Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Economic conditions; Land tenure -- Ireland
But Colonial experience can give us more than that. It can provide us
not only with an immense mass of arguments and instances against
disruption, but with invaluable instances of what can be done to
strengthen and build up the Union against all possible future danger of
disruptive tendencies. The confederation of Canada was accomplished in
the teeth of all the geographical and economic conditions of the time.
Canadian statesmanship thereupon set itself to transform geography, and
to divert the course of trade in order to make the Union a reality. The
Intercolonial Railway, the Canadian Pacific, the Grand Trunk Pacific,
the proposed Hudson Bay Railway, and the Georgian Bay Canal schemes, all
these have been deliberate instruments of policy, aiming, first of all,
at bridging the wilderness between practically isolated settlements
scattered across a continent, and creating a continuous Canada, east and
west; and, secondly, at giving that continuous strip depth as well as
extension. Hand in hand with the policy of constructing the internal
framework of transportation, which is the skeleton of the economic and
social life of a nation, went the policy of maintaining a national
tariff to clothe that skeleton with the flesh and blood of production
and exchange, and, as far as possible, to clothe it evenly. Australia,
too, is waking, though somewhat hesitatingly, to the need of
transcontinental railways, for the protection of new industries and for
the even development and filling up of all her territories. In South
Africa the economic process preceded the political. It was the dread of
the breakdown of a temporary customs union already in existence that
precipitated the discussion of union. And it was the development of the
Rand as the great internal market of South Africa, and the competitive
construction of railway lines from the coast, that really decided the
question of legislative union against federation. All three instances
lead to the same conclusion that union to be really effective and stable
needs three things: firstly, a developed system of internal
communications reducing all natural barriers to social, political, and
commercial intercourse to the very minimum; secondly, a national tariff,
protective or otherwise, sufficient at least to encourage the fullest
flow of trade along those communications rather than outside of them;
thirdly, a deliberate use of the tariff and of the national expenditure
to secure, as far as possible, the even development of every portion of
the national territory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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