If there is little or no danger that a Home-Ruled Ireland will commit tariff follies of her own, she has unquestionably a right to escape from further entanglement in the tariff policy of Great Britain.  What may be the issue of Great Britain’s great fiscal controversy nobody can foretell.  But as long as a protective tariff remains the cardinal point in the constructive policy of one of the British parties, there is a strong likelihood of such a tariff, which would be uniform for the whole United Kingdom, being carried into law.  Free Traders, like myself, may deplore the possibility, but we cannot shut our eyes to it.  That tariff, if and when it is framed, will, like the Free Trade tariff of the past, be framed without regard to Irish interests, which are predominantly agricultural, and with exclusive regard to British interests, which are mainly industrial.  Whatever may have been the original ideal of the Conservative Protectionists, however highly they may once have valued the protection of agriculture, irresistible political forces have driven them in the direction of a tariff framed mainly to secure the adhesion of the great manufacturing towns.  The electoral power of these towns, the growing resentment of the working classes in most parts of the world at the increasing cost of living, the fact that Great Britain cannot under any conceivable circumstances feed her own population, have been reflected in the definite abandonment by the party leaders of the proposed small duty against colonial imports, and in the admission by Mr. Bonar Law at Manchester, during the last General Election, that the proposed tariff would not benefit the farmers.  Nor will the failure of the Reciprocity Agreement between Canada and the United States appreciably diminish the obstacles to food-taxes in the United Kingdom.  Any practicable protective tariff, therefore, on the ground of its injustice to Ireland, would cause strong and legitimate resentment in that country, which is subjected to the most formidable competition from foreign and colonial foodstuffs, but whose great competition in manufactured goods is Great Britain herself.  The one Irish industry which might favour it is the linen industry of the North.  It would have no attraction for the shipbuilding industry, which in no part of the British Isles has anything to gain by Protection, as I believe all parties to the controversy agree.  Other small manufacturing industries would complain that they gained nothing; while the agricultural population would complain that, as consumers, they would be damaged by higher prices for clothing and other manufactured articles, while as producers they were ignored.