g the burden of new expenditure of which the
mass of the people will derive the benefit. And if that new
expenditure must, as I think I have shown, be met, at least in large
part, by Customs duties, which method of raising these duties is more
in the interest of the poorer classes--our present system, which
enhances enormously the price of a few articles of universal
consumption like tea and sugar and tobacco, or a tariff spread over a
much greater number of articles at a much lower rate? Beyond all doubt
or question the mass of the people would be better off under the
latter system. Even assuming--as I will for the sake of argument,
though I do not admit it--that the British consumer pays the whole of
the duty on imported foreign goods competing with British goods, is it
not evident that the poorer classes of the community would pay a
smaller proportion of Customs duties under a tariff which included a
great number of foreign manufactured articles, at present entirely
free, and largely the luxuries of the rich, than they do, when Customs
duties are restricted to a few articles of universal consumption?

And that is at the same time the answer to the misleading, and often
dishonest, outcry about "taxing the food of the people," about the big
loaf and little loaf, and all the rest of it. The construction of a
sensible all-round tariff presents many difficulties, but there is
one difficulty which it does not present, and that is the difficulty
of so adjusting your duties that the total proportion of them falling
upon the wage-earning classes shall not be increased. I for one regard
such an adjustment as a postulate in any scheme of Tariff Reform. And
just one other argument--and I recommend it especially to those
working-class leaders who are so vehement in their denunciation of
Tariff Reform. Is it of no importance to the people whom they
especially claim to represent that our fiscal policy should lean so
heavily in favour of the foreign and against the British producer? If
they regard that as a matter of indifference, I think they will come
to find in time that the mass of the working classes do not agree with
them. But be that as it may, it is certain that I, for one, do not
advocate Tariff Reform in the interests of the rich, but in the
interests of the whole nation, and therefore necessarily of the
working classes, who are the majority of the nation.

A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY

Guildford, October 29, 1907

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