46 TRANSACTIONS iSgg-'oo 



first half of it Englishmen were busy fighting battles on the con- 

 tinent, which called for every man England could spare. Blen- 

 heim and Ramillies and Malplaquet ear-mark the period for us. 

 Sixty battles in fifty years leave little room for other work. In 

 the early years of the century the exigencies of England were so 

 great that the fleet was raised to 30,000 men and the army to 

 10,000, then deemed extraordinary figures indicative of great 

 strain upon the nation's resources. John Churchill, Earl of 

 Marlborough, who, as Voltaire notes, never besieged a fortress 

 that he did not take or fought a battle which he did not win, 

 was fighting his way to the Danube to win the battle of Blenheim. 

 It was the day of the first of the great Commoners, Walpole and 

 the Pitts. The century saw the Seven Years' War, which, open- 

 ing on land with a brush between a small body of troops under 

 Washington and a party of French under Jumonville at Fort du 

 Quesne, and on sea with the naval engagement between Admiral 

 Boscawen and the French ships "I^ys" and "Alcide" in the fogs 

 of the Newfoundland coast, soon kindled the world into a flame. 



These acts were the "beginning of the end" of that contest 

 for commercial control of the world which that first of Imperial 

 Unionists, Sir William Petty, (ancestor of our Eord lyansdowne) 

 recognized as already world-wide in his time, (1676) and for the 

 prosecution of which Sir William, with a prescience that has 

 kept his memory green, proved statistically that England had all 

 the natural advantages necessary to ultimate success ; Portugal 

 and Spain having been pushed aside, the Netherlands reeling 

 from the blows received and preparing to give way to France as 

 the coming challenger of England's growing greatness. They 

 precipitated the tremendous struggle, which, fought out to the 

 bitter end on the plains of India, on the waters of the Mediter- 

 ranean and the Spanish Main, on the Gold Coast of Africa, on 

 the ramparts of Louisburg, on the Heights of Quebec, and along 

 the valley of the Ohio, determined for ages the destinies of the 

 world. With that struggle began the re-creation of Germany, 

 its intellectual supremacy over the continent of Europe, its 

 political union under the leadership of Prussia and its kings ; 

 the independence of the United States, and "the foundation of 

 the unique Empire, which, unlike Russia and the United States 

 equally vast, but not continuous, with the ocean flowing through 



