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 But as our greatest poet, as well as greatest philosopher, tells us—

So even out of this petty network of hostile local tariffs, under which each colony shows such an irritating disposition to levy duties on its neighbour's productions, and where so many combine to shut out the teeming industries of the mother country, there may yet be evolved a homogeneous system of British and colonial free-trade. This cannot be done thoughtlessly without producing disastrous results, as I have elsewhere indicated with regard to Victoria; nor would the Protectionist colonies ever enter into any Zollverein with Great Britain, unless with an understanding as to the exclusion of foreign products and industries in a manner apparently subversive of Cobden's most cherished theories. As a matter of mere abstract economic science, nobody can dispute the truth of free-trade. Not only, as Sir Charles Dilke points out, is it the cosmopolitan theory; but if the British Empire is an empire in anything but name, there should certainly be the freest interchange of commodities within its borders throughout the whole