "circumstances." But I can assure my
young friends that they are just the kind of circumstances which were
foreseen by their seniors in pre-war days as sure to arise when any
attempt was made to apply tariffist principles to British industry. As a
German professor of economics once remarked at a Free Trade Conference,
it is not industries that are protected by tariffs: it is firms. When a
multitude of firms in various industries subscribed to a large Tariff
Reform fund for election-campaign purposes, they commanded a large
Conservative vote; but when for platform tariff propaganda, dealing in
imaginative generalities and eclectic statistics, there are substituted
definite proposals to meddle with specified interests, the real troubles
of the tariffist begin. You might say that they began as soon as he met
the Free Trader in argument; but that difficulty did not arise with his
usual audiences. It is when he undertakes to protect hides and hits
leather, or to protect leather and hits boot-making, or to help shipping
and hits shipbuilding that he becomes acutely conscious of difficulties.
Now he is in the midst of them. The threat of setting up a general
tariff which will hit everybody alike seems so far to create no alarm,
because few traders now believe in it. Still, it would be very unwise to
infer that the project will not be proceeded with. It served as a party
war-cry in Opposition for ten years, and nearly every pre-war
Conservative statesman was committed to it--Earl Balfour and Lord
Lansdowne included