The Daily News. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1903. MR CHAMBERLAIN'S GREAT SPEEDS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXV, Issue 217, 9 October 1903, Page 2

The Daily News. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1903. MR CHAMBERLAIN'S GREAT SPEEDS.

In common wita other morning papers we were able yesterday morning to lay on our readers breakfast tables a fairly full summary of the Right Hod, Joseph Chamberlain's great speech on Fiscal Reform at Glasgow. Considering it nearly midnight on Tuesday (cor responding with our noon on Wednesday) when Mr Chamberlain finished speaking, and the fact that the great English and Continental morning popers would monopolise the wiies for some hours, this was a very creditable piece of work, and gives a good idea of how the electric wires annihilate space. Mr Chamberlain did well, and gave an excellent reason for speaking in the great commercial city of Glasgow on such a momentuous question) as fisol reform. Glasgow is one of the greatest commeicial centres in the world, and as Mr Chamberlain very appropriately remarked, Scotchmen have a reputation as Empire builders second to cone. Indeed it has often been remarked that Jrish soldiers, Scotch brains, and jEoglish gold have made the British nation what it is to-day. There never was a time when the Empire required greater care than, it does to-day. As a people we are, because the colonies are concerned in it, face to face with a struggle in comparison to which the Boer war is a mere circumstance. At this early stage in the controversy it would not ba right to enter into an extended discussion on this momentous question, a question which is fending the Old Country from end to end in an almost uoprdcedented manner, and upon thf) result of which the supremacy of the nation depends. are inclined to think that the federation of the Empire with a Federal Parliament meeting in London in which all parts of the Empire will be represented will have to precede perfect reciprocity. The people at Home are too ignoranjt of colonial conditions and are unable as yet to realise how selfcontained the Ea pire is, The jiction of freetrade, to the exclusion of fair trade, will die hard and slowly and only as the result of education. As it is British trade is slipping away from her, and colonial trade, although rapidly expanding, is growing faster with foreign countries than with the Motherland. Foreigners are not only eating their way into markets formerly sapplied from Great Britain, but are supplying their own requirements to the serious loss of British manufacturers. A Parliamentary White Paper issued at Home by the Board of Trade in September gives a return of British exports to foreign countries of woollen and cotton goods. The figures given disclose a serious and continuous full-ing-off since the early eighties in both woollen goods and cu'.lury, while a similar movement in cotton goods which has been going on for 15 years was only checked last year. The decline is strikingly shown in the following comparisons: —•

Woollen exports 1887 ... £20,686,781 „ 1902 ... 14.26fi.243 Cotton exports 1882 ... 45,413.843 1902 ... 42.558.978 Cutlery & hardware 1882 ... 2,508.556 „ „ 1902 ... 963,696 In these comparisons She figures for the last year obtainable have b.e.sn apt against those when the trade was at its zenith.