none of them has kept a growing empire oversea as their
British rival has. What made the difference? The two
things that made all the difference in the world were
freedom and sea-power. We cannot stop to discuss freedom,
because that is more the affair of statesmen; but, at
the same time, we must not forget that the side on which
Wolfe fought was the side of freedom. The point for us
to notice here is that all the freedom and all the
statesmen and all the soldiers put together could never
have made a Greater Britain, especially against all those
other rivals, unless Wolfe's side had also been the side
of sea-power.

Now, sea-power means more than fighting power at sea; it
means trading power as well. But a nation cannot trade
across the sea against its rivals if its own ships are
captured and theirs are not. And long before the Second
Hundred Years' War with France the other sea-trading
empires had been gradually giving way, because in time
of war their ships were always in greater danger than
those of the British were. After the English Navy had
defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 the Spaniards began,
slowly but surely, to lose their chance of making a
permanent Greater Spain. After the great Dutch War, when
Blake defeated Van Tromp in 1653, there was no further
chance of a permanent Greater Holland. And, even before
the Dutch War and the Armada, the Portuguese, who had
once ruled the Indian Ocean and who had conquered Brazil,
were themselves conquered by Spain and shut out from all
chance of establishing a Greater Portugal.