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In 1902 the Canadian import of manufactures from Great Britain was $41,675,000; excess from the United States, $27,861,000. Of the import of manufactures from the United States in 1902, $21,195,000 was on the free list, which included binder twine, fishing nets and twines, brass, copper, steel rails, mining machinery, steel and iron in various forms to the extent of over $3,000,000, tin, barbed wire, etc.

The need for a revision of the trade policy of the United States towards Canada must be apparent to any disinterested and candid man who will carefully weigh the facts.

At last the great obstacle to the continuance and completion of the work of the Joint High Commission has been removed through the reference of the Alaskan boundary question to another tribunal. Provided this treaty is ratified, the way is now open for the Commission to resume its labors. Is it worth while for it to reassemble? Better, without doubt, not to do so than to have another fiasco. Considerable progress was made by the Commission with the trade question at its Washington session in 1899. Matters have to some extent changed since then.

Concessions that were then offered by the American Government were at that time considered insufficient, and would clearly fall short of what would be found necessary now. With the great market for food in British Columbia and the Yukon region, which can be most readily furnished from Washington and Oregon; with the greater market for food in the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, for which supplies will naturally come from the seaboard cities of the United States; with the market for grain and meats which will be furnished by the lumbering and mining regions of Ontario and Quebec; with a free list of $60,632,000 of imports from the United Statesmore than ten times greater than the American free list of Canadian imports, and

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$21,000,000 of which is manufactures— and with a present importation of American farm products for consumption more than double the export of Canadian farm products to the United States, the present Canadian tariff, the rates under which are about half the rates imposed by the American tariff, and the present trade conditions, would seem to warrant the request for free trade in natural products, provided the British preference, so far as it affects the United States, was repealed.

The manufacturing interests of the United States are becoming fully alive to the importance of the Canadian market, and are nearly ready for a reciprocity treaty with fair and equitable conditions. The American farmer and lumberman, however, are troubled with fears that free natural products will depress prices in the United States. Canada desires free trade in lumber and farm products, not for the purpose of breaking prices in the United States markets, but for the purpose of securing higher prices in Canada through the addition of the duty to the price now received. The export to the United States of lumber and farm products for consump tion bears an insignificant proportion to the amount of each produced in the United States for consumption. In lumber the importation does not amount to two per cent. of the total American production. The same conditions hold good in relation to farm products of the kind that both countries do not raise a surplus of for export; and with regard to products of which each country has a surplus, American and Canadian producers meet as competitors in foreign markets. One statement with regard to the egg trade will illustrate the groundlessness of American apprehension about reduction in prices of farm products resulting from free trade.

Eggs

at one time were free, and were one of the most important in value of the list of exports from Canada to the United States. A duty of five cents per dozen has practically excluded them from the American market for many years, and the Canadian producer has found a market for this article in Great Britain which is said to be as satisfactory as was the market formerly furnished by the United States. Last year the export of eggs from Canada was, to Great Britain, 11,397,000 dozen ; to the United States, 237,000 dozen-a

total of 140,608,000 eggs, or less than two eggs annually for each inhabitant of the United States. With free trade in eggs the export to the United States, it is evident from the above statement, would bear so small a proportion to the production in that country for consumption that no appreciable effect upon prices could be produced; and the same thing would hold true, practically, with regard to the prices of all farm products imported into the United States from Canada for consumption.

Of late years a marked change has come over public sentiment in Canada regarding reciprocity with the United States, and the feeling of indifference which exists is increasing. The knowledge, as yet only partial, of the great resources of Canada and the boundless possibilities of the great Canadian Northwest has aroused aspirations for national development. The policy of fostering Canadian industries and interests is appealing more strongly day by day to the sympathies of the Canadian people, and the idea of a high protection tariff and the inauguration of a distinctively Canadian system is growing in favor, and will sweep the country at the next general elections if not headed off by a successful reciprocity movement. This feeling is closely allied to the Imperialistic sentiment which aspires to some form of organic union between Britain and her colonies, and indulges in day-dreams of Imperial trade preference for the colonies, or an Imperial Zollverein, coupled with a system of Imperial defense, in the cost of which the colonies are to bear a considerable share. All of these phases of Imperialism and extreme protection are the legitimate offspring of the selfishness of the American trade policy towards Canada, and will gradually disappear when a radical change of that policy takes place.

The Canadian economic and political forces opposed to reciprocity are, the manufactering interests, which have attained considerable development and stand resolutely for high protective duties against the United States and all other countries; the Imperialistic sentiment, which sees in reciprocity a deadly foe to its scheme for a united Empire and the destruction of colonial autonomy; the preferential trade policy, which looks for the enlargement

of our British export trade through the application of preferential duties in favor of the colonies, and all the scattered elements, Tory in instinct and anti-republican in conviction, which look upon the expansion of the power of the great Republic as a menace to the divine right of kings and all the safeguards of conservative stability. In addition to these, the transportation interests centering in the St. Lawrence route look upon reciprocity with suspicion, if not with hostility, fearing that more liberal trade arrangements will tend, through the removal of custom restrictions, to draw trade to American canals and railways and to American seaports. Against these forces and influences we may set the lumberman, the mineworker, and the fisherman, all of whom ardently desire reciprocity, and the farmer, whose views range from active desire down to passive realization that two markets must be better than one.

In Canada it is objected to reciprocity that it will lead to annexation to the United States. This objection would prove an argument in favor of the policy in the United States. Reciprocity thirty years ago would have been a working force in the direction of political union of the most powerful character. Since then conditions have materially changed, and it is useless to speculate as to whether increased intimacy in trade relations and the establishment of great mutual interests would have a commanding influence upon political relations. It may, however, be affirmed without the slightest hesitation that the continuance of the present trade relations between the two countries will have a powerful and ever-increasing tendency to render political union impossible.

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gone. The opportunity will have departed, and the evils of a tariff war will be intensified through the adoption by Canada of a policy as distinctly wide of good sense and recognition of true eco

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nomic principles as the one with which the United States in her dealings with Canada has for the last thirty years invited the scorn of future generations of economists.

John Redmond'

By Justin McCarthy

Author of A History of Our Own Times," "The Story of Gladstone's Life," etc.

OHN EDWARD REDMOND is one of the leading men in the House of Commons just now. He is one of the very few really eloquent speakers of whom the House can boast at the present time. His eloquence is, indeed, of a kind but rarely heard in either House of Parliament during recent years. The ordinary style of debate in the House of Commons is becoming more and more of the merely conversational order, and even when the speaker is very much in earnest, even when he is carried away by the fervor of debate, his emotion is apt to express itself rather in an elevation of the voice than in an exaltation of the style. Among members of the House who may be still regarded as having a career before them I do not think there are more than three or four who are capable of making a really eloquent speech-a speech which is worth hearing for its style and its language as well as for its information and its argument. John Redmond is one of these gifted few; Lloyd-George is another. I have heard some critics depreciate John Redmond's eloquence on the ground that it is rather old-fashioned. If it be old-fashioned to express one's meaning in polished and well-balanced sentences, in brilliant phrasing, and with melodious utterance, then I have to admit that John Redmond is not, in his style of eloquence, quite up to the present fashion, and I can only say that it is so much the worse for the present fashion. It is quite certain that Redmond is accepted by the House of Commons in general as one of its most eloquent speakers and one of its ablest party leaders.

Redmond has already been some twenty This forms the tenth of a series of articles on living British statesmen. Subjects already treated are: Mr. Balfour, Lord Salisbury, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Henry Labouchere, Lord Aberdeen, Sir William Harcourt, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Other articles will have as subjects John Burns and Sir Michael Hicks Beach,

years in the House of Commons. He was a very young man when first chosen to represent an Irish constituency in the House. I have noticed that our biographical dictionaries of contemporary life do not agree as to the date of Redmond's birth. Some of the books set him down as born in 1851, while others give the year of his birth as 1856. I think I have good reason for knowing that the latter date is the correct one. Perhaps it ought to bring a sense of gratification to a public man when a dispute arises as to the date of his birth. It may give him a complacent reminder of the fact that certain cities disputed as to Homer's birthplace.

John Redmond comes of a good family, and his father was for a long time a member of the House of Commons. I can remember the elder Redmond very well, and he was a man of the most courteous bearing and polished manners, a man of education and capacity, who, whenever he spoke in debate, spoke well and to the point, and was highly esteemed by all parties in the House. John Redmond was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, studied for the law and was called to the bar, but did not practice in the profession. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1881, and became a member of that National party which had been formed not long before under the guidance of Charles Stewart Parnell. From the time when he first took part in a Parlia mentary debate it was evident that John Redmond had inherited his father's graceful manner of speaking, and it was soon discovered that he possessed a faculty of genuine eloquence which had not been displayed by the elder Redmond. John Redmond had and still has a voice of remarkable strength, volume, and variety of intonation, and he was soon afforded

ample opportunity of testing his capacity for public speech. It was a great part of Parnell's policy that there should be a powerful Home Rule organization extending itself over all parts of Great Britain, founding institutions in all the principal cities and towns, and addressing audiences indoors and out on the subject of Ireland's demand for domestic self-government. John Redmond soon became one of the most effective organizers of this new movement and one of the most powerful pleaders of the cause on public platforms. The first time I ever heard him make a speech in public was at a great open-air meeting held in Hyde Park. He had to address a vast crowd, and I felt naturally anxious to know what his success might be under such trying conditions for a young speaker. He had then but a slender frame, and his somewhat delicately molded features did not suggest the idea of great lung-power. After his first sentence I felt no further doubt as to his physical capacity. He had a magnificent voice, clear, resonant, and thrilling, which made itself heard all over the crowd without the slightest apparent effort on the part of the speaker. I could not help being struck at the time by the seeming contrast between the boyish, delicate figure and the easy strength of the resonant voice.

During his earlier sessions in the House of Commons Redmond did not speak very often, but when he did speak he made it clear that he had at his command a gift of genuine eloquence. He held office as one of the "whips" of the Irish National party- that is to say, as one of the chosen officials whose duty it is to look after the arrangements of the party, to see that its members are always in their places at the right time, to settle as to the speakers who are to take part in each debate, and to enter into any necessary communications with the whips of the other parties in the House. Redmond was a man admirably suited for such work. He had had an excellent education; he had the polished manners of good society; he belonged to what I may call the country gentleman order, and could ride to hounds with a horsemanship which must have won the respect of the Tory squires from the hunting counties; and he had an excellent capacity and memory for all matters of

arrangement and detail. arrangement and detail. He attended to his duties as one of the party whips with unfailing regularity, and could exercise with equal skill the influence of persuasiveness and that of official command.

In the early days of the Parnell party there was not, to be sure, any great demand on the marshaling power of the whips over the rank and file of the little army. For a considerable time the whole Parnellite party did not consist of more than ten or a dozen members. These members, however, were compelled to do constant duty, and to maintain the great game of Parliamentary obstruction revived. by Parnell at all hours of the day and the night. It was quite a common thing for a member of the party to deliver a dozen or fifteen speeches in the course of a single sitting, and John Redmond had all his work to do in endeavoring to keep exhausted colleagues up to their business and to see that they did not leave the precincts of the House until Mr. Speaker should have formally announced that the day's sitting was over. Redmond's services were of inestimable value during such a period of trial. As the days went on, the Irish constituencies became more and more aroused to the necessity of increasing as far as possible the number of thoroughgoing Parnellites in the House by getting rid, at every election, of the Irish members-Irish Whigs as they were called-who did not go in thoroughly, heart and soul, for the. policy of Parnell. Under such conditions the influence and the eloquence of John Redmond were of the most substantial service to his party in the work of stirring up the national sentiment among the Irish populations in the cities and towns of England and Scotland. Before many years had passed, John Redmond was one of the whips of an Irish National party in the House of Commons which numbered nearly ninety members. The increase of official duties thus put upon him and his brother whips did not seem to trouble him in the slightest degree. He was always on duty in the House, unless when he had to be on duty at some public meeting outside its precincts; he was ever in good spirits; could always give his chief the fullest and most exact information as to the conditions of each debate, and the best methods of getting full use of the numbers

and the debating strength of the Irish party at any given moment.

During the greater part of this time he had not had much opportunity of cultivating his faculty as a debater, for the whip of a party is understood to be occupied rather in putting other men up to speak than in displaying eloquence of his own, and it was for several years not quite understood by the party that John Redmond was qualified to be and was destined to be one of its most commanding spokesmen. I ought to say that among other duties discharged by John Redmond was the trying and responsible task of traveling on more than one occasion over the United States and Canada and Australia to preach the Home Rule gospel to the Irish populations in those countries and to all others who would listen, and thus to obtain the utmost possible support for the great movement at home. For many sessions, however, John Redmond was regarded by his colleagues in the House as a speaker best heard to advantage on some great public platform outside the Parliamentary precincts, and very few of them indeed had yet formed the idea that he was also qualified to become one of the foremost orators in the representative chamber itself.

I may mention here that Mr. Redmond's intimate knowledge of the rules and practices of the House and his thorough acquaintance with its business ways were, in great measure, due to his having held for a time a place in one of the offices belonging to the House of Commons. He was appointed, before he became a member of the House, a clerk in the Vote Office, a department which has to do with the preparation of Parliamentary documents, the distribution of Parliamentary papers, and other such technical work. The clerkships in these offices are in the gift of the Speaker, are an avenue towards the highest promotions in the official staff of the House, and are usually given to young men who, in addition to high education and the promise of capacity, can bring some Parliamentary or family influence to bear on their behalf. John Redmond had some experience in this Vote Office, and it made him a thorough master of Parliamentary business. I had enjoyed his personal acquaintance for some time before he came into the House as a mem

ber, and I had been in the House myself some two years before his election. I remember often seeing him and exchang ing a word with him as he stood within the House itself, just below the line which marks the place where the bar of the House is erected when there is occasion, for any public purpose, to admit a stranger thus far and no farther, in order that he may plead some cause before the House or present some petition. Officials employed in any of the offices belonging to the House are allowed the proud privilege of advancing up the floor of the chamber as far as the chair occupied by the Sergeant-at-Arms, the point at which the bar would be drawn across if occasion should require. Thus I had the opportunity of conversing with John Redmond on the floor of the House itself, before he had yet obtained the right of passing beyond the sacred line of the bar.

I am quite certain that Parnell himself did not, until the great crisis came in the Irish National party, fully appreciate the political capacity of John Redmond. Parnell always regarded him as both useful and ornamental-useful in managing the business of the party, and ornamental as a brilliant speaker on a public platform. But he did not appear to know, and had indeed no means of knowing, that Redmond had in himself the qualifications of a party leader and the debating power which could make him an influence in the House of Commons. The speeches which Redmond made, or rather was "put up" by his leader to make, in the House had often for their object merely to fill up time and keep a debate going until the moment arrived when Parnell thought a division ought to be taken. But when the great crisis came in the affairs of the party, then Redmond was soon able to prove himself made of stronger metal than even his leader had supposed. The crisis was, of course, when the Parnell divorce case came on, and Gladstone and the Liberal leaders generally became filled with the conviction that it would be impossible to carry a measure of Home Rule if Parnell were to retain the leadership of the Irish National party. I need not go over this old and painful story again; it is enough to say that the great majority of Parnell's own followers found themselves compelled to believe that it would

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