promise made five years ago to Canada that
she, with the other Dominions, should have a relative preference in our
markets for her products. In so far as that plan involved an advantage
to our own Dominions over the Allies who, equally with them, bore with
us the heat and burden of the war, it was as impolitic as it was unjust,
and as unflattering as it was impolitic, inasmuch as it assumed that the
Dominions wanted a "tip" as a reward for their splendid comradeship.

As it turns out, the one concession that Canada really wanted was the
removal of the invidious embargo on Canadian store cattle in our ports.
And whereas a promise to that effect was actually given by the tariffist
Coalition during the war, it is only after five years that the promise
is about to be reluctantly fulfilled. It was a promise, be it observed,
of _free importation_, and it is fulfilled only out of very shame. It
may be surmised, indeed, that the point of the possible lifting of the
Canadian embargo was used during the negotiations with Ireland to bring
the Sister State to terms; and that its removal may lead to new trouble
in that direction. But that is another story, with which Free Traders
are not concerned. Their withers are unwrung.

SCIENCE AND EXPERIENCE

On the total survey, then, the case for Free Trade is not only unshaken,
it is stronger than ever before, were it only because many of the enemy
have visibly lost faith in their own cause. The Coalition, in which
professed Liberals were prepared to sacrifice something of Free Trade to
colleagues who were pledged in the past to destroy it, has quailed
before the insuperable practical difficulties which arise the moment the
scheme of destruction is sought to be framed.

All that has resulted, after four and a half years, is a puerile
tinkering with three or four small industries--a tinkering that is on
the face of it open to suspicion of political corruption. To intelligent
Free Traders there is nothing in it all that can give the faintest
surprise. They knew their ground. The doctrine of Free Trade is
_science_, or it is nothing. It is not a passing cry of faction, or a
survival of prejudice, but the unshakable inference of a hundred years
of economic experience verifying the economic science on which the great
experiment was founded.

On the other hand, let me say, the tactic of tinkering with Free Trade
under a system of special committees who make decisions that only the
House