ABSTRACT
From the time of Neville Chamberlain’s launching of the Tariff Reform movement in 1903, Radicals became more and more concerned with the danger to Free Trade. This danger, though apparently repulsed triumphantly in the General Elections of 1906, 1909, and 1910, could never be regarded as over whilst the great bulk of the Conservative Party, large bodies of manufacturers and, often enough, considerable sections of workers, in industries particularly affected by foreign competition, continued critical of Free Trade. Even Stanley Baldwin was driven to fury by what he considered the shortsighted Free Trade malignancy, capable of exposing to certain ruin a group of key-industries built up by so much effort, and despite the Liberal-Labour majority available to thwart him in the Commons, a way was found to prevent the undoing of Dyestuffs “Regulation” in the Lords.
