The simple truth is that trade has no feelings. We all of us buy and sell to the best advantage we can, and on the whole we do wisely. It is a shrewd saying that warns men to beware of business transactions with their own kinsfolk; nor do we need a prophet to tell us that an attempt to fetter Colonial trade for our own benefit may lose us more affection than it wins us custom. After all, why worry? Our world-embracing commerce is to-day as prosperous as ever it has been. The loyalty of our Colonists no one questions. Let well alone. Our industrial success has not hitherto been dependent on favouring tariffs, nor is there the slightest evidence that old age has yet laid his hand upon our powers. As for the closer union between our Colonists and ourselves, it will hardly be promoted by asking them to sacrifice their commercial freedom to increase the profits of our manufacturers, nor by taxing our food to please their farmers. It is indeed a sign of little faith to even look for a new bond of empire in an arrangement of tariffs. The tie that binds our Colonists to us will not be found in any ledger account, nor is ink the fluid in which that greater Act of Union is writ. CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSION. In the foregoing pages I have been obliged more than once to accuse Mr. Williams of misrepresenting facts in order to bolster up his argument. That accusation I cannot withdraw. It has been deliberately made because the facts compelled it. Doubtless in the ordinary affairs of life Mr. Williams is not less honourable than other men, but in his zeal to establish a case, which cannot be established, he has blinded himself to the main facts of the matter with which he was dealing, and has often so quoted facts and figures as to convey an impression the reverse of the truth. Even from his own point of view this was a pity, for it throws discredit upon the whole of his work, whereas several of his statements are quite true. It is, for example, true that Germany has made great progress in the chemical and in the iron trades. It is also true that her commerce is gaining a foothold in Eastern markets once almost exclusively our own. These, and several other perfectly true statements, are to be found in Mr. Williams’s pages, and might have been edifying to exalted persons who can only discover a distorted image of the truth ten years after the main facts have been clearly seen by those common folk who are primarily concerned with them. To such individuals Mr. Williams, without his picturesque exaggerations and strange twistings of the truth, might have been really useful. As it is, he has only helped to lead them astray. Indeed, it is much to be feared that these hasty students of a big subject have by the perusal of Mr. Williams’s neatly-turned sentences and epigrammatic phrases acquired an impression which no drab-coloured statement of simple fact will ever be able to dislodge. NOT ONLY A PROTECTIONIST PAMPHLET.