AN EPOCH-MAKING ISSUE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 92, 20 April 1911, Page 6

AN EPOCH-MAKING ISSUE.

The latest news regarding the prospects of the reciprocity agreement between Canada and the United States comes from Washington, and tends to increase the uncertainty of an extraordinarily interesting problem. There has seldom been a great public question of which the interest has been so well maintained through so regular a succession of ups and downs in a controversy extending without intermission for a period of three months. The confidence of the prophets on both sides that no agreement could possibly be reached was rudely shaken when the terms at which the Commissioners had provisionally arrived were announced. In Canada the proposals were considered to be so favourable that their acceptance by the Dominion Parliament was at first regarded as a certainty by those best qualified to judge. "Whatever may be ite fate in Congress," wrote the Canadian correspondent of the Round Taßle on the 30th January, "there is hardly any doubt that the agreement will be accepted in its entirety by the Canadian Parliament." But the remarkable energy with which the opposition was developed during the next few days naturally induced an editorial footnote somewhat qualifying the confidence of this judgment. With regard to the United States, the division of opinion has been less keen, and its variations „ less exciting. The Senate was at once recognised as the most dangerous obstacle in the way of the agreement, and the danger is still seen to lie that way. The American people has not taken anything like the same eager part in the fray as people the frontier, and the politicians have been left for the most part to the attentions of the industrial and commercial interests immediately concerned, and to their own ideas as to what is required by the exigegcies of party or the welfare of the nation. The question v of party can never be excluded from any important proposal regarding the tariff either in the United States or anywhere else, and in the present instance party tactics bear a' very intimate relation to the consideration of the measure. At the general election in November the Republican Party suffered a defeat which was so decisive that one has to go back twenty years in order to find a parallel to it in American politics. One of the principal causes, and probably the principal cause, of this disaster was the failure of the party to fulfil its promises to revise the tariff in the interest, of the consumer. The American elector is amazingly patient, and is content, . as a rule, to let the politicians, the trusts, and the manufacturers settle the tariff with singularly little regard for the needs of the unorganised majority. But it has certainly been drummed into hia head at last that the protected interest)* are fattening on the home consumer as much as on the foreigner, and that the immense increase in the cost of living during recent years is, in part at any rate, due to protection run mad. President Taft may reasonably hope 1 to securb a double advantage .by the proposals which he is now asking Congress to accept. As a statesman, he naturally desires to remove the causes of friction and estrangement between Canada and his own country, £o open a wider field for the expansion of American enterprise and for the supply of the American consumer, and ultimately, perhaps, to prepare the way for the peaceful absorption of the great Dominion by her 'still more powerful neighbour. As a politician, the President naturally welcomes the chance of doing something towards the fulfilment of the Republican promises to mitigate the burden of the tariff which were so flagrantly violated by the passing of the Payne Act. But in carrying out the second of these oojects the Republican leader is in the difficult position of having to rely upon the votes of the opposite party. Tho House of Representatives gives him no cause for anxiety. The measure vyas carried in that Chamber some two months ago by an overwhelming majority, and the position is safer still now, since the new House which came into being last month has given the Democrats a majority. In spite, however, of then losses in November the Republicans still retain a majority of about fifteen in the Senate,, and it looks as though they intend to use it to thwart tho policy of the President. At present the measure 6 is before the House of Representatives, ■which is considering it for the second time, owing to the last Congress having reached the end of its term before the Senate had dealt with the matter. In the House the passage of the measure is, for the reasons already given, a certainty, but the cable informed us yesterday that the Republican members will vote against it. If a similar course is followed in the Senate, then the doom of tho measure is sealed. In any case, the result is likely to be determined one way or the other' by a very small margin of the votes. The running, as the sportsman would say, has been exceptionally close and keen from the start, and it is 'still, anybody's race.