'Reason shows and experience proves that no commercial prosperity can be durable if it cannot be united, in case of need, to naval force.' This remark of De Tocqueville is so fully proved by the facts of history that its truth may be accepted as axiomatic. It is a truth for the colonies to consider. Highly commercial already, their desire and manifest destiny are to be still more so. Canada's commercial navy, as has been said, already ranks fourth in the world. She is a first-class shipping power. Australia's trade is perhaps greater in proportion to population than that of any other country. Alone among all the people of the past or present, British colonists have not had to accept the full responsibilities of increasing commercial greatness. The {84} little republic of Chili, with a trade of £26,000,000, and a population of about 3,000,000 maintains 40,000 tons of armed shipping, at a large annual expense. The other republics of South America bear like burdens. Australia, with its much larger volume of sea trade and far greater of revenue, pays only £126,000 for naval defence, strictly confined to its own shores. Canada, with its remarkable tonnage of ocean shipping, its great interests at stake on its eastern and western coasts, leans almost entirely for defence of commerce and fisheries upon British ironclads paid for exclusively by the people of the United Kingdom. The deceptive argument, drawn from the example of the United States at some periods of their history, that a degree of isolation gives immunity from such burdens, has now lost its force. The policy of the Great Republic has been sharply reversed, and the creation of a powerful navy has become an object of national ambition, and is apparently the outcome of national necessities developed by the widening of commercial relations.