's address on our Colonial Empire 321

The Newfoundland Fishery dispute 329

The Germanic Confederation 331

Conclusion 334

THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND.

'There is a vulgar view of politics which sinks them into a mere
struggle of interests and parties, and there is a foppish kind of
history which aims only at literary display, which produces delightful
books hovering between poetry and prose. These perversions, according
to me, come from an unnatural divorce between two subjects which
belong to one another. Politics are vulgar when they are not
liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it
loses sight of its relation to practical politics.' These very just
remarks are made by Mr. Seeley in a new book which everybody has been
reading, and which is an extremely interesting example of that union
of politics with history which its author regards as so useful or even
indispensable for the successful prosecution of either history or
politics. His lectures on the expansion of England contain a
suggestive and valuable study of two great movements in our history,
one of them the expansion of the English nation and state together by
means of colonies; the other, the stranger expansion by which the vast
population of India has passed under the rule of Englishmen. Mr.
Seeley has in his new volume recovered his singularly attractive
style and power of literary form. It underwent some obscuration in the
three volumes in which the great transformation of Germany and Prussia
during the Napoleonic age was not very happily grouped round a
biography of Stein. But here the reader once more finds that ease,
lucidity, persuasiveness, and mild gravity that were first shown, as
they were probably first acquired, in the serious consideration of
religious and ethical subjects. Mr. Seeley's aversion for the florid,
rhetorical, and over-decorated fashion of writing history has not
carried him to the opposite extreme, but it has made him seek sources
of interest, where alone the serious student of human affairs would
care to find them, in the magnitude of events, the changes of the
fortunes of states, and the derivation of momentous consequences from
long chains of antecedent causes.

The chances of the time have contributed to make Mr. Seeley's book, in
one sense at le