“Your argument would go to prove that we should be better without colonies; but what will our merchants say to our parting with markets into which we can empty our warehouses?” “As to being better without colonies,—we agreed just now that colonies are good things both for the natives and the settlers, while the one class wants to be civilized and the other to find a home of promise. Let this connexion be modified by circumstances as time rolls on, the child growing up into a state fit for self-government, and the mother country granting the liberty of self-government as the fitness increases. If the control be continued too long, if the colony be not admitted to understand, and allowed to pursue its own interests, its interests must languish, and it will become a proportionate burden to the mother country. It will have only the wages of ill-paid labour, or the scanty profits of feeble speculation to exchange for the productions of the mother country, instead of a store of wealth gathered by commerce with the whole world. Which is worth the most to England at this moment, Ceylon, her servile dependency, or any province of her band of commercial allies,—our United States,—I leave your merchants to say.” “It is true, we get nothing now in taxes from your States; but we get incalculably more as the profits of trade; while the heavy taxation of Ceylon will not nearly pay its own expenses, and the mother country must defray the remainder.” “So much for keeping colonies for the sake of their trade. This notion involves two assumptions; that the colony would not trade with the mother country if it were no longer a colony, and that colonial monopoly is a good to the mother country.” “The very term ‘colony trade’ involves the notion of monopoly: since, if there were no monopoly, the distinction would be lost between that and any other sort of free trade.” “Well; if the exclusive trade with the mother country be the best for the interest of the colony, the colony will continue it, after the compulsion is withdrawn. If it be not for the interest of the colony, neither can it be so for the parent; since the interest of the seller demands the prosperity of the customer; and the welfare of the whole demands the welfare of its component parts.” “Indeed, our colonies are too often used as a special instrument of forcing the means of production into artificial channels, to serve the selfish purposes of classes, or companies, or individuals.”