None of England’s colonies has accepted the policy of free trade, while one half of her own people are decidedly in favour of some form and measure of protection. As for our own country, where opinion has always been preponderantly protectionist, free trade is under a sentence of death which will be executed the moment the people come into their own, perhaps even earlier. Men of Mr Asquith’s way of thinking do wrong in seemingly imagining that imperial preference and free trade between them exhaust all the possibilities of the case.

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