PROTECTION & PROPAGANDA

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 138, 9 December 1930, Page 8

PROTECTION & PROPAGANDA

(To the Editor.) Sir,—l£ wo were to judge by the cable news, there are few, if any, Free Traders in England. Ever since Mr. Joseph Chamberlain commenced his tariff propaganda in' 1903, this country' lias been deluged from time to time with news, the bias of which is well proved by the effect it has produced on public opinion. Ninetenths of the people one meets in this country take it for granted that protectionist opinion is in the ascendant in England, and we have recently seen the humiliating spectacle of representative business men cabling Mr. Forbes, as if our very life as a people depended upon the adoption of protection in England, for that is what preferential trade means. A glaring illustration in proof of my submission, that we arc subjected to more or less continuous tariff-mongering propaganda, was afforded recently. On Monday, 22nd October, there was a great Free Trade demonstration at Manchester, at which the chief speaker was Mr. Philip Suowden, Chancellor of tlio Exchequer in Mr. M McDonald's -Government., The meetBSS His essentially a demonstration ju.

support of Free Trade, and was representative of all parties, the chair being taken by Lord Stanley o£ Alderley, who is a Conservative, while the platform was occupied by prominent men who are Free Traders first, and the resolution of thanks to Mr. Snowden was moved by Alderman J. A. Hutton, a member of the Manchester City Corporation, who announced himself a Conservative in politics, but a Tree Trader before all tilings. A whole page of . the "Manchester Guardian" is occupied with the report of Mr. Snowden's speech, in addition to which there is a leading article commenting thereon. Had that been a protectionist demonstration, had some of the adventurers of the so-called Empire Free Trade Crusade reiterated some of their stale nonsense, we would have had a long report. As it was the great demonstration in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, was dismissed with a four-line cable! Mr.. Snowden's speech was a masterly exposition of the Free Trade case. For example, he showed that wages are lower on the Continent of Europe than they are in England; that there were more unemployed in the United States of America —he might have added Australia and New Zealand—in proportion to population than there are in England; and he administered a deft rebuke to the "ambassadors of Empire" who at that very time were endeavouring to utilise the Imperial Conference as a means of persuading Britain to reverse her fiscal policy. "Be careful what you are going to take," said the Chancellor, "and be especially careful that you don't accept and believe in a remedy for baldness which is offered you by a bald-headed barber." The protectionist wreckage left behind them by the Bennetts, the Forbeses, and the Seullins could not have been better described.—l am, etc., P. J.\ O'HEGAN. Bth December.