And the common-sense verdict on the whole matter is that if continuous and vigilant research and experiment in the chemistry of dye-making is held to be essential to the national safety, the proper course is for the Government to establish and maintain a department or arsenal for such research and experiment, unhampered by commercial exigencies.  Such an institution may or may not be well managed.  But a dividend-earning company, necessarily concerned first and last with dividend earning, and at the same time protected against foreign competition in the sale of its products, cannot be for the purpose in question well managed, being expressly enabled and encouraged to persist in out-of-date practices.

This being so, the whole argument for protection of key industries goes by the board.  It has been abandoned as to agriculture, surely the most typical key industry of all; and it has never even been put forward in regard to shipbuilding, the next in order of importance.  For the building of ships of war the Government has its own dockyards:  let it have its own chemical works, if that be proved to be necessary.  Protection cannot avail.  If the Dyestuffs Act is put in operation so as to exclude the competition of foreign chemicals, it not only keeps our chemists in ignorance of the developments of the industry abroad:  it raises the prices of dyestuffs against the dye-using industries at home, and thereby handicaps them dangerously in their never-ending competition with the foreign industries, German and other, which offer the same goods in foreign markets.

The really fatal competition is never that of goods produced at low wages-cost.  It is that of superior goods; and if foreign textiles have the aid of better dyes than are available to our manufacturers our industry will be wounded incurably.  It appears in fact to be the superior quality of German fabric gloves, and not their cheapness, that has hitherto defeated the competition of the native product.  To protect inferior production is simply the road to ruin for a British industry.  Delicacy in dyes, in the pre-war days, gave certain French woollen goods an advantage over ours in our own markets; yet we maintained our vast superiority in exports by the free use of all the dyes available.  Let protection operate all round, and our foreign markets will be closed to us by our own political folly.  Textiles which are neither well-dyed nor cheap will be unsaleable against better goods.

THE PARIS RESOLUTIONS

It is of a piece with that prodigy of self-contradiction that, when the Liberal leaders in the House of Commons expose the absurdity of professing to rectify the German exchanges by keeping out German fabric gloves, a tariffist leader replies by arguing that the Paris Resolutions of the first Coalition Government, under Mr. Asquith, conceded the necessity of protecting home industries against unfair competition.  Men