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£100,000,000 a year on the British consumer, and without considering any further burdens on him through difficulties with foreigners. The summary statistics we have given, indeed, practically speak for themselves, and require little argument to enforce them. No one who studies them can believe that colonial preferences are practicable, and far less that they are desirable. We only wish that we could give the mass of details from which our tables have been built up, for they are even more convincing than the summaries, but they would occupy some ten pages of this paper, and would not be lively reading. We append, however, in a note, a list of the main articles on which colonial or imperial preferences would necessitate duties, ending, as we believe they would, in a general tariff on the whole of our imports, say, roundly, on 1,500 or 1,600 commodities.
We have not touched on the political or imperial objections to preferences, but their ultimate effect, in the opinion of most Free Traders, would be to shatter the Empire into fragments. We lost the United States through attempting to tax them. Let us take care that the Colonies do not reverse the process and lose the Mother Country through taxation, to say nothing of the inter-colonial jealousies and quarrels that a preferential tariff would lead to. We are a prosperous and happy family as we are. We have the ties of blood, of affection, of common objects and sympathies. We have an almost unimaginable future before us under the present system. Let us not sacrifice all this and descend to the attempt to make our connection one of cash and of huckstering. In our own families we do not try to see how much we can get out of each other, but our object is to promote our common welfare. The colonies do not wish to exploit the Mother Country, but in some extraordinary way they think we should benefit by raising the cost of living, in
