Critical Miscellanies, Vol. III

cutest and greatest Englishmen then living, from Richard Price up to Burke and Fox, believed that it was our battle at home that our kinsfolk were fighting across the Atlantic Ocean, and that the defeat and subjection of the colonists would have proved fatal in the end to the liberties of England herself. Surely the preservation of parliamentary freedom was as important as the curtailment of British dominion, and only less important than the rise of the new American state. Even for a monograph, Mr. Seeley puts his theme in too exclusive a frame; and even from the point of his own profession that he seeks to discover 'the laws by which states rise, expand, and prosper or fall in this world,' his survey is not sufficiently comprehensive, and his setting is too straitened.

Another criticism may be made upon the author's peculiar delimitation of his subject. We will accept Mr. Seeley's definition of history as having to do with the state, with the growth and the changes of a certain corporate society, acti