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