GHOSTS OF PAPER. You shall see, where taxis throng, While, where buses churn and splash, Through be-cobbled square and street, These are some of things you'll view Punch. THE SECRET OF THE ROAD. Which way does the road go? Up and down From the valley to the hill's crown, Athwart the woods that lie behind Like a silver ribbon blown by the wind And through the green Where geese are seen, And past the gray mill with its peeping panes, And the long honeysuckled lanes; And down, and on, and up the spinney's rise Till it creeps into the skies. If I should start, and walk the livelong day, Watching wonderingly all the way, Till all familiar things had travelled by And the stars had fall'n into the skyI should not find that which the wind finds at his will: The secret of the road-it stretches farther, farther still. Agnes Grozier Herbertson. The Pall Mall Magazine. THE MOTHER-LAND. Since God to folks of six or seven Gave strength, with which no king may strive. Since half the sweetness under heaven He gave to people under five. We little knew what we were giving, Methinks, when we gave play for strife And for the land where we are living The country where we played at Life. O'er wooden trees and toy-church steeple Burns faintly each man's morning star, O Mother-land whose laughing people The dearest of all people are! To Death some fragment of thy stories The beggar brings, and to thy song, Behind the dying Emperor's glories, His old tin soldiers tramp along. Henry de Vere Stacpoole. THE CANADIAN-AMERICAN RECIPROCITY AGREEMENT. BY SIR ALFRED Mond, BART., M. P. The surprise with which the Tariff Reformers now seem to be overwhelmed at the news of the Reciprocity Agreement, is one more result of their persistent misunderstanding of Canadian fiscal history, Canadian development, and the spirit that inspires the Canadian people. They have from the first been led astray by their besetting delusion that it would be possible for them in one way or another to "nobble" Canadian products and trade for Great Britain to the exclusion of other countries. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the originator of the idea, furnished himself one of the first and most striking examples of the ludicrous misapprehension of Canadian views in the celebrated schedule of prohibited industries proposed in his speech at Glasgow on October 6, 1903. As the version of that speech subsequently published in book form gives a revised and inaccurate report of what Mr. Chamberlain said, it may be well to quote the exact words used by him on that occasion: After all, there are many things which you do not now make, many things for which we have a great capacity of production. Leave them to us as you have left them hitherto. Do not increase your tariff walls against us, pull them down where they are unnecessary to the success of this policy to which you are committed. Let us in exchange with you have your productions in all these numberless industries which have not yet been erected. This proposal by Mr. Chamberlain, who was always disposed to regard the arrangement with the Colonies as a bargain, was evidently in his mind at a still earlier date. Speaking in London on June 9, 1896, he referred to the suggestion that while the Colonies "should be left absolutely free to impose what protective duties they please both upon Foreign countries and upon British commerce, they should be required to make a small discrimination in favor of British trade, in return for which we are expected to change our whole system and impose duties on food and raw material." On this suggestion he made the following outspoken comment: Well, I express again my own opinion when I say that there is not the slightest chance that in any reasonable time this country, or the Parliament of this country, would adopt so one-sided an agreement. The foreign trade of this country is so large, and the foreign trade of the Colonies is comparatively so small, that a small preference given to us upon that foreign trade by the Colonies would make so trifling a difference would be so small a benefit to the total volume of our trade-that I do not believe the working classes of this country would consent to make a revolutionary change for what they would think to be an infinitesimal gain. While on the subject of Mr. Chamberlain's love for a bargain, it may be well to point out that that statesman threw away, without any return, one of the best objects of barter in an arrangement with the Colonies which any British statesman could desire. He bestowed upon the Dominion, without any equivalent to this country, the enormous advantage granted to it by the Amendment of the Trustees Act, putting Canadian government and municipal securities on the same basis as our own, and thereby enabling the smallest Canadian municipality to raise money on better terms than certain great Powers, such as Germany, Russia and Japan, by giving them ac cess to the cheapest money market in the world. That, in reality, was a preference given gratis to Canada at the cost of diminishing the value of British "gilt-edged" securities, and it was of far greater importance to the Canadians than the proposed two-shilling duty on wheat could ever possibly be. If at the time we had had a statesman of really wide vision and foresight, that great advantage accorded to Canada might have been utilized for securing a far more favorable tariff for our goods from the Canadians than they have ever had under the existing preference arrangement, while it would furthermore have been an important step towards eventual Free Trade between Great Britain and her most important Colony. One of the peculiar difficulties of following the Neo-protectionist arguments on preference, as on their other proposals, is the the changes which those arguments have undergone from the commencement of the Tariff Reform propaganda. It has suited the Tariff Reform propagandists in this country constantly to represent the Canadians as clamoring for the adoption of their preference scheme, while they further tried to secure its acceptance in this country by vague threats of impending disaster to Great Britain and the Empire, alternately of a political and a commercial character. As a matter of fact, that clamor has existed only in their own imaginations. A reference to some of the statements of Colonial Ministers on this subject will dispose of the idea that any pressure of the kind referred to has been brought upon the Mother Country. The attitude of Canada was very clearly expressed by Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1897, and by Mr. Fielding, the Canadian Minister of Finance, at the second Colonial Conference in 1902. Sir Wilfrid Laurier said: If England were willing to give us a preference over other nations, taking our goods on exceptionally favorable terms, I would not object. . . It would be a great boon. But for how long would it last? Would it be an advantage in the long run? That is what men who think beyond the passing moment have to ask themselves. Suppose England did such a thing and abandoned her Free Trade record, she would inevitably curtail the purchasing power of her people. And do you not think we should suffer from thatwe who alone have natural resources enough to feed your millions from our fertile lands? I have too great a belief in English common sense to believe they will do any such thing. What we have done in the way of Tariff Preference to England we have done out of gratitude to England, and not because we want her to enter upon the path of Protection. The Canadian attitude is still more clearly expressed in the statement by Mr. Fielding in 1902: We do not profess that we want to introduce British goods to displace goods made by the manufacturers of Canada. That is a point upon which we must speak with great frankness. Whether or not it was a wise policy for Canada to foster her manufactures by high duties is a point hardly worth discussing now; we must deal with things as we find them. We had very high duties under the former tariff. The present Government have reduced those duties very materially, espe cially in the case of British goods. Many things of British manufacture paid 40 per cent., 50 per cent., or 60 per cent.. but we have reduced these now down to 23 per cent. from Great Britain, and we think that in those cases we have gone about as far as we can without sacrificing our manufacturers. The interests are very large: the interests of the capital invested, the labor and the banking interest, and the many other interests which cluster round a great industry. Therefore, if we are asked to reduce our duties and bring in British goods and displace Canadian own manufactures, we must frankly say that it is not possible for us to do so. But we say that it is quite possible to give an advantage to British goods in some cases by raising the tariff. The most rudimentary acquaintance with the history of this discussion in Canada, shows clearly that the Canadian manufacturers who have welcomed the advocacy of Protection in England as a means of strengthening in the Dominion that Protection from which they themselves profit, never have had any intention, so far as it lay in their power, to allow British manufacturers to compete on anything like equal terms with their own products. The nature of the gift offered to Great Britain by these manufacturers, the so-called Imperialists of the Dominion, is clearly shown by their attitude towards preference to England during the inquiry carried on by the Tariff Commission in different Canadian provinces in 1906. In the This attitude is aptly symbolized by the action of a protectionist firm of cotton manufacturers at Valleyfield, the industrial Venice of Canada, who, after running up the Union Jack over their mill, immediately proceeded to submit to the Commission a demand for increased duties in the cotton schedules with the object of reducing the imports from Lancashire. evidence given by manufacturers before the Commission, the British Preference was frequently attacked, the witnesses speaking of London and Liverpool as "foreign" and of Englishmen who came to Canada in search of orders as "foreigners." Yet many of those "Canadians" who thus proclaimed their newly acquired nationality hailed from the very districts whose imports they wished to exclude from Canada. Mr. Porritt, in his Sixty Years of Protection in Canada, points out that the Canadian quarrymen who were endeavoring to exclude Aberdeen gran ite, were themselves chiefly Scots from Aberdeen. One of them confessed to Mr. Porritt that he expected the people at home would think they were "darned mean." Mr. Porritt says, "It is difficult to recall a single session of the Commission in industrial Canada in which the preference (to Great Britain) was not attacked by the manufacturers." On the other hand, the farmers constantly and enthusiastically defended preference— they, together with the importers of textiles in Montreal and Toronto, being urgent in their pleas for the repeal of the Tariff Act amendment of 1904 which curtailed it. "The farmers commended the preference because it afforded some relief from the tariff and because it served as a tie to the Mother Country. They realized that as a result of the good feeling towards Canada, Great Britain gave a sentimental preference to Canadian products, and that they had already a market in England for all their produce." Of course, in the resolutions passed by Canadian manufacturers at public meetings and intended for British readers, their real intention to "protect" themselves effectively from British competition is not so plainly expressed, although it is sufficiently obvious. Thus, for instance, in a resolution of the Candian Manufacturers' Association, the "substantial preference to the Mother Country" is made subject to the condition that "the minimum tariff must afford adequate protection to all Canadian producers." The Ottawa Board of Trade in November 1903 also insisted upon such a form of Protection as would "reasonably safeguard such industries and business interests as have been developed under the existing tariff conditions." A great deal of the difficulty of British trade with Canada, as with the Protectionist Colonies generally, consists in the tariffs secured by the Colo nial manufacturers against English goods, which in Canada in particular heavily burden the woollen and cotton industries. On the other hand, the only real hope of relief from this burden lies in the general lowering of the tariff walls, in response to the protests of the consuming masses. Those flag-waving colonial patriots seem to think that they have done something very generous when they give this country a preference over her foreign competitors, while the duty to which her goods are still subject is sufficient, practically to exclude or greatly hamper them in favor of the protected colonial article. Speaking in Parliament at Ottawa on February 9, 1911, Mr. Fielding, the Canadian Minister of Finance, thus characterized this type of Colonial Imperialist: "Unable to deal with the question (of reciprocity) on its merits, many opponents are beating the big drum of Imperialism and thereby insulting the intelligence of the Canadian people." As to the alleged damage done to Imperial interests by the manner in which the Liberals are said to have held the Colonies at arm's length, and rejected offers by the latter of which nobody had ever heard, the best answer is to be found in the statements of responsible Canadian Ministers, including Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and in the resolutions of the farmers of Canada, who have been the most consistent and effective supporters of preference to England, and the only class directly interested in the Tariff Reformers' proposal. The Hon. W. S. Fielding, the Canadian Minister of Finance, telegraphing on February 7, 1911, to the High Commissioner for Canada, not only disposed of the fears that the Reciprocity Agreement might seriously affect imports from Great Britain and that discrimination would be made in favor of the United States and against this country, but expressly stated that Canada's right to deal with the British preference as she pleases remains The untouched by the agreement. adoption of the agreement will probably lead to some further revision of the Canadian tariff, in which the Canadian I'arliament will be entirely free to fix the British preferential tariff at any rates that may be deemed proper. The determination of the Canadian farmers as expressed in the resolutions laid by them before Sir Wilfrid Laurier on December 16, 1910, is equally clear. They state that they also favor the principle of the British preferential tariff, and urge an immediate lowering of the duties on all Brit. ish goods to one-half the rates charged under the general tariff schedule, whatever that may be; and that any trade advantages given the United States in reciprocal trade relations be extended to Great Britain. They likewise advocate such further gradual reduction of the remaining preferential tariff as will ensure the establishment of complete Free Trade between Canada and the Motherland within ten years; and add that the farmers of this country are willing to face direct taxation in such form as may be advisable to make up the revenue required under new tariff conditions. That the Canadian Government is inspired by precisely the same desire is evident from the statement made by Mr. Fielding, the Finance Minister, in the Canadian House of Commons on January 26, 1911, in the course of which he said: Of course, as a general principle,. whether Great Britain is to be interested or not, any duty that may be lowered to any foreign country, according to our well-established policy, would be at the same time lowered to Great Britain, and a clause will be in serted in the resolutions which I shall have the honor to propose providing that where in any case the duties are |