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. 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. They are still
blind, that is to say, to the elementary fact that since Germany
manufactures for a much larger glove-market than the English, the
exclusion of the German gloves means the probable loss to the
yarn-makers of a much larger market than England can possibly offer,
even if we make all our own gloves. In a word, instead of having to
furnish new Free Trade arguments to meet a new situation, we find
ourselves called upon to propound once more the fundamental truths of
Free Trade, which are still so imperfectly assimilated by the nation.

So far as I can gather, the circumstances alleged to constitute a new
problem are these; the need to protect special industries for war
purposes; and the need to make temporary fiscal provision against
industrial fluctuation set up by variations in the international money
exchanges. Obviously, the first of these pleas has already gone by the