Excerpt from Commerce and the Empire After working many years for Free Trade in Australia I feel emboldened to make an effort in the wider field of the Empire. The time has arrived when, in my judgment, Free Traders in all the self-governing Colonies should make an effort to bring their respective parts of the Empire into line with British fiscal policy. The task is by no means so difficult as some people think; race sympathy is making it easier every year; and the very need of revenue makes the task less instead of more difficult, since it is easier to obtain revenue without than it is with restriction. The necessity of dealing with the preferential phase of the subject has caused me to hurry the publishing, and consequently the book is less complete in many respects than I intended. The controversy with regard to preferential duties will have one good result: it will lead to a better general knowledge of the whole subject, and will, therefore, pave the way for the Self-Governing Colonies, one after another, to raise the Free Trade flag. A British Free Trade Empire is a noble object for which to fight. During a period of about nine months, in 1900-1901, immediately preceding the first Federal Election in the Australian Commonwealth, I published a weekly paper, under the title of Our Country, dealing solely with the fiscal controversy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.