i.] TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 9 
betray by our modes of speech that we do not reckon our 
colonies as really belonging to us ; thus if we are asked 
what the English population is, it does not occur to us to 
reck on-in the population of Canada and Australia. This 
fixed way of thinking has influenced our historians. It 
causes them, I think, to miss the true point of view 
in describing the eighteenth century. They make too much 
of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about 
liberty, in all which matters the eighteenth century of 
England was but a pale reflexion of the seventeenth. They 
do not perceive that in that century the history of England 
is not in England but in America and Asia. In like 
manner I believe that when we look at the present state 
of affairs, and still more at the future, we ought to 
beware of putting England alone in the foreground and 
suffering what we call the English possessions to escape 
our view in the back-ground of the picture. 
Let me describe with some exactness the change that 
bas taken place. In the last years of Queen Elizabeth 
Lngland had absolutely no possessions outside Europe, for 
a ll schemes of settlement, from that of llore in Henry 
VIH s reign to those of Gilbert and Raleigh, had failed 
alike. Great Britain did not yet exist; Scotland was a 
separate kingdom, and in Ireland the English were but a 
colony in the midst of an alien population still in the tribal 
stage. With the accession of the Stuart family commenced 
at the same time two processes, one of which was brought 
to completion under the last Stuart, Queen Anne, while the 
°f er has continued without interruption ever since. Of 
t ese the first is the internal union of the three kingdoms, 
j V lc ^’ though technically it was not completed till much 
ater, may be said to be substantially the work of the 
seventeenth century and the Stuart dynasty. The second