that enter our country? Four-fifths at least are food or the raw
materials of manufacture. In support of this statement I must refer the
reader to the Custom House returns to make his own classification. After
going through the figures carefully I arrive at the following rough
result for 1895:--

----------------------+--------------
| Million L's.
----------------------+--------------
Food and Drink | 177
Raw Materials | 163
Manufactured Goods | 76
+--------------
Total Imports | 416
----------------------+--------------

Colonel Howard Vincent, I see, puts the total of manufactured goods at
80 millions. His figure will serve as well as mine. Either shows clearly
enough the character of the great mass of our imports. On which of the
two main branches, on food or on raw materials, do the Protectionists
propose to levy a tax? It is a strange way of helping our manufacturers
in their struggle for the markets of the world to impose additional
taxation on the food of their workpeople or on the raw materials of
their industry.

A NEW ROAD TO FORTUNE.

There remains the comparatively small amount of manufactured goods we
import, representing articles which our manufacturers cannot or will not
produce at all, or cannot produce so cheaply as the foreigner does.
Supposing we taxed every one of these articles as it entered our ports,
where would the advantage be to British manufacturers whose main
ambition is to send their goods abroad? There is, it is true, just one
possibility of benefit to them. It is possible that the imposition of a
tax on some of these foreign manufactured articles would enable the
British manufacturer so to raise his prices in the home market that he
could afford to forego all profit on his sales abroad and sell to his
foreign customers at or below cost price. That is the only conceivable
way in which a Protective tariff could help the British manufacturer in
his rivalry with his German competitors for the markets of the world. As
for the cost of this topsy-turvy system of trade it is to be borne of
course by that patient ass the British public. The British consumer is
to be compelled to pay more dearly for certain goods in order that some
other people, Japs or Chinamen, may be able to buy those goods below
cost price. Here, again, I will not assert that such an apparent act of
folly is not worth committing un