Foreign News: Roosevelt & Rebirth

(See front cover)* Even the late, great Theodore Roosevelt was dragged last week into Britain’s Imperial Conference tariff controversy (TIME, Oct. 13). Free traders dug out a letter posted to English Editor St. Loe Strachey by President Roosevelt in 1906.

“As for protection and free trade,” wrote the President, “, I am confident that protection would be most damaging to Great Britain. As regards the United States, I think I told you that on this point I am rather an economic agnostic.

We have certainly prospered under protection and I have seen the prophecies of free traders so utterly fail of fulfillment during the last 30 years that I am inclined to treat the matter as one of expediency purely.” This was exactly the way the leaders of all three of Britain’s parties treated the issue last week. As a matter of expediency, David Lloyd George came out for neither free trade nor protection in a100-minute speech before the annual conference of his free trade Liberal party at Torquay.

After he left, the meeting became a free trade demonstration, but Mr. Lloyd George is obviously tempted by the vote-getting possibilities of tariff proposals.

As a matter of expediency Conservative Leader Stanley Baldwin came out with a new statement modifying his acceptance last fortnight of the Empire preference tariff scheme proposed to the Imperial Conference by Canadian Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett (TIME, Oct.

20). A vital point in Canada’s proposal is that Great Britain should put a tariff on now-Empire goods of all sorts but especially on wheat, which Canada wants to sell to the Mother Country. Last week Mr. Baldwin, without directly saying so, definitely implied that he will not stand for this tariff on “foodstuffs” which would raise the price of British bread.

Result: From within Leader Baldwin’s own party he was mocked by Baron Beaverbrook for first swallowing the Canadian scheme whole, then spitting out the wheat kernel. “Baldwin! Baldwin! Again Baldwin!” sneered the press peer in one of his papers. “We want no more of Baldwin!” (Baron Beaverbrook of course advocates food tariffs.) As a matter of expediency the MacDonaid cabinet pigeonholed Canada’s straightforward proposal last week in an especially created committee, sorely vexed Canada’s Bennett who soon afterward gave a dinner to all important correspondents in London, thereby, perhaps, increasing their sympathy with his plans.

Meanwhile the cabinet, just 24 hours before Conservative Baldwin was scheduled to do the same thing, suddenly came out with a scheme for “guaranteed food purchases from the Dominions through British quota boards.” Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden was credited with thus smartly stealing the enemy’s thunder. But nobody seemed to think that even “Phil” himself wholeheartedly approves of this merely expedient scheme.

It would provide that Britain guarantee to buy hereafter a certain percentage of her grain and other foodstuffs from the Dominions, a larger percentage than she buys at present. Such a guarantee is not a “tariff” but, if feasible, it would give the Dominions all they expect to get from a foodstuff tariff, namely, a chance to sell England more food.

If only this scheme were feasible it might solve very prettily the Labor party’s problem of how to appease the Dominions and win reciprocal trade concessions from them without embarking on a tariff policy to which so many Laborites are opposed —but in London last week several Dominion representatives called the Snowden scheme a “quack panacea,” expressed the belief that it envisions a form of interference with the laws of supply and demand by “meddling quota boards” so complex as to be unworkable.

With Empire statesmen at home and those from beyond the seas thus divided most ominously among themselves on the great tariff issue, bewildered Mother England looked for a solution to the oldest, greatest of her institutions: Parliament.

At the coming session the Labor Government must put their new stopgap scheme to the test, either wangle through with it or go to the country for a general election.

Greater interest than has been felt in years centred on the government declaration to be read to the Lords and Commons by the King-Emperor in his “Speech from the Throne”—actually written last week by Messrs. MacDonald and Snowden in council. As though for a zero hour, the Empire braced itself for the gorgeous moment next week when King George V and Queen Mary would sally from the robing room of the House of Lords (see cover), when His Majesty would signalize the momentous rebirth of the Mother of Parliaments by the gracious words, “My Lords, pray be seated!”

*Painted for TIME by Artist Edward Barnard Lintott (see p. 25).