People who want to get out so badly that they are willing to take all sorts of risks can invariably find a way. Hundreds of thousands of French Protestants took to the “underground route” and soon afterwards appeared in London or Amsterdam or Berlin or Basel. Of course, such fugitives were not able to carry much ready cash. But they were known everywhere as honest and hard working merchants and artisans. Their credit was good and their energy undiminished. After a few years they usually regained that prosperity which had been their share in the old country and the home government was deprived of a living economic asset of incalculable value.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the prelude to the French Revolution.
France had been and still was a very rich country. But commerce and clericalism have never been able to coöperate.
From the moment that the French government surrendered to petticoats and cassocks, her fate was sealed. The same pen that decreed the expulsion of the Huguenots signed the death-warrant of Louis XVI.
CHAPTER XXIV
FREDERICK THE GREAT
The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous for its love of popular forms of government. But ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs had tainted this sober-minded family of bookkeepers and overseers, they rendered some very useful service to the cause of tolerance.
In part this was the result of a practical necessity. The Hohenzollerns had fallen heir to the poorest part of Europe, a half-populated wilderness of sand and forests. The Thirty Years War had left them bankrupt. They needed both men and money to start in business once more and they set out to get them, regardless of race, creed or previous condition of servitude.
The father of Frederick the Great, a vulgarian with the manners of a coal-heaver and the personal tastes of a bartender, could grow quite tender when he was called upon to meet a delegation of foreign fugitives. “The more the merrier,” was his motto in all matters pertaining to the vital statistics of his kingdom and he collected the disinherited of all nations as carefully as he collected the six-foot-three grenadiers of his lifeguard.
His son was of a very different caliber, a highly civilized human being who, having been forbidden by his father to study Latin and French, had made a speciality of both languages and greatly preferred the prose of Montaigne to the poetry of Luther and the wisdom of Epictetus of that of the Minor Prophets. The Old Testament severity of his father (who ordered the boy’s best friend to be decapitated in front of his window so as to teach him a lesson in obedience) had not inclined his heart toward those Judaean ideals of rectitude of which the Lutheran and Calvinist ministers of his day were apt to speak with such great praise. He came to regard all religion as a survival of prehistoric fear and ignorance, a mood of subservience carefully encouraged by a small class of clever and unscrupulous fellows who knew how to make good use of their own pre-eminent position by living pleasantly at the expense of their neighbors. He was interested in Christianity and even more so in the person of Christ himself, but he approached the subject by way of Locke and Socinius and as a result he was, in religious matters at least, a very broad minded person, and could truly boast that in his country “every one could find salvation after his own fashion.”