There is, however, an even more fundamental difficulty, which neither Colonial nor British preferentialists have yet had the courage to face. It is this:—That the Colonist and the Britisher are aiming at different ends. The Britisher wishes to expand in ever-increasing proportions his manufacturing business, and it is solely because he thinks that he may possibly get a better market for his manufactures in the Colonies than in foreign countries that he gives even momentary approval to the idea of preferential trade. But no Colonist looks forward to his country remaining for ever the dumping ground for British manufactures. He wishes, and wisely wishes, to manufacture for himself, and he has deliberately arranged his tariffs with that end. Towards realising this ambition it will advance him nothing to shut out the puny Teutonic infant and let in the British giant. In like manner, if we turn from manufactures to agriculture we find the same essential divergence of view. The Colonial producer regards England as the best market for his meat and corn and butter. But the British farmer wants none of it. If he is to be ruined by competition from abroad he would as lief that the last nail were driven into his coffin by Argentine beef as by New Zealand mutton.
A DREAM OR A NIGHTMARE?
These objections go to the root of the matter, and show how futile it is to hope that the Mother Country and the Colonies will ever agree on any scheme of preferential trade. But need we, therefore, sit down sorrowing? Does the dream of inter-Imperial trade, if we come to examine it closely, really hold all the beauties that its shadowy shape suggests? Take it either way. Take the scheme either as an end in itself, or as a means to an end. As for the first hypothesis, if trade is itself an end, it matters to us nothing whether we trade with foreigners or fellow subjects; all we have to think of is the profitableness, immediate or prospective, of the trade itself. And from this point of view a growing trade with Germany is worth a good deal more than a declining trade with Australasia. But most advocates of inter-Imperial trade would not admit that their dream is an end in itself. They adopt the second of the two hypotheses just mentioned, and look upon the expansion of inter-Imperial trade as the most convenient means of drawing the Colonies closer to the Mother Country, and to one another.
DOES TRADE UNITE?
With that end no one will quarrel; but how will preferential trade promote it? The preferentialists assume that mutual trade must of necessity promote the closer union of different parts of the Empire. Neither in individual life nor in national life can any fact be found to support that assumption. A man does not necessarily make a bosom friend of his baker and his butcher; he may even be at daggers drawn with his tailor. As for nations it might almost be said that there is the least love exchanged between those who exchange most goods. We are splendid customers to France; we buy French goods with open hands and ask for more, yet where is the love of France for England? Never for a moment do the French cease to gird at us and to try and thwart our national projects solely because we are doing in Egypt what they have done in Tunis and are on the way to do in Madagascar. Germany, on the other hand, is one of our best customers; yet at the beginning of this year, when there seemed to be a chance of war with Germany, a feeling of elation ran through the whole of England. One more illustration: when in December, 1895, President Cleveland’s Message aroused all decent folk on both sides the Atlantic to protest that war between the United Kingdom and the United States was impossible, was it of trade interests that all men thought, or of the tie of common blood? Or, again, did Canada pause to calculate that her best customer was her Southern neighbour, or did she for a moment weigh that fact against the loyalty she owed to the Mother Country?
A NEXUS STRONGER THAN CASH.
The simple truth is that trade has no feelings. We all of us buy and sell to the best advantage we can, and on the whole we do wisely. It is a shrewd saying that warns men to beware of business transactions with their own kinsfolk; nor do we need a prophet to tell us that an attempt to fetter Colonial trade for our own benefit may lose us more affection than it wins us custom. After all, why worry? Our world-embracing commerce is to-day as prosperous as ever it has been. The loyalty of our Colonists no one questions. Let well alone. Our industrial success has not hitherto been dependent on favouring tariffs, nor is there the slightest evidence that old age has yet laid his hand upon our powers. As for the closer union between our Colonists and ourselves, it will hardly be promoted by asking them to sacrifice their commercial freedom to increase the profits of our manufacturers, nor by taxing our food to please their farmers. It is indeed a sign of little faith to even look for a new bond of empire in an arrangement of tariffs. The tie that binds our Colonists to us will not be found in any ledger account, nor is ink the fluid in which that greater Act of Union is writ.
CHAPTER VII.
Conclusion.
In the foregoing pages I have been obliged more than once to accuse Mr. Williams of misrepresenting facts in order to bolster up his argument. That accusation I cannot withdraw. It has been deliberately made because the facts compelled it. Doubtless in the ordinary affairs of life Mr. Williams is not less honourable than other men, but in his zeal to establish a case, which cannot be established, he has blinded himself to the main facts of the matter with which he was dealing, and has often so quoted facts and figures as to convey an impression the reverse of the truth. Even from his own point of view this was a pity, for it throws discredit upon the whole of his work, whereas several of his statements are quite true. It is, for example, true that Germany has made great progress in the chemical and in the iron trades. It is also true that her commerce is gaining a foothold in Eastern markets once almost exclusively our own. These, and several other perfectly true statements, are to be found in Mr. Williams’s pages, and might have been edifying to exalted persons who can only discover a distorted image of the truth ten years after the main facts have been clearly seen by those common folk who are primarily concerned with them. To such individuals Mr. Williams, without his picturesque exaggerations and strange twistings of the truth, might have been really useful. As it is, he has only helped to lead them astray. Indeed, it is much to be feared that these hasty students of a big subject have by the perusal of Mr. Williams’s neatly-turned sentences and epigrammatic phrases acquired an impression which no drab-coloured statement of simple fact will ever be able to dislodge.