*LEST WE FORGET!* 253

British people had shown no consciousness of the necessity for
an imperial policy. But during the two decades of Conservative
supremacy that followed Gladstone's defeat, they had become
increasingly aware of the Empire. For the big steamer, the
electric telegraph, the inventions of Marconi, were making the
world a smaller place. They even made a united commonwealth
scattered haphazard over its surface seem a practical possibility*

A few scholars and dreamers began the fashion that made
men think in a new way. In 1883, John Seeley, Regius Professor
of Modern History at Cambridge, published his lectures on the
Expansion of England. His theme was that the outward spread
of the English race had been the main human trend of the past
three centuries. If England was wise enough to recognise her
chance, her future could be more glorious even than her past.
If she neglected it she would decline like Rome and Spain
and see her commercial wealth pass to younger rivals. For the
potamic and thalassic ages had been succeeded by an oceanic,
and the future of the world lay, not with the small nation states
of the past, but with composite world states like the U.S.A. and
Russia linked by the new forces of steam and electricity.

It was a question not of lust for power or empire, but of
common sense and civic responsibility. If the race were to
survive in a changing world, its leaders must secure the
conditions necessary for it to do so. Already hundreds of
thousands in Britain were hungry and in need of work and
living space. Yet they could have both for the asking: their
heritage was already made. alt may be true that the
mother country of this great Empire is crowded, but in order
to relieve the pressure it is not necessary for us, as if we
were Goths or Turcomans, to seize upon tie territory of our
neighbours. ... it is only necessary to take possession of bound-
less territories in Canada, South Africa and Australia where
already our language is spoken, our religion professed, and our
laws established. If there is pauperism in Wiltshire arid Dorset-
shire, this is but complementary to unowned wealth in Australia.
On the one side there are men without property, on the other
there is property waiting for men."1

Three years later Seeley's work, which ran through many
editions, was followed by one even more widely read. The
historian Froude's Qceana was named after the seventeenths

* J. R. fcefey, Expansion of Znglmd, 70-1.