The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was indeed the one large measure of reform that became law between the French Revolution and Castlereagh's d… - G. M. Trevelyan

Dictatorship and democracy must live side by side in peace, or civilization is doomed. For this end I believe Englishmen would do well to remember that the Nazi form of government is in large measure the outcome of Allied and British injustice at Versailles in 1919.

At Utrecht the bigwigged Plenipotentiaries ended an epoch, and liquidated the fifty years' struggle of the smaller States of Europe to save themselves from the hegemony of France, and of the Protestants of Europe to save themselves from the fate of the French Huguenots. These two movements of self-defence, combined by the political genius of William, had triumphed through the military genius of Marlborough. England, entering late into the struggle, had decided the issue. Her success had demonstrated that a country of free institutions could defeat a State based upon autocratic rule. This was a new idea in the world, and caused men to think afresh on the maxims of State.

In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State.