with
the career before her which, through tribulation and adversity, was to
lead her at last to the headship of a united Germany.

Through centuries of strife and vicissitude the French
monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people,
gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with
illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the
phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor;
till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined
with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards
the abyss of ruin.

While the war hastened the inevitable downfall of the
French monarchy, it produced still more notable effects.
France under Colbert had embarked on a grand course of maritime
and colonial enterprise, and followed it with an activity and vigor
that promised to make her a great and formidable ocean power. It was
she who led the way in the East, first trained the natives to fight
her battles, and began that system of mixed diplomacy and war which,
imitated by her rival, enabled a handful of Europeans to master all
India. In North America her vast possessions dwarfed those of every
other nation. She had built up a powerful navy and created an extensive
foreign trade. All this was now changed. In India she was reduced to
helpless inferiority, with total ruin in the future; and of all her
boundless territories in North America nothing was left but the two
island rocks on the coast of Newfoundland that the victors had given
her for drying her codfish. Of her navy scarcely forty ships remained;
all the rest were captured or destroyed. She was still great on the
continent of Europe, but as a world power her grand opportunities
were gone.

In England as in France the several members of the State
had battled together since the national life began, and the
result had been, not the unchecked domination of the Crown,
but a system of balanced and adjusted forces, in which King,
Nobility, and Commons all had their recognized places and
their share of power. Thus in the war just ended two great
conditions of success had been supplied: a people instinct
with the energies of ordered freedom, and a masterly leadership
to inspire and direct them.

All, and more than all, that France had lost England had
won. Now, for the first time, she was beyond dispute the
greatest of maritime and colonial Powers. Portugal and Holland,
her precursors in ocean enterprise, had long ago fa