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Adhering, then, to the fiscal issue, we reach the position that, just as
foreign trade has been a main source of British wealth in the past, and
particularly in the Free Trade era, the wealth consumed in the war is
recoverable only on the same lines. It is not merely that British
shipping--at present so lamentably paralysed and denuded of earning
power--cannot be restored to prosperity without a large resumption of
international exchanges: a large proportion of industrial employment
unalterably depends upon that resumption. And it is wholly impossible to
return to pre-war levels of employment by any plan of penalising
imports.

THE DYESTUFFS ACT

How then does the persistent Free Trader relate to the special case of
the "key industry," of which we heard so much during the war, and hear
so little to-day? I have said that the question of maintaining any given
industry on the score that it is essential for the production of war
material is a matter of military administration, and not properly a
matter of fiscal policy at all. But the plea, we know, has been made the
ground of a fiscal proceeding by the present Government, inasmuch as the
special measure known as the Dyestuffs (Import Regulation) Act of 1920
forbids for ten years the importation of dyestuffs into this country
except under licence of the Board of Trade. Dyestuffs include, by
definition, all the coal-tar dyes, colours, and colouring matter, and
all organic intermediate products used in the manufacture of these--the
last category including a large number of chemicals such as
formaldehyde, formic acid, acetic acid, and methyl alcohol. The
argument is, in sum, that all this protective control is necessary to
keep on foot, on a large scale, an industry which in time of war has
been proved essential for the production of highly important munitions.

What has actually happened under this Act I confess I am unable to tell.
Weeks ago I wrote to the President of the Board of Trade asking if,
without inconvenience, he could favour me with a general account of what
had been done in the matter of issuing licences, and my letter was
promised attention, but up to the moment of delivering this address I
have had no further reply. I can only, then, discuss the proposed policy
on its theoretic merits.[1] The theoretic issues are fairly clear.
Either the licensing power of the Board of Trade has been used to
exclude competitive imports or it has not. If it has been so used, it is
obvious that we have no security whatever for the maintenance of the
industry in question in a state of efficiency. In the terms of the case,
it is enabled to persist in the use of plant and of methods which may be
inferior to those used in the countries whose competition has been
excluded. Then the very object posited as the justification for the Act,
the securing of a thoroughly efficient key industry necessary to the
production of munitions, is not attained by the fiscal device under
notice. If, on the other hand, there has been no barring of imports
under the licence system, the abstention from use of it is an admission
that it was either unnecessary or injurious or was felt to be useless
for its purpose.

[Footnote 1: The promised statistics were soon afterwards sent to Mr.
Robertson by the Board of Trade. They will be found in the _Liberal
Magazine_ for September, 1922, p. 348.--ED.]

And the common-sense verdict on the whole matter is that if continuous
and vigilant research and experiment in the chemistry of dye-making is
held to be essential to the national safety, the proper course is for
the Government to establish and maintain a department or arsenal for
such research and experiment, unhampered by commercial exigencies. Such
an institution may or may not be well managed. But a dividend-earning
company, necessarily concerned first and last with dividend earning, and
at the same time protected against foreign competition in the sale of
its products, cannot be for the purpose in question well managed, being
expressly enabled and encouraged to persist in out-of-date practices.

This being so, the whole argument for protection of key industries goes
by the board. It has been abandoned as to agriculture, surely the most
typical key industry of all; and it has never even been put forward in
regard to shipbuilding, the next in order of importance. For the
building of ships of war the Government has its own dockyards: let it
have its own chemical works, if that be proved to be necessary.
Protection cannot avail. If the Dyestuffs Act is put in operation so as
to exclude the competition of foreign chemicals, it not only keeps our
chemists in ignorance of the developments of the industry abroad: it
raises the prices of dyestuffs against the dye-using industries at home,
and thereby handicaps them dangerously in their never-ending competition
with the foreign industries, German and other, which offer the same
goods in foreign markets.

The really fatal competition is never that of goods produced at low
wages-cost. It is that of superior goods; and if foreign textiles have
the aid of better dyes than are available to our manufacturers our
industry will be wounded incurably. It appears in fact to be the
superior quality of German fabric gloves, and not their cheapness, that
has hitherto defeated the competition of the native product. To protect
inferior production is simply the road to ruin for a British industry.
Delicacy in dyes, in the pre-war days, gave certain French woollen goods
an advantage over ours in our own markets; yet we maintained our vast
superiority in exports by the free use of all the dyes available. Let
protection operate all round, and our foreign markets will be closed to
us by our own political folly. Textiles which are neither well-dyed nor
cheap will be unsaleable against better goods.

THE PARIS RESOLUTIONS

It is of a piece with that prodigy of self-contradiction that, when the
Liberal leaders in the House of Commons expose the absurdity of
professing to rectify the German exchanges by keeping out German fabric
gloves, a tariffist leader replies by arguing that the Paris Resolutions
of the first Coalition Government, under Mr. Asquith, conceded the
necessity of protecting home industries against unfair competition. Men
who are normally good debaters seem, when they are fighting for a
tariff, to lose all sense of the nature of argument. As has been
repeatedly and unanswerably shown by my right hon. friend the Chairman,
the Paris Resolutions were expressly framed to guard against a state of
things which has never supervened--a state of things then conceived as
possible after a war without a victory, but wholly excluded by the
actual course of the war. And those Resolutions, all the same, expressly
provided that each consenting State should remain free to act on them
upon the lines of its established fiscal system, Britain being thus left
untrammelled as to its Free Trade policy.

Having regard to the whole history, Free Traders are entitled to say
that the attempt of tariffists to cite the Paris Resolutions in support
of the pitiful policy of taxing imports of German fabric gloves, or the
rest of the ridiculous "litter of mice" that has thus far been yielded
by the Safeguarding of Industries Act, is the crowning proof at once of
the insincerity and ineptitude of tariffism where it has a free hand,
and of the adamantine strength of the Free Trade case. If any further
illustration were needed, it is supplied by the other tariffist
procedure in regard to the promise made five years ago to Canada that
she, with the other Dominions, should have a relative preference in our
markets for her products. In so far as that plan involved an advantage
to our own Dominions over the Allies who, equally with them, bore with
us the heat and burden of the war, it was as impolitic as it was unjust,
and as unflattering as it was impolitic, inasmuch as it assumed that the
Dominions wanted a "tip" as a reward for their splendid comradeship.

As it turns out, the one concession that Canada really wanted was the
removal of the invidious embargo on Canadian store cattle in our ports.
And whereas a promise to that effect was actually given by the tariffist
Coalition during the war, it is only after five years that the promise
is about to be reluctantly fulfilled. It was a promise, be it observed,
of _free importation_, and it is fulfilled only out of very shame. It
may be surmised, indeed, that the point of the possible lifting of the
Canadian embargo was used during the negotiations with Ireland to bring
the Sister State to terms; and that its removal may lead to new trouble
in that direction. But that is another story, with which Free Traders
are not concerned. Their withers are unwrung.

SCIENCE AND EXPERIENCE

On the total survey, then, the case for Free Trade is not only unshaken,
it is stronger than ever before, were it only because many of the enemy
have visibly lost faith in their own cause. The Coalition, in which
professed Liberals were prepared to sacrifice something of Free Trade to
colleagues who were pledged in the past to destroy it, has quailed
before the insuperable practical difficulties which arise the moment the
scheme of destruction is sought to be framed.

All that has resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile
tinkering with three or four small industries--a tinkering that is on
the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent
Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest
surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine of Free Trade is
_science_, or it is nothing. It is not a passing cry of faction, or a
survival of prejudice, but the unshakable inference of a hundred years
of economic experience verifying the economic science on which the great
experiment was founded.

On the other hand, let me say, the tactic of tinkering with Free Trade
under a system of special committees who make decisions that only the
House of Commons should ever be able to make, is a "felon blow" at
self-government. It puts national affairs under the control of cliques,
amenable to the pressures of private interests. Millions of men and
women are thus taxable in respect of their living-costs at the caprice
of handfuls of men appointed to do for a shifty Government what it is
afraid to do for itself. It is a vain thing to have secured by statute
that the House of Commons shall be the sole authority in matters of
taxation, if the House of Commons basely delegates its powers to
unrepresentative men. Here, as so often in the past, the Free Trade
issue lies at the heart of sound democratic politics; and if the nation
does not save its liberties in the next election it will pay the price
in corrupted politics no less than in ruined trade.

INDIA

BY SIR HAMILTON GRANT

K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E.; Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province,
India; Deputy Commissioner of various Frontier districts; Secretary to
Frontier Administration; Foreign Secretary, 1914-19; negotiated Peace
Treaty with Afghanistan, 1919.

Sir Hamilton Grant said:--I have been asked to address you on the
subject of India, that vast, heterogeneous continent, with its varied
races, its Babel of languages, its contending creeds. There are many
directions in which one might approach so immense a topic, presenting,
as it does, all manner of problems, historical, ethnological,
linguistic, scientific, political, economic, and strategic. I do not
propose, however, to attempt to give you any general survey of those
questions, or to offer you in tabloid form a resume of the matters that
concern the government of India. I propose to confine my remarks to two
main questions which appear to be of paramount importance at the present
time, and which, I believe, will be of interest to those here present
to-day, namely, the problems of the North-West Frontier, and the
question of internal political unrest.

Let me deal first with the North-West Frontier. As very few schoolboys
know, we have here a dual boundary--an inner and an outer line. The
inner line is the boundary of the settled districts of the North-West
Frontier Province, the boundary, in fact, of British India proper, and
is known as the Administrative border. The outer line is the boundary
between the Indian Empire and Afghanistan, and is commonly known as the
Durand line, because it was settled by Sir Mortimer Durand and his
mission in 1895 with the old Amir Abdur Rahman. These two lines give us
three tracts to be dealt with--first, the tract inside the inner line,
the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province, inhabited for
the most part by sturdy and somewhat turbulent Pathans; second, the
tract between the two lines, that welter of mountains where dwell the
hardy brigand hillmen: the tribes of the Black Mountain, of Swat and
Bajur, the Mohmands, the Afridis, the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Mahsuds,
and a host of others, whose names from time to time become familiar
according as the outrageousness of their misconduct necessitates
military operations; third, the country beyond the outer line, "the
God-granted kingdom of Afghanistan and its dependencies."

Now each of these tracts presents its own peculiar problems, though all
are intimately inter-connected and react one on the other. In the
settled districts we are confronted with the task of maintaining law and
order among a backward but very virile people, prone to violence and
impregnated with strange but binding ideas of honour, for the most part
at variance with the dictates of the Indian Penal Code. For this reason
there exists a special law called the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a most
valuable enactment enabling us to deal with cases through local
Councils of Elders, with the task of providing them with education,
medical relief etc., in accordance with their peculiar needs, and above
all with the task of affording them protection from the raids and forays
of their neighbours from the tribal hills. In the tribal area we are
faced with the task of controlling the wild tribesmen. This control
varies from practically direct administration as in the Lower Swat and
Kurram valleys to the most shadowy political influence, as in the remote
highlands of Upper Swat and the Dir Kohistan, where the foot of white
man has seldom trod. Our general policy, however, with the tribes is to
leave them independent in their internal affairs, so long as they
respect British territory and certain sacrosanct tracts beyond the
border, such as the Khyber road, the Kurram, and the Tochi. The problem
is difficult, because when hardy and well-armed hereditary robbers live
in inaccessible mountains which cannot support the inhabitants,
overlooking fat plains, the temptation to raid is obviously
considerable: and when this inclination to raid is reinforced by
fanatical religion, there must be an ever-present likelihood of trouble.

FRONTIER RAIDS

Few people here in England reading of raids on the North-West Frontier
in India realise the full horror of these outrages. What generally
happens is that in the small hours of the morning, a wretched village is
suddenly assailed by a gang of perhaps 50, perhaps 200, well-armed
raiders, who put out sentries, picket the approaches, and conduct the
operation on the most skilful lines. The houses of the wealthiest men
are attacked and looted; probably several villagers are brutally
murdered--and probably one or two unhappy youths or women are carried
off to be held up to ransom. Sometimes the raid is on a larger scale,
sometimes it is little more than an armed dacoity. But there is nearly
always a tale of death and damage. Not infrequently, however, our
troops, our militia, our frontier constabulary, our armed police, or the
village _chigha_ or hue-and-cry party are successful in repelling and
destroying the raiders. Our officers are untiring in their vigilance,
and not infrequently the district officers and the officers of their
civil forces are out three or four nights a week after raiding gangs.
Statistics in such matters are often misleading and generally dull, but
it may be of interest to state that from the 1st April, 1920, to the
31st March, 1921, when the tribal ebullition consequent on the third
Afghan war had begun to die down, there were in the settled districts of
the North-West Frontier Province 391 raids in which 153 British subjects
were killed and 157 wounded, in which 310 British subjects were
kidnapped and some L20,000 of property looted. These raids are often led
by outlaws from British territory; but each tribe is responsible for
what emanates from or passes through its limits--and when the bill
against a tribe has mounted up beyond the possibility of settlement,
there is nothing for it but punitive military operations. Hence the
large number of military expeditions that have taken place on this
border within the last half century.

Now this brings us to the question so often asked by the advocates of
what is called the Forward policy: "If the tribes give so much trouble,
why not go in and conquer them once and for all and occupy the country
up to the Durand line?" It sounds an attractive solution, and it has
frequently been urged on paper by expert soldiers. But the truth is that
to advance our frontier only means advancing the seat of trouble, and
that the occupation of tribal territory by force is a much more
formidable undertaking than it sounds. We have at this moment before us
a striking proof of the immense difficulty and expense of attempting to
tame and occupy even a comparatively small tract of tribal territory in
the Waziristan operations. Those operations have been going on for two
and a half years. At the start there were ample troops, ample equipment,
and no financial stringency. The operations were conducted, if a layman
may say so, with skill and determination, and our troops fought
gallantly. But what is the upshot? We managed to advance into the heart
of the Mahsud country on a single line, subjected and still subject to
incessant attacks by the enemy; but we are very little nearer effective
occupation than when we started; and now financial stringency has
necessitated a material alteration in the whole programme, and we are
reverting more or less to the methods whereby we have always controlled
the tribes, namely, tribal levies or _khassadars_ belonging to the
tribe itself, frontier militia or other armed civil force, backed by
troops behind.

FRONTIER POLICY

And for my own part I believe this is the best solution. We must not
expect a millennium on the North-West Frontier. The tribal lion will not
lie down beside the district lamb in our time, and we must deal with the
problem as best we can in accordance with our means, and to this end my
views are briefly as follows:--

(1) We should do everything possible to provide the younger trans-border
tribesmen with all honourable employment for which they are suited:
service in the army, in the frontier civil forces, and in the Indian
police or similar forces overseas, and we should give labour and
contracts as far as possible to tribesmen for public works in their
vicinity. For the problem is largely economic. Unless the lion gets
other food he is bound to cast hungry eyes on the lamb.

(2) We should do all that is possible to establish friendly relations
with the tribal elders through selected and sympathetic political
officers, to give them, by means of subsidies for service, an interest
in controlling the hot-bloods of their tribe, and, where possible, to
give them assistance in education and enlightenment. We must remember
that we have duties to the tribes as well as rights against them.

(3) We should extend the _khassadar_ or levy system; that is, we should
pay for tribal corps to police their own borders, arming themselves and
providing their own ammunition and equipment. In this way we give
honourable employment and secure an effective safeguard against raiders
without pouring more arms into tribal territory.

(4) We must have efficient irregular civil forces, militia, frontier
constabulary, and police, well paid and contented.

(5) We should revert to the old system of a separate frontier force in
the army, specially trained in the work of guarding the marches. Those
who remember the magnificent old Punjab frontier force will agree with
me in deploring its abolition in pursuance of a scheme of army
reorganisation.

(6) We should improve communications, telephones, telegraphs, and
lateral M.T. roads.

(7) We should give liberal rewards for the interception and destruction
of raiding gangs, and the rounding up of villages from which raids
emanate.

(8) We should admit that the Amir of Afghanistani for religious reasons
exercises a paramount influence over our tribes, and we should get him
to use that influence for the maintenance of peace on our common border.
It has been the practise of our statesmen to adopt the attitude that
because the Amir was by treaty precluded from interfering with our
tribes, therefore he must have nothing to do with them. This is a
short-sighted view. We found during the Great War the late Amir's
influence, particularly over the Mahsuds, of the greatest value, when he
agreed to use it on our behalf.

(9) Finally, there is a suggestion afoot that the settled districts of
the North-West Frontier Province should be re-amalgamated with the
Punjab. I have shown, I think, clearly, how inseparable are the problems
of the districts, the tribal area, and of Afghanistan; and any attempt
to place the districts under a separate control could only mean
friction, inefficiency, and disaster. The proposal is, indeed, little
short of administrative lunacy. There is, however, an underlying method
in the madness that has formulated it, namely, the self-interest of a
clever minority, which I need not now dissect. I trust that if this
proposal should go further it will be stoutly resisted.

AFGHANISTAN

Let me now turn to Afghanistan. Generally speaking, the story of our
dealings with that country has been a record of stupid, arrogant muddle.
From the days of the first Afghan war, when an ill-fated army was
despatched on its crazy mission to place a puppet king, Shah Shuja, on
the throne of Afghanistan, our statesmen have, with some notable
exceptions, mishandled the Afghan problem. And yet it is simple enough
in itself. For we want very little of Afghanistan, and she does
not really want much of us. All we want from the Amir is
good-neighbourliness; that he should not allow his country to become the
focus of intrigue or aggression against us by Powers hostile to us, and
that he should co-operate with us for the maintenance of peace on our
common border. All he wants of us is some assistance in money and
munitions for the internal and external safeguarding of his realm,
commercial and other facilities, and honourable recognition, for the
Afghan, like the Indian, has a craving for self-respect and the respect
of others.

Now, where our statesmen have failed is in regarding Afghanistan as a
petty little State to be browbeaten and ordered about at our pleasure,
without recognising the very valuable cards that the Amir holds against
us. He sees his hand and appraises it at its value. He knows, in the
first place, that nothing can be more embarrassing to us than the
necessity for another Afghan war, and the despatch of a large force to
the highlands of Kabul, to sit there possibly for years as an army of
occupation, in a desolate country, incapable of affording supplies for
the troops, at enormous cost which could never be recovered, and at the
expense of much health and life, with no clear-cut policy beyond. He
knows, in the second place, that such a war would be the signal for the
rising of practically every tribe along our frontier. The cry of _Jehad_
would go forth, as in the third Afghan war, and we should be confronted
sooner or later with an outburst from the Black Mountain to
Baluchistan--a formidable proposition in these days. He knows, in the
third place, that with Moslem feeling strained as it is to-day on the
subject of Turkey, there would be sympathy for him in India, and among
the Moslem troops of the Indian army. Now these are serious
considerations, but I do not suggest that they are so serious as to make
us tolerate for a moment an offensive or unreasonable attitude on the
part of the Amir. If the necessity should be forced on us, which God
forbid, we should face the position with promptitude and firmness and
hit at once; and apart from an advance into Afghanistan we have a
valuable card in the closing of the passes and the blockade of that
country.

All I suggest is that in negotiating with Afghanistan, we should
remember these things and should not attempt to browbeat a proud and
sensitive ruler, who, however inferior in the ordinary equipment for
regular war, holds such valuable assets on his side. And my own
experience is that the Afghans are not unreasonable. Like every one
else, they will "try it on," but if handled courteously, kindly, with
geniality, and, above all, with complete candour, they will generally
see reason. And remember one thing. In spite of all that has happened,
our mistakes, our bluster, our occasional lapses from complete
disingenuousness, the Afghans still like us. Moreover, their hereditary
mistrust of Russia still inclines them to lean on us. We have lately
concluded a treaty with Afghanistan--not by any means a perfect treaty,
but the best certainly that could be secured in the circumstances, and
we have sent a Minister to Kabul, Lt.-Colonel Humphrys, who was one of
my officers on the frontier. A better man for the post could not, I
believe, be found in the Empire. Unless unduly hampered by a hectoring
diplomacy from Whitehall, he will succeed in establishing that goodwill
and mutual confidence which between Governments is of more value than
all the paper engagements ever signed. One word more of the Afghans.
There is an idea that they are a treacherous and perfidious people.
This, I believe, is wicked slander, so far as the rulers are concerned.
In 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, the Amir Dost Muhammed was true to
his bond, when he might have been a thorn in our side; and during the
Great War the late Amir Halilullah, in the face of appalling
difficulties, maintained the neutrality of his country, as he promised,
and was eventually murdered, a martyr to his own good faith to us.

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