32 National Life 



have not the means to start all your offspring 

 in your ovv; ^*, let them do the work of 

 another; if you cannot make them into lawyers 

 and engineers, let them be village school- 

 masters and mechanics. Or, if this sugges- 

 tion raise an insurmountable, if utterly false, 

 shame, let them go to new lands even as 

 miners, cowboys, and storekeepers ; they 

 will strengthen the nation's reserve, and this 

 is far better than that they should never 

 have existed at all. 



I will not say that we have a dearth of 

 ability and of physique at this time, but I 

 will venture to assert that there has, of recent 

 years, been a want of them in the right places, 

 and that last year, but for the reserve of 

 strong men in our colonies, we should have 

 been in far greater difficulties than we were. 

 It is not only in warfare that is the crudest 

 form of the modern struggle of nations but 

 in manufacture and in commerce that there 

 has been a want of brains in the right place. 

 Leadership in trade is really no more than 

 leadership in the army open to the man of 

 brains ; in both cases it becomes a question 

 of wealth ; the endowed but brainless get the 



