t daggers drawn with his
tailor. As for nations it might almost be said that there is the least
love exchanged between those who exchange most goods. We are splendid
customers to France; we buy French goods with open hands and ask for
more, yet where is the love of France for England? Never for a moment do
the French cease to gird at us and to try and thwart our national
projects solely because we are doing in Egypt what they have done in
Tunis and are on the way to do in Madagascar. Germany, on the other
hand, is one of our best customers; yet at the beginning of this year,
when there seemed to be a chance of war with Germany, a feeling of
elation ran through the whole of England. One more illustration: when in
December, 1895, President Cleveland's Message aroused all decent folk on
both sides the Atlantic to protest that war between the United Kingdom
and the United States was impossible, was it of trade interests that all
men thought, or of the tie of common blood? Or, again, did Canada pause
to calculate that her best customer was her Southern neighbour, or did
she for a moment weigh that fact against the loyalty she owed to the
Mother Country?

A NEXUS STRONGER THAN CASH.

The simple truth is that trade has no feelings. We all of us buy and
sell to the best advantage we can, and on the whole we do wisely. It is
a shrewd saying that warns men to beware of business transactions with
their own kinsfolk; nor do we need a prophet to tell us that an attempt
to fetter Colonial trade for our own benefit may lose us more affection
than it wins us custom. After all, why worry? Our world-embracing
commerce is to-day as prosperous as ever it has been. The loyalty of our
Colonists no one questions. Let well alone. Our industrial success has
not hitherto been dependent on favouring tariffs, nor is there the
slightest evidence that old age has yet laid his hand upon our powers.
As for the closer union between our Colonists and ourselves, it will
hardly be promoted by asking them to sacrifice their commercial freedom
to increase the profits of our manufacturers, nor by taxing our food to
please their farmers. It is indeed a sign of little faith to even look
for a new bond of empire in an arrangement of tariffs. The tie that
binds our Colonists to us will not be found in any ledger account, nor
is ink the fluid in which that greater Act of Union is writ.

CHAPTER VII.

CONCLUSION.

In the foregoing pages I have been