could prove that Tariff Reform really means this, or that it would necessarily lead to this. But Tariff Reformers do not contemplate an insular protection without the broader attempt to guide and direct it in the light of a national and an Empire ideal. A simple beginning indeed in this wider preferential protection might be made at any time by giving to our Government, through its trade and fiscal committees, the power to institute a small protective duty upon foreign goods necessary to Britain which are in the meantime imported from both Empire and non-Empire sources. In its essence in fact the tariff of the reformers is, as Mr. L. S. Amery, M.P., puts it in his important pamphlet upon the Fallacies of Free Trade, a

tariff designed to change the character of our imports and our exports in order to include the volume of our home production. The object of our tariff is selection, not exclusion. It will be framed to check the import of those manufactured goods which displace home industry, in order to stimulate and increase the import of those raw materials which are the life and sustenance of our home industry.

As for the second point, Tariff Reformers (going back as they do in their thought to List and to the German Historical School of political economy) see as a rule that mankind has made its main advances in groups and in federations and in nations, and that people who lose their cohesiveness and their social consciousness' invariably begin to retrograde. And, of course, in the group mere economic activity is generally subordinated to political and social considerations of one kind or another, to ideals' in fact, as in the case, say, of China or Russia or Germany. Our third point may perhaps be left to speak for itself as it stands.

As for the fourth point, Tariff Reform, as has been partly indicated, does not mean a blind, selfish, fifty-or-eighty-per-cent. tax upon everything entering into our country, including raw materials. It would not tax raw material at all, and it would lower the taxes that at present exist upon tea, sugar, cocoa, tobacco -quite important things to the average man.

And as for the fifth point, that of the supposed total change in our traditional nineteenth-century business policy (at bottom really only the economic aspect of the famous revolutionary attempt to get back to nature in everything), Tariff Reform does not mean anything like the quixotic attempt it is said to be to reform the very nature of things, to arrest the stars in their courses and with them the general march of mankind. It is rather simply a very wholesome and liberating change in the conceptions and dogmas of political and economic theory, akin to that which has now at last taken place in the concepts and dogmas that obtained

in other sciences like theology and medicine and education. Economic dogmas like Free Trade,' or the 'mobility of labour,' or the free territorial distribution of industry,' are in no sense legislative prescripts or adamantine laws of nature. They are only postulates or conceptions, like 'Evolution' and the various supposed laws' of physics and chemistry that help us to unravel the complex world in which we find ourselves. An expert

economist is as such no more capable of running' a country's business or of freeing England from its social evils than is an expert physiologist of curing people from the thousand complex diseases that beset our human life.

And, again, speaking from the standpoint of the self-governing dominions, Tariff Reform does not mean such an impossible revision of their fiscal arrangements as to allow of, say, the free import of British manufactures (the thing, however, that the Cobdenites expected to see everywhere as a mere matter of course). Equally little does it mean an endless bargaining and wrangling within the Empire about mutual concessions and mutual business favours, but rather simply the possibility of Great Britain being able to make here and there such trading arrangements as the component parts of the Empire have now for some time been making on their own initiative.

Another strange thing about our present political and social atmosphere is the contradiction that seems to exist between our half-fearful imitation of Germany in the matter of our naval policy, and our failure either to imitate or to try somehow to get at the real reasons of Germany's remarkable industrial and social development since 1870. The things of which one naturally thinks in this connexion are the thoroughly efficient character of German education from many different points of view, the profound belief of the German Government in expert information of all kinds (particularly in information bearing upon trade and industrial development), Germany's scientific treatment of social and municipal problems, and its ability to use the scientific information that it possesses about most of its industries on account of its national and protective policy. You can certainly afford to endow science and research with a view to their economic application when you are sure that your industry will not be swept out of existence by unregulated foreign competition.

Enough has perhaps now been said to suggest that some at least of the chief difficulties that beset the path of the Tariff Reformers are to be found in a prejudice against looking into the various facts and considerations that bear upon the point. As in the case of the splendid educational work done some fourteen years ago in the United States by way of combating

the folly of the Free Silver' agitation, so we English people may soon have on foot an educative campaign in regard to the problems and the mistakes that have arisen out of our FreeTrade philosophy when foolishly construed as a piece of practical politics. It is, to be sure, already educative' to reflect that the Liberalism of to-day is itself so far along the path of State supervision of the conduct of Labour. It is surely but another step along that same path to adopt the policy of State supervision of the development of industry and of business, to make these things also subservient, as far as possible, to our national life in the Empire. It is also educative to remember that it is in the main the Tory or the Unionist party that has been progressive enough to suggest the adoption of a system which has been by their critics impertinently and ignorantly set aside as mere American methods. Years ago the writer used to hear Mr. Chamberlain talked of in the United States-so well do some Americans know this country as well as their own-as obviously 'the American' in English politics. Well, we certainly require in our own country a healthy infusion of American practicality, and of American efficiency and American wisdom in safeguarding national resources and national productive power.

And, of course, as we all know, the one name that arouses enthusiasm in all our dominions as that of an Englishman who was unprejudiced enough to see and to adopt the Colonial point of view about the upbuilding of a community, and possibly of the Empire itself, is that of Mr. Chamberlain. Where would Canada have been to-day without Protection? And did she not recently show both courage and idealism in putting aside temporary economic advantage for the sake of the sincerity of her belief in the Empire, and in trade within the Empire? And it was not, by the way, merely the matter, as it is sometimes said, of her own 'interests' that determined her in her recent decision against 'Reciprocity' with the United States. For the Empire is from her point of view still very largely 'in the making,' and so in her decision she chose to walk by faith' rather than by sight."

Of those who prefer to blunder along in the old patch-work method, attempting to improve our social condition here and there, who refuse to look upon our national conditions in the light of the successful policy of other peoples and of our own dominions, we would simply ask the question: What reform can you think of as penetrating and as thorough-going as Tariff Reform with Imperial Preference? How otherwise can we help ourselves or be helped by the Colonial Empire that is our heritage from the eighteenth century, and from the days of the famous Elizabethan voyages of discovery. All other reforms, the present attack upon

'privilege' for example, are necessarily self-limiting. What will you do when people will not-we are told that this is the case in Scotland at present-go on buying land or investing money in business in this country? And what will you do in the policy of insuring working men out of the proceeds of their work, when their work and employment go from them through conditions over which they, poor fellows, have almost no control.

Another self-limiting remedy to which people in Great Britain may still despairingly cling is increased emigration. And, of course, anyone who has lived in the great West, either of America or of Canada, has again and again the feeling, on walking through the streets and lanes of England, that the best thing that could happen to thousands of her people would be an immediate transportation to Chicago or to Winnipeg or to British Columbia. And even with Tariff Reform there would still be a place for a moderate and a wisely supervised emigration-possibly of more benefit to the Empire and to England than at present. But what, for example, is to become of Scotland if the present grave exodus of her sons is to continue-an exodus that brings every emigrant to Montreal with the words upon his lips, that the old country is a 'done country'? We who live there know all this, and think that we see what is behind it, for we meet those people daily. How, too, does such an exodus square with the assertion that British trade and industry [which ought, by the way, to include agriculture] were never better off than they have recently been.

It is really time, perhaps, for both political parties in England to see that the day is not far distant when they may be obliged to form a sort of coalition against the extreme demands of Socialist labour. Carried far enough, these demands will certainly pull down the house of Great Britain about the ears of the labourers, as well as about the ears of those who seek meantime to be their friends for to-day, regardless of the future. And if such a coalition could some day tell working-men that the whole country is really facing the future through the question of the future of their work and the conditions of their permanent employment, would not this look like the true way of enlisting their interest in England and in the Empire?

A closing reflexion may be added in respect of a question that is often upon the lips of many-Why make things at home. at protection prices if we can get them more cheaply ('dumped down') from abroad? On the Free-Trade assumption those people would be right-if we had endless other industries at home, producing things that we exchanged for those imported goods. But the point is, that, owing to the fact of the warfare that seems (whether we like it or not) to characterise all life,

other nations are attacking all the economic sinews of our country. And if things go on as they often seem to the visitor and to the foreign merchant to be going on, this country will in the future become more and more a place of residence for the privileged, for rentiers, for retired investors, with the submerged tenth as their servants and labourers and agents of one kind or another.

Even on the Liberal side in politics a' career' is to-day largely a thing for the privileged and the fortunate, for brains and money perhaps, or for these things in some sort of working association with the great and the powerful, with interests,' with the beati possidentes.

W. CALDWELL.