position that
France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered
little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around
her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival
of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that
of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India,
claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered
high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to
comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.

[Sidenote: England in the Pacific.]

It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our
statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in
English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English
race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that
the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly
different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that
the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's
standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in
Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.
Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words
to his assailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But
greater even than Pitt's statesmanship was the conviction on which his
statesmanship rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of
Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own
among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in
arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his
daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay
before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be
lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them
showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into
far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the
other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British
Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the
British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from
America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a
Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements
spread along its eastern s