ABSTRACT

In January, 1913, there occurred one of the most surprising events in the annals of domestic politics. Six weeks earlier, a great historic party in the State, amid a scene of indescribable enthusiasm, had bound itself in the most public and deliberate manner, and had pledged its faith and its future by the most formal and explicit undertaking, to execution of a momentous imperialistic policy. Then there was a somersault. This catastrophe was all the more astonishing because, during almost a decade, the whole tendency of Conservative policy had been moving, ever more decisively, the other way. The wonder grows and deepens when it is remembered that, in the course of that same epoch, Tariff Reform had become a species of obsession to any number of minds. While the policy of Sir Robert Peel had been increasingly scouted as a grotesque shibboleth and as an antediluvian absurdity, Tariff Reform, itself once a fetish, had been steadily dignified into a faith.