This pride and enthusiasm have very positive and practical issues. The citizen of the remotest colony knows that should an enemy wantonly attack his frontier--should port or city be threatened by a hostile force--almost within twenty-four hours, as soon as telegraph could summon or steam convey them, British sailors or British soldiers would be pouring thither, as ready to fight and die for that particular bit of soil as for the shores of England itself. But the sentiment which makes this possible is balanced and qualified by very different considerations. The citizen of the United Kingdom has often been compelled to regard the colonies as great dependencies which increased his responsibilities and multiplied his difficulties without returning to the mother-country, under their present organization, strength in men or resources, or even in exclusive commercial advantage. Every new colony or colonial interest was to him something new to defend, and augmented the burden of Empire. Yearly the vast expense necessary to provide adequately for national responsibilities increased, and added itself to the weight of taxation incident to an advanced civilization and complex social system. While forced to bear the chief burden of the taxation required for national defence, the people of the British Islands could see that the mass of the colonists benefited by this protection already possessed, or were likely before long to possess a higher average of wealth and comfort than the mass of the people {20} who bestowed the benefit. Looking forward little more than a generation he could foresee a time when the colonists whose commerce was protected would equal in number the whole home population which gave the protection, when the volume of colonial commerce itself would surpass that of the mother-land. It requires little argument to prove that the anomaly of leaving one part of a nation to bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of the whole is as inconsistent with Anglo-Saxon ideas of government as the exclusion of the colonies from a proportionate voice in the conduct of national affairs.