CRUMBLING    HERITAGE	307
was ready at last to repudiate free trade.  For men had cried to
their totem, and their totem had failed them.
Not that any very vigorous protective policy was adopted.
The worst abuses of dumping by State subsidised foreign impor-
ters, who had long regarded the unprotected British urban market
as a happy hunting ground, were checked. And in 1932 a British
Delegation, led by the Lord Privy Seal, Baldwin, agreed at the
Imperial Conference at Ottawa to afford to the Dominions, in
return for reciprocal advantages for British exporters, that prefer-
ential treatment which had been refused by Lord Salisbury's
government at the Diamond Jubilee thirty-five years before.
But the extent of such preference was strictly limited because tl^e
National Government felt itself unable to reserve more than a
moderate fraction of the home market in foodstuffs for imperial
producers. Its reluctance was dictated not so much by the old
fear of raising the price of food to the British consumer as by its
deference to the vested financial, commercial and shipping
interests which had grown up round the imports of foreign
agricultural products. For it was plainly impossible for Britain
to take her beef simultaneously from British farms and from
the Argentine: if she sacrificed the latter for the former, it would
become difficult and perhaps impossible to transmit the interest
on the British capital invested in that country. And as the vast and
costly party machines necessary to a country with a democratic
franchise inevitably received more support from bankers and
shipowners than farmers, it was only natural that the former's
interests should prevail.
So imperial preference, though popularly approved, was but
tentatively encouraged instead of boldly applied. It was not
possible to create a new economic order for the British Empire as
the public wished without breaking financial eggs.. In 1938, the
Anglo-American Trade Agreement, without any mandate from
the electorate, actually whittled down the modest concessions
granted to Dominion producers in 1932. As for protection, this
was virtually never possible without the repudiation of a com-
plicated system of foreign commercial treaties which had been
built up during the Free Trade years, and of which the public
knew nothing. The whole economic structure raised in a century „
of titanic capitalist enterprise was too intricate and interdepen-
dent for any one to be able to produce, let alone execute, a plan
capable for mending any one of its defective parts without injur-