somewhat lazy
and drunken, into "a nation of shopkeepers." It also coincided with the
end of the supremacy of France in Europe; France had succeeded to Spain
as the leading power in Europe, and had on the whole maintained a
supremacy which Napoleon brought to a climax, and, in doing so, crushed.
The growing prosperity of England represented an entirely new wave of
influence, mainly economic in character, but not less forceful than that
of Spain and of France had been; and this prosperity was reflected in
the growth of the nation. The greater part of the Victorian period was
marked by this expansion of population, which reached its highest point
in the early years of the second half of that period. While the
population of England was thus increasing with ever greater rapidity at
home, at the same time the English-speaking peoples overspread the whole
of North America, and colonized the fertile fringe of Australia. It was,
on a still larger scale, a phenomenon similar to that which had occurred
three hundred years earlier, when Spain covered the world and founded an
empire upon which, as Spaniards proudly boasted, the sun never set.

When now, a century later, we survey the situation, not only has
industrial and commercial activity ceased to be a special attribute of
the Anglo-Saxons--since the Germans have here shown themselves to
possess qualities of the highest order, and other countries are rapidly
rivalling them--but within the limits of the English-speaking world
itself the English have found formidable rivals in the Americans.
Underlying, however, even these great changes there is a still more
fundamental fact to be considered, a fact which affects all branches of
the race; and that is, that the Anglo-Saxons have passed their great
epoch of expansion and that their birth-rate is rapidly falling to a
normal level, that is to say, to the average level of the world in
general. Disregarding the extremely important point of the death-rate in
its bearing on the birth-rate, England is seen to possess a medium
birth-rate among European countries, not among the countries with a high
birth-rate, like Russia, Roumania, or Bulgaria, nor among those with a
low birth-rate, like Sweden, Belgium, and France. It was in this last
country that the movement of decline in the European birth-rate began,
and though the rate of decline has in France now become very gradual the
long period through which it has extended has placed France in