III. Unionism and Tariff Reform: The Crisis of 1906

Abstract

The bitter hostility with which Joseph Chamberlain was pursued by the sections of the Unionist party opposed to his policy of tariff reform, even after he resigned from Balfour's cabinet in September 1903 to conduct his campaign untrammelled by office, is a curious aspect of Unionist history. The party had seen its defeat clearly foreshadowed in a series of catastrophic by-elections, and yet it persisted in fighting its own internal fiscal battles instead of closing its ranks to meet the most formidable combination of Radical and Socialist forces that it had ever had to face. It knew that no viable proposals for fiscal reform would be put forward for several years, since its opponents were all committed to free trade. Why then did it perversely continue to dispute a remote contingency, thus encouraging its opponents to drive wedges into the divided Unionist leadership by well-chosen parliamentary motions in the sessions of 1904–5, and ensuring that in 1906 it was a demoralized as well as a defeated party that emerged from the polls? After every allowance is made for the purely human impulses that might account for these fiscal quarrels—the hopelessness of defeat, weariness of office, uncertainty in new and alarming political circumstances, and the suspicion that Chamberlain's ‘new departure’ was a bid to salvage his own political fortunes from the wreck of the party—it is still necessary to adduce some more convincing explanation for this seeming folly. For such an explanation, one must appreciate the full significance to contemporaries of Chamberlain's tariff movement, and his determination to make tariff reform and its attendant social and economic policies ‘the great question of the future, and the one on which party divisions will ultimately settle themselves’. His Unionist opponents believed they were fighting to protect not simply free trade, vital as this appeared, but also the whole fabric of Conservatism, both as a historic creed, and as a practical movement.