Page:Problems of Empire.djvu/167

PREFERENTIAL TRADE. slow to move in Sussex, but for that reason, perhaps, we move more surely.

To turn to Tariff Reform, which is of even greater public interest at the present time. I have taken an interest in this question for many years, ever since I had an opportunity of discussing at Cape Town with Mr. Hofmeyr, the head of the Afrikander Bond, the proposals which he had just put before the first Colonial Conference of 1887. It is idle to deny that the reform proposed by Mr. Chamberlain involves a departure from Free Trade principles, from those principles which have governed our fiscal policy for many years past. But I have asked myself for some years whether all of these rest on a really solid basis.

The enormous growth of the export trade of Germany and the United States since their adoption of a highly protectionist policy, compared with the comparative stagnation of our own, make one doubt the truth of the Free Trade theory, that cheapness of production is dependent on a free trade. Certainly these two countries produce as cheaply as we can. Again, any one who has studied the prices of wheat during the nineteenth century, must admit that the history of those prices tends to disprove another great theory of the free traders, namely, that cheap food depends on free trade. The price of wheat touched as high or higher prices in the twenty-five years after the introduction of free trade, and fluctuations in price were as great in those twenty-five years as they were in the twenty-five years before the introduction of Free Trade. I have in my hand a letter from a gentleman, not known, perhaps, to many of you, 149