Note 79 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
I.e. as a real "Empire," the British Empire was a failure, as all Empires must be. It has been a success since it ceased to be an Empire about a hundred years ago. Cf. Professor H. E. Egerton's remark:—
"The British Colonial Empire of to-day is not the Empire which was the outcome of seventeenth-century methods. So far as the colonists themselves were concerned, English colonisation (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was a complete success, but from the point of view of the mother country it was a failure, and the rock on which it foundered was the same rock which lost America to Spain and caused Canada to acquiesce in separation from France."