But its main strategy must be oceanic and its diplomacy will naturally ...

But its main strategy must be oceanic and its diplomacy will naturally aim at friendship with the chief military power of the Continent. Only when that power grows strong at sea must the island look for another mate.

So in the sixteenth century we had swung from Burgundy to Valois: in the seventeenth from Bourbon to Hapsburg, and the time had come for a new variety of an old combination: England at sea, Germany by land, watching the Channel and the Rhine, the Polish frontier and the Indian passes, an equipoise which would hold until Ger-many looked seaward too.

Russia, urged by that strange power of growth which had spread the Orthodox People from the Black Sea to the Arctic, and from the Baltic to the Pacific, was still moving forward.

Field maneuvers were introduced by General Hope Grant in 1870. With the volunteers' annual Field-day at Brighton, they did much to create that interest in the army and its doings which is characteristic of the later decades of the reign.