Part 2 — Chapter III. (These four articles abrogated by the four articles following them, 118-122.) Article 118. The Federal Constitution may at any time be amended. (continued 36)

It was in keeping with the character of the Frondeurs that they went into alliance, at last, with Spain, and that, even after peace within the nation had been restored, "the Great Condé" remained in the Spanish service and fought against his own countrymen. Mazarin regained control of affairs, and managed them on the whole ably and well. He brought about an alliance with England, under Cromwell, and humbled Spain to the acceptance of a treaty which considerably raised the position of France among the European Powers. By this Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), the northwestern frontier of the kingdom was both strengthened and advanced; Lorraine was shorn of some of its territory and prepared for the absorption which followed after no long time; there were gains made on the side of the Pyrenees; and, finally, Louis XIV. was wedded to the infanta of Spain, with solemn renunciations on her part, for herself and her descendants, of all claims upon the Spanish crown, or upon Flanders, or Burgundy, or Charolais. Not a claim was extinguished by these solemn renunciations, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees is made remarkable by the number of serious wars and important events to which it gave rise.

Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661 and the government was assumed personally by Louis XIV., then twenty-three years old.

England Under the Stuarts.

While Germany and France had, each in turn, been disordered by extremely unlike civil wars, one to the unmitigated devastation and prostration of the land, the other to the plain putting in proof of the nothingness of the nation at large, as against its monarchy and court, the domestic peace of England had been ruffled in a very different way, and with very different effects.

The death of Queen Elizabeth united the crown of England with that of Scotland, on the head of James, son of the unhappy Mary Stuart. In England he was James I., in Scotland James VI. His character combined shrewdness in some directions with the most foolish simplicity in others. He was not vicious, he was not in any particular a bad man; but he was exasperating in his opinionated self-conceit, and in his gaucheries of mind and body. The Englishmen of those days did not love the Scots; and, all things considered, we may wonder, perhaps, that James got on so well as he did with his English subjects. He had high notions of kingship, and a superlative opinion of his own king-craft, as he termed the art of government. He scarcely deviated from the arbitrary lines which Elizabeth had laid down, though he had nothing of Elizabeth's popularity. He offended the nation by truckling to its old enemy, the King of Spain, and pressing almost shamefully for a marriage of his elder son to the Spanish infanta. The favorites he enriched and lavished honors upon were insolent upstarts. His treatment of the growing Puritanism in English religious feeling was contemptuous. There was scarcely a point on which any considerable number of his subjects could feel in agreement with him, or entertain towards him a cordial sentiment of loyalty or respect. Yet his reign of twenty-two years was disturbed by nothing more serious than the fatuous "gunpowder plot" (1605) of a few discontented Catholics. But his son had to suffer the retarded consequences of a loyalty growing weak, on one side, while royalty strained its prerogatives on the other.

The reign of James I. witnessed the effective beginnings of English colonization in America,—the planting of a durable settlement in Virginia and the migration of the Pilgrim Fathers to New England. The latter movement (1620) was one of voluntary exile, produced by the hard treatment inflicted on those "Separatists" or "Independents" who could not reconcile themselves to a state-established Church. Ten years later, the Pilgrim movement, of Independents, was followed by the greater migration of Puritans—quite different in class, in character and in spirit.

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Charles. I.

James died in 1625, and the troubled reign of his son, Charles I., began. Charles took over from his father a full measure of popular discontent, along with numerous active springs in operation for increasing it. The most productive of these was the favorite, Buckingham, who continued to be the sole counselor and minister of the young king, as he had been of the older one, and who was utterly hateful to England, for good reasons of incapacity and general worthlessness. In the king himself, though he had virtues, there was a coldness and a falsity of nature which were sure to widen the breach between him and his people.

Failing the Spanish marriage, Charles had wedded (1624) a French princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII. The previous subserviency to Spain had then been followed by a war with that country, which came to Charles among his inheritances, and which Buckingham mismanaged, to the shame of England. In 1627 another war began, but this time with France, on account of the Huguenots besieged at La Rochelle. Again the meddlesome hand of Buckingham wrought disaster and national disgrace, and public indignation was greatly stirred. When Parliament endeavored to call the incapable minister to account, and to obtain some security for a better management of affairs, the king dissolved it. Twice was this done, and Charles and his favorite employed every arbitrary and questionable device that could be contrived for them, to raise money without need of the representatives of the people. At length, in 1628, they were driven to face a third Parliament, in order to obtain supplies. By this time the Commons of England were wrought up to a high and determined assertion of their rights, as against the Crown, and the Puritans had gained a majority in the popular representation. In the lower House of Parliament, therefore, the demands of the king for money were met by a counter-demand for guarantees to protect the people from royal encroachments on their liberties. The Commons were resolute, and Charles gave way to them, signing with much reluctance the famous instrument known as the "Petition of Right," which pledged the Crown to abstain in future from forced loans, from taxes imposed without Parliamentary grant, from arbitrary imprisonments, without cause shown, and from other despotic proceedings. In return for his signature to the Petition of Right, Charles received a grant of money; but the Commons refused to authorize his collection of certain customs duties, called Tonnage and Poundage, beyond a single year, and it began attacks on Buckingham,—whereupon the king prorogued it. Shortly afterwards Buckingham was assassinated; a second expedition to relieve Rochelle failed miserably; and early in 1629 Parliament was assembled again. This time the Puritan temper of the House began to show itself in measures to put a stop to some revivals of ancient ceremony which had appeared in certain churches. At the same time officers of the king, who had seized goods belonging to a member of the House, for non-payment of Tonnage and Poundage, were summoned to the bar to answer for it. The king protected them, and a direct conflict of authority arose. On the 2d of March, the king sent an order to the Speaker of the House of Commons for adjournment; but the Speaker was forcibly held in his chair, and not permitted to announce the adjournment, until three resolutions had been read and adopted, denouncing as an enemy to the kingdom every person who brought in innovations in religion, or who advised the levying of Tonnage and Poundage without parliamentary grant, or who voluntarily paid such duties, so levied. This done, the members dispersed; the king dissolved Parliament immediately, and his resolution was taken to govern England thenceforth on his own authority, with no assembly of the representatives of the people to question or criticise him. He held to that determination for eleven years, during which long time no Parliament sat in England, and the Constitution was practically obliterated.

The leaders of the Commons in their recent proceedings were arrested and imprisoned. Sir John Eliot, the foremost of them, died in harsh confinement within the Tower, and others were held in long custody, refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the king's judges over things done in Parliament.

Wentworth and Laud.

One man, of great ability, who had stood at the beginning with Sir John Eliot, and acted with the party which opposed the king, now went over to the side of the latter and rose high in royal favor, until he came in the end to be held chiefly responsible for the extreme absolutism to which the government of Charles was pushed. This was Sir Thomas Wentworth, made Earl of Strafford at a later day, in the tardy rewarding of his services. But William Laud, Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the evil counselor of the king, much more than Wentworth, in the earlier years of the decade of tyranny. It was Laud's part to organize the system of despotic monarchy on its ecclesiastical side; to uproot Puritanism and all dissent, and to cast religion for England and for Scotland in one mould, as rigid as that of Rome.

For some years, the English nation seemed terrorized or stupefied by the audacity of the complete overthrow of its Constitution. The king and his servants might easily imagine that the day of troublesome Parliaments and of inconvenient laws was passed. At least in those early years of their success, it can scarcely have occurred to their minds that a time of accounting for broken laws, and for the violated pledges of the Petition of Right, might come at the end. At all events they went their way with seeming satisfaction, and tested, year by year, the patient endurance of a people which has always been slow to move. Their courts of Star Chamber and of High Commission, finding a paramount law in the will and pleasure of the king, imprisoned, fined, pilloried, flogged and mutilated in quite the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition, though they did not burn. {1076} They collected Tonnage and Poundage without parliamentary consent, and servile judges enforced the payment. They invented a claim for "ship-money" (in commutation of an ancient demand for ships to serve in the King's navy) from inland towns and counties, as well as from the commercial ports; and when John Hampden, a squire in Buckinghamshire, refused payment of the unlawful tax, their obedient judges gave judgment against him. And still the people endured; but they were laying up in memory many things, and gathering a store of reasons for the action that would by and by begin.

Rebellion in Scotland.

At last, it was Scotland, not England, that moved to rebel. Laud and the king had determined to break down Presbyterianism in the northern kingdom and to force a Prayer Book on the Scottish Church. There was a consequent riot at St. Giles, in Edinburgh (1637); Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the bishop, and Scotland presently was in revolt, signing a National Covenant and defying the king. Charles, attempting to frighten the resolute Scots with an army which he could not pay, was soon driven to a treaty with them (1639) which he had not honesty enough to keep. Wentworth, who had been Lord Deputy of Ireland since 1632, and who had framed a model of absolutism in that island, for the admiration of his colleagues in England, now returned to the king's side and became his chief adviser. He counselled the calling of a Parliament, as the only means by which English help could be got for the restoring of royal authority in Scotland. The Parliament was summoned and met in April, 1640. At once, it showed a temper which alarmed the king and he dissolved it in three weeks. Again Charles made the attempt to put down his Scottish subjects without help from an English Parliament, and again the attempt failed.

The Long Parliament.

Then the desperate king summoned another Parliament, which concentrated in itself, when it came together, the suppressed rebellion that had been in the heart of England for ten years, and which broke his flimsy fabric of absolutism, almost at a single blow. It was the famous Long Parliament of English history, which met in November, 1640, and which ruled England for a dozen years, until it gave way to the Cromwellian dictatorship. It sent Laud and Strafford to the Tower, impeached the latter and brought him to the block, within six months from the beginning of its session; and the king gave up his minister to the vengeance of the angry Commons with hardly one honest attempt to protect him. Laud waited in prison five years before he suffered the same fate. The Parliament declared itself to be indissoluble by any royal command; and the king assented. It abolished the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission; and the king approved. It swept ship-money, and forest claims, and all of Charles' lawless money-getting devices into the limbo; and he put his signature to its bills. But all the time he was intriguing with the Scots for armed help to overthrow his masterful English Parliament, and he was listening to Irish emissaries who offered an army for the same purpose, on condition that Ireland' should be surrendered to the Catholics.

Civil War.

Charles had arranged nothing on either of these treacherous plans, nor had he gained anything yet from the division between radicals and moderates that was beginning to show itself in the popular party, when he suddenly brought the strained situation to a crisis, in January, 1642, by his most foolish and arrogant act. He invaded the House of Commons in person, with a large body of armed men, for the purpose of arresting five members—Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazlerigg and Strode—whom he accused of having negotiated treasonably with the Scots in 1640. The five members escaped; the House appealed to the citizens of London for protection; king and Parliament began immediately to raise troops; the nation divided and arrayed itself on the two sides,—most of the gentry, the Cavaliers, supporting the king, and most of the Puritan middle-class, wearing close-cut hair and receiving the name Roundheads, being ranged in the party of Parliament. They came to blows in October, when the first battle was fought, at Edgehill.

In the early period of the war, the parliamentary forces were commanded by the Earl of Essex; and Sir Thomas Fairfax was their general at a later stage; but the true leader on that side, for war and for politics alike, was soon found in Oliver Cromwell, a member of Parliament, whose extraordinary capacity was first shown in the military organization of the Eastern Counties, from which he came. After 1645, when the army was remodeled, with Cromwell as second in rank, his real chieftainship was scarcely disguised. The decisive battle of the war was fought that year at Naseby, where the king's cause suffered an irrecoverable defeat.

The Presbyterians of Scotland had now allied themselves with the English Roundheads, on condition that the Church of England should be remodeled in the Presbyterian form. The Puritan majority in Parliament being favorable to that form, a Solemn League and Covenant between the two nations had been entered into, in 1643, and an Assembly of Divines was convened at Westminster to frame the contemplated system of the Church. But the Independents, who disliked Presbyterianism, and who were more tolerantly inclined in their views, had greatly increased in numbers, and some of the stronger men on the Parliament side, including Cromwell, the strongest of all, were among them. This difference brought about a sharp struggle within the popular party for the control of the fruits of the triumph now beginning to seem secure. Under Cromwell, the Army became a powerful organization of religious Independency, while Parliament sustained Presbyterianism, and the two stood against each other as rival powers in the state.

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At the beginning of the year 1646 the fortunes of Charles had fallen very low. His partisan, Montrose, in Scotland, had been beaten; his intrigues in Ireland, for the raising of a Catholic army, had only alarmed and disgusted his English friends; he was at the end of his resources, and he gave himself up to the Scots. The latter, in conjunction with the Presbyterian majority in Parliament, were willing to make terms with him, and restore him to his throne; on conditions which included the signing of the Covenant and the establishing of Presbyterianism in the Churches of both kingdoms. He refused the proposal, being deluded by a belief that the quarrel of Independents and Presbyterians would open his way to the recovery of power without any concessions at all. The Scots then surrendered him to the English, and he was held in confinement by the latter for the next two years, scheming and pursuing intrigues in many directions, and convincing all who dealt with him that his purposes were never straightforward—that he was faithless and false to the core.

Ill-will and suspicion, meanwhile, were widening the breach between Parliament and the Army. Political and religious agitators were gaining influence in the latter and republican ideas were spreading fast. At length (December, 1648), the Army took matters into its own hands; expelled from Parliament those members who favored a reconciliation with the king, on the basis of a Presbyterian establishment of the Church, and England passed under military rule. The "purged" Parliament (or rather the purged House of Commons, which now set the House of Lords aside, declaring itself to be the sole and supreme power in the state) brought King Charles to trial in the following month, before a High Court of Justice created for the occasion. He was convicted of treason, in making war upon his subjects, and was beheaded on the 30th of January, 1649.

The Commonwealth and the Protectorate.

The king being thus disposed of, the House of Commons proclaimed England a Commonwealth, "without a King or House of Lords," took to itself the name of Parliament, and appointed an executive Council of State, forty-one in number. The new government, in its first year, had a rebellion in Ireland to deal with, and sent Cromwell to the scene. He crushed it with a merciless hand. The next year Scotland was in arms, for the late king's son, now called Charles II., who had entered the country, accepted Presbyterianism, and signed the Covenant. Again Cromwell was the man for the occasion, and in a campaign of two months he ended the Scottish war, with such decision that he had no more fighting to do on English or Scottish soil while he lived. There was war with the Dutch in 1652, 1653 and 1654, over questions of trade, and the long roll of English naval victories was opened by the great soldier-seaman, Robert Blake.

But the power which upheld and carried forward all things at this time was the power of Oliver Cromwell, master of the Army, and, therefore, master of the Commonwealth. The surviving fragment of the Long Parliament was an anomaly, a fiction; men called it "the Rump." In April, 1653, Cromwell drove the members of it from their chamber and formally took to himself the reins of government which in fact he had been holding before. A few months later he received from his immediate supporters the title of Lord Protector, and an Instrument of Government was framed, which served as a constitution during the next three years. Cromwell was as unwilling as Charles had been to share the government with a freely elected and representative Parliament. The first House which he called together was dissolved at the end of five months (1655), because it persisted in discussing a revision of the constitution. His second Parliament, which he summoned the following year, required to be purged by the arbitrary exclusion of about a hundred members before it could be brought to due submission. This tractable body then made certain important changes in the constitution, by an enactment called the "Humble Petition and Advice." It created a second house, to take the place of the House of Lords, and gave to the Lord Protector the naming of persons to be life-members of such upper house. It also gave to the Protector the right of appointing his own successor, a right which Cromwell exercised on his death-bed, in 1658, by designating his son Richard.

The responsible rule of Cromwell, from the expulsion of the Rump and his assumption of the dignity of Lord Protector, covered only the period of five years. But in that brief time he made the world respect the power of England as it had never been respected before. His government at home was as absolute and arbitrary as the government of the Stuarts, but it was infinitely wiser and more just. Cromwell was a statesman of the higher order; a man of vast power, in intellect and will. That he did not belong to the yet higher order of commanding men, whose statesmanship is pure in patriotism and uncolored by selfish aims, is proved by his failure to even plan a more promising settlement of the government of England than that which left it, an anomalous Protectorate, to a man without governing qualities, who happened to be his son.

Restoration of the Stuarts.

Richard Cromwell was brushed aside after eight months of an absurd attempt to play the part of Lord Protector. The officers of the Army and the resuscitated Rump Parliament, between them, managed affairs, in a fashion, for almost a year, and then they too were pushed out of the way by the army which had been stationed in Scotland, under General George Monk. By the action of Monk, with the consent, and with more than the consent, of England at large, the Stuart monarchy was restored. Charles II. was invited to return, and in May, 1660, he took his seat on the re-erected throne.

The nation, speaking generally, was tired of a military despotism; tired of Puritan austerity; tired of revolution and political uncertainty;—so tired that it threw itself down at the feet of the most worthless member of the most worthless royal family in its history, and gave itself up to him without a condition or a guarantee. For twenty-five years it endured both oppression and disgrace at his hands. It suffered him to make a brothel of his Court; to empty the national purse into the pockets of his shameless mistresses and debauched companions; to revive the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud; to make a crime of the religious creeds and the worship of more than half his subjects; to sell himself and sell the honor of England to the king of France for a secret pension, and to be in every possible way as ignoble and despicable as his father had been arrogant and false. When he died, in 1685, the prospects of the English nation were not improved by the accession of his brother, the Duke of York, who became James II. {1078} James had more honesty than his brother or his father; but the narrowness and meanness of the Stuart race were in his blood. He had made himself intolerable; to his subjects, both English and Scotch, by entering the Catholic Church, openly, while Charles was believed to have done the same in secret. His religion was necessarily bigotry, because of the smallness of his nature, and he opposed it to the Protestantism of the kingdom with a kind of brutal aggressiveness. In the first year of his reign there was a rebellion undertaken, in the interest of a bastard son of Charles II., called Duke of Monmouth; but it was savagely put down, first by force of arms, at Sedgemoor, and afterwards by the "bloody assizes" of the ruthless Judge Jeffreys. Encouraged by this success against his enemies James began to ignore the "Test Act," which excluded Catholics from office, and to surround himself by men of his own religion. The Test Act was an unrighteous law, and the "Declaration of Indulgence" which James issued, for the toleration of Catholics and Dissenters, was just in principle, according to the ideas of later times; but the action of the king with respect to both was, nevertheless, a gross and threatening violation of law. England had submitted to worse conduct from Charles II., but its Protestant temper was now roused, and the loyalty of the subject was consumed by the fierceness of the Churchman's wrath. James' daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of Orange, were invited from Holland to come over and displace the obnoxious father from his throne. They accepted the invitation, November, 1688; the nation rose to welcome them; James fled,—and the great Revolution, which ended arbitrary monarchy in England forever, and established constitutional government on clearly defined and lasting bases, was accomplished without the shedding of a drop of blood.

The House of Orange and the Dutch Republic.

William of Orange, who thus acquired a place in the line of English kings, held, at the same time, the nearly regal office of Stadtholder of Holland; but the office had not remained continuously in his family since William the Silent, whose great-grandson he was. Maurice, the son of the murdered William the Silent, had been chosen to the stadtholdership after his father's death, and had carried forward his father's work with success, so far as concerned the liberation of the United Provinces from the Spanish yoke. He was an abler soldier than William, but not his equal as a statesman, nor as a man. The greater statesman of the period was John of Barneveldt, between whom and the Stadtholder an opposition grew up which produced jealousy and hostility, more especially on the part of the latter. A shameful religious conflict had arisen at this time between the Calvinists, who numbered most of the clergy in their ranks, and a dissenting body, led by Jacob Hermann, or Arminius, which protested against the doctrine of predestination. Barneveldt favored the Arminians. The Stadtholder, Maurice, without any apparent theological conviction in the matter, threw his whole weight of influence on the side of the Calvinists; and was able, with the help of the Calvinist preachers, to carry the greater part of the common people into that faction. The Arminians were everywhere put down as heretics, barred from preaching or teaching, and otherwise silenced and ill treated. It is a singular fact that, at the very time of this outburst of Calvinistic fury, the Dutch were exhibiting otherwise a far more tolerant temper in religion than any other people in Europe, and had thrown open their country as a place of shelter for the persecuted of other lands,—both Christian sectaries and Jews. We infer, necessarily, that the bitterness of the Calvinists against the Arminians was more political than religious in its source, and that the source is really traceable to the fierce ambition of Prince Maurice, and the passion of the party which supported his suspicious political aims.

Barneveldt lost influence as the consequence of the Calvinistic triumph, and was exposed helplessly to the vindictive hatred of Prince Maurice, who did not scruple to cause his arrest, his trial and execution (1619), on charges which none believed. Maurice, whose memory is blackened by this great crime, died in 1625, and was succeeded by his half-brother, Frederic Henry. The war with Spain had been renewed in 1621, at the end of the twelve years truce, and more than willingly renewed; for the merchant class, and the maritime interest in the cities which felt secure, preferred war to peace. Under a hostile flag they pushed their commerce into Spanish and Portuguese seas from which a treaty of peace would undoubtedly exclude them; and, so long as Spanish American silver fleets were afloat, the spoils of ocean war were vastly enriching. It was during these years of war that the Dutch got their footing on the farther sides of the world, and nearly won the mastery of the sea which their slower but stronger English rivals wrested from them in the end. Not until the general Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, was a final settlement of issues between Spain and the United Provinces brought about. The freedom and independence of the Provinces, as sovereign states, was then acknowledged by the humbled Spaniard, and favorable arrangements of trade were conceded to them. The southern, Catholic Provinces, which Spain had held, were retained in their subjection to her.

Frederic Henry, the third Stadtholder, was succeeded in 1647 by his son, William II. The latter wasted his short career of less than four years in foolish plotting to revolutionize the government and transform the stadtholdership into a monarchy, supported by France, for the help of which country he seemed willing to pay any base and treasonable price. Dying suddenly in the midst of his scheming, he left an unborn son—the future William III. of England—who came into the world a week after his father had left it. Under these circumstances the stadtholdership was suspended, with strong feelings against the revival of it, resulting from the conduct of William II. The lesser provinces then fell under the domination of Holland—so much so that the name of Holland began soon to be applied to the confederation at large, and is very commonly used with that meaning for a long subsequent time. The chief minister of the Estates of Holland, known as the Grand Pensionary, became the practical head of the federal government. After 1653 the office of Grand Pensionary was filled by a statesman of high ability, John de Witt, the chief end of whose policy appears to have been the prevention of the return of the House of Orange to power. The government thus administered, and controlled by the commercial class, was successful in promoting the general prosperity of the provinces, and in advancing their maritime importance and power. {1079} It conducted two wars with England—one with the Commonwealth and one with the restored monarchy—and could claim at least an equal share of the naval glory won in each. But it neglected the land defense of the country, and was found shamefully unprepared in 1672, when the Provinces were attacked by a villainous combination, formed between Louis XIV. of France and his servile pensioner, Charles II. of England. The republic, humbled and distressed by the rushing conquests of the French, fixed its hopes upon the young Prince of Orange, heir to the prestige of a great historic name, and turned its wrath against the party of De Witt. The Prince was made Stadtholder, despite the opposition of John de Witt, and the latter, with his brother Cornelius, was murdered by a mob at Amsterdam. William of Orange proved both wise and heroic as a leader, and the people were roused to a new energy of resistance by his appeals and his example. They cut their dykes and flooded the land, subjecting themselves to unmeasured loss and distress, but peremptorily stopping the French advance, until time was gained for awakening public feeling in Europe against the aggressions of the unscrupulous French king. Then William of Orange began that which was to be his great and important mission in life,—the organizing of resistance to Louis XIV. Without the foresight and penetration of French designs which he evinced,—without his unflagging exertions for the next thirty years,—without his diplomatic tact, his skill of management, his patience in war, his obstinate perseverance,—it seems to be a certainty that the ambitious "grand monarch," concentrating the whole power of France in himself, would have been able to break the surrounding nations one by one, and they would not have combined their strength for an effective self-protection. The revolution of 1688-9 in England, which gave the crown of that kingdom to William, and his wife Mary, contributed greatly to his success, and was an event nearly as important in European politics at large as it was in the constitutional history of Great Britain.

Germany after the Thirty Years War.

In a natural order of things, Germany should have supplied the main resistance to Louis XIV. and held his unscrupulous ambition in check. But Germany had fallen to its lowest state of political demoralization and disorder. The very idea of nationality had disappeared. The Empire, even collapsed to the Germanic sense, and even reduced to a frame and a form, had almost vanished from practical affairs. The numerous petty states which divided the German people stood apart from one another, in substantial independence, and were sundered by small jealousies and distrusts. Little absolute principalities they were, each having its little court, which aped, in a little way, the grand court of the grand monarch of France—central object of the admiration and the envy of all small souls in its time. Half of them were ready to bow down to the splendid being at Versailles, and to be his creatures, if he condescended to bestow a nod of patronage and attention upon them. The French king had more influence among them than their nominal Emperor. More and more distinctly the latter drew apart in his immediate dominions as an Austrian sovereign; and more and more completely Austrian interests and Austrian policy became removed and estranged from the interests of the Germanic people. The ambitions and the cares of the House of Hapsburg were increasingly in directions most opposite to the German side of its relations, tending towards Italy and the southeast; while, at the same time, the narrow church influence which depressed the Austrian states widened a hopeless intellectual difference between them and the northern German people.

Brandenburg.—Prussia.

The most notable movements in dull German affairs after the Peace of Westphalia were those which connected themselves with the settling and centering in Brandenburg of a nucleus of growing power, around which the nationalizing of Germany has been a crystalizing process ever since. The Mark of Brandenburg was one of the earliest conquests (tenth century) of the Germans from the Wends. Prussia, afterwards united with Brandenburg, was a later conquest (thirteenth century) from Wendish or Slavonic and other pagan inhabitants, and its subjugation was a missionary enterprise, accomplished by the crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, under the authority and direction of the Pope. The Order, which held the country for more than two centuries, and ruled it badly, became degenerate, and about the middle of the fifteenth century it was overcome in war by Casimir IV. of Poland, who took away from it the western part of its territory, and forced it to do homage to him for the eastern part, as a fief of the Polish crown. Sixty years later, the Reformation movement in Germany brought about the extinguishment of the Teutonic Order as a political power. The Grand Master of the Order at that time was Albert, a Hohenzollern prince, belonging to a younger branch of the Brandenburg family. He became a Lutheran, and succeeded in persuading the Polish king, Sigismund I., to transfer the sovereignty of the East Prussian fief to him personally, as a duchy. He transmitted it to his descendants, who held it for a few generations; but the line became extinct in 1618, and the Duchy of Prussia then passed to the elder branch of the family and was united with Brandenburg. The Mark of Brandenburg had been raised to the rank of an Electorate in 1356 and had been acquired by the Hohenzollern family in 1417. The superior weight of the Brandenburg electors in northern Germany may be dated from their acquisition of the important Duchy of Prussia; but they made no mark on affairs until the time of Frederick William I., called the Great Elector, who succeeded to the Electorate in 1640, near the close of the Thirty Years War. In the arrangements of the Peace of Westphalia he secured East Pomerania and other considerable additions of territory. In 1657 he made his Duchy of Prussia independent of Poland, by treaty with the Polish king. In 1672 and 1674 he had the courage and the independence to join the allies against Louis XIV., and when the Swedes, in alliance with Louis, invaded his dominions, he defeated and humbled them at Fehrbellen, and took from them the greater part of their Pomeranian territory. When the Great Elector died, in 1688, Brandenburg was the commanding North-German power, and the Hohenzollern family had fully entered on the great career it has since pursued.

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Frederick William's son Frederick, with none of his father's talent, had a pushing but shallow ambition. He aspired to be a king, and circumstances made his friendship so important to the Emperor Leopold I. that the latter, exercising the theoretical super-sovereignty of the Cæsars, endowed him with the regal title. He was made King of Prussia, not of Brandenburg, because Brandenburg stood in vassalage to the Empire, while Prussia was an independent state.

Poland and Russia.

When Brandenburg and Prussia united began to rise to importance, the neighboring kingdom of Poland had already passed the climax of its career. Under the Jagellon dynasty, sprung from the Duke Jagellon of Lithuania, who married Hedwig, Queen of Poland, in 1386, and united the two states, Poland was a great power for two centuries, and seemed more likely than Russia to dominate the Slavonic peoples of Europe. The Russians at that time were under the feet of the Mongols or Tartars, whose terrific sweep westwards, from the steppes of Asia, had overwhelmed them completely and seemed to bring their independent history to an end. Slowly a Russian duchy had emerged, having its seat of doubtful sovereignty at Moscow, and being subject quite humbly to the Mongol Khan. About 1477 the Muscovite duke of that time, Ivan Vasilovitch, broke the Tartar yoke and acquired independence. But his dominion was limited. The Poles and Lithuanians, now united, had taken possession of large and important territories formerly Russian, and the Muscovite state was entirely cut off from the Baltic. It began, however, in the next century, under Ivan the Terrible, first of the Czars, to make conquests southward and south-eastward, from the Tartars, until it had reached the Caspian Sea. The dominion of the Czar stretched northward, at the same time, to the White Sea, at the single port of which trade was opened with the Russian country by English merchant adventurers in the reign of Elizabeth. Late in the sixteenth century the old line of rulers, descended from the Scandinavian Ruric, came to an end, and after a few years Michael Romanoff established the dynasty which has reigned since his time.

As between the two principal Slavonic nations, Russia was now gaining stability and weight, while Poland had begun to lose both. It was a fatal day for the Poles when, in 1573, on the death of the last of the Jagellons, they made their monarchy purely elective, abolishing the restriction to one family which had previously prevailed. The election was by the suffrage of the nobles, not the people at large (who were generally serfs), and the government became an oligarchy of the most unregulated kind known in history. The crown was stripped of power, and the unwillingness of the nobility to submit to any national authority, even that of its own assembly, reached a point, about the middle of the seventeenth century, at which anarchy was virtually agreed upon as the desirable political state. The extraordinary "liberum veto," then made part of the Polish constitution, gave to each single member of the assemblies of the nobles, or of the deputies representing them, a right to forbid any enactment, or to arrest the whole proceedings of the body, by his unsupported negative. This amazing prerogative appears to have been exercised very rarely in its fullness; but its theoretical existence effectually extinguished public spirit and paralyzed all rational legislation. Linked with the singular feebleness of the monarchy, it leaves small room for surprise at the ultimate shipwreck of the Polish state.

The royal elections at Warsaw came to be prize contests at which all Europe assisted. Every Court set up its candidate for the paltry titular place; every candidate emptied his purse into the Polish capital, and bribed, intrigued, corrupted, to the best of his ability. Once, at least (1674), when the game was on, a sudden breeze of patriotic feeling swept the traffickers out of the diet, and inspired the election of a national hero, John Sobieski, to whom Europe owes much; for it was he who drove back the Turks, in 1683, when their last bold push into central Europe was made, and when they were storming at the gates of Vienna. But when Sobieski died, in 1696, the old scandalous vendue of a crown was re-opened, and the Elector of Saxony was the buyer. During most of the last two centuries of its history, Poland sold its throne to one alien after another, and allowed foreign states to mix and meddle with its affairs. Of real nationality there was not much left to extinguish when the time of extinction came. There were patriots, and very noble patriots, among the Poles, at all periods of their history; but it seems to have been the very hopelessness of the state into which their country had drifted which intensified their patriotic feeling.

Russia had acquired magnitude and strength as a barbaric power, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it was not until the reign of Peter the Great, which opened in 1682, that the great Slavonic empire began to take on a European character, with European interests and influences, and to assimilate the civilization of the West. Peter may be said to have knotted Russia to Europe at both extremities, by pushing his dominions to the Baltic on the north and to the Black Sea on the south, and by putting his own ships afloat in both. From his day, Russia has been steadily gathering weight in each of the two continents over which her vast bulk of empire is stretched, and moving to a mysterious great destiny in time to come.

The Turks.

The Turks, natural enemies of all the Christian races of eastern and southeastern Europe, came practically to the end of their threatening career of conquest about the middle of the sixteenth century, when Suleiman the Magnificent died (1566). He had occupied a great part of Hungary; seated a pasha in Buda; laid siege to Vienna; taken Rhodes from the Knights of St. John; attacked them in Malta; made an alliance with the King of France; brought a Turkish fleet into the western Mediterranean, and held Europe in positive terror of an Ottoman domination for half a century. His son Selim added Cyprus to the Turkish conquests; but was humbled in the Mediterranean by the great Christian victory of Lepanto, won by the combined fleets of Spain, Venice and the Pope, under Don John of Austria. After that time Europe had no great fear of the Turk; though he still fought hard with the Venetians, the Poles, the Russians, the Hungarians, and, once more, carried his arms even to Vienna. But, on the whole, it was a losing fight; the crescent was on the wane.

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Last glories of Venice.

In the whole struggle with the Ottomans, through the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the republic of Venice bore a noble part. She contested with them foot by foot the Greek islands, Peloponnesus, and the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Even after her commerce began to slip from her control, and the strength which came from it sank rapidly, she gave up her eastern possessions but slowly, one by one, and after stout resistance. Crete cost the Turks a war of twenty-four years (1645-1669). Fifteen years afterwards the Venetians gathered their energies afresh, assumed the aggressive, and conquered the whole Peloponnesus, which they held for a quarter of a century. Then it was lost again, and the Ionian Islands alone remained Venetian territory in the East.

Rise of the House of Savoy.

Of Italy at large, in the seventeenth century, lying prostrate under the heavy hand of Spain, there is no history to claim attention in so brief a sketch as this. One sovereign family in the northwest, long balanced on the Alps, in uncertainty between a cis-Alpine and a trans-Alpine destiny, but now clearly committed to Italian fortunes, had begun to win its footing among the noticeable smaller powers of the day by sheer dexterity of trimming and shifting sides in the conflicts of the time. This was the House of Savoy, whose first possessions were gathered in the crumbling of the old kingdom of Burgundy, and lay on both slopes of the Alps, commanding several important passes. On the western and northern side, the counts, afterwards dukes, of Savoy had to contend, as time went on, with the expanding kingdom of France and with the stout-hearted communities which ultimately formed the Swiss Confederacy. They fell back before both. At one period, in the fifteenth century, their dominion had stretched to the Saone, and to the lake of Neufchatel, on both sides of it, surrounding the free city of Geneva, which they were never able to overcome, and the lake of Geneva entire. After that time, the Savoyards gradually lost territory on the Gallic side and won compensations on the Italian side, in Piedmont, and at the expense of Genoa and the duchy of Milan. The Duke Victor Amadeus II. was the most successful winner for his house, and he made his gains by remarkable manœuvering on both sides of the wars of Louis XIV. One of his acquisitions (1713) was the island kingdom of Sicily, which gave him a royal title. A few years later he exchanged it with Austria for the island kingdom of Sardinia—a realm more desirable to him for geographical reasons only. The dukes of Savoy and princes of Piedmont thus became kings of Sardinia, and the name of the kingdom was often applied to their whole dominion, down to the recent time when the House of Savoy attained the grander kingship of united Italy.

First wars of Louis XIV.

The wars of Louis XIV. gave little opportunity for western and central Europe to make any other history than that of struggle and battle, invasion and devastation, intrigue and faithless diplomacy, shifting of political landmarks and traffic in border populations, as though they were pastured cattle, for fifty years, in the last part of the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth (1665-1715). It will be remembered that when this King of France married the Infanta of Spain, he joined in a solemn renunciation of all rights on her part and on that of her children to such dominions as she might otherwise inherit. But such a renunciation, with no sentiment of honor behind it, was worthless, of course, and Louis XIV., in his own esteem, stood on a height quite above the moral considerations that have force with common men. When Philip IV. of Spain died, in 1665, Louis promptly began to put forward the claims which he had pledged himself not to make. He demanded part of the Netherlands, and Franche Comté—the old county (not the duchy) of Burgundy—as belonging to his queen. It was his good fortune to be served by some of the greatest generals, military engineers and administrators of the day—by Turenne, Condé, Vauban, Louvois, and others—and when he sent his armies of invasion into Flanders and Franche Comté they carried all before them. Holland took alarm at these aggressions which came so near to her, and formed an alliance with England and Sweden to assist Spain. But the unprincipled English king, Charles II., was easily bribed to betray his ally; Sweden was bought over; Spain submitted to a treaty which gave the Burgundian county back to her, and surrendered an important part of the Spanish Netherlands to France. Louis' first exploit of national brigandage had thus been a glorious success, as glory is defined in the vocabulary of sovereigns of his class. He had stolen several valuable towns, killed some thousands of people, carried misery into the lives of some thousands more, and provoked the Dutch to a challenge of war that seemed promising of more glory of like kind.

In 1672 he prepared himself to chastise the Dutch, and his English pensioner, Charles II., with several German princes, joined him in the war. It was this war, as related already, which brought about the fall and the death of John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland; which raised William of Orange to the restored stadtholdership, and which gave him a certain leadership of influence in Europe, as against the French king. It was this war, likewise, which gave the Hohenzollerns their first great battle-triumph, in the defeat of the Swedes, allies of the French, at Fehrbellin. For Frederick William, the Great Elector, had joined the Emperor Leopold and the King of Spain in another league with Holland to resist the aggressions of France; while Sweden now took sides with Louis. England was soon withdrawn from the contest, by the determined action of Parliament, which forced its king to make peace. Otherwise the war became general in western Europe and was frightful in the death and misery it cost. Generally the French had the most success. Turenne was killed in 1675 and Condé retired the same year; but able commanders were found in Luxemburg and Crequi to succeed them. In opposition to William of Orange, the Dutch made peace at Nimegueu, in 1678, and Spain was forced to give up Franche Comté, with another fraction of her Netherland territories; but Holland lost nothing. Again Louis XIV. had beaten and robbed his neighbors with success, and was at the pinnacle of his glory. France, it is true, was oppressed and exhausted, but her king was a "grand monarch," and she must needs be content.

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For a few years the grand monarch contented himself with small filchings of territory, which kept his conscience supple and gave practice to his sleight-of-hand. On one pretext and another he seized town after town in Alsace, and, at last, 1681, surprised and captured the imperial free city of Strasburg, in a time of entire peace. He bombarded Genoa, took Avignon from the Pope, bullied and abused feeble Spain, made large claims on the Palatinate in the name of his sister-in-law, but against her will, and did nearly what he was pleased to do, without any effective resistance, until after William of Orange had been called to the English throne. That completed a great change in the European situation.

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The change had already been more than half brought about by a foul and foolish measure which Louis had adopted in his domestic administration. Cursed by a tyrant's impatience at the idea of free thought and free opinion among his subjects, he had been persuaded by Catholic zealots near his person to revoke the Edict of Nantes and revive persecution of the Huguenots. This was done in 1685. The fatal effects within France resembled those which followed the persecution of the Moriscoes of Spain. The Huguenots formed a large proportion of the best middle class of the kingdom,—its manufacturers, its merchants, its skilled and thrifty artisans. Infamous efforts were made to detain them in the country and there force them to apostacy or hold them under punishment if they withstood. But there was not power enough in the monarchy, with all its absolutism, to enclose France in such a wall. Vast numbers escaped—half a million it is thought—carrying their skill, their knowledge, their industry and their energy into Holland, England, Switzerland, all parts of Protestant Germany, and across the ocean to America. France was half ruined by the loss.

The League of Augsburg.

At the same time, the Protestant allies in Germany and the North, whom Louis had held in subserviency to himself so long, were angered and alarmed by his act. They joined a new defensive league against him, formed at Augsburg, in 1686, which embraced the Emperor, Spain, Holland, and Sweden, at first, and afterwards took in Savoy and other Italian states, along with Germany almost entire. But the League was miserably unprepared for war, and hardly hindered the march of Louis' armies when he suddenly moved them into the Rhenish electorates in 1688. For the second time in his reign, and under his orders, the Palatinate was fearfully devastated with fire and sword. But this attack on Germany, occupying the arms of France, gave William of Orange his opportunity to enter England unopposed and take the English crown. That accomplished, he speedily brought England into the League, enlarging it to a "grand alliance" of all western Europe against the dangerous monarch of France, and inspiring it with some measure of his own energy and courage. France had now to deal with enemies on every side. They swarmed on all her frontiers, and the strength and valor with which she met them were amazing. For three years the French more than held their own, not only in land-fighting, but on the sea, where they seemed likely, for a time, to dispute the supremacy of the English and the Dutch with success. But the frightful draft made on the resources of the nation, and the strain on its spirit, were more than could be kept up. The obstinacy of the king, and his indifference to the sufferings of his people, prolonged the war until 1697, but with steady loss to the French of the advantages with which they began. Two years before the end, Louis had bought over the Duke of Savoy, by giving back to him all that France had taken from his Italian territories since Richelieu's time. When the final peace was settled, at Ryswick, like surrenders had to be made in the Netherlands, Lorraine, and beyond the Rhine; but Alsace, with Strasburg, was kept, to be a German graft on France, until the sharp Prussian pruning knife, in our own time, cut it away.

War of the Spanish Succession.

There were three years of peace after the treaty of Ryswick, an then a new war—longer, more bitter, and more destructive than those before it—arose out of questions connected with the succession to the crown of Spain. Charles II., last of the Austro-Spanish or Spanish-Hapsburg kings, died in 1700, leaving no heir. The nearest of his relatives to the throne were the descendants of his two sisters, one of whom had married Louis XIV. and the other the Emperor Leopold, of the Austrian House. Louis XIV., as we know, had renounced all the Spanish rights of his queen and her issue; but that renunciation had been shown already to be wasted paper. Leopold had renounced nothing; but he had required a renunciation of her Spanish claims from the one daughter, Maria, of his Spanish wife, and he put forward claims to the Spanish succession, on his own behalf, because his mother had been a princess of that nation, as well as his wife. He was willing, however, to transfer his own rights to a younger son, fruit of a second marriage, the Archduke Charles.

The question of the Spanish succession was one of European interest and importance, and attempts had been made to settle it two years before the death of the Spanish king, in 1698, by a treaty, or agreement, between France, England, and Holland. By that treaty these outside powers (consulting Spain not at all) undertook a partition of the Spanish monarchy, in what they assumed to be the interest of the European balance of power. They awarded Naples, Sicily, and some lesser Italian possessions to a grandson of Louis XIV., the Milanese territory to the Archduke Charles, and the rest of the Spanish dominions to an infant son of Maria, the Emperor's daughter, who was married to the elector of Bavaria. But the infant so selected to wear the crown of Spain died soon afterwards, and a second treaty of partition was framed. This gave the Milanese to the Duke of Lorraine, in exchange for his own duchy, which he promised to cede to France, and the whole remainder of the Spanish inheritance was conceded to the Austrian archduke, Charles. In Spain, these arrangements were naturally resented, by both people and king, and the latter was persuaded to set against them a will, bequeathing all that he ruled to the younger grandson of Louis XIV., Philip of Anjou, on condition that the latter renounce for himself and for his heirs all claims to the crown of France. The inducement to this bequest was the power which the King of France possessed to enforce it, and so to preserve the unity of the Spanish realm. That the argument and the persuasion came from Louis' own agents, while other agents amused England, Holland and Austria with treaties of partition, is tolerably clear.

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Near the end of the year 1700, the King of Spain died; his will was disclosed; the treaties were as coolly ignored as the prior renunciation had been, and the young French prince was sent pompously into Spain to accept the proffered crown. For a time, there was indignation in Europe, but no more. William of Orange could persuade neither England nor Holland to war, and Austria could not venture hostilities without their help. But that submissiveness only drew from the grand monarch fresh displays of his dishonesty and his insolence. Philip of Anjou's renunciation of a possible succession to the French throne, while occupying that of Spain, was practically annulled: The government of Spain was guided from Paris like that of a dependency of France. Dutch and English commerce was injured by hostile measures. Movements alarming to Holland were made on the frontiers of the Spanish Netherlands. Finally, when the fugitive ex-king of England, James II., died at St. Germains, in September, 1701, Louis acknowledged James' son, the Pretender, as King of England. This insult roused the war spirit in England which King William had striven so hard to evoke. He had already arranged the terms of a new defensive Grand Alliance with Holland, Austria, and most of the German states. There was no difficulty now in making it an offensive combination.

But William, always weak in health, and worn by many cares and harassing troubles, died in March, 1702, before the war which he desired broke out. His death made no pause in the movement of events. Able statesmen, under Queen Anne, his successor, carried forward his policy and a great soldier was found, in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to command the armies of England and the Dutch. Another commander, of remarkable genius, Prince Eugene of Savoy, took service with the Emperor, and these two, acting cordially together, humbled the overweening pride of Louis XIV. in the later years of his reign. He had worn out France by his long exactions. His strong ministers, Colbert, Louvois and others, were dead, and he did not find successors for them. He had able generals, but none equal to Turenne, Condé or Luxemburg,—none to cope with Marlborough and Prince Eugene. The war was widespread, on a stupendous scale, and it lasted for twelve years. Its campaigns were fought in the Low Countries, in Germany, in Italy and in Spain. It glorified the reign of Anne, in English history, by the shining victories of Blenheim, Ramilies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, and by the capture of Gibraltar, the padlock of the Mediterranean. The misery to which France was reduced in the later years of the war was probably the greatest that the much suffering nation ever knew.

The Peace of Utrecht.

Louis sought peace, and was willing to go far in surrenders to obtain it. But the allies pressed him too hard in their demands. They would have him not only abandon the Bourbon dynasty that he had set up in Spain, but join them in overthrowing it. He refused to negotiate on such terms, and Fortune approved his resolution, by giving decisive victories to his arms in Spain, while dealing, out disaster and defeat in every other field. England grew weary of the war when it came to appear endless, and Marlborough and the Whigs, who had carried it on, were ousted from power. The Tories, under Harley and Bolingbroke, came into office and negotiated the famous Peace of Utrecht (1713), to which all the belligerents in the war, save the Emperor, consented. The Emperor yielded to a supplementary treaty, signed at Rastadt the next year. These treaties left the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V., on his throne, but bound him, by fresh renunciations, not to be likewise King of France. They gave to England Gibraltar and Minorca, at the expense of Spain, and Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Hudson's Bay at the expense of France. They took much more from Spain. They took Sicily, which they gave to the Duke of Savoy, with the title of King; they took Naples, Milan, Mantua and Sardinia, which they gave to Austria, or, more strictly speaking, to the Emperor; and they took the Spanish Netherlands, which they gave to Austria in the main, with some barrier towns to the Dutch. They took from France her conquests on the right bank of the Rhine; but they left her in possession of Alsace, with Strasburg and Landau. The great victim of the war was Spain.

France at the death of Louis XIV.

Louis XIV. was near the end of his reign when this last of the fearful wars which he caused was brought to a close. He died in September, 1715, leaving a kingdom which had reasons to curse his memory in every particular of its state. He had foiled the exertions of as wise a minister, Jean Colbert, as ever strove to do good to France. He had dried the sources of national life as with a searching and monstrous sponge. He had repressed everything which he could not absorb in his flaunting court, in his destroying armies, and in himself. He had dealt with France as with a dumb beast that had been given him to bestride; to display himself upon, before the gaze of an envious world; to be bridled, and spurred at his pleasure, and whipped; to toil for him and bear burdens as he willed; to tread upon his enemies and trample his neighbors' fields. It was he, more than all others before or after, who made France that dumb creature which suffered and was still for a little longer time, and then began thinking and went mad.

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Charles XII. of Sweden.

While the Powers of western Europe were wrestling in the great war of the Spanish Succession, the nations of the North and East were tearing each other, at the same time, with equal stubbornness and ferocity. The beginning of their conflict was a wanton attack from Russia, Poland and Denmark, on the possessions of Sweden. Sweden, in the past century, had made extensive, conquests, and her territories, outside of the Scandinavian peninsula, were thrust provokingly into the sides of all these three neighbors. There had been three Charleses on the Swedish throne in succession, following Christina, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. Queen Christina, an eccentric character, had abdicated in 1654, in order to join the Catholic Church, and had been succeeded by her cousin, Charles X. The six years reign of this Charles was one of constant war with the Danes and the Poles, and almost uniformly he was the aggressor. His son and successor, Charles XI., suffered the great defeat at Fehrbellin which gave prestige to Brandenburg; but he was shielded by the puissant arm of Louis XIV., his ally, and lost no territory. More successful in his domestic policy than in his wars, he, both practically and formally, established absolutism in the monarchy. Inheriting from his father that absolute power, while inheriting at the same time the ruthless ambition of his grandfather, Charles XII. came to the throne in 1697.

In the first two years of his reign, this extraordinary young autocrat showed so little of his character that his royal neighbors thought him a weakling, and Peter the Great, of Russia, conspired with Augustus of Poland and Frederick IV. of Denmark to strip him of those parts of his dominion which they severally coveted. The result was like the rousing of a lion by hunters who went forth to pursue a hare. The young Swede, dropping, instantly and forever, all frivolities, sprang at his assailants before they dreamed of finding him awake, and the game was suddenly reversed. The hunters became the hunted, and they had no rest for nine years from the implacable pursuit of them which Charles kept up. He defeated the Danes and the Russians in the first year of the war (1700). In 1702 he invaded Poland and occupied Warsaw; in 1704 he forced the deposition of the Saxon King of Poland, Augustus, and the election of Stanislaus Leczinski. Not yet satisfied, he followed Augustus into his electorate of Saxony, and compelled him there to renounce the Polish crown and the Russian alliance. In 1708 he invaded Russia, marching on Moscow, but turning aside to meet an expected ally, Mazeppa the Cossack. It was the mistake which Napoleon repeated a century later. The Swedes exhausted themselves in the march, and the Russians bided their time. Peter the Czar had devoted eight years, since Charles defeated him at Narva, to making soldiers, well-trained, out of the mob which that fight scattered. When Charles had worn his army down to a slender and disheartened force, Peter struck and destroyed it at Pultowa. Charles escaped from the wreck and took refuge, with a few hundreds of is guards, in the Turkish province of Bessarabia, at Bender. In that shelter, which the Ottomans hospitably accorded to him, he remained for five years, intriguing to bring the Porte into war with his Muscovite enemy, while all the fruits of his nine years of conquest in the North were stripped from him by the old league revived. Augustus returned to Poland and recovered his crown. Peter took possession of Livonia, Ingria, and a great part of Finland. Frederick IV., of Denmark, attacked Sweden itself. The kingless kingdom made a valiant defense against the crowd of eager enemies; but Charles had used the best of its energies and its resources, and it was not strong.

Near the end of 1710, Charles succeeded in pushing the Sultan into war with the Czar, and the latter, advancing into Moldavia, rashly placed himself in a position of great peril, where the Turks had him really at their mercy. But Catherine, the Czarina, who was present, found means to bribe the Turkish vizier in command, and Peter escaped with no loss more serious than the surrender of Azov. That ended the war, and the hopes of the Swedish king. But still the stubborn Charles wearied the Porte with his importunities, until he was commanded to quit the country. Even then he refused to depart,—resisted when force was used to expel him, and did not take his leave until late in November, 1714, when he received intelligence that his subjects were preparing to appoint his sister regent of the kingdom and to make peace with the Czar. That news hurried him homeward; but only for continued war. He was about to make terms with Russia, and to secure her alliance against Denmark, Poland and Hanover, when he was killed during an invasion of Norway, in the siege of Friedrickshall (December, 1718). The crown of Sweden was then conferred upon his sister, but shorn of absolute powers, and practically dependent upon the nobles. All the wars in which Charles XII. had involved his kingdom were brought to an end by great sacrifices, and Russia rose to the place of Sweden as the chief power in the North. The Swedes paid heavily for the career of their "Northern Alexander."

Alliance against Spain.

Before the belligerents in the North had quieted themselves, those of the West were again in arms. Spain had fallen under the influence of two eager and restless ambitions, that of the queen, Elizabeth of Parma, and an Italian minister, Cardinal Alberoni; and the schemes into which these two drew the Bourbon king, Philip V., soon ruptured the close relations with France which Louis XIV. had ruined his kingdom to bring about. To check them, a triple alliance was formed (1717) between France, England and Holland,—enlarged the next year to a quadruple alliance by the adhesion of Austria. At the outset of the war, Spain made a conquest of Sardinia, and almost accomplished the same in Sicily; but the English crushed her navy and her rising commerce, while the French crossed the Pyrenees with an army which the Spaniards could not resist. A vast combination which Alberoni was weaving, and which took in Charles XII., Peter the Great, the Stuart pretender, the English Jacobites, and the opponents of the regency in France, fell to pieces when the Swedish king fell. Alberoni was driven from Spain and all his plans were given up. The Spanish king withdrew from Sicily and surrendered Sardinia. The Emperor and the Duke of Savoy exchanged islands, as stated before, and the former (holding Naples already) revived the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while the latter became King of Sardinia.

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War of the Polish Succession.

These disturbances ended, there were a few years of rest in Europe, and then another war, of the character peculiar to the eighteenth century, broke out. It had its cause in the Polish election of a king to succeed Augustus II. As usual, the neighboring nations formed a betting ring of onlookers, so to speak, and "backed" their several candidates heavily. The deposed and exiled king, Stanislaus Leczinski, who received his crown from Charles XII. and lost it after Pultowa, was the French candidate; for he had married his daughter to Louis XV. Frederick Augustus of Saxony, son of the late King Augustus, was the Russian and Austrian candidate. The contest resulted in a double election (1733), and out of that came war. Spain and Sardinia joined France, and the Emperor had no allies. Hence the House of Austria suffered greatly in the war, losing the Two Sicilies, which went to Spain, and were conferred on a younger son of the king, creating a third Bourbon monarchy. Part of the duchy of Milan was also yielded by Austria to the King of Sardinia; and the Duke of Lorraine, husband of the Emperor's daughter, Maria Theresa, gave up his duchy to Stanislaus, who renounced therefor his claim on the crown of Poland. The Duke of Lorraine received as compensation a right of succession to the grand duchy of Tuscany, where the Medicean House was about to expire. These were the principal consequences, humiliating to Austria, of what is known as the First Family Compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons.

War of Jenkins' Ear.

This alliance between the two courts gave encouragement to hostile demonstrations in the Spanish colonies against English traders, who were accused of extensive smuggling, and the outcome was a petty war (1739), called "the War of Jenkins' Ear."

War of the Austrian Succession.

Before these hostilities were ended, another "war of succession," more serious than any before it, was wickedly brought upon Europe. The Emperor, Charles VI., died in 1740, leaving no son, but transmitting his hereditary dominions to his eldest daughter, the celebrated Maria Theresa, married to the ex-Duke of Lorraine. Years before his death he had sought to provide against any possible disputing of the succession, by an instrument known as the Pragmatic Sanction, to which he obtained, first, the assent of the estates of all the provinces and kingdoms of the Austrian realm, and, secondly, the guaranty by solemn treaty of almost every European Power. He died in the belief that he had established his daughter securely, and left her to the enjoyment of a peaceful reign. It was a pitiful illusion. He was scarcely in his grave before half the guarantors of the Pragmatic Sanction were putting forward claims to this part and that part of the Austrian territories. The Elector of Bavaria, the Elector of Saxony (in his wife's name) and the King of Spain, claimed the whole succession; the two first mentioned on grounds of collateral lineage, the latter (a Bourbon cuckoo in the Spanish-Hapsburg nest) as being the heir of the Hapsburgs of Spain.

While these larger pretensions were still jostling each other in the diplomatic stage, a minor claimant, who said little but acted powerfully, sent his demands to the Court of Vienna with an army following close at their heels. This was Frederick II. of Prussia, presently known as Frederick the Great, who resuscitated an obsolete claim on Silesia and took possession of the province (1740-41) without waiting for debate. If, anywhere, there had been virtuous hesitations before, his bold stroke ended them. France could not see her old Austrian rival dismembered without hastening to grasp a share. She contracted with the Spanish king and the Elector of Bavaria to enforce the latter's claims, and to take the Austrian Netherlands in prospect for compensation, while Spain should find indemnity in the Austro-Italian states. Frederick of Prussia, having Silesia in hand, offered to join Maria Theresa in the defense of her remaining dominions; but his proposals were refused, and he entered the league against her. Saxony did the same. England and Sardinia were alone in befriending Austria, and England was only strong at sea. Maria Theresa found her heartiest support in Hungary, where she made a personal appeal to her subjects, and enlarged their constitutional privileges. In 1742 the Elector of Bavaria was elected Emperor, as Charles VII. In the same year, Maria Theresa, acting under pressure from England, gave up the greater part of Silesia to Frederick, by treaty, as a price paid, not for the help he had offered at first, but barely for his neutrality. He abandoned his allies and withdrew from the war. His retirement produced an immense difference in the conditions of the contest. Saxony made peace at the same time, and became an active ally on the Austrian side. So rapidly did the latter then recover their ground and the French slip back that Frederick, after two years of neutrality, became alarmed, and found a pretext to take up arms again. The scale was now tipped to the side on which he threw himself, but not immediately; and when, in 1745, the Emperor, Charles VII., died suddenly, Maria Theresa was able to secure the election of her husband, Francis of Lorraine (or Tuscany), which founded the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty on the imperial throne. This was in September. In the following December Frederick was in Dresden, and Saxony—the one effective ally left to the Austrians, since England had withdrawn from the war in the previous August—was at his feet. Maria Theresa, having the Spaniards and the French still to fight in Italy and the Netherlands, could do nothing but make terms with the terrible Prussian king. The treaty, signed at Dresden on Christmas Day, 1745, repeated the cession of Silesia to Frederick, with Glatz, and restored Saxony to the humbled Elector.

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

France and Spain, deserted the second time by their faithless Prussian ally, continued the war until 1748, when the influence of England and Holland brought about a treaty of peace signed at Aix-la-Chapelle. France gained nothing from the war, but had suffered a loss of prestige, distinctly. Austria, besides giving up Silesia to Frederick of Prussia, was required to surrender a bit of Lombardy to the King of Sardinia, and to make over Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla to Don Philip of Spain, for a hereditary principality. Under the circumstances, the result to Maria Theresa was a notable triumph, and she shared with her enemy, Frederick, the fruitage of fame harvested in the war. But antagonism between these two, and between the interests and ambitions which they respectively represented—dynastic on one side and national on the other—was henceforth settled and irreconcilable, and could leave in Germany no durable peace.

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Colonial conflicts of France and England.

The peace was broken, not for Germany alone, but for Europe and for almost the world at large, in six years after the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The rupture occurred first very far from Europe—on the other sides of the globe, in America and Hindostan, where England and France were eager rivals in colonial conquest. In America, they had quarreled since the Treaty of Utrecht over the boundaries of Acadia, or Nova Scotia, which that treaty transferred to England. Latterly, they had come to a more serious collision in the interior of the continent. The English, rooting their possession of the Atlantic seaboard by strong and stable settlements, had been tardy explorers and slow in passing the Alleganies to the region inland. On the other hand, the French, nimble and enterprising in exploration, and in military occupation, but superficial and artificial in colonizing, had pushed their way by a long circuit from Canada, through the great lakes to the head waters of the Ohio, and were fortifying a line in the rear of the British colonies, from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the valley of the Mississippi, before the English were well aware of their intent. Then the colonists, Virginians and Pennsylvanians, took arms, and the career of George Washington was begun as leader of an expedition in 1754 to drive the French from the Ohio. It was not successful, and a strong force of regular troops was sent over next year by the British government, under Braddock, to repeat the attempt. A frightful catastrophe, worse than failure, came of this second undertaking, and open war between France and England, which had not yet been declared, followed soon. This colonial conflict of England and France fired the train, so to speak, which caused a great explosion of suppressed hostilities in Europe.

The House of Hanover in England.

If the English crown had not been worn by a German king, having a German principality to defend, the French and English might have fought out their quarrel on the ocean, and in the wilderness of America, or on the plains of the Carnatic, without disturbing their continental neighbors. But England was now under a new, foreign-bred line of sovereigns, descended from that daughter of James I., the princess Elizabeth, who married the unfortunate Elector Palatine and was queen of Bohemia for a brief winter term. After William of Orange died, his wife, Queen Mary, having preceded him to the grave, and no children having been born to them, Anne, the sister of Mary, had been called to the throne. It was in her reign that the brilliant victories of Marlborough were won, and in her reign that the Union of Scotland with England, under one parliament as well as one sovereign, was brought about. On Anne's death (1714), her brother, the son of James II., called "the Pretender," was still excluded from the throne, because of his religion, and the next heir was sought and summoned, in the person of the Elector George, of Hanover, whose remote ancestress was Elizabeth Stuart. George I. had reigned thirteen years, and his son, George II., had been twenty-seven years on the throne, when these quarrels with France arose. Throughout the two reigns, until 1742, the English nation had been kept mostly at peace, by the potent influence of a great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and had made a splendid advance in material prosperity and strength; while the system of ministerial government, responsible to Parliament and independent of the Crown, which has been in later times the peculiar feature of the British constitution, was taking shape. In 1742, Walpole fell from power, and the era of peace for England was ended. But her new dynasty had been firmly settled, and politically, industrially, and commercially, the nation was so sound in its condition as to be well prepared for the series of wars into which it plunged. In the War of the Austrian Succession England had taken a limited part, and with small results to herself. She was now about to enter, under the lead of the high spirited and ambitious Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, the greatest career of conquest in her history.

[Image: Europe 1768 A. D.]

The Seven Years War.

As before said, it was the anxiety of George II. for his electorate of Hanover which caused an explosion of hostilities in Europe to occur, as consequence of the remote fighting of French and English colonists in America. For the strengthening of Hanover against attacks from France, he sought an alliance with Frederick of Prussia. This broke the long-standing anti-French alliance of England with Austria, and Austria joined fortunes with her ancient Bourbon enemy, in order to be helped to the revenge which Maria Theresa now promised herself the pleasure of executing upon the Prussian king. As the combination finally shaped itself on the French side, it embraced France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Poland, Saxony, and the Palatinate, and its inspiring purpose was to break Prussia down and partition her territories, rather than to support France against England. The agreements to this end were made in secret; but Frederick obtained knowledge of them, and learned that papers proving the conspiracy against him were in the archives of the Saxony government, at Dresden. His action was decided with that promptitude which so often disconcerted his enemies. He did not wait to be attacked by the tremendous league formed against him, nor waste time in efforts to dissolve it, but defiantly struck the first blow. He poured his army into Saxony (August, 1756), seized Dresden by surprise, captured the documents he desired, and published them to the world in vindication of his summary precipitation of war. Then, blockading the Saxon army in Pirna, he pressed rapidly into Bohemia, defeated the Austrians at Lowositz, and returned as rapidly, to receive the surrender of the Saxons and to enlist most of them in his own ranks. This was the European opening of the Seven Years War, which raged, first and last, in all quarters of the globe. In the second year of the war, Frederick gained an important victory at Prague and suffered a serious reverse at Kolin, which threw most of Silesia into the hands of the Austrians. Close following that defeat came crushing news from Hanover, where the incompetent Duke of Cumberland, commanding for his father, the English King George, had allowed the French to force him to an agreement which disbanded his army, and left Prussia alone in the terrific fight. Frederick's position seemed desperate; but his energy retrieved it. {1087} He fought and defeated the French at Rossbach, near Lützen, on the 5th of November, and the Austrians, at Leuthen, near Breslau, exactly one month later. In the campaigns of 1758, he encountered the Russians at Zorndorf, winning a bloody triumph, and he sustained a defeat at Hochkirk, in battle with the Austrians. But England had repudiated Cumberland's convention and recalled him; English and Hanoverian forces were again put into the field, under the capable command of Prince Frederick of Brunswick, who turned the tide in that quarter against the French, and the results of the year were generally favorable to Frederick. In 1759, the Hanoverian army, under Prince Ferdinand, improved the situation on that side; but the prospects of the King of Prussia were clouded by heavy disasters. Attempting to push a victory over the Russians too far, at Kunersdorf, he was terribly beaten. He lost Dresden, and a great part of Saxony. In the next year he recovered all but Dresden, which he wantonly and inhumanly bombarded. The war was now being carried on with great difficulty by all the combatants. Prussia, France and Austria were suffering almost equally from exhaustion; the misery among their people was too great to be ignored; the armies of each had dwindled. The opponents of Pitt's war policy in England overcame him, in October, 1761, whereupon he resigned, and the English subsidy to Frederick was withdrawn. But that was soon made up to him by the withdrawal of Russia from the war, at the beginning of 1762, when Peter of Holstein, who admired Frederick, became Czar. Sweden made peace a little later. The remainder of the worn and wearied fighters went on striking at each other until near the end of the year.

Meantime, on the colonial and East Indian side of it, this prodigious Seven Years War, as a great struggle for world-empire between England and France, had been adding conquest to conquest and triumph to triumph for the former. In 1759, Wolfe had taken Quebec and died on the Heights of Abraham in the moment of victory. Another twelve months saw the whole of Canada clear of Frenchmen in arms. In the East, to use the language of Macaulay, "conquests equalling in rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and Pizarro, had been achieved." "In the space of three years the English had founded a mighty empire. The French had been defeated in every part of India. Chandernagore had yielded to Clive, Pondicherry to Coote. Throughout Bengal, Bahar, Orissa, and the Carnatic, the authority of the East India Company was more absolute than that of Acbar or Aurungzebe had ever been."

Treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg.

In February, 1763, two treaties of peace were concluded, one at Paris, on the 10th, between England, France and Spain (the latter Power having joined France in the war as late as January, 1762); the other at Hubertsburg, on the 15th, between Prussia and Austria. France gave up to England all her possessions in North America, except Louisiana (which passed to Spain,), and yielded Minorca, but recovered the Philippines. She surrendered, moreover, considerable interests in the West Indies and in Africa. The colonial aspirations of the French were cast down by a blow that was lasting in its effect. As between Prussia and Austria, the triumphs of the peace and the glories of the war were won entirely by the former. Frederick came out of it, "Frederick the Great," the most famous man of his century, as warrior and as statesman, both. He had defended his little kingdom for seven years against three great Powers, and yielded not one acre of its territory. He had raised Prussia to the place in Germany from which her subsequent advance became easy and almost inevitable. But the great fame he earned is spotted with many falsities and much cynical indifference to the commonest ethics of civilization. His greatness is of that character which requires to be looked at from selected standpoints.

Russia.

Another character, somewhat resembling that of Frederick, was now drawing attention on the eastern side of Europe. Since the death of Peter the Great, the interval in Russian history had been covered by six reigns, with a seventh just opening, and the four sovereigns who really exercised power were women. Peter's widow, Catherine I., had succeeded him (1725) for two years. His son, Alexis, he had put to death; but Alexis left a son, Peter, to whom Catherine bequeathed the crown. Peter II. died after a brief reign, in 1730; and the nearest heirs were two daughters of Peter the Great, Anne and Elizabeth. But they were set aside in favor of another Anne—Anne of Courland—daughter of Peter the Great's brother. Anne's reign of ten years was under the influence of German favorites and ministers, and nearly half of it was occupied with a Turkish War, in cooperation with Austria. For Austria the war had most humiliating results, costing her Belgrade, all of Servia, part of Bosnia and part of Wallachia. Russia won back Asov, with fortifications forbidden, and that was all. Anne willed her crown to an infant nephew, who appears in the Russian annals as Ivan VI.; but two regencies were overthrown by palace revolutions within little more than a year, and the second one carried to the throne that Princess Elizabeth, younger daughter of Peter the Great, who had been put aside eleven years before. Elizabeth, a woman openly licentious and intemperate, reigned for twenty-one years, during the whole important period of the War of the Austrian Succession, and almost to the end of the Seven Years War. She was bitterly hostile to Frederick the Great, whose sharp tongue had offended her, and she joined Maria Theresa with eagerness in the great effort of revenge, which failed. In the early part of her reign, war with Sweden had been more successful and had added South Finland to the Russian territories. It is claimed for her domestic government that the general prosperity of the country was advanced.

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Catherine II.

On the death of Elizabeth, near the end of the year 1761, the crown passed to her nephew, Peter of Holstein, son of her eldest sister, Anne, who had married the Duke of Holstein. This prince had been the recognized heir, living at the Russian court, during the whole of Elizabeth's reign. He was an ignorant boor, and he had become a besotted drunkard. Since 1744 he had been married to a young German princess, of the Anhalt Zerbst family, who took the baptismal name of Catherine when she entered the Greek Church. Catherine possessed a superior intellect and a strong character; but the vile court into which she came as a young girl, bound to a disgusting husband, had debauched her in morals and lowered her to its own vileness. She gained so great an ascendancy that the court was subservient to her, from the time that her incapable husband, Peter III., succeeded to the throne. He reigned by sufferance for a year and a half, and then (July, 1762) he was easily deposed and put to death. In the deposition, Catherine was the leading actor. Of the subsequent murder, some historians are disposed to acquit her. She did not scruple, at least, to accept the benefit of both deeds, which raised her, alone, to the throne of the Czars.

Partition of Poland.

Peter III., in his short reign, had made one important change in Russian policy, by withdrawing from the league against Frederick of Prussia, whom he greatly admired. Catherine found reasons, quite aside from those of personal admiration, for cultivating the friendship of the King of Prussia, and a close understanding with that astute monarch was one of the earliest objects of her endeavor. She had determined to put an end to the independence of Poland. As she first entertained the design, there was probably no thought of the partitioning afterwards contrived. But her purpose was to keep the Polish kingdom in disorder and weakness, and to make Russian influence supreme in it, with views, no doubt, that looked ultimately to something more. On the death of the Saxon king of Poland, Augustus III., in 1763, Catherine put forward a native candidate for the vacant throne, in the person of Stanislaus Poniatowsky, a Russianized Pole and a former lover of her own. The King of Prussia supported her candidate, and Poniatowsky was duly elected, with 10,000 Russian troops in Warsaw to see that it was properly done. The Poles were submissive to the invasion of their political independence; but when Catherine, who sought to create a Russian party in Poland by protecting the members of the Greek Church and the Protestants, against the intolerance of the Polish Catholics, forced a concession of civil equality to the former (1768), there was a wide-spread Catholic revolt. In the fierce war which followed, a band of Poles was pursued across the Turkish border, and a Turkish town was burned by the Russian pursuers. The Sultan, who professed sympathy with the Poles, then declared war against Russia. The Russo-Turkish war, in turn, excited Austria, which feared Russian conquests from the Turks, and another wide disturbance of the peace of Europe seemed threatening. In the midst of the excitement there came a whispered suggestion, to the ear of the courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg, that they severally satisfy their territorial cravings and mutually assuage each other's jealousy, at the expense of the crumbling kingdom of Poland. The whisper may have come from Frederick II. of Prussia, or it may not. There are two opinions on the point. From whatever source it came, it found favorable consideration at Vienna and St. Petersburg, and between February and August, 1772, the details of the partition were worked out.

Poland was not yet extinguished. The kingdom was only shorn of some 160,000 square miles of territory, more than half of which went to Russia, a third to Austria, and the remainder, less than 10,000 square miles, to Prussia. This last mentioned annexation was the old district of West Prussia which the Polish king, Casimir IV., had wrested from the Teutonic Knights in 1466, before Brandenburg had aught to do with Prussian lands or name. After three centuries, Frederick reclaimed it.

The diminished kingdom of Poland showed more signs of a true national life, of an earnest national feeling, of a sobered and rational patriotism, than had appeared in its former history. The fatal powers monopolized by the nobles, the deadly "liberum veto," the corrupting elective kingship, were looked at in their true light, and in May, 1791, a new constitution was adopted which reformed those evils. But a few nobles opposed the reformation and appealed to Russia, supplying a pretext to Catherine on which she filled Poland with her troops. It was in vain that the patriot Kosciusko led the best of his countrymen in a brave struggle with the invader. They were overborne (1793-1794); the unhappy nation was put in fetters, while Catherine and a new King of Prussia, Frederick William II., arranged the terms of a second partition. This gave to Prussia an additional thousand square miles, including the important towns of Danzig and Thorn, while Russia took four times as much. A year later, the small remainder of Polish territory was dismembered and divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and thus Poland disappeared from the map of Europe as a state.

Russia as left by Catherine II.

Meantime, in her conflicts with the Turks, Catherine was extending her vast empire to the Dneister and the Caucasus, and opening a passage for her fleets from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. By treaty in 1774 she placed the Tartars of the Crimea in independence of the Turks, and so isolated them for easy conquest. In 1783 the conquest was made complete. By the same treaty she secured a right of remonstrance on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Sultan, in the Danubian principalities and in the Greek Church at Constantinople, which opened many pretexts for future interference and for war at Russian convenience. The aggressions of the strong-willed and powerful Czarina, and their dazzling success, filled her subjects with pride, and effaced all remembrance of her foreign origin and her want of right to the seat which she filled. She was ambitious to improve the empire, as well as to expand it; for her liberal mind took in the large ideas of that speculative age and was much moved by them. She attempted many reforms; but most things that she tried to do for the bettering of civilization and the lifting of the people were done imperiously, and spoiled by the autocratic method of the doing. In her later years, her inclination towards liberal ideas was checked, and the French Revolution put an end to it.

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State of France in the Eighteenth Century.

In tracing the destruction of Poland and the aggrandizement of Russia, we have passed the date of that great catastrophe in France which ended the old modern order of things, and introduced a new one, not for France only, but for Europe at large. It was a catastrophe toward which the abused French people had been slowly slipping for generations, pushed unrelentingly to it by blind rulers and a besotted aristocracy. By nature a people ardent and lively in temper, hopeful and brave in spirit, full of intelligence, they had been held down in dumb repression: silenced in voice, even for the uttering of their complaints; the national meeting of their representative States suppressed for nearly two centuries; taxes wrung from them on no measure save the will of a wanton-minded and ignorant king; their beliefs prescribed, their laws ordained, their courts of justice commanded, their industries directed, their trade hedged round, their rights and permissions in all particulars meted out to them by the same blundering and irresponsible autocracy. How long would they bear it? and would their deliverance come by the easing of their yoke, or by the breaking of it?—were the only questions.