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4.

impossible to talk of handing them about as if they were mere inanimate
counters. But I would protest most strongly against the notion
that we won our Colonies by a lucky gamble. We have been making our
Colonial Empire for three hundred years. Its making has called for a
vast expenditure of blood and treasure and national energy. On the
balance I doubt if we have made any material gain from our overseas
possessions, even from India. They have been a field for the energy
and devotion of our people, and they have been won and developed at
a gigantic cost. The making of our Colonial Empire was, to my mind,
a far greater national effort than, say, the making of modern Germany
or the making of Modern Italy. What we have got we have paid for in
the fullest pense by expenditure of the human spirit. And I think that
on the whole we have shown ourselves unselfish and farsighted in their
administration. We have no cause to be ashamed of our record, and
there is no one , I am convinced, in Britain or the Dominions, who will
ever consent to treat our great network of historic responsibilies as
if it were merely a lightly won and idle balance in a speculative bank
account.

I turn to the Dominions. They, too, have been created at a
great cost - first of all by Britain and then by their own peoples.
Remember that they have been created, and have not merely grown by accident.
They are a refutation of the shallow view that the only factor
that matters in history is the economic. Take canada. Her natural
economic outlets were all towards the south, to the United States, but
under the impulse of a political ideal she turned westward, defied her
geography, pushed on t hrough thousands of miles of rock and forest, and
conquered the wilds until she reached the western seas.

What is to be the future of this great alliance? Well, the