olicy of tariff reform,
we have been told, had become absolutely necessary if the revenue of
the country was to be obtained and if a natural expansion were to be
imparted to it. But now, if we may judge from the newspapers, one of
the complaints made against the free-trade system and the free-trade
Budget of my right hon. friend is not that the revenue will expand too
little, but that there is the possibility that it will expand too
much. It is not that we have reached the limits of practicable
free-trade taxation, but that the taxation we now ask Parliament to
assent to, will yield in the second year a much more abundant return
than in the first year, and that in subsequent years the yield will
increase still further. In the words of _The Times_ newspaper: "The
Chancellor of the Exchequer has laid broad and deep the basis of
further revenue for future years."

Those who lately taunted us with being arrested by a dead wall of
Cobdenite principles are now bewailing that we have opened up broad
avenues of financial advance. They came to bewail the deficit of this
year: they remained to censure the surplus of next. We may, no doubt,
in the future hear arguments of how protection will revive industry
and increase employment, as we have heard them in the past; but there
is one argument which I should think it unlikely would be effectively
used against us in the future, and that is that a free-trade system
cannot produce revenue, because one of the criticisms which is
emphatically directed against this Budget is on account of that very
expansiveness of revenue which it was lately declared a free-trade
system never could produce.

But that is not the only vindication of free-trade finance which is at
hand. How have foreign countries stood the late depression in trade?
The shortfall of the revenue from the estimates in this country was
last year less than two millions, in Germany it was eight millions,
and in the United States over nineteen millions. Let the House see
what fair-weather friends these protectionist duties are. In times of
depression they shrink. In times of war they may fail utterly. When
they are wanted, they dwindle, when they are wanted most urgently,
they fade and die away altogether.

And what is true of the taxation of manufactured articles as a
foundation for any fiscal policy is true still more of the taxation of
food, and of no country is it so true as of this island. For if you
were ever engaged in