On Monday Mr. Chamberlain's 75th birthday was celebrated by a
banquet in London. The guests numbered 110, repre- senting Mr. Chamberlain's years and his 35 years of member- ship of the House of Commons. Mr. Balfour spoke unex- pectedly in response to urgent calls, and protested that a bad precedent was set 'when a dinner which was to be without speeches was turned into a dinner with speeches. He then said that the Canadian Reciprocity Treaty and other complex industrial treaties were now laying up incomparable trouble for the Foreign Office in the future. This trouble could have been prevented only by the adoption of Mr. Chamberlain's policy of Imperial Preference. The trouble was epitomized in the interpretation which the United States insisted on putting on "most-favoured-nation" clauses—an interpretation different from that of all other nations. The Cobdenite theory, whatever else might happen, was doomed. "The old system must go." We have dealt elsewhere with the subject of "the most-favoured-nation clause."
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