From this war, too, dated British supremacy in America:
.but the British Empire in North rica was not an empire at all in any hitherto recognized sense. It was no result of planning or conquest; it had happened. Some of the most important colonies had grown up not ecause, but in spite of the State. The Pilgrim had crossed the Ocean not to extend the British imperim, but to get away from it and govern themselves.
Failure to realize this led to disaster; the American colonists refused to give up their freedom:
....80 the memory of this American set-back was for a warning that an overseas empire—in the sense in which that word had always hitherto been taken—was something fundamentally anti-British.
As for India, into the suzerainty of which England had also stumbled almost unintentionally, the British attitude was well summed up in Burke's condemnation of any "attempt to introduce British forms and the substance of despotic principles together." The idea of freedom still predominated.
It is not the first time that Britain has stood between a tyrant and his dream of world empire; but. At de essential that she should herself fully and finally from the least taint or susi ipleion of that to which she stands opposed.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.