Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution, whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch every movement of the nations from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a "balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying political conditions of the time. Of this balance of power, as recognized and defined in the Treaty of Utrecht and its successors, England became the special guardian. Her insular position made her almost the one great state which could have no dreams of continental aggrandizement; while the main aim of her policy, that of guarding the throne of the Revolution, secured her fidelity to the European settlement which offered an insuperable obstacle to a Jacobite invasion. Her only interest lay in the maintenance of European peace on the basis of an observance of European treaties. [Sidenote: Its results.]