has never been able to free herself from a sense that her business in
the world is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about
her, and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition,
amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of
international engagements and the sanctity of treaties. The sentiment
has no doubt been deepened by other convictions, by convictions of at
once a higher and a lower stamp, by a growing sense of the value of
peace to an industrial nation, as by a growing sense of the moral evil
and destructiveness of war. But strong as is the influence of both these
sentiments on the peace-loving temper of the English people, that temper
itself sprang from another source. It sprang from the sense of
responsibility for the peace of the world, as a necessary condition of
tranquillity and freedom at home, which grew into life with the earlier
years of the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: England's intellectual influence.]

Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the
new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her
for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the
European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English
letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our
philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent.
It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion
that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions
were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the
Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and
Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they
carried English ideas. The combination of material and military
greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere,
which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of
1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our
history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking
to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that
drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than
political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the
Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English
literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed,
even in wretched tra