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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
THE CASE FOR TARIFF REFORM AND MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S PROPOSALS My first duty is to thank this great and representative audience for having offered to me an opportunity of explaining for the first time in some detail the views which I hold upon the subject of our fiscal policy (cheers). I would desire no better platform than this ("Hear, hear," and cheers). I am in a great city, the second of the Empire ; the city which by the enterprise and intelligence which it has always shown is entitled to claim something of a representative character in respect of British industry (cheers). I am in that c'.ty in which Free Trade took its birth ("hear, hear"), in that city in which Adam Smith taught so long, and where he was one of my most distinguished predecessors in the great office of Lord Rector of your University (cheers) wh'cl1 it will always be to me a great honour to have filled. Adam Smith was a great man. It was not given to h m, it never has been given to mortals, to foresee all the changes that may occur in something like a century and a half, but with a broad and far-seeing intelligence which is not common among men, Adam Smith did at any rate anticipate many of our modern conditions, and when I read his books I see how even then he was aware of the importance of home markets as compared with foreign ("hear, hear") ; how he advocated retaliation under certain conditions ; how he supported the Navigation Laws ; how he was the author of a sentence which we oiight never to forget, that " DoDelivered at St. Andrew's Hall, Glasgow, Tuesday, October 6, 1903. is greater than opulence" (cheers). When I remember,also, how he, entirely before his time, pressed for reciprocal trade between our Colon es and the Mother Country, I say he had a broader mind, a more Imperial concept...