WHAT COLONIAL PREFERENCE MEANS.
Reprinted from The Produce Markets' Review of July 13 and 20, 1907.
Whether we are Liberals, Conservatives, or Labour men, all parties in the State wish well to our fellow subjects beyond the seas, and would be glad to help them if we could. The Little Englander is, in fact, an imaginary being. We already relieve the Colonies of the necessity of external defence at a cost to the struggling millions of this heavily-laden country of some 65 million pounds a year, or, if the interest on our debt be added, of some 90 million pounds, and it is to be borne in mind that our debt was to a large degree built up in the acquisition and defence of our Empire. Beyond this we have supplied them with many hundreds of millions for their development, and of late years have made their securities Trustee stocks, to the considerable loss of our own funds. Further, we have given to our self-governing Colonies entire internal liberty, without any reservation of the vast Crown Lands contained in them, or any return for our past expenditure in their acquisition and development. We have left them complete freedom to tax the manufactures of the home country, and to limit the immigration of our own people and of our fellow subjects in Crown colonies and possessions, to the vast and fertile regions whose administration we have handed over to small handfuls of our colonists. This represents a bold, a generous, and a broad-minded policy, deliberately entered upon and
