Note 243 — Chapter XXIX · INTERNATIONAL INTERESTS AND MONOPOLY

The Foreign Office was warned as far back as the beginning of 1898 by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce of the danger of the possible inauguration of a system of territorial monopolies. Lord Salisbury said it would receive “our most earnest attention,” and admitted inferentially that in fiscal questions England had, as a free-trade country, “inferior” means of influencing other countries; “with the occasional exception,” added his lordship, “of territorial concessions, we have no means whatever of persuasion.” Nevertheless, in the purely fiscal question which formed the principal object of the Deputation of Chambers of Commerce to Lord Salisbury on this occasion, that of the differential tariff in the French possessions, Lord Salisbury was able to get his own way, simply by persuasion, by “influencing France’s ideas.” Yet in this matter of the French Congo Concessions, in which the purely fiscal question does not enter at all, and where we have an international treaty to work on, Lord Lansdowne has been unable to prevent the expulsion of British merchants from an internationally free-trade zone!