the Englishman was more careful to distinguish and name the trees.  So I cannot doubt that it will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelled by a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a couple of generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of much that was most vital in our own social philosophy.  Perhaps the best thing that can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the next generation, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as we have learned from her.

The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is a study of complex interactions between processes going forward in each of the leading nations.  The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations were better known.  The French revolution bore on the entire thought of Europe, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionary philosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and the endeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham.  Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct but related Manchester school had two generations of development in England, and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparative peace that followed Waterloo and that raised men’s hopes of an era that should put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress of mankind.  French influences again, particularly that of Comte acting through J.S.  Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flush of its youth was fading.  Finally, as we have seen, German influences overwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige of Germany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine of the self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State.  In this story of political thought events have been no less potent than arguments.  The failure and success of institutions, the victories and defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of those principles as the case might be in all lands.  The successive steps by which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragement to believers in national right and liberal government throughout the middle of the century.  The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory for autocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, for blood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious and very slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for that reason, in the attitude of men to fundamental questions of social ethics.  Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two European