the first nation and the rest nowhere, has completely changed while he
has been attending to his private business, his "politics," and his
cricket, and he finds the true state of the world to be that, while in
industry England has hard work to hold her own against her chief rival,
she has already been passed in education and in science, that her army,
good as it is, is so small as scarcely to count, and that even her navy
cannot keep its place without a great and unexpected effort.

Yet fifty years ago England had on her side all the advantages but one.
She was forgetting nationhood while Germany was reviving it. The British
people, instead of organising themselves as one body, the nation, have
organised themselves into two bodies, the two "political" parties.
England's one chance lies in recovering the unity that has been lost,
which she must do by restoring the nation to its due place in men's
hearts and lives. To find out how that is to be done we must once more
look at Europe and at England's relations to Europe.




IX.


NEW CONDITIONS

It has been seen how, as a result of the struggle with Napoleon,
England, from 1805 onwards, was the only sea power remaining in Europe,
and indeed, with the exception of the United States, the only sea power
in the world. One of the results was that she had for many years the
monopoly of the whole ocean, not merely for the purposes of war, but