The colonials might or might not be
good customers; he knew how many decanters he sold in
the United States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that
the tax on food-stuffs was being commended to the
working-man with the argument of higher wages. Higher
wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only
one word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin.
The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening,
near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the
prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond.
He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the
British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of
the operative. Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking
to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though
their prosperity might be rooted in his own. "Give them
cheap food and keep them poor," was the sum of his advice.
His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the
unnatural: he was one of the people whom Wallingham's
scheme in its legitimate development of a tariff on
foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This
fact, which he constantly insisted on, did give them
weight; it made him look like a cunning fellow not to be
caught with chaff. He and his business had survived free
trade--though he would not say this either--and he
preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the
chances of any zollverein.
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