2 ENGLISH SAGA

sional army which was far smaller than that of any other major
power. They ruled by measure of their complete mastery over the
seas, won for them in a series of seven great European and world
wars which, covering sixty-seven out of a hundred and twenty-
six years between 1689 and 1815, had culminated in the defeat and
exhaustion of a rival with a population nearly, three times as great
Since then, apart from punitive expeditions against the heathen,
the British had lived in peace with their fellow Christians.

The continent of Europe, of which Britain was geographically
a part, consisted of thirteen Christian nations, the Mahomedan
and partially Asian Ottoman Empire, and forty-one minor Ger-
man and Italian states which, though enjoying sovereign
independence, lacked national status in the modem ^ sense.
Four only were major powers; the still semi-revolutionary
French kingdom with thirty-five million inhabitants—a source
of perpetual fear to its neighbours; the old multi-racial Empire
of Austria with a slightly smaller population; the parvenu
north German Kingdom of Prussia with about sixteen millions;
and the barbaric Empire of Russia with more than sixty millions
of whom seven millions inhabited the Siberian plains. The once
powerful Kingdom of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, still
exercising an uneasy and despotic sway over the semi-Christian
tribesmen of the Balkans, no longer played any part in the
councils of Europe.

Of the other continents, Africa was a savage terra incognita
with a fringe of decadent Mahomedan states littering its
Mediterranean shore, one of which, Algiers, had recently been
annexed by France, and a few scattered British, Dutch and Portu-
guese outposts along its ocean coasts. Round the latter passed
the ships which carried the trade of Europe to the East. Asia, with
more than two-thirds of the world's population, had become a
European trading preserve, though still mainly unexploited, with
its southern peninsula British, its vast northern deserts Russian,
and only the moribund Empire of China preserving a semblance
of loose independence while British traders and gunboats injected
western commerce and culture into her eastern ports and creeks.
Japan was a group of dreamy islands, still unopened to
European trade and innocent alike of western idealism and
material progress.

Only in North America was there any civilisation comparable
to that of Europe. Here seventeen vigorous millions of British