] Competition for the New World between the five western maritime States of Europe : this is a formula which sums up a great part of the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is one of those generalisations which escape us so long as we study history only in single states.
Much would be gained if the student of history would look at modern Europe as he has already the habit of looking at ancient Greece. Here he has constantly before him three or four different states at once—Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Argos, not to mention Macedonia and Persia, and is led to make most instructive comparisons and most useful reflections upon large general tendencies. This is entirely owing to the accident that Greece was not a State but a complex of States, which fact our historians do not perceive clearly enough to conclude, as in con sistency they ought, that they ought not to write a history of Greece at all, but separate histories ofLECT. yi COMMERCE AND WAR 115 Athens, Sparta, etc. Let me ask those of you who know Grecian history to apply to these Western States the mode of conceiving to which you have accustomed yourselves. You have been in the habit of thinking of a cluster of States gathered round a common sea, which is studded with islands, and which has on the other side of it large territories imperfectly known and inhabited by strange races. You have thought of all these States together, and not merely of each by itself ; you have traced the general results produced upon the Hellenic world as a whole by all the intricate play of interests between the several Hellenic city-states. Now the five States we have in view—Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England—were ranged in like manner on the North-Eastern shore of the Atlantic Ocean, and had in like manner a common interest in what that Ocean contained or hid. If the States seem to you so large, the Ocean so boundless, and the settlements so scattered that you cannot bring them into one view, make an effort, bring them into the same map, and draw the map on a small scale. But your great effort must be to raise your head above the current of mere chronological narrative, to apply a fixed principle to the selection of facts, grouping them not by nearness in time, nor by their personal biographical connection, but by the internal affinity of causation. This great struggle of five States for the New World differs from the struggles of those old Greek States in thisj that it is not isolated. It was superinduced by the discovery of Columbus upon other struggles, 116 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
themselves sufficiently complicated, which were going on within the European States; in particular it is entangled with the great religious struggle of the Eeformation. Altogether what a tangled web ! Nowin a case like this what shall science do 1 Surely the first thing will be to separate and arrange together all the effects whioh can be traced to any one cause. In order to do this it must evidently neglect chrono logical order ; it must break the fetters of narrative. Following this method, it will see in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as I have pointed out, two grand causes, each followed by its multitude of effects, viz. the Reformation and the attraction of the New World; these two grand causes it will study separately, tracing each through the long series of effects produced by it, and then perhaps, but not till then, it will consider the mutual action of the two causes upon each other. It is our business at present to consider separately the effects produced on the five Western States by the attraction of the New World.
Now why should the New World have produced any further eflfect upon those States than simply to rouse them to a new commercial activity, and perhaps more gradually to enlarge their ideas by enlarging their knowledge 1 That it did produce this latter effect I explained in the last lecture by pointing out how in the course of the sixteenth century the centre of civilisation moves from the Mediterranean to the neighbourhood of the Atlantic, so that, whereas in the earlier years of it the eye turns always to Italy or VI COMMERCE AND WAR 117 Germany, where tke Kaphaels and Michael Angelos, the Ariostos and Macchiavelli’s, the Diirers and Hiittens and Luthers Hve, at the end of it and in the seventeenth century the eye turns just as naturally Westward and Northward. We see Cervantes and Calderon in Spain, Shakspeare and Spenser and Bacon in England ; Scaliger and Lipsius, then Grotius arise in Holland, Montaigne and Casaubon in France ; the destinies of the world are in the hands of Henry IV., Queen Elizabeth, the Prince of Orange ; and, as time goes on, we grow more and more accustomed to expect everything great in this quarter, and to regard Italy and the Mediterranean as out of date. So much was natural. The contact of the New World might have been expected to produce this effect, for, as we have always been accustomed to trace ancient civilisa- tion to the influence of the Mediterranean, we are prepared to find that the Atlantic, when once it becomes a Mediterranean,—that is, when once lands are laid open on the farther side of it, —should pro- duce similar effects on a grander scale. But it does not at once appear why any further effects should be produced. To understand this we must consider the peculiar nature of the contact between the New World and the Old, and, now that we have looked a little into modern colonisation, we are in a condition to do so.
Let us think how the New World might have acted on the Old quite otherwise than as it did. What if America had been found to be full of power ful and consolidated States like those of Europe? 118 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.
Then our relations with it would have been similar to our present relations with China or Japan. Our advances might have been met with a certain prudery, as by China; in that case the result would either have been non-intercourse, or some attempt, success ful or otherwise, to force intercourse upon them. Or the American States might have proved open-minded and liberal like the Japanese ; then there might have followed intercourse, exchange of ideas, and mutual benefit. But in either case it does not appear that important political consequences would have followed, for in those days, while communication was so difficult, it is not likely that any fusion of the European political system with the American system, any alliances of European with American States, would have taken place. The two worlds would have remained aware of each other, yet almost closed to each other, in a relation less like that we now see between England and China or Japan than that of England with the same countries or with India and Persia during the seventeenth century.
Well ! there were no such consolidated States in America except in Mexico and Peru, where they were overwhelmed in a moment by the Spanish advent urers. Hence the New “World had not the power it would otherwise have had of keeping the Old at arm’s length. And the consequence was that there began between the Old World and the New an emigration.
Now this by itself is a great fact. It implies that the Atlantic had become, not merely a Mediterranean, TI COMMERCE AND WAR 119 but something more. To the Greeks the Mediter- ranean gave trade, intercourse with foreigners, movement and change of ideas, but it did not, unless perhaps at a certain time, aflford a means of unbounded emigration. Emigration there was, but on a scale not only inferior, but inferior in proportion. Political Powers, some of them exclusive, guarded the opposite shore. But even this fact is rather social than political. Emigration is in itself only a private aflfair; it does not, as such, concern Governments, and though it may produce a great effect upon them, as for example the Puritan emigration to New England produced no doubt a perceptible effect in our civil troubles, yet this effect is only indirect.
Governments might have shut their eyes to all the affairs of the New World. In that case the great adventurers would perhaps have set up kingdoms for themselves, and the reaction of the New World upon the Old would have been confined within narrow limits. The Continent of America was so roomy, so thinly peopled, that the action of such adventurers, what ever it might have been, would have had no remote consequences, and the Governments of Europe might have looked on without anxiety. The New World would then have exerted as little influence upon the Old as, for example, the South American States now exert upon Europe. Eevolutionary violence may rage there, but it rages unheeded, and its effects evaporate in the boundless toi ritory peopled by so few inhabitants.
By considering thus what might have been we are 120 EXPANSION Of ENGLAND lect.
brought to discern the critical point in the course which was actually pursued. The New World could not but exert a strong influence, but it need not have exerted, directly at least, any properly political influence upon the Old. It was made into a political force of the most tremendous magnitude by the interference of the European Governments, by their assuming the control of all the States set up by their subjects in it. The necessary efi’ect of this policy was to transform entirely the politics of Europe, by materially altering the interest and position of five great European States. I bring this fact into strong relief because I think it has been too much over- looked, and it is the fundamental fact upon which this course of lectures is founded. In one word, the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries does not lie outside Europe, but exists inside it as a principle of unlimited political change. Instead of being an isolated region in which history is not yet interested, it is a present influence of the utmost importance to Avhich the historian must be continually alive—an influence which for a long time rivalled the Reformation, and from the beginning of the eighteenth century surpassed the Reformation, in its eff"ect upon the politics of the European States.
Historians of those centuries have kept in view mainly two or perhaps three great movements first, the Reformation and its consequences ; secondly, the constitutional movement in each country leading to liberty in England and to revolution through despotism in France. They have also considered tlie VI COMMERCE AND WAR 121 great Ascendencies which from time to time have arisen in Europe, that of the House of Austria, that of the House of Bourbon, and again that of Napoleon.
These great movements have been, as it were, the framework in which they have fitted all particular incidents. The framework is insuflficient and too exclusively European. It furnishes no place for a multitude of most important occurrences, and the movement which it overlooks is perhaps greater and certainly more continuous and durable than any of those which it recognises. Each view of Europe separately is true. Europe is a great Church and Empire breaking up into distinct kingdoms and national or voluntary Churches, as those say who fix their eyes on the Reformation ; it is a group of monarchies in which popular freedom has been gradually developing itself, as the constitutional lawyer says ; it is a group of states which balance themselves uneasily against each other, liable there- fore to be thrown ofi” its equilibrium by the pre- ponderance of one of them, as the international lawyer says. But all these accounts are incomplete and leave almost half the facts unexplained. We must add, " It is a group of States, of which the five westernmost have been acted upon by a steadfast gravitation towards the New World, and have dragged in their train great New World Empires." I have already applied this observation to the eighteenth century, and shown you how it explains the perpetual struggles which that century witnessed between England and France. These struggles, I am 122 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
persuaded, are treated by historians of the Balance of Power from a point of view much too exclusively European, This strikes me particularly in the picture they give of the career of Napoleon, They see in him simply a ruler who had the ambition to undertake the conquest of all Europe, and who had the genius almost to succeed in this enterprise. Now the main peculiarity of his career is that, though he did this, he did not intend it, but something different. He intended to make great conquests, and he made great conquests, but the conquests he made were not those he intended to make. Napoleon did not care about Europe. " Cette vieille Europe wHennuie," he said frankly. His ambition was all directed towards the New World. He is the Titan whose dream it is to restore that Greater France which had fallen in the struggles of the eighteenth century, and to overthrow that Greater Britain which had been established on its ruins. He makes no secret of this ambition, nor does he ever renounce it. His conquests in Europe are made, as it were, accidentally, and he treats them always as a starting point for a new attack on England. He conquers Germany, but whyl Because Austria and Eussia, subsidised by England, march against him while he is brooding at Boulogne over the conquest of England. When Germany is conquered, what is his first thought? That now he has a ncAV weapon against England, since he can impose the Continental System upon all Europe. Does he occupy Spain and Portu gal % It is because they are maritime countries with VI COMMERCE AND WAR 123 fleets and colonies that may be used against England. Lastly, when you study such an enterprise as the Eussian expedition, you are forced to admit, either that it had no object, or that it was directed against England. But this view escapes most historians, because from the outset they have underestimated the magnitude of that great historical cause, the attraction of the New World upon the Old, To them colonies have seemed unimportant, because they were distant and thinly peopled, as it were, inert, almost lifeless appendages to the parent-states. And true it is that the colonies received very little direct attention in the headquarters of politics. In London or Paris no doubt few people troubled themselves’ with the affairs of Virginia and Louisiana ; there no doubt domestic topics absorbed attention, and politics seemed centred in the last parliamentary division or the last court intrigue. But the eye is caught by what is on the surface of things, not by Avhat is at the bottom of them; and the hidden cause which made Ministers rise and fall, which convulsed Europe and led it into war and revolution, was, far more than might be supposed, the standing rivalry of interests in the New World.
But if this is so, it ought to be applicable to the seventeenth century as well as to the eighteenth. In the history of the relation of the New World to the Old the three centuries, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, have each their marked character.
The sixteenth century may be called the Spain-and Portugal period. As yet the New World is monopo- 124 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
lised by the two nations which discovered it, by the country of Vasco da Gama and the adopted country of Columbus, until late in- the century Spain and Portugal become one State in the hands of Philip IL In the seventeenth century the other three States, France, Holland, and England, enter the colonial field. The Dutch take the lead. In the course of their war with Spain they get possession of most of the Portuguese possessions, which have now become Spanish, in the East Indies ; they even succeed for a time in annexing Brazil. France and England soon after establish their colonies in North America. From this time then, or almost from this time, we may expect to trace that transformation in the politics of Europe, which I showed to be the necessary consequence of the new position assumed by these five States. During the course of this century a certain change takes place in the relative colonial importance of the five States. Portugal declines ; so later does Holland. Spain remains in a condition of immobility ; her vast possessions are not lost, but additions are no longer made to them, and they remain secluded, like China itself, from intercourse with the rest of the world. England and France have both decidedly advanced ; Colbert has placed France in the first rank of commercial countries, and she has explored the Mississippi. But the English colonies have decidedly the advantage in population. And thus it is that the eighteenth century witnesses the great duel of France and England for the NewWorld.VI COMMERCE AND WAR 125 I exhibited that great duel early in this course, in order to show you at once by a conspicuous instance that the expansion of England has been neither a tranquil process nor yet belonging purely to the most recent times : that throughout the eighteenth century that expansion was an active principle of disturbance, a cause of wars unparalleled both in magnitude and number. I could not at that stage go further, but now that we have analysed the attraction of the New World upon the Old in general and upon England in particular, now that we have considered the nature and intensity of that attraction, we are in a condition to trace further back and even to its beginning the expansion of England into Greater Britain.
It was in the Elizabethan age, as I showed, that England first assumed its modern character, and this means, as I showed at the same time, that then first it began to find itself in the main current of commerce, and then first to direct its energies to the sea and to the New World. At this point then we mark the beginning of the expansion, the first sjrmptom of the rise of Greater Britain. The great event which announces to the world England’s new character and the new place which she is assuming in the world, is the naval invasion by the Spanish Armada. Here, we may say decidedly, begins the modern history of England. Compare this event with anything that preceded it in English history ; you will see at once how new it is. And if you inquire in what precisely the novelty consists, you Avill arrive at this answer, that the event is throughout oceanic. Of course we 126 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
had always been an island; of course our foreign wars had always begun at least on the sea. But by the sea in earlier times had always been meant the strait, the channel, or at most the narrow seas. Now for the first time it is different. The whole struggle begins, proceeds and ends upon the sea, and it is but the last act of a drama which has been played, not in the English seas at all, but in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico. The invader is the master of the New World, the inheritor of the legacies of Columbus and Vasco da Gama ; his main complaint is that his monopoly of that New World has been infringed; and by whom is the invasion met 1 Not by the Hotspurs of medieval chivalry, nor by the archers who won Cr^cy for us, but by a new race of men, such as medieval England had not known, by the hero - buccaneers, the Drakes and Hawkinses, whose lives had been passed in tossing upon that Ocean which to their fathers had been an unexplored, unprofitable desert. Now for the first time might it be said of England—what the popular song assumes to have been always true of her—that " her march is on the Ocean wave." But there is no Greater Britain as yet ; only the impulse has been felt to found one, and the path has been explored, which leads to the transatlantic seats where the Englishmen of Greater Britain may one day live. While Drake and Hawkins have set the example of the rough heroism and love of roaming which might find the vray into the Promised Land, Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh display the VI COMMERCE AND WAR 127 genius which settles, founds and colonises. In the next reign Greater Britain is founded, though neither Gilbert nor Raleigh are allowed to enter into it. In 1606 James I. signs the Charter of Virginia, and in 1620 that of New England. And now very speedily the new life with which England is animated, her new objects and her new resources, are exhibited so as to attract the attention of all Europe. It is in the war of King and Parliament, and afterwards in the Protectorate, that the new English policy is first ex- hibited on a great scale. Under Cromwell England appears, but prematurely and on the unsound basis of imperialism, such as she definitely became under William III. and continued to be throughout the eighteenth century, and this is England steadily ex- panding into Greater Britain.
It seems to me to be the principal characteristic of this phase of England that she is at once commer cial and warlike. A commonplace is current about the natural connection between commerce and peace, and hence it has been inferred that the wars of modern England are attributable to the influence of a feudal aristocracy. Aristocracies, it is said, naturally love war, being in their own origin military ; whereas the trader just as naturally desires peace, that he may practise his trade without interruption. A good specimen of the a priori method of reasoning in politics ! Why ! how came we to conquer India 1 Was it not a direct consequence of trading with India ? And that is only the most conspicuous illustration of a law which prevails throughout English history in the 128 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, —thelaw, namely, of the intimate interdependence of war and trade, so that throughout that period trade leads naturally to war and war fosters trade. I have pointed out already that the wars of the eighteenth century were incomparably greater and more burdensome than those of the Middle Ages. In a less degree those of the seventeenth century were also great. These are precisely the centuries in which England grew more and more a commercial country. England indeed grew ever more warlike at that time as she grew more commercial. And it is not difficult to show that a cause was at work to make war and commerce increase together. This cause is the old colonial system. Commerce in itself may favour peace, but when commerce is artificially shut out by a decree of Government from some promising territory, then commerce just as naturally favours war. We know this by our own recent experience with China. The New World might have favoured trade without at the same time favouring war, if it had consisted of a number of liberal-minded States open to intercourse with foreigners, or if it had been occupied by Euro- pean colonies which pursued an equally liberal system. But we now know what the old colonial system was. We know that it carved out the NewWorld into territories, which were regarded as estates, to be enjoyed in each case by the colonising nation. The hope of obtaining such splendid estates and enjoying the profits that Avere reaped from them, con stituted the greatest stimulus to commerce that had n COMMERCE AND WAR 129 ever been known, and it was a stimulus which acted without intermission for centuries. This vast historic cause had gradually the effect of bringing to an end the old medieval structure of society and introducing the industrial ages. But inseparable from the com mercial stimulus was the stimulus of international rivalry. The object of each nation was now to increase its trade, not by waiting upon the wants of mankind, but by a wholly different method, namely by getting exclusive possession of some rich tract in the New World. Now whatever may be the natural opposition between the spirit of trade and the spirit of war, trade pursued in this method is almost identical with war, and can hardly fail to lead to war. What is conquest but appropriation of territory? Now appropriation of territory under the old colonial system became the first national object. The five nations of the West were launched into an eager com petition for territory—that is, they were put into a relation to each other in which the pursuit of wealth naturally led to quarrels, a relation in which, as I said, commerce and war were inseparably entangled together, so that commerce led to war and war fostered commerce. The character of the new period which was thus opened showed itself very early. Consider the nature of that long desultory war of England with Spain, of which the expedition of the Armada was the most striking incident. I have said that the English sea-captains were very like buc caneers, and indeed to England the war is throughout an industry, a way to wealth, the most thriving K 130 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
business, the most profitable investment, of the time. That Spanish war is in fact the infancy of English foreign trade. The first generation of Englishmen that invested capital, put it into that war. As nowwe put our money into railways or what notl so then the keen man of business took shares in the new ship which John Oxenham or Francis Drake was fitting out at Plymouth, and which was intended to lie in wait for the treasure galleons, or make raids upon the Spanish towns in the Gulf of Mexico. Andyet the two countries were formally not even at war with each other. It was thus that the system of monopoly in the New World made trade and war indistinguishable from each other. The prosperity of Holland was the next and a still more startling illustration of the same law. What more ruinous, you say, than a long war, especially to a small state 1 And yet Holland made her fortune in the world by a war of some eighty years with Spain. How was this 1 It was because war threw open to her attack the whole boundless possessions of her antagonist in the New World, which would have been closed to her in peace. By conquest she made for herself an Empire, and this Empire made her rich.
These are the new views which begin to determine English policy under the Protectorate. From the point from which we here regard English history, the great occurrence of the seventeenth century before 1688 is not the Civil War or the execution of the King, but the intervention of Cromwell in the Euro- pean war. This act may almost be regarded as the VI COMMEECE AND WAR 131 foundation of the English World-Empire. It was of so much immediate importance that it may be said to have decided the fall of the Spanish Power. Spain, which less than a century before had overshadowed the world, is found soon after lying a helpless prey to the ambition of Louis XIV. Perhaps the turning point is marked by the Eevolution of Portugal, which took place in 1640. Then began the fall of Spain. But for twenty years from that time she struggled with her destiny, and the internal troubles of her rival France caused a reaction in her favour. At this crisis then the interference of Cromwell was decisive. Spain fell never to rise again, and no measure taken by England had for centuries been so momentous.
But it marks the rise as well as the fall of a World Power. England by this time has learned to profit by the example of Holland, and follows her in the path of commercial empire. The first Stuarts, though it was in their time that our first colonies were founded, show, I think, no signs of having entered into the new ideas. They abandon the Elizabethan system, and set their faces towards the Old World rather than the New. But this reaction comes to an end with the accession to power of the party of the Commonwealth. A policy now begins which is not, to be sure, very scrupulous, but is able, resolute, and successful.
It is oceanic and looks westward, like the policy of the later years of Elizabeth. Here for the first time the New World reacts upon the Old by actual 132 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.
personal influence. Dr. Palfrey lias traced in a very interesting manner what I may call the New England clement in our Parliamentary party. New England was itself the child of Puritanism, and of Puritanism in that second form of Independency to which Crom well himself adhered. Accordingly it took a very direct part in the English Revolution. Several pro- minent English politicians of that time may be mentioned who had themselves lived in Massa chusetts, e.g. Sir Henry Vane, George Downing, and Hugh Peters, Cromwell’s chaplain. Now too the great English navy, so famous since, begins to rule the seas under the command of Robert Blake. The navy is now and henceforth the great instrument of England’s power. The army—though it is more highly organised than ever before, and has in fact usurped the government of the country and placed its leader on the throne,—this army falls with a great catas- trophe and is devoted to public execration, but the navy from this time forward is the nation’s favourite. Henceforward it is a maxim that England is not a military state, that she ought to have either no armyor the smallest army possible, but that her navy ought to be the strongest in the world.
From our point of view the colonial policy of Cromwell does not attract us by any marked super iority either in morality or success to that of the Restoration, but rather as the model which Charles n. imitates. Moral rectitude is hardly a character istic of it, and if it is religious, this perhaps wouldhave appeared, had the Protectorate lasted longer, to VI COMMERCE AND WAR 133 have been its most dangerous feature. Nothing is more dangerous than Imperialism marching with an idea on its banner, and Protestantism was to our Emperor Oliver what the ideas of the Eevolution were to Napoleon and his nephew. The success too of this policy is of the same Napoleonic type. Eng land had become for the moment a military State, and necessarily assumed a far grander position in the world than she could support when she disbanded her army and became constitutional again. The Protectorate was fortunate in coming to an end before its true character was understood. By the law of its nature it was drawn towards war. It is an illusion to suppose that the Puritanism of the Protector or of his party was analogous to modern Liberalism, and therefore inspired a repugnance to war. Eead Marvell’s panegyric on him. The virtu- ous poet predicts that Oliver will be ere long “a Csesar to Gaul and a Hannibal to Italy.” Does the prospect shock him ? Not at all ; lest his hero should falter in the course, he exhorts him to " march inde- fatigably on," and bids him remember that " the same acts that did gain a power must it maintain." Nor when we examine the Protector’s foreign policy do we find him unmindful of this principle. He seems to look forward to a religious war, in which England will play the same part in Europe that he himself with his Ironsides has played in England. Some of his modern admirers have perceived this. “In truth,” writes Macaulay, " there was nothing which Cromwell had, for his own sake and that of his family, so much 134 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
reason to desire as a general religious war in Europe. . . . UnlmppiUj for him he had no opportunity of dis- playing his admirable military talents except against the inhabitants of the British isles." We may well, I think, shudder at the thought of the danger which was removed by the fall of the Protectorate.
On the side of the Continent this imperialist policy was developed but imperfectly, but on the side of the New World, where it was borne upon the tide of the time, it went further and had more lasting conse- quences. Here indeed Cromwell’s policy is only that of the Long Parliament before him and of Charles II.
after him. It has indeed a peculiarly absolute and unscrupulous tinge. Of his own pure will, without consulting directly or indirectly the people, and in spite of opposition in his Council, he plunges the country into a war with Spain. This war is com- menced after the manner of the old Elizabethan sea-rovers by a sudden descent without previous quarrel or declaration of war upon St. Domingo. I remember hearing a predecessor of my own. Sir J. Stephen, say in this place that, if any of his hearers had a taste for iconoclasm, he could recommend him to employ it upon the buccaneering Cromwell. Per- haps this may seem too severe, when we remember the lawlessness of all maritime war at that time. What I wish you to remark is the continuity that holds together this Cromwellian policy with the Elizabethan, and equally with the policy which the nation pursued in the eighteenth century, when in 1739 it went to war again to break the SpanishVI COMMERCE AND WAR 135 monopoly. In all these cases alike you see the close connection which the old colonial system established between war and trade.
But the great characteristic of this Commonwealth period, indeed of the whole middle part of the seven- teenth century, is not war with Spain, but war with Holland. If Cromwell’s breach with Spain shows most strikingly by its violent suddenness the spirit of the new commercial policy, yet it is capable of being misinterpreted. For Spain was the great Catholic Power, and therefore it miglit be imagined that our war with her was caused by the other great historic cause which then acted, by the Eeformation, and not by the New World. But what of our war with Holland ? Had the Reformation been the dominating cause in the seventeenth century, we should have seen England and Holland in permanent brotherly alliance. It is the great proof that this cause is fast giving way to the other, viz. the great trade-rivalry produced by the New World, that all through the middle of the seventeenth century England and Holland wage great naval wars of a character such as had never been seen before. These wars are seldom sufficiently considered as a Avhole, and therefore are explained by causes which in fact were only secondary. This is especially the case with the war of 1672, for which Charles II. and the Cabal are responsible. It is cited as a proof of the reckless immorality of that Government, that it combined with the Catholic Government of Louis XIV. to strike a deadly blow at the brother Pro-
136 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect, testant Power, and that it did so for a dynastic interest, for the purpose of overthrowing the oli- garchic or Louvestein faction and raising to power Charles II. ’s nephew, the young Prince of Orange. And no doubt Charles II. had this object. Never theless there was nothing new at that time either in war with Holland or alliance with France. Instead of suddenly reversing the foreign policy of the country, Charles here followed precedents set by the Commonwealth and by Cromwell, for the former had waged fierce war with Holland, and the latter had entered into alliance with France. Accordingly the Government was supported by some of those who inherited the tradition of the Commonwealth. Anthony Ashley Cooper, a man of Cromwellian ideas, supported it by quoting the old words Delenda est Carthago. In other words: “Holland is our great rival in trade, on the Ocean and in the New World. Let us destroy her, though she be a Protestant Power let us destroy her with the help of a Catholic Power.” These were the maxims of the Commonwealth and of the Protector, because, Puritans though they were, and though they had risen up against Popery, they understood that in their age the struggle of the Churches was falling into the background, and that the rivalry of the maritime Powers for trade and empire in the New World was taking its place as the question of the day.
And thus we are able to fill up the large outline of the history of Greater Britain. We saw in the Elizabethan war with Spain the movement, the VI COMMEKCE AND WAR 137 fermentation out of which it sprang. Under the first two Stuarts we see it actually come into exist- ence by the settlement of Virginia, New England and Maryland. At a later time, in the eighteenth century, it is seen to engage, now more mature, in a long duel with Greater France. What occupies the interval 1 This is the foimdation of the English na,vj and the great duel with Holland. It covers the middle of the seventeenth century, it embraces our first great naval wars, and the following acquisitions : —Jamaica conquered under Cromwell from Spain, Bombay received by Charles II. from Portugal, New York acquired also by Charles II. from Holland. This great struggle with Holland is followed by a period of close alliance with Holland, represented in the career of ^Yilliam of Orange. From our point of view this appears as a temporary revival of the Reformation-contest. By the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the world is thrown back into the religious wars of the sixteenth century. The New World passes for a time into the background ; once more the question is of Catholicism or religious freedom. Once more therefore the two Protestant Powers stand shoulder to shoulder against France. William rules both countries and the trade-rivalry is adjourned for a time.
LECTUEE VII