PREFERENTIAL TRADE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume 1327, Issue 1327, 3 September 1906, Page 4

PREFERENTIAL TRADE.

It is scarcely surprising that the preference proposals of the Federal Premier should have been received by the freetrade press in England in a carping and unfriendly spirit. These critics see in every overture for closer commercial relations between the colonies and the Mother Country a danger to the fetish of freetrade. And, from their point of view, their attitude, it must be admitted, is rational enough. It is inevitable that if the colonies are prepared to grant preference to British goods an alteration in the fiscal policy of Great Britain must follow. It may not come, it is true, as quickly as some of those who have been urging reform would like it to do. But in the end the logic of facts must prevail. It is for this reason that all colonial overtures are unwelcome to the poli-tico-economists of the Bright and Cobden school. They have no desire to see the fiscal question, which they would fain believe has been finally and irrevocably settled by the verdict of the last general election, kept alive by offers from the colonies. Hence their laboured efforts to belittle these offers and to show that they are prompted by purely selfish motives and involve no colonial sacrifice of any kind. Criticisms of this kind are not calculated to draw the bonds of union between the colonies and the Mother Country closer, or to increase their mutual esteem and sympathy. But we do not believe for one moment that they will succeed in preventing the ultimate triumph of a rational and commonsense reform necessitated by the changed economic conditions of the world. The British freetraders in resisting all alterations of fiscal policy are fighting against the spirit of the age and are doomed to defeat. Mr. Deakin's offer may not amount to very much, but it unquestionably marks a distinct advance in the cause of Imperial tariff reform, as the London Globe points out, and brings the Commonwealth into line with New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. Should these great self-governing colonies resolve upon a uniform basis of preference at the Imperial Conference next year a further step will have been taken towards the realisation of that reform, which the more thoughtful statesmen of our time, both at Home and in the colonies, are beginning to recognise as lying at the very root of a strong and lasting Imperial union.