o find ourselves
unprepared when the next Conference meets. A cordial social welcome,
many toasts, many dinners, are all very well in their way, but they
are not enough. What is wanted is a real understanding of what our
fellow countrymen across the seas are driving at, and a real attempt
to meet them in their efforts to keep us a united family. All that our
present rulers seem able to do is to misunderstand, and therefore
unconsciously to misrepresent--I do not question their good
intentions, but I think they are struck with mental blindness in this
matter--to misrepresent the attitude of the colonists and greatly to
exaggerate the difficulties of meeting them half-way. The speeches of
Ministers on a question like that of Colonial Preference leave upon me
the most deplorable impression. One would have thought that, if they
could not get over the objections which they feel to meeting the
advances of our kinsmen, they would at least show some sort of regret
at their failure. But not a bit of it. Their one idea all along has
been to magnify the difficulties in the way in order to make party
capital out of the business. They saw their way to a good cry about
"taxing the food of the people," the big and the little loaf, and so
forth, and they went racing after it, regardless of everything but its
electioneering value. From first to last there has been the same
desire to make the worst of things, sometimes by very disingenuous
means. First of all it was said that there was "no Colonial offer."
But when the representatives of the Colonies came here, and all in the
plainest terms offered us preference for preference, this device
evidently had to be abandoned. So then it was asserted that, in order
to give preference to the Colonies, we must tax raw materials. But
this move again was promptly checkmated by the clear and repeated
declaration of the Colonial representatives that they did not expect
us to tax raw materials. And so nothing was left to Ministers,
determined as they were to wriggle out of any agreement with the
Colonies at all costs, except to fall back on the old, weary
parrot-cry--"Will you tax corn?" "Will you tax butter?" and so on
through the whole list of articles of common consumption, the taxation
of any one of which was thought to be valuable as an electioneering
bogey.

For my own part, I am not the least bit frightened by any of these
questions. If I am asked whether I would tax this or tax that, it may