The state of the world which he thought existed, in which England was the first nation and the rest nowhere, has completely changed while he has been attending to his private business, his “politics,” and his cricket, and he finds the true state of the world to be that, while in industry England has hard work to hold her own against her chief rival, she has already been passed in education and in science, that her army, good as it is, is so small as scarcely to count, and that even her navy cannot keep its place without a great and unexpected effort.

Yet fifty years ago England had on her side all the advantages but one.  She was forgetting nationhood while Germany was reviving it.  The British people, instead of organising themselves as one body, the nation, have organised themselves into two bodies, the two “political” parties.  England’s one chance lies in recovering the unity that has been lost, which she must do by restoring the nation to its due place in men’s hearts and lives.  To find out how that is to be done we must once more look at Europe and at England’s relations to Europe.

IX.

NEW CONDITIONS

It has been seen how, as a result of the struggle with Napoleon, England, from 1805 onwards, was the only sea power remaining in Europe, and indeed, with the exception of the United States, the only sea power in the world.  One of the results was that she had for many years the monopoly of the whole ocean, not merely for the purposes of war, but also for the purposes of trade.  The British mercantile marine continued through the greater part of the nineteenth century to increase its preponderance over all others, and this remarkable, and probably quite exceptional, growth was greatly favoured by the Civil War in America, during which the mercantile marine of the United States received from the action of the Confederate cruisers a damage from which it has never recovered.

In the years immediately following 1805, Great Britain in self-defence, or as a means of continuing the war against France, in regard to which her resources for operations on land were limited, had recourse to the operations of blockade, by which the sea was closed, as far as possible, to enemy merchantmen while Great Britain prohibited neutral ships from carrying enemy goods.  Napoleon replied by the attempt to exclude British goods from the Continent altogether, and indeed the pressure produced by Great Britain’s blockades compelled Napoleon further to extend his domination on the Continent.  Thus the other continental States found themselves between the devil and the deep sea.  They had to submit to the domination of Napoleon on land and to the complete ascendency of Great Britain on the waters which surrounded their coasts.  The British claims to supremacy at sea were unanimously resented by all the continental States, which all suffered from them, but in all cases the national