France, the next door neighbor of Great Britain, was long its prey. While, after the memorable invasion of William of Normandy, France never succeeded in transporting an army to the island shores, and even Napoleon failed utterly in his stupendous expedition, the islanders sent army after army to France, defeated its chivalry on many a hard-fought field, ravaged its most fertile domains, and for a time held it as a vassal realm of the British King. All this is matter of far-past history. But the old feeling was prominently shown again in the Napoleonic wars, when Great Britain resumed her attitude of enmity to France, and pursued the conqueror with an unrelenting hostility that finally ended in his overthrow. Only for this aggressive island Europe might have remained the bound slave of Napoleon's whims. He could conquer his enemies on land, but the people of England lay beyond his reach. Every fleet he sent to sea was annihilated by his island foes. They held the empire of the waters as he did that of the land. Enraged against these ocean hornets, he sought to repeat the enterprise of William of Normandy, but if his mighty Boulogne expedition had put to sea it would probably have met the fate of the Armada of Spain. Great Britain was impregnable. The conqueror of Europe chafed against its assaults in vain. This little island of the west was destined to be the main agent in overthrowing the great empire that his military genius had built. [=The Vast Industries of Great Britain=] Great Britain, small as it was, had grown, by the opening of the nineteenth century, to be the leading power in Europe. Its industries, its commerce, its enterprise had expanded enormously. It had become the great workshop and the chief distributor of the world. The raw material of the nations flowed through its ports, the finished products of mankind poured from its looms, London became the great money centre of the world, and the industrious and enterprising islanders grew enormously rich, while few steps of progress and enterprise showed themselves in any of the nations of the continent. [=How England Fought Against Napoleon=] It was with its money-bags that England fought against the conqueror. It could not conveniently send men, but it could send money and supplies to the warring nations, and by its influence and aid it formed coalition after coalition against Napoleon, each harder to overthrow than the last. Every peace that the Corsican won by his victories was overthrown by England's influence. Her envoys haunted every court, whispering hostility in the ears of monarchs, planning, intriguing, instigating, threatening, in a thousand ways working against his plans, and unrelentingly bent upon his overthrow. It was fitting, then, that an English general should give Napoleon the _coup de grace_, and that he should die a prisoner in English hands.