XXXVIII.

1841.

of a graduated sliding duty to a fixed one. I do not CHAP. pledge myself to any rigid details; I reserve to myself the opportunity of considering them. I bind myself to the principle of a graduated scale in- preference to a fixed one, but not to any details. The noble lord will propose the adoption of a fixed duty: I will offer my opposition to it on the ground that it cannot be permanent; it must be abandoned under the pressure of general distress in seasons of scarcity.

47.

"Government talk of a great commercial crisis; they are themselves mainly responsible for it. They have Concluded. come down to the house year after year complaining of a deficiency, and now they boast themselves the martyrs of Free Trade, and apply to me for a budget. I am by no means surprised at the confidence of your opponents to do what you have shown you yourselves cannot do. During the period when the Administration of which I formed a part had held office, they had reduced the public debt by £20,000,000, and the annual charge upon that debt by above £1,000,000, and yet they left a clear surplus of income above expenditure of £1,600,000 when they went out of office in 1830. What has come. of that surplus now? It has turned, on your own showing, into a deficit of £2,400,000. And this has happened when we were impeded by all the difficulties of an unreformed Parliament, and you have had all the advantages of a reformed one-when you have had your own way for eleven years, during which you have enjoyed all the advantages of cheap government. This evil has occurred, not from any particular cause, but from general mismanagement-from the circumstance of Ministers clinging to office when they no longer enjoyed the confidence of this house or the country, and were unable to carry through the measures which they deem essential to the public good of the country. It is not for the interest of representative government and constitutional monarchy that such a system should con

CHAP. tinue; Ministers, in so retaining power, are violating XXXVIII. the first principles of the constitution which they gave 1841. me credit for yielding to in 1835. Even measures in themselves beneficial lose their good effects by being brought forward by a party holding office under such circumstances. They are looked upon, not as springing from the deliberate will of its leaders-not in consequence of the settled convictions of their minds,—but merely for the purpose of propping up a falling cause, and conciliating the good-will of a particular party to 1 Parl. Deb. whose support it looks. I will not be tempted to fall into the snare laid for me; I will not offer my budget in competition with yours; my vote this evening is upon a question of confidence." 1

Iviii. 615,

639; Ann.

Reg. 1841, 108-111.

48.

merston's

reply.

To these powerful and sarcastic observations it was reLord Pal- plied by Lord Palmerston: "The question which is this night before the house, which should be answered openly and explicitly, is, When a deficiency exists, do you approve of making it up in the way which we intend, or do you propose to lay on new taxes? The right honourable baronet has not done this; he has objected to our proposed duties on sugar, timber, and corn, but he has not told us what he would substitute in their room. And yet that some additional imposts must be laid on is selfevident; and where shall we find any to which objections equally plausible may not be stated? The question to be decided to-night is not a question of confidence; it is the adoption or rejection of a great principle; that principle is Free Trade, the opposite principle is Monopoly. The Opposition have shrunk from grappling with this great issue, and endeavoured, instead, to narrow the discussion to one collateral point, and to mislead the house and the country by pretending an unbounded zeal for the negroes. I distrust the sincerity of this newborn anxiety on the part of those who have so long been a party to the sufferings of these very negroes. We decline to take slavegrown sugar ourselves on pretence of humanity, but we do

XXXVIII.

1841.

not hesitate to assist the slave-owners by transporting CHAP. their produce to other countries, or refining it. Is not the pretence of conscience, under these circumstances, a gross hypocrisy? The true, the only way to exterminate the slave-trade is, to increase the vigilance and activity of our own cruisers, and the stringency of our treaties with foreign governments, to effect its abolition. Were we to assert, as the Opposition now do, that free labour cannot compete with slave labour, we should be supplying the advocates of slavery with the best of all arguments against their complying with our demand for the abolition of the slave-trade, and falsifying all that we had said as to the advantages of freedom.

"The proposed budget retains duties on foreign produce solely for the purposes of revenue. We do not Continued.

wish to see the principles of Free Trade suddenly and universally applied, to the derangement of established interests, and the ruin of great numbers of individuals; we desire only to go on as quickly as circumstances will admit. All must admit that it is for the interest of Great Britain to extend our foreign exports; but how is this to be done if, by prohibiting duties, we virtually exclude theirs in return? It will not do to urge a more liberal commercial policy on foreign nations, telling them that competition is the light and life of trade, while we keep up our own restrictive system at home. It is our doing so which has so long deterred other nations from adopting a more liberal commercial policy. This is, in particular, the case with Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, and the United States. Foreign countries listen with polite incredulity to our representations, and point from our theories, pressed upon them, to our practice embraced by ourselves. It is difficult to see what reply can be made, under our present restrictive system, to such answers.

Protection, in the sense in which it is now used by those who oppose the plan of Government, is a tax levied

49.

XXXVIII.

1841.

50.

CHAP. upon the industry and skill of the mass of the community, to enable a few to remain indolent and unskilful. Such protection is not only erroneous in principle, but utterly Continued. useless to those for whose particular benefit it is maintained. Show me a trade that is free, by which I mean open to fair competition, and I will show you a trade carried on with intelligence, enterprise, and success. Show me a trade that is highly protected, and I will show you a set of men, supine, unimproving, and probably labouring under perpetual embarrassment. But the evil does not stop here. Not only does this excessive protection paralyse the very interests it is intended to invigorate, but it operates most injuriously upon the country in relation to our commercial intercourse with foreign nations. For protection is a game which two can play at. It is impossible that a great country like England should go on protecting, as it is called, its various interests, and that other nations should not follow our example. They have all accordingly done or are doing so. The Commercial Union of Northern Germany, which is in reality a protective union, has just renewed itself by treaty from 1842. Russia and Sweden are doing the same. France, which ought to be the great market for our commodities, being so populous and so near us, has a tariff which excludes the greater portion of our manufactures. The United States and Mexico have the same. When we

preach to these foreign nations the absurdity of such practices, they reply: It is all very well; but we observe that England has grown wealthy and great by these means, and it is only now, when other nations are following her example, that she has discovered that this system is an absurd one when we shall have attained the same pitch of commercial prosperity which England has reached, it will then be time enough to abandon a system which perhaps then may no longer be necessary. It is in vain to tell them that England has grown great and prosperous, not in consequence of the protective system,

XXXVIII.

1841.

51.

but in spite of it. Till we prove by our practice that we CHAP. are serious in our doctrines, neither France nor Belgium, nor any other country, will relax their prohibitory laws. Symptoms of the most dangerous kind are already visible in our trade, the consequences of the protective Continued. system, which may well arrest the attention of the nation. Every year a smaller portion of those manufactures consists of articles in the making of which much labour and skill are employed. Every year a greater proportion of our exports consists of articles of an elementary nature, which are not destined for inward consumption, but are to serve as materials to the foreign manufacturers. For instance, the exportation of cotton. goods does not increase in the same proportion as the exportation of cotton yarn. Our artisans and capitalists are leaving the country. Every year the protective system is rising up against us, raising in other parts of the world manufacturing competitors, and every year British skill and capital are transferring themselves abroad, to render the competition of foreign countries more and more formidable. We are thus ourselves assisting to exclude our own commerce from the markets of other countries. If this system is persevered in, we shall at last come to that spendthrift industry which is to consist in exporting machinery as well as the elements of manufactures; and when our exports consist of capital, skill, machinery, and materials, we shall no doubt see how it happens that we are no longer able to compete with other nations in the markets of the world.

52.

"These, then, are the principles on which we stand; our plan is simple, plain, and intelligible. The whole history Concluded. of parliamentary legislation for a number of years past has been nothing but the destruction of monopolies. The Test and Corporation Acts, the Protestant monopoly in Parliament, the boroughmongers' monopoly, have successively fallen. The monopolies of corporators, and that