• As for Ottawa, we shall still have to wait
some weeks before we know the other side of the bargain Mr. Baldwin and his colleagues struck. The undisclosed concessions by Canada and Australia, I am told, are substantial enough to make it possible to claim that in the aggregate the Ottawa agreements have resulted on balance in a decrease, not an increase, of Imperial tariffs. That may be well enough as regards tariffs within the Commonwealth, but the Dominion duties are lowered only in relation to one country (or in some .cases two or three) and stand against the rest of the world, whereas the new British tariffs operate against all the world except three or four Dominions. That gives a very different aggregate and a very different balance. I hear, by the way, that President Hoover is greatly impressed by one Ottawa achievement, the provision giving British exporters the right to be heard before a Canadian or Australian Tariff Board. That procedure, Mr. Hoover thinks, might be widely copied. But the procedure is no good without a principle to guide the Board. The principle accepted at Ottawa (with provisos that largely stultify it) was that Dominion tariffs should be kept down to a point that would give British exporters " full opportunities of reasonable competition." Will -Mr. Hoover's Government accept that ? And if so, when ?
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