If, from circumstances which we may easily imagine, any of the great staple articles which were the subject of preference should be driven up in price to an unusual height, there would be a demand—­and I think an irresistible demand—­in this country that the tax should be removed.  The tax would bear all the unpopularity.  People would say:  “This, at any rate, we can take off, and relieve the burden which is pressing so heavily upon us.”  But now see the difficulty in which we should then be involved.  At present all our taxes are under our own control.  An unpopular tax can be removed; if the Government will not remove it they can be turned out and another Government to remove the tax can be got from the people by election.  It can be done at once.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer can come down to the House and the tax can be repealed if there is a sufficiently fierce demand for it.

But these food taxes by which you seek to bind the Empire together—­these curious links of Empire which you are asking us to forge laboriously now—­would be irremovable, and upon them would descend the whole weight and burden of popular anger in time of suffering.  They would be irremovable, because fixed by treaty with self-governing Dominions scattered about all over the world, and in return for those duties we should have received concessions in Colonial tariffs on the basis of which their industries would have grown up tier upon tier through a long period of time.

Although, no doubt, another Conference hastily assembled might be able to break the shackle which would fasten us—­to break that fiscal bond which would join us together and release us from the obligation—­that might take a great deal of time.  Many Parliaments and Governments would have to be consulted, and all the difficulties of distance would intervene to prevent a speedy relief from that deadlock.  If the day comes in this country when you have a stern demand—­and an overwhelming demand of a Parliament, backed by a vast population suffering acutely from high food-prices—­that the taxes should be removed, and on the other hand the Minister in charge has to get up and say that he will bring the matter before the next Colonial Conference two years hence, or that he will address the representatives of the Australian or Canadian Governments through the agency of the Colonial Office, and that in the meanwhile nothing can be done—­when you have produced that situation, then, indeed, you will have exposed the fabric of the British Empire to a wrench and a shock which it has never before received, and which any one who cares about it, cannot fail to hope that it may never sustain.