of the well-to-do, and the great increase in the price of commodities since 1898.

It is impossible to gauge the part played by the preference in this increase. That the preference has been helpful to British exporters in some lines of trade may reasonably be assumed, especially as there has been no such increase in the exports from Germany and France to Canada as there has been in English exports. German trade with Canada was disturbed for several years by the imposition of a surtax by each Government-German and Canadian; and only in 1911 did the imports into Canada from Germany, which had been greatly decreased, reach again the value of ten million dollars-a figure that had been passed in 1902. French imports into Canada have never been large. They amounted in 1902 to six million dollars, and in 1911, after much careful nursing by means of a reciprocity treaty, to ten million dollars. Under conditions so complicated as these, not much can be learned from a study of the French and German figures.

More enlightening are the statistics of trade with the United States--a trade which has not been disturbed either by a reciprocity treaty or by a surtax. In 1891, when dutiable imports from Great Britain were of the value of $24,300,000, those from the United States amounted to $29,790,000. By 1911, when British dutiable imports had increased to $84,511,835, those from the United States reached the value of $153,167,000, while of duty-free imports Canada imported from Great Britain to the value of $25,422,830 and from the United States to the value of $121,777,000. It will thus be seen that, while British imports, with all the supposed advantages of the preference, increased almost three and a half times in value, American imports increased more than five times. In 1896 British imports, free and dutiable, formed 31.15 per cent. of all imports into Canada, while American imports amounted to 50-80 per cent. In 1911 the proportion of British imports, free and dutiable, had decreased to 24 34 per cent., while the percentage of the whole import trade of the Dominion held by the United States had risen to 60.84.

The aim of this article is to record the history of Preference since it was first enacted in 1897, to recall the political conditions under which it was conceived, and to

describe the changes which it has undergone since 1904, when the Laurier Government, in consequence of pressure from the manufacturers, began to weaken on the policy it had adopted in 1897. An endeavour has been made to explain the forces that have been working against Preference since it was first adopted, and also the forces that have combined since 1905 to secure its maintenance and if possible to extend it and to widen the market for British manufactures in the Dominion. The interests hostile to Preference are solely those of the manufac turers. Consumers generally are heartily in favour of it; but the only organised forces that have made any fight for it are the farmers of Ontario and the graingrowers of the three western provinces. The graingrowers will become a much stronger factor in Dominion politics after the redistribution of electoral power that is now due following the census of 1910. The prairie provinces, which now have 27 members in the House of Commons, will have at least 42 after the redistribution; and, however much the manufacturers may press for further curtailment of preference and for increases in the duties in the general list, any government, Conservative or Liberal, must pay heed to the growing demand of the West for lower duties in the general tariff and for the increase of the British preference to fifty per cent. Canada for half a century has been much influenced by the tariff legislation of the United States. It may now be assumed that duties in the American tariff have reached their climax. The tendency is now in the direction of lower duties; and any general reduction in the duties in the American tariff, such as is expected at the coming revision, will react on Canada and strengthen the demand for freer trade with the United States and for further reductions in the duties on imports from Great Britain.

EDWARD PORRITT.

Art. 9.-THE TRAINING OF A QUEEN.

1. The Girlhood of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty's Diaries, 1832-1840. Edited by Viscount Esher. Two vols. London: Murray, 1912.

2. Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttelton, 1787-1870. Edited by the Hon. Mrs Hugh Wyndham. London: Murray, 1912.

THERE is a certain irony in the fact that the century which more than any other produced revolutionary changes in the standing of women, and in the ideas current about them, was in this country identified with a woman who, rigid in many directions, was nowhere so rigid or so unchanging as in her attitude towards her own.sex. It is too early yet to get an unbiased view of Queen Victoria in relation to her work, or to strike a balance between the limitations belonging to her character and those imposed upon her by tradition; we can only note the singular paradox of her life. That she was in training for her task from an early age would be evident enough from this Journal, were it not already known. But the training, though it aimed at a single and clearly defined object, was confused and contradictory in itself. The young Princess knew that she was to rule over her country, and she was encouraged to take a high view of the sacredness of the charge. Simultaneously she learnt, not only by direct precept, which is the least part of education, but from all the ideas and influences surrounding her, that the charge was one which must bring her into direct conflict with the sacred laws governing her duty as a woman. Only a skilled casuist could have done justice to the ethics of her position. A Quaker divinely called to lead a military expedition would find himself in much the same case; conscience would impose upon him duties which would be crimes in his fellow religionists as well as repugnant to his own feelings. All rulers are exempt to some degree from the laws of conduct binding ordinary men. Queen Victoria was so exempt to a degree that was extraordinary if not unnatural.

The discrepancy between her actual and her theoretical obligations might have produced inconvenient results

upon a mind more speculative or more sensitive to mental climates. Man, as philosophers inform us, is so constituted that by telling him he is a fool you may make him believe he is one. Had Victoria been placed in France or Russia or some other country where ideas react more immediately upon life, she might easily have been convinced by all that she read, heard, and dutifully accepted about women, that she could not by any means fulfil her task. As it was, with a truly British knack of separating views from conduct, she mounted the throne with an alacrity and self-confidence that amazed those who were more accustomed to consider what women should be than what they could be or were. How the Queen herself, then and afterwards, reconciled her active exercise of authority with the views she is known to have held about feminine duty, is a problem before which curiosity must retire unsatisfied. From time to time she expressed herself with dogmatic force upon the subject, but apparently she never attempted to examine the ground of her conviction, or to pursue the anomalies of her case to their logical conclusion. Probably she took the more pious course of regarding herself as an exception created by inscrutable Providence for some good but not-to-be-questioned purpose, as a man separates his mother or his daughter from the great mass of women, condemned by nature to be either rakes or dolls.

That this was her attitude is amusingly apparent in some of her talk with Lord Melbourne, whose views about women may be described as classical. Except on one point, they fitted in very comfortably with the Queen's notions of things. No woman should touch pen and ink, Melbourne assures her; and he gives as the reason that women have too much passion and too little sense.' These faults are more likely to disqualify a queen than a writer; and the Queen's meek acquiescence would seem to imply that, in her own view, she was fit only to register automatically the decrees of those with less passion and more sense than herself. It did in fact imply nothing of the sort, because she escaped from the dilemma by the simple expedient of endorsing the criticism as regards women in general, and firmly rejecting it in the case of the Queen. Drastic as were Melbourne's generalisations on this side, his detailed

judgments-as witnessed by some of his comments on history quoted by the Queen-were considerably more enlightened and sympathetic than hers. It is not good for anyone to be self-separated from his fellows; and there can be little doubt that the Queen's character to some extent suffered because, being a queen, the ideas of the time compelled her to be also a super-woman. The autocratic element in her was certainly not diminished by her practice of regarding herself as a being in more ways than one removed from the common lot. But the blame for any regrettable results must be divided between her and the old-fashioned ideas about women which coincided with her advent to the throne.

With her training on the purely intellectual side the Queen in after years expressed some discontent. Her information was slight, no doubt, as appears clearly enough from the candid pages of her Journal; but perhaps the Dean of Chester and her other teachers were not altogether in fault. Neither here nor elsewhere is there much evidence of her possessing a disinterested love of knowledge, or any great capacity to gain experience from books. Life at first hand, rather than through books, was her concern; and it is probable that, like most women of a practical and positive turn of mind, she only learnt with ease and profit under a directly utilitarian incentive. For the most part, her remarks upon her studies show her interest in them to have been narrowly specialised; reading in history or in Shakespeare, for instance, becoming strictly a means of discovering the good and bad qualities of rulers in the past, with the lessons to be learnt from them for a 19th century purpose. Still more to her taste was the contemplation, under the guidance of her uncle Leopold ('who governs Belgium so beautifully'), of living Kings and Queens, and of the constitutions under which they ruled their countries, France, Spain, or Portugal. From the time she was fifteen, Princess Victoria began to express herself upon public affairs and to learn the vocabulary of her craft. This, and her wonderful habits of industry and of accurate observation and statement, were probably the best that she gained from her bringing up. They were not exciting acquisitions, but she might have done worse; and without them it is possible that her enthusiasm would Vol. 218.-No. 434.