ABSTRACT
An Imperial Conference on these matters was fixed for the summer of 1932 at Ottawa. In short, as an experiment in tariff bargaining, the Ottawa agreements were an utter failure. It is in the light of this condition of things that we must judge the policy adopted by Britain and the British Empire during the fateful years from 1931 to 1935. The British Government was responsible because it alone could issue orders to the Governments of the dependent colonies and protectorates, requiring them to impose tariffs against the foreign imports and to give a preference to British and Dominion imports. On the strength of this, one of the minor British ministers boasted that the Empire had in principle abandoned Protection. The reversal of this time-honoured policy by the Second National Government did serious harm, as we have seen, to the trade of the dependent colonies. A British merchant can buy British colonial goods with British money.
