[Sidenote: =Personal power and territorial aggrandisement, the motives of policy.=] The monarchs and statesmen who were succeeding to the responsibilities of government in the middle of the seventeenth century found themselves in a very different position from that which their fathers had inherited. No longer were there great ideals around them to take captive their imaginations and absorb their energies. No longer were there obvious difficulties of home government to conquer or avoid. There were no struggling nationalities like that of Holland to protect, no overgrown dominating tyranny like that of Spain to oppose, no turbulent territorial baronage to crush, or be crushed by, the Crown. These questions had worked themselves out in the earlier part of the century and had left a blank behind them. A young king, who took up the reins of government after the middle of the century, found an open map before him. [Sidenote: =Unique position of the Crown.=] His country was much exhausted by war, longing above everything for rest, ready to make any sacrifices for order. The nobles, thinned and impoverished by war, were not in a position to dispute his authority. The army, well organised and obedient, gave him a power over the lives and property of his subjects, wholly unknown to former generations. A highly developed system of diplomacy enabled him to conduct negotiations secretly with all the important states of Europe, while as yet the comity of nations had established no general moral standard to which diplomatists were expected to conform. Under these circumstances it was only natural that the ambition of sovereigns should impel them to try and make their own power supreme at home, and to enlarge the boundaries of their territories abroad. Absolute power and territorial aggrandisement become the main objects of European kings. The nation is identified with the king; the larger and the richer the territory he rules, the greater his glory and circumstance. Before that all things give way. Differences of speech, differences of race, differences of religion, differences of government, count for nothing, and whole peoples are tossed about from one ruler to another like counters at the table of the diplomatists, not in cynicism but in sheer unconcern. Wrapped up in the supreme importance of gaining for their respective masters one district or one town the more, politicians have become wholly oblivious of everything else; until from the sheer necessity of having some principle to which to appeal, they eventually evolved the doctrine of the balance of power, which, when pushed to its logical development in the succeeding century, meant little else than that, if one European state managed to steal something, all the other states had the right of stealing something too. In the nineteenth century, the cause of oppressed nationalities has most powerfully influenced the map of Europe. It is the glory and the boast of the greater powers