strength on one side, and of British man-power and money-power upon the other, would obviously add nothing to the security of this country. But a transaction with the Colonies means the double development—the development which is British on both sides. The Empire, as Adam Smith would say, gets both the benefits. The fate of the British Empire is a matter of comparative indifference to the farmer in the United States or Argentina. But every man employed in raising a quarter of wheat on colonial soil, instead of on foreign soil, will be a man who can fight, a man who can pay. He is a civic as well as an economic asset.
Adam Smith failed to do justice to a profound idea when he said that a home transaction, from a purely economic standpoint, is twice as valuable to a country as a foreign transaction. In pure economics that is unquestionably an overstatement; and, nevertheless, the instinct of that sagacious mind was far better than the formula. A transaction in Imperial trade, and, above all, with our white Colonies, gives undoubtedly at least twice the political strength derived from a transaction in foreign trade. For in war with a foreign State, that part of the reciprocating mechanism of Free Trade ceases to act at once, but all the reciprocating mechanism under the same flag goes on working, and in all probability at still higher pressure. If we have used our consuming power to increase the number of settlers under the flag, rather than to support population under other flags, the British man beyond the seas will be a man of the Empire, like the man at home.
We see at once that, though trade with Canada, let us say, and with Argentina might be of nominally equal worth on the cash-reckoning of the orthodox economist, there is no comparison in the political value of the two. With the one we establish a cash nexus; with the other we have the cash nexus also, and, behind that, the nexus of nerve and sinew, 'the tendrils strong as flesh and blood,' binding us to the heritors of the glory that is ours, to the sharers of all the hopes we cherish, to the men who will have to be counted before the flag
