inroads into Poland, and especially the duchy of Masovia. To attack them
among their own forests and morasses was so hopelessly difficult that
the bishops, whom the pope had admonished to preach a “crusade” against
them, had hitherto refrained from doing so. The event proved the wisdom
of this inaction; for after marching a large army over the border, under
the command of Henry of Silesia and Duke Conrad of Masovia, with whom
the bishops with their men-at-arms joined forces, the assailers found
themselves in a network of marshes, behind which the assailed quietly
waited. The wearied troops had at last to be ingloriously marched back
again, while the enemy came out in their rear, made a raid into Masovia,
carried off five thousand Christian captives, burnt a thousand villages
and hamlets as well as almost every church in the province, and drove
Duke Conrad into Germany for refuge. Henry then advised the fugitive
duke to call upon the German Knights of Venice, a military order who
afterwards under their grand master, Hermann Balk, settled in Kulmerland
and effectually routed and conquered the Prussians. The conversion of
the latter was, therefore, a feat of arms rather than a triumph of
missionary zeal; and perhaps it was less to be wondered at that, after
only three hundred years’ Christianity, they should have accepted
another change in the shape of the Lutheran Reformation. The order
itself, however, was more blamable, in that it departed, in the person
of its head, the famous Albert of Brandenburg, from its old chivalric
standard of honor, and went over to the “new doctrine,” as it was
called, because this defection promised political independence. And,
again, it strikes one, in reading of these thirteenth-century feuds,
that history repeats itself; for a new religious war has sprung up
between Prussia and Posen, and the two civilized races are in much the
same relative positions, speaking broadly, as the two barbarous ones
were then, although Posen can point to a short and dazzling career
between the two eras of persecution.
It is impossible here to recount the various and sad events that led up
to the death of Henry. He died in 1238, at the age of seventy, under the
ban of excommunication, which was only partially removed, and deprived
to the last of the presence of his saintly wife. The scene of the return
of his body to the abbey church at Trebnitz was heartrending. The nuns
and vassals, no less than his widow and children, looked upon him as
their stay and their protector; they bewailed him with genuine grief as
their benefactor, and buried him with all imaginable respect and pomp as
their founder. Hedwige’s life as a widow became more penitential than
before.
After her death a hair-shirt and a belt with small, sharp points turned
inwards were found on her body; but these she had worn for many years
before her widowhood. Her cloister-life, however, was not her only one,
for she watched with intelligent interest the politics of the time, the
great events, and even the less obtrusive details, whose consequences to
the cause of good might afterwards be manifold; and above all she lived
in her son, Henry the Pious, a worthy and able sovereign, whose reign
was to be short, stormy, and glorious.
In January, 1241, the Tartars, under their chiefs Batu and Peta, having
previously desolated Russia, fell with nearly three hundred thousand
fighting men upon Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Poland. The King of
Hungary, Bela, was beaten by Batu, while Peta besieged, took, and burnt
Cracow on his way to Silesia. The King of Bohemia, Wenzel, brought as
large an army as he could to defend his frontiers, while Henry gathered
thirty thousand men in his father’s city of refuge, Liegnitz, waiting to
attack Peta on his road to Breslau. Trebnitz was in dire confusion;
monasteries always fell the first prey to the heathen invaders, and the
nuns judged it prudent to scatter themselves and claim each the
protection of her own family, while Hedwige, with her daughter, the
Abbess Gertrude, and her daughter-in-law, Anna, shut themselves up in
the strong castle of Crossen on the Oder. Before she left she gave her
son a scarf, or rather sword-belt, embroidered with her own hands, which
he received as an omen of good-fortune, cheering her with hopes of his
speedy and victorious return, while the stricken, heroic mother feared
but too surely that she should never see his face again. All Breslau
retired within the citadel to await the attack, and Henry tried to
intercept the foe on his way. He drew up his army on some high ground
just outside the walls—Wahlstatt, a good battle-ground, as he judged—and
himself gave the signal to attack the oncoming foe. He commanded the
main body, while lesser brother-sovereigns directed the wings; but the
irresistible might of numbers, which was the chief reliance of the
Tartars, bore down all opposition, as a whirlwind does the densest
forest. The Poles and Silesians fell like heroes, defending themselves
and asking no quarter, until a cry arose in German, “Strike dead! strike
dead!” which, whether raised by accident or by treachery, produced a
panic by its likeness to the Polish word for “Fly! fly!” The army seemed
literally to melt away; squadrons broke and ran, and a cloud of small,
sharp Tartar arrows clove the air after them; the Asiatic cavalry hunted
and trampled down the fugitives. One of the Polish leaders at last
succeeded in rallying part of the troops, and the fight began again with
some hopes of victory, when the enemy had resort to a kind of infernal
machine used in ancient Indian warfare, the likeness of a gigantic head,
which was so made as to give out a dense smoke and unbearable stench,
besides being in some degree explosive. The contrivance was held by the
Christians to be magical and devilish, and the Tartars themselves, so
dangerous was it to those of their own men who had the handling of it,
only resorted to it in the utmost extremity, which shows how
hard-pressed they were on this occasion by the Silesian soldiery. But
the terrible device stood them in good stead this time. The panic was
renewed, and once more a wild flight and wilder pursuit took place; the
leaders, the knights, and Henry himself, regardless of the flight of
their followers, fought on long after they knew their fate to be
hopeless and death certain. One by one the brave fellows were cut down,
the little band decreased at every stroke of sword or flight of arrows,
and the duke, with four knights, found himself almost alone on the lost
field of battle. They urged him to try to save his life by flight; he
scouted the proposal, and told them that since God had not willed that
he should conquer, he would at least die. “For the faith,” he said; “at
least, it will be a martyr’s death.” His charger was killed under him,
and he fought on foot for some time, hewing a lane for himself through
his enemies. One of his knights managed at last to bring him a fresh
horse, which he had no sooner mounted than his person was recognized by
hundreds of his foes and he was hemmed in on all sides. While in the act
of lifting his sword to cut down a Tartar in his front, he was wounded
from behind by a long lance thrust in precisely where a joint in his
armor exposed the shoulder; the spear went right through and pierced the
lung, and the son of Duchess Hedwige sank dying from his horse. The
enemy cut off his head, and, hoisting it on a spear, paraded it before
the walls of Liegnitz, summoning the defenders to surrender; but they,
guarding Henry’s young sons, answered back from the battlements: “If we
have lost one duke to-day, we have four yet with us in the castle, and
these we will defend to the last drop of our hearts’ blood.” The next
day they were relieved by King Wenzel of Bohemia, who, however, came too
late to do anything but hasten the departure of the Tartar horde, which
had suffered severely in the encounter, but rallied soon enough to
maraud, burn, and sack churches, abbeys, villages, etc., throughout
Hungary and Silesia, Bohemia and Mähren, until, one year later,
Jaroslaus von Sternberg finally routed their diminished army under the
walls of Olmütz. This roused Germany and France, and the Christian
sovereigns combined sent a mighty army, under the command of Wenzel of
Bohemia, to defend the Austro-Hungarian frontiers, whence the Tartars
retreated, by the same road by which they had come, to their steppes on
the high table-lands of Asia. Their traces in Europe, however, were not
blotted out for half a century; the ruined churches, blackened villages,
and ravaged fields long showed their awful track; and the outward work
of Hedwige’s life would have been well-nigh destroyed had not the spirit
she had brought with it remained alive as the germ of a future exterior
restoration.
The night of the lost battle, when Henry’s headless body lay on the
field, Hedwige, after a prayer of unusual length, woke her nearest
friend and favorite attendant, and said to her:
“Demundis, this night I have lost my only son. He has left me as
swiftly as a bird flies upwards, and I shall never look upon his
face again.” She forbade her to say anything of this to the dead
man’s wife and sister until some messenger from the army should
bring news of the battle; and it was not till the third day that
Jaroslaus von Janowitz came with the terrible tidings. Anna,
Henry’s young widow, hastened to the field to seek and recover
her husband’s body, which was so mutilated that she only
recognized it by the six toes of the left foot. The corpse was
brought to Trebnitz and buried with his father, brother, and
infant sons in the abbey church. Hedwige prayed thus aloud over
his grave: “O Lord! I thank thee that thou hast given me such a
son, who, as long as he lived, loved and honored me truly, and
never gave me an hour’s sorrow. However gladly I would have kept
him by my side on earth, I hold him blessed in that, by the
shedding of his blood, he is now united in heaven with thee, his
Creator. With supplication, O Lord! do I commend his soul unto
thee.”
Hedwige’s life and work were drawing to an end. Her last public act was
one of charity to the dead and comfort to the bereaved living. The
bodies of many heroic defenders of their country had been left to rot
upon the field of battle. She had these gathered together and buried in
consecrated ground, and ordered solemn requiems to be sung for the
repose of their souls, while she made herself accessible to every
sorrowing widow, mother, sister, or orphan of the dead soldiers,
listened to their complaints and laments, comforted and helped them, and
brought God’s peace once more into their hearts. After this she prepared
herself to die. Her first care was a practical one: she set her affairs
in order—a moral duty too often foolishly confounded with worldliness.
Then she redoubled her devotions, and, sending for her chaplain, asked
to receive Extreme Unction. He demurred, seeing no sign of death about
her; but her holiness was so well known that he asked her the reason of
her request.
“It is a sacrament,” she answered reverently, “which should be received
in full consciousness, that we may treat it with due reverence and
thankfulness; and I fear that sickness would make me receive it with
little or no preparation, and would prevent me from being, as far as
possible, worthy of this dying grace. I shall belong to the sick before
many days are over, and I would fain be strengthened for the passage
through death to the joy of meeting my God.”
Her agony was not long, but she seemed to struggle with a fear of death
and of the devil’s temptations. When her daughter wished to send for
Anna, she said: “No; I shall not die before she comes home” (she was
then absent on a visit to her brother, King Wenzel of Bohemia). Her
biographers tell us that angels and saints visited her on her death-bed.
She died with the veil of her holy niece, Elizabeth of Hungary, wound
round her head, and held in her hand, and often to her lips, a little
ivory image of the Blessed Virgin. At the very last she was calm and
peaceful, blessed her daughter and daughter-in-law, and every nun in the
monastery of Trebnitz, her chosen home, and died at evening twilight, on
the 15th of October, 1243. Twenty years later the clergy of Silesia,
Poland, and Bohemia sent deputies to Rome to beg for her canonization,
which Pope Clement IV. proclaimed almost immediately. Many miracles
through her intercession were sworn to by credible witnesses, and the
neighborhood blossomed with gracious and beautiful legends of the
sainted duchess, the mother of the poor and the guardian angel of
Silesia. The ceremony of transferring her body to a shrine in the abbey
church at Trebnitz in 1268 was the occasion for a national festival;
pilgrims flocked in from the remotest districts, and many foreigners
came too. Sovereigns and knights, in costly robes and armor, walked in
procession to her altar; lay and ecclesiastical pomp was showered upon
and around her remains; but nothing of all this was so great a tribute
as the memory she left, deep in the heart of the people, of a model
wife, mother, mistress, and sovereign, a woman strong in principle,
truthful in every word and deed, charitable yet not weak, merciful yet
not sentimental, a wise, far-seeing, but tender, brave, and thoroughly
womanly woman.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CHARACTER OF THE PRESENT INDUSTRIAL CRISIS.
FROM THE REVUE GENERALE.
Every one agrees that “business is bad”; but how many give themselves
the trouble to look for the causes of this persistent stagnation? Some
are distressed, others astonished, by it. The calmer observers—those who
are not dismayed beyond measure by a deceptive view from the bank of the
river of fortune—seek for comparisons in the crises of 1837, 1848, and
1866.
A gifted writer, who conducts with deserved success a technical magazine
of our country, the “Monitor of Material Interests” (_Le Moniteur des
Intérêts Matériels_), has examined this interesting subject in a series
of remarkable articles. M. George de Laveleye—who must not be confounded
with his relative, the professor at Liege—maintains that the present
crisis is not transient. He attributes to it a permanent character. If
the reader will follow attentively the summary that we are about to give
of the argument of M. De Laveleye, he will not be too alarmed at his
conclusion.
Generally, these crises have had the effect of rarefying the capital by
which the great industrial enterprises were fed; these, then, deprived
of the food which enabled them to live, seemed to hesitate; then they
shook and fell. But to-day what do we see? Entirely the reverse. Money,
floating capital, unused funds, are more abundant than ever; the
cash-boxes overflow; the large banks literally sweat with gold; and this
excess, this plethora of unemployed capital causes the public funds to
advance and the price of money to decrease. It is business that is
wanting; it is the employment of capital that is in default.
Whence comes this accumulation of savings and this inertia of capital,
and how does it happen that new and tempting enterprises do not attract
it, notwithstanding its apparently low price? M. De Laveleye thus
instructs us:
“All these tempests,” says he, speaking of the crises of 1837,
1848, 1857, and 1866, “which reproduced themselves at almost
equal intervals, were periods of settlement which marked the
impatience of the industrial speculation over-excited during a
period of forty years; each time that it had abused credit, each
time that there was a disproportion between the engagements
entered upon and the available resources, industrial,
commercial, and financial Europe received a warning; credit
vanished suddenly; there was a series of commercial or
industrial failures; there was a violent contraction in the
stock exchanges and in business; there was a slackening of new
enterprises or of those already in hand; there were more losses
than one could reckon. But at each of these momentary and
transitory crises a remedy was very quickly found. Thus we had
free trade and the upward movement of commercial relations; we
had the play of free joint-stock companies; we had the war of
secession, which, from a European point of view, was a powerful
derivative; finally, during this long period we had the
discovery of gold and silver mines, coming annually to swell the
stock of metal at the disposal of business and of speculation.
Thus these crises were not of long duration. It sufficed to let
the overworked market have time to assimilate the stocks of
paper or of merchandise from which it suffered, to re-establish
the equilibrium between the current debts, circulating capital
and credit, and immediately industrial and commercial Europe
resumed her progressive march; the new enterprises which
presented themselves obtained public favor; the warning was
forgotten; the play of credit renewed itself; and after a period
of enforced quiet, which never exceeded three years, we felt
vibrating anew that febrile activity which, in forty years, has
caused a veritable transformation of the world.”
This was always the course of these crises in the past. To-day there is
nothing like this; on the contrary, “if there be a disproportion between
undertakings and resources, it is absolutely the reverse of that which
marked the preceding crises: the undertakings are almost null, and the
resources are exaggerated.”
Why? Because the present crisis is not merely a transitional crisis: it
is a permanent, final one; the origin of the evil from which the
industry and the commerce of Europe suffer is to be traced to other
causes than those commonly attributed to it. The true origin of the
crisis, says M. De Laveleye, is the withdrawal of capital from the
operations in which it had been employed, and the inactivity and
unproductiveness to which it has been since doomed. At the beginning of
the crisis of 1873 a general panic was produced among the lenders, whose
confidence was profoundly shaken, and they exerted themselves all at
once to realize their money. The bankers and the money-lenders of Europe
were seized, by a unanimous accord, with a desire to have their capital,
or that which remained of it, in their hands—“to see their money again,”
as M. De Laveleye says. They realized their foreign securities; they
retired _en masse_ from the industrial enterprises in which they were
engaged abroad; and, above all, they cut off credit. The countries and
the establishments which lived on credit and on outside capital saw
their resources cut off and suspended their activity, believing,
however, that the crisis would be only temporary. The three principal
lending countries—England, France, and Holland—realized their money, at
the price of heavy losses on more than one occasion; and, under the
influence of the panic, they contented themselves with keeping it under
lock and key in their cash-boxes. From this resulted a great and rapid
decline in the rate of interest. Bank paper fell to one per cent., and
the lenders upon short bills, with incontestable securities, got but a
half per cent. This was the result of the return of the capital drawn
back from the foreign countries to which it had been lent; the
capitalists had but one ambition: they wished to be certain that their
money was running no risk whatever.
The result of all this was that, in every instance where they lived on
borrowed capital, industrial works were stopped and all sorts of
enterprises were cut short. On the other hand, a plethora of capital was
produced among those who had realized, and who could no longer find
means to employ their funds with profit. This is the explanation and the
first characteristic of the present crisis—the accumulation of capital
and the low price for the use of money.
The accumulation is general; but it is principally in the rich
countries, like England and France, that this excess was produced. The
same phenomenon, however, also showed itself in Austria, Italy, Sweden,
etc.—countries which live in part upon foreign capital. On the other
hand, the countries which depended entirely upon this capital—Turkey,
Egypt, Peru, etc.—were crippled, as they were deprived of the resources
which credit had previously placed at their disposal.
Thus, then, nothing happened as in the preceding crises, and from 1873
to 1877 all has been new, the phenomena themselves and their causes.
There would be reason for surprise and bewilderment at this if one did
not admit, with M. De Laveleye, that only now has ceased the industrial
and speculative movement which has led Europe for forty years to send
her money abroad. New employments for capital are very nearly exhausted;
new sources of riches have been exploited as much as they can be. The
movement of the last forty years, especially active since 1851, is not
merely arrested for a moment to resume its march once more, as in the
previous crises; it is definitely terminated.
The design of the past movement was the economical furnishing of Europe
and of the world: and this equipment is completed, or nearly so. But in
giving proof of this assertion and seeking for its justification, M. De
Laveleye supplies a very clear account of the direct and specific causes
of the crisis through which we are passing.
“Western Europe,” he says—“and by this generic expression we
mean Europe rich in capital and feeding great foreign
enterprises—Western Europe has made a rude return upon herself.
She has retaken her money; she has made an inventory of what she
possessed abroad, and she shows herself solicitous to preserve,
to keep by her, this scattered wealth. The first element of the
force of progress, then, is in default; the money is wanting; it
is hidden; it is refused. Concurrently, what have the borrowing
countries done since 1873? They have abandoned the game and
ceased an impossible struggle, which consisted in paying to
Western Europe a revenue which was not produced by the soil or
by practicable enterprises. They have become bankrupt, and the
crisis in their government funds has opened the eyes of the two
champions. Each perceived that he was ruined: the borrower by
becoming indebted without sufficient motive; the lender not only
by lending his capital upon illusory guarantees, but by
receiving finally only a part of it, under the form of
arrearages.”
This is the second cause. As for the third:
“It is the depreciation of silver, due to the incapacity and the
improvidence of the Western states, which imagined they could
make a good stroke of political economy by allowing one of the
agents of circulation to debase itself.
“Principal possessors of the stock of gold these states have
obeyed an egoistic thought in seconding the movement for a
single metal as currency—gold; a movement which had for its
first effect an increase in the relative value of their metallic
circulation. But they took no note of another very grave
consequence of this disturbance of equilibrium.
“When a nominal money submits to variations in value as great as
those which have been noted in silver, it becomes provisionally
inapt for its functions. Commercial enterprises, based upon this
metal, become extremely dangerous, and are no longer attempted
by those who wish to operate only with the security attached to
studied and matured plans. But all the commerce with the East is
based upon silver, which, for these countries, is the nominal
money. When the value of silver, and, following it, the course
of exchange, became subject to oscillations of ten and fifteen
per cent., there was no longer any security for international
commerce. The cost of despatching and of selling raw material or
manufactured goods could no longer be precisely fixed; and the
most careful merchant became a speculator in spite of himself.
He then stopped, and by that very act he added to the difficulty
of the situation. The fall in the value of silver broke the
charm exercised by the constant augmentation of the stock of
metals put at the disposal of international enterprises.
“This is the third element in the advance of progress which has
disappeared in its turn; and we may thus sum up:
“1. The lenders are not willing, provisionally, to enter upon
new schemes.
“2. The borrowers, weary or feeble, are incapable of giving
birth to new illusions.
“3. The monetary crisis has added its action to these two
negative elements.
“So that to-day, after proper deliberation, people decide to do
nothing; or, at least, to do nothing under the former conditions
of international enterprises.”
But is it admissible that we shall do nothing henceforth, and that the
present situation will prolong itself indefinitely? No, assuredly; and,
so far as this goes, M. De Laveleye recognizes with every one that the
stagnation of business cannot endure, that a reaction is inevitable, and
that it will come in its time.
“But,” he hastens to add, “this return to activity will not be
produced at all in the form known and hoped for by those who
have seen the revivals of speculation after the crises of 1837,
1857, and 1866; and this for the logical reason that the
industrial, commercial, financial, and speculative activity of
the middle of this century has had for its base and aim the
economical furnishing of the world (_l’outillage économique du
monde_), and that this furnishing is very nearly completed.
“The base and the object of the former activity will no longer
exist, or scarcely so. We must, then, wait for a profound
modification in the form and conditions of this activity.
“This is why we have called the present crisis a permanent, a
final crisis”—_une crise définitive_.
He goes on to give his reasons for this idea, that the economical
furnishing of the world is finished, or so far advanced that henceforth
we can expect no such development as we have seen in the past: