selves They are free. They will put up their tariffs as the European countries have done and as the neutral countries are beginning to do, unless we can give them some sufficient inducement to act otherwise. It is a matter of life and death to British commerce that some means should be found to preserve for the manufactures of the Mother Country a preferential passage through the barriers of Inter-imperial Protection. Mr. Chamberlain's most bitter opponent would hardly deny, it may be supposed, that since Free Trade throughout the Empire is not attainable, the main aim of the fiscal movement—keeping itself within the bounds of possibility, reckoning step by step with the concrete, and losing sight of no single interest as it goes—is to establish throughout the Empire the freest trade attainable.
The choice is not between fiscal reform and the status quo, but between an extended preferential system and something far worse than the status quo. That is the fact to be faced, and Mr. Cobden's disciples have never yet faced it. Let us observe the actual working of preference during the seven complete years in which it has been in operation. England and Germany are at a tolerably equal geographical disadvantage in competing with the United States upon the other side of the Atlantic. We have the following comparisons:
| British Exports. | German Exports. | ||
| Million £. | Million £. | ||
| 1898 | 5·8 | 1898 | 1·2 |
| 1899 | 7·0 | 1899 | 1·2 |
| 1900 | 7·6 | 1900 | 1·0 |
| 1901 | 7·8 | 1901 | 1·8 |
| 1902 | 10·8 | 1902 | 1·9 |
| 1903 | 11·1 | 1903 | 1·8 |
| 1904 | 10·6 | 1904 | 1·2 |
German trade remains where it was when preference in Canada was first adopted; British has doubled.
