s and aspects and disguises.

If again we turn to our great self-governing colonies, we have learnt
to feel how valuable it is, in an age in which international
jealousies are so rife, that there should be vast and rapidly growing
portions of the globe that are not only at peace with us, but at one
with us; how unspeakably important it is to the future of the world
that the English race, through the ages that are to come, should cling
as closely as possible together. As a distinguished statesman who
lately represented the United States in England[4] has admirably said,
'If it is not always true that trade follows flag, it is at least true
that "heart follows flag,"' and the feeling that our fellow-subjects
in distant parts of the Empire bear to us is very different from the
feeling even of the most friendly foreign nation. Our great colonies
have readily undertaken the responsibility of providing for their own
defence by land, and even in some degree by sea. If the protection of
their coasts in time of war might become a great strain upon our navy,
this disadvantage is largely balanced by the importance of distant
maritime possessions to every nation that desires to maintain an
efficient fleet; by the immense advantage to a great commercial Power
of secure harbours and coaling stations scattered over the world. It
is not difficult to conceive circumstances in which the destruction of
some of our main industries, occurring, perhaps, in the midst of a
great war, might make it utterly impossible for our present population
to live upon British soil, and when the possession of vast territories
under the British flag, and in the hands of the British race, might
become a matter of transcendent importance. Think for a moment of the
colossal, and indeed appalling, proportions which our great towns are
assuming! Think of all the vice and ignorance and disease, of all the
sordid abject misery, of all the lawless passions that are festering
within them! And then consider how precarious are many of the
conditions of our industrial prosperity, how grave and how numerous
are the dangers that threaten it both from within and from without.
Who can reflect seriously on these things without feeling that the day
may come--perhaps at no distant date--when the question of emigration
may overshadow all others? To many of us, indeed, it seems one of the
greatest errors of modern English statesmanship that when the great
exodus from Ireland too