All that has resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile tinkering with three or four small industries—­a tinkering that is on the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption.  To intelligent Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest surprise.  They knew their ground.  The doctrine of Free Trade is science, or it is nothing.  It is not a passing cry of faction, or a survival of prejudice, but the unshakable inference of a hundred years of economic experience verifying the economic science on which the great experiment was founded.

On the other hand, let me say, the tactic of tinkering with Free Trade under a system of special committees who make decisions that only the House of Commons should ever be able to make, is a “felon blow” at self-government.  It puts national affairs under the control of cliques, amenable to the pressures of private interests.  Millions of men and women are thus taxable in respect of their living-costs at the caprice of handfuls of men appointed to do for a shifty Government what it is afraid to do for itself.  It is a vain thing to have secured by statute that the House of Commons shall be the sole authority in matters of taxation, if the House of Commons basely delegates its powers to unrepresentative men.  Here, as so often in the past, the Free Trade issue lies at the heart of sound democratic politics; and if the nation does not save its liberties in the next election it will pay the price in corrupted politics no less than in ruined trade.

INDIA

BY SIR HAMILTON GRANT

K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E.; Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, India; Deputy Commissioner of various Frontier districts; Secretary to Frontier Administration; Foreign Secretary, 1914-19; negotiated Peace Treaty with Afghanistan, 1919.

Sir Hamilton Grant said:—­I have been asked to address you on the subject of India, that vast, heterogeneous continent, with its varied races, its Babel of languages, its contending creeds.  There are many directions in which one might approach so immense a topic, presenting, as it does, all manner of problems, historical, ethnological, linguistic, scientific, political, economic, and strategic.  I do not propose, however, to attempt to give you any general survey of those questions, or to offer you in tabloid form a resume of the matters that concern the government of India.  I propose to confine my remarks to two main questions which appear to be of paramount importance at the present time, and which, I believe, will be of interest to those here present to-day, namely, the problems of the North-West Frontier, and the question of internal political unrest.