did not fail to impress the superstitious. Once his strong hand lay
still, England fell away from this premature attempt to realize a
righteous commonweal of free men. In 1660 Charles II, the son of Charles
the “Martyr,” was welcomed back to England with all those
manifestations of personal loyalty dear to the English heart, and the
country relaxed from its military and naval efficiency as a sleeper
might wake and stretch and yawn after too intense a dream. The Puritans
were done with. “Merrie England” was herself again, and in 1667 the
Dutch, once more masters of the sea, sailed up the Thames to Gravesend
and burnt an English fleet in the Medway. “On the night when our ships
were burnt by the Dutch,” says Pepys, in his diary, “the King did sup
with my Lady Castelmaine, and there they were all mad, hunting a poor
moth.” Charles, from the date of his return, 1660, took control of the
foreign affairs of the state, and in 1670 concluded a secret treaty with
Louis XIV of France by which he undertook to subordinate entirely
English foreign policy to that of France for an annual pension of
£100,000. Dunkirk, which Cromwell had taken, had already been sold back
to France. The King was a great sportsman; he had the true English love
for watching horse races, and the racing centre at Newmarket is perhaps
his most characteristic monument.
While Charles lived, his easy humour enabled him to retain the British
crown, but he did so by wariness and compromise, and when in 1685 he was
succeeded by his brother James II, who was a devout Catholic, and too
dull to recognize the hidden limitation of the monarchy in Britain, the
old issue between Parliament and Crown became acute. James set himself
to force his country into a religious reunion with Rome. In 1688 he was
in flight to France. But this time the great lords and merchants and
gentlemen were too circumspect to let this revolt against the King fling
them into the hands of a second Pride or a second Cromwell. They had
already called in another king, William, Prince of Orange, to replace
James. The change was made rapidly. There was no civil war--except in
Ireland--and no release of the deeper revolutionary forces of the
country.
Of William’s claim to the throne, or rather of his wife Mary’s claim, we
cannot tell here, its interest is purely technical, nor how William III
and Mary ruled, nor how, after the widower William had reigned alone for
a time, the throne passed on to Mary’s sister Anne (1702-14). Anne seems
to have thought favourably of a restoration of the Stuart line, but the
Lords and the Commons, who now dominated English affairs, preferred a
less competent king. Some sort of claim could be made out for the
Elector of Hanover, who became King of England as George I (1714-27). He
was entirely German, he could speak no English, and he brought a swarm
of German women and German attendants to the English court; a dullness,
a tarnish, came over the intellectual life of the land with his coming,
the poetry, painting, architecture, and imaginative literature of later
eighteenth-century England is immeasurably below that of the seventeenth
century,[408] but this isolation of the court from English life was his
conclusive recommendation to the great landowners and the commercial
interests who chiefly brought him over. England entered upon a phase
which Lord Beaconsfield has called the “Venetian oligarchy” stage; the
supreme power resided in Parliament, dominated now by the Lords, for the
art of bribery and a study of the methods of working elections carried
to a high pitch by Sir Robert Walpole had robbed the House of Commons of
its original freedom and vigour. By ingenious devices the parliamentary
vote was restricted to a shrinking number of electors, old towns with
little or no population would return one or two members (old Sarum had
one non-resident voter, no population, and two members), while newer
populous centres had no representation at all. And by insisting upon a
high property qualification for members, the chance of the Commons
speaking in common accents of vulgar needs was still more restricted.
George I was followed by the very similar George II (1727-60), and it
was only at his death that England had again a king who had been born in
England, and one who could speak English fairly well, his grandson
George III. On this monarch’s attempt to recover some of the larger
powers of monarchy we shall have something to say in a later section.
Such briefly is the story of the struggle in England during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the three main factors in
the problem of the “modern state”; between the crown, the private
property owners, and that vague power, still blind and ignorant, the
power of the quite common people. This latter factor appears as yet only
at moments when the country is most deeply stirred; then it sinks back
into the depths. But the end of the story, thus far, is a very complete
triumph of the British private property owner over the dreams and
schemes of Machiavellian absolutism. With the Hanoverian Dynasty England
became--as the _Times_ recently styled her--a “crowned republic.” She
had worked out a new method of government, Parliamentary government,
recalling in many ways the Senate and Popular Assembly of Rome, but more
steadfast and efficient because of its use, however restricted, of the
representative method. Her assembly at Westminster was to become the
“Mother of Parliaments” throughout the world. Towards the crown the
English Parliament has held and still holds much the relation of the
mayor of the palace to the Merovingian kings. The king is conceived of
as ceremonial and irresponsible, a living symbol of the royal and
imperial system. But much power remains latent in the tradition and
prestige of the crown, and the succession of the four Hanoverian
Georges, William IV (1830), Victoria (1837), Edward VII (1901), and the
present king, George V (1910), is of a quite different strain from the
feeble and short-lived Merovingian monarchs. In the affairs of the
church, the military and naval organizations, and the foreign office,
these sovereigns have all in various degrees exercised an influence
which is none the less important because it is indefinable.
§ 3
The breaking away of the Netherlands from absolutist monarchy was on the
face of it much more of a religious and national affair and much less
economic and social than the English parliamentary revolution. In the
twelfth century all the lower Rhine country was divided up among a
number of small rulers, and the population was a Low German one on a
Keltic basis, mixed with subsequent Danish ingredients very similar to
the English admixture. The southeastern fringe of it spoke French
dialects; the bulk, Frisian, Dutch, and other Low German languages. The
Netherlands figured largely in the crusades. Godfrey of Bouillon, who
took Jerusalem (First Crusade), was a Belgian; and the founder of the
so-called Latin Dynasty of emperors in Constantinople (Fourth Crusade)
was Baldwin of Flanders. (They were called Latin emperors because they
were on the side of the Latin church.) In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries considerable towns grew up in the Netherlands: Ghent, Bruges,
Ypres, Utrecht, Leyden, Haarlem, and so forth; and these towns developed
quasi-independent municipal governments and a class of educated
townsmen. We will not trouble the reader with the dynastic accidents
that linked the affairs of the Netherlands with Burgundy (Eastern
France), and which finally made their overlordship the inheritance of
the Emperor Charles V.
It was under Charles that the Protestant doctrines that now prevailed in
Germany spread into the Netherlands. Charles persecuted with some
vigour, but in 1556, as we have told, he handed over the task to his son
Philip (Philip II). Philip’s spirited foreign policy--he was carrying on
a war with France--presently became a second source of trouble between
himself and the Netherlandish noblemen and townsmen, because he had to
come to them for supplies. The great nobles, led by William the Silent,
Prince of Orange, and the Counts of Egmont and Horn, made themselves the
heads of a popular resistance, in which it is now impossible to
disentangle the objection to taxation from the objection to religious
persecution. The great nobles were not at first Protestants. They became
Protestants as the struggle grew in bitterness. The people were often
bitterly Protestant.
Philip was resolved to rule both the property and consciences of his
Netherlander. He sent picked Spanish troops into the country, and he
made governor-general a nobleman named Alva, one of those ruthless
“strong” men who wreck governments and monarchies. For a time he ruled
the land with a hand of iron, but the hand of iron begets a soul of iron
in the body it grips, and in 1567--about eighty years, that is, before
the English civil war--the Netherlands were in open revolt. Alva
murdered, sacked, and massacred--in vain. Counts Egmont and Horn were
executed. William the Silent became the great leader of the Dutch, a
king _de facto_. For a long time, and with many complications, the
struggle for liberty continued, and through it all it is noteworthy that
the rebels continued to cling to the plea that Philip II was their
king--if only he would be a reasonable and limited king. But the idea of
limited monarchy was distasteful to the crowned heads of Europe at that
time, and at last Philip drove the United Provinces, for which we now
use the name of Holland, to the republican form of government. Holland,
be it noted--not all the Netherlands; the southern Netherlands, Belgium
as we now call that country, remained at the end of the struggle a
Spanish possession and Catholic.
The siege of Alkmaar (1573), as Motley[409] describes it, may be taken
as a sample of that long and hideous conflict between the little Dutch
people and the still vast resources of Catholic Imperialism.
“‘If I take Alkmaar,’ Alva wrote to Philip, ‘I am resolved not to leave
a single creature alive; the knife shall be put to every throat.’ ...
“And now, with the dismantled and desolate Haarlem before their eyes, a
prophetic phantom, perhaps, of their own imminent fate, did the handful
of people shut up within Alkmaar prepare for the worst. Their main hope
lay in the friendly sea. The vast sluices called the Zyp, through which
the inundation of the whole northern province could be very soon
effected, were but a few miles distant. By opening these gates, and by
piercing a few dykes, the ocean might be made to fight for them. To
obtain this result, however, the consent of the inhabitants was
requisite, as the destruction of all the standing crops would be
inevitable. The city was so closely invested, that it was a matter of
life and death to venture forth, and it was difficult, therefore, to
find an envoy for this hazardous mission. At last, a carpenter in the
city, Peter Van der Mey by name, undertook the adventure....
“Affairs soon approached a crisis within the beleaguered city. Daily
skirmishes, without decisive results, had taken place outside the walls.
At last, on the 18th of September, after a steady cannonade of nearly
twelve hours, Don Frederick, at three in the afternoon, ordered an
assault. Notwithstanding his seven months’ experience at Haarlem, he
still believed it certain that he should carry Alkmaar by storm. The
attack took place at once upon the Frisian gate and upon the red tower
on the opposite side. Two choice regiments, recently arrived from
Lombardy, led the onset, rending the air with their shouts and confident
of an easy victory. They were sustained by what seemed an overwhelming
force of disciplined troops. Yet never, even in the recent history of
Haarlem, had an attack been received by more dauntless breasts. Every
living man was on the walls. The storming parties were assailed with
cannon, with musketry, with pistols. Boiling water, pitch and oil,
molten lead, and unslaked lime were poured upon them every moment.
Hundreds of tarred and burning hoops were skilfully quoited around the
necks of the soldiers, who struggled in vain to extricate themselves
from these fiery ruffs, while as fast as any of the invaders planted
foot upon the breach, they were confronted face to face with sword and
dagger by the burghers, who hurled them headlong into the moat below.
“Thrice was the attack renewed with ever-increasing rage--thrice
repulsed with unflinching fortitude. The storm continued four hours
long. During all that period not one of the defenders left his post,
till he dropped from it dead or wounded.... The trumpet of recall was
sounded, and the Spaniards, utterly discomfited, retired from the walls,
leaving at least one thousand dead in the trenches, while only thirteen
burghers and twenty-four of the garrison lost their lives.... Ensign
Solis, who had mounted the breach for an instant, and miraculously
escaped with life, after having been hurled from the battlements,
reported that he had seen ‘neither helmet nor harness’ as he looked down
into the city: only some plain-looking people, generally dressed like
fishermen. Yet these plain-looking fishermen had defeated the veterans
of Alva....
“Meantime, as Governor Sonoy had opened many of the dykes, the land in
the neighbourhood of the camp was becoming plashy, although as yet the
threatened inundation had not taken place. The soldiers were already
very uncomfortable and very refractory. The carpenter-envoy had not been
idle....”
He returned with despatches for the city. By accident or contrivance he
lost these despatches as he made his way into the town, so that they
fell into Alva’s hands. They contained a definite promise from the Duke
of Orange to flood the country so as to drown the whole Spanish army.
Incidentally this would also have drowned most of the Dutch harvest and
cattle. But Alva, when he had read these documents, did not wait for the
opening of any more sluices. Presently the stout men of Alkmaar,
cheering and jeering, watched the Spaniards breaking camp....
The form assumed by the government of Holland was a patrician republic
under the headship of the house of Orange. The States-General was far
less representative of the whole body of citizens than was the English
Parliament even in its “Venetian” days. Though the worst of the struggle
was over after Alkmaar, Holland was not effectively independent until
1609, and its independence was only fully and completely recognized by
the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We have given this account of the
origin of free Holland _after_ our account of the English revolution
because it was less representative of the essential triangle of forces
in the developing modern state, and because it was complicated by the
merely patriotic element of insurrection against the Spanish foreigner.
But though we have told of it later, the reader must remember it came to
its climax in the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, half a century
earlier than the English civil war. As Motley says, the Dutch, the
English, and the American revolution, of which latter we have presently
to tell, “form but a single chapter in the great volume of human fate.”
§ 4
Upon no part of Europe did the collapse of the idea of a unified
Christendom bring more disastrous consequences than to Germany.
Naturally one would have supposed that the Emperor, being by origin a
German, both in the case of the earlier lines and in the case of the
Habsburgs, would have developed into the national monarch of a united
German-speaking state. It was the accidental misfortune of Germany that
her Emperors never remained German. Frederick II, the last Hohenstaufen,
was, as we have seen, a half-Orientalized Sicilian; the Habsburgs, by
marriage and inclination, became in the person of Charles V, first
Burgundian and then Spanish in spirit. After the death of Charles V, his
brother Ferdinand took Austria and the empire, and his son Philip II
took Spain, the Netherlands, and South Italy; but the Austrian line,
obstinately Catholic, holding its patrimony mostly on the eastern
frontiers, deeply entangled therefore with Hungarian affairs and paying
tribute, as Ferdinand and his two successors did, to the Turk, retained
no grip upon the north Germans with their disposition towards
Protestantism, their Baltic and westward affinities, and their ignorance
of or indifference to the Turkish danger.
[Illustration: Central EUROPE after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648.]
The sovereign princes, dukes, electors, prince bishops, and the like,
whose domains cut up the map of the Germany of the Middle Ages into a
crazy patchwork, were really not the equivalents of the kings of England
and France. They were rather on the level of the great land-owning dukes
and peers of France and England. Until 1701 none of them had the title
of “King.” Many of their dominions were less both in size and value than
the larger estates of the British nobility. The German Diet was like the
States-General or like a parliament without the presence of elected
representatives. So that the great civil war in Germany that presently
broke out, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), was in its essential nature
much more closely akin to the civil war in England (1643-49) and to the
war of the Fronde (1648-53), the league of feudal nobles against the
Crown in France, than appears upon the surface. In all these cases the
Crown was either Catholic or disposed to become Catholic, and the
recalcitrant nobles found their individualistic disposition tending to a
Protestant formula. But while in England and Holland the Protestant
nobles and rich merchants ultimately triumphed and in France the success
of the Crown was even more complete, in Germany neither was the Emperor
strong enough, nor had the Protestant princes a sufficient unity and
organization among themselves to secure a conclusive triumph. It ended
there in a torn-up Germany. Moreover, the German issue was complicated
by the fact that various non-German peoples, the Protestant Bohemians
and the Protestant Swedes (who had a new Protestant monarchy which had
arisen under Gustava Vasa as a direct result of the Reformation) were
entangled in the struggle. Finally, the French monarchy, triumphant now
over its own nobles, although it was Catholic, came in on the Protestant
side with the evident intention of taking the place of the Habsburgs as
the imperial line.
The prolongation of the war, and the fact that it was not fought along a
determined frontier, but all over an empire of patches, Protestant here,
Catholic there, made it one of the most cruel and destructive that
Europe had known since the days of the barbarian raids. Its peculiar
mischief lay not in the fighting, but in the concomitants of the
fighting. It came at a time when military tactics had developed to a
point that rendered ordinary levies useless against trained professional
infantry. Volley firing with muskets at a range of a few score yards had
abolished the individualistic knight in armour, but the charge of
disciplined masses of cavalry could still disperse any infantry that had
not been drilled into a mechanical rigidity. The infantry with their
muzzle-loading muskets could not keep up a steady enough fire to wither
determined cavalry before it charged home. They had, therefore, to meet
the shock standing or kneeling behind a bristling wall of pikes or
bayonets. For this they needed great discipline and experience. Iron
cannon were still of small size and not very abundant, and they did not
play a decisive part as yet in warfare. They could “plough lanes” in
infantry, but they could not easily smash and scatter it if it was
sturdy and well drilled. War under these conditions was entirely in the
hands of seasoned professional soldiers, and the question of their pay
was as important a one to the generals of that time as the question of
food or munitions. As the long struggle dragged on from phase to phase,
and the financial distress of the land increased, the commanders of both
sides were forced to fall back upon the looting of towns and villages,
both for supply and to make up the arrears of their soldiers’ pay. The
soldiers became, therefore, more and more mere brigands living on the
country, and the Thirty Years’ War set up a tradition of looting as a
legitimate operation in warfare and of outrage as a soldiers’ privilege
that has tainted the good name of Germany right down to the Great War of
1914. The earlier chapters of Defoe’s _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, with its
vivid description of the massacre and burning of Magdeburg, will give
the reader a far better idea of the warfare of this time than any formal
history. So harried was the land that the farmers ceased from
cultivation, what snatch crops could be harvested were hidden away, and
great crowds of starving women and children became camp followers of the
armies, and supplied a thievish tail to the rougher plundering. At the
close of the struggle all Germany was ruined and desolate. Central
Europe did not fully recover from these robberies and devastations for a
century.
Here we can but name Tilly and Wallenstein, the great plunder captains
on the Habsburg side, and Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, the
Lion of the North, the champion of the Protestants, whose dream was to
make the Baltic Sea a “Swedish Lake.” Gustavus Adolphus was killed in
his decisive victory over Wallenstein at Lützen (1632), and Wallenstein
was murdered in 1634. In 1648 the princes and diplomatists gathered
amidst the havoc they had made to patch up the affairs of Central Europe
at the Peace of Westphalia. By that peace the power of the Emperor was
reduced to a shadow, and the acquisition of Alsace brought France up to
the Rhine. And one German prince, the Hohenzollern Elector of
Brandenburg, acquired so much territory as to become the greatest German
power next to the Emperor, a power that presently (1701) became the
kingdom of Prussia. The Treaty also recognized two long accomplished
facts, the separation from the empire and the complete independence of
both Holland and Switzerland.
§ 5
We have opened this chapter with the stories of two countries. Britain
and the Netherlands, in which the resistance of the private citizen to
this new type of monarchy, the Machiavellian monarchy, that was arising
out of the moral collapse of Christendom, succeeded. But in France,
Russia, in many states of Germany and of Italy--Saxony and Tuscany _e.
g._--personal monarchy was not so restrained and overthrown; it
established itself indeed as the ruling European system during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
(In Poland conditions were peculiar, and they will be dealt with in a
later section.)
In France there had been no Magna Carta, and there was no tradition of
parliamentary rule. There was the same opposition of interests between
the crown on the one hand and the landlords and merchants on the other,
but the latter had no recognized and traditional gathering-place, and no
dignified method of unity. They formed oppositions to the crown, they
made leagues of resistance--such was the “Fronde,” which was struggling
against the young King Louis XIV and his great minister Mazarin, while
Charles I was fighting for his life in England--but ultimately (1652),
after a civil war, they were conclusively defeated; and while in England
after the establishment of the Hanoverians the House of Lords and their
subservient Commons ruled the country, in France, after 1652, the court
entirely dominated the aristocracy. Cardinal Mazarin was himself
building upon a foundation that Cardinal Richelieu, the contemporary of
King James I of England, had prepared for him. After the time of Mazarin
we hear of no great French nobles unless they are at court as court
servants and officials. They have been tamed--but at a price, the price
of throwing the burthen of taxation upon the voiceless mass of the
common people. From many taxes both the clergy and the
nobility--everyone indeed who bore a title--were exempt. In the end this
injustice became intolerable, but for a while the French monarchy
flourished like the Psalmist’s green bay tree. By the opening of the
eighteenth century English writers are already calling attention to the
misery of the French lower classes and the comparative prosperity, _at
that time_, of the English poor.
[Illustration: Louis XIV.]
On such terms of unrighteousness what we may call “Grand Monarchy”
established itself in France. Louis XIV, styled the Grand Monarque,
reigned for the unparalleled length of seventy-two years (1643-1715),
and set a pattern for all the kings of Europe. At first he was guided by
his Machiavellian minister, Cardinal Mazarin; after the death of the
Cardinal he himself in his own proper person became the ideal “Prince.”
He was, within his limitations, an exceptionally capable king; his
ambition was stronger than his baser passions, and he guided his
country towards bankruptcy through the complication of a spirited
foreign policy, with an elaborate dignity that still extorts our
admiration. His immediate desire was to consolidate and extend France to
the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb the Spanish Netherlands; his
remoter view saw the French kings as the possible successors of
Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He made bribery a state
method almost more important than warfare. Charles II of England was in
his pay, and so were most of the Polish nobility, presently to be
described. His money, or rather the money of the tax-paying classes in
France, went everywhere. But his prevailing occupation was splendour.
His great palace at Versailles, with its salons, its corridors, its
mirrors, its terraces and fountains and parks and prospects, was the
envy and admiration of the world. He provoked a universal imitation.
Every king and princelet in Europe was building his own Versailles as
much beyond his means as his subjects and credits would permit.
Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or extended their chateaux to the new
pattern. A great industry of beautiful and elaborate fabrics and
furnishings developed. The luxurious arts flourished everywhere;
sculpture in alabaster, faience, gilt wood-work, metal work, stamped
leather, much music, magnificent painting, beautiful printing and
bindings, fine cookery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine
furniture went a strange race of “gentlemen” in vast powdered wigs,
silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing canes;
and still more wonderful “ladies,” under towers of powdered hair and
wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it
all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the
meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those lower
darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate.
We cannot give here at any length the story of the wars and doings of
this monarch. In many ways Voltaire’s _Siècle de Louis XIV_ is still the
best and most wholesome account. He created a French navy fit to face
the English and Dutch; a very considerable achievement. But because his
intelligence did not rise above the lure of that Fata Morgana, that
crack in the political wits of Europe, the dream of a world-wide Holy
Roman Empire, he drifted in his later years to the propitiation of the
Papacy, which had hitherto been hostile to him. He set himself against
those spirits of independence and disunion, the Protestant princes, and
he made war against Protestantism in France. Great numbers of his most
sober and valuable subjects were driven abroad by his religious
persecutions, taking arts and industries with them. The English silk
manufacture, for instance, was founded by French Protestants. Under his
rule were carried out the “dragonnades,” a peculiarly malignant and
effectual form of persecution. Rough soldiers were quartered in the
houses of the Protestants, and were free to disorder the life of their
hosts and insult their womankind as they thought fit. Men yielded to
that sort of pressure who would not have yielded to rack and fire. The
education of the next generation of Protestants was broken up, and the
parents had to give Catholic instruction or none. They gave it, no
doubt, with a sneer and an intonation that destroyed all faith in it.
While more tolerant countries became mainly sincerely Catholic or
sincerely Protestant, the persecuting countries, like France and Spain
and Italy, so destroyed honest Protestant teaching that these peoples
became mainly Catholic believers or Catholic atheists, ready to break
out into blank atheism whenever the opportunity offered. The next reign,
that of Louis XV, was the age of that supreme mocker, Voltaire
(1694-1778), an age in which everybody in French society conformed to
the Roman church and hardly anyone believed in it.
It was part--and an excellent part--of the pose of Grand Monarchy to
patronize literature and the sciences. Louis XIV set up an academy of
sciences in rivalry with the English Royal Society of Charles II and the
similar association at Florence. He decorated his court with poets,
playwrights, philosophers, and scientific men. If the scientific process
got little inspiration from this patronage, it did at any rate acquire
resources for experiment and publication, and a certain prestige in the
eyes of the vulgar.
Louis XV was the great-grandson of Louis XIV, and an incompetent
imitator of his predecessor’s magnificence. He posed as a king, but his
ruling passion was that common obsession of our kind, the pursuit of
women, tempered by a superstitious fear of hell. How such women as the
Duchess of Châteauroux, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame du Barry
dominated the pleasures of the king, and how wars and alliances were
made, provinces devastated, thousands of people killed, because of the
vanities and spites of these creatures, and how all the public life of
France and Europe was tainted with intrigue and prostitution and
imposture because of them, the reader must learn from the memoirs of the
time. The spirited foreign policy went on steadily under Louis XV
towards its final smash. In 1774 this Louis, Louis the Well-Beloved, as
his flatterers called him, died of smallpox, and was succeeded by his
grandson, Louis XVI (1774-93), a dull, well-meaning man, an excellent
shot, and an amateur locksmith of some ingenuity. Of how he came to
follow Charles I to the scaffold we shall tell in a later section. Our
present concern is with Grand Monarchy in the days of its glory.
[Illustration: EUROPE in 1714]
Among the chief practitioners of Grand Monarchy outside France we may
note first the Prussian kings, Frederick William I (1713-40), and his
son and successor, Frederick II, Frederick the Great (1740-86). The
story of the slow rise of the Hohenzollern family, which ruled the
kingdom of Prussia, from inconspicuous beginnings is too tedious and
unimportant for us to follow here. It is a story of luck and violence,
of bold claims and sudden betrayals. It is told with great appreciation
in Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_. By the eighteenth century the
Prussian kingdom was important enough to threaten the empire; it had a
strong, well-drilled army, and its king was an attentive and worthy
student of Machiavelli. Frederick the Great perfected his Versailles at
Potsdam. There the park of Sans Souci, with its fountains, avenues,
statuary, aped its model; there also was the New Palace, a vast brick
building erected at enormous expense, the Orangery in the Italian style,
with a collection of pictures, a Marble Palace, and so on. Frederick
carried culture to the pitch of authorship, and corresponded with and
entertained Voltaire, to their mutual exasperation. The Austrian
dominions were kept too busy between the hammer of the French and the
anvil of the Turks to develop the real Grand Monarch style until the
reign of Maria-Theresa (who, being a woman, did not bear the title of
Empress) (1740-80). Joseph II, who was Emperor from 1765-92, succeeded
to her palaces in 1780. With Peter the Great (1682-1725) the empire of
Muscovy broke away from her Tartar traditions and entered the sphere of
French attraction. Peter shaved the Oriental beards of his nobles and
introduced Western costume. These were but the outward and visible
symbols of his westering tendencies. To release himself from the Asiatic
feeling and traditions of Moscow, which, like Pekin, has a sacred inner
city, the Kremlin, he built himself a new capital, Petrograd, upon the
swamp of the Neva. And of course he built his Versailles, the Peterhof,
about eighteen miles from this new Paris, employing a French architect
and having a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park, and
all the recognized features. His more distinguished successors were
Elizabeth (1741-62) and Catherine the Great, a German princess, who,
after obtaining the crown in sound Oriental fashion through the murder
of her husband, the legitimate Tsar, reverted to advanced Western ideals
and ruled with great vigour from 1762 to 1796. She set up an academy,
and corresponded with Voltaire. And she lived to witness the end of the
system of Grand Monarchy in Europe and the execution of Louis XVI.
We cannot even catalogue here the minor Grand Monarchs of the time in
Florence (Tuscany) and Savoy and Saxony and Denmark and Sweden.
Versailles, under a score of names, is starred in every volume of
Bædeker, and the tourist gapes in their palaces. Nor can we deal with
the war of the Spanish Succession. Spain, overstrained by the imperial
enterprises of Charles V and Philip II, and enfeebled by a bigoted
persecution of Protestants, Moslems, and Jews, was throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sinking down from her temporary
importance in European affairs to the level of a secondary power again.
These European monarchs ruled their kingdoms as their noblemen ruled
their estates: they plotted against one another, they were politic and
far-seeing in an unreal fashion, they made wars, they spent the
substance of Europe upon absurd “policies” of aggression and resistance.
At last there burst upon them a great storm out of the depths. That
storm, the First French Revolution, the indignation of the common man in
Europe, took their system unawares. It was but the opening outbreak of a
great cycle of political and social storms that still continue, that
will perhaps continue until every vestige of nationalist monarchy has
been swept out of the world and the skies clear again for the great
peace of the federation of mankind.
§ 6
We have seen how the idea of a world-rule and a community of mankind
first came into human affairs, and we have traced how the failure of the
Christian churches to sustain and establish those conceptions of its
founder, led to a moral collapse in political affairs and a reversion to
egotism and want of faith. We have seen how Machiavellian monarchy set
itself up against the spirit of brotherhood in Christendom, and how
Machiavellian monarchy developed throughout a large part of Europe into
the Grand Monarchies and Parliamentary Monarchies of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. But the mind and imagination of man is incessantly
active, and beneath the sway of the grand monarchs, a complex of notions
and traditions was being woven as a net is woven, to catch and entangle
men’s minds, the conception of international politics not as a matter of
dealings between princes, but as a matter of dealings between a kind of
immortal Beings, the Powers. The Princes came and went; a Louis XIV
would be followed by a petticoat-hunting Louis XV, and he again by that
dull-witted amateur locksmith, Louis XVI. Peter the Great gave place to
a succession of empresses; the chief continuity of the Habsburgs after
Charles V, either in Austria or Spain, was a continuity of thick lips,
clumsy chins, and superstition; the amiable scoundrelism of a Charles II
would make a mock of his own pretensions. But what remained much more
steadfast were the secretariats of the foreign ministeries and the ideas
of people who wrote of state concerns. The ministers maintained a
continuity of policy during the “off days” of their monarchs, and
between one monarch and another.
So we find that the prince gradually became less important in men’s
minds than the “Power” of which he was the head. We begin to read less
and less of the schemes and ambitions of King This or That, and more of
the “Designs of France” or the “Ambitions of Prussia.” In an age when
religious faith was declining, we find men displaying a new and vivid
belief in the reality of these personifications. These vast vague
phantoms, the “Powers,” crept insensibly into European political
thought, until in the later eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries
they dominated it entirely. To this day they dominate it. European life
remained nominally Christian, but to worship one God in spirit and in
truth is to belong to one community with all one’s fellow worshippers.
In practical reality Europe does not do this, she has given herself up
altogether to the worship of this strange state mythology. To these
sovereign deities, to the unity of “Italy,” to the hegemony of
“Prussia,” to the glory of “France,” and the destinies of “Russia,” she
has sacrificed many generations of possible unity, peace, and prosperity
and the lives of millions of men.
To regard a tribe or a state as a sort of personality is a very old
disposition of the human mind. The Bible abounds in such
personifications. Judah, Edom, Moab, Assyria figure in the Hebrew
Scriptures as if they were individuals; it is sometimes impossible to
say whether the Hebrew writer is dealing with a person or with a nation.
It is manifestly a primitive and natural tendency. But in the case of
modern Europe it is a retrocession. Europe, under the idea of
Christendom, had gone far towards unification. And while such tribal
persons as “Israel” or “Tyre” did represent a certain community of
blood, a certain uniformity of type, and a homogeneity of interest, the
European powers which arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were entirely fictitious unities. Russia was in truth an assembly of the
most incongruous elements, Cossacks, Tartars, Ukrainians, Muscovites,
and, after the time of Peter, Esthonians and Lithuanians; the France of
Louis XV comprehended German Alsace and freshly assimilated regions of
Burgundy; it was a prison of suppressed Huguenots and a sweating-house
for peasants. In “Britain,” England carried on her back the Hanoverian
dominions in Germany, Scotland, the profoundly alien Welsh and the
hostile and Catholic Irish. Such powers as Sweden, Prussia, and still
more so Poland and Austria, if we watch them in a series of historical
maps, contract, expand, thrust out extensions, and wander over the map
of Europe like amœbæ under the microscope....
If we consider the psychology of international relationship as we see it
manifested in the world about us, and as it is shown by the development
of the “Power” idea in modern Europe, we shall realize certain
historically very important facts about the nature of man. Aristotle
said that man is a political animal, but in our modern sense of the word
politics, which now covers world-politics, he is nothing of the sort. He
has still the instincts of the family tribe, and beyond that he has a
disposition to attach himself and his family to something larger, to a
tribe, a city, a nation, or a state. But that disposition, left to
itself, is a vague and very uncritical disposition. If anything, he is
inclined to fear and dislike criticism of this something larger that
encloses his life and to which he has given himself, and to avoid such
criticism. Perhaps he has a subconscious fear of the isolation that may
ensue if the system is broken or discredited. He takes the _milieu_ in
which he finds himself for granted; he accepts his city or his
government, just as he accepts the nose or the digestion which fortune
has bestowed upon him. But men’s loyalties, the sides they take in
political things, are not innate, they are educational results. For most
men their education in these matters is the silent, continuous education
of things about them. Men find themselves a part of Merry England or
Holy Russia; they grow up into these devotions; they accept them as a
part of their nature.
It is only slowly that the world is beginning to realize how profoundly
the tacit education of circumstances can be supplemented, modified, or
corrected by positive teaching, by literature, discussion, and properly
criticized experience. The real life of the ordinary man is his everyday
life, his little circle of affections, fears, hungers, lusts, and
imaginative impulses. It is only when his attention is directed to
political affairs as something vitally affecting this personal circle,
that he brings his reluctant mind to bear upon them. It is scarcely too
much to say that the ordinary man thinks as little about political
matters as he can, and stops thinking about them as soon as possible. It
is still only very curious and exceptional minds, or minds that have by
example or good education acquired the scientific habit of wanting to
know why, or minds shocked and distressed by some public catastrophe
and roused to wide apprehensions of danger, that will not accept
governments and institutions, however preposterous, that do not directly
annoy them, as satisfactory. The ordinary human being, until he is so
aroused, will acquiesce in any collective activities that are going on
in this world in which he finds himself, and any phrasing or
symbolization that meets his vague need for something greater to which
his personal affairs, his individual circle, can be anchored.
If we keep these manifest limitations of our nature in mind, it no
longer becomes a mystery how, as the idea of Christianity as a world
brotherhood of men sank into discredit because of its fatal entanglement
with priestcraft and the Papacy on the one hand and with the authority
of princes on the other, and the age of faith passed into our present
age of doubt and disbelief, men shifted the reference of their lives
from the kingdom of God and the brotherhood of mankind to these
apparently more living realities, France and England, Holy Russia,
Spain, Prussia, which were at least embodied in active courts, which
maintained laws, exerted power through armies and navies, waved flags
with a compelling solemnity, and were self-assertive and insatiably
greedy in an entirely human and understandable fashion. Certainly such
men as Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin thought of themselves as
serving greater ends than their own or their monarch’s; they served the
quasi-divine France of their imaginations. And as certainly these habits
of mind percolated down from them to their subordinates and to the
general body of the population. In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries the general population of Europe was religious and only
vaguely patriotic; by the nineteenth it had become wholly patriotic. In
a crowded English or French or German railway carriage of the later
nineteenth century it would have aroused far less hostility to have
jeered at God than to have jeered at one of those strange beings,
England or France or Germany. To these things men’s minds clung, and
they clung to them because in all the world there appeared nothing else
so satisfying to cling to. They were the real and living gods of Europe.
(Yet in the background of the consciousness of the world, waiting as the
silence and moonlight wait above the flares and shouts, the
hurdy-gurdys and quarrels of a village fair, is the knowledge that all
mankind is one brotherhood, that God is the universal and impartial
Father of mankind, and that only in that universal service can mankind
find peace, or peace be found for the troubles of the individual
soul....)
This idealization of governments and foreign offices, this mythology of
“Powers” and their loves and hates and conflicts, has so obsessed the
imaginations of Europe and Western Asia as to provide it with its “forms
of thought.” Nearly all the histories, nearly all the political
literature of the last two centuries in Europe, have been written in its
phraseology. Yet a time is coming when a clearer-sighted generation will
read with perplexity how in the community of western Europe, consisting
everywhere of very slight variations of a common racial mixture of
Nordic and Iberian peoples and immigrant Semitic and Mongolian elements,
speaking nearly everywhere modifications of the same Aryan speech,
having a common past in the Roman Empire, common religious forms, common
social usages, and a common art and science, and intermarrying so freely
that no one could tell with certainty the “nationality” of any of his
great-grand-children, men could be moved to the wildest excitement upon
the question of the ascendancy of “France,” the rise and unification of
“Germany,” the rival claims of “Russia” and “Greece” to possess
Constantinople. These conflicts will seem then as reasonless and insane
as those dead, now incomprehensible feuds of the “greens” and “blues”
that once filled the streets of Byzantium with shouting and bloodshed.
Tremendously as these phantoms, the Powers, rule our minds and lives
to-day, they are, as this history shows clearly, things only of the last
few centuries, a mere hour, an incidental phase, in the vast deliberate
history of our kind. They mark a phase of relapse, a backwater, as the
rise of Machiavellian monarchy marks a backwater; they are part of the
same eddy of faltering faith, in a process altogether greater and
altogether different in its general tendency, the process of the moral
and intellectual reunion of mankind. For a time men have relapsed upon
these national or imperial gods of theirs; it is but for a time. The
idea of the world state, the universal kingdom of righteousness of
which every living soul shall be a citizen, was already in the world two
thousand years ago never more to leave it. Men know that it is present
even when they refuse to recognize it. In the writings and talk of men
about international affairs to-day, in the current discussions of
historians and political journalists, there is an effect of drunken men
growing sober, and terribly afraid of growing sober. They still talk
loudly of their “love” for France, of their “hatred” of Germany, of the
“traditional ascendancy of Britain at sea,” and so on and so on, like
those who sing of their cups in spite of the steadfast onset of sobriety
and a headache. These are dead gods they serve. By sea or land men want
no Powers ascendant, but only law and service. That silent unavoidable
challenge is in all our minds like dawn breaking slowly, shining between
the shutters of a disordered room.
§ 7
The seventeenth century in Europe was the century of Louis XIV; he and
French ascendancy and Versailles are the central motif of the story. The
eighteenth century was equally the century of the “rise of Prussia as a
great power,” and the chief figure in the story is Frederick II,
Frederick the Great. Interwoven with his history is the story of Poland.
The condition of affairs in Poland was peculiar. Unlike its three
neighbours, Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the
Habsburgs, Poland had not developed a Grand Monarchy. Its system of
government may be best described as republican with a king, an elected
life-president. Each king was separately elected. It was in fact rather
more republican than Britain, but its republicanism was more
aristocratic in form. Poland had little trade and few manufactures; she
was agricultural and still with great areas of grazing, forest, and
waste; she was a poor country, and her landowners were poor aristocrats.
The mass of her population was a downtrodden and savagely ignorant
peasantry, and she also harboured great masses of very poor Jews. She
had remained Catholic. She was, so to speak, a poor Catholic inland
Britain, entirely surrounded by enemies instead of by the sea. She had
no definite boundaries at all, neither sea nor mountain. And it added to
her misfortunes that some of her elected kings had been brilliant and
aggressive rulers. Eastward her power extended weakly into regions
inhabited almost entirely by Russians; westward she overlapped a German
subject population.
Because she had no great trade, she had no great towns to compare with
those of western Europe, and no vigorous universities to hold her mind
together. Her noble class lived on their estates, without much
intellectual intercourse. They were patriotic, they had an aristocratic
sense of freedom--which was entirely compatible with the systematic
impoverishment of their serfs--but their patriotism and freedom were
incapable of effective co-operation. While warfare was a matter of
levies of men and horses, Poland was a comparatively strong power; but
it was quite unable to keep pace with the development of military art
that was making standing forces of professional soldiers the necessary
weapon in warfare. Yet divided and disabled as she was, she could yet
count some notable victories to her credit. The last Turkish attack upon
Vienna (1683) was defeated by the Polish cavalry under King John
Sobiesky, King John III. (This same Sobiesky, before he was elected
king, had been in the pay of Louis XIV, and had also fought for the
Swedes against his native country.) Needless to say, this weak
aristocratic republic, with its recurrent royal elections, invited
aggression from all three of its neighbours. “Foreign money,” and every
sort of exterior interference, came into the country at each election.
And like the Greeks of old, every disgruntled Polish patriot flew off to
some foreign enemy to wreak his indignation upon his ungrateful country.
Even when the King of Poland was elected, he had very little power
because of the mutual jealousy of the nobles. Like the English peers,
they preferred a foreigner, and for much the same reason, because he had
no roots of power in the land; but, unlike the British, their own
government had not the solidarity which the periodic assembling of
Parliament in London, the “coming up to town,” gave the British peers.
In London there was “Society,” a continuous intermingling of influential
persons and ideas. Poland had no London and no “Society.” So practically
Poland had no central government at all. The King of Poland could not
make war nor peace, levy a tax nor alter the law, without the consent of
the Diet, and _any single member of the Diet had the power of putting a
veto upon any proposal before it_. He had merely to rise and say, “I
disapprove,” and the matter dropped. He could even carry his free veto,
his _liberum veto_, further. He could object to the assembly of the
Diet, and the Diet was thereby dissolved. Poland was not simply a
crowned aristocratic republic like the British, it was a paralyzed
crowned aristocratic republic.
[Illustration: The PARTITIONS of POLAND]
To Frederick the Great the existence of Poland was particularly
provocative because of the way in which an arm of Poland reached out to
the Baltic at Dantzig and separated his ancestral dominions in East
Prussia from his territories within the empire. It was he who incited
Catherine the Second of Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria, whose
respect he had earned by depriving her of Silesia, to a joint attack
upon Poland.
Let four maps of Poland tell the tale.
After this first outrage of 1772 Poland underwent a great change of
heart. Poland was indeed born as a nation on the eve of her dissolution.
There was a hasty but very considerable development of education,
literature, and art; historians and poets sprang up, and the impossible
constitution that had made Poland impotent was swept aside. The free
veto was abolished, the crown was made hereditary to save Poland from
the foreign intrigues that attended every election, and a Parliament in
imitation of the British was set up. There were, however, lovers of the
old order in Poland who resented these necessary changes, and these
obstructives were naturally supported by Prussia and Russia, who wanted
no Polish revival. Came the second partition, and, after a fierce
patriotic struggle that began in the region annexed by Prussia and found
a leader and national hero in Kosciusko, the final obliteration of
Poland from the map. So for a time ended this Parliamentary threat to
Grand Monarchy in Eastern Europe. But the patriotism and republican
passion of the Poles grew stronger and clearer with suppression. For a
hundred and twenty years Poland grew in spirit, and struggled like a
submerged creature beneath the political and military net that held her
down. She rose again in 1918, at the end of the Great War.
§ 8
We have given some account of the ascendancy of France in Europe, the
swift decay of the sappy growth of Spanish power and its separation from
Austria, and the rise of Prussia. So far as Portugal, Spain, France,
Britain, and Holland were concerned, their competition for ascendancy in
Europe was extended and complicated by a struggle for dominion overseas.
The discovery of the huge continent of America, thinly inhabited,
undeveloped, and admirably adapted for European settlement and
exploitation, the simultaneous discovery of great areas of unworked
country south of the torrid equatorial regions of Africa that had
hitherto limited European knowledge, and the gradual realization of vast
island regions in the Eastern seas, as yet untouched by Western
civilization, was a presentation of opportunity to mankind unprecedented
in all history. It was as if the peoples of Europe had come into some
splendid legacy. Their world had suddenly quadrupled. There was more
than enough for all; they had only to take these lands and continue to
do well by them, and their crowded poverty would vanish like a dream.
And they received this glorious legacy like ill-bred heirs; it meant no
more to them than a fresh occasion for atrocious disputes. But what
community of human beings has ever yet preferred creation to conspiracy?
What nation in all our story has ever worked with another when, at any
cost to itself, it could contrive to do that other an injury? The Powers
of Europe began by a frantic “claiming” of the new realms. They went on
to exhausting conflicts. Spain, who claimed first and most, and who was
for a time “mistress” of two-thirds of America, made no better use of
her possession than to bleed herself nearly to death therein.
We have told how the Papacy in its last assertion of world dominion,
instead of maintaining the common duty of all Christendom to make a
great common civilization in the new lands, divided the American
continent between Spain and Portugal. This naturally roused the
hostility of the excluded nations. The seamen of England showed no
respect for either claim, and set themselves particularly against the
Spanish; the Swedes turned their Protestantism to a similar account. The
Hollanders, so soon as they had shaken off their Spanish masters, also
set their sails westward to flout the Pope and share in the good things
of the new world. His Most Catholic Majesty of France hesitated as
little as any Protestant. All these powers were soon busy pegging out
claims in North America and the West Indies.
Neither the Danish kingdom (which at that time included Norway and
Iceland) nor the Swedes secured very much in the scramble. The Danes
annexed some of the West Indian islands. Sweden got nothing. Both
Denmark and Sweden at this time were deep in the affairs of Germany. We
have already named Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant “Lion of the
North,” and mentioned his campaigns in Germany, Poland, and Russia.
These Eastern European regions are great absorbents of energy, and the
strength that might have given Sweden a large share in the new world
reaped a barren harvest of glory in Europe. Such small settlements as
the Swedes made in America presently fell to the Dutch.
The Hollanders too, with the French monarchy under Cardinal Richelieu
and under Louis XIV eating its way across the Spanish Netherlands
towards their frontier, had not the undistracted resources that Britain,
behind her “silver streak” of sea, could put into overseas adventures.
Moreover, the absolutist efforts of James I and Charles I, and the
restoration of Charles II, had the effect of driving out from England a
great number of sturdy-minded, republican-spirited Protestants, men of
substance and character, who set up in America, and particularly in New
England, out of reach, as they supposed, of the king and his taxes. The
_Mayflower_ was only one of the pioneer vessels of a stream of
emigrants. It was the luck of Britain that they remained, though
dissentient in spirit, under the British flag. The Dutch never sent out
settlers of the same quantity and quality, first because their Spanish
rulers would not let them, and then because they had got possession of
their own country. And though there was a great emigration of Protestant
Huguenots from the dragonnades and persecution of Louis XIV, they had
Holland and England close at hand as refuges, and their industry, skill,
and sobriety went mainly to strengthen those countries, and particularly
England. A few of them founded settlements in Carolina, but these did
not remain French; they fell first to the Spanish and finally to the
English.
The Dutch settlements, with the Swedish, also succumbed to Britain;
Nieuw Amsterdam became British in 1674, and its name was changed to New
York, as the reader may learn very cheerfully in Washington Irving’s
_Knickerbocker’s History of New York_. The state of affairs in North
America in 1750 is indicated very clearly by a map we have adapted from
one in Robinson’s _Medieval and Modern Times_. The British power was
established along the east coast from Savannah to the St. Lawrence
River, and Newfoundland and considerable northern areas, the Hudson Bay
Company territories, had been acquired by treaty from the French. The
British occupied Barbados (almost our oldest possession) in 1605, and
acquired Jamaica, the Bahamas, and British Honduras from the Spaniards.
But France was pursuing a very dangerous and alarming game, a game even
more dangerous and alarming on the map than in reality. She had made
real settlements in Quebec and Montreal to the north and at New Orleans
in the south, and her explorers and agents had pushed south and north,
making treaties with the American Indians of the great plains and
setting up claims--without setting up towns--right across the continent
behind the British. But the realities of the case are not adequately
represented in this way. The British colonies were being very solidly
settled by a good class of people; they already numbered a population of
over a million; the French at that time hardly counted a tenth of that.
They had a number of brilliant travellers and missionaries at work, but
no substance of population behind them.
Many old maps of America in this period are still to be found, maps
designed to scare and “rouse” the British to a sense of the “designs of
France” in America. War broke out in 1754, and in 1759 the British and
Colonial forces under General Wolfe took Quebec and completed the
conquest of Canada in the next year. In 1763 Canada was finally ceded to
Britain. (But the western part of the rather indefinite region of
Louisiana in the south, named after Louis XIV, remained outside the
British sphere. It was taken over by Spain; and in 1800 it was recovered
by France. Finally, in 1803, it was bought from France by the United
States government.) In this Canadian war the American colonists gained a
considerable experience of the military art, and a knowledge of British
military organization that was to be of great use to them a little
later.
§ 9
[Illustration: Britain, France & Spain in America, 175O.]
[Illustration: The chief Foreign Settlements in INDIA at the end of the
17th Century]
It was not only in America that the French and British powers clashed.
The condition of India at this time was one very interesting and
attractive to European adventurers. The great Mongol Empire of Baber,
Akbar, and Aurangzeb was now far gone in decay. What had happened to
India was very parallel to what had happened to Germany. The Great Mogul
at Delhi in India, like the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany, was still
legally overlord, but after the death of Aurangzeb he exerted only a
nominal authority except in the immediate neighbourhood of his capital.
In the southwest a Hindu people, the Mahrattas, had risen against Islam,
restored Brahminism as the ruling religion, and for a time extended
their power over the whole southern triangle of India. In Rajputana also
the rule of Islam was replaced by Brahminism, and at Bhurtpur and Jaipur
there ruled powerful Rajput princes. In Oudh there was a Shiite kingdom,
with its capital at Lucknow, and Bengal was also a separate (Moslem)
kingdom. Away in the Punjab to the north had arisen a very interesting
religious body, the Sikhs, proclaiming the universal rule of one God and
assailing both the Hindu Vedas and the Moslem Koran. Originally a
pacific sect, the Sikhs presently followed the example of Islam, and
sought--at first very disastrously to themselves--to establish the
kingdom of God by the sword. And into this confused and disordered India
there presently (1738) came an invader from the north, Nadir Shah
(1736-47), the Turcoman ruler of Persia, who swept down through the
Khyber pass, broke every army that stood in his way, and captured and
sacked Delhi, carrying off an enormous booty. He left the north of India
so utterly broken, that in the next twenty years there were no less than
six other successful plundering raids into North India from Afghanistan,
which had become an independent state at the death of Nadir Shah. For a
time Mahrattas fought with Afghans for the rule of North India; then the
Mahratta power broke up into a series of principalities, Indore,
Gwalior, Baroda, and others....
This was the India into which the French and English were thrusting
during the eighteenth century. A succession of other European powers had
been struggling for a commercial and political footing in India and the
east ever since Vasco da Gama had made his memorable voyage round the
Cape to Calicut. The sea trade of India had previously been in the hands
of the Red Sea Arabs, and the Portuguese won it from them in a series of
sea fights. The Portuguese ships were the bigger, and carried a heavier
armament. For a time the Portuguese held the Indian trade as their own,
and Lisbon outshone Venice as a mart for oriental spices; the
seventeenth century, however, saw the Dutch grasping at this monopoly.
At the crest of their power the Dutch had settlements at the Cape of
Good Hope, they held Mauritius, they had two establishments in Persia,
twelve in India, six in Ceylon, and all over the East Indies they had
dotted their fortified stations. But their selfish resolution to exclude
traders of any other European nationality forced the Swedes, Danes,
French, and English into hostile competition. The first effectual blows
at their overseas monopoly were struck in European waters by the
victories of Blake, the English republican admiral; and by the opening
of the eighteenth century both the English and French were in vigorous
competition with the Dutch for trade and privileges throughout India. At
Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta the English established their headquarters;
Pondicherry and Chandernagore were the chief French settlements.
At first all these European powers came merely as traders, and the only
establishments they attempted were warehouses; but the unsettled state
of the country, and the unscrupulous methods of their rivals, made it
natural for them to fortify and arm their settlements, and this armament
made them attractive allies of the various warring princes who now
divided India. And it was entirely in the spirit of the new European
nationalist politics that when the French took one side, the British
should take another. The great leader upon the English side was Robert
Clive, who was born in 1725, and went to India in 1743. His chief
antagonist was Dupleix. The story of this struggle throughout the first
half of the eighteenth century is too long and intricate to be told
here. By 1761 the British found themselves completely dominant in the
Indian peninsula. At Plassey (1757) and at Buxar (1764) their armies
gained striking and conclusive victories over the army of Bengal and the
army of Oudh. The great Mogul, nominally their overlord, became in
effect their puppet. They levied taxes over great areas; they exacted
indemnities for real or fancied opposition.
These successes were not gained directly by the forces of the King of
England; they were gained by the East India Trading Company, which had
been originally, at the time of its incorporation under Queen Elizabeth,
no more than a company of sea adventurers. Step by step they had been
forced to raise troops and arm their ships. And now this trading
company, with its tradition of gain, found itself dealing not merely in
spices and dyes and tea and jewels, but in the revenues and territories
of princes and the destinies of India. It had come to buy and sell, and
it found itself achieving a tremendous piracy. There was no one to
challenge its proceedings. Is it any wonder that its captains and
commanders and officials, nay, even its clerks and common soldiers, came
back to England loaded with spoils? Men under such circumstances, with a
great and wealthy land at their mercy, could not determine what they
might or might not do. It was a strange land to them, with a strange
sunlight; its brown people were a different race, outside their range of
sympathy; its temples and buildings seemed to sustain fantastic
standards of behaviour. Englishmen at home were perplexed when presently
these generals and officials came back to make dark accusations against
each other of extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parliament passed a
vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774. In 1788 Warren Hastings,
a second great Indian administrator, was impeached and acquitted (1792).
It was a strange and unprecedented situation in the world’s history. The
English Parliament found itself ruling over a London trading company,
which in its turn was dominating an empire far greater and more populous
than all the domains of the British crown. To the bulk of the English
people India was a remote, fantastic, almost inaccessible land, to which
adventurous poor young men went out, to return after many years very
rich and very choleric old gentlemen. It was difficult for the English
to conceive what the life of these countless brown millions in the
eastern sunshine could be. Their imaginations declined the task. India
remained romantically unreal. It was impossible for the English,
therefore, to exert any effective supervision and control over the
company’s proceedings.
§ 10
[Illustration: INDIA in 1750]
And while the great peninsula of the south of Asia was thus falling
under the dominion of the English sea traders, an equally remarkable
reaction of Europe upon Asia was going on in the north. We have told in
chap. xxxiv, § 5C, how the Christian states of Russia recovered their
independence from the Golden Horde, and how the Tsar of Moscow became
master of the republic of Novgorod; and in § 5 of this chapter we have
told of Peter the Great joining the circle of Grand Monarchs and, as it
were, dragging Russia into Europe. The rise of this great central power
of the old world, which is neither altogether of the East nor altogether
of the West, is one of the utmost importance to our human destiny. We
have also told in the same chapter of the appearance of a Christian
steppe people, the Cossacks, who formed a barrier between the feudal
agriculture of Poland and Hungary to the west and the Tartar to the
east. The Cossacks were the wild east of Europe, and in many ways not
unlike the wild west of the United States in the middle nineteenth
century. All who had made Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well
as the persecuted innocent, rebellious serfs, religious sectaries,
thieves, vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum in the southern steppes,
and there made a fresh start and fought for life and freedom against
Pole, Russian, and Tartar alike. Doubtless fugitives from the Tartars to
the east also contributed to the Cossack mixture. Chief among these new
nomad tribes were the Ukraine Cossacks on the Dnieper and the Don
Cossacks on the Don. Slowly these border folk were incorporated in the
Russian imperial service, much as the Highland clans of Scotland were
converted into regiments by the British government. New lands were
offered them in Asia. They became a weapon against the dwindling power
of the Mongolian nomads, first in Turkestan and then across Siberia as
far as the Amur.
The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is very difficult to explain. Within two or three centuries from the
days of Jengis and Timurlane, Central Asia had relapsed from a period of
world ascendancy to extreme political impotence. Changes of climate,
unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial type, may have played
their part in this recession--which may be only a temporary recession
measured by the scale of universal history--of the Central Asian
peoples. Some authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching
from China also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any rate, by the
sixteenth century the Mongol Tartar and Turkish peoples were no longer
pressing outward, but were being invaded, subjugated, and pushed back
both by Christian Russia in the west and by China in the east.
All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were spreading eastward
from European Russia, and settling wherever they found agricultural
conditions. Cordons of forts and stations formed a moving frontier to
these settlements to the south, where the Turkomans were still strong
and active; to the north-east, however, Russia had no frontier until she
reached right to the Pacific....
At the same time China was in a phase of expansion. In 1644 the Ming
Dynasty, in a state of artistic decay and greatly weakened by a Japanese
invasion, fell to Manchu conquerors, a people apparently identical with
the former Kin Dynasty, which had ruled at Pekin over North China until
the days of Jengis. It was the Manchus who imposed the pigtail as a mark
of political loyalty upon the Chinese population. They brought a new
energy into Chinese affairs, and their northern interests led to a
considerable northward expansion of the Chinese civilization and
influence into Manchuria and Mongolia. So it was that by the middle of
the eighteenth century the Russians and Chinese were in contact in
Mongolia. At this period China ruled eastern Turkestan, Tibet, Nepal,
Burmah, and Annam....
We have mentioned a Japanese invasion of China (or rather of Korea).
Except for this aggression upon China, Japan plays no part in our
history before the nineteenth century. Like China under the Mings, Japan
had set her face resolutely against the interference of foreigners in
her affairs. She was a country leading her own civilized life, magically
sealed against intruders. We have told little of her hitherto because
there was little to tell. Her picturesque and romantic history stands
apart from the general drama of human affairs. Her population was
chiefly a Mongolian population, with some very interesting white people
of a Nordic type, the Hairy Ainu, in the northern islands. Her
civilization seems to have been derived almost entirely from Korea and
China; her art is a special development of Chinese art, her writing an
adaptation of the Chinese script.
§ 11
In these preceding ten sections we have been dealing with an age of
division, of separated nationalities. We have already described this
period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an interregnum in
the progress of mankind towards a worldwide unity. Throughout this
period there was no ruling unifying idea in men’s minds. The impulse of
the empire had failed until the Emperor was no more than one of a number
of competing princes, and the dream of Christendom also was a fading
dream. The developing “powers” jostled one another throughout the world;
but for a time it seemed that they might jostle one another indefinitely
without any great catastrophe to mankind. The great geographical
discoveries of the sixteenth century had so enlarged human resources
that, for all their divisions, for all the waste of their wars and
policies, the people of Europe enjoyed a considerable and increasing
prosperity. Central Europe recovered steadily from the devastation of
the Thirty Years War.
Looking back upon this period, which came to its climax in the
eighteenth century, looking back, as we can begin to do nowadays, and
seeing its events in relation to the centuries that came before it and
to the great movements of the present time, we are able to realize how
transitory and provisional were its political forms and how unstable its
securities. Provisional it was as no other age has been provisional, an
age of assimilation and recuperation, a political pause, a gathering up
of the ideas of men and the resources of science for a wider human
effort. But the contemporary mind did not see it in that light. The
failure of the great creative ideas as they had been formulated in the
Middle Ages, had left human thought for a time destitute of the guidance
of creative ideas; even educated and imaginative men saw the world
undramatically; no longer as an interplay of effort and destiny, but as
the scene in which a trite happiness was sought and the milder virtues
were rewarded. It was not simply the contented and conservative-minded
who, in a world of rapid changes, were under the sway of this assurance
of an achieved fixity of human conditions. Even highly critical and
insurgent intelligences, in default of any sustaining movements in the
soul of the community, betrayed the same disposition. Political life,
they felt, had ceased to be the urgent and tragic thing it had once
been; it had become a polite comedy. The eighteenth was a century of
comedy--which at the end grew grim. It is inconceivable that that world
of the middle eighteenth century could have produced a Jesus of
Nazareth, a Gautama, a Francis of Assisi, an Ignatius of Loyola. If one
may imagine an eighteenth-century John Huss, it is impossible to imagine
anyone with sufficient passion to burn him. Until the stirrings of
conscience in Britain that developed into the Methodist revival began,
we can detect scarcely a suspicion that there still remained great tasks
in hand for our race to do, that enormous disturbances were close at
hand, or that the path of man through space and time was dark with
countless dangers, and must to the end remain a high and terrible
enterprise.
We have quoted again and again in this history from Gibbon’s _Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Now we shall quote from it for the last
time and bid it farewell, for we have come to the age in which it was
written. Gibbon was born in 1737,[410]
and the last volume of his
history was published in 1787, but the passage we shall quote was
probably written in the year 1780. Gibbon was a young man of delicate
health and fairly good fortune; he had a partial and interrupted
education at Oxford, and then he completed his studies in Geneva; on the
whole his outlook was French and cosmopolitan rather than British, and
he was much under the intellectual influence of that great Frenchman who
is best known under the name of Voltaire (François Marie Arouet de
Voltaire, 1694-1778). Voltaire was an author of enormous industry;
seventy volumes of him adorn the present writer’s shelves, and another
edition of Voltaire’s works runs to ninety-four; he dealt largely with
history and public affairs, and he corresponded with Catherine the Great
of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Louis XV, and most of the
prominent people of the time. Both Voltaire and Gibbon had the sense of
history strong in them; both have set out very plainly and fully their
visions of human life; and it is clear that to both of them the system
in which they lived, the system of monarchy, of leisurely and privileged
gentlefolks, of rather despised industrial and trading people and of
down-trodden and negligible labourers and poor and common people, seemed
the most stably established way of living that the world has ever seen.
They postured a little as republicans, and sneered at the divine
pretensions of monarchy; but the republicanism that appealed to Voltaire
was the crowned republicanism of the Britain of those days, in which the
king was simply the official head, the first and greatest of the
gentlemen.
The ideal they sustained was the ideal of a polite and polished world in
which men--men of quality that is, for no others counted--would be
ashamed to be cruel or gross or enthusiastic, in which the appointments
of life would be spacious and elegant, and the fear of ridicule the
potent auxiliary of the law in maintaining the decorum and harmonies of
life. Voltaire had in him the possibility of a passionate hatred of
injustice, and his interventions on behalf of persecuted or ill-used men
are the high lights of his long and complicated life-story. And this
being the mental disposition of Gibbon and Voltaire, and of the age in
which they lived, it is natural that they should find the existence of
religion in the world, and in particular the existence of Christianity,
a perplexing and rather unaccountable phenomenon. The whole of that
side of life seemed to them a kind of craziness in the human make-up.
Gibbon’s great history is essentially an attack upon Christianity as the
operating cause of the decline and fall. He idealized the crude and
gross plutocracy of Rome into a world of fine gentlemen upon the
eighteenth-century model, and told how it fell before the Barbarian from
without because of the decay through Christianity within. In our history
here we have tried to set that story in a better light. To Voltaire
official Christianity was “_l’infâme_”; something that limited people’s
lives, interfered with their thoughts, persecuted harmless dissentients.
And indeed in that period of the interregnum there was very little life
or light in either the orthodox Christianity of Rome or in the orthodox
tame churches of Russia and of the Protestant princes. In an interregnum
incommoded with an abundance of sleek parsons and sly priests it was
hard to realize what fires had once blazed in the heart of Christianity,
and what fires of political and religious passion might still blaze in
the hearts of men.
At the end of his third volume Gibbon completed his account of the
breaking up of the Western Empire. He then raised the question whether
civilization might ever undergo again a similar collapse. This led him
to review the existing state of affairs (1780) and to compare it with
the state of affairs during the decline of imperial Rome. It will be
very convenient to our general design to quote some passages from that
comparison here, for nothing could better illustrate the state of mind
of the liberal thinkers of Europe at the crest of the political
interregnum of the age of the Great Powers, before the first intimations
of those profound political and social forces of disintegration that
have produced at length the dramatic interrogations of our own times.
“This awful revolution,” wrote Gibbon of the Western collapse, “may be
usefully applied to the useful instruction of the present age. It is the
duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory
of his native country; but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his
views, and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose various
inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and
cultivation. The balance of power will continue to fluctuate, and the
prosperity of our own or the neighbouring kingdoms may be alternately
exalted or depressed; but these partial events cannot essentially injure
our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and
manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind,
the Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe are
the common enemies of civilized society; and we may enquire with anxious
curiosity whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those
calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.
Perhaps the same reflections will illustrate the fall of that mighty
empire and explain the probable causes of our actual security.
“The Romans were ignorant of the extent of their danger, and the number
of their enemies. Beyond the Rhine and Danube, the northern countries of
Europe and Asia were filled with innumerable tribes of hunters and
shepherds, poor, voracious, and turbulent; bold in arms, and impatient
to ravish the fruits of industry. The Barbarian world was agitated by
the rapid impulse of war; and the peace of Gaul or Italy was shaken by
the distant revolutions of China. The Huns, who fled before a victorious
enemy, directed their march towards the west; and the torrent was
swelled by the gradual accession of captives and allies. The flying
tribes who yielded to the Huns assumed in their turn the spirit of
conquest; the endless column of barbarians pressed on the Roman Empire
with accumulated weight and, if the foremost were destroyed, the vacant
space was instantly replenished by new assailants. Such formidable
emigrations can no longer issue from the North; and the long repose,
which has been imputed to the decrease of population, is the happy
consequence of the progress of arts and agriculture. Instead of some
rude villages, thinly scattered among its woods and morasses, Germany
now produces a list of two thousand three hundred walled towns; the
Christian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland have been successively
established; and the Hanse merchants, with the Teutonic knights, have
extended their colonies along the coast of the Baltic, as far as the
Gulf of Finland. From the Gulf of Finland to the Eastern Ocean, Russia
now assumes the form of a powerful and civilized empire. The plough,
the loom, and the forge are introduced on the banks of the Volga, the
Oby, and the Lena; and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes have been
taught to tremble and obey....
“The Empire of Rome was firmly established by the singular and perfect
coalition of its members.... But this union was purchased by the loss of
national freedom and military spirit; and the servile provinces,
destitute of life and motion, expected their safety from the mercenary
troops and governors, who were directed by the orders of a distant
court. The happiness of a hundred millions depended on the personal
merit of one or two men, perhaps children, whose minds were corrupted by
education, luxury, and despotic power. Europe is now divided into twelve
powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths, and
a variety of smaller, though independent, states; the chances of royal
and ministerial talents are multiplied, at least with the number of its
rulers; and a Julian[411] or Semiramis[412] may reign in the north,
while Arcadius and Honorius[413] again slumber on the thrones of the
House of Bourbon. The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual
influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and
stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at
least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced
into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the
times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated
by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces
are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests. If a savage
conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly
vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany,
the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who,
perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the
victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the
Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their
pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and
flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies
and institutions.
“Cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue fortify the strength
and courage of Barbarians. In every age they have oppressed the polite
and peaceful nations of China, India, and Persia, who neglected, and
still neglect, to counterbalance these natural powers by the resources
of military art. The warlike states of antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and
Rome, educated a race of soldiers; exercised their bodies, disciplined
their courage, multiplied their forces by regular evolutions, and
converted the iron which they possessed into strong and serviceable
weapons. But this superiority insensibly declined with their laws and
manners; and the feeble policy of Constantine and his successors armed
and instructed, for the ruin of the empire, the rude valour of the
Barbarian mercenaries. The military art has been changed by the
invention of gunpowder; which enables man to command the two most
powerful agents of nature, air and fire. Mathematics, chemistry,
mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the service of war; and
the adverse parties oppose to each other the most elaborate modes of
attack and of defence. Historians may indignantly observe that the
preparations of a siege would found and maintain a flourishing colony;
yet we cannot be displeased that the subversion of a city should be a
work of cost and difficulty, or that an industrious people should be
protected by those arts, which survive and supply the decay of military
virtue. Cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier
against the Tartar horse;[414] and Europe is secure from any future
irruption of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease
to be barbarous....
“Should these speculations be found doubtful or fallacious, there still
remains a more humble source of comfort and hope. The discoveries of
ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic history, or tradition,
of the most enlightened nations, represent the _human savage_, naked
both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and
almost of language. From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive
and universal state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the
animals, to fertilize the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure
the heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental
and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various, infinitely slow
in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity;
ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid
downfall; and the several climates of the globe have felt the
vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four thousand
years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions; we
cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their
advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no
people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism.
“Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious
zeal have diffused, among the savages of the Old and New World, those
inestimable gifts, they have been successively propagated; they can
never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion
that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real
wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the
human race.”
§ 12[415]
One of the most interesting aspects of this story of Europe in the
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century during the phase of the Grand
and Parliamentary Monarchies, is the comparative quiescence of the
peasants and workers. The insurrectionary fires of the fourteenth and
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seem to have died down. The acute
economic clashes of the earlier period had been mitigated by rough
adjustments. The discovery of America had revolutionized and changed the
scale of business and industry, had brought a vast volume of precious
metal for money into Europe, had increased and varied employment. For a
time life and work ceased to be intolerable to the masses of the poor.
This did not, of course, prevent much individual misery and discontent;
the poor we have always had with us, but this misery and discontent was
divided and scattered. It became inaudible.
In the earlier period the common people had had an idea to crystallize
upon, the idea of Christian communism. They had found an educated
leadership in the dissentient priests and doctors of the Wycliffe type.
As the movement for a revival in Christianity spent its force, as
Lutheranism fell back for leadership from Jesus upon the Protestant
Princes, this contact and reaction of the fresher minds of the educated
class upon the illiterate mass was interrupted. However numerous a
downtrodden class may be, and however extreme its miseries, it will
never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity
by the development of some common general idea. Educated men and men of
ideas are more necessary to a popular political movement than to any
other political process. A monarchy learns by ruling, and an oligarchy
of any type has the education of affairs; but the common man, the
peasant or toiler, has no experience in large matters, and can exist
politically only through the services, devotion, and guidance of
educated men. The Reformation, the Reformation that succeeded, the
Reformation that is of the Princes, by breaking up educational
facilities, largely destroyed the poor scholar and priest class whose
persuasion of the crowd had rendered the Reformation possible.
The Princes of the Protestant countries when they seized upon the
national churches early apprehended the necessity of gripping the
universities also. Their idea of education was the idea of capturing
young clever people for the service of their betters. Beyond that they
were disposed to regard education as a mischievous thing. The only way
to an education, therefore, for a poor man was through patronage. Of
course there was a parade of encouragement towards learning in all the
Grand Monarchies, a setting up of Academies and Royal Societies, but
these benefited only a small class of subservient scholars. The church
also had learnt to distrust the educated poor man. In the great
aristocratic “crowned republic” of Britain there was the same shrinkage
of educational opportunity. “Both the ancient universities,” says
Hammond, in his account of the eighteenth century, “were the
universities of the rich. There is a passage in Macaulay describing the
state and pomp of Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘when
her Chancellor, the Venerable Duke of Ormonde, sat in his embroidered
mantle on his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian
theatre, surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their
rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly presented to him
as candidates for academical honours.’ The university was a power, not
in the sense in which that could be said of a university like the old
university of Paris, whose learning could make Popes tremble, but in the
sense that the university was part of the recognized machinery of
aristocracy. What was true of the universities was true of the public
schools. Education in England was the nursery not of a society, but of
an order; not of a state, but of a race of owner-rulers.” The missionary
spirit had departed from education throughout Europe. To that quite as
much as to the amelioration of things by a diffused prosperity, this
phase of quiescence among the lower classes is to be ascribed. They had
lost brains and speech, and they were fed. The community was like a
pithed animal in the hands of the governing class.[416]
Moreover, there had been considerable changes in the proportions of
class to class. One of the most difficult things for the historian to
trace is the relative amount of the total property of the community held
at any time by any particular class in that community. These things
fluctuate very rapidly. The peasant wars of Europe indicate a phase of
comparatively concentrated property when large masses of people could
feel themselves expropriated and at a common disadvantage, and so take
mass action. This was the time of the rise and prosperity of the Fuggers
and their like, a time of international finance. Then with the vast
importation of silver and gold and commodities into Europe from America,
there seems to have been a restoration of a more diffused state of
wealth. The poor were just as miserable as ever, but there were perhaps
not so many poor relatively, and they were broken up into a variety of
types without any ideas in common. In Great Britain the agricultural
life which had been dislocated by the confiscations of the Reformation
had settled down again into a system of tenant fanning under great
landowners. Side by side with the large estates there was still,
however, much common land for pasturing the beasts of the poorer
villagers, and much land cultivated in strips upon communal lines. The
middling sort of man, and even the poorer sort of man upon the land,
were leading an endurable existence in 1700. The standard of life, the
idea, that is, of what is an endurable existence, was, however, rising
during the opening phase of Grand Monarchy; after a time the process of
the upward concentration of wealth seems to have been resumed, the
larger landowners began to acquire and crowd out the poorer free
cultivators, and the proportion of poor people and of people who felt
they were leading impoverished lives increased again. The bigger men
were unchallenged rulers of Great Britain, and they set themselves to
enact laws, the Enclosure Acts, that practically confiscated the
unenclosed and common lands, mainly for the benefit of the larger
landowners. The smaller men sank to the level of wage workers upon the
land over which they had once possessed rights of cultivation and
pasture.
The peasant in France and upon the Continent generally was not so
expropriated; his enemy was not the landlord, but the tax-gatherer; he
was squeezed on his land instead of being squeezed off it.
As the eighteenth century progressed, it is apparent in the literature
of the time that what to do with “the poor” was again exercising men’s
thoughts. We find such active-minded English writers as Defoe
(1659-1731) and Fielding (1707-54) deeply exercised by this problem. But
as yet there is no such revival of the communistic and equalitarian
ideas of primitive Christianity as distinguished the time of Wycliffe
and John Huss. Protestantism in breaking up the universal church had for
a time broken up the idea of a universal human solidarity. Even if the
universal church of the Middle Ages had failed altogether to realize
that idea, it had at any rate been the symbol of that idea.
Defoe and Fielding were men of a livelier practical imagination than
Gibbon, and they realized something of the economic processes that were
afoot in their time. So did Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74); his _Deserted
Village_ (1770) is a pamphlet on enclosures disguised as a poem.[417]
But Gibbon’s circumstances had never brought economic facts very vividly
before his eyes; he saw the world as a struggle between barbarism and
civilization, but he perceived nothing of that other struggle over which
he floated, the mute, unconscious struggle of the commonalty against
able, powerful, rich, and selfish men. He did not perceive the
accumulation of stresses that were presently to strain and break up all
the balance of his “twelve powerful, though unequal, kingdoms,” his
“three respectable commonwealths,” and their rag, tag, and bobtail of
independent minor princes, reigning dukes, and so forth. Even the civil
war that had begun in the British colonies in America did not rouse him
to the nearness of what we now call “Democracy.”
From what we have been saying hitherto, the reader may suppose that the
squeezing of the small farmer and the peasant off the land by the great
landowners, the mere grabbing of commons and the concentration of
property in the hands of a powerful privileged and greedy class, was all
that was happening to the English land in the eighteenth century. So we
do but state the worse side of the change. Concurrently with this change
of ownership there was going on a great improvement in agriculture.
There can be little doubt that the methods of cultivation pursued by the
peasants, squatters, and small farmers were antiquated, wasteful, and
comparatively unproductive, and that the larger private holdings and
estates created by the Enclosure Acts were much more productive (one
authority says twenty times more productive) than the old ways. The
change was perhaps a necessary one and the evil of it was not that it
was brought about, but that it was brought about so as to increase both
wealth and the numbers of the poor. Its benefits were intercepted by the
bigger private owners. The community was injured to the great profit of
this class.
And here we come upon one of the chief problems of our lives at the
present time, the problem of the deflection of the profits of progress.
For two hundred years there has been, mainly under the influence of the
spirit of science and enquiry, a steady improvement in the methods of
production of almost everything that humanity requires. If our sense of
community and our social science were equal to the tasks required of
them, there can be little question that this great increment in
production would have benefited the whole community, would have given
everyone an amount of education, leisure and freedom such as mankind had
never dreamt of before. But though the common standard of living has
risen, the rise has been on a scale disproportionately small. The rich
have developed a freedom and luxury unknown in the world hitherto, and
there has been an increase in the proportion of rich people and
stagnantly prosperous and unproductive people in the community; but that
also fails to account for the full benefit. There has been much sheer
waste. Vast accumulations of material and energy have gone into warlike
preparations and warfare. Much has been devoted to the futile efforts of
unsuccessful business competition. Huge possibilities have remained
undeveloped because of the opposition of owners, forestallers, and
speculators to their economical exploitation. The good things that
science and organization have been bringing within the reach of mankind
have not been taken methodically and used to their utmost, but they have
been scrambled for, snatched at, seized upon by gambling adventurers and
employed upon selfish and vain ends. The eighteenth century in Europe,
and more particularly in Great Britain and Poland, was the age of
private ownership. “Private enterprise,” which meant in practice that
everyone was entitled to get everything he could out of the business of
the community, reigned supreme. No sense of obligation to the state in
business matters is to be found in the ordinary novels, plays, and such
like representative literature of the time. Everyone is out “to make his
fortune,” there is no recognition that it is wrong to be an unproductive
parasite on the community, and still less that a financier or merchant
or manufacturer can ever be overpaid for his services to mankind. This
was the moral atmosphere of the time, and those lords and gentlemen who
grabbed the people’s commons, assumed possession of the mines under
their lands, and crushed down the yeoman farmers and peasants to the
status of pauper labourers, had no idea that they were living anything
but highly meritorious lives.
Concurrently with this change in Great Britain from traditional patch
agriculture and common pasture to large and more scientific agriculture,
very great changes were going on in the manufacture of commodities. In
these changes Great Britain was, in the eighteenth century, leading the
world. Hitherto, throughout the whole course of history from the
beginnings of civilization, manufactures, building, and industries
generally had been in the hands of craftsmen and small masters who
worked in their own houses. They had been organized in guilds, and were
mostly their own employers. They formed an essential and permanent
middle class. There were capitalists among them, who let out looms and
the like, supplied material, and took the finished product, but they
were not big capitalists. There had been no rich manufacturers. The rich
men of the world before this time had been great landowners or
money-lenders and money manipulators or merchants. But in the eighteenth
century, workers in certain industries began to be collected together
into factories in order to produce things in larger quantities through a
systematic division of labour, and the employer, as distinguished from
the master worker, began to be a person of importance. Moreover,
mechanical invention was producing machines that simplified the manual
work of production, and were capable of being driven by water power and
presently by steam. In 1765 Watt’s steam engine was constructed, a very
important date in the history of industrialism.
The cotton industry was one of the first to pass into factory production
(originally with water-driven machinery). The woollen industry followed.
At the same time iron smelting, which had been restrained hitherto to
small methods by the use of charcoal, resorted to coke made from coal,
and the coal and iron industries also began to expand. The iron industry
shifted from the wooded country of Sussex and Surrey to the coal
districts. By 1800 this change-over of industry from a small scale
business with small employers to a large scale production under big
employers was well in progress. Everywhere there sprang up factories
using first water then steam power. It was a change of fundamental
importance in human economy. From the dawn of history the manufacturer
and craftsman had been, as we have said, a sort of middle-class
townsman. The machine and the employer now superseded his skill, and he
either became an employer of his fellows, and grew towards wealth and
equality with the other rich classes, or he remained a worker and sank
very rapidly to the level of a mere labourer. This great change in human
affairs is known as the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in Great
Britain, it spread during the nineteenth century throughout the world.
As the Industrial Revolution went on, a great gulf opened between
employer and employed. In the past every manufacturing worker had the
hope of becoming an independent master. Even the slave craftsmen of
Babylon and Rome were protected by laws that enabled them to save and
buy their freedom and to set up for themselves. But now a factory and
its engines and machines became a vast and costly thing, measured by the
scale of the worker’s pocket. Wealthy men had to come together to create
an enterprise; credit and plant, that is to say, “Capital,” were
required. “Setting up for oneself” ceased to be a normal hope for an
artisan. The worker was henceforth a worker from the cradle to the
grave. Besides the landlords and merchants and the money-dealers who
financed trading companies and lent their money to the merchants and the
state, there arose now this new wealth of industrial capital--a new sort
of power in the state.
Of the working out of these beginnings we shall tell later. The
immediate effect of the industrial revolution upon the countries to
which it came was to cause a vast, distressful shifting and stirring of
the mute, uneducated, leaderless, and now more and more propertyless
common population. The small cultivators and peasants, ruined and
dislodged by the Enclosure Acts, drifted towards the new manufacturing
regions, and there they joined the families of the impoverished and
degraded craftsmen in the factories. Great towns of squalid houses came
into existence. Nobody seems to have noted clearly what was going on at
the time. It is the keynote of “private enterprise” to mind one’s own
business, secure the utmost profit, and disregard any other
consequences. Ugly great factories grew up, built as cheaply as
possible, to hold as many machines and workers as possible. Around them
gathered the streets of workers’ homes, built at the cheapest rate,
without space, without privacy, barely decent, and let at the utmost
rent that could be exacted. These new industrial centres were at first
without schools, without churches.... The English gentleman of the
closing decades of the eighteenth century read Gibbon’s third volume and
congratulated himself that there was henceforth no serious fear of the
Barbarians, with this new barbarism growing up, with this metamorphosis
of his countrymen into something dark and desperate, in full progress,
within an easy walk perhaps of his door.
XXXVII
THE NEW DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE
§ 1. _Inconveniences of the Great Power System._ § 2. _The Thirteen
Colonies before Their Revolt._ § 3. _Civil War is Forced upon the
Colonies._ § 4. _The War of Independence._ § 5. _The Constitution
of the United States._ § 6. _Primitive Features of the United
States Constitution._ § 7. _Revolutionary Ideas in France._ § 8.
_The Revolution of the Year 1789._ § 9. _The French “Crowned
Republic” of ‘89-91._ § 10. _The Revolutions of the Jacobins._ §
11. _The Jacobin Republic, 1792-94._ § 12. _The Directory._ § 13.
_The Pause in Reconstruction and the Dawn of Modern Socialism._
§ 1[418]
When Gibbon, nearly a century and a half ago, was congratulating the
world of refined and educated people that the age of great political and
social catastrophes was past, he was neglecting many signs which we--in
the wisdom of accomplished facts--could have told him portended far
heavier jolts and dislocations than any he foresaw. We have told how the
struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century princes for
ascendancies and advantages developed into a more cunning and
complicated struggle of foreign offices, masquerading as idealized
“Great Powers,” as the eighteenth century wore on. The intricate and
pretentious art of diplomacy developed. The “Prince” ceased to be a
single and secretive Machiavellian schemer, and became merely the
crowned symbol of a Machiavellian scheme. Prussia, Russia, and Austria
fell upon and divided Poland. France was baffled in profound schemes
against Spain. Britain circumvented the “designs of France” in America
and acquired Canada, and got the better of France in India. And then a
remarkable thing occurred, a thing very shocking to European diplomacy.
The British colonies in America flatly refused to have further part or
lot in this game of “Great Powers.” They objected that they had no voice
and no great interest in these European schemes and conflicts, and they
refused to bear any portion of the burthen of taxation these foreign
policies entailed.
Of course this decision did not flash out complete and finished from the
American mind at the beginning of these troubles. In America in the
eighteenth century, just as in England in the seventeenth, there was an
entire willingness, indeed a desire on the part of ordinary men, to
leave foreign affairs in the hands of the king and his ministers. But
there was an equally strong desire on the part of ordinary men to be
neither taxed nor interfered with in their ordinary pursuits. These are
incompatible wishes. Common men cannot shirk world politics and at the
same time enjoy private freedom; but it has taken them countless
generations to learn this. The first impulse in the American revolt
against the government in Great Britain was therefore simply a
resentment against the taxation and interference that followed
necessarily from “foreign policy” without any clear recognition of what
was involved in that objection. It was only when the revolt was
consummated that the people of the American colonies recognized at all
clearly that they had repudiated the Great Power view of life. The
sentence in which that repudiation was expressed was Washington’s
injunction to “avoid entangling alliances.” From his time until the year
1917 the united colonies of Great Britain in North America, liberated
and independent as the United States of America, stood apart altogether
from the blood-stained intrigues and conflicts of the European foreign
offices. Soon after (1810-1823) they were able to extend their principle
of detachment to the rest of the continent, and to make all the New
World “out of bounds” for the scheming expansionists of the old. When at
length, in 1917, they were obliged to re-enter the arena of world
politics, it was to bring the new spirit and new aims their aloofness
had enabled them to develop into the tangle of international
relationships. They were not, however, the first to stand aloof. Since
the treaty of Westphalia (1648), the confederated states of Switzerland,
in their mountain fastnesses, had sustained their right to exclusion
from the schemes of kings and empires.
But since the North American peoples are now to play an increasingly
important part in our history, it will be well to devote a little more
attention than we have hitherto given to their development. We have
already glanced at this story in § 8 of the preceding chapter. We will
now tell a little more fully--though still in the barest outline--what
these colonies were, whose recalcitrance was so disconcerting to the
king and ministers of Great Britain in their diplomatic game against the
rest of mankind.[419]
§ 2
The extent of the British colonies in America in the early half of the
eighteenth century is shown in the accompanying map.[420] The darker
shading represents the districts settled in 1700, the lighter the growth
of the settlements up to 1760. It will be seen that the colonies were a
mere fringe of population along the coast, spreading gradually inland
and finding in the Alleghany and Blue Mountains a very serious barrier.
Among the oldest of these settlements was the colony of Virginia, the
name of which commemorates Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of England.
The first expedition to found a colony in Virginia was made by Sir
Walter Raleigh in 1584, but there was no permanent settlement at that
time; and the real beginnings of Virginia date from the foundation of
the Virginia Company in 1606 in the reign of James I (1603-25). The
story of John Smith and the early founders of Virginia, and of how the
Indian “princess” Pocahontas married one of his gentlemen, is an
English classic.[421] In growing tobacco the Virginians found the
beginning of prosperity. At the same time that the Virginian Company was
founded, the Plymouth Company obtained a charter for the settlement of
the country to the north of Long Island Sound, to which the English laid
claim. But it was only in 1620 that the northern region began to be
settled, and that under fresh charters. The settlers of the northern
region (New England), which became Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode
Island, and Massachusetts, were men of a different stamp to the Virginia
people. They were Protestants discontented with the Anglican Church
compromise, and republican-spirited men hopeless of resistance to the
Grand Monarchy of James I and Charles I. Their pioneer ship was the
_Mayflower_, which founded New Plymouth in 1620. The dominant northern
colony was Massachusetts. Differences in religious method and in ideas
of toleration led to the separation of the three other Puritan colonies
from Massachusetts. It illustrates the scale upon which things were done
in those days that the whole state of New Hampshire was claimed as
belonging to a certain Captain John Mason, and that he offered to sell
it to the king (King Charles II in 1671) in exchange for the right to
import 300 tons of French wine free of duty--an offer which was refused.
The present state of Maine was bought by Massachusetts from its alleged
owner for twelve hundred and fifty pounds.
In the Civil War that ended with the decapitation of Charles I the
sympathies of New England were for the Parliament, and Virginia was
Cavalier; but two hundred and fifty miles separated these settlements,
and there were no serious hostilities. With the return of the monarchy
in 1660, there was a vigorous development of British colonization in
America. Charles II and his associates were greedy for gain, and the
British crown had no wish to make any further experiments in illegal
taxation at home. But the undefined relations of the colonies to the
crown and the British government seemed to afford promise of financial
adventure across the Atlantic. There was a rapid development of
plantations and proprietary colonies. Lord Baltimore had already in 1632
set up a colony that was to be a home of religious freedom for
Catholics under the attractive name of Maryland, to the north and east
of Virginia; and now the Quaker Penn (who was nevertheless a very good
friend of Charles II) established himself to the north at Philadelphia
and founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Its main boundary with Maryland
and Virginia was delimited by two men, Mason and Dixon, whose “Mason and
Dixon line” was destined to become a very important line indeed in the
later affairs of the United States. Carolina, which was originally an
unsuccessful French Protestant establishment, and which owed its name
not to Charles (Carolus) II of England, but to Charles IX of France, had
fallen into English hands and was settled at several points.[422]
Between Maryland and New England stretched a number of small Dutch and
Swedish settlements, of which the chief town was New Amsterdam. These
settlements were captured from the Dutch by the British in 1664, lost
again in 1673, and restored by treaty when Holland and England made
peace in 1674. Thereby the whole coast from Maine to Carolina became in
some form or other a British possession. To the south the Spanish were
established; their headquarters were at Fort St. Augustine in Florida,
and in 1732 the town of Savannah[423] was settled by a philanthropist
Oglethorpe from England, who had taken pity on the miserable people
imprisoned for debt in England, and rescued a number of them from prison
to become the founders of a new colony, Georgia, which was to be a
bulwark against the Spanish. So by the middle of the eighteenth century
we have these settlements along the American coastline: the New England
group of Puritans and free Protestants, Maine (belonging to
Massachusetts), New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and
Massachusetts; the captured Dutch group, which was now divided up into
New York (New Amsterdam rechristened), New Jersey, and Delaware (Swedish
before it was Dutch, and in its earliest British phase attached to
Pennsylvania); then came catholic Maryland; Cavalier Virginia; Carolina
(which was presently divided into North and South), and Oglethorpe’s
Georgia. Later on a number of Tyrolese Protestants took refuge in
Georgia, and there was a considerable immigration of a good class of
German cultivators into Pennsylvania.
[Illustration: The AMERICAN Colonies, showing territories settled up to
1760]
Such were the miscellaneous origins of the citizens of the Thirteen
Colonies.[424] The possibility of their ever becoming closely united
would have struck an impartial observer in 1760 as being very slight.
Superadded to the initial differences of origin, fresh differences were
created by climate. North of the Mason and Dixon line farming was
practised mainly upon British or Central European lines by free white
cultivators. The settled country of New England took on a likeness to
the English countryside; considerable areas of Pennsylvania developed
fields and farmhouses like those of South Germany. The distinctive
conditions in the north had, socially, important effects. Masters and
men had to labour together as backwoodsmen, and were equalized in the
process. They did not start equally; many “servants” are mentioned in
the roster of the _Mayflower_. But they rapidly became equal under
colonial conditions; there was, for instance, a vast tract of land to be
had for the taking, and the “servant” went off and took land like his
master. The English class system disappeared. Under colonial conditions
there arose equality “in the faculties both of body and mind,” and an
individual independence of judgment impatient of interference from
England. But south of the Mason and Dixon line tobacco growing began,
and the warmer climate encouraged the establishment of plantations with
gang labour. Red Indian captives were employed; Cromwell sent Irish
prisoners of war to Virginia, which did much to reconcile the Royalist
planters to republicanism; convicts were sent out, and there was a
considerable trade in kidnapped children, who were “spirited away” to
America to become apprentices or bond slaves. But the most convenient
form of gang labour proved to be that of negro slaves. The first negro
slaves were brought to Jamestown in Virginia by a Dutch ship as early as
1620. By 1700 negro slaves were scattered all over the states, but
Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas were their chief regions of
employment, and while the communities to the north were communities of
not very rich and not very poor farming men, the south developed a type
of large proprietor and a white community of overseers and professional
men subsisting on slave labour. Slave labour was a necessity to the
social and economic system that had grown up in the south; in the north
the presence of slaves was unnecessary and in some respects
inconvenient. Conscientious scruples about slavery were more free,
therefore, to develop and flourish in the northern atmosphere. To this
question of the revival of slavery in the world we must return when we
come to consider the perplexities of American Democracy. Here we note it
simply as an added factor in the heterogeneous mixture of the British
Colonies.[425]
But if the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies were miscellaneous in
their origins and various in their habits and sympathies, they had three
very strong antagonisms in common. They had a common interest against
the Red Indians. For a time they shared a common dread of French
conquest and dominion. And thirdly, they were all in conflict with the
claims of the British crown and the commercial selfishness of the narrow
oligarchy who dominated the British Parliament and British affairs.
So far as the first danger went, the Indians were a constant evil, but
never more than a threat of disaster. They remained divided against
themselves. Yet they had shown possibilities of combination upon a
larger scale. The Five Nations of the Iroquois (see map, p. 283) was a
very important league of tribes. But it never succeeded in playing off
the French against the English to secure itself, and no Red Indian
Jengis Khan ever arose among these nomads of the new world. The French
aggression was a more serious threat. The French never made settlements
in America on a scale to compete with the English, but their government
set about the encirclement of the colonies and their subjugation in a
terrifyingly systematic manner. The English in America were colonists;
the French were explorers, adventurers, agents, missionaries, merchants,
and soldiers. Only in Canada did they strike root. French statesmen sat
over maps and dreamt dreams, and their dreams are to be seen in our map
in the chain of forts creeping southward from the Great Lakes and
northward up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The struggle of France and
Britain was a worldwide struggle. It was decided in India, in Germany,
and on the high seas. In the Peace of Paris (1763) the French gave
England Canada, and relinquished Louisiana to the inert hands of
declining Spain. It was the complete abandonment of America by France.
The lifting of the French danger left the colonists unencumbered to face
their third common antagonist--the crown and government of their mother
land.
§ 3
We have noted in the previous chapter how the governing class of Great
Britain steadily acquired the land and destroyed the liberty of the
common people throughout the eighteenth century, and how greedily and
blindly the new industrial revolution was brought about. We have noted
also how the British Parliament, through the decay of the representative
methods of the House of Commons, had become both in its upper and lower
houses merely the instrument of government through the big landowners.
Both these big property-holders and the crown were deeply interested in
America; the former as private adventurers, the latter partly as
representing the speculative exploitations of the Stuart kings, and
partly as representing the state in search of funds for the expenses of
foreign policy, and neither lords nor crown were disposed to regard the
traders, planters, and common people of the colonies with any more
consideration than they did the yeomen and small cultivators at home. At
bottom the interests of the common man in Great Britain, Ireland, and
America were the same. Each was being squeezed by the same system. But
while in Britain oppressor and oppressed were closely tangled up in one
intimate social system, in America the crown and the exploiter were far
away, and men could get together and develop a sense of community
against their common enemy.
Moreover, the American colonist had the important advantage of
possessing a separate and legal organ of resistance to the British
government in the assembly or legislature of his colony that was
necessary for the management of local affairs. The common man in
Britain, cheated out of his proper representation in the Commons, had no
organ, no centre of expression and action for his discontents.
It will be evident to the reader, bearing in mind the variety of the
colonies, that here was the possibility of an endless series of
disputes, aggressions, and counter-aggressions. The story of the
development of irritations between the colonies and Britain is a story
far too intricate, subtle, and lengthy for the scheme of this _Outline_.
Suffice it that the grievances fell under three main heads: attempts to
secure for British adventurers or the British government the profits of
the exploitation of new lands; systematic restrictions upon trade
designed to keep the foreign trade of the colonies entirely in British
hands, so that the colonial exports all went through Britain and only
British-made goods were used in America;[426] and finally attempts at
taxation through the British Parliament as the supreme taxing authority
of the empire. Under the pressure of this triple system of annoyances,
the American colonists were forced to do a very considerable amount of
hard political thinking. Such men as Patrick Henry and James Otis began
to discuss the fundamental ideas of government and political association
very much as they had been discussed in England in the great days of
Cromwell’s Commonweal. They began to deny both the divine origin of
kingship and the supremacy of the British Parliament, and (James Otis,
1762[427]) to say such things as:--
“God made all men naturally equal.
“Ideas of earthly superiority are educational, not innate.
“Kings were made for the good of the people, and not the people for
them.
“No government has a right to make slaves of its subjects.
“Though most governments are _de facto_ arbitrary, and consequently the
curse and scandal of human nature, yet none are _de jure_ arbitrary.”
Some of which propositions reach far.
This ferment in the political ideas of the Americans was started by
English leaven. One very influential English writer was John Locke
(1632-1704), whose _Two Treatises on Civil Government_ may be taken, as
much as any one single book can be taken in such cases, as the point of
departure for modern democratic ideas. He was the son of a Cromwellian
soldier, he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, during the republican
ascendancy, he spent some years in Holland in exile, and his writings
form a bridge between the bold political thinking of those earlier
republican days and the revolutionary movement both in America and
France.
But men do not begin to act upon theories. It is always some real
danger, some practical necessity, that produces action; and it is only
after action has destroyed old relationships and produced a new and
perplexing state of affairs that theory comes to its own. Then it is
that theory is put to the test. The discord in interests and ideas
between the colonists was brought to a fighting issue by the obstinate
resolve of the British Parliament after the peace of 1763 to impose
taxation upon the American colonies. Britain was at peace and flushed
with successes; it seemed an admirable opportunity for settling accounts
with these recalcitrant settlers. But the great British property-owners
found a power beside their own, of much the same mind with them, but a
little divergent in its ends--the reviving crown. King George III, who
had begun his reign in 1760, was resolved to be much more of a king than
his two German predecessors. He could speak English; he claimed to
“glory in the name of Briton”--and indeed it is not a bad name for a man
without a perceptible drop of English, Welsh, or Scotch blood in his
veins. In the American colonies and the overseas possessions generally,
with their indefinite charters or no charters at all, it seemed to him
that the crown might claim authority and obtain resources and powers
absolutely denied to it by the strong and jealous aristocracy in
Britain. This inclined many of the Whig noblemen to a sympathy with the
colonists that they might not otherwise have shown. They had no
objection to the exploitation of the colonies in the interests of
British “private enterprise,” but they had very strong objections to the
strengthening of the crown by that exploitation so as to make it
presently independent of themselves.[428]
The war that broke out was therefore in reality not a war between
Britain and the colonists, it was a war between the British government
and the colonists, with a body of Whig noblemen and a considerable
amount of public feeling in England on the side of the latter. An early
move after 1763 was an attempt to raise revenue for Britain in the
colonies by requiring that newspapers and documents of various sorts
should be stamped. This was stiffly resisted, the British crown was
intimidated, and the Stamp Acts were repealed (1766). Their repeal was
greeted by riotous rejoicings in London, more hearty even than those in
the colonies.
But the Stamp Act affair was only one eddy in a turbulent stream flowing
towards civil war. Upon a score of pretexts, and up and down the coast,
the representatives of the British government were busy asserting their
authority and making British government intolerable. The quartering of
soldiers upon the colonists was a great nuisance. Rhode Island was
particularly active in defying the trade restrictions; the Rhode
Islanders were “free traders,”--that is to say, smugglers; a government
schooner, the _Gaspee_, ran aground off Providence; she was surprised,
boarded, and captured by armed men in boats, and burnt. In 1773, with a
total disregard of the existing colonial tea trade, special advantages
for the importation of tea into America[429] were given by the British
Parliament to the East India Company. It was resolved by the colonists
to refuse and boycott this tea. When the tea importers at Boston showed
themselves resolute to land their cargoes, a band of men disguised as
Indians, in the presence of a great crowd of people, boarded the three
tea ships and threw the tea overboard (December 16th, 1773).
All 1774 was occupied in the gathering up of resources on either side
for the coming conflict. It was decided by the British Parliament in the
spring of 1774 to punish Boston by closing her port. Her trade was to be
destroyed unless she accepted that tea. It was a quite typical instance
of that silly “firmness” which shatters empires. In order to enforce
this measure, British troops were concentrated at Boston under General
Gage. The colonists took counter-measures. The first colonial Congress
met at Philadelphia in September, at which twelve colonies were
represented: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island,
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and
North and South Carolina. Georgia was not present. True to the best
English traditions, the Congress documented its attitude by a
“Declaration of Rights.” Practically this Congress was an
insurrectionary government, but no blow was struck until the spring of
1775. Then came the first shedding of blood.
Two of the American leaders, Hancock and Samuel Adams, had been marked
down by the British Government for arrest and trial for treason; they
were known to be at Lexington, about eleven miles from Boston; and in
the night of April 18th, 1775, Gage set his forces in motion for their
arrest.
That night was a momentous one in history. The movement of Gage’s troops
had been observed, signal lanterns were shown from a church tower in
Boston, and two men, Dawes and Paul Revere, stole away in boats across
the Back Bay to take horse and warn the countryside. The British were
also ferried over the water, and as they marched through the night
towards Lexington, the firing of signal cannon and the ringing of church
bells went before them. As they entered Lexington at dawn, they saw a
little company of men drawn up in military fashion. It seems that the
British fired first. There was a single shot and then a volley, and the
little handful decamped, apparently without any answering shots, leaving
eight dead and nine wounded upon the village green.
The British then marched on to Concord, ten miles further, occupied the
village, and stationed a party on the bridge at that place. The
expedition had failed in its purpose of arresting Hancock and Adams, and
the British commander seems to have been at a loss what to do next.
Meanwhile the colonial levies were coming up from all directions, and
presently the picket upon the bridge found itself subjected to an
increasing fire from a gathering number of assailants firing from behind
trees and fences. A retreat to Boston was decided upon. It was a
disastrous retreat. The country had risen behind the British; all the
morning the colonials had been gathering. Both sides of the road were
now swarming with sharpshooters firing from behind rock and fence and
building; the soldiers were in conspicuous scarlet uniforms, with yellow
facings and white gaiters and cravats; this must have stood out very
vividly against the cold sharp colours of the late New England spring;
the day was bright, hot, and dusty, and they were already exhausted by a
night march. Every few yards a man fell, wounded or killed. The rest
tramped on, or halted to fire an ineffectual volley. No counter-attack
was possible. Their assailants lurked everywhere. At Lexington there
were British reinforcements and two guns, and after a brief rest the
retreat was resumed in better order. But the sharpshooting and pursuit
was pressed to the river, and after the British had crossed back into
Boston, the colonial levies took up their quarters in Cambridge and
prepared to blockade the city.
§ 4
So the war began. It was not a war that promised a conclusive end. The
colonists had no one vulnerable capital; they were dispersed over a
great country, with a limitless wilderness behind it, and so they had
great powers of resistance. They had learnt their tactics largely from
the Indians; they could fight well in open order, and harry and destroy
troops in movement. But they had no disciplined army that could meet the
British in a pitched battle, and little military equipment; and their
levies grew impatient at a long campaign, and tended to go home to their
farms. The British, on the other hand, had a well-drilled army, and
their command of the sea gave them the power of shifting their attack up
and down the long Atlantic seaboard. They were at peace with all the
world. But the king was stupid and greedy to interfere in the conduct of
affairs; the generals he favoured were stupid “strong men” or flighty
men of birth and fashion; and the heart of England was not in the
business. He trusted rather to being able to blockade, raid, and annoy
the colonists into submission than to a conclusive conquest and
occupation of the land. But the methods employed, and particularly the
use of hired German troops, who still retained the cruel traditions of
the Thirty Years’ War, and of Indian auxiliaries, who raped and scalped
the outlying settlers, did not so much weary the Americans of the war as
of the British. The Congress, meeting for the second time in 1775,
endorsed the actions of the New England colonists, and appointed George
Washington the American commander-in-chief. In 1777, General Burgoyne,
in an attempt to get down to New York from Canada, was defeated at
Freeman’s Farm on the Upper Hudson, and surrounded and obliged to
capitulate at Saratoga with his whole army. This disaster encouraged the
French and Spanish to come into the struggle on the side of the
colonists. The French sent an army to the States under General
Lafayette, and their fleet did much to minimize the advantage of the
British at sea. General Cornwallis was caught in the Yorktown peninsula
in Virginia in 1781, and capitulated with his army. The British
Government, now heavily engaged with France and Spain in Europe, was at
the end of its resources.
[Illustration: Sketch map to show BOSTON & neighbourhood 1775]
At the outset of the war the colonists in general seem to have been as
little disposed to repudiate monarchy and claim complete independence as
were the Hollanders in the opening phase of Philip II’s persecutions and
follies. The separatists were called radicals; they were mostly
extremely democratic, as we should say in England to-day, and their
advanced views frightened many of the steadier and wealthier colonists,
for whom class privileges and distinctions had considerable charm. But
early in 1776 an able and persuasive Englishman, Tom Paine, published a
pamphlet at Philadelphia with the title of _Common Sense_, which had an
enormous effect on public opinion. Its style was rhetorical by modern
standards. “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of Nature cries,
‘’Tis time to part,’” and so forth. But its effects were very great. It
converted thousands to the necessity of separation. The turn-over of
opinion, once it had begun, was rapid.
Only in the summer of 1776 did Congress take the irrevocable step of
declaring for separation. “The Declaration of Independence,” another of
those exemplary documents which it has been the peculiar service of the
English to produce for mankind, was drawn up by Thomas Jefferson; and
after various amendments and modifications it was made the fundamental
document of the United States of America. There were two noteworthy
amendments to Jefferson’s draft. He had denounced the slave trade
fiercely, and blamed the home government for interfering with colonial
attempts to end it. This was thrown out, and so too was a sentence about
the British: “we must endeavour to forget our former love for them ...
we might have been a free and a great people together.”
(But for the British crown and great proprietors and the mutual
ignorance of the common men in the two countries.)[430]
Towards the end of 1782, the preliminary articles of the treaty in which
Britain recognized the complete independence of the United States were
signed at Paris. The end of the war was proclaimed on April 19th, 1783,
exactly eight years after Paul Revere’s ride, and the retreat of Gage’s
men from Concord to Boston. The Treaty of Peace was finally signed at
Paris in September.
§ 5
From the point of view of human history, the way in which the Thirteen
States became independent is of far less importance than the fact that
they did become independent. And with the establishment of their
independence came a new sort of community into the world. It was like
something coming out of an egg. It was a western European civilization
that had broken free from the last traces of Empire and Christendom; it
had not a vestige of monarchy left and no state religion. It had no
dukes, princes, counts, nor any sort of title-bearers claiming to
ascendancy or respect as a right. Even its unity was as yet a mere unity
for defence and freedom. It was in these respects such a clean start in
political organization as the world had not seen before. The absence of
any binding religious tie is especially noteworthy. It had a number of
forms of Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but as a
state document of 1796 explicitly declared, “The government of the
United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian
religion.”[431] The new community had in fact gone right down to the
bare and stripped fundamentals of human association, and it was building
up a new sort of society and a new sort of state upon those foundations.
Here were about four million people scattered over vast areas with very
slow and difficult means of inter-communication, poor as yet, but with
the potentiality of limitless wealth, setting out to do in reality on a
huge scale such a feat of construction as the Athenian philosophers
twenty-two centuries before had done in imagination and theory.
This situation marks a definite stage in the release of man from
precedent and usage, and a definite step forward towards the conscious
and deliberate reconstruction of his circumstances to suit his needs and
aims. It was a new method becoming practical in human affairs. The
modern states of Europe have been evolved institution by institution
slowly and planlessly out of preceding things. The United States were
planned and made.
[Illustration: The UNITED STATES, showing the extent of settlement in
1790.]
In one respect, however, the creative freedom of the new nation was very
seriously restricted. This new sort of community and state was not built
upon a cleared site. It was not even so frankly an artificiality as some
of the later Athenian colonies, which went out from the mother city to
plan and build brand new city states with brand new constitutions. The
thirteen colonies by the end of the war had all of them constitutions
either like that of Connecticut and Rhode Island dating from their
original charters (1662) or, as in the case of the rest of the states,
where a British governor had played a large part in the administration,
re-made during the conflict. But we may well consider these
reconstructions as contributory essays and experiments in the general
constructive effort.
Upon the effort certain ideas stood out very prominently. One is the
idea of political and social equality. This idea, which we saw coming
into the world as an extreme and almost incredible idea in the age
between Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth, is now asserted in the later
eighteenth century as a practical standard of human relationship. Says
the fundamental statement of Virginia: “All men are by nature equally
free and independent,” and it proceeds to rehearse their “rights,” and
to assert that all magistrates and governors are but “trustees and
servants”; of the commonweal. All men are equally entitled to the free
exercise of religion. The king by right, the aristocrat, the “natural
slave,” the god king, and the god have all vanished from this political
scheme--so far as these declarations go. Most of the states produced
similar preludes to government. The Declaration of Independence said
that “all men are born equal.” It is everywhere asserted in
eighteenth-century terms that the new community is to be--to use the
phraseology we have introduced in an earlier chapter--a community of
will and not a community of obedience. But the thinkers of that time had
a rather clumsier way of putting the thing, they imagined a sort of
individual choice of and assent to citizenship that never in fact
occurred--the so-called Social Contract. The Massachusetts preamble, for
instance, asserts that the state is a voluntary association, “by which
the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the
whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common
good.”
Now it will be evident that most of these fundamental statements are
very questionable statements. Men are not born equal, they are not born
free; they are born a most various multitude enmeshed in an ancient and
complex social net. Nor is any man invited to sign the social contract
or, failing that, to depart into solitude. These statements, literally
interpreted, are so manifestly false that it is impossible to believe
that the men who made them intended them to be literally interpreted.
They made them in order to express certain elusive but profoundly
important ideas--ideas that after another century and a half of thinking
the world is in a better position to express. Civilization, as this
outline has shown, arose as a community of obedience, and was
essentially a community of obedience. But generation after generation
the spirit was abused by priests and rulers. There was a continual
influx of masterful will from the forests, parklands, and steppes. The
human spirit had at last rebelled altogether against the blind
obediences of the common life; it was seeking--and at first it was
seeking very clumsily--to achieve a new and better sort of civilization
that should also be a community of will. To that end it was necessary
that every man should be treated as the sovereign of himself; his
standing was to be one of fellowship and not of servility. His real use,
his real importance depended upon his individual quality.
The method by which these creators of political America sought to secure
this community of will was an extremely simple and crude one. They gave
what was for the time, and in view of American conditions, a very wide
franchise. Conditions varied in the different states; the widest
franchise was in Pennsylvania, where every adult male taxpayer voted,
but, compared with Britain, all the United States were well within sight
of manhood suffrage by the end of the eighteenth century. These makers
of America also made efforts, considerable for their times, but puny by
more modern standards, to secure a widely diffused common education. The
information of the citizens as to what was going on at home and abroad,
they left, apparently without any qualms of misgiving, to public
meetings and the privately owned printing press.