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EXPANSION OF ENGLAND. 
[lect. 
movement, that of Reform or Liberalism, began not in 
England but on the Continent, from whence we borrowed 
it. The peculiarly English movement, I have urged, in 
this period has been an unparalleled expansion. Grasp 
this fact, and you have the clue both to the eighteenth and 
the nineteenth centuries. The wars with France from 
Louis XIV. to Napoleon fall into an intelligible series. 
The American Revolution and the conquest of India 
cease to seem mere digressions, and take their proper 
places in the main line of English history. The growth 
of wealth, commerce and manufacture, the fall of the 
old colonial system and the gradual growth of a new one, 
are all easily included under the same formula. Lastly 
this formula binds together the past of England and 
her future, and leaves us, when we close the history 
of our country, not with minds fatigued and bewildered 
as though from reading a story that has been too much 
spun out, but enlightened and more deeply interested 
than ever, because partly prepared for what is to come 
next. 
I am often told by those who, like myself, study 
the question how history should be taught, Oh, you 
must before all things make it interesting! I agree 
with them in a certain sense, but I give a different 
sense to the word interesting, a sense which after all 
is the original and proper one. By interesting they 
mean romantic, poetical, surprising; I do not try to 
make history interesting in this sense, because I have 
found that it cannot be done without adulterating 
history and mixing it with falsehood. But the word 
interesting does not properly mean romantic. That is 
interesting in the proper sense which affects our interests, 
which closely concerns us and is deeply important to