MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S POLICY AND ITS

PROSPECTS.

Addresses by Mr. F. E. Smith, M. P.; the Hon. Henry Lygon ; Mr. Norman Chamberlain, and Mr. John Murray; before the Empire Club of Canada, on October 4th, 1906.

Mr. F. E. Smith, M.P.-Gentlemen: I assure you that I speak without any affectation at all when I say that I welcome, as do my friends, the opportunity which your Club has given to us on the occasion of our first visit to Canada, far more than I can possibly explain to you in any words that are at my disposal. It has been my dream, as long as I have taken any interest in politics, and that has been ever since I was a very much younger man than I am now, to visit Canada and the rest of the British Empire. I remember well when I was a very small child indeed, my father giving me Dilke's book, Greater Britain, to read, and I remember making up my mind that as soon as I was able to do so, I would follow in the same journey which he had travelled, and I would make observations for myself of the various parts of that Empire of which we in the Old Country are so fond of speaking in our political speeches.

I am not here to-day to address you either as a Conservative or as a Liberal in English politics, and I am not here to address you either as Conservatives or Liberals in Canadian politics. You have your internal differences in politics, and we have our internal differences, and I am not here to-day, and I know you would not wish it, to attempt to gain any party advantage in respect of differences which do not concern you when you are dealing with a subject so immensely important to all parties as the Empire, which has given its name to your Club. I would not have you think that I might attempt to gain a party advantage by implying that those who are

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opposed to us in the domestic policy of our own country are indifferent to the greatness of this Empire, or that their hearts do not pulsate with pride at the success and welfare of Canada. I do not come here as a Conservative politician to try and persuade you that it is with the Conservative party in England alone that you would find those aspirations respecting tariff reform. It is true, gentlemen, that my view is that the great historic party with which I have the honour of acting in England is better prepared at the moment to carry out the policy which is your object and my object, and the object of everyone; I do not attempt to conceal from you that in my humble judgment the policy of Tariff Reform, which will always be associated with the name of the distinguished uncle of my young friend, Mr. Chamberlain, the name of the greatest English statesman since Chatham; I say, gentlemen, I do not conceal from you that in my judgment it is upon those lines that true Imperial consolidation will be found ultimately to rest.

I am a little apprehensive that some of you who are not as familiar as we are in England with the causes which explain the ebbs and flows of political success, may have been greatly discouraged in the results of the election which has recently taken place in England. I do not know, gentlemen, whether you have been told here (I know that you have had visitors who do not belong to my party who have been visiting your country)—I do not know whether you have been told, as we have been told in England, that the English people have pronounced once for all, quite decisively, upon the issue of Tariff Reform. I do not know whether the word "mandate" is as much abused in your politics as in mine. I have heard on the floor of the House of Commons a mandate claimed for one subject after another. If you ask a man whether he is a freetrader, whether he is in favour of Chinese slavery, whether he wants his children to have a secular education and whether he wants to marry his deceased wife's sister; I say, if you put all these questions to a single man and ask him to answer yes or no, you may get something which will place a political party in power,

but, believe me, you will never get an answer which will dispose once for all of a profound economic difficulty.

Those are some of the difficulties which we had to contend with, and I would ask you to remember that there was a greater one and that there is an explanation which goes deeper still into our failure of a few months ago. Gentlemen, we were attack-' ing in England for the first time a dogma which we had sucked in with our mother's milk. There may be different schools of economy; I know that for years in Germany and other countries, great economists have advanced scientific arguments in favour of that economic creed which is ours to-day. Gentlemen, we never had that in England; there never were two sides to the question, or if there were two sides, they were never advanced. We never taught that. If you went to an English University, you heard from the professor the doctrines of free trade and the doctrines of Adam Smith explained without qualification, given to you as the dry bones and parchment of a subject quite divorced from human nature and from the vicissitudes of political affairs; and it is true to say that only the rank and file of our voters who, from the necessity of the case, must be less experienced than their leaders, that the men who by their origin and by their education would naturally have been the leaders of political thought; that not even they ever had the arguments of the economist, political and social, in favour of the reform of the tariff put before them until put before them by Mr. Chamberlain a year or two years ago.

Gentlemen, has no progress been made since then? I said you have challenged a fetish which has been accepted without question and without qualification by England for forty years. You have challenged it, and with what result? At an election, which would have been, without free trade, the most disastrous to the Conservative party which has been fought since the Reform Bill, with everything against us, we polled for the first time that we challenged the abstract dogma of free trade, forty per