Competition for the New World between the five western maritime States of Europe; this is a formula which sums up a great part of the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is one of those generalisations which escape us so long as we study history only in single states.

Much would be gained if the student of history would look at modern Europe as he has already the habit of looking at ancient Greece. Here he has constantly before him three or four different states at once, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Argos, not to mention Macedonia and Persia, and is led to make most instructive comparisons and most useful reflexions upon large general tendencies. This is entirely owing to the accident that Greece was not a State but a complex of States, which fact our historians do not perceive clearly enough to conclude, as in consistency they ought, that they ought not to write a history of Greece at all but separate histories of Athens, Sparta &c. Let me ask those of you who know Grecian history to apply to these Western States the mode of conceiving to which you have accustomed yourselves. You have been in the habit of thinking of a cluster of States gathered round a common sea, which is studded with islands and which has on the other side of it large territories imperfectly known and inhabited by strange races.