we should speedily have been compelled by starvation to surrender to our enemies. But political considerations place out of the range of possibility a tariff on agricultural produce. No political party is going again to risk the cry: "Your food will cost you more." That cry was sufficiently effective in 1906; it would be even more effective now that the electorate has been increased by millions of women householders who invariably want to buy the necessaries of life at the lowest possible price. Therefore, as Mr. Baldwin has made clear, our most important national industry has no hope of obtaining the favour of a tariff. Next to agriculture, the most important of our industries from the national point of view is shipping. We are dependent on ships to bring to our shores not only food for our people but also the raw materials for many of our industries. Without this imported food roughly half our present population would starve; and without these imported materials some millions of people would be thrown out of work in our manufacturing industries. It may indeed accurately be said that most of our industries, and the vast population behind them, owe their existence to our shipping. In English life the ship preceded the factory. So obvious in previous centuries was the importance of shipping to our national life that parliament, for the purpose of developing British shipping, passed Acts which excluded foreign ships from the carrying trade between Great Britain and her colonies. Undoubtedly this privilege helped to build up our shipping industry, but it greatly irritated the colonies and helped to create the spirit that led to the American Declaration of Independence. To-day, happily, British shipping is so well organised that it can hold its own, and seeks no parliamentary favours; but British shipowners legitimately object to their industry being injured by parliamentary favours conferred on other British industries. Any system of tariffs must injure British shipping, because tariffs, by diminishing both import and export trade, necessarily diminish the volume of traffic that ships have to carry. Shipbuilders come closely into the same picture as shipowners. If the demand for shipping declines there will be slackness of employment in the shipbuilding yards. Further, if the protectionist tariff is extended to materials that are vital to the shipbuilding industry, such as iron and steel, the cost of shipbuilding will be increased and part of that industry may be diverted to other 1 countries. In this connection it is important to note that Germany ence of if a t rice of arty im Obvi fa tarif the rotecti Another vital industry is the coal industry. Doubtless this industry in its present condition of depression would be grateful for any kind of government favour. But no protectionist tariff can help our coal industry, for the simple reason that we import uria practically no coal. In the first eight months of 1928 our imports of coal were valued at the insignificant figure of £24,000; our exports at nearly £26,000,000. For a similar reason the Lancashire cotton industry, which is still the most important of our manufacturing industries, can receive no benefit from a tariff on imports because the larger part of the industry depends on exports. It is true that Lancashire has lost some of her foreign markets because foreign countries are now developing cotton industries for the invasion of markets in which Lancashire previously enjoyed a practical monopoly. This movement would not be in the least degree checked by the imposition of protective duties on the comparatively insignificant amounts of cotton goods imported into Great Britain. In the first eight months of the present year our imports of cotton yarn and manufactures, less re-exports, were well under £7,000,000; our exports well over £98,000,000. in alrea actuall heap the These great staple British industries-coal, cotton, shipping and shipbuilding-cannot possibly be benefited by tariff safeguards, while agriculture is debarred by political considerations from the benefits that it might receive. Surely then it is essentially unjust to handicap the persons engaged in these great industries by imposing duties on the goods which they want to buy from abroad, either because of quality or of price. Every one of these staple industries is immensely more important to the | nation than the whole handful of relatively minute industries that have received the favour of safeguarding. If politicians aimed at playing fair instead of playing for votes, the simple fact that protection is denied to agriculture would alone suffice to rule out protection as a policy for Great Britain. Incidentally the refusal of the present government to give protection to agriculture is itself an answer to the common pre tence of the " Obviously it is possible that in some instances the imposition of a tariff may not immediately produce an actual rise in the price of the article protected. If, for example, the imposition of a I protective duty on imported wheat happened to be followed by a luxuriant wheat crop all over the world, the price of wheat would fall in spite of the duty. In the same way, if an industry which is already in process of rapid expansion receives the favour of a tariff it may not be profitable to the protected manufacturers actually to put up prices. They can do better business by selling cheaply and enlarging their market. This is what has happened in the case of the motor industry. Motoring has become a world passion, and motor manufacturers in all countries are very wisely utilising the economies that result from large-scale production to lower prices so as to increase their sales. All that the critic of protection says is that a protective tariff raises the home price above what it would be if there were no tariff. Unless a tariff does this it brings no benefit to the home producer. Responsible statesmen who have adopted the policy of protection have frankly recognised this obvious fact. The late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, when he started his Tariff Reform campaign, insisted that raw materials were not to be taxed. He declined, it is true, to say what was a raw material, but his insistence that raw materials were not to be taxed sufficiently demonstrated that he recognised and admitted the fact that if a tax on imports is to bring any benefit to a protected industry it must raise home prices above the point at which they would be if there were no tax. The point that the protectionist has to explain is on what economic and moral grounds he can justify the action of parliament in penalising the persons who use the taxed article in order to confer a benefit on the persons who make it. RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOKS THINGS TO COME. By JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY. Cape; 75. 6d. THIS is a significant and important book. It is significant because it is an attempt to define the unformulated need of many people for a spiritual way of life beyond the traditional forms of orthodox religion. There can be no doubt that this need exists and increases, and it is equally true that most of those who are conscious of it are groping in a dark loneliness. There are roads, but there are also cross-roads; there are signposts, but the golden city bears many names. All that the seekers know is that they long to find that harmony of spiritual being which Mr. Murry calls achieving their soul. The search is essential, but it is not simple. It should be simple, and in the process of simplification lies Mr. Murry's function. He does not pretend to prove anything, and he is afraid that he has been vague; actually there is no need for proof, and there is no possibility of concrete statement in spiritual experience. Mr. Murry tells us as plainly as he can as much of his own experience and consequent convictions as may be expressed; he can do no more, and it remains for us to say whether his adventuring at any period travels and illuminates our own path. First he deals with the need for a new psychology which will accept the fact that as brutes are to us, so are we to what we may become, a psychology which will make it its chief aim to point the way, through the study of the heroes of humanity, to what humanity may be. He has discovered in his studies of these heroes, such heroes as Christ, Plato, Eckhart and Shakespeare, that they all achieved themselves in one way and obeyed the same pattern of life. It is in this achievement of self, this winning of the soul, that he believes the highest future of mankind to lie, and it will come through a dynamic psychology based on the realisation that man is a rational animal, but at the same time a creature with a soul. There is no novelty in that; but Mr. Murry pleads for the recognition of a psychology which will take as its central problem the growth and spiritual development of man, but which will not regard man physiologically or biologically, as scientific psychology has hitherto regarded him. The great mystics have been thus studied by Miss Evelyn Underhill and others, but men whose type of heroism was not entirely religious in application have not been approached as spiritual adventurers. And yet Mr. Murry believes that they all underwent the same spiritual re-birth, and that the moment of the re-birth marked their development to greatness. If that can be proved, if we can find a common spiritual way and experience by wrestling for the secret of the heroes, we shall have a truth applicable in proportionate degree to our own lives. That is Mr. Murry's thesis, and it runs through his collection of essays, whether he is dealing with Newman and Sedgwick, with Keats and Tolstoy, with Science and Knowledge, with Pantheism or the Parables of Jesus. It is most clearly defined in his explanation of his attitude to Christianity and to Christ, two essays of exceptional interest. To those who are concerned with the spiritual life-and who is not, though possibly subsconsciously?-to those, this book must express much that they have felt but have not been able to define. And more than that, since Mr. Murry is himself still adventuring, though with more courage than most of us, his essays carry with them a comforting sense of companionship in the darkness. SHELLEY-LEIGH HUNT. Edited, with Introduction, by R. BRIMLEY JOHNSTON. Ingpen & Grant; 12s. 6d. his In this collection of reprinted articles and letters, Mr. Brimley Johnston has been mainly concerned with the rehabilitation of Leigh Hunt as a fighter, an independent and democratic journalist, and a champion of the idealism of Shelley. It was a strange world into which these two young men plunged, a narrow-minded and vituperative world, suspicious of any reaction against orthodoxy or any claim to liberty of thought. In such a world Leigh Hunt established a journalistic tradition with paper, the Examiner, which we should do well to remember to-day, even if there is unfortunately little likelihood of our returning to it. He would admit no advertisements, those drags on independence, he would toady to no political clique, and he would pander to no betting or gambling public. He had what to-day would appear to be the curious ideal of telling the truth for the truth's sake, rather than embroidering the truth for the sake of sensation. It is therefore not surprising that he alone had the courage to uphold what in every other quarter were regarded as the heresies of Shelley. This book consists of a collection of appreciations of Shelley's poetry and ideals which Leigh Hunt published in the Examiner, some thirty-five Examiner leaders on a variety of subjects (one of which on newspaper editors might well be read widely in Fleet Street, though its sarcasm might be misinterpreted as sound advice), some correspondence between the Shelleys and Leigh Hunt, and a short epilogue, consisting of extracts from the unpublished letters and diaries of Shelley, Trelawney, Mary Shelley, Marianne Hunt and Hogg. Altogether an interesting study in honesty and courageous idealism. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND SOME FOREIGNERS. Edited by VICTOR VON KLARWILL. Translated by Professor T. H. NASH. John Lane; 18s. IN a somewhat florid historical introduction, the editor explains the principal contents of this book, which consists of translations of a series of hitherto unpublished letters from the Vienna State archives. The |