How true this was, even those in Europe who had not appreciated the changed conditions of Great Britain immediately perceived when the determination of Parliament, at the end of 1701, to support the alliance against Louis XIV., took the form of voting 40,000 men, all of whom would be immediately supplied and paid with English money. True, of the 40,000 not half were British; but (save for the excellent quality of the British troops), the point was more or less indifferent. The important thing was that England was able to provide and to maintain this immense accretion to the coalition against France, and to use it where she would. We shall see later how this power turned the fate of the war. If I have insisted so strongly upon the financial factor, it is both because that factor is misappreciated in most purely military histories, and also because, in the changed circumstances of our own time, it is not easy for the reader to take for granted, as did his ancestors, the overwhelming superiority which England once enjoyed in mobilised wealth, usable after this kind. It can best be compared to the similar superiority enjoyed in the Middle Ages by the Republic of Venice, to whose fortunes, both good and ill, the story of modern England affords so strange a parallel. The second factor I have mentioned--the aristocratic constitution of the country--though almost equally important, is somewhat more elusive, and might be more properly challenged by a critic. England had not, in the first years of the eighteenth century, reached that calm and undisturbed solidity which is the mark of an aristocratic State at its zenith. Faction was bitter, the opposition between the old loyalty to the Crown and the new national régime was so determined as to make civil war possible at any moment. This condition of affairs was to last for a generation, and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century was passed that it disappeared. Nevertheless, compared with the Continental States, Great Britain already presented by 1701 that elasticity in substance and tenacity in policy which accompany aristocratic institutions. Corruption might be rife, but it was already growing difficult to purchase the services of a member of the governing class against the national interests. That knowledge of public affairs, diffused throughout a small and closely combined social class, which is the mark of an aristocracy, was already apparent. The power of choosing, from a narrow and well-known field, the best talents for any particular office (which is another mark of aristocracy), was already a power apparent in the government of this country. The solidarity which, in the face of a common enemy, an aristocracy always displays, the long-livedness, as of a corporate body, which an aristocracy enjoys, and which permits it to follow with such strict continuity whatever line of foreign policy it has undertaken, was clearly defining itself at the moment of which I write.