After the Conference of 1907 preferential trade ceased for a time to be a living issue. Social reform, the budget controversy, the struggles with the House of Lords, Home Rule, foreign affairs, in turn took the leading place on the stage. Four years later, at the Conference of 1911, the subject was not even mentioned. The Unionist party was now definitely pledged to protection on manufactures, but the tax on food, essential to effective colonial preferences, had been thrown overboard by a large section of the party. The British farmer was promised land reform instead of protection on foodstuffs. Even Mr Bonar Law, speaking in 1912, declared that he did not wish to impose food duties, and would impose them only if, in a conference {280} to be called, the colonies declared them to be essential. This endeavour to throw on the colonies the onus and responsibility of making the Englishman pay food taxes was denounced on every side, and after much shuffling a compromise was reached to the effect that 'if when a Unionist Government has been returned to power it proves desirable, after consultation with the Dominions, to impose new duties upon any articles of food, in order to secure the most effective system of preference, such duties should not be imposed until they have been submitted to the people of this country at a general election.' Thus, after ten years of ardent agitation for tariff reform, one great party in the state was as resolutely opposed to the scheme as ever, and, while the other was committed to it, the duty on foodstuffs, once declared essential to save the Empire, was made conditional and given second place to protection of manufacturers. It was by no means improbable that the whirligig of time would once more bring to the front food taxes and imperial preference. Yet as far as the early years of the century went, the years within which Mr Chamberlain declared that the decision had to be made, no step towards preference had {281} been taken by Great Britain, and still the Empire drew closer together instead of drifting apart. As a matter of fact, the empire-binding value of tariff preference was greatly exaggerated by its advocates. The Laurier-Fielding preference was a real bond of imperial unity simply because it was a free-will offering, given from motives of sentiment, not of profit. A system of preferences such as Mr Chamberlain advocated might possibly be a good business arrangement for one or all of the countries concerned, but it could have little force as empire-cement. It would be a matter of cold-blooded bargain, on a par with the similar reciprocal or preferential arrangements which the protectionists proposed to make with foreign countries. There would be nothing exclusive about it.