The Great Inquiry

This satirical political pamphlet turns Britain's tariff crisis into a mock parliamentary spectacle, where Chamberlain, Balfour, and other officials preside over absurdly formal inquiries into trade, dumping, and economic decline. Witnesses from the iron, bicycle, powder, oil, hop, and shipping trades offer self-interested, contradictory, and often ridiculous testimony, while grand questions of imperial policy are reduced to slogans, statistics, and bureaucratic performance. A mysterious economist with aliases, a philosophical theorist translated into crude protectionist common sense, and experts waving alarming figures all expose the gap between public rhetoric and economic reality. As the proceedings grow more chaotic, foreign imports are blamed for sabotaging British industry through technical tricks, and the supposed "drain of gold" is inflated into patriotic panic. The satire becomes even more farcical with staged animal demonstrations, including pigs, a horse, an imperial lion, and a dead elephant, all pressed into service as political evidence. Across its comic hearings, the book skewers class prejudice, expert evasions, and the vanity of statesmen who treat national policy as theater. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.