There is another set of arguments to which I should like to refer.  We have been long told that this Budget would reveal the bankruptcy of free-trade finance, and the Leader of the Opposition, seeking from time to time for a sound economic foothold in the fiscal quicksands in which he is being engulfed, has endeavoured to rest the sole of his foot on tariff for revenue.  The adoption of a policy of tariff reform, we have been told, had become absolutely necessary if the revenue of the country was to be obtained and if a natural expansion were to be imparted to it.  But now, if we may judge from the newspapers, one of the complaints made against the free-trade system and the free-trade Budget of my right hon. friend is not that the revenue will expand too little, but that there is the possibility that it will expand too much.  It is not that we have reached the limits of practicable free-trade taxation, but that the taxation we now ask Parliament to assent to, will yield in the second year a much more abundant return than in the first year, and that in subsequent years the yield will increase still further.  In the words of The Times newspaper:  “The Chancellor of the Exchequer has laid broad and deep the basis of further revenue for future years.”

Those who lately taunted us with being arrested by a dead wall of Cobdenite principles are now bewailing that we have opened up broad avenues of financial advance.  They came to bewail the deficit of this year:  they remained to censure the surplus of next.  We may, no doubt, in the future hear arguments of how protection will revive industry and increase employment, as we have heard them in the past; but there is one argument which I should think it unlikely would be effectively used against us in the future, and that is that a free-trade system cannot produce revenue, because one of the criticisms which is emphatically directed against this Budget is on account of that very expansiveness of revenue which it was lately declared a free-trade system never could produce.

But that is not the only vindication of free-trade finance which is at hand.  How have foreign countries stood the late depression in trade?  The shortfall of the revenue from the estimates in this country was last year less than two millions, in Germany it was eight millions, and in the United States over nineteen millions.  Let the House see what fair-weather friends these protectionist duties are.  In times of depression they shrink.  In times of war they may fail utterly.  When they are wanted, they dwindle, when they are wanted most urgently, they fade and die away altogether.

And what is true of the taxation of manufactured articles as a foundation for any fiscal policy is true still more of the taxation of food, and of no country is it so true as of this island.  For if you were ever engaged in a war which rendered the highways of the ocean insecure the rise in prices would be such that all food taxes would have to be swept away at once by any Government which desired to use the whole vigour of its people in prosecuting the war.  This year, with its trade depression and its excellent maintenance of the revenue, has seen the vindication of free trade as a revenue-producing instrument; next year will see its triumph.