CHARLES F. HORNE
uring the eighteenth century a remarkable change swept over Europe. The dominant spirit of the time ceased to be artistic as in the Renaissance, or religious as in the Reformation, or military as during the savage civil wars that had followed. The central figure of the world was no longer a king, nor a priest, nor a general. Instead, the man on whom all eyes were fixed, who towered above his fellows, was a mere author, possessed of no claim to notice but his pen. This was the age of the arisen intellect.
The rule of Louis XIV, both in its splendor and its wastefulness, its strength and its oppression, its genius and its pride, had well prepared the way for what should follow. Not only had French culture extended over Europe, but the French language had grown everywhere to be the tongue of polite society, of the educated classes. It had supplanted Latin as the means of communication between foreign courts. Moreover, the most all-pervading and obtrusive of French monarchs was succeeded by the most retiring, the one most ready of all to let the world take what course it would. Louis XV chanced to reign during this entire period, from 1715 to 1774, and that is equivalent to saying that France, which had become the chief state of Europe, was ungoverned, was only robbed and bullied for the support of a profligate court. So long as citizens paid taxes, they might think—and say—wellnigh what they pleased.
The elder Louis had realized something of the error of his own career and had left as his last advice to his successor, to abstain from war. We are told that the obedient legatee accepted the caution as his motto, and had it hung upon his bedroom wall, where it served him as an excellent excuse for doing nothing at all. His government was notoriously in the hands of his mistresses, Pompadour and the others, and their misrule was to the full as costly to France as the wars of the preceding age. They drained the country quite as deeply of its resources and renown; they angered and insulted it far more.
Meanwhile the misery of all Europe, caused by the continued warfare, cried out for reform, demanded it imperatively if the human race were not to disappear. The population of France had diminished by over ten per cent. during the times of the "Grand Monarch"; the cost of the Thirty Years' War to Germany we have already seen. Hence we find ourselves in a rather thoughtful and anxious age. Even kings begin to make some question of the future. Governments become, or like to call themselves, "benevolent despotisms," and instead of starving their subjects look carefully, if somewhat dictatorially, to their material prosperity.
England, to be sure, but England alone, stands out as an exception to the prevalence of despotic rule. There the commons had already won their battle. King George I, the German prince whom they had declared their sovereign after the death of Anne (1714), did not even know his subjects' language, communicated with his ministers in barbaric Latin, and left the governing wholly in their hands. The "cabinet" system thus sprang up; the ministers were held responsible to Parliament and obeyed its will. The exiled Stuart kings made one or two feeble attempts to win back their throne, but the tide of progress was against them and their last hope vanished in the slaughter of Culloden.[1]
By that defeat Great Britain was finally and firmly established as a parliamentary government; and the most marked of all the physical changes of the century was the rapid expansion of her power under this new form of rule. She grew to be really "mistress of the seas," extended her sceptre over distant lands, ceased to be an island, and became a world-wide empire. Her trade increased enormously; her manufactures developed. By his invention of the "spinning-jenny," Arkwright placed England's cotton manufacture among the most giant industries of the world.[2] The land grew vastly rich. It was her reward for political progress, for having been able so to "get the start of the majestic world."
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
At the opening of this period the talk of the town, both in Paris and in London, ran on colonies and the tremendous wealth to be gained from them as the Spaniards and the Dutch had done. During the minority of Louis XV, even the Prince Regent of France dabbled in colonial investments. The stock market became suddenly a prominent feature of politics. John Law planned his dazzling "Mississippi Scheme," by which all Frenchmen were to become millionaires. Only, unfortunately, the bubble burst, and the industrious were ruined instead.[3] England had its "South Sea Bubble," with the same madness of speculation, vanishing fortunes, and blasted reputations.[4] The nobility having been driven by gunpowder from their ancient occupation as warrior chiefs, having lost to kings and people their rights as governors, became traders instead. We approach a period in which they cease to be the leading order of society, we approach the "reign of the middle classes."
From England, according to the English view, sprang also the great intellectual movement of the age. Voltaire visited the England of Addison and Pope; Montesquieu studied the English Constitution of 1689; and these two men were the writers who overthrew absolutism in Europe, who paved the way for the epoch of Revolution that was to follow. Montesquieu's Persian Letters, satirizing French society, appeared as early as 1721. Voltaire's sarcasms and witty sneers got him into trouble with the French Government as early as 1715. He was imprisoned in the Bastille, but released and at last driven from his country, a firebrand cast loose upon Europe to spread the doctrine of man's equality, to cry out everywhere for justice against oppression, and to mock with almost satanic ingenuity against the religion in whose name Europe had plunged into so many wars. By 1740 Voltaire was the most prominent figure of his world, if we except perhaps the quarrelling sovereigns, Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great. He dwelt for a time with Frederick in Berlin; but the two disagreed as great potentates will, and Voltaire withdrew to Geneva (1755), the little independent city republic which had served as a refuge to so many fugitives on France's border.[5]
From Geneva, Voltaire corresponded with most of the crowned heads of Europe. His advice was eagerly sought by "benevolent despotism." The aid of his mighty pen was claimed by every victim of oppression. In Paris, Diderot and his companions brought out the famous Cyclopædia, a mighty monument of human learning indeed, but even more a mighty sermon against tyranny, a scornful protest against Christianity, a teacher spreading over all the earth the preachings of Voltaire.
If there was evil in this movement there was also good. Thought was aroused, was stimulated, and everywhere the products of awakened genius began to appear. The marvellous development of modern music had its origin in this period with the creations of Bach.[6] The modern novel began its tremendously important career with Richardson and Fielding.[7] Inventive genius achieved the first great triumph of modern mechanicism in Watt's steam-engine.[8] Even across the ocean spread the intellectual impulse, and the New World had its Franklin to astonish and delight the old with his experiments in electricity—childish experiments at first, as man reached out slowly, shudderingly, toward control of this last and most marvellous of his servants.[9]
Philanthropy awoke also. Serious folk began to have vague self-questionings as to the righteousness of human slavery. The prison system was investigated; in England there were vague attempts at its reform. The noble Oglethorpe did what he could to arouse public sentiment against imprisonment for debt, and in his own person led to America a colony of the unfortunate victims of the system. They founded Georgia, the latest of the colonies; and the chain of settlements along the Atlantic coastline was complete.[10]
Who would find waste land to live on after that, must journey farther west, must seek the interior of the new continent—a simple fact, but one that was soon destined to produce tempestuous results.
In this age also, as if in answer to the spiritual apathy of which Voltaire was only the expression, not the cause, there arose Methodism, which in externals at least showed itself the most passionate and the most expressive form of devotion to Christianity. Wesley and Whitefield, the celebrated preachers, spread their doctrines over England in the face of insult and persecution. They penetrated the American colonies; their doctrines reached even beyond their language and affected the entire European Continent. The revival of devotion may have been hysterical, yet a vast revival it assuredly was; it has been called by some critics the most important religious movement since the Reformation.[11]
WARS OF EUROPE AND ASIA
In face of such events as these, we learn to attach less importance to the schemes of kings, and their selfish territorial wars, horrible as these may be in their exhibitions of human heartlessness and blood-guilt, destructive as they have ever been in their consequences of suffering and degeneration.
The Turks were now finally beaten back from their conquests in Hungary. The war which they had begun with the siege of Vienna was continued by the celebrated Austrian general, Prince Eugene, the companion of Marlborough against Louis XIV. Eugene won victory after victory, and finally by the capture of Belgrad (1717) drove the Mahometans forever from Hungarian territory, reduced them from a universal menace to become an ever-fading "Eastern question."[12]
Russia also, at first under Peter the Great and later under Catherine II, began to reach out for Turkish territory. The Turks had risen by the sword, and now, as other nations progressed and they stood still, the power of the sword was failing them. Russia expanded toward the Black Sea, as before she had expanded toward the Baltic, feeling out from her boundaries everywhere, moving along the line of least resistance, already looking toward Poland as her next tempting mouthful.
In Asia too the Turks had troubles to encounter. Asia, the vastly productive, multitudinous through unprogressive, could still raise up conquerors of the Turkish type to stand against them. The last of those sudden waves of temporary, meaningless, barbarian conquest swept over the Asian plains. Nadir Shah, a Persian bandit, freed his country from the yoke of its Afghan tyrants, assumed its throne, and by repeated battles enlarged his domains at Turkish expense. He subdued Afghanistan, and then extending his attention to India made a sudden invasion of that huge land, overthrew the forces of the Great Mogul, and, having captured both him and his capital, permitted him to continue to reign as a sort of subject prince. Returning from this distant expedition, Nadir Shah was beginning to push his conquests over Northeastern Asia when he was slain by a conspiracy among his Persian followers, driven to desperation by his savage tyranny. His dominions fell to pieces with his death.[13]
Europe meanwhile was going through a series of wars which seem small improvement over those of Nadir, except that they have had more polished historians. The selfish principles of Louis XIV had not lost their influence, the passion for territorial aggrandizement had not disappeared. In all history it would be hard to find a war more brazen in the avowed selfishness of its beginning, more utterly callous in its persistence, than that into which all Europe plunged in 1740.
This astonishing turmoil is known as the War of the Austrian Succession. We have seen how the extinction of the line of the Spanish Hapsburgs had given rise to kingly jealousies and strife in 1700. Next the Austrian Hapsburgs, or at least the male line of them, became extinct in 1740. Their surviving representative was a daughter, a young and energetic woman, Maria Theresa, the "Empress Queen." Her father, the Emperor Charles VI, foreseeing the difficulties she must encounter, had during his lifetime made treaties with every important court of Europe, by which he yielded them valuable concessions in return for their guarantee that on his death his daughter should succeed to his throne and his possessions undisturbed. Her husband was to be made emperor.
The moment Charles was gone, every treaty was thrown to the winds, and every hand seemed extended by a common impulse to clutch what it could from a woman's weakness.[14] The first to move was Frederick II, King of Prussia, he whom his admirers have called the Great. He was a young man, he had just succeeded to the Prussian kingdom which his father had left peaceful and prosperous, guarded by a powerful and well-trained army, made secure by a well-filled treasury. Young Frederick was undoubtedly great in intellect and in cynical frankness. He saw his opportunity, he made no pretence of keeping his promises; marching his army forward he seized the nearest Austrian province, the rich and extensive land of Silesia. The other kingdoms rushed to get their share of the spoils; France, Bavaria, Saxony, Sardinia, and Spain formed an alliance with Prussia. Only England, in her antagonism to France, made protest—purely diplomatic. Austria was assailed from every side. Her overthrow seemed certain. A French army was within three days' march of Vienna; it captured the Bohemian capital, Prague.
It was then that Maria Theresa made her famous appeal to the Hungarians, and the impressionable Magyars swore to die in her defence. She gathered armies, Austrian and Hungarian. She made a desperate alliance with Frederick, consenting to give him Silesia so as to save her other domains. The members of the coalition quarrelled among themselves. The French were driven to a disastrous retreat from Prague. Louis XV remembered his disapproval of war, as soon as it became disastrous; and the whole assault on the Empress Queen faded away as selfishly as it had risen.
The only result was that Frederick had Silesia, and Maria Theresa intended to have it back; and so they plotted and plotted, fought and fought. War followed war, and battle, battle. Silesia became a desert at last and of little value to either party. As to the Silesians who had once existed there, a few of them escaped starvation and massacre, not many, some hundred thousands, a mere matter of figures this in the kingly game and not accurately kept count of.
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR
The final upshot of this Silesian argument was the Seven Years' War. Maria Theresa made friends with the mistress of Louis XV, and so secured a French alliance. Frederick offended the Empress of Russia by his witty tongue, and she also joined in the "ladies' war" against him. Saxony, the nearest state to Prussia, was ever on the side of the strongest. So here was the European coalition hurled against Frederick in his turn. He proved the ablest general of his age, one of the master minds of military skill. For seven years he withstood all his enemies, Austria and Russia mainly, for Saxony he soon conquered, and France showed no great military powers—disgraced herself if further disgrace were possible to her condition.
Over the military details of the contest we need not pause.[15] Prussia had always been regarded as one of the lesser European states, Austria and France as the chief powers. Russia now proved herself of equal weight with the greatest, so that even the genius of Frederick began to fail against the enormous odds which crushed him down. His land was laid waste, his capital seized by a sudden attack and held for ransom. He was saved by the death of the Russian Empress; her son and successor, an admirer of Frederick, promptly changed sides in the war. By degrees everyone abandoned it but Maria Theresa; and she, finding her single strength insufficient against Prussia, was compelled to yield at last. Frederick kept his dear-bought desert of Silesia.
This Seven Years' War caused what that of the Austrian Succession had attempted, a complete redistribution of the balance of European power, England, Russia, and Prussia rising to at least equality with Austria and France. Even before the opening of the formal war France and England had been engaged in a colonial strife, which had caused England to declare herself Frederick's ally; and, while in Europe the grapple between England and France did not assume serious proportions, it was of enormous consequence to their colonies in India and America.
In India both countries had trading-stations, but the French were popular with the natives and the English were not. The weakness of the native support was not realized by either party. The conquests of Nadir Shah were scarcely known to them; the name of the Great Mogul at Delhi was one of vagueness and mysterious power; it seemed to the French that with Indian aid they could easily drive the English into the sea; and the attempt was made. It must have been successful but for Clive. That remarkable young warrior rose from his subordinate desk, laid aside his clerkly pen, and gathering a little band of fighters round him, defeated both French and natives in the remarkable siege of Arcot. Then came the hideous tale of the "black hole of Calcutta," and Clive achieved revenge and completed his work of conquest at Plassey (1757).[16]
Centuries had elapsed since Europeans had encountered, in serious battle, any Asiatics except the Turks—and these had proved quite equal to the strife. Hence the vast superiority which the more progressive civilization had attained was little realized. The American aborigines had indeed fallen an easy prey to Europe, but the conquest of Asia and Africa had not yet been begun. Thus the victories of Clive seemed to his contemporaries even more marvellous than they were. They won for England not only an empire in India, but a high prestige in Europe also.
WAR IN AMERICA
In America the British success was equally decisive though more dearly bought. Here the war had originated in the Ohio valley. Finding no more room upon the coast, the English colonists were pressing westward and there met the French. The vast wilderness which had lain unoccupied for centuries, even though men knew of its existence, now became suddenly of importance. Frenchmen needed it for their fur trade; Britons for colonization. They fought for it.
Here as in India the natives had been won by the diplomatic French, but their aid proved of no avail. The British Parliament sent over General Braddock in 1757, and he perished with a large portion of his army in the celebrated ambuscade from which Washington escaped.[17] For a time French energy made the war seem not unequal; but the number of French in America was small; the home Government of Louis XV seemed wholly lost in sloth and indifferent to the result. The English Government was doggedly resolute. Its unwilling subjects, the French colonists of Acadia, were driven from their homes.[18] Troops were poured into America, and in 1759 Wolfe won his famous victory at Quebec.[19] The next year Montreal also fell into the hands of the British, and the conquest of Canada was complete.
The treaty of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War for Prussia, brought peace also between England and France. The latter surrendered her colonial pretensions, partly in India, wholly in America, without having really exerted herself to retain them. Perhaps her experience in the Mississippi Scheme of Law had convinced her they were of but little worth.
SUPREMACY OF FREDERICK THE GREAT
The latter half of the reign of Frederick the Great was very different from its beginning. He had encountered war sufficient to satiate even his reckless appetite, and he clung to peace. Prussia became for a while the centre of European government and intrigue; and Frederick, by far the ablest sovereign of his time, remained until his death (1786) the leader in that system of paternal government, of kindly tyranny, which typifies the age. He husbanded the resources of his country with jealous care; he compelled his people to work, and be provident, and prosper, whether they would or no. Maria Theresa treated her subjects with much the same benevolence; and her son and successor Joseph II became the most ardent of the admirers of Frederick. Russia also came under a ruler of similar ideas, Catharine II,[20] a German princess by birth, who wedded a czar, deposed him, and, ruling in his stead, became the most Russian of the Russians. She ruled her land wisely and well, with a little more than Frederick's tyranny, a little less than his benevolence. She was cynical, as was the fashion, and her moral life shocked even that easy-going age. Also she was a philosopher, and invited Diderot, chief of the French Cyclopædists, to dwell at her court, much as Voltaire had dwelt at Frederick's. French literature was still the literature of Europe, and both Frederick and Catharine openly despised the tongue of their own lands.
It was among these three congenial rulers, of Russia, Prussia, and young Joseph of Austria, that the scheme arose of dividing Poland among themselves.[21] This has been termed "the crime of the century," but it was in strict accordance with what the rest of Europe had attempted to do to Austria and then to Prussia. Only, the first two victims had proved unexpectedly capable of resistance, the third was more shrewdly selected. Kindly benevolent despotism had also a voice in the matter, for Poland was wretchedly misgoverned, a source of constant danger to herself and to her neighbors. It was really a kindness, as those neighbors explained, to relieve her of half her territories. So well were their successors of the next generation pleased with the results, that they took each another slice, and then, fully convinced of the ancestral wisdom and good-will, divided what was left.
SHADOW OF COMING CHANGES
The new cynicism and philosophy which was thus spreading even among monarchs, was soon destined to have most explosive results. It found expression first in a further revolt against the dominion of the Roman Church. Most of the sovereigns joined in a determined attack against the Jesuits, the enthusiastic and devoted priests who had become the mainstay of the papal power. After a long resistance, the Jesuits succumbed; their order was abolished by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.
The next startling symptom of the changing times was the rapid literary development of Germany. Its young men had been left free to think and talk. Frederick half contemptuously declared that his people might believe what nonsense they pleased so long as they remained orderly. The poet Lessing by his books roused the ancient spirit of liberty, long dormant in the German mind. Goethe and Schiller became the foremost of a crowd of younger men whose revolt at first took the form of an extravagant devotion to romance as opposed to the dull workaday world about them.[22] Pestalozzi, a Swiss, conceived the idea of reforming the world through its children, encouraging the little ones by constant, loving example to develop all the strength and goodness that was in them.[23]
Yet the first open defiance given to despotism by the fast-growing spirit of freedom came not from Europe but from America; was a revolt not against the lazy tyranny in France or the kindly tyranny of Eastern Europe, but against the constitutional government of England. When the French minister signed the treaty surrendering to England all his country's possessions in America he justified himself with a well-turned phrase, "I give her all, on purpose to destroy her."
The words seemed prophetic, England's loss came through her gain. The Indians, devoted to the French, refused to submit peacefully to the change of rule. Pontiac, often regarded as the ablest statesman of his fading race, gathered them into a widespread confederacy, and for years held the English at bay in the region of the Great Lakes.[24] The expenses involved both upon England and upon her American colonists by this strife and by the French war itself were a constant source of friction. England insisted that she had spent her substance in defence of the colonists, and should be repaid by them. They on the other hand asserted that she had fought for her own glory, and had been well repaid by her vast increases of territory both in India and America; that they had become impoverished, while she had now the richest trade in the world, and stood upon the top-most pinnacle of national grandeur with wealth pouring in to her from every quarter of the globe.
Neither side being able to convince the other by abstract argument, England exerted her authority and passed the "Stamp Act," laying new taxes on the colonists.[25] They responded with protests, argumentative, eloquent, fiery, and defiant. They refused to trade with Great Britain, and became self-supporting. Thus the obnoxious laws, instead of bringing money to the mother country, caused her heavy losses. English merchants joined the Americans in petitioning for the repeal of the offensive acts of Parliament; and soon every tax was withdrawn except a tiny one on tea, so small that the money involved was trifling. But it was not the money, it was the principle involved, which had aroused the Americans; and their resistance continued as vigorous as against the previous really burdensome taxation. The tea which King George commanded should be sent forcibly to the colonists, they refused to receive. In Boston it was dumped into the harbor.[26]
The English Parliament drew back in amazement; its members found themselves dealing, as one of them put it, with a nation of lawyers. They were wrong; they had encountered a force far more potent, a nation of freemen who had been permitted for a century and a half to rule themselves, who had reached the fullest measure of self-reliance and self-assertion. America had become earliest ripe for the Age of Revolution toward which the European middle classes, more lately left to themselves, were more slowly, but not less surely, developing.
[for the next section of this general survey see volume xiv]