theories and conflicting interests a
new ideal and a new reality had developed. The policy of imperial
cooperation--the policy whereby each great colony became independent of
outside control but voluntarily acted in concert with the mother country
and the sister states on matters of common concern--sought to reconcile
liberty and unity, nationhood and empire, to unite what was most
practicable in the aims of the advocates of independence and the
advocates of imperial federation. The movement developed unevenly. At
the outbreak of the Great War, it was still incomplete. The ideal was
not always clearly or consciously held in the Empire itself and was
wholly ignored or misunderstood in Europe and even in the United States.
Yet in twenty years' space it had become dominant in practice and theory
and had built up a new type of political organization, a virtual league
of nations, fruitful for the future ordering of the world.

The three fields in which this new policy was worked out were trade,
defense, and political organization. Canada had asserted her right to
control her tariff and commercial treaty relations as she pleased.
Now she used this freedom to offer, without asking any return in kind,
tariff privileges to the mother country. In the first budget brought
down by the Minister of Finance in the Laurier Cabinet, William S.
Fielding, a reduction, by instalments, of twenty-five per cent in tariff
duties was offered to all countries with rates as low as Canada's--that
is, to the United Kingdom and possibly to the Netherlands and New South
Wales. The reduction was meant both as a fulfilment of the Liberal
party's free trade pledges and as a token of filial good will to
Britain. It was soon found that Belgium and Germany, by virtue of their
special treaty rights, would claim the same privileges as Britain, and
that all other countries with most favored nation clauses could then
demand the same rates. This might serve the free trade aims of the
Fielding tariff but would block its imperial purpose. If this purpose
was to be achieved, these treaties must be denounced. To effect this
was one of the tasks Laurier undertook in his first visit to England in
1897.

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, celebrating the sixtieth
anniversary of her reign, was made the occasion for holding the
third Colonial Conference. It was attended by the Premiers of all the
colonies. Among them Wilfrid Laurier, or Sir Wilfrid as he now becam