extend our borders, and take new races under our sway. The discussion of a colonial system ceases to be an abstract debate, and becomes a question of practical emergency, when a colonial convention presses the diplomacy of the mother-country and prompts its foreign policy. Mr. Seeley's book has thus come upon a tide of popular interest. It has helped, and will still further help, to swell a sentiment that was already slowly rising to full flood. History, it would seem, can speak with two voices—even to disciples equally honest, industrious, and competent. Twenty years ago there was a Regius Professor of History at Oxford who took the same view of his study as is expressed in the words at the head of this article. He applied his mind especially to the colonial question, and came to a conclusion directly opposed to that which commends itself to the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge.[1] Since then a certain reaction has set in, which events will probably show to be superficial, but of which while it lasts Mr. Seeley's speculations will have the benefit. In 1867, when the guarantee of the Canadian railway was proposed in Parliament, Mr. Cave, the member for Barnstaple, remarked that instead of giving three millions sterling with a view of separating Canada from the United States, it would be more sensible and more patriotic to give ten millions in order to unite them. Nobody protested against this remark. If it were repeated to-day there would be a shout of disapprobation. On the other hand we shall not have another proposal to guarantee a colonial railway. This temporary fluctuation in opinion is not the first instance of men cherishing the shadow after they have rid themselves of the substance, and clinging with remarkable ardour to a sentiment after they have made quite sure that it shall not inconvenience them in practice.

Writing as a historian, Mr. Seeley exhorts us to look at the eighteenth century in a new light and from a new standpoint, which he exhibits with singular skill and power. We could only wish that he had been a little less zealous on behalf of its novelty. His accents are almost querulous as he complains of historical predecessors for their blindness to what in plain truth we have always supposed that they discerned quite as clearly as he discerns it himself. 'Our historians,' he says, 'miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. They make too much of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty. They do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.' 'I shall venture to assert,' he proceeds in another place, 'that the main struggle of England from the time of Louis XIV. to the time of Napoleon was for the possession of the New World; and it is for want of perceiving this that most of us find that century of English history uninteresting.' The same teasing refrain runs through the book. We might be disposed to traverse Mr. Seeley's assumption that most of us do find the eighteenth century of English history uninteresting. 'In a great part of it,' Mr. Seeley assures us, 'we see nothing but stagnation. The wars seem to lead to nothing, and we do not perceive the working of any new political ideas. That time seems to have created little, so that we can only think of it as prosperous, but not as memorable. Those dim figures, George I. and George II., the long tame administrations of Walpole and Pelham, the commercial war with Spain, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, the foolish prime minister Newcastle, the dull brawls of the Wilkes period, the miserable American war—everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of greatness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men and in affairs.' This would be very sad if it were true, but is it true? A plain man rubs his eyes in amazement at such reproaches. So far from most of us finding the eighteenth century uninteresting, as prosperous rather than memorable, as wanting in greatness, as distressing by the commonness and the flatness of its men and its affairs, we undertake to say that most of us, in the sense of most people who read the English language, know more about, and feel less flatness, and are more interested in the names of the eighteenth century than in those of all other centuries put together. If we are to talk about 'popular histories,' the writer who distances every competitor by an immeasurable distance is Macaulay. Whatever may be said about that illustrious man's style, his conception of history, his theories of human society, it is at least beyond question or denial that his Essays have done more than any other writings of this generation to settle the direction of men's historical interest and curiosity. From Eton and Harrow down to an elementary school in St. Giles's or Bethnal Green, Macaulay's Essays are a text-book. At home and in the colonies, they are on every shelf between Shakespeare and the Bible. And of all these famous compositions, none are so widely read or so well-known as those on Clive, Hastings, Chatham, Frederick, Johnson, with the gallery of vigorous and animated figures that Macaulay grouped round these great historic luminaries. We are not now saying that Macaulay's view of the actors or the events of the eighteenth century is sound, comprehensive, philosophical, or in any other way meritorious; we are only examining the truth of Mr. Seeley's assumption that the century which the most popular writer of the day has treated in his most glowing, vivid, picturesque, and varied style, is regarded by the majority of us as destitute of interest, as containing neither memorable men nor memorable affairs, and as overspread with an ignoble pall of all that is flat, stagnant, and common.

Nor is there any better foundation for Mr. Seeley's somewhat peremptory assertion that previous writers all miss what he considers the true point in our history during the eighteenth century. It is simply contrary to fact to assert that 'they do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.' Mr. Green, for instance, was not strong in his grasp of the eighteenth century, and that period is in many respects an extremely unsatisfactory part of his work. Yet if we turn to his History of the English People, this is what we find at the very outset of the section that deals with modern England:—

The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning point in our national history, as it is a turning point in the history of the world.... From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world. It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history—in