strength of the Dutch nation was unimpaired these two companies were immensely strong; but, whereas no such wholehearted support by their Government was given to English companies, their fortunes were not to the same extent as the fortunes of their Dutch competitors bound up with those of the State. This was a great asset in a century when English Governments seemed but a series of dissolving views. It was no doubt impossible for companies, whose directors were leading Englishmen domiciled in England, to be kept outside politics, but in so far as they were associations of private citizens for trading or colonising purposes, licensed but as a rule not subsidised by or in any way dependent on the State, they did not rise or fall with this Government or that but in their particular calling carried on continuously beyond the seas the work of an undivided England. Charles II's reign was fruitful of companies. In 1670 was chartered the Hudson's Bay Company, which next to the East India Company has filled the largest space in our history. Shaftesbury and his partners were responsible for the planting of the Carolinas. The Duke of York, afterwards King James II, was a leading member of the African companies formed to prosecute the slave trade, which with the rest of the carrying trade had been previously in the hands of the Dutch. It was always the same story. The Crown gave patents to individual proprietors or to syndicates of private citizens, and derived its benefit indirectly from the increased flow of imports and exports if the ventures succeeded. In all the three full centuries of the life of the British Empire the 'eighties have been most crucial decades. The Revolution of 1688 made the Netherlands an ally and made France, the friend of the exiled Stuarts, an enemy. From this date onward for many generations France and Great Britain competed for leadership beyond the seas. As far as the British colonies were concerned, the Revolution had another and most far-reaching effect. The monarchy was placed once for all on a constitutional basis and the powers of Parliament were recognised beyond question. The liberties of the home country were thereby safeguarded, but the change involved parliamentary interference with the liberties of the colonies. The seventeenth century made way for the eighteenth with the opening of the first great war that was almost as important in the colonial as in the European sphere. Marlborough's victories brought, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, great gains to the English in America. But, over the seas, co-operation with the North American colonists had been most ineffective. Little was done under their eyes which was calculated to impress them in any way with the might of England. Though, while Walpole was in power, Great Britain enjoyed a markedly long interval of peace, or rather of abstention from formal war, the eighteenth century stands out in the history of the Empire as first and foremost a century of great wars and, as the result of great wars, of gains and losses on a large scale. The elements which the preceding century contributed to the childhood of the Empire were all or nearly all growing in potency. Trade, Plantations, immense preponderance of the West, distance, diversity, self-dependence and self-assertion of the diverse constituent parts, all were formative factors of prime importance. To them were now added force and direct action by the State to an extent unknown in the previous hundred years, and the result of the interaction of all these influences was the dissolution of the existing Empire. In the 'eighties, after the collapse, there was a new beginning of peaceful expansion and then the century ended, as it had begun, in war. Its first years had been years of present success and of much promise for the future. They had seen Marlborough's triumphs in the War of the Spanish Succession and a British footing in the Mediterranean gained by the taking of Gibraltar and Minorca; parliamentary union with Scotland, indispensable for the Empire, had been achieved; and British progress in India had been assured by amalgamation of the two rival East India Companies. The outlook was fair when the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713. What were the main features of the next seventy years until the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 put its seal on the downfall of the old Empire? France was the foreign Power which Great Britain had most to fear. The Dutch dropped out of the front rank of competitors, and, at all points beyond the seas, Franco-British competition made history. But in the list of nations whose courses intersected that of Great Britain, Spain, far behind France as a direct source of real danger, was in some respects in front of her as a perpetual source of irritation and collision. The Spanish oversea dominions were immense, still more immense were Spanish claims. In great wars, down to 1783, Spain, for the most part following the lead of France, was almost invariably ranged against Great Britain; and outside great wars there was continuous friction between the citizens of the two nations and constant fighting even when there was no recognised war. The construction of the terms of the Asiento or contract for supplying slaves to the Spanish Indies, transferred from France to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, was a fruitful source of trouble; the woodcutters and squatters in what is now British Honduras occasioned a dispute which lasted through the whole century; the Falkland Islands brought the two Powers to the verge of war; as did also in 1790 Nootka Sound in Vancouver Island. If the British North American colonies on their northern and western sides were solely concerned with France, in the south they were very much concerned with Spain. Here the youngest of them, Oglethorpe's colony of Georgia, was not solely a philanthropic venture but also an important British outpost against the Spaniards in Florida. In the Mediterranean there were acute irritants to Spain in the British tenure of Gibraltar and Minorca, uninterrupted in the case of Gibraltar, intermittent in the case of Minorca. In the relations between Spain and Great Britain the eighteenth century resembled the sixteenth rather than the seventeenth, but a stronger Britain was pitted against a weaker Spain. Against both Spain and France the mid-century foreign war, the Seven Years' War, was for Great Britain triumphantly successful. The old Empire rose to its topmost height immediately before it was broken in pieces by civil and foreign war combined. What brought it to its height was sea power. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession Great Britain was easily first on the sea, and the first place thenceforward she never lost except in the years 1778-81, when the temporary loss of command produced decisive effects on the struggle in America. But Rodney's victory saved her when the old Empire crumbled and fell, and great were the sailors whose names crowd the first chapter of the new Empire, for the new Empire, like the old, was born of the sea. There was no longer any question of a Dutch monopoly of the carrying trade, and British shipping had outgrown the need for the forcing process of the Navigation Acts. The sole object of these Acts was now to ensure to the market of the mother country a monopoly of the Empire's trade. From the point of view of statesmen, merchants and manufacturers in Great Britain in the eighteenth century not only did trade go in front of Plantations, but Plantations were interpreted in terms of trade. This was not the view of the Plantations themselves. To them the Navigation Laws became in a growing degree a practical nuisance, only to be tolerated in so far as they could be evaded, and, as the Plantations themselves grew, these laws appeared to be, in Adam Smith's words, "impertinent badges of slavery" It may well be contended that the mercantile system was beneficial in the childhood of the Empire; and at a later date it did little harm to those oversea provinces whose products did not compete with the home-grown products of Great Britain. But where, as in New England, climate and soil promised, in the absence of artificial restrictions, competition with the Old Country, and where the human stock had been from the first nurtured on extreme ideas of freedom, there it was inevitable that trade, as the mother country construed trade, and Plantations, as they construed themselves, would sooner or later collide, and that Plantations, having nature on their side, would prevail. For at any rate three-quarters of the eighteenth century trade dictated the policy of the British Empire, yet the century was not marked by any large growth of new trading companies. The South Sea Company was a child of the century, but otherwise the companies which helped to make the history of these years were in the main enlarged versions of the old companies. With the East India Company, trade led on to territorial dominion, territorial dominion to manifold abuses, and territorial dominion and manifold abuses conduced to constantly growing State supervision. The rise of the East was a leading feature of the century, especially after the preponderance of the West had disappeared with the loss of the United States. In the East was illustrated the strength and the danger of the company system as an agency for making an empire. In the West Indies were illustrated both the strength and the danger of a moneyed interest, and the tyranny that can be exercised by a much-prized commodity when its production is a strongly entrenched monopoly. The eighteenth century saw the reign of sugar; the reign of cotton was yet to come. Though, as the century grew older, the riches which flowed from India into Britain grew rapidly in volume, yet almost to the end the West Indies bulked larger as a source of wealth and of the political and social influence which is derived from wealth. The West Indies fitted admirably into the mercantile system. Here were no competing colonies and products to arouse the apprehension of home growers and merchants. Sugar demanded slavery and the slave trade, and the powerful cities and classes concerned with this carrying trade were solidly behind the West Indian planters and merchants. The richest planters spent much of their time in England with ample means to pull the strings of State. Rarely has any interest gathered to itself so much power linked to so much that was odious and indefensible. It seems strange that such an enormity as the slave trade should have survived the century. Towards its close, after the old Empire had gone by the board, the voice of humanity became insistent, and even in the earlier years the call of the spirit was not unknown, as witness the story of the founding of Georgia; but in the inain, as long as the old Empire lasted, the eighteenth century, though it was John Wesley's century, was a material age. Before 1783 the capacity for rule, which is among the Englishman's best qualities, had not been developed, and the sense of trusteeship for coloured races had hardly been aroused, save in the minds and consciences of exceptional men. Much history was crowded into the 'eighties of the eighteenth century. With the recognition of the independence of the United States, the West, though still prominent in what remained of the Empire, was once for all dethroned from its inordinately high estate and men turned from a narrow commercial view of imperial policy to a wider outlook. No prospect of material gain guided the steps of the United Empire Loyalists into Upper Canada and the Maritime Provinces. The settlement at Sierra Leone testified to growing British feeling in favour of freedom for the negro, and no force entered into the acquisition of the territory. It was peaceably acquired by purchase from its native owner. Peaceably acquired, too, leased in perpetuity by its native sultan to the East India Company, was the island of Penang, a nucleus of what was to be in the twentieth century a noble province of the Empire. Peaceably acquired, once more, was Australia, where the first white settlement was planted on the shores of Sydney Harbour, not typical of the eighteenth century in being peaceably acquired, but typical of it in being directly acquired by the State. Meanwhile, as against the fatal collapse in the West, in India, at the darkest time, Warren Hastings ceded not a foot of ground to Britain's enemies. Yet before these memorable ten years were ended the saviour of India and the friend of the Indian peasantry had been brought to trial in Westminster Hall; and the fact of the trial, however much the proceedings should be condemned, testified, as did the founding of Sierra Leone, that a new spirit of humanity was abroad in the land. The old Empire ended its days in 1783. Before 1790 it was clear that on the old foundations or what was left of them a new Empire was about to rise, more widely spread and therefore better balanced than the Empire of the past, on the way to part with the evil inheritance of slavery, and more responsive to the call of religion and philanthropy than had been the powerful but ill-assorted aggregate of peoples and interests which constituted the old Empire. The passing of the Act of 1791, whereby representative institutions were granted to Canada, proved that regard for political freedom did not leave the Empire when the old North American colonies left it; but the excesses of the French Revolution which speedily followed did not incline British minds to extension of democracy. Then came year after year of war with France, British possessions increased in number, diversities were multiplied. On the other hand, the outcome of over twenty years of almost continuous war was for the time being an empire organised and administered as though war were its normal condition; every colony was garrisoned, every colonial governor was a soldier. Yet in the midst of war the new age was on its way. The slave trade was abolished, the end of slavery came in sight, and the end too of the unhealthy domination of the sugar interest, further threatened as it was by the development of the beet sugar industry on the continent of Europe. The last years of the eighteenth century handed on to the nineteenth a great awakening of Protestant missionary enterprise, which went hand in hand with the crusade against slavery, and henceforward the missionary was a potent factor in the Empire, more especially in Africa and the Pacific. Side by side with the new spiritual forces scientific discovery was recasting the world. James Watt lived until 1819, at which date George Stephenson was verging on forty; and the 112 years from Watt's birth in 1736 to Stephenson's death in 1848 covered the time when steam and telegraphy triumphed, when new machinery for spinning and weaving made cotton rise as sugar declined, when Great Britain became a land of cities and factories, and when progressive diminution of |