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DOMINION OF CANADA. 



and promoting the trade between the two 

 countries." 



Hon. Wilfrid Laurier (leader of the Oppo- 

 sition), in supporting Sir Richard Cartwright's 

 motion, said : 



" The national policy has not developed our 

 native industry, and has not created the home 

 market for our agricultural products, as we 

 were promised. But the necessity of widening 

 the area of our trade and commerce is so great 

 that we have been looking around in this di- 

 rection and in the other direction to find new 

 outlets and new channels for our trade. In 

 the debate on the address during the present 

 session, the mover of the address told us with 

 pride that the Government had sent a com- 

 missioner to Australia in order to obtain the 

 trade of that country ; he told us that they had 

 opened communication with the Argentine Re- 

 public in order to establish a trade with that 

 country. What will come of these efforts? 

 What has come of all similar efforts? What 

 has come of our sending commissioners to Bra- 

 zil, to the West Indies, and to Spain ? Nothing, 

 for the very obvious reason that, burdened as 

 we are by our protective tariff, we can not 

 meet free-trade England in those markets; so 

 fiat the conclusion is inevitable that all the 

 efforts we have made so far to develop our 

 trade and commerce, and to broaden their area, 

 ever since 1867, have been a succession of fail- 

 ures. We are a colony of England, it is true ; 

 but we are a colony not by force but by choice ; 

 and if we are a colony to-day, it is because we 

 are convinced that at the present day our colo- 

 nial independence is quite compatible with all 

 kinds of national advancement and material 

 prosperity. If you on the other side pretend 

 that our colonial relation curtails and limits 

 our possibilities, that England would allow us 

 to reach a certain altitude and not go higher, I 

 say you slander England ; and if any man were 

 to rise on the other side and tell us that Eng- 

 land would be jealous at whatever we could do 

 to improve our condition, I would say that 

 man does not know England ; he mistakes the 

 England of to-day for the England of one hun- 

 dred years ago. I commend to the considera- 

 tion of these fervent loyalists on the other side, 

 whose mouths are ever lull of the word loyalty, 

 the following words spoken by Lord Palmerston 

 twenty years ago in reference to the British 

 North American provinces: 'If these provinces 

 felt themselves strong enough to stand upon 

 their own ground, and if they desire no longer 

 to maintain their connection with us, we should 

 say, " God speed you, and give you the means 

 to maintain yourselves as a nation ! " These 

 are the sentiments of British statesmen. They 

 tell us that whenever we want our political 

 liberty, we are free to have it. But what we 

 ask is not political independence ; we want to 

 keep the flag of England over our heads ; but 

 we affirm that we are economically independ- 

 ent as we are legislatively independent. Colo- 

 nies have interests in common with the mother- 



land, but colonies have interests of their own 

 also ; and to-day we levy a heavy toll on all im- 

 ports from Great Britain. We have done that 

 not only for the sake of collecting revenue, but 

 also for the purpose of protection, to enable us 

 to manufacture ourselves what we had formerly 

 purchased from England, and to that extent to 

 destroy British trade. There was a time when 

 this would not have been tolerated ; there was 

 a time when England would have disallowed 

 such a policy ; but now we adopt it as a mat- 

 ter of course; now our policy is never ques- 

 tioned why ? Because England has long 

 ago admitted the principle that colonies have 

 interests of their own, and that it is within 

 their right and power to develop and foster 

 and promote those interests, even to the point 

 of clashing with British interests." 



Hon. Mr. Chapleau (Secretary of State), 

 in supporting Mr. Foster's amendment, said: 



" On some abstract questions men can dictate 

 to the people, they can state certain opinions 

 and impose them on the people ; but on a 

 question of policy like this it is the voice of 

 the people that decides ; and the voice of the 

 people is against you. Your statistics may be 

 good, and you may be able to make them 

 prove anything you want, but the only statis- 

 tics I want are statistics of the sentiments and 

 feelings of the people ; and those are against 

 you. The people themselves have their say, 

 and in discussing questions of this kind abstract 

 theories of men have no influence over them. 

 Free trade is in the hearts of the people of Erg- 

 land ; and why ? Because in England after 

 long years, I might say, after centuries, of weli- 

 digested, of well-guided, of well-applied pro- 

 tection, the manufacturing genius of the Eng- 

 lish people has acquired a perfection that can 

 not be surpassed or equaled. Manufacturers in 

 England challenge and defy all competition, 

 and in a country like England, where the 

 largest possibilities of production have been 

 attained, cheap living is the desideratum of the 

 working-classes. Free trade is in the hearts of 

 the people of England, whatever might be the 

 difficulties which at the present moment it 

 might entail on the financial condition of the 

 country. On the other hand, protection is in 

 the hearts of the people of the United States; 

 and why? Is it because the genius for manu- 

 facturing industries has not developed there ? 

 It has to an immense extent ; it has so much 

 that American manufacturers are the rivals of 

 Great Britain in almost all the markets of the 

 world. Why is protection still in the hearts of 

 the people of the United States ? It is, and will 

 be so long as there is a productive South, an 

 extensive West, affording opportunities for the 

 activity and intelligence of the sons of work- 

 ingmen to progress under the protective policy 

 which has done great benefit in the past. But 

 it is still more in the hearts of the people of the 

 United States, because the structure they have 

 built necessarily requires further time to be- 

 come consolidated so as to be able to defy the 



