Publications of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Division of Economics and History FREEDOM OF THE BRITISH BY EDWARD PORRITT EDITED BY DAVID KINLEY PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OXFORD: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS Carnegie Endowment for Internat. Peace gt. 9-29-1922 PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS PREFACE THIS book is ostensibly a story of fiscal progress, of trade and industry. Knowing this, the ordinary reader will feel impelled to turn from it as a dry record of facts and figures. But the book is more than that. It is a story of growth of nationalities, of adjustments of the economic and political life of her colonies to the mother country. It is a story of the growth to mature womanhood and independence of the greatest of the colonial daughters of the mighty Empire of Britain. It is a story of her independent action, of the ebb and flow of her affection, of the alternate strengthening and weakening of the bonds that join her to her mother land, yet on the whole always resulting in the strengthening of the more deeply laid and hidden ties that bind that wonderful world empire which has played so great a part in the war. The fiscal history of Canada resembles in some respects that of the United States. Discussion of tariff and protection has played a large part. Many of the great movements, like the protectionist, sprang from the sordid motives of individuals; yet not infrequently, as in our own country, they worked out for the public weal. There is no minimizing of the blindness, the selfishness, and the sordidness of the views of many British statesmen. Not only to the average Englishman, but to many Englishmen above the average, charged with responsibilities of great colonial government, the colonies have frequently seemed matters of minor importance and the colonist entitled to something less than the full consideration of stay-at-home Englishmen. This point of view is well and frequently shown in the history of the great commonwealth to the north of us. However, the colonies, including Canada, were not themselves altogether V 407958 |