From Macmillan's Magazine. THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. THE object of this paper will be to show in a large survey of the course of English history through the eighteenth century the truth of the following position, viz., that the development of England in that century is essentially a territorial expansion, that it is, in short, the development of Great Britain into what Sir Charles Dilke calls Greater Britain. I constantly remark both in our popular histories and in occasional allusions to the history of the eighteenth century, what a faint and confused impression that period has left upon the national memory. Nothing seems to hold together the series | of its events; the wars seem to lead to nothing; at home we do not perceive the working of great new ideas leading to new political creations; altogether it seems as if nothing was evolved out of the struggle of that time, so that we can only think of it as prosperous and prosaic, not memorable. Those dim figures, George I. and George II., the long, tame administrations of Walpole and Pelham, the buccaneering war with Spain, the useless campaigns in Germany and the Low Countries, the foolish prime minister Newcastle, the dull brawls of the Wilkes period, everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of greatness, a commonness and flatness in men and in affairs, which distress us in the history of a great nation. What we chiefly miss is unity. In France the corresponding period has just as little greatness, but it has unity; it is intelligible; we can describe it in one word as the age of the approach of the Revolution. But what is the English eighteenth century, and what has come of it? What was approaching then? This is the question I attempt here to answer. the fainéants they are sometimes made to In As a plain example of this principle, take the reign of George III. What can be more absurd than to treat those sixty years as constituting one period, simply because one man was king during the whole of them? What, then, are we to substitute for the king as a principle of division? Evidently great events. One part of the reign will make a chapter by itself as the period of the loss of America, another as that of the struggle with the French Revolution. But in a national history there are larger as well as smaller divisions. Besides chapters, there are, as it were, books or parts. This is because the great events, when examined closely, are seen to be connected with each other; those which are chronologically nearest to each other are seen to be similar; they fall into We have an unfortunate habit of dis-groups, each of which may be regarded tributing historical affairs under reigns. as a single complex event, and the comEven where monarchy is extremely pow-plex events give their names to the parts, erful, it is seldom that an age ought to be called after a monarch. It would be better not to speak even of the Siècle de Louis XIV. The English monarchs of the eighteenth century were by no means as the simpler events give their names to the separate chapters, of the history. In some periods of history this arrangeinent is so natural that we adopt it almost unconsciously. The events bear their significance written on their face, and the connection of events is also obvious. When you read the reign of Louis XV. of France, you feel, without waiting to reason, that you are reading of the fall of the French monarchy. But in other parts of history the clue is less easy to find, and it is here that we feel that embarrassment and want of interest which, as I have said, Englishmen are conscious of when they look back upon their eighteenth century. In most cases of this kind the fault is in the reader; he would be interested in the period if he had the clue to it, and he would find the clue if he sought it deliberately. We are to look then at the great events of the eighteenth century, examine each to see its precise significance, and compare them together with a view to discovering any general tendency there may be. I speak roughly, of course, when I say the eighteenth century. More precisely I mean the period which begins with the Revolution of 1688 and ends with the peace of 1815. Now what are the great events during this period? There are no revolutions. In the way of internal disturbance aN that we find is two abortive Jacobite insurrections in 1715 and 1745. There is a change of dynasty, and one of an unusual kind, but it is accomplished peacefully in accordance with an act of Parliament. The great events are all of one kind, they are foreign wars. These wars are on a much larger scale than any which England had waged before since the Hundred Years' War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They are also of a more formal, businesslike kind than earlier wars. For England has now, for the first time, a standing army and navy. The great English navy first took definite shape in the wars of the Commonwealth, and the English army, founded on the Mutiny Bill, dates from the reign of William III. Between the Revolution and the battle of Waterloo it may be reckoned that we waged seven great wars, of which the shortest lasted seven years and the longest about twelve. Of the whole period, comprising a hundred and twenty-six years, sixty-four years, or more than half, were spent in war. That these wars were on a greater scale than any which had preceded may be estimated by the burden which they laid upon the country. Before this period England had of course often been at war; still, at the commencement of it, England had no debt, that is, her debt was less than a million, but at the end of this period, in 1817, her debt amounted to 840,000,000%. And we are to beware of taking even this large amount as measuring the expensiveness of the wars. Eight hundred and forty millions was not the cost of the wars; it was only that part of the cost which the nation could not meet at once, but an enormous amount had been paid at once. And yet this debt alone, contracted in a period of a hundred and twenty years, is equivalent to seven millions a year spent on war during the whole time, while for a good part of the eighteenth century the whole annual cost of government did not exceed seven millions. This series of great wars is evidently the characteristic feature of the period, for not only does it begin with this period, but also appears to end with it. Since 1815 we have had local wars in India and some of our colonies, but of struggles against great European powers such as this period saw seven times, we have only seen one since, in a period more than half as long, and it lasted but two years. Let us pass these wars in review. There was first the war in which England was involved by the Revolution of 1688. It is pretty well remembered, since the story of it has been told by Macaulay. It lasted eight years, from 1689 to 1697. There was then the great war which arose out of the Spanish succession, and which we shall never cease to remember because it was the war of Marlborough's victories. It lasted eleven years, from 1702 to 1713. The next great war has now passed almost entirely out of memory, not having brought to light any very great commander, nor achieved any definite result. But we have all heard speak of the fable of Jenkins' Ears, and we have heard of the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, though perhaps few of us could give a rational account either of the reason for fighting them, or of the result that came | hopelessly baffled in our first attempts. In of them. And yet this war too lasted one war the question was of the method of nine years, from 1739 to 1748. Next succession to the crown of Spain; in ancomes the Seven Years' War, of which other war it was of the Austrian succession the German part has been made famous and of the succession to the Empire. But by the victories of Frederick. In the if there seems so far some resemblance, English part of it we all remember one what have these succession questions to grand incident, the Battle of the Heights do with the right of search claimed by of Abraham, in which we lost Wolfe and the Spaniards along the Spanish Main, or gained Canada. And yet in the case of the limits of Acadie, or the principles of this war also it may be observed how the French Revolution? And as the much the eighteenth century has faded grounds of quarrel seem quite accidental, out of our imaginations. We have quite so we are bewildered by the straggling, forgotten that that victory was but one of haphazard character of the wars thema long series, which to contemporaries selves. Hostilities may break out, so it seemed fabulous, so that the nation came seems, in the Low Countries, or in the out of the struggle intoxicated with glory, heart of Germany, but the war is waged and England stood upon a pinnacle of anywhere or everywhere, at Madras, or at greatness which she had never reached the mouth of the St. Lawrence, or on the before. We have forgotten how, through banks of the Ohio. As Macaulay says, all that remained of the eighteenth cen- speaking of Frederick's invasion of Siletury, the nation looked back upon those sia, "In consequence of his unprincipled two or three splendid years as upon a ambition black men fought on the coast happiness that could never return, and of Coromandel, and red men scalped each how long it continued to be the unique other by the Great Lakes of North Amerboast of the Englishman, ica." On a first survey such is the con That Chatham's language was his mother fused appearance which these wars pre tongue, And Wolfe's great heart compatriot with his own. sent. colonies, yet became in a short time and ended as wars of England and France. But look a little closer, and after all you will discover some uniformities. For exThis is the fourth war. It is in sharp ample, out of these seven wars, if we look contrast with the fifth, which we have at them from the English point of view, tacitly agreed to mention as seldom as we five are wars with France from the begincan. What we call the American War, ning, and both the other two, though the which from the first outbreak of hostili-opposite belligerent at the outset was in ties to the Peace of Paris lasted eight the first Spain, and in the second our own years, from 1775 to 1783, was indeed ignominious enough to us in America, but in its latter part it spread into a grand naval war in which England stood at bay against almost all the world, and in this, through the victories of Rodney, we came off with credit. The sixth and seventh are the two great wars with Revolutionary France, which we are not likely to forget though we ought to keep them more separate in our minds than we do. The first lasted nine years, from 1793 to 1802, the second twelve, from 1803 to 1815. Now probably it has occurred to few of us to connect these wars together or to look for any unity of plan or purpose pervading them. And if such a thought did occu: we should probably find ourselves Now here is one of those general facts which we are in search of. The full magnitude of it is not usually perceived because the whole middle part of the eighteenth century has passed too much into oblivion. We have not forgotten the pair of great wars with France at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nor the other pair of great wars with France about the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth, but we have half forgotten that near the middle of the eighteenth century there was also a great war between England and France, and that as prelude and afterpiece to this war there was a war with Spain which own blindness which leads us to overlook the grandeur of that phase in our history, while we fix our eyes upon petty domestic occurrences, Parliamentary quarrels, party intrigue, and court gossip. turned into a war with France, and a war | seems so sadly to want. It is only our with America which turned into a war with France. The truth is, these wars group themselves very symmetrically, and the whole period stands out as an age of gigantic rivalry between England and France, a kind of second Hundred Years' War. In fact in those times and down to our own memory the eternal discord of England and France appeared so much a law of nature that it was seldom spoken of. The wars of their own times blending with vague recollections of Crécy, Poictiers, and Agincourt created an impression in the minds of those generations that England and France always had been at war and always would be. But this was a pure illusion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England and France had not been these persistent enemies. The two States had often been in alliance against Spain. In the seventeenth century an Anglo-French alliance had been almost the rule. Charles I. has a French queen, Cromwell allies himself with Mazarin, Charles II. and James II. make themselves dependent upon Louis XIV. It so happens that the accession of George III. falls in the middle of this period, and seems to us, with our childish mode of arranging history, to create a division where there is no real division but rather unusually manifest continuity. And as in Parliamentary and party politics the accession of George III. really did make a considerable epoch, and the temptation of our historians is always to write the history rather of the Parliament than of the State and nation, a false scent misleads us here, and we remain quite blind to one of the grandest and most memorable turning-points in our history. I say these wars make one grand and decisive struggle between England and France. For look at the facts. Nominally the first of these three wars was ended by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Nominally there followed eight years of peace between England and France. But really it was not so at all. Whatever virtue the Treaty of Aix-laChapelle may have had towards settling the quarrels of the other European powers concerned in the war, it scarcely interrupted for a moment the conflict between England and France. It scarcely even appeared to do so, for the great question of the boundary of the English and French settlements in America, of the limits of Acadie and Canada, was disputed with just as much heat after the treaty as before it. And not in words only but by arms, just as much as if war were still going on. Moreover what I remark of the American frontier is equally true of another frontier along which at that time the English and French met each other, namely, in India. It is a re But may not this frequent recurrence of war with France in the eighteenth century have been a mere accident arising from the nearness of France and the necessary frequency of collisions with her? On examination we shall find that it is not merely accidental, but that these wars are connected together in internal causation as well as in time. It is rather the occasional cessation of war that is accidental; the recurrence of it is natural and inevitable. There is indeed one long truce of twenty-seven years after the Treaty of Utrecht; this was the natural effect of the exhaustion in which all Europe was left by the War of the Spanish Succession, a war almost as great in comparison with the then magnitude of the European States as the great struggle with Napoleon. But when this truce was over wemarkable, little-noticed fact, that some of may almost regard all the wars which followed as constituting one war, interrupted by occasional pauses. At any rate the three wars between 1740 and 1783, those commonly called the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War, and the American War, are, so far as they are wars of England and France, intimately connected together, and form as it were a trilogy of wars. This fact is especially to be noticed here, because this group of wars, considered as one great event with a single great object and result, supplies just the grand feature which that time the most memorable encounters between the English and the French which have ever taken place in the course of their long rivalry, some of the classic occurrences of our military history, took place in these eight years when, nominally, England and France were at peace. We have all heard how the French built Fort Duquesne on the Ohio River, how our colony of Virginia sent a body of four hundred men under the command of George Washington, then a very young man and a British subject, to attack it, and how Washington was surrounded and forced to capitulate. |