Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/181

Rh really a Free Trade proposition. A proposition came from Home that I should put in the words ‘That the duty on imported goods should not exceed the present Cape tariff.’ I declined to do that because I thought that in the future, twenty-five or fifty years hence, you might deal with the United States as you would with a naughty child, saying, ‘If you will keep on this system of the McKinley tariff, or an increase of it, we shall shut your goods out,’ in the same way that you go to war, not because you are pleased with war, but because you are forced. That is why I wished to put the words ‘British goods,’ because actually England in the future might adopt this policy and yet have a clause in the constitution of one of her own colonies which prevented it. (Cheers.) Now who could object to this? Certainly not the French or the German Ambassadors, because so long as England’s policy is to make no difference, they come in under this clause, the policy of England being that there should be no preferential right. Any law passed by us giving a preferential right would be disallowed. But this clause would have assisted the German and French manufacturer, so long as England remains what it is, because they also would have shared in the privilege of the duty on imported goods, or British goods not exceeding 12 per cent. If you follow the idea, so long as England did not sanction a law making a difference, we had to make it the same to all. But this great gain was obtained, that supposing that the charter passed into self-government, and a wave of Protection came over the territory, and they pass, we will say, a duty of 50 per cent. on British goods, that would be disallowed, because it was contrary to the constitution. The only objection that has ever been made to this propo-