“... There is a great difference between ancient and modern colonies. A modern colony is a commercial enterprise, an ancient colony was a political sentiment. In the emigration of our citizens, hitherto, _we have merely sought the means of acquiring wealth_; the ancients, when their brethren quitted their native shores, wept and sacrificed, and were reconciled to the loss of their fellow-citizens solely by the constraint of stern necessity, and the hope that they were about to find easier subsistence, and to lead a more cheerful and commodious life. _I believe that a great revolution is at hand in our system of colonisation, and that Europe will soon recur to the principles of the ancient polity._” In 1836 he thus satirises the impending King’s speech in his Runnymede Letter to Lord Melbourne-- “... It will announce to us that in our colonial empire the most important results may speedily be anticipated from the discreet selection of Lord Auckland as a successor to our Clives and our Hastings; that the progressive improvement of the French in the manufacture of beetroot may compensate for the approaching destruction of our West Indian plantations;[113] and that, although Canada is not yet independent, the final triumph of liberal principles, under the immediate patronage of the Government, may eventually console us for the loss of the glory of Chatham and the conquests of Wolfe.” Once in the House of Commons, he never ceased to urge the claims of sentiment and the bonds of interest, while he enforced the necessity for cementing them by federation and by tariffs. In 1848, when Lord Palmerston, with his “perfumed cane,” was dictating a constitution to Narvaez, Disraeli, who on principle deprecated interference with foreign powers unless British interests were endangered, here supported him, just because he considered it a case with contingencies affecting our colonial welfare and our own prestige. It was in 1848, too, that, descanting on the narrowing aspects of the Manchester School, and their “unblushing” advocacy of the “interests of capital,” he indicted their “colonial reform with ruining the colonies.” It was in the same year that he taxed the self-righteous Peelites with “turning up their noses at East India cotton as at everything else Colonial and Imperial.”[114]