and remains still without a
rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories
determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of
Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, the revival of its political
and intellectual life, the long process of its union under the
leadership of Prussia and Prussia's kings. With that of Plassey the
influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander
on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "saw
one of the races of the north-west cast into the heart of Asia new
manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on
the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States. By
removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother
country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred
them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the
great republic of the west.

[Sidenote: England a World-Power.]

Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War
is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a
turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight
of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within
Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in
other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived
from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their
fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European
position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in
South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her
empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the
strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of
political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new
road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of
Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would
have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes
in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French
ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had
to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance
of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits
of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the