generations, such as is involved in technological development. This business development in earlier modern times, together with the accumulations of funded wealth that came of this business enterprise, ran their course to a finish in Continental Europe, leaving no basis for a new start. The new start from which the current situation takes its rise, in Europe and elsewhere, was given to the Continental peoples by
1 The perfected Ryetem of bualneM priticlple« reataon the bisloric»l bMia of free itiBtitutions, and so presnme & protracWd hiaioric! growth ol Lbeae inslliutioiui ; but a highly efScIent, though leea perfect, baainess iQ««tn w»B worked out in a relativoly abort time by the South and Centnl Europenti peoples io eul; modern times on the basis ol « less ooDSummBite aystem of rigbu. — CI. Ehreuberg, Ztitatter dtr Fugger; Sombart, KapUaliimtu, toI. 1L oh. VIIL, XIV., XV.
the English, ready-made, in the so-called Industrial Eevolution. The natural-rights metaphysics, to which the eventual breakdown o£ the old Continental system owed its specific character, came also from the English.'
In point of blood and cultural descent the population of Great Britain did not differ materially from their neighbors across the Channel or across the North Sea.* But from the beginning of the modem cultm-al era Great Britain stood outside of the general European situation, by force of its physical isolation. So that during the modern era, down to the close of the eighteenth century, the British community was in the position of an interested third party rather than a participant in the political concert of Europe. The era of " statemaking," so called, is an era in which England interferes, but is, on the whole, not greatly interfered with, so far as her own home affairs are concerned. England, and