India and Lancashire would cause a rankling and persistent sore which might do infinite political harm.  They wished, therefore, to apply a timely remedy, and it cannot be doubted that, so long as it lasted, the remedy was effective.  In most respects the fiscal policy adopted then and that now advocated by Sir Roper Lethbridge and his coadjutors are the poles asunder.  Nevertheless, in one respect they coincide.  Sir Roper Lethbridge places in the forefront of his proposals the abolition both of the import duty on cotton goods and the corresponding excise duty levied in India.  He is unquestionably right.  That is an ideal which both Free Traders and Protectionists may very reasonably seek to attain.  It is, in fact, the only really satisfactory solution of the main point at issue.  The difficulty is to realise this ideal without doing more than an equivalent amount of injury to Indian interests in other directions.

The chief arguments by which Sir Roper Lethbridge defends the special proposals which he advances are three in number.  They are (1) that the nascent industries of India require protection; (2) that it is necessary to raise more revenue, and that the suggestions now made afford an unobjectionable method for achieving this object; and (3) that the economic facts connected with India afford special facilities for the adoption of a policy of retaliation.

From a purely economic point of view the first of these three pleas is singularly inconclusive.

It was refuted by Sir Fleetwood Wilson, whom both Mr. Austen Chamberlain, in the introduction which he has written to Sir Roper Lethbridge’s book, and Sir Roper Lethbridge himself seem to regard, on grounds which are apparently somewhat insufficient, as a partial convert to their views.  It may be said without exaggeration that if any country in the world is likely to benefit by the adoption of Free Trade principles that country is India.  Industries cannot, as Sir Fleetwood Wilson very truly said, be “encouraged” by means of a protective tariff without raising home prices.  Without going over all the well-trodden ground on this subject, which must be familiar to all who have taken part in the fiscal controversy, and without, moreover, denying that nascent industries have in some countries been successfully encouraged by the adoption of a protective system, it will be sufficient to say that, looking at all the economic facts existent in India, the period of partial transition from agriculture to industries, during which the process of encouragement will have to be maintained, will almost certainly last much longer than even in America or Germany, and that during the whole of that lengthy period the mass of the population, who are very poor and who are engaged in agricultural pursuits, will not benefit from the protection, although they will at the same time suffer grievously from the rise in prices.