fortunes of Ireland. Closely approaching Scotland, the northern coast of
Ireland in course of time invited Scotch immigration, which formed as it
were a Presbyterian Pale. If the antagonism between the English
Episcopalian and the Irish Catholic was strong, that between the Scotch
Presbyterian and the Irish Catholic was stronger. To the English
Episcopalian the Irish Catholic was a barbarian and a Romanist; to the
Scotch Presbyterian he was a Canaanite and an idolater. Nothing in
history is more hideous than the conflict in the north of Ireland in the
time of Charles I. This is the feud which has been tenacious enough of
its evil life to propagate itself even in the New World, and to renew in
the streets of Canadian cities the brutal and scandalous conflicts which
disgrace Belfast. On the other hand, through the Scotch colony, the
larger island has a second hold upon the smaller. Of all political
projects a federal union of England and Ireland with separate
Parliaments under the same Crown seems the most hopeless, at least if
government is to remain parliamentary; it may be safely said that the
normal relation between the two Parliaments would be collision, and
collision on a question of peace or war would be disruption. But an
independent Ireland might be a feasible as well as natural object of
Irish aspiration if it were not for the strength, moral as well as
numerical, of the two intrusive elements. How could the Catholic
majority be restrained from legislation which the Protestant minority
would deem oppressive? And how could the Protestant minority, being as
it is more English or Scotch than Irish, be restrained from stretching
its hands to England or Scotland for aid? It is true that if scepticism
continues to advance at its present rate, the lines of religious
separation may be obliterated or become too faint to exercise a great
practical influence, and the bond of the soil may then prevail. But the
feeling against England which is the strength of Irish Nationalism is
likely to subside at the same time.
Speculation on unfulfilled contingencies is not invariably barren. It is
interesting at all events to consider what would have been the
consequences to the people of the two islands, and humanity generally,
if a Saxon England and a Celtic Ireland had been allowed to grow up and
develop by the side of each other untouched by Norman conquest. In the
case of Ireland we should have been spared centuries of oppression which
has profoundly reacted, as oppression always does, on the character of
the oppressor; and it is difficult to believe that the Isle of Saints
and of primitive Universities would not have produced some good fruits
of its own. In the Norman conquest of England historical optimism sees a
great political and intellectual blessing beneath the disguise of
barbarous havoc and alien tyranny. The Conquest was the continuation of
the process of migratory invasions by which the nations of modern Europe
were founded, from restless ambition and cupidity, when it had ceased to
be beneficent. It was not the superposition of one primitive element of
population on another, to the ultimate advantage, possibly, of the
compound; but the destruction of a nationality, the nationality of
Alfred and Harold, of Bede and AElfric. The French were superior in
military organization; that they had superior gifts of any kind, or that
their promise was higher than that of the native English, it would not
be easy to prove. The language, we are told, is enriched by the
intrusion of the French element. If it was enriched it was shattered;
and the result is a mixture so heterogeneous as to be hardly available
for the purposes of exact thought, while the language of science is
borrowed from the Greek, and as regards the unlearned mass of the people
is hardly a medium of thought at all. There are great calamity in
history, though their effects may in time be worked off, and they may be
attended by some incidental good. Perhaps the greatest calamity in
history were the wars of Napoleon, in which some incidental good may
nevertheless be found.
To the influences of geographical position, soil, and race is to be
added, to complete the account of the physical heritage, the influence
of climate. But in the case of the British Islands we must speak not of
climate, but of climates, for within the compass of one small realm are
climates moist and comparatively dry, warm and cold, bracing and
enervating, the results of special influences the range of which is
limited. Civilized man to a great extent makes a climate for himself;
his life in the North is spent mainly indoors, where artificial heat
replaces the sun. The idea which still haunts us, that formidable vigour
and aptitude for conquest are the appanage of Northern races, is a
survival from the state in which the rigour of nature selected and
hardened the destined conquerors of the Roman Empire. The stoves of St.
Petersburg are as enervating as the sun of Naples, and in the struggle
between the Northern and Southern States of America not the least
vigorous soldiers were those who came from Louisiana. In the barbarous
state the action of a Northern climate as a force of natural selection
must be tremendous. Of the races which peopled the British Islands the
most important had already undergone that action in their original
abodes. They would, however, still feel the beneficent influence of a
climate on the whole eminently favourable to health and to activity;
bracing, yet not so rigorous as to kill those tender plants of humanity
which often bear in them the most precious germs of civilization,
neither confining the inhabitant too much to the shelter of his
dwelling, nor, as the suns of the South are apt to do, drawing him too
much from home. The climate and the soil together formed a good school
for the character of the young nation, as they exacted the toil of the
husbandman and rewarded it. Of the varieties of temperature and weather
within the island the national character still bears the impress, though
in a degree always decreasing as the assimilating agencies of
civilization make their way. Irrespectively of the influence of special
employments, and perhaps even of peculiarity of race, mental vigour,
independence, and reasoning power are always ascribed to the people of
the North. Variety, in this as in other respects, would naturally
produce a balance of tendencies in the nation conductive to moderation
and evenness of progress.
The islands are now the centre of an Empire which to some minds seems
more important than the islands themselves. An empire it is called, but
the name is really applicable only to India. The relation of England to
her free colonies is not in the proper sense of the term imperial, while
her relation to such dependencies as Gibraltar and Malta is military
alone. Colonization is the natural and entirely beneficent result of
general causes, obvious enough and already mentioned, including that
power of self-government, fostered by the circumstances of the
colonizing country, which made the character and destiny of New England
so different from those of New France.
Equally natural was the choice of the situation for the original
colonies on the shore of the New World. The foundation of the Australian
Colonies, on the other hand, was determined by political accident,
compensation for the loss of the American Colonies being sought on the
other side of the globe. It will perhaps be thought hereafter that the
quarrel with New England was calamitous in its consequences as well as
in itself, since it led to the diversion of British emigration from
America, where it supplied, in a democracy of mixed but not uncongenial
races, the necessary element of guidance and control, to Australia,
where, as there must be a limit to its own multiplication, it may
hereafter have to struggle for mastery with swarming multitudes of
Chinese, almost as incurable of incorporation with it as the negro.
India and the other conquered dependencies are the fruits of strength as
a war power at sea combined with weakness on land. Though not so
generally noticed, the second of these two factors has not been less
operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant
dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own
coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war
ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to
take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the
Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not
think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked
up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he could not mate the king do
not at first sight necessarily commend themselves as invaluable
possessions. Carthage and Venice were merely great commercial cities,
which, when they entered on a career of conquest, were compelled at once
to form armies of mercenaries, and to incur all the evil consequences by
which the employment of those vile and fatal instruments of ambition is
attended. England being, not a commercial city, but a nation, and a
nation endowed with the highest military qualities, has escaped the fell
necessity except in the case of India; and India, under the reign of the
Company, and even for some time after its legal annexation to the Crown,
was regarded and treated almost as a realm in another planet, with an
army, a political system, and a morality of its own. But now it appears
that the wrongs of the Hindoo are going to be avenged, as the wrongs of
the conquered have often been, by their moral effect upon the conqueror.
A body of barbarian mercenaries has appeared upon the European scene as
an integral part of the British army, while the reflex influence of
Indian Empire upon the political character and tendencies of the
imperial nation is too manifest to be any longer overlooked. England now
stands where the paths divide, the one leading by industrial and
commercial progress to increase of political liberty; the other, by a
career of conquest, to the political results in which such a career has
never yet failed to end. At present the influences in favour of taking
the path of conquest seemed to preponderate, [Footnote: Written in
1878.] and the probability seems to be that the leadership of political
progress, which has hitherto belonged to England and has constituted the
special interest of her history, will, in the near future, pass into
other hands.
THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
[Footnote: In this lecture free use has been made of recent writers--
Mitchell, Chapman, Vehse, Freytag and Ranke, as well as of the older
authorities. To Chapman's excellent Life of Gustavus Adolphus we are
under special obligations. In some passages it has been closely
followed. Colonel Mitchell has also supplied some remarks and touches,
such as are to be found only in a military writer.]
AN EPISODE OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.
The Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been
recently revived. The conflict between Austria and German Independence
commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V.,
and, continued on those battle-fields, was renewed and decided at
Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for
independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her
Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies,
sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany
struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the
victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great
uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally
accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan.
Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of
German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot
of all who aspire high--no man or nation ever was dandled into
greatness.
The Thirty Years' War was a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew
after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and
progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that
lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey
herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico
and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish
hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long
remained the Public Law of Europe.
Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway
between the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the political
wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she
crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants
against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more
politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of
Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the
princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people
religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of
Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd
the scene rise at least two grand forms.
In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no
comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The
armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty
thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von
Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat,
there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no
accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be
everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the
powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to
fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at
Augsburgh, so that the money power became the arbiter even of Imperial
elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by
their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of
anything which Von Moltke would call strategy: and hence again the cruel
length of the war, a whole generation of German agony.
But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side
especially, they were types of a class of men, the most terrible
perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of
those mercenary bands, _soldados_, in the literal and original
sense of the term, free companions, _condottieri_, lansquenets, who
came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times.
In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries, under Alva and Parma and
Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in
human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great
Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near
of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait
of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them
were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of
Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired
butcher and marauder.
But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians,
Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the
devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European
and some non-European tongues. Their only country was the camp; their
cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their
blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough
to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin
to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel, but outcasts of
all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity
of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without
scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and
again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the
carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour,
embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of
its articles the duel with all the forms--an improvement at any rate
upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that
between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day
sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a
language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished
with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was
filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against
bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which
since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate.
Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf
and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and
unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of
women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess,
as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a
battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a
great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but
the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews
who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the
central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good,
when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a
merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his
charger glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with
finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously
cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is
my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my
paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier
was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to
find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But
when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city
stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war kings any more
gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he
was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger
comrades; for the rule of that world was woe to the weak. Terrible then
were the mutinies. Fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot
altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men,
many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which
Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he
finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such
a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and
the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy
witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects
for two hundred years.
A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism,
working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria,
had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the
Church of Rome; but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons,
were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of
Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal
unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise,
questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges still
open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no
mediating authority being able to make church authority and liberty of
private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the
Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants
had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of
which Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief.
The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal
division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having
said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The
great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weak-kneed: like the Tudor
nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they
had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the
lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the
disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were
politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and
gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for
vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold
Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed
the reaction produced by the Peasants' war and the excesses of the
Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready
to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities
wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause
which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.