Page:The Past, Present and Future Trade of the Cape Colonies with Central Africa.pdf/31

there which finds the means of paying for nearly ten millions sterling a year on imported goods, and nearly all from England, because, as the Right Hon. Mr. Forster so well said at your last meeting, trade follows the flag. Think what the trade from Britain to the United States would have been to-day if England’s flag had still floated there. Not forty-five millions sterling only, as by last year’s statistics, but many times that amount, judging by the doings of Cape Colony as an importing country. (Hear, hear.) It is this that makes me and other colonists feel so keenly the deprecatory strain in which some would be leaders of public opinion here speak of our Colonial dominions as possessions the growth of which is rather to be checked than encouraged. They tell you that it is as good to have the United States as our own Colonies to which our superabundant population may swarm off. Well, for those who go abroad it may be conceded perhaps that it may be so; but for those who remain behind in the old country it certainly is not so. In Cape Colony, as I have already said, every man, woman, and child—white and black—takes from you ten pounds’ worth of goods, and gives all the employment to your people implied thereby. In the United States all that each man, woman, and child requires there of your goods is only one pound’s worth per head—a very different thing. The Colonies are your strength. They are not your weakening, but your strengthening and your making. They are joined to you by sentimental ties, which wise statesmanship will never seek to disrupt. The strength of that sentimental tie is shown in the language in which every colonist, of whatever national origin, speaks of the old country. He even calls it home, never speaking of it by any other name. It is far different with those who go to the United States. Home is not the endearing term in which they speak most frequently of England. What, then, is the conclusion of all this but that English politicians should learn to cherish our Colonial dominions, and to glory in their extension. When they have ceased to grow and extend, death and decay have begun to attack the Empire nearer the heart thereof than in the distant Colonial possessions. We could not long exist without that free and illimitable field for our enterprising population which our Colonial possessions offer. You have heard of Nihilism in Russia—the worship of the spirit of destruction which is being set up there. If some great catastrophe were to occur to-morrow by which at one swoop England’s Colonial possessions should all be cut off from here, and there should be then no longer that free field for her superabundant population to swarm off to, I fear that the spirit of Nihilism—the spirit of destruction