Its practical consequences have been of the nature of abatement and defection in the pursuit of national ambitions and dynastic enterprise, rather than a creative work of installing any institutional furniture suitable to its own ends.

It has in effect gone no farther than what would be called an incipient correction of abuses.
The highest rise, as well as the decline, of this movement lie within the nineteenth century.
In point of time, the decay of this amiable conceit of _laissez-faire_ in national policy coincides with the period of great advance in the technology of transport and communication in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps, on a larger outlook, it should rather be said that the run of national ambitions and animosities had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suffered a degree of decay through the diffusion of this sentimental predilection for Natural Liberty, and that this decline of the manlier aspirations was then arrested and corrected by help of these improvements in the technological situation; which enabled a closer and more coercive control to be exercised over larger areas, and at the same time enabled a more massive aggregate of warlike force to strike more effectively at a greater distance.

This whole episode of the rise and decline of _laissez-faire_ in modern history is perhaps best to be conceived as a transient weakening of nationalism, by neglect; rather than anything like the growth of a new and more humane ideal of national intercourse.

Such would be the appraisal to be had at the hands of those who speak for a strenuous national life and for the arbitrament of sportsmanlike contention in human affairs.

And the latterday growth of more militant aspirations, together with the more settled and sedulous attention to a development of control and of formidable armaments, such as followed on through the latter half of the nineteenth century, would then be rated as a resumption of those older aims and ideals that had been falling somewhat into abeyance in the slack-water days of Liberalism.
There is much to be said for this latter view; and, indeed, much has been said for it, particularly by the spokesmen of imperialist politics.
This bias of Natural Liberty has been associated in history with the English-speaking peoples, more intimately and more extensively than with any other.