in the protected markets of Europe and the United States. We shall be helpless to prevent the repetition of that injury in neutral markets, like those of the Far East and South America. In any case the natural development of increased competition from the United States and Japan, possessing geographical advantages and political facilities we cannot equal, must arrest our progress in those regions, as we have seen it arrested during the passing generation upon the European Continent.
The Colonies will join one and all in the world-wide process of closing markets. Instead of possibly tighter tariffs with considerable compensation under preference, we shall have even higher barriers, without any compensation in the shape of preferential scaling-ladders. Secure of free imports in this country under all circumstances, the Colonies would simply be encouraged towards McKinleyism by the system of unconditional free imports, which to all outside the island means Protection with impunity. German and American competition will extend its inroads into the home and colonial markets alike, and British industry, unable to threaten foreign rivalry at the base in any way, will continue to show less vitality in enterprise under the fatal sense of being upon the defensive at all points. Free imports can only end in reducing an island with a comparatively small population, and without a hinterland, to the same position as if it had never founded a colony or possessed one acre of Imperial territory oversea. Our population must become stationary like that of France, and then it must decline, as it depends for its present state of numbers and prosperity upon the exterior trade, which might be diminished indefinitely with lapse of time, and is not adjusted, like the population of France, to the inexhaustible productiveness of the soil.
There can be no political substitute for the unifying influence of preference. In Germany the Zollverein had to precede the Kriegsverein and the restoration of the Reich. In the American Colonies, after the
