get a better market for his manufactures in the Colonies than
in foreign countries that he gives even momentary approval to the idea
of preferential trade. But no Colonist looks forward to his country
remaining for ever the dumping ground for British manufactures. He
wishes, and wisely wishes, to manufacture for himself, and he has
deliberately arranged his tariffs with that end. Towards realising this
ambition it will advance him nothing to shut out the puny Teutonic
infant and let in the British giant. In like manner, if we turn from
manufactures to agriculture we find the same essential divergence of
view. The Colonial producer regards England as the best market for his
meat and corn and butter. But the British farmer wants none of it. If he
is to be ruined by competition from abroad he would as lief that the
last nail were driven into his coffin by Argentine beef as by New
Zealand mutton.

A DREAM OR A NIGHTMARE?

These objections go to the root of the matter, and show how futile it is
to hope that the Mother Country and the Colonies will ever agree on any
scheme of preferential trade. But need we, therefore, sit down
sorrowing? Does the dream of inter-Imperial trade, if we come to
examine it closely, really hold all the beauties that its shadowy shape
suggests? Take it either way. Take the scheme either as an end in
itself, or as a means to an end. As for the first hypothesis, if trade
is itself an end, it matters to us nothing whether we trade with
foreigners or fellow subjects; all we have to think of is the
profitableness, immediate or prospective, of the trade itself. And from
this point of view a growing trade with Germany is worth a good deal
more than a declining trade with Australasia. But most advocates of
inter-Imperial trade would not admit that their dream is an end in
itself. They adopt the second of the two hypotheses just mentioned, and
look upon the expansion of inter-Imperial trade as the most convenient
means of drawing the Colonies closer to the Mother Country, and to one
another.

DOES TRADE UNITE?

With that end no one will quarrel; but how will preferential trade
promote it? The preferentialists assume that mutual trade must of
necessity promote the closer union of different parts of the Empire.
Neither in individual life nor in national life can any fact be found to
support that assumption. A man does not necessarily make a bosom friend
of his baker and his butcher; he may even be a