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]