Britain on the old world
of Europe, whose nations will have shrunk into insignificance before it.
What the issues of such a world-wide change may be, not even the wildest
dreamer would dare to dream. But one issue is inevitable. In the
centuries that lie before us, the primacy of the world will lie with the
English People. English institutions, English speech, English thought,
will become the main features of the political, the social, and the
intellectual life of mankind.

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND

1782-1792

[Sidenote: England in the American War.]

That in the creation of the United States the world had reached one of
the turning-points in its history seems at the time to have entered into
the thought of not a single European statesman. What startled men most
at the moment was the discovery that England herself was far from being
ruined by the greatness of her defeat. She rose from it indeed stronger
and more vigorous than ever. Never had she shown a mightier energy than
in the struggle against France which followed only ten years after her
loss of America, nor did she ever stand higher among the nations than on
the day of Waterloo. Her internal developement was as imposing as her
outer grandeur. Weary and disgraceful indeed as was the strife with the
Colonies, the years of its progress were years of as mighty a revolution
for the mother country as for its child. The England that is about us
dates from the American War. It was then that the moral, the
philanthropic, the religious ideas which have moulded English society
into its present shape first broke the spiritual torpor of the
eighteenth century. It was then that with the wider diffusion of
intelligence our literature woke to a nobler and larger life which
fitted it to become the mouthpiece of every national emotion. It was
then that by a change unparalleled in history the country laid aside her
older agricultural character to develope industrial forces which made
her at a single bound the workshop of the world. Amidst the turmoil of
the early years of George the Third Brindley was silently covering
England with canals, and Watt as silently perfecting his invention of
the steam-engine. It was amidst the strife with America that Adam Smith
regenerated our economical, Gibbon our historical, and Burke our
political literature; and peace was hardly declared when the appearance
of Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns heralded a new birth of our poetry.

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