If the colonies are able to expend their borrowings on reproductive works alone, this advantage is not entirely due to their own superior prudence, but in part at least to the circumstance that they have been protected by a great Imperial power not afraid to go into debt for national ends. Gibraltar and Malta, Aden, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the Cape and St. Helena, stations in every corner of the world for the protection of the commerce of the colonies as much as that of the United Kingdom, are the best answers to those who sneer at the National Debt of Great Britain. The United States incurred a war debt of more than 2000,000,000 dollars, not indeed in carrying out a foreign policy, right or wrong, but in remedying mistakes of internal policy. The war brought no vast addition of territory; it simply saved the state from disruption. No one doubts that the expenditure has been more than repaid by the national unity and greatness which it secured. But the very people who were crushed by that vast outlay have been obliged, since they remain within the nation, to contribute to the payment of the debt incurred. They are obliged to contribute their share of the vast pension roll, amounting to much more than 100,000,000 dollars per annum, paid to the soldiers of the Union {99} who crushed them. Compared with this, the magnanimity of the mother-land in handing over to her younger communities, absolutely free from incumbrance either of mortgage, of military responsibility, or of commercial restraint, the major part of those vast assets which she had to show for her national debt, seems to me amazing. A colonist, reproaching England with her foreign policy and the debt which it led to, cuts a sorry figure in the face of these facts. And if we put the £30,000,000 added to the debt of England in order to extinguish slavery beside the price paid by the United States for the same national purification, we shall discover reasons for thinking that there may be national mistakes worse than those to be discovered in the foreign policy of Britain. Sir Charles Dilke says[6]: 'It is a remarkable instance of past Imperial carelessness that the very principles upon which the burden of defence should be divided between ourselves and colonies, and the proportions in which it should be borne, have never been settled.'