Under such circumstances the very first object of the foreign policy of the United States should be to place its relations with Canada on a better footing.  There was a time when this object could have been accomplished by the negotiation of a liberal treaty of commercial reciprocity.  If the commercial policy of the United States had been determined by its manifest national interest instead of by the interests of a group of special industries, such a treaty would have been signed many years ago.  A great opportunity was lost when the negotiations failed early in the eighties, because ever since Canada has been tightening her commercial ties with Great Britain; and these ties will be still further tightened as Canada grows into a large grain-exporting country.  But while it will be impossible to make an arrangement as advantageous as the one which might have been made twenty-five years ago, the national interest plainly demands the negotiation of the most satisfactory treaty possible at the present time; and if the special interests of a few industries are allowed to stand indefinitely in the way, we shall be plainly exhibiting our incompetence to carry out an enlightened and a truly national foreign policy.  We shall be branding ourselves with the mark of a merely trading democracy which is unable to subordinate the selfish interests of a few of its citizens to the realization of a policy combining certain commercial advantages with an essential national object.  Just as the maintenance of the present high protective tariff is the clearest possible indication of the domination of special over national interests in domestic politics, so the resolute opposition which these industries show to the use of the tariff as an instrument of a national foreign policy, suggests that the first duty of the United States as a nation is to testify to its emancipation from such bondage by revising the tariff.  The matter concerns not merely Canada, but the South American Republics; and it is safe to say that the present policy of blind protection is an absolute bar to the realization of that improved American political system which is the correlative in foreign affairs of domestic individual and social amelioration.

The desirable result of the utmost possible commercial freedom between Canada and the United States would be to prepare the way for closer political association.  By closer political association I do not mean the annexation of Canada to the United States.  Such annexation might not be desirable even with the consent of Canada.  What I do mean is some political recognition of the fact that the real interests of Canada in foreign affairs coincide with the interests of the United States rather than with the interests of Great Britain.  Great Britain’s interest in the independence of Holland or in the maintenance of the Turkish power in Europe might involve England in a European war, in which Canada would have none but a sentimental stake, but from which she might suffer severe losses.