SECRETARY BLAINFS RECIPROCITY SCHEME.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 2710, 24 July 1891, Page 4

SECRETARY BLAINFS RECIPROCITY SCHEME.

The full purpose and ultimate significance of the reciprocity programme conceived by Mr Blame did not at 6rj<t reveal themselves to the public mind. Even ihe commercial and industrial advantages derivable from such a policy were not instantly and clearly appreciated. Still less was the politie.il significance of a schpme, the most capacious ever formed by an American statesman since Thomas Jefferson planned the purchase of L'jui^ia'ia, at once distinctly recognised. Tit a little reflection must convince us that under the guidance of Secretary Blame we have entered ou a course whose fixed and by no | means distant goal is the acauirement for the United States rf not only commercial but political ascendency throughout the Westsrn Hemisphere. The first decisive step taken toward the unification ia France by the StatesGeneral in 1789 was the abolition of the Internal Custom House which had walled off one province from another in protracted isolation. The basi; of the North German Confederation and of its outgrowth, the present German Empire, was firmly la : d in the Z >\\- verein, which gradually drew together the States of Germany by the cohesive force of common commercial interests. We may go further, and find a still instructive parallel. The foundations of the rapid and tremendons aggrandisement of the Romau Republic— tbe Republic whose history presents so many striking points of likeness to our own — were securely laid from the moment that the Eoraan Senate, having consolidated its power in Italy, began to enter into close commercial relations with the Greek cities of Marseilles and Saguutum in the West, with the Greek States of Sicily and with the and Achaean Leagues on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Such commercial co-opera-tion inevitably led to an assumption of political hfgemony, on the part of the stronger nation, and to a more or less willing acquiescence on the part of weaker people. There is reason to believe that the prospective outcome of this deep policy was discerned from tbe outset by the leaders of tbe Roman Senate, which was unquestionably tbe greatest school of statecraft that the world has seen*

Some years will doubtless pass before the Pan-Americen Zollverein projected by Mr Blame is throughly compacted and ready for effective operation. The interests of England are, of course, "seriously menaced by our reciprocity programme, and it so happens that many of the South American and Central American Commonwealths have long been accustomed to find in Great Britiau a market for their exports and a reciprocal purveyor of their imports. We must expect to find British influence exceptionally powerful and hard to overcome Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and Valparaiso ; but we have already overthrown the agelong commercial supremacy of Ergland in Brazil, iv Venezuela, in Peru, iv Mexico and Guatemala. — N.Y.Sun.