The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning point in our national history, as it is a turning point in the history of the world.... From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world. It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. 'If I send an army to Germany,' he replied in memorable words to his assailants, 'it is because in Germany I can conquer America!' This must be pronounced to be, at any rate, a very near approach to that perception which Mr. Seeley denies to his predecessors, of the truth that in the eighteenth century the expansion of England was the important side of her destinies at that epoch.