The power of the English aristocracy is no doubt to be justified, in part, by the admirable service which has been rendered to the country by the nobility and the gentry.  During the eighteenth and a part of the nineteenth centuries the political leadership of the English people was on the whole both efficient and edifying.  During all this period their continental competitors were either burdened with autocratic obscurantism or else were weakened by civil struggles and the fatal consequences of military aggression.  In the meantime Great Britain pursued a comparatively tranquil course of domestic reform and colonial and industrial expansion.  She was the European Power whose political and industrial energies were most completely liberated and most successfully used; and as a consequence she naturally drifted into an extremely self-satisfied state of mind in respect to her political and economic organization and policy.  But during the last quarter of the nineteenth century political and economic conditions both began to change.  The more important competing nations had by that time overcome their internal disorders, and by virtue of their domestic reforms had released new springs of national energy.  Great Britain had to face much severer competition in the fields both of industrial and colonial expansion; and during all of these years she has been losing ground.  Her expansion has not entirely ceased; but industrially she is being left behind by Germany and by the United States, and her recent colonial acquisitions have been attained only at an excessive cost.  Inasmuch as she has succeeded in retaining her relative superiority on the sea, she has maintained her special position in the European political system; but the relatively greater responsibilities of the future coupled with her relatively smaller resources make her future international standing dubious.  It looks as if there might be something lacking in the national organization and policy with which Great Britain has been so completely content.

Many Englishmen recognize that their national organization has diminished in efficiency, and they are considering various methods of meeting the emergency.  But to an outsider it does not look as if any remedy, as yet seriously proposed, was really adequate.  The truth is, that the existing political, social, and economic organization of Great Britain both impairs and misleads the energy of the people.  It was adequate to the economic and political conditions of two generations ago, but it is at the present time becoming more and more inadequate.  It is inferior in certain essential respects to the economic and political organization of Great Britain’s two leading competitors—­Germany and the United States.  It is lacking in purpose.  It is lacking in brains.  It is lacking in faith.