Page:The empire and the century.djvu/154

 Mr. Chamberlain and his supporters have definitely proposed that preference shall operate, it may be said without exaggeration that if the great self-governing Colonies were now engaged in supplying the vast bulk of our imported grain and meat, they would possess double their present white population. Preference would turn the flow of agricultural emigrants—the stream of human irrigation—towards the uncultivated tracts of the Empire. If combined as it must be with adequate support of enterprises like that of the British Cotton Growing Association, it would enhance the value of every tropical dependency we possess. These neutral markets within the Empire would of course remain neutral and become continually richer, increasing their capacity to consume finished articles parallel with their ability to supply raw produce.

Our commercial competitors would still enjoy fairer treatment in our market than we have had for many years in their markets. Our predominance in maritime trade would be secure for as long as there is need to calculate. And with commercial security would come political security. Preference would so accelerate the filling up of the Colonies that within half a lifetime we might expect their combined population to equal that of the Mother Country. Their national self-consciousness would be intensified with their growth. None of them under the modern conditions of Weltpolitik would be strong enough to stand alone.

Linked with the Mother Country and with each other in an Imperial Sea League, financed in every portion of the Empire by a small taxation of imports, as Mr. Hofmeyr suggested at the first Jubilee Conference, their position would be once for all unassailable. The unpeopled parts of the King's dominions will be to the twentieth century what the Far West of the United States was to the nineteenth, and the relative political and financial strength of the Britannic Commonwealth could only increase with time. Upon some similar basis alone is the permanence of the Empire thinkable. For Colonies, in Turgot's phrase, are no