Page:The empire and the century.djvu/121

 and the increased continental duties to be enforced from 1906 will hasten decay.

Mr. Cobden's dogma offers no prospect in that direction. The change on our part to an active commercial policy might even yet do much. Just as throughout the Continent tariffs are the only check upon tariffs, a British tariff— threatening the penalty of exclusion from the greatest consuming centre in the world—would be the most powerful of all restraining and reducing influences.

We shall never get Free Trade, or anything approaching Free Trade. The continental Powers cannot sacrifice their agriculture. France, for instance, is governed by an agricultural majority; and, in spite of the devoted efforts of the foremost German Free Trader, Professor Lujo Brentano, to prove that Germany might safely trust her national fate to street-bred armies, the Kaiser's Government have reasons overwhelming in their view—reasons dynastic, military, naval, social—for believing that the maintenance of a large rural population parallel with the swarming industrial growth of the towns is the vital interest of the State. In America, even the recent Reciprocity Congress at Chicago began by declaring its undiminished adherence to Protection as the basis of national life. The meeting then declared in favour of a maximum and minimum tariff on the German plan. To countries with which the Republic might have any commercial quarrels, duties amounting to prohibition might be applied. 'Most favoured nations' would enjoy the benefit of the minimum scale; but that scale would in any case, it was unanimously agreed, be higher than any tariff existing in Western Europe; and so prominent a member of President Roosevelt's administration as Mr. Shaw, Secretary to the Treasury, would make the existing Dingley tariff the 'minimum' which the 'most favoured nations' are to enjoy under the soothing name of Reciprocity!

Nothing will give us back our old hold upon the principal protected markets. Our competitors can concede us no such drastic abatement of duties as would