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Total to Colonial debit, L.3,000,000

Mr Cobden enumerates a variety of expenditure against the colonies besides,
under the head of civil establishments, public works, and grants for
educational and religious purposes. We need not--there is no occasion to
discuss these minutiae with him; we prefer to make him a bargain at once,
and so we throw in, against these civil contingencies for the colonies, the
whole lump of the estimates for the diplomatic and consular service, Dr
Bowring's commissionerships inclusive; all the charges for civil
government, education, religion, public works, &c., besides of those
stations, such as Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Isles, Singapore, Penang,
&c., occupied altogether, or chiefly, for the purposes of foreign commerce,
partially from political views, but assuredly not at all with reference to
colonial objects. If he be not content with this bargain of a set-off, we
are quite ready to call over the account with him at any time, crediting
him not more liberally than justly besides, with all the prodigal waste
imposed upon the country by the colonial imposture facetiously styled the
"self-supporting system," in his smart exposure of which our sympathies are
all with him, zealous advocates though we be of colonization, of
colonization on a national scale moreover, and therefore on a national and
commensurate scale of expenditure; which, however, can only be undertaken
by the government when the fiat of financial insolvency which, with the
Exchequer bill fraud, was the last legacy of Mr Spring Rice and Lord
Monteagle, shall be superseded, and the Treasury rehabilitated, and then
only by slow degrees, but sure. An individual may, perchance, thrive upon
an imposture, a government never; the late Ministry are the living evidence
of the truth. We can comprehend "self-supporting colonization" in the
individual sense of the pioneers and backwoodsmen of the United States; in
the "squatting" upon wild lands in Canada and the West Indies; in the
settlement of isolated adventurers among the savages of New Zealand; but
the "self-supporting" settlement of communities, or, as more fancifully
expressed, of "society in frame," is just as sound in principle, and as
possible in practice, as would be the calculation of the Canadian
shipwright, who should nail together a mass of boards and logs as a
leviathan lumber