historical and vital unity was forgotten. The whole higher unity of national life fell to pieces, and for two generations Englishmen were taught to regard that national life under a single aspect—the aspect of unregulated commerce, safeguarded by the policeman and the law courts. For the first time in our history we really had become a nation of shopkeepers, with all the narrowness and short-sightedness the epithet is held to convey.
The result was very much what might have been expected. There was a very great increase in every direction. But not all of that increase was secure. To a great extent we lost the political control of our commerce; and that commerce existed—and still exists, to a large extent—only in so far as other States chose to let it exist. The industrial development naturally produced an enormous increase of population. But the greater part of that went outside our own political borders. The population of the United States was, to a large extent, stimulated by the overflow from this country, and was actually built up in America itself by the sustaining power of the British market. That population was lost immediately as far as defence was concerned, and was gradually lost for economic purposes as well, as it began to learn to manufacture for itself, and refused to keep its market open to British goods. It is no exaggeration to say that we lost a greater colonial empire to the United States in the nineteenth century than we did in the eighteenth. Even as regards the population which remained within the Empire, it was bound to the Mother Country by the weakest of political ties, and allowed to move away towards complete economic separation. Outside of England the economic development of the British Empire was very slow. Taken as a whole, there can be no doubt that the expansion of wealth and population in the British State was far less under the policy pursued than it would have been under a policy which looked to national greatness and security as a whole.
