§ LORD JOHN MANNERSasked the President of the Board of Trade, Whether the pamphlet "On the industry and trade of Germany during the first year of the new Protective Policy," an abstract of which, with a preface by "E. W. G.," has been presented to Parliament by the Board of Trade is an official document; and, whether it was forwarded to the Department through the Foreign Office; if not, on what principle are Foreign works, by private persons, on controversial political questions, selected for the privilege of translation and publication at the public expense by the Department?
§ MR. CHAMBERLAINSir, in answer to the first Question of the noble Lord, I am not quite certain what constitutes an official document. In one sense it might be matter of definition, and in some sense matter of opinion. The Reports of German Chambers of Commerce are Reports of quasi-official bodies, and 778 when forwarded by our Ministers and Consuls have, on various occasions, been laid before Parliament; but I do not know if a document, which is an abstract of the Report of a Chamber of Commerce, ought to be called an official document or not. In the present case we had received the Report of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce from the Statistical Bureau at Berlin, which first drew our attention to the view taken on Protection by the trading classes of Germany. In consequence of this, we applied to the Foreign Office, and received through it the pamphlet in question, giving a résumé of the Reports of all the Chambers of Commerce. We then purchased other copies through a bookseller, from which the actual translation and abstract laid before Parliament were made. The paper, it will be observed, shows different opinions of various Chambers on both sides of the question. The principle on which foreign works, whether by private persons or others, and whether on controversial subjects or not, are selected for publication by the Department, is to give papers which contain matters of sufficient public interest and importance. I may inform the noble Lord that the present publication is in strict accordance with precedent. I could refer him to a great number of instances if that were necessary; but if the noble Lord will look at the Reports from Her Majesty's Representatives in Germany on the New German Tariff, which were presented by the late Government in 1879, he will find various articles from private newspapers, chiefly on the Protectionist side, and at page 27 he will find a table extracted from a work issued by the German Free Trade Association; and if he will look at the Reports from Her Majesty's Secretaries of Embassy and Legation, presented in 1880, he will find at page 157 translations of observations by the Heidenheim Chamber of Commerce on the New German Tariff made in a Free Trade sense. In short, almost every volume of this class of Reports contains articles and extracts from private sources forwarded by Her Majesty's Ministers and Consuls.