Colonies. Tropical Australia, which has been transferred to the administration of the Australian Commonwealth, is outside the present range of experiment from home. Some of the West Indian Colonies approach nearly to conditions of self-government. India has its own time-honoured administration. But with abstraction made for these and for any others for which abstention may be deemed desirable, there still remain some 2,000,000 square miles in which a Colonial Office, which should be supported by public sympathy, could initiate any experiment that it chose to make. These 2,000,000 square miles of territory possess vast resources. They produce in small quantities now the cotton, the silk, the tobacco, the coffee, the tea, the cocoa, the sugar, the rice, the gums, the oils, the dyes, the drugs, the spices, the minerals, and other materials of commerce and manufacture which are needed for the maintenance and the expansion of our trade. There is little doubt that the production of raw material could be indefinitely multiplied till it should render British manufactures of these and similar articles substantially independent of foreign supplies. The extension of such markets of supply would automatically create markets of consumption within the Empire for many classes of manufactured goods; and were it possible to organize a system of tropical administration which should enable British industry to bring about this result, British trade would enter upon an era of prosperity which would leave little doubt of the value of the tropics. The Empire is large enough to become, if it were desirable, self-sufficing; and the tropical Colonies are, in truth, to it as the tropics have ever been to the world—a reserve of wealth of which the distribution insures the creation of more wealth.
They may be, perhaps, more than this. They were also in ancient times reserves of labour for the great civilizations which based their industries upon the institution of slavery. They may become again reserves of labour, but of free labour, which, under white direc-
