"Both ends meet!" exclaimed one of the women. "We think we are lucky if we can get one end meat and the other end bread." "Wot's it all about, Mr. Crooks?" asked another. "Here's bread gone up a ha'penny a loaf. And sugar and tea's gone up. And the children say they don't get so many sweets for a farthing now as they used to." "And," I added, "meat's likely to go up too--all in the interests of the Empire. Twopence a pound more for Colonial mutton." "What!" they cried in a body. "Twopence more for mutton!" "Haven't you heard?" I went on. "The Tariff Reformers have a great scheme to bind the Empire together by letting the Colonies charge us more for our food. If you don't agree with them they'll call you little Englanders." "That's just it," said one of the women. "If I'm to pay another twopence a pound for meat my children will soon be Little Englanders!" Then turning suddenly from his anecdotal style, Crooks would go on to ask his audience how a worthy Imperial race was to be built up on a lack of food? The Empire begins in the workman's kitchen. The imposition of new duties on food imports, though no more than a penny or twopence, means to many a poor housewife the difference between having and going without. I know one large family where the recent addition of a half-penny on the loaf robbed the children of a slice of bread a day. Do you know what that means? Have you ever lived in a family where the slices have to be counted, and where every child could eat twice as much as its allowance? I belonged to such a family as a child, and when a clergyman came round once and found my mother crying over an empty cupboard, he said: "Ah, well; God sends the bread for all the mouths." "That's all very fine," my mother said; "but He seems to send the mouths to our house and the bread to yours." The policy of Preference came in for his banter equally with that of Protection. Under any scheme of Preference, the relation of this country, with its large imports, to our Colonies, which take comparatively few of our exports, he used to say reminded him of a boxing-match between a thin man and a fat man. After the first round or two the fat man stops and says: "This ain't fair; you've got more to strike at than I have." "Very well, then," says the thin man, "let's chalk my size out on your body, and all blows outside the chalk mark don't count." Mr. Chamberlain seems to have heard how Crooks was riddling with ridicule his Protection and Preference policies up and down the country. At any rate, the ex-Minister began his favourite policy of Retaliation. At some of his public meetings he supported his argument by representing Crooks as having said at Leith that the poor of this country were worse off than the poor of any other country.