e efficiently and fertility of the English political system? Has
it contributed in the past to such efficiency? Does it still contribute?
And if so, how far?

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