of continental critics have reminded us, which is nothing less than the dream of universal monarchy realized on one element. Were that Empire not already in being it would be impossible, under present conditions of international policy, for any conceivable Power to create it.
We acquired what we have when the whole energies of one insular people alone were free to concentrate upon the 'sea-affair' and to overbear the partial and irregular energies directed towards the same object by a single rival—France. France was distracted and exhausted on land by her secular conflict with the German races; and when accounted for at sea, all political danger and commercial opposition in the colonial world was at an end. The Continent was convulsed by religious, dynastic, revolutionary, and national conflicts in every alternate generation from the Thirty Years' War to Sedan, and incapable of full commercial development before the introduction of steam and the invention of railways. In Europe at that time all real maritime rivalry was extinguished, and no strong economic competition could arise. And beyond Europe existed neither one nor other. America was unploughed and Asia dormant. We settled at will, annexed to our liking, and were everywhere unassailable. These conditions alone enabled an island people pre-eminent in vigour but not in numbers to engross so large a portion of the territory and trade of the world. But England in turn did more than all other countries together to change the conditions under which her dominion and commerce were impregnable. Whether that fact will rank among the moral triumphs or the supreme ironies of history the future will record. We invented machine-industry and steam-communication; the Stockton and Darlington Railway was the 'short model' of the trans-Siberian; before the War of Independence, and indirectly even afterwards, our sea-power sheltered, as our later economic policy nourished, the growth of the United States; British capital went far to provide
