Iain Macleod

"In the middle of the twentieth century," declared Richard Cobden, nineteenth-century apostle of free trade, "there will be only two great powers in the world, the United States and Russia, and they will overshadow all the rest." Alexis de Tocqueville had, of course, said much the same thing at much the same time. But the Frenchman's prophecy, it must be remembered, came a generation after his own country's decisive defeat at Waterloo. The Englishman's, though less familiar, is in a sense more remarkable; for it was made in the heyday of Britain's preëminence in world affairs.