there could be secured a general agreement to protect British agriculture to the point at which it could be relied on to produce at least a war ration on which the nation could subsist without imports.  That dream has already been abandoned by practical politicians, if any of them ever entertained it.  The effective protection of agriculture on that scale has been dismissed as impossible; and we rely on foreign imports as before.  Whatever may be said as to the need of subsidising special industries for the production of certain war material is nothing further to the fiscal purpose, whether the alleged need be real or not.  The production of war material is a matter of military policy on all fours with the maintenance of Government dockyards, and does not enter into the fiscal problem properly so called.  But to the special case of dyes, considered as a “key” or “pivotal” industry, I will return later.

How then stands the argument from the fluctuations of the exchanges?  If that argument be valid further than to prove that all monetary fluctuations are apt to embarrass industry, why is it not founded on for the protection of all industries affected by German competition?  The Prime Minister in his highly characteristic speech to the Lancashire deputation, admitted that the fall of the mark had not had “the effect which we all anticipated”—­that is, which he and his advisers anticipated—­and this in the very act of pretending that the further fall of the mark is a reason for adhering to the course of taxing fabric gloves.  All this is the temporising of men who at last realise that the case they have been putting forward will bear no further scrutiny.  The idea of systematically regulating an occasional tariff in terms of the day-to-day fluctuations of the exchanges is wholly chimerical.  A tariff that is on even for one year and may be off the next is itself as disturbing a factor in industry as any exchange fluctuations can be.

Nor is there, in the nature of things, any possibility of continuous advantage in trade to any country through the low valuation of its currency.  The Prime Minister confesses that Germany is not obtaining any export trade as the result of the fall.  Then the whole argument has been and is a false pretence.  The plea that the German manufacturer is advantaged because his wages bill does not rise as fast as the mark falls in purchasing power is even in theory but a statement of one side of a fluctuating case, seeing that when the mark rises in value his wages bill will not fall as fast as the mark rises, and he is then, in the terms of the case, at a competitive disadvantage.