COMPETITION 123 



" dumped " there when European markets were glutted 

 with the artificially stimulated over-production in those 

 countries. A scale of countervailing duties was drawn 

 up in India and submitted to Parliament in the Indian 

 Tariff Bill of 1899. A great debate took place, and Mr. 

 Chamberlain made an eloquent and convincing speech, 

 in which he stated the whole case in favour of the duties 

 with remarkable clearness and force. He challenged 

 the House to establish once for all the principle of a 

 duty to countervail such a foreign artificially stimulated 

 competition as this, and the House supported him by 

 a large majority. This was four years before his great 

 pronouncement in 1903. Again, Sir Robert Giffen, who 

 as one of the Government experts had fought valiantly 

 against the sugar industries in his evidence before the 

 Select Committee in 1879-80, made the following hand- 

 some recantation at a meeting of the Royal Statistical 

 Society in 1902. Speaking of his evidence in 1879, he 

 said that " he was not sure that he would have taken 

 the same line if he had been able to look forward a 

 quarter of a century and see what the result was to be 

 of allowing these bounties to continue. People became 

 wiser as time went on, and a good many of the assump- 

 tions which it was perhaps legitimate to make a quarter 

 of a century ago had been falsified by events . . . but, 

 having had a quarter of a century's more experience, 

 he was satisfied that these bounties must be treated as a 

 great infraction of free trade, and that all the countries 

 affected by them were quite entitled to take exceptional 

 measures to put an end to them. . . Whatever we 

 might gain temporarily in consequence of what foreign 

 countries gave us by these bounties, they were not to be 

 endured, and we should join in this general movement 

 in favour of free trade." 



The Report of the Committee fell dead, and the 



