In a sense, there are new fiscal “circumstances.”  But I can assure my young friends that they are just the kind of circumstances which were foreseen by their seniors in pre-war days as sure to arise when any attempt was made to apply tariffist principles to British industry.  As a German professor of economics once remarked at a Free Trade Conference, it is not industries that are protected by tariffs:  it is firms.  When a multitude of firms in various industries subscribed to a large Tariff Reform fund for election-campaign purposes, they commanded a large Conservative vote; but when for platform tariff propaganda, dealing in imaginative generalities and eclectic statistics, there are substituted definite proposals to meddle with specified interests, the real troubles of the tariffist begin.  You might say that they began as soon as he met the Free Trader in argument; but that difficulty did not arise with his usual audiences.  It is when he undertakes to protect hides and hits leather, or to protect leather and hits boot-making, or to help shipping and hits shipbuilding that he becomes acutely conscious of difficulties.  Now he is in the midst of them.  The threat of setting up a general tariff which will hit everybody alike seems so far to create no alarm, because few traders now believe in it.  Still, it would be very unwise to infer that the project will not be proceeded with.  It served as a party war-cry in Opposition for ten years, and nearly every pre-war Conservative statesman was committed to it—­Earl Balfour and Lord Lansdowne included.  Even misgivings about Lancashire may fail to deter the tariffist rump.

Some of the people who even yet understand nothing of Free Trade economics are still found to argue that, if only the duty on imported gloves is put high enough, sufficient gloves will be made at home to absorb all the yarns now exported to German glove-makers.  They are still blind, that is to say, to the elementary fact that since Germany manufactures for a much larger glove-market than the English, the exclusion of the German gloves means the probable loss to the yarn-makers of a much larger market than England can possibly offer, even if we make all our own gloves.  In a word, instead of having to furnish new Free Trade arguments to meet a new situation, we find ourselves called upon to propound once more the fundamental truths of Free Trade, which are still so imperfectly assimilated by the nation.

So far as I can gather, the circumstances alleged to constitute a new problem are these; the need to protect special industries for war purposes; and the need to make temporary fiscal provision against industrial fluctuation set up by variations in the international money exchanges.  Obviously, the first of these pleas has already gone by the board, as regards any comprehensive fiscal action.  One of the greatest of all war industries is the production of food; and during the war some supposed that after it was over,