share this solicitude.  He has got a comfortable theory that if you only look after your imports your exports will look after themselves.  Will they?  The Tariff Reformer does not agree with that at all.  Imports no doubt are paid for by exports, but it does not in the least follow that by increasing your dependence on others you will necessarily increase their dependence on you.  It would be much truer to say:  “Look after the exports and the imports will look after themselves.”  The more you sell the more you will be able to buy, but it does not in the least follow that the more you buy the more you will be able to sell.  What business man would go on the principle of buying as much as possible and say:  “Oh, that is all right.  I am sure to be able to sell enough to pay for it.”  The first thought of a wise business man is for his markets, and you as a great trading nation are bound to think of your markets, not only your markets of to-day but of to-morrow and the day after to-morrow.

The Free Trade theory was the birth of a time when our imports were practically all supplemental to our exports, all indispensable to us, and when, on the other hand, the whole of the world was in need of our goods, far beyond our power of supplying it.  Since then the situation has wholly altered.  At this actual moment, it is true, there is temporarily a state of things which in one respect reproduces the situation of fifty years ago.  There is for the moment an almost unlimited demand for some of our goods abroad.  But that is not the normal situation.  The normal situation is that there is an increasing invasion of our markets by goods from abroad which we used to produce ourselves, and an increasing tendency to exclude our goods from foreign markets.  The Tariff Reform movement is the inevitable result of these altered circumstances.  There is nothing artificial about it.  It is not, as some people think, the work of a single man, however much it may owe to his genius and his courage, however much it may suffer, with other good causes, through his enforced retirement from the field.  It is not an eccentric idea of Mr. Chamberlain’s.  Sooner or later it was bound to come in any case.  It is the common sense and experience of the people waking up to the altered state of affairs, beginning to shake itself free from a theory which no longer fits the facts.  It is a movement of emancipation, a twofold struggle for freedom—­in the sphere of economic theory, for freedom of thought, in the sphere of fiscal policy, for freedom of action.

And that freedom of action is needed quickly.  It is needed now.  I am not doubtful of the ultimate triumph of Tariff Reform.  Sooner or later, I believe, it is sure to achieve general recognition.  What does distress me is the thought of the opportunities we are losing in the meantime.  This year has been marked, disastrously marked, in our annals by the emphatic and deliberate rejection on the part of our Government of the great principle of Preferential