* L E s T WE FORGET!* 269

This concession meant little at the time. There were no
British duties to reduce in favour of the colonies. Least of all
could Britain offer the colonies the sheltered markets they needed
for their two most important articles of export—food and raw
material. Absolute freedom from restriction In both was an
article of faith of the Liberal Party. Since the day when
Disraeli had taught his followers in the early 'fifties to seek
electoral merit by discarding the damnosa hereditas of protection,
it was scarcely less so with the Tory.

It said much, therefore, for Chamberlain's courage that, at
the age of 67, with a reasonable chance of the reversion of the
Conservative leadership and the Premiership, he should have
resigned his office in order to convince his countrymen of the
necessity of an imperial tariff union. In 1903 this ambitious and
vigorous man on his return from a tour in South Africa electrified
England by going on the stump in a nation-wide campaign of
economic education.

The outcry was tremendous* The Liberals, now long out of
favour, were jubilant. They raised the most popular of all
electoral cries—-the People's Food in Danger. The Conservative
Party was terrified, and for a while split from top to bottom.
Its leader, the aristocratic Arthur Balfour, saved its unity 'by
temporising. But when in 1905, refusing to follow his lieutenant's
lead, he went to the country on a note of half-hearted interroga-
tion, he was routed. Imperial preference was marked down for
a generation.

It could hardly have been otherwise. For almost inevitably
Chamberlain, in his Empire crusade, fell into a fatal error. He
began by appealing to patriotism, He asked for tariffs against
foreign imports in order to consolidate the imperial heritage of
the unborn and to help the primary producers of the Empire
who had fought for Britain in the Boer War and who were now
voluntarily offering her traders preference. But having to win
votes in a commercial age, he and his more worldly followers
soon transferred the appeal to material self-interest. Ingenious
and elaborately supported economic arguments were advanced
to show that the British manufacturer and consumer would reap
immediate rewards from a general tariff on foreign goods. The
issue of imperial preference as a long-term patriotic investment
became obscured by that of protection as an opportunity for
quick profits. Great empire and little minds, as Burke saw, go