favour of such preferences, if these and like criticisms and objections are well founded. May I suggest in reply, with all hesitation, that colonial opinion in such a matter is perhaps biassed, unconsciously no doubt, but biassed all the same. It is the Colonies which are to receive the bonus, and it is always agreeable to receive money, much or little, without any return, as the proposed bonus will be received on the volume of existing production. The money will be received, moreover, by a comparatively small class, chiefly, as regards wheat, the farmers in the Far West of Canada, while behind this class, if I may hazard a guess, there may be found a number of land speculators, whose speculation will be favoured by a windfall from the English Government, even though small, enhancing the price of land taken up by immigrants. What the English Government has to beware of in all such proposals is undoubtedly the little finger of the speculator and promoter, who sees his way to realising a capital profit out of the trifling differences, as they may appear, which are alone in view.

The conclusion is that we should inquire most carefully in detail into these suggested measures of protection, besides examining them in principle and theory. The detail helps in fact to let us see what the proposals really are, and may often render theoretical examination unnecessary. I desire to add one word in conclusion on a broader aspect of this whole protectionist discussion. If it is the right view that the proposals themselves are puerile, like this preference to agricultural production, what a calamity it is that the whole country should be in a tumult for so little! We seem to have quite lost sight of the urgent business of an agreement with our Colonies respecting commercial negotiations with foreign countries, and respecting common action when difficulties arise, which was the excuse for beginning the agitation, and which indeed most urgently requires settlement for business reasons alone. While explaining in July last some reasons for the conclusion that, in order to unite the Empire for international commercial affairs, it might be expedient for the country to make some concessions to colonial prejudices, if they would not associate with us in a freetrade policy, I expressed the fear that the subject would not fare well before the constituencies, themselves ignorant and passionate, and receiving information from biassed and ignorant instructors. This apprehension has been only too well realised. Ministers and their missionaries, instead of trying to effect some arrangement with the minimum of resistance, have thought proper as a preliminary to raise again the whole question between free trade and protection, and have thereby aroused the opposition of large numbers of Imperialists, who are forced to make a choice between their attachment to free-trade policy, and an Imperial policy of a sort which no friend

of liberty can desire. The leaders of the political Opposition, on the other side, seem rather to welcome the rallying cry which has been offered them, and say as little as Ministers themselves about the serious and urgent problems which face the country, and which can hardly be postponed until this fight between two systems of commercial policy is settled. Evil must come of it all unless we have more good luck than we deserve.

ROBERT GIFFEN.

THE LARGER BASIS OF COLONIAL

PREFERENCE

IN the midst of much that is difficult respecting the fiscal controversy now raging in this country there is probably a prediction that may be made with some confidence. Whatever the hasty confusion of facts and figures for the moment, whatever the passing plausibility of argument on either side, the case for the reversal of the trade policy which this country has followed for the past sixty years can only be carried on one condition. It must be won on its permanent and intrinsic merits. If so much be admitted, there is a test of those merits which may be held to surpass most others in severity. If the case for change be made out, we must be able to conceive it as involving in the not remote future a national policy having the general assent not of one but of both political parties in the State. Looking for a moment beyond the existing party conflict in Great Britain, how are we able in such a light to regard the proposals that have been made? If we can imagine the position in British politics reversed, and can conceive a statesman of unusual insight and of commanding personality engaged on the other side in just such a task as Mr. Chamberlain has undertaken on his, what is the nature of the case he would have to present? What are the arguments by which he would have to justify before the tradition of English Liberalism the proposal to depart from the attitude in fiscal relations which Great Britain has for the last two generations maintained towards the world and towards her own Colonies ?

It is now some ten years since a book was published in England which at the time attracted a great deal of attention. It was the product of a mind steeped and nurtured in the ideas which have been associated with the free-trade epoch through which we have passed in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century in England. The book in question, National Life and Character, by the late Charles Pearson, was the last work of a man of education and culture, who had held the lectureship of Modern History at Trinity College, Cambridge; who had become a student of the

world, visiting the countries of Europe, the United States, and the British colonies, and bringing at last a varied career practically to a close as Minister of Education in the colony of Victoria. The principal conclusion of the book, as it appeared to many minds, was absurd to a degree. Urged with the intensest conviction, it was to the effect that the civilisation of the advanced peoples was in the not remote future bound to go down before the increasingly effective industrial competition of the lower races of the world. It was not this fact alone, however, which principally attracted notice. What riveted attention on the book was the logical precision of argument, reinforced by a very wide experience of the world, by which this conclusion was deduced from the accepted ascendency in the world. of the doctrines associated with the free-trade period in England; and above all the stoical pessimism with which the author accepted what appeared to him as the inevitable assumptions following from his own belief. There must be many in England who remember the kind of effect produced by the reading of this remarkable book. The present writer will not forget that effect as he saw it in print, in a review of the work which appeared at the time in one of the leading organs of Liberal opinion in this country. For one brief moment, as it were, the author of National Life and Character had taken the reviewer up into a high mountain and shown him all the kingdoms of the world. And in that moment in which he had resisted the temptation of Mr. Pearson's desolate creed there had apparently come to him a vision in which a life-long conviction had withered. What the reviewer saw was that the conception of that international scramble in commerce and industry, which we have hitherto called free trade, was fated to become an impossible creed; that it had never been a scientific creed; and that all the dogmas and doctrines which have accreted round it in England were destined to slow but certain dispersion by the inevitable logic of events in the world.

Not more than ten years have passed since that time, and we have at the present moment a statesman of the first rank and of commanding personality proposing in England a revolution in the fiscal policy of the United Kingdom which would have been almost inconceivable a few years ago. Nay, further, we have the Prime Minister of England and one of the two great parties in the State already committed to the first step by which the vision of the Liberal reviewer begins to realise itself in national policy. For the moment the air is full, as well it may be, of the sound of the readjusting strife of parties in Great Britain. But a quarter of a century hence who will be troubled to remember these transient phases of the hour? Who will even think it worth while to recall to which side in parties Mr. Chamberlain or Mr. Balfour belonged? As in the case of other statesmen who have deeply influenced British policy, there will be only one standard by which their conceptions can be measured-the

place which they will occupy in the development of the national life of Great Britain. Let us see if it is possible to anticipate how the proposals that have been made will stand to be judged in this light.

The existing generation in England has been so familiarised with the name of free trade that there are probably few persons who have taken the trouble to imagine exactly what is involved in the present circumstances of the world in that policy of international exchange which goes by the name of free trade. Let us, instead of occupying ourselves with outside aspects of the subject, endeavour to get to the heart of it at once. What is free trade? Down to the present day the literature of this movement in England has perhaps produced no terms either in economics or in controversy which give a better idea of the essential principles of the policy which has gone by the name of free trade in England than a few terse expressions of Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, which may be set out substantially in his own words as follows:

(1) The fundamental principle upon which civilised society exists is the unrestricted working of the principle: give me what I want and you shall have what you want. (2) The merchant is not neces sarily the citizen of any particular country. (3) It is not the advantage of society, but his own advantage, which the merchant has in view. But the individual by following his own advantage is necessarily led to the best employment of his capital in the interest of society.

These three maxims may be said to express all the essential meaning and spirit of that policy which has gone by the name of free trade in England during the nineteenth century. It is the spirit of these maxims which is reproduced at the present moment in economic criticisms which oppose Mr. Chamberlain's proposals on the grounds that to give preferential treatment to colonial products in British markets is necessarily wrong, because it rests on the idea that the trade with the members of one political body is better than trade with members of another.

Now if we regard the fundamentals of free trade as here clearly and simply set out, it is obvious that there is a question involved to which as a people who have hitherto played a leading part in the world we must sooner or later be prepared to give an answer. Do we really in our heart of hearts imagine that in the resulting free scramble of the merchants and financiers of every race and country, each following his own advantage in quest of gain, it is possible for us to remain ultimately indifferent as to what types of civilisation or races of men or standards of labour or of living shall in the result prevail? With the development of the world the international rivalry is getting down to the ultimate principles which govern it. As a living people we must stand and consider our answer. In anticipating what that answer is likely to be, it seems to me, and