] The situation was well understood in London. Burke, Governor Pownall,
and others explained it in Parliament, while Chatham implored the
landlords not to alienate America, which they could not, he told them,
conquer, but which gave them a necessary market,--a market as he aptly
said, both of supply and demand. And Chatham was right, for America not
only supplied the grain to feed English labor, but bought from England at
least one third of all her surplus manufactures.
This brings us to the eighteenth century, which directly concerns us,
because the religious superstition, which had previously caused men to
seek in a conscious supreme energy the effective motor in human affairs,
had waned, and the problem presented was reduced to the operation of that
acceleration of movement by the progress of applied science which always
has been, and always must be, the prime cause of the quickening of
economic competition either as between communities or as between
individuals. And this is the capital phenomenon of civilization. For it is
now generally admitted that war is nothing but economic competition in its
acutest form. When competition reaches a certain intensity it kindles into
war or revolution, precisely as when iron is raised to a certain heat it
kindles into flame. And, for the purposes of illustration, possibly the
best method of showing how competition was quickened, and how it affected
adjacent communities during the eighteenth century, is to take navigation,
not only because navigation was much improved during the first three
quarters of that period, but because both England and France competed for
control in America by means of ships.
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