254 THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 



Plymouth and Boston and Hartford, that they were " the first colonists 

 in history who went out not to seek gold, but God." We shall find, 

 as we study English colonization, that.it is always the former of these 

 elements, the gold-seeker, that has started the fighting, and that the 

 freebooting colony has by and by come to grief, sowing the seeds of 

 quarrels from which they reaped such a tragical harvest for England 

 and for the world. 



With this epoch of colonization England became more than the 

 peoi>le of the little island — England became a world people ; and we 

 in America remember that it is as she has become what she is that we 

 have become at all ; and as we come back to this seventeenth century, 

 which was the great century of the exi)ansion of English freedom — 

 the century in which Englishmen declined to allow that an English 

 king could rule by divine right, but decreed that he was " as much a 

 creature of law as the i)ettiest tax-gatherer in the realm " — it is itnpor- 

 tant to remember that the great Puritan movement which accom- 

 plished this was a movement on both sides of the Atlantic. It brought 

 in the Commonwealth in England, and Oliver Cromwell and Sir Harry 

 Vane worked for the same things for which our fathers were working 

 here — for the true expansion of England. Freedom was worked out 

 in America and England alike; each side reinforced the other. It 

 was precisely at that time of the (.'oinmonwealth that English ]>(nver 

 was felt as it had never been felt before in the affairs of Europe. If 

 there was wrong— sufficient wrong — the power of Oliver Cromwell 

 would be felt in Italy, in France, and among the Alps, as well as in 

 England itself. The English navy took its definite shape and became 

 a power in the world during the Commonwealth. 



THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND IN AMERICA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

 A MATTER OF CHANCE AND NOT OF FORESIGHT 



We have been reading, the last fifteen years, the brilliant work by 

 Professor Seeley, who was one of the most learned professors in Cam- 

 bridge twenty-five years ago, when I had the good fortune to be there, 

 and who possessed one of the most comprehensive and acute minds 

 which have dealt with modern histor3\ His book upon the expan- 

 sion of England has almost given us a new definition of English his- 

 tory in the eighteenth century and since. The main thesis of his book 

 is that as the seventeenth century had been the century which ex- 

 panded and upheld English freedom, the eighteenth century marked 

 the era of English expansion and empire ; that the Avars of the eigh- 



