Jeniffer electronic book

In the meantime Great Britain
pursued a comparatively tranquil course of domestic reform and colonial
and industrial expansion. She was the European Power whose political and
industrial energies were most completely liberated and most successfully
used; and as a consequence she naturally drifted into an extremely
self-satisfied state of mind in respect to her political and economic
organization and policy. But during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century political and economic conditions both began to change. The more
important competing nations had by that time overcome their internal
disorders, and by virtue of their domestic reforms had released new
springs of national energy. Great Britain had to face much severer
competition in the fields both of industrial and colonial expansion; and
during all of these years she has been losing ground. Her expansion has
not entirely ceased; but industrially she is being left behind by
Germany and by the United States, and her recent colonial acquisitions
have been attained only at an excessive cost.


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