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 convictions that more might be discovered than met the eye, or squared with the desire, should the component elements of those proportions be respectively submitted to the process of dissection, he preferred to leave the tale half told, the subject less than half discussed, rather than challenge the certain exposure of the fallacious assumptions on which he had reconstructed a seemingly plausible, but really shallow dogma. A foreign export trade of thirty-five millions he wished the world to believe must represent, proportionally, a larger amount of profit, than sixteen millions of colonial export trade; that the difference, in fact, would be as thirty-five to sixteen, and so, according to his Cockerian rule of calculation, it should be. But, it is said and agreed, that two and two do not always make four, as in the present case will be verified. We may, indeed, place the matter beyond dispute, by a homely illustration level to every man's capacity. For example, a Manchester banker, dealing in money, shall turn over in discounts and accounts-current, with a capital of L.100,000, the sum of one million sterling per annum. As he charges interest in current-account at the rate of 5 per cent, so he allows the same. His profit, therefore, _quoad_ the interest on current-accounts and balances in hand, is _nil_; but for the trouble of managing accounts and for discounts, his charge is five shillings per L.100. In lending out his capital, he realises five per cent more upon that. But the return upon capital embarked, say, in the cotton manufacture, is calculated, at the least, at an average of fifteen per cent. What, then, are the relative profit returns upon the same sum-total of operations for the banker and manufacturer?