maintain Empire. It is our first business to consider the many and various ideals which together produce the modern Imperial ideal in order to understand the true nature of a creed which to many of us is the one living creed in current politics. Montesquieu truly remarked that three qualities above others distinguished the English from any other nation—the qualities of Liberty, Piety, and Industrial Ambition. One great feature in England's history is that her political and social conflicts were never barren of results. In France the Wars of Religion left only a bankrupt society and an effete autocracy. The Imperial ambitions of Spain left only a wearied and reactionary State. The Thirty Years' War in Germany took its toll of bloodshed without bequeathing as a recompense any real political or moral blessing. In England, on the other hand, it is hard to point to any struggle in which the soul of the nation was engaged which did not end in a vast and far-reaching reform. This is true of our religious strife, and it is equally true of our political and social revolutions. The three great qualities which Montesquieu noted, and which may be taken as the different forms of the national ideal, complementary to each other, and each forming in its special way the ideal most needed by its age, were developed in three separate and distinct epochs.
Political liberty, the first of these ideals, was won in an early stage of our history, at a time when England took small part in international affairs. While the rest of the world was groaning under the tyranny of absolute rulers, the spirit of individual liberty had already permeated our masses, certain substantive rights had been won as against autocratic power, and when the ultimate crisis arose, and the fleet of the greatest nation of the day threatened her coasts, the country armed as a whole
