Great Britain's free-trade policy was first called in question. Scarcely ended were the Boer War and the disappointing Conference of 1902 when Mr Chamberlain, fresh from a tour through South Africa, launched his great campaign for imperial preferential trade. Though protection and retaliation later became more important phases of the tariff-reform movement, at the outset it was its imperial side which was emphasized. The colonies and the mother country, it was urged, were certain to drift apart unless bound by links of material interest. Give the colonies a preference on their wheat or wool in Britain, give British {272} manufacturers a real preference in colonial markets, and the Empire would cease to be merely a sentiment. Once committed to setting up a protective tariff in order to make reductions in favour of such colonies as would reciprocate, Mr Chamberlain and his followers went on to find in it other great advantages. It would aid British agriculture and British industry, would protect both farmer and manufacturer from the competition they were increasingly unable to bear, and would give a weapon for forcing foreign countries to tear down their tariff barriers. The colonial market, the home market, and the foreign market would thus all be gained, and none too soon, if the complete decay of British industry and the triumph of its rivals were to be averted. 'We have reached our highest point,' declared Mr Chamberlain. 'Our fate will be the fate of the empires and the kingdoms of the past.... Sugar has gone, silk has gone, iron is threatened, wool is threatened, cotton will come.... We are no longer first. We are third. We shall be fifth or sixth if things go on as they are at present.... The trade of this country, as measured by the exports to foreign countries and to British possessions, {273} has during the last twenty or thirty years been practically stationary; our export trade to all these foreign countries which have arranged tariffs against us has enormously diminished, and at the same time their exports to us have enormously increased.' For a time it seemed that the tariff reformers would sweep all before them. Their chief was the most skilful and popular leader of his time. The inevitable growth of other countries in manufacturing had excited the alarm of the British manufacturer, and protectionist sentiment among the landowners, though scotched, had not been killed. The almost universal reign of protection in foreign countries and the other colonies appeared to prove obsolete the doctrines of Cobden and Bright. It seemed that fifty years of unquestioned triumph in England itself had left free trade a traditional dogma, not a living belief. To the poor, tariff reform promised work; to the rich, a shifting of heavy taxation from their shoulders; to the imperialist, the indissoluble empire of his dreams.