I hope the President of the Board of Trade will forgive me if I say that his remarks with regard to the proposed Committee, which he led us to suppose might, in certain eventualities, be substituted for that proposed by the Mover of the Resolution, are somewhat indefinite. Will he also forgive me for saying that this is a Motion which has been on the Order Paper for some days, if not for some weeks, and I think hon. Members will have expected some kind of definite reply from the Government, if they could not accept the proposals before them, as to what their alternative proposals would be. He says that if my hon. Friend opposite will put a question to the Prime Minister to-morrow, he may, or may not, get a satisfactory answer. What reason is there, if the Prime Minister can make a statement on the subject tomorrow, why the House of Commons should not have that statement tonight? After all, this is not a new question brought before the House. It was a question discussed by many hon. Members during the Election. It is a question which, if I may say so, I myself raised prior to the Dissolution, at the time when the Leader of the Opposition was Prime Minister, and proposed to go to the country on an economic issue. I said at the time—and I am sure a number of other Members of the House agree—that it was quite unnecessary and wrong to take a step of that kind without some big economic inquiry into the situation of the country and the Empire, in the light of post-War conditions.

Nobody can deny that post-War conditions have profoundly affected the situation. The right hon. Gentleman, who is himself so renowned an economist, does not need to be told that there are at least half a dozen factors in the economic life of the world to-day which simply did not exist in 1914. I will mention one, to begin with. One is embodied in the Treaties of Peace, and is what is called the "Labour Covenant." In the Labour Covenant of the Treaties of Peace, for the first time is laid down, for adoption by all the signatories, the principle that Labour is no longer to be regarded as a commodity, but is to be regarded as something much higher, and it is to be the duty of the various Governments to undertake progressive legislation, and progressive social reform, for the purpose of increasing the remuneration of labour in industry. That is a factor which did not exist before the War. Before the War, it was an aspiration; to-day, so far as this country is concerned, it is very largely a realisation. All parties in the State and in the House of Commons, it is no exaggeration to say, are agreed to extend to the labouring partners in industry a far larger share of the return on the produce which they manufacture. That is the first new factor.

Then there is the factor which has been referred to throughout this Debate—and the right hon. Gentleman's remarks in regard to the total volume of the trade which we do with Europe do not take away the truth of that factor—the devastation of Europe, the want of purchasing power in Europe. The fact that we are sending a great quantity of goods into Europe—roughly, the same volume as we did before the War—proves nothing whatever, because the right hon. Gentleman has omitted to say, what I am sure is the truth, that a considerable proportion—I do not know the exact proportion—of the produce which is sent from this country to the Continent is sent at cost price, and, in some cases, below cost price, in order to keep the good will in the foreign markets. That factor did not operate before the War, and you do not dispose of the problem of the devastation of Europe by pointing to the very small disparity in the volume of the trade to-day compared with what it was in 1913.

Then you have again the problem in existence before the country and very much aggravated since the War, the problem of an increased working population. You have also the problem which is, to my mind, very largely if not entirely a new factor, the very great entry of the woman worker into industry. That has developed, and has followed quite naturally, upon the very large employment of women in munitions making during the War. It has come, and come to stay. You have a greater volume of unemployment than before the War. The right hon. Gentleman finds some satisfaction in the fact that the unemployment figures are not materially worse than they were in 1909. Yes, but consider what they have been in the last two years, and what they are now! That is another factor which must be borne in mind in connection with this matter.

There is another factor which has only been touched upon—and I do not wish to detain the House except to refer to the effect of taxation upon industry. That is a factor which would make an investigation entirely of its own, as to how far industry can continue to bear it. I do not want to be led away from the two points I have jotted down, or I shall detain the House too long, but the hon. Member behind me has just mentioned finance. That is not a point of the taxation matter, but it has to be taken into account. There is the question which to a certain extent has been illustrated by what the right hon. Gentleman said in regard to the sheltered and unsheltered trades—the question of the transport trades, for instance. These have been very seriously affected by the factor to which he referred, that far higher wages rule in the sheltered trades than in the unsheltered trades. There may have been a disparity between the rate of remuneration in these respective areas of trade before the War, but they were not in any way comparable to the existing disparity. As the right hon. Gentleman truly pointed out in his speech, one of the principal handicaps is the indirect taxation upon industry in the rate of wages paid in the sheltered trades as against the unsheltered trades.

There is another factor which appears in this connection, and that is the purchasing value of our customers abroad, that is the individual quantities that the populations of the various parts of the world consume. It is a most important point. If you only take the trouble to make the simplest investigation into the conditions of the export trade, you will find the most astonishing results. You find, for instance, that the individual customer in New Zealand or Australia is worth something like 25 to 30 times the customer in America. That is to say, that, taking the volume of trade that we do with our Dominions and comparing it with the volume of trade that we do with other parts of the world, the individual customer in our Dominions is enormously more valuable than the customer in other parts of the world. That leads obviously to this corollary, that if you can increase the number of customers in your Dominions you are taking a very important step towards creating those new markets to which reference has been made. The corollary to that is that if you transport the surplus—I do not like the word used in relation to our population—but I give it as having been used by another Member—and I agree that we do not want to consider this country as over-populated, and we do not want to consider a certain section of the population as being obliged, owing to economic circumstances, to emigrate—if we consider that point of view at all. It is quite certain if you are going to offer substantial inducements to a large number of your population to go abroad you must consider not only the market they are going to provide for you but the market you are going to provide for them. The few factors which I have indicated seem to me to be something entirely new, and they have been modified by the state of affairs produced by the late War.

If you have these new conditions, what is more appropriate and natural than that there should be a strong committee representative of industry, of merchants, banking, shipping and the consumer set up to make a thorough investigation of the whole economic situation not only of this country, but of the Empire, to make a report for the purpose of reviewing our economic policy, and seeing how far it is right or wrong? I am quite sure that the hon. Member who moved this Motion will be willing to accept as an alternative any subsequent proposals which the President of the Board of Trade can put forward for setting up an alternative committee, but unless the Government give some definite undertaking within a definite time to set up a committee with definite terms of reference, I hope my hon. Friend will press his Motion to a Division.