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398 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDiES
and suggested measures that are either i~possible or
will defeat the object aimed at, the advocacy its'elf has
been hardly less mischievous. The cause of federation
of the Empire has come to be identified with a p(ilicy
of Protection until adherents of a Free-trade policy
are almost under compulsion to choose between the
abandonment of their ideas and the promotion of Im-
perial Federation itself. This,is not a desirable result.
Whether the commercial policy of the federated Empire
is to be Protectionist or Free-trading, federation itself
is a good thing for sound political reasons. For those
who desire it, therefore, to put in the forefront of their
arguments a commercial policy which arrays against
them large masses of the very people whose co-opera-
tion they desire, is a mistake of no small magnitude.
I t lays them open to the charge from which I fear
some of our colonial friends could not easily clear them-
selves-that it is Protection they seek by means of
federation and not federation itself. I recollect first
coming in contact with this idea twenty years ago at
a dinner in the club at Montreal, when I was obliged
to listen to a very heated argument by leading citizens
in favour of a preferential duty of 2S. 6d. per quarter
in England on grain from the United States as com-
pared with grain from Canada, an argument so heated
that a modest speaker could hardly get in a word edge-
ways on the other side. Such heat is still observable
in colonial arguments for a "preference." They want
a "pull," an advantage of some kind out of the mother
country, not for the sake of federating the Empire, but
because they want Protection so much. They offer
hardly any quid pro quo which will stand discussion;
but even if they did it is surely most lamentable that
colonial appeals to the mother country to federate
should be mixed up with bargaining on the lowest..-
level of any commercial transaction. ~ ,
As I write ad.ditional evidence is furnished us as to
the anxiety. in the colonies for Protection. Only the
other day Mr. Seddon was reported to have said that the