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.