the history not of England only, but of the English race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. 'If I send an army to Germany,' he replied in memorable words to his assailants, 'it is because in Germany I can conquer America!'

This must be pronounced to be, at any rate, a very near approach to that perception which Mr. Seeley denies to his predecessors, of the truth that in the eighteenth century the expansion of England was the important side of her destinies at that epoch.

Then there is Carlyle. Carlyle professed to think ill enough of the eighteenth century—poor bankrupt century, and so forth,—but so little did he find it common, flat, or uninteresting, that he could never tear himself away from it. Can it be pretended that he, too, 'missed the true point of view'? Every reader of the History of Frederick remembers the Jenkins's-Ear-Question, and how 'half the World lay hidden in embryo under it. Colonial-Empire, whose is it to be? Shall half the world be England's, for industrial purposes; which is innocent, laudable, conformable to the Multiplication Table, at least, and other plain laws? Shall there be a Yankee Nation, shall there not be; shall the New World be of Spanish type, shall it be of English? Issues which we may call immense.' This, the possession of the new world, was 'England's one Cause of War during the century we are now upon (Bk. xii. ch. xii.) It is 'the soul of all these Controversies and the one meaning they have' (xvi. xiv.) When the war was over, and the peace made at Hubertsburgh, Carlyle apprehended as clearly as words can express, what the issue of it was for England and the English race. England, he says, is to have America and the dominion of the seas,—considerable facts both,—'and in the rear of these, the new Country is to get into such merchandisings, colonisings, foreign settlings, gold nuggetings, as lay beyond the drunkenest dreams of Jenkins (supposing Jenkins addicted to liquor)—and in fact to enter on a universal uproar of Machineries, Eldorados, "Unexampled Prosperities," which make a great noise for themselves in the days now come,' with much more to the same effect (xx. xiii.) Allowance made for the dialect, we do not see how the pith and root of the matter, the connection between the transactions of the eighteenth century and the industrial and colonial expansion that followed them, could be more firmly or more accurately seized.

It would be unreasonable to expect these and other writers to isolate the phenomena of national expansion, as Mr. Seeley has been free to do, to the exclusion of other groups of highly important facts in the movements of the time. They were writing history, not monograph. Nor is it certain that Mr. Seeley has escaped the danger to which writers of monographs are exposed. In isolating one set of social facts, the student is naturally liable to make too much of them, in proportion to other facts. Let us agree, for argument's sake, that the expansion of England is the most important of the threads that it is the historian's business to disengage from the rest of the great strand of our history in the eighteenth century. That is no reason why we should ignore the importance of the constitutional struggle between George the Third and the Whigs, from his accession to the throne in 1760 down to the accession of the younger Pitt to power in 1784. Mr. Seeley will not allow his pupils to waste a glance upon 'the dull brawls of the Wilkes period.' Yet the author of the Thoughts on the Present Discontents thought it worth while to devote all the force of his powerful genius to the exploration of the causes of these dull brawls, and perceived under their surface great issues at stake for good government and popular freedom. Mr. Seeley does justice to the importance of the secession of the American colonies. He rightly calls it a stupendous event, perhaps in itself greater than the French Revolution, which so soon followed it. He only, however, discerns one side of its momentous influence, the rise of a new state, and he has not a word to say as to its momentous consequences to the internal politics of the old state from which the colonies had cut themselves off. Yet some of the acutest and greatest Englishmen then living, from Richard Price up to Burke and Fox, believed that it was our battle at home that our kinsfolk were fighting across the Atlantic Ocean, and that the defeat and subjection of the colonists would have proved fatal in the end to the liberties of England herself. Surely the preservation of parliamentary freedom was as important as the curtailment of British dominion, and only less important than the rise of the new American state. Even for a monograph, Mr. Seeley puts his theme in too exclusive a frame; and even from the point of his own profession that he seeks to discover 'the laws by which states rise, expand, and prosper or fall in this world,' his survey is not sufficiently comprehensive, and his setting is too straitened.

Another criticism may be made upon the author's peculiar delimitation of his subject. We will accept Mr. Seeley's definition of history as having to do with the state, with the growth and the changes of a certain corporate society, acting through certain functionaries and certain assemblies. If the expansion of England was important, not less important were other changes vitally affecting the internal fortunes of the land that was destined to undergo this process. Expansion only acquired its significance in consequence of what happened in England itself. It is the growth of population at home, as a result of our vast extension of manufactures, that makes our colonies both possible and important. There would be nothing capricious or perverse in treating the expansion of England over the seas as strictly secondary to the expansion of England within her own shores, and to all the causes of it in the material resources and the energy and ingenuity of her sons at home. Supposing that a historian were to choose to fix on the mechanical and industrial development of England as the true point of view, we are not sure that as good a case might not be made out for the inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton as for the acquisition of the colonies; for Brindley and Watt as for Clive and Hastings. Enormous territory is only one of the acquisitions or instruments of England, and we know no reason why that particular element of growth should be singled out as overtopping the other elements that made it so important as it is. It is not the mere multiplication of a race, nor its diffusion over the habitable globe that sets its deepest mark on the history of a state, but rather those changes in idea, disposition, faculty, and, above all, in institution, which settle what manner of race it shall be that does in this way replenish the earth. From that point of view, after all, as Tocqueville said, the greatest theatre of human affairs is not at Sydney, it is not even at Washington, it is still in our old world of Europe.

That the secession of the American colonies was a stupendous crisis, Mr. Seeley recognises, but his dislike of the idea that their example may be followed by other colonies seems to show that he does not agree with many of us as to the real significance of that great event. He admits, no doubt, that the American Union exerts a strong influence upon us by 'the