THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD

PERIOD III

The Development of the Modern World

A COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING THE FIRST LOCOMOTIVE EVER MADE
FOR A PUBLIC RAILWAY STANDING UPON THE SAME TRACK ALONG WHICH
IT HAULED THE FIRST TRAIN ON SEPTEMBER 27TH, 1825, AND THE
"FLYING SCOTSMAN" CROSSING THE OLD LINE AT DARLINGTON.

PERIOD III

The Development of the Modern World

BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

FIRST EDITION ... 1926

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES

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PREFACE TO PERIOD III

In this third and final volume of the Greatest Story in the World I have tried to give an outline sketch of the happenings of the last five centuries. It is the period which must appeal more forcibly than any earlier time to all of Anglo-Saxon race, because it is the Anglo-Saxon race that plays by far the largest role in it, and a role which becomes of constantly increasing interest right down to the present day. We first see Great Britain, in the gallant figures of Elizabeth's sea-captains, as chief actor in thwarting the aims at world empire of Spain. A little while, and we see her again taking the lead in abating the arrogance of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. of France. But of far greater importance than even this checking of the powers of the would-be masters of the world is that part which fortune or Providence assigned to her to play so conspicuously throughout the second half of the period which this volume covers—the part of mother of nations. It is thus that the historian, J. R. Green, writes of her as she appeared to the world after the United States had fought their way to independence—not a nation broken by her loss, as all had perhaps expected to find her, possibly a sadder and certainly a wiser nation, but, most surprising of all, stronger and more adventurous.

These are Mr. Green's words: "From the moment of the Declaration of Independence it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the {vi} nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power, no longer a mere rival of Germany or Russia or France. She was from that hour a mother of nations.... And to these nations she was to give not only her blood and her speech, but the freedom which she had won. It is the thought of this which flings its grandeur round the pettiest details of our story in the past. The history of France has little result beyond France itself. German or Italian history has no direct issue outside the boundaries of Germany or Italy. But England is only a small part of the outcome of English history. Its greater issues lie not within the narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping in the past of our little island the future of mankind."

The greatest part, in fact, of this Greatest Story for the last hundred and fifty years has been made in England. That is, indeed, much to say, but it is not too much.

In this volume I have thought best not to take up space with description of the way in which men have so lately lived, have built their houses, and so on. I have assumed that all this would be more or less familiar to my readers from other books and pictures and talk. And not even in vaguest outline have I attempted a sketch of the Great War and its effects. The moving picture which I have tried to make intelligible stops before the curtain is rung up on that grim tragedy whose import we do not even now fully understand.

And yet again my best thanks are due to Mr. R. B. Lattimer for valuable criticisms and suggestions.

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. How Man sailed East and West
II. The Stories of the Old East and of the New West
III. Three Kings and a Monk
IV. The Waning Power of Spain
V. The Wars of Religion
VI. The Growing Power of France
VII. The Humbling of France
VIII. From the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
IX. The Seven Years' War
X. How The United States won Independence
XI. How the Stage was set for the French Revolution
XII. The Revolution and the Terror
XIII. The Napoleonic Wars
XIV. The Expansion of the Anglo-Saxon and the Slav
XV. Steam and Evolution
XVI. The Resettlement of Europe
XVII. The Settlement of America
XVIII. "The White Man's Burden"
SECTION I.—Africa
SECTION II.—India and the Far East
SECTION III.—The Far South
Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Railway Centenary, 1925: Ancient and Modern Locomotives ... Frontispiece

Ships of the Time of Henry VIII.

Mexican Picture Writing

Statue of Buddha

Sir Francis Drake

General Wolfe's Statue, Quebec

The Potala at Lhasa

The Taj Mahal, Agra

Warren Hastings

The Modern Palace of Versailles

Napoleon I.

H.M.S. "Victory" after Trafalgar

The Duke of Wellington

An Old Mail Coach

Old Hand Loom and Modern Power Loom

Garibaldi

Old Japan: Entrance to the Tombs, Tokio

A Street Scene in Modern Japan

A Scene in New Zealand: Mt. Pembroke

{1}

THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD

Suddenly, at the end of the fifteenth century, the persons of our story found the picture of the world which they carried in their minds wonderfully expanded, rather as if it were a closed fist widely opening. Columbus in 1492 "discovered America": Vasco da Gama, in 1487, "rounded the Cape of Good Hope."

That is the way in which most of the history books state it for us; but it is a statement which gives credit to Columbus for a little more than he actually did, and does not put enough to the credit of da Gama. For it was not what we call America at all which Columbus discovered in 1492, but only one of what we now know as the West Indies, or West Indian Islands: and the mere "rounding" of the Cape of Good Hope had been done by another before da Gama, but da Gama, after "rounding" and sailing up the eastern coast of Africa, struck across to the western coast of India. As a feat of navigation his voyage was far greater than that of Columbus.

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Vasco da Gama

Thus Vasco da Gama, going eastward, reached the western coast of India, and Columbus, going westward, reached the "West Indies." The name is worth noting.

These islands, as further exploration showed them to be, were called "West Indies," because men had expected to reach India by sailing west. The geographers had no conception of the great continent of America and the vast ocean of the Pacific that lay between the land touched by Columbus and the land which he thought that he had touched.

No matter. He came back with a very marvellous story—a story which grew ever more marvellous as further exploration revealed the astonishing truth.

What made this discovery of America so intensely exciting was that it was discovery of a land wholly new and unexpected. Although the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India was a new and remarkable achievement in navigation, the people in the West, the only people with whom this "greatest story" has been concerned until this time, were tolerably informed about the East. But its story had never before come into their own and mingled itself with their own so that each should have an effect and make a change in the other, as did begin to happen now.

The "New World," as it was called, of America, unlike the East, scarcely had a story at all. A few, a very few, historical records were discovered by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru. The inhabitants whom the Spaniards found there had been workers in gold and silver, and the riches which Spain obtained by robbery of this treasure and, later, by working the gold mines and silver mines from which the precious metals were taken, made a large difference, as we shall see, in the history of men in Europe. But for the rest the "New World" had no history, no activities, which worked into and altered the history of the old. {3} The old world was vastly affected by the discovery nevertheless. Just because it was so new, and occupied by savages who were able to make very little resistance to invasion, it enlarged the actual size of the world both for men's imaginations and also as a place for them to live in. But except for the treasure which the Spaniards took, it had little to send back to the old world. All else was a going out of the old world to the new.

Da Gama did not discover a new world. He merely—but it made a vast difference to the story—proved possible a new and far more convenient route to a country already known. Thus he brought that known land into contact with Europe so that the story of the far East interpenetrated the European story as it never had done before. The whole, in fact, became one world-wide story.

The East had been sending her produce to the West ever since the West—by which term we here mean Europe—had been civilised enough to need and to value it. There was a very ancient overland route from the north-west of India through Persia and Mesopotamia to Tyre and the Mediterranean coast. Another way was oversea from some Indian port as far as the head, that is to say the northern end, of the Persian Gulf, and thence, as before, overland to a port on the coast of Syria. And thirdly, there was a route by longer sea, again starting from India, calling perhaps at one or two ports in Arabia and up through the Red Sea. At a port in the Red Sea the goods would be landed and taken, probably on camel-back, to the Nile, and would be brought down the river and transhipped at its mouth into vessels which would carry them to Venice or Genoa.

The chief Indian port from which the trading vessels sailed, whether to the Persian Gulf or to the Red Sea, was Calicut, which we still see marked on {4} the maps of India. It is a town on what is called the Malabar Coast, on the western side of India, low down towards the west.

And not only did ships bearing the produce of India start from Calicut, but Calicut was also the port to which came ships, some of them of great size, from the farther East, bearing the silks of China, the spices of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and so on.

All the carrying trade west of Calicut seems to have been in the hands of Mahommedans, by far the most part of them being Arabs, at the date of da Gama's adventurous voyage to India. It was, of course, by far the more adventurous and full of danger for that very reason, because here was he, a Christian, and therefore to be regarded as almost their natural enemy by all good Mahommedans, coming to interfere with a trade which they had made their own.

It does not seem possible that they did not realise what his coming was likely to mean for the future of that trade. The Arab traders themselves knew the eastern coast of Africa at least as far south as Mozambique, for it was at this point that da Gama first came into touch with them. And it is probable that they knew the African coast further south also. They must have realised that ships going round the Cape of Good Hope could carry goods from India to Europe very much more cheaply than they could be transported by means which involved several transhipments, the payment of duties at several ports, and a longer or shorter carriage overland.

The wonder is that da Gama, going with only three vessels and of no great size—they were of the kind that were known as caravels—was ever allowed by the Moslems to come home again. But he artfully pretended to them that these three were only part of a larger fleet from which they had become separated, {5} and it may be that this pretence imposed upon the Arabs and deterred them from doing him any injury. As it was, he was imprisoned for awhile by one of the Sultans, or rulers of a territory on the Indian coast, but by some means he conciliated his captor and was allowed to trade and go home again with his ships laden with silks, pearls, rubies, and a variety of treasure. The question that naturally occurs now is why it should have been the Portuguese, of all the European nations, that were led to undertake this sailing round Africa. The answer is interesting, because it involves an explanation of a curious idea of the geographers of the day.

We saw, in the second volume of this Greatest Story, Arabs and Moors established along the fertile fringe of Northern Africa. Northward of this fringe lay the Mediterranean; behind it, that is to say to the south, the desert. But the African tribes had penetrated and traversed this desert. They had learnt that there was, on the far side of it, a fertile land again, a land which was later known as Guinea. And this land was watered by a great river, now known as the Senegal river, flowing from the east and coming out into the sea in the Gulf of Guinea. It appeared to come from much the same direction as that in which they rightly supposed lay the sources of the Nile, the river of Egypt; and they seem to have imagined it a western branch of that ancient river. If they could mount up this branch then far enough in their boats they deemed that they might come out on the Nile, and so, if they pleased, arrive again on the Mediterranean.

The land of slaves

Apart from this idea, the land in itself was rich and produced much that they valued—gold dust and ivory in the elephants' tusks which the natives brought or barter with them—but above the ivory and gold and the rest of the rich products they valued the {6} natives themselves, whom they captured and brought to markets in the Mediterranean towns and sold for slaves. Slaves had a value then which is not easy for us to realise to-day when our great difficulty is to find work for men to do. At that time the difficulty was to find men to do the work; and perhaps this was more true of Portugal and Spain than of other European countries, because so much of their territory lay uncultivated and waste by reason of the continual wars which had been waged between the Christians and the Moors. They needed men badly to till those waste lands. This fertile country then, south of the extensive tract of desert, had much that might attract the Spaniard or the Portugee.

We do not know very precisely why it was that little Portugal, rather than great Spain, sent out the mariners which worked southward along the western coast of Africa. We do not know, but perhaps we may make a guess. Spain had a large stretch of coast, with many ports, along the Mediterranean, and it is likely that Portuguese vessels would not have been very welcome if they tried to trade in that direction. Moreover, the Mediterranean swarmed with pirates, both of Mahommedan and Christian nations. It was no peaceful sea for the trader. Again, Spain had a long coast line northward and north-eastward right away to where the Pyrenees come up to the Bay of Biscay. There was no warm welcome there for ships encroaching on Spanish trade. Therefore, if the Portuguese sailors were to be adventurous at all there was no other very apparent direction for their enterprise to take than that of the western coast of Africa and of the islands that lay off it, such as Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde islands.

Portuguese adventurers

And there can be no doubt about the adventurous spirit of the Portuguese sailors of that day. They were inspired by the spirit of adventure, but also—for {7} human motives are generally mixed—the adventure attracted them by the profits to be gained in it, the gold and the slaves. Further, we have to credit them with a more noble and spiritual motive, for they were inspired with a fervent conviction that it was a work most pleasing to God to induce the natives of new-found lands to become Christians. The means employed to this end were often cruel, but we ought to realise that it was a very real motive, both with the Spaniard and the Portugee. It is a motive which gives dignity to their conquests. They were not undertaken solely for material gain. Even if the means were cruel by which they converted a savage, whether of Africa or of America, they believed that it was in the truest sense a kindness to be thus cruel, if by so dealing with his body his soul might be saved.

Such motives as the above had their influence not only with the adventurers themselves, but also with the Governments of their countries. A member of the Royal family of Portugal, known in story as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), especially favoured and helped to equip these expeditions. He was grandson of our own John of Gaunt. Perhaps his title of "Navigator" was cheaply earned, for there is no evidence that he ventured far oversea himself, but the distant voyages owed very much of their success to his assistance.

Thus the Portuguese crept farther and farther down the African coast until at length they rounded it, and in the last years of the fifteenth century da Gama achieved the great adventure. He must have deemed himself uncommonly fortunate to come home, with those three "caravels," to his native land, and that he was considered to have been favoured by fortune we may gather from Portugal's later conduct. Her rulers were far from trusting that it would be always so—that her trading ships might always go {8} safely voyaging in those seas which the Moslems had hitherto deemed to be their own. One fleet, more powerful and more numerous than da Gama's poor three ships, was sent out, and again another, greater still, until the Portuguese had taken all the chief ports—Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Africa itself, the ports commanding the entries of the Red Sea and of the Persian Gulf—had penetrated farther east and captured the great trading port of Malacca, had even landed in China, and had established their headquarters at Goa, in the Indian peninsula.

It is not the least wonderful part of the whole surprising story that they should have made this conquest so completely and so easily. We must attribute it to the superiority of their ships in comparison with those of the Arabs and other Moslems in that sea, to their better armament and to their greater skill in using these ships for naval battle. Had the Mahommedans of that ocean possessed anything like the ships and the experience of marine warfare that sailors of the same religion in the Mediterranean had acquired by perpetual sea-fighting, it is not possible that Portugal could have dominated them so decisively and at such slight cost to herself. Besides that the Portuguese could manœuvre far more skilfully with their ships, and knew how to combine them for attack, the guns which their ships carried seem to have been far more powerful than any that the Moslems had, whether ashore or afloat; for not only do we find them gaining the victory in all the naval battles, but they employed their ships' guns in bombarding the ports and combining the bombardment from the sea with attacks by their landing forces.

The result of it all was that within a dozen or so years of da Gama's reaching India the Portuguese were the masters of those seas, and had the whole of that trade in their hands. And while Portugal thus {9} worked her way to the dominance of the eastern sea, Spain was confirming the conquests for which Columbus had pointed her the way in the West.

Atlantis

For some years there had been vague rumours in Europe of an island far out in the western sea, and a still more confident idea that if men could sail westward far enough they would come to the eastern side of Asia. That was the goal at which they aimed, in the westward sailing. Columbus' special genius and courage inspired him to go bravely on this western cruise, not troubling himself, as others had done before him, with the search for that fabulous island, of Atlantis, supposed to be somewhere in the mid-ocean, but holding his way continuously towards the sunset until he did at length touch a land which he thought to be that eastern Asia which he had set out to look for.

We know how that it was something very different. During the next few years Spain kept sending out expedition after expedition, to find out what sort of new world it was that this bold sailor had thus reached. To Spain fell the enterprise and the conquest first, but not by any natural sequence of events, for it was truly due to the genius of Columbus, who was a man of Genoa, and no son of Spain at all, that the first enterprise of discovery was undertaken. He could not attempt it at his own cost. His native state would not furnish him with the means. For four years he was trying to get his voyage "financed," as we should say now—that is, get its expenses paid—by the Governments either of Spain or of England. He had a brother working to this end at the English Court, while he was pleading his own cause at the Court of Spain. Our Henry VII. was just beginning to listen favourably to the prayer of the brother, when Isabella, joint ruler, with Ferdinand, of Spain, was won by the eloquence of Christopher Columbus. {10} Spain equipped the ships, and England, whether for her good or her ill it is interesting to speculate, but impossible surely to know, lost her chance of achieving the astonishingly rich conquest which thus came to Spain.

For what the repeated Spanish expeditions established ever more conclusively was the amazing richness of the new world, or, at least, of that part of it which she was first to conquer. And yet, at the beginning, there was some disappointment. We have seen how one of the great needs of these countries of the old world was men to cultivate their war-wasted lands. This man-power they were constantly hoping to increase by acquiring slaves. Portugal did acquire slaves, who proved excellent workers, from Africa. The slaves which the first conquerors of the West brought to Spain were nearly useless. The Red Indian, as it became the fashion to call him later, has never been of any value, as the African negro and the East Indian "coolie" have been valuable, in the service of the white man.

Thence, just at first, arose disappointment in Spain. But later, as the treasures in gold and silver and gems of the new land were brought over and became known and appreciated, there was ever growing joy and triumph over the El Dorado—the Golden Land—which had thus surprisingly been added to the Spanish Crown. There were new riches, without limit, to be brought home, new souls, beyond number, to be saved. Priests went out with the conquerors. It was a spiritual, as well as a material conquest. Immense treasure was taken when in 1521 Cortez made himself master of Mexico, and twelve years later the yet greater wealth of Peru was added by the conquest of Pizarro.

And it was a conquest and a source of riches with which at first no other country interfered. We have {11} seen, however, that Columbus in the first instance, sailing west, had supposed himself to arrive on the eastern shore of Asia and of India—the eastern shore, that is to say, of the very land at which the Portuguese arrived by sailing east. It was apparent then that if these voyagings were prolonged far enough the ships must meet, or at least must cross each other's path. Therefore the two nations came to an agreement between themselves for the amicable partition of the world. It was arranged that Spain should have all lands, that she should conquer from any non-Christian peoples, to the west of a line drawn from north to south half-way between the Azores and the West Indies, and that Portugal should have the lands that she might similarly conquer to the east of that line. Each country would establish the Christian Church in its conquered territories; and the division was sanctioned by the Pope in a "Bull," as the Papal pronouncement is called, dated as early as 1493.

The northern nations of Europe paid only a partial respect to the Bull. Before the close of the fifteenth century Henry VII. of England had given a charter to a Venetian seaman—he had learnt his seamanship in Venice, though he, like Columbus, was a Genoese by birth—Cabot and his three sons to claim as England's possession any non-Christian lands that they might discover in the West. This charter, however, was expressly stated to apply to the northern, western, and eastern seas, but not the southern, a restriction which obviously shows that the rights of Spain and Portugal in the south were observed.

America

Long years before this, Northmen, as is told in the Saga of Eric the Red, sailing from Iceland and going west, had come to a land which they had called Vineland the Good. It is supposed to have been either Newfoundland or the mainland of North America. Very likely they touched both. There is {12} a small grape that grows there which might justify the name. They tried to form a settlement there, but the settlers were all murdered by the natives, and the attempt was not repeated. From the port of Bristol there was commerce with Iceland. There can be no doubt that sailors brought the account of this enterprise, and of this Vineland, to Bristol. When the Cabots went westward it is likely that it was this land which they had a mind to seek.

The result of their expedition was that they reached and explored the western coasts of Newfoundland and of Labrador, but found nothing of such promise as tempted them to bring back any glowing reports of the new-found land. Its effect was indeed to extinguish the interest of England in these western voyages for many years.

In the very last year of the century the coast of South America was touched by two expeditions, one Spanish, the other Portuguese. The former had on board that Amerigo Vespucci who later wrote an account of the voyage and after whom America has its name. The expedition with which Amerigo sailed touched the coast of what we now call Brazil, and it seems to have been a surprise to discover that this part of the continent lay within the north and south line which had been drawn on the chart to define the westernmost possession of the Portuguese.

A circumnavigation

Within the first quarter of the following century the Spaniards exploring northward had proved the continuity of the great continent with that land which Cabot had reached. Southward a Portugee, Magellan, had sailed through the straits which bear his name, had rounded Cape Horn and come out into the Pacific. This boldest perhaps of all seamen, in an age of bold seamen, pressed still westward over the ocean, to meet his death from the spear of a native in the far west islands of the Philippines. He had, in fact, made {13} real the vision of Columbus—to reach the East by sailing west. His ship, the Victoria, returned safely to Europe, being the first to accomplish a circumnavigation, or voyage round the world, in 1522. The voyage had occupied three years all but a fortnight.

SHIPS OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII.

And by this time the coast of the Pacific on the western side of America had been reached at several points by travellers overland, and the extent and contour of the New World could be tolerably well mapped out except in its north-western quarter.

{14}

The story of the New World before the coming of the Spaniards may be told shortly because we know so little of it.

At its far north-westerly corner the Continent of America is divided from Asia by a narrow strait. It is a shallow strip of ocean, and there is no doubt that there was a time when it did not exist as a dividing barrier, and that animals—man among the rest—poured into America from Asia at what was then a point of junction between them.

It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated. The so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic immigrants. One might almost say of them that they have no story, in the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human progress in other parts of the world. Apart from what they have learnt from the white man since the year 1500—and unhappily they learned from him much evil, as well as good—they still represent what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes. They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he passed into the second {15} of the three recognised phases and became pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds.

The Red Indian

Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting some supernatural creature of unknown powers.

But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.

Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of America from passing into the pastoral stage.

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And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came, the Indians had cultivated plants—notably that maize, sometimes called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been imported into North America from the south.

MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.

Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority of {17} the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth deity to grant them good harvests.

Egypt and Mexico

These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought to point to Egypt as their source. Is it at all possible that they really may have come thence? There is a theory about man's story in the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to be gaining adherents.

According to this theory, explorers, belonging to the date of the ancient sun-worship in Egypt, pushed out from that country adventurously in search of certain definite objects. Chief among those objects were gold and pearls. And they were sought and prized not only because of their rarity and beauty, but far more because they were considered to have certain magical qualities, to be great "life-givers." The theory then is that the explorers—who were {18} sun-worshippers, who offered human sacrifices, made stone-works, understood irrigation and were distinguished by other practices and beliefs—travelled widely in search for these "life-givers." Traces of their sojourn, it is claimed, are to be found in India, in the chain of islands which is called Indonesia, thence onwards through other islands of the Pacific, until finally we find them on the American continent, in Mexico and Peru, and in various places in North America. Their traces are in the north of Europe also. These traces consist chiefly in large stone works. One or other, and in some places many, of the distinctive elements of the civilisation and religion of ancient Egypt are to be found among the peoples who live where the ancient stone works are. Very commonly they have the belief that there was once among them a ruling family who were "children of the sun," whose forefather actually was the sun himself, to whom, according to some legends, they would return at death. It was the belief that the Spaniards were the sun children, or sun-gods, come again, which greatly assisted them in their conquest of Mexico, and perhaps of Peru also. In the latter country there still existed, at the time of its conquest, the custom common among some of the Pharaohs of Egypt, for the ruler to take his own sister for his queen. Besides its interest, this is a theory which gives a plausible account of facts, such as the stone working and the widely spread belief in the sun children, which are otherwise very difficult to explain. But it is not to be taken as proved, nor even as generally accepted.

In Peru, exceptionally, the Spaniards found a distinct race, the Incas, supposed to be descended from the sun, still ruling, and ruling with a singular benevolence. But throughout the whole of the rest of the continent, North and South, the natives had {19} made very little progress along any lines of civilisation. Here and there was some cultivation, chiefly of the Indian corn; but generally the people were hunters, going nearly naked in the warmer regions, clad in the skins of beasts in the colder climates, poorly armed with bows and arrows.

Thus obscure and scanty is the story of this great newly found world of the Spaniards. In the East, on the other hand, were lands whose stories dated, with actual records, thousands of years back. There was one, that wonderland of China, with earliest annals between two and three thousand years before Christ—by no means the oldest annals of humanity, but incomparably older than those of any other empire that still exists.

The permanence of China

That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence. And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have forced their way in upon it from the north—rude, uncivilised tribes invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They and their sons for many generations have governed the land. But the country generally, with its vast extent and its large population, has gone on its way very little troubled by the change of rulers. Those military conquerors have in fact been themselves conquered by the higher civilisation in which they have found themselves.

The Chinese themselves appear to have come into the country from the west. Although they always have been a people who held soldiers and the military caste in very low esteem, they gradually pushed out the original natives until their empire had boundaries even more extensive than its present wide limits. {20} It is one of the many wonders of this most singular nation, that though it relied so little on force of arms it gained a very marked respect from all the other peoples of the East.

Confucius

Since the empire grew to be so vast, it is not surprising that the great men far from the centre became very independent, so that the social conditions in the sixth century before Christ have been likened to those feudal conditions which we saw prevailing in Europe at a much later date. Chinese rulers of provinces have been written of as "feudal dukes." And just at that time, when the country was in the disturbed state which such conditions made inevitable, there arose two great teachers of whom the younger, Confucius, exercised a very extraordinary influence over all China, an influence that has force even to-day.

He expounded sage maxims for man's conduct towards his fellow-men, maxims not necessarily of his own invention but taken from wise men before him. "Do good," he enjoined, "not only to those who do good to you, but to those who do you injury." It had been said even before him. But to "do unto others as you would they should do unto you" may be taken as the principal basis of his own teaching, and the Christian goes no further, in respect of man's "duty to his neighbour." But about man's duty towards God Confucius had nothing to say. Obedience and piety of the son towards the father were, according to him, "the beginning of virtue, that which distinguishes man from the brutes."

And this relation and piety he conceived ought to prevail all through the State. The Emperor ought to act as the father of his people, and the people ought to be obedient to him, like his sons. But he naïvely qualified this, in a way calculated to prevent the Emperor's acting as a tyrannical parent, by saying {21} that he forfeited his claim on this obedience if he governed wrongly.

Confucius never claimed, as did Mahomet, for instance, to be divinely inspired. He came as a mere man, preaching unselfishness and filial piety and the duty of obedience and the beauty of goodness. Those to whom he preached accepted his words, and certainly in some large measure formed their conduct accordingly. It was a sermon advocating peace in a country distracted by disturbances; and its ultimate effect is that the Chinese even to-day are a peace-loving nation. For all that, the great empire has been the scene of very frequent war, both by invaders from without and rebels within; but unhappily that is the state which has been usual throughout man's history everywhere.

Confucius put the highest value on education. In the second century B.C. competitive examinations began to be held for selecting ministers to posts in the Government—a curiously democratic measure, and perhaps possible in no other country than China. Some of the scientific inventions, which have made much difference in the story of the West, were known in China far earlier than elsewhere—the power and use of gunpowder, for instance, and the art and craft of printing. China discovered them early; but after their first discovery she did not develop them at all, as did the Western nations when they relearned them or took them from her.

It was in the third century B.C. that one of the world's wonders, the Great Wall of China, was built—running west from the sea to a length of a thousand and four hundred miles, and going over mountain and valley without deviation. Its purpose was to act as a barrier, easy of defence, against the wild tribes that pressed in from the north. The Emperor under whom this mighty, though not wholly effective, obstacle {22} was raised, was powerful enough to put down most of the feudal dukes, and, much as the feudal dukes and lords in Europe were replaced by the king's official tax collectors, so in China, Viceroys of provinces, appointed by the Emperor, took the place of the dukes. The Viceroys also were not always obedient to the central power, but on the whole the change made for peace within the empire.

Confucianism then, as the doctrine of that great teacher was called, was not a religion, but merely a system for the ordinance of man's life on earth, without reference to a God; but about the same time as Confucius, Buddha lived and founded the religion of Buddhism in India; and in the first century A.D. Buddhist missionaries came to China. It is to this influence that the pagoda-shaped temples are due which are a prominent feature in Chinese scenery, for it was in this form that the Buddhist temples were roofed. The new religion gained numerous converts, and its monasteries are many in China to this day; but it really seems to have made but little difference in the lives of the people—for two reasons. First because the Chinese are least ready to change their way of life of any people in the world, and secondly because the unselfishness, which is the leading principle in the religion of Buddha, had been already preached as a leading principle in the maxims of Confucius and of wise men of China before him.

The general story of China nevertheless continues to be the story of dissensions within the empire and of uncivilised tribes threatening its borders on the north and west. Among these we may notice that there were Huns, akin to those who threatened, and from time to time overran, parts of Europe also.

The Nestorians

Christianity was brought into the country probably in the sixth century, by members of a Christian sect called Nestorians, after a certain bishop Nestorius, {23} their founder. His doctrine respecting the divine and human natures of Christ was condemned as unorthodox both by the Church of Rome and also by the head of the Eastern Church, at Constantinople. The sect had its headquarters in Syria, and was dispersed by order of the Eastern Emperor. The result was that its members travelled and settled in Central and Eastern Asia. They were Asiatics and found themselves among peoples well disposed towards them. By this violent dispersal of them the Emperor helped their doctrines to prevail as he never could have helped their prevalence by his greatest favours. Incidentally, one of the results of his action was that silkworms, as we are told, were first carried to the West by some of the Nestorians returning from the far East—the ancient land whence silk had been brought for many centuries.

Mahommedanism was introduced not very long after, and the most interesting point to note about these successively introduced religions is that all seem to have been permitted and even encouraged with equal favour, or with equal indifference, by the Chinese rulers. This was in strict accord with the counsel of the sage Confucius, whose expressed opinion was that the ruler should interfere as little as might be with the life of his people. And that life was still principally influenced by the doctrines of Confucius, no matter what religions were brought in.

Thus went the story of China through century after century, with violent dissensions, yet never dissensions deep enough or wide enough to create a real change in an empire so vast and in a people so unwilling to change. We have to picture them living chiefly along the river banks, cultivating the rice which was their principal food, and with unwearied patience and industry making their silk, from the cocoons spun by the caterpillars, their beautiful porcelain, their lacquered {24} furniture and vessels, their ivory carvings, and so on.

And then, towards the end of the twelfth century, began to rise to great power in Asia a people called the Mongols. Huns, Tartars, and Mongols we have to look on as closely related; and to some degree the last two names are interchangeable. They were divided into tribes under the rule of chieftains called Khans; and over the whole was a chosen ruler named the Khakan—the Khan of Khans. Their numbers grew. They led the pastoral life. As conquerors they were as ruthless as the Huns from whom they were descended, and at length, under the famous Kublai Khan, they possessed by far the greater portion of Asia and Europe as far as the boundaries of Poland. Before the end of the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, with his palace at Peking, dominated the whole of China, and a vast portion of the earth's surface besides. It was to his court that the famous Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, made his way. He lived there no less than seventeen years in all, and probably at no other time was it so easy for a western traveller to go to China overland, because at no other time has there been a single power which could ensure his safety on so long a journey through lands in possession of such lawless people.

On land, Kublai and his Mongols were irresistible, but they failed entirely by sea in two expeditions sent out to attempt the conquest of Japan.

Kublai's successors had little of what must have been his very extraordinary genius, both for government and war. In the middle of the fourteenth century a Buddhist monk headed a revolution in China which was completely successful, and ended with the expulsion of the Mongol conquerors and the establishment of the monk on the throne as Emperor, the first of the great Ming dynasty which lasted till {25} 1626. It was the last native dynasty to rule in China, for in that year, 1626, the Manchus came in as conquerors, and are there still.

The first of the Mings not only drove the Mongols out of China, but defeated their principal armies so decisively that it was the beginning of the end of their power in other parts of Asia and in Europe. The tribes broke away from their dependence on the Khakan, or central ruler, and with that loss of union their military predominance was lost and they ceased to take nearly so large a part in our story.

Japan

In striking contrast with China, Japan is a land of no ancient story, and of recent civilisation. It was not until near the end of the third century A.D. that Chinese writing and letters were brought into the islands. They were brought in from the independent kingdom of Korea which we may see on the map running down southward from Manchuria, that northern province from which the Manchus came to conquer China. It shows how little we really know of Japanese history, that though there is a legend that Korea was conquered by Japan about the beginning of the third century, modern historians are in much doubt whether any such conquest actually occurred. It was, at all events, but temporary, and Korea soon regained independence. Its fortunes, or misfortunes, however, play a very small part in this Greatest Story.

Thus Chinese civilisation came to Japan, and was followed by Buddhism replacing the ancient religion of Shinto in which ancestor worship was the principal element.

Buddhism was essentially a religion of peace, and all the teaching of Chinese civilisation was opposed to war. The Chinese held the profession of arms, the military caste, in the lowest esteem. Therefore {26} it is very singular that Japan, in spite of Buddhism and of this Chinese civilisation, gave highest possible honour to her soldiers. The Japanese had the greatest reverence for their aristocracy, moreover—-for their highly born—and the real government was in the hands of one or other of the noble families. The country was distracted for years and years by perpetual fighting between two of these great families and their followers. It is a story which may recall our Wars of the Roses.

The conclusion of that long conflict was brought about in what certainly was the greatest of naval battles ever fought up to that time in any Asiatic sea. It is called the Battle of Dannoura and its date is 1188. More than a thousand junks, as the native vessels are still called, took part in it, and by the slaughter, both in the actual fighting and afterwards, the defeated clan was all but wiped out of existence.

It was cruel work, but it opened the way for a period of comparative peace. The mode of government was reformed. There was the Mikado, the Emperor, by whom all power was supposed to be wielded, and there was also an official called the Shogun, the head of the army. Perhaps we may best designate his powers by calling him Commander-in-Chief. But his authority was far more independent than that of our highest military officer. For centuries the Shogun appears as the real power in the land, although in theory his power is derived from the Mikado.

After the victorious repulse of the great Kublai Khan, above mentioned, the Daimios, as the great nobles were called, again became powerful and turbulent and the condition of the country when the Portuguese first visited it, in the early years of the sixteenth century, seems to have been not very unlike {27} that of Europe in the worst days of the fighting among the feudal barons.

India

In that disordered condition we have to leave, for the time being, the story of the Yellow Race in the Farthest East, and pass to the story of India previous to the epoch-making voyage of da Gama.

In a former volume we noticed the "Indo-European" as one of the great human families. It is a word which indicates an immigration of a people from Central Asia into India and also into Europe. The kinship of Indians with Europeans is testified by the likeness of many words in the languages of both. Especially is this likeness apparent in the words which express simple things, conveying ideas which people would be likely to wish to communicate to each other in a primitive state of society.

The immigrants found a people in the land before them, and remnants of that people still remain. In India itself those survivors are called Dravidians, and the Tamils of Ceylon are probably of the same race.

The Indians or Hindus appear to have lived, from their first coming into the land that we call India, in village communities, each community independent of the rest and producing all that its members needed. It is very like the way in which we have seen that the Germanic or Gothic tribes lived.

What is unlike those tribes is the "caste" system which still prevails in India. Their highest "caste" was that of the Brahmans or priests who kept in their own families the many secrets of a mysterious religion. It consisted in "Nature worship," especially worship of the forces that produce human food, and more particularly worship of the sun. Our knowledge of it is derived from their sacred books, the Vedas and others. The Brahmans claimed that they were formed by the Creator of the world from his mouth; the {28} caste of soldiers, the military caste, from his arm; the farmer caste from his thigh, and the tillers of the soil from his feet. There were other castes. The divisions were so very rigid that it was unlawful and irreligious for one caste to do the work of another, to eat with another, or to inter-marry. The restrictions were many and severe, and are but little relaxed even now. They exist still as we find them laid down in a Brahmany code called "The Laws of Manu," which is supposed to date from the fifth century B.C.

Buddha

The institutions and manners of life in the East have been very slow to change, in comparison with the West, and it is likely that the life of these village communities continued for many centuries to be much as it had been when the immigrants first came down from the north to that valley of the Indus river which seems to have been their earliest place of settlement. And then, about 550 years before Christ, or a little earlier, was born a wonderful man Buddha, son of the Rajah of a small territory which is now Nepal. Here and there the headman of a village more powerful than those about him had begun to exercise some authority over more villages than one and to be called a rajah: and of one such Buddha was born.

STATUE OF BUDDHA.

When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in the world. It appeared to him that the first cause of all that misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of pleasure. He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of these desires his misery would cease. One might think that if this were so the simple remedy for it all would be death. But that was no remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives which each soul has to live through. The only way then by which man's misery could be relieved {29} was that he should strive by all means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless, that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying his natural desires. And so convinced was this young prince, or rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and child and all {30} his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world preaching this doctrine.

No doubt it was developed by his followers—for he quickly gained a numerous following—beyond his own first ideas. It taught that the final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won, after many re-incarnations—that is to say, after living again and again on the earth in different human bodies—by being absorbed into some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana. In that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length, and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it.

Buddhism

What he preached, then, was not quite unselfishness as we understand it; for our unselfishness seems to imply an active concern for the selves of other people. Buddha's idea was much more passive than active. We might better call it selflessness. His great thought was how to get rid of all self, both a man's own self and that of all others. He did, however, devote himself to what we may describe even in our sense as a perfectly unselfish life, for he not only denied himself all but the barest necessities, but went through northern India trying to save other men from what he considered, and pitied, as their misery, by explaining to them how he thought they might escape from it.

The theory of re-incarnation opened a way for the union of Buddhism with the older Brahmanism, for the priests taught that in Buddha himself was the incarnated soul of Vishnu, the supreme spirit of the Brahmans. So they taught, and who was there to contradict them?

For the regulation of social life the maxims of Buddha are such as the highest Christian morality must approve. Hatred was to be conquered by love. Wives, children, and servants were to be treated with {31} wise kindness. After a while, as has happened with other religions, the followers of Buddhism split up into sects, and especially into what were called the Northern and the Southern Churches. Although it was in the north of India that Buddha had preached, it was there that his rules of life were modified and made less severe. The Southern Church observed them more strictly.

In the centuries that followed, the doctrines of Buddha won converts far beyond India itself—in Tibet in the north, in Burma and Siam in the east and south, and so to the Malay Peninsula and to the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Farther west it was carried down into Ceylon.

Whatever, we may think of the religion of Buddha, it is obvious that it was in no sense a "fighting religion." It did not inspire its followers to be soldiers. Perhaps this is the reason why the Hindus never seem to have been able to resist the incursions of warlike neighbours. In the fourth century B.C. came Alexander of Macedon and pushed his wonderful conquests into the very heart of India. His general, Seleucus, organised part of the conquered territory under his rule, but it made little lasting impression on the story of the country. About the middle of the second century A.D., the wild hordes of the Parthians, the people who gave such continual trouble to the mighty Roman Empire, swept into Northern India, and with them they brought Christianity. Christianity, too, came early to that Malabar coast where the Portuguese, more than a thousand years later, found the Moslems in full possession. But Christianity was not imposed by force.

Although many wars have been fought for Christianity, it would be no more right to speak of it, than of Buddhism itself, as a "fighting religion." Mahommedanism, on the contrary, has ever been the great fighting religion of the world.

{32}

In the eighth century, while the Mahommedans in the West were making themselves dominant in Spain, other armies of the same faith went conquering eastwards through Central Asia to the very borders of China. They conquered, but they did not succeed in establishing any permanent empire. There was no power at their centre to control such an extent of the world's surface. The local princes became practically independent again. But in many parts the Mahommedan religion remained. It failed to make any impression in Tibet, where the Great Llama, as the chief of the Tibetan Buddhists was called, was ruler as well as high priest.

In India Mahommedanism established itself the more easily because Buddhism was by that time a waning force in many parts and was being re-absorbed by the older Brahmanism. Spread by its missionaries, called Mullahs, the new creed won its way right through the country to Siam, down the Malay Peninsula and into the islands of the archipelago. It penetrated southward also. We have noted that when the Portuguese came to the western shores of Southern India in 1500 or so they found Sultans, as the heads of Mahommedan states were called, in possession. To these seaports, however, and to the islands it is likely enough that the religion of Mahomet was brought by the Arab traders as much as or more than by any overland route.

Of the principalities which gained, or regained, independence after the flood of Moslem conquest had swept from West to East, that which became of greatest importance in the story was the kingdom of Afghanistan. It has been of importance by reason of its geographical position making it "the gate of India," as it has been called. It is the "gate" for such nations as Persia and Russia which might seek to enter India from the west and north.

{33}

From the kingdom of Afghanistan itself a Moslem army swept again into India about the year A.D. 1000. A confederacy of Hindu princes assembled a force to oppose it, but it is said that this army was entirely demoralised by the sound—the first of its kind that they had heard—of a gun brought by the invaders. The rule of the Moslem Viceroys, under which a large portion of Northern India was administered as the result of this Afghan victory, seems to have been equitable and effective, and in the course of the four centuries that followed a great part of all India became Mahommedan.

Timour, the Tartar

At the end of that period appeared on the Indian scene the formidable figure of Timour, the Tartar, sometimes known as Tamerlane or Tambourlaine, meaning Tamer, or Timour, the Lame. He too was a Mahommedan, and doubtless was of the same stock as those Afghan rulers who claimed Turkish descent; but that distant relationship did not deter him from the invasion of India from the north. He won his way easily enough as far as Delhi, and there appears no reason why he should not have pushed his conquests as far south as he wished. He returned to his own country, however, and shortly afterwards went westward against the Ottoman Turks and very heavily defeated them at Angora, the new capital of modern Turkey.

But for the lack of ships, it seems certain that Timour, with his Tartar hordes, would have passed over into Europe—with what result on our story no one can say. But he had no means of crossing the Dardanelles, and once more he went back to his own country.

Rather more than a thousand years later one of his descendants again invaded India from the north, and made a beginning of that Mogul empire which was to become far more widely and firmly established, {34} under the great Akbar, towards the end of the sixteenth century.

Such, or somewhat such, are the main features of the stories of that new world in the West and that old world in the East which were opened up by the enterprise of Spain and Portugal about the year 1500.

{35}

Apart from the discovery of the West and of the new sea-route to the East, the most important events in the early years of the sixteenth century happened in Italy—Northern Italy. We have seen that Italy was almost the only country which showed no sign, as yet, of settling down within something like the boundaries which delimited the European nations up to the time of the Great War. It must be understood that this is a statement which takes no account of the differences made by Napoleon's victories at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We may disregard them, for the moment, because they were not lasting.

But the most important of all the events happening in Italy had nothing to do with changes of territories or national boundaries. Far more interesting and more helpful to the world was the growth of that Renaissance, or new birth, of love of letters and of all artistic beauty which we saw beginning with Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio, and some of the early Italian painters, sculptors, and jewellers. Moreover, we must not forget the glorious architecture which goes by the name of Gothic, nor the noble buildings in that Byzantine style which the influence of the Moors carried into Spain.

We should notice that a very great impetus was {36} given to that study of Greek literature, which Petrarch and Boccaccio in particular had revived, by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in the middle of the fifteenth century; for it had the effect of scattering the Greeks far and wide, seeking new homes and bringing their books and their traditions with them.

And further, we ought to observe how this learning had been carried into every country and corner of Europe by the establishment of colleges and universities where it now became possible for every student to read "the classics." Their establishment was the work of the Church or of wealthy men acting under the advice of the Church. Moreover, for what we may call elementary education the teaching of the children of the poorer classes, so far as they received any teaching at all, was also the Church's work, for it was done by the members of the monasteries and convents all over Christendom. It is well that we should bear this in mind, to the Church's credit, at this moment, for the time is close at hand when we shall have to see that same Church accused, and in large measure convicted, of acts very greatly to her discredit.

All the while that the love of letters and of art was growing within the walls of the fortified cities of Italy, the cities were constantly at variance with one another, and even within their walls civic strife seems to have been the rule rather than the exception; but apart from these small local fights there were two principal causes of unrest. The first was the fact that the kings of France were not at all disposed to regard the Alps as forming a natural boundary of their possessions—they were constantly coveting the fertile land of Northern Italy—and a second cause of unrest was the desire, which was strong enough to unite for a time most of the other states, to cripple the excessive power of Venice.

{37}

The decline of Venice

Several circumstances combined to make possible the curbing of that power. The Turks were strong enough at sea to demand the full attention of the naval force of Venice, and her resources were vastly diminished by the diversion of that Eastern trade, for which she had held the gate into Europe, to the newly found sea-way round Africa. The Pope took the lead against her. He formed a league which was joined by the Emperor and by the kings of France and Spain. The alliance was too strong for the single state, and after the first battle Venice resigned nearly all her possessions on the mainland. She ceased to be a danger to the neighbouring states.

There was, however, no such combination of circumstances to diminish the power of France. Within a few years after the beginning of the century the French, by the capture of Genoa, had established themselves in a strong position to menace the whole of Italy. The French king Louis XII. had some pretext for the menace, for he could produce a kind of hereditary claim on the sovereignty both of Naples and of Milan. He had served the Pope against Venice, and after rendering this assistance he was not disposed to withdraw his claims. The Pope therefore arranged a new league against his late ally. Spain, the Emperor, and England were parties to this, which was called the Holy League—England under Henry VIII., who was not always to prove himself so close a friend of the Pope! The result was the speedy expulsion from Italy of the French, chiefly by the Spanish armies. Very shortly afterwards the French king died and was succeeded on the throne by his cousin Francis I. in 1515.

It has been my aim, through all the course of this Greatest Story, to encumber it with as few names as possible, in order that the names of the most {38} important actors may stand out the more clearly and be remembered the more easily. But just at the moment which the story has now reached the names of four men, three being powerful kings and one a humble cleric, stand out pre-eminently. We might almost say that the story of those four is the story of all Europe, so large is their part in it.

Luther is the name of the cleric. He was the leader in that great schism, or cleaving off, of the Protestant Church—the Church which "protested"—from the ancient Church of Rome. It is that cleaving off from the old and founding of the new, the reformed, Church, which is called the Reformation.

The three great kings were Francis I. of France, above mentioned, our own King Henry VIII., and—by far the greatest of the three—Charles V.

It was the greatness of Charles V., the accident, as we may perhaps call it, that he held, in his own person and by rightful succession, the sovereignty of so many and extensive countries so far apart from each other, which was one of the chief factors of the story at this time. For he was of the ancient house of the Habsburgs. He was the ruler of Austria. He became Emperor. He became King of Spain. He was Duke of Brabant and Count of Flanders and Holland. He had a claim of sovereignty over Burgundy. The Pope purchased his help against the Reformation movement of Luther by giving up to him such sovereignty as he was able to enforce over the greater part of Italy.

We can see at once what was the position of France thus surrounded. And we must always remember that it was the day of despotic monarchy, when the king could make war or peace at his own pleasure and regarded the lands over which he was king as his own private property. Especially of this despotic kind was the monarchy of Francis. He appears in {39} history as a brilliant figure, ambitious, eager for deeds of arms, without depth of character or fixed principles. He came to the throne as a young man and at once was attracted by the lure of Italy.

At first his arms had a rapid success, and he defeated the combined forces of Spain, the Papal states, and Venice—Venice being then in alliance with the Pope. He was thus victorious over Italy in arms, but the culture of Italy and of the Renaissance made a complete conquest of him. A new combination of Swiss, German, and Spanish arms drove the French out of Italy, and Francis returned, strongly influenced by that new light of art and letters which he had there found. From that invasion of Italy by the French we may date the beginning of the Renaissance in France, whence it spread to other nations of Europe.

The "Cloth of Gold"

It was in the year 1516 that Charles succeeded to the throne of Spain and to the possession of all the wealth that the Spanish ships had begun to bring in from the New World. Three years later he was elected Emperor, giving offence thereby to Henry VIII. of England, as well as to Francis, since both had sought to be Emperor. Their common cause of offence led to their famous meeting known as the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" by reason of the magnificence of the decorations, the gay and splendid tents, and so on. But it all ended in nothing, or indeed less than nothing, except an exchange of compliments, for almost immediately afterwards we find Henry, under the influence of the great Cardinal Wolsey, pledged to support Charles. In the shifting alliances of the time it was nearly always against France that England was engaged, notwithstanding that Henry's sister had married Francis' predecessor on the throne of France. Charles, on the other hand, was Henry's nephew. But France was constantly giving aid to Scotland, whether {40} secretly or openly, in her continual fight with England. Scotland, however, had just been beaten to her very knees in the battle of Flodden, and had little fighting left in her for the moment. With such forces as these opposed to France the wonder really is that she maintained her power undiminished. It is yet more wonderful that, under Francis, she should have been ready for still further adventures in Italy. Yet she did so adventure, and though she and her king met with grievous disaster there—especially at the battle of Pavia where Francis was made prisoner and whence he was taken to Madrid—we have to notice that at the death of Francis, shortly before the middle of the century, France was in possession of the provinces of Savoy and Piedmont, both on the Italian side of the Alps—and this, although Charles had been crowned "King of Italy" by the Pope nearly twenty years earlier. Probably the explanation lies chiefly in the fact that the territories over which Charles ruled were so extensive, and also so scattered, that it was impossible for him to bring any great force together at any one place. Moreover, on his south-eastern border, in and around Austria, he was constantly menaced by the Turks ever pressing up from Constantinople. He seems to have tried to rid himself of the Turkish trouble by handing over to his brother some of the provinces on the side which lay most dangerously exposed; but even so their defence must have remained practically on his hands.

He never made good his claim to Burgundy—in which matter again it is rather wonderful that Francis should have been able to resist him. And, not having Burgundy in his possession, he was obliged to maintain a fleet able to command the seas on the west of France in order to go to and fro between Spain and the Netherlands. He must also have a second fleet of ships for bringing treasure from the {41} East; and, since Spain had a long sea-coast on the Mediterranean where the Turks and pirates swarmed, he must have yet a third fleet there for the protection of his trade. Besides, he had a claim of sovereignty over Naples and Sicily.

Therefore, with these, and other less important, calls upon his power it is really not surprising, great although that power was, that it did not prove equal to all he would have liked to demand of it. And further, in those states over which he had been elected Emperor, with the rather vague authority and duties belonging to that title, another cause arose of great and increasing trouble, the Reformation.

Luther

For the last few pages we have been occupied with kings and emperors: it is time that our story concerned itself with the cleric of low degree. I put this phrase in place of that which was on my pen's tip to write, namely, "humble cleric," because, however we may think of Luther, "humble" he certainly does not appear. Humble before God he may indeed, as a good Christian, have been. It was perhaps the most striking feature in his character that he would not humble himself before men—not even before that great man whom he had been taught to look on as endowed with a quite special grace and blessing, the Pope of Rome. His origin was humble enough. He was the son of a miner in the German state of Saxony. He had the education of a monk, was made Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome and came back grieving sorely over what he saw there.

The way in which the Pope and his council, called the Curia, had been governing, or misgoverning, the Church, had given great offence for many years. The monasteries and the convents, that is to say, the {42} establishments of the monks and the nuns, had done much useful work in acquiring learning and in educating the people throughout Christendom in religious and other knowledge. Many of them were doing good work still. But the condition of most of them appears to have become very bad, both monks and nuns being lazy, gluttonous, and worse—setting the worst possible example to the common people. They were careful perhaps about the performance of the religious ceremonies in the churches, but their religion had little or no influence on the conduct of their lives.

Against Rome itself the complaint of Christendom was not only that it did not exercise its authority to amend these ill practices, and that the very same practices were followed in Rome itself, but also that the Pope and his council exacted money, from the people generally and even from the clergy themselves, and did not apply the money to the purposes for which it had been demanded. For the demand was made on the plea that the money was needed to equip armies to fight the Turk, and those armies were never summoned or put in movement. The money was diverted to increase the private wealth and pomp of Pope and Cardinals and high church dignitaries at Rome.

So there was sufficient cause of offence, both at the centre and in every part of the world over which the Pope claimed authority. We saw in the last volume how our own Wycliffe, and how Huss, in Bohemia, had raised furious protests against these evils in the Church. The fire of those fierce protests was still smouldering. The people understood the protests better. The knowledge of the Bible was not so entirely the possession of the clerics as it had been. The printing press had made many copies. Moreover, the Greeks and the knowledge of the Greek language, {43} in which the New Testament was written, had been widely dispersed when the Turks took Constantinople—the headquarters of the Greek Church.

Luther's first act of protest against the action of Rome was directed against the sale of "Indulgences," as they were called. These "indulgences" were written pardons for sin. They were even credited with power to bring out of Purgatory a soul that was there already. And they—that is to say, the parchments or papers with the pardon written on them—could be bought. They could be bought from people called "pardoners" who sold them on behalf of Rome, and the Pope's explanation was that the money was needed for the building at Rome of the Cathedral of St. Peter.

The burning of the "Bull"

Luther boldly declared that the "indulgences" were valueless, because no man, not even the Pope, had the power to forgive sins, and he nailed a declaration to this effect on the door of the great church at Wittenberg and sent another copy to his Archbishop. At first the Pope seems to have made light of the matter; but at length, as Luther's supporters increased in number, he issued a Bull of excommunication against Luther as a heretic, summoning him to Rome to give an account of his actions, and commanding the burning of books which he had written against Rome. We have seen before what such a Bull meant. It had meant so much in the way of setting a man outside the protection of the laws in this world, and in condemning him in the world to come, that even the great Emperor Frederic had to yield before it, cowed and vanquished. The act of the monk of Wittenberg, when he received it, was to throw it publicly on the fire kindled for the very purpose in an open space of the city!

The fire created by the burning of the Papal document set all the smouldering embers into a more {44} furious flame than ever before. That burning of the Bull happened in 1520.

Luther did not go to Rome; but he did go, when summoned by Charles, the Emperor, and appeared before him at the Diet, or meeting, of the German States, held at Worms. Charles, after listening to his passionate pleadings, pronounced that he should receive the treatment of a heretic, but he was allowed to leave Worms and start for his home. On the journey he was taken prisoner by the Elector of Saxony, who had always been a friend to him. It is supposed that this capture was effected for his better protection. In his imprisonment he made the translation into German of the New Testament. Later, he translated the whole Bible.

It is not impossible that this capture was made with the cognisance of Charles himself. The course of events forced him to side with the Pope and oppose the reformers, but there are several incidents which show him much more anxious to make peace, if that were possible, between the two parties, than to take a leading part in the strife. He had much to attend to elsewhere. In 1526 the Protestant states of Germany had leagued themselves together for mutual support; and in the very same year the Turks had made themselves masters of the whole of Hungary, and reduced it to a Turkish province.

It was now only a year since Charles had released Francis, whom he had taken prisoner at Pavia, after making a solemn compact with him; yet Francis was already intriguing against him. Francis had induced the Pope of all people—the Pope whom Charles had so helped against Francis—to be his ally against Charles. Charles's reply was to send a strong force into Italy which sacked Rome and took the Pope prisoner. Thus he disposed of that trouble. He then again made peace with Francis on liberal {45} terms. The Pope was soon set at liberty and returned to his see, but he seems to have learnt his lesson—namely, that Charles held a power far too great to be opposed, if he cared to put that power forth. In 1530 Charles was crowned King of Italy by the Pope and at the same time he received the Pope's consecration as Emperor.

Spread of Reformation

Meanwhile the Turks had been extending their aggressions and besieged Venice. And the Reformation, that schism, or cleaving off, which denied the authority of the Pope, spread more widely and took deeper root. Its direction of growth was chiefly northward, from Saxony which is one of the Southern German states. It worked up through Germany and so to Scandinavia and Denmark, to the Netherlands and to France. The help of those German princes who had formed themselves into a Protestant league was essential to Charles if he was to be successful in repelling the Turks, and he consented to withdraw the edicts condemning the so-called "heretics" which had been passed by his own authority.

Finally he did march against the Turks, and though he did not gain any striking victory, a peace on favourable terms was made with them in 1538, after their fleet had suffered a heavy defeat from the Venetians. For the Turks were constantly at war at various points of their wide empire. On the eastern, the Persian side, there was continual fighting, with the result that they maintained their hold on Bagdad, the capital; but it was a possession which they always had to keep strongly defended. Their pirate fleets had established themselves in Tunis and Algiers on the North African coast. Charles made two naval expeditions against them, in the first of which he succeeded tolerably, but in the second had no success at all. The Moslem corsairs remained dominant in {46} the Mediterranean until they suffered a notable defeat in the famous battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Luther died in 1546, boldly uttering, both by speech and writing, his doctrines until the last. He lived to see them firmly grounded in Germany, and spreading north and west. On the Continent of Europe the kings were in opposition to them. In England, exceptional circumstances arose which disposed Henry VIII. to receive them with favour.

Rather as Francis was attracted by the idea of adding to his French possessions the northern and western provinces of Italy, so Henry VIII. was tempted by the desire to regain for England some of the continental territory that had once been hers. It was largely to this end that he had sought alliance with Spain and had helped Spain and the Pope in driving the French out of Italy in 1512. Later he had the assistance of the King of Spain in an invasion of a part of France which had belonged to England in a former reign. He gained a quick success, but before he could establish himself in the conquered province the Spanish help was withdrawn. The adventure gained nothing for England, but cost her a large sum and created much dissatisfaction among the people.

The idea of the Spanish alliance had been in the mind of Henry VIII.'s father, before him, and to confirm it he had married his eldest son to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. That eldest son died, and left Catherine a widow. Henry VIII. pursuing the same policy, sought, and obtained, from the Pope a "dispensation," as it was called—that is to say, a permission—to marry Catherine, although she was his brother's widow.

Henry VIII. and his Queens

The alliance with Spain did not bring Henry nearly all that he had hoped of it. He was disgusted by the withdrawal from France of the Spanish force that {47} we have just noted. Catherine's children died, with the exception of a daughter, Mary. Perhaps his great minister, Cardinal Wolsey, put it into Henry's head that there was a curse on his marriage with his brother's widow, or perhaps it was a thought that came to him without Wolsey's suggestion. However it came, it seems that it took possession of him. He expressed doubts about the legality of the marriage. Also he had fallen in love with a lady of the Court, Anne Boleyn. He began to desire the annulment of his marriage with Catherine in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn, and approached the Pope with a request that he should pronounce that marriage invalid and illegal. It was, in effect, asking the head of the Church, who, in theory, could do no wrong, and was infallible, to confess that such infallible authority had erred.

The Pope was not at all anxious to make an enemy of Henry. In the troubles created by Luther's preaching and writing, Henry, so late as 1521, had appeared as a true friend to the Pope by ordering the burning of all Luther's books. So the Pope sent great Churchmen to England to look into the matter of the marriage. There was much talk and many conferences, but in the end Henry must have realised, what he probably had deemed probable from the beginning, that the Pope would not reverse a former decision. He could not get his marriage declared to be illegal by the Church at Rome. He determined to act without that Church, to have the illegality pronounced by English bishops, whom he could trust to express such opinions as he should command them to utter, and to proceed in accordance with their views thus expressed. Catherine was divorced. He married Anne Boleyn.

Once he had taken this step, he followed on the path to which it led, never looking back. The proud {48} Cardinal Wolsey fell from the king's favour, largely by reason of his pride and arrogant ostentation which had raised him up a number of enemies among the English nobles, but he was succeeded by another adviser, Thomas Cromwell, whose influence was even greater in determining the king to be the absolute master of England. Under Wolsey he had gone far in this direction. Parliament had power in its hands, because it had the power of granting subsidies for the king's wars and expenses. Wolsey had advised the king not to summon Parliament, but to extort contributions from his subjects instead. They did not give cheerfully, nor to the full extent of the sums demanded, but they gave grudgingly, in fear of punishment for some charge that would be brought against them if they did not.

Under Cromwell's influence, the king did call his Parliament together; but by that time, with his growing power, he had succeeded in getting his own friends in a majority in that Parliament. And in order to put down any possible opposition in the Upper House, he did not hesitate to bring to the executioner's block some of the noblest and most venerable of the Peers. It was a reign of terror, with Henry as absolute despot.

And he made himself despotic in the Church no less; for that was the final end of that path on which he made the first step when he divorced Catherine and married Anne in defiance of Rome. For first came thunders, ever louder and louder, from Rome, answered by ever louder defiance. It was defiance that was not displeasing to a large number in England. Already, before any of the ideas of the Reformation were introduced, we have noticed England growing restive under the attempts of the Popes of Rome to dictate to her. We may be sure that this restiveness had been increased of later years. Some of the clergy {49} themselves, as we have seen, were none too pleased at the demands which Rome made upon them for money for Turkish wars, or for the building of St. Peter's Cathedral. They were the less pleased, because of a strong suspicion that it never was intended to use the money for the purposes stated.

Henry, therefore, and his powerful and ruthless counsellor were able to turn this dissatisfaction to their own use. The clergy were very ready to support Henry in asserting that the English Church was not to be subservient to Rome. Even the bishops in the Upper House probably thought that they were doing a good work for the freedom of the Church when they passed the Act called the Act of Supremacy which made the King of England head of the English Church. That Church was indeed freed, by the Act, from the authority of Rome, but it was only to put it under another authority, the authority of the English king.

And it gave equally little offence to the majority of the clergy when the king drove the monks from their monasteries, and took their land and its revenues for the service of the Crown or gave them to his friends. The good work of the monasteries had been done, and they had passed the time of their usefulness, for their inmates no longer studied to acquire knowledge, nor imparted it to the laity and their children. Only in the north of England did their suppression rouse opposition and lead to a dangerous rising which the Crown's forces put down with great severity.

But education had been spreading in England, as elsewhere in Christendom, in spite of the religious troubles. The new opening of the ancient stores of classical literature, and their diffusion by the printing press, could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of men of intelligence.

The spirit of protest against Rome which Luther {50} preached had this, at least, in common with the spirit in which Henry of England acted, that both were bitterly and even violently opposed to the Pope's claim of authority. So this spirit of the Reformation made its way in England without encountering the difficulties which it had met in other parts of Europe. The clergy, who, in an earlier reign, would have opposed it, had now become subject, in part by their own act, to the King of England rather than to the Pope of Rome. Protestantism was accepted as the State religion.

In Ireland also Henry declared himself head of the Church as well as king. All Acts of the Irish Parliament, from his reign for several centuries, had to receive the assent of England before they became law.

Of the four great men who had so large a share in the making of our story in the first half of the sixteenth century, the monk, the most important figure of the four, was the first to die, in 1546. The next year saw the deaths of Francis and of Henry. Charles, greatest of the three kings, lived on until 1558, though he laid down his honours two years or so earlier and retired to a monastery to end his days.

By the death of Francis, Charles was relieved of his life-long enemy, and took advantage of that relief to turn all his attention to the Protestant princes of Germany who were leagued together to support their faith by arms. He defeated them at that time, and, using his victory, as was his custom, with moderation, he drew up a document called the "Interim," a statement of doctrines to which he hoped that both Catholics and Protestants would agree. It failed, however, to satisfy either. Five years later the Protestant princes again took arms, and this time their Emperor, whom they found unprepared, had to fly for his life. The ultimate result was a treaty called {51} the Peace of Religion, of which the most important provision was that the Emperor permitted the Protestants, so far as the permission lay with him to give, to hold their doctrines and perform their religious services as they thought right.

The Peace of Religion

It was a beautiful name—the Peace of Religion—but unfortunately the name of peace was not sufficient to ensure that peace would follow. Even within the Protestant Church itself there soon arose acute differences of opinion.

The doctrines of the monk won their way over most of North-Western Europe. Into Scandinavia and Denmark they were introduced with the support and favour of the king himself. They made little penetration on the eastern side, for the simple reason that those particular abuses against which they protested did not exist there. Their protest was mainly against evil practices in the Church of Rome. But over Russia, rising into greatness in the east of Europe, the Greek Church prevailed. Constantinople, until its capture by the Turks, had been the capital city, the Holy Place, of that Church; but now the Tsar of Russia claimed to be its head, speaking from his capital city of Moscow.

We saw something of the break-up of the Mongol power, which had extended over nearly the whole of Asia and threatened Europe also, when we were recounting the story of China. The blow that was dealt it at the end of the fourteenth century by the Buddhist monk who became the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty doubtless helped in its break-up even so far away as its western border. The centre of its power was shattered. It no longer had the strength that comes from unity. The Mongols fell apart into a number of independent tribes. Early in the sixteenth century Russia began to throw off the domination with which those Mongols, or Tartars, always threatened {52} her, and from time to time exercised. She had partly amalgamated with the Tartars, and partly ruled over them, by the middle of that century.

The knowledge of Russia began about the same time to be brought to England, by traders who had found their way to Moscow by adventurous voyages round the top of Scandinavia and so on to the White Sea, whereon is the city of Archangel, and so down into the centre and capital of the great country, travelling partly by river and partly overland. A treaty, for the exchange of the products of the two countries, was made, and the English were allowed to build warehouses for storing those goods which they brought in to trade with and those Russian goods which they obtained in return.

It is of interest to note that this discovery of Muscovy, as Russia for a long while was called in England, was made by sailors in search of a very different land, namely, China. For there was an idea in the minds of the men of the fifteenth century that a way to China, and all its riches, might be found by sea round the top of Scandinavia and so eastward until China was reached.

And so, in fact, some sort of a way was ultimately found through Behring's Straits—the narrow sea-way between the extreme north-east of Asia and the extreme north-west of America. But it is a way so blocked by the ice for so large a part of the year as to be of no practical use, and the discovery of the south-west passage round the Cape took all the interest and zest out of the search for what was called the North-West Passage. Portuguese trading vessels had reached China and Japan before the middle of the century and missionaries of the Order of Jesus, or Jesuits, had introduced Christianity into Japan as they had already brought it to India. Spanish missionaries of the same great monastic order had {53} carried Christianity westward into the New World. Thousands of Indians in Mexico and Peru and other countries conquered by the Spaniards were baptised as Christians. Churches and cathedrals built by the labour of the natives, which cost the Spaniards nothing, began to rise on the sites of the pagan temples.

Cross and Crescent

Thus both eastward and westward the Cross, the Christian emblem, travelled with the conquering sword of those who went by sea; but on land, and in the Mediterranean itself, the Mahommedan Crescent was carried far by the scimitar, or curved blade, of the Moslem.

The Moslem Turks fought their way, as we have seen, so far, in Europe, as Vienna, which they nearly, but not quite, captured. On the other side they had subdued Persia, and established themselves at Bagdad. Up to the year 1571 and the heavy defeat of their fleet at Lepanto, they continued to be the strongest naval force in the Mediterranean. It was in the first half of the century that they touched the highest point of their power and extended their sway most widely. In further course of the story we shall find them for the most part on the defensive, striving, especially against the growing might of Russia, to retain what they had won.

Towards the latter part of his reign that great king and emperor, Charles V., had trouble in the most northern section of his wide domain—in the Netherlands. He put down, with severity, a rising of the great city of Ghent, formidable, within its walls, because of the privileges that had been granted to its burghers, because of the wealth and of the numbers of its inhabitants and their independent spirit. This little trouble in the Netherlands might have sounded in his ears, if they had been able to appreciate its meaning, as the first note of an immense trouble that was to follow, for in the years to come we shall find {54} unrest and fighting over almost the whole stage, which has become world-wide, of our story; and we may trace the origin of it all back to what now happened in that comparatively small corner which was called the Netherlands.

{55}

Charles V. resigning the Crown of Spain, gave it over to his son Philip II., who married Mary, Queen of England. He had already ceded to him the kingdom of Naples. With the Crown of Spain went the Netherlands; and Charles would have wished his son to receive the Imperial title also. The Electors of Germany, however, refused to elect Philip and, with the assent of Charles, Ferdinand, Charles's younger brother, became the new Emperor.

Charles, although a firm supporter of the authority of the Church of Rome, had done his best, by the publication of that "Interim" mentioned in the last chapter, and by a merciful treatment of the defeated Protestants, to bring the two parties together again. He failed; but he had made the effort. The character of Philip did not dispose him to follow his father in any attempts at peace-making. He was ardently jealous for the ecclesiastical authority of Rome and appears to have had much of the tyrant's spirit: he was very impatient of opposition, and showed no favour to any who differed from him in opinion. Heresy was, in his view, a sin against the Church, which it was his duty to put down by the most effective means in his power, wherever he might find it among his subjects. Wherever it was even so much as suspected, the strictest search should be made for its unmasking.

{56}

And to him, being in this mood, there was a machine ready to his hand—an institution of the Church known as the Inquisition. Inquisition means inquiry; and the particular object for which the Inquisition was instituted was to inquire into alleged instances of heresy—that is to say, of doctrines and practices of which the Church did not approve—and also into instances of the practice of magic and sorcery, which were deemed to be miracles performed by men with the aid of the devil.

The first institution of "Inquisitors," or officials appointed for such inquiry, dated back to the early centuries of the Church's existence, and in those early centuries the punishment which the Inquisitors were allowed to impose on persons convicted of heresy were very mild in comparison with later penalties. They were not allowed to inflict death, nor to use torture in order to extract confession.

In the time of Philip II., the Inquisition in Spain, under the name of the Holy Office, became largely independent of the Church of Rome. It actually brought before its Courts bishops of the Church. And it shrank from no cruelty of torture inflicted on suspected persons, in order to make them confess: it even tortured witnesses, to extract from them the testimony, true or false, which the Inquisitors desired. Convicted persons were publicly burnt. There was no appeal from its decisions. An accused person had scarcely a chance of escaping conviction. And the religious zeal of the Inquisitors was quickened by the circumstance that the estates of the convicted were confiscated and distributed to the Church, or partly to the Church and partly to the Crown.

Netherlands in revolt

It is no more than fair to the Church of Rome to say that though the severity and injustice of the Inquisition under the Church's direct authority were harsh enough, they were far less cruel than under {57} the Holy Office of Spain, which became a veritable terror. The Netherlanders had largely accepted reformed doctrines. They had become Protestant, that is to say heretics, in the eyes of Philip. He had been their sovereign only a few years when he sent his Inquisitors among them to root the heresy out by torture, confiscation of estates, and by burning at the stake. The natives were brave and stubborn. They resisted with armed force.

It had all the aspect of a vain, even a ridiculous resistance—bound to fail, certain to be punished with relentless cruelty. To enforce obedience and to carry out measures of punishment, Philip sent an army under command of a general notorious for his harsh severity, the Duke of Alva. In such an outlined sketch as this the details cannot be given of the extraordinary struggle which the Netherlands, under that very great leader and statesman, William of Orange, surnamed the Silent, finally brought to a successful end against all the might of Spain. Again and again their endurance seemed on the point of being overcome. Once, at least, they were saved only by the desperate expedient of breaking chasms in the raised dykes which protect that low-lying land from the sea, and allowing the water to flood the country. They had a small naval force before this struggle began. Dutch ships had helped Charles in that attempt which he made to put down the Mahommedan pirates of the north coast of Africa. Now, as the fight with Spain went on, they added to their fleet. With but a few ships, they gained a victory, which meant much to them, over a far larger Spanish fleet. Some of the Spanish ships captured in that battle helped to increase their own naval forces.

England, under Mary, whom Philip had married in 1554, naturally would give Holland no help. She had, besides, her own religious troubles, for Mary, {58} under her husband's direction, was doing all that she dared to bring England back under the authority of Rome. No tribunal with the name of Inquisition or of Holy Office was established, but the persecution of Protestants, with torture and burning, went forward almost as briskly as if there had been. A small force came to Holland's help from Germany, at one moment of the long struggle, but little could be expected from that country, in which the states were divided in their sympathies between Rome and the Reformation. The attitude of France was uncertain and varied. Her natural action would have been to oppose Spain, as in the days of Francis and Charles, but she was a Roman Catholic country. She was distracted, too, by her own troubles with her own Protestants, called Huguenots. The form of Protestantism which had made its way in France was somewhat different from that taught by Luther. It inclined to the doctrines taught by Calvin. But Calvin was a reformer as earnest and even more bitter than Luther himself in opposition to Rome. It was what has been called, after him, the Calvinistic form of Protestantism which prevailed in the Netherlands also, and, with some modification, in England and Scotland. The details of the difference we need not consider. The main feature which they had in common and which so affected this Greatest Story was their resistance to Rome.

The Huguenots

The origin of that name Huguenot, by which the Protestants in France were known, is doubtful, nor does it greatly matter. Beginning in the reign of Francis, the reformed party in France grew stronger during the reign of several succeeding kings. There were two great families in France at this time, the Bourbons and the Guises. The former became leaders of the Protestants and the latter of the Catholics. Civil war broke out in 1562. Elizabeth of England {59} sent troops to help the Huguenots, but the fortune of the war went against them. A Catholic League was formed for their extermination. A general massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, in 1572, has made that day lamentable in the reformed Church ever since.

Still the Protestants held on, in the far west of France, under the leadership of that Henry of Navarre who became King of France in 1589. To bring peace to his country he formally declared himself a Catholic, but he so favoured the cause of reform that two years before the end of the century he passed a famous measure, the Edict of Nantes, by which the French Protestants were granted freedom to think and act as they pleased in all religious matters, without penalty of any kind.

Such being the divisions in France during the struggle of the Netherlands against Spain, it was not likely that she would give much assistance to either side. Elizabeth sent a small army, which effected little. She might perhaps have been more liberal with her help, but England had her full share of troubles too. There was still a large English party sympathising with Rome. The change in the State religion which Elizabeth effected as soon as she succeeded her half-sister Mary—the Catholic and the wife of the King of Spain—was not easy. She found herself with a French war on her hands, a war into which Philip had persuaded Mary towards the end of her reign. Almost its only result had been that Calais, England's last possession in France, had been lost to her.

Elizabeth quickly made peace with France; and that peace included Scotland also. We have seen, and we shall see again, how ready France always was to embarrass England by taking the side of Scotland in the constant Scottish and English wars. Elizabeth {60} made peace with France; but since at this moment there really were two parties dividing France, it was not easy to be at peace with both. Elizabeth, as we also have seen, so far helped the Bourbons, the Huguenots, as to send some troops to their aid; and for that aid Havre, with its fine harbour at the mouth of the Seine, was handed over to England. But the Huguenots were defeated. Havre was English only for a very short time.

And Catholic France was now again helping Scotland, favouring the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots, who married a short-lived French king. In Scotland the reformed religion, of Calvin's type, had taken a hold which was destined to grow firmer as time went on; but for the present the Catholics were in strength there too. Their queen was Catholic. She was hardly more than in name a queen, for she was but a child when she came to the throne, and spent years of her short life as Elizabeth's prisoner. Finally she was executed, most probably by Elizabeth's order, although it was an order which Elizabeth denied.

It was almost wholly by their own stout courage that the United Provinces, as they were called, of the Netherlands did at length gain their freedom, and not only freedom to serve God as they saw fit, but also freedom from the sovereignty of Spain. It was a freedom which was not formally acknowledged till many years later; but it was practically won in 1579. These United Provinces were seven in number, of which one was called Holland: and this Holland came, after a while, to be the name for the whole. The seven lay in the north, and were united as a federation under the rule of William of Orange. The southern provinces remained for a while longer under the power of Spain.

Into this new and free State came many of the reformed religion flying from persecution in their {61} own countries. Holland became populous. Her industries developed. Her foreign trade increased. She had a large trading fleet. It ventured into those waters round the Cape of Good Hope which the Portuguese claimed as their own. It disputed with them the trade of the islands in the Malay Archipelago. And even here the fighting took on something of a religious character, for the battle was between ships of Protestant Holland and of Catholic Portugal.

Exactly the same character pertained to certain encounters of ships which began to take place more and more frequently westward of the line which the Pope's Bull had marked out to divide the sphere of Portugal from that of Spain—encounters between the ships of Elizabeth and of Philip of Spain. By the year 1581 that line lost what importance it ever had, because Philip made good, by force of arms, his rather doubtful claim to the throne of Portugal. For three reigns, lasting over sixty years, the King of Spain was King of Portugal also, although the smaller kingdom never lost her national identity.

England's Navy

England had begun to have a considerable fleet. She had long had necessity for ships of war to protect her exports, principally of wool, to the Continent. She was under the necessity of making her fleet stronger and stronger by reason of the growing strength, just noted, of the Dutch fleet, which came from all the ports across the Channel. And especially she had need to strengthen it since Philip, whose proposal of marriage Elizabeth had declined, threatened her with his Armadas. Hostility to England had become a religious duty in his sight. Elizabeth had been excommunicated. The Act of Supremacy, by virtue of which her father had been declared head of the Church in England, had been passed again in her favour, in order to wipe out the measures of reaction {62} towards Rome which had marked the reign of Mary. Ireland had risen in revolt in 1560, and a joint expedition of Spaniards and Italians landed to aid the rebels. They were overwhelmed and destroyed by one, Raleigh, whom Elizabeth knighted as Sir Walter.

And so, on the English side, and on the side of all the princes of Europe who professed the reformed religion, the war against Spain became a religious war. To waylay the Spanish treasure-ships from the Indies was an adventure which appealed to the sailors of England. It gratified them to get these treasures for their own and for their Queen and country, and moreover it was this wealth, thus robbed from the conquered Indies, with which the enemies of the reformed Church built and equipped their ships of war. So we have Drake and Frobisher and other heroes adventuring into the Pacific and even sailing round the world in vessels which seem to us almost ridiculously small for such great enterprise. They attacked any Spanish ship they met, they landed and sacked Spanish settlements in South America, they even ventured into the very harbours of Spain herself, to "singe the King of Spain's beard," as they put it.

The King of Spain could not for ever endure these "singeings" so insulting to his dignity. In 1588 he launched, for the destruction of England, the largest naval force ever seen. It was that force known to history as the Great Armada.

{63}

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.

Our country was saved assuredly more by the storms of heaven than by the valour of even such splendid fighting seamen as the troublous times had produced. Survivors of the vast fleet of Spain, after a severe hammering by Drake in the Channel, completely circumnavigated our islands, going eastward and northward through the Straits of Dover and so round the north coasts of Scotland and down along {64} the western shores, everywhere losing ships on the way. Even now, in such lonely places as some of the small islands lying to the north of Scotland, are found evidences of the Spaniards' wreckage. Only a very small number of that Grand Armada sailed their crippled way back into the harbours of Spain.

In the years that followed, England then being allied with Henry IV. of France, her ships were seen more than once attacking the shipping in the very harbours of proud Spain.

It is obvious, from the position as official head of the reformed Church in which the Act of Supremacy had first placed our Henry VIII., and had then confirmed, in a position of scarcely less authority, his daughter Elizabeth, that the form which Protestantism took in England, as the State religion, differed from its forms elsewhere. On the Continent, none of the rulers of the States that had adopted the doctrines of Luther or of Calvin had thought of claiming such a position. In England under Henry and under Elizabeth it must have seemed that, while protesting against the authority of the Pope over the Church, Englishmen acquiesced in a like authority vested in the Crown. It was a transfer of allegiance. But Luther, and yet more so Calvin, would have bitterly resented that the Church should be under any authority except that of her own choosing. Moreover, the English Protestants retained many of the ceremonies and services, and performed many of the rites, of the Church of Rome. Calvin's ideal of worship was that it should consist in the simplest and most direct communication of man with God, with no aids of beautiful music and rich colour and other appeal to the emotions, such as the Romans used. All this he specially hated. The rules of life among pious followers of Calvin were extremely strict. Austere behaviour and a serious expression of countenance were rigidly {65} demanded of them. They regarded even the most innocent amusement as contrary to the spirit of their religion.

This is perhaps a difference which it would be out of place, in a story sketched in mere outlines, to mention even at such short length as this, were it not that it was a difference which had serious consequences in the reigns of those Scottish kings who succeeded Elizabeth on the throne of England. How that came about was thus:

The Puritans

In the reign of Mary, the Roman Catholic queen, very many English Protestants had fled abroad. They had gone to lands where the Calvinistic doctrines were followed. Under Elizabeth they ventured back into their native land; and the form of Protestantism that they found there was a shock to them. They could not range themselves as members of a Church that had practices which they detested. They formed themselves into a separate sect under the name of Puritans. At once they found themselves in opposition to, not in conformity with (and were therefore sometimes spoken of as Non-conformists), the national Church. They were subjected to persecution even by a Protestant Government. From denying the authority of the Crown as head of the Church, it was not a very long step to denying the authority of the Crown in other, less spiritual, matters. And it was this denial that led to Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, to the cutting off of Charles I.'s head, to the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers to America, and all that was to follow therefrom. Surely we are justified in finding a space to note a difference of opinion in which such astonishing things had their beginning.

During Elizabeth's reign our country was reduced to its insular boundaries, and yet never before does there seem to have been a time when England was {66} so aware of her greatness as she was under Elizabeth. Never, moreover, was there such a splendour of English literary achievement, from the plays of Shakespeare downward.

The truth is that she really was doing a very great work, though probably Englishmen of that day only dimly realised what that work was. She, with the Dutch and other Protestant States, was gradually wearing down the greatness of Spain, and all that Spain stood for.

What Spain stood for was despotic power in Church and State. Our Henry and Elizabeth were despotic in both, but the Stuart kings who succeeded them were not made of the right human stuff for despots, and both Church and State won freedom under them. Spain's power suffered a gradual but constant diminution. She was fighting on all sides—constantly struggling with France or Italy.

And Elizabeth's seamen kept harrying her in every quarter of the Atlantic and even in the far Pacific, The English Colony of Newfoundland was established. Elizabeth had relations as far east and south as Persia, as far east and north as Muscovy, where Russia was gradually consolidating herself.

Russia gained an important victory over the Turks in 1569. Moscow, her capital, was indeed burnt by invading Mongols as late as 1571, but in the year following the conquerors were themselves defeated. The other Slav State, Poland, gained a great accession of strength by absorbing the large territories of Livonia and Lithuania. During the sixteenth century we do not find the Scandinavian nations taking much direct part in the big story, but in 1587 the King of Sweden was King of Poland also. The general tendency of affairs in that part of the world's stage, however, was for those two, Poland and Russia, to be forming themselves into two strong nations of Slav people, {67} on the eastern border of the Teutonic people of Germany. That is an element in the story to be borne in mind.

Affairs in the East

Farther eastward again, Russia was extending her power in Siberia and working out towards that China of which there is still little story to tell, because, of all nations of the world, she has ever changed least and most slowly. The day had not yet come for Russia's reaching southward towards Constantinople on the one side or towards India on the other. The Turk was as yet so strong that she had to fight hard to keep him out of her own borders. She was still on the defensive in that south-western corner of her empire.

But India had to suffer invasion nevertheless in this sixteenth century by a people coming down from Afghanistan and the north. They were Mongols, usually given the name of Moguls. They were a Mahommedan people, and under the reign of the Grand Mogul, Akbar, which covered nearly all the latter half of the century, they were continually extending their rule over the Hindus. It is in this Mahommedan invasion that we see the real beginning of that division and opposition in India of Hindus and Mahommedans which has played a large part in the story of that country ever since, and which is a principal cause of her troubles even to-day. There were Moslems in India before the coming of the so-called Moguls, but not in anything like the same force or number.

On the eastern side of Afghanistan lay Persia, and beyond Persia, to the west again, began the Turkish Empire. Between the Persians and these Ottoman Turks—Mahommedans both, but belonging to different sects—fighting went on with little pause, and with no result of any long duration. Persia's position was difficult, for on the eastern border she was always {68} subject to attack from the Moguls. That she kept her independence is due in part doubtless to the valour of her soldiers, but also, in large part, to the engagements of the Moguls with India and of the Turks with their European neighbours on land and sea. Even the heavy defeat of the Turkish navy at Lepanto by no means put an end to their activities in the Mediterranean. In 1573, two years after that battle, they lost Tunis; but were still strong enough to regain that valuable port the very next year.

{69}

Elizabeth died in 1603, and there was no descendant of Henry VIII. to inherit the throne. But Henry VII.'s daughter had married the King of Scotland, and a grandson of Henry VII. now held the Scottish Crown with the title of James VI. On the death of Elizabeth he became rightful hereditary King of England also, with the title of James I.

And now it might indeed seem as if the United Kingdom was about to enter upon years of peace and glory. Elizabeth's prudence and the valour of her seamen had won her military fame. Her alliance was sought by princes as far off as the Tsar of Russia and the Sophy, as the ruler was called, of Persia. She had possessions in India, far away in the East, in America far in the West. For the first time in her story she had Scotland as a second self, instead of a constant enemy on her very border. Ireland appeared to be subjugated. And she had no possessions on the Continent to draw her into troubles with France.

This hopeful prospect was soon clouded over owing, in large measure, to the folly of the Stuart kings, as that dynasty was called of which the Scottish James was the first. And yet, if it had not been for their folly, and also for their weakness, it is possible that England might have had to suffer even greater trials than did befall her, by reason of the despotic power which had been won for the Crown by Henry VIII, {70} and his great ministers Wolsey and Cromwell. But before that power could be broken, and the people could regain the rights that legally were theirs under the provisions of Magna Carta, the country had to suffer miserably through civil war and one of the kings had to lose his head on the executioner's block.

James I. tried to govern as Henry VIII. had governed before him, that is to say, he tried to govern without summoning a Parliament. Legally it was Parliament only that could vote the money that the king required to carry on the government. James tried to extort this money by what were politely called "loans." If those from whom they were demanded paid the required contributions, well and good. If they refused to pay, the Crown had sufficient power to misuse the processes of the law so as to punish them for their refusal.

The "middle class"

Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all who withstood him. But by the time we come to the seventeenth century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of the nation. It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in Europe. It was that change by which what was soon to be called the "middle class" came into existence.

We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy. It was the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered. After the cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be strong and to acquire much independence. In our own land London was, from a very early day, the chief city. Its power was the greater because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, {71} its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the chief citizen. Our country never produced quite such important citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of Florence, and others. We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands. True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period.

It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen. The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one who lives in a city. The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις, which is Greek for "city."

Thus there grew everywhere a force of this kind, a force of burghers or townsfolk, a middle class, which increased in power as the numbers of townsmen and their riches increased. In England the people, as against the king, had an advantage which the people of Continental countries had not, in their legal right to send representatives to Parliament before contributing to the expense of government. The right existed, even while they were not able to enforce it. And with the growth of this new power of the middle class they began to have greater power for its enforcement, or, at least, greater power to resist the punishments which the king had tried to impose on those who refused to supply him with money which had not been legally voted for his use.

The Tudors, for all their masterfulness, had been {72} more prudent than the Stuarts proved themselves. Even Henry VIII., in Wolsey's time, had consented to take only one-half of the sum which he had demanded as a contribution from the people. And we may often see that these Tudors, although they dealt so despotically with their nobility, appear to have kept a finger, as it were, on the pulse of the nation, and to have known how to give way when that pulse beat too forcibly in opposition. Perhaps it takes a strong character to yield, on occasion. Certainly the Tudors had what we should call strong characters, and they knew how to yield. The Stuarts had less strength, and they brought the country into cruel trouble by their inability to yield. Rather, perhaps, we should say, they yielded when they should have stood firm, and stood firm when they should have yielded. Had they yielded more discreetly the people would have had to wait longer for their freedom, though it is possible they might have won it by less painful means.

And although James's prospects looked so fair when he came to the throne of England, he yet came to a troubled inheritance. There was all that trouble between the State Church and the Puritans, a trouble which grew greater and which perhaps the Scottish element that James brought down to England with him increased. The Scottish element, if it were not Roman Catholic in religion, was mainly of the extreme Puritan type.

There was this double source of trouble, therefore—the king's illegal endeavour to govern and to extort supplies of money without a Parliament, and the increasing tension between the persecuted Puritan party and the party of the State Church. Both Puritans and Catholics had already suffered some persecution under Elizabeth, and under James these persecutions became more severe. It was only a year or two after his accession that the Gunpowder Plot was {73} discovered—a plot contrived by the Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and all the legislators therein. After this discovery, the persecution of the Catholics became more severe than ever.

The Stuart Kings

The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some one were the Pope himself. We have seen how difficult it was for those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the conditions which they found when they returned to England—the king occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which the Pope claimed. They were very apt, then, to be critical in matters of government as well as in matters of religion. And the actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to provoke a great deal of criticism. The feeling throughout England began to be very strong against the Crown. It was tension, strained feeling, between a large section of the nation—a section that began to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed, of the middle class—and the king who was the head of the State Church.

On the Continent there was tension quite as acute between the people and the princes, but there it was tension not so much between any two sections of the reformed Church, as between the people as members of the reformed Church and the princes as representatives of the old Church. Moreover in some lands the princes and rulers themselves were of the reformed religion.

In France it is the Catholic Crown and the State forces that we see opposed to the Protestants, there called Huguenots.

In Germany a Catholic League is made by the {74} rulers of the States that adhered to the old faith, and, in opposition, a Protestant Union is formed by the princes of the States that have accepted the doctrines of the Reformation. But also in Germany, we see that, in one of the States at least, a Catholic prince is set against a large Protestant section of his people. This was in Bohemia.

It was in France that the first violent outbreak, due to this tension, occurred—a rising of the Huguenots under the great Prince Condé. It was quickly suppressed, and Condé was taken and imprisoned. That was a rising of very small and unimportant character compared to one which happened three years later, in 1618, as a consequence of the opposition which we have just noted, between the king and people in Bohemia.

Bohemia was the land of Huss, one of the fore-runners of Luther's Reformation. The spirit of Protestantism was strong there. By attempting to persecute the Bohemians for their religious opinions and practices the king at once made that spirit stronger still, and the people appealed for support to the German princes of the Protestant Union. It was support, energetically given.

Gustavus Adolphus

The Bohemian king, on his side, had the help of the German rulers of States in the Catholic League and also the promised help of France and of Spain. James of England was appealed to, but declined. He was very fully occupied at home. But we see a new figure appearing on the stage, a figure of most attractive and romantic interest—that of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.

Sweden, and all Scandinavia, by which I mean Norway and Denmark also, have not come very prominently on the stage of the Great Story. Nor will they be there now for a very long period at a time. But at least twice we shall see a Swedish king appearing {75} in a dramatic fashion. Little Denmark is also the occasional scene of a great event. One of these occasions arrived very soon after the date which we have now reached. That date is 1618, the year of the commencement of what is known as the Thirty Years' War. The principal leader of the Protestant forces in that war was Gustavus Adolphus coming down from Sweden at the head of his armies at a moment when his help was sorely needed.

It was not the first time that he had made himself known and felt in the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe. About the year 1611, when he came to the throne of Sweden, a design was formed of uniting Sweden with Russia. The throne of Russia was the object of much dispute at the moment. The year before, the Poles had invaded Russia, had taken Moscow, and the son of the Polish king had been crowned Tsar. In the year of Gustavus's accession as King of Sweden, the Poles were driven out of Moscow again. We should remember that the first rulers of Russia, those under whom she had begun to be a nation, came from Sweden, and since there was no very apparent heir to the throne it might have seemed to the Muscovites not unnatural that a Swede should step into it. In the end, quite a different solution of the question was arrived at. A Tsar of the family of Romanoff, very distantly connected with the original sovereign family, was put on the throne, and founded the dynasty which endured until the last Tsar was deposed and done to death in the terrible revolution which happened during the Great War.

It is impossible here to pursue all the ups and downs of the fighting which went on in Germany, for Germany provided the principal battle-fields through that war of thirty years' duration. Knowing what we do of modern warfare, it may seem difficult for us to understand how the people of the countries that {76} were the scene of such prolonged fighting could survive at all. But we have to understand that the way in which wars were fought in those days was very different from the present manner.

The Thirty Years' War

In the first place, the numbers of the fighters on either side was small—ridiculously small, we may think. The total population of the countries was nothing like as dense as it is now. But even in proportion to that lesser population, the fighting forces were small. In the recent Great War we saw "nations in arms," as has been truly said. Every man who could possibly be spared from the peace work that had to be continued if people were to have food to eat and other bare necessities of life, was pressed into the fighting. In those older wars only a very few of the population fought. The rest might go on with their ordinary work, for the most part of an agricultural kind, so long as their land was lucky enough not to be the scene of the fighting.

And the troops moved slowly, so that the campaign was restricted to comparatively small spaces. In the winter there was little or no fighting. The soldiers went into "winter quarters." Probably this was largely because the roads were so bad and the country was so undrained and marshy, that it was almost impossible for them to move about with any artillery and baggage horses.

Generally they went into the towns for their winter quarters. And if these towns had walls round them, as in those days many had, they were tolerably secure within the walls, so long as they had collected enough provisions, because there was no artillery powerful enough to batter down a strongly built wall.

Doubtless the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, and the coming and going of armies during so many years, was very great, even so. It is said that in the principal areas ravaged by the war the population {77} was reduced to one-third of what it had been before. But a consideration of the leisurely way in which the fighting was conducted, and the small number engaged in it, helps us to realise how the people of the countries were able to endure it at all. It also helps us to understand how it was that it took so long to bring the war to a conclusion.

The Protestant King of Denmark took the lead of the Union at the beginning of the long struggle, and at first the Protestants suffered many defeats. The great leader of the Catholics, Wallenstein, overran Denmark itself. The outlook for the Protestant cause was as black as it well could be. At this darkest moment Gustavus Adolphus came with his Swedes from the north, and the Catholics were driven back. Within a few years he was invading Germany, and in 1632 he fought the very important battle of Lutzen, in which the Protestant forces were completely victorious. But it was a victory dearly bought, for Gustavus himself was killed in the battle and the Protestant cause found no other leader of equal ability.

The war dragged on. Spain and France had come in as members of the Catholic League, against the Protestants, but now there arose in France a new policy which set these two Catholic nations in opposition to each other. It is an opposition that is closely associated with the name of one man, the French king's great minister, Richelieu.

We may note here one of the minor results of the Reformation. Previously to the Reformation we find great ecclesiastics, that is to say, men holding the highest positions in the Church, as great ministers of the State also. Our Cardinal Wolsey is an instance. Indeed you will scarcely find an instance anywhere of a great minister who was not a high ecclesiastic. The reason is simple: they were the men who had the {78} education, and nearly the only men. But now many laymen were beginning to be men of learning also, and in most of the Protestant countries the State and the Church were not nearly so closely associated together as they still were in the Roman Catholic countries. Therefore we now begin to see that, whereas in the Catholic countries the chief ministers of State continue to be cardinals and great men of the Church, in the Protestant countries it is so no longer. The king's ministers are most often laymen.

Richelieu's policy

During part of the Thirty Years' War the great French cardinal, Richelieu, had on his hands a heavy task in suppressing a most formidable rising of the Huguenots, whose greatest strength was in the west. England sent a fleet to their assistance, but it effected little. They were compelled to yield, after very brave resistance, and in 1629 was arranged that Peace of Alais, which is noted in history as marking "the end of religious wars." Under that treaty the Huguenots were given equal political rights in France with the Catholics.

Nevertheless in Germany the Thirty Years' War, which certainly had its rise as a war about religion, dragged on for nearly a score of years longer, until its final settlement by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The terms of that treaty might have been less favourable to the Protestants than they were had the two great Catholic nations of France and Spain been in accord. They had fallen, however, as we have seen, into bitter opposition, which broke out into active war. The real occasion of the war was, as before, the too masterful power which was held in a single hand owing to the accident that the Habsburg family, which governed in Austria, wore the Crown of Spain also. It still possessed those Southern States of the Netherlands which had not won their independence, {79} and it had the Duchy of Milan in Northern Italy as well as Naples in Southern Italy. The Habsburgs still surrounded France. Richelieu's aim was to break this circle. He was ruthless and subtle, and he was single-minded in his determination to make his king not only the despotic ruler of his own country but also powerful throughout Europe. The French monarch was served by his minister as effectively as our Henry VIII. by Wolsey and by Thomas Cromwell. Richelieu had put down a rising of the nobles against the Crown with severity as cruel as that of Henry's last, and worst, minister. The people of France had never secured the rights which the law gave them in England—though the Tudor kings paid those rights little respect—and they gave the nobles no support. In his first aim the great cardinal succeeded. The king became despotic in France.

His position in Europe, with so powerful an opponent in the field as the King of Spain, was not so easily secured. It was a curious twist of policy which brought France to the assistance of the Protestant Union in the later years of the Thirty Years' War—France, a Catholic State and under the influence of a cardinal of the Catholic Church, aiding Protestants against Catholics! And it was the aid of France which saved them, notwithstanding that the French armies twice suffered defeat in Germany.

Of course the motive that brought France in on the Protestant side was the opportunity of opposing Spain.

The Treaty of Westphalia, which really marked the end of the religious wars much more definitely than the Peace of Alais, gave France an extension of territory on her eastern border, at the cost of Germany. It gave Sweden compensation in money and in a fortress or two on the Baltic for what she had done in the war. Switzerland had borne a share in the fighting on the {80} Protestant side, and her independence was recognised by the treaty; and Holland, which had been practically a free country for years, was now formally declared to owe no dependence either to Spain or to the Emperor. The Emperor's power indeed, for a long while vague and declining, was now diminished to almost nothing.

But though Holland stood thus finally free, we have to remember that there still were what were called "the Spanish Netherlands," a district, under the rule of Spain, not very different in its boundaries from modern Belgium. In these Spanish Netherlands fighting between France and Spain continued, in spite of the Treaty of Westphalia. They met each other too in Italy, and the war lingered on with changing results for more than ten years. In Germany the Protestants had gained religious freedom under the Treaty of Westphalia, and the German princes of both Protestant and Catholic faiths had been freed from the rather uncertain bond of union in which they had been held by the Emperor. Thus disunited, they had little power, and the power of France became greater by their weakness.

Mazarin's policy

Richelieu died in 1642 and another great churchman, Cardinal Mazarin, became the king's chief minister in his place. But in the following year died also that king whom Richelieu had served faithfully, ably, and unscrupulously. He was succeeded by Louis XIV., the monarch whose Court was so splendid, with himself as the centre of its glory, that he is known as Le Roi Soleil—the Sun King. He was a child of four when he came to the throne. The regent was his mother, and since she was a daughter of Philip II. a reversal of the policy of Richelieu was expected from her. To the grievous disappointment of a large party in France itself and also in Spain and Austria, she put herself into the hands of Mazarin; and he was a {81} faithful follower of Richelieu. The war with Spain continued. But in the very year of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia there broke out in France that uprising of the nobles and of the people which is called the "Fronde." It had a remarkable success at first; though a success which did not endure. Under the captaincy of the great Prince Condé, who had led an earlier rising of the nobles against the Crown and, before that, had taken a leading part on the Huguenots' side, Mazarin was driven from Paris.

The strength of the two parties was so evenly divided, however, that in this very same year Condé himself and a number of his adherents were put under arrest. Within three years from the middle of the century the Queen Mother, with Mazarin as her minister, was re-established in power and the old lines of policy were pursued, both at home and abroad.

Our England, as we have seen, played little direct part in the long drawn-out war between the Protestants and Catholics on the Continent. Neither did she directly take any large part in the European contest between the two great Catholic powers. She did, nevertheless, come into touch and into opposition with both France and Spain abroad.

The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken. French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain and Portugal the trade of the East. In the West, in the New World, Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South America. The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia, named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without {82} fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England potatoes and tobacco.

Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec.

Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of France—Louisiana. At that time it formed but a small part of a far larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession. England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence. In the meantime settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia southward. Among these were the colonists who received the name of the Pilgrim Fathers—pilgrims flying from England for their religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the great American nation.

Religious differences

We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced them to go this pilgrimage. Their principal motive was to escape persecution on account of their religion. That desire led to several pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the story. It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands. Some went to Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the St. Lawrence. To understand the violent intolerance of any differences of religious belief {83} and practice which produced these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of that date viewed those differences.

In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the establishments of the Church. They protested against these evils, and also against the authority claimed by the Pope. The Puritans in England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority claimed by the Crown as head of that Church.

On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible, that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest against anything he might choose to do or affirm. And inevitably, since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his authority by their subjects.

Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all agreeable to the despotic kings of that day.

Finally, we should note this point most particularly—that men had lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible, and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished Israel and Judah—whole nations at a time—because certain sections of those nations deviated from His true service. Thence they derived the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a whole {84} was liable to divine punishment. We must get that conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely intolerant of these religious differences. It explains a great deal of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in the name of religion. It explains why the nations were so ready to send out of their midst any section that so differed from the majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these sections were so very willing to go. The English Puritans who went to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too pleased to see them go—for the same reason, that the majority feared lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as wickedness) of this small section.

Cavaliers and Puritans

Ten years later than the expedition of the Pilgrim Fathers, that is to say, in 1630, there was a further large emigration of Puritans from Old England into New England. Under Charles I. who had succeeded James, and tried to pursue the same policy of governing and extorting money without a Parliament, the strained feeling between the Crown and the people grew more intense. They formed themselves into distinct parties—Royalists or Cavaliers on the outside, and Puritans on the other.

The smouldering hostility broke into open war. In the first battles the Royalists had the advantage. The Puritan armies were raw and badly organised. But in their ranks were men of ability and of stern purpose. Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell as {85} their commander-in-chief a rigid discipline was imposed. They went into battle singing hymns, inspired by an intense conviction that they were fighting in the service of the Lord. It was a union of discipline with zeal which the light-hearted and light-headed Cavaliers could not match.

The Royalists wore gallant and gay attire and flowing curls, and culled all the joys of life. The Puritans dressed themselves in sombre colours, set their faces into solemn lines and regarded even innocent mirth and amusement as a sin. The earnestness which marked all their behaviour they brought to the business of fighting.

After the fortunes of the war had gone variously in several campaigns, the Royalists suffered what really was a decisive defeat in the battle of Naseby in 1645. Their cause never recovered from it.

There was quartered in the north of England at this time a Scottish army. Charles had endeavoured to impose on the Church of Scotland the form of Protestantism which was the State religion in England. But the majority of the Scottish people professed a religion much more nearly akin to that of the English Puritans. They bound themselves by a Covenant (whence its adherents were called Covenanters) to oppose by all means in their power the priests and the bishops whom the Scottish king of the United Kingdom tried to force on them. They took arms and made their way victoriously south until they were bribed to stop and to establish themselves in quarters in the north of England by part payment and part promise of payment of a yearly sum. And to the protection of that army Charles fled, as his fortunes grew more and more desperate, after the defeat at Naseby in 1646. The payments promised to the Scots were much in arrears. After long negotiations they gave up their king into the hands of the English Puritans in exchange {86} for a large sum of money to quit the debt. Once the king escaped, but was recaptured, and in 1649, after a trial in which the verdict was certain from the first, was executed on the block.

The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector. The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was all-powerful, ready to do his bidding. And this was a power which he had proved that he would not hesitate to use. He was a man typical of the Puritan spirit—absolutely convinced of the justice of his cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies—a very terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the weak Stuart kings.

So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the Reformation. We have to look on those religious wars as one of the two great features in our story during that half-century. The other principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour.

England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place between English and French over the French settlements in the St. Lawrence. The French were defeated, but for the time being they were allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements.

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GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.

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Quebec had been founded as early as 1608. It was not until 1641 that the foundations were laid of Montreal. But in the meantime Prince Edward's Island, Nova Scotia, and several of the West Indian islands had been occupied by English colonists.

Portugal during most of this half-century was under the Spanish king. She regained her complete independence, under a king of her own, in 1640. But by that time she had lost her empire in the East. Spain, sailing west from the New World, had arrived at the Philippine Islands, which Portugal had reached going east. Thus neither had transgressed the famous Bull. And yet East and West did meet in those islands. Drake, moreover, in his famous circumnavigation of the world, had come to the neighbouring Spice Islands, going west.

Both English and Dutch had taken a hand in destroying the Portuguese claims to any exclusive right of settlement in the East. Between English and Dutch, a decision was not reached so easily. It was largely on account of the excessive prices charged by the Dutch for pepper and other spices brought from the East Indian islands that the British East India Company was formed. It received a charter from the Crown to found settlements and claim trading rights for England. The Dutch so stubbornly held and defended their trade in the islands that the British gained no headway there until after the first half of the century. They did, however, make some trading settlements on the mainland of India, of which the earliest was in Madras, in 1639.

But an immediate impression was made on the Dutch supremacy in the islands the moment that the resolute policy of Cromwell took the place of the easy indifference of the Stuarts.

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The event of chief importance in the story of the second half of the seventeenth century is the gradual shifting of the power in Europe from the hand of Spain into the hand of France. It was indeed in the earlier half that Spain had begun to fail. We have noticed more than once how, with all the far-flung possessions of her great ruling family of Habsburg—possessions in Italy, in Austria, in the Netherlands—she held France surrounded and hemmed in. On the other hand, France had all the advantage which, as is well known, belongs to the "central position." She could throw her whole force into the struggle on this side or on that far more easily than Spain could mass her force on any one point. And the very fact that Spain had so many possessions to defend proved in the end her weakness. She spent her vast strength in the struggle. Moreover, she had inflicted on herself a great loss by driving out of the country the converted Jews and the converted Mahommedans. The last of the latter were expelled in the tenth year of the seventeenth century, and the Jews had gone long before. Both were intelligent and industrious people, and Spain thus lost a most valuable section of her population.

She had immense wealth coming to her from America, but the transport of this wealth made a heavy demand on her fleet. When Elizabeth was {90} on the throne of England, English seamen, by their constant attacks, drained much of the life-blood of the Spanish fleet. Under the vacillating rule of the Stuarts, English attacks on the Spanish treasure ships grew inconsiderable, but another formidable menace to Spain had arisen in the sea-power of the Dutch.

The naval power of Holland had been necessary to her during the war of religion in which Spain had tried to crush out the Protestant spirit. As early as 1607 the Dutch fleet had practically destroyed the principal fleet of Spain off Gibraltar. The Dutch, as we have seen, had taken the supremacy which the Portuguese had held in the Malay Archipelago; and since Portugal till 1640 had been for sixty years under the King of Spain, it was nearly equivalent to taking that supremacy from Spain herself. The victory which really was decisive was won by the great Dutch admiral, Van Tromp, in 1639. It made Holland, so lately a mere province of Spain, the strongest sea-power in the world.

Cromwell as dictator

And at this point, that is to say, in 1651, Cromwell, in his masterful manner, passed the law called the Navigation Act which directly challenged the naval power of Holland. It provided that ships trading to England should carry no other goods than those produced in the country to which the ship belonged; and this was a direct challenge to the Dutch because they had a great carrying trade, and their ships brought to England the goods produced in many other countries besides their own. Moreover, the English claimed that the ships of all other nations meeting English ships in the Channel, should salute them by lowering their flags. The English admiral, Blake, meeting the Dutch fleet under Van Tromp in the Channel, demanded that he should lower the Dutch flag accordingly, and Van Tromp's reply was a broadside from his guns.

As always, the English seamen fought with astonishing {91} skill and courage. Probably in the whole course of this Greatest Story only one other nation, and that the Dutch, has rivalled them in their genius for the battle at sea. After several actions the issue was still open. Van Tromp swept the Channel for a while, after an English defeat, splicing a broom, by way of derision, to his masthead. But the English fleet was strengthened; Blake came forth again from the Thames and harried Van Tromp successfully. While Cromwell was Protector neither side had the decisive mastery. The day of England's humiliation was to come later, when a Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames and burned English ships at Chatham; but that was not until again a weak Stuart was on the throne.

What Cromwell and his Puritans did was amazing. He had Ireland in rebellion on his hands. He put down that rising with an iron severity. Rulers of England before him had established those colonies of Scottish and other immigrants which are the source of the present division of Ireland into the Free State in the south and the Northern Ireland which is still directly under the English Government. Cromwell's plan to break up the centres of rebellion was to shift sections of the Irish people themselves out of their homes and plant them down in other parts of the same country. It was a policy that left a hatred of English rule which still lives in the hearts of the descendants of the people so mistreated. But for the moment it brought a forced peace.

Also on his hands was a Scottish rising, of the Church party which was opposed equally to English Puritans and to Scottish Covenanters. That too he dealt with masterfully and severely. He was a virtual dictator.

The Parliament ventured to oppose him: he dissolved the Parliament. With indifference to the form of all government recognised in England, he chose eleven of his generals to act as his ministers. The {92} Army, with Cromwell as its head, was for the time the governing body. He was greatly hated, and still more greatly feared. Plots were formed against his life; but none were successful. He died peacefully in 1658 and his portentous figure goes out of the story.

Like nearly every dictator, he left no under-study able to play his part. His son Richard, with little of his father's hardness, was put, reluctantly, into his place. He retired at the first opportunity. Within little more than a year of the great Protector's death the Army weakened, and the Parliament, which he had overridden by that Army's aid, regained its power. The Stuart who was king by hereditary right was recalled. The tremendous episode of the Commonwealth was, to outward seeming, almost as if it had not happened.

Meanwhile, that is, in 1659, France and Spain had for the moment made terms of peace, of which one article was that Louis XIV. should marry a Bavarian princess, and another that France should take over from Spain certain frontier fortresses and also a part of the Spanish Netherlands.

That peace was maintained for some seven years, during which Spain was much occupied by recurring wars with Portugal, Portugal having thrown off the Spanish sovereignty in 1640.

But a new king came to the throne of Spain, and Louis put forward further claims in the Netherlands. Louis, at the moment, was in alliance with Holland against England in the war which had been provoked by the Navigation Act.

A peace was now formally made by the English Government with Holland, which was quickly followed by an alliance between the two countries so lately at war. Yet, while this alliance was thus sealed by the Government, Charles, King of England, on his own account, and in return for sums of money advanced {93} to him by Louis, made a secret treaty of alliance with the French. Four years later, England and France, as allies, declared war upon Holland. A separate peace was made between England and Holland two years later again; but between France and Holland the war continued for another four years. A temporary peace was then agreed to, but yet again Louis, by further claims, provoked the war anew; and it was while this war was in progress that William of Holland became King of England, in succession to James II., last of the Stuarts.

This conjunction naturally brought England and Holland into a really active alliance, and so threw England into war with France. It was a war which at first went badly for the allies, both on sea and land, and England was menaced with invasion by the French—a menace dispelled by the great English naval victory of La Hogue in 1692.

The Peace of Ryswick

On land also the Dutch gained some successes, and in 1697 a general peace, to which Spain was one of the signatories, was made at Ryswick. By a former treaty, some ten years earlier, Spain had given up, as we have seen, part of her Netherlands possessions. That treaty had been broken, as usual, by the aggressive policy of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. But by the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Spain recovered a portion of the Netherlands territory that had been taken from her during the latter course of the war. Nevertheless, only a year later—as we are able to state now, though probably nothing was known of it at the time—a secret pact was made between England, France, and Holland for dividing up the Spanish dominions.

The whole story is one of false dealing between nations and of alliances so quickly shifting as to be bewildering, and so guileful as to be offensive to all faith in human nature. But the very idea that there {94} could be good faith between nations, or any other guide for their conduct than the selfish interest of each, never seems to have entered into the minds of the statesmen of that day. They may have been men of honour in their personal dealings, but in their international dealings such terms as honour and honesty were empty words, conveying no meaning.

All through this portion of our story Christian Europe was constantly in peril from the Turk on the borders, and often far over the borders, of Austria and Hungary. Never was that menace greater than in 1683 when he was besieging Vienna with a great force. He was defeated by Poles and Germans. Yet at this supreme crisis Louis, the Catholic King of France, was secretly favouring the Moslems!

The story of our own country at this time is especially humiliating. Cromwell, in the early years of the half-century which we have been considering, had set England high in the estimation of the world. But Cromwell had died, and with him had gone down much for which he had so strongly stood. Again two Stuarts succeeded one another on England's throne, and the English king, like a very Petit Monarque, became a pensionary, a paid creature, of the Grand Monarque of France. Charles II. of England, and James II. after him, with no sense of responsibility, acted both as knaves and fools, though both had good wits enough, had they used them rightly; and they brought England into the very valley of humiliation. Out of that humiliation she was rescued by the accession to the English throne—jointly with his English wife, daughter of James I.—of William of Orange, ruler of Holland. Englishmen of a later day have perhaps been less grateful than they should be for what some will call the happy accident, and others the Providential dispensation, that, at this critical moment, she found a king who had a sense of duty to {95} his subjects, and a king who brought so valuable an alliance as that of his Dutch fellow-countrymen.

Had some such foreign source of strength not come to our country's aid, had the succession continued in the Stuart line with other kings like those Stuarts who had occupied the throne, it is not possible to say what her fortunes might have been, but it is scarcely possible to doubt that she must have fallen, for a while at least, under the sovereignty of France. As it was, she had fallen under a most despotic rule by her own kings. Partly under the pretence that he was about to make war against France, and partly by expending money that he had secretly received from the French king, Charles II. had raised a large army. He had employed it to stamp out all opposition at home. The Grand Monarque was a strict Roman Catholic, and he used all his power over his royal pensioners in England to induce them to bring England back into the fold of Rome. But if anything were needed to make the great majority of the English and Scottish people yet more determined than before that the State religion should not be that of Rome, a powerful influence towards the stiffening of that determination was supplied by a measure passed by Louis in 1685 and known in history as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Edict of Nantes revoked

That Edict of Nantes had permitted to the Huguenots, the French Protestants, freedom to practise their religion and to live under no disadvantages, as compared with their fellow-countrymen of the Roman Church. The Revocation of the Edict not only withdrew those permissions, but was accompanied and followed by a deadly persecution under which many of the Huguenots lost their lives and the survivors fled to Protestant countries, especially to England and to Holland.

It was a persecution and an expulsion very similar, {96} in its motives and in its effects, to the flight from Spain of the converted Jews and Mahommedans, and of the Pilgrim Fathers and other Puritans from England. It is curious that in each instance it was a flight of a singularly industrious, intelligent, and valuable portion of the population of each nation, and resulted in a serious loss to those nations from which the exodus was made. And as they were a loss to those countries which they left, so were they a gain to those which received them. The Huguenots in England retain to this day those characteristics of valuable citizens. Years before, England had been similarly fortunate in receiving the Flemish weavers who had fled from Flanders before the Inquisition and the Spanish armies commanded by the Duke of Alva.

France could very ill afford such a loss. Louis XIV., who came to the throne at the age of four years old in 1643 and lived until 1715, reigning thus no less than seventy-two years, became towards the end of the seventeenth century without dispute the greatest monarch in Europe and in all the western world. It is safest to limit his greatness by that word "western," because in another part of the world-stage there was at least one other monarch, the Emperor of China, who could not conceive the possibility that there was a human being so eminent as himself; and also in India there was a very powerful sovereign of the Moguls who yielded an authority and lived in a splendour perhaps as great as either of these.

Louis's court at least was splendid beyond all that had been seen in the West, his courtiers more magnificent in their costumes and brilliancy, more sumptuous in their expenditure. Over the people on their estates, the nobles had unbounded power. Had the people been in very name slaves they could not have been more enslaved in reality. But even the most powerful of the nobles was absolutely subservient {97} to the king. He had an army, which was immense for those days, at his command.

Consider, for a moment, what that power meant, in the hands of one who had been a king since four years old. It meant that his will had always been law to those about him. He had heard only pleasant words, because no one had dared tell him an unpleasant truth. What chance, then, had he, coming to manhood in such circumstances, of knowing anything of the real truth about the world and about his subjects?

The French peasantry

The real truth about his subjects was, though Louis did not know it, that their state was as utterly miserable as that of human beings well could be. They were ground down not only by their local lords and nobles, but also by the heavy taxes that they had to contribute in order that the king should be able to keep up this magnificence in his court, to pay so large an army and to wage costly wars. It was no part of the French constitution, as of the English, that the money supplied for the purposes of government should be voted by the Parliament. It is true that English kings often tried, sometimes successfully, to extract such money without a vote of Parliament; but at least the law was there, for the people to appeal to, as a great fact in the English constitution. Its existence made a very great difference.

Thus, while all went so gloriously with France upon the surface and in the upper ranks, below, in those foundations on which, after all, this splendid edifice was based, there was misery and increasing poverty—poverty which could have only one end, that there would be no money to pay for the wars and for the magnificence, and misery so intolerable that men would rise and revolt against their conditions of life, no matter how many should perish in the revolution. We, now, knowing what actually did come to pass, can see how the forces were slowly accumulating which would {98} bring it all about. But from the eyes of men of that time, living in the midst of it, the end was hidden; and most of all, as we may suppose, hidden from that resplendent monarch himself.

We may observe as curious that in the varying struggle that we have seen going on between France, Spain, England, and Holland during this half-century, we hear so little of Germany taking a hand. Certain of the German States did, as a matter of fact, play some small part, directly, in that struggle, either as Protestants in alliance with the Protestant Dutch, or later in their own defence against the claims of the French king; but the reason why Germany, as a whole, took no continuous or large share, by direct action at the centre, was in the first place that her power was much broken up—she was split into a number of separate States, with no strong central authority to combine their action; secondly, that indirectly she really was playing a part that was important—serving as a guard to keep back the Turk on the south-eastern corner of Europe.

Always we have to remember, in considering the action of our story at this period, that there was this menace from the Turk pressing in on the side of Austria and Hungary. The power of Russia was rising, but she was continuously engaged in wars farther north—with Sweden and with Poland. The fortunes of these wars went variously, and to no decisive result. At one time we do indeed see Poland and Russia in alliance against the Turk; but no decision was reached in that war either. Peter the Great, well named for the greatness to which he brought his country, came to the Russian throne in 1682. But great Russia was as yet only in process of establishing herself and was beset by enemies. She was soon to be a very prominent actor in the world's story, but her time had not then come.

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Turkey was fighting on all her land borders, and carrying on an indecisive naval war with the Venetians the while. The Venetians gained part of Greece from the Turks; the Austrians took Belgrade from them; several of the Balkan States maintained their independence. Evidently the fighting force of the Turks was not as powerful as it had been. By the end of the century they were more concerned with keeping the large empire that they had won than in adding to it by further conquests; and they made peace, for the time being, with Russia, Poland, Austria, and Venice.

As yet there was no Italian nation to play a part in the contest which had now ended in the transference to France of the overmastering power in the world which had been Spain's.

The Spanish Succession

We have noticed how a secret pact had been made between England, France, and Holland for partitioning the domains of Spain. But the King of Spain, dying in 1700, gave, by will, the whole of his possessions to Philip of Aragon, grandson of Louis XIV. The inheritor was an infant. The Grand Monarque did not hesitate, in spite of the secret pact, to accept the inheritance on his grandson's behalf. It was an arrangement which would have given his family more power than even the house of Habsburg had possessed. It menaced the liberty of England, of Holland, and of all Europe. The War of the Spanish Succession, which occupied the first years of the eighteenth century, was waged to oppose it. England's portion in that war in the Netherlands is commonly known to Englishmen as the Wars of Marlborough, from the great leader, the Duke of Marlborough, who commanded in them.

England and Holland, then, had been drawn into natural alliance, after years of fighting, by the establishment on the throne of England of William of Orange who married Mary, the heiress to the Crown; but James II., the rightful king, still lived. He was king {100} by right of inheritance, but had used his kingship so wrongfully, in such direct opposition to the wishes of his people, that he had been driven from the throne and from the country. He fled to France where he could be sure of a friendly welcome from a Catholic king. The favour that he had shown, contrary to the law of England, to English Catholics had been a great part of his wrongdoing in the eyes of his people. Moreover, Louis was well disposed to aid any enemy of the ruler of Holland.

So there came assistance of French troops for James, a landing in Catholic Ireland, and a march, leading to the famous Battle of the Boyne, wherein, in 1690, James and his Catholics suffered a defeat, at the hands of William and his Protestants, which meant the end in England of the Stuarts, the Jacobite kings. That battle further meant the firm establishment as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland of this ruler of Holland who was married to Mary, the daughter of the last Jacobite king. It was his own father-in-law that William succeeded on the throne, and the father-in-law still lived.

He lived, and not only was made welcome at the Court of France, but also had many faithful to his cause in England. But William ruled wisely, and his hold on power grew steadily. The Dutch guards that he had brought with him from Holland gave offence to his English subjects. He had the sound sense to remove the offence and send the guards back to Holland. The very idea that the king should have what we call "a standing army" was still new and strange to Englishmen. They had been accustomed to armies raised for special wars, but not until rather lately to soldiers maintained under arms in time of peace. The idea of a foreign regiment in their midst was naturally not agreeable.

It was in the last year of the century that William {101} sent back his Dutch guards, and surely gained, rather than lost, in security on the throne by doing so. He died three years later. His wife had died before him, and he was succeeded by yet another daughter of James II., "the good Queen Anne," wisest of the Stuart monarchs.

Settlement of America

All through the troubles of that last half-century Englishmen in increasing numbers sought refuge from them in America where land, fertile land, appeared to be unlimited for all who chose to take it and could keep it against the attacks of the Red Indians whom they drove out. Spain was predominant in Mexico and in South America, and in North America she claimed and insecurely held a land of indefinite boundaries which she called Florida. But it was a land of woods and prairies of unknown extent whither the Spanish conquerors did not go. The very name Florida has a Spanish sound; and in the same way Louisiana, with its capital city of New Orleans, tells the story of French settlement. It was farther north, however, along the shores of that great St. Lawrence estuary running up into Canada, that English and French fell, as we have seen already, to fighting for the new lands. From Virginia southwards, the settlement that Sir Walter Raleigh had so named in honour of his queen, nearly up to the St. Lawrence, were vast lands along the eastern sea-board which the English explored without meeting enemies other than the Indians.

From time to time there were hideous massacres of the white men; but the Indians were too poorly armed and generally too disunited to make serious opposition to the settlers. There was a settlement of the Dutch, at an early date, a little southward of the present New York; and farther south again a settlement of the Swedes; but both became incorporated in the larger numbers of the English.

Just as the name Florida speaks of Spain, and {102} Louisiana of the Grand Monarque of France, so we find other States on the eastern sea-board with names that have a story to tell us of our own monarchs. For there are, besides Elizabeth's Virginia. Mary's Maryland, and the Carolinas of the Charleses; later, Georgia, of the Georges. The titles, however, do not indicate the dates of the settlement of the various States which bear them.

It is well to have the atlas open at the map of North America when we discuss these colonies. We shall see thereon a name Pennsylvania, which tells us of the pilgrims led out by the Quaker, Penn. Maryland, we should note, which is called after the Catholic queen, was resorted to largely by the Catholics. New England was the centre of Puritan migration. There was a religious reason, in the first instance, for many of the settlements in America. We have seen before how glad men were to be quit of those of an alien religion from their midst; and also how glad those aliens were to go. Montreal, on its first settlement, in 1542, was a Catholic establishment. The Jesuits were pressing out to the farthest West in this quarter of the globe, converting the Red Indians, as they also pressed eastward about the same time to India, China, and to Japan. But Montreal had to become a military and an industrial settlement too. All the early settlers, whatever interpretation they put on the Bible, had to carry the sword, as well as the Cross, with them. They had, in truth, scant semblance of right in their complaint that the Indians were always ready to turn and massacre them. Were they not expelling the Indians, who had done them no manner of harm, out of their own homes?

The French, in these early days, explored and claimed possession of an immense territory in North America. We may trace it all along both sides of the gulf and the river of St. Lawrence, and westward to {103} the Great Lakes. Southward we may trace it along wide lands watered by the Ohio, and down the Mississippi until we come out at New Orleans. Mobile, at the river's mouth, was even earlier settled by the French.

All this, from the Great Lakes southward, lay westward and inland of the English settlement along the coast. But the limits of the territories claimed were not very clearly drawn; at first it was only by a fort here and there, and not by any continuous settlement, that possession of the vast lands was claimed and partially made good by the white men. The upper Mississippi was explored before the end of the century, and some settlement had been made of the Canadian north-west.

Settlements in the East

Progress, as ever, was more slow in the East. It was in 1652 that the Dutch colonised the Cape of Good Hope. Amongst those Dutch colonists, and of the same reformed religion, were a number of the Huguenots from France. In 1661 the English colonised the Gold Coast, on the west of Africa, where the Portuguese had previously been in possession, and in the same year Portugal ceded to the English Crown what soon proved to be of the greatest importance to England in the East, the province of Bombay in India.

So saying, we have to understand that the hold of any of the western nations on India was almost confined to the coasts and to the ports. It did not go far into the country.

Bombay, in this sense of its coastal trading towns, was transferred by the Crown to the East India Company a year or two later, and some twenty-five years later again a disaster happened which made its possession of the first value to England, for in the attempt to increase their holding in Bengal the English were so heavily defeated that they were driven out of that province altogether. Bengal and Madras had {104} been separated for purposes of the administration of their Governments some years before. But now the headquarters of the Company were established in Bombay, after the temporary loss of Bengal. It was in the first year of the new century that Calcutta was founded.

Thus went the story along the Indian coasts; but in India itself the Mahommedan power of the Moguls, which we have spoken of before, was now rising to its zenith. This was in the reign of the great Aurungzeb. And at the same time, in spite of this supremacy of the Moguls, arose into prominence two principal races of the Hindus, the Mahrattas and the Sikhs. The power of all three was to be greatly diminished in the years to come, but their rise is of particular interest because it is the division between Mahommedans and Hindus which is the main cause of unrest in India to-day, and also the reason why the native Indians are incapable of uniting so as to throw off a foreign yoke altogether. If that yoke were removed the fighting between these opposed elements would certainly be fatal to the well-being of the country. It is just about the date at which we have now arrived in this Greatest Story that we see the two elements most clearly in opposition.

Another event of much importance for England's future empire in India happened about the same date on India's north-west border: that state of Afghanistan, at length, after prolonged and doubtful fighting against Persia, finally gained its independence. Its importance is that it thus became what we call a "buffer state," preventing the direct collision of Russia with the Indian Empire. That threatened collision, and the value of the "buffer state," was not in evidence in the story at this time; but it was at this time that the foundation of its future value to England was laid.

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THE POTALA AT LHASA, FROM THE W.S.W.
From Fergusson's History of Indian and Eastern Architecture.
From a photograph by Lieut. F. M. Bailey.

The Court of the Great Mogul in India is one of {106} those two which were mentioned a few pages back as rivalling in its splendour that of the Grand Monarque himself. The other is that of China, where a new dynasty, the Manchus, came by conquest to the throne. As usual, it was by way of invasion of a people from the north, more warlike and less civilised than the Chinese. As usual, the warlike conquerors lost their own characteristics among the multitudes of the more civilised nation. But they kept the throne till close on the end of the eighteenth century, and by enforcing some sort of authority, from Pekin as a centre, they brought the empire to greater prosperity than it had known during the very many previous years in which it had been distracted by feuds between the local chieftains. Tibet, the land of the "Forbidden City" of Lhasa, with its wonderful Potala, the palace of the holy Lama, was conquered and absorbed for a while into the huge empire.

But the fortunes of China and the glories of the Emperor's court had very little influence in the making of the great world story. It was a land, a vast land, apart. And it did not move. How stationary it was is indicated by the curious fact that although China is credited with the invention and use of gunpowder before any of the western nations, the only artillery that they had for their defence against the Manchu invaders was cast for them by the Jesuits, Jesuit missionaries from the West. With a beautiful impartiality, the Jesuits are said to have cast cannon for the Manchus also. It is truly a remarkable circumstance that these emissaries, devoted, at the imminent risk of their lives, to carrying the Christian faith all over the world, should be thus engaged in making munitions of war. But the members of this singular religious order were always practical, always active as politicians in all the countries into which they went. And there were none which they did not penetrate.

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Populations of East and West

At first the Jesuits were made welcome in China, but a reaction against all western people seems to have taken place when the Manchu emperor was firmly established on his throne. Japan also set her face against the new trade that was carried out in Dutch and Portuguese vessels. Moreover, in 1662 the Dutch suffered a heavy reverse in being driven out of the island of Formosa, after long and hard fighting. The beginning of the eighteenth century really saw the doors of the far East more firmly closed to the West than they had been fifty years before. The far East therefore was, for the time being, even less in the world story than it had been. But it had its own story, which sufficed for itself, and it was a story in which very many actors played a part. The western lands were still what we should reckon very thinly populated. Our England, for instance, nearly certainly did not have a population of more than five millions and a half at the end of the seventeenth century. But already there must have been a relatively dense population in China. In Pekin, in an appalling earthquake that happened in 1661, it is said that 400,000 people lost their lives. Now the total population of London in 1685 is put at only a little more than half a million, and London was already far and away the largest town in our country, seventeen times larger than Bristol, which then was second to it in numbers. North of the Trent, the country was still scarcely civilised or settled at all. But after nightfall the unlighted streets of the cities were probably more dangerous than any part of the country. Near London even, at a much later date, it was the law that all the covert near the high roads should be cut away so as to leave less shelter for the lurking highwaymen; but still the picturesque Dick Turpins abounded. And high roads, roads along which a coach might go, ever so slowly, sometimes drawn by oxen, were few, and these few were bad. Great men {108} travelled with six horses to their coach and a large following, not for honour and glory but because it was likely that the pulling power of six horses and even more might be required to draw the coach through the marshy places of the road—and in the undrained and unenclosed country the marshy places were many. Nor were the numerous retainers for vain show: they were for necessary protection, and at any moment might have to use their arms.

When the fields began to be enclosed and drained, they would grow more corn or pasture and so help to support a larger population; but the enclosing meant that much of the waste, where the poor people had picked firewood and perhaps caught or killed some game, were taken from them. And as it was in England, so too was it in other European countries as they advanced in civilisation.

In the main, then, the story of the latter half of the seventeenth century is the story of the shifting of the great power in the world from Spain to France. The story of the early years of the eighteenth century is in the main the story of the opposition of the other nations to the carrying out of the provisions of the will of the King of Spain by which he bequeathed all that was Spain's to the grandson of the French king. Had those provisions been faithfully executed they would have thrown so great power and wealth into the hands of the ruler of France that no other nation could have lived at ease under so vast a menace. Already France had submitted to some check in agreeing to the provisions of the Peace of Ryswick. But she was arrogant and aggressive still.

{109}

We may probably say that no other man has made so great a difference to the history of the world, by his last will and testament, as did the King of Spain by that will which left all his monarchy to the grandson of him who already was so great as to be called the Grand Monarque. He willed away his vast territories, as it had been a five-acre field, and his subjects, of many nationalities, as they had been the sheep or cattle thereon.

And the Grand Monarque, by accepting the gift on behalf of his infant grandson, united his enemies so that they forgot their own mutual quarrels and formed a great alliance against him.

But he was very strong. He had a huge army, he had great wealth, and he had the advantage of being at the centre of the theatre of conflict, while his foes were on the circumference.

The most formidable in the alliance against him were the English and the Dutch. William III., husband of Mary, daughter of James II., was on the English throne. As Protestants and Stuarts, Mary and her sister Anne, who succeeded in 1702, in some degree conciliated both parties in England. William III., besides being married to England's queen, was himself of the English Royal line, being a grandson of Charles I. An Act of Settlement, as it was called, {110} had been passed by the English Parliament which should exclude, after Anne's death, a son born to James II. by a second marriage. This son, a Catholic, thus excluded, received welcome at the French Court and became the centre of Jacobite intrigues for the Crown of England. It was his recognition as King of England by Louis XIV. which determined William III. to support with all his forces what came to be known as the Grand Alliance against France. William, however, died suddenly as the result of an accident before the war really began.

Queen Anne then, came to the throne, and the command of the allied English and Dutch forces was taken by John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough. He proved himself a great general. His first great victory was in the battle of Blenheim in 1704, followed by that of Ramillies two years later. The French had received so heavy a beating that the Grand Monarque sought peace; but the terms offered did not satisfy the victors.

The war was not restricted to the Netherlands. The little country of Portugal was in the alliance; so too was, for a while, another small country, the Duchy of Savoy in the north-west corner of Italy. Later Savoy went over to the Habsburg party. The Emperor was on the side of the allies.

Besides the Netherlands, the allies were victorious in Bavaria, in Italy, and for a moment in Spain itself. The approach of an English army to Madrid actually forced the king to leave his throne and his capital; but that advance was not maintained, the allies were defeated in Spain, and he was re-established. Between English and French, the war was fought so far from home as Canada—much to the English advantage in the peace by which it was concluded. But before Louis would make peace on terms that the allies were willing to accept, his armies had to suffer further defeat in the {111} Netherlands at the hands of Marlborough. Oudenarde in 1708 and Malplaquet in the following year are the places and dates of these two English victories which were really decisive of the war.

Marlborough's success and the ascendancy which he and his duchess had gained over the queen, made him many enemies at home. We begin about this time to hear of the two great political parties, Tories and Whigs. Marlborough was of the latter party, which was in power till 1710, in which year they lost place to the former. Marlborough was dismissed from his command in the year following; and with his dismissal negotiations for peace were renewed.

Peace of Utrecht

It was not until 1713 that its terms were finally agreed, in the Peace of Utrecht; and in the main it gave the allies what they had fought for. Certain frontier fortress towns were ceded to the Netherlands by France. Louis, as representing the Habsburg house, gave up all claim to the Spanish Netherlands. The King of Spain was recognised as ruler in his own country, but renounced all right to the French Crown. On the other hand, it was the Peace of Utrecht that made Austria dominant for many years in Italy. In Canada, England gained a large territory from the French.

Look where we may on the scene of the great story in this period, we find great misery everywhere. No sooner had the wars of religion ceased than there began those wars over the succession to the thrones of the newly formed or forming nations. It seems that as soon as the people began to have any sense of nationality, as we say—any feeling that as a nation they had an existence free and independent of the others—they at once found themselves faced by the danger of some one nation, or some one Royal house ruling several nations, becoming so strong as to take their liberty from them. First were the Habsburgs {112} and next the power of Spain, then that of France: nor have we even so by any means come to the end of these wars of succession. We have to hear of more. The nations could no longer endure the idea of an empire such as Charlemagne's, with authority over them.

The Emperor, still so-called, had little power: it was scarcely more than nominal over the German States by which he was elected. About the date of the Peace of Utrecht, an event took place in those German States which was to be of much importance in the future. That was the accession of the Elector—the ruler who had a vote for the election of the Emperor—of Brandenburg, to the throne of Prussia. Its import, of course, was not seen at the time, but it was the beginning of the dominance of Prussia over Germany.

The Emperor, with such power as he might command, had been one of the allies against Louis, but he had his own troubles on his north-eastern boundary to occupy his attention. We have before now, in course of the story, seen a King of Sweden coming down from the north and fighting in Germany. That was in the days of the great Gustavus Adolphus, commanding the Protestant forces and dying in the hour of victory at Lutzen, near Leipsic.

Charles XII

Now, in the early years of the eighteenth century, we have another King of Sweden, Charles XII., fighting in Germany; but it is no religious war that he is waging. He is fighting in the first place to maintain his right to his kingdom of Sweden. Kings of Sweden had at one time or other coveted the throne of Poland. But also more than one King of Poland had laid claim to the throne of Sweden. And now, although this claim had been formally renounced, Charles XII. had no sooner acceded, than Danes (including Norwegians), Poles, and Russians united to dethrone {113} him. That very remarkable ruler, Peter the Great, was at this time Tsar.

The young King of Sweden first met and defeated the Danes, next the Russians, and then marched his victorious troops into Poland, which he conquered and overran. As a result of his victories he seems to have gained little, however, beyond the maintenance of his own throne in Sweden, and, after remaining two years or more in Poland, he set a king of his own nomination, Leszynska, on its throne, made peace with his enemies and went back to his own country. Three years later, however, he was again fighting in Russia, and it was during this campaign, that his armies pushed into Germany also. In Russia he finally suffered an overwhelming defeat at Pultowa: this was in 1709, and one result of that disaster was that his nominee lost the crown of Poland.

After Pultowa, Charles fled to the Turks, engaged them as his allies and persuaded them to send an army of invasion into Russia; but after a short campaign peace was made between Russia and Turkey, and in 1714 Charles returned to his own country. He died four years later; and thereafter Sweden was no more a great actor in our story. The power of Russia, on the other hand, continually increased, and within a few years Russian armies were victoriously overrunning Sweden itself. The Swedes, nevertheless, preserved their independence, but were no longer dangerously aggressive to the nations south of the Baltic.

{114}

In the last, short, chapter I tried to tell the story of the early years of the eighteenth century up to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Principally it is the story of the humbling of France, and of the checking of the ambition of Louis XIV. to unite in his descendants, together with the Crown of France, all that was included in the monarchy of Spain. That ambitious design was checked, and from now onward we shall see that a great motive in the story is the preservation of what became known as "the balance of power in Europe"; so that no one nation should have too preponderant a superiority over the rest.

The purpose of the present chapter is to carry forward the story to the middle of the century, or, more precisely, to another very important peace treaty, that between England and France, signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748.

The Peace of Utrecht had indeed included in its provisions a settlement between England and France; but within a few years war broke out again in Europe, which involved both these countries, and again it was war over the succession to thrones. There was war over the succession to the throne of Poland, to the throne of Austria, and, although it is not written of {115} by historians as a war of succession, it really was a small war of the same kind in which England very soon found herself engaged in Scotland.. And, as ever of old, France and her Catholic king sided with the Scottish Catholics against the English Protestant king. The Court of France had, as we have noted, given welcome and shelter to the son, by his second marriage, of James II., who had a claim by birth to the English Crown.

Hanoverian English Kings

But by a recent law of England no Catholic could succeed to the throne. The Act of Settlement gave the Crown of England to George, Elector of Hanover, who was a Protestant and son of a Protestant grand-daughter of James I. It was thus that the Hanoverian dynasty, represented by our present King George V., attained the throne of England. Until Queen Victoria's accession, the sovereignty of Hanover, which became a kingdom when the Bourbon king was restored to the throne of France, also belonged to the King of England. But the laws of Hanover did not recognise succession through the female line, or admit of a queen as ruler; and therefore the two Crowns were separated when Victoria became sovereign of England.

The son of James II. came over to Scotland in 1715 and raised a revolt there, with the aid of some of the Highland clans; but this rising, known in history, from its date, as "The Fifteen," was easily put down and made no abiding mark on the story.

The next, which really was of some importance, of the wars of succession was that waged about the throne of Poland. It was a throne, as we have seen, in frequent dispute, but generally the trouble was fought out between Russia, Sweden, and Poland itself, with eastern German States taking some hand in it. Usually these German States acted as a kind of buffer between that particular trouble and the West of Europe, {116} rather as Austria, southward, acted as a buffer for the West against the Turk. But now the King of France was drawn into the fight, because he had married a daughter of the Leszynska whom Charles of Sweden had made King of Poland for a few years before the disastrous overthrow of the Swedes at Pultowa. Russia supported the cause of a rival candidate to the throne, and Leszynska and his French allies were defeated. The chief importance of this war of the Polish succession, for the general story, is that it resulted in a large increase of Russia's power over Poland. The successive rulers of Russia began to be more and more fully recognised as the heads of the Slav people and the supreme upholders of the Greek Church.

At the same time another power, a Protestant power, that of Prussia, was becoming more and more formidable along the shores of the Baltic to the north of Poland, and the time is near at hand when we shall see these two, Russia and Prussia, playing a very leading part in the story.

For the moment, however, the western nations are perhaps not considering them greatly. They are occupied with wars amongst themselves. France and Spain are in arms against each other within a very few years after the peace signed at Utrecht. In the Mediterranean, fighting is nearly perpetual. Venice takes part of Greece from the Turks, and the Turks regain it. Italy and the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily are the scenes of battles and exchanges of territory. But still we have to remember what we have seen reason to note before, that we should quite misunderstand the effect of the wars if we were to estimate them by anything like the scale which the last Great War has painfully made known to us. The fighting was all done by the professional soldiers, and the numbers engaged were what we should deem {117} very small, even in comparison with the far smaller population of the countries at that date. The area of the fighting was restricted, so that comparatively small tracts were laid waste; nor was the land so cultivated as it is now. There were not the same crops to be destroyed.

The Austrian Succession

After the war over the Spanish Succession, which terminated with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, the most important of the wars of the same kind was that over the succession to the Austrian throne, which begun in 1740 on the accession of Maria Theresa, who was the daughter and heiress of the Emperor and Austrian Grand Duke, Charles VI.

Frederick II., King of Prussia, known in history as Frederick the Great, appears to have thought the opportunity good for getting a slice of Austrian territory for himself. It was that land which was called Silesia, and he claimed it on the ground that it had at one time belonged to the Electors of Brandenburg. The Electors of Brandenburg, we shall remember, had become rulers of the kingdom of Prussia.

Frederick was a great general, and two successive victories quickly induced Maria Theresa to make peace with him, ceding him a portion of that Silesia for which he had gone to war.

Maria Theresa was married to Francis of Lorraine, who was Grand Duke of Tuscany. She was of the Habsburg house. Louis XIV. was a Bourbon—a younger branch of the Capet family—and in direct descent from the Henry IV., who was the first of the Bourbons to be King of France. And of the same Bourbon family was the King of Spain and of Southern Italy and Sicily—"the Two Sicilies," as they were called.

Nearly thirty years before his death, the Emperor Charles had secured the assent of the great powers of Europe to his decree that if he died without sons his {118} daughter should succeed to the Austrian dominions. The Bourbons, with others, had assented. Nevertheless, directly Charles died and Maria Theresa, according to this arrangement, claimed to succeed him, they took sides with the Elector of Bavaria, who claimed the throne.

For allies, she had only England, with Hanover, in the north, and, in the south, the small but ancient kingdom of Savoy, often, in course of the story, the object of fighting between France and Spain, yet still, after varying fortunes, maintaining its independence. Moreover, Sardinia, which had long been a Spanish possession, now belonged to Savoy. The armies of this small State had a great reputation, due to the genius for generalship shown by Prince Eugene of Savoy both against the Turks and in Marlborough's service.

Mainly, however, it was the valour and devotion of the Hungarians that saved Austria for Maria Theresa. The armies of France and Bavaria advanced through Russian territory, but they were flung back by Hungarians and Austrians. Maria Theresa returned to the throne from which she had fled. Her principal enemy, the Bavarian Elector, who had been chosen as Emperor, died, and her own husband, Francis, was elected Emperor in his place.

In the north, England and France met in the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy. The English were assisted by the Dutch, for Holland was now a member of the alliance, but neither of the allies gained much glory in the campaign. They did at least divert some of the strength of France from the Austrian battlefields, while the armies of Savoy occupied the attention of Spain in Italy and also of such troops as France had to spare for that quarter of the far-flung war. Frederick the Great broke his word, with the cynicism which the Prussian has always shown since, and took the field {119} on the side of France and Bavaria. Again he was victorious. He was confirmed in possession of Silesia, though he assented to the election of Francis as Emperor.

Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle

The result of this various fighting was summed up in the Provisions of the famous Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed at that place in 1748. Maria Theresa was established on the Austrian throne, with the formal assent of the other powers. Her dominion in Northern Italy, including Milan and Tuscany, was confirmed. And the territory of Savoy was extended. In the south, the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies retained these dominions. Thus, in the main, the position of neither Spain nor of France was greatly affected. We may note that one of the treaty provisions put Genoa under the protection of France. That may seem a detail rather small for attention in so outlined a story as this. It is, however, a detail of which the importance must be realised when we observe that Genoa claimed a sovereignty over the little island of Corsica. Corsica shortly afterwards rebelled against this sovereignty, with the ultimate result that the island was annexed by France in 1755. And in 1769 was born, in Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was in direct consequence, therefore, of this protectorate of Genoa by France under the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and of France's annexation of Corsica a few years later, that Napoleon was born a French subject. That seemingly accidental circumstance was of some importance in the world's history.

The disposition of the various States in Italy, made by this Peace of 1748, was maintained with little disturbance until the armies of the French Republic, under the leadership of the wonderful Corsican, broke up every European disposition.

If France, in the course of this war over the Austrian succession, had possessed an army free for an attack {120} in any force on England, it might have gone very hardly for our country. The son of James II., known as the Old Pretender (pretender to the Crown of England) was still living at the French Court in 1745; and in that year his son, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, landed in Scotland, and led that rising which is known from its date as "the Forty-five." With the Highland clans to aid, he gained victories over the English generals sent against him, he conquered practically all Scotland and made his way southward in England as far as Derby.

If he had shown determination, if he had pushed on towards London, it is quite likely that much of the future story of England and of the whole Anglo-Saxon community in the world might have to be written very differently. For England was not warmly devoted to her Hanoverian kings. The Young Pretender might have picked up many more adherents as he went south. Had a French force been poured in to his assistance at this critical moment, it seems to be the opinion of historians that his cause would have been won.

But no French force appeared. Probably France had all her available armies fully engaged. Charles Edward did not show determination. He went back to Edinburgh, and the clans, held together by no central authority, but only by their sympathy with the Scottish royal family of Stuart, dispersed to their Highland homes. For a while the Pretender played the king in Edinburgh, but at length a strong English force under the Duke of Cumberland was sent to Scotland. A decisive engagement was fought on the wild moor of Culloden, near Inverness. It settled for all time the fate of the Stuart dynasty, and set the Hanoverians firmly on the throne of England. The clans which had arisen for the Stuarts in the previous attempt by the Old Pretender in "the {121} Fifteen" had suffered slight punishment at the hands of the victorious English. After "the Forty-five," on the contrary, their punishment was cruelly severe; but it had at least the effect of quelling their spirit so that they did not imperil the peace of the realm again.

Ireland's misfortunes

At the same moment, towards the middle of this eighteenth century, Ireland was in terrible suffering also. In 1739 had happened her worst famine, due to failure of the potatoes on which most of the people depended, almost entirely, for their livelihood. It was estimated that no less than one-fifth of the population actually died, and there can be no doubt that the effect of that starvation on the survivors must have been to weaken the stock for more than one generation.

And we are obliged to confess, with shame, that England's dealing with Ireland during all that half-century was as cruel and selfish as it was stupid and short-sighted. There was a moment when it seems as if the people of the smaller island were anxious for union with the greater; but that union was opposed by a section of the English themselves—especially the powerful section interested in the trade of wool with the continent of Europe. A law passed as far back as the second half of the seventeenth century prohibited the Irish from exporting cattle. Consequently they had largely devoted their excellent pasture to producing sheep, for the wool. The English wool traders wished to keep this profitable commerce to themselves. To attain that selfish end they opposed the proposed union, which presumably would have put the Irish wool producers on the same footing as the English. Further, under William III., they succeeded in passing through Parliament a bill prohibiting the Irish from either making up their home-grown wool or from exporting it.

{122}

The not unnatural result was that the unfortunate Irish turned to all sorts of secret devices for shipping their wool, contrary to the provisions of this extraordinarily cruel law, to France; and this secret traffic is generally regarded as the starting-point of all the many secret societies, the Whiteboys, the Fenians, and so on, which have figured largely in Ireland's later political story. So much of the bitter feud between England and Ireland has been due to the folly and injustice of the former nation! For all our just pride in the greatness of our country, we must try to keep a clear vision and not let that proper pride blind us to England's faults.

One of the reasons why I suggested that a French force landing in England in "the Forty-five" might have changed the subsequent story of the Anglo-Saxon people, is that it might have had the result of modifying those very stupid measures by which England drove her American colonies to revolt, and so caused the separation from the mother land of the United States. It is always interesting to speculate about what might have happened to the world story had this or the other event gone just a little differently. It is interesting; but we can never know the answers to such questioning. The story of that lamentable separation belongs to the second half of the century with which we are now dealing. For the moment preparation is in making for it by the continual increase of the English colonists and their continual expansion over more and more of the virgin land. But still the French are in possession of all that vast extent then included under the name of Louisiana.

In a former chapter we saw how unmeasured were the hopes of Spain regarding that fabled city of El Dorado, which seems to have been imagined as built and paved with gold. In the new world which the voyagers of the previous century had begun to open {123} out for men of Europe, no vision seemed impossible to realise, and the French, in their American possessions, appear to have deemed that they had found something equivalent to a city of gold—a land with boundless possibilities of wealth. Nor were the less imaginative English immune from the like delusive dreams. We had our "South Sea Bubble"; the French their "Mississippi Bubble."

Bubble was the name applied to those schemes only when they had proved themselves, by bursting, to be filled with nothing more substantial or golden than the air. The English bubble, at its inception, was a grave business proposition styled the South Sea Company. The French equivalent was the Mississippi Company, or Compagnie de l'Occident. Like the East India Company, these were formed by persons who subscribed funds for exploiting the wealth, real or imaginary, of the countries indicated by the titles of each. Shares in both one and the other rose to ridiculous values; and the bursting of the one, as of the other, brought ruin to very many in both countries.

The French bourgeois

Nevertheless the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in the middle of the eighteenth century was the starting-point from which began a remarkable commercial prosperity in France. It was a prosperity of the bourgeois, the burghers or dwellers in the towns, who developed the industries and trades, but it did not reach down to the paysans, the peasants or dwellers in the country. They were in a very bad way, ground down by heavy taxes and by the enforced labour demanded from them by the seigneurs, or landowners.

France had expected great things from her Compagnie de l'Occident, and her extensive colony of Louisiana; but the trading stations which she established in increasing number in the East brought her far richer gains. The war of the Austrian Succession engaged England and France in fighting on {124} battlefields as far apart as Canada and Louisiana in the West, and India in the East; and in the East the French, under Dupleix, at first had the advantage again and again. They repulsed an attack of the English on Pondicherry and they captured Madras. Indications, for the moment, pointed towards an Indian Empire for France as far more likely than an English Indian Empire. In the West, England fared better, but the results of the victories of either side were largely neutralised by that far-reaching Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which provided that both should relinquish their recent conquests to the other. So the apparent effect of that far-off fighting was to show England increasing in strength westward, but losing, relatively to France, in the East. The events of the next few years were to prove that appearance true for the West, but completely to disprove it in the East. And we should note here once again that it was mainly on the sea-coasts of India, not inland, that the French established themselves. In the interior, the great empire of the Moguls was passing from its zenith of power. The most remarkable monument to its glory is that surpassingly beautiful Taj Mahal, regarded as one of the world's wonders—the shrine erected by the Mogul emperor in memory of his best beloved wife. And as the Mogul supremacy wanes, the power of the Hindu States of Mahratta and Sindhia increases, so that the balance is nearly equal between the Mahommedans and the Buddhists.

Taj Mahal

THE TAJ MAHAL, AGRA.

The little kingdom of Afghanistan which we have seen rise on the north-eastern frontier of India established its complete independence towards the middle of the century, after long fighting, with varying fortune, against Persia. On her other boundary, westward and northward, Persia was engaged, on the whole successfully, in perpetual fighting against the Turk; but the result, except as it indicated a decrease {125} in Turkey's striking force, had little or no effect on the Great Story. Under the famous Shah Nadir, Persian armies had penetrated as far eastward as Delhi. But after Nadir's death, in 1747, his eastern conquests were lost.

On its north-western border, India was menaced by Chinese armies, that conquered the warlike Ghurkas and subdued Nepal. At no other moment of our story does China appear so successful or so aggressive in arms or so likely to play an important part in the world drama. Her great emperor Keenlung had come to the throne in 1735, commencing a reign of no less than sixty years. Nor even then did he leave the throne to die, but voluntarily relinquished it to his son—to the fifteenth, in seniority, of his many sons.

This, however, was the farthest limit of Chinese extension in the direction of India. The Ghurkas, a {126} tribe of martial hill-men destined to distinguished service under the British flag in later years, soon regained their independence. China contented herself with a much disputed sovereignty over the more northern province of Tibet.

{127}

It is likely that until the latter half of the eighteenth century the people of Europe did not even begin to realise the full meaning of the great New World which Columbus had discovered for them in the West. Spain regarded it as a Tom Tiddler's ground where she would go and pick up gold. France and possibly England too had their foolish dreams. They expected enormous things from that vast continent of which the western limits were only gradually revealed to them. They expected enormous results which never were, nor ever could be realised. But they had no idea whatever of the yet more enormous effect which the finding of the new continent really was to have on the story. All that was hidden from their eyes.

The settlement between the nations agreed at Aix-la-Chapelle was called a "Peace," but it was a settlement that left one of the States of Europe in a situation which did not promise that the peace would last long. That State was Prussia. We have seen her establishing herself and gaining strength. She had taken Silesia from Austria, and Austria had agreed to that loss in the terms of the peace, but yet longed for an opportunity to regain the loss. France and Spain were knit together in an alliance known as the Family Compact, because the rulers of both countries were of the Bourbon family. Austria, under Maria Theresa, joined {128} their family alliance, and brought in Saxony with her, for Saxony was no less jealous of the power of Prussia than Austria herself. Russia, under the Tsarina Elizabeth, was anxious about the growing strength of this Teutonic State on her border; and on her side she brought Sweden into the large conspiracy which had for its object the break up of the power of Prussia and a partition between the conspirators of the Prussian territories.

It was a conspiracy which came to the knowledge of Frederick, the Prussian king.

For many years the interests of England and of France had been in conflict both West and East, in America and in India. The opposition was approaching the point at which war must result from it. Now, in the European position just indicated, England saw the opportunity of getting a strong helper against France. She allied herself with Frederick, who had carried the States of Brunswick and of Hesse-Cassel with him; and together they declared war upon nearly all Europe. France, Austria, Spain, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony were against them.

It has the sound of a combination of overwhelming force as opposed to the English and the Prussian kings, even though the immense power of Russia was then only in its infancy. England was not likely to send very large armies to the Continent, and an English force of 50,000 retreated before the French and was disbanded very early in the war. But Frederick had a genius for the creation and organisation of armies, and had occupied it, during the eight years following the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in making the Prussian army the finest military machine which the modern world had seen.

The Seven Years' War

The war which ensued, known as the Seven Years' War from the time that it lasted, is most remarkable for its dramatic changes of fortune. Frederick began {129} by a victory in Saxony, yet more than once he was so heavily defeated that he almost gave up the fight in despair. It is said that he thought of suicide. England, when the elder Pitt was Prime Minister, gave assistance in form of large subsidies of money rather than large forces of men or arms, and without these subsidies Frederick must have given in. A mixed force of English and Hanoverians did indeed fight under the Duke of Brunswick and drove back the French from their attacks on Hanover in 1758 and again in 1759, but except for this last success everything went heavily against Frederick in the fourth year of the war. In the year following, contingents of Russian and Austrian armies were actually occupying Berlin when he fell upon the main Austrian force at Torgau on the Elbe. The victory that he there gained, over heavy odds, turned the tide of the fighting in his favour when it was at its lowest ebb.

Still the struggle continued, with Frederick and his war-weary troops chiefly on the defensive, exhausted. And to that exhaustion and to his encircling foes he would in all likelihood have been compelled to own defeat, had it not been for the death at the beginning of 1762 of one of his chief enemies, the Tsarina of Russia, and the accession of a Tsar who was his friend. Russia, from a foe became an ally and carried Sweden with her. England, however, had become tired of the war and made alliance with France and Spain by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and in the same year the protagonists, or chief fighters, Prussia and Austria, themselves came to terms. Prussia retained Silesia. The final result of the seven years' fighting, with these singular alternations of victories and defeats, was to leave the map of Europe practically unchanged. From that point of view all the bloodshed had been for nothing.

From another, a larger and more just point of view, {130} however, we are obliged to realise that perhaps no other one war in the whole of the story has made more difference to its future course. If we consider its effect on the Continent alone, we must realise that it laid the foundation on which the union of the German States into a compact nation was later to be built. It established Prussia in far greater strength than before, because, if she had not added to her possessions, she had at least held her own while her enemies vainly dashed themselves against her. Austria had perforce to acquiesce at length in the loss of Silesia and also in the recognition of this strong State of Northern Germany set up against her own strength in the south. Prussia was to prove the nucleus round and under which the unity of Germany should be built, and it was this war which set firm the foundations of that building.

And as to who was the master mason in that building we can have no doubt whatever.

We have come across many men in course of this Greatest Story to whom the title of Great has been given, but surely to none more rightly than to this great King of Prussia. His courage in the hour of defeat has been indicated by the above very brief sketch of the war. It was only by the most steadfast courage combined with rare military genius that he came out of that seven years' fighting unshattered. But his genius served his country in peaceful as well as warlike interests. He was an absolute despot, yet he used himself and his despotic power entirely for his country's good. He set the example, in his own court, of a rigid, a scraping economy. He did all in his power to develop the industries of the country, by road making, by improved means of transport, and by every possible expedient. He encouraged education and brought men of letters like Voltaire to the Prussian court. He was rough and passionate, but a very hard worker, and {131} all his work was given to the strengthening and enlightening of his subjects.

Taken from this point of view, then, the Seven Years' War is seen to have had a very great effect on our story.

But let us regard it also in its effects on the far larger stage upon which the story is being enacted, now that the Old East and the New West have begun to form part of it.

The War overseas

In the very same year, 1757, that Frederick gained two of his most effective victories, those of Rosbach and of Leuthen, in the first of which he broke up the French armies and in the second the armies of Austria, England was gaining success no less important against France far overseas. We have spoken of the East India Company of merchants settled as traders in various places along the coasts of India. It was thus, establishing stations on the coast, that the Portuguese, first, had come; and so too the French and English after them. Already, before the Seven Years' War, we have also noticed sundry clashes of arms between the English and the French, in which the advantage had gone heavily against the former. Both nations were obliged to keep a certain force of troops under arms for their protection in a country where the friendship of the natives was uncertain. The natives were of various races; the land was divided between many rulers of different States; and there was the one outstanding division of religion between Hindus and Mahommedans.

It may seem a strange thing to say, but really it was the French ambition to found a French Empire in India which led to the foundation of the British Empire. Under their able and ambitious leader, Dupleix, the French began to push inland from their coastal stations and forcibly to claim authority in some of the native States. It was, of course, an authority {132} which they exercised in favour of their own people and against the English traders. When the Seven Years' War broke out, English and French in India as elsewhere were declared and open enemies. It was at this very moment that the Nawab, the native ruler, of Bengal, began to quarrel with the English. Naturally he was supported by the French. At first things went badly for the English in some fighting which led to no decisive result, but in the following year—the year of Rosbach and of Leuthen—the British, under Clive, gained a victory of the greatest importance over the troops of the Nawab, supported by the French, at Plassey.

It seems to have been quite a revelation to the natives that the British were able to fight at all, and from this time forward their prestige was established in the East, The battle which mainly decided the issue, as between English and French, was not fought until three years later, for at Plassey there had been only a few French supporting the native forces. But at Wandewash, in 1760, the battle was between British and French almost wholly, and its result was a decisive British victory. From that time forward Britain was always regarded as the principal European power in India and on all the eastern sea-coasts.

That was the mark made in the East on this greatest of all stories by the Seven Years' War.

Its mark was planted no less deeply on the western side. Montreal and Quebec were French towns at the beginning of the war. Moreover, Montcalm, the French governor, had established the authority of the French, supported by a chain of forts, right away west as far as the Mississippi. Take out the atlas, and, remembering that the French possession of Louisiana at that time stretched right up from New Orleans at the Mississippi's mouth to the Great Lakes, you will realise what this meant to the British people in America. {133} It meant that they were completely hemmed in and shut off from all access to the West.

Canada gained by England

Pitt seems to have realised it. He sent out a strong force, which was ably helped by the militia called up from the British who were settled in America. Montcalm appears to have shown much genius for friendship with the Indians, and he had many of their tribes to aid his French forces. But the British gained post after post, and the crowning victory was won by Wolfe in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham, which dominate Quebec. Canada was won for Great Britain. The way to the almost boundless West was opened to men of British race. France's dream of Western empire was broken as completely as her dream of empire in the East. Florida, moreover, became British under the terms of the Peace of Paris, being assigned to Great Britain in return for Cuba and the Philippine Islands which had been taken from the Spaniards during the war.

1760, the year of the Wandewash battle in India, saw two great battles in Europe, one on land, at Minden, and one on sea, in Quiberon Bay, in both of which the French were heavily beaten. They happened at a moment when Frederick's fortunes were at low ebb, and were sorely needed. In the land battles the French were broken by a charge of the English line which seems to have been delivered contrary to all then recognised rules of war. At sea the French fleet was practically destroyed by the English under Admiral Hawke just when it was actually preparing for an invasion of England.

And the rewards of these conquests, both East and West, were confirmed to Britain by that Peace of Paris which terminated the Seven Years' War.

{134}

We have come to a moment in our story at which the events which modified it most importantly occurred, not in Europe at all, but in that new West which was still British. Before considering them, however, it will be well to gather up some loose ends of the European story.

There had been some rearrangement of territory, in the year 1767, between Denmark and Sweden, by which most of what we may see on modern maps marked as Schleswig-Holstein was given over to Denmark in exchange for the Duchy of Oldenburg; but a rearrangement of far more importance was that which is known as the first partition of Poland in 1772. It was a mutual arrangement, between the three strong powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, to dismember and embody as parts of themselves such pieces of Polish territory as lay most neighbourly to their own boundaries.

The Seven Years' War had been in large measure brought about by a rather similar design against Prussia and Poland seems to have been one of the consenting parties, if not an active partaker, in that proposed robbery. Now a robbery yet more audacious was not only proposed but actually perpetrated upon her. She was powerless to resist; though there had been a time when she was a great power and {135} Russia was scarcely heard of, Austria no more than the boundary buffer state between the Teuton and the Slav, and Prussia of no account whatever in the story. This first partition was followed by a second and yet a third rather more than twenty years afterwards. By that latest division she was almost wholly swallowed up in Russia and ceased to exist as an independent State until her comparatively recent resuscitation.

Expansion of Russia

On whatever side we now look of the boundaries of Russia we see them continuously extending. Her armies defeat the Tartars eastward, the Turks southward; she destroys a large Turkish fleet; she gains the extensive region called White Russia, and the Crimea, and sends conquering armies into the Balkan States, where the Bulgarian Slavs are establishing themselves ever more firmly as an independent nation. Largely it is by reason of the growing power of Russia that the Turks, are more and more compelled to fight for their existence and for their hold on even a part of their wide conquests in Europe. They are no longer fighting to extend them. And at the same time, that is to say, in 1768, Egypt, under the Mamelukes, throws off the domination of the Ottomans. Originally these Mamelukes themselves were Turkish—a bodyguard of Turkish slaves enrolled for the protection of the Egyptian rulers. They had revolted and seized the government soon after the reign of Saladin. And it is worthy of note that in the midst of all the fighting which goes on in and around the Balkans between Venetians, Turks, Russians, and others, the little mountain State of Montenegro always retains her independence. Though often attacked, she is never subdued. Her story may remind us of those valiant and invincible Swiss, for doubtless it is because of the mountainous character of the two countries alike, giving the defence such a great advantage over the {136} attack, that the heroic defenders of both kept their homeland free against enemies whose numbers were many times greater than their own.

Now, turning to the far western side of the stage, the leading feature of the drama is that the British had established themselves as the great power in America. They had little to fear now from the French. And the reason why that fact is of such vast importance in the story is that, had it not been for that freedom from the French menace, the independence of the United States could not possibly have been won as, and at the time when, it was won. We may regard that independence as a good thing or a bad thing for the world: we may think it better for the world that there should be this great free nation in the West, not united by any political ties with Europe; or we may, on the contrary, deem that the peace and prosperity of man would be better served if the United States belonged to that confederation of States which we call the British Empire—although "Empire" is rather a misleading name for it. The voice of the Anglo-Saxon communities would certainly speak even more forcibly than it does in the world's counsels if there were such union and such unity.

But, whatever view we may take as to that, we cannot but see that the English settlers in America could never, with even tolerable safety, have declared themselves independent of the British Government, if they had still had the French menace hanging over them. They could not possibly have dispensed with the support of the British army and navy. But after the defeat of the French in Canada they were free to assert themselves.

George III

And again whatever be our opinion about this great splitting up into two branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock, we of England are painfully obliged to realise {137} that it was England's fault. It came about owing to the obstinacy and the despotic ideas of that king of the Hanoverian Royal family, George III., who was on the throne of Great Britain. He even tried his hardest, but in vain, to suppress the newspapers which dared to comment on matters of public interest at home. As a foreigner, and very ignorant of the temper of the people, he was in some degree to be excused. He could scarcely be expected to know better than he did.

There were those about him whom we might have expected to know better—his Prime Ministers, and notably Lord Grenville and Lord North. But Lord Grenville was as proud and arrogant as the king himself, and Lord North was not at all a clever man, and, besides, was the absolute servant of his king, not daring to assert his voice against his master's, as Pitt, who had been Prime Minister a little while before, had dared often and long.

We have to realise that the actual government was very much in the hands of the king at this date. Then, as now, it was nominally the Parliament that governed. The Cabinet, in fact, does most of the business to-day. Under George III. it was George III. that governed, because the Parliament was full of "the king's friends," as they were called—members whom affection or bribery or some other form of interest influenced so that they could be relied on to support any measures which the king wished to be carried.

The population and the wealth of the British colonies in America had grown very rapidly. At the beginning of George III.'s reign the colonists are said to have numbered nearly a million and a half, which was then just about a fourth of the population of the mother country. And there was already half a million of slaves in the South.

{138}

The slaves were already creating a difference between the South and the North, or, shall we say, were emphasising and widening the difference created by the different type of colonist by which the two districts were populated. For Virginia and the other southern States had been occupied largely by emigrants from the West of England and by aristocratic families, and with the slaves to work for them they tended to divide up the country into large estates; whereas in the North, whither the emigrants had come from a lower social stratum at home, and where they had no slaves to work for them, the holdings were small.

In religion the Virginians were mainly of the Established English Church. In Maryland, the inhabitants were chiefly Roman Catholic. In New England, Puritans were in a large majority; and in Pennsylvania, the State of William Penn, the people were largely Quakers.

It was for the sake of religion that most of them, or their forbears, had left their native land. And just because the religions were so many and various, it was impossible that there could be any established Church among them in the land of their adoption. Men were free to serve God according to the dictates of their consciences.

Each State was governed by an Assembly elected by its own people and by a Governor appointed by the Crown. The States had their "charters"—documents in which were drawn up their rights and their duties—and so long as they acted within the provisions of those characters the Governor had no right or reason to interfere. The right of taxing themselves for the purpose of administering their own affairs was given them. The home Government derived a revenue from the colonies by the duties charged on articles which they imported by sea. And the colonies were obliged {139} by their charters to engage in no trade overseas except with the home country.

This last provision had not been faithfully observed, and a considerable trade was going on illicitly between the British and the Spanish colonies. Britain, short of money by reason of the cost of the Seven Years' War, raised the import duties and enforced the prohibition against trading with the Spaniards.

Certain of the expenses of the war had been incurred for the protection of the colonies, and though they might not welcome this action of the home Government they could not legally resist it. Nor did they. But then the king and his minister Grenville imposed, or sought to impose, on them a tax which surely was illegal and which surely they were within their rights in resisting.

The Stamp Act

It was imposed by the piece of legislation known as the Stamp Act, because its object was to levy money from the colonists by making it illegal for them to buy and sell certain articles within the colonies themselves unless they bore a government stamp; for which stamp payment had to be made to the home Government.

It was a manifest breach of the agreement which had been made with the colonists, and the principal effect of the passing of this Stamp Act in 1765 was that the colonists called together a Congress of delegates from all the colonies and passed a protest against the Act and a demand for its repeal. More than that; when the ship came into Boston harbour carrying the first batch of the stamps to be used for the new tax, they had the stamps seized and retained. It was open defiance. It was defiance by something like three millions of determined people, the population having nearly doubled itself since the beginning of George III.'s reign. Pitt's generous comment upon it is well known: "Three millions of people so dead to all {140} feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest."

It was chiefly Pitt's influence which led to the repeal of the Act in 1766; but much of the good effect of its repeal must have been spoiled by a measure called the "Declaratory Act," passed at the same time, declaring that the power of the British Parliament was supreme over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." It was as much as to say, "We yield on this particular point, but we maintain that our right over you is despotic whensoever we think fit to exercise it." It did, in fact, claim to enslave, as Pitt indicated, these people, because, as we have seen all through the story, it was by insistence on the right to tax themselves that Britons had painfully won liberty: it was a right expressed in the words "no taxation without representation": and here was a declaration directly opposed to that right, for it declared that the home Government might tax the colonists, although they had no representation in the home Government!

But for the moment the trouble passed. The colonists had all the substance of victory in the repeal of the Stamp Act: they could afford to disregard the shadowy threat of the Declaratory Act. They may have thought that, since the king and Parliament had yielded to their resistance once, they were not likely to challenge that resistance again. But King George appears to have been incapable of learning. Seven years later the trouble broke out anew, again provoked by the question of taxation. The colonists protested against import duties which they considered illegal and oppressive, and their protest was met by the withdrawal of all the duties objected to except that on tea. They accepted this withdrawal, and this exception, amicably; but they countered the exception by generally refusing to drink tea, so that no {141} tea was imported and no duty on it was payable. It was a situation which would be laughable if the consequences had not been so tragic.

Opposition to the tea duty

Despite the non-tea-drinking resolution, English ships laden with tea put into Boston harbour towards the end of 1773, doubtless with a view to landing it. Whether or no it would have been landed we can never know, for the ships while in harbour were boarded by a mob disguised as wild Indians and all the tea-chests were thrown into the sea.

Again it would be laughable but for the tragic consequence. The colonial Governments deplored the lawless act and were ready to make compensation. But the king, who had ever bewailed what he called "the fatal compliance" in the repeal of the Stamp Act, would accept no expression of regret. Measures were introduced into Parliament for closing the port of Boston to all commerce, by way of punishment for the act of "hooliganism," as we now should call it, and virtually all the liberties granted by charter to the State of Massachusetts, of which Boston was the chief city, were withdrawn. Troops were sent out to enforce these decrees, and the general in command was appointed Governor of the State with powers such as had never before been vested in any governor of any American colony.

The citizens of Massachusetts refused to obey the enactments of the Governor, and all the colonies in America sooner or later came to the support of Massachusetts. And that is no matter for our wonder, seeing that they must have felt that what was done to Massachusetts to-day might be done to them to-morrow. They must quickly have realised that their best hope of liberty lay in opposing a united front to the servitude that threatened them. It might seem but a slender hope; yet we may remember that those colonists of a new world were far more apt to make {142} good fighters than agriculturists or townsfolk in a long settled land. They were still surrounded by hostile tribes of Red Indians. Many of themselves, and most of their forefathers, must have lived with rifle ever ready at hand, for protection against sudden attack, while they went about their tasks of peace. They were doubtless quick-witted, as men needs must be who are constantly facing new conditions. They were tough, determined men, and in their struggle to be free they found a man to lead them—George Washington.

Of their tough quality the British soldiers made experience in the first serious clash of arms at Bunker's Hill. I cannot tell you, in a story of barest outlines like this, the details of the long drawn-out fighting, how the cause of the colonists' freedom seemed now and again all but lost, how the fortunes of the war went this way and that. For its changes were scarcely less remarkable than those of the Seven Years' War in Europe. The quality that served the colonists best and enabled them to win through was that essentially British quality of refusing to believe themselves defeated. They endured with an extraordinary steadfastness and they recovered themselves when beaten to the ground with a marvellous resilience.

Even after fighting had begun, a reconciliation might have been made had the counsels of Lord Chatham prevailed at home. George Washington was representative of the great landowners of Virginia. By their traditions, and also owing to the fact that their state lay far south of that Massachusetts which was the immediate sufferer by the British tyranny, the Virginians clung more closely and longer to the mother country than any of the other colonial children. But their clinging was of no use. Chatham's good counsel was rejected. Washington, as leader of the nation in war, was probably the more looked up to {143} because he had tried so hard for peace. His face now was set as firmly towards the prosecution of the war as it had been towards peace while any hope of favourable peace was left. And every year of the war's duration revealed more and more his rare character for wisdom, determination, and moderation.

Course of the War

A solemn and formal declaration of the independence of the United States of America was made on July 4th, 1776, but all that year and the greater part of the next the fighting went hardly for the colonists until, in October, 1777, the British under Burgoyne suffered their first serious—and it was very serious—defeat at Saratoga.

It was a disaster to the British arms which had far-reaching effects. France was still seething with discontent over the loss of colonies in the Seven Years' War. Now, encouraged by the event of Saratoga, she declared war on Great Britain. Spain shortly followed her lead. And in the same year Lord Chatham died. A little later Holland took the side of the enemies of Great Britain also, provoked by the claims of Britain to search the ships of neutral nations for arms or other "contraband of war" which they might be carrying for the Americans. Sweden, Russia, and Denmark united in an "armed neutrality" compact against her, to enforce the freedom of the seas and the right which they claimed for their ships to cross the ocean without liability to be searched.

A further effect of Saratoga was that the British armies took the field no more in the northern States, but concentrated in the south. There they held their own, if not more than their own, until in 1781 a second blow, even more calamitous than that of Saratoga, befell them. The generals in command of the sections of the British did not work in harmony. Lord Cornwallis was disappointed in the support which he had expected, and entrenched himself behind {144} defensive lines in York Town in Virginia. The French fleet held the sea. Washington marched round and cut him off from supplies by land. He was driven by famine to surrender, with all his army.

It was the end of the war. It was the establishment, never again to be shaken, of the independence of the United States of America. It looked grievously like the end of Great Britain as a leading power in the world. Ireland rose against her in a clamour for what virtually was independence, Spain claimed Gibraltar as the price of peace, and France demanded that Great Britain should give over to her the greater part of British India.

Then, in that very dark hour for England, deliverance came, as more than once before, from the sea. Lord Rodney had already struck a disabling blow at a main portion of the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent; and now, in 1782, he dealt what really was a shattering stroke on the French fleet in the West Indies. These naval victories and the repulse of the French and Spanish ships beleaguering Gibraltar disposed those nations to agree to terms of peace in which England could acquiesce without dishonour. She lost nothing to France; to Spain she resigned the island of Minorca and gave back Florida; and—she lost the United States.

{145}

Thus England's star went setting in the West; but in the East coincidentally it rose continuously to greater glory. Plassey had given Bengal into her hands; Wandewash had made her authority dominant in Southern India. But as yet it was not England, the nation and the King of England, that held this scarcely defined authority. It was the great trading concern known as the East India Company.

"Some have greatness thrust upon them"; and this was remarkably true of the empire of India which Great Britain was really compelled by the force of circumstances to assume. The trading company did not desire to govern the country: they wished to fulfil their original purpose of trade, of making money. It was the aggression of the French and the oppression of the native ruler of Bengal, as we have seen, which obliged them to fight for the very liberty to trade. Further, they were compelled to maintain some kind of order in the districts in which they thus became supreme. It was not easy for them to do this under their charter as traders. The government of the native princes of Bengal was inefficient and corrupt and the people under them were in misery. An Act of the British Parliament in 1773 appointed a Governor-General with powers over all the British possessions in {146} India. Warren Hastings, a civilian in the Company's service, was the first to hold that high post, and with a strong hand he reduced to nothing the powers of the worst of the native rulers and made the government of the better among them less ineffective and corrupt. With the rulers of some of the independent States he entered into treaties and alliances. The idea of Britain's Indian Empire seems to have been born in the brain of Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings

And the peculiar conditions of India made the realisation of that idea not only possible but inevitable. Through the whole of her story Hindustan has been a land of constant strife between various races settled on her soil and between those settled races and warlike tribes coming down upon her from the north through the passes of her great boundary mountains, the Himalayas. But the greatest cleavage of all among her people was that which still exists between the Moslems and the Hindus of the Buddhist faith. All the many divisions have been causes of jealousies and fighting, but none so constant and prolonged as those due to these two opposed faiths. It is that opposition, in the main, which has made the British Empire in India both possible and necessary—possible, because without that cleavage there might well have been a union of native strength sufficient to withstand the British domination, and necessary, because at every step the British found their trade and their peace imperilled by disturbances beyond the latest limits within which they had made good their authority. They were impelled, for their own mere safety, to push that authority further and further again. And it was a necessity imposed on them also by consideration for the sufferings of the natives in some of the worst governed States. It was a veritable "white man's burden" laid, of no will of their own, and sometimes sorely against their will, upon their shoulders.

WARREN HASTINGS

{147}

Warren Hastings had to stand a prolonged trial on his return home for what almost certainly were acts of exceeding harshness in his dealings with some of the native rulers. He was acquitted; and it is not possible for us now to try him over again. Almost certainly he dealt very hardly; but almost as certainly no man who did not deal very hardly could have done {148} what he did to bring a large part of India under a government which gave its subjects greater peace and happiness than they had known before.

As we know, there was another power besides the French with which Great Britain came into collision in the East—the Dutch. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been much ill-will in Holland against England. Holland only a little while before had been the chief naval power in the Northern seas. Her ships had even come conquering and destroying far up the Thames. And now the Dutch saw that supremacy gradually taken from them; the British Government actually passing resolutions to restrain their free right of traffic on the high seas. And at the same time Great Britain was taking much, and constantly more and more, of the carrying trade away from Holland; Great Britain was trading more and more, on her own behalf and on that of other nations, with the East; Great Britain was bringing to the West, from her ever-growing Eastern possessions, the produce of the East which used to be brought from the Dutch colonies in Dutch ships; some of these colonies and trading settlements themselves were being taken from the Dutch by the British; and where the Dutch rights were not very firmly established British traders set up settlements to compete with them.

A state of actual war between the countries existed from 1780 to 1784. The terms of the treaty which put an end to that active warfare could not put an end to their constant trade rivalry in the East in which Great Britain was usually the gainer and Holland the loser. By the date of the great convulsions caused by the French Revolution we find Holland so diminished in power as to be ready to do the bidding of Great Britain and of Prussia.

It was thus that Britain's star rose higher and {149} brighter in the East even as it sank in the West, and if we look to the far southern quarter of the world stage we find it in the ascendant there also, for in 1787 New Zealand was declared a British possession, and that declaration was followed in the next year by the colonisation of New South Wales. The beginning of the British occupation of the west coast of Africa dates from the same time. On every side therefore, except along that eastern fringe of the American continent where the colonists had gloriously won their independence, the British, the Anglo-Saxons, were extending their sway.

Poyning's Act Repealed

There was one people, British yet not Anglo-Saxon, very, much nearer the home centre, who made a bold claim, and in part a successful claim, at this moment for their independence—the Irish. By a law of George I., known as Poyning's Act, from its proposer, no measure passed by the Parliament of Ireland could become law until it had received the assent of the King of England. It was this law of which the Irish, under the lead of Grattan, their great orator, obtained the repeal in the year 1782, taking advantage of the dire straits in which England then found herself. It needs but a moment's thought to show that this repeal meant all the difference between a dependent and an independent Parliament in Ireland. It put Irishmen into the position that they were free to legislate in all Irish matters without interference from England. Irishmen in large numbers had before this emigrated to America, and naturally had been active in inflaming the anti-English feeling in the colonies. Besides all political reasons, and the real grievances under which the Irish had suffered from the English, the fact that the great majority of them were Catholics was an added occasion why these people of a Celtic origin could not be at rest under the government of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

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Church of Rome in Ireland

The political power of the Church of Rome, that is to say, the power of the Pope to interfere in the government, had received some severe checks even in the countries where Roman Catholicism was the religion of the State. As early as 1753 the Pope had yielded to the King of Spain the power to make appointments to the high dignities in the Church; but still the Romish Church meddled with politics abroad. Such interference was resented by the despotic kings of the Bourbon branch of the great Capet stock, both in France and Spain. The political activities of the very able and energetic order of Jesuits gave special offence to the Governments. Portugal had commenced the campaign against them by driving them out as early as 1759. In France their activities were suppressed five years later. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain, and within a very few years such pressure was put upon the Pope that he was obliged to break up their order in Italy itself. We have seen how Spain was ground beneath the heel of the Inquisition—not acting under orders from Rome but on its own initiative. Now, that is to say, in 1774, the Spanish Government asserted itself to confine the judicial power of the Inquisition to ecclesiastical cases; that is to say, that its officials might only arrest and try and punish the people guilty, or suspected of guilt, against the laws of the Church. Before that, it had been in the habit of arresting and trying and punishing persons suspected of breaking the common law of the land, the civil law. The Inquisition's claim to try these civil cases had been without legal warrant, but the Government had not till now found the courage to resist it. And this withdrawal of all such cases out of the hands of the Inquisition gave a blow that was really deadly to the power of that cruel and dreaded institution, though it was not finally abolished until nearly half a century later.

Thus, in all these strongholds of the Roman {151} Catholic faith the political activity of the Church was checked. It received no such check, however, in Ireland. That island was as true a stronghold of the old faith as any of those others and had escaped, as they had not, much, both of the darkening of the faith in the Middle Ages, and also of the storms that shook it in the Reformation. Rome's authority received no check from any Government in Ireland, because it had never come up against the authority of an Irish Government. During the years in which other Governments were growing restive under the political interference of the Church, and latterly of the Jesuits more particularly, there was no independent Government in Ireland, and the native leaders of Ireland were ready enough to welcome any form of interference with England's Government. For this reason the Church continued to be politically active in Ireland—always in opposition to Protestant England—without arousing the hostility to which it had been obliged to yield in other Catholic countries.

And now the course of this Greatest Story has brought us to the years in which the centre of the stage begins to be occupied by the tragic figure of France struggling in the throes of her revolution. Even at that time, although communication was comparatively very difficult and slow, the tremors of the revolution were felt over nearly all the world stage. Temporarily it changed the map of Europe beyond recognition. And not only temporarily, but for all time, it changed the minds of men not only in Europe, but nearly the whole world over.

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The position in Europe at this time, that is to say, about 1790, was singular and interesting. That continent, always since the establishment of the power of Rome the stage on which the principal world drama was played, was in the enjoyment of a peace which was unexpected. A time of extreme tension, during which war on a great scale had seemed most probable, had just been safely passed—war provoked by the ambition of Russia still further to extend her vast territories, and especially to acquire the port of Constantinople.

But first it seemed good to her to proceed to a second partition of Poland, and Poland lay at her mercy, unless some foreign power intervened. Annexation perhaps would be a better word than partition, for she had little thought of letting in another to share with her.

Alliance against Rome

Another power, however, namely Prussia, with Frederick as its king, claimed a share, and drew the Emperor and King of Austria into alliance with him. Austria, also, demanded her slice of Polish land, and in consequence of these conflicting claims, the whole scheme was allowed to drop for the time being.

The next act in the drama was that Prussia and Austria fell to quarrelling over the latter's proposal to annex Bavaria, and of that quarrel Russia took {153} advantage to seek the alliance of Austria with the design of parcelling out between the Russian and the Austrian powers, the territory of the Turks in Europe and establishing herself as mistress of Constantinople.

Again it was Prussia that stepped in to foil the scheme, and this time Prussia had once again on her side her old ally, Great Britain. The American war and the formation of that Northern League, as it was called, of the neutral powers who opposed Great Britain's claim to search their ships, and so on, had made a breach of that friendship, for Prussia had been a member of the League. But now that trouble was healed. The two old allies had come together again over the business of restoring the Stadholder, the constitutional ruler, of Holland, who had been driven out by a revolutionary movement. Holland also, therefore, came as a third into the alliance, now reformed, between Great Britain and Prussia for the special purpose, as was said, of preserving the Turkish Empire. The real motive of the compact was probably to hold Russia in check; but no doubt the other way of putting it sounded more unselfish. A very great struggle appeared imminent. But the danger passed, yet again, as soon as Austria realised the strength of the opposition. She withdrew from the war with Turkey, and Russia, left alone, did not press it. The war cloud passed. Men might again draw their breath freely after a time of breathless suspense in which the worst had been expected. They were free to sit in the audience and look on at the great events that quickly followed upon each other in France.

In course of telling this greatest of all stories I have thought it worth to turn aside now and again from the direct narrative in order to attempt a brief sketch of the peoples that have played a leading part in it. The tough tenacity of the Jews, the subtle intellectual curiosity of the Greeks, the determination and {154} directness of purpose of the Romans have been such important moving forces in the history of the world that they claim to be considered. No less consideration is due at this point to the national character of the French. It is largely because of that character that the Revolution took place at all. It was a Revolution not only in the government of France, but in the thoughts of men all over the world. And it was largely because of the French national character that Napoleon's empire, rising out of the ruin wrought by the Revolution, had force to extend itself even more widely than that of Charlemagne.

We are able to realise something of the qualities of the national character which had such remarkable results; but I think we are obliged to confess ourselves unable to give a very perfect account of the causes which made it such as it was. For the French nation, after all, as its very name implies, is the nation of the Franks; and the Franks were but one of the many Gothic tribes which came breaking through the weakened defences of the later Roman Empire. Then, having so broken through, they found themselves in contact with the settlers already in possession of the land; and no doubt this contact modified more than a little the national character which they brought with them. Probably most of the settlers whom they would find, and by whose influence they would be affected, would be of the Latin race; and therefore the blend would be in the main a Franco-Latin blend.

But this Franco-Latin is really nothing more, as we have just said, than a Gothic-Latin—or Germano-Latin, if you like—and the other Gothic or German tribes coming in would be subject to just the same blend, so far as we can see, and therefore we should naturally expect to find the same characteristics in them all.

But certainly we do not. Certainly the Batavians, {155} who settled to the northward of the Franks, and the Burgundians who settled to their westward, did not show the same blend. We have seen how the subtlety of Louis XI. proved too much at last for the audacity of his great Burgundian vassal, Charles the Bold, and after Burgundy had become part of the French kingdom its national characteristics do seem gradually to have blended nearly into identity with those of the French.

The Visigoths passing on into Spain became subject to other influences. They do not come into the comparison.

But the Batavians and the peoples of the Netherlands generally, where the Batavians settled, were very different from the French. Doubtless there was an increasing blend of Latin as the invaders went south, but an adequate reason for their difference is hard to find.

The French character

At all events what we can say confidently is that the French developed, and still express, a national character of their own which is distinct from that of the others that broke through the bounds. It is also different from that of those German peoples who did not break through, who remained east of the Roman Empire's palisades.

One distinguishing characteristic of the French is that they are very "quick at the uptake," as we say: their minds respond quickly to suggestion, and they act quickly on the ideas thus quickly grasped. Thinking and acting more quickly than, say, Britons or Germans, they also set a much higher value on presenting to themselves a clear reason for any action that they undertake. The Briton, and in less degree the German, is tolerably well content to do the act which appears likely to give the best result, without troubling himself much as to what account he would give of the action if he were required to explain just {156} why, in accordance with what law of right reason, he so acted. The French mind is not at ease unless it can refer an act back to some such reason as its motive. And one of the tendencies of that disposition of mind is that, if the French once perceive a reason of this kind clearly, they act according to it and are very readily obedient to its prompting.

So it was that when the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote about Egalité, Fraternité, and Liberté, with the idea that all men were created equal (and therefore ought to be equal always), that all men ought to live in brotherly love, and that all men should be free, these ideas won an immediate influence over the minds of Frenchmen that they would not have exercised over the minds of Britons or Germans. No doubt they are pleasant ideas, and would be very welcome, if they could be practically realised, to all reasonable men of any country; but on the French their effect was such that the nation at once had an eager desire to act on them. Frenchmen deemed that they might bring about the millennium, or a heaven on earth, by striving for their realisation.

Rousseau, then, and other writers inspired with his sentiments, prepared the minds of men in France for revolution. Many, with an ardour for freedom from the hard conditions which bound them, went as volunteers to help the Americans fighting against England. Those who returned came back with their ardour further kindled.

Now most of the historians write as if the immediate occasion of the Revolution was the misery, the oppression, the poverty, and the hunger of the lowest classes in the towns and in the country. Yet other historians, perhaps more judicious, tell us that, evil as their condition was, it was certainly no worse than that of the lowest classes elsewhere on the Continent. Let us admit, at any rate, that it was a cruelly evil {157} condition and left much to be desired. What was different in France was the very rigid division between the classes of society and the fact, noticed before, that the king had all the real power in his own hands. The nobles and large landowners had none, except over their own dependants.

Thus there was no link, no connexion, between the Government and the great mass of the governed: the governed were dumb; they could not make their voices heard.

The "States General"

The reckless extravagance of three successive French kings had exhausted the treasury. Money was needed for the bare necessities of Government, for the pay of soldiers and officials. His ministers having failed to devise a means of raising the sums required, the king, Louis XVI., called together the "States General," a measure to which the Government had not resorted since the early years of the seventeenth century.

This States General was an assembly of the whole nation of France represented by deputies elected by the three great classes, the nobles, the Church, and the commoners. Each class elected its own deputies and sent them up to Paris to take counsel together and assist the Government in its distress.

The deputies of the three estates came to Paris in 1789, and though they did not succeed in finding money for the Government, they did succeed in finding a voice for the people. And it was by this voice that the Revolution was declared.

Trouble began over the manner in which votes were to be recorded. The clergy and the nobles demanded that each estate should give a single vote on any measure under discussion, and since clergy and nobles were likely to cast similar votes, the result would then be that the commoners would be outvoted. The commoners demanded that the votes of all three {158} estates should be given in mass, a vote by each deputy. And since the deputies of the commoners outnumbered the other two combined, this would give them a majority. The clergy and nobles thereupon began their deliberations and excluded the deputies of the third estates from the assembly hall.

The deputies of the people, thus isolated, went in a body to the neighbouring tennis court, and there began their deliberations apart from the deputies of the other classes. They assumed the name of the National Assembly and took an oath not to dissolve until they had given France a constitution under which men might live in the desired condition of equality, brotherhood, and liberty. They commenced their sitting on June 20th, 1789.

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THE MODERN PALACE OF VERSAILLES, FRANCE.

On July 14th the mob of Paris rose, and broke the walls of the Bastille, the great State prison, loosing the captives. The whole city was in their hands. The troops within the city were of the same mind as the mob.

Similar risings, with like effects, occurred nearly all over France.

In October the mob marched on Versailles and the king's palace; they sacked the palace and compelled the king and Royal family to come to live in Paris, where they were practically prisoners.

The Assembly effected something towards getting money to carry on with, by printing paper money and paying the debts of the Government with the notes. And continually the most violent of the extreme party gained more and more power in it, most notably the Jacobins, so called from a club whose members gathered in what had once been a house of the Jacobin friars.

In the spring of 1791 the king and Royal family attempted to escape, secretly, out of France, but were recognised before they reached the frontier and {160} forcibly brought back. The aristocrats all over the country had fled from the persecution, or had been caught in the attempt, and forced to return. Large numbers were imprisoned, given a form of trial and decapitated by the guillotine. A mob stormed the Tuileries, where the Royal family were living, and the king barely escaped with his life. He implored the help and mercy of the Assembly, and for the time being the whole of the Royal family were kept closely imprisoned.

Amidst all these horrors, in the autumn of 1792 a French army showed the first sign of what the soldiers of revolutionary France could do by the defeat of a force of Prussians and Austrians marching on Paris to restore Louis to the throne. One of the immediate results was that, early in the following year, the king was tried for treason and conspiracy against the nation, was sentenced to death and beheaded. He was soon followed to the guillotine by the queen, his wife. Their son, styled Louis XVII., though he never reigned, died in prison.

That was an act which at once bound the enemies of France into some sort of unity against her. Hitherto there had been much division of opinion, in England especially, about the events of the Revolution. There had been sympathy with a people fighting to be free.

The act of king-killing and of queen-killing alienated all sympathy among the nations ruled by kings. They made a solid ring around republican France, and France herself fell more and more into the hands of the extremists, governing by terror and by executions. All suspected of sympathy with the aristocrats fell by the guillotine. Even the deposed revolutionary leaders themselves, who had not gone far enough to please the yet more murderous leaders that followed them, were arraigned and executed.

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The Reign of Terror, as it was well named, reached its terrible height when Robespierre was chief man in the Government, and after he too, failing in an attempt to commit suicide, had suffered the death to which he had consigned a thousand others, the murders committed in the name of justice and patriotism abated. The worst of the Terror passed.

France and her foes

So here was this poor vexed country, thus cruelly misgoverned, ringed round by the kings under arms. What chance had she? Perhaps her best chance lay in the fact that in spite of the misery there was much enthusiasm in the people. After Robespierre's death in 1794 they might draw breath and consider what all the bloodshed had meant, and they might conclude that it meant that they had won France for themselves, for the French people, out of the hands of the king. Therefore it was their own France, their own country, that they saw now menaced by the ring of monarchs. England, Prussia, Austria Spain—in whichever direction France looked she saw an enemy.

She had, as before in the days of the Habsburg menace, the advantage of her central position. Moreover, she had the advantage of one single purpose, namely, her very existence, over those enemies who, although they might coalesce against her, yet had their own rivalries and jealousies. On the northern frontier, where the troops of Austria, Prussia, England, and Holland were gathered, the fortunes of war went badly, for a time, for France. There was a moment when the Allies, if they had shown unity of purpose and determination, might have marched on Paris with but little opposition. Besides the enemy on the frontier, the republic had her own enemies, who were still in favour of the monarchy, within, especially in the district of La Vendée in the west and in some of the large towns of the south.

The indecision of the Allies allowed France a {162} breathing space, and she made wonderful use of her opportunity.

We have to realise two points in particular, first the singular and tragic condition of the French armies at the moment—short of pay, short of equipment, short of seasoned soldiers, and especially short of experienced leaders, because most of those who should have led them had been executed or were in prison expecting execution—and secondly the fact that the methods of making war and of fighting battles were in a transition state, from the old fashion to the new.

The old fashion of fighting had been, roughly speaking, for the armies to advance in a mass, firing as they went, until one yielded and fell back or until they clashed together with the bayonet. Now the new method was introduced of keeping a big body of troops in reserve, to throw in, and so gain a decision in the battle, after the first encounter of the others. And gradually that disposition of the troops developed into the throwing forward of a single line of shooters in advance of the main body—skirmishers as they came to be called, when the thinning of the line was brought to its extreme.

Together with that new way of fighting battles, there came in a new idea of war. For the old idea had been chiefly to capture some important city or fortress of the enemy, and so to gain a decision in the campaign. The new idea was that a decision might be most quickly and convincingly reached by destroying the enemy's army. And, with that new idea, the value of time seems to have been appreciated more fully—the importance, that is to say, of arriving in numbers at a certain place before the enemy could have time to mass his forces there, and so of beating his armies piecemeal, before they could be concentrated.

As a very rough sketch, that may perhaps serve {163} to give a notion of the way in which war and battles were changing.

It was out of the great danger menacing her very life as a nation that France was now able to draw new strength. The Government passed a decree that all men of suitable age were liable to conscription to the army. They were called on to fight for their own hearths and homes. It was not unlike the idea which had inspired the earliest Roman legions.

Republican victories

The Allies had lost their opportunity. They did not drive their stroke home. France, with much reinforced armies, took the offensive again. She poured into the Netherlands and into Holland. It was indeed only due to the inexperience of her own commanders, and to the interference of her Government with the generals, that the defeats of the Allies were no heavier than they were. A conclusion, for the time being, of the fighting on that front was reached in 1795, when the Austrians retired from the Netherlands—which were then annexed to the French Republic—when Prussia made a separate peace with her, when the English armies were withdrawn, and when Holland was allowed to retain her nominal independence with the style of the Batavian Republic.

And so, ingloriously for the Allies, ended the first coalition against Revolutionary France. The young Republic was for the moment saved; yet it must have been hard to think that the salvation could be more than temporary, so many and so strong were her foes. Her crisis brought forth, for her rescue, the extraordinary being whom most historians agree in deeming the greatest military genius in the whole course of man's story—Napoleon Bonaparte, born, as we have seen, in that little island of Corsica only lately ceded to France by Genoa. It is ever difficult to say to what degree this or that remarkable man has influenced the story of mankind, but we can hardly {164} have a doubt of the immense effect due to the genius of Napoleon.

He came into notice first in course of the attack by the Republican troops on Toulon, which was held by Royalists aided by some English and Spanish ships. He was a Colonel of Artillery then, and conducted certain artillery operations with a masterly success.

After the death of Robespierre the chief power in the Government was put into the hands of a Council of five Directors. Together, they were called the Directory. It was their special business to see that the laws were carried out. The Paris mob did not appreciate the carrying out of the laws, and rose in protest, with the militia, called the National Guard, supporting them. They marched on the Tuileries, where the Government offices were established. The President, warned in time, summoned that young officer of artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was then in Paris, with his batteries, for their defence. Napoleon placed his guns to command the streets approaching the Tuileries, and when the columns of the mob appeared he opened fire on them with grapeshot. Grapeshot: consider the effect of it on those dense columns of humanity advancing through a street! Even the Paris mob, frantic with enthusiasm, could not stand such butchery. They wavered, halted, then streamed back, mangled and beaten. The Directory, the Government of the country, was saved. The reputation of that artillery officer, first heard of at Toulon, was made. He was appointed to the command of what was known as the Army of the Interior.

France and the kings

It was in 1795 that Prussia had made peace, that Austria had yielded the Netherlands, and that all immediate danger to France from the north had passed. And it was in the same year that the "whiff of grapeshot" ploughed its furrows through these living masses, {165} and may be said to have ended the French Revolution, properly so-called. From that time forward the story is not of revolution in the heart of France but of France struggling with, and strangling, the kings of Europe. And the struggle and the strangling are all dominated by one man and his amazing personality—Napoleon.

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We have seen the Austrians fighting and suffering defeat from France in the Netherlands. There was another battle ground where these two had now to meet, and that was in the beautiful country of Northern Italy where the Austrian Habsburgs and the Bourbons of France and Spain had met many a time. Of all the Allies, Austria had the right to feel most bitterly towards the French, for the queen whom the French had beheaded was daughter of the Austrian Empress.

Napoleon I

As early as 1792 the armies of revolutionary France had swept over Savoy—at that time an independent State with which Sardinia was conjoined. Sardinians were now in the coalition against France, and there was a Sardinian army co-operating with the Austrians in North Italy. In 1796 Napoleon was put in command of the Army of Italy, and at once he gave evidence of those qualities which made him the master mind in war.

THE GREAT NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
(From an Engraving after a Portrait by Paul Delarothe.)

It is impossible here even to touch on his campaigns in any detail; nor is it possible to select any one campaign or a single battle as a type of his generalship or his tactics, because perhaps the chief reason of all his success is that he was so very able to vary them according to the needs of each case. It was this, that there was no reckoning what he was likely to do, that confused his enemies so greatly.

But in all his campaigns we find a common point, {167} that he realised probably more fully than any of his opponents the value of time, and had so masterly a power of organisation that he nearly always arrived at the place where he had determined to give battle before his enemies were ready for him.

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It was just so with this his first campaign in Italy. He was across the Alps, with his army, and into Milan and the Austrian dominions far quicker than he had been expected; and here he did execute one of his most favourite manœuvres, which, at all events, might always be foreseen if the opportunity for it were given him. He thrust his army in between the armies of the Austrians eastward and the Sardinians westward and so disabled the latter, and less powerful, foe from any valuable co-operation at the very outset. Then, turning eastward, he defeated the Austrians again and again, driving them from Italy and pursuing them far along the road to Vienna.

He turned southward thence and seized the lands of Venice. In the treaty which ended this campaign, in 1797, France gained the Netherlands, the Ionian Islands, and territory along the Rhine and in Albania. The following year the French were in Rome, which they captured, making the Pope a prisoner and establishing what was called the Tiberine Republic.

We have to note that in all these early battles of the French Republic, the victors—for they were nearly always victorious—came with the pretence, at all events, that their purpose was to relieve the populace from their burdens, their dukes and archdukes and kings. Accordingly they set up this Tiberine Republic along the Tiber, and the Transpadane Republic, of the country beyond the river Po, and the Cis-Alpine Republic on this side of the Alps, and so on. We have already seen how they had set up the Batavian Republic in Holland. By these fine promises and pretences they gained much favour with the civil population in all countries. In 1798 Napoleon was no longer in Italy: he was in Egypt, intent on extending the French power over the East—thus quickly had events moved since France, only three or four years before, had been fighting for her very existence among the nations of Europe!

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It was English sea-power that foiled him in that Eastern enterprise, and in the following years he was back again—badly needed. For there was war again with the Austrians, who had recuperated their forces in North Italy, and the fortunes of the war were going all against the French. They had been forced to retire from Italy and from a part of Switzerland which they had held. French armies, moreover, had suffered defeat on the Rhine, and in consequence the Directory had fallen from popular favour.

The First Consul

Rather as our Cromwell had once appeared, backed by his Ironsides, in Parliament, so now Napoleon made a dramatic entry into the Council Hall of the French Government. There was a cry from some of the legislators of "No Dictator," which Napoleon's friends, doubtless according to plan, chose to interpret as an attack on Napoleon's person. His soldiers entered, and turned the Assembly out of the Hall. The Assembly was dissolved, and a new constitution formed which entrusted the Government for ten years to three consuls, of whom Napoleon was nominated as the First Consul. The other two might be relied on to do his dictates. Thus, by the end of 1799 he was the virtual ruler of France.

By his diplomacy he came to terms with Russia, but Austrian armies still held North Italy. Taking the command again of the Army of Italy, he repeated the chief incidents of the former campaign. Again he crossed the Alps unexpectedly; again he beat the Austrians in Lombardy; the terms of the treaty which had ended the former battles were reaffirmed in 1801, and before the end of 1800 French victories on the Rhine had re-established the position there. Again there was a breathing space.

Beyond question we have to look on Napoleon as one of the most extraordinary of all the actors in our story. His intellectual powers, whether for the {170} organization of war or of peace, must have been almost more than human: his absence of any love for his fellows and of any kindness of heart must appear almost equally below the human mark. He had no regard for truth or for morality or religion in any form. Christian worship, abolished in France by the earlier revolutionary Governments, had been re-established. Napoleon was as ready to profess himself a good Catholic in France, as to pretend a leaning towards Mahommedanism in the East, in order to gain favour with the Orientals.

In spite of his lack of sympathy with mankind, he was a subtle judge of human nature. He observed men's weaknesses with a coldly critical eye. He knew that men—and Frenchmen more than most men, and perhaps women even more than men—are attracted and fascinated by show and splendour. Therefore, as First Consul, he caused all the ceremonies in connection with Government to be splendid; he encouraged or commanded his officers and civil servants to be richly dressed, and their wives and daughters to wear gorgeous gowns.

So, in this breathing space, all was triumph and splendour in Paris; but Napoleon had already, as we have seen, been thwarted in his great designs upon the East by the naval defeat which he suffered from the English in Egypt. He realised very clearly that England was the foe whom it was most essential that he should remove out of his way if he were to achieve all his ambitions for world power. As a first step he renewed that Armed Neutrality against her which had been formed by the Northern Powers when she was at war with the United States, and insisted on searching neutral vessels to see whether they were carrying what is called "contraband of war."

He forced Denmark, contrary to her will, into the compact. Against the unfortunate Denmark, then, {171} England declared war, in order to drive her to withdraw from the compact into which she had been forced so unwillingly; and compelled that withdrawal by a bombardment, under Nelson, of Copenhagen. It was here that Nelson, who was then only second in command, is recorded to have put up his telescope to his blind eye in order not to see the signal to break off the engagement which had been hoisted by the superior admiral.

Another special effort against England had been made by the French in 1797, who landed a force in Ireland; but it was not supported as had been expected by the native Irish and was broken to pieces the year following by the English troops. Ireland was then no part of the United Kingdom; but in 1801 was passed the Act of Union, whereby the two did become incorporated.

By 1803 there was again a state of active war between Great Britain and France, and Napoleon was threatening an invasion. He now had the navy of Spain to aid his own; but against him was a coalition of Russia, Austria, and Sweden. From the idea of invading England, he was called eastward and southward by the pressure of Austria and Russia, and there the French gained a great victory over the Austrians in the autumn of 1805.

Trafalgar

Four days later the united fleets of France and Spain met the British at Trafalgar, where Nelson destroyed them as a fighting force, but at the grievous cost to Britain of his own life.

Six weeks later again Napoleon fought the crowning land battle of that campaign at Austerlitz, when the Russian and Austrian armies suffered a crushing defeat which, for a time, ended the fighting and gave Europe another short spell of peace.

A principal result of this victory was the dissolution of that so-called Holy Roman Empire which had {172} existed since the days of Charlemagne. The title of German Emperor was no longer known. The electors were abolished. Kings were appointed by Napoleon to govern Wurtemberg and Bavaria, Hanover was given to Prussia, and other German States were formed into the Confederation of the Rhine. The ruler of Austria retained the title of Emperor of that country. Eighteen months earlier in the story a new emperor altogether had been created—Napoleon himself, as Emperor of the French.

H.M.S. "VICTORY" AFTER TRAFALGAR.

The cession of Hanover to Prussia cost France nothing, for Hanover was a kingdom under the Hanoverian King of England, to whom it was restored at the end of the wars. It was separated, as we have noticed already, from England when Queen Victoria came to the throne, because the Hanoverian succession was governed by the Salic Law which allows no female to succeed or to transmit the succession.

By this period in his career Napoleon was no longer posing as a republican come to free peoples from their kings. On the contrary, he became himself a {173} king-maker on the most extensive scale. Naples and Holland each had a brother of Napoleon's imposed on it as ruler. A little later it was the turn of Spain. One of his Marshals was named as successor to the throne of Sweden.

The "Continental System"

And now Prussia engaged his attentions. She had been a doubtful friend of both sides, for she had received Hanover from the hand of the victor and yet she professed to be the friend of England. In a single day Napoleon utterly smashed the elaborate Prussian fighting machine; and it was actually from Berlin that he proclaimed that state of blockade against England sometimes called the Continental system—as we should now say "boycotting England"—declaring her as an outlaw, outside the protection of the law of nations, and commanding that no Continental port should receive her ships.

This was in 1806. In 1807 came Russia's turn to receive chastisement. We may observe, however, that neither of the Eastern Empires, Russia or Austria, seems to have been disabled from further fighting by defeat. They had vast territories to retreat to and recuperate.

So far then has gone the tide of Napoleon's success, ever mounting. But now, in 1808, we begin to see it turn towards the ebb, and again it is England, though on land this time, that is chief in so turning it, for now begins the story of what we call the Peninsular War, waged in Spain and Portugal.

At first it is a story of England, of Wellington, on the defensive. Napoleon in person is in command of the French. He is once more called away eastward, to deal with Austria, and again he deals with her drastically. Once more he crushes her armies and extorts from her a peace which gives a large slice of her territories to France.

And something more it now pleased him to take {174} from Austria, a daughter of the great house of Habsburg as his wife—for he had obtained a divorce from his first wife. The daughter of the oldest, proudest family in the whole Western world was thus married to the Corsican adventurer, become Emperor of the French!

It appeared indeed as if there was nothing in Europe which he might not take, if he so pleased. He treated spiritual power when it was opposed to him precisely as he dealt with kings, for the Pope's reply to his annexation of the papal dominions in Italy was to excommunicate him; and that excommunication Napoleon countered by sending soldiers to climb the walls of the Vatican, the Pope's palace in Rome, and bring out the Pope a prisoner.

Still Wellington stood firmly against his troops on a line near the boundary between Spain and Portugal, holding back the tide. Russia, despite Napoleon, had opened her ports to British ships, wherefore once more he declared war upon her. And now, marching into the heart of Russia in the autumn days, which constantly grew shorter, of 1812, he came to Moscow to find it in flames and its inhabitants gone. Destroy the enemy's army in the field had always been Napoleon's maxim, but now he found no enemy to destroy. That enemy had all the East on which he might fall back. To pursue farther would be madness. Through the snows of winter, with the Cossacks hanging on their flanks and rear and taking every opportunity to attack, began that return of the French Grand Army from Russia which is one of the most pathetic scenes in all the story.

{175}

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

That tragedy was his ruin. The powers of Europe gathered about him again in the spring of 1813. He fought brilliantly on the defensive beyond the Rhine, but against increasing odds, and in the autumn of that year suffered the defeat that finally broke him, at {176} Leipsic. Already, earlier in the year, Wellington had taken the offensive triumphantly in the Peninsula, had pushed the French back, had driven and pursued them across the Pyrenees and was on their heels in the South of France.

For two months longer, after the blow at Leipsic, Napoleon fought on, till he made a fatal error in turning upon the rear of the allies to cut off their communications. Their effective reply was to disregard that threat, and to march straight upon the defenceless Paris which they occupied on the last day of March, 1814. He was formally deposed by a vote of his own Senate, and on April 4th he abdicated.

He was taken by a British ship to Elba and imprisoned there. The Bourbon monarch was brought back to the throne of France. A congress of the Powers sat at Vienna to restore and regulate the affairs of Europe. Then in February of 1815 came the appalling news that Napoleon had escaped, was back in the South of France, the old soldiers, fascinated by his name and his victories, flocking to him—so he marched to Paris with an army that ever grew as he went. Louis XVIII. fled. The Emperor was on his throne again.

Once more the Powers gathered; but for Napoleon the only two that mattered were the British and the Prussians, close upon the French boundary, in Belgium. As ever of old, he sought to break these up before others should come to strengthen them. The Prussians had to meet the French armies first, and had to admit defeat, had to retreat. Napoleon marched on to meet the British at Waterloo; and all through the long June day his soldiers charged again and again, only to break upon the steadfast red line.

Towards evening the Prussians, far less shattered by their defeat of two days before than Napoleon had supposed, appeared upon the French right flank. {177} That apparition was the beginning of the end. Wellington ordered an advance of his whole army. The French defeat became a rout. The Emperor preceded the remnants of his broken force to Paris, where, yet again, he signed his abdication. He had an idea of escaping to America, but the British ships were on the look-out, and, foiled in this, he voluntarily gave himself up to one of them.

The Code Napoleon

His final destiny was the Island of St. Helena, where he lived in failing health till his death six years later. One good work at least he did, in directing his lawyers to draw up into a code, called the Code Napoleon, the laws of France, which also were the laws which he imposed on a large part of conquered Europe. Based on the existing system of laws, it embodied many wise and liberal changes and is widely accepted even to-day. He was twenty-six years of age when he won his first victories in Italy in 1796. He had become virtual ruler of France by 1799, was acclaimed Emperor in 1804, and set kings, chiefly of his own family, on the thrones of Europe from 1806 onward, was prisoner in Elba in 1814, and finally in St. Helena in 1815—surely the most amazing chapter in the whole of this Greatest Story!

{178}

In such manner this tragedy, called the French Revolution, was played to its dénouement at Waterloo on the European stage, and on its conclusion, despite all the agony, we find that stage strangely little altered. Norway had been separated from Denmark and joined to Sweden. Belgium was no longer Austrian, and Belgium and Holland were united as the kingdom of the Netherlands. Austria had become independent of the rest of Germany and was dominant in Italy, but all main boundaries of the greater nations' territories were restored nearly as they were before.

A great change, however, had been wrought in the minds of men, by the French Revolution in the first place and by the Napoleonic wars in the second. Kings had been so thrown from their pedestals and set up again that they could never more have the sanctity in the eye of the people which they had long enjoyed. The exaggerated reverence paid to social rank, surviving from the exaggerated regard paid to the knight by popular opinion in the Middle Ages, had gone. The no less exaggerated ideas on the subject of liberty with which the Revolution had opened had been modified by the inevitable discovery that it is impossible for men to live together in anarchy and without discipline. Indeed there was a marked reaction in thought for a {179} few years after the Revolution, because men had realised the excesses to which these liberal ideas could lead. But still all that was best in those ideas was retained. The principle was conceded that no class should be treated as slaves by the class above. Even the humblest was recognised to have his rights as man.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson which had to be learnt by all men, kings, nobles, and poor men alike, from those cruel years in Europe; and it was more important than changes in territorial possessions.

Anglo-Saxon world-power

But if political boundaries were little altered in Europe by the fighting of the Napoleonic wars, a very extensive change will be seen to have occurred during those years if we take the whole world-stage into our view. The Anglo-Saxon had been extending his possessions and his domination almost immeasurably.

Since Great Britain was the strongest sea-power, and at war, at one time or other of the Napoleonic period, with France, Spain, and Holland—that is to say, with all the colonising nations, except Portugal—it was only to be expected that she should have captured nearly all the colonial possessions of each. And this actually is what had occurred. Moreover, on her own account she had established new settlements in places which seemed favourable for trade.

The boundaries of Canada and most of what now is British in the North of America had been settled by the wars with the French in that region, and by the War of American Independence, before the French Revolution and all that followed it. One of its consequences was indeed a renewed and lamentable outbreak of war, in 1812, between the now independent States and the mother country. The integrity of Canada was threatened by it at one moment, but in the end the boundaries were left as before.

{180} New Zealand, as we have seen, had been declared a British possession in 1787. British colonists had established themselves in New South Wales in the year following. Honduras had become British some years earlier. And Britain had her African West Coast Settlement at Sierra Leone.

Then in 1795 Ceylon was ceded to her by the Dutch, and from that time onward until the end of the wars almost every year added to her colonies. Already she had many of the West Indian islands. Now she acquired Trinidad, a little later St. Lucia, and in the same year Tasmania and British Guiana. In 1800 she gained Malta. In 1806 the Cape of Good Hope and the Seychelles, which had been held by the Dutch, were given up to her. A year later she took the island of Heligoland. Mauritius passed to her by capitulation in 1810; and at the conclusion of the war she was confirmed by the King of the Netherlands in her unquestioned domination in South Africa. All the while, moreover, she was consolidating and extending her hold on India.

Many of these settlements and acquisitions were no more than the formation of so many nuclei or starting centres whence the Anglo-Saxon was swiftly to extend his power over vast regions—in Australia most notably.

But despite all this nearly world-wide expansion of what we have now to begin to call the old Anglo-Saxon stock, an addition which was to prove of scarcely, if at all, less importance in the story was made to the territories of the younger branch of that stock when the United States, in 1803, purchased Louisiana.

It was of immense importance, not only because of the territory's own very considerable extent and richness, but also because it so lay, as we have seen already, as to prevent the expansion westward of the people of British race who were settled in America {181} along the shores of the Atlantic. For the Louisiana of the French was vastly more extensive than the State which now has that name. It reached up right from New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi to the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes, so that the United States were absolutely cut off from the west by this French barrier westward, and by the British Canadians northward. It was a happy circumstance for the world that this purchase was peacefully made and that Anglo-Saxons—continually strengthened, we should note, by successive immigrations of Celts from Ireland—were thus left free to fight their way to the west against the tribes of the Red Indians, and to cultivate the wild.

Those unfortunate Red Indians are to be pitied for the fate which came upon them. Again and again they combined and took savage vengeance on the pioneers of the white men who were evicting them from their age-long homes. But they had no equal chance, and step by step were driven back or tamed.

Gradual expansion westward

Limitless therefore, until the Pacific, was now the gradual expansion of the Anglo-Saxon westward, and world-wide, as we have just seen, the expansion from his ancient stock in other quarters.

But there was also another race that, all through these years of storm in Europe, was spreading itself extensively—though more from its own centre outwards, and in a less scattered manner—the Slav or Slavonic race. All round its already great circumference the Russian Empire was growing. On its immense Eastern borders were vast areas still inhabited by nomad tribes, mainly remnants of those great Tartar hordes which had been wont to sweep over all that now was Russia. Modern Russia stretched her conquering arm ever farther and farther over them till she came up against the borders of China and, in the far north-east, to the Pacific Ocean. Across the {182} Straits of Behring she joined hands in Alaska with the Anglo-Saxon when he pushed up into the extreme north-west of his new Continent: for until the United States acquired Alaska, by purchase, in 1867, it was a Russian possession. In the North of Europe Russia had won Finland from Sweden after the fighting of 1808 and 1809. In the extreme south she had been victoriously at war with Persia, and a result of that war was that the Persian province of Georgia became Russian. Also she was nearly continuously, and on the whole victoriously again, fighting with the Turk, of which fighting the general outcome was that she gained more and more territory in the Balkan region and more and more authority in those Balkan States which remained nominally independent.

And let me say now a word which will have to apply to all the rest of the story, so far as it touches these Balkan States, Danubian Principalities, and so on: that the changes which have taken place in their governments and political conditions have been so many and so quickly varied that it is quite impossible to give them place in this story. They are changes, moreover, of relatively little importance for the story as a whole. The population is almost inextricably mixed, with the Slav generally predominating. Among this mixture the Turk appears quite alien in blood, as he is in religion, and therefore it seems only natural and right, that Russia, as the leading Slav nation, with the headquarters of the Greek Church, which is the national Church of the Slav, at her southern capital city of Moscow, should extend, as she did, her sway over the Balkans and that the domination of the Turk should continually recede. Perhaps the really most interesting outcome of all this anti-Turk fighting is the independence won by Greece and acknowledged by Turkey in 1820, after some ten years of intermittent wars.

{183}

The power of Russia

In the main we have to realise that by this date Russia had taken over what used to be Austria's part in the defence of Christendom against the Moslem Turk. Not indeed that Austria had lost importance, except, maybe, in comparison with Russia, for she had become for the moment the most important of the Teutonic States. Prussia was still her chief rival among them, but until the other German States were brought to act together under Prussia's lead Austria was singly the most powerful of them all.

In a second Persian war, Russia gained a large territory in the Caucasian district which reached right down to the borders of Armenia. The unfortunate Poland, already thrice divided, had become nominally a kingdom, but was subject to Russia's dictation, and in 1831 she was annexed by that vast and ever-increasing empire—-a domination from which she has only recently been delivered as a result of the Great War.

Thus it is that, on all sides except the west, where she was up against the solid Teuton block of the German States, the great Slav monster, whose appropriate emblem was the bear, was stretching its huge grasping paws ever farther.

The Turk had suffered losses not only from Russia, and not only in Europe, but also in that land of Egypt where he had been sovereign. Napoleon had given the Turkish armies a bad battering there before the end of the eighteenth century. Now, in 1811, the Turkish power received a blow much more lastingly severe in a revolt of the Egyptians themselves. They revolted against the rule of the Mamelukes, originally a bodyguard of Turkish slaves formed to protect the sovereign of Egypt. The Mamelukes had continued to be influential in the government all through the Turkish regime. But the popular rising against them now was completely successful; they were massacred {184} without mercy, and Egypt passed into the hands of a ruler entirely independent of Turkish dominance. Under that rule she so prospered that within less than half a century she went pushing up northward, just as the old Pharaohs had thrust up thousands of years before, into Syria, and won that province also back from Turkey.

{185}

The realisation of the power of steam, and its application to machinery, have made a greater difference in this Greatest Story than any other single event that ever happened in it before or since. It is a realisation that came just before the end of the eighteenth century, and it made a greater difference between the story of the nineteenth century and that of all the centuries before it than there ever had been between any two former periods. That is indeed a large claim to make for it, but it is none too large.

Hitherto, the force that man had made use of to do his work had been, with few exceptions, the force of his own muscles or those of his horses or oxen. He had used the winds to blow his ships along. He had used both wind and water to turn his corn-grinding mills. He had used explosive gunpowder to propel his missiles. Earlier still, he had used the resilient force of wood, for his bows, to shoot his arrows, and this was perhaps his first use of the forces of Nature which surrounded him and which he, like everything else, without knowing it, obeyed. But now, all at once, he discovered the use of another exceedingly strong force, in steam. The real wealth of the world consists more truly in man's power to control and turn to his own use the forces of Nature than in anything else. Hitherto he had possessed scarcely any of this {186} true wealth, because his force was limited by the muscular power of himself and his domestic animals. Now he had a servant whose power to do work for him was almost without limit. The steam-engine was invented.

When we speak of a steam-engine the first idea it brings to mind is a locomotive engine drawing a train or driving a ship; but it was not to this that the steam-engine was turned on its first invention, nor is it perhaps its most important use.

The first steam-engine

Its first use was as a stationary engine, and the purposes to which those stationary engines could be, and soon were, turned are far too many to tell. Already some previous inventions in hand-worked and foot-worked machines had greatly increased the manufacture of textile goods in England.

But now cotton and wool began to be made into thread by the steam-driven machines. By them, the thread was woven into sheets and pieces. They cut and finished metal and wood into the shapes needed for a thousand different articles of daily use—furniture, agricultural implements, pots and pans, and so forth. They made and combined and pieced together parts of new machines for the making of yet more and more useful things. They had the power to hammer out great sheets of metal, and the delicacy to make a thread of wire or a needle. They became more and more efficient and fine as experience led to improvements, but it would be true to say that even in the very early days of their development a machine which it took only one man to mind and keep in working order could do as much work as had been done by twenty men who were served only by their own hands and muscles. Thus, if we may regard the productive work accomplished as the true wealth of the nation, we find it already increased by twenty times as the result of this engine.

{187}

But it is no use producing more unless there are people who want that increased produce. And that is exactly what there were just at this moment. In spite of the wars, the population had been growing in Europe, and when they ceased, in 1815, it began to grow even faster. Besides, there was growth of humanity all the world over, and especially in America. And the end of the wars allowed the produce of one country to be freely carried across sea and exchanged for the produce of another. It was especially in British ships that the produce was carried; and this carrying trade, as it is called, was a great cause of the wealth which Britain began to make in this century.

She needed that replenishment, because it was very largely by the help of her money that the allies—especially Prussia when she was in the coalition—had been able to keep their armies in the field against France. The British were very heavily taxed in and after the Napoleonic wars even as in and after what we now call the Great War.

This Industrial Era, of which the application of steam power was the principal cause, had been in progress many years before the steam-engines were used for drawing railway trains. Perhaps 1775 may be given as the date of the first practical steam-engine in Great Britain; yet it was not till 1830 that the first steam-worked railway line was opened to the public. But once this new mode of travel was introduced it quickly superseded the old mail-coach traffic and gradually drove the coaches off the road.

Besides her carrying trade across the seas, Britain had the good fortune to find iron ore close to her coal in her North Midlands. Wherever those two were found together—the coal to heat the water into steam for the driving of the machines, and the iron as the chief material of the machines themselves and of a thousand things made by them—the conditions favoured {189} manufacturing. So, in such places, both in England and elsewhere, there grew up the large and ever-increasing towns, as the people gathered to work together in the factories. For though the machines might do the work of twenty men, many more than twenty times the former total of work was performed within the space that each of these big towns occupied.

Hand loom and power loom

OLD HAND LOOM AND MODERN POWER LOOM.
(By kind permission of Northrop Loom Co., Blackburn.)

{188}

AN OLD MAIL COACH.

But all this work done in the towns by the machines meant that less work was done in the villages, and the {190} country cottages. There was no longer any profitable sale for the cloth woven at home by the little machines which the women used to work with hand and foot, because the very same, or almost the same, could be made so much more cheaply by the big steam-driven machines.

And while a machine attended by one man did the work formerly done by twenty, what about the other nineteen? Obviously, at first, they fell out of work. Therefore, when the steam-engines first came in they produced great hardship, great unemployment. The men rose up against them in organised gangs of machine-breakers. Very many machines were broken up.

Conditions of industry

But everywhere authority prevailed in the long run: the machine-breakers were put down. Men had to learn, sometimes at the cost of much suffering, to adapt themselves to a changed condition which had come to stay. The point of principal importance in the change is that it enabled the earth to support a larger population than had been possible before. We may notice this as a main result of each of the successive big changes. In the first known phase of human society we find man in the hunting stage; that passes into the pastoral stage, of keeping domestic animals, which supported more human beings than the hunting stage could. After the pastoral came the agricultural, with again an increase in the numbers that the earth could support, and lastly has come this industrial stage in which many more can be fed and clothed and kept in tolerable comfort than ever before.

And yet this industrial era had to bring its own hardships, and, unhappily, its own hatreds. The class hatred, as it is called—the animosity felt by the man who works with his hands against the class that has the money and works with its brains—arose directly out of the conditions which the steam-engine produced. To-day, when that industrial era has lasted more {191} than a hundred years, it is that hatred which makes our life so very difficult for us all, both for the classes above and for the classes below. And we are compelled to realise that the hate is largely due to the hard treatment of the lower classes by the higher in those early years. It is quite different now; there is little or no animosity, as I believe, felt by the upper classes in any country towards the lower, but I do believe that the lower classes are in some part justified in thinking that their better treatment has been won by their own effort rather than freely given by those above them. In the East the same animosities have not been aroused, for the Eastern industries have not developed along the same lines and have not caused the same difficulties.

In the industrial West, and everywhere that the white man has made his settlements, the hand workers are now protected by their organisation into Trades Unions—combinations of workers formed principally in order to bargain with the employers about the wages and the hours of work and the conditions under which the work is to be done.

At the beginning of the industrial era the workers were not able to come together in this way; so the employer made his bargain with each man separately, and, as many were anxious to get work, the employer could engage them very cheaply and make them work very hard. Nor was it only the men, or only the fully grown women, that were thus made to labour long hours for low pay. Even little children, because their labour could be engaged so cheaply, were hired to work many hours a day at such jobs about the machines and factories as a child could do. Very often the conditions as to ventilation, and so on, under which the work had to be done, were such as would not be allowed by the law now; but no one then seems to have considered the hardships of the men and women and, above all, of the children. We may believe it {192} was out of thoughtlessness and lack of recognition of their sufferings, rather than sheer cruelty, on the employer's part, that all this was done; but done it was, and it has left a bitterness of feeling which still lasts.

So the wealth of the world, as measured by its productive labour and its power of supporting human life, increased vastly; and its population increased vastly therewith. At the same time it is very much to be doubted whether the happiness of the people generally increased. But gradually, by coming together into the combinations of which I have spoken, and so being able to say to the employer, "You will not get any of us to work for you unless you give us so much money for so many hours of work"—gradually, by this argument, and sometimes by carrying it into actual effect by "striking," and ceasing to work altogether, they have won better and better terms for themselves. Employers now recognise that the workman should receive such a wage as the profits of the industry in which he is engaged suffice to pay him. Perhaps some of our more recent labour trouble is due to the worker's claim to be paid a larger wage than the industry can afford, if it is to turn out its products at a cost at which any one will buy them. And if it cannot turn them out at such cost, it must, and it will, stop producing them altogether; so that thus the workman is unemployed.

Further remarkable discoveries followed. Coal gas was used for lighting, and was later superseded by electricity. Electricity was used to give motion to machinery in place of steam. The telegraph was invented and the telephone. Engines were constructed to work by means of petrol firing within themselves—by internal combustion, as it is called—whence came motor-cars and flying machines. Wireless telegraphy made its marvellous appearance. {193} Radio-activity with its terrifying possibilities has been discovered. But no one, not even all of these together, made a new start, with a new chapter in the story, at all in the same sense as did the application of the power of steam. All these others were rather in the nature of a development from that starting-point. They were further successful efforts on the part of man to "harness," as has been said—which means, to control for his own purposes—the forces of Nature.

Evolution

There was, however, one scientific discovery of about the middle of the nineteenth century, which is of very remarkable interest in man's history, because it gave quite a new direction to his thoughts about his own origin. It is that discovery which is summed up in the word "Evolution," and which is associated especially with the name of Darwin.

Its main importance consists in its revelation that, whatever we may think about the origin of man's soul, there can be no reasonable doubt that his bodily form, his bones and all his organs, have descended to him from ancestors belonging to the same common stock as the apes or monkeys. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century man had regarded himself as specially created in his present form. He had also supposed all other living things to have been similarly created as they are. From 1850 or so, onward, he had to realise that all the many and complicated forms of life, both of plants and animals, have developed—"evolved" was the word adopted for the process—from the very simplest forms, even from single tiny cells.

It required countless ages for such a process; but the discoveries of geologists and astronomers—the earth-diggers and the star-gazers—combined to show that such countless ages not only might, but must, be assigned to the process. Our universe and our earth are by many millions of years older than men had thought.

{194}

But perhaps the chief fact of all, about this new discovery, is that it turned men's eyes forward, instead of backward. They began to look with a new hope towards the future of the race of men. Heretofore there had been an idea that the "Golden Age," when man was very good and very happy, lay somewhere in the remote past, and that present man had very much deteriorated. The new discovery showed him that he was, on the contrary, continually "evolving" into something higher, or, at the least, that, as he now is, he has evolved from something very much lower, even from the very lowest tiny atom that has any sort of life. It was an enlivening, hope-giving discovery.

But let us not ascribe to it, as some, at its first coming, almost certainly did, more than its due. It revealed to man the origin of his body; perhaps, but of less certainty, it showed him the origin of his mind. That it tells him anything of the origin of his spiritual self is really only asserted by those who virtually deny that he has any spiritual side at all in his nature. Or so, let me say to avoid dogmatic assertion, it seems to me that they deny it.

{195}

When Napoleon had been finally chained down, under the ward of the British Government, on the rock of St. Helena, the Emperors of Russia and Austria and the King of Prussia made a compact, which was called the Holy Alliance, with the principal and excellent object of maintaining peace. It is not easy to estimate how far it succeeded in that good aim, because we cannot be sure how many wars were checked by the existence of the alliance. Probably we ought to give it credit for some negative results of this kind which do not make any show in the story.

It had one curious effect, at all events. The Spanish settlements in South America had taken advantage of the distracted condition of Europe to declare their independence of the mother country. Spain appealed to the Holy Alliance to help her in regaining them, and the Alliance received the appeal favourably. But, before anything came of it, the United States put forward a famous declaration, known as the Monroe Doctrine, saying that they would not tolerate any interference, or any further colonisation, by any European Power, in either of the American Continents. Even so, Spain and the Holy Alliance might possibly have proceeded with their project had Great Britain favoured it. But Great Britain, on the contrary, was found to be not at all in its favour—for one thing her {196} own experience in attempting to bring American colonists under a home Government which they disliked had not been encouraging—so the idea of putting pressure on the Spaniards in South America was at once and finally abandoned. It could not have been undertaken with any prospect of success if two nations so dominant at sea as Great Britain and the United States were opposed to it.

This Holy Alliance was formed between the three most powerful and most despotic rulers in Europe. Its essential idea was to maintain peace and order, but, as was evident from this very design of forcibly helping Spain to bring back her South American sheep into the home fold, it was peace and order according to the ideas of these despotic rulers. That is to say, that its ideals were in no accord with the spirit of freedom which had been let loose by the French Revolution, and was still working throughout the world, although for the moment it had lost some of its vitality because of the alarm excited by the extreme violence of that Revolution.

Both the allied Emperors had within their boundaries peoples over whom they held a sovereignty by force, and much against the will of the governed. The Russian great bear had his paw on a prostrate, but always protesting, Poland. The Austrian double-headed eagle had occasion to be on watchful guard in two directions, both east and south-west. The rulers of all the States of Italy held their governments virtually under Austrian direction, and by none, except perhaps the Pope, whom she had been influential in restoring to his Papal States, was she beloved.

Austro-Hungarian War

But she had more cause for anxious watchfulness on the east. In course of the gradual relaxing of the Turk's grip on Europe, that Oriental power had been forced to relinquish Hungary to Austria at the end of the nineteenth century. The population of Hungary {197} was mixed, but by far the largest blend in the mixture was of people of Magyar race, which had affinity with the Finns, the natives of Finland. The language and the chief men were Magyar. They never blended kindly with the Germanic Austrians, and were jealous in maintaining their own national identity. In 1833 they obtained the concession that the debates in their own Parliament might be conducted in the Magyar language. But there was ever this constant friction, the Austrian Crown trying to reduce the Hungarians to more complete dependence and the Hungarians constantly striving for more freedom. Finally war blazed out, from all this smouldering trouble, just before the middle of the century, when the Austrian Emperor abdicated in favour of Francis Joseph, his nephew, and the Hungarians refused to recognise the nephew as their king.

The Magyar orator and statesman, Kossuth, was the great figure in this gallant effort of the Hungarians for their liberty. In the early period of the struggle the Hungarians gained victories, and there was a moment when it seems that, had they pushed forward, they might have taken Vienna itself, Austria's capital city. But they did not so push on. The Austrian armies were reinforced, and then Austria called in the help of her friend in the Holy Alliance, Russia. That was a combination against which the Hungarians could not well be successful. Their revolt was put down with cruel severity. For the time being they gave up the idea of independence, though their sense of a nationality distinct from that of their conquerors remained as vivid as ever.

This rising, and its suppression, occurred in the years 1848 and 1849. By the year 1866 a rift had appeared in the Alliance so-called Holy; and Austria was actually at war with Prussia. The war arose out of a work of spoliation done by the two allies two years {198} before, when they had combined to take the provinces of Schleswig-Holstein from under the rule of Denmark. The population of those provinces was in part Scandinavian and in part Germanic, so that they were divided in their political desires, some of the people favouring union with Denmark and others wishing to be taken into the Confederation of German States. On their own part they were claiming their independence of the Danish rule. There was therefore a certain excuse for the action of these two Holy Allies; but now, when they had done the act of robbery, they quarrelled over the division of the spoils. Prussia claimed to take both Schleswig and Holstein under her own dominance. Austria said that she should at least be given one of them for her share. The result was the outbreak of that which has been called the Seven Weeks' War, in which Prussia was completely victorious.

And in this brief campaign there were Hungarian legions fighting on the side of Prussia against Austria, their own sovereign. That, however, did not imply that Austria's sovereignty was weakened, and in the following year, that is, in 1867, Francis Joseph the Austrian Emperor, was formally crowned King of Hungary at Buda-Pesth, the Hungarian capital.

In this way Austria and Hungary came to stand in a curious position towards one another. They were two kingdoms under the same ruler—a double kingdom.

Another outcome of that Schleswig-Holstein conflict and of the Seven Weeks' War was that the Confederation of the German States was reconstituted. The old single confederation was broken up into a North German Confederation, of which Prussia was the head, and a South German Confederation, the river Maine being taken as the boundary between them. Austria stood apart politically, though geographically belonging to the Southern group.

{199}

In spite of her defeat then, Austria maintained her old dominance over Hungary, but she did not succeed in maintaining for long the far less definite dominance which the European Powers had assigned to her, at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, over the various States of Italy.

Italy was later than any other land of Europe in settling down into the national boundaries which remained without any break of importance until the Great War. We may indeed say that the very idea of Italy as a single nation had scarcely existed before the year 1830 or thereabouts. Men did not regard Italy as a unit; but thought of Tuscany, of Venice, of the Papal States, of the Kingdom of Naples, and so on.

The Young Italy Party

But the year 1831 was epoch-making, as we say, for Italy, because it was the year in which the great Italian patriot Mazzini began to gain men's attention. He formed what was styled the "Young Italy" party, of which the leading idea might be called, according to a phrase now in common use, "Italy for the Italians." He had this good ground to work on, that the people of Italy, speaking of the country as we know it to-day, were for the most part of the same stock and, with certain local differences, spoke the same language.

Mazzini then, and his "Young Italy" party, went working and speaking to inspire the people with their own views. Already there was a widespread hatred of the Austrians, which made these views acceptable. In 1846 a Pope of liberal tendencies came to the papal throne and accorded his subjects a measure of freedom which gave offence and alarm to the Austrians. They sent an army to subvert these popular measures, and on that there was a general rush to arms on part of the peoples of Central and Northern Italy.

For a while all went in favour of the Italian arms, but the Austrians brought reinforcements, the tide {200} of Italian success was stayed, was driven back; by the middle of the century all was as before the rising—except that a keen national spirit had been aroused in the Italian people.

For a while it could not find expression. But in the year 1859 it at length found outlet by the help of a neighbour who had not usually played the part of Italy's friend in our story. Already, ten years before, the French had taken a hand in the internal struggles of Italy. They had captured Rome, when its citizens had declared for a republic and had driven out their Pope; and had restored the Pope to the sovereignty of his Papal States.

But in the interval strange things had been happening in France. The Bourbon who was brought back to the French throne at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and his younger brother who succeeded him, ruled not much more wisely than their fathers. Bitter experience had taught them nothing. In 1830 the mob of Paris rose against the king, forced him to flee for his life, and elected his relative, Louis Philippe, of the younger, the Orleans, branch, king in his stead. He was acceptable to the people as the son of that Philippe who had been, entitled Philippe "Egalité," because he took the side of the people in the early days of the French Revolution.

Louis Philippe ruled France from 1830 to 1848, and then his government also gave offence. Again, there was a rising of the people of Paris, supported by the old soldiers of the National Guard, which the king had unwisely disbanded. Again the rising was successful, and now it was no longer a king of any kind that the vote of the people called to govern them. They declared for a republic, and as President they elected one of the deputies to the Assembly. The name of that deputy was Louis Napoleon, and he was nephew of the great Emperor. Twice he had made attempts {201} to seize the government by force, but each time with so little success as to seem merely ridiculous.

From the moment of his election he began to have difficulties with the Assembly. Its members still seem to have regarded their President as a man of small account, an adventurer, trading on the reputation of his name, who twice had made himself a laughing stock. Then, on a certain night in 1851, he sent soldiers to the houses of the leaders who opposed him in the Assembly. The soldiers took the surprised statesmen from their beds and threw them into prisons. The next morning Paris awoke to find its walls placarded with the announcement that the Assembly was dissolved and that Paris was under martial law.

Napoleon III

The people were reconciled to the surprising stroke by the right of universal suffrage—every man of age to have a vote—being restored to them. There was an attempt at a counter-stroke; but after some hundreds had been shot down, as by that "whiff of grapeshot" with which this Napoleon's uncle had dispersed the Paris mob years before, all further trouble ceased. Yet another change in the constitution of the government appointed Louis Napoleon ruler of France for ten years. Less than a year later he was proclaimed Emperor of the French with the style of Napoleon III.; for the title of Napoleon II. had been given to the son of Napoleon I. who had died without ever reigning as Emperor.

There had been many adventures in the new Emperor's life. In his young days he had served with the Italian revolutionists against the Papal States, and had thus a rather personal interest in the Young Italy movement of Mazzini. It is certain too, and very natural, that he felt the influence of his name, and the tradition of his uncle's glory. The very fact that he had followed that uncle to the imperial throne would strengthen that influence. In obedience to it he was {202} impelled to lead France to further adventures, in some small imitation of that uncle's grandiose schemes. Moreover, his hold on the throne was none too secure: the more distraction he could find abroad for the restless spirit of the people, the less risk there was of disturbances to shake him from the throne at home.

Some such blend of motives seems to have driven him to be constantly seeking occasions to put his armies in the field. He found such occasion first against Russia—against Russia, and in support of the Turk!

It was a curious reversal of all that seems right and natural, though already we have seen the Turk strangely and occasionally allied with one Christian power against another. But generally we have found the Turk regarded as the common foe against whom all Christendom must combine. The truth is that the Turk was no longer at this time the power to be dreaded that he had been. He had for long been standing on the defensive in Europe, trying, but on the whole rather failing, to hold what he had won.

And on the other hand Russia, now the Turk's principal foe, had become so powerful that all Europe was afraid of her, afraid of her upsetting that "balance of power" in Europe of which we now begin to hear a good deal. In particular, she was reaching down to get Constantinople for her port; and France, and other nations of Europe, conceived it their business to see that she did not get it, with all the increase of power that it would bring her.

The Crimean War

To that opinion Napoleon III., a man of character and abilities which have puzzled all historians, but certainly a man of much astuteness, had brought opinion in Great Britain. Great Britain was beginning, on her own account, to fear the Russian push down towards the northern bounds of her Indian possessions. And so now, that is to say, most particularly in 1854, {203} we see another reversal, another happening rather different from all that the story has been wont to show us. For we see now those old enemies, England and France, in friendly alliance together, partners in the very fruitless enterprise known as the Crimean War. It was fought with much bloodshed and misery and cost to all three nations involved, and ended in a barren victory for the English and French.

Possibly it did check the Russians in their movement towards Constantinople, possibly it did something to maintain that much desired balance of power; but of positive result there was little or even none.

Nor did the Crimean War put a final end to the troubles between Russia and Turkey. Russia, as the great Slav power, was sure to find herself opposed to Turkey, who ruled over the Slavs in portions of the Balkans. There was war between them again, thirty years later, in 1877, but yet again its result solved no problems.

Shortly after the conclusion of his Crimean enterprise the Emperor went adventuring again—on the adventure at which I have already hinted—and this time, it must be admitted, with a far more evident mark set upon the world's story as its outcome. For in 1859, in conjunction with the Sardinian army, we find him helping the Italians, inspired by their new sense of nationality, to express their hatred for the domination of Austria. Again following the footsteps of his great uncle, he defeated the Austrians in two successive battles in the North of Italy, and drove them out of Lombardy.

Meanwhile, under the popular leader Garibaldi, the southern part of the peninsula had been won for the Italian people in 1860. An Italian Parliament, so called for the first time, was summoned, and the King of Sardinia elected King of Italy, though not yet with a kingship over the whole of what we now call Italy. {204} There were, still outstanding, Venice and the Papal States. As the price of her help, France received the Sardinian provinces of Savoy and Nice.

GARIBALDI.

In 1866, however, this new Italy took the side of Prussia against Austria in their fight over Schleswig-Holstein. Both on land and sea the Italians were defeated, but no doubt they kept employed some of the Austrian force which, but for Italy's help, might have been used against Prussia, and as the recompense that help Italy was given Venice and the Venetian territory at the end of the Seven Weeks' War.

{205}

Garibaldi with his followers defeated the Papal troops, and entered Rome in the following year, but the French, again appearing as the Pope's friend, stepped in, recaptured Rome for the Pope, and forced Garibaldi and his army to surrender. It was largely due to Garibaldi's gallant efforts, nevertheless, that the Papal States were shortly afterwards finally incorporated into the kingdom of Italy, and in the following year, that is, in 1871, Rome became the capital of the kingdom and the seat of Government. The temporal power of the Pope was at an end; the national unity of Italy was virtually complete.

France, at that moment, had little enough attention to spare for affairs other than her own. Trouble had arisen between Napoleon III. and the King of Prussia, leader of that Northern Confederation of German States which Bismarck had firmly welded together, over the succession to the Spanish throne. Save for that Franco-German trouble, Spain, since her great days, has made little mark on the Greatest Story. As we have already seen before, so now again, she played her own part, cut off from the main stage behind the barrier formed by the Pyrenees. It was a troubled drama. One king and then another was tried and found wanting. An experiment with a republican form of government had even less success. A solution was found in going back to a representative of the old royal family in 1875; and his successor is on the throne of Spain to-day.

Franco-German War

As to that Franco-German war which resulted in 1870 from the dispute over the Spanish succession, it is still debated whether its actual outbreak was due to the ambition and machinations of Bismarck and the military spirit in Prussia or to the restlessness and ambition of Napoleon. Certain it is that he was very ready to take offence with Prussia which had already baulked him in a design of purchasing from Holland {206} the Duchy of Luxemburg. That project had to be abandoned, and Luxemburg remained a Grand Duchy attached to the throne of Holland, until 1890, when a queen came to the Dutch Crown and Luxemburg passed under the Salic Law to the eldest male of the same family. Napoleon had expected that he would be helped, in the fight against Prussia, by Austria and also by the Southern Confederation of the States of Germany. But he had under-estimated the skill with which Bismarck held all the Teutonic States together. Neither of these came to his assistance when he declared war. And within a very short time after that declaration it became equally certain that he had wholly under-estimated the power and the readiness for action of the Prussian fighting machine.

In the course of a few weeks consistently disastrous for France, two of her principal armies laid down their arms, and at Sedan the Emperor himself was taken prisoner. Paris was besieged, and yielded under stress of famine early in 1871. Peace was made on the terms that France should pay a money indemnity and should give up to Germany Alsace and Lorraine. There was the usual anarchical interlude of the Commune, when the mob obtained temporary possession of Paris; and finally a republican form of government was adopted which still endures. Those provinces which Germany thus took from France remained under German rule until given back to her at the end of the Great War.

One result of the war of 1870 to 1871 was that the domination of Prussia over the rest of the German States was yet more firmly established. The Southern, as well as the Northern, were brought into one group, and the King of Prussia assumed the supremacy over all with the title of German Emperor.

Norway and Sweden

That severance of Alsace and Lorraine from France was the last change of really large importance made in {207} the map of Europe during the nineteenth century. It was almost the latest made before the Great War. In Scandinavia there was a later rearrangement, where Norway, who had for a long while chafed under her union with Sweden and desired freedom and recognition as a separate nation, attained her aim in 1905.

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When the United States of America had once acquired the extensive territory known at the beginning of the century as Louisiana there was no effective bar to their extension westward until they came to the shore of the Pacific. There were hostile Indians, and deserts difficult to traverse in the slow-going wagons, but the westward progress of the pioneers went on with no serious sets-back and at a pace which was very wonderful considering the conditions. When the railway era came—we may date its beginning approximately at 1830—the progress was much accelerated.

The population of the States grew very fast, both by the increase of the old settlers and by immigration, especially from Ireland. Ireland never had been happy in her Union with England, and her people were discontented and very ready to try their fortunes under the American flag. Just before the middle of the century the potato, on which the Irish people chiefly live, had failed almost entirely, and there had been cruel famine and distress, which further encouraged them to emigrate.

Thus America grew great. We have seen that as early as 1823 she had put forth that announcement known as the Monroe Doctrine, which proclaimed that she deemed the whole of the vast South American Continent, as well as the whole of the North which lay {209} south of the Canadian border, to be her concern, and hers alone. She would allow no European nation to interfere there.

The South American states

That did not imply that she herself would seek to upset arrangements already made. What did happen in that South American section was that it was divided into a number of States, which never became united, as did the States of the North. Most of them, very soon after their settlement, had become self-governing, their mother countries in Europe being too war-weary to make very serious efforts to retain them. Spanish was the language of the majority, but in the State which had by far the largest territory of all, that of Brazil, which had rather unexpectedly fallen to the share of Portugal under the dispensation sanctioned by the famous Bull of Pope Alexander, the common language was Portuguese. The population in all of them varied from pure European to pure Indian, with every possible degree of mixture between. Side by side, on the north-east shoulder of the Continent, were, and are, the three Guianas, the British, French, and Dutch.

But whereas these three still are European possessions, over all the rest of the Continent the settlers soon threw off all allegiance to their mother lands, as also did Mexico, once known as New Spain, at the southern end of the Northern Continent.

Both Mexico and Brazil started their independent careers with governors of the style of Emperor, but in Mexico he was very soon ousted and a republican government instituted. In all the Spanish States of South America, too, the form of government was republican; but there was an Emperor of Brazil, of the royal family of Portugal, though quite independent of the Portuguese Government, throughout most of the century, until she too elected to become republican. The Continent is for the greater part exceedingly {210} rich and fertile, and supplies to Europe a great deal of its surplus products of very many kinds. Were it not for the frequent revolutions and changes of government, which make property insecure and distract the people from productive work, all these States might be far more prosperous even than they are. Naturally enough they always have had many immigrants of the Latin race. Italians especially have been going out to the States of that Southern Continent in very large numbers. The United States have attracted the peoples of more Northern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavia. Of Canada the population has been swelled by English, Irish and, largely, by Scottish immigration. The French have not gone there in great numbers, but we must always remember that there is a considerable population, in certain parts of Canada, that is French in race and in speech—the descendants of the original French settlers.

Even after they had acquired Louisiana, the people of the United States did not find themselves with an entirely unimpeded course to the West, for Mexico, independent since 1822, possessed all or most of that territory which you may now see marked on the map as Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, all of which passed, by conquest or by arrangement, into the hands of the United States shortly before the middle of the century. The transfer of California was immediately followed by a violent rush of Eastern Americans to the West, where gold, in great quantities, had just been found.

Thus, or somewhat thus, the general political boundaries of the United States and of the other countries of the two American Continents came to be as they are; but there was at least one moment when the Union of the States itself was in grievous danger of breaking up.

The slavery question

Between the States in the North and those in the {211} South there were certain differences in interests and outlook which were very likely to lead to a quarrel. There had been some difference even in their original settlers. As already noticed, those who went to New England and the Northern States generally were for the most part of the Puritan persuasion, of a humbler social rank, and with more rigid religious views than those who settled in Virginia and other States of the South. The latter were largely of the landowning class at home, and when they came to America formed large estates and worked them by slave labour—negro slaves brought from America, or the descendants of those Africans.

When Louisiana was taken over from the French, slavery was in use all over its then vast extent. In the Northern section, soon to be known as the State of Missouri, slavery was abolished. It was retained in the South.

The idea of the slavery of the black races was not repugnant to the conscience of men of that day. It was not until later, and only after the great English philanthropist Wilberforce had devoted his whole life to the cause, that slavery was abolished in the British and French West Indies. The condition of the slaves, once they had arrived, was not, generally, so very bad, but the horrors that they suffered in the passage from Africa to America were unspeakable; the death-rate was terribly heavy; and the slave raids in Africa itself made the lives of the wretched negroes in their native country miserably anxious even if they evaded capture.

But the consciences of white men were not alive to these miseries then, even as they were not alive to the miseries inflicted by the industrial system on many who worked under it. When consciences did begin to be stirred, it was only in accordance with human nature that expressions of disgust with the conditions of slavery should be uttered by the people of the {212} Northern States, who were not owners of slaves, and should be keenly resented by those in the South who did own slaves and whose sugar crops and cotton and maize were cultivated by slave labour.

Thus came division between slave States and non-slave States, that is to say, States in which slavery was the law of the land and States in which it was not. Now and again a slave would escape, and the right claimed by the master of an escaped slave to follow him and recapture him would naturally be resented in a State which did not recognise slavery.

So dissatisfaction arose, and so it grew, over this slave question, between the Abolitionists, as they were called—that is, those who favoured the abolition of slavery generally, and of the slave trade in particular—and the anti-Abolitionists. Nearly all the North was of the former, nearly all the South of the latter persuasion.

And this divergence about slavery was but one point of difference among several. The question of tariff—the duties to be paid on goods entering American ports—was another. There were Protectionists and Free-traders then and there, as there are here and now. There were States in the South that claimed the right to "nullify," as it was called, in respect of goods brought to their ports, the Act of Congress which imposed the duties. The nullifaction claim—the claim to "make nothing of" the Act—was disallowed; and thence arose more bitterness.

The War of Secession

So the embers of discontent went smouldering until active war broke out between the two sections in 1861; and it broke out over a difference, which was not actually a difference over slaves or tariffs although it originated in those questions. The point on which it broke out was this: that the Southern States claimed for themselves the right to secede, to cut themselves off, from the Union. That is why the war is called {213} the War of Secession. They even called themselves by a distinctive name, not the "United," but the "Confederate" States. The North resisted, and refused them the right to break away and govern themselves as they wished. It was, perhaps we may think, a singular position to be taken by those United States which had lately fought so well and triumphantly to gain their own independent right to self-governance, but almost certainly it is a good thing for mankind that they did take that attitude. Had the attempted "secession" succeeded, the States of North America might have been as disunited as the States of South America; and so might never have stood, as they do, a strong force for peace in the world.

The War of Secession was waged with varying fortune, at first rather favouring the South, though always it was the South which, as the chief battlefield, had to endure the worst of the misery. It was a particularly cruel war in the divisions that it caused between friends and even between families. There were moments when the cause of the North was in great danger; but the North was able to dispose of rather larger forces and perhaps of a tougher type of soldiery, although the endurance and the aptitude for strategy and fighting seem to have been remarkable on both sides among armies of which only a small minority were soldiers by profession and training. The Northern advantages were compensated by the very remarkable military ability for war of the Southern leaders.

The sympathies of Europe and of England generally were rather with the South than with the North, and England gave some just cause of offence to the North by allowing the South to fit out privateering vessels in British ports.

It was not until after four years of fighting, that is to say, in 1865, that the end came with the surrender {214} of General Lee's Southern army to the forces of General Grant at Appomatox in Virginia. That was the end of the fighting, and peace terms were agreed very shortly afterwards. The claim of any State or collection of States to break away from the Union has never been put forward since, and the authority of Congress was confirmed over the whole Union.

The effects of the war were grievous for the vanquished. Their fairest territories had been overrun by the troops of both sides, their crops had been ruined and, heaviest blow of all, their slaves were emancipated so that there was the less labour available to repair the losses. All the money that they might have spent in hiring labour had gone in the war, and the problems of the peace were scarcely less difficult than those of the war.

It was very many years before the South recovered, and it has scarcely recovered now. Nor has the bitter feeling of the South towards the North, which arose from the war and from the many differences of which it was the outcome, even yet wholly died away. As lately as 1924 a member of one of the old Virginian families told me that the Great War, of 1914-1918, by summoning Americans from North, South, East, and West to serve in the same regiments and in a common cause, had done more to bring them together and create a sense of unity, and dispel the misunderstandings, than anything that had happened in all the years between the American War of Secession and the Great War.

Maximilian in Mexico

While the United States were thus in the agonies of their Civil contest, an attempt was made to interfere with the affairs of Mexico which was in direct defiance of that Monroe Doctrine already mentioned. Just as there is now, at this time of writing, so were there then, Europeans and European property in Mexico which the Government of the country was not able to make {215} tolerably secure. It did not seem to be putting out much effort to secure them. Europe thought then, as she is perhaps justified in thinking now, that if the United States forbade any foreign interference with the American Continents it was their business to see that the States of those Continents behaved themselves in a reasonable manner. At that moment the United States were obviously unable to undertake any such responsibility. Europeans in Mexico therefore appealed to Europe, and especially to Napoleon III., to enforce a better government on the country. It was the sort of appeal to which the character of Napoleon, made him peculiarly ready to respond, and under his promise of support Maximilian, brother of Francis Joseph of Austria, went out to take over the government of Mexico, with the title of Emperor. His reception was by no means as warm as he had expected. On the contrary, he found his own partisans inferior in force to those of the opposing faction. For a brief while he held a nominal rule over some two-thirds of the country. The French troops supporting him were quite insufficient to put down the native republican bands. His position was very shaky even at its best.

Then in 1865 the United States, freed from their Civil War, reasserted the Monroe Doctrine, and made some demonstrations under arms which clearly indicated that they were ready to give active effect to it. Upon that, Napoleon recalled his French troops, and the already shaky position of the Mexican Emperor at once became desperate. He was captured, tried by a court martial, condemned, and shot.

So, tragically and ingloriously, ended what really was Europe's one and only attempt at action opposed to the doctrine enunciated by Monroe.

A certain implication, or what has been considered an implication, of that doctrine, namely, that the {216} United States shall abstain from any interference with affairs foreign to her own two Continents, even as she has forbidden the foreigner to interfere with them—this implication she violated, most happily for Europe, in the Great War. But she had already violated it in her own Spanish war, of 1898, which followed on Spain's ineffective attempts to restore reasonably good government in Cuba, that island which lies in a position to guard the Gulf of Mexico and the Panama Canal. Spain was unable to enforce respect for the lives and property of Americans in the island, and, not unjustifiably, the United States, after some years of long-suffering, resolved that the Spanish rule must be overthrown. Even America herself shared in the general surprise that the complete defeat of Spain was so easy; and she was genuinely surprised also to find the sympathy of Great Britain cordially with her in the short war.

And as its results, not only Cuba itself, but also the far-off Philippines, those Spanish-owned islands where Portuguese going East and Spaniards going West had unexpectedly met a few centuries before, were given over to the United States.

Nearly at the same time certain Samoan Islands and the Hawaiian group of islands were annexed to the United States. Therefore she too must now shoulder her portion of what Kipling has well called "the white man's burden."

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SECTION I.—AFRICA

I have taken the above heading for this chapter because it indicates truly the manner in which the dominion of the white man over many of the coloured races has been thrust upon him. There is a good deal of misunderstanding on the subject. Really the world-wide dominion of the British Empire, to take the most conspicuous example, has been forced upon the mother country. There is an idea, and some of our rival nations have specially encouraged it, that those overseas dominions have been won by our aggressive spirit, land-grabbing and desirous of ever acquiring new possessions. Even we ourselves are rather apt to attribute it to the adventurousness of our ancestors; as if they had gone out seeking adventures like the knights-errant of old.

If we regard the events as they actually did happen we must confess the process much more prosaic. No doubt very adventurous and heroic deeds were done during its course. We have every right to be proud of our Anglo-Saxon race on their account. But our principal reason for pride is to be found in what the race has done, less in aggression, than in defence. It was Britain that was very largely concerned in humbling the overweening ambition of Spain, in baulking {218} the arrogance of Louis XIV., in thwarting the projects for world empire of Napoleon.

But what happened in the spread of the white man's power all over the world was that he went here and there, in the first place, and settled, for purposes of trade. We have seen the Portuguese going down the west coast of Africa for slaves and gold and ivory; Spain crossing the Atlantic for the treasures of El Dorado, the supposed city of gold; Portuguese, Dutch, and English going easterly to India, and farther, all to see what they could bring back.

They settled. Then they found that, in order to trade peaceably, and with tolerable security, they had to take control of the city or territory in which they settled.

That is, in few words, the story of the whole process. The settlements were at first along the coasts, and then gradually extended inland, as the boundaries of the districts already settled were everywhere threatened by the unsettled peoples outside the boundaries. We saw the process in action in the British Empire in India.

That is the common story. It is a little varied by the special circumstances of such countries as Australia and parts of South America which favoured the raising of sheep and cattle. There the settlers extended their boundaries not so much for security as to gain more pasture lands.

Somewhat thus, then, is the manner in which the white man has been forced, if he would develop the earth so as to afford support for its increasing population, to take this burden on his shoulders.

Africa, being so accessible to Europe, was the first of the new countries to which Europeans went trading in their ships. In a very early chapter of the story we have seen that many of the ports along the north coast of Africa, which is the Southern Mediterranean {219} shore, were nests of pirates preying upon the trading shipping. That was a condition of affairs which became more and more intolerable to Europe as the trade increased. It was with the approval of all Europe that the French in 1830 captured and took Algiers, which was the headquarters of the Moorish pirates. They extended that possession over the whole of Algeria till they reached the Turkish possession of Tripoli, which, again, extended to Egypt easterly.

Egypt

Egypt had freed herself from the suzerainty of Turkey about the date, 1830, of France's annexation of Algiers. Under an able ruler she developed her resources and was well governed, but from about 1870 onward, under a far less able successor, both government and finance fell into confusion.

In 1876 the British Government acquired by purchase the larger number of the shares in the Suez Canal. As a short cut to India, the Suez Canal was of vital interest to Great Britain. It was of vital interest, too, that the traffic through it should be safe and well conducted. This led to an inquiry into the condition of the Egyptian government, which showed that unless these conditions were bettered it was most unlikely that the Canal would be properly controlled and made safe.

The outcome was that the English and French established themselves in a joint control—it was called a Dual Control—over Egypt, in 1879.

Three years later, again, Egypt revolted against this control. England asked France to join her in forcibly putting down the revolt. France declined. England then invited the aid of Italy, for Italy had an interest both in Egyptian affairs generally, and in the Suez Canal especially, because she had established a coaling station, where her ships might replenish their coal supplies, in Eritrea, a district far down on the {220} west shore of the Red Sea. But Italy also declined. Therefore Great Britain went in alone to restore order.

The revolt was effectually quelled; but Great Britain dared not leave the country to the mercies of a native or of a Turkish ruler. She had to stay, in the very interests of Egypt herself. At the moment of writing, Egypt has been given a large share of self-government, of which she still has to prove herself altogether worthy.

And this burden of Egypt, thus undertaken, led on to the shouldering of yet another, of the country southward, the Sudan. Really it is a burden inseparable from the burden of Egypt, because the Nile, which is Egypt's very life-blood, passes through it, and because it is, or it was, the home of wandering slave-making Arab tribes always liable to inflict raids on Egypt itself.

Hence arose expeditions and again expeditions, in some of which Great Britain's arms suffered heavy reverse, against one or other of the fanatical Arab leaders who arose and assumed the title of Mahdi. The loss which stands out most tragically in England's memory is that of General Gordon, at Khartoum, in 1885. It was not until 1898, and the decisive defeat of the Mahdi by Lord Kitchener, that the problem of the Sudan could be regarded as tolerably solved. We may note that the manner of fighting of the Arabs was to charge in cavalry masses. It is mode of attack which gives a target terribly exposed to the fire of modern machine guns; and that gun has greatly diminished the danger of civilised troops charged by those desert warriors.

In the south of Africa the burden of the white man had at first lain chiefly on the shoulders of the Dutch, and the story of South Africa in the nineteenth century is mainly the story of the shifting of that burden to the {221} British. It was in the year of the battle of Waterloo that the Dutch possessions, from the Cape of Good Hope northward, were ceded to Great Britain by the King of the Netherlands.

The Boers

But the Boers, as the colonial Dutch were called—the name is akin to German bauer, a peasant—were, and are, a people who valued their nationality and their independence. It was not for more than thirty years that they formally acknowledged the British rule, which in the meantime had been extended to include the district of Natal. After a few years of experience of that rule, the Boers made a great "trek," or exodus, and established themselves farther north, beyond the British domination, in what was then called the Orange Free State.

And there it is possible they might have dwelt for many generations as a free republic of farmers had it not been for the discovery, some twenty years later, of the diamond mines in the Transvaal district, farther north again, whither the Boers had by that time extended their occupation.

The effect of that discovery was to attract to the region of the diamond mines a rush, chiefly of British, but of variously mixed, nationality. Ten years later the Transvaal was proclaimed a British possession, and almost immediately the Boers went to war to maintain its independence.

The war was inglorious for Great Britain and involved a serious disaster to a considerable British force. It ended in a compromise which did not promise much security for the future. The Boers acknowledged the suzerainty of Great Britain and, subject to that not very clearly defined control, were conceded the right of managing affairs in the Transvaal. That was in 1881.

And from that time until the end of the century trouble grew and grew between the increasing {222} population of the diamond fields and the increasing numbers and strength of the Transvaal Boers. Britain's position was difficult. These Boers had been the first to shoulder the white man's burden—if we like to put it in that way. They had been the first to drive out those black people who had owned the land before them—if we prefer to put it so. Whichever way we prefer, they had a right prior to that of those diamond finders, who came in and bought up their farms at great prices and were not at all welcome to the majority of the Boers whose farms did not happen to lie over diamond-producing strata.

From that point of view, all the argument seems to be on the Boers' side. But there is another point of view. These diamond searchers had come in in a perfectly peaceful way. They brought much wealth to the Boer Government which taxed them very severely, and really did not give them fair and decent treatment. The result was the breaking out, in 1899, of the great Boer War which went for a while so hardly for Great Britain that it looked at one moment as if her armies might be forced right back to the sea. Not only the Transvaal Boers but those of the Free State, and of Natal, joined together. Fortunately for Great Britain, Cape Colony, where the British element was largest, stood firmly for the Empire. At length the fortune of war turned, as more and more British troops arrived from oversea. By 1903 it was ended: the Boers surrendered at discretion.

And then was done one of the noblest and most generous and most courageous acts that the whole of this Greatest Story is able to show in the way of the treatment of a vanquished people by the victors: a very large part of the independent rule for which the vanquished foe had been fighting was voluntarily given to him. It was a tremendous experiment—tremendous, in the most literal sense of the word; {223} that is to say, an experiment to be feared. It seemed an immense risk to take—thus to rely on the sense of gratitude of a beaten foe. But that foe showed himself as generous in acceptance of the experiment as Great Britain in making it. He proved his gratitude by devoted service for the Empire in the Great War. It was a tremendous experiment, wonderfully justified.

The division of Africa

It is not needful, for the purposes of this story, to go over in detail the possessions, and their boundaries, of the various white nations in Africa. The French have a huge area in the north-west, reaching right down from Algeria to a junction with the Congo River. The Belgian Congo lies between that French area and British Rhodesia, which joins the other British colonies farther south. Great Britain has Nigeria on the west coast and British East Africa on the east. Portugal has Angola on the one side and Mozambique on the other, with the large island of Madagascar, which is French, lying off it. Abyssinia, easterly of the Sudan and bounded on the east again by the British and the Italian Somalilands, is by far the greatest and most interesting of the African countries still in the possession of a coloured race. Even Morocco, just westerly of Algiers, is now under French protection, and on either side of it lies a territory that is under Spain.

These many and very different countries have not been won for the white man without heavy fighting with the natives whom the white intruders found there. Great Britain has had its severe campaigns against the Kaffirs and the Zulus in the south. The Italians have received very rough handling from the Abyssinians. Spain and France still have their troubles in the north. But the white man has prevailed, and must prevail increasingly as his better science puts better instruments of war into his hands.

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There remains one great nation not yet named in this chapter which also had extensive possessions in Africa until the Great War—Germany. It was not until rather a late date in the story that Germany, under the strong hand of Bismarck, had been welded into a nation at all. The year 1884, when the German Colonisation Society was founded, may be taken as the date when she set to work with the deliberate and avowed purpose of taking her place among the colonising nations. It was less a matter, with her, of shouldering a burden thrust upon her, than of going out of her way to seek the burden, in her fear lest the other nations should possess themselves of all the unclaimed spaces before she could stretch out a hand for them.

Acting from this motive, she obtained, on the west coast of Africa, the large territory of the Cameroons—now, since the Great War, under the French mandate—of German South-West Africa—now under the mandate of the Union of South Africa—and of German East Africa—now under the mandate of Great Britain.

Of all these, the last was perhaps of chief importance from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxon dominance, because there was a small portion of its north-eastern boundary where it joined with the Belgian Congo, and it was just this, and only this, junction which intervened between the Anglo-Saxon protectorate of Uganda on the north and the long lake of which the southern shore was part of Rhodesia. That is to say, that this junction of Germany with Belgium alone prevented an all-British route, by river, lake, or land, from the Mediterranean mouth of the Nile to the Cape of Good Hope.

With the mandate to Great Britain of German East Africa, which was one of the results of the Great War, that intervention has been removed.

{225}

This then, in bare outline, is the way in which the burden of Africa has been distributed on the shoulders of the white men.

SECTION II.—INDIA AND THE FAR EAST

India

Already we have seen something of the way in which the burden of India came to be borne—the British East India Company, which was purely a trading concern, being forced to take military measures, for the defence of its trading stations and for the maintenance of good order, at one time against the French who were aiming at the establishment of an empire and at another against the native rulers, or rather the mis-rulers, of the Indian States.

It was thus that the Company came to have an army in its pay and to hold the control over extensive lands and many peoples. It was a position never contemplated when the Company was formed, nor was it a position entirely welcome to its directors. Continual additions had been made to the territories over which its control spread. The most notable perhaps were the addition of Cashmere in 1846, of the Punjab in 1849, and of Oudh in 1856. Farther east even than India, to the Straits Settlements and even to China itself, the authority reached of this vastly overgrown trading concern. Obviously it involved a control which could far better be undertaken directly by the British Government than by a Company acting under its charter. But with that typically British tendency to let things go on as they are going until it is impossible so to let them go any longer, nothing was done to transfer the Company's power to the Crown until the crisis came in the shape of the most formidable rising of a coloured people which the white man ever has {226} been called on to meet in the whole course of taking up his burden. It is that known as the Indian Mutiny—"mutiny," because it was mainly the affair of the native soldiers in the Company's pay. This was in the years 1857 and 1858. It threatened the very existence of the white man in the East, and only a splendid heroism in resistance to heavy odds, and heroic efforts and forced marches to relieve a situation nearly desperate, saved the principal, though scanty, British force from being annihilated. Once more the British wonderfully won through to a final victory, but the events of the war had brought into clear light the long known fact that the government of British India was an affair which demanded the most direct attention of British statesmen, with all the resources at their disposal. The East India Company were relieved of their far too heavy burdens. The Crown took over their responsibilities both in India and in the farther East.

The responsibilities of India were not only those which arose from the troubles incidental to a rule over peoples of different race and of religions—the Moslem and the Hindu—which brought them often into collision with each other. There was another trouble which began to menace like a dark cloud on the north-eastern boundary of the country, where lay the independent State of Afghanistan bordering with Persia on its east and with Russia on its north.

Russia had taken no part in that overseas colonisation by the other great powers of Europe. She had vast spaces enough, contiguous to her own bounds, over which she spread. Gradually she had annexed all Turkestan, which brought her into direct contact with Afghanistan, and she had been at frequent war with Persia over the question of the Russo-Persian boundary on Persia's north-west. Both Persia and Russia had ambitions to absorb that independent {227} Afghanistan which lay in the corner where they joined, and where, but for Afghanistan, they would join British India also. It was Britain's policy to maintain Afghanistan independent, as a buffer between her and those others, especially against Russia.

But it was to Persia, in the first place, that she had to say "hands off," when Persia advanced to the important position of Herat, within Afghan territory, in 1852. The result of campaigning and fighting lasting over some five years was that a friendly agreement was reached with Persia, which settled boundaries and left Herat to the Afghans.

Russia's menace to India

But in 1887 Russia, from the north, pushed down, and was across the Afghan boundary and advancing to that same Herat, when she was checked only by very forcible representations made to her by Great Britain. Britain herself had pushed her own Indian frontier forward by the acquisition of Beluchistan in 1878. Russia withdrew her forces for the time being, but all through that century and for some years of the present, the dread that she would come down upon India was always in the minds of British statesmen. There was more than one moment when war seemed imminent. Possibly it was nothing but Russia's own doubt of her effective fighting power which averted it. No suspicion of her internal weakness was entertained in Europe generally until it was revealed by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and yet more clearly by the Great War of 1914-1918. But there is little doubt that this small State of Afghanistan, which arose out of the Moslem spread towards the East many centuries before, saved Britain and Russia from disastrous collision. She had played the game that a small State thus situated was likely to play, intriguing with the great powers on either side of her and taking advantage of their rivalry. More than once there has been war between her and Great Britain. But she {228} remains an independent State and Britain's friend to-day.

On India's north-eastern side Britain extended her Empire by the acquisition of Assam in 1826, and later by that of Burma in 1886. The French had taken to themselves Annam and Tongking in 1884, and thus the British Burmese territory marched with French Indo-China, as it was called, and both were bounded on their northern side by the great Chinese Empire which stretched right up to Siberia.

Affairs in China

For the last hundred years or so, the story of China has been largely the story of her efforts to prevent the foreigner from coming into China and playing any part in her story.

Nevertheless we find the white man pushing on, in his eternal quest for trade, not to be denied, founding trading stations at Chinese ports. Generally it is only in submission to a show of force, or to its active application, that these trading facilities, warehouses and so on, are permitted to him. He is obliged to fight to be allowed to establish them, and further, we find him fighting again to punish the native people who have disregarded the agreements they have made with him and who sometimes have killed the peaceful traders.

Out of the troubles thus arising came war between Britain and China as early as 1840. The Chinese were quite incapable of seriously opposing the large British force which was sent out. The result was the conclusion of a commercial treaty which opened five principal ports of China to British trading vessels and gave Britain possession of the island of Hongkong. In 1854 Shanghai, one of the five ports above named, was opened to the trade of all nations.

But still the attitude of the people and of the Government was hostile to the foreigner. At any moment an uprising and a general massacre might {229} happen. A few white missionaries, chiefly of British and American nationality, penetrated into the country, preaching Christianity at constant risk of their lives.

The year 1860 saw a great change in the relations of the white men and the Chinese. Hitherto any fighting between them had been near the coast and the great ports. Now, as a protest against the ill-treatment of which the foreign traders were the victims and the bad faith with which the Chinese broke the treaties, and also to insist on the establishment of legations of the European Powers to protect the interests of their nations, a strong combined force of British and French marched on Pekin, the capital city, and looted and burnt the sacred Summer Palace from which the Emperor had fled.

The really important result of the campaign was the shock which it gave the Chinese and the conviction which it brought home to them of the strength and determination of the white men. Thereafter they treated the foreign traders with a consideration never paid them before, and ministers representing foreign powers had their appointed residences in Pekin.

It is true that as lately as 1900 a combined foreign force was obliged to march in extreme haste on Pekin in order to save those ministers, who were in great peril there. But it was peril arising out of an insurrection against the Government, rather than immediately from the Government's own action. Nevertheless it is also true that the very clever old Empress, who was then ruler of China, deliberately contrived to convert the activities of the revolutionaries into an attack upon the foreigners, rather than upon the Government itself. And it is to be noted that in co-operation with that combined army, which thus again invaded China's once sacred capital, was a force of the other branch of the yellow race, the island branch, the Japanese.

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The story of that island branch is certainly no less interesting than that of the continental. At what point far back in the story they branched off from a common stock we do not know, but it is more than probable that they came from the same original source. We found Kublai Khan, when master of China and of an immense part of the world besides, sending out from China an expedition against the islanders, of which the fate was much like that of the Grand Armada which the masterful power of Spain launched against our own islands. Japan kept her independence then, and has fought for it again and asserted it conclusively far later.

The awakening of Japan

She too, in her story, seems to have repeated, as did China, something very like the series of changes through which society passed in Europe, with its feudalism and the rest of it. But whereas in modern China this feudalism seems to belong to some era very, very far back in her story, so that she has almost lost all memory of it, with Japan, on the contrary, it is a very recent chapter—later even than with us of Europe. It is a condition from which she has indeed only just shaken herself free. 1867 is generally given as the date at which Japanese feudalism passed. And it passed in a fashion for which there is certainly no parallel in Western story. The Daimios, who were the feudal lords, of their own accord agreed, as the only means of ending their mutual fighting, to give up their local powers into the hands of the Mikado.

The white men knew very little about Japan until the sixteenth century. No overland travellers, like Marco Polo, had been there to bring back news to the West. About the middle of the sixteenth century a few Portuguese trading vessels touched it, and the very famous Jesuit missionary Xavier introduced Christianity. Here, however, as elsewhere, the Jesuits seem to have caused trouble by interfering with politics, {231} and the exclusion of the foreigners was enforced more strictly than ever. Gradually, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, trade with foreigners began to grow, chiefly with the Dutch, the Russians, and the Americans.

But still Japan continued, like China, to hold aloof as much as possible from all intercourse with the West, and with its science and progress. America at length took the decided step of sending a strong naval force and demanding the opening of a port to American ships of trade. This was in 1850, but the real opening up of the country did not begin until after the end of feudalism and the establishment of the Mikado's single power in 1867. And then a most extraordinary change did happen—a change perhaps more extraordinary than any other of which we find record in the whole history of mankind.

We may describe the story of China for many centuries as the story of a people buried in a profound sleep. She shows but little immediate sign of awaking from that slumber even to-day. The story of Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century we may designate as the most astonishing awakening of a nation out of slumber that the world has ever known.

Even now the part played by great China is only a passive, a negative part (except, of course, so far as her own people are concerned), but the part played by little Japan, though perfectly passive until some two-thirds of the nineteenth century had gone, has been startlingly vigorous and effective. The truth is that beneath the slumbering surface the spirit of the people had always been active, inquiring, ready for any novelty that struck them as valuable—in great contrast to the indifference of the Chinese. Their seclusion had been forced upon them by their rulers. When that enforcement ceased, they welcomed with very keen intelligence all the progress in science and thought which steam {233} and evolution had given to the West. In religion and in art they seem to have been satisfied to follow their own traditions, but they took every possible opportunity to learn lessons that might be of practical use. Military experts were called from Germany and naval experts from Great Britain to teach the art of war by land and sea. Scientific, educational, and legal advisers were engaged. The nation set itself with astonishing quickness to learn all that the West could teach it, and within a few years the efficiency of both army and navy were very thoroughly proved.

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OLD JAPAN: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMBS, TOKIO.

Korea

On the coast of China, just opposite Japan, lay the independent State of Korea. Its people were of the yellow race—not great fighters, but they had successfully resisted some rather half-hearted efforts of the Chinese to subdue them. Against the Chinese they invoked Japanese help—and not in vain. Japan had an interest in this country which lay just opposite her own islands, across a narrow sea, and which gave an outlet for her own surplus population. Over the Korean question, then, Japan and China came to war in 1894. The Japanese armies met and repeatedly defeated the Chinese, in the north of Korea and in the Chinese province of Manchuria just northward again. At sea, it was evident that Japan still had much to learn, for the Chinese for a while had rather the better of the naval engagements. Finally the Japanese prevailed there also.

One result of that war was that Korea was formally declared independent, but the Government was so feeble that the Japanese, in the years that followed, gained more and more power over it. By the terms of peace, the large island of Formosa was ceded to Japan. But the war's most important result was to reveal to the Western powers the weakness of China. Russia, thwarted in her advances towards India, was pushing but eastward into Manchuria, and now {234} encouraged China to resist some of the demands of the victorious Japanese. In compensation, she obtained for herself certain advantages, as the friend of China. China handed to her Manchuria, partly as the result of pressure, partly of friendly persuasion. What was of still more importance for her was that she acquired the ice-free harbour of Port Arthur; for hitherto her only Pacific port had been Vladivostock, farther north and often ice-bound.

It mattered comparatively little to Japan that Great Britain and Germany, to balance these gains of Russia, demanded and took for themselves, from the enfeebled hands of the Chinese, ports in the same neighbourhood. What did matter was that the menace of Russian power, and Russia's insatiable desire to expand, became more and more formidable to her. But among the peace terms which she had not failed to extort from China was a large money indemnity, and that money she spent in buying ships of war.

So then, in 1904, as Russia grew more and more aggressive in her eastward push, Japan, confident in her German-instructed army and her British-instructed and greatly enlarged fleet, ventured on a kind of David and Goliath contest. She declared war on the vast power.

The Russo-Japanese War

And, just as, through the test applied by this surprising little island power in the Pacific, had been revealed the essential weakness of great China, so now, to the astonishment of the world, was revealed by the very same test the weakness of great Russia. The Russian fleet, sailing from the Gulf of Finland, circumnavigated the world to come into touch with the Japanese fleet awaiting it in Japan's home waters; and at the very first touch that sea-worn fleet of Russia was sent to the bottom, save for such inconsiderable remnants as the Japanese allowed to remain afloat or to run ashore.

{235}

On land the fighting was hard. Port Arthur, strongly fortified, held out bravely, but was invested and forced to yield. The Japanese armies were victorious, driving the Russians back, but at price of a continually lengthening line of communications as the battle rolled north. The victories had cost Japan the very utmost that she could afford. She consented to terms of peace which surprised Europe by their moderation. But the details were of little importance compared with the astonishing achievement. This little island State, scarcely emerged out of its feudal era, had become, at a stroke, a great modern power, the naval ruler of the Pacific, Great Britain's counterpart in the East, and her ally on equal terms.

She might now gratify her wish about Korea, and formally declared it a Japanese protectorate in 1910. The Russian menace was rolled back, by the restoration of Manchuria in the same year.

In the Great War Japan more than confirmed her claim to high place among the nations. She was active in scouring the sea for German marauders of commerce, and very early in the war captured the port which Germany had occupied in the Pacific, and so eliminated any threat to her authority with which that occupation might threaten her.

Within so few years did Japan thus pass, from taking no part whatever in the Great Story, to be one of the foremost actors.

Southward of the Japanese islands, the next most important group is that of the Philippines, transferred, as we saw, from the sovereignty of Spain to that of the United States as a result of the Spanish-American war of 1897-8. Southward again, we come to those islands of the Malay Archipelago chiefly dominated by the Dutch, although Britain also has important possessions there and on the Malay Peninsula itself.

And so, working yet farther southward through {237} innumerable islands, we arrive at the huge British colonial territory of Australia, with the two islands of New Zealand some twelve hundred miles away towards the south-east.

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A STREET SCENE IN MODERN JAPAN.

SECTION III.—THE FAR SOUTH

The far South

That vast and wonderful responsibility, the burden of Australia, was laid so lightly upon the Anglo-Saxon's shoulders that he has scarcely felt the weight of it at all. Although second to none, and equalled only by one, namely America, in its immense possibilities, it has been less costly in blood and treasure than any other. Partly this is because Australasia lies so remote that no other nation has contested its possession with Great Britain, and partly because the Australian native himself is (or was, for he has nearly disappeared) so poor a specimen of humanity that he could put up no effective fight for the home lands from which the white man was evicting him.

That is a remark, however, which by no means applies to the native people of New Zealand, the Maoris. They were and are a fine people of a very quick intelligence, very brave, and distinguished for their oratory. We need not be surprised that they are so different from the Australian natives, because, although we often think of Australia and New Zealand as near neighbours, they are, as already mentioned, twelve hundred miles apart. It is tolerably certain, from the likeness of the language and other indications, that the Maoris are of the same stock as the Samoans, in Polynesia.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the white man began to take much notice of these great lands in the South. New Zealand was the first to be proclaimed a British possession, in 1787, and the {238} following year is the date of the beginning of the settlement of New South Wales. The founding of the next Australian colony, Queensland, was not until 1824, and five years later again began the colonisation of Western Australia. South Australia was recognised as a separate colony in 1834, and Victoria in 1851.

Australia

Of the settlement, and the claiming for the Anglo-Saxon, of these glorious and vast possessions, there is but little to say in this story, because each successive settlement was accomplished with comparatively little interference by the natives and with none whatever from any other white nation. The coast was found to have some splendid harbours, most of the interior was excellent grazing land, and later, profitable gold mines were discovered.

The chief drawback of Australia as a cattle and sheep producing country has always been its liability to long droughts when no rain falls and the grass perishes and the stock dies for lack of food and water. Much trouble arose at one time from the foolish and short-sighted action of the Government at home in transporting criminals thither. In the first instance they were sent to New South Wales and later to Queensland also. Many of these convicts escaped into the bush, and, banding themselves together, became a terror, by the name of bushrangers, to peaceful farmers. Obviously the families of the convicts could not have been brought up in circumstances likely to turn them into good citizens. It is all the more to the credit of the country that it has such a fine population to-day.

The folly and the wickedness of thus filling up a grand new country with the refuse ejected from the old was gradually realised. Transportation of criminals ceased in 1868.

The Australian colonies continued to govern themselves as separate units, under a constitution granted them by the Crown in 1850, for just fifty years. In {239} 1900, by their own request, they were welded into the Commonwealth of Australia, with a Governor-General appointed by the Crown. The federated States are six, that is to say, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia on the main land, with the island State of Tasmania to the south.

Thus, shortly, it is possible to relate the story of the white man's acquisition of this great continent of the South; but though its story is so short and simple the importance of the part that it is likely to play in the future of this Greatest of all Stories is quite beyond our estimate, but is certain to be very large. Its vacant spaces, ready for the immigrant, are vast. The difficulties created by the droughts are being gradually overcome, as the means of irrigation are improved. The population is vigorous and efficient. Australia sent fighters of splendid bravery and splendid loyalty to aid the mother country in the Great War. The world has yet to learn the possibilities of this young and still undeveloped continent.

The story of New Zealand is very much the story of Australia, except that the New Zealand white settlers did, for a while, suffer much anxiety in their protracted warfare with the coloured race that they found there. It was not until 1861 that the Maoris took up arms in any force against the whites who were gradually driving them out of their ancient territories. Had they known how to combine and act together, and to take advantage of the concealment of the bush, they might have been really dangerous to the white man's rule. But jealousies between the tribes prevented their combination, and a Quixotic pride in braving death and danger seems to have caused them to deem it the act of a coward to creep upon the enemy undetected. They chose rather to dash themselves upon {241} the defence in frontal attacks which cost them very heavy losses. Even so the war dragged on, in a series of intermittent fighting, for ten long years, and in the terms of peace which ended it the Maoris secured for themselves better conditions than before. Their bravery and fine qualities had made an impression, and they received a liberal recognition of their rights. They have proved themselves good friends and citizens of the Empire in the years since.

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A SCENE IN NEW ZEALAND: MT. PEMBROKE.

New Zealand

The products of New Zealand are very similar to those of Australia. On the whole its climate is more agreeable, because cooler, to the European. As a stock-raising country it has the advantage of not being subject to the same risk of droughts. Assuredly the white race thrives there and produces grand specimens of humanity. Even New Zealand has perhaps not yet begun to play its full part in this Greatest Story, but it has relatively little or none of the vast empty space of the great Australian country. We may know, more or less, the role that New Zealand is to play. Of Australia's share in the drama of the future it is scarcely possible to make even a conjecture.

Thus then, in broad and simple lines, I have tried to sketch the manner in which the white man, and the Anglo-Saxon more than all other white men, has been shouldering the world's burden. That is a political sketch, showing the movements of some of the societies of men and some of the changes in the boundaries of States. But during the last hundred years of our Greatest Story the principal events have been five, of which three only have been of this political character. There is the unification of Italy into a nation, that is the earliest. There is the consolidation of the German States into the national unity of Germany, that is the second. There is the assumption of his burden by {242} the white man, and especially of the Anglo-Saxon, all the world over—that is the third.

The fourth and fifth are not of a political character at all; though more important in our story than any political event. First of these last two, because it came first in time, though I am not sure whether we should rate it first in importance, is the application of steam power to the working of machinery. The second is the discovery of evolution, with all that the word implies, and its turning of men's eyes with glad hope towards a splendid future for human life on the earth, instead of a despairing regret for a vainly imagined splendour in the past.

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ABOLITIONISTS, and Anti-Abolitionists, 212, 213

Abraham, Plains of, 133

Abyssinia, 223

Act of Settlement, the, 109, 115

Act of Supremacy, the, 49, 61

Afghanistan, 32 et passim, 104, 226, 227, 228

Africa, 4 et passim, 218 et seq.

Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 114, 119

Akbar, Grand Mogul, 34, 67

Alaska, 182

Algiers, 45, 219, 223

Alsace, 206

Alva, Duke of, 57

Angola, 223

Anne, Queen, 101, 109, 110

Anne Boleyn, 47

Appomatox, 214

Assam, 208

Atlantis, 9

Aurungzeb, 104

Austerlitz, battle of, 171

Australia, 237 et seq.

BALKAN States, the, 182

Barbadoes, 81

Bastille, the, 158

Batavians, the, 155

Bavaria, Elector of, 118

Beluchistan, 227

Bengal, 103, 104

Bermuda, 81

Bismarck, 205, 206

Blake, Admiral, 90

Boers, the, 221

Boer War, the great, 222

Bombay, 103, 104

Boston, U.S.A., 139, 141

Bourbons, the, 58, 60

Boyne, the, battle of, 100

Brahmans, the, 27

Brandenburg, Elector of, 112

Brazil, Emperor of, 208

Bristol, 107

Buddha, 22, 28, 29

Buddhism, 25 et seq.

Bunker's Hill, battle of, 142

Burgoyne, General, 143

Burma, 208

CABOT, Sebastian, 11, 12

Calais, lost to England, 59

Calcutta, 104

Calendar Stone, the, 17

Calicut, 3, 4

Calvin, 58, 64

Cameroons, the, 224

Carolina, 102

Cashmere, 225

Catherine of Aragon, 41, 47

Catholic League, the, 73

Cavaliers, the, 84 et seq.

Charles I., 65, 84, 85

Charles II., 94, 95

Charles V., 38 et seq.

Charles XII., of Sweden, 112, 113

Chatham, Lord, 142, 143

Children of the Sun, the, 18

China, 19 et seq., 228 et seq.

Clive, 131

Cloth of Gold, Field of, 39

Columbus, 1 et seq., 9

Commonwealth of Australia, 239

Confucius, 20, 21

Condé, Prince, 74, 81

Congo, the, 223

Congress, in America, 139

Constantinople, 36 et passim

Continental system, the, 173

Copenhagen, battle of, 171

Cornwallis, Lord, 143

Corsica, 119

Cortez, 10

Covenanters, the, 85

Crimean War, 203

Cromwell, Oliver, 65 et seq., 84 et seq.

Cromwell, Richard, 92

Cromwell, Thomas, 48

Cuba, 216

Culloden, battle of, 120

Cumberland, Duke of, 120

DA GAMA, Vasco, 1 et seq.

Daimios, the, 26, 230

Dannoura, battle of, 26

Darwin, 193

Declaration of Independence, 143

Declaratory Act, 140

Dettingen, battle of, 118

Diet of Worms, the, 44

Directory, the, 164

Drake, Sir Francis, 63, 88

Dual Control, the, 219

Dupleix, 124, 131

EAST India Company, 225 et seq.

Edict of Nantes, 59

Egypt, 219 et seq.

Elba, 175

El Dorado, 10

Elizabeth, Queen, 58 et seq.

Eric the Red, 11

Eritrea, 219

Eugene, of Savoy, 118

Evolution, 193 et seq.

FAMILY Compact, the, 127

Ferdinand, of Spain, 9

Ferdinand, Emperor, 55

First Consul, 169

Flodden, battle of, 40

Florida, 82, 101

Fontenoy, battle of, 118

Formosa, island, 107, 223

Francis I., 37 et seq.

Francis Joseph, 197, 198

Francis, of Lorraine, 117, 118

Franco-German War, 205, 206

Frederick the Great, 117 et seq., 128 et seq.

French, character of, 154 et seq.

French Indo-China, 208

Frobisher, 62

"Fronde," the, 81

GARIBALDI, 203, 205

Genoa, 119

George I., 115

George III., 137 et seq.

George V., 115

Georgia, 102, 182

German Colonisation Society, the, 224

German East Africa, 224

German Emperor, the, 206

German South-West Africa, 224

Ghurkas, the, 125

Goa, 8

Gold Coast, 103

Good Hope, Cape of, 104

Gordon, General, 240

Grand Alliance, the, 110

Grand Army, in Russia, 174

Grant, General, 214

Great Armada, 62

Great Llama, 32

Great Wall of China, 21

Great War, 227, 235

Grenville, Lord, 107, 139

Guinea, Gulf of, 5

Guises, the, 58

Gunpowder, discovered, 21

Gunpowder Plot, 72, 73

Gustavus Adolphus, 74 et seq.

HABSBURGS, the, 78 et passim.

Hastings, Warren, 146

Havre, handed to England, 60

Hawaiian Islands, 216

Hawke, Admiral, 133

Henry VIII., 37 et seq.

Henry IV., of Navarre, 59

Henry, Prince, the Navigator, 7

Herat, 227

Holland, 60 et passim

Holy Alliance, the, 195

Holy Roman Empire, dissolved, 171

Hongkong, 208

Huguenots, the, 73 et seq., 82

Huns, the, 22, 24

INCAS, the, of Peru, 18

Indian Mutiny, 226

Indulgences, sale of, 43

Industrial Era, 187 et seq.

Inquisition, the, 56 et seq.

"Interim," the, 50

Ireland, her ill-treatment, 121; Secret Societies in, 122

Isabella, of Spain, 9

Italian Parliament, the first, 203

JAMES I., of England, 69

James II., 93, 94, 109

Japan, 24 et passim, 230 et seq.

Jesuits, the, 53, 54 et passim

KAFFIRS, the, 223

Keenlung, 125

Khakan, the, 24

Khartoum, 220

Kitchener, Lord, 220

Korea, 25, 233, 235

Kossuth, 197

Kublai Khan, 24, 26, 228

LA HOGUE, battle of, 93

Lama, the Grand, 100

La Vendée, 161

Laws of Manu, 28

Lee, General, 214

Leipsic, battle of, 176

Lepanto, battle of, 46, 68

Le Roi Soleil, 80

Leszynska, 113, 116

Leuthen, battle of, 131, 132

Lhasa, 106

London, 107

Lord Mayor, the, 71

Lorraine, 206

Louis XII., 37

Louis XIV., 80 et seq.

Louis XVI., 157 et seq.

Louis Napoleon, 200 et seq.

Louis Philippe, 200

Louisiana, 82, 101 et seq., 180, 181

Luther, 38 et seq., 58, 64

Lutzen, battle of, 77

MADAGASCAR, 223

Madras, 88, 103, 124

Magellan, 12

Magyars, the, 197

Mahdi, the, 220

Mahrattas, the, 104

Malacca, 8

Malay Archipelago, 235

Malay Peninsula, 235

Malplaquet, battle of, 111

Mamelukes, the, 135, 183

Manchuria, 133, 234, 235

Manchus, 25, 106

Maria Theresa, 117 et seq.

Marlborough, Duke of, 99 et seq.

Maoris, the, 237, 239, 240

Mary, Queen of England, 55 et seq.

Mary, Queen of Scots, 60

Mary, wife of William III., 99, 100, 109

Maryland, 102

Massachusetts, State of, 14

Maximilian, of Mexico, 215

Mazarin, Cardinal, 80, 81

Mazzini, 199, 201

Mexico, 208, 214, 215

Middle Class, the, 71

Mikado, the, 26, 230, 231

Minden, battle of, 133

Ming, dynasty, 24

Mississippi Bubble, 123

Mississippi, river, 103, 132

Mobile, 103

Moguls, the, 67

Mongols, the, 24 et passim; their decline, 51

Monroe Doctrine, the, 208, 214, 215

Montcalm, 132, 133

Montreal, 102, 132

Montenegro, 135

Morocco, 223

Mozambique, 223

Muscovy, 52, 66

NANTES, Edict of, revoked, 95

Napoleon Bonaparte, 119, 163 et seq.

Naseby, battle of, 85

Natal, 221

National Assembly, the, 158

National Guard, the, 164

Navigation Act, the, 90, 92