. 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. 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!'

This must be pronounced to be, at any rate, a very near approach to
that perception which Mr. Seeley denies to his predecessors, of the
truth that in the eighteenth century the expansion of England was the
important side of her destinies at that epoch.

Then there is Carlyle. Carlyle professed to think ill enough of the
eighteenth century--poor bankrupt century, and so forth,--but so
little did he find it common, flat, or uninteresting, that he could
never tear himself away from it. Can it be pretended that he, too,
'missed the true point of view'? Every reader of the _History of
Frederick_ remembers the Jenkins's-Ear-Question, and how 'half the
World lay hidden in embryo under it. Colonial-Empire, whose is it to
be? Shall half the world be England's, for industrial purposes; which
is innocent, laudable, conformable to the Multiplication Table, at
least, and other plain laws? Shall there be a Yankee Nation, shall
there not be; shall the New World be of Spanish type, shall it be of
English? Issues which we may call immense.' This, the possession of
the new world, was 'England's one Cause of War during the century we
are now upon (Bk. xii. ch. xii.) It is 'the soul of al