Page:Bearing and Importance of Commercial Treaties in the Twentieth Century, 1906.djvu/7

 I begin with a definition.

It is usual to think of Treaties of Commerce as restricted to tariffs. Nothing is more erroneous and no popular error is more detrimental to an intelligent understanding of the subject. One unpropititious consequence of the error is that treaties of commerce are popularly supposed by some to be a counterblast to free trade, by others as a step towards it. In reality, treaties of commerce are simply agreements between States relating to trade carried on between them. Through them States bring order into their commercial intercourse, and order is as essential to the security and prosperity of international intercourse as it is to our domestic intercourse.

It is with treaties of commerce in this general and, so to speak, more correct sense that I propose to deal, and not merely, though also, with questions involved in tariff restrictions upon imports.

Let us take our relations with France as an example of the different matters concerned.

When the negotiations for a new tariff treaty broke down in 1882, and the then existing period of prolongation of the old treaty of 1860 came to an end, France, with a spontaneity which she has never lacked in moments of great emergency, immediately passed an Act of Parliament granting the most favoured tariff to British commerce, and the day following, February 28th, 1882, a