s event, perhaps in itself greater than the French
Revolution, which so soon followed it. He only, however, discerns one
side of its momentous influence, the rise of a new state, and he has
not a word to say as to its momentous consequences to the internal
politics of the old state from which the colonies had cut themselves
off. Yet some of the acutest and greatest Englishmen then living, from
Richard Price up to Burke and Fox, believed that it was our battle at
home that our kinsfolk were fighting across the Atlantic Ocean, and
that the defeat and subjection of the colonists would have proved
fatal in the end to the liberties of England herself. Surely the
preservation of parliamentary freedom was as important as the
curtailment of British dominion, and only less important than the rise
of the new American state. Even for a monograph, Mr. Seeley puts his
theme in too exclusive a frame; and even from the point of his own
profession that he seeks to discover 'the laws by which states rise,
expand, and prosper or fall in this world,' his survey is not
sufficiently comprehensive, and his setting is too straitened.

Another criticism may be made upon the author's peculiar delimitation
of his subject. We will accept Mr. Seeley's definition of history as
having to do with the state, with the growth and the changes of a
certain corporate society, acting through certain functionaries and
certain assemblies. If the expansion of England was important, not
less important were other changes vitally affecting the internal
fortunes of the land that was destined to undergo this process.
Expansion only acquired its significance in consequence of what
happened in England itself. It is the growth of population at home, as
a result of our vast extension of manufactures, that makes our
colonies both possible and important. There would be nothing
capricious or perverse in treating the expansion of England over the
seas as strictly secondary to the expansion of England within her own
shores, and to all the causes of it in the material resources and the
energy and ingenuity of her sons at home. Supposing that a historian
were to choose to fix on the mechanical and industrial development of
England as the true point of view, we are not sure that as good a case
might not be made out for the inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and
Crompton as for the acquisition of the colonies; for Brindley and Watt
as for Clive and Hastings. Enormous territor