Privileged
bodies do not reform themselves; proposals by Burke and by Pitt and by
others were rejected one after another; and then the French Revolution
came to stiffen the wavering ranks of reaction. Not till the Industrial
Revolution had changed the face of England did the old political forces
acknowledge their defeat and surrender their claim to govern the nation
against its will.
CHAPTER VI
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND
1603-1815
In the reign of Elizabeth Englishmen had made themselves acquainted
with the world. They had surveyed it from Greenland's icy mountains to
India's coral strand, and from the Orinoco to Japan, where William
Adams built the first Japanese navy; they had interfered in the
politics of the Moluccas and had sold English woollens in Bokhara; they
had sailed through the Golden Gate of California and up the Golden Horn
of the Bosphorus; they had crossed the Pacific Ocean and the deserts of
Central Asia; they had made their country known alike to the Great Turk
and to the Grand Moghul. National unity and the fertile mingling of
classes had generated this expansive energy, for the explorers included
earls as well as humble mariners and traders; and all ranks, from the
queen downwards, took shares in their "adventures." They had thus
acquired a body of knowledge and experience which makes it misleading
to speak of their blundering into empire. They soon learnt to
concentrate their energies upon those quarters of the globe in which
expansion was easiest and most profitable.
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