◆¹ And this brings us to that class of questions which, in ordinary language, are called questions of policy, and amongst which foreign policy holds a chief place. Successful foreign policy means the maintenance or the achievement of those conditions that are most favourable to the industries of our own nation; and this means the conditions that are most favourable to the homes of our own people. It is too commonly supposed that the greatness and the ascendancy of our Empire minister to nothing but a certain natural pride; and natural pride, in its turn, is supposed by some to be an immoral and inhuman sentiment peculiar to the upper classes. No one will be quicker to resent this last ludicrous supposition than the great masses of the British people; but, all the same, they are apt to think the former supposition correct,—to regard the mere glory of the country as the principal result of our Empire; and such being the case, they are, on occasion, apt to be persuaded that glory can be bought at too dear a price, in money, struggle, or merely international friction. At all events, they are constantly tempted to regard foreign politics as something entirely unconnected with their own immediate, their domestic, their personal, their daily interests. I am going to enter here on no debatable matter, nor discuss the value of this or that special possession, or this or that policy. It is enough to point out that, to a very great extent, on the political future of this country depends the magnitude of its income, and on the magnitude of its income depends the income of the working classes—the warmth of the hearth, the supply of food on the breakfast-table, of every labourer’s home,—and that when popular support is asked for some foreign war, the sole immediate aim of which seems the defence of some remote frontier, or the maintenance of British prestige, it may well be that our soldiers will be really fighting for the safety and welfare of their children and wives at home—fighting to keep away from British and Irish doors not the foreign plunderer and the ravisher, but enemies still more pitiless—the want, the hunger, and the cold that spare neither age nor sex, and against which all prayers are unavailing. APPENDIX