Imperial Preference, and this decision has given the greatest satisfaction to business men here and in the Dominion and Colonies. We are all waiting to see what they will do as regards dumping. We are all against dumping, even the free traders, but just exactly how to tackle. the problem effectually is not so obvious. If there is one thing more difficult than another in the realm of international trade it is to find a

practical method of preventing dumping by means of legislative enactment. What we really need is a tariff scientifically drawn, and this must be a work of time. The policy of protection by restrictive order has not worked well. It has created friction with our Allies and caused much embarrassment to our manufacturers and others.

The Budget has been hailed with general satisfaction, probably because many people expected more taxation, especially in the income tax. Of course, the feature of the Chancellor's proposals was the introduction of Imperial Preference. England has definitely broken with the past, laissez faire, and all the old Manchester theories. We are to give a preference to the Empire ranging from one-sixth to one-third lower duty for Empire products. The one-third class includes motorcars, watches, musical instruments, etc., and it will be given by way of reduction on existing duties on Colonial products, and not by way of surcharge on foreign imports. The House of Commons received the proposals with equanimity, and

free traders contented themselves by solemnly warning the Chancellor that this was the thin edge of the wedge and the beginning of setting up tariff walls in the United Kingdom.

As Mr. Chamberlain pointed out he was, in this respect, only carrying out the principles and decisions. arrived at, at the Imperial War Conference, and at the Paris Economic Conference. The country accepts the Chancellor's proposals cheerfully as a slight return for the gallant aid accorded by our Colonial kinsmen during the war. The free trade press is equally agreeable, the London Chronicle remarking that "bearing in mind that the principle had been already conceded, we think it should be recognized that the thin end of the wedge is very thin indeed, and we need not be unduly nervous about a hypothetical wedge behind it."

Steel manufacturers are very gloomy about the future of the industry in England. The chairman of the Barrow Hematite Steel Company, one of the biggest concerns here, says that if the industry is to be carried on, labor must take less wages, or there must be a tariff, which must keep out competing foreign goods. "If," he says, "wages and costs of production generally remain at the present high figure, and we have no tariffs, competing products will simply wipe us out in a very short time, with the exception of a comparatively small number of the better situated plants."

To show the trend of thought and policy of the Government, I may say that in view of the large amount of unemployment in the paper-making industry, imports of paper and paper goods are prohibited from countries outside the Empire, except by special license, and then only under restrictions as to quan

GERMAN

One hundred years before Christ 300,000 Germans invaded France, murdering, burning, pillaging as they went. At Aix-en-Provence they were stopped and defeated. They sued for peace and swore they would never do it again. Sixty years afterward 240,000 Germans invaded the Jura district of France. Six years later 400,000 Germans invaded the territory between the Meuse and the Oise. They were beaten. They swore they would never do it again.

Sixty years before Christ the Germans invaded the left bank of the Rhine. Two hundred and thirty years after Christ the Germans invaded France. They were beaten. They swore they would never do it again. Twenty years later in another invasion, another defeat, another solemn pledge "never again." In 274 A. D. the Rhone basin was invaded by the Germans; in 275 Northeastern France. In 301 Langres was pillaged. The invaders were beaten and they swore "never again." In 351 they reconquered the left bank of the Rhine. In 354 they devastated Lyons, in 360 Bes

tity. Many imports of paper goods are totally prohibited.

The prospective sugar growers and manufacturers in this country have just had an interview with the responsible cabinet minister as to the future of the industry here, and have come away from the interview "quite satisfied." F. C. Chappell.

PROMISES.

acon. In 364 they invaded and plundered Belgium.

Here is the chronology of the subsequent invasions: 372, 382, 400, 410, 413, 800, 858, 978, 1124, 1214, 1513, 1521, 1523, 1536, 1544, 1552, 1553, 1567, 1569, 1576, 1587, 1636, 1674, 1675, 1707, 1708, 1744, 1792, 1793, 1814, 1815, 1870, 1914. Thirtythree invasions in a little over fifteen hundred years, an average of one invasion every fifty years.

Whenever they were successful, the Germans celebrated with unspeakable atrocities. Whenever they were beaten they swore they would never do it again.

"Le Matin," which prints the above statistics, recalls that three days before the outbreak of the world war, Herr Haase, the German Socialist leader, solemnly declared at Brussels that the German proletariat would oppose war to the utmost. Three days later Herr Haase voted for the war budget.

Four and a half years ago, the

Germans Germans again invaded France. Again they were beaten. And now they swear they will never do it again.

limit to the latitude of the Council in this respect; and from his history, is there any doubt that Mr. Wilson would approve such an arrangement?

Mr. Wilson has said that he had a single-track mind. Those who know his career, know that it is the mind of the single-track plantationist; and they are able satisfactorily to account for every puzzling act of his administration on that ground, not excepting his otherwise. inexplicable attitude towards the Huns during the first years of the

war.

Single-track

plantationism has

had a definite statesmanship behind it almost ever since the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. Up to that period, the raising of cotton by slave labor in America did not pay. Mr. Wilson himself tells us that the Whitney gin "enabled even an unskilful slave to cleanse a thousand pounds of cotton of its tenacious seed in a single day. Without it, he had been able to cleanse but five or six pounds." (History of the American People, Vol. 3, p. 252.)

Upon this invention, a vision of boundless wealth arose to the plantationist's imagination. The South contained some 448,000,000 of cotton-producing acres (Encyc. Brit.), which was land enough to supply the whole world with cotton for centuries to come. And the world should be his market. He would monopolize it; keep back every rival and then get such prices for cotton as he pleased. Furthermore, cotton could be supplemented with rice,

tobacco and sugar; perhaps other things; and all together here would be a field for riches beyond the dreams of avarice. But there was one thing necessary from the start: A producing cost as low as or a trifle lower than that of any other cotton country; and there were thirty-five of these countries.

To be sure, the other countries were not so well located as to worldtransportation facilities as our own Southern cotton fields, traversed as they were by rivers, indented by bayous opening into rivers and fringed by the great ocean itself. Nevertheless, once they were well started in the raising of cotton, these other countries, helped by their coolie or peon labor, would be dangerous rivals. Therefore, in the plantationist view, slavery became indispensable, together with conditions which, so far as possible, would limit the demand for white labor to that from the plantationists themselves, purchasing products not embraced in the plantation category; since any increase in plantation cost would be a handicap against American and in favor of foreign-raised cotton. The hostility of the plantationist to multi-industrialism dates from the moment when this plan was formed in his mind. As long ago as 1820, or about a century, the planters of Charleston, South Carolina, memorialized Congress against the injustice of increasing the value of labor by multiplying industries and therefore the labor demand, through encouraging tariffs, claiming that any increase

in Northern wages above wages in England, for instance, because of the tariff, was equivalent to wringing a bounty from the planters equal to the difference in wages thus promoted (Annals of Congress, 1820, 1821, p. 1507.); because the planters were prevented by the tariff from purchasing English products at at English costs. This was the position of later plantation statesmen, like Calhoun, Hayne, and McDuffie -splendid men, all, but victims of the instinct of self-preservation. (Congressional Debates, Vol. 8, 8, p. 3827.)

The plantationists were honest, and from their standpoint, reasonable, when they maintained that the right to buy plantation supplies in the cheapest markets was the principle upon which depended their success in monopolizing the world's market for cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar. They tolerated tariffs merely for revenue purposes, strictly limited to government needs; revenue-only tariffs being recognized by them as free-trade tariffs; earlier, on the authority of John C. Calhoun himself, the great South Carolinian free trader, who had formerly been a protectionist (Curtiss, "Industrial Development of Nations," Vol. II, p. 310); and, later, on that of Professor William G. Sumner, of Yale, also a radical free trader. (Protectionism, p. 17.).

The free trade plantation tenet was supplemented by that for free seas; which was further both logical and necessary, since a sea blockade would handicap American cot

ton as effectually as Northern protection; and both free trade and free seas are laid down as leading principles in the plantation presidential platform of 1856.

It is easy to understand the passionate devotion of the plantationist to these principles, once the underlying fact is seen. It is simply because of a strong reaction in behalf of self-preservation. The Union which so entangled him with the destinies of the multi-track industrialists became irksome to him. In South Carolina he started to secede in 1832 but was temporarily held back by the Clay Compromise, which displaced in stages, by free trade, the protective tariff law of 1832. In 1844. he won with Polk by a campaign of deceit, crying Protection in the North and Free Trade in the South; and in 1846, by a coalition with the Cobden people in Great Britain, simultaneously put this country on a free trade footing, with the repealing of the Corn Laws by Great Britain, thereby opening the ports here for British manufactures in exchange for the opening of the ports there to cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar and other Southern products, incidentally, of course, also to Northern wheat and provisions. In 1860 he seceded, no doubt by concert with Great Britain for her support, inasmuch as Great Britain fitted our cruisers for the destruction of Northern merchant ships; and thereupon adopted a constitution insuring free trade and slavery forever. In 1892, for the first time since the Civil War, he came into