But then the opponents of Tariff Reform say: "Yes. That is all very well. But though you may begin with moderate duties, you are bound to proceed to higher ones. It is in the nature of things that you should go on increasing and increasing, and in the end we shall all be ruined." I must say that seems to me great nonsense. It reminds me of nothing so much as the fearful warnings which I have read in the least judicious sort of temperance literature, and sometimes heard from temperance orators of the more extreme type--the sort of warning, I mean, that, if you once begin touching anything stronger than water, you are bound to go on till you end by beating your wife and die in a workhouse. But you and I know perfectly well that it is possible to have an occasional glass of beer or glass of wine, or even, low be it spoken, a little whisky, without beating or wanting to beat anybody, and without coming to such a terrible end. The argument against the use of anything from its abuse has always struck me as one of the feeblest of arguments. And just see how particularly absurd it is in the present case. The effect of duties on foreign imports, even such moderate and carefully devised duties as those to which I have referred, would, we are told, be ruinous to British trade. It would place intolerable burdens upon the people. Yet for all that the people would, it appears, insist on increasing these burdens. Surely it is as clear as a pike-staff that, if the duties which Tariff Reformers advocate were to produce the evils which Free Importers allege that they would produce, these duties, so far from being inevitably maintained and increased, would not survive one General Election after their imposition. It is not only with regard to Tariff Reform that I think the air is clearer. The Unionist Party has to my mind escaped another danger which was quite as great as that of allowing the Tariff question to be pushed on one side, and that was the danger of being frightened by the scare, which the noisy spreading of certain subversive doctrines has lately caused, into a purely negative and defensive attitude; of ceasing to be, as it has been, a popular and progressive party, and becoming merely the embodiment of upper and middle class prejudices and alarms. I do not say that there are not many projects in the air which are calculated to excite alarm, but they can only be successfully resisted on frankly democratic and popular lines. My own feeling is--I may be quite wrong, but I state my opinion for what it is worth--that there is far less danger of the democracy going wrong about domestic questions than there is of its going wrong about foreign and Imperial questions, and for this simple reason, that with regard to domestic questions they have their own sense and experience to guide them.