The Tariff Road to Ruin.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19170, 29 November 1927, Page 8

The Tariff Road to Ruin.

One of our cables yesterday attributed a remark to Sir George Paish Which those people only would read calmly who simply did not believe it. The trade and, credit system of the world, Sir George said, will utterly crash next year "unless the riatifins act quickly"; and by "act quickly" he meant stop at once piling up higher tariff barriers. It will be remembered that about this time last year, or a little earlier, a group of distinguished bankers and industrialists, representing all the leading countries of the worldincluding the United States, which Protectionists are always pointing to as an example of the folly of Free Trade—issued rin impressive manifesto deploring the tendency to pile up tariffs, and recommending ah immediate reduction for the benefit of all mankind. But.their appeal has gone unanswered, and theif warning, so far as anyone can see, unheeded. England, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark, and rather oddly in its position and circumstances, Portugal, are low tariff countries, but all the other countries of Europe have high or very high tariffs, some' of them for reasons that it is almost impossible to explain. It is easy enough to understand why England and Holland and Denmark, say—-"semi-amphibious countries" playing the part of finishers, brokers, bankers, and carriers to their neighbours and to the whole world —should find high tariffs inexpedient, and why " a human " ant-hill" like Belgium, highly industrialised and feverishly active, should find it necessary to avoid obstacles to the free passage of raw and manufactured goods across its borders; but it is not easy to imagine why Norway, say, has raised its tariff walls quite recently, or why Greece, a "glorified "pack-pedlar," and Italy, a country so poor in natural resources, arid so dependent on exchange with all its neighbours, should both have gone to an extreme in Protection, while Spain has the highest tariff in all Europe except Russia, Some of these tariffs are of course bargaining barriers which can be raised or lowered at special places on special conditions—France's to Belgium, for example, or Switzerland's to Italy or Germany. Some of them are the marks of old or recent national animosities which economics cannot alter—Poland's against Russia, and Russia's against the whole Western World. But most of them are neither one nor the other of those things. They are the marks of the blind and foolish belief that it is possible to get rich at a neighbour's expense. Because tho United States has made money faster than any other nation in history, and made it all behind a towering tariff, Protectionists argue that tariffs pay. But the United States is a continent and not a country It has almost every Variety of climate and every variety of soil, minerals, oils, timber, and tremendous rivers, the best pbsition (now) for trade on the whole earth, youth, and a hundred million

producing and consuming people What it has done behind its tariff walls no other nation anywhere could do, nor is it possible even to think of it as a highly protected country, in the ordinary way, since it could be compared with other countries only if all its States, or small groups of them, were shut off by tariffs from all their neighbours. When the remaining, and smaller, countries of the world seek to imitate it by shutting out their neighbours, they are simply wasting their own and their neighbours' substance and energy, and helping to bring about that catastrophe against which Sir George Paish has raised his almost despairing voice.