Each of these opinions has some superficial ground of justification; each process of reasoning has, if pushed to its final conclusions, fatal defects. But is there not reason to believe that the growth of the Empire is bringing us to a point when the policy of England and her colonies may be entirely coincident on the great questions of peace or war? In the desperate struggle for existence which England in past centuries has often had to carry on, in those contests which have toughened the fibre of her children and fitted them to be of the ruling races of the world, she has often had to make combinations or enter into agreements with the European nations around her from which she would gladly have kept herself free. But with the spread of the Empire abroad England is every day becoming more able {95} to look away from Europe, to stand aloof from purely European disputes, and to secure all the strength she requires from combination with communities which are her own offspring. Such an outcome of the nation's life would be the best justification for all that England has suffered and spent in building up the Empire. But it is not for colonists to forget that she has spent and suffered much. At Melbourne two years ago, in a lecture intended to refute the arguments for British unity, and to point out the danger to Australia of remaining connected with the Empire, Sir Archibald Michie, with great apparent deliberation, said: 'As the miserable result of her (England's) past foreign policy, as ineffectual to any good purpose as it has proved expensive, she is indebted to the amount of some £700,000,000 to the public creditor, the National Debt. To what an extent does not this one miserable fact, so disgusting to all Chancellors of the Exchequer, cripple the strength and movements of the mother-country, and weaken her influence with the world at large.' Were this the thought of a single man it would be scarce worth while to recall it. But in some of the colonies similar reference to the National Debt is found not infrequently in journals which must be taken seriously, and in the mouths of men who influence public opinion. Often it is emphasized by a triumphant allusion to the different application of colonial borrowings, represented as they are by assets in the form of railways, canals, harbour improvements, {96} telegraph systems, and public works of many kinds. The criticism and comparison seem misleading in the last degree.