“Do you want to know why trade languishes? It is summed up in a short sentence: Want of confidence on the part of the trader; it cramps his enterprise, damps his ardor, spoils his temper, and crushes all the manliness out of him. The commercial stability of England was not built up by a lot of unprotected females, which is the condition the British merchant abroad is rapidly being reduced to by the neglect and apathy and indifference to his interests of his Government. He is perfectly well aware in every port there is a consul, that he is considered a nuisance by that functionary, who knows that in the degree in which he prevents his complaints from reaching the department which is supposed to direct the foreign policy of England, he will be considered capable and efficient. No longer does he feel himself to be the _Civis Romanus_ of old days. His sugar plantations may be destroyed in Madagascar, his commercial interests may be imperilled in China, he may be robbed and insulted in Turkey; but he is gradually being taught, by bitter experience, that it is hopeless to look to diplomatic interference for redress. Meanwhile the British taxpayer continues to pay for that expensive luxury whose function it is supposed to be to protect those commercial interests abroad upon which the prosperity and wealth of Great Britain depends. In like manner the ties between the mother country and her colonies are weakened by her persistent shrinking from the responsibilities and obligations which the welfare and security of those colonies involve. She sacrifices ruthlessly that prestige upon the maintenance of which the safety, and in some cases the allegiance, of her subjects depends. She deludes unhappy colonists into making investments and settlements in half-civilised States upon the faith of treaties, which she ignominiously shrinks from enforcing at the first appearance of danger, and calmly leaves her savage allies to be slaughtered and her colonists to be plundered, as in the case of South Africa; or she makes transparent display of her timidity and weakness, as has been conspicuously the case in her relations with her Australian possessions; or retreats from the protection of her natural frontiers, as she has lately done in India. And all this is in pursuance of a theory of political economy incomprehensible to the unprejudiced observer like myself, that it is cheaper and more advantageous to the national prosperity to sacrifice the commercial interests of the country than to incur the risks and expense of protecting them. The only explanation one can give of an infatuation so incredible, of a policy so short-sighted and so fraught with disaster, is, that it is based on ignorance—ignorance of the present injury that it is working, and ignorance of the dangers to which it is giving birth. There can be no surer way of precipitating the crisis which England seeks to avoid, and which, when it comes, must involve the utter ruin of her trade,