at the same time protected against foreign competition in the sale of
its products, cannot be for the purpose in question well managed, being
expressly enabled and encouraged to persist in out-of-date practices.

This being so, the whole argument for protection of key industries goes
by the board. It has been abandoned as to agriculture, surely the most
typical key industry of all; and it has never even been put forward in
regard to shipbuilding, the next in order of importance. For the
building of ships of war the Government has its own dockyards: let it
have its own chemical works, if that be proved to be necessary.
Protection cannot avail. If the Dyestuffs Act is put in operation so as
to exclude the competition of foreign chemicals, it not only keeps our
chemists in ignorance of the developments of the industry abroad: it
raises the prices of dyestuffs against the dye-using industries at home,
and thereby handicaps them dangerously in their never-ending competition
with the foreign industries, German and other, which offer the same
goods in foreign markets.

The really fatal competition is never that of goods produced at low
wages-cost. It is that of superior goods; and if foreign textiles have
the aid of better dyes than are available to our manufacturers our
industry will be wounded incurably. It appears in fact to be the
superior quality of German fabric gloves, and not their cheapness, that
has hitherto defeated the competition of the native product. To protect
inferior production is simply the road to ruin for a British industry.
Delicacy in dyes, in the pre-war days, gave certain French woollen goods
an advantage over ours in our own markets; yet we maintained our vast
superiority in exports by the free use of all the dyes available. Let
protection operate all round, and our foreign markets will be closed to
us by our own political folly. Textiles which are neither well-dyed nor