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Even misgivings about Lancashire may fail to deter the tariffist rump. Some of the people who even yet understand nothing of Free Trade economics are still found to argue that, if only the duty on imported gloves is put high enough, sufficient gloves will be made at home to absorb all the yarns now exported to German glove-makers.
All the same, high wages in America and low wages on the Continent were alike given as reasons why we should have a protective tariff. There stands out, then, the fact that the payment of lower wages by the protected foreign manufacturer was one of the tariffist arguments of the pre-war period, when there was no question of unequal currency exchanges.
The pre-war tariffist argued, when he dealt with the problem, that tariffs would suffice at will to keep out manufactured goods and let in only raw material. To that the answer was simple.
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.
As it turns out, the one concession that Canada really wanted was the removal of the invidious embargo on Canadian store cattle in our ports. And whereas a promise to that effect was actually given by the tariffist Coalition during the war, it is only after five years that the promise is about to be reluctantly fulfilled.
But even that pleasing paralogism did not suffice for the appetite of tariffism in the way of fallacy. The same propaganda which affirmed the lowness of the rate of wages paid in tariffist countries affirmed also the superiority of the rate of wages paid in the United States, whence came much of our imported goods which the tariffists wished to keep out.
He who sees this as to Russia cannot conceivably miss seeing it as to Germany; even tariffist hallucinations about a "losing trade" under German tariffs cannot shut out the fact that our trade with Russia and the United States was carried on under still higher hostile tariffs.
The argument from the exchanges, which is now admitted to be wholly false in practice, really brings us back to the old tariffist argument that tariffs are required to protect us against the imports of countries whose general rate of wages is lower than ours. On the one hand, they assured us that a tariff was the one means of securing good wages for the workers in general.
But the worst absurdity of all in the tariffist reasoning on this topic is the assumption that in no other respect than wage-rates is German industry affected by the fall of the mark. The wiseacres who point warningly to the exchanges as a reason for firm action on fabric gloves never ask how a falling currency relates to the process of purchasing raw materials from abroad.
When, therefore, the Committee of Lord Balfour of Burleigh published its report, suggesting a variety of reasons for setting up compromises in a tariffist direction, there were not wanting professed Free Traders who agreed that the small tariffs proposed would not do any harm, while others were even anxious to think that they might do good.
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