The next point to notice is that it has always been held that, as between a mother country and its colonies, if they are colonies in the true sense and not merely tributary states, it is rather for the mother country to give and her colonies to take, than vice versa. This is a view which has been held at all times and among all races, but especially among members of the English race. Other nations and races have, it is true, felt as strongly as, or more strongly than, the English the duty of protecting their outlying possessions: they have in some cases lavished more money directly upon them at the expense of the taxpayers at home; but, on the other hand, they have almost invariably regarded their colonies as dependencies pure and simple, constrained to take the course of the dominant partner in preference to their own. The English alone in history have bred communities protected by, but in practice not subject to, the mother country. They have given, without exacting toll in return. [Sidenote: Adam Smith on the subject.] No writer has laid greater stress on this view of the relations between the mother country and the colonies than Adam Smith, who published the _Wealth of Nations_ just as the American colonies were breaking away from Great Britain. ‘The English colonists,’ he wrote, ‘have never yet contributed anything towards the defence of the mother country, or towards the support of its civil government. They themselves, on the contrary, have hitherto been defended almost entirely at the expense of the mother country;’ and again, ‘Under the present system of management, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she has assumed over her colonies.’ ‘Great Britain is, perhaps, since the world began, the only state which, as it has extended its empire, has only increased its expense without once augmenting its resources.’[23] His opinion would have been modified could he have foreseen the help given to the mother country in our own day by the self-governing colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in a war far removed from their shores; but even in our own day the old view, against which he contended, largely holds the field, that more is due from the mother country to the colonies than from the colonies to the mother country, that what the mother country spends on the Empire is payment of a debt, while what the colonies spend on the Empire is a free gift. [Sidenote: The mother country, being usually greater than the colony, is expected to give rather than to receive.] [Sidenote: Contentions of the colonists.]