DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 55, 28 November 1929, Page 9

DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRE

“THE TIMES” AND THE TARIFF PROBLEM “If the wanton abolition of preference, worth £2,000,000 a year, accorded to Dominion goods, were to result in any diminution of the Dominion preferences, worth seven times that amount, accorded to British goods, the responsibility of the present Government would be very heavy,” says the London "Times” in a recent leading article. “It must be confessed, however, that the optimism of those who see in these reciprocal preferences the beginning of so-called ‘Empire free trade’ appears extremely precarious. They must persuade the English electorate to agree to a system of tariffs, or their equivalent, whose advocacy has hitherto invited electoral disaster. They must persuade the Dominions to give up a cherished and natural ambition to nurse secondary industries, and to raise by other means that very large part of their revenue now derived from duties on British imports. . . . The conception of the whole Empire, including Great Britain, as a single producing and consuming unit, happily does not depend upon its encirclement by a common fiscal barrier. Sir Granville Ryrie, in his review of Australian production for the past year, points out that two large British firms have recently amalgamated with two Australian iron and steel firms, and that similar Imperial amalgamations have taken place in the fertiliser and rubber industries. This unification of productive interests has proceeded, and can proceed, in spite of the persistency of national tariffs, and is well calculated to secure by natural means a more rapid spread of population. The question therefore arises whether official efforts to promote the sale of Empire goods and individual efforts at rationalisation on an Imperial scale really exhaust the inspiration of the reciprocal impulse to ‘buy from those who buy from us.’ That impulse has just resulted in a potentially very valuable agreement with Argentina, and, if it can produce such fruits in Argentina, why not in the Dominions? An Imperial Economic Conference is clearly best fitted to supply the answer. The sooner it is held the better, for it is only right, if the Labour Government are determined to destroy one method of encouraging Empire trade, that they should give the statesmen of the Empire an opportunity to construct others.”