Yes; but let those who reproach us with pedantry and with not showing a sympathetic desire to meet the Colonies listen to this:  When such a statement is made by a Minister, is it accepted as a desire on the part of the Government to extend sympathetic treatment to the Colonies?  Not at all.  It is taken as an admission, and used for the purpose of trying to pretend that the Government have abandoned the principle of their opposition to the larger question of Imperial preference.  If, although we think them unsatisfactory, we were, out of complaisance, to accord the small preferences suggested upon dutiable articles, we should be told in a minute that we had given up every logical foothold against preference, and that nothing prevented us imposing a tax on bread and meat except our inability to follow the drift of our own arguments.

I have referred to preference, but there is another proposal.  The right hon. gentleman the Member for St. George’s, Hanover Square, put forward a proposal earlier in the year, and it was renewed in a slightly different form by Mr. Deakin[5] at the Conference.  The proposal was to impose a 1 per cent. ad valorem surtax on all foreign merchandise coming into the ports of the British Empire.  That is the proposal which has been put forward as the least objectionable form of the preferential proposals, and it has been said of it that it was the least objectionable because it gave no loophole for the corruption which may spring up in the wake of the other proposals.

Let me ask the House to examine this proposal for a moment.  Has any serious, civilised Government—­I ask for information—­ever been to the pains and trouble of erecting round their coasts a tariff, with all its complications, with the need of exacting certificates of origin on every class of goods, with the need of demanding strict assessment of all commodities brought to their shores—­has any nation ever erected the vast and complicated network which would be involved in such a duty, simply for the paltry purpose of imposing a duty of 1 per cent.?  I say there is no argument and no reason for such a course, and the only argument which could justify it is the argument used by Dr. Smartt at the Colonial Conference when he said (page 514 of the Blue Book), “The foreigner pays, and we do not.”  Mr. Deakin felt the force of the objection which would be entertained in this country to introducing such a tariff as the right hon. gentleman has proposed, simply for fiscal purposes, and he proceeded to say that Great Britain, if she was a party to such a bargain, should be permitted to raise the money in her own way, and to contribute her proportion to the common fund.  That was a great concession to the self-government of the Mother Country.