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 And now for the ‘great war’. For Britain it would necessarily be a sea war, and therefore a war for empire, trade and colonies. For France, as far as she could make it so, it would be a land war, since it was Europe that France wanted to conquer, not sea or colonies. At first, as I told you, she professed to be conquering other states for their own good, ‘to liberate them from their tyrants,’ and all that sort of nonsense. But most nations, even those that really were badly governed, soon found out that a French invasion was much worse than any amount of bad government by their own ‘tyrants’. So nation after nation rose and fought against France, either one by one or in great alliances of nations. All were beaten; France was the greatest land power in the world, and her soldiers the bravest, cleverest and fiercest fighters. All the nations in the world appealed to England to help them with the one thing which all knew she had got in heaps, money. We actually paid Dutchmen, Prussians, Austrians, Spaniards, Russians and even Turks to fight for their own Interests against France.

How could we afford to do this? Simply because of the power of our navy, which in a few years became so great, that it was able to crush the commerce and to take the colonies of any nation that would not fight against France. Soon it was only in Britain that people could buy the goods of the far East and the far West, silk, coffee, tobacco, sugar, tea, spice. And at last only in Britain could they buy manufactured articles at all. Even the very Frenchmen who fought us had to buy the clothes and shoes they wore from English merchants!

This control of the worlds trade did not come to us at once, and not without hard fighting. Pitt, as I told