If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for empire. Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks the imperial character of Persia and of Rome. England seems fated to add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant States, illustrating the theme--+húbris phyteúei tyrannón+--"insolence begets the tyrant!" Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan by the earlier Abbassides we encounter an administration singularly free from the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith. And now in the days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to nothing. Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow; but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph. It was not merely the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet. But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a change is now apparent. As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden; but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him, "companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning. But the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII, recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery, and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united. The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of nationality, cement the union.