in spite of all handicaps, because of the automatic variation in the exchange rates of those currencies or of the comparative price levels in terms of those currencies. And such adverse exchange rates will, of course, put our exports at a corresponding disadvantage and thereby effect a marked reduction in all but those upon which we have a practical monopoly.

The effect of a tariff evenly distributed over all commodities entering into international trade would then be nil. For such an ad valorem tariff would immediately and automatically be reflected in an adjustment of exchange rates to absorb the duty. Tariffs, however, are not usually constructed on this basis. Protective tariffs are intended to protect those producers who are most likely to suffer from foreign competition and to leave unprotected the stronger industries, extractive and manufacturing, which, because of their efficiency or advantages, seem not to need it. The result of such a protective system under present conditions will be to inhibit or prevent imports in those commodities which it would be to our advantage to import; to raise the barrier of exchange rates against us; and thereby to encourage imports and discourage exports of those commodities of which we naturally have an exportable surplus. Such a tariff, by which we protect our weak industries at the expense of our strong industries, in the forlorn hope of preventing the inevitable payment of debts due us in the form in which such payments must to a great extent exist, is the paradoxical remedy for industrial depression still advocated by many who adhere to principles politically successful and therefore deemed economically sound half a century ago.

While such unsound expedients may radically alter the character of our imports and radically curtail our natural exports, neither a tariff nor any other system will prevent the foreign debt from being liquidated in due course. As a creditor nation we will see to it that what is owing us is paid, and the judgment of our investors will determine to what extent we are paid in securities and how largely in an adverse balance of trade.

C. REINOLD NOYES.

THE RETURN OF A NATIVE

BY P. W. WILSON

To revisit England after an absence of three years-and especially three years of the social turmoil that has followed the armistice could not but be for an Englishman an experience at once fascinating and poignant. About the landscapes, so familiar, there was now a strange unfamiliarity, as if something— or someone had changed-a change, not indeed in those fields, by comparison with the prairies so curiously green, or in the hedges that enclosed them, but in the eye itself which for the first time views them, as it were, from a distance, objectively. One realized why it is that Englishmen, after domicile abroad, whether in Asia, Africa or America,―for in this respect it makes no difference, can never again be quite at home in England. These nomads have seen with their eyes what their people at home have not troubled as yet to imagine. They have looked over the hedges to the horizons beyond, and in their gaze these far horizons must ever be reflected. For every pilgrim who goes forth, the New World is a discovery, but for the American of seventy times seven generations the Old World remains, as Rome remained to the Celts of Cornwall, a sub-conscious memory-like a child's sense of the mother who died at his birth. The Old World can never know the New World as well as the New World knows the Old.

Take Fleet Street, the proverbial haunt of the press. Of her newspapers, dignified, accurate, and restrained, Britain has been justly proud. But in Fleet Street to-day there is a crisis. While the price of paper in the open market has fallen, many journals are tied to war contracts which have still a period Labor is costly and the coal strike slumped advertisements, which source of revenue is only beginning to recover. All this means that newspapers are apt to be smaller than their normal size and that there is room for an ampler interpretation

to run.

of life and events overseas. At the Foreign Office I found men like Sir William Tyrrell, who accompanied Lord Grey to Washington, and Sir Arthur Willert, who gained his experience in that city as correspondent of The Times; but even in the Foreign Office, though humanized out of all recognition, one was amused by the whimsical remark, "The spirit of Lord North is not dead."

One noticed first how large and crowded are the cities for so small a country. Here is population twice as dense per square mile as that of Japan. And for England, as for Japan, the fundamental problem is how to maintain and, still more, how to raise to a higher level the standard of life on an area so restricted. In the States, where poor men can and do constantly become rich or at least "comfortably off", you can talk plausibly to the wage-earner about production and output and an opportunity for all, but in Great Britain where, broadly speaking, the coal and mineral fields are under full development-and some approaching exhaustion-there is not this sense of limitless resources, still to be tapped. The English feel that for them there is so much and no more to be spent and enjoyed per head, and the question how the heritage is to be shared thus becomes vital to every household. When politicians call upon the workers to increase production, the workers have hitherto listened, if at all, with impatience. To them, output means export-commodities for others than themselves to enjoy-and export, so they think, means higher profits for the employer at stationary wages for the employed. Labor, thus arguing, is faced this winter by a sad disillusionment. The idea that the markets of the world will pay any price asked by British industry, whether Capital or Labor, for British coal, iron or cotton, is slowly but surely disappearing under the harsh stress of unemployment. France is getting her coal from Germany, and Germany is supplying finished steel at a figure which Britain must demand for pig-iron. Hence the great blast furnaces which I saw standing cold and silent-a spectacle all the more significant because it is reported as general. That the iron industry will revive, everyone believes. Railways, both in Britain and in India, to give one factor,-must have metal. But the busi

ness has received, for the moment, a knockout blow and at Mansfield, in the very heart of a prosperous mining area, I watched hundreds of men spending an idle day in the town square, where the only activity was displayed by a newspaper boy, selling a sheet called The Early Bird, entirely devoted to those sports which inspire betting. There is among the English a passion for glorious uncertainty which drives them into every quarter of the world, and when they remain at their own fireside, on humdrum money when Saturday comes round, they find an outlet either in religious emotion, as inspired by Wesleys and Whitefields and Moodys, or in games and races-football, pigeon flying, celery-shows, horses, dogs, fowls-any medium for competition with prizes. In many quarters, I heard regrets that the bookmaker should have so thriving a business. It was pointed out that mathematically his must be an undertaking which, on balance, draws money from the pocket of the wageearner-money not to be spared with ease by the wage-earner's wife and family.

Unemployment has thus failed to limit expenditure at any rate, to the extent one would have expected or out of door recreation. Cricket and football are supported by a generous patronage. The famous games at Grasmere drew to that charming village among the Lakes of Westmoreland an amazing train of char-a-bancs and motorcars, most of them hired by persons of small means. Agricultural shows, improvised in remote dales, gathered hundreds of pounds in an afternoon, at the gate. There are those who believe that it will take one more stern lesson this winter to teach the nation the duty of daily work; that with all the distress and anxiety, thrift has still to be learned. My impression is that a salutary awakening has already come. At the various Trade Union congresses the proceedings have been conducted in a very gentle tone. The miners, for example, are less than they used to be in the hands of their young and advanced rhetoricians, and in negotiations they now refrain from pressing demands which, as they rightly perceive, must imperil their own-and indeed all-industry. Railway men openly confessed to me that the time had come for everybody to settle down to his task, and in quarters where I should not have

expected it I found a strong conviction that industry requires a complete liberation from the barbed-wire entanglements of Trade Union rules. Some of these, as quoted to me, seemed almost inconceivable in their economic futility. With large reserves of labor unemployed, there must be of necessity a chance for the open shop which the masters are advocating with unaccustomed boldness. I gathered that objection is not taken to Trade Union hours and wages so much as to the regulations which appear to waste the workers' energies and fritter away his time. For these regulations, it may be that employers have only had themselves to blame. In many industries before the war unfair wages and hours provoked among the workers their still existing unreasonable attitude. The reaction against organized labor is, however, none the less severe on that account. A policy of strikes has impoverished the Unions, which have had to realize their accumulated investments at heavy depreciation. While paying their dues, the members of the Unions have begun to ask what precisely, of recent years, have been the benefits accruing to them as contributors to a common fund. There is in Britain undoubtedly what in the United States would be called a "radical" movement. Of this movement, the large circulation of The Daily Herald-this despite its price raised to twopence or four cents-is evidence. But it did not seem to me that the intellectuals in British Socialism-men like Ramsay Macdonald-were holding their own. Mrs. Philip Snowden, after visiting Russia and seeing things there for herself, has swung clearly from the left wing to the right. Her husband is no longer reckoned among the firebrands. Indeed, the fear in some quarters is that the reaction will sweep the country too far. Every reasonable person admits that the sweating system, as denounced by Charles Kingsley and immortalized to infamy in his Song of the Shirt by Tom Hood,—a system which condemned thousands of women to toil for three cents an hour and even less,-was a blot on the industrial escutcheon of England. A dozen years ago Sir Herbert Samuel, then at the Home Office, established Trade Boards which rescued these virtually enslaved workers. The Trade Boards are now being assailed and their abolition is demanded, which,