ii6 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



years, vine and apple harvests, thanks to sunshine, has contributed a great 

 deal to this, and has helped the French people to modify into modern 

 forms the age-old feeling of a trusteeship (of the sacred soil) handed along 

 the generations. With ideas of this kind shaping social life the population 

 of France has grown only relatively slowly, and a country which led in 

 population a century ago now has far fewer people than Germany and 

 fewer than Great Britain, countries which have pursued a different course 

 of evolution. 



Britain's harvests have long been less secure because of summer rains 

 and coolness, and, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there 

 grew first a widespread maritime commerce, and then manufacturing in- 

 dustries — in fact, the Industrial Revolution with its financial successes and 

 its notion of taking a profit wherever that could be made. This new and 

 enormous development in Britain almost made people forget the old feeling 

 of trusteeship and maintenance ; what would pay for the next few years 

 became more important than any question of its lasting as a means of 

 livelihood for the third and fourth generation. An immense increase of 

 population was an accompaniment of this, and for a while the surplus 

 found outlets in distant lands, so that British expansion has become one 

 of the outstanding facts of the world's history. 



But the home population came to exceed by a great deal the numbers 

 that could be kept busy supplying the needs of their fellow-citizens. 

 Britain's export trade came to be her mainstay, and few recognised the 

 dangers of the position thus created, for, in early stages, Britain's industry 

 was far ahead of that of other countries. 



The contrast between French and British development was thus ex- 

 treme and startling. That it did not lead to more trouble between them 

 after 1815 was due partly to the opportunities for expansion of trade, and 

 of settlement, outside Europe. 



Industrialism spread from Britain to Germany and led to a parallel 

 increase of population, but this time with less facility for its emigration, 

 because by this time there were few new lands without organised govern- 

 ment, and German emigration, therefore, now meant the ultimate loss of 

 the direct link with the Fatherland. Then, also, the German efl^ort had 

 its aim moulded politically by the desire to rise out of an old position of 

 political inferiority and disunion. Further, the historic cities of Germany 

 in several cases, such as Niirnberg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Koln, Leipzig, and 

 so on, had their situations predetermined by major physical considera- 

 tions, and must be important centres so long as Germany is a land of 

 organised civilisation. This fact and the related one of the finding of coal 

 near the zone of gradation from the hills to the northern plain — i.e. a zone 

 of cities — led to the development of modern industry in several cases in 

 historic towns, whereas in England the greatest developments took place 

 in what had previously been small places. Both national and municipal 

 authorities in Germany, therefore, had a larger and more direct share in 

 the directing of industrial growth than was the case in Britain. Manu- 

 factures, mining and agriculture were made to interlock where possible, 

 and the profits derived from new growth of cities often came to the 

 municipal treasur)\ The tendency was for the nation to become one 



