of the monarchies and experimental governments, and a considerable
number of ducal and princely courts aped the splendours of Versailles
on varying scales. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), a devastating
scramble among the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians for fluctuating
political advantages, sapped the energies of Germany for a century. A
map must show the crazy patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map
of Europe according to the peace of Westphalia (1648). One sees a
tangle of principalities, dukedoms, free states and the like, some
partly in and partly out of the Empire. Sweden’s arm, the reader will
note, reached far into Germany; and except for a few islands of
territory within the imperial boundaries France was still far from the
Rhine. Amidst this patchwork the Kingdom of Prussia—it became a
Kingdom in 1701—rose steadily to prominence and sustained a series of
successful wars. Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740-86) had his
Versailles at Potsdam, where his court spoke French, read French
literature and rivalled the culture of the French King.
In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England, adding one more
to the list of monarchies half in and half out of the empire.
The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained the title
of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now there was also
an Emperor of the East again. After the fall of Constantinople (1453),
the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), claimed to be
heir to the Byzantine throne and adopted the Byzantine double-headed
eagle upon his arms. His grandson, Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible
(1533-1584), assumed the imperial title of Cæsar (Tsar). But only in
the latter half of the seventeenth century did Russia cease to seem
remote and Asiatic to the European mind. The Tsar Peter the Great
(1682-1725) brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He built
a new capital for his empire, Petersburg upon the Neva, that played the
part of a window between Russia and Europe, and he set up his
Versailles at Peterhof eighteen miles away, employing a French
architect who gave him a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery,
park and all the recognized appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia
as in Prussia French became the language of the court.
Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia was the Polish
kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors too jealous
of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a nominal kingship
to the monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these three
neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France to retain her as an
independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a group of republican
cantons; Venice was a republic; Italy like so much of Germany was
divided among minor dukes and princes. The Pope ruled like a prince in
the papal states, too fearful now of losing the allegiance of the
remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and their subjects
or to remind the world of the commonweal of Christendom. There remained
indeed no common political idea in Europe at all; Europe was given over
altogether to division and diversity.
All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of
aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a “foreign
policy” of aggression against its neighbours and of aggressive
alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last phase of this
age of the multifarious sovereign states, and still suffer from the
hatreds, hostilities and suspicions it engendered. The history of this
time becomes more and more manifestly “gossip,” more and more unmeaning
and wearisome to a modern intelligence. You are told of how this war
was caused by this King’s mistress, and how the jealousy of one
minister for another caused that. A tittle-tattle of bribes and
rivalries disgusts the intelligent student. The more permanently
significant fact is that in spite of the obstruction of a score of
frontiers, reading and thought still spread and increased and
inventions multiplied. The eighteenth century saw the appearance of a
literature profoundly sceptical and critical of the courts and policies
of the time. In such a book as Voltaire’s _Candide_ we have the
expression of an infinite weariness with the planless confusion of the
European world.
LIII
THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS
While Central Europe thus remained divided and confused, the Western
Europeans and particularly the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Spanish,
the Portuguese, the French and the British were extending the area of
their struggles across the seas of all the world. The printing press
had dissolved the political ideas of Europe into a vast and at first
indeterminate fermentation, but that other great innovation, the
ocean-going sailing ship, was inexorably extending the range of
European experience to the furthermost limits of salt water.
The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern Atlantic
Europeans were not for colonization but for trade and mining. The
Spaniards were first in the field; they claimed dominion over the whole
of this new world of America. Very soon however the Portuguese asked
for a share. The Pope—it was one of the last acts of Rome as mistress
of the world—divided the new continent between these two first-comers,
giving Portugal Brazil and everything else east of a line 370 leagues
west of the Cape Verde islands, and all the rest to Spain (1494). The
Portuguese at this time were also pushing overseas enterprise southward
and eastward. In 1497 Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the
Cape to Zanzibar and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were
Portuguese ships in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were
setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about the coasts
of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two smaller possessions in
India, Macao in China and a part of Timor are to this day Portuguese
possessions.
The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement paid little
heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal. The English, the Danes and
Swedes, and presently the Dutch, were soon staking out claims in North
America and the West Indies, and his Most Catholic Majesty of France
heeded the papal settlement as little as any Protestant. The wars of
Europe extended themselves to these claims and possessions.
Map: Central Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648
In the long run the English were the most successful in this scramble
for overseas possessions. The Danes and Swedes were too deeply
entangled in the complicated affairs of Germany to sustain effective
expeditions abroad. Sweden was wasted upon the German battlefields by
a picturesque king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant “Lion of the
North.” The Dutch were the heirs of such small settlements as Sweden
made in America, and the Dutch were too near French aggressions to hold
their own against the British. In the far East the chief rivals for
empire were the British, Dutch and French, and in America the British,
French and Spanish. The British had the supreme advantage of a water
frontier, the “silver streak” of the English Channel, against Europe.
The tradition of the Latin Empire entangled them least.
EUROPEANS TIGER HUNTING IN INDIA
EUROPEANS TIGER HUNTING IN INDIA
_(From the engraving of the picture by Zoffany in the British Museum)_
France has always thought too much in terms of Europe. Throughout the
eighteenth century she was wasting her opportunities of expansion in
West and East alike in order to dominate Spain, Italy and the German
confusion. The religious and political dissensions of Britain in the
seventeenth century had driven many of the English to seek a permanent
home in America. They struck root and increased and multiplied, giving
the British a great advantage in the American struggle. In 1756 and
1760 the French lost Canada to the British and their American
colonists, and a few years later the British trading company found
itself completely dominant over French, Dutch and Portuguese in the
peninsula of India. The great Mongol Empire of Baber, Akbar and their
successors had now far gone in decay, and the story of its practical
capture by a London trading company, the British East India Company, is
one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole history of
conquest.
THE LAST EFFORT AND FALL OF TIPPOO SULTAN
THE LAST EFFORT AND FALL OF TIPPOO SULTAN
_(From the engraving of the picture by Singleton in the British
Museum)_
This East India Company 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 seemed
a different race, outside their range of sympathy; its mysterious
temples sustained 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.
And while the Western European powers were thus fighting for these
fantastic overseas empires upon every ocean in the world, two great
land conquests were in progress in Asia. China had thrown off the
Mongol yoke in 1360, and flourished under the great native dynasty of
the Mings until 1644. Then the Manchus, another Mongol people,
reconquered China and remained masters of China until 1912. Meanwhile
Russia was pushing East and growing to greatness in the world’s
affairs. 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. Its expansion is very
largely due to 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 secretaries, 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. 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....
LIV
THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
The third quarter of the eighteenth century thus saw the remarkable and
unstable spectacle of a Europe divided against itself, and no longer
with any unifying political or religious idea, yet through the immense
stimulation of men’s imaginations by the printed book, the printed map,
and the opportunity of the new ocean-going shipping, able in a
disorganized and contentious manner to dominate all the coasts of the
world. It was a planless, incoherent ebullition of enterprise due to
temporary and almost accidental advantages over the rest of mankind. By
virtue of these advantages this new and still largely empty continent
of America was peopled mainly from Western European sources, and South
Africa and Australia and New Zealand marked down as prospective homes
for a European population.
The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco da Gama to India
was the perennial first motive of all sailors since the beginning of
things—trade. But while in the already populous and productive East
the trade motive remained dominant, and the European settlements
remained trading settlements from which the European inhabitants hoped
to return home to spend their money, the Europeans in America, dealing
with communities at a very much lower level of productive activity,
found a new inducement for persistence in the search for gold and
silver. Particularly did the mines of Spanish America yield silver.
The Europeans had to go to America not simply as armed merchants but as
prospectors, miners, searchers after natural products, and presently as
planters. In the north they sought furs. Mines and plantations
necessitated settlements. They obliged people to set up permanent
overseas homes. Finally in some cases, as when the English Puritans
went to New England in the early seventeenth 336}century to escape
religious persecution, when in the eighteenth Oglethorpe sent people
from the English debtors’ prisons to Georgia, and when in the end of
the eighteenth the Dutch sent orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the
Europeans frankly crossed the seas to find new homes for good. In the
nineteenth century, and especially after the coming of the steamship,
the stream of European emigration to the new empty lands of America and
Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great migration.
So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Europeans, and the
European culture was transplanted to much larger areas than those in
which it had been developed. These new communities bringing a
ready-made civilization with them to these new lands grew up, as it
were, unplanned and unperceived; the statecraft of Europe did not
foresee them, and was unprepared with any ideas about their treatment.
The politicians and ministers of Europe continued to regard them as
essentially expeditionary establishments, sources of revenue,
“possessions” and “dependencies,” long after their peoples had
developed a keen sense of their separate social life. And also they
continued to treat them as helplessly subject to the mother country
long after the population had spread inland out of reach of any
effectual punitive operations from the sea.
Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be remembered,
the link of all these overseas empires was the oceangoing sailing ship.
On land the swiftest thing was still the horse, and the cohesion and
unity of political systems on land was still limited by the limitations
of horse communications.
Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century the
northern two-thirds of North America was under the British crown.
France had abandoned America. Except for Brazil, which was Portuguese,
and one or two small islands and areas in French, British, Danish and
Dutch hands, Florida, Louisiana, California and all America to the
south was Spanish. It was the British colonies south of Maine and Lake
Ontario that first demonstrated the inadequacy of the sailing ship to
hold overseas populations together in one political system.
These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin and
character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settlements as well as
British; there were British Catholics in Maryland and British
ultra-Protestants in New England, and while the New Englanders farmed
their own land and denounced slavery, the British in Virginia and the
south were planters employing a swelling multitude of imported negro
slaves. There was no natural common unity in such states. To get from
one to the other might mean a coasting voyage hardly less tedious than
the transatlantic crossing. But the union that diverse origin and
natural conditions denied the British Americans was forced upon them by
the selfishness and stupidity of the British government in London.
They were taxed without any voice in the spending of the taxes; their
trade was sacrificed to British interests; the highly profitable slave
trade was maintained by the British government in spite of the
opposition of the Virginians who—though quite willing to hold and use
slaves—feared to be swamped by an ever-growing barbaric black
population.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
GEORGE WASHINGTON
_(From a painting by Gilbert Stuart)_
Britain at that time was lapsing towards an intenser form of monarchy,
and the obstinate personality of George III (1760- 1820) did much to
force on a struggle between the home and the colonial governments.
The conflict was precipitated by legislation which favoured the London
East India Company at the expense of the American shipper. Three
cargoes of tea which were imported under the new conditions were thrown
overboard in Boston harbour by a band of men disguised as Indians
(1773). Fighting only began in 1775 when the British government
attempted to arrest two of the American leaders at Lexington near
Boston. The first shots were fired in Lexington by the British; the
first fighting occurred at Concord.
THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL, NEAR BOSTON
THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL, NEAR BOSTON
_(From the engraving of the picture by John Trumbull in the British
Museum)_
So the American War of Independence began, though for more than a year
the colonists showed themselves extremely unwilling to sever their
links with the mother land. It was not until the middle of 1776 that
the Congress of the insurgent states issued “The Declaration of
Independence.” George Washington, who like many of the leading
colonists of the time had had a military training in the wars against
the French, was made commander-in-chief. In 1777 a British general,
General Burgoyne, in an attempt to reach New York from Canada, was
defeated at Freemans Farm and obliged to surrender at Saratoga. In the
same year the French and Spanish declared war upon Great Britain,
greatly hampering her sea communications. A second British army under
General Cornwallis was caught in the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia and
obliged to capitulate in 1781. In 1783 peace was made in Paris, and
the Thirteen Colonies from Maine to Georgia became a union of
independent sovereign States. So the United States of America came
into existence. Canada remained loyal to the British flag.
Map: The United States, showing extent of settlement in 1790
For four years these States had only a very feeble central government
under certain Articles of Confederation, and they seemed destined to
break up into separate independent communities. Their immediate
separation was delayed by the hostility of the British and a certain
aggressiveness on the part of the French which brought home to them the
immediate dangers of division. A Constitution was drawn up and
ratified in 1788 establishing a more efficient Federal government with
a President holding very considerable powers, and the weak sense of
national unity was invigorated by a second war with Britain in 1812.
Nevertheless the area covered by the States was so wide and their
interests so diverse at that time, that—given only the means of
communication then available—a disintegration of the Union into
separate states on the European scale of size was merely a question of
time. Attendance at Washington meant a long, tedious and insecure
journey for the senators and congressmen of the remoter districts, and
the mechanical impediments to the diffusion of a common education and a
common literature and intelligence were practically insurmountable.
Forces were at work in the world however that were to arrest the
process of differentiation altogether. Presently came the river
steamboat and then the railway and the telegraph to save the United
States from fragmentation, and weave its dispersed people together
again into the first of great modern nations.
Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America were to follow
the example of the Thirteen and break their connection with Europe.
But being more dispersed over the continent and separated by great
mountainous chains and deserts and forests and by the Portuguese Empire
of Brazil, they did not achieve a union among themselves. They became
a constellation of republican states, very prone at first to wars among
themselves and to revolutions.
Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable
separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occupied the
mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy had fled to Brazil. From
that time on until they separated, Portugal was rather a dependency of
Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822 Brazil declared itself a
separate Empire under Pedro I, a son of the Portuguese King. But the
new world has never been very favourable to monarchy. In 1889 the
Emperor of Brazil was shipped off quietly to Europe, and the United
States of Brazil fell into line with the rest of republican America.
LV
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE
Britain had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America before a
profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of Grand
Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the essentially
temporary nature of the political arrangements of the world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of the
personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a
multitude of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a basis
of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and
aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and substance of its common
people. The clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a
system of exemption that threw the whole burden of the state upon the
middle and lower classes. The peasants were ground down by taxation;
the middle classes were dominated and humiliated by the nobility.