l these
Controversies and the one meaning they have' (xvi. xiv.) When the war
was over, and the peace made at Hubertsburgh, Carlyle apprehended as
clearly as words can express, what the issue of it was for England and
the English race. England, he says, is to have America and the
dominion of the seas,--considerable facts both,--'and in the rear of
these, the new Country is to get into such merchandisings,
colonisings, foreign settlings, gold nuggetings, as lay beyond the
drunkenest dreams of Jenkins (supposing Jenkins addicted to
liquor)--and in fact to enter on a universal uproar of Machineries,
Eldorados, "Unexampled Prosperities," which make a great noise for
themselves in the days now come,' with much more to the same effect
(xx. xiii.) Allowance made for the dialect, we do not see how the pith
and root of the matter, the connection between the transactions of the
eighteenth century and the industrial and colonial expansion that
followed them, could be more firmly or more accurately seized.

It would be unreasonable to expect these and other writers to isolate
the phenomena of national expansion, as Mr. Seeley has been free to
do, to the exclusion of other groups of highly important facts in the
movements of the time. They were writing history, not monograph. Nor
is it certain that Mr. Seeley has escaped the danger to which writers
of monographs are exposed. In isolating one set of social facts, the
student is naturally liable to make too much of them, in proportion to
other facts. Let us agree, for argument's sake, that the expansion of
England is the most important of the threads that it is the
historian's business to disengage from the rest of the great strand of
our history in the eighteenth century. That is no reason why we should
ignore the importance of the constitutional struggle between George
the Third and the Whigs, from his accession to the throne in 1760
down to the accession of the younger Pitt to power in 1784. Mr. Seeley
will not allow his pupils to waste a glance upon 'the dull brawls of
the Wilkes period.' Yet the author of the _Thoughts on the Present
Discontents_ thought it worth while to devote all the force of his
powerful genius to the exploration of the causes of these dull brawls,
and perceived under their surface great issues at stake for good
government and popular freedom. Mr. Seeley does justice to the
importance of the secession of the American colonies. He rightly calls
it a stupendou