other countries, that notwithstanding our high wages, it is really the cheapest help in the world. Probably this is true in a few instances, but how long will it remain so? Foreigners quickly "catch on" to our methods and imitate our machines. In nearly all industries they produce as much per hand and per machine as we do. Accustomed from youth to plain and cheap living, they accept one-third, one-half, or not more than twothirds the wages paid here, i. e., measured by the labor cost of the product, while at the same time buildings and machinery cost less there than here and interest upon capital is lower. So, the only way to preserve our American civilization and widely distribute the profits of industry among the people is to preserve protection, the only barrier between us and the harder conditions that prevail abroad.

Thus the case is clear and conclusive that the protective policy ought to be preserved indefinitely. This does not mean that tariffs should not be changed occasionally or that some duties cannot safely be reduced; it simply means that protection is the normal condition of national life in a developing country like ours, and that there is no good reason why it should ever be exchanged for the privacy of free trade.

CANADA'S NEW SETTLERS.

[W. H. Osborne in Boston Transcript.] There has been much talk, especially in the newspapers of the United States,

about the probable political effects of the influx within our borders of so many Americans. To begin with, it must be understood that, despite the hitherto somewhat tardy growth of our population and development of our resources, our people have remained absolutely patient and loyal. The annexation policy has never had a baker's dozen of a following. Well, these new people are, almost to a man, going to become naturalized Canadians. This is not a general judgment, the wish making itself father to the thought. I have made it subject of special inquiry. Few of the Southerners coming in are violently pro-American. Many of them are foreignersScandinavian and other-who had not yet become thoroughly incorporate in American life. A very large number are repatriated Canadians. Many are touched with the Populist discontent that has had its home in the Western States. All are in it for No. 1, care nothing for sentiment, and little for the flag under which their competence is acquired. Before they have been here many weeks even, they realize that for practical purposes with us in Canada monarchy, aristocracy and the like are only names, that at least as much liberty is to be enjoyed under British rule as under republican institutions. Governmentally then, and sentimentally, I cannot see but that these newcomers will, long before they acquire the franchise, have sunk quietly into the bosom of our people, and that when they come to the polls they will proceed to move along distinctively Canadian lines-lending us, as I observed before, as a result of their past experience, signal assistance in the solution of our problems. Only one thing can I think of that could possibly make the movement count in the direction of annexation. If customs regulations should prove tyrannous, or if Canadian capital should be unwisely tardy in providing transportation facilities to meet the growing demands of the country, then this new element might grow restless more quickly than our own, might in fact look to political union as a possible solution of the difficulty.

[Robert Ellis Thompson Nearly forty years ago Sir Charles Dilke published his "Greater Britain," in which he described America and the English colonies with some reference to their rejection of the economic policy which England had adopted for herself and wished to have them copy. He declared that one reason why England got no hearing was the unreadiness of Englishmen to understand the protectionists of those countries, and to enter into the reasons which made them think free trade a ruinous policy for them to follow. "We say that we will not argue about economic idiocy," he said. To the average Englishman the free trade theory was as certain as mathematics. You might as well doubt if twice two made four. This positiveness was derived partly from an unwarranted simplification of the problem, in which the industrial situation of every other country was assumed to be the same as that of England. It was derived even more from the conviction that the free trade doctrine was very good for England, and would be still better for her if everybody could be got to adopt it.

Just now this last conviction is being badly weakened by the lessona

in the Irish World.]

of experience. of experience. England, under that policy, is falling behind the countries which rejected it, and she is not so complacently sure that it is the last word of economic wisdom for mankind, and least of all, for England herself. Even by her own tests she is losing ground. She has set up foreign commerce as the measure of national well-being, and she finds that a steadily increasing share of the world's commerce is passing to her rivals, and that her share has fallen ominously within the last quarter of a century. She still has more than any other country, but at this rate she will not continue to have it before the twentieth century has passed its middle point, and she is loath to take a second place. Better never have filled the first than be driven from it by successful rivals.

The discussion in the English newspapers takes shape from the ridiculously low duty on imported wheat, which the budget of this year imposed, and from the conferences which are in progress between the Colonial Office and the Colonial Premiers in London. It has been thought best to have these held in private this time, and if it be true, as some English newspapers say, that a

demand for a better treatment of Ireland was one of the suggestions the Premiers put forward as tending to a better harmony within the empire, the exclusion of the public from the discussions was inevitable. John Bull is about to learn that America is not the only country in which the Irishman is heard and commands sympathy. Colonial politics everywhere are more difficult and complicated by his presence as a voter. Imperial sympathies everywhere are the weaker for the spectacle of a country deprived of constitutional government by a group of landlords acting as privy councillors, in order to put down a perfectly lawful agitation for a better land policy. The scandal of class government has reached its height in Ireland this year.

The Colonial Premiers want to know what England will do, in the way of trade preferences, to draw closer the bonds of the imperial system. Canada has wheat to sell; New Zealand, mutton; Australia, wine and wool. Will England put protective duties on these things, and then admit them free from her colonies? The Tories would like to do so, as a step toward more intimate relations with those countries; "but still I dare not' waits upon 'I would." The slight duty upon foreign wheat from every quarter has made such a stir, and seems to have cost the Tories so many by-elections, that they are timid about going any further.

Their organs plead that adoption of such a policy would mean the beginning of "a war of tariffs" with

America and nearly all Europe. This is pure nonsense. We and the continental nations have arranged our tariffs without the smallest reference to the fact that England practises free trade. We have not kept off a single duty out of regard for her interests, and we have no right to expect her to abstain from imposing any duty on our products out of regard for us. Her return to protection would not affect our legislation, nor that of Germany or France.

That this is certain is shown by our own experience. When the present tariff went into operation, and the Senate declined to follow Mr. McKinley's lead in the direction of reciprocity, our free traders threatened us with "a war of tariffs." But the war did not come, and our commerce with Europe has not been disturbed in the least by any resentments of our tariff policy in Europe. England would not sell a web of cotton or a pound of nails the less for becoming a protectionist country either to favor the products of her colonies, or to rebuild the shattered fabric of her own agriculture. And those who say she would, have nothing to support a belief, which is merely a convenient reason for refusing the concessions asked by her colonies.

The real reason for the refusal is that the land-owning class in Great Britain have destroyed the class of yeoman farmers, on which the protectionist policy might have rested for popular support. In their own

supposed interests they swept off the land the people whose rights in it antedated their own, drove them into the cities to fill the mills and foundries, or drove them out of the country to build up the nation's great est rival.

First came the day of the big farms and the capitalist farmer, with a scanty village population, living on wages as farm laborers. Now that the capitalist farmers have been ruined, England is becoming a grazing country, with a still smaller laboring population to take care of the sheep and oxen. The farm laborers follow the yeomen into the cities, to fill the slums rather than the mills and the foundries.

The landowners of to-day have no population behind them, which is interested in the welfare of agriculture. Their own selfishness and their tyranny are visited upon them in lowered income and popular detestation, while the brewers, the stockjobbers, and the shoddy Americans outshine them in social display, and are heartily welcomed at the royal court. It is said that Salisbury stepped out of the premiership because he and the king could not agree as to the distribution of "coronation honors" between the class which "had a grandfather," and that which had money to throw about in the style of Baron Wolff. The marquis was for giving titles to the former; the king to the latter. This may not be true, but that, it is said, is an index of what is taking place in England.

The Colonial Premiers will not get their concessions, because England does not find it to her interest to give them. They cannot promise to retrieve her losses in trade, no matter how much they may want to do so. Canada has gone as far in the preference of English commodities as any of them dare, and yet our trade with the Dominion has grown at the expense of England. They are collectively far too weak in numbers and in wealth to replace her losses in America alone. Sentiment is very pretty in war time, but the war is over and John Bull is counting its cost, without much comfort, and he finds he has to bear it alone. The colonies will not pay a pound of it. He had to pay the troops they sent to South Africa, and he will have to go on paying all the costs of "imperial defence." It is only by bearing those costs, and by furnishing them with every kind of diplomatic service gratuitously, that he keeps them within the Empire. Were he to take the other course, as he did with America after the French and Indian War, he would have new declarations of independence from every one of them. It is a miserable rôle, that of being backyard to a European power, and in this age of the world no people will accept it un less it is handsomely paid for it.

So England will have to go on in the vicious circle into which her ambitions have shut her. She needs the restoration of her farming, but there are no farmers to plead and vote for it. She must keep up a vast navy