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 self-governing Dominions.  We then refused to embark upon a policy of casting-up balances as between the Colonies and the Mother Country, and, speaking on behalf of the Colonial Office, I said that the British Empire existed on the principles of a family and not on those of a syndicate.  But the introduction of those seven or eight taxes into the Budget of every year will force a casting-up of balances every year from a severe financial point of view.  It has been said, and will be generally admitted, that there is no such thing in this country as an anti-Colonial party.  It does not exist.  Even parties, like the Irish Party, not reconciled to the British Government, who take no part in our public ceremonial, are glad to take opportunities of showing the representatives of the self-governing Dominions that they welcome them here, and desire to receive them with warmth and with cordiality.  But I cannot conceive any process better calculated to manufacture an anti-Colonial party, than this process of subjecting to the scrutiny of the House of Commons year by year, through the agency of taxation, the profit and loss account, in its narrow, financial aspect, of the relations of Great Britain and her Dominions and dependencies.