But though we detest the Convention, and should like to
see it denounced, we are bound to admit that in dealing with their friends and neighbours the British Government are obliged to preserve a certain continuity of action, and that if once they enter upon arrangements with foreign Powers, it may not always be possible, or at any rate expedient, to withdraw from them, even though the arrangements are wrong per se. The Entente with France and the Agreement with Russia are facts, and on the whole very beneficent facts, but they are also facts which to some extent deprive UR of a free hand in the region of foreign affairs. This being so, it seems to us that Mr. Asquith would have been on much safer ground if he bad confined his defence of the Government to pointing out that they had not and could not have a complete freedom of action in the matter of the Sugar Convention, and that here they were obliged to be governed by considerations other than those which are purely economic. Unfortunately Mr. Asquith was not content with resting his case on the wider considerations of foreign policy, but in striving to find economic grounds for the Government's action actually slipped into the use of an argument—the argument that the Government were doing good service to Free-trade in fighting foreign bounties—which came perilously near to that by which Mr. Balfour and his colleagues defended the original Convention.
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