Examine that list. Remember that, with immense territories and thin population, making the collection of direct taxation disproportionately expensive and difficult, the Colonies must depend in the main upon import duties for their revenue. It will then appear that the Mother Country could not expect better tariff treatment than she gets. Nor does all the burthen even of these low rates fall upon us. So far as the Colonies have not yet got competing manufactures of their own—for they are still largely without them, and it will take a very long time to establish them—the colonists themselves pay the tax. The tariff does not fall on British goods at all. But, in any case, compare the 17 per cent. rate in Canada with the 73 per cent. rate in the United States. Compare the Australian and South African 6 per cent. with the Russian 131 per cent., or the Argentine 28 per cent. We keep India to the 3 per cent. by force, and by force alone, and we give her no equivalent, but tax her tea exactly as we do Chinese. In India the very name of Free Trade, as Lord George Hamilton has admitted and every Anglo-Indian knows, 'is loathed' accordingly, and that condition of things, if unaltered, will eventually prove the greatest danger to our dominion.[1]
In short, it must appear that to give wheat, meat, and wool from Russia, the United States, and Argentina the same treatment that we extend to Canada, Australia, and South Africa in return for their much more favourable treatment of our manufactures is a singularly inverted idea of reciprocity. By the tariff conditions obvious upon the face of the figures, every development of population and cultivation in the self-governing Colonies must be from fivefold to tenfold and twentyfold more favourable to the expansion of British trade than any similar extension of population and cultivation outside the flag. Preference, even upon the present basis of colonial tariffs, or upon anything like that basis, could not benefit colonial production without benefiting to an equivalent extent the
- ↑ It is in this sense that the Bengal boycott shows the danger-signal to Lancashire.
