ENGLISH CHANNEL
617
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
champion of Protestantism; and the strength of the nation was built up till it could drive from the coasts of England the Spanish Armada.
On the death of the queen the crown passed to the Scottish king. James I came to the throne more by right of inheritance than by choice of Parliament. His title was declared to be by divine right, as it was then called, but he was used to Scotch, not to English, ideas of the rights of the crown. The rights of Parliament had been decided when the house of Lancaster was on the throne, but now had to be fought for all over with the house of Stuart. The struggle came to a head under Charles I, from whom was forced the great Petition of Right. Then followed^the Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles. But Parliament now found itself mastered by the overwhelming ability of Oliver Cromwell, who had been brought to the front as a successful general in the war. He succeeded in raising England to a high place among nations, but on his death and the prospect of a succession of military tyrannies Charles II was asked to be king. At once the struggle between king and Parliament began again; and, though Charles died seemingly triumphant, the want of judgment, little short of blindness, of his brother, James II, in a few years brought things to a head. Invited by the leaders of the Whig party, William of Orange had but to lead to put an end to the Stuart dynasty and drive James from the country. William was the first parliamentary king; for before power was put in his hands a binding charter set forth the liberties of the country. When the last attempt of the Stuarts to regain the throne was thwarted in 1715, Parliament settled the Hanoverian house upon the throne, and since that time through the reigns of the four Georges, William IV and Victoria, England has had what is called a constitutional government. It was in the reign of Anne that party-government began. Marlborough did not have complete success in his wars till he found himself supported in 1708 by a ministry all of one party. From that time the ministry, really a committee of the majority of the house of commons and known as the cabinet, has formed a part of the machinery of government. Under Elizabeth England had become a world-power, but not till the Revolution of 1688 did it become a power of the first rank in Europe. Then, under William and Marl-borough, England forced its way to the head of the European nations in the wars against Louis XIV. Under the great Chatham her navy was supreme upon the ocean, and under his greater son, Pitt, English money, English troops and English successes in Spain were the great causes of Napoleon's downfall. In the igth century
the wars the nation fought were avowedly in the interests of her colonies, while she kept more aloof from the politics of the continent. The most marked thing in the history of the igth century was the rise into greater prominence of the trading, manufacturing and laboring classes, who were given representation in Parliament by the great reform-bill of 1832. Since that time England has been slowly but surely growing into a real democracy. With the decease (May 6, 1910) of King Edward VII, George V succeeded to the throne, and rules over colonies and dependencies of the crown whose area (including that of the United Kingdom) is estimated at 11,894,-opo square miles, with a total population (including that of the United Kingdom— 45»30o,ooo) estimated at 400 millions. The annual value of the imports and exports of the United Kingdom now exceeds 1,257 millions of pounds sterling; while its reputed wealth is cloae upon 12,000 million pounds sterling. The percentage of national debt of the kingdom to its wealth is 5 per cent, only. Its navy, consisting of battleships, cruisers and torpedo-vessels, comprises a total of about 597 vessels, manned by 134, ooo officers and men. The value of the exports of merchandise of home-production from England, in the year 1911, was 454 million pounds sterling; her exports, in the same year, of colonial and foreign produce were 102 million pounds in addition. England's exports have, of recent years, shown no vast increase, owing to the increased competition of this country and of Germany, especially in the production of iron and steel, in which the United States is beating her in the world-market. Britain is also exhausting her available coal resources at a rapid rate, though recent official estimates assert that these will last many centuries.
England is divided into 45 counties. Nine cover over 1,000,000 acres each, the largest being York. Seven have a population of over 1,000,000, the largest being London. Her national funded and unfunded debt in 1916 amounted to about 713 million pounds sterling, the annual charge on the budget for which was 28 million pounds. In the new (1910) parliament Great Britain returned 670 members. Population of England and Wales 36,075,269, and that of the United Kingdom is 45,216,741. See the histories by Green, Freeman, Froude, Stubbs, Lingard, Hume and Macaulay and the Epochs of Modern History series.
English Channel. See CHANNEL, ENGLISH.
English Language, The, now spoken by 130 millions of people as their native tongue, especially in the British Isles North America, South Africa and Australasia, was in the fifth century A. D. th&
