Excerpt from England Under the Hanoverians

The legislative union of 1707 had converted the personal union of the English and Scottish Crowns into the single dominion of Great Britain. And with 1714 set in a remarkable change. Hence forward Europe may be rent asunder by political upheavals; dynasties may come and go, forms of government be remade, crumble and perish, and the streets of European capitals run with the blood of revolution. Great Britain alone is the exception. Her sovereigns die in their beds and pass their sceptre undisputed to their heirs the outward form of the constitution defined in 1689 and 1701 remains unaltered; London, unlike Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, Rome, has never seen a foreign foe in possession; in the British calendar days of March, May, July, August and December are not marked for national rejoicing or remorse. What ever verdict may be passed on the British people since 1714 they must be acquitted of the charge that in constitutional matters they are incurably turbulent, unstable and vindictive. A single formula - the expansion of Great Britain - conveniently sums up the main results of the new epoch which begins with 1714 and ends with Waterloo and the Congresses of Vienna. And in this expansion three features stand out in deep-cut relief - the growth and consolidation of the empire, the organisation of the parlia mentary State, the Industrial Revolution. These three are triple aspects of the evolution of a single national life. They are con currently worked out; common formative causes combine to operate in producing effects that are revealed concurrently in the political, constitutional and economic spheres of State-development. But the student, anxious to compare broadly the contribution of the eighteenth century to our national development with that of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, is entitled to disentangle and to analyse these features separately, in order more accurately to appreciate their intrinsic characteristics and import.

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