outcome.  He carried on the development of naval warfare, revolutionized ideas, raised professional standards, and thereby both affected the result in his own time, and perpetuated an influence, the effect of which was to be felt in the gigantic contests of later days.  In this eminent particular, which involves real originality, no sea officer of the eighteenth century stands with him; in this respect only he and Nelson, who belongs rather to the nineteenth, are to be named together.

In the years of nominal peace, 1748-1755, the Navy of Great Britain was permitted by a politically cautious Government to decline much in power; but there was compensation in the fact that that of France drooped equally.  In both countries there was then, as there has been ever since, a party opposed to over-sea enterprise.  “The partisans of the Ministry,” wrote Walpole in 1755, “d——­n the Plantations [Colonies], and ask if we are to involve ourselves in a war for them.”  The French government underwent a like revulsion of feeling as regarded India, and in 1754 recalled Dupleix in mid-career, in order to quiet the remonstrances of Great Britain.  It would be irrelevant, were it not signally instructive, to remark that both nations passed under the influence of the same ideas a hundred years later.  In the middle of the nineteenth century, the preponderant expression in England was that the colonies were unprofitable incumbrances, and, if occasion arose, should be encouraged to separate rather than urged to remain; while France, through whatever motive, at a critical moment abandoned the field in Egypt, by refusing joint action.  It is, therefore, probably the result of a true national genius, asserting itself above temporary aberrations, that the close of the nineteenth century saw France wholly excluded, politically, from Egypt, as she had before been from India, and Great Britain involved in an expensive war, the aim of which was the preservation of the imperial system, in the interest not only of the mother country, but of the colonies as well.

And that it was in the interest of her colonies was precisely the all important part which differentiated the Seven Years War in its day, and the South African War in our day, from the struggle, so disastrous to the Empire, that is known as the American Revolution.  “There is no repose for our thirteen colonies,” wrote Franklin a hundred and fifty years ago, “so long as the French are masters of Canada.”  “There is no repose for British colonists in South Africa,” was the virtual assertion of Natal and the Cape Colony, “so long as the Boer political methods are maintained in the Transvaal with the pledged support of the Orange Free State.”  Irreconcilable differences of political and social systems, when brought into close contact, involve irrepressible conflict, and admit of no lasting solution except the subjugation and consequent submersion of one or the other.