6
BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY
imports from abroad, and by bounties on home exports, the aim of every country appears to be to surround its trade with a ring fence. It may well be that such a policy is really suicidal, and that free trade has been none the less a benefit to England, because the sanguine hopes held out by its first prophets of its general acceptance have not been at all fulfilled ; but it is natural that, in the state of things we see around us, men should look more and more to the Colonies as the producers of our raw materials, and the customers for our manufactures, and hanker after some kind of Zollverein among the scattered portions of the Empire, however difficult it may be to enact such in express terms. Moreover, human nature remaining what it is, there is nothing which causes men to put so high a value on their own possessions as the observing that they are being coveted by their neighbours. The scramble for colonies among the Continental nations has had the good effect at least of determining the English not to be left behind in the race for empire. To these practical considerations others of a more theoretic nature have been added. A distinguished Cambridge Professor threw a powerful search - light on the development of British empire, and brought home to thousands of readers, who had never before thought of it, the sense that, after all, our Colonies are only England beyond the seas—a greater England, but England all the same. A brilliant American writer and naval expert first clearly made manifest the connection of England’s Colonial and Imperial greatness with the command of the sea, and carried home to the conviction of Englishmen the truth that, without that command of the sea, our scattered empire is only a source of weakness. The Press has also played a great part in the new movement. For example, consider the influence of the weekly article in the Times 1 on the Colonies, and compare the spirit which animates it with the indifferent and half-contemptuous tone on colonial matters of the Times of forty years ago. In this state of things, and when both political parties have, with a few exceptions, more notable for ability than weight, 1 Unfortunately discontinued.