ties of distant colonization to the perils of domestic war.
It was under a government occupied with conflict at home that all the colonies in America, except Georgia, were founded; it was under a Parliament increasingly mercantile in character that they grew into powerful economic and political societies; and it was in the doctrines of John Locke, philosopher of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, that they found secular authority for their Declaration of Independence in 1776. Thus the social transformation of England facilitated colonization, gave a practical economic turn to imperial administration, and finally afforded the linguistics of colonial revolution.
In all these things lay the secret of England's expanding power. She had a monarchy, strong but limited—dominated at last by the middle classes rather than by courtiers such as those who disported themselves at Versailles. While Spain and France discarded their representative institutions, England retained her Lords and Commons and made them potent agencies for commercial and industrial promotion. Her Church, shattered by the endless multiplication of sects, was early compelled to grant a certain degree of toleration as the price of peace. The state, racked by two revolutions and subjected to the fire of constant criticism, was forced to give up the censorship of the press and fling wide the floodgates for intellectual interests of a secular cast.
In her social development, as in church and state, England was rapidly moving toward the modern age. She had a large and growing estate of merchants, a body of yeomen ready for adventure, and a supply of free agricultural laborers, men and women, loose from the feudal ties that bound them to the soil. In short, England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a nation engrossed in applying ever-increasing energies to business enterprise—of which colonization in the New World was one branch for the employment of capital and administrative genius.
