The Marlborough Express PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1910. THE CASE FOR THE LIBERALS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIV, Issue 3, 5 January 1910, Page 4

The Marlborough Express PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1910. THE CASE FOR THE LIBERALS.

In a preyidUs article we dealt with the factors which are favoring, or which are supposed to be favoring, the "Conservatives in the great party struggle now proceeding in the Mother Country. To-day we propose to recapitulate the principal points in the Liberal or Government claim to a renewal of confidence by the electors. First and foremost is the contention that by rejecting the Budget the House of Lords has deliberately flouted and insulted the elected representatives of the. people, and been guilty of an Infraction of what is an unwritten bttt none the less generally accepted principle of the British Constitution-. Lawyers have, it is true, expressed .various opinions as to the right of the Lords to reject a Money Bill, and much has been made of the absurd plea that because the measure indirectly involved further legislation, not purely on financial matters, the Peers were justified in rejecting it. But even Lord Rosebery, bitterly as he denounced the land taxation proposals of the Government, took care to qualify his denunciation by expressing grave doubts as to whether

the House of Lords would be acting wisely in rejecting the Bill, and some of the highest placed and most experienced authorities on constitutional law and legislative precedents :have declared—much against the grain as such declaration has been with some of them—that the position taken up by the Peers was practically indefensible. Mr Lloyd-George and Mr Winston Churchill have very naturally played the ."Peers against the People" card very cleverly.; but % it is doubtful whether the great mass of the electors grasp the real import of the rejection of the Budget. That affront to the Commons was but the last of a long series of similar obstacles thrown by the hereditary Chamber in the path of Liberal legislation. Ever since the Asquith. Government assumed office the Lords have systematically done their utmost to injure Liberal legislation, taking the democratic sting o fut of measures passed by the Liberal majority in the Lower House by -means of frivolous and mischievous amendments deliberately intended to nullify their reformative effect.' As Mr Haldane very neatly put it a few weeks ago, "The House of Lords, which, when Mr Balfour was in power rarely altered: a Bill in the slightest degree, suddenly awoke when the Liberal Government assumed the reins otf office to a full sense of its powers—and, I grieve to say.—its intentions for mischievous interference with the will of the people. We do not object to reasonable revision, but to, the ruthless whittling away of all the important points in our Bills until they are left mere empty shells, we do most emphatically object.". Will the electors realise this great fact, that the House of Lords, as at present constituted, exists only as a machine to approve of anything and everything suggested by the Conservatives, whilst stubbornly refusing to assist the Liberals in passing progressive reform legislation? If this fact be once realised we should have no fear of the result; but we fear very much that the halo of fictitious sanctity which still surrounds this'very name of a lord in England 'will prove one of the strongest obstacles in the path to victory of the Liberals. The Peers stand forth to-day not only as the champions of Toryism and the enemies of I liberalism, but as the selfish protectors of the wealthy and privileged classes against that fairer share of the burden of "taxation which the authors of the Budget proposed and still propose should be borne by those best able to bear it. The battle is not only one of Peers against People, but of the. "landocracy" versus a system of taxation under which the huge sums gained by a few in unearned increment shall be taxed for the benefit of ithe national exchequer. Figures could be quoted, had we space to spare, to prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that stupendous amounts of money have been amassed by the great landowners .through no special exertion or ability, or even intelligence of their own, but simply through a rise in values, to the making of which they have contributed nothing. And yet these Wealthy men are willing that the food-^-the very '. necessaries of life of the people at large—shall be further taxed to supply .the money necessary for national defence, for old-age pensions, and for other purposes, whilst at the same time they squeak and whine and howl when out of their own vast hoards they are called upon to contribute ' what is only a very reasonable quota, j That the Liberals see in the higher ! taxation of land the indirect. result' that many large estates now devoted] to searing game will probably be cut j up and be rendered available for that - closer settlement by which the oft proclaimed panacea of "back to the land is to be brought about, may be ■ admitted at once. But landowners who have selfishly and greedily abused I their privileges, have closed up public ! walks and pathways, have fenced in village greens, have, denied the right to Nonconformists to lease or buy their, land, from them for the purpose of erecting places wherein to worship » according to their faith—landowners who exact crushing rents from' the hapless agricultural laborers who earn the princely wage of 10s to 12s a week; landowners who have to be forced, under threat of,legal proceedings, to put the wretched tenements tor which they exact such high rents into decent sanitary condition—landowners such as these need expect no sympathy from the people when they «I m Co£%ation," "Socialism," Kobbery," just because strong men ?v? I fi. ad of the Government show v 11 i ey, are «etertained that justice in idone and that seliish Wealth shall no longer be allowed to dominate the land. Were the British elections to depend upon the vote of the agricultural laborers we should have no tear as to what the result would he .But the result does not depend upon such a vote, and this brings us to the third, and, to our mind, most important question at issue—namely whether Great Britain is, or is not, to throw to the winds its now old, tried and once trusted policy of Freetrade and adopt the policy of Protection for which the new term "Tariff Reform has been coined. It is upon this question that we believe the result of the elections depends more than upon any other. For it is here that the living, the very existence of the people may be at stake. Mr LloydGeorge declares, and we believe he is quite sincere in declaring, that under : the new land taxation the revenue will be sufficient to meet all reonire- : ments. The Tariff Reformers go fur- '

ther. They declare that so long as the present Freetrade policy continues' the question of unemployment will always be one of danger to the nation. They assert that by means of protective duties on ioreign-made goods-^and on foreign-produced food —large sums of money can be raised, and that indirectly such duties must inevitably mean such a tremendous new impetus being given to British manufactures and British agriculture that £ity and country industries will forthwith enter upon -a new era^ of unprecedented activity and prosperity. A beautiful vision indeed, and. one which is very tempting to the British working man and agricultural laborer. But these men have fathers and mothers who have not forgotten—who certainly ought not to _ia>ve iforgotiben—what Protection spelt for the MXfitfkers in the pre-Corn Law (days. '"'JMibre employment and higher cages'' 'is the tempting bait held out by the Tariff Reformers. "Dear Food" is the retort of the Free Traders. Much could be written on both sides, but so far as we NewZea-. lander are concerned there is a special aspect of this question which is of no small interest to us. The Conservatives, the gVeat landowners, the Peers, the wealthy and the privileged classes, are everlastingly talking about "Colonial Preference," and they have the audacity to assert that Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians are bitterly disappointed that our "offers" of Colonial Preference have hitherto been laid aside by the Liberal Government. We cannot believe it possible—indeed, we believe it is quite impossible—that any Australian, New Zealander or Cana* dian would wish to get a higher'price for his wheat, meat or butter at the expense of the half-starved workers of the Old Country. As to our offers of Preference, they are genuine enough*1 so far as they go, but they do not go so far as the Conservatives and Tariff Reformers are trying to make the English workers believe that they will go—that is, that we shall agree to ruin our own home manufacturing industries by giving free entrance to British-made goods whilst setting up, ah jgh tariff wall against the foreigner. , Such misrepresentation is downright dishonest, and we . are "astonished that the various AgentsGeneral in London of the Australasian Colonies have hitherto given it no denial. We have not space to-day to deal with that important side issue, the question of Home Rule, which may affect the voting very materially in certain constituencies. We can only say in conclusion that our sympathies are entirely with the English land reformers, and that, although there are yery many and most palpable drawbacks attaching to a rigid _maintenance of the Free Trade principle, the uncertainty' as to what would be the result of Tariff Reform must be regarded as a grave argument against its hasty adoption as a panacea for the industrial and social evils from which the Motherland is suffering.