ENGLISH POLITICAL HISTORY s , 9 



in the party. The Daily Mail took it quite plainly as meaning that no food taxes would 

 be proposed at all, and approved of their being dropped. The Times, admiring " the 



spirit, but not the letter," objected to making the taxation of the United 

 ^internal Kingdom appear in any shape to depend on the decision of the colonies; 

 dissensions, the responsibility must be with the electors of the United Kingdom. In 



Lancashire and Yorkshire, and also in Ireland and Scotland, some important 

 Unionist papers openly mutinied against the abandonment of the Referendum. Un- 

 certainty as to what Mr. Law really meant an unusual thing in his case led to a 

 revival, in the clubs and in the House of Commons, as well as in the Press, of the same 

 sort of expression of hostile sectional views that had made Mr. Balfour's leadership so 

 difficult between 1903 and 1906. There were " alarums and excursions " for several 

 days. Mr. Garvin, in the Pall Mall Gazette and Observer, violently accused the Times 

 and Daily Mail of leading a movement for repudiating the idea of food duties altogether, 

 and fulminated against all and sundry who should split the party and betray the cause 

 of Imperial Preference. Nothing that those papers had actually said really warranted 

 any such invective, though the Times, both through its parliamentary correspondent 

 and in its second leading-article on the subject (Dec. i9th), encouraged the view that 

 the majority of Unionists were averse from food taxes and would prefer to see Mr. Bal- 

 four's Referendum policy maintained, and that the section in favour of food taxes, 

 though in control of the party "machine," was really a small minority. By giving 

 currency to the report that the larger section was composed of followers of Mr. Walter 

 Long and the smaller of those of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, an analysis of the situation 

 which was much too simple and very far from correct, the Times moreover gave some 

 ground for suspicion and irritation on the part of those who had always advocated the 

 " whole policy." But, while criticizing Mr. Bonar Law's suggestion that it would rest 

 with colonial opinion to decide whether food taxes should be imposed, the Times had 

 been quite firm in supporting Imperial Preference, including the possibility of new food 

 duties; its real objection was to laying down any scheme of taxation in advance of pre- 

 cise knowledge of the conditions which might exist when a Unionist government should 

 return to power. Nor was there theoretically any weakening in the Daily Mail, so far 

 as the general policy of Tariff Reform was concerned:. on the contrary, on December 

 24th it announced that " the Daily Mail is frankly Protectionist, and is a firm believer 

 in Imperial Preference," but it was " not over-enamoured of food taxes " and " hopeful 

 that the Dominions do not wish Great Britain to tax corn." As consideration became 

 cooler, it was recognised that nobody wanted to do anything that was not in the interest 

 of a united party. Mr. F. E. Smith, speaking at Dudley on December aoth, declared 

 that the whole Unionist front bench in the House of Commons adopted the views ex- 

 pressed by Mr. Law, and that he had never meant that the decision as to food duties 

 would be left to the colonies; all that he meant was that the decision must depend on 

 what the colonies wanted. A duty on wheat, which geemed a vital matter in 1903, 

 might be much less so now; and while Mr. Law had taken the straightforward course of 

 saying that the electors must leave the matter open for negotiation, the indications were 

 that the colonies themselves would not ask for any measure which could be represented, 

 even untruthfully, as likely to raise the cost of living to the working-classes in Great 

 Britain. Mr. Austen Chamberlain also wrote a letter to a correspondent on December 

 23rd, expressing a general agreement with Mr. Bonar Law. 1 



While this lively interlude was providing sport for the Free Trade party, the penulti- 

 mate act of another drama, of more direct import to Liberalism, was also drawing to its 

 close. On December igth the result of the poll was published which had been taken 

 among the medical profession, as to whether they would accept Mr. Lloyd George's 

 latest terms for ordinary medical service under the Insurance Act, outside the special 



Eventually, as the result of a memorial from the bulk of the Unionist M.P.'s, 

 Mr. Bonar Law, on January 14, stated in a letter that he and Lord Lansdowne, while 

 remaining leaders of the party, were willing to agree that food duties should not be imposed 

 without the approval of the electorate at a subsequent general election. 



