291

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our various industries, but we do have on that list a number of lines free, as many as are protected. These are made free to promote our various industries. You here have lost many of your industries, I have been informed. I may have perhaps the impudence to say that it was because of your Free Trade policy. Mr. LLOYD GEORGE : What industries have we lost \ Mr. F. R. MOOR : I think glass. Mr. ASQUITH : No, we have not lost it at all. Dr. JAMESON : There is not much left Mr. F. R. MOOR : Sugar refinery; silk. Mr. LLOYD GEORGE : No; I had a deputation of silk manufacturers before me last week, and one of them protested most strongly against the idea that it was a dying industry. Mr. F. R. MOOR : Clock-making is another. Mr. LLOYD GEORGE : I had a deputation from them, also, not long ago. Mr. F. R. MOOR : They still exist in a languishing condition. However, if in these cases you had some kind of protection for these lines, which would not after all have increased the cost of living to your people, but would on the other hand have found employment for them —I say, had that been the case then to that extent, if your industries suffered at all—and I think Mr. Chamberlain did show it very strongly in his campaign Mr. ASQUITH : Ido not quite agree with him. Mr. LLOYD GEORGE : Nor did the nation quite agree with him. Mr. F. R. MOOR : I say, had they suffered then to that extent, it might have been remedied by giving relief in those directions. You have already a tariff on wine, sugar, tobacco, and tea. You are taxing your people. I will take tobacco as one line, and we ask you to give relief to your people to the extent of giving us preference on that tariff, say, on tobacco. You would be helping us to build up a new industry in South Africa which is a very promising one, and from which I believe you can get supplies as good as any in the world. At the same time you would be doing your people a benefit by reducing taxation in their favour, which I believe is in the direction of your Free Trade policy. However, it will be interesting to know what objections you can have to making an experiment in that direction as regards your own Colonies, and in the interests of your own consumers by reducing taxation. If nothing comes of this at all the discussion we have had here is going to be of value to us all, inasmuch as it is going to make us all think, and having got the people of these different Colonies to think over these large questions, and the people of these islands to think over these

Ninth Day. 1 May 1907.

Preferential Trade. (Mr. F. R. Moor.)