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 Argentine wheat upon the same terms as Canadian. But here comes the direct bearing of our trade relations upon the problem of Empire. In the Boer War the Dominion and the Commonwealth gave us of their manhood and means; and everything we had ever done to develop their national life—and how little we had done: no more than for any foreign country with which we had a similar cash nexus—came back to us. Their man-power was our man-power; their money-power was our money-power. But Argentina, though an excellent market, was a foreign country, no more prepared than any other alien nation, to spill either blood or treasure in our cause. More still. Argentine wheat in our ports is free; in the German ports it is, or is about to be, taxed to the tune of 11s. a quarter. But German trade competes with us in Argentina on a precisely equal footing, and progresses, on the whole, more rapidly than ours.

Our Argentine trade, therefore, is an absolute asset, and special arrangements might be made under any alteration of our fiscal policy for a reciprocity with that Republic, which would secure our position in its market. But under present circumstances even that trade does not conduce to the maintenance of our relative power, nor, therefore, to the maintenance of Empire. The Canadian preferential tariff, on the contrary, means preferential employment for British workers against German workers; preferential profit for British capital as against foreign capital; it works directly, so far as it operates, to the relative increase of the trade and revenue, the man-power, money-power, and sea-power of these islands, and makes no less for the security of our commerce than for the strength and permanence of the King's dominions.

IX.

This point goes to the root of the matter. It brings us at once to the crux of Imperial economics and to the political argument under which the whole theory of Free Trade breaks down. We come, in other words, to