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 Chancellors of the home Exchequer are sufficiently ominous to make it impossible to believe the present rate of expenditure can much longer continue. If that be so, there are but two alternatives:—either the outlying parts of Empire must equitably share with the Mother-land the cost and responsibility of providing what is essential for general security; or the task of furnishing sufficient force and armaments to protect the Empire in war must be left unfulfilled, which, in plain English, means an attempt to continue its existence on sufferance. This last alternative can only present itself after all hope is extinguished of the adoption of the first, so the immediate question is. What, if any, are the prospects of acceptance by the Colonies and possessions abroad of any such proposition? India already bears so great a share of the military burden of an Imperial character that this great dependency does not come so directly within the purview of this momentous question.

The most discouraging feature in the prospect of transmarine possessions cooperating with the Mother Country for the maintenance of the navy is the effect of the policy and example pursued for over forty years by the Mother Country herself. The reflex action of what is above described as the 'negation of Imperial patriotism' has strongly impressed the colonial mind. It was the Mother Country, not the Colonies, which dethroned the ideal of an Empire bonded together for mutual advantages and for the discharge of common obligations. It was the Mother-land that taught the Colonies to discard reliance upon sea-power as the real security from military descents by sea, and it was by her example and by the explicit advice of her War Office that any measures taken by Colonies to prepare for war were conceived in the spirit of a selfish isolation. They were to prepare for war by locking themselves up in watertight compartments sealed by fortifications, expecting no military help from, and giving none to, the Mother-land or each other.

The circumstance of the South African War and the failure of the War Office theories of British defence