work here; and the first of them, undoubtedly, was the
protection afforded to our industries by Imperial preference. The time
for tinkering with half-measures had gone by, and, accordingly, the
fiscal belt with which the first really Imperial Parliament girdled the
Empire was made broad and strong. The effect of its application was
gradual, but unmistakable; its benefits grew daily more apparent as the
end of the war approached.

Factories and mills which had long lain idle in the North of England
were hastily refitted, and they added every day to the muster-roll of
hands employed. Our shipping increased by leaps and bounds, but even
then barely kept pace with the increased rate of production. The price
of the quartern loaf rose to sixpence, in place of fivepence; but the
wages of labourers on the land rose by nearly 25 per cent., and the
demand exceeded the supply. Thousands of acres of unprofitable
grass-land and of quite idle land disappeared under the plough to make
way for corn-fields. Wages rose in all classes of work; but that was not
of itself the most important advance. The momentous change was in the
demand for labour of every kind. The statistics prove that while wages
in all trades showed an average increase of 19-1/2 per cent.,
unemployment fell during the year of the Peace to a lower level than it
had ever reached since records were instituted.

In that year the cost of living among working people was 5-1/2 per cent.
higher than it had been five years previously. The total working
earnings for the year were 38-1/2 per cent. greater than in any previous
year. Since then, as we know, expenditure has fallen considerably; but
wages have never fallen, and the total earnings of our people are still
on the up grade.

Another cause of the unprecedented access of prosperity which changed
the face of industrial and agricultural England, was the fact that some
seven-tenths of the trade lost by Germany was now not only carried in
British ships, but held entirely in British hands. Germany's world
markets became Britain's markets, just as the markets of the whole
Empire became our own as the result of preference, and just as the great
oversea countries of the Empire found Britain's home markets, with fifty
million customers, exclusively their own. The British public learned
once and for all, and in one year, the truth that reformers had sought
for a decade to teach us--that the Empire was self-supporting and
self-su