The man thus struck down, like a soldier at his post, was one whom Americans no less than Englishmen have delighted to honour. The personal fascination which he exerted in his lifetime is something we can no longer know; but as the field of modern history expands till it covers the globe, we find ourselves better able than his contemporaries to comprehend the part which he played at one of the most critical moments of the career of mankind. For simple magnitude, the preponderance of the English race in the world has come now to be the most striking fact in human history; and when we consider all that is implied in this growing preponderance of an industrial civilization over other civilizations of relatively archaic and militant type, we find reason to believe that among historic events it is the most teeming with mighty consequences to be witnessed by a distant future. With no other historic personage are the beginnings of this supremacy of the English race so closely associated as with the elder William Pitt. It was he who planned the victories which gave England the dominion of the sea, and which, rescuing India from the anarchy of centuries, prepared it to become the seat of a new civilization, at once the apt pupil and the suggestive teacher of modern Europe. It was he who, by driving the French from America, cleared the way for the peaceful overflow of our industrial civilization through the valley of the Mississippi; saving us from the political dangers which chronic warfare might otherwise have entailed, and insuring us the ultimate control of the fairest part of this continent. To his valiant and skilful lieutenants by sea and land, to such great men as Hawke, and Clive, and Wolfe, belongs the credit of executing the details; it was the genius of Pitt that conceived and superintended the prodigious scheme as a connected whole. Alone among the Englishmen of his time, Pitt looked with prophetic gaze into the mysterious future of colonial history, and saw the meaning of the creation of a new and greater Europe in the outlying regions of the earth; and through his triumphs it was decided that this new and greater Europe should become for the most part a new and greater England,--a world of self-government, and of freedom of thought and speech. While his political vision thus embraced the uttermost parts of the globe, his action in the centre of Europe helped to bring about results the importance of which we are now beginning to appreciate. From the wreck of all Germany in that horrible war of religion which filled one third of the seventeenth century, a new Protestant power had slowly emerged and grown apace, till in Pitt's time--for various reasons, dynastic, personal, and political--it had drawn down upon itself the vengeance of all the reactionary countries of Europe. Had the coalition succeeded, the only considerable Protestant power on the continent would have been destroyed, and the anarchy which had followed the Thirty Years' War