asing necessity for an army was the first unwilling rift in
the old provincial policy of isolation. England was being led, or
forced, or both, to abandon her insular position and to take her place
more actively among the nations, and the consequent need for that
permanent national police, the army, was being slowly, though
still reluctantly, recognised.

[Illustration: _Private 14^{th} Reg^{t}. 1742._]

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 Chu