e, L.4,450,000
Id. colonial, as before stated, 3,000,000
-----------
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 h