THE RESULTS OF THE POLICY. o3

restriction will follow in its train. Then it could
not be long before the treaty was broken off.
Commercial treaties are always dangerous when
they are broken off. Economic disturbances result
which dislocate trade and cause suffering, depression,
 and of course, resentment against the Power
with whom the treaty existed.
So it was when colonial preference was abandoned
 as a result of the adoption of Free Trade by
England. The feeling then was so strong that it
almost led to the loss of Canada, by stimulating an
existing undercurrent of annexation feeling. This
is an example of the danger of the commercial tie.
Further, the feeling caused by the abandonment of
the Canadian-American reciprocity treaty, which
was the result of the Civil War, led to a feeling of
resentment on both sides of the boundary which
has not yet disappeared. This has at present led
to no important political or constitutional changes,
but a similar feeling between two parts of a great
Empire is likely to be so dangerous in its results as
to more than warrant us in hesitating to risk its
accurrence.l

| We do not propose to enter into the necessarily somewhat
 speculative question of whether foreign nations presaratory
 to an attempt to break down the Imperial tariff
would cease to give most-favoured.nation treatment to
Britain and her colonies or not. The risk of such treatment,
 however, fraught as it would be with inevitable loss
of foreign trade, deserves consideration, particularly as the
whole question has to be considered from a commercial
standpoint.