especially 
in view 
To 
velop- 
ment of 
political 
throughout 
the British 
Empire. 
POSTSCRIPT 
place under the fiscal and legislative measures he carried, has 
been altogether wholesome. It will be for future ages to 
decide whether he was the wisest of democratic leaders, 
or the greatest of unconscious charlatans. 
Nor does it seem possible to apply the mé&thod which has 
been pursued throughout the foregoing pages, in tracing the 
fortunes of the English people for nineteen hundred years’, 
to the industrial and commercial growth of the last half- 
century. It has been the object of this book to co-ordinate 
the story of economic life with that of political development, 
and to bring out the relations between the two. In each 
era political aims have affected the direction and manner of 
economic growth ; the story of material development is only 
intelligible, when the underlying sentiments and objects are 
clearly understood. But with the fall of the Mercantile System, 
the power of the English realm, in its narrower sense, which 
was for centuries the determining factor in shaping the 
economic growth of the country, has ceased to be treated as 
an adequate, far less as an exclusive object of consideration. 
There is a far wider outlook before us in discussing the 
economic policy of the realm, and we have hardly yet 
focussed our view as to the direction in which we may most 
wisely try to move. Account must be taken of the great 
communities and dependencies beyond the sea, both as re- 
gards our political institutions, our naval and military ex- 
penditure, and our material prosperity. Not till the new 
forms, which the life of the British Empire is assuming under 
our very eyes, are more clearly defined, will it be possible to 
trace the process of economic readjustment which has been 
involved in attempting to meet these new requirements. 
Political and economic factors react upon one another; the 
doctrine of laissez faire has vanquished the narrower national- 
ism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but has 
it said the last word in regard to our mercantile relations 
with all parts of the world ? We have discarded this doctrine, 
deliberately and finally, in regard to the conditions of in- 
dustrial life, and the management of traffic within Great 
Britain. Who shall say what the issue will be when the 
1 B.c. 55 t0 A.D. 1830. 
B66