ed to persist in the use of plant and of methods which may be
inferior to those used in the countries whose competition has been
excluded. Then the very object posited as the justification for the Act,
the securing of a thoroughly efficient key industry necessary to the
production of munitions, is not attained by the fiscal device under
notice. If, on the other hand, there has been no barring of imports
under the licence system, the abstention from use of it is an admission
that it was either unnecessary or injurious or was felt to be useless
for its purpose.

[Footnote 1: The promised statistics were soon afterwards sent to Mr.
Robertson by the Board of Trade. They will be found in the _Liberal
Magazine_ for September, 1922, p. 348.--ED.]

And the common-sense verdict on the whole matter is that if continuous
and vigilant research and experiment in the chemistry of dye-making is
held to be essential to the national safety, the proper course is for
the Government to establish and maintain a department or arsenal for
such research and experiment, unhampered by commercial exigencies. Such
an institution may or may not be well managed. But a dividend-earning
company, necessarily concerned first and last with dividend earning, and
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expressly enabled and encouraged to persist in out-of-date practices.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