and the colonies yielded obedience the Empire was rapidly being
transformed into a free and equal partnership of independent
commonwealths under one king. Out of the clash of rival theories
and conflicting interests a new ideal and a new reality had
developed. The policy of imperial cooperation--the policy whereby
each great colony became independent of outside control but
voluntarily acted in concert with the mother country and the
sister states on matters of common concern--sought to reconcile
liberty and unity, nationhood and empire, to unite what was most
practicable in the aims of the advocates of independence and the
advocates of imperial federation. The movement developed
unevenly. At the outbreak of the Great War, it was still
incomplete. The ideal was not always clearly or consciously held
in the Empire itself and was wholly ignored or misunderstood in
Europe and even in the United States. Yet in twenty years' space
it had become dominant in practice and theory and had built up a
new type of political organization, a virtual league of nations,
fruitful for the future ordering of the world.

The three fields in which this new policy was worked out were
trade, defense, and political organization. Canada had asserted
her right to control her tariff and commercial treaty relations
as she pleased. Now she used this freedom to offer, without
asking any return in kind, tariff privileges to the mother
country. In the first budget brought down by the Minister of
Finance in the Laurier Cabinet, William S. Fielding, a reduction,
by instalments, of twenty-five per cent in tariff duties was
offered to all countries with rates as low as Canada's--that is,
to the United Kingdom and possibly to the Netherlands and New
South Wales. The reduction was meant both as a fulfilment of the