Joseph Chamberlain believed in imperialism. His design for the British Empire was of a worldwide family of nations, diverse, secure, prosperous—and closely tied to the United Kingdom. To promote this design he had taken the Colonial Office in 1895; to achieve it he had worked through the Boer War and the Khaki Election. By the summer of 1902, it still had not been accomplished. Britain’s largest dominions, Canada and Australia, were secure and prosperous, but they were becoming independent. Their people still thought of themselves as subjects of the British Crown, but as Australian or Canadian subjects, not British subjects. “Colonies,” wrote Robert Jacques Turgot, the eighteenth-century French economist and finance minister, “are like fruits1 which cling to the tree only until they ripen.” Chamberlain concluded that the colonies needed incentives to remain attached to the Empire and that the incentives most likely to work were commercial. He therefore proposed building a tariff wall around the British Empire. All competing produce and goods from foreign states bound for any part of the Empire would be taxed once they crossed the tariff wall. This would benefit farmers and manufacturers throughout the Empire and bind them more closely to the mother country. The Colonial Secretary further anticipated that customs duties levied on foreign goods entering the United Kingdom would provide government revenues to pay for the social reforms he advocated. Chamberlain named his plan “Imperial Preference.”
Chamberlain thought the country was ready for his proposal: under an imperialist banner, the nation had won the South African war; on an imperialist platform, the Unionist Party had won the Khaki Election. Imperial Preference, he believed, would ride the same tide of Imperial feeling. Other factors seemed favorable. Lord Salisbury, always dubious of Chamberlain and his schemes, had stepped down and been replaced by Arthur Balfour. In August 1902, the Fourth Colonial Conference had met in London and, although it rejected Chamberlain’s suggestion that a Council of the Empire be formed, it passed a resolution favoring Imperial Preference. The British government was respectfully urged to grant preferential treatment to agricultural products and manufacturers of the colonies, “either by exemption2 from or reduction of duties now or hereafter imposed.” In fact, Great Britain’s historic adhesion to free trade had already been broken. In the 1902 budget, Conservative Chancellor Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had asked for and been given a small (one shilling per ton) duty on foreign cornfn1 imported into the United Kingdom. Its purpose was to raise revenue to pay for the Boer War, but Chamberlain saw its acceptance by the Cabinet and the House of Commons as a starting point from which he could advance. If the shilling duty were kept on foreign corn, while corn grown in the Empire was exempted, it would be the beginning of Imperial Preference.
Chamberlain’s idea found immediate favor with a faction of the Unionist Party: protection for British industry had long been a demand of the businessmen of the Conservative Party. But free trade remained an article of faith of many Tories and all Liberals. Indeed, Britain’s attachment to free trade had been unchallenged by any major political figure since Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1848. Hicks-Beach’s small duty on corn was explained and accepted as a war tax only, to be lifted as soon as the end of the war made extra revenues unnecessary. To many in Parliament and the country, use of this temporary tariff as the first step in erecting a permanent tariff wall was a breach of promise and of Britain’s tradition of free trade. In launching his crusade for Imperial Preference, therefore, Joseph Chamberlain was challenging history, as well as upsetting party alignments. Before the battle was over, he would split the Unionist Party over free trade as dramatically as, twenty years earlier, he had split the Liberal Party over Home Rule.
Imperial Preference was not the only matter on Joseph Chamberlain’s mind in the summer of 1902. “Joe’s war” had finally ended in May, and the Colonial Secretary was planning a visit to South Africa to investigate personally the problems of reintegrating the Boer republics into the Empire. While there, he also hoped to persuade the wealthy Transvaal Uitlanders to contribute £30 million towards the cost of the war. He was to be away for four months, leaving England in November, staying through the South African summer, and returning home in March. Before leaving, he wanted the Cabinet to confront the issue of Imperial Preference, at least to the extent of deciding to retain the corn duty imposed by Hicks-Beach. The Cabinet met on October 21 and discussed the corn duty, but Chamberlain’s proposal that it be the first step towards introducing the broader program of Imperial Preference was vigorously opposed by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Ritchie. Balfour’s report to the King of the Cabinet’s deliberation was drafted in careful language. “It was suggested,”3 the Prime Minister wrote, “that, while retaining the shilling duty on corn as regards foreign importation, our Colonies should be allowed to import it free. There is a very great deal to be said in favor of this proposal. But it raises very big questions indeed.... On the whole, Mr. Balfour leans towards it, but it behooves us to walk warily....”
The Cabinet met again on November 19, a week before Chamberlain was to sail. Ritchie repeated his protest and handed his colleagues a confidential memorandum opposing Chamberlain’s design: “Let us first be quite clear4 what preferential treatment involves. It involves the imposition of a charge on the taxpayers of the United Kingdom in order to benefit our kith and kin beyond the sea. Don’t let us be under any delusion about that....” Balfour, presiding, remained above the battle. The other ministers, turning their heads first to Chamberlain, then to Ritchie, kept silent. Chamberlain left the meeting convinced that he had the majority and that, in time, he might win over even Mr. Ritchie. In any case, it was agreed that, while he was away, the issue would be suspended and a final decision made only before the budget was presented to the Commons the following spring. The Colonial Secretary’s impression of victory in principle is borne out by the Prime Minister’s report that night to the King: “The Cabinet finally resolved5 that... they would maintain the corn tax but that a preferential remission of it would be made in favor of the British Empire.”
During the four months the Colonial Secretary was away, Ritchie worked feverishly to reverse the Cabinet decision and do away with the shilling corn tax in the new budget. Armed with Treasury statistics, he pressed his Cabinet colleagues to reconsider their views. Early in March, before Chamberlain’s return to England, the Chancellor asked Balfour to schedule a meeting and put the budget before the Cabinet. The Prime Minister, distressed to find his Chancellor and his Colonial Secretary still on a collision course, refused Ritchie’s request and through Chamberlain’s son, Austen, warned the Colonial Secretary, then aboard a ship approaching Madeira. Chamberlain considered his South African journey a success. He had toured the country, visiting Durban, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, making speeches and interviewing leaders of all parties; his only setback had been his failure to collect £30 million from the Uitlanders. Although disturbed by the message he received in Madeira, he arrived in Southampton on March 14, 1903, determined to press the Cabinet for maintenance of the corn tax as a first step to Imperial Preference.
At the Cabinet meeting three days later, on March 17, Ritchie demanded that the corn tax be abolished. Forewarned, Chamberlain was not surprised. What did surprise him was discovering that a majority of the Cabinet now seemed to favor the Chancellor. Balfour again did not take sides. He did not overrule Ritchie because he did not wish his new Chancellor to resign on the eve of his first budget presentation. Playing for time, the Prime Minister concentrated on mollifying Chamberlain, promising that if Ritchie were allowed to have his way with the budget in the Cabinet, the summer would be used to investigate and further analyze the matter. Chamberlain bowed and admitted that “there was no time to fight6 the question out in the Cabinet before the Budget had to be introduced.” The budget Ritchie presented to the House on April 23 was a pure free-trade budget, and the Chancellor defended it with a full-blooded free-trade, free-food argument: “Corn is in a greater degree7 a necessity of life than any other article... it is the food of our people....”
While Ritchie spoke, Chamberlain sat quietly. He maintained his silence for another three weeks. Then, on May 15 at Birmingham Town Hall, before his speech, he turned to the chief organizer and said grimly, “You can burn your leaflets.8 We are going to talk about something else.” He began by apologizing that while doing the Empire’s business in South Africa his “party weapons9 had become a little rusty.” “In the calm which is induced by the solitude of the illimitable veldt,” he had found himself looking beyond the petty issues of the day. He asked his audience to contemplate the glorious future of the British Empire: today, 40 million subjects in the United Kingdom; overseas, 10 million. One day, these 10 million would be 40 million. Did his audience wish these millions to continue in “close, intimate, affectionate” bond with the mother country or to break away and become independent nations? In preventing the disintegration of the Empire, “the question of trade and commerce is of the greatest importance.” To achieve the promised glory of the Empire, Great Britain must favor its colonies by a policy of Imperial Preference. This question, he announced, must be an issue at the next General Election.
Balfour and Cabinet were stunned. On the very day that Chamberlain spoke in Birmingham, the Prime Minister was assuring a protectionist delegation in London that it was not the proper time to introduce Imperial Preference. Balfour recovered quickly enough to tell the press that Chamberlain’s address was “a great speech by a great man.”10 On May 28, Chamberlain repeated his challenge in the House of Commons. He was roundly cheered by many Unionist backbenchers and hooted by the Liberals while his colleagues on the Government Front Bench sat silent. Outside the Commons, other leaders of the Unionist Party, including the Duke of Devonshire, Lord President of the Council, who eighteen years before had joined Chamberlain in deserting the Liberal Party over Home Rule, now sided against the Colonial Secretary. The lines between free trade and protectionism were being drawn. “From that point on11 until the General Election of 1906,” said H. H. Asquith, “it became the dominating issue of British politics.”
The Prime Minister, who stood in the middle, pleaded for calm. “Chamberlain’s views...12 commit no one but himself. They certainly do not commit me,” he wrote to the Duke of Devonshire on June 4. He suggested to his Cabinet colleagues that “for the present13 it shall be agreed that the question is an open one and that no one stands committed by any statement but their own.” His first speech to the Commons on the subject, delivered on June 10, followed this noncommittal path. He announced that he had not made up his own mind and therefore refused to take sides between free trade and Imperial Preference. To the House’s astonishment, Balfour boldly ascribed his indecision—clearly an effort to keep both wings of his party in harness by criticizing neither—to moral rectitude and political wisdom: “I should consider14 that I was ill-performing my duty—I will not say to my Party but to the House and to the country—if I were to profess a settled conviction where no settled conviction exists.” The Liberals hooted. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, declared that it was intolerable that a British Prime Minister be without settled convictions on a fundamental issue of British politics. Sir Wilfred Lawson, a Liberal M.P., promptly scribbled a verse which circulated widely:
I’m not for Free Trade,15 and I’m not for Protection
I approve of them both, and to both have objection
In going through life I continually find
It’s a terrible business to make up one’s mind
So in spite of all comments, reproach and predictions
I firmly adhere to unsettled convictions.
For the Liberal Party, deeply divided by the Boer War, Chamberlain’s proposal provided a simple, telling issue: the Unionists stood for a tax on food. Even better, from the Liberal standpoint, the electorate soon would be treated to the sight of free-trade Unionists and protectionist Unionists attacking each other. “This reckless, criminal escapade16 of Joe’s is the great event of our time,” Campbell-Bannerman chortled, adding that “to dispute Free Trade... is like disputing the Law of Gravitation. All the old war horses about me are snorting with excitement. We are in for a great time.” Asquith instantly understood the implications: “On the morning of May 16, 1903,17 my husband came into my bedroom at 20 Cavendish Square with The Times in his hand,” Margot Asquith recalled. “‘Wonderful news today,’ he said, ‘and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep the country.’ Sitting upon my bed, he showed me... the report of a speech made at Birmingham the night before by Mr. Chamberlain.” Many Unionists also glimpsed what was to come. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, now a backbencher, warned, “Tariff Reform has united18 the Party opposite—divided for the last eight years—into a happy family. If persisted in, it will destroy the Unionist Party as an instrument for good.”
Balfour’s delaying tactic had been to persuade the Commons to suspend formal debate on Imperial Preference until the Board of Trade ascertained the economic facts, compiled statistics, and presented analyses and recommendations. Privately, he begged his colleagues not to speak on the subject until the report was in. The Prime Minister could control the House, but not Unionists outside the House. In the House of Lords, Lord Goschen, the former First Lord, denounced Imperial Preference and praised free trade. On July 1, fifty-four free-trade Unionist M.P.’s, calling themselves the Unionist Free Food League, gathered to listen to fiery speeches by Lord Hugh Cecil—Lord Salisbury’s son—and twenty-eight-year-old Winston Churchill, who had won his seat in the Khaki Election three years before. Initially, Balfour’s delaying tactics succeeded. The Board of Trade assembled statistics in leisurely fashion and forwarded them to the Cabinet. Cabinet discussions drifted indecisively into August. On August 13, Parliament rose for the summer recess.
By the beginning of autumn, a reckoning could no longer be postponed. On September 9, Chamberlain sent a dramatic letter to the Prime Minister declaring that he wished to resign from the government and go out, a free man, to stump the country on behalf of Imperial Preference. Balfour, golfing at Whittingehame during the parliamentary recess, did not reply in writing. Instead, he summoned the Cabinet to meet on Monday, September 14. An hour before the Cabinet met, Balfour and Chamberlain met at a private flat. The Colonial Secretary firmly repeated his argument: the Cabinet as constituted, with Ritchie and other free-traders adamantly opposed, would not accept Imperial Preference. He agreed with the Prime Minister that public opinion was not yet ready for legislation involving a tax on food. Much convincing would first have to be done, and this he was prepared, even eager, to do. Balfour accepted Chamberlain’s reasoning but still did not accept his resignation.
The Cabinet meeting lasted three hours. Confronting his Ministers, the languid and amiable Balfour displayed why, as Irish Secretary, he had been called “Bloody Balfour.” He did not reveal his discussion with the Colonial Secretary. He said that he was determined to put an end to dissension, at least within his own Cabinet. He declared that some form of tariff was to be the government’s policy and that any ministers opposed could not remain in the Cabinet. Ritchie and another free-trader promptly resigned. In fact, the astonished Duke of Devonshire wrote to a friend, “Ritchie and... [the other free-trader] did not really resign19 but were told they must go.” To another friend, he added, “I never heard anything20 more summary and decisive than the dismissal of the two Ministers.” The following day—the second of the Cabinet meeting—two more ministers, one of them the Duke himself, resigned. Only when they were gone, on September 16, did the Prime Minister accept Mr. Chamberlain’s resignation as he had planned all along to do. The Duke, seeing that Chamberlain was leaving, withdrew his own resignation, responding as Balfour had calculated. That same day, September 16, the Prime Minister published a short pamphlet, entitled “Notes on Insular Free Trade,” in which he analyzed England’s dangerously isolated position as a free-trade island surrounded by a protectionist sea. Devonshire, feeling tricked, resigned a second time on October 6. With the departure of Chamberlain on one extreme and four free-traders on the other, Balfour had purged his Cabinet and hoped to govern amidst diminished rancor.
The only loss he regretted was that of the Duke. “The Duke, whose mental processes21 were not rapid,” wrote a Liberal journalist, “had apparently been mystified by the dialectic of Mr. Balfour’s pamphlet and dazed by the swiftness and subtlety of the transactions that followed. A fortnight later, he awoke with a crash.” Balfour’s own impression was similar: “The Duke never read it22 [Balfour’s pamphlet], you know. I remember hearing he had confessed to somebody that he tried, but couldn’t understand it. Dear Devonshire! Of course he hadn’t. He told me once he had been content to leave his financial conscience in the hands of Mr. Gladstone. But it was all a muddle. He got himself into such a position that he had to behave badly to somebody—and there it was! But it never made the slightest difference to my love for him.”
Balfour’s “purging” of Chamberlain was less brutal than his dismissal of Ritchie and the free-traders, because Chamberlain had suggested his own resignation. The departure was even more friendly because, in parting, Balfour and Chamberlain had struck a bargain. The Prime Minister did not wish to break completely with the former Colonial Secretary, whose popularity he knew to be greater than his own. A bond would be maintained in the person of Chamberlain’s eldest son, Austen, who was already in the Cabinet as Postmaster-General. Austen, then forty, would be offered Ritchie’s post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, nominally the second most powerful office in the Cabinet and a traditional springboard to the Premiership. Balfour urged Chamberlain to persuade Austen to accept. Chamberlain did and Austen accepted.
There was more to the bargain. Chamberlain was not leaving the Cabinet simply to go home to his orchids or to hasten the advancement of his son. Despite differences, there was an area of agreement on fiscal reform between Balfour and Chamberlain and both men seized it. Balfour agreed that greater imperial unity was desirable and that Imperial Preference might be a way to achieve it. As party leader, however, he feared the domestic political cost if the public perceived the imposition of tariffs as a tax on food. Chamberlain agreed with Balfour that the sudden and sweeping nature of his proposal had alarmed the country and that before the enactment of legislation (and certainly before the public was asked to choose in the next election), a great deal more educating and persuading had to be done. This he was prepared to do himself. Balfour and Chamberlain, accordingly, agreed that the former Colonial Secretary, now a free man, would stump the country, propagandizing on behalf of Imperial Preference. When public opinion was swayed, the Prime Minister would lead the party onto this electorally safe new ground. Balfour would simultaneously follow with a minimum program which rejected free trade, but proposed only selective retaliatory tariffs, avoiding anything that smacked of a tax on food.
In early October, Chamberlain set out as a free-lance missionary of Imperial Preference, tariff reform, and protection. He was still the most popular politician in the country and he expected success preaching this new gospel. He began with a speech in Glasgow on October 6, 1903, in which he revealed his program: a two-shilling-per-ton duty on foreign wheat and flour, 5 percent tariffs on foreign meat and dairy products, and a 10 percent duty on foreign manufactured goods. Agricultural imports and manufactured goods from the British Empire would be exempted. He went from Newcastle to Cardiff, to Liverpool, Newport, and Leeds, concluding in the London Guildhall on January 18, 1904. Everywhere, he displayed an energy and zeal astonishing for a man of seventy. He had the support of most of the younger Unionist M.P.’s and of the entire Conservative press. As his progress continued, however, his message began to change. He had begun by demanding Imperial Preference solely for the sake of Imperial unity; with the passage of time his theme evolved increasingly into the protection of British agricultural products and British manufactured goods. His most vociferous backers were businessmen like himself who wanted protection for their own products against foreign competition. Chamberlain’s speeches now rang with appeals to save this or that “dying British industry.”23
While Chamberlain preached, Balfour did his best to hold the Unionist free-traders on the leash. The Liberal Party was under no constraint. Asquith, the party’s finest debater, set out in pursuit of Chamberlain and followed him around the country, speaking in the same town where Chamberlain had spoken, two or three evenings after the former Colonial Secretary had departed. Asquith’s essential theme was that Chamberlain’s tariffs would increase the price of food. Asquith also observed that the former screw manufacturer was a businessman who knew little of economics and whose arguments sometimes rested on flawed intellectual or even factual foundations. When he blundered, Asquith pounced and held up the error for public scrutiny and ridicule. After a few weeks of this relentless shadowing, Chamberlain angrily lashed back. At Cardiff, he dismissed Asquith as a mere lawyer with no business experience. Asquith tartly replied that he would “gladly defer24 to a businessman who understood and applied the rules of arithmetic.” During the autumn, Chamberlain’s campaign and Asquith’s countercampaign, heavily reported in all the national newspapers, developed into a kind of rhetorical mano a mano, scrutinized, analyzed, and relished by the entire country.
Balfour—true to his bargain with Chamberlain—launched his own proposals for milder tariffs. Addressing a Unionist association at Sheffield on September 30, he sought a middle ground between free-trade absolutism and Chamberlain’s Imperial Preference tariff on imported food. Abandoning the high-flown goal of Imperial unity, he asked only for weapons to combat the protectionist policies of other nations. He proposed that the government be empowered to apply selective tariffs against specific products from specific foreign countries. Such tariffs could be used as negotiating chips with foreign powers, or, if negotiating failed, to retaliate until the foreign powers removed their tariffs. Once this happened, Balfour explained, British tariffs could be removed and free trade would be reestablished. On its own, the Prime Minister’s scheme might have been logical, but in the political atmosphere in which it was launched, it was received with contempt by free-traders and protectionists alike. Everyone on both sides understood that Balfour’s real purpose was not a new system of selective tariffs, but a compromise—any compromise—that would hold his party together.
Rejection of Balfour’s program did not mean rejection of Balfour. He was still Prime Minister and both Unionist free-traders and Unionist protectionists believed that this created an advantage for them. The Chamberlainites cited his selective tariffs as evidence that he was at heart a protectionist simply holding the government in line while Joe converted the country. The Unionist free-traders believed that Balfour was forced to indulge Chamberlain for the sake of party unity, but would in time declare himself, in party tradition, a pure free-trader. Both sides were willing for him to continue until—as seemed to each certain—he arrived in their camp. Balfour, clearly understanding that the moment he chose sides his government would collapse, found precarious safety by encouraging everyone to believe of him whatever suited them.
By the spring of 1904, Chamberlain sensed that something was wrong. His agreement with Balfour had been that he would lead and that once the path was cleared, Balfour, following behind, would catch up and embrace Imperial Preference. What Chamberlain had not realized was that, for Balfour, there was an escape clause: if Chamberlain did not clear the path, there would be no catching up and no embrace. In fact, Arthur Balfour was not passionately interested in either Imperial Preference or free trade. He could watch Joseph Chamberlain proclaiming the glories of an imperial Zollverein and then observe his cousin, Lord Hugh Cecil, an ardent Tory, zealously defending the great legacy of free trade, and be moved by neither. Balfour did not much care which policy was adopted as long as the party survived. He waited to see how successfully Chamberlain was converting the country to protectionism. As the months dragged on, it became apparent that the former Colonial Secretary was in difficulty. At that point, Chamberlain, looking over his shoulder for Balfour’s support, did not find the Prime Minister. Chamberlain’s principal failure in his tariff-reform campaign lay not in his embarrassment by the gadfly stings of Asquith, or even in his inability to sweep the country with a slogan as he had in the Khaki Election, but in his failure to convince the Prime Minister that what he was doing was right and important. Balfour had the power to introduce—or to refuse to introduce—legislation. He had given Chamberlain a chance to convince the country; the country remained unconvinced. He had promised to follow and embrace once the path was cleared. The path had not been cleared. For Balfour, the important thing now was to save the party.
The task seemed hopeless. Mr. Balfour’s own policy, the official policy of retaliation, had, by the beginning of 1904, become negligible. Except for the Prime Minister himself, no one propounded it or defended it or regarded it as anything other than a temporary shelter for a politician in distress. The Prime Minister, said an observer, was “a Free Trader who sympathized25 with Protection, a well-wisher of food taxes who was also their official opponent.” By spring, Chamberlain’s campaign and Balfour’s equivocation had spread confusion and dismay through the party rank and file. In thirty-seven House of Commons by-elections held in 1904 and 1905, the Unionists lost twenty-eight seats and won only nine. Balfour’s majority, which had been 134 when Lord Salisbury and Joseph Chamberlain won the Khaki Election in 1900, slid on some votes to only fifty. One celebrated party member was lost on May 31, 1904, when Winston Churchill, amid cries from the Unionist benches of “Blenheim Rat”26 and “Blackleg Blueblood,” crossed the aisle and joined the Liberals. Churchill was an absolute free-trader as his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been, as Lord Salisbury had been, and as Churchill believed he had heard Arthur Balfour promise the Carlton Club he was when Balfour succeeded his uncle as Prime Minister. Now, as Churchill saw it, Chamberlain, a turncoat former Liberal, was proposing protectionism and Balfour, guardian of Tory traditions, was, if not wholly supporting him, disgracefully waffling. Churchill fumed: “Some of us were born27 in the Tory Party and we are not going to let any aliens turn us out.” His attacks on the Prime Minister in the House became violent: “To keep in office28 for a few weeks and months there is no principle which the Government is not prepared to abandon, and no quantity of dust and filth they are not prepared to eat,” he said. “The dignity of a Prime Minister, like a lady’s virtue, is not susceptible to partial diminution.” Balfour, normally suavely immune to barbs hurled at him in the House of Commons, was stung by Churchill’s malice. He rose to put the enfant terrible in his place: “It is not, on the whole,29 desirable to come down to this House with invective which is both prepared and violent. The House will tolerate, and very rightly tolerate, almost anything within the rule of order which evidently springs from genuine indignation aroused by the collision of debate. But to come down with these prepared phrases is not usually successful, and at all events, I do not think it was very successful on the present occasion. If there is preparation there should be more finish and if there is so much violence there should certainly be more veracity of feeling.”
Somehow, Balfour survived. For sheer political nimbleness, few parliamentary achievements can match his performance in maintaining his government for over two years after Chamberlain’s resignation. He endured the steady erosion of strength in by-elections, the constant bitter warfare in the House of Commons, and the rising chorus of press predictions that the government could not outlive each coming month. What struck everyone—delighting some, enraging others—was how much Balfour enjoyed it. There was no challenge in leading a government with a huge majority in which a prime minister’s every whim glided submissively into law. Living on borrowed time, Balfour mobilized all his talents and maneuvered his government through session after session. Nevertheless, by artificially prolonging the Unionist government, Arthur Balfour ensured that when the fall came, it would be precipitous and catastrophic.fn2
fn1 “Corn,” to Britons, is the grain Americans call wheat.
fn2 The campaign for Imperial Preference was Joseph Chamberlain’s last political battle. On June 1, 1905, he suffered the first of a series of strokes which affected his ability to speak and largely confined him to a wheelchair. Balfour, visiting him in 1910, found him “very unintelligible.” Chamberlain died on July 6, 1914, three weeks before the beginning of the Great War.