especially
in view
To
velopment
 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 halfcentury.
 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 regards
 our political institutions, our naval and military expenditure,
 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 nationalism
 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 industrial
 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.

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