with their plates, which buyers declare to be useless. The same people who condemn the American tinplate often praise and produce evidence of the good quality of Welsh plates. The only guarantee ever given in Wales was the brand, and whether it were Lily, Worcester, or M.F. brand the plates could always be relied and depended upon.

Conditions under Protection.

We turn now to examine how far the contention of Tariff Reformers is correct, that a Protectionist country is a "land of promise, flowing with milk and honey." Surely if any Protectionist country ought to be free from unemployed problems, free from strikes among its workmen, free from poverty among its people, and full of highly paid labour, that country should be the United States, with its unparalleled natural wealth. The history of the country, however, proves that this state of things has not existed, and does not exist, and that, instead of being benefited, Americans are impoverished by Protection, and also that instead of there being no unemployed trouble, it is often found there in its most acute form; and as to poverty, we find more unfair division of the wealth produced by labour in the United States than is found in this country.

With regard to wages, certain classes are better paid than they are here, but the people are no better off. Wages 50 per cent. in advance of what is paid here give no advantage to a workman who finds that his earnings will bring him, say, 75 per cent. less value than he could get in this country.

Strikes.

With regard to strikes, we have not had since 1890 such bitter strikes as those which have occurred in the States. It was two years after the adoption of that vaunted measure of the Protectionists the McKinley Tariff that the dreadful struggle at Homestead Steel Works took place, when Pinkerton's men on one side and steel workmen on the other used firearms, and when young John Morris, a native of Cwmavon, was shot. Capital conquered! A general strike took place at all the tinplate works in 1894, when a demand for a reduction of wages of 20 to 25 per cent. was made.

A general strike of steel and tinplate workers resulted in 1901 from the efforts of the Trust to deny the right to organise non-Union mills, and during the last few years both steel and tinplate workers have had to submit to reductions of wages of from 18 to 21 per cent. off the scale, whilst they have also been deprived of valued privileges. This only applies to general strikes in the steel trade, but local strikes have also been numerous. In the building and coal traders, strikes of magnitude, difficult to conceive here, have also taken place. Stoppages of work from other causes have occurred, some of the largest works in the tinplate industry having been idle for months at a time. In July, 1905, 50 per cent. of the tinplate mills of the Trust were idle. In October, only 45 per cent. were at work, and there were 30 per cent. idle in November.

It is not the steel and tinplate workers alone that have to submit to reductions of wages. The report of the Bureau of Commerce and

Labour for July of last year shows that bricklayers had been reduced 10 per cent., carpenters 12 per cent., gas fitters 12 per cent., hod carriers 9 per cent., lathers 17 per cent., plasterers 12 per cent., etc. Do these facts show continuous employment at good wages in this ideal country? No.

Sufferings of the Unemployed.

Some excitement was caused in England last summer by the march of the unemployed on London, but this was tame compared with the panic caused by the march of Coxey's army of unemployed on Washington in 1894, when the unemployed from different towns started their march on Washington, causing such consternation that Mayors issued proclamations, railway companies stopped traffic, and troops were called out. That things have not since improved will be seen from the following description of a scene taken from the "New York World" last year:-"Outside a large bakery in Broadway, where bread was given away to the starving poor, there were 419 men in the "bread line," all reduced to such a state of destitution that they would wait silently for hours to get a loaf. The distributor told the World' that he had been giving away more than 400 loaves every night in this way, and that he had had more applicants this summer than for 14 years. Worse than that, nine out of every ten in the 'bread line' were respectable working men in the prime of life." It is perfectly evident, therefore, that the state of things in America by no means tallies with the representations made by Protectionists as to what they ought to be.

Finally, a comprehensive, detailed, and, above all, an accurate survey of the conditions of the tinplate trade in Wales and the United States before and after the McKinley Tariff is a forcible lesson upon the mistaken policy of Protection. We have seen how abundant were the resources the Americans had at their command to produce tinplates, which they had manufactured long before McKinley was known, and how by a tariff of almost equal to the cost of Welsh plates they established the tinplate industry in their country, but at an immeasurable cost, and with the result that on account of the bad quality of the plate produced, threats are made to discard the use of terne plates, and that they are told that their canning plates might "produce serious consequences." Also that the product of this trade is entirely confined to its own home demand, and that it is helpless to place its production in competition with the cheap but good Welsh tinplates in the markets of the world.

We can contrast this with the Welsh trade, entirely unprotected, but flourishing even as it never did before, though it lost three-fourths of the business of its larger customer. Again, we find the American works only employed spasmodically, and the workmen compelled to submit to a reduction of one-fifth of their wage scale, and working under conditions that would not be tolerated in the Welsh industry. In fact, it proves a vain search to discover anything in the history of the tinplate trade to justify the arguments of Tariff "Imposers."

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LIBERAL POLICY.

IR HENRY CAMPBELL - BANNERMAN — speaking at a great Liberal Demonstration in the Albert Hall on December 21st, 1905 (Mr. W. H. Dickinson, Chairman of the London Liberal Federation, in the Chair)-said :—

The

Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen,-We are met to-night as Liberals in a position which we have not occupied for ten years. Unionist Government has gone. It has executed what we may call a moonlight flitting. It has run away. Not in the broad day of the Session, not even in the twilight of October, but in the murky midnight of December. They have gone. They had long ago lost, as they well knew, the confidence of the country. They still boasted in a feeble and uncertain way of holding the confidence of the House of Commons; but, last of all and worst of all, they lost confidence in themselves. And they are gone. We were told-told emphatically and abundantly -that the method of their going would be a masterpiece of tactical skill. Tactics! Tactics! Ladies and gentlemen, the country is tired of their tactics. It would have been better for them if they had had less of tactics and more of reality. But they have lived for some years on nothing but tactics, and now they have died of tactics.

Two Characteristics of the Late Government. Two characteristics are outstanding above all others in the late Administration. First of all, their infinite cleverness, which was not always clever; and, secondly, an inexhaustible fund of self-approbation. Of this last quality they were possessed of so much that they have even now some of it left for their obituary notices, for you will observe that each of them is going about giving himself and his colleagues the most marvellous testimony. They even carry self-esteem so far that they convinced themselves that they were the only people in this kingdom who could form a Government, and that if any one else tried the effort, any Cabinet which could be got together would be at once distasteful to the country and destitute of strength and unity. You see here in what the wonderful tactics consist. That was the design that lurked in the December resignation. And it has come to naught; for a Government has been formed amid the respect of our opponents, which I gratefully acknowledge, and amid the confidence and satisfaction of our friends. What lesson, then, are we to draw-for let us always be taught by the conduct of our enemies-what lesson are we to draw from their discomfiture? Surely it is to avoid those evil practices of boastfulness and over-cleverness which have brought them to ruin.

A Word of Warning.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new Government, and we shall shortly have, I hope, a new, and strengthened, and rejuvenated Parliamentary party. It rests with you largely to furnish us with that. But this is not the moment of our triumph; it is the moment of our trial. We are not ending our battle, we are arming for it; and I hope you will not think me too sober and too serious in my estimate of the necessities of the situation when I remind you of two old maxims, always wise and singularly applicable to this situation-"Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall," and "Let not him that putteth on his armour boast himself as he that taketh it off."

The Twofold Purpose of the Surprising Resignation. Ladies and gentlemen, in this surprising resignation, which took place in the most inconvenient period that could have been chosen in the whole year, inconvenient for Parliament and for the country as well, there was a twofold purpose. In the first place, they hoped by resigning in this way to place us in a dangerous predicament. In the second place, they hoped to evade the day of reckoning for all their past administration, and they hoped also to evade as far as we can judge from what is now happening-the great issue which they themselves have placed before the country. The first of these purposes we have surmounted. We are in no predicament, and this meeting shows it. As to the second, it is for us not to allow them to escape from the responsibilities for their past actions and from the judgment of the country both on their fiscal policy and on their conduct of affairs. Their fiscal policy! What is it? Where is it? After three years of turmoil, in which the work of Parliament has been paralysed, in which the thoughts of the nation have been almost entirely concentrated upon this one problem, and after this great controversy has echoed and re-echoed from one end of the land to the other—after all this, we have the head of the late Government of Tariff Reform hurrying into Opposition in order to minimise and belittle as well as he can the issue that was to stand in the forefront of his programme, and to hide it away behind some other issue.

The Issue at the General Election.

But he is making a mistake. It is not for him or for any one like him to fix the issue at a general election-especially so important an issue as that which he has already been a party to raising. Mr. Balfour seems to think that he can select the issues at a general election somewhat as a holiday tripper going into a railway station and reading the advertisements may exercise a choice between Ramsgate and Margate for his destination. The issue is fixed, and is fixed by circumstances largely of his own creation. And as to their conduct of affairs, we will take care that neither resignation, nor dissolution, nor anything else will prevent the people of this country from pronouncing judgment