Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/17

Rh reasonable nature, suggest themselves, and stand for review in turn.

Perhaps wealth is the cause of our importance. Hence our ability to sustain arduous conflicts, and to pursue enterprises financially too exhausting for poorer men. Hence, too, that never-ceasing export of our capital to every region under the sun which has put mankind in our debt.

Nevertheless, a short consideration must make plain that this view, though there is something to be said for it, is inadequate. For the exploitation of our resources and the expansion of our industry only began in earnest at the industrial revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Yet at that date England had already run a distinguished career. Besides, our office as a creditor nation was not established on any very large scale till some time after the close of the Napoleonic struggle, when we began to export capital to build the railways of the continent. Accordingly, in whatever degree wealth may have assisted us, it is evident that it has served us as an adjunct rather than as a principal.

Indeed, the argument might be turned round, and it might be contended that, in the main, what we have done has mostly been accomplished, not by the power of wealth, but at the stimulus of poverty. For it is under the goad of inadequate means of livelihood at home that our people have ranged the globe for commercial profit, and that a quarter of the earth's habitable surface has some-