THE RESULTS OF THE POLICY. 8;

Government of this country does not apparently
object, but one which the colonies would most
violently resent. It must amount under certain
circumstances to nothing more nor less than the
sheer loss of the fiscal independence which the
colonies at present enjoy, and the Canadians have
explicitly stated they will not give this up.
Under present conditions, further, it is open to
any colony to frame its tariff with a view to the
advantages of the colony itself. Under the new
system, however, each Chancellor of the Exchequer
and each colonial Minister of Finance would have
to consider the effect on the Imperial Preference
scheme of any suggested alteration, and so each
colony would tend to lose its political entity, and
become a portion of an interdependent machine.
Theoretically this result might have many advantages,
 but in practice it would be open to the
objection that our self-governing colonies, with
their advanced and growing ideas of nationality,
would not be content under any system which must
entail the abrogation by the various units of the
Empire of their independence of action.
If we take as an example the last budget introduced
 into the Imperial Parliament we see that
the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to consider
the readiest means of raising the money he required,
and, revelling in the fiscal independence of Great
Britain, he imposed taxes on tea and tobacco.
Should the preferential programme be carried out,
no new tax on imports could be imposed, and no