In a former lecture I pointed out how much unity is given to the history of England in the eighteenth century, how all the great wars of that time are shown to belong together and fall into a connected series, if you remark the single fact that Greater Britain during that period was establishing itself in opposition to Greater France. And I have since proceeded further in the same train of reflection, by remarking that during the eighteenth and seven- teenth centuries it is not England and France only that have great colonies, but Spain, Portugal, and Holland also. You will, I think, find it very helpful in studying the history of those two centuries, always to bear in mind that throughout most of that period the five states of Western Europe all alike are not properly European states but world-states, and that they debate continually among themselves a mighty question, which is not European at all, and which the student with his eye fixed on Europe is LECT. V EFFECT OF THE NEW WOULD ON THE OLD 91 too apt to disregard, namely, the question of the possession of the New World.
This obvious fact, sufficiently borne in mind, gives much unity to the political history of those nations, and reduces to a simple formula most of their wars and alliances. But I now proceed to show, especially with respect to England, that the European States were greatly modified, not only in their mutual dealings with each other, but internally in the nature of each community, by their connection with the New World. It will be found that the modern character of England, as it has come to be since the Middle Ages, may also be most briefly d’escribed on the whole by saying that England has been expand ing into Greater Britain.
Two great events happened within thirty years of each other, the discovery of the New World and the Reformation. These two events closely involved with two others, viz. the consolidation of the great European States and the closing of the East by the Turkish Conquest, caused the vast change which we know as the close of the Middle Ages and the opening of the modern period. But of the two leading events the one was of far more rapid operation than the other. The Reformation produced its effect at once and in the very front of the stage of history. For more than half a century the historical student finds himself mainly concerned with the struggle between the Habsburg House and the Reformation, first in Germany, where it is assisted by France, then in the Low Countries, where it is helped, 92 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot, sometimes by France, sometimes by England. Mean while the occupation of the New World is going on in the background, and does not force itself upon the attention of the student who is contemplating Europe. The achievements of Cortez and Pizarro do not seem to have any reaction upon the European struggle. And perhaps it is not till near the end of the six- teenth century, when the raids of Francis Drake and his fellows upon the Spanish settlements in Central America mainly contributed to decide Spain to her great enterprise against England, perhaps it is not till the time of the Spanish Armada, that the New World begins in any perceptible degree to react upon the Pld.
But from this time forward European affairs begin to be controlled by two great causes at once, viz. the Reformation and the New World, and of these the Reformation acts with diminishing force, and the New World has more and more influence. It is characteristic of the seventeenth century that these two causes act throughout it in combination. This is illustrated, as I mentioned above, by Cromwell’s policy of war against Spain, which is double-faced and, while it seems to be a blow of Protestantism against Catholicism, is really a stroke for territory in the New World, so that it results in the conquest of Jamaica. It is illustrated too by the alliance of France and England against Holland in 1672, when one Protestant Power assails another with the pointed approbation of the Cromwellian statesman Shaftes- bury, because they have rival interests in the New V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 93 World. But by the end of that century the Reform ation as a force in politics has declined, and in the eighteenth century the ruling influence is throughout the New World. This is what gives t6 that century the prosaic commercial character which distinguishes it. The religious question with all its grandeur has sunk to rest, and the colonial question, made up of worldly and material considerations, has taken its place.
Now the New World, considered as a boundless territory open to settlement, would act in two ways upon the nations of Europe. In the first place it would have a purely political effect—that is, it would act upon their Governments. For so much debatable territory would be a standing cause of war. It is this action of the New World that we have been considering hitherto, while we have observed how mainly the wars of the eighteenth century, and particularly the great wars of England and France, were kindled by this cause. But the New World would also act upon the Eiu-opean communities themselves, modifying their occupations and ways of life, altering their industrial and economical char acter. Thus the expansion of England involves its transformation.
England is now pre-eminently a maritime, colonising and industrial country. It seems to be the prevalent opinion that England always was so, and from the nature of her people can never be otherwise. In Riickert’s poem the deity that visited the same spot of earth at intervals of five hundred years, and found
94 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leOt.
there now a forest, now a city, now a sea, when ever he asked after the origin of what he saw, received for answer, “It has always been so, and always will be.” This unhistorical way of thinking, this disposition to ascribe an inherent necessity to whatever we are accustomed to, betrays itself in much that is said about the genius of the Anglo Saxon race. That we might have been other than we are, nay, that we once were other, is to us so inconceivable that we try to explain why we were always the same, before ascertaining by any inquiry whether the fact is so. It seems to us clear that we are the great wandering, working, colonising race, descended from sea-rovers and Vikings. The sea, we think, is ours by nature’s decree, and on this highway we travel to subdue the earth and to people it.
And yet in fact it was only in the Elizabethan age that England began to discover her vocation to trade and to the dominion of the sea.
Our insular position, and the fact that our island towards the West and North looks right out upon the Atlantic Ocean, may lead us to fancy that the nation must always have been maritime by the necessity of the case. We entered the island in ships, and afterwards we were conquered by a nation of sea-rovers. But after all England is not a Norway it is not a country which has only narrow strips of cultivable land, and therefore forces its population to look to the sea for their subsistence. England in the time of the Plantagenets was no mistress of theV EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 95 seas ; in fact she was scarcely a maritime state at all. Occasionally in war-time we find medieval England in possession of a considerable navy. But as soon as peace arrives the navy dwindles away again. The constant complaints of piracy in the Channel show how little control England was able to exercise even over her own seas. It has been justly remarked that, as the Middle Ages know of no standing army, so, excepting the case of some Italian city-states, they know of no standing fleet. Over and over again in those times this decay of the navy recurs. Then when a new war broke out, the Government would issue a general license to all merchant-ships to act as privateers, and the merchant-ships would respond to it by becoming not merely privateers but pirates. In fact, though under the Plantagenets the English nation Avas more warlike in spirit than it has been since, yet it is observable that in those days its ambition was directed much more to fighting by land than by sea. The glories of the English army of those days greatly eclipse those of the English navy ; we remember the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, but we have forgotten that of Sluys.
The truth is that the maritime greatness of England is of much more modern growth than most of us imagine. It dates from the civil wars of the seventeenth century and from the career of Eobert Blake. Blake’s pursuit of Prince Rupert through the Straits of Gibraltar up the eastern coast of Spain is said to have been the first appearance of an English fleet in the Mediterranean after the time of the 96 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect Crusades, There are no doubt naval heroes older than Blake. There is Francis Drake, and Richard Grenville, and John Hawkins. But the navy of Elizabeth was only the English navy in infancy, and the heroes themselves are not far removed from buccaneers. Before the Tudor period we find only the embryo of a navy. In the fifteenth century English naval history, except during the short reign of Henry V., shows only feebleness ; before that too feebleness is the rule and efficiency the exception, until we arrive at the reign of Edward I., who was the first to conceive even the idea of a standing navy.
And not in maritime war only but in maritime discovery, in maritime activity of all kinds, the great- ness of England is modern. In the great unrivalled explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we did no doubt something, but we had no pretension whatever to take the lead. It is true that we made a promising commence;ment. A ship from Bristol was absolutely the first to touch the American Continent, so that there were English sailors who saw America proper a year or so before Columbus himself. At that moment we seemed likely to rival Spain, for if the commander Cabot ^ was no English- man, neither was Columbus a Spaniard. But we fell behind again ; Henry VII. was unwisely parsimonious, ^ John Cabot was an Italian, by citizenship a “Venetian ; but if his son Sebastian was born after the father settled in Bristol, and if the son, not the father, commanded the ship, the whole achieve- ment might be made out to be English. The evidence however points the other way. See the discussion in Hellwald, Sebastian Cabot.
V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 97 Henry VIII. was caught in the vortex of the Eeformation. In the first generation of great discoverers there is no English name. Frobisher, Chancellor and Francis Drake did not appear on the Ocean till Columbus had lain for half a century in his grave. Among nations of maritime renown whether in war, discovery or colonisation, before the time of the Spanish Armada England could not pretend to take any high rank. Spain had carried off the prize, less by merit than by the good fortune which sent her Columbus, but the nation which had really deserved it was beyond dis- pute Portugal, which indeed had almost reason to complain of the glorious intrusion of Columbus. Even against him she might urge that, if the object was to find the Indies, she took the right way and found them, while he took the wrong way and missed them.^ After these nations, and in quite a lower class, might be placed England and France, and I do not know that England would have a right to stand before France. This is somewhat disguised in our histories owing to the natural desire of the historians to make the most of our actual achieve- ments. In later times, after our maritime supremacy had once begun, we should be surprised at any nation competing with us for the first place, whereas we are content to appear as spirited aspirants venturing to 1 Even if it were answered in hia behalf that it is better to be wrong and find America than to be right and find India, Portugal might answer that she did both, since in the second voyage made from Lisbon to India she discovered Brazil, only eight years after the first voy^e of Columbus, and would undoubtedly have discovered it, if Columbus had never been bom.
U 98 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
contest the pre-eminence of Spain after she has enjoyed it for the best part of a century. And even at the end of the sixteenth century, when a large part of the American Continent has been carved out in Spanish vice-royalties, and Portugal has sent out governors to rule in the Indian Ocean, when Spanish missionaries have visited Japan, when the great poet of Portugal has led a literary career for sixteen years and written an epic poem in regions which to former poets had seemed fabulous, even as late as this the English are quite beginners in the maritime career, and have as yet no settlements.
But from naval affairs let us turn to manufactures and commerce. Here again we shall find that it is not a natural vocation, founded upon inherent aptitudes, that has given us our success in these pursuits. In manufactures our success dependsupon our peculiar relation to the great producing countries of the globe. The vast harvests of the world are reaped in countries where land is wide andpopulation generally thin. But those countries cannot manufacture their own raw materials, because all hands are engaged in producing and there is nosurplus population to be employed in manufacture. The cotton of America and wool of Australia therefore come to England, where not only such a surplus population exists, but where also the great standing instrument of manufacture, coal, is found in abund ance and near the coast. Now all this is modern,most of it very modern. The reign of coal beganwith machinery, that is, in the latter half of the V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 99 eighteenth century. The vast tracts of production were not heard of till the New World had been laid open, and could not be used freely till two centuries and a half later, when railways were introduced. Evidently therefore the basis of our manufacturing greatness could not be laid till very recent times.
The England of the Plantagenets occupied a wholly different economical position. Manufactures were not indeed wanting, but the nation was as yet so far from being remarked for its restless industry and practical talent, that a description written in the fifteenth century says that the English, “being seldom fatigued with hard labour, lead a life more spiritual and refined.” ^ In the main England at that time subsisted upon its lucrative intercourse (magnus intercursus) with Flanders. She produced the wool which was manufactured there ; she was to Flanders what Australia is now to the West Riding. London was as Sydney, Ghent and Bruges were as Leeds and Bradford.
This continued in the main to be the case till the Elizabethan age. But then, about the time that the maritime greatness of England was beginning, she began also to be a great manufacturing country. For the manufactures of Flanders perished in the great catastrophe of the religious war of the Low Countries with Spain. Flemish manufacturers swarmed over 1 Fortescue, quoted by Mr. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, p. 217. Besides being indolent and contemplative, the Englishman of the fifteenth century y/as pre- eminent in urbanity and totally devoid of domestic aflfection ! See Gairdner’s Paston Letters, vol. iii. Intr. p. Ixiii.
100 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
into England, and gave a new life to the industry which had long had its centre at Norwich. There began what may be called the Norwich period of our manufacturing history, which lasted through the whole seventeenth century. The peculiarity of it was that in this period England manufactured her own product, wool. Instead of being mainly a pro- ducing country as before, or mainly a manufacturing country as now, she was a country manufacturing what she herself produced.
So much for manufactures. But the present in- dustrial greatness of England is composed only in part of her greatness in manufacture. She has also the carrying trade of the world, and is therefore its exchange and business - centre. Now this carrying trade has come to her as the great maritime country it is therefore superfluous to remark that she had it not in the Middle Ages, when she had not yet become a maritime country. Indeed in those times a carrying trade can hardly be spoken of. It implies a great sea-traffic, and a great sea-traffic did not begin till the New World was thrown open. Before that event business had its centre in the central countries of Europe, in Italy and the Imperial Cities of Germany. The great business men of the fifteenth century were the Medici of Florence, the Fuggers of Augsburg, the founders of the Bank of St. George at Genoa.
In the Middle Ages England was, from the point of view of business, not an advanced, but on the whole a backward country. She must have been V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 101 despised in the chief commercial countries; as now she herself looks upon the business-system and the banking of countries like Germany and even France as old-fashioned compared to her own, so in the Middle Ages the Italians must have looked upon England. With their city-life, wide business-con- nections and acuteness in affairs, they must have classed England, along with France, among the old- world, agricultural, and feudal countries, which lay outside the main-current of the ideas of the time.
Nor when the great change took place, which left Italy and Germany in their turn stranded, and turned the whole course of business into another channel, are we to suppose that England stepped at once into their place. Their successor was Holland. Through a great part of the seventeenth century the carrying trade of the world was in the hands of the Dutch, and Amsterdam was the exchange of the world. It is against this Dutch monopoly that England struggles in Cromwell’s time and in the earlier part of the reign of Charles II. Not till late in that century does Holland begin to show signs of defeat. Not till then does England decidedly take the lead in commerce.
And thus, if we put together all the items, we arrive at the conclusion that the England we know, the supreme maritime commercial and industrial Power, is quite of modern growth, that it did not clearly exhibit its principal features till the eighteenth century, and that the seventeenth century is the period when it was gradually assuming this form.
102 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
If we ask when it began to do so, the answer is particularly easy and distinct. It was in the Elizar bethan Age.
Now this was the time when the New World began to exert its influence, and thus the most obvious facts suggest that England owes its modern character and its peculiar greatness from the outset to the New World. It is not the blood of the Vikings that makes us rulers of the sea, nor the industrial genius of the Anglo-Saxon that makes us great in manufactures and commerce, but a much more special circumstance, which did not arise till for manycenturies we had been agricultural or pastoral, war like, and indifferent to the sea.
In the school of Carl Ritter much has been said ^ of three stages of civilisation determined by geograph ical conditions, the potamic, which clings to rivers, the thalassic, which grows up around inland seas, and lastly the oceanic. This theory looks as if it had been suggested by the change which followed the discovery of the New World, when indeed European civilisation passed from the thalassic to the oceanic stage. Till then trade had clung to the Mediterranean Sea. Till then the Ocean had been a limit, a boundary, not a pathway. There had been indeed a certain amount of intercourse across the narrow seas of the North, which had nourished the trade of the Hanseatic League. But in the main the Mediterranean con- tinued to be the headquarters of industry as of civilisation, and the Middle Age moved so far in the
- See Peschel, Abhandlungen zur Erd-und Volkerkunde, p. 398.
V EFFECT OF THE NEW WOULD ON THE OLD 103 groove of the ancient world that Italy in both seemed to have a natural superiority over the countries on this side of the Alps. France and England had no doubt advanced greatly, but to the Italian in the fifteenth century they still seemed comparatively barbarous, intellectually provincial and second-rate. The reason of this was that for practical purposes they were inland, while Italy reaped the benefit of the civilising sea. The greatness of Florence rested upon woollen manufactures, that of Venice, Pisa and Genoa upon foreign trade and dependencies, and all this at a time when France and England comparatively were given up to feudalism and rusticity. By the side of the Italian republics, France and England showed like Thessaly and Macedonia in comparison with Athens and Corinth.
Now Columbus and the Portuguese altered all this by substituting the Atlantic Ocean for the Mediter- ranean Sea as the highway of commerce. From that moment the reign of Italy is over. The relation of cause and effect is here in some degree concealed by the misfortunes which happened to Italy at the same time. The political fall of Italy happened accidentally just at the same moment. The foreigner crossed the Alps; Italy became a battlefield in the great struggle of France and Spain ; she was con- quered, partitioned, enslaved ; and her glory never revived afterwards. Such a catastrophe and its obvious cause, foreign invasion, blinds us to all minor influences, which might have been working to produce the same eff"ect at the same time. But assuredly, had 104 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.
no foreign invasion taken place, Italy would just then have entered on a period of decline. The hidden source which fed her energy and glory was dried up by the discovery of the New World. She might be compared to one of those seaports on the coast of Kent from which the sea has receded. Where there had once been life and movement, silence and vacancy must have set in throughout the great city republics of Italy, even if no stranger had crossed the Alps. The Mediterranean Sea had not indeed receded, but it had lost once for all the character which it had had almost from the days of the Odyssey. It had ceased to be the central sea of human intercourse and civilisation, the chief, nay, almost the one sea of history. It so happened that, soon after commerce began to cover the Atlantic, it was swept out of the Mediterranean by the besom of the Turkish sea-power. Thus Eanke remarks that the trade of Barcelona seemed to be little affected by the new discoveries, but that it sank rapidly from about 1529, in conse- quence of the maritime predominance of the Turks caused by the successes of Barbarossa, the league of France with Solyman, and the foundation of the Barbary States. So clearly had the providential edict gone forth that European civilisation should cease to be thalassic and should become oceanic.
The great result was that the centre of movement and intelligence began to pass from the centre of Europe to its Western Coast. Civilisation moves away from Italy and Germany ; where it will settle is not yet clear, but certainly farther west. See howV EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 105 strikingly this change stands out from the history of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of that century all the genius in the world seems to live in Italy or Germany. The golden age of modern art is passing in the first country, but if there are any rivals to the Italian painters they are German, and Michael Angelo is obliged at least to reason with those who prefer the maniera tedesca. Meanwhile the Reforma tion belongs to Germany. For France and England in those days it seems sufiicient glory to have given a welcome to the Renaissance and to the Reformation. But gradually in the latter part of the sixteenth century we become aware that civilisation is shifting its headquarters. Italy and Germany are first rivalled and then eclipsed ; gradually we grow accus- tomed to the thought that great things are rather to be looked for in other countries. In the seven- teenth century almost all genius and greatness is to be found in the western or maritime states of Europe.
Now these are the states which were engaged in the struggle for the New World. Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England have the same sort of position with respect to the Atlantic Ocean that Greece and Italy had in antiquity with respect to the Mediterranean. And they begin to show a similar superiority in intelligence. Vast problems of conquest, colonisation and commerce occupy their minds, which before had vegetated in a rustic monotony. I have already shown you at length what an efTect this change had upon the English nation. The cfi"ect 106 EXPANSION OP ENGLAND lect.
produced upon the Dutch was quite as striking and much more rapid. The Golden Age of Holland is the first half of the seventeenth century. Let us examine for a moment the causes which produced its prosperity.
The Low Countries which revolted against Philip II. of Spain were, as you know, not merely the seven provinces which afterwards made the Dutch Eepublic and now make the Dutch Monarchy, but those other provinces which now make the kingdom of Belgium. It was the latter group which at the time of the rebellion were most prosperous. They were the great manufacturing region, the Lancashire or West Eiding of the Middle Ages. The former group, the Dutch provinces, were then of much less importance. They were maritime and chiefly occupied in the herring fishery. Now the result of the Eebellion was that Spain was able to retain possession of the Belgian group, which from this time is known as the Spanish Low Countries, but she was not able to hold the Dutch group, which, after a war which seemed interminable, she was forced to leave to their inde- pendence. Now during the struggle the prosperity of the Belgian Provinces, as I have pointed out, was ruined. The Flemish manufacturers emigrated and founded the woollen manufacture of England. But the maritime provinces, poorer at the outset, instead of being ruined grew rich during the war, and had become, before it was ended, the wonder and the great commercial state of the world. How was this t It was because they were maritime, and because their V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLL 107 sea was the highway which led to the New World. As they had devoted themselves earlier to the sea, they had the start of the English, and their war with the Spaniards proved actually an advantage to them, because it threw open to their attack all the thinly peopled ill-defended American Empire of Spain. The world was astonished to see a petty state with a barren soil and insignificant population, not only hold its own against the great Spanish Empire, but in the midst of this unequal contest found a great colonial Empire for itself in both hemispheres. Meanwhile the intellectual stimulus, which the sea had begun to give to these “Western States, was nowhere more manifest than in Holland. This same small popula tion took the lead in scholarship as in commerce, welcomed Lipsius, Scaliger and Descartes, and pro- duced Grotius at the same time as Piet Hein and Van Tromp.
This is the most startling single instance of the action of the New World. The efi"ects produced in Holland were nothing like so momentous as those which I have traced in England, for the greatness of Holland, wanting a basis sufficiently broad, was short lived, but they were more sudden and more evidently referable to this single cause.
Such then was the effect of the New World on the Old. It is visible not merely in the wars and alliances of the time, but also in the economic growth and transformation of the Western States of Europe.
Civilisation has often been powerfully promoted by some great enterprise in which several generations 108 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
continuously take part. Such was the war of Europe and Asia to the ancient Greeks; such the Crusades in the Middle Ages. Such then for the Western States of Europe in recent centuries has been the struggle for the New World. It is this more than anything else which has placed these nations, where they never were before, in the van of intellectual pro gress, and especially it is by her success in this field that our own country has acquired her peculiar greatness.
I will conclude this lecture with some remarks on the large causes which, in the struggle of five states, left the final victory in the hands of England. Among these five we have seen that Spain and Portugal had the start by a whole century, and that Holland was in the field before England. Afterwards for about a century France and England contended for the New World on tolerably equal terms. Yet now of all these states England alone remains in possession of a great and commanding colonial power. Why is this? We may observe that Holland and Portugal laboured under the disadvantage of too small a basis. The decline of Holland had obvious causes, which have often been pointed out. For her suflferiugs in a war of eighty years with Spain she found the com pensations I have just described. But when this was followed, first by naval wars with England, and then by a struggle with France which lasted half a century, and she had now England for a rival on the seas, she succumbed. At the beginning of the
V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 109 eighteenth century she shows symptoms of decay, and at the Treaty of Utrecht she lays down her arms, victorious indeed, but fatally disabled.
The Portuguese met with a diflFerent misfortune. From the outset they had recognised the insufficiency of their resources, regretting that they had not been content with a less ambitious course of acquisition on the northern coast of Africa. In 1580 they suffered a blow such as has not fallen on any other of the still existing European states. Portugal with all her world-wide dependencies and commercial stations fell under the yoke of Spain, and underwent a sixty years’ captivity. In this period her colonial Empire, which by becoming Spanish was laid open to the attacks of the Dutch, suffered greatly ; Portuguese writers accuse Spain of having witnessed their losses with pleasure, and of having made a scapegoat of Portugal ; certain it is that the discontent which led to the insurrection of 1640, and founded a new Portugal under the House of Bragan^a, was mainly caused by these colonial losses. Yet the insurrection itself cost her something more in foreign possessions she paid the Island of Bombay for the help of England. Nor could the second Portugal ever rival the first, that nurse of Prince Henry, Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco da Gama, Magelhaens and Camoens, which has quite a peculiar glory in the history of Europe.
Be it remarked in passing that this passage also of the history of the seventeenth century shows us the New World reacting on the Old. As the rise of 110 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
Holland, the great occurrence of its first years, so the Revolution of Portugal, which occupies the middle of it, is caused by the influence of the colonies.
As to the ill-success of Spain and France, it would no doubt be idle to suppose that any one cause will fully explain it. But perhaps one large cause may be named which in both cases contributed most to pro- duce the result.
Spain lost her colonial Empire only, as it were, the other day. Having founded it a century earlier, she retained it nearly half a century later than England retained her first Empire. Compared to England, she has been inferior only in not having continued to found new colonies. And this was the effect of that strange decay of vitality which overtook Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The decline of population and the ruin of finance dried up in her every power, that of colonisation included.
No similar decline is observable in France. France lost her colonies in a series of unsuccessful wars, and perhaps you may think that it is not necessary to inquire further, and that the fortune of war explains everything. But I think I discern that both States were guilty of the same error of policy, which in the end mainly contributed to their failure. It may be said of both that they " had too many irons in the fire.” There was this fundamental difi’erence between Spain and France on the one side and England on the other, that Spain and France were deeply involved in the struggles of Europe, from which England has V EFFECT OF THE NEW WOKLD ON THE OLD 111 always been able to hold herself aloof. In fact, as an island, England is distinctly nearer for practical pur- poses to the New World, and almost belongs to it, or at least has the choice of belonging at her pleasure to the New World or to the Old. Spain might perhaps have had the same choice, but for her conquests in Italy and for the fatal marriage which, as it were, wedded her to Germany. In that same sixteenth century in which she was colonising the New World, Spain was merged at home in the complex Spanish Empire, which was doomed beforehand to decline, because it could never raise a revenue proportioned to its responsibilities. It was almost bankrupt when Charles V. abdicated, though it could then draw upon the splendid prosperity of the Netherlands ; when, soon after, it alienated this province, lost the poorer half of it and ruined the richer, when it engaged in chronic war with France, when after eighty years of war with the Dutch it entered upon a quarter of a century of war with Portugal, it could not but sink, as it did, into bankruptcy and political decrepitude. These overwhelming burdens, coupled with a want of industrial aptitude in the Spanish people, whose temperament had been formed in a permanent war of religion, produced the result that the nation to which a new world had been given could never rightly use or profit by the gift.
As to France, it is still more manifest that she lost the New World because she was always divided between a policy of colonial extension and a policy of European conquest. If we compare together those 112 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
seven great wars between 1688 and 1815, we shall be struck with the fact that most of them are double wars, that they have one aspect as between England and France and another as between France and Germany. It is the double policy of France that causes this, and it is France that suffers by it. England has for the most part a single object and wages a single war, but France wages two wars at once for two distinct objects. When Chatham said he would conquer America in Germany, he indicated that he saw the mistake which France committed by dividing her forces, and that he saw how, by subsidis- ing Frederick, to make France exhaust herself in Germany, while her possessions in America passed defenceless into our hands. Napoleon in like manner is distracted between the New World and the Old. He would humble England; he would repair the colonial and Indian losses of his country. But he finds himself conquering Germany and at last invad ing Eussia. His comfort is that through Germany he can strike at English trade, and through Russia perhaps make his way to India.
England has not been thus distracted between two objects. Connected but slightly with the European system since she evacuated France in the fifteenth century, she has not since then lived in chronic war with her neighbours. She has not hankered after the Imperial Crown or guaranteed the Treaty of Westphalia, When Napoleon by his Continental System shut her out from Europe, she showed that she could do without Europe, Hence her hands have V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 113 always been free, while trade of itself inevitably drew her thoughts in the direction of the New World. In the long rim this advantage has been decisive. She has not had to maintain a European Ascendency, as Spain and France have had ; on the other hand she has not had to withstand such an Ascendency by mortal conflict within her own territory, as Holland and Portugal, and Spain also, have been forced to do. Hence nothing has interrupted her or interfered with her, to draw her off from the quiet progress of her colonial settlements. In one word, out of the five states which competed for the New World success has fallen to that one—not which showed at the outset the strongest vocation for colonisation, not which surpassed the others in daring or invention or energy—but to that one which waa least hampered by the Old World.
LECTURE VI