74 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
on paper. Inany case in the middle of the eighteenth 
century the remedy, if remedy it could be accounted, 
was proposed too late. What had been wanting and 
what might conceivably still have held the Empire 
together was set forth in Burke’s noble speeches. The 
time ctied aloud for relinquishment by the Mother 
Country of all dictation in any form to the American 
children of her household, and for full recognition of 
the plain fact that those children, having come to 
manhood, must be accorded the freedom inherent in 
British citizenship, and be subject to no restraint or 
payment, unless imposed by themselves in their own 
lands and in their own way. The subject is beyond 
the scope of the present book, but it is not beyond 
its scope to note that freedom of trade for and with 
the colonies and political equality for the colonies 
presented themselves to writers and thinkers at the 
time of crisis as close akin, as two aspects of one 
and the same fact. Conversely, under the mercantile 
system trade domination meant political domination 
also. What killed the Old Empire was dominance of 
trade in its most vicious, insolent and godless guise, 
exulting in the appalling wickedness of the slave 
traffic, instilling poison into the heart of the Empire, 
from the West through the West India interest, from 
the East through the nabobs. Since the Restoration 
trade had always, with constantly growing strength and 
insistence, called for and supported the specious but 
most disastrous principle of uniformity in the dealings 
of the Mother Country with the colonies, which meant 
a dominant Mother Country and dependent colonies. 
In the course of the friction and the strife which tore