France proclaimed herself the liberator of the peoples; the monarchs of Europe combined to suppress the proletariat. During the last decade of the century one revolutionary constitution after another was set up in Paris, while the revolutionary armies shattered monarchical armies, and turned the “liberated” peoples into subject dependencies of the Republic. On the seas, however, Britain successfully asserted her supremacy. Of the commanders of the Republic, the most brilliant was the Corsican Bonaparte. He dreamed of making Egypt the basis for achieving an Asiatic empire, and thence overwhelming Europe; but the dream was shattered when he found himself isolated by Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir in the Battle of the Nile. Returning to Paris, he transformed the republic into an empire; he set up his brothers or his generals as rulers over half the kingdoms in Europe; he dictated terms to every government except Britain. Britain annihilated his fleets, and fought and beat his generals in the Spanish Peninsula. He conquered the kings, but the nations rose against him, and overthrew him; his last effort was crushed at Waterloo. Absolutism was reinstated, but the proletariats had learnt to demand freedom. Steam-power and steam-traction so changed the conditions of production as to revolutionise the relations between labour and capital, and between the landed and the manufacturing interests. In Great Britain political power passed from the landowners to the manufacturers with the great Reform Bill of 1832, and from the wealthy to the labouring classes with the Franchise Bills of 1867 and 1884. Every monarchy has been compelled to submit to limitations of its own powers more or less copied from Britain. [Sidenote: The World as it is] Britain herself, not untaught by the breach with America, has learned to establish responsible government in her Colonies, making them virtually free states; and among those states the idea of federation has taken root and is bearing fruit. In India, challenged by one native race after another, she has extended her sway over the whole peninsula, and has abolished the anomaly of governing her great dependency through a trading company. In the West her kinsmen have raised the United States into a mighty nation. In Europe France has passed through monarchy and republic and second empire into a stable republic; Italy has revolted against foreign rulers, and become a united nation; the small peoples of the Balkan Peninsula have now achieved by arms their liberty from Turkish rule. Prussia has won the hegemony of the German states, and established a new German Empire. Russia, the bogey of the West, and of Britain in particular, has shown her weakness in collision with the sudden development of Japan.