The second task confronting the policy of imperial cooperation was a harder one.For a partnership between colony and mother country there were no precedents.Centralized empires there had been; colonies there had been which had grown into independent states; but there was no instance of an empire ceasing to be an empire, of colonies becoming self-governing states and then turning to closer and cooperative union with one another and with the mother country.
Along this unblazed trail two important advances were made.The initiative in the first came from Canada.In 1880 a High Commissioner was appointed to represent Canada in London.The appointment of Sir Alexander Galt and the policy which it involved were significant.The Governor-General had ceased to be a real power; he was becoming the representative not of the British Government but of the King; and, like the King, he governed by the advice of the responsible ministers in the land where he resided.His place as the link between the Government of Canada and the Government of Britain was now taken in part by the High Commissioner.The relationship of Canada to the United Kingdom was becoming one of equality not of subordination.
The initiative in the second step came from Britain, though Canada's leaders gave the movement its final direction.Imperial federationists urged Lord Salisbury to summon a conference of the colonies to discuss the question they had at heart.Salisbury doubted the wisdom of such a policy but agreed in 1887 to call a conference to discuss matters of trade and defense.Every self-governing colony sent representatives to this first Colonial Conference; but little immediate fruit came of its sessions.In 1894 a second Conference was held at Ottawa, mainly to discuss intercolonial preferential trade.Only a beginning had been made, but already the Conferences were coming to be regarded as meetings of independent governments and not, as the federationists had hoped, the germ of a single dominating new government.The Imperial Federation League began to realize that it was making little progress and dissolved in 1893.
Preferential trade was the alternative path to imperial federation.Macdonald had urged it in 1879 when he found British resentment strong against his new tariff.Again, ten years later, when reciprocity with the United States was finding favor in Canada, imperialists urged the counterclaims of a policy of imperial reciprocity, of special tariff privileges to other parts of the Empire.The stumbling-block in the way of such a policy was England's adherence to free trade.For the protectionist colonies preference would mean only a reduction of an existing tariff.For the United Kingdom, however, it would mean a complete reversal of fiscal policy and the abandonment of free trade for protection in order to make discrimination possible.Few Englishmen believed such a reversal possible, though every trade depression revived talk of "fair trade" or tariffs for bargaining purposes.A further obstacle to preferential trade lay in the existence of treaties with Belgium and Germany, concluded in the sixties, assuring them all tariff privileges granted by any British colony to Great Britain or to sister colonies.In 1892the Liberal Opposition in Canada indicated the line upon which action was eventually to be taken by urging a resolution in favor of granting an immediate and unconditional preference on British goods as a step toward freer trade and in the interest of the Canadian consumer.
Little came of looking either to London or to Washington.Until the middle nineties Canada remained commercially stagnant and politically distracted.Then came a change of heart and a change of policy.The Dominion realized at last that it must work out its own salvation.
