England
and Scotland, factories which support the greater portion of the
population, and cause the prosperity of the province; but outside of
Ulster, cattle and butter are the staple products. And how does Ireland
stand in her only market, England, as compared with other nations? She
enjoys free trade in butter, no doubt, but so do France and Holland; but
these countries, while they find an open market in England, tax all
English and Irish productions, and being manufacturing countries
themselves they can afford to sell butter at so cheap a rate as to swamp
Ireland's market. A slight protective duty on foreign butter would be
hailed with gratitude in Ireland, and do more to allay discontent than
any further acts of so-called "generosity."

'Again, the great thinly peopled countries of the West find in England a
free market for cattle and flour, and America taxes very highly all
English goods. Why not place Ireland on a par with America, by levying a
slight protective duty on American beef and flour? Every little village
in Ireland formerly had its flour mill, which worked up the corn grown
in the country as well as imported grain. These mills are now generally
idle and the men who worked them ruined. A small duty on manufactured
flour would restore this industry, and enable men with some capital to
give employment to labour, and to work up in small quantities for the
farmer, at a cheap rate, their home-grown corn, as well as to grind
imported grain. Our own colonies may have, no doubt, a right to object
to our taxing their goods, but not so foreign countries.

'The Free Trade system of England would, no doubt, have been successful
if reciprocated. But the question is worth considering, whether the
English people do not now lose more by taxation resulting from the
chronic state of rebellion in Ireland than she gains by bringing in
American beef and flour, and foreign butter and butterine, free, to the
impoverishment of Ireland, and of the agricultural portions of England
and Scotland? "Remedial measures" for an agricultural country are
certainly not those which spoil its market.'

Don't dismiss that as pre-Chamberlainese Protection for it is sheer
common-sense on a matter of national importance, and what I wrote in
1887, after many years, has become part of the political convictions of
a great and an increasing party.

I wonder what the Protective party will be like when it eventually comes
into office. Promises out