Commercial Federation Colonial Trade Policy - Economic History Author:John Davidson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. COMMERCIAL FEDERATION. WHEN Prince Bismarck declared in 1884 that it was not the intention of'the German Government to found provinces but comme... more »rcial undertakings1 he set forth not only the intention of the German Government but the motive of all colonisation and the ideal of colonial policy of all nations. This is the one permanent colonial problem—how to raise up a nation of customers. Other problems have attracted attention and have been solved or disappeared naturally in the development of history. Indeed, nothing is so remarkable in the history of colonial policy as this fact of the complete disappearance of so many of those problems on which the fate of our colonial empire seemed to depend, and about which whole generations of men have vexed and agitated themselves. Men used to grow heated over the pro and cons of responsible government, of penal settlements, and systematic colonisation and state aided emigration, of land grants and the treatment of natives. Yet these questions are all dead issues. Some of them have solved themselves and other have been solved by contriving to shift the responsibility from the Imperial Government to the colonial administrations. These questions, if they remain questions at all, are no longer problems of colonial policy but problems in the domestic politics of the colonies. The land question, which so interested Wakefield and his fellows, was transferred to the colonial legislatures, and has there, the theorists to the contrary, been settled satisfactorily, to the colonists at least,in the way best fitted to promote the growth of the colonies ; and the treatment of the natives by colonial governments has been, at the worst, as satisfactory as it was while the Imperial Government was worried by the Nonconformist conscience. Ca...« less