The supporters of the movement emphasize the growing political and commercial importance of our colonies, and the rapid advances made by Germany and the United States in neutral markets, and they point to the tariff walls which block our trade with foreign nations. Free-traders, in reply, maintain that the progress of Germany and America is due to a combination of many causes apart from their tariffs. They are, for purposes of internal trade, the largest free trade areas in the world. {229} Since the trade of nations is mutually interdependent we cannot suffer from an increase in commercial prosperity elsewhere, and retaliation has never proved a successful method of fighting hostile tariffs. In conclusion, they declare that an impossible task awaits any statesman who undertakes to frame a British tariff satisfactory alike to farmer, manufacturer, the colonies and India, and one which would not involve an increase in the price of food and other necessaries. The reader must refer to larger treatises for details of the controversy, which has been much embittered by party spirit. But it seems at least that the war of statistics and arguments has not proved that the position of the working classes in regard to real wages, continuity of employment, and conditions of labour is better in protected countries than among our own people: indeed, as skilled economists constantly remind us, so many other factors are involved and so many qualifications must be made that it is almost impossible to draw trustworthy comparisons of this nature. Nor has the response of the colonies to the suggestions of the Preferentialists been encouraging. They have shown without ambiguity that highly as they value their connexion with the mother-country, they value equally highly their own political and commercial independence. In 1901 the various States of Australia united in a Federal Commonwealth whose tariff is highly protective, and in 1911 Canada began to negotiate mutual tariff concessions with the United States, her nearest and most important market. Our colonies are thus rapidly developing into practically independent States, bound to us, indeed, by ties of filial affection and interest, but determined to shape their own careers. South Africa has just entered upon the most hopeful chapter of her chequered history {230} by the federation of the four colonies in the Union of South Africa. The original settlements of Cape Colony and Natal and the two Boer States conquered in the late war form now a self-governing whole--a happy reconciliation, hardly to have been anticipated at the end of the war, which is a high tribute to the wisdom of statesmen at home and to the healing effects of time in South Africa.