THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY OCTOBER 12, 1903. IMPERIAL FOOD SUPPLY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12399, 12 October 1903, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY OCTOBER 12, 1903. IMPERIAL FOOD SUPPLY.

We recently drew attention to the importance of connecting preferentialism and settlement, so that the secure market which Mr. Chamberlain's policy, if consistently carried out, -would give to colonial producers might be made to foster colonisation, extend the areas of cultivation within the Empire, keep down food prices and- increase the Imperial market for British goods. We hope to find that Mr. Seddon, who does not ordinarily fail to advise the Imperial authority because of timidity, will keep the colonisation necessities of the Empire before those in high places, so that the Empire's waste lands may not be merely settled under the impulse of preferentialism.} but settled by men and women of our own British stock. We cannot consider it altogether satisfactory that of 113,000 immigrants into Canada during the first nine months of the current year, only 43,000 should have been from Great Britain. This is but a few thousand more than went from the- continent of Europe and only a third more than went from the United States. This is a phase of the question worth attention. If we are-to have fiscal preference to Imperial goods, there should be land-settlement preference to the Imperial people. We | certainly do not want to see a Cana- | dian province become another Bohemia or our own North of Auckland beccme another Wallachia simply for lack of that organisation by which our own British population could be -"transplanted easily and swiftly from the crowded parts of the Empire-to its fertile wastes. Only a few days since our cable messages informed us that Russia had arranged to plant a million colonists upon the Amur River, on the Manchurian border. We do not suppose that in our complicated civilisation, with its specialised trades and infinite industrial distinctions, capable colonists can be gathered together as readily as in a barbaric country like Russia, where there are very few special callings, and where nine men out of ten are users of the soil. But we should be able to organise sufficient emigration from Britain to the colonies for all that. Without such organisation mutually arranged between the Home and the colonial Governments, no preferential movement can be regarded as complete.

For if we sift to the bottom the fiscal problem, now being so powerfully presented to the people of Scotland by Mr. Chamberlain, we must see that its satisfactory solution depends upon the probability of 'our making the Empire mainly selfsupporting. When Mi*. Cobden preached his crusade against protection he directed his main attack against the Corn Laws. It was because of the public indignation against the Corn Laws that Cobden triumphed and Free Trade became the fiscal gospel of the United Kingdom. But; the fiscal sitiiatior was absolutely the reverse of what it is to-day. There being then little wheat grown in British colonies, and less thought of it being grown there in great quantities, the alternative of preferentialism was not thought of. ' The corn produced with the protected area being hopelessly short of requirements and the land being utterly incapable of producing sufficient to in any way meet requirements, the tax was added to " the price of bread. It doubled, and sometimes trebled, the cost of the loaf, while the only persons who benefited were those who owned the very limited corn-lands of the United Kingdom. To-day there is within the Imperial zone, within the area which Mr. Chamberlain's corn-tax proposal would leave fiscally as free a3 evei to the British bread-buyer, enough wheat land to easily feed not only Britain, but the whole of Europe. The land upon which the bread of the United Kingdom can be grown free of tax is practically unlimited. The tax proposed would only increase the cost of the loaf by a fraction of a penny if all paid by the consumer, and it is extremely

doubtful whether lie would pay it at all, for it is held by many experts that foreign importers would shoulder the tax in 'order to compete with untaxed colonial growers. In either ease the colonial grower has the full advantage of the tax against the foreign grower, as long as the United Kingdom was not entirely supplied i'roni her colonies, which, owing to their limitless wheat area, would be but a matter of a few years with energetic colonisation. Similarly With butter, with meat, with friiit, with other articles. The housekeeping rooriey of the United Kingdom would be spent with grocer, butcher, baker, fruiterer, farmer, dairyman, who in their turn would buy its hardware; its machinery and its leather goods. And this is possible because of the Empire's capacities. It can afford to go in for "preference" because it can easily feed itself. It could not afford to have anything but Free Trade in Mr. Cobden's days because then it apparently could not feed itself.

The manner in which the preferential idea is being received by those closely wedded to the Gobden doctrine is noticeably indicative of unreasoning prejudice. Australian papers Of Free Trade bias comment upon Mr. Chamberlain' policy as bitterly as though he were one of their local protectionist opponents. To English Free Trade papers and Free Trade champions, the ex-Colo-nial Secretary appears as a political Pandora who is allowing every national blessing to escape by tampering with the box of Cobdenism in which they are contained. His determined advocacy of retaliation in order to win reciprocity is particularly reprobated as a policy calculated to make all nations our enemies and to stir up endless strife and trouble. It is forgotten altogether that every other nation on the face of the earth does what Mr. Balfour is asking the United Kingdom to do. America and Germany in particular do so, nor does it seem to make them anything but prosperous, while it certainly does not make any peoples dislike them worse than they dislike '■ peace-at-any-price Britain. We may gather from the weakness of the speeches being made against Mr. Chamberlain's policy how illogical is the existing fiscal status of the Mother Country and of the Empire. Its great strength is that it has been accepted unquestioningly for sixty years, not a saving quality when a nation begins to weigh it in the balances of common sense and finds it wanting.