| Kings of England and Scotland. | ||||
| A.D. | ||||
| William III. and Mary.—(cont.) | ||||
| 1702. | Anne. | |||
| (Great Britain, 1707.) | ||||
| 1714. 1727. 1760. | George I. George II. George III. | } | House of Hanover. | |
| Kings of Spain. | ||
| A.D. | ||
| 1700. | Philip V. | |
| 1724. | Louis I. | |
| 1724. | Philip V. again. | |
| 1745. | Ferdinand VI. | |
| 1759. | Charles III. | |
| 1788. | Charles IV. | |
Distinguished Men.
Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lesage, Marmontel, Montesquieu, Franklin, (1706-1790,) Johnson, (1709-1784,) Goldsmith, (1728-1774,) Wolfe, (1726-1759,) Washington, (1732-1799.)
[THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.]
INDIA — AMERICA — FRANCE.
The characteristic feature of this period is constant change on the greatest scale. Hitherto changes have occurred in the internal government of nations: the monarchic or popular feeling has found its expression in the alternate elevation of the Kingly or Parliamentary power. But in this most momentous of the centuries, nations themselves come into being or disappear. Russia and Prussia for the first time play conspicuous parts in the great drama of human affairs. France, which begins the century with the despotic Louis the Fourteenth at its head, leaves it as a vigorous Republic, with Napoleon Buonaparte as its First Consul. The foundations of a British empire were laid in India, which before the end of the period more than compensated for the loss of that other empire in the West, which is now the United States of America. It was the century of the breaking of old traditions, and of the introduction of new systems in life and government,—more complete in its transformations than the splitting up into hitherto unheard-of nationalities of the old Roman world had been; for what Goth and Vandal, and Frank and Lombard, were to the political geography of Europe in the earlier time, new modes of thought, both religious and political, were to the moral constitution of that later date. The barbarous invasions of the early centuries were the overflowing of rivers by the breaking down of the embankments; the revolutionary madness of France was the sudden detachment of an avalanche which had been growing unobserved, but which at last a voice or a footstep was sufficient to set in motion. In all nations it was a period of doubt and uneasiness. Something was about to happen, but nobody could say what. The political sleight-of-hand men, who considered the safety of the world to depend on the balance of power, where a weight must be cast into one scale, exactly sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to keep the other in equilibrio, were never so much puzzled since the science of balancing began. A vast country, hitherto omitted from their calculations, or only considered as a make-weight against Sweden or Denmark, suddenly came forward to be a check, and sometimes an over-weight, to half the states in Europe. Something had therefore to be found to be a counterpoise to the twenty millions of men and illimitable dominions of the Russian Czars. This was close at the conjurer’s hand in Prussia and her Austrian neighbour. Counties were added,—populations fitted in,—Silesia given to the one, Gallicia added to the other; and at last the whole of Poland, which had ceased to be of any importance in its separate existence, was cut up into such portions as might be required, with here a fragment and there a fragment, till the scales stood pretty even, and the three contiguous kingdoms were satisfied with their respective shares of infamy and plunder. If you hear, therefore, of robberies upon a gigantic scale,—no longer the buccaneering exploits of a few isolated adventurers in the Western seas, but of kingdoms deliberately stolen, or imperiously taken hold of by the right of the strong hand; of the same Titanic magnitude distinguishing almost all other transactions; colonies throwing off their allegiance, and swelling out into hostile empires, instead of the usual discontent and occasional quarrellings between the mother-country and her children; of whole nations breaking forth into anarchy, instead of the former local efforts at reformation ending in temporary civil strife; of commercial speculations reaching the sublime of swindling and credulity, and involving whole populations in ruin; and of commercial establishments, on the other hand, vaster even in their territorial acquisitions than all the conquests of Alexander,—you are to remember that these things can only have happened in the Eighteenth Century; the century when the trammels of all former experiences were thrown off, and when wealth, power, energy, and mental aspirations were pushed to an unexampled excess. This exaggerated action of the age is shown in the one great statement which nearly comprehends all the rest. The Debt of this country, which at the beginning of this century was sixteen millions and a half and tormented our forefathers with fears of bankruptcy, had risen at the end of it, in the heroic madness of conquest and national pride, to the sum of three hundred and eighty millions, without a doubt of our perfect competency to sustain the burden.
If the tendency of affairs on the other side of our encircling sea was to pull down, to destroy, to modify, and to redistribute, the tendency at home was to build up and consolidate; so that in almost exact proportion to the wild experiments and frantic strugglings of other nations after something new—new principles of government, new theories of society—there arose in this country a dogged spirit of resistance to all alterations, and a persistence in old paths and old opinions. The charms which constitution-mongers saw in untried novelties and philosophic systems existed for John Bull only in what had stood the wear and tear of hundreds of years. The Prussians, Austrians, Americans, and finally the French, were groping after vague abstractions; and Frederick the Soldier, and Joseph the Philanthropist, and Citizen Franklin, and Lafayette and Mirabeau, were each in their own way carried away with the delusion of a golden age; but the English statesmen clung rigidly to the realities of life,—declared the universal fraternity of nations to be a cry of knaves or hypocrites,—and answered all exclamations about the dignity of humanity and the sovereignty of the people with “Rule Britannia,” and “God save the King.” How deeply this sentiment of loyalty and traditionary Toryism is seated in the national mind is proved by nothing so much as by the dreadful ordeal it had to go through in the days of the first two Georges. It certainly was a faith altogether independent of external circumstances, which saw the divinity that hedges kings in such vulgar, gossiping, and undignified individuals. And yet through all the troubled years of their reigns the great British heart beat true with loyalty to the throne, though it was grieved with the proceedings of the sovereigns; and when the third George gave it a man to rally round—as truly native-born as the most indigenous of the people, as stubborn, as strong-willed, and as determined to resist innovation as the most consistent of the squires and most anti-foreign of the citizens—the nation attained a point of union which had never been known in all their previous history, and looked across the Channel, at the insanity of the perplexed populations and the threats of their furious leaders, with a growl of contempt and hatred which warned their democrats and incendiaries of the fate that awaited them here. There are times in all national annals when the narrowest prejudices have an amazing resemblance to the noblest virtues. When Hannibal was encamped at the gates of Rome, the bigoted old Patricians in the forum carried on their courts of law as usual, and would not deduct a farthing from the value of the lands they set up for sale, though the besieger was encamped upon them. When a king of Sicily offered a great army and fleet for the defence of Greece against the Persians, the Athenian ambassador said, “Heaven forefend that a man of Athens should serve under a foreign admiral!” The Lacedemonian ambassador said the Spartans would put him to death if he proposed any man but a Spartan to command their troops; and those very prejudiced and narrow-minded patriots were reduced to the necessity of exterminating the invaders by themselves. Great Britain, in the year 1800, was also of opinion that she was equal to all the world,—that she could hold her own whatever powers might be gathered against her,—and would not have exchanged her Hood, and Jervis, and Nelson, for the assistance of all the fleets of Europe.
Nothing seems to die out so rapidly as the memory of martial achievements. The military glory of this country is a thing of fits and starts. Cressy and Poictiers left us at a pitch of reputation which you might have supposed would have lasted for a long time. But in a very few years after those victories the English name was a byword of reproach. All the conquests of the Edwards were wrenched away, and it needed only the short period of the reign of Richard the Second to sink the recollection of the imperturbable line and inevitable shaft. Henry the Fifth and Agincourt for a moment brought the previous triumphs into very vivid remembrance. But civil dissensions between York and Lancaster blunted the English sword upon kindred helmets, and peaceful Henry the Seventh loaded the subject with intolerable taxes, and his son wasted his treasures in feasts and tournaments. The long reigns of Elizabeth and James were undistinguished by British armies performing any separate achievements on the Continent; and again civil war lavished on domestic fields an amount of courage and conduct which would have eclipsed all previous actions if exhibited on a wider scene. We need not, therefore, be surprised, if, after the astonishing course of Louis the Fourteenth’s arms, the discomfiture of his adversaries, the constant repulses of the English contingent which fought under William in Flanders, and at last the quiet, looking so like exhaustion, which ushered in the Eighteenth Century, the British forces were despised, and we were confessed, in the ludicrous cant which at intervals becomes fashionable still, to be not a military nation. How this astounding proposition agrees with the fact that we have met in battle every single nation, and tribe, and kindred, and tongue, on the face of the whole earth, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and have beaten them all; how it further agrees with the fact that no civilized power was ever engaged in such constant and multitudinous wars, so that there is no month or week in the history of the last two hundred years in which it can be said we were not interchanging shot or sabre-stroke somewhere or other on the surface of the globe; how, further still, the statement is to be reconciled with the fact, perceptible to all mankind, that the result of these engagements is an unexampled growth of influence and empire,—the acquisition of kingdoms defended by millions of warriors in Hindostan, of colonies ten times the extent of the conqueror’s realm, defended by Montcalm and the armies of France,—we must leave to the individuals who make it: the truth being that the British people is not only the most military nation the world has ever seen, not excepting the Roman, but the most warlike. It is impossible to say when these pages may meet the reader’s eye; but, at whatever time it may be, he has only to look at the “Times” newspaper of that morning, and he will see that either in the East or the West, in China or the Cape, or the Persian Gulf, or on the Indus, or the Irrawaddy, the meteor flag is waved in bloody advance. And this seems an indispensable part of the British position. She is so ludicrously small upon the map, and so absorbed in speculation, so padded with cotton, and so sunk in coal-pits, that it is only constant experience of her prowess that keeps the world aware of her power. The other great nations can repose upon their size, and their armies of six or seven hundred thousand men. Nobody would think France or Russia weak because they were inactive. But with us the case is different: we must fight or fall.