the most honourable means.  The epoch of expansion is pretty nearly past, but there remains before us a great work of development and consolidation.  And that is a work which should appeal especially to Scotsmen.  The Scottish people have borne a great part, great out of proportion to their numbers, in building up our common British heritage.  They are taking a foremost part in it to-day.  All over the world, as settlers in Canada, in Australia, or in South Africa, as administrators in India and elsewhere, they are among the sturdiest pillars on which the great Imperial fabric rests.  I am not talking in the air.  I am speaking from my personal experience, and only saying in public here to-night what I have said in private a hundred times, that as an agent of my country in distant lands I have had endless occasion to appreciate the support given to the British cause by the ability, the courage, the shrewd sense and the broad Imperial instinct of many Scotsmen.  And therefore I look with confidence to a Scottish audience to support my appeal for continuous national effort in making the most of the British Empire.  I say this is not a matter with regard to which we can afford to rest on our laurels.  We must either go forward or we shall go back.  And especially ought we to go forward in developing co-operation, on a basis of equality and partnership, with the great self-governing communities of our race in the distant portions of the world, else they will drift away from us.  Do not let us think for a moment that we can afford such another fiasco as the late Colonial Conference.  Do not let us imagine for a moment that we can go to sleep over the questions then raised, and not one of them settled, for four years, only to find ourselves unprepared when the next Conference meets.  A cordial social welcome, many toasts, many dinners, are all very well in their way, but they are not enough.  What is wanted is a real understanding of what our fellow countrymen across the seas are driving at, and a real attempt to meet them in their efforts to keep us a united family.  All that our present rulers seem able to do is to misunderstand, and therefore unconsciously to misrepresent—­I do not question their good intentions, but I think they are struck with mental blindness in this matter—­to misrepresent the attitude of the colonists and greatly to exaggerate the difficulties of meeting them half-way.  The speeches of Ministers on a question like that of Colonial Preference leave upon me the most deplorable impression.  One would have thought that, if they could not get over the objections which they feel to meeting the advances of our kinsmen, they would at least show some sort of regret at their failure.  But not a bit of it.  Their one idea all along has been to magnify the difficulties in the way in order to make party capital out of the business.  They saw their way to a good cry about “taxing the food of the people,” the big and the little loaf, and so forth, and they went racing after it,