Page:The empire and the century.djvu/140

 in the growth of population and of total productive power. What the Navigation Laws did in Adam Smith's days only the policy of Imperial preference as applied to the Colonies—in addition to fiscal reciprocity as applied to foreign nations—can enable us to do now. If Sir Michael Hicks-Beach is correct in his opinion, that a small island with no continental hinterland cannot hold its own—in spite of its unique enjoyment of free imports—against countries which succeed under other economic methods in supporting a far larger number of inhabitants, it follows that we must seek to obtain the cooperation of the Colonies by the necessary change in the existing system of fiscal separatism.

For even if we could secure the assistance of the Colonies as they stand (which would mean the imperfect and scattered federation of some 54,000,000 of white people in the British Empire against the complete and compact federation of over 60,000,000 of inhabitants in Germany and over 80,000,000 in the United States), it would not be enough. The inadequacy appears on the face of the figures. We have still time to make up the ground we have lost, but the problem so long neglected when far simpler of solution has become a question of the first urgency. We have not only to federate with the Colonies. We have to develop the future strength of that federation to the utmost by directing British emigration and attracting foreign emigration to the lands under the British flag, and filling up the empty places of the Empire as the United States peopled the Far West.

This is where the Free Trade theory at its best gives neither help nor light to constructive statesmanship. Free Trade, we are told, means equal benefits—an equal development of power, wealth, and population on both sides. Where one of the sides is foreign, the doctrine of economic equality means clearly a doctrine of political checkmate. In war this means that each country, so far as material forces can decide, has an equal chance of destroying the other. An exchange, for instance, which meant an equal development of German wealth and