The object I professed to set before myself in these lectures was to present English history to you in such a light that the interest of it instead of gradually diminishing should go on increasing to the close.
You will perceive by this time in what way I hope to do this. It is impossible that the history of any State can be interesting, unless it exhibits some sort of development. Political life that is uniform has no history, however prosperous it may be. Now it appears to me that English historians fail in the later periods of England, because they have traced one great development to its completion, and do not perceive that, if they would advance further, they must look out for some other development. More or less consciously, they have always before their minds the idea of constitutional liberty. This idea suffices until they reach the licvolution of 1688, perhaps even until they reach the accession of the LECT. VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 139 House of Brunswick. But after this it fails them. Not that development ceases in the English Con stitution at that point, nor even that to the political student it becomes less interesting. But it begins to be gradual and quiet ; the tension is relaxed ; dram atic incident henceforth must be looked for elsewhere. Our historians are not sufficiently alive to this. It may be true that George III.’s use of royal influence attained in an insidious way objects similar to those which the Stuarts tried to reach by prerogative or by military force. But when Wilkes and Home Tooke, Chatham and Fox are brought forward to play the parts of Prynne and Milton, Pym and Shaftesbury, the interest of the reader grows languid. He seems to have before him the feeble second part of some striking story. Those parliamentary strug gles which in the seventeenth century were so intense, seem, when repeated in the eighteenth, to have something conventional about them.
The mistake, according to me, lies in selecting these struggles to fill the foreground of the scene. It is a misrepresentation to describe England in George III.’s reign as mainly occupied in resisting the encroachments of a somewhat narrow-minded king. “We exaggerate the importance of these petty struggles. England was then engaged in other and vaster enterprises. She was not wholly occupied in doing over again what she had done before ; she was also doing new and great things. And these new things had vast consequences, which have changed and are at this day changing the face of the world.
140 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND ^ lbot.
It is the historian’s business then to open a new scene, and to bring into the foreground new actors. I have now brought out in strong relief this new development in English history. I have shown that in the same seventeenth century, when England at home was victoriously reconciling her old Teutonic liberties to modern political conditions, and finding a place in England for the professional soldier and for the religious dissenter, she was also at work abroad.
She, along with the other four western States of Europe, was founding an empire in the New World. I have shown also that, though she began this work later than some other States, and did not for a long time make strikingly rapid progress in it, yet in the end she left all her rivals behind, so that she alone now remains in possession of a great New World empire. Now it was in the eighteenth century, just when the struggle for liberty was over, that she began thus to take the lead in the New World, and it is now, in the nineteenth century, that she finds herself called upon to consider what new shape she shall give to the Empire she possesses. It plainly follows that here is the new development we are in search of—the development which ought to make the principal study of historians from the time when they find constitutional liberty a completed develop ment, and therefore an exhausted topic. For here is a development which ever since the seventeenth century has been steadily growing in magnitude; here is a development which binds together the future with the past.
VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 141 If then we give it the principal place, we escape the perplexity into which most historians fall, who strangely find the history grow less and less interest- ing as England grows greater and greater. But at the same time we shall find much rearrangement necessary. For we shall have adopted a new standard of importance for events, and a new principle of grouping. Colonial affairs and Indian affairs are usually pushed a little on one side by historians. They are relegated to supplementary chapters. It spems to be assumed that affairs which are remote from England cannot deserve a leading place in a history of England, as if the England of which histories are written were the island so-called, and not the political union named after the island, which is quite capable of expanding so as to cover half the globe. To us England will be wherever English people are found, and we shall look for its history in whatever places witness the occurrences most important to Englishmen. And therefore, as in the periods when the liberties of England were in danger we seek it principally at Westminster in the Parliamentary debates, so in these periods, of which the characteristic is that England is expanding into Greater Britain, English history will be wherever this expansion is taking place, even when the scene is as remote as Canada or as India. We shall avoid the error commonly committed in these later periods of confounding the history of England with the history of Parliament. The rearrangement which such a change will involve may affect especially the 142 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. But in the seventeenth century also, though wo may not wish to displace the accepted arrangement, which has refer- ence to the struggle for liberty with the Stuart Kings, yet we must keep in our minds at the same time another arrangement, founded on the principle of marking the stages in the advance of Greater Britain.
The accepted arrangement is according to reigns and dynasties, and in each reign it ranks as the principal occurrences the dealings of the sovereign with Parliament. On this system the leading demarcations are the accession of the House of Brunswick, and beyond that the accession of the House of Stuart, and in the middle the Great Interregnum and the Revolution of 1688. We make far too much of these demarcations even when they are unobjectionable. We imagine a much greater difference than really existed between the age of George I. and that of Queen Anne, between that of William IH. and that of Charles II., between the Restoration and the Commonwealth, between the age of James I. and the Elizabethan age. The Revolu tion was not nearly so revolutionary, nor the Re storation so reactionary, as is commonly supposed. But if once we begin to think of England as a living organism, which in the Elizabethan age began a process of expansion, never intermitted since, into Greater Britain, we shall find these divisions alto- gether useless, and shall feel the want of a completely new set of divisions to mark the successive stages of the expansion.
vn PHASES OF EXPANSION 143 I have already pointed out some of the principal of these divisions. But it will be well to present a connected view of English history as it appears when arranged on this principle.
The history of the expansion of England must neces sarily begin with the two ever-memorable voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the reign of Henry VII. From that moment the position of England among countries was entirely changed, though almost a century elapsed before the change became visible to all the world. In our rearrangement this tract of time forms one period, the characteristic of which is that England is gradually finding out her vocation to the sea. We pass by the domestic disturbances, political, religious and social, of that crowded age. We see nothing of the Reformation and its conse- quences. What we see is simply that England is slowly and gradually taking courage to claim her share with the Spanish and Portuguese in the new world that has been thrown open. There are a few voyages to Newfoundland and Labrador, then there is a series of bold adventures, which, however, proved not to have been happily planned. Our explorers, naturally but unfortunately, turned their attention to the Polar regions, and so discovered notliing but frozen Oceans, while their rivals were making a triumphal progress " on from island unto island at the gateways of the day.” Next comes the scries of buccaneering raids upon the Spanish settlements, in the course of which the English earned at least a character for seamanship and audacity.
144 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
The Spanish Armada marks the moment when this period of preparation or apprenticeship closes. The internal modification in the nation is now com plete. It has turned itself round, and looks now no longer towards the Continent but towards the Ocean and the New World. It has become both maritime and industrial.
On the other system of arrangement the accession of the House of Stuart is thought to mark a decline. The Tudor sovereignty, popular and exercised with resolution and insight, makes way for a monarchy of divine right, pedantic and unintelligent. Nevertheless in our view there is no decline ; there is continuous development. The personal unlikeness of James and Charles to Elizabeth is a matter of indifference. The foundation of Greater Britain now takes place. John Smith, the Pilgrim Fathers, and Calvert establish the colonies of Virginia, New England, and Maryland, of which the last marks its date by its name, taken from Queen Henrietta Maria.
Greater -Britain henceforth exists, for henceforth Englishmen are living on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It received at once a peculiar stamp from the circumstances of the time. Greater Spain had been an artificial fabric, to which much thought and skilful contrivance had been applied by the HomeGovernment. Authority, both civil and ecclesiastical, was more rigorous there than at home. This was because the Spanish settlements, as producing a steady revenue, were all-important to the mother country. The English settlements, not being thusvn PHASES OF EXPANSION 145 important, were neglected. This neglect had a momentous result owing to the discord just then springing up in England. Colonies, if not sources of wealth, might at least be useful as places of refuge for unauthorised opinions. Half a century before the voyage of the Mayflower Coligny ^ had given this turn to colonisation. He had conceived that idea of toleration along with local separation of rival religions, which was afterwards realised within France itself by the Edict of Nantes. How different, be it said in passing, would the world now be, if a Huguenot France had sprung up beyond the Atlantic ! The idea of Coligny was now realised by England." As her settlements were made at a critical moment of dissension, an impulse to emigration was supplied which would not otherwise have existed, but at the same time there was introduced a subtle principle of opposition between the New World and the Old. The emigrants departed with a secret determination, which was to bear fruit later, not of carrying England with them, but of creating something which should not be England.
The second phase of Greater Britain was brought on by the military revolution of 1648. After the triumph of the Commonwealth at home, it had to ^ See au excellent account of his schemes in Mr. Besant’a Coligny.
^ In the charter of Rhode Island, 1663, it is expressed distinctly. Religious liberty is granted " for that the same by reason of the remote distances of those places will, as \Vu hope, be no breach of the unity and uniformity established in this nation." Charles 11, in his religious policy seems always to keep his maternal grand father in view.
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wage a new war with royalism by sea. From our point of view this second contest is more important than the first; for the army created by Cromwell was destined soon to dissolve again, but the maritime power organised by Vane and wielded by Blake is the English navy of all later time. Our maritime ascend- ency has its beginning here. " At this moment," says Kanke, " England awoke more clearly than ever before to a consciousness of the advantage of her geographical position, of the fact that a maritime vocation was that to which she was called by nature herself." Cromwell’s attack upon the Spanish Empire and seizure of Jamaica, the most high-handed measure recorded in the modern history of England, is the natural effect of this new consciousness awakening at a moment when England found herself a military State. The next phase is the duel with Holland. This belongs most peculiarly to the first half of the reign of Charles II., when it fills the foreground of the historic stage ; but it had begun long before at the massacre of Amboyna in 1623, and had grown in prominence under the Commonwealth. It may be said to end in the year 1674, when Charles II. with drew from the attack on Holland, which he had made in combination with Louis XIV. That was a great moment of glory for Holland, when in such extreme danger she found a new champion in the family which had saved her Ijefore, when a new Stadtholder, a second William the Silent, stood in the breach to withstand the new invasion. Nevertheless it was the beginning of the decline of Holland. For in this VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 147 second great struggle of the Dutch Republic, though she showed the old heroism, she could not have all the old good fortune. She could not again positively prosper and grow rich by means of war, as she had done before. This time she was at war not with Spain, the possessor of infinite colonies, which she could plunder at leisure, but only with France ; her fleet did not now sweep the seas un- opposed, but was confronted with the powerful navy of England ; and the very source of her wealth, her mercantile marine, was struck at by the English Navigation Act. Accordingly, though she saved her self, and afterwards had another age of great deeds, the decay of Holland begins now to set in ; it becomes visible to all the world at the death of her great Stadtholder, the last of the old line, our William III. England, richer by nature, and not tried by invasion, begins now to draw ahead, and the 6aKaa<T0Kparia of Holland terminates.
The reign of Charles H. stands out in the history of Greater Britain as a period of remarkable progress.^ It was then especially that the American Colonies took the character which they had when they attracted so much attention in the next century, of an uninterrupted series of settlements extending from South to North along the Atlantic coast. For it was in this reign that the Carolinas and Pennsyl vania were founded and that the Dutch were expelled ’ “The spirit of enterprise,” writes Mr. Saintsbury, “and the desire for colonisation appear to have licen almost as strong at that period as in the days of Elizabeth and James.” 148 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect from New York and Delaware. Considered as a whole and judged by the standard of the time, this American settlement begins now to be most imposing. Its distinction is that it has a population which is at once large and almost purely European. Through out the Spanish settlements the Europeans Avere blended and lost in an ocean of Indian and half-Indian population. The Dutch colonies naturally wanted population, because the Dutch mother -country was so small ; they were generally little moi’e than commercial stations. The French colonies, which now begin to attract attention, were also weak in this respect. Already in the daAvn of French colonial greatness might be perceived a deficiency in genuine colonising power, and perhaps also that slowness of multiplication which has characterised the French since. The row of English colonies on the Atlantic was perhaps already the most solid achievement in the way of colonisation that any European state could boast, though it would seem insignificant enough if judged by a modern standard. The whole population at the end of Charles II. ’s reign was about two hundred thousand, but it was a population which doubled itself every quarter of a century.
What now is the next phase of Greater Britain 1 It enters now, in conjunction with Holland, upon a period of resistance to the aggressions of Greater France created by Colbert. From our point of view the administration of Colbert means the deliberate entrance of France into the competition of the Western States for the New World. France had VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 149 not been much, if at all, behind England in her early explorations. Jacqties Cartier had made himself a name earlier than Frobisher and Drake ; Coligny had had schemes of colonisation earlier than Kaleigh. Acadie and Canada were settled and the town of Quebec founded under the guidance of Samuel Champlain about the time of the voyage of the Mayflower. But, as usual, her European entangle- ments checked the progress of France in the New World. The Thirty Years’ War had given her an opportunity of laying the foundation of a European Ascendency. All through the middle of that century she was engaged in almost uninterrupted European war. Of the great Spanish estate which is in liquid- ation she leaves the colonial part to Holland and England, because she naturally covets for herself that which lies close to her frontier, the Burgundian part. In the days of Cromwell therefore she has fallen somewhat behind in the colonial race. Mazarin seems to have little comprehension of the oceanic policy of the age. But as soon as he is gone, and the war is over, and a tranquil period has set in, Colbert rises to guide her into this new path. He appropriates all the great commercial inventions of the Dutch Republic, particularly the Chartered Com pany. He labours, and for a time with success, to give to France, the State pre-eminently of feudalism, aristocracy and chivalry, an industrial and modern character, such as the attraction of the New World was impressing upon the maritime states. He figures in Adam Smith as the representative statesman of 150 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect the mercantile system, and indeed, as the minister of Louis XIV., he seemed to embody that perversion of the commercial spirit which filled Europe with war, so that, as Adam Smith himself says, “commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity.” We have remarked that the seventeenth century is controlled by two great forces, of which one, the Reformation, is decreasing, while the other, which is the attraction of the New World, increases, and that the student must continually beware of attributing to one of these forces results produced by the other. Thus under Cromwell, as under Elizabeth before him, the commercial influence works disguised under the religious. When now, later in the century, the duel between the two Sea -Powers is succeeded by their alliance against France, we have once more to unravel the same tangle of causation. This alliance endured through two great wars and through two English reigns, and it seems, when we trace the growth of it from 1674 to the Revolution of 1688, to be an alliance of the two Protestant Powers against a new Catholic aggression. For in those years there set in one of the strangest and most disastrous reactions that history has to record. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes revived the politics of the sixteenth century. Coinciding nearly in time with the acces- sion of the Catholic James II. in England, it created a world-wide religious panic. History seemed to be VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 151 rolled back just a century, the age of the League, of Philip II. and William the Silent, seemed to have returned, at a time when it was thought that the balance of the Confessions had been established firmly thirty years before in the Treaty of Westphalia, and when the age had during those thirty years been drifting in the other direction of colonial expansion. The ideas of Colbert seem suddenly to be forgotten, the wealth he has amassed is wasted, the navy he has founded is exposed to destruction at La Hogue.
It is against this Catholic Eevival that England and Holland first form their alliance.
But it was only for a moment, and less really than apparently, that the New World was thus pushed into the background. If we trace history upward instead of downward, if we look from the Treaty of Utrecht back upon the alliance of the Sea Powers which triumphed there, we see an alliance of quite a different kind. There has been no breach of continuity; Marlborough has the same position as William, and the alliance is stiU directed against the same Louis XIV. But the religious warmth has faded out of the war, which now betrays by the settlement made at Utrecht its intensely commercial character. That war h^s such a splendour in our annals, and the title we give it, " War of the Spanish Succession," has such a monarchical ring, tliat we think it a good sample of the fantastic, barbaric, wasteful wars of the olden time. It is of this war that " little Peterkin " desires to know " what good came of it at last." In reality it is the most business- 152 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
like of all our wars, and it was waged in the interest of English and Dutch merchants whose trade and livelihood were at stake. All those colonial questions, which had been setting Europe at discord ever since the New World was laid open, were brought to a head at once by the prospect of a union between France and the Spanish Empire, for such a union would close almost the whole New World to the English and Dutch, and throw it open to the countrymen of Colbert, who were at that moment exploring and settling the Mississippi. Behind all the courtly foppery of the Grand Si^cle commercial considerations now rule the world as they had never ruled it before, and as they continued to rule it through much of the prosaic century that was then opening.
In the midst of this war a memorable event befell, which belongs to this development in the fullest sense, the legislative union of England and Scotland. Eead the history of it in Burton ; you will see that it marks the beginning of modern Scottish history, just as the Armada that of modern English history. It is the entrance of Scotland into the competition for the New World. No nation has since, in propor tion to its numbers, reaped so much profit from the New World as the Scotch, but before the Union they had no position there. They were excluded from the English trade, and the poverty of the country did not allow them successfully to compete with the other nations on their own account. In William III.’s reign they made a great national VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 153 effort on the plan then usual. They tried to appro priate to themselves a territory in the New World. They set up the Darien Company, which was to carve a piece for the benefit of Scotland out of the huge territory claimed by Spain as its own. This enterprise failed, and it was out of the excitement and disappointment caused by the failure that the negotiations arose which ended in the Union. England gained by the Union security in time of war against a domestic foe ; Scotland gained admission into the New World.
In the history of the expansion of England one of the greatest epochs is marked by the Treaty of Utrecht. In our survey this date stands out almost as prominently as the date of the Spanish Armada, for it marks the beginning of England’s supremacy At the time of the Armada we saw England enter- ing the race for the first time ; at Utrecht England wins the race. Then she had the audacity to defy a power far greater than her own, and her success brought her forward and gave her a place among great states. She had advanced steadily since, but in the first half of the seventeenth century Holland had attracted more attention and admiration, and in the second half France. From about 1660 to 1700 France had been the first state in the world beyond all dispute. But the Treaty of Utrcclit left England the first state in the world, and she continued for some years to be first without a rival. Her reputa tion in other countries, the respect felt for her claims in literature, philosophy, scholarship and science, date 154 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.
from this period. If ever, it was after this time that she held the same kind of intellectual primacy which France had held before. Much of this splendour was transient, but England has remained ever since that date on a higher level than ever before. It has been universally allowed ever since that no state is more powerful than England. But especially it has been admitted that in wealth and commerce and in maritime power, no state is equal to her. This was partly because her rivals had fallen off in power, partly because she herself had advanced.
The decline of Holland had by this time become perceptible. So long as William lived, she enjoyed the benefit of his renown. But in Marlborough’s time, and from that time forward, languor and the desire of repose grow upon her. Her powers have been overstrained in war with France and in competi tion with England. Never again does she display her old energy. Thus the old rival has fallen behind. The new rival, France, is for the moment over- whelmed by the disasters of the war, and she, whose affairs thirty years before had been set in order by the greatest financier of the age, is now burdened with a bankruptcy she will carry with her to the Revolution. Her bold snatch at the trade of the New World has not succeeded. She has in a sense won Spain, but not that which made Spain valuable, viz. a share in the American monopoly. Some part of the loss was indeed soon to be repaired. France was soon to show much colonial enterprise and intelligence. Dupleix in India, La Galissoni^re invu PHASES OF EXPANSION 155 Canada, the Bailli Suffren on the sea, were to carry the name of France high in the New World and maintain for a long time an equal competition with England. But at the moment of the Peace of Utrecht so much could hardly have been foreseen. Fresh from her victories, England seemed at that moment even greater than she was.
The positive gains of England were Acadie, or Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland (surrendered by France) and the Asiento Compact granted by Spain. In other words, the first step was taken towards the destruction of Greater France by depriving her of one of her three settlements, Acadie, Canada, and Louisiana, in North America, And the first great breach was made in that intolerable Spanish mono poly, which then closed the greater part of Central and Southern America to the trade of the world. England was allowed to furnish Spanish America with slaves, and along with slaves she soon managed to smuggle in other commodities.
I must pause here for a moment to make a general observation. You will remark that in this survey of the growth of Greater Britain I do not make the smallest attempt, either to glorify the conquests made, or to justify the means adopted by our countrymen, any more than, when I point out that England outstripped her four rivals in the competi tion, I have the smallest thought of claiming for England any superior virtue or valour. I have not called upon you to admire or approve Drake or Hawkins, or the Commonwealth or Cromwell, or the 156 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
Government of Charles II. Indeed it is not easy to approve the conduct of those who built up Greater Britain, though there is plenty to admire in their achievements, and much less certainly to blame or to shudder at than in the deeds of the Spanish adven turers. But I am not writing the biography of these men ; it is not as a biographer nor as a poet nor as a moralist that I deal with their actions. I am con- cerned always with a single problem only, that of causation. My question always is, How came this enterprise to be undertaken, how came it to svucceed 1 I ask it not in order that we may imitate the actions we read of, but in order that we may discover the laws by which states rise, expand and prosper or fall in this world. In this instance I have also the further object, viz. to throw light on the question whether Greater Britain, now that it exists, may be expected to prosper and endure or to fall. Perhaps you may ask whether we can expect or wish it to prosper, if crime has gone to the making of it. But the God who is revealed in history does not usually judge in this way. History does not show that conquests made lawlessly in one generation are certain or even likely to be lost again in another : and, as government is never to be confounded with property, it does not appear that states have always even a right, much less that they are bound, to restore gains that may be more or less ill-gotten. The Norman conquest was lawless enough, yet it prospered and prospered permanently ; we ourselves own this land of England by inheritance from Saxon vn PHASES OF EXPANSION 157 pirates. The title of a nation to its territory is generally to be sought in primitive times, and would be found, if we could recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre ; the territory of Greater Britain was acquired in the full light of history and in part by unjustifiable means, but less unrighteously than the territory of many other Powers, and perhaps far less unrighteously than that of those states whose power is now most ancient and established. If we compare it with other Empires in respect of its origin, we shall see that it has arisen in the same way ; that its founders have had the same motives, and these not mainly noble ; that they have displayed much fierce covetousness, mixed with heroism ; that they have not been much troubled by moral scruples, at least in their dealings with enemies and rivals, though they have often displayed virtuous self-denial iu their dealings among themselves. So far we shall find Greater Britain to be like other Empires, and like other states of whose origin we have any knowledge ; but its annals are on the whole better, not worse, than those of most. They are conspicuously better than those of Greater Spain, which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity. In some pages of these annals there is a real elevation of thought and an intention at least of righteous deal ing, which are not often met with in the history of colonisation. Some of these founders remind us of Abraham and Aeneas. The crimes on the other hand are such as have been almost universal in colonisation.
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I make these remarks in this place because I have now before me the greatest of these crimes. England had taken some share in the slave-trade as early as Elizabeth’s age, when John Hawkins distinguished himself as the first Englishman who stained his hands with its atrocity. You will find in Hakluyt his own narrative, how he came in 1567 upon an African town, of which the huts were covered with dry palm leaves, how he set fire to it, and out of " 8000 inhabitants succeeded in seizing 250 persons, men, women and children." But we are not to suppose that from that time until the abolition of the slave- trade England took a great or leading share in it. England had then, and for nearly half a century afterwards, no colonies in which there could be a demand for slaves, and when she acquired colonies they were not mining colonies like the first colonies of Spain, in which the demand for slaves had been urgent. Like our colonial empire itself, our parti cipation in the slave-trade was the gradual growth of the seventeenth century. By the Treaty of Utrecht it was, as it were, established, and became " a central object of English policy."^ From this date I am afraid we took the leading share, and stained our selves beyond other nations in the monstrous and enormous atrocities of the slave-trade.
This simply means that we were not better in our principles in this respect than other nations, and that. having now at last risen to the highest place among
- Tlie plirase is borrowed from Mr. Lecky. See History of England in the Jiighteenth Century, ii. p. 13.
VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 159 the trading-nations of the world, and having extorted the Asiento from Spain by our military successes, we accidentally obtained the largest share in this wicked commerce. It is fair that we should bear this in mind while we read the horror-striking stories which the party of Abolition afterwards published. Our guilt in this matter was shared by all the colonising nations ; Ave were not the inventors of the crime, and, if within a certain period we were more guilty than other nations, it is some palliation that we published our own guilt, repented of it, and did at last renounce it. But taken together, the whole successful develop ment which culminated at Utrecht secularised and materialised the English people as nothing had ever done before. Never were sordid motives so supreme, never was religion and every high influence so much discredited, as in the thirty years that followed. There has been a disposition to antedate this corrup tion, and to attribute it to the wrong cause. It was not so much after the Restoration, as after the Revolution, and especially after the reign of Queen Anne, that cynicism and corruption set in. In his well-known essay on “the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration " Macaulay attributes to the Restoration the cynicism of four writers, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, of which writers three did not write a play till several years after the Revolu tion ! We have arrived then at the stage when England, in the course of her expansion, stands out for the first time as the supreme maritime and commercial 160 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.
Power in the World. It is evidently her connection with the New World that has given her this char acter ; nevertheless she did not yet appear at least to ordinary eyes as absolutely the first colonial Power. In extent her territories were still insignifi- cant by the side of those of Spain, and much inferior to those of Portugal. They were but a fringe on the Atlantic coast of North America, a few Western Islands and a few commercial stations in India. What was this compared with the mighty vice- royalties of Spain in Southern and Central America 1 And, as I have said before, France as a colonial Power might seem in some respects superior to England ; her colonial policy might seem more able and likely in the end to be more successful.
The next stage in the history of Greater Britain is one which I have already surveyed. Holland being now in decline, the rivalry of England is hence forth with Spain and France, Powers henceforth united by a Family Compact. But the pressure of it falls mainly on France, since it is France, not Spain, that is neighbour to England both in America and in India. That duel of France and England begins, which I have already described. The decisive event of it is the Seven Years’ War and the new position given to England by the Treaty of Paris in 1762. Here is the culminating point of English power in the eighteenth century; nay, relatively to other states England has never since been so great. For a moment it seems that the whole of North America is destined to be hers, and to make for ever a part of VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 161 Greater Britain. Such an Empire would not have been greater in mere extent than that which Spain abeady possessed; but in essential greatness and power how infinitely superior ! The Spanish Empire had the fundamental defect of not being European in blood. Not only did the part of the population which was European belong to a race which even in Europe appeared to be in decline, but there was another large part which had a mixture of barbarism in its blood, and another larger still whose blood was purely barbaric. The English Empire was through out of civilised blood, except so far as it had a slave- population. But the example of antiquity shows that a separate slave-caste, discharging all drudgery and unskilled labour, is consistent with a very high form of civilisation. Much more serious is the de- terioration of the national type by barbaric inter- mixture.
In this culminating phase England becomes an object of jealousy and dread to all Europe, as Spain and afterwards France had been in the seventeenth century. It was about the time when she won her first victories in the colonial duel with France, that an outcry began to be raised against her as the tyrant of the seas. In 1745, just after the capture of Louisburg, the French Ambassador at St. Peters- burg handed in a note, in which he complained of the maritime despotism of the English, and their purpose of destroying the trade and navigation of all other nations ; he asserted the necessity of a com bination to maintain the maritime balance. England’s M 162 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
former ally joins in the complaint, for there appeared about the same time a pamphlet entitled “ia voix d’un citoyen h Amsterdam” in which the cry Delenda est Carthago, formerly raised by Shaftesbury against Holland, is now echoed back by a certain Maubert against England. " Mettons nous,” he exclaims, " avec la France au niveau de la Grande Bretagne, en- richissons-nous de ses propres fantes et du d^lire ambitieux de ses Ministres." And then he suggests a Coalition for the purpose of procuring the repeal of the Navigation Act. From this time till 1815 jealousy of England is one of the great motive forces of European politics. It led to the intervention of France in America, and to the Armed Neutrality; later it became a kind of passion in the mind of the First Napoleon, and lured him gradually on, partly against his will, to make the conquest of Europe.
So far we have traced a course of uninterrupted continuous expansion. Slowly but surely England has grown greater and greater. But now occurs an event wholly new in kind, a sudden shock, proving that in the New World there might be other hostile Powers beside the rival States of Europe. The secession of the American colonies is one of those events, the immense significance of which could not even at the moment be overlooked. It was felt at the time to be pregnant with infinite consequences, and so it has proved, though the consequences have not been precisely of the kind that was expected. It was the first stirring of free-will on the part of the New World Avhich had remained, since Columbus VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 163 discovered it, and since the Spanish Adventurers ruthlessly destroyed whatever germs of civilisation it possessed, in a kind of nonage. But now it asserts itself ; it accomplishes a revolution in the European style, appealing to all the principles of European civilisation. This was in itself a stupendous event, perhaps in itself greater than that French EeA’-olution, which followed so soon and absorbed so completely the attention of mankind. But it might have seemed at the moment to be the fall of Greater Britain. For the thirteen colonies which then seceded were almost all the then colonial Empire of Britain. And their secession seemed at the moment a proof demonstra tive that any Greater Britain of the kind must always be unnatural and short-lived. Nevertheless a century has passed and there is still a Greater Britain, and on more than the old scale of magnitude. This event will be the subject of the next lecture.
LECTUEE VIII