absolutely vital to any consideration of
Imperial preference. Although it is no doubt a very good answer, when
the direct question is raised,--What are your notions? to say that the
Colonies would leave that to the Mother Country, those who urge upon
us a system of reciprocal preference are bound to face the conclusions
of their own policy, and are bound to recognise that that request, if
it is to be given effect to in any symmetrical, logical, complete,
satisfactory, or even fair and just manner, must involve new taxes to
us on seven or eight staple articles of consumption in this country. I
lay it down, without hesitation, that no fair system of Imperial
preference can be established which does not include taxes on bread,
on meat, on that group of food-stuffs classified under the head of
dairy produce, on wool and leather, and on other necessaries of
industry.

If that be so, seven or eight new taxes would have to be imposed to
give effect to this principle you have brought before us. Those taxes
would have to figure every year in our annual Budget. They would have
to figure in the Budget resolutions of every successive year in the
House of Commons. There will be two opinions about each of these
taxes; there will be those who like them and favour the principle, and
who will applaud the policy, and there will be those who dislike them.
There will be the powerful interests which will be favoured and the
interests which will be hurt by their adoption. So you will have, as
each of those taxes comes up for the year, a steady volume of
Parliamentary criticism directed at it.

Now that criticism will, I imagine, flow through every channel by
which those taxes may be assailed. It will seek to examine the value,
necessarily in a canvassing spirit, of the Colonial Preferences as a
return for which these taxes are imposed. It will seek to dwell upon
the hardship to the consumers in this country of the taxes themselves.
It will stray farther, I think, and it will examine the contributions
which the self-governing Dominions make to the general cost of
Imperial defence; and will contrast those contributions with a severe
and an almost harsh exactitude with the great charges borne by the
Mother Country.

There has just been a debate upon that subject in the House of
Commons; but the manner in which that question when raised was
received by the whole House, ought, I think, to give great
satisfaction to the representatives of the