against foreign goods. This would act as an automatic compensation for every new development of colonial manufacture. What is meant may be still more clearly explained. Even the most highly protected States have still a large import of foreign manufactured goods. As their primary industries arise their wealth increases, and import continues—supplying social luxuries by the more refined forms of foreign manufacture, and more complex economic needs by the machinery of more advanced production. Finished imports never perish under Protection, they only change their character; and if in the United States, the French, and the German and other markets we had a preference over all other outside competitors, our now declining trade with what the Inquiry Blue-books call 'the chief protected countries' would be greater than ever. It does not so much matter, if preference prevails, what the Colonies do with their general tariffs. We hope they will keep them low. But so long as we enjoy a substantial relative advantage over all foreign competitors—'preference' pure and simple—our trade with the colonial markets must remain secure and progressive.
XV.
2. That preference to the Colonies would injure our foreign trade connections.
How? Has American Protection injured its foreign trade, which is expanding in all directions? Is it not the fact that the exports of France under the Méline tariff have been advancing, in spite of her stationary population, at a more rapid rate than our own? And has not Germany increased her export of manufactured goods by 50 per cent. in the last twenty years? Is there any protected country to be named in the world whose foreign trade under the tariff is receding? Is Japan declining under the low average tariff which is almost exactly what Mr. Chamberlain proposes? If he proposed twice that rate our foreign competitors would
