or otherwise actively help their local climate to consume, is invaluable to a textile manufacturing town. Yet it would be idle to pretend that our Government has realised these things. Our superior ability as manufacturers, and the great enterprise of our men who have gone out to conquer the markets of the tropics, have given us all the advantages we now enjoy from those markets, but they could do no more; and now, when we are confronted by the expansion of other European nations, those men and their work are being lost to England. Our fellow-countrymen will go anywhere and win anywhere to-day just as well as yesterday, where the climate of the region allows England to throw enough of them in at a time to hold it independent of the home government; but in places where we cannot do this, in the unhealthy tropical regions where those men want backing up against the aggression on their interests of foreign governments, well, up to the present they have not had that backing up, and hence we have lost to England in England the advantages we so easily might have secured.
An American magazine the other day announced in a shocked way that I could evidently "swear like a trooper!" I cannot think where it got the idea from; but really!—well, of course I don't naturally wish to, but I cannot help feeling that if I could it would be a comfort to me; for when I am up in the great manufacturing towns, England properly so called, their looms and forges seem to me to sing the same song to the great maker of Fate—we must prosper or England dies. And there is but one thing they can prosper on—for there is but one feeding ground for them and all the thousands of English men, women and children dependent on them—
