than in any other point, may be placed the commercial centre of the
world. It may be said that the nation looked out unconsciously from its
cradle to an immense heritage beyond the Atlantic. France and Spain
looked the same way, and became competitors with England for ascendancy
in the New World, but England was more maritime, and the most maritime
was sure to prevail. Canada was conquered by the British fleet. To the
commerce and the maritime enterprise of former days, which were mainly
the results of geographical position, has been added within the last
century the vast development of manufactures produced by coal and steam,
the parents of manufactures, as well as the expansion of the iron trade
in close connection with manufactures. Nothing can be more marked than
the effect of industry on political character in the case of England.
From being the chief seat of reaction, the North has been converted by
manufactures into the chief seat of progress. The Wars of the Roses were
not a struggle of political principle; hardly even a dynastic struggle;
they had their origin partly in a patriotic antagonism to the foreign
queen and to her foreign councils; but they were in the main a vast
faction-fight between two sections of an armed and turbulent nobility
turned into buccaneers by the French wars, and, like their compeers all
over Europe, bereft, by the decay of Catholicism, of the religious
restraints with which their morality was bound up. Yet the Lancastrian
party, or rather the party of Margaret of Anjou and her favourites, was
the more reactionary, and it had the centre of its strength in the
North, whence Margaret drew the plundering and devastating host which
gained for her the second battle of St. Albans and paid the penalty of
its ravages in the merciless slaughter of Towton. The North had been
kept back in the race of progress by agricultural inferiority, by the
absence of commerce with the Continent, and by border wars with
Scotland. In the South was the seat of prosperous industry, wealth, and
comparative civilization, and the banners of the Southern cities were in