But ill deeds take long a-dying. It was not yet a century since kings had tried to crush the freedom of a people, or since an army had taken the place of personal rule and had threatened another and still worse form of autocracy; still matters were mending. National poverty--for the country was then neither populous nor rich--may have had a little to do with past reluctance to enter the arena of European politics; and for a long time a natural dread of a despotism of any kind led a freedom-loving people to refuse supplies that might be used to create a weapon hostile to their continued liberty. But all strong nations, not governed by feminine hysteria or led by ill-balanced doctrinaires, like to feel themselves strong and respected abroad as well as at home. Blake had already shown the value of such a sentiment, but the time was hardly yet ripe for the full influence of his work to be felt. It was possibly but little known, generally, in his lifetime; for information, in the middle of the seventeenth century, was slow in spreading. Certainly it had not been fully grasped. But times were changing. National glory, once tasted, could not be maintained by keeping aloof from the broader work and interests of the world. The wars of Anne’s reign, in which Marlborough was the leading spirit, roused the bold fighting spirit that made the England of the eighteenth century, as the campaigns of the early part of the nineteenth century have kept that spirit from decay. [Illustration: THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH _From an old print_ ] But, more than this, an Englishman, the greatest of our national leaders, John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, Captain-General of the combined forces in the Netherlands, was not only to take a more prominent part in the coming war, was not only to enter into a campaign the theatre of which was to range from the Atlantic to the German Ocean, but was to command a more distinctly British contingent than in William’s reign, when British, Dutch, and even Danes fought under the same flag. And if the causes of the wars of the Dutch prince had been rather of a personal nature, as before remarked, those which now led the advisers of Queen Anne to take a vigorous offensive on the Continent, were to preserve that “Balance of Power in Europe,” which eventually became one of the special reasons advanced in the Mutiny Act for the continuous, large standing army in this country. The war was to check French oppression generally, for Europe’s sake, and to prevent a single small State from falling into her hands.