Garrisons, Gibraltar, &c., and reliefs at home, L.1,200,000
War with China, 250,000
Navy and Ordnance, 3,000,000
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Total cost of foreign trade, L.4,450,000
Id. colonial, as before stated, 3,000,000
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Excess foreign, L.1,450,000

This excess might justly be swelled to at least half a million more by a surcharge of army expenditure in China; of navy expenditure on foreign stations, that for China is not taken into account at all; and in respect of various other items of smaller consideration, separately, although in the aggregate of consideration, the account might still more be aggravated.  There would be some difficulty, it must be allowed, in clearly disinvolving them from masses of general statements, although for an approximate valuation it might not amount to an impossibility; we prefer, however, to leave Mr Cobden in possession of all the advantages we cannot make a clear title to.  The advantages, indeed, are of dubious title, and something of the same kind as the entry into a house of which the owner cannot be found, or of which he cannot lay his hands on the title-deeds.

We have now disposed of the preposterous exaggerations of the anti-colonial school, so far as that school can be said to be represented by Mr Alderman Cobden, under the head of colonial cost to the metropolitan state.  We have reduced his amount of that cost to its fair approximate proportions, item by item, of gross charge, so far as we are enabled by those parliamentary or colonial documents, possessing the character of official or quasi-official origin.  We have necessarily followed up this portion of our vindication of the colonies from unjust aspersions by a concurrent enquiry into the cost at which our foreign trade is carried on, in the national sense of the military, naval, and other establishments required and kept up for its protection and encouragement.  And, finally, we have struck the balance between the two, the results of which are already before the public.

There remains one other essential part of the duty we have undertaken to fulfill.  It is true that it did not suit the purposes of Mr Cobden to enter himself into any investigation of the comparative profitableness of foreign and colonial commerce, nor did he, doubtless, desire to provoke such an investigation on the part of others.  With the cunning of a prejudiced partizan, he was content to skim superficially the large economical question he had not scrupled to raise from the depths of discomfiture and oblivion, in which abandoned by the colonial detractors, his predecessors, who had tried their art to conjure “spirits from the vasty deep,” which would not come when they did “call for them.”  With gross numerical proportions apparently in his favour, but well-grounded