"The late times of Civil War and confusion, to make some

recompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage

with them, that they stirr'd up men's minds from long ease and a

lazy rest, and made them active, industrious, and inquisitive: it

being the usual benefit that follows upon Tempests and Thunders in

the State, as well as in the skie, that they purifie and cleer the

Air which they disturb. But now, since the King's return, the

blindness of the former Age and the miseries of this last are

vanish'd away: now men are generally weary of the Relicks of

Antiquity, and satiated with Religious Disputes; now not only the

eyes of men but their hands are open, and prepar'd to labour; Now

there is a universal desire and appetite after Knowledge, after the

peaceable, the fruitful, nourishing knowledge; and not after that

of antient Sects, which only yielded hard indigestible arguments,

or sharp contentions, instead of food: which when the minds of men

requir'd bread, gave them only a stone, and for fish a

serpent."[1181]

Here too, then, there was reaction. It could not suffice to lift the

plane of national life, which was determined by the general conditions

and the general culture; nor did it alter the predominance of _belles

lettres_ in the reading of the educated; but it served to sow in that

life the seed of science, destined to work through the centuries a

gradual transformation of activity and thought which should make

impossible the old political strifes and generate new. Out of experiment

came invention, machinery, theory, new scepticism, rationalism,

democracy. It is difficult to measure, but not easy to over-estimate,

the gain to intellectual life from even a partial discrediting of the

old preoccupation with theology, which in the centuries between Luther

and Spinoza stood for an "expense of spirit" that is depressing to think

of. Down even to our own day, the waste of labour and learning

continues; but from the time when two-thirds of Europe had been agonised

by wars set up or stimulated by theological disputes, the balance begins

to lean towards saner things. The second generation after that in which

there arose a "free way of reasoning"[1182] saw the beginnings of

"Freethinking" in those religious problems which were for the present

laid aside, and the foundation of a new experiential philosophy. New and

great reactions against these were to come; reactions of endowed

clericalism, of popular sloth, of new "enthusiasm" generated in new

undergrowths of ignorance, of recoil from terrific democratic

revolution. But the new principle was to persist.

Sec. 4

It is not easy, at this time of day, to accept as a scientific product

the confused theory of constitutionalism which gradually grew up in

English politics from William the Third onwards. The theory in all its

forms is in logic so invertebrate, and in morals so far from satisfying

any fairly developed sense of political justice, that we are apt to

dismiss it in derision. In so far, indeed, as it proceeds on a

formulation of the "social contract" it is always severely handled by

the school of Sir Henry Maine, which here represents the anxiety of the

upper classes since the French Revolution to find some semblance of

rational answer to the moral plea that all men are entitled to political

enfranchisement and social help on the simple ground of reciprocity,

supposed to be canonised for Christians in the "Golden Rule." Locke, of

course, was not thinking of the working mass when he wrote his Letters

on Government, any more than when he helped to draw up a constitution

for South Carolina endorsing slavery.[1183] But he was at least much

nearer rational morals than were his antagonists; the provisions for

liberty of conscience in the South Carolina Constitution are notably far

in advance of any official view ever previously promulgated; and in

subsuming the "social contract" he was but following Hooker and Milton,

and indeed adapting Aristotle, an authority whom Locke's later critics

are wont to magnify.

Sir Frederick Pollock, in his _Introduction to the History of the

Science of Politics_ (p. 20), assumes to have saved Aristotle from

the criticism which assails the "social contract" theory, by saying

that Aristotle regards a "clanless and masterless man" as a monster

or an impossibility, whereas the "theorists of the social contract

school" take such a man to be the social unit. There is really no

reason to suppose that Aristotle would have denied a pre-political

state of nomadic barbarism such as is vaguely figured by Thucydides

(i, 2); and as a matter of fact he does expressly posit a process

of society-making by compact, first by the utility-seeking

combination of families in a village, later by the villages

_joining themselves_ into a State, whose express purpose is "good

life" (_Politics_, I, ii). It does not cancel this to say that

Aristotle also makes the State "prior" in the rational order to

man, for his "prior" (I, ii, 12-14) is not a historical but a

metaphysical or ethical proposition. In the third book, again (c.

9), he endorses a proposition of Lycophron which virtually affirms

the social contract.

And just as the school of Maine attacks the social contract theory

for giving a false view of the origin of society, so did Bodin long

ago, and at least as cogently, attack Aristotle and Cicero for

defining a State as a society of men assembled to live well and

happily. Bodin insists (_De la Republique_, 1580, l. i, c. i, p. 5;

l. i, c. vi, p. 48; l. iv, c. i, _ad init._ p. 350) that all States

originated in violence, the earliest being found full of slaves. It

is true that Aristotle at the outset implies that slavery is as old

as the family, but he still speaks of States as voluntary

combinations for a good end. As to the first kings he is also vague

and contradictory, and is criticised by Bodin accordingly.

Aristotle was doubtless adaptable to the monarchic as well as to

the democratic creed; but Bodin's criticism suggests that in the

sixteenth century he was felt to be too favourable to the latter.

It may be worth while to remark that the notion of an unsociable

"state of nature" prior to a "social contract" was effectively

criticised by Sir William Temple in his _Essay upon the Origin and

Nature of Government_ (1672). With a really scientific

discrimination he points to food conditions as mainly determining

gregation or segregation among animals, observing: "Nor do I know,

if men are like sheep, why they need any government, or, if they

are like wolves, how they can suffer it" (_Works_, ed. 1814, i, 9,

10). In the next generation, again, the ultra-Hobbesian view was

keenly attacked and confuted by Shaftesbury within a few years of

Locke's death (_Characteristics_, early edd. i, 109-11; ii,

310-21). As I have elsewhere pointed out (_Buckle and his Critics_,

p. 395), the "contract" theory lent itself equally to Whiggism and

to High Toryism.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find the Radical

Bentham (_Fragment on Government_, 1776) deriding it as held by the

Tory Blackstone. But Rousseau himself (preface to the _Discours sur

l'inegalite_) avowedly handled the "State of Nature" as an ideal,

not as a historical truth; and Blackstone did the same. It is

therefore only a new species of abstract fallacy, and one for which

there is no practical excuse, to argue as does the school of Maine

(cp. Pollock, as cited, pp. 63, 75, 79, etc.) that the theories in

question are responsible for the French Revolution in general, or

the Reign of Terror in particular. Revolutions occur for reasons

embodied in states of life: they avail themselves of the theories

that lie to hand. The doctrine that "all are born equal" or "free"

comes from the Institutes of Justinian, and is laid down in so many

words by Bishop Sherborne of Chichester in 1536, and by the

orthodox Spanish Jesuit Suarez early in the seventeenth century

(_Tractatus de Legibus_, l. ii, c. ii, Sec. 3). The first-mentioned

passage is cited by Stubbs, iii, 623-24, and the second by Hallam,

_Literature of Europe_, iii, 160.

The derivation was bound to warp the theory; but such as it is, it

represents the beginning of a new art, and therefore of a new science,

of representative government. A variety of forces combined to prevent

anarchy on the one hand, and on the other the fatal consolidation of the

monarch's power which took place in France.[1184] The new English king

was a Protestant, and therefore religiously acceptable to the people;

but he was a Dutchman, and therefore racially obnoxious; for fierce

commercial jealousy had long smouldered between the two peoples, and war

had fanned it into flames that had burned wide. Further, he was a

"latitudinarian" in religious matters, and zealous to appoint

latitudinarian bishops; and the retirement from London forced on him by

his asthma deepened tenfold the effect of his normal coldness of manner

towards all and sundry. In the very Church whose cause he had saved, he

was unpopular not only with the out-and-out zealots of political divine

right, but with the zealous Churchmen as such, inasmuch as he favoured

the Dissenters as far as he dared. So hampered and frustrated was he

that it seems as if nothing but his rare genius for fighting a losing

battle could have saved him, despite the many reasons the nation had for

adhering to him.

One of these reasons, which counted for much, was the political effect

of a National Debt in attaching creditors as determined supporters to

the Government. The highest sagacity, perhaps, could not have framed a

better device than this for establishing a new dynasty; albeit the

device was itself made a ground of hostile criticism, and was, of

course, resorted to as a financial necessity, or at least as a resource

pointed to by Dutch example, not as a stroke of statecraft. What

prudence and conciliation could do, William sought to do. And yet, with

all his sanity and enlightenment, he failed utterly to apply his

tolerant principles to that part of his administration which most sorely

needed them--the government of Ireland. Even in England he could not

carry tolerance nearly as far as he wished;[1185] but in Ireland he was

forced to acquiesce in Protestant tyranny of the worst description. The

bigotry of his High Church subjects was too strong for him. On the

surrender of the last adherents of James at Limerick he concluded a

treaty which gave the Irish Catholics the religious freedom they had had

under Charles II when the Cromwellian oppression was removed; but the

English Parliament refused to sanction it, save on the condition that

nobody should sit in the Irish Parliament without first repudiating the

Catholic doctrines. This was not the first virtual breach of faith by

England towards Ireland; and it alone might have sufficed to poison

union between the two countries; but it was only the first step in a

renewal of the atrocious policy of the past.[1186]

At the Restoration the ex-Cromwellian diplomatists had contrived to

arrange matters so that the monstrous confiscations made under the

Commonwealth should be substantially maintained; though the settlement

of 1653 had been made in entire disregard of the Act of Oblivion by

Charles I in 1648; and though Charles II avowed in the House of Lords in

1660 that they had "showed much affection to him abroad." So base were

the tactics of the Protestants that many Irish were charged with having

forfeited their lands by signing under compulsion the engagement to

renounce the House of Stuart; while those who had compelled them to the

act now held the lands as royalists. But the decisive evil was the base

indolence of the King. As Halifax said of him, he "would slide from an

asking face";[1187] and what Clarendon called "that _imbecillitas

frontis_ which kept him from denying"[1188] made him solve the

intolerable strife of suitors by leaving possession in the main to those

who had it. The adventurers and soldiers finally relinquished only

one-third of their estates;[1189] and only a few hundreds of favoured

Irish were restored to their old lands, under burden of compensation to

the dispossessed holders.[1190]

When the resort of James II to Ireland gave power to the oppressed

population, it was a matter of course that reprisals should be

attempted. The English historian glibly decides that they should not

have been permitted; that the King "ought to have determined that the

existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable"; and that

"whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not

been committed, _was immaterial_. That transfer, just or unjust, had

taken place so long ago that to reverse it would be to unfix the

foundations of society."[1191] Thus does the race which claims to be

civilised prescribe a course of action for that which it declares to be

uncivilised.[1192] It is further suggested that the English interest in

the Irish Parliament would have "willingly" granted James a "very

considerable sum" to indemnify the despoiled natives for whom during a

quarter of a century it had never moved a finger. There is not the least

reason to believe in any such willingness; and it was in the ordinary

way of things that the wronged race should not exhibit a moderation and

magnanimity of which the wrongers had never for a moment shown

themselves capable. The Irish Parliament of 1689, indeed, took care to

indemnify all purchasers and mortgagees, while dispossessing original

holders under the Cromwellian Settlement;[1193] but it passed an Act of

Attainder in the fashion of the age; and when the Protestant cause

triumphed, the revenge taken was a hundredfold greater than the

provocation.

It was the legislature, not the crown, that did the work. Under the

tolerant and statesmanlike King, the Irish Protestant Parliament

proceeded to pass law after law making the life of Catholics one of

cruel humiliation and intolerable wrong. There is nothing in civilised

history to compare with the process by which religious and racial hatred

in combination once more set the miserable Irish nation on the rack. The

extreme political insanity of the course taken is doubtless to be

attributed to the propagandist madness of James, who had just before

sought to give all Ireland over to Catholicism. Fanaticism bred

fanaticism. But the fact remains that the Protestant fanatics began in

the reign of William a labour of hate which, carried on in succeeding

reigns, at length made Ireland the darkest problem in our politics.

Hassencamp (pp. 117, 125) insists that the penal laws "were not

dictated by any considerations of religion, but were merely the

offspring of the spirit of domination," citing for this view Burke,

_Letter to a Peer_ (_Works_, Bohn ed. iii, 296), and _Letter to Sir

Hercules Langrishe_ (_Id. ib._ p. 321). But this is an attempt to

dissociate religion from persecution in the interests of religious

credit, and will not bear criticism. Burke, in fact, contradicts

himself, assigning the religious motive in an earlier page (292) of

the _Letter to a Peer_, and again in the _Letter to Langrishe_ (p.

301). When the Protestants went on heaping injuries on the

Catholics in the knowledge that the people remained fixed in

Catholicism, they were only acting as religious persecutors have

always done. On Burke's and Hassencamp's view, persecution could

never take place from religious motives at all. No doubt the race

feeling was fundamental, but the two barbaric instincts were really

combined. Cp. Macaulay's _History_, ch. vi (2-vol. ed. 1877, i,

390-93).

As regards Irish trade, commercial malice had already effected all that

religious malice could wish. Even in the reign of Henry VIII a law was

passed forbidding the importation of Irish wool into England; and in the

next century Strafford sought further to crush the Irish woollen trade

altogether in the English interest, throwing the Irish back on their

linen trade and agriculture, which he encouraged.[1194] Strafford's

avowed object was the keeping Ireland thoroughly subject to the English

crown by making the people dependent on England for their chief

clothing; and to the same end he proposed to hold for the crown a

monopoly of all Irish trade in salt.[1195] Cromwell, on his part, was

sane enough to leave Irish shipping on the same footing as English under

his Navigation Act; but in 1663 the Restoration Parliament put Ireland

on the footing of a foreign State, thus destroying her shipping trade

once for all,[1196] and arresting her natural intercourse with the

American colonies. In the same year, a check was placed on the English

importation of Irish fat cattle: two years later, the embargo was laid

on lean cattle and dead meat; still later, it was laid on sheep, swine,

pork, bacon, mutton, and cheese. In William's reign, new repressions

were effected. The veto on wool export having led to woollen

manufactures, which were chiefly in the hands of Dissenters and

Catholics,[1197] the Irish Parliament, consisting of Episcopalian

landlords, was induced in 1698 to put heavy export duties on Irish

woollens; and this failing of its full purpose, in the following year

the English Parliament absolutely prohibited all export of manufactured

wool from Ireland.[1198]

To this policy of systematic iniquity the first offset was a measure of

protection to the Irish linen trade in 1703; and this benefaction went

almost solely into the hands of the Scotch settlers in Ulster.[1199]

Even thereafter the linen trade of Ireland was so maimed and restricted

by English hindrances that it was revived only by continual bounties

from 1743 to 1773. And this twice restored and subsidised industry, thus

expressly struck out of native and put in Protestant and alien hands,

has been in our own age repeatedly pointed to as a proof of the

superiority of the Protestant and non-Celtic inhabitants over the others

in energy and enterprise. As a matter of fact, many of the Scots who

benefited by the bounties of 1703 in Ulster had recently immigrated

because of the poverty and over-population of their own country, where

their energy and enterprise could do nothing. Irish energy and

enterprise, on the other hand, had been chronically strangled, during

two hundred years, by English and Protestant hands, with a persevering

malice to which there is no parallel in human history; and the process

is seen at its worst after the "glorious Revolution" of 1688.

Modern English writers of the Conservative school, always eager to

asperse Ireland, never capable of frankly avowing the English

causation of Irish backwardness, think it a sufficient exculpation

of their ancestors' crimes to say that Irishmen have not taken up

the old industries since they have been free to do so. Thus the

late Mr. H.D. Traill meets Irish comment on Strafford's treatment

of the Irish woollen trade by saying that the complainants "in

these days prefer other and less worthy industries to those which

they have now been free to practise, if they chose, for

generations" (_Strafford_, 1889, p. 137). This is a fair sample of

the fashion in which racial and political prejudices prompt men

otherwise honourable to devices worthy of baseness. It should be

unnecessary to point out, in reply, that when the Irish industries

had been so long extirpated as to be lost arts, it was simply

impossible that they could be successfully restored _in

competition_ with the highly developed machine industry of England.

Other countries set up new industries under high protective duties.

This Ireland could not do. But the most obvious considerations are

missed by malice.

The beginnings of modern parliamentary government thus coincide with the

recommencement, in the worst spirit, of the principal national crime

thus far committed by England; and this not by the choice of, but in

despite of, the king, at the hands of the Parliament. In the next reign

the same sin lies at the same door, the monarch doing nothing. The fact

should serve better than any monarchic special pleading to show us that

the advance towards freedom is a warfare not merely with despots and

despotic institutions, but with the spirit of despotism in the average

man; a warfare in which, after a time, the opposing forces are seldom

positive right and wrong, but as a rule only comparative right and

wrong, evil being slowly eliminated by the alternate play of

self-regarding instinct. Gross and wilful political evil, we say, was

wrought in the first stages of the new progress towards political

justice. But that is only another way of saying that even while gross

political evil was being wrought, men were on the way towards political

justice. A clear perception of the whole process, when men attain to it,

will mean that justice is about to be attained.

Sec. 5

Even while the spirit of religion and the spirit of separateness were

working such wrong in Ireland, the spirit of separateness was

fortunately defeated in Scotland, where it had yet burned strongly

enough to make perpetual division seem the destiny of the two kingdoms.

We learn how much political institutions count for when we realise that

in Scotland, just before the parliamentary union with England, there was

as furious an aversion to all things English as there has ever been

shown in France of late years to things German. The leading Scots

patriots were not only bitterly averse to union, but hotly bent on

securing that the line of succession in Scotland after Anne should not

be the same as that in England; this because they held that Scottish

liberties could never be secure under an English king. The stern

Fletcher of Saltoun, a Republican at heart, had to play in part the game

of the Jacobites, much as he abominated their cause. But both alike were

defeated, with better results than could possibly have followed on any

separation of the crowns; and the vehement opposition of the great mass

of the Scots people to the Parliamentary Union was likewise defeated, in

a manner hard to understand. The heat of the popular passion in Scotland

is shown by the infamously unjust execution of the English Captain Green

and two of his men[1200] on a charge of killing a missing Scotch captain

and crew who were not even proved to be dead, and were afterwards found

to be alive. The fanatical remnant of the Covenanters was as bitter

against union as the Jacobites. Yet in the teeth of all this violence of

feeling the Union was carried, and this not wholly by bribery,[1201] as

was then alleged, and as might be suspected from the analogy of the

later case of Ireland, but through the pressure of common-sense instinct

among the less noisy. There was indeed an element of bribery in the

English allowance of liberal compensation to the shareholders of the

African Company (better known as the Darien Company), who thus had good

cash in exchange for shares worth next to nothing; and in a certain

sense the reluctant English concession to Scotland of freedom of trade

was a bribe. But it is by such concessions that treaties are secured;

and it needed a very clear self-interest to bring round a Scotch

majority to union in the teeth of a popular hostility much more fierce

than is shown in our own day in the not altogether disparate case of

Ulster, as regards Home Rule. Burton and Macaulay agreed[1202] that the

intense wish and need of the Scottish trading class to participate in

the trade of England (as they had done to much advantage under Cromwell,

but had been hindered from doing after the Restoration) was what brought

about the passing of the Act of Union in the Scots Parliament. No doubt

the moderate Presbyterians saw that their best security lay in

union;[1203] but that recognition could never have overridden the

stiff-necked forces of fanaticism and race hatred[1204] were it not for

the call of plain pecuniary advantage. A transformation had begun in

Scotland. The country which for a hundred and fifty years had been

distracted by fanatical strifes, losing its best elements of culture

under the spell of Judaic bibliolatry, had at length, under the obscure

influence of English example, begun to move out of the worst toils of

the secondary barbarism, not indeed into a path of pure

civilisation--the harm had gone too deep for that--but towards a life of

secular industry which at least prepared a soil for a better life in the

centuries to come; and even for a time, under the stimulus of the new

thought of France, developed a brilliant and various scientific

literature. The Darien scheme may be taken as a turning-point in

Scottish history; an act of commercial enterprise then arousing an

amount of energy and sensation that had for centuries been seen only in

connection with strokes of State and sect. It is not agreeable to

idealising prejudice to accept Emerson's saying[1205] that the greatest

ameliorator in human affairs has been "selfish, huckstering trade"; but,

barring the strict force of the superlative, the claim is valid. It is

the blackest count in the indictment against England for her[1206]

treatment of Ireland that she deliberately closed to the sister nation

the door which the Scotch, by refusing union on other terms when union

was highly expedient in the view of English statesmen, forced her to

open to them.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1145: Armand Carrel (_Histoire de la Contre-Revolution en

Angleterre_, ed. Bruxelles, 1836, p. 8) notes the "apathetic

indifference" to which Cromwell's imperialist rule had reduced the

middle classes.]

[Footnote 1146: It is to be noted in this connection that at first the

secret was very well kept. There can be no reasonable doubt that

Shaftesbury and Lauderdale were kept in the dark as to the Treaty of

Dover, in which Charles agreed with Louis to introduce Catholicism in

England. Macaulay's suggestion to the contrary comes of his

determination to hear nothing in Shaftesbury's defence.]

[Footnote 1147: This is accepted by Armand Carrel, who calls him

(_Histoire de la Contre-Revolution en Angleterre_, p. 6) "homme d'une

immoralite profonde."]

[Footnote 1148: It is to be regretted that Green, while admitting that

Mr. Christie was "in some respects" successful in his vindication of

Shaftesbury, should have left his own account of Shaftesbury's character

glaringly unfair. Verbally following Burnet, he pronounces Ashley "at

best a Deist" in his religion, and adds that his life was "that of a

debauchee," going on to couple the terms "Deist and debauchee" in a very

clerical fashion. And yet in the previous paragraph he admits that "the

debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact, _temperate by

nature and habit_, and his ill-health rendered any great excess

impossible." The non-correction of the flat contradiction must

apparently be set down to Green's ill-health. As a matter of fact, the

charge of debauchery is baseless. Long before Mr. Christie, one of the

annotators of Burnet's _History_ (ed. 1838, p. 64, _note_) defended

Shaftesbury generally, and pointed out that "in private life we have no

testimony that he was depraved." Cp. Christie, _Life of Anthony Ashley

Cooper_, 1871, i, 316.]

[Footnote 1149: _History of His Own Time_, ed. 1838, p. 290.]

[Footnote 1150: My old friend, Mr. Alfred Marks, whose masterly book,

_Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?_ (Burns and Oates, 1905),

decisively establishes the suicide theory, and disposes of the

counter-theory of Mr. John Pollock, did not dispute the fact of the

vague plotting of Coleman. No one can say how much of such loose and

futile scheming there was.]

[Footnote 1151: How odious it was may be gathered from Dryden's _Annus

Mirabilis_ and Marvell's _Character of Holland_, pieces in which two men

of genius exhibit every stress of vulgar ill-feeling that we can detect

in the Jingo press and poets of our own day.]

[Footnote 1152: Dryden's charge, in _The Medal_, of "bartering his venal

wit for sums of gold" during the Rebellion, is pure figment. It is an

established fact that even as Councillor of State, to which office there

was attached a salary of L1,000, Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley

Cooper, received no salary at all. See note to Mr. Christie's (Globe)

ed. of Dryden's poems, pp. 127, 128.]

[Footnote 1153: Christie's _Life of Ashley Cooper_, ii, 293, _note_.

Perhaps it is not sufficiently considered by Mr. Christie that Sidney

regarded France as a possible ally for the overthrow of monarchy in

England. Cp. Hallam, ii, 460-61. His position was not that of an

ordinary Parliamentary bribe-taker. See Ludlow's _Memoirs_, iii, 165,

_et seq._ And the English Government had sought to have him

assassinated.]

[Footnote 1154: In 1603 Lord Mountjoy in Ireland laid it down as the

doctrine of the Church of England that his master was "by right of

descent an absolute king," and that it was unlawful for his subjects

"upon any cause to raise arms against him." These words, says Dr.

Gardiner (_History 1604-43_, i, 370), "truly expressed the belief with

which thousands of Englishmen had grown up during the long struggle with

Rome." For earlier discussions see Stubbs, i, 593, More's _Utopia_, bk.

i, and Hooper's _Early Writings_, ed. 1843, p. 75.]

[Footnote 1155: As Hallam notes (_Middle Ages_, 11th ed. ii, 157), the

French bishops in the ninth century had claimed sacerdotal rights of

deposing kings in as full a degree as the Popes did later. In that

period, however, bishops were often anti-papal; and the papal claim

practically arose in the Roman and clerical resistance to the nomination

of Popes by the Emperor, though Pope John VIII had in his time gone even

further than Gregory VII did later, claiming power to choose the

Emperor. _Id._ pp. 165-83.]

[Footnote 1156: Buckle is wrong (i, 394) in dating the beginning of the

revival of the doctrine "about 1681." Saunderson's edition of Usher was

first published in 1660.]

[Footnote 1157: The words of Thomas are extremely explicit: "Si

[principes] non habeant justum principatum sed usurpatum, vel si injusta

praecipiant, non tenentur eis subditi obedire." _Summa_, pt. ii, q. civ,

art. 6. The right of the Pope to depose an apostate prince was, of

course, constantly affirmed.]

[Footnote 1158: _Tractatus de Legibus_, lib. ii, c. ii, Sec. 3.]

[Footnote 1159: Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 161.]

[Footnote 1160: Hallam, as last cited, p. 162. Bayle notes (art.

"Althusius," and _notes_) that the treatise was much denounced in

Germany.]

[Footnote 1161: _Ecclesiastical Polity_, bk. i, ch. x, Sec. 8.]

[Footnote 1162: Amsterdam, 1689-90, 2 vols.]

[Footnote 1163: It is to be noted that "Passive Obedience" had different

degrees of meaning for those who professed to believe in it. For some it

meant merely not taking arms against the sovereign, and did not imply

that he was entitled to active obedience in all things. See Hallam, ii,

463.]

[Footnote 1164: Filmer begins his _Patriarcha_ (1680) with the remark

that the doctrine of natural freedom and the right to choose governments

had been "a common opinion ... since the time that school divinity began

to flourish." Like Salmasius, he fathers the doctrine on the Papacy;

and, indeed, the Church of Rome had notoriously employed it in its

strifes with kings, at its own convenience; but it had as notoriously

been put forward by many lay communities on their own behalf, and had

been practically acted on in England over and over again. And it is

clearly laid down in the third century by Tertullian, _Ad Scapulam_,

ii.]

[Footnote 1165: _Memoirs_, 2nd ed. p. 177.]

[Footnote 1166: Though it is substantially maintained by Grotius, _De

Jure Belli et Pacis_, 1625, I, iii, 9-12.]

[Footnote 1167: Johnson was moved to pronounce Dryden the most excessive

of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical

adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to

"Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse

samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (_Life_, in

vol. i of _Prose Works of Dryden_, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate

the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist

atmosphere.]

[Footnote 1168: Toland's ed., 1700, p. 55.]

[Footnote 1169: Essay (xvi of pt. ii) on the _Idea of a Perfect

Commonwealth_. Cp. Essay vii, on the tendencies of the British

Government, where Harrington's unpracticality is sufficiently

indicated.]

[Footnote 1170: Cp. Carrel, _Contre-Revolution_, p. 212, as to the

"profound discouragement" that had fallen on the people in 1685. Cp. p.

213.]

[Footnote 1171: "Our late Warrs and Schisms having almost wholly

discouraged men from the study of Theologie." W. Charleton, _The

Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature_,

1657, p. 50. (Cp. Baxter, _The Reformed Pastor_, 1656; ed. 1835, pp.

95-100.) Charleston, as his title and that of his previous work on

Atheism show, uses no ecclesiastical arguments.]

[Footnote 1172: The French Academy, formally founded in 1635, had in a

similar way originated in a private gathering some six years before

(Olivet et Pelisson, _Relation concernant l'Histoire de l'Academie

Francoise_, ed. 1672, p. 5). There may of course have been many such

private groups in England in the period of the Commonwealth.]

[Footnote 1173: _History of the Royal Society_, 1667, p. 53.]

[Footnote 1174: P. 67. Sprat mentions that many physicians gave great

help (p. 130).]

[Footnote 1175: P. 53.]

[Footnote 1176: _History of the Royal Society_, 1667, p. 83. The French

_beaux esprits_ were not afraid to discuss now and then the soul, or

even God, contriving to do it without theological heat. See the

_Collection_ cited, Conferences 6, 16, 79, 87, 142, etc.]

[Footnote 1177: _History_, p. 73.]

[Footnote 1178: P. 91.]

[Footnote 1179: P. 53.]

[Footnote 1180: So too with the non-combatants. Note, for instance,

Locke's recoil from the scholastic philosophy, and his early eager

interest in chemistry, medicine, and meteorology. Anthony a Wood records

him as a student "of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and

never-contented"--that is to say, argumentative.]

[Footnote 1181: _History of the Royal Society_, p. 152.]

[Footnote 1182: Sprat, of course, carried the "free way of reasoning"

only to a certain length, feeling obliged to deprecate "that some

Philosophers, by their carelessness of a Future Estate, have brought a

discredit on knowledge itself" (p. 367); and "that many Modern

Naturalists have bin negligent in the Worship of God"; but he still

insisted that "the universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a

rational Religion" (p. 366). Compare the _Discourse of Things above

Reason, by a Fellow of the Royal Society_ (1681), attributed to Boyle,

and published with a tract on the same theme by another Fellow.]

[Footnote 1183: If, that is, the section providing for slavery be his.

It probably was not. See Mr. Fox Bourne's _Life of Locke_, 1876, i, 239.

His influence may reasonably be traced in the remarkable provisions for

the freedom of sects--under limitation of theism. _Id._ pp. 241-43. Mr.

Fox Bourne does not deal with the slavery clause.]

[Footnote 1184: Thoughtful observers already recognised in the time of

James II that if England developed on the French lines religious freedom

would disappear from Europe. See the tractate _L'Europe esclave si

Angleterre ne rompt ses fers_, Cologne, 1677.]

[Footnote 1185: This may be taken as certain; but it is not clear how

far he wished to go. Ranke (_History of England_, Eng. tr. iv, 437) and

Hassencamp (_History of Ireland_, Eng. tr. p. 117) are satisfied with

the evidence as to his having promised the German emperor to do his

utmost to repeal the penal laws against the Catholics, and his having

offered the Irish Catholics, before the Battle of Aghrim, religious

freedom, half the churches in Ireland, and half their old possessions.

For this we have only a private letter. However this point may be

decided, the Treaty of Limerick is plain evidence. On the point of

William's responsibility for the breach of that Treaty, see the

excellent sketch of _The Past History of Ireland_ by Mr. Bouverie-Pusey

(1894).]

[Footnote 1186: Cp. the author's _Saxon and the Celt_, 1897, pp.

146-56.]

[Footnote 1187: _A Character of King Charles II_, ed. 1750, p. 45.]

[Footnote 1188: _Continuation of the Life of Clarendon_, in 1-vol. ed.

of _History_, 1843, p. 1006.]

[Footnote 1189: Hallam, iii, 396, following Carte and Leland.]

[Footnote 1190: Bishop Trench (_Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's

Settlement and Sale of Ireland_, Dublin rep. 1843, pp. 84-93) declares

that not only were all re-appropriations to be compensated, but the 54

nominees added to the original list of 500 loyalist officers to be

rewarded had not received an acre of land as late as 1675. Hallam sums

up on Anglican lines that the Catholics could not "reasonably murmur

against the confiscation of half their estates, after a civil war

wherein it was evident that so large a proportion of themselves were

concerned." In reality, much more than half the land had been

confiscated; and all the while the bulk of it remained in the hands of

men who had themselves been in rebellion! The settlement was simply a

racial iniquity.]

[Footnote 1191: Macaulay, ch. vi, Student's ed. i, 393.]

[Footnote 1192: _Id._ _ib._]

[Footnote 1193: For a full account of the procedure see Thomas Davis's

work, _The Patriot Parliament of 1689_, rep. with introd. by Sir C.

Gavan Duffy, 1893.]

[Footnote 1194: Cp. the author's _Saxon and Celt_, pp. 160, 161, and

_note_.]

[Footnote 1195: H.D. Traill, _Strafford_, 1889, p. 81.]

[Footnote 1196: Lecky, _History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century_,

i, 174.]

[Footnote 1197: See Petty, _Essays in Political Arithmetic_, ed. 1699,

p. 186.]

[Footnote 1198: The checking of the Irish wool trade was strongly urged

by Temple in the English interest (_Essay on the Advancement of Trade in

Ireland_, Works, iii, 10).]

[Footnote 1199: See Dr. Hill Burton's _History of the Reign of Queen

Anne_, 1880, iii, 160-63. This measure seems to have been overlooked by

Mr. Lecky in his narrative, _History of Ireland_, i, 178.]

[Footnote 1200: Green's ship and crew were first seized without form of

law in reprisal for the seizure in England, by the East India Company,

of a Scotch ship belonging to the old Darien Company, whose trade the

India Company held to be a breach of its monopoly. The charge of slaying

a Scotch captain was an afterthought.]

[Footnote 1201: On this see Burton, viii, 178-85; and cp. Buckle, 3-vol.

ed. iii, 160, as to the rise of the trading spirit.]

[Footnote 1202: Burton's _History of Scotland_, viii, 3, _note_.]

[Footnote 1203: _Id._ viii, 168.]

[Footnote 1204: "It is a marvel how the Edinburgh press of that day

could have printed the multitude of denunciatory pamphlets against the

Union" (Burton, viii, 131). "The aristocratic opponents of the Union did

their utmost to inflame the passions of the people" (_id._ p. 137, cp.

p. 158, etc.).]

[Footnote 1205: Following Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 327.]

[Footnote 1206: Properly speaking, the action of "England" was the

action of the merchant class, which in this case most exerted itself and

got its way.]

CHAPTER IV

INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION

At all times within the historic period trade and industry have reacted

profoundly on social life; and as we near the modern period in our own

history the connection becomes more and more decisively determinant. In

the oldest culture-history at all known to us, as we have seen, the

commercial factor affects everything else; and at no time in European

annals do we fail to note some special scene or area in which trade

furnishes to politicians special problems. Thus the culture-history of

Italy, as we have also seen, is in past epochs inseparably bound up with

her commercial history. But as regards the north of Europe, it is in the

modern period that we begin specially to recognise trade as playing a

leading part in politics, national and international. The Mediterranean

tradition is first seen powerfully at work in the history of the Hansa

towns: then comes the great development of Flanders, then that of

Holland, then that of England, which gained so much from the influx of

Flemish and Dutch Protestant refugees in the reign of Philip II, but

which was checked in its commercial growth, under Elizabeth and James

alike, by their policy of granting monopolies to favourites.

Sir Josiah Child puts "the latter end of Elizabeth's reign" as the

time when England began to be "anything in trade" (_New Discourse

of Trade_, 4th ed. p. 73). Cp. Prof. Busch on English trade under

Henry VII, _England unter den Tudors_, i, 71-85, with Schanz,

_Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 328, where it is stated that in the

latter part of the sixteenth century there were 3,000 merchants

engaged in the sea trade. This seems extremely doubtful when we

note that the whole foreign trade of London was stated in

Parliament in 1604 to be in the hands of some 200 citizens

(_Journals of the House of Commons_, May 21, 1604), and the total

customs of London amounted to L110,000 a year, as against L17,000

from all the rest of the kingdom. As Hume notes (ch. 45, _note_), a

remonstrance from the Trinity House in 1602 declared that since

1588 the shipping and number of seamen in England had decayed about

a third. (Cit. from Anglesey's _Happy Future State of England_, p.

128.) This again, however, seems doubtful.

Broadly put, the fact appears to be that after a considerable

development of woollen manufacture in the towns during the Wars of

the Roses (above, p. 393), when sheep-rearing must have been

precarious and wool would be imported, there was a general return

to pasturage under the Tudor peace, the towns falling away, with

their manufactures. Attempts were made under Henry VIII and Edward

VI to develop the English mining industries by means of German

workmen and overseers, but apparently with no great success

(Ehrenberg, _Hamburg und England im Zeit. der Koen. Elisabeth_,

1896, pp. 4-6). It was after the persecution of Protestants in the

Netherlands under Charles V had driven many tradesmen to England

for refuge that manufacturing industry notably revived; and in

1564-65 we find the year's exports of England reckoned at L68,190

for wool and L896,079 for cloths and other woollen wares; the whole

of the rest of the export trade amounting only to L133,665 (Brit.

Mus. Lansdowne MS. 10, fol. 121-22, cited by Ehrenberg, p. 8; cp.

Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, ii, 82-83; Gibbins,

_Industrial Hist. of England_, 3rd. ed. pp. 132-33.) After the fall

of Antwerp, again, much of the commerce of that city fell to the

share of England, some of her commercial and artisan population

following it (Froude, _Hist. of England_, ed. 1872, xii, 1-2).

In the same period the commercial life of north Germany, which had

hitherto been far more widely developed than that of England

(Ehrenberg, pp. 1-11), was thrown back on the one hand by the

opening of the new ocean route to the East Indies, which upset the

trans-European trade from the Mediterranean, and on the other by

the new strifes between the princes and the cities (_id._ pp.

34-49); and here again English trade came to the front.

The "Merchant Adventurers," ready enough to accept monopolies for their

own incorporations, were free-traders as against other monopolists;[1207]

and not till all such abuses were abolished could England compete with

Holland. And though they were never legally annulled even under the

Commonwealth, "as men paid no regard to the prerogative whence the

charters of those companies were derived, the monopoly was gradually

invaded, and commerce increased by the increase of liberty."[1208]

France at times promised to rival both Holland and England; but she at

length definitely fell behind England in the race, as Flanders fell

behind Holland, by reason of political misdirection. In the middle and

latter part of the seventeenth century, all the northern States had

their eyes fastened on the shining example of Holland;[1209]

and commerce, which as an occasion of warfare had since the rise of

Christianity been superseded by religion, begins to give the cue for

animosities of peoples, rulers, and classes. The last great religious

war--if we except the strifes of Russia and Turkey, which are

quasi-religious--was the Thirty Years' War. Its very atrocity doubtless

went far to discredit the religious motive,[1210] and it ranks as the

worst war of the modern world. Commerce, however, for centuries supplied

new motives for war to men whose ideas of economics were still at the

theological stage.[1211] The eternal principle of strife, of human

attraction and repulsion, plays through the phenomena of commerce as

through those of creed. The profoundly insane lust for gold and silver,

which had so largely determined the history of the Roman Empire,

definitely shaped that of Spain; and Spain's example fired the northern

nations with whom she came in contact.

Prof. Thorold Rogers is responsible for the strange proposition

(_Economic Interpretation of History_, p. 186; _Industrial and

Commercial History of England_, p. 321) that the chief source of

the silver supply of Europe, before the discovery of the New World,

was _England_. He offers nothing but his own conviction in proof of

his statement, to which he adds the explanation that the silver in

question was extracted from sulphuret of lead. It seems well to

point out that there is not a shadow of foundation for the main

assertion. That the argentiferous lead mines were worked seems

clear; but that they could produce the main European supply without

the fact being historically noted is incredible. On the other hand,

silver mines were found in Germany in the tenth century and later,

and there is reason to attribute to their output a gradual rise of

prices before the fifteenth century (Anderson's _History of

Commerce_, i, 67). In any case, there is no reason to doubt the

statement of the historians of the precious metals, that what

silver was produced in Europe in the Middle Ages was mostly mined

in Spain and Germany. See Del Mar, _History of the Precious

Metals_, 1880, pp. 38-43 and refs.; also Ehrenberg, _Hamburg und

England im Zeitalter der Koenigin Elisabeth_, 1896, pp. 4, 9;

Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, Cap. 276, _end_; and

Kohlrausch, _History of Germany_, Eng. tr. 1844, p. 261.

The direct search for gold as plunder developed into the pursuit of it

as price; and wealthier States than Spain were raised by the more

roundabout method which Spain disdained.

This was soon recognised by Spanish economists, who probably

followed the French physiocrats, as represented in the excellent

chapters of Montesquieu on money (cited above, p. 363). See the

passage from Bernard of Ulloa (1753) cited by Blanqui, _Hist. de

l'econ. polit._, 2e edit. ii, 28. Cp. Samber, _Memoirs of the Dutch

Trade_, Eng. tr. 1719, pref. Apart from the habits set up by

imperialism, the Spaniards were in part anti-industrial because

industry was so closely associated with the Moriscoes (Major Hume,

_Spain_, p. 195); and the innumerable Church holidays counted for

much. Yet in the first half of the sixteenth century Spain had a

great development of town industrial life (Armstrong, Introd. to

same vol. pp. 83-84). This is partly attributable to the new

colonial trade; but probably more to the connection with Flanders.

Cp. Grattan, _The Netherlands_, pp. 66, 88. About 1670, however,

manufacture for export had entirely ceased; the trade of Madrid,

such as it was, was mainly in the hands of Frenchmen; the Church

and the bureaucracy alone flourished; and although discharged

soldiers swarmed in the cities, what harvests there were had to be

reaped by the hands of French labourers who came each season for

the purpose. Hume, as cited, p. 285. This usage subsisted nearly a

century later (Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, ed. 1756, p. 25)

Holland in the seventeenth century presented to the European world, as

we have seen, the new and striking spectacle of a dense population

thriving on a soil which could not possibly be made to feed them.

"Trade" became the watchword of French statesmanship; and Colbert

pressed it against a froward nobility;[1212] while in England a

generation later it had acquired the deeper rooting that goes with the

voluntary activity and self-seeking of a numerous class; and already the

gentry freely devoted their younger sons to the pursuits which those of

France contemned.[1213]

The turn seems to have been taken in the most natural way, after

Parliament was able to force on James I a stoppage of the practice of

granting monopolies. At his accession, the King had sought popularity by

calling in and scrutinising the many monopolies granted by Elizabeth,

which constituted the main grievance of the time.[1214] Soon, however,

he conformed to the old usage, which had in some measure the support of

Bacon;[1215] and in 1621 it was declared that he had multiplied

monopolies twentyfold.[1216] The most careful historian of the period

reports that though they were continually being abused,[1217] they were

granted on no corrupt motives, but in sheer mistaken zeal for the spread

of commerce.[1218] It would be more plausible to say that when interests

either of purse or of patronage lay in a certain direction, those

concerned were very easily satisfied that the interests of commerce

pointed the same way. At length, after much dispute, the Lords passed,

in 1624,[1219] a Monopoly Bill previously passed by the Commons in

1621;[1220] and though some of the chief monopolies were left standing,

either as involving patents for inventions or as being vested in

corporations,[1221] mere private trade monopolies were for the future

prevented.

It was a triumph of the trading class over the upper, nothing more. As

for the corporations, they were as avid of monopolies as the courtiers

had ever been; and independent traders hampered by monopolist

corporations were only too ready to become monopolist corporations

themselves.[1222] Under Charles I, for instance, there was set up a

chartered company with a monopoly of soap-making, of which every

manufacturer could become a member--a kind of chartered "trust," born

out of due time--the price paid to the crown for the privilege being

L10,000 and a royalty of L8 on every ton of soap made. For this payment

the monopolists received full powers of coercion and the punitive aid of

the Star Chamber. After a few years, in consideration of a higher

payment, the King revoked the first patent and established a new

corporation. Similar monopolies were granted to starch-makers and other

producers; the Long Parliament pursuing the same policy, "till

monopolies became as common as they had been under James or

Elizabeth."[1223]

Part of the result was that about 1635 "there were more merchants to be

found upon the exchange worth each one thousand pounds and upwards than

there were in the former days, before the year 1600, to be found worth

one hundred pounds each."[1224] The upper classes, as capitalists and

even as traders, were not now likely to remain aloof. But all the while

there was no betterment of the lot of the poor. "That our poor in

England," writes Child after the Restoration, "have always been in a

most sad and wretched condition ... is confessed and lamented by all

men."[1225] Child's theory of the effect of usury laws in the matter is

pure fallacy; but his estimate of men's fortunes is probably more

accurate than the statement of the Venetian ambassador in the reign of

Mary, that "there were many merchants in London with L50,000 or L60,000

each."[1226] Howell, in 1619,[1227] expresses a belief that "our

four-and-twenty aldermen may buy a hundred of the richest men in

Amsterdam." Yet, though it was also confessed that among the Dutch, and

even in Hamburg and Paris, the poor were intelligently provided

for,[1228] no such necessity was practically recognised in

England,[1229] either by Puritan or by Cavalier, though before the

Rebellion the administration of Charles had not been apathetic;[1230]

and a century later there were the same conditions of popular misery and

vice, with a new plague of drunkenness added.[1231] By that time, too,

the corporation monopolies were strangling trade just as the private

monopolies had formerly done;[1232] while France, which in the latter

part of the seventeenth century gave such a stimulus to English and

Dutch industry by the suicidal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had

recovered both population and trade,[1233] and was on a commercial

footing which, well developed, might have given her the victory over

England in the race for empire.

Everywhere in the seventeenth century, however, the new development

meant new strife. Protestant England and Holland, Catholic France and

Protestant Holland, flew at each other's throats in quarrels of trade

and tariffs; and for the monopoly of the trade in cloves, Dutch and

Spanish and English battled as furiously as for constraint and freedom

of conscience. The primitively selfish and mistaken notion men had

formed of commercial economy was on a level with the religious impulse

as it had subsisted from the beginning of Christendom; and even as each

Christian sect had felt it necessary to throttle the rest, each nation

felt that its prosperity depended on the others' impoverishment. To

spite the Dutch, the Cromwellian party in 1651 passed the Navigation

Act, prohibiting all imports of foreign goods save in English ships or

those of the nations producing them. In practice it was a total failure,

the effect being to injure the English rather than the Dutch trade; but

the Dutch themselves, who were fanatical for their own Asiatic monopoly

trade, believed it would injure them, and went to war accordingly.

The eulogy of the Navigation Act as "wise" by Adam Smith (put, by

the way, with a "perhaps") is one of his worst mistakes. Roger Coke

in 1672 testified (_Treatise on Trade_, p. 68, cited by M'Culloch)

that within two years of the passing of the Act England lost the

greater part of the Baltic and Greenland trades; and Sir Josiah

Child's _New Discourse of Trade_ shows in detail that the English

by about 1670 or 1690 had lost to the Dutch even much of the trade

they formerly had. (See Preface to second and later editions, and

compare M'Culloch, note xi to his edition of the _Wealth of

Nations_, and McCullagh, _Industrial History_, ii, 340.) The one

direction in which the Act seems to have been successful was in

stimulating shipbuilding and seafaring in the American colonies.

(See Prof. Ashley in the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, Boston,

November, 1899, pp. 4-6.) Joshua Gee, in his _Trade and Navigation

of Great Britain Considered_ (1730, 6th ed. p. 113), expressly

ascribes a "prodigious increase of our shipping" to "the timber

trade between Portugal, etc., and our plantations," one result

being that English ships have "become the common carriers in the

Mediterranean, as well as between the Mediterranean, Holland,

Hambro', and the Baltic." He says nothing of the Navigation Act,

but lays stress on the cheap building of ships in New England, and

notes (p. 114) that the Dutch habitually hire English ships "to

transport their goods from Spain, etc., to Amsterdam, and other

places."

Even among expert merchants there was no true economic science, only a

certain empirical knowledge, reduced to rule of thumb. Hence the traders

were for ever tending to strangle trade, and the ablest administrators

fell into the snare. Everywhere they tended to be possessed by the gross

fallacy that they could somehow sell without buying,[1234] and so heap

up gold and silver; and to secure at least a balance in bullion was

considered an absolute necessity. This was the most serious error of the

policy of Colbert, who secured a balance of social gain to France by

stimulating and protecting shipping and new industries,[1235] but failed

to learn the lesson that foreign commerce in the end must consist in an

exchange of goods. Thus, though he resisted the ruinous methods of Louis

XIV,[1236] he lent himself to the theory which, next to the hope of

making the Netherlands a province of France and so an arm of French

naval strength, stimulated the policy of war. By repeatedly raising his

tariffs he forced the Dutch to raise theirs; whereupon France went to

war. Had he known that the Dutch could not sell to France without buying

thence, and _vice versa_, he would have rested content with establishing

his new industries.

M. Dussieux (as cited, p. 127) frames a deplorable demonstration

that Holland was impoverishing France and destroying all industry

there by selling more articles than she bought. As if any country

could go on buying in perpetuity without selling in payment. M.

Dussieux goes on to admit that France before Colbert had some great

industries, and a great agricultural export trade, as must needs

have been. His argument shows the survival of the mercantilist

delusion that trade can drain a productive country of its bullion.

It is evident that Colbert helped trade more by checking fiscal

abuses and promoting canals and roads than by protecting new

industries. On the whole he seems to have gravely injured

agriculture (_id._ pp. 89, _note_, and 133); and Adam Smith's

criticism (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. ii; bk. iv, ch. ix)

remains valid. He was "imposed upon by the sophistry of merchants

and manufacturers, who are always demanding a monopoly against

their countrymen," and by prohibiting export of grain he depressed

agriculture, the natural and facile industry of France, and so

promoted the rural misery which at length inspired the Revolution.

It was essentially by way of reaction against his error that the

Physiocrats fell into theirs--the denial that any industry was

productive _except_ agriculture. Even if he had not prohibited

export of grain, his import duties, in so far as they excluded

foreign products, would have checked the grain exports which had

formerly paid for these. Thus, as M. Dussieux admits, Colbert

failed to secure prosperity for the peasantry while he was helping

industry. (Cp. Brandt, _Beitraege_, as cited.) Colbert in the

nineteenth century had the benefit of the doctrine that monarchism

prepared for democracy in France, and there is some truth in the

protest of Morin that on this and other grounds he became the

object of "un culte ridicule qui brave les notions les plus

elementaires de l'economie publique" (_Origines de la democratie_,

Introd.--written in 1854--p. 48). Morin goes so far as to charge on

Colbert equally with Louvois the misfortunes of France under Louis

XIV (_id._ pp. 88, 120).

Of course the rival nations were equally self-seeking. Prohibitive

tariffs were necessarily lowest with the most specifically commercial

State, the Dutch; and the free trade doctrine began early to be heard in

England.

_E.g._, from Dudley North. Macaulay, ed. cited, i, 253. See the

quotations in M'Culloch, as above cited. Pepys, in his _Diary_,

under date 1664, February 29, tells how Sir Philip Warwick

expounded to him the "paradox" that it does not impoverish the

nation to export less than it imports. For earlier instances of

right thinking on the subject see the author's _Trade and Tariffs_,

p. 65 _sq_. The repeal in 1663 of statutes against exporting

bullion was carried in the interests of the East India Company, and

apparently on a false theory; see it in Child, _New Discourse_, p.

173. Cp. Shaftesbury, _Characteristics_, Treatise II, pt. i, Sec. 2,

_end_, as to the advantage of a "free port." This had been

partially insisted on, as we have seen, by the Merchant Adventurers

in the days of Elizabeth and James; and Raleigh strongly pressed it

in his _Observations touching Trade and Commerce with the Hollander

and other Nations_, presented to James. Works, ed. 1829, viii,

356-57. Raleigh, however, was a bullionist.

But whether rulers leant in the direction of free trade or strove to

heap up import duties as did France, they went to war for monopolies and

for imposts. Holland had as determinedly sought the ruin of Antwerp as

England did that of Holland. And as the race-principle embroiled nations

on the score of trade, so the class-principle set up new feuds of class

in all the nations concerned. The new trading class fought for its own

hand as the trade gilds of the Middle Ages had done; and the fact of its

connections with the gentry did not prevent animosity between gentry and

traders or investors in the mass. Thus were the old issues complicated,

for good or for ill.

Prof. Cunningham (_English Industry and Commerce_, ed. 1892, ii,

16-17) offers an unexpected defence of the "Mercantile System,"

under which bullion was striven for as "the direct means of

securing power." "The wisdom of the whole scheme," he writes, "is

apparently justified by the striking development of national power

which took place during the period when it lasted. England first

outstripped Holland and then raised an empire in the East on the

ruins of French dependencies." After this argument Dr. Cunningham

falters, observing: "But even if the logic of facts seems to tell

in its favour, there is a danger of fallacy: success was attained,

but how far was it due to the working of coal, and the age of

mechanical invention, and how far to the policy pursued?" There is

really no need to suppose such an antinomy between "the logic of

facts" and any other logic. The only legitimate logic of facts is

that which takes in all the facts. Now, seeing that France was as

much devoted as England to the Mercantile System, and that in the

terms of the case she failed, it cannot have been the Mercantile

System that secured success to England. The logic of facts excludes

the hypothesis. As for the "outstripping" of Holland, a country

with perhaps a fourth of England's population in the eighteenth

century, we have seen that the Mercantile System, as operating in

the Navigation Act, totally failed to attain its purpose, and that

Dutch decadence was largely due to monopolies--_i.e._, to

acceptance of the Mercantile System. The working of coal, on the

other hand, was a real wealth-making force, certainly conducive to

naval and other empire. But more allowance is to be made for the

fact that France had heavy continental quarrels on hand while she

was fighting England in Asia and America.

If at this stage we seek to discover the manner of life of the working

class in England, we shall find it hard to reach a confident conception.

Many phrases in Shakespeare remind us that as towns grew there grew with

them a nondescript semi-industrial class, untrained for any regular

industry and unable to subsist without industry of some sort. In the

latter part of the seventeenth century we seem to see a process of

elimination at work by which the organisms capable of enduring toil are

selected from a mass to which such toil was too irksome. In 1668 Sir

Josiah Child writes that the English poor in a cheap year "will not work

above two days in a week; their humour being such that they will ...

just work so much and no more as may maintain them in that mean

condition to which they have been accustomed." That, accordingly, a high

price for bread was a good thing, as forcing the poor to industry,

became the standing doctrine of such publicists as Petty.[1237] In the

next generation, Mandeville puts as indisputable the statement that "the

poor" will not work any more than they need to maintain bare existence.

When, late in the eighteenth century, we find Adam Smith, with French

testimony to support him, denying that the pinch of poverty makes for

industry, we are left in doubt as to whether the improvement came by a

positive dying out of the lazy types through the new plague of

alcoholism, or through the gradual exemplary force of a higher standard

of comfort as seen among the more industrious. Probably both influences

were at work. But it was at best in a grimy under-world of degeneracy

and hunger, squalor and riot, that there were laid the roots of the new

mechanical industries which were to make England the chief mill and

counter of Europe.[1238] And when we find one of the acutest observers

of the next generation arguing that a large body of the needy poor is

the right and necessary basis of industry and public wealth,[1239] we

realise that the new life was to be as hard for the toilers as that of

any earlier age.

_Conclusion_

It is in the reign of the last of the Stuarts, whose sex made her

perforce rely on ministers to rule for her, and whose unenlightened

zeal[1240] thus missed the disaster which similar qualities had brought

upon two of her predecessors--it is in the reign of Anne, swayed by

favourites to an extent that might have made monarchy ridiculous[1241]

if monarchists had gone by reason and not by superstition--that there

begins recognisably the era of government by parliamentary leaders,

representing at once, in varying degrees, monarch and people; and it is

at this point that we begin the biographical studies[1242] to which the

foregoing pages offer an introduction. But under new conditions and

phases we are to meet for the most part repetitions and developments of

the forces already recognised as at work from time immemorial. Thus

early have we seen in action, on the field of English history, most of

those primary forces of strife whose play makes the warp of politics,

ancient and modern; and the distinct emergence, withal, of that spirit

which, rare and transient in ancient times, seems destined to inherit

the later earth--the spirit of science, which slowly transmutes politics

from an animal to an intellectual process, raising it from the stage of

mere passional life to the stage of constructive art, and from the

social relation of rule and subjection towards the relation of mutuality

and corporate intelligence. Politics, we formally say, is the process of

the clash of wills, sympathies, interests, striving for social

adjustment in the sphere of legislation and government. The earlier

phases are crude and animalistic, and involve much resort to physical

strife. The later phases are gradually humanised and intelligised, till

at length the science of the past process builds up a new phase of

consciousness, which evolves a conscious progressive art. That is to

say, the conscious progressive art develops in course of time: it had

not really arisen in any valid form at the period to which we have

brought our bird's-eye view. It had transiently arisen in the ancient

world, as in Solon and, far less effectually, in the Gracchi; but the

conditions were too evil for its growth, and the course of things

political was downward, the animal instincts overriding science, till

even when there was compulsory peace the spirit of science could no more

blossom. In English politics, soon after the beginning of the eighteenth

century, the conditions brought about civil peace under a new dynasty,

which it was the function of the statesmanship of the dynasty to

maintain. At the same time the spirit of science had entered on a new

life. It remains to trace, under successive statesmen and in the

doctrine of successive politicians, the fluctuations of English progress

towards the great Utopia, the state of reconciliation of all the lower

social antipathies and interests, and of free scope for the inevitable

but haply bloodless strifes of ideals, which must needs clash so far as

we can foresee human affairs. The progress, we shall see, is only in our

own day beginning to be conscious or calculated: it has truly been, so

far as most of the actors are concerned, by unpath'd waters to undream'd

shores. The hope is that the very recognition of the past course of the

voyage will establish a new art and a new science of social navigation.

To make a new aspiration pass for a law of progress merely because it is

new would, of course, be only a fresh dressing of old error. There is no

security that the scientific form will make any ideal more viable than

another; every ideal, after all, has stood for what social science there

was among its devotees. The hope of a moral transformation of the world

is a state of mind so often seen arising in human history that some

distrust of it is almost a foregone condition of reflection on any new

ideal for thoughtful men. A dream of deliverance pervades the earliest

purposive literature of the Hebrews; a fabled salvation in the past is

made the ground for trust in one to come. Wherever the sense of present

hardship and suffering outweighs the energetic spirit of life in the

ancient world, the young men are found seeing visions, and the old men

dreaming dreams; and the thought of "the far serenity of Saturn's days"

becomes a foothold for the Virgilian hope of a golden age to come. A

hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident

rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In

our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have

seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes an ideal of peaceful

transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons

save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has

widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new

science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. In the

fulfilment or non-fulfilment of that hope lies for the coming age the

practical answer to the riddle of existence.

Without such a hope, the study of the past would indeed be desolating to

the tired spectator. Followed through cycle after cycle of illusory

progress and conscious decline, all nevertheless as full of pulsation,

of the pride of life and the passion of suffering, as the human tide

that beats to-day on the shores of our own senses, the history of

organised mankind, in its trivially long-drawn immensity, grows to be

unspeakably disenchanting. Considered as a tale that is told, it seems

to speak of nothing but blind impulse, narrow horizons, insane

satisfactions in evil achievement, grotesque miscalculation, and vain

desire, till it is almost a relief to reflect how little we know of it

all, how immeasurable are the crowded distances beyond the reach of our

search-light. Alike the known and the unknown, when all is said, figure

for us as fruitless, purposeless, meaningless moments in some vast,

eternal dream.

Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti

D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa

Girando senza posa,

Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;

Uso alcuno, alcun frutto,

Indovinar non so.[1243]

The untranslatable cadence of Leopardi has the very pulse of the wearied

seeker's spirit. Yet, through all, the fascination of the inquiry holds

us, as if in the insistent craving to understand there lay some of the

springs of movement towards better days. We brood over the nearer

remains, so near and yet so far, till out of the ruins of Rome there

rise for us in hosts the serried phantoms of her tremendous drama; till

we seem to catch the very rasp of Cato's voice, and the gleam of Caesar's

eye, swaying the tide of things. Still, the sensation yields no sense of

fruition; Rome the dead, and Greece the undying, drift from our reach

into the desert distance. Beyond their sunlit fragments lies a shoreless

and desolate twilight-land, receding towards the making of the world;

and there in the shadows we dimly divine the wraiths of a million

million forms, thronging a hundred civilisations. The vision of that

vanished eternity renews the intolerable burden of the spirit baffled of

all solution. For assuredly, in the remotest vistas of all, men and

women desired and loved, and reared their young, and toiled unspeakably,

and wept for their happier dead; and the evening and the morning, then

as now, wove their sad and splendid pageantries with the slow serenity

of cosmic change. Great empires waxed to the power of wreaking infinite

slaughter, through the infinite labour of harmless animal souls; and

seas of blood alternately cemented and sapped their brutal foundations;

and all that remains of them is a tradition of a tradition of their

destruction, and the shards of their uttermost decay. Not an echo of

them lives, save where perchance some poet with struggling tongue

murmurs his dream of them into tremulous form; or when music with its

more mysterious spell gathers from out the inscrutable vibration of

things strange semblances of memories, that come to us as an ancient and

lost experience re-won, grey with time and weary with pilgrimage. But to

what end, of knowledge or of feeling, if the future is not therefore to

be changed?

Save for such a conception and such a purpose, the civilisations of

to-day could have no rational hope to survive in perpetuity any more

than those of the past. The fullest command of physical science, however

great be the resulting power of wealth-production, means no solution of

the social problem, which must breed its own science. The new ground for

hope is that the great discipline of physical science has brought with

it the twofold conception of the reign of law in all things and the

sequence of power upon comprehension, even to the controlling of the

turbulent sea of human life. With the science of universal evolution has

come the faith in unending betterment. And this, when all is said, is

the vital difference between ancient and modern politics: that for the

ancients the fact of eternal mutation was a law of defeat and decay,

while for us it is a law of renewal. If but the faith be wedded to the

science, there can be no predictable limit to its fruits, however long

be the harvesting.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1207: Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 332 ff. The

Merchant Adventurers were incorporated under Elizabeth (_id._ i, 350).]

[Footnote 1208: Hume, _History of England_, ch. 62, near _end_.]

[Footnote 1209: Dr. Cunningham (ii, 101, 102, 104) notes the feeling

under the first Stuarts.]

[Footnote 1210: See Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 42, 1-vol. ed. pp. 308-9, and

his citations, as to the anti-ecclesiastical character of the Peace of

Westphalia.]

[Footnote 1211: Cp. Storch, quoted by M'Culloch, _Principles of

Political Economy_, Introd., and Schoell's addition to Koch, _Hist. of

Europe_, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 110. On the tendency of economic science to

promote peace, see Buckle, i, 217, 218; 1-vol. ed. pp. 120-25.]

[Footnote 1212: See the so-called _Political Testament of Colbert_, Eng.

tr. 1695, p. 351.]

[Footnote 1213: Petty, _Political Arithmetic_, ch. x (_Essays_, ed.

1699, p. 273). Even noblemen are mentioned as sometimes putting their

younger sons to merchandise. Cp. Toynbee, _Industrial Revolution_, p.

63; and Josiah Tucker, _Essay on Trade_ (1751), 4th ed. p. 43.]

[Footnote 1214: Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed. 1893, i,

100.]

[Footnote 1215: _Id._ iv, 2.]

[Footnote 1216: _Id._ iv, 1.]

[Footnote 1217: See Gardiner, as cited, iv, 8, for a sample, and in

particular pp. 41-43 for the notorious case of Sir Giles Mompesson and

the inn licences.]

[Footnote 1218: _Id._ iv, 6, 7.]

[Footnote 1219: _Id._ v, 233.]

[Footnote 1220: _Id._ iv, 125.]

[Footnote 1221: _Id._ vii, 71.]

[Footnote 1222: _Id._ viii, 74, 75.]

[Footnote 1223: Hallam, _Constitutional History_, ii, 11.]

[Footnote 1224: Sir Josiah Child, _New Discourse of Trade_, 4th ed. p.

9.]

[Footnote 1225: _Id._ p. 87.]

[Footnote 1226: Lingard, _Hist. of England_, 6th ed. v, 262.]

[Footnote 1227: _Epistolae Ho-elianae_, ed. 1891, i, 25.]

[Footnote 1228: Child, _New Discourse of Trade_, p. 88. As to the good

management of the Dutch in this regard, cp. Howell, as cited above, p.

334.]

[Footnote 1229: Child, whose main concern was to reduce the rate of

interest by law, proposed (p. 98) to sell paupers as slaves on the

plantations, "taking security for ... their freedom afterwards." An

antagonist (see pref. p. xi) proposed a law limiting wages.]

[Footnote 1230: Above, p. 434.]

[Footnote 1231: Josiah Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. pp. 46, 105.]

[Footnote 1232: _Id._ pp. 28, 50, 51; Richardson's _Essay on the Decline

of the Foreign Trade_ (often attributed to Decker), ed. 1756, pp.

46-64.]

[Footnote 1233: France also, of course, still kept up trade monopolies

(Tucker, p. 36).]

[Footnote 1234: The fallacy was indeed soon exposed as such by the more

enlightened economists. Thus the French writer Samber, in his _Memoirs

of the Dutch Trade_ (Eng. tr. ed. 1719, p. 75), speaks of the French

rulers of Colbert's day as having "entertained a notion that they could

carry on trade after a new unheard-of method: they proposed to sell

their goods to their neighbours, and buy none of theirs." But this was

none the less the prevailing ideal of the age. Cp. Jansen's _General

Maxims of Trade_, 1713, cited by Buckle, i, 217.]

[Footnote 1235: Cp. A. von Brandt, _Beitraege zur Geschichte der

franzoesischen Handelspolitik_, 1896, pp. 25-28.]

[Footnote 1236: L. Dussieux, _Etude biographique sur Colbert_, 1886, ch.

vi, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 1237: Cp. Child, _New Discourse_, p. 17; Petty, Essays, p.

205; Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. pp. 45-57. For a general view of

the discussion see Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, 1892,

Einleitung.]

[Footnote 1238: As early as 1641 the Manchester woollen industry is

noted as flourishing. Early in the next century it had immensely

increased. Schulze-Gaevernitz, as cited, pp. 26, 27.]

[Footnote 1239: Mandeville, _Fable of the Bees_, Remarks _Q_ and _Y_.]

[Footnote 1240: "That narrow and foolish woman." Hallam, _Constitutional

History_, iii, 124, _note_. Cp. Buckle, i, 419: "a foolish and ignorant

woman."]

[Footnote 1241: "It seems rather a humiliating proof of the sway which

the feeblest prince enjoys even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes

of Europe should have been changed by nothing more noble than the

insolence of one waiting-woman and the cunning of another. It is true

that this was effected by throwing the weight of the Crown into the

scale of a powerful faction; yet the house of Bourbon would probably not

have reigned beyond the Pyrenees but for Sarah and Abigail at Queen

Anne's toilet" (Hallam, iii, 210).]

[Footnote 1242: A work in course of preparation.]

[Footnote 1243: "Then as to all this activity, so many movements of all

things celestial and all things earthly, turning without ceasing, only

to return forever there whence they set forth, I can divine no use and

no fruition" (Leopardi's _Nocturnal Song of a Nomad Shepherd in Asia_).]

INDEX

Aargau, 338, 346, 349

Abbott, Dr. E., 37, 106 _n._

Abderrahman I, 154

---- III, 153

Abdy, Prof., 201, 373

Abortion in Greece, 102, 117

Abyssinia, 179

Academy, the French, 444 _n._, 445

Achaian League, 51

Adams and Cunningham, 331, 351 _n._

Adrian IV, 235

AEschines, 50

AEschylus, 136

Aetius, 96, 185

AEtolian League, 51

_Ager publicus_, 77

Agis, 51, 104

Agrarian distress, 403-5

Agriculture, 88;

Egyptian, 56;

Roman, 76, 79, 82 _sq._, 94;

Greek, 99, 108, 117;

Feudal, 202;

Italian, 221;

Dutch, 328;

English, 88, 348 _n._, 403;

Scandinavian, 270, 283;

Swiss, 347, 348

Alaric, 185

Alba Longa, 14

Alboin, 188, 194

Albuquerque, 358

Alcibiades, 46, 50

Alcuin, 189

Alexander the Great, empire of, 111

---- of Parma, 307, 309, 310

Alexandria, 133, 134

Alfonso de Sousa, 362

Alfred, 370 _n._, 375

Algiers, French. 57 _n._, 156-7, 177

Alkman, 132

Allen, C.-F., 264 _n._

Almohades, the, 155

Almoravides, the, 155

Althusius, 441

Alva, 308

Amalfi, 194, 204

Ambrose, 194

Amphictyonic Councils, 53

Amsterdam, 315;

bank of, 324

Anabaptism, 306, 307

Anarchism, 424

Anastasius, 96 _n._

Anaxagoras, 46

Anglo-Saxons, 275, 369-76

Anne, 468

Anskar, 267

Antioch, 133

Antonines, 89, 113, 117, 166, 167

Antony, franchise policy of, 4 _n._

Antwerp, 308, 310, 311, 313

Anund Jakob, 267, 272

Anytus, 50

Appenzell, 337, 338, 344, 347

Apuleius, 167

Aquinas, Thomas, 118 _n._, 212, 235, 440

Arab character, 146 _sq._

Architecture, 150, 151, 192, 205, 220

Arianism, 97, 168

Aribert, 206

Ariosto, 230

Aristocracy, Roman, 17, 21, 22 _sq._, 29-30, 78;

and culture, 62, 166;

and politics, 70;

Greek, 42, 49, 98, 109;

Feudal, 200, 202, 209;

Italian, 236, 245, 255;

English, 288, 376, 379, 385, 390 _sq._, 396, 403, 410;

Dutch, 306;

Scandinavian, 275, 276, 277, 281;

Portuguese, 355;

Swiss, 336, 348;

French, 391, 415 _n._, 461

Aristotle, 50, 127, 448 _sq._;

on militarism, 45;

on slavery, 98, 133 _n._;

on Sparta, 101 _n._;

on population, 102;

on education, 126;

and Aquinas, 212

Aristophanes, 50, 135

Armada, 308, 311, 314, 399, 408

Arminianism, 310

Arnold of Brescia, 235, 246

Arnold, M., 434

Arnold, W.T., 78

Artaxerxes, 113

Art, evocation of, 63, 122, 134, 150, 159, 220, 327, 409;

in Athens, 48-49, 106;

in medieval Italy, 220-21, 225;

in Holland, 327;

in Portugal, 359;

in England, 409

Arteveldt, J. van, 299

Ashley, Prof., 379 _n._, 394

Asia Minor, 55, 123

Associations, religious, 113, 115

Assyria, 135

Aston, Sir A., 428

Astronomy, 149, 150, 151

Athaulf, 186

Athens, variety of stock in, 16;

social problem in, 40, 107;

reforms of Solon in, 40 _sq._, 99;

morals in, 47-48, 50;

superstition and ignorance in, 45 _sq._;

art and letters in, 48-49, 106, 124;

imports of, 84;

commerce of, 99;

buildings of, 105;

silver mines of, 105-6;

citizenship of, 124;

retrogression of, 134

Attila, 185, 191

Attraction and repulsion in politics, 5-7, 23, 28, 202, 207, 210,

257 _sq._, 299, 369, 377, 386, 460;

modes of, 70

Augustine, 34, 118 _n._, 168, 261

Augustus, 81, 83, 164

Australian aborigines, 128

Aurelian, 87 _n._, 184, 185

Autocracy. See _Despotism_ and _Tyranny_

Avitus, St., 187

Babylonia, 68

Bacchic mysteries, 164

Bacon, 461

Bagaudae, the, 175

Bagehot, cited, 23 _n._, 57 _n._

Bain, R.N., 264 _n._, 277 _n._

Balfour, A.J., 72 _n._, 171 _sq._, 180 _n._

Ball, John, 390

Banking, 218, 435

Barante, 292

Barneveldt, 310, 318

Barros, 359

Basle, 338, 344, 346, 348

Bayle, 326

Beaconsfield, 72

Becker, cited, 9

Becket, 377

"Beggars," Confederacy of, 306

Beghards, 305

Behn, Aphra, 442 _n._

Belgium, 260, 307

Belisarius, 96, 184, 191, 194

Bent, J.T., 181

Bentham, 449

Berbers, 154 _n._, 155

Berlin, University of, 139

Berne, 336, 337, 338, 343, 344, 345, 346, 349

Bertrand, A., cited, 64

Bibliolatry, 152, 154, 157, 396, 405, 410

Bijns, Anna, 326

Bikelas, cited, 143, 144

Bishops and Italian cities, 198, 206

Black Death, 380, 384, 386, 387, 388

Blackstone, 449

Blake, 420

Blok, P.J., 292, 296

Blossius of Cumae, 81

Boccaccio, 226

Bodin, 449

Boeckh, 37, 41, 107, 108, 109

Boissier, cited, 159 _n._, 162

Bolingbroke, 437

Bologna, 205, 208, 211, 212

Bordier, 334, 335

Borghini, 217

Borgia, Cesare, 233, 253

Botta, cited, 229 _n._

Boulting, 195 _n._, 196, 202 _n._

Boyle, 447 _n._

Brazil, 317, 361-68;

population in, 362;

prospects of, 366-67

Brethren of the Common Lot, 305

Bribery in Rome, 22

Britain, economic basis of, 59, 79

Browning, O., 181

Bruce, 308

Bruges, 297

Brun, 336

Brunehild, 186

Brussels, 297

Brutus, 79

Bryce, cited, 4, 58, 189 _n._, 199, 201

Buchanan, 441

Buckingham, 415

Buckle, on national character, 1 _n._, 4;

on Montesquieu, 28 _n._;

on food and life conditions, 55;

on Spanish fanaticism, 155, 304;

on climate and civilisation, 361;

on Magna Carta, 392;

on Delolme, 392;

on Divine Right, 440 _n._;

on Anne, 468 _n._

Bullion delusion, 80, 464 _sq._

Burckhardt, 182;

as sociologist, 36;

on Greek happiness, 47;

on Sparta, 130;

on Spain and Italy, 230, 233 _n._

Burghley, 400, 406, 407

Burke, 453

---- U.R., cited, 119, 169, 191, 192

Burnet, 438, 439

Burrows, Prof., 123

Bursian, C., 65

Burton, Hill, 11, 414 _n._, 456

Bury, 38;

on Roman Empire, 34 _n._;

on Solon, 43;

on Christian disunion, 97 _n._;

on Heraclius, 116 _n._;

on Greek Art, 122 _n._;

on the Dorians, 130-31;

on Byzantine superstition, 145 _n._;

on Roman currency, 175 _n._

Busch, 392 _n._

Butler, W.F., 181, 196, 197 _n._, 206, 211

Byzantium, 34, 93, 95, 96, 114 _sq._, 143 _sq._, 152, 186

Cade, Jack, 388, 406

Caesar, franchise policy of, 4 _n._;

revenue policy of, 73;

policy of doles of, 82;

policy in Campania of, 91;

and Corinth, 110

Calderon, 359, 413

Calvin, 301, 343, 344, 398, 435

Calvinism, 306, 310, 326, 344, 396 _n._, 398

Camden, 398, 407

Camoens, 359

Cantu, 181

Capitalism, in antiquity, 86, 104, 108;

in Florence, 218, 248 _sq._;

in Holland, 316, 318, 324; in America, 365;

in England, 393, 403, 434-35, 462

Caracalla, 4, 175

Carlyle, 264 _n._, 419, 429-30

Carmagnola, 249

Carrel, A., 436 _n._, 437 _n._, 444 _n._

Carthage, 28 _n._, 30, 86

Castruccio Castracani, 243, 255

_Cathari_, 220

Cato, 32

Cats, 307, 326

Catullus, 165, 166

Celibacy, Sacerdotal, 235

Celts, 187, 190, 192, 258, 279, 375, 378

Chancery, Court of, 432

Chapman, 412, 413

Charlemagne, 188, 189, 191, 192, 267, 295

Charles I of England, 410, 414 _sq._, 426, 443

---- II of England, 319, 320, 437, 438, 442, 443, 451

---- III of Spain, 363

---- IV, 246

---- V, 300, 301, 302, 304, 309 _n._, 311

Charleton, W., 444 _n._

Chasles, Ph., cited, 74

Chastity, barbaric, 184

Chaucer, 384, 386

Chemistry, 149, 150

Chievres, 302

Child, Sir J., 316, 458, 462, 463 _n._, 464, 467

Chilperic, 186

China, polity of, 56, 57, 59-60, 67, 73, 180, 260;

secret societies of, 26 _n._

Chinese and Europeans, repulsions of, 6

Chivalier, 294 _n._

Chivalry, 383

Christian II, 276

---- III, 277

Christianity, conditions of success of, 27, 114-15, 165;

effects of, 28;

and progress, 34-5, 179, 205, 272, 431;

and Roman Empire, 95, 96, 97, 265;

and heresy, 97, 115, 168, 300, 303, 344;

spread of, 112, 114-15;

and infanticide, 117-18;

and slavery, 118 _sq._, 214 _sq._, 372-73;

and culture, 142, 144, 168, 280;

and Islam, 149, 157;

in Gaul, 167;

and morals, 186, 210, 272, 431, 434;

and Italian disunion, 210;

in Scandinavia, 265 _sq._, 272, 274;

and fish eating, 293;

in modern Holland and Belgium, 307;

strife of sects in, 422

Chrysostom, 118

Church in politics, 96, 145, 152, 168-69, 198, 203, 206, 210, 223, 234,

235, 265, 274, 377, 391

Cicero, on Roman politics, 20-21;

on manumission, 215

Cimabue, 220

Cincinnatus, 12, 19

City States, 29, 38 _sq._, 52, 53, 124, 179, 198, 202 _sq._, 209 _sq._,

286 _sq._, 295

Civilisation and superstition, 46;

modern, roots of, 169

Civilisations, primary and secondary, 55 _sq._

Clans, Highland, 11, 67

Clarendon, 437, 451

Class degradation, effects of, 62, 68, 372;

relations in England, 376, 379;

as political factor, 70

Classes, strife of, in Rome, 17 _sq._;

in Greece, 38, 45;

in Florence, 229 _sq._;

in Flanders, 296-97;

in Switzerland, 336, 350;

in England, 393-94, 405

Claudian, 167

Claudius II, 185

Clemenceau, 271

Cleomenes, 51, 104

_Clientes_, Roman, 11

Climate and race, 193, 361

_Cloacae_, the Roman, 14

Clothaire, 186

Clovis, 187

Coal civilisations, 79, 88, 365, 366

Coinage, alleged debasement of, by Solon, 41;

Roman debasement of, 175;

Papal debasement of, 223;

debasement of, by Henry VIII, 397.

See _currency_

Colbert, 140, 315, 445, 446, 461, 464, 465

Cologne, 288

Colonies, Greek, 39, 48, 100;

and culture, 63 _n._;

Roman, 86;

Scandinavian, 271;

Dutch, 312

Comines, 391

_Comitia_, Roman, 9 _sq._

Commerce, Roman, 76-7, 80;

Athenian, 99, 108;

Greek, under Roman Empire, 113;

Byzantine, 117;

Italian, 211, 218-19, 221, 256, 383;

Danish, 273;

Norwegian, 284;

Medieval, 288;

Dutch, 297, 310 _sq._;

Portuguese, 357 _sq._;

Anglo-Saxon, 370;

English, 380, 393, 404, 459;

Irish, 453;

Spanish, 461;

and civilisation, 70, 99, 104, 109, 113, 205, 211, 221, 287, 315,

457, 458;

and war, 297, 460

Compass, the, 205

Competition of societies, 58, 70

Comte, A., 2 _n._, 4

Conrad the Salic, 203

Conradin, 241

Conservatism and isolation, 56, 144;

Chinese, 60;

Egyptian, 125;

and militarism, 132-33;

English, 424

Constantine, 27 _n._, 114, 117, 215

Constantinople, evolution of, 116 _sq._

Consuls and Italian cities, 198, 203, 207

Corinth, 105, 110, 131 _n._

Corporations, religious, 160, 235, 377

Cox, Sir G., cited, 66, 161

Creed politics, 405, 415, 424

Creighton, Bishop, 401 _n._

Cremona, 216

Crete, polity of, 59 _n._, 131-32, 133

Crichton and Wheaton, 264 _n._, 272, 273, 275

Cromer, Lord, discussed, 177 _sq._

Cromwell, Oliver, 318, 417-21, 424-33, 453;

Richard, 436;

Thomas, 395

Crusades, effects of, 69;

and slavery, 214, 296;

and civilisation, 383

Culture, Greek, 46 _sq._;

and the sexes, 61;

importance of diffusion of, 62

Culture-contacts, effects of, 57, 63;

conditions of success of, 57, 58;

and Greek civilisation, 64, 122;

in Christendom, 69, 150;

in Japan, 69, 70;

in modern Europe, 138 _sq._;

and Saracen civilisation, 146;

and Roman civilisation, 158, 163, 164;

and post-Roman civilisation, 189, 193;

and medieval Italy, 211, 219, 254;

and England, 212 _n._;

and Scandinavia, 279;

and Holland, 326;

and Renaissance, 340;

and England, 375

Cunningham, Dr., on Greek civilisation, 36, 129;

on Roman expansion, 67;

on Roman wars, 76 _n._, 78 _n._;

on Roman decline, 93-4;

on Athenian expenditure, 106 _n._;

on Greeks and Phoenicians, 129, 150;

on Black Death, 388;

on the Tudors, 402;

on Puritanism, 433;

on the mercantile system, 466

_Curiae_, the Roman, 8 _sq._, 203

Currency, Roman, 80, 175;

Byzantine, 96;

Dutch, 311

Curtius, E., 130

Cybele, cult of, 163

Dahn, F., cited, 188 _n._

Danby, 442

Daendliker, 331, 339 _n._

Dante, 213, 217, 226, 233, 240 _n._

Daremberg, Dr., cited, 147-48

Darien Company, 456

Daru, 255 _n._

D'Aubigne, 430-31

David, J., 292

Davies, 291

Davis, Sir J., 67

---- H.W. C., 378

"Death," political, 33-4, 59

Decay, social, 22, 25, 32, 59, 69, 170 _sq._;

socio-physiological, 186;

socio-psychological, 61, 112, 141, 280, 411-13

Defoe, 413

Dekker, 406 _n._

De la Chambre, 445

Delacourt, 313

Delaunay, cited, 10, 11

Della Torre, 241

Democracy, Roman, 19 _sq._;

Greek, 38 _sq._, 46 _sq._;

French, 72;

American, 38 _n._, 365, 366;

Scandinavian, 276, 278;

Flemish, 300;

Dutch, 306, 310, 311;

English, 388, 414 _sq._;

Italian, 209 _sq._, 225;

Swiss, 350 _sq._;

conditions of success of, 52;

and intellectual life, 139

Demosthenes, 50, 105, 136

Denmark, structure of, 265;

political evolution of, 268, 271, 273, 273-74;

religion in, 268;

slavery in, 273, 274;

commerce of, 273;

Reformation in, 276-77;

culture of, 280-81

Dennis, G., 185

Denton, Rev. W., 385

Descartes, 326, 446

Despotism, and food supply, 55-6;

as political factor, 70;

and art, 135 _sq._, 166, 220, 224 _sq._;

and culture, 141, 153, 224 _sq._;

and decadence, 173;

in Holland, 299;

in Portugal, 357-58;

spirit of, 455

Deutsch, cited, 149 _n._, 157 _n._

De Witt, 291, 317, 319, 324

Dicaearchus, 105

Dierauer, 331, 334

Diocletian, 96, 113, 175

Dionysos, cult of, 164

Diophanes, 81

"Divine Right," 440 _sq._

Doge, the title, 204 _n._