This sounds a very excellent argument till one notices that
Mr. Chamberlain has taken our total Colonial trade which is done with some 400,000,000 people in India and elsewhere, and amounts to about 2100,000,000 a year, and then divided it, not by the population of the whole Empire, but by the Population of the self-governing Colonies alone. This blunder makes his figure for Colonial trade 210 a head. If he had done his division-sum correctly, the trade would have been instead something like five shillings a head. In a word, Mr. Chamber- lain's blunder knocks his argument completely on the head, and, as Mr. Emmott points out in his excellent letter in the Westminster Gazette, makes nonsense of the rhetorical question: "May it not be possible that it would be better for us to cultivate trade with ten millions of our own kinsmen who take from us at the present time 210 per head ? " As a matter of fact, the people of our self-governing Colonies take from us on an average about 2.5 per head.
