It would be as irrelevant to accuse the one man of insensibility because he did not weep over the chopped-down branches, as to accuse the other of emotional weakness because he grew tender over his sprig. The Englishman in England needs no visible emblem of that national life in the centre of which he is imbedded, and of which he forms an integral part. To the Englishman separated from that life by wide space and material interests, the smallest representative of the old nation has a powerful emotional value. It is to him what the lock of his mistress's hair is to an absent lover; he treasures it and kisses it to assure himself of her existence. If she were present he would probably notice the lock little. The princeling is our lock of hair, the Union Jack our sprig of lilac. Even in the seemingly childish deference to manners and fashions imported from home, along with less exalted motives, this idealizing instinct plays its part. Nowhere on earth's surface are English-speaking men so consciously Anglo-Saxon as in the new lands they have planted. You may forget in England that you are an Englishman; you can never forget it in Africa. The colonist will oppose England if he fancies she interferes with the material interests of the land he inhabits, as the married man takes the part of his wife, should he fancy his own mother seeks to over-dominate her. The wife is the bearer of his children, the minister to his material comforts; but deep in his heart there is a sense in which the mother has a place the wife will never fill. If his wife die he may soon find another, and her hold will be lost and her place taken; but his relation towards his mother is ineradicable; more changeless because more purely ideal and immaterial. She is the one woman he will never allow man or woman to speak slightingly of while he lives. He may quarrel with her himself, may even wound her, but he will allow no other man to touch her by word or in deed. If to-morrow England lay prostrate, as France lay in 1871, with the heel of the foreigner on her throat, there are sixty millions of English-speaking men and women all the world over who would leap to their feet. They would swear never to lie down again till they had seen her freed. Women would urge on sons and husbands and forego all luxury, and men would leave their homes and cross the seas, if in so doing there was hope of aiding her. It will never be known what colonial Englishmen feel for the national nest till a time comes when it may be in need of them. Our dearest bluid to do her guid We'd give it her and a' that!