Britain learned many valuable lessons from the American Revolution. In the new empire which she began to build up as soon as the old one was lost, it might have been expected that she would have fought shy of those principles of self-government which no other State had ever tried to apply in its over-sea dominions, and which seemed to have led (from the imperialistic point of view) to such disastrous results in America. But she did not do so; the habits of self-government were too deeply rooted in her sons to make it possible for her to deny them self-governing rights in their new homes. On the contrary, she learnt, during the nineteenth century, to welcome and facilitate every expansion of their freedom,[3] and she gradually felt her way towards a means of realising a partnership of free peoples whereby freedom should be combined with unity. Its success (although it must still undergo much development) has been strikingly shown in the Great War. Thus British institutions--the institutions of national self-government, which are peculiarly British in origin--have played a main part both in determining the character of the British Empire and in bringing about its wonderful expansion. The more the British Empire has grown the more freedom has been established on the face of the earth. The second great factor in the growth of the British Empire has been the power of the British Navy, which has been the greatest sea power of the world practically since the overthrow of the Spanish Armada in 1588. It is a striking fact that in all her history Britain has never possessed a large army, until the necessities of this war suddenly forced her (as they are now forcing America) to perform the miracle of calling her whole manhood from the pursuits of peace to arms, of training them, and of equipping them, all within two years. In 1775 it was the fact that she possessed only a tiny armed force (some 40,000 men for the defence of all her dominions), which made it necessary for her, for example, to hire Hessian troops in a hurry for the purposes of the American War of Independence. Is not this an astounding paradox, that the power which has acquired dominion over one-quarter of the earth has done it without ever possessing a large army? And does it not suggest that the process by which this empire was acquired must have been very different from the ordinary processes of military conquest? This is a paradox which those who speak of the British Empire as if it were a mere military dominion must somehow explain.