this amiable conceit of _laissez-faire_
in national policy coincides with the period of great advance in the
technology of transport and communication in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps, on a larger outlook, it should rather be said that the run of
national ambitions and animosities had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, suffered a degree of decay through the diffusion of this
sentimental predilection for Natural Liberty, and that this decline of
the manlier aspirations was then arrested and corrected by help of these
improvements in the technological situation; which enabled a closer and
more coercive control to be exercised over larger areas, and at the same
time enabled a more massive aggregate of warlike force to strike more
effectively at a greater distance. This whole episode of the rise and
decline of _laissez-faire_ in modern history is perhaps best to be
conceived as a transient weakening of nationalism, by neglect; rather
than anything like the growth of a new and more humane ideal of national
intercourse. Such would be the appraisal to be had at the hands of those
who speak for a strenuous national life and for the arbitrament of
sportsmanlike contention in human affairs. And the latterday growth of
more militant aspirations, together with the more settled and sedulous
attention to a development of control and of formidable armaments, such
as followed on through the latter half of the nineteenth century, would
then be rated as a resumption of those older aims and ideals that had
been falling somewhat into abeyance in the slack-water days of
Liberalism.

There is much to be said for this latter view; and, indeed, much has
been said for it, particularly by the spokesmen of imperialist politics.
This bias of Natural Liberty has been associated in history with the
English-speaking peoples, more intimately and more extensively than with
any other. Not that this amiable conceit is in any peculiar degree a
race characteristic of this group of peoples; nor even that the history
of its rise and decline runs wholly within the linguistic frontiers
indicated by this characterisation. The French and the Dutch have borne
their share, and at an earlier day Italian sentiment and speculation
lent its impulsion to the same genial drift of faith and aspiration.
But, by historical accident, its center of gravity and of diffusion has
lain with the English-speaking communities during the period when this
bias made histo