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 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 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