( 2 ) Their position protected them.  What they got they could keep; wealth could accumulate.  Invasion was difficult and practically impossible to their neighbors.  And yet they were in the bustling world, close to the continent, commanding the most important of the navigable seas.  The wealth of Holland was on the one hand, the wealth of France on the other.  They held the keys.

( 3 ) The insular position and their free institutions invited refugees from all the Continent, artisans and skilled laborers of all kinds.  Hence, the beginning of their great industries, which made England rich in proportion as her authority and chance of trade expanded over distant islands and continents.  But this would not have been possible without the third advantage which I shall mention, and that is: 

III.  Coal.  England’s power and wealth rested upon her coal-beds.  In this bounty nature was more liberal to the tight little island than to any other spot in Western Europe, and England took early advantage of it.  To be sure, her coal-field is small compared with that of the United States—­an area of only 11,900 square miles to our 192,000.  But Germany has only 1,770; Belgium, 510; France, 2,086; and Russia only in her expansion of territory leads Europe in this respect, and has now 30,000 square miles of coal-beds.  But see the use England makes of this material:  in 1877, she took out of the ground 134,179,968 tons.  The United States the same year took out 50,000,000 tons; Germany, 48,000,000; France, 16,000,000; Belgium, 14,000,000.  This tells the story of the heavy industries.

We have considered as elements of national greatness the race itself, the favorable position, and the material to work with.  I need not enlarge upon the might and the possessions of England, nor the general beneficence of her occupation wherever she has established fort, factory, or colony.  With her flag go much injustice, domineering, and cruelty; but, on the whole, the best elements of civilization.

The intellectual domination of England has been as striking as the physical.  It is stamped upon all her colonies; it has by no means disappeared in the United States.  For more than fifty years after our independence we imported our intellectual food—­with the exception of politics, and theology in certain forms—­and largely our ethical guidance from England.  We read English books, or imitations of the English way of looking at things; we even accepted the English caricatures of our own life as genuine—­notably in the case of the so-called typical Yankee.  It is only recently that our writers have begun to describe our own life as it is, and that readers begin to feel that our society may be as interesting in print as that English society which they have been all their lives accustomed to read about.  The reading-books of children in schools were filled with English essays, stories, English views of life; it was the English heroines over whose woes the girls wept; it was of