Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/134

 120 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

One hundred and fifty years pass away, and all this is changed. Spain is no longer the great threatening European power. She is still blindly, intolerantly Catholic. But her blindness and intolerance now affect no one but herself. Her naval supremacy has been forever shattered. On all sides France has broken through the Hapsburg girdle. Stranger still, as a result of one of those very marriage alliances which Hapsburg knew so well how to manage to her own aggrandize- ment, a prince of the House of Bourbon, the modern representative of Valois, has been placed upon the throne of Charles and Philip. The Hapsburg name no longer disturbs the dreams of the court by the Seine. The once vast circle of its influence has been constantly nar- rowed, until Germany remains almost the sole field for the exercise of its ambitious projects. Direct Valois too has passed away, but a new Valois has risen greater and more powerful than ever in the modern Bourbon the heir to the throne and the traditions of old Valois. England too has passed away as a distinct power, but only to be merged in the greater England the modern great power which we know as the United Kingdoms. This new England of the eighteenth century has a policy of its own, very different from the petty dynastic policy of the sixteenth century, that "began with a lass and ended with a lass."

The new policy was distinctively a British policy. It was founded upon trade and commercial interests common to the three king- doms. It found its great rival in France. Side by side with the expansion of British power and the development of British wealth by colonization and trade, it held as a grim necessity the equal duty of crippling its mighty adversary across the channel and preventing the expansion of the power of Bourbon. In its wake it brought along also the navy and the standing army, the bank and the national debt.

This new policy was fully inaugurated in the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne, and made England the center, and her king, the head of the coalition against the overweening ambition of Bourbon. This new and modern policy, distinctively British and national, that for two hundred years has been carried for- ward so ably, so mightily and with such overwhelming success, began with the eighteenth century. But beyond this point there was a slow period of growth when this British policy was in the making. The slow and tortuous unwinding, the successive stages of action and reaction, to the final unfolding in the reigns of William and Mary, and Anne, is the theme of Mr. Seeley's book.