XI. THE GERMANIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY…

XI. THE GERMANIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE IN DECLINE

[Sidenote: Backwardness of the Germanies]

In another connection we have already described the political condition of the Germanies in the sixteenth century. [Footnote: See above, pp. 10 ff.] Outwardly, little change was observable in the eighteenth. The Holy Roman Empire still existed as a nominal bond of union for a loose assemblage of varied states. There was still a Habsburg emperor. There were still electors--the number had been increased from seven to nine [Footnote: Bavaria became an electorate in 1623 and Hanover in 1708; in 1778 Bavaria and the Palatinate were joined, again making eight.]--with some influence and considerable honor. There was still a Diet, composed of representatives of the princes and of the free cities, meeting regularly at Ratisbon. [Footnote: Ratisbon or Regensburg--in the Bavarian Palatinate. The Diet met there regularly after 1663.] But the empire was clearly in decline. The wave of national enthusiasm which Martin Luther evoked had spent itself in religious wrangling and dissension, and in the inglorious conflicts of the Thirty Years' War. The Germans had become so many pawns that might be moved back and forth upon the international chessboard by Habsburg and Bourbon gamesters. Switzerland had been lost to the empire; both France and Sweden had deliberately dismembered other valuable districts. [Footnote: For the provisions of the treaties of Westphalia, see above, pp. 228 f.]

[Sidenote: Deplorable Results of the Thirty Years' War]

It seemed as though slight foundation remained on which a substantial political structure could be reared, for the social conditions in the Germanies were deplorable. It is not an exaggeration to say that during the Thirty Years' War Germany lost at least half of its population and more than two-thirds of its movable property. In the middle of the seventeenth century, at about the time Louis XIV succeeded to a fairly prosperous France, German towns and villages were in ashes, and vast districts turned into deserts. Churches and schools were closed by hundreds, and religious and intellectual torpor prevailed. Industry and trade were so completely paralyzed that by 1635 the Hanseatic League was virtually abandoned, because the free commercial cities, formerly so wealthy, could not meet the necessary expenses. Economic expansion and colonial enterprise, together with the consequent upbuilding of a well-to-do middle class, were resigned to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, or England, without a protest from what had once been a proud burgher class in Germany. This elimination of an influential bourgeoisie was accompanied by a sorry impoverishment and oppression of the peasantry. These native sons of the German soil had fondly hoped for better things from the religious revolution and agrarian insurrections of the sixteenth century; but they were doomed to failure and disappointment. The peasantry were in a worse plight in the eighteenth century in Germany than in any other country of western or central Europe.

[Sidenote: The German Princes]

The princes alone knew how to profit by the national prostration. Enriched by the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in the sixteenth century and relieved of meddlesome interference on the part of the emperor or the Diet, they utilized the decline of the middle class and the dismal serfdom of the peasantry to exalt their personal political power. They got rid of the local assemblies or greatly curtailed their privileges, and gradually established petty tyrannies. After the Thirty Years' War, it became fashionable for the heirs of German principalities to travel and especially to spend some time at the court of France. Here they imbibed the political ideas of the Grand Monarch, and in a short time nearly every petty court in the Germanics was a small-sized reproduction of the court of Versailles. In a silly and ridiculous way the princes aped their great French neighbor: they too maintained armies, palaces, and swarms of household officials, which, though a crushing burden upon the people, were yet so insignificant in comparison with the real pomp of France, that they were in many instances the laughingstock of Europe. Beneath an external gloss of refinement, these princes were, as a class, coarse and selfish, and devoid of any compensating virtues. Neither the common people, whom they had impoverished, nor the Church, which they had robbed, was now strong enough to resist the growing absolutism and selfishness of the princes.

THE HABSBURG DOMINIONS

[Sidenote: Charles VI and his Hereditary Dominions]

At the opening of the eighteenth century, the largest and most important states of the Holy Roman Empire were those which owned the direct sovereignty of the Austrian Habsburgs. Charles VI (1711-1740), who as the Archduke Charles had vainly struggled against Louis XIV to secure the whole Spanish inheritance in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), reigned over extensive and scattered dominions. Around Vienna, his capital city, were gathered his hereditary possessions: (1) Lower Austria, or Austria proper, on the Danube; (2) Inner Austria, which comprised Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola; (3) Further Austria, consisting of the mountainous regions about Innsbruck, commonly designated the Tyrol; and (4) Upper Austria, embracing Breisgau on the upper Rhine near the Black Forest. To this nucleus of lands, in the greater part of which the German language was spoken universally, had been added in course of time the Czech or Slavic kingdom of Bohemia with its German dependency of Silesia and its Slavic dependency of Moravia, and a portion of the Magyar kingdom of Hungary, with its Slavic dependencies of Croatia and Slavonia and its Rumanian dependency of Transylvania. Charles VI, like so many of his Habsburg ancestors, was also emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and was thereby accounted the foremost of German princes. But neither Bohemia nor Hungary was predominantly German in language or feeling, and Hungary was not even a part of the Holy Roman Empire.

[Sidenote: Conquests of Charles VI]

What additions were made to the Habsburg dominions by Charles VI were all of non-German peoples. The treaty of Utrecht had given him the Flemish- and French-speaking Belgian Netherlands and the Italian- speaking duchy of Milan and kingdom of the Two Sicilies. [Footnote: See above, p. 253, footnote.] A series of wars with the Ottoman Turks had enabled his family to press the Hungarian boundaries south as far as Bosnia and Serbia and to incorporate as a dependency of Hungary the Rumanian-speaking principality of Transylvania. [Footnote: Definitely ceded by Turkey by the treaty of Karlowitz (1699).] Of course all these newer states of the Habsburgs remained outside of the Holy Roman Empire.

[Sidenote: Diversity of Habsburg Dominions]

Between the various peoples who were thus brought under the Habsburg sway, the bond was of loosest description. They spoke a dozen different languages and presented an even greater diversity of interests. They did not constitute a compact, strongly centralized, national state like France. Charles VI ruled his territories by manifold titles: he was archduke of Austria, king of Bohemia, king of Hungary, duke of Milan, and prince of the Netherlands; and the administration of each of these five major groups was independent of the others. The single bond of union was the common allegiance to the Habsburg monarch.

[Sidenote: Check upon Habsburg Ambitions in the Germanies]

To adopt and pursue a policy which would suit all these lands and peoples would hardly be possible for any mortal: it certainly surpassed the wit of the Habsburgs. They had made an attempt in the seventeenth century to develop a vigorous German policy, to unify the empire and to strengthen their hold upon it, but they had failed dismally. The disasters of the Thirty Years' War, the jealousies and ambitions of the other German princes, the interested intervention of foreign powers, notably Sweden and France, made it brutally clear that Habsburg influence in the Germanies had already reached its highest pitch and that henceforth it would tend gradually to wane.

Blocked in the Germanies, the Austrian Habsburgs looked elsewhere to satisfy their aspirations. But almost equal difficulties confronted them. Extension to the southeast in the direction of the Balkan peninsula involved almost incessant warfare with the Turks. Increase of territory in Italy incited Spain, France, and Sardinia to armed resistance. Development of the trade of the Belgian Netherlands aroused the hostility of the influential commercial classes in England, Holland, and France. The time and toil spent upon these non-German projects obviously could not be devoted to the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, not only were the Germanies a source of weakness to the Habsburgs, but the Habsburgs were a source of weakness to the Germanies.

[Sidenote: Continued Prestige of the Habsburgs]

Despite these drawbacks, the Habsburg family was still powerful. The natural resources and native wealth of many of the regions, the large, if rather cosmopolitan, armies which might be raised, the intricate marriage relationships with most of the sovereign families of Europe, the championship of the Catholic Church, the absolutist principles and practices of the reigning prince, all contributed to cloak the weaknesses, under a proud name and pretentious fame, of the imperial Austrian line.

[Sidenote: Question of the Habsburg Inheritance] [Sidenote: The "Pragmatic Sanction" of Charles VI]

In the eighteenth century a particularly unkind fate seemed to attend the Habsburgs. We have already noticed how the extinction of the male line in the Spanish branch precipitated a great international war of succession, with the result that the Spanish inheritance was divided and the greater part passed to the rival Bourbon family. Now Charles VI was obliged to face a similar danger in the Austrian inheritance. He himself had neither sons nor brothers, but only a daughter, Maria Theresa. Spurred on by the fate of his Spanish kinsman, Charles VI directed his energies toward securing a settlement of his possessions prior to his death. Early in his reign he promulgated a so-called Pragmatic Sanction which declared that the Habsburg dominions were indivisible and that, contrary to long custom, they might be inherited by female heirs in default of male. Then he subordinated his whole foreign policy to securing general European recognition of the right of Maria Theresa to succeed to all his territories. One after another of his manifold principalities swore to observe the Pragmatic Sanction. One after another of the foreign powers--Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, Holland, the Empire, Poland, France, Spain, and Sardinia,--to whom liberal concessions were made--pledged their word and their honor most sacredly to preserve the Pragmatic Sanction. When Charles VI died in 1740, he left his daughter a disorganized state, a bankrupt treasury, and a small ill-disciplined army, but he bequeathed her an ample number of parchment guarantees. The cynical Prussian king remarked that 200,000 fighting men would have been a more useful legacy, and, as events proved, he was right.

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA. THE HOHENZOLLERNS

[Sidenote: The Hohenzollern Family]

Next to the Habsburgs, the most influential German family in the eighteenth century was the Hohenzollern. As far back as the tenth century, a line of counts was ruling over a castle on the hill of Zollern just north of what is now Switzerland. These counts slowly extended their lands and their power through the fortunes of feudal warfare and by means of a kindly interest on the part of the Holy Roman Emperors, until at length, in the twelfth century, a representative of the Hohenzollerns became by marriage burgrave of the important city of Nuremberg.

[Sidenote: Brandenburg]

So far the Hohenzollerns had been fortunate, but as yet they were no more conspicuous than hundreds of petty potentates throughout the empire. It was not until they were invested by the Habsburg emperor with the electorate of Brandenburg in 1415 that they became prominent. Brandenburg was a district of northern Germany, centering in the town of Berlin and lying along the Oder River. As a mark, or frontier province, it was the northern and eastern outpost of the German language and German culture, and the exigencies of almost perpetual warfare with the neighboring Slavic peoples had given Brandenburg a good deal of military experience and prestige. As an electorate, moreover, it possessed considerable influence in the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire.

In the sixteenth century, the acceptance of Lutheranism by the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg enabled them, like many other princes of northern Germany, to seize valuable properties of the Catholic Church and to rid themselves of a foreign power which had curtailed their political and social sway. Brandenburg subsequently became the chief Protestant state of Germany, just as to Austria was conceded the leadership of the Catholic states.

[Sidenote: The Hohenzollerns and the Thirty Years' War]

The period of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) was as auspicious to the Hohenzollerns as it was unlucky for the Habsburgs. On the eve of the contest, propitious marriage alliances bestowed two important legacies upon the family--the duchy of Cleves [Footnote: Though the alliance between Brandenburg and Cleves dated from 1614, the Hohenzollerns did not reign over Cleves until 1666. With Cleves went its dependencies of Mark and Ravensberg.] on the lower Rhine, and the duchy of East Prussia, [Footnote: Prussia was then an almost purely Slavic state. It had been formed and governed from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century by the Teutonic Knights, a military, crusading order of German Catholics, who aided in converting the Slavs to Christianity. In the sixteenth century the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights professed the Lutheran faith and transformed Prussia into an hereditary duchy in his own family. In a series of wars West Prussia was incorporated into Poland, while East Prussia became a fief of that kingdom. It was to East Prussia only that the Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg succeeded in 1618.] on the Baltic north of Poland. Henceforth the head of the Hohenzollern family could sign himself margrave and elector of Brandenburg, duke of Cleves, and duke of Prussia. In the last-named role, he was a vassal of the king of Poland; in the others, of the Holy Roman Emperor. In the course of the Thirty Years' War, the Hohenzollerns helped materially to lessen imperial control, and at the close of the struggle secured the wealthy bishoprics of Halberstadt, Minden, and Magdeburg, [Footnote: The right of accession to Magdeburg was accorded the Hohenzollerns in 1648; they did not formally possess it until 1680.] and the eastern half of the duchy of Pomerania.

[Sidenote: The Great Elector]

The international reputation of the Hohenzollerns was established by Frederick William, commonly styled the Great Elector (1640-1688). When he ascended the throne, the Thirty Years' War had reduced his scattered dominions to utmost misery: he was resolved to restore prosperity, to unify his various possessions, and to make his realm a factor in general European politics. By diplomacy more than by military prowess, he obtained the new territories by the peace of Westphalia. Then, taking advantage of a war between Sweden and Poland, he made himself so invaluable to both sides, now helping one, now deserting to the other, that by cunning and sometimes by unscrupulous intrigue, he induced the king of Poland to renounce suzerainty over East Prussia and to give him that duchy in full sovereignty. In the Dutch War of Louis XIV (1672- 1678) he completely defeated the Swedes, who were in alliance with France, and, although he was not allowed by the provisions of the peace to keep what he had conquered, nevertheless the fame of his army was established and Brandenburg-Prussia took rank as the chief competitor of Sweden's hegemony in the Baltic.

In matters of government, the Great Elector was, like his contemporary Louis XIV, a firm believer in absolutism. At the commencement of his reign, each one of the three parts of his lands--Brandenburg, Cleves, and East Prussia--was organized as a separate, petty state, with its own Diet or form of representative government, its own army, and its own independent administration. After a hard constitutional struggle, Frederick William deprived the several Diets of their significant functions, centered financial control in his own person, declared the local armies national, and merged the three separate administrations into one, strictly subservient to his royal council at Berlin. Thus, the three states were amalgamated into one; and, to all intents and purposes, they constituted a united monarchy.

The Great Elector was a tireless worker. He encouraged industry and agriculture, drained marshes, and built the Frederick William Canal, joining the Oder with the Elbe. When the revocation of the Edict of Nantes caused so many Huguenots to leave France, the Great Elector's warm invitation attracted to Brandenburg some 20,000, who were settled around Berlin and who gave French genius as well as French names to their adopted country. The capital city, which at the Great Elector's accession numbered barely 8000, counted at his death a population of over 20,000.

[Sidenote: Brandenburg-Prussia a "Kingdom," 1701]

Brandenburg-Prussia was already an important monarchy, but its ruler was not recognized as "king" until 1701, when the Emperor Leopold conferred upon him that title in order to enlist his support in the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1713, by the treaty of Utrecht, the other European powers acknowledged the title. It was Prussia, rather than Brandenburg, which gave its name to the new kingdom, because the former was an entirely independent state, while the latter was a member of the Holy Roman Empire. Thereafter the "kingdom of Prussia" [Footnote: At first the Hohenzollern monarch assumed the title of king in Prussia, because West Prussia was still a province of the kingdom of Poland. Gradually, however, under Frederick William I (1713-1740), the popular appellation of "king of Prussia" prevailed over the formal "king in Prussia." West Prussia was definitely acquired in 1772 (see below, p. 387).] designated the combined territories of the Hohenzollern family.

Prussia rose rapidly in the eighteenth century. She shared with Austria the leadership of the Germanies and secured a position in Europe as a first-rate power. This rise was the result largely of the efforts of Frederick William I (1713-1740).

[Sidenote: King Frederick William I, 1713-1740]

King Frederick William was a curious reversion to the type of his grandfather: he was the Great Elector over again with all his practical good sense if without his taste for diplomacy. His own ideal of kingship was a paternal despotism, and his ambition, to use most advantageously the limited resources of his country in order to render Prussia feared and respected abroad. He felt that absolutism was the only kind of government consonant with the character of his varied and scattered dominions, and he understood in a canny way the need of an effective army and of the closest economy which would permit a relatively small kingdom to support a relatively large army. Under Frederick William I, money, military might, and divine-right monarchy became the indispensable props of the Hohenzollern rule in Prussia.

By a close thrift that often bordered on miserliness King Frederick William I managed to increase his standing army from 38,000 to 80,000 men, bringing it up in numbers so as to rank with the regular armies of such first-rate states as France or Austria. In efficiency, it probably surpassed the others. An iron discipline molded the Prussian troops into the most precise military engine then to be found in Europe, and a staff of officers, who were not allowed to buy their commissions, as in many European states, but who were appointed on a merit basis, commanded the army with truly professional skill and devoted loyalty.

In civil administration, the king persevered in the work of centralizing the various departments. A "general directory" was intrusted with the businesslike conduct of the finances and gradually evolved an elaborate civil service--the famous Prussian bureaucracy, which, in spite of inevitable "red tape," is notable to this day for its efficiency and devotion to duty. The king endeavored to encourage industry and trade by enforcing up-to-date mercantilist regulations, and, although he repeatedly expressed contempt for current culture because of what he thought were its weakening tendencies, he nevertheless prescribed compulsory elementary education for his people.

King Frederick William, who did so much for Prussia, had many personal eccentricities that highly amused Europe. Imbued with patriarchal instincts, he had his eye on everybody and everything. He treated his kingdom as a schoolroom, and, like a zealous schoolmaster, flogged his naughty subjects unmercifully. If he suspected a man of possessing adequate means, he might command him to erect a fine residence so as to improve the appearance of the capital. If he met an idler in the streets, he would belabor him with his cane and probably put him in the army. And a funny craze for tall soldiers led to the creation of the famous Potsdam Guard of Giants, a special company whose members must measure at least six feet in height, and for whose service he attracted many foreigners by liberal financial offers: it was the only luxury which the parsimonious king allowed himself.

[Sidenote: Accession of Frederick the Great, 1740]

During a portion of his reign the crabbed old king feared that all his labors and savings would go for naught, for he was supremely disappointed in his son, the crown-prince Frederick. The stern father had no sympathy for the literary, musical, artistic tastes of his son, whom he thought effeminate, and whom he abused roundly with a quick and violent temper. When Prince Frederick tried to run away, the king arrested him and for punishment put him through such an arduous, slave- like training in the civil and military administration, from the lowest grades upward, as perhaps no other royal personage ever received. It was this despised and misunderstood prince who as Frederick II succeeded his father on the throne of Prussia in 1740 and is known in history as Frederick the Great.

The year 1740 marked the accession of Frederick the Great in the Hohenzollern possessions and of Maria Theresa in the Habsburg territories. [Footnote: Below are discussed the foreign achievements (pp. 354 ff.) of these two rival sovereigns, and in Chapter XIV (pp. 440 ff.) their internal policies.] It also marked the outbreak of a protracted struggle within the Holy Roman Empire between the two foremost German states--Austria and Prussia.

THE MINOR GERMAN STATES

[Sidenote: German States Other than Austria and Prussia]

Of the three hundred other states which composed the empire, few were sufficiently large or important to exert any considerable influence on the issue of the contest. A few, however, which took sides, deserve mention not only because in the eighteenth century they preserved a kind of balance of power between the rivals but also because they have been more or less conspicuous factors in the progress of recent times. Such are Bavaria, Saxony, and Hanover.

[Sidenote: Bavaria]

Bavaria lay on the upper Danube to the west of Austria and in the extreme southeastern corner of what is now the German Empire. For centuries it was ruled by the Wittelsbach family, whose remarkable prince, Maximilian I (1597-1651), had headed the Catholic League and loyally supported the Habsburgs in the Thirty Years' War, and by the peace of Westphalia had gained a part of the Palatinate [Footnote: The other part of the Palatinate, under another branch of the Wittelsbachs, was reunited with Bavaria in 1779.] together with the title of "elector." His successor had labored with much credit in the second half of the seventeenth century to repair the wounds caused by the war, encouraging agriculture and industries, building or restoring numerous churches and monasteries. But the Bavarian electors in the first half of the eighteenth century sacrificed a sound, vigorous policy of internal reform to a far-reaching ambition in international politics. Despite the bond of a common religion which united them to Austria, they felt that their proximity to their powerful neighbor made the Habsburgs their natural enemies. In the War of the Spanish Succession, therefore, Bavaria took the side of France against Austria, and when Maria Theresa ascended the throne in 1740, the elector of Bavaria, who had married a Habsburg princess disbarred by the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VI, immediately allied himself with Frederick of Prussia and with France in order to dismember the Austrian dominions.

[Sidenote: Saxony]

The Saxony of the eighteenth century was but a very small fraction of the vast Saxon duchy which once comprised all northwestern Germany and whose people in early times had emigrated to England or had been subjugated by Charlemagne. Saxony had been restricted since the thirteenth century to a district on the upper Elbe, wedged in between Habsburg Bohemia and Hohenzollern Brandenburg. Here, however, several elements combined to give it an importance far beyond its extent or population. It was the geographical center of the Germanies. It occupied a strategic position between Prussia and Austria. Its ruling family--the Wettins--were electors of the empire. It had been, moreover, after the championship of Martin Luther by one of its most notable electors, [footnote: Frederick the Wise( 1486-1525)] a leader of the Lutheran cause, and the reformer's celebrated translation of the Bible had fixed the Saxon dialect as the literary language of Germany. At one time it seemed as if Saxony, rather than Brandenburg-Prussia, might become the dominant state among the Germanies. But the trend of events determined otherwise. A number of amiable but weak electors in the seventeenth century repeatedly allied themselves with Austria against the Hohenzollerns and thereby practically conceded to Brandenburg the leadership of the Protestant states of northern Germany.[Footnote: Another source of weakness in Saxony was the custom in the Wettin family of dividing the inheritance among members of the family. Such was the origin of the present infinitesimal states of Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen, and Saxe-Altenburg.]

[Sidenote: Personal Union of Saxony and Poland]

Then, too, toward the close of the century, the elector separated himself from his people by becoming a Roman Catholic, and, in order that he might establish himself as king of Poland, he burdened the state with continued Austrian alliance, with war, and with heavy taxes. The unnatural union of Saxony and Poland was maintained throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century: it was singularly disastrous for both parties.

[Sidenote: Hanover, and its Personal Union with Great Britain]

A part of the original ancient territory of the Saxons in north western Germany was included in the eighteenth century in the state of Hanover, extending between the Elbe and the Weser and reaching from Brandenburg down to the North Sea. Hanover was recognized as an electorate during the War of the Spanish Succession, [Footnote: The emperor had given the title of elector to Ernest Augustus in 1692; the Powers recognized George I as elector in 1708.] but its real importance rested on the fact that its first elector, through his mother's family, became in 1714 George I of Great Britain, the founder of the Hanoverian dynasty in that country. This personal union between the British kingdom and the electorate of Hanover continued for over a century, and was not without vital significance in international negotiations. Both George I and George II preferred Hanover to England as a place of residence and directed their primary efforts towards the protection of their German lands from Habsburg or Hohenzollern encroachments.

Enough has now been said to give some idea of the distracted condition of the Germanies in the eighteenth century and to explain why the Holy Roman Empire was an unimportant bond of union. Austria, traditionally the chief of the Germanies, was increasingly absorbed in her non-German possessions in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. Prussia, the rising kingdom of the North, comprised a population in which Slavs constituted a large minority. Saxony was linked with Poland; Hanover, with Great Britain. Bavaria was a chronic ally of France. Add to this situation, the political domination of France or Sweden over a number of the petty states of the empire, the selfishness and jealousies of all the German rulers, the looming bitter rivalry between Prussia and Austria, and the sum-total is political chaos, bloodshed, and oppression.

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN HOHENZOLLERNS AND HABSBURGS

[Sidenote: Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa]

In the struggle between Prussia and Austria--between Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs--centered the European diplomacy and wars of the mid- eighteenth century. On one side was the young king Frederick II (1740- 1786); on the other, the young queen Maria Theresa (1740-1780). Both had ability and sincere devotion to their respective states and peoples,--a high sense of royal responsibilities. Maria Theresa was beautiful, emotional, and proud; the Great Frederick was domineering, cynical, and always rational. The Austrian princess was a firm believer in Catholic Christianity; the Prussian king was a friend of Voltaire and a devotee of skepticism.

[Sidenote: Coalition against Maria Theresa]

Frederick inherited from his father a fairly compact monarchy and a splendidly trained and equipped army of 80,000 men. He smiled at the disorganized troops, the disordered finances, the conflicting interests in the hodge-podge of territories which his rival had inherited from her father. He also smiled at the solemn promise which Prussia had made to respect the Austrian dominions. No sooner was the Emperor Charles VI dead and Maria Theresa proclaimed at Vienna than Frederick II entered into engagements with Bavaria and France to dismember her realm. The elector of Bavaria was to be made Holy Roman Emperor as Charles VII and Prussia was to appropriate Silesia. France was suspected of designs upon the Austrian Netherlands.

[Sidenote: Frederick's Designs on Silesia]

Silesia thus became the bone of contention between Frederick II and Maria Theresa. Silesia covered the fertile valley of the upper Oder, separating the Slavic Czechs of Frederick's Bohemia on the west from the Slavic Poles on the east. Its population, which was largely German, was as numerous as that of the whole kingdom of Prussia, and if annexed to the Hohenzollern possessions would make them overwhelmingly German. On the other hand, the loss of Silesia would give Austria less direct influence in strictly German affairs and would deprive her of a convenient point of attack against Berlin and the heart of Prussia.

[Sidenote: Outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740]

Trumping up an ancient family claim to the duchy, Frederick immediately marched his army into Silesia and occupied Breslau, its capital. To the west, a combined Bavarian and French army prepared to invade Austria and Bohemia. Maria Theresa, pressed on all sides, fled to Hungary and begged the Magyars to help her. The effect was electrical. Hungarians, Austrians, and Bohemians rallied to the support of the Habsburg throne; recruits were drilled and hurried to the front; the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) was soon in full swing.

[Sidenote: Entrance of Great Britain and Spain]

A trade war had broken out between Great Britain and Spain in 1739, [Footnote: Commonly called the War of Jenkins's Ear. See above, p. 311] which speedily became merged with the continental struggle. Great Britain was bent on maintaining liberal trading privileges in the Belgian Netherlands and always opposed the incorporation of those provinces into the rival and powerful monarchy of France, preferring that they should remain in the hands of some distant and less-feared, less commercial power, such as Austria. Great Britain, moreover, had fully recognized the Pragmatic Sanction and now determined that it was in accordance with her own best interests to supply Maria Theresa with money and to dispatch armies to the Continent to defend the Netherlands against France and to protect Hanover against Prussia. On the other side, the royal family of Spain sympathized with their Bourbon kinsmen in France and hoped to recover from Austria all the Italian possessions of which Spain had been deprived by the treaty of Utrecht (1713).

The main parties to the War of the Austrian Succession were, therefore, on the one hand, Prussia, France, Spain, and Bavaria, and, on the other, Austria and Great Britain. With the former at first joined the elector of Saxony, who wished to play off Prussia against Austria for the benefit of his Saxon and Polish lands, and the king of Sardinia, who was ever balancing in Italy between Habsburg and Bourbon pretensions. With Austria and Great Britain was united Holland, because of her desire to protect herself from possible French aggression.

[Sidenote: Course of the War]

The war was not so terrible or bloody as its duration and the number of contestants would seem to indicate. Saxony, which inclined more naturally to Austrian than to Prussian friendship, was easily persuaded by bribes to desert her allies and to make peace with Maria Theresa. Spain would fight only in Italy; and Sardinia, alarmed by the prospect of substantial Bourbon gains in that peninsula, went over to the side of Austria. The Dutch were content to defend their own territories.

[Sidenote: Success of Frederick]

Despite the greatest exertions, Maria Theresa was unable to expel Frederick from Silesia. Her generals suffered repeated reverses at his hands, and three times she was forced to recognize his occupation in order that she might employ all her forces against her western enemies. By the third treaty between the two German sovereigns, concluded at Dresden in 1745, Silesia [Footnote: Except a very small district, which thereafter was known as "Austrian Silesia."] was definitely ceded by Austria to Prussia. Frederick had gained his ends: he coolly deserted his allies and withdrew from the war.

Meanwhile the Austrian arms had elsewhere been more successful. The French and Bavarians, after winning a few trifling victories in Bohemia, had been forced back to the upper Danube. Munich was occupied by the troops of Maria Theresa at the very time when the elector was being crowned at Frankfort as Holy Roman Emperor. The whole of Bavaria was soon in Austrian possession, and the French were in retreat across the Rhine. Gradually, also, the combined forces of Austria and Sardinia made headway in Italy against the Bourbon armies of France and Spain.

In the last years of the war, the French managed to protect Alsace and Lorraine from Austrian invasion, and, under the command of the gifted Marshal Saxe, they actually succeeded in subjugating the greater part of the Austrian Netherlands and in carrying the struggle into Holland. On the high seas and in the colonies, the conflict raged between France and Great Britain as "King George's War," which has already been separately noted. [Footnote: See above, pp. 311 f.]

[Sidenote: Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): Indecisive Character of Struggle between Prussia and Austria]

The treaties which ended the War of the Austrian Succession were signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. They guaranteed the acquisition of Silesia by Frederick II of Prussia and restored everything else to the situation at the opening of the conflict. The Wittelsbach family was reinstated in Bavaria and in the Palatinate, and the husband of Maria Theresa, Francis of Lorraine, succeeded Charles VII as Holy Roman Emperor. France, for all her expenditures and sacrifices, gained nothing. The War of the Austrian Succession was but a preliminary encounter in the great duel for German leadership between Prussia and Austria. It was similarly only an indecisive round in the prolonged battle between France and Great Britain for the mastery of the colonial and commercial world.

[Sidenote: Coalition against Frederick the Great]

In the war just closed, Austria had been the chief loser, and the resolute Maria Theresa set herself at once to the difficult task of recovering her prestige and her ceded territory. Her first efforts were directed toward internal reform--consolidating the administrations of her various dominions by the creation of a strong central council at Vienna, encouraging agriculture, equalizing and augmenting the taxes, and increasing the army. Her next step was to form a great league of rulers that would find a common interest with her in dismembering the kingdom of Frederick. She knew she could count on Saxony. She easily secured an ally in the Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia, who had been deeply offended by the caustic wit of the Prussian king. She was already united by friendly agreements with Great Britain and Holland. She had only France to win to her side, and in this policy she had the services of an invaluable agent, Count Kaunitz, the greatest diplomat of the age. Kaunitz held out to France, as the price for the abandonment of the Prussian alliance and the acceptance of that of Austria, the tempting bait of Frederick's Rhenish provinces. But Louis XV at first refused an Austrian alliance: it would be a departure from the traditional French policy of opposing the Habsburgs. Kaunitz then appealed to the king's mistress, the ambitious Madame de Pompadour, who, like the Tsarina Elizabeth, had had plenty of occasions for taking offense at the witty verses of the Prussian monarch: the favor of the Pompadour was won, and France entered the league against Prussia.

[Sidenote: The "Diplomatic Revolution"]

Meanwhile, however, Great Britain had entered into a special agreement with Frederick with the object of guaranteeing the integrity of Hanover and the general peace of the Germanies. When, therefore, the colonial war between Great Britain and France was renewed in 1754, it was quite natural that the former should contract a definite alliance with Prussia. Thus it befell that, whereas in the indecisive War of the Austrian Succession Prussia and France were pitted against Austria and Great Britain, in the determinant Seven Years' War, which ensued, Austria and France were in arms against Prussia and Great Britain. This overturn of traditional alliances has been commonly designated the "Diplomatic Revolution."

[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War, 1756-1763]

The Seven Years' War lasted in Europe from 1756 to 1763, and, as regards both the number of combatants and the brilliant generalship displayed, deserves to rank with the War of the Spanish Succession as the greatest war which the modern world had so far witnessed. The story has already been told of its maritime and colonial counterpart, which embraced the French and Indian War in America (1754-1763) and the triumphant campaigns of Clive in India, and which decisively established the supremacy of Great Britain on the seas, in the Far East, and in the New World. [Footnote: See above, pp. 312 ff.] There remains to sketch its course on the European continent.

[Sidenote: Frederick's Victory at Rossbach, 1757]

Without waiting for a formal declaration of hostilities, Frederick seized Saxony, from which he exacted large indemnities and drafted numerous recruits, and, with his well-trained veteran troops, crossed the mountains into Bohemia. He was obliged by superior Austrian forces to raise the siege of Prague and to fall back on his own kingdom. Thence converged from all sides the allied armies of his enemies. Russians moved into East Prussia, Swedes from Pomerania into northern Brandenburg, Austrians into Silesia, while the French were advancing from the west. Here it was that Frederick displayed those qualities which entitle him to rank as one of the greatest military commanders of all time and to justify his title of "the Great." Inferior in numbers to any one of his opponents, he dashed with lightning rapidity into central Germany and at Rossbach (1757) inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon the French, whose general wrote to Louis XV, "The rout of our army is complete: I cannot tell you how many of our officers have been killed, captured, or lost." No sooner was he relieved of danger in the west than he was back in Silesia. He flung himself upon the Austrians at Leuthen, took captive a third of their army, and put the rest to flight.

The victories of Frederick, however, decimated his army. He still had money, thanks to the subsidies which Pitt poured in from Great Britain, but he found it very difficult to procure men: he gathered recruits from hostile countries; he granted amnesty to deserters; he even enrolled prisoners of war. He was no longer sufficiently sure of his soldiers to take the offensive, and for five years he was reduced to defensive campaigns in Silesia. The Russians occupied East Prussia and penetrated into Brandenburg; in 1759 they captured Berlin.

[Sidenote: French Reverses. The "Family Compact"]

The French, after suffering defeat at Rossbach, directed their energies against Hanover but encountered unexpected resistance at the hands of an army collected by Pitt's gold and commanded by a Prussian general, the prince of Brunswick. Brunswick defeated them and gradually drove them out of Germany. This series of reverses, coupled with disasters that attended French armies in America and in India, caused the French king to call upon his cousin, the king of Spain, for assistance. The result was the formation of the defensive alliance (1761) between the Bourbon states of France, Spain, and the Two Sicilies, and the entrance of Spain into the war (1762).

[Sidenote: Withdrawal of Russia]

What really saved Frederick the Great was the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth (1762) and the accession to the Russian throne of Peter III, a dangerous madman but a warm admirer of the military prowess of the Prussian king. Peter in brusque style transferred the Russian forces from the standard of Maria Theresa to that of Frederick and restored to Prussia the conquests of his predecessor. [Footnote: Peter III was dethroned in the same year; his wife, Catherine II, who succeeded him, refused to give active military support to either side.] Spain entered the war too late to affect its fortunes materially. She was unable to regain what France had lost, and in fact the Bourbon states were utterly exhausted. The Austrians, after frantic but vain attempts to wrest Silesia from Frederick, finally despaired of their cause.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Hubertusburg (1763): Humiliation of the Habsburgs and Triumph of the Hohenzollerns]

The treaty of Hubertusburg (1763) put an end to the Seven Years' War in Europe. Maria Theresa finally, though reluctantly, surrendered all claims to Silesia. Prussia had clearly humiliated Austria and become a first-rate power. The Hohenzollerns were henceforth the acknowledged peers of the Habsburgs. The almost synchronous treaty of Paris closed the war between Great Britain, on the one hand, and France and Spain on the other, by ceding the bulk of the French colonial empire to the British. Thereafter, Great Britain was practically undisputed mistress of the seas and chief colonial power of the world.

[Sidenote: Frederick the Great and the Partition of Poland]

Frederick the Great devoted the last years of his life to the consolidation of his monarchy [Footnote: For the internal reforms of Frederick, see below, pp. 440 ff.] and to enlarging its sphere of influence rather by diplomacy than by war. Frederick felt that the best safeguard against further attempts of Austria to recover Silesia was a firm alliance between Prussia and Russia. And it was an outcome of that alliance that in 1772 he joined with the Tsarina Catherine in making the first partition of Poland. Catherine appropriated the country east of the Düna and the Dnieper rivers. Frederick annexed West Prussia, except the towns of Danzig and Thorn, thereby linking up Prussia and Brandenburg by a continuous line of territory. Maria Theresa, moved by the loss of Silesia and by fear of the undue preponderance which the partition of Poland would give to her northern rivals, thought to adjust the balance of power by sharing in the shameful transaction: she occupied Galicia, including the important city of Cracow. Maria Theresa repeatedly expressed her abhorrence of the whole business, but, as the scoffing Frederick said, "She wept, but she kept on taking."

The partition of Poland was more favorable to Prussia than to Austria. In the former case, the land annexed lay along the Baltic and served to render East Prussia, Brandenburg, and Silesia a geographical and political unit. On the other hand, Austria to some extent was positively weakened by the acquisition of territory outside her natural frontiers, and the addition of a turbulent Polish people further increased the diversity of races and the clash of interests within the Habsburg dominions.

When, a few years later, the succession to the electorate of Bavaria was in some doubt and Austria laid claims to the greater part of that state (1777-1779), Frederick again stepped in, and now by intrigue and now by threats of armed force again prevented any considerable extension of Habsburg control. His last important act was the formation of a league of princes to champion the lesser German states against Austrian aggression.

By hard work, by military might, by force of will, unhampered by any moral code, Frederick the Great perfected the policies of the Great Elector and of Frederick William I and raised Prussia to the rank of partner with Austria in German leadership and to an eminent position in the international affairs of Europe. Had Frederick lived, however, but a score of years longer, he would have witnessed the total extinction of the Holy Roman Empire, the apparent ruin of the Germanies, and the degradation of his own country as well as that of Austria. [Footnote: See below, Chapter XVI.] He might even have perceived that a personal despotism, built by bloodshed and unblushing deceit, was hardly proof against a nation stirred by idealism and by a consciousness of its own rights and power.

ADDITIONAL READING

GENERAL. Brief narratives: J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe, Vol. I (1907), ch. iv, v; E. F. Henderson, A Short History of Germany, Vol. II (1902), ch. i-iv; A. H. Johnson, The Age of the Enlightened Despot, 1660-1789 (1910), ch. vii, viii; Ferdinand Schevill, The Making of Modern Germany (1916), ch. i, ii; Arthur Hassall, The Balance of Power, 1715-1789 (1896), ch. vi-ix; C. T. Atkinson, A History of Germany, 1715-1813 (1908), almost exclusively a military history; H. T. Dyer, A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople, 3d ed. rev. by Arthur Hassall, 6 vols. (1901), ch. xlv-xlviii. Longer accounts: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V (1908), ch. xii, xx, xxi, and Vol. VI (1909), ch. vii- ix, xx; Histoire générale, Vol. V, ch. xix, Vol. VI, ch. xvi, and Vol. VII, ch. iv, v; Émile Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, 4th ed., Vol. I (1906), ch. vi, xii, valuable for international relations of the Germanies; Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer, Deutsche Geschichte, 1648-1740, 2 vols. (1892-1893).

THE HABSBURG DOMINIONS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. In English: Sidney Whitman, Austria (1899), and, by the same author, The Realm of the Habsburgs (1893), brief outlines; Louis Leger, A History of Austro- Hungary from the Earliest Time to the Year 1889, trans. by Mrs. B. Hill from a popular French work (1889); William Coxe, House of Austria, 4 vols. (1893-1895) in the Bohn Library, originally published nearly a century ago but still useful, especially Vol. Ill; C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, The Political Evolution of the Hungarian Nation, Vol. I (1908), ch. iv-vii; Ármin Vámbéry, The Story of Hungary (1894), in the "Story of the Nations" Series. In German: Franz Krones, Handbuch der Geschichte Oesterreichs, 5 vols. (1876-1879), Vol. IV, Book XVIII. There is a good brief English biography of Maria Theresa by J. F. Bright (1897) in the "Foreign Statesmen" Series, and a great standard German biography by Alfred von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, 10 vols. (1863-1879). See also A. Wolf and Hans von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Österreich unter Maria Theresia (1884).

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA. History of All Nations, Vol. XV, The Age of Frederick the Great, Eng. trans. of a well-known German history by Martin Philippson; Herbert Tuttle, History of Prussia to the Accession of Frederick the Great (1884), and, by the same author, History of Prussia under Frederick the Great, 3 vols., coming down to 1757 (1888-1896), primarily constitutional and political; Reinhold Koser, Geschichte der brandenburgisch-preussischen Politik, Vol. I (1914), from earliest times through the Thirty Years' War, by the late general director of the Prussian State Archives, an eminent authority on the history of his country; J. G. Droysen, Geschichte der preussischen Politik, 14 vols. (1868- 1876), the most elaborate history of Prussia down to 1756 by a famous national historian; Ernst Berner, Geschichte des preussischen Staates (1891), a briefer, popular account, richly illustrated; Hans von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitraum der Gründung des preussischen Königtums, 2 vols. (1890-1894), an enthusiastic German appreciation; Albert Waddington, Histoire de Prusse, Vol. I (1911), from the origins of the state to the death of the Great Elector, an able French presentation. There is an admirable old German biography of Frederick the Great's father, with copious extracts from the sources, by F. C. Forster, Friedrich Wilhelm I König von Preussen, 3 vols. (1834-1835). On Frederick the Great: F. W. Longman, Frederick the Great and the Seven Years' War, 2d ed. (1886), a good summary in English; W. F. Reddaway, Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia (1904) in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series; Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, an English classic in many editions, sympathetic and in spots inaccurate; Reinhold Koser, Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen, 5th ed., 4 vols. (1912-1914), a most thorough and authoritative biography; Politische Korrespondenz Friedrichs des Grossen, ed. by Reinhold Koser and others, in many volumes, constitutes the most valuable original source for the reign of Frederick the Great.

THE WARS OF FREDERICK THE GREAT. G. M. Priest, Germany since 1740 (1915), ch. i-iii, a useful outline; D. J. Hill, History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, Vol. III (1914), ch. vi- viii, valuable for diplomatic relations; Richard Waddington, La guerre de sept ans: histoire diplomatique et militaire, 5 vols. (1899-1914), the best history of the Seven Years' War; A. D. Schaefer, Geschichte des siebenjährigen Kriegs, 2 vols. in 3 (1867-1874), a careful German account; Wilhelm Oncken, Das Zeitalter Friedrichs des Grossen, 2 vols. (1881-1882), an important work on Frederick's reign, in the imposing Oncken Series. See also A. W. Ward, Great Britain and Hanover, Some Aspects of their Personal Union (1899).

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Chapter XII

THE RISE OF RUSSIA AND THE DECLINE OF TURKEY, SWEDEN, AND POLAND

RUSSIA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

How the backward, Oriental tsardom of Muscovy has been transformed into the huge empire of Russia, now comprising one-sixth of the land surface and one-twelfth of the population of the earth, is one of the most fascinating phases of the history of modern times. It was not until the eighteenth century that Russia came into close contact with the commerce and culture of western Christendom; not until then did she become a great power in the European family of nations.

[Sidenote: Russian Expansion]

Several occurrences during the two centuries which separated the reign of the Tsar Ivan the Great from that of Peter the Great paved the way for the subsequent, almost startling rise of the powerful empire of northern and eastern Europe. The first in importance was the expansion of the Russian race and dominion. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the farming folk of the region about Moscow were emigrating south and east and establishing themselves in the fertile plains of the Don, the Volga, and the Irtysh. [Footnote: Armies of the tsar backed up the colonists: they occupied Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan, near the Caspian Sea, in 1554.] A glance at the map of Russia will show how the network of rivers combined with the level character of the country to facilitate this process of racial expansion. The gentle southerly flowing Dnieper, Don, and Volga, radiating from the same central region, and connected by way of the Kama with the headwaters of the Dwina, which empties into the White Sea in the extreme north, became chief channels of trade and migration, and contributed much more to the elaboration of national unity than any political institutions. Boats could be conveyed over flat and easy portages from one river-basin to another, and these portages with a relatively small amount of labor were gradually changed into navigable channels, so that even now the canals are more important than many of the railways as arteries of commerce.

[Sidenote: The Cossacks]

As the emigrants threaded their way along the river courses and over the broad plains they had to be constantly on the alert against attacks of troublesome natives, and they accordingly organized themselves in semi-military fashion. Those in the vanguard of territorial expansion constituted a peculiar class known as Cossacks, who, like frontiersmen of other times and places, for example, like those that gained for the United States its vast western domain, lived a wild life in which agricultural and pastoral pursuits were intermingled with hunting and fighting. In the basins of the southern rivers, the Cossacks formed semi-independent military communities: those of the Volga and the Don professed allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy, while those of the Dnieper usually recognized the sovereignty of the king of Poland.

[Sidenote: Eastword Expansion into Asia]

Nor was the migration of the Russian race restricted to Europe. The division between Europe and Asia is largely imaginary, as another glance at the map will prove,--the low-lying Urals are a barrier only toward the north, while southward the plains of Russia stretch on interminably above the Caspian until they are merged in the steppes of Siberia. Across these plains moved a steady stream of Cossacks and peasants and adventurers, carrying with them the habits and traditions of their Russian homes. Ever eastward wended the emigrants. They founded Tobolsk in 1587 and Tomsk in 1604; they established Yakutsk on the Lena River in 1632, and Irkutsk on Lake Baikal in 1652; in 1638 they reached the Sea of Okhotsk, and, by the close of the seventeenth century, they occupied the peninsula of Kamchatka and looked upon the broad Pacific. Thus at the time when the Spaniards were extending their speech and laws throughout South America and the English were laying the foundations for the predominance of their institutions in North America, the Russians were appropriating northern Asia and demonstrating that, with them at least, the course of empire takes its way eastward.

Ivan the Great had already been described in church service as "the ruler and autocrat of all Russia, the new Tsar Constantine [Footnote: The last Cæsar of the Græco-Roman Empire, Constantine XI, had perished in 1453 in vain defense of Constantinople against the Turks. It was a significant fact that the Russian rulers, who owed their Christianity and their nation's culture to the Greeks, should now revive the title of Caesar (Russian form, tsar or czar).] in the new city of Constantine, Moscow." His successors invariably had themselves crowned as tsars and autocrats of all Russia. By military might they maintained their control over the ever-widening territories of the Russian people; with racial pride and religious fervor, the distant emigrants regarded their royal family at Moscow. The power of the tsars kept pace with the expansion of the state.

[Sidenote: Oriental Characteristics of Russia]

Yet this greater Russia remained essentially Oriental. Its form of Christianity was derived from the East rather than from the West. Its social customs savored more of Asia than of Europe. Its nobles and even its tsars were rated by western Christendom as little better than barbarians. In fact, the Russian state was looked upon in the seventeenth century in much the same way as China was regarded in the nineteenth century.

The reasons for this relative backwardness are not hard to ascertain. In the first place, the religion of the state was a direct heritage of the expiring Eastern Empire and was different from either the Catholicism or the Protestantism of western Europe. Secondly, long and close contact with the conquering Mongols or Tatars of Asia had saturated the Russian people with Oriental customs and habits.[Footnote: See above, pp. 21 f.] Thirdly, the nature of the country tended to exalt agriculture and to discourage industry and foreign commerce, and at the same time to turn emigration and expansion eastward rather than westward. Finally, so long as the neighboring western states of Sweden, Poland, and Turkey remained powerful and retained the entire coast of the Baltic and Black seas, Russia was deprived of seaports that would enable her to engage in traffic with western Europe and thus to partake of the common culture of Christendom.

Not until Russia was modernized and westernized, and had made considerable headway against one or all of her western neighbors, could she hope to become a European Power. Not until the accession of the Romanov dynasty did she enter seriously upon this twofold policy.

[Sidenote: The "Troublous Times"]

The direct line of Ivan the Great had died out at the close of the sixteenth century, and there ensued what in Russian history are known as "the troublous times." Disputes over the succession led to a series of civil wars, and the consequent anarchy invited foreign intervention. For a time the Poles harassed the country and even occupied the Kremlin, or citadel, of Moscow. The Swedes, also, took advantage of the troublous times in Russia to enlarge their conquests on the eastern shore of the Baltic and to seize the important trading center of Novgorod. In the south, the Turks warred with the Cossacks and brought many of the Crimean principalities under their control.

[Sidenote: The Accession of the Romanovs, 1613]

Under these discouraging circumstances a great national assembly met at Moscow in 1613 to elect a tsar, and their choice fell upon one of their own number, a certain Michael Romanov, whose family had been connected by marriage ties with the ancient royal line. It is an interesting fact that the present autocrat of Russia is a lineal descendant of the Romanov who was thus popularly elected to supreme authority in 1613.

Michael Romanov proved an excellent choice. Accepted by all classes, he reestablished order and security throughout the country and successfully resisted foreign encroachments. He founded several fortified towns in the south against the Tatars and the Turks. He recovered Novgorod from the Swedes. During the reign of his son, Polish depredations were stopped and the Dnieper River was fixed upon [Footnote: Treaty of Andrussovo (1667), in accordance with which Poland ceded to Russia Kiev, Smolensk, and eastern Ukraine.] as the general dividing line between Poland and Russia.

PETER THE GREAT

[Sidenote: His Accession and Early Travels]

The grandson of Michael Romanov was the celebrated Peter the Great, who may rightfully be designated as the father of modern Russia. His older brothers, with whom during his youth he was nominally associated in the government, died in turn without leaving direct heirs, and Peter became sole ruler in 1696. From the outset he showed an insatiable curiosity about the arts and sciences of western Europe, the authority of its kings and the organization of its armies and fleets. To an intense curiosity, Peter added an indomitable will. He was resolved to satisfy his every curiosity and to utilize whatever he learned or found.

From childhood, Peter had displayed an aptitude for mechanical tools and inventions and especially for boat-making. Shipbuilding and ship- sailing became his favorite pastimes. When he was barely twenty-one, he launched at Archangel, on the ice-bound White Sea, a ship which he had built with his own hands. Now in 1696, being sole tsar at the age of twenty-four, he fitted out a fleet which defeated the Turks on the Black Sea and allowed him to capture the valuable port of Azov. No other successes were gained, however, in this Turkish War; and the young tsar began to perceive that if he were to succeed in his cherished project he would have to obtain Western aid. In 1697, therefore, a special commission left Moscow for the purpose of soliciting the cooperation of the principal Powers against Turkey, and to this commission the young tsar attached himself as a volunteer sailor, "Peter Mikhailov," in order that he might incidentally learn much about ship-building and other technical sciences.

In its primary purpose, the Russian commission failed signally. Western Europe was on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession, and all the European sovereigns seemed to be engrossed in the distractions of dynastic politics. No help against the Turks was forthcoming. But personally Peter learned many useful things. In Holland he studied ship-building as well as anatomy and engraving. In England he investigated industry and commerce. He closely scrutinized the military establishment of Prussia. In all places which he visited he collected artisans, sailors, engineers, or other workmen, whom he sent back to Russia to instruct his people.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Streltsi]

While he was on his way from Vienna to Venice, news reached him that the royal bodyguard, called the streltsi, had taken advantage of his absence of a year and a half and had mutinied at Moscow. In hot haste he hurried home and wreaked dire vengeance upon the mutineers. Two thousand were hung or broken on the wheel, five thousand were beheaded, and Peter for many days amused himself and edified his court by the wonderful dexterity he displayed in slicing off the heads of streltsi with his own royal arm.

The severe punishment of the rebellious streltsi and the immediate abolition of their military organization was clear evidence that Peter was fully determined both to break with the past traditions of his country and to compel all the Russian people to do likewise.

[Sidenote: Military Reform]

His first care was the reconstruction of the army on the Prussian model. Officered and disciplined by foreigners dependent entirely upon the tsar, the new army replaced the streltsi and proved a potent factor in furthering the domestic and foreign policies of Peter the Great.

[Sidenote: Introduction of Occidental Customs]

The young reformer next turned his attention to the customs of his people--their clothing and manners--which he would transform from Oriental to Occidental. Edict followed edict with amazing rapidity. The chief potentates of the empire were solemnly assembled so that Peter with his own hand might deliberately clip off their long beards and flowing mustaches. A heavy tax was imposed on such as persisted in wearing beards. French or German clothes were to be substituted, under penalty of large fines, for the traditional Russian costume. The use of tobacco was made compulsory. The Oriental semi-seclusion of women was prohibited. Both sexes were to mingle freely in the festivities of the court. These innovations were largely superficial: they partially permeated the nobility and clergy, but made little impression on the mass of the population. Peter had begun a work, however, which was certain of great results in the future.

[Sidenote: Development of Autocracy]

The reign of Peter the Great is notable for the removal of serious checks upon the power of the tsar and the definitive establishment of that form of absolutism which in Russia is called "autocracy." By sheer ability and will-power, the tsar was qualified to play the role of divine-right monarch, and his observation of the centralized government of Louis XIV, as well as the appreciation of his country's needs, convinced him that that kind of government was the most suitable for Russia.

[Sidenote: Subordination of the Orthodox Church to the Russian State] [Sidenote: The Holy Synod]

We have already observed how Peter replaced the independent, turbulent streltsi with a thoroughly devoted and orderly standing army. That was one important step in the direction of autocracy. The next was the subordination of the Church to the state. The tsar understood the very great influence which the Holy Orthodox Church exerted over the Russian people and the danger to his policies that ecclesiastical opposition might create. He was naturally anxious that the Church should become the ally, not the enemy, of autocracy. He, therefore, took such steps as would exalt the Church in the opinion of his countrymen and at the same time would render it a serviceable agent of the government. Professing the warmest faith in its religious tenets, he deprived the patriarch [Footnote: Until late in the sixteenth century, the metropolitan of Moscow was in theory under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople; thereafter, through Boris Godunov, he became independent with full consent and approval of the whole Greek Orthodox Church and was styled the patriarch of Moscow.] of Moscow of his privilege of controlling the ecclesiastical organization and vested all powers of church government in a body, called the Holy Synod, whose members were bishops and whose chief was a layman, all chosen by the tsar himself. No appointment to ecclesiastical office could henceforth be made without the approval of the Holy Synod; no sermon could be preached and no book could be published unless it had received the sanction of that august body. The authority which the tsar thereby obtained over the Russian Church was as complete and far-reaching as that which Henry VIII had acquired, two centuries earlier, over the Anglican Church. The results have been in keeping with Peter's fondest expectations, for the Orthodox Church in Russia has been from his time to the present the right-hand support of absolutism. The tsars have exalted the Church as the fountain of order and holiness; as a veritable ark of the covenant have the clergy magnified and extolled the autocracy.

[Sidenote: Secular Power of the Tsar]

A remodeling of the secular government of Russia along autocratic lines was another achievement of Peter the Great which long endured. At the head of the state was the tsar or emperor, possessing absolute, unlimited powers. An ancient assembly, or Duma, of nobles, which had formerly exercised vague legislative rights, was practically abolished, its place being taken by an advisory Council of State whose members, usually noblemen, were selected by the tsar. All traces of local self- government were similarly swept away, and the country was henceforth administered by the tsar's personal agents. To enforce his autocratic will, a system of police was organized on a militia basis, its chiefs being made dependent on the central authority. In these, as in all his other reforms, the tsar encountered a good deal of opposition, and for a while was obliged to rely largely on foreigners to carry them out. As soon as possible, however, Peter employed natives, for it was a cardinal point in his policy that the Russians themselves must manage their own state without foreign interference or help.

[Sidenote: Attempted Social Reforms of Peter the Great]

Like his contemporaries in western Europe, Peter gave considerable attention to the economic condition of the monarchy. He strove, though often in a bungling manner, to promote agriculture and to improve the lot of the peasantry, who still constituted the overwhelming bulk of forms of the population. He certainly deprived the nobles of many of their former privileges and sought to rest political power and social position on ability rather than on birth. He understood that Russia grievously lacked a numerous and prosperous middle class, and he aimed to create one by encouraging trade and industries. His almost constant participation in wars, however, prevented him from bringing many of his economic and social plans to fruition.

[Sidenote: Ambitious Foreign Policy of Peter the Great]

Internal reforms were but one-half of Peter's ambitious program. To him Russia owes not only the abolition of the streltsi, the loss of the independence of the Church, the Europeanization of manners and customs, and the firm establishment of autocracy, but also the pronouncement and enforcement of an elaborate scheme of foreign aggrandizement. On one hand, the tsar showed a lively interest in the exploration and colonization of Siberia and in the extension of Russian dominion around the Caspian Sea and towards the Persian Empire. On the other hand,--and this, for our purposes, is far more important,--he was resolved to make the cultural and commercial connection between Russia and Europe strong and intimate, to open a way to the west by gaining outlets on both the Black and Baltic seas--"windows" to the west, as he termed them.

On the Baltic Sea, Sweden blocked him; toward the Black Sea, the Ottoman power hemmed him in. It was, therefore, against Sweden and Turkey that Peter the Great waged war. It seemed to him a matter of dire necessity for the preservation of European civilization in Russia that he should defeat one or both of these states. Against the Turks, as events proved, he made little headway; against the Swedes he fared better.

In order that we may understand the nature of the momentous conflict between Russia and Sweden in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, it will be necessary at this point to notice the parallel development of Sweden.

SWEDEN AND THE CAREER OF CHARLES XII

[Sidenote: Sweden a Great Power in the Seventeenth Century]

It will be recalled that a century before Peter the Great, the remarkable Gustavus Adolphus had aimed to make the Baltic a Swedish lake. To his own kingdom, lying along the western shore of that sea, and to the dependency of Finland, he had added by conquest the eastern provinces of Karelia, Ingria, Esthonia, and Livonia [Footnote: Livonia, occupied by Gustavus Adolphus during the Polish War of 1621-1629, was not formally relinquished by Poland until 1660. Esthonia had been conquered by the Swedes in 1561, but Russia did not renounce her pretensions to this province until 1617.], and his successful interference in the Thirty Years' War had given Sweden possession of western Pomerania and the mouths of the Elbe, Oder, and Weser rivers and a considerable influence in German affairs. For many years after the death of Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden was the recognized leader of continental Protestantism, and her trade on the Baltic grew and thrived. The exports of Russia and Poland found a convenient outlet through the Swedish port of Riga, and those of the northern Germanics were frequently dispatched on Swedish vessels from Stettin or Stralsund.

Repeated efforts were made by Denmark, Poland, and Brandenburg to break the commercial monopoly which Sweden enjoyed upon the Baltic and to deprive her of her conquests, but for a long time in vain. Victory continued to attend Swedish arms and a general treaty in 1660 confirmed her dominion. At that time Sweden was not only a military power of the first magnitude but also one of the largest states of Europe, possessing about twice as much area as present-day Sweden. Her area embraced a land-surface 7000 square miles larger than the modern German Empire. All the islands and the greater part of the coast of the Baltic belonged to her. Stockholm, the capital, lay in the very center of the empire, whose second city was Riga, on the other side of the sea. In politics, in religion, and in trade, Sweden was feared and respected.

[Sidenote: Elements of Weakness in Sweden's Position]

Yet the greatness of Sweden in the seventeenth century was more apparent than real. Her commerce provoked the jealousy of all her neighbors. Her dependencies across the Baltic were difficult to hold: peopled by Finns, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Danes, their bond with Sweden was essentially artificial, and they usually sympathized, naturally enough, with their sovereign's enemies. They, therefore, imposed on the mother country the duty of remaining a military monarchy, armed from head to foot for every possible emergency. For such a tremendous destiny Sweden was quite unfitted. Her wide territory was very sparsely populated, and her peasantry were very poor. Only the French alliance gave her solid backing in the Germanies, and, with the decline of the fortunes of Louis XIV and the rise of Prussia and Russia, she was bound to lose her leadership in the North.

To the fate of Sweden, her rulers in the seventeenth century contributed no small share. Nearly all of them were born fighters and nearly all of them were neglectful of home interests and of the works of peace. The military instincts of the Swedish kings not only sacrificed thousands of lives that were urgently needed in building up their country and cost the kingdom enormous sums of money but likewise impaired commerce, surrounded the empire with a broad belt of desolated territory, and implanted an ineradicable hatred in every adjacent state. Then, too, the extravagance and negligence of the sovereigns led to chaos in domestic government. Taxes were heavy and badly apportioned. The nobles recovered many of their political privileges. The royal power steadily dwindled away at the very time when it was most needed; and a selfish, grasping aristocracy hastened their country's ruin. [Footnote: A reaction appeared under the capable Charles XI (1660-1697), but its fruits were completely lost by his son and successor, Charles XII.]

[Sidenote: Coalition against Charles XII]

At length, in 1697, when Charles XII, a boy of fifteen years, ascended the throne of Sweden, the neighboring Powers thought the time had arrived to partition his territories among themselves. Tsar Peter, while returning home the following year from his travels abroad, had discussed with Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, a plan which the latter had formed for the dismemberment of the Swedish Empire: Poland was to recover Livonia and annex Esthonia; Russia was to obtain Ingria and Karelia and thereby a port on the Baltic; Brandenburg was to occupy western Pomerania; and Denmark was to take possession of Holstein and the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. Charles XII was to retain only his kingdom in the Scandinavian peninsula and the grand duchy of Finland. At the last moment Brandenburg balked, but Saxony, Denmark, and Russia signed the nefarious alliance in 1699. The allies expected quick and decisive victory. All western and southern Europe was on the verge of a great struggle for the Spanish inheritance and would clearly be unable to prevent them from despoiling Sweden.

[Sidenote: Military Exploits of Charles XII]

But the allies grossly underrated their foe. Charles XII was a mere boy, but precocious, gloomy, and sensitive, and endowed with all the martial determination and heroism of his ancestors. He desired nothing better than to fight against overwhelming odds, and the fury of the youthful commander soon earned him the sobriquet of the "madman of the North." The alliance of 1699 precipitated the Great Northern War which was to last until 1721 and slowly, but no less inevitably, lower Sweden to the position of a third-rate power. It was amid the most spectacular exploits of the boy-king that the ruin of Sweden was accomplished. It was a grander but more tragic fate than in the same period befell Spain.

Charles XII did not give the allies time to unite. Hurriedly crossing the straits, he invaded Denmark, whose terrified king promptly signed a treaty with him (1700), paying a large indemnity and engaging to keep the peace in future.

Thence Charles hastened across the Baltic to Esthonia in order to deal with the invading Russians. At Narva he met and annihilated their army. Then he turned southward, clearing Livonia and Lithuania of Poles, Saxons, and Russians.

Into the very heart of Poland he carried the war, possessing himself of both Warsaw and Cracow. He obliged the Polish Diet to dethrone Augustus and to accept a king of his own choice in the person of a certain Stanislaus Leszczynski (1704).

All these things had been done by a young man between the age of seventeen and twenty--two. It was quite natural that he should be puffed up with pride in his ability and successes. It was almost as natural that, hardened at an early age to the horrors of war, he should become increasingly callous and cruel. Many instructions the impulsive youth sent out over conquered districts in Russia, Poland, and Saxony "to slay, burn, and destroy." "Better that the innocent suffer than that the guilty escape" was his favorite adage.

Small wonder, then, that neither Peter the Great nor the Elector Augustus would abandon the struggle. While Charles was overrunning Poland, Peter was reorganizing his army and occupying Karelia and Ingria; and when the Swedish king returned to engage the Russians, Augustus drove out Stanislaus and regained the crown of Poland. Yet Charles, with an unreasoning stubbornness, would not perceive that the time had arrived for terminating the conflict with a few concessions. Russia at that time asked only a port on the Gulf of Finland as the price of an alliance against Poland.

[Sidenote: Battle of Poltava (1709): Defeat of Charles XII]

To all entreaties for peace, Charles XII turned a deaf ear, and pressed the war in Russia. Unable to take Moscow, he turned southward in order to effect a juncture with some rebellious Cossacks, but met the army of Peter the Great at Poltava (1709). Poltava marks the decisive triumph of Russia over Sweden. The Swedish army was destroyed, only a small number being able to accompany the flight of their king across the southern Russian frontier into Turkish territory.

Then Charles stirred up the Turks to attack the tsar, but from the new contest he was himself unable to profit. Peter bought peace with the Ottoman government by re-ceding the town of Azov, and the latter gradually tired of their guest's continual and frantic clamor for war. After a sojourn of over five years in Ottoman lands, Charles suddenly and unexpectedly appeared, with but a single attendant, at Stralsund, which by that time was all that remained to him outside of Sweden and Finland.

[Sidenote: Obstinacy and Death of Charles XII]

Still, however, the war dragged on. The allies grew in numbers and in demands. Peter the Great and Augustus were again joined by the Danish king. Great Britain, Hanover, and Prussia, all covetous of Swedish trade or Swedish territory, were now members of the coalition. Charles XII stood like adamant: he would retain all or he would lose all. So he stood until the last. It was while he was directing an invasion of Norway that the brilliant but ill-balanced Charles lost his life (1718), being then but thirty-six years of age.

[Sidenote: Decline of Sweden]

Peace which had been impossible during the lifetime of Charles, became a reality soon after his death. It certainly came none too soon for the exhausted and enfeebled condition of Sweden. By the treaties of Stockholm (1719 and 1720), Sweden resigned all her German holdings except a small district of western Pomerania including the town of Stralsund. Denmark received Holstein and a money indemnity. Hanover gained the mouths of the Elbe and Weser; Prussia, the mouth of the Oder and the important city of Stettin. Augustus was restored to the Polish throne, though without territorial gain. Great Britain, Denmark, and Prussia became the principal commercial heirs of Sweden.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Nystad (1721): Russia on the Baltic] [Sidenote: Petrograd]

The treaty of Nystad (1721) was the turning point for Russia, for thereby she acquired from Sweden full sovereignty over not only Karelia and Ingria but the important Baltic provinces of Esthonia and Livonia and a narrow strip of southern Finland including the strong fortress of Viborg. Peter the Great had realized his ambition of affording his country a "window to the west." On the waste marshes of the Neva he succeeded with enormous effort and sacrifice of life in building a great city which might be a center of commerce and a bond of connection between Russia and the western world. He named his new city St. Petersburg [Footnote: Known generally in the Teutonic form "St. Petersburg" from its foundation until the War of the Nations in 1914, when the Slavic form of "Petrograd" was substituted.] and to it he transferred his government from Moscow. Russia supplanted Sweden in the leadership of the Baltic and assumed a place among the Powers of Europe.

Peter the Great did not realize his other ambition of securing a Russian port on the Black Sea. Although he captured and held Azov for a time, he was obliged to relinquish it, as we have seen, in order to prevent the Turks from joining hands with Charles XII.

[Sidenote: Character of Peter the Great]

Nevertheless, when Peter died in 1725, he left his empire a compact state, well-organized, and well-administered, westernized at least superficially, and ready to play a conspicuous role in the international politics of Europe. The man who succeeded in doing all these things has been variously estimated. By some he has been represented as a monster of cruelty and a murderer, [Footnote: Peter had his son and heir, the Grand Duke Alexius, put to death because he did not sympathize with his reforms. The tsar's other punishments often assumed a most revolting and disgusting character.] by others as a demon of the grossest sensuality, by still others as a great national hero. Probably he merited all such opinions. But, above all, he was a genius of fierce energy and will, who toiled always for what he considered to be the welfare of his country.

CATHERINE THE GREAT: THE DEFEAT OF TURKEY AND THE DISMEMBERMENT OF POLAND

It is hardly possible to feel much respect for the character of the Russian rulers who succeeded Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Most of them were women with loose morals and ugly manners. But they had little to fear from Sweden, which, utterly exhausted, was now on a steady decline; and domestic difficulties both in Poland and in Turkey removed any apprehension of attacks from those countries. In policies of internal government, Peter had blazed a trail so clear and unmistakable that one would have difficulty in losing it.

[Sidenote: Character of the Tsarina Catherine II]

Of those female sovereigns of the Russian Empire, the most notable was Catherine II, usually called Catherine the Great (1762-1796). By birth she was not even a Russian, but a princess of Protestant Germany, whom dynastic considerations made the wife of the heir to the Russian crown. [Footnote: The marriage was arranged by Frederick the Great in order to minimize Austrian influence at Petrograd.]

No sooner was she in her adopted country than she set to work to ingratiate herself with its people. She learned the Russian language. She outwardly conformed to the Orthodox Church. She slighted her German relatives and surrounded herself with Russians. She established a reputation for quick wit and lofty patriotism. So great was her success that when her half-insane husband ascended the throne as Peter III in 1762, the people looked to her rather than to him as the real ruler, and before the year was over she had managed to make away with him and to become sovereign in name as well as in fact. For thirty-four years Catherine was tsarina of Russia. Immoral to the last, without conscience or scruple, she ruled the country with a firm hand and consummated the work of Peter the Great.

[Sidenote: Her Administration]

In the administrative system Catherine introduced the "governments" and "districts," divisions and subdivisions of Russia, over which were placed respectively governors and vice-governors, all appointed by the central authority. To the ecclesiastical alterations of Peter, she added the secularization of church property, thereby making the clergy distinctly dependent upon her bounty and strengthening the autocracy.

[Sidenote: Her Patronage of Learning]

The tsarina had some personal interest in the literary and scientific progress of the eighteenth century and was determined to make Russia appear cultured in the eyes of western Europe. She corresponded with Voltaire and many other philosophers and learned men of the time. She pensioned Diderot, the author of the great Encyclopædia, and invited scholars to her court. She posed as the friend of higher education.

[Sidenote: Her Foreign Policy]

Of the three foreign countries which in the eighteenth century blocked the western expansion of Russia, Sweden had been humbled by Peter in the Great Northern War and the treaty of Nystad. Poland and Turkey remained to be dealt with by Catherine the Great. Let us see what had lately transpired to render this task comparatively easy for the tsarina.

[Sidenote: Poland in the Eighteenth Century]

Poland in the first half of the eighteenth century was geographically a large state, but a variety of circumstances contributed to render it weak and unstable. In the first place, it was without natural boundaries or adequate means of defense. To the west it was separated from Prussia and Austria by an artificial line drawn through level plains or over low-lying hills. To the south a fluctuating frontier, fixed usually along the Dniester River, set it off from the Ottoman Empire. The fertile valleys of the Dnieper, to the east, and of the Dona, to the north, were shared by Russia and Poland. No chains of mountains and no strongly fortified places protected the Polish people from Germans, Turks, or Russians.

Nor was this wide, but indefensible, territory inhabited by a single homogeneous people. The Poles themselves, centering in the western cities of Warsaw and Cracow, constituted a majority of the population, but the Lithuanians, a kindred Slavic folk, covered the east-central part of the kingdom and a large number of Cossacks and "Little Russians" [Footnote: Ruthenians.] lived in the extreme east, while along the northern and western borders were settlements of Germans and Swedes. Between the Poles and the Lithuanians existed a long-standing feud, and the Germans regarded all the Slavs with ill-disguised contempt.

Religion added its share to the dissension created by race and language within Poland. The Poles and most of the Lithuanians were stanch Roman Catholics. Other Lithuanians--especially the great nobles--together with the Russians and Cossacks adhered to the Greek Orthodox faith, while Lutheran Protestantism was upheld by the western settlements of Swedes and Germans. The Dissenters, as the Orthodox and Protestants were called, demanded from the Catholic majority a toleration and a freedom of worship which at that time existed in no other country of Europe. When it was not forthcoming, they appealed to foreign Powers-- the Lutherans to Prussia, the Orthodox to Russia.

[Sidenote: Wretched Social Conditions in Poland]

Worst of all were the social conditions in Poland. By the eighteenth century, the towns had sunk into relative insignificance, leaving Poland without a numerous or wealthy middle class. Of the other classes, the great nobles or magnates owned the land, lived in luxury, selfishly looked out for their own interests, and jealously played politics, while the mass of the nation were degraded into a state of serfdom and wretchedness that would be difficult to parallel elsewhere in Europe. With a grasping, haughty nobility on one hand, and an oppressed, ignorant peasantry on the other, social solidarity, the best guarantee of political independence, was entirely lacking.

[Sidenote: Weakness of Polish Political Institutions]

An enlightened progressive government might have done something to remedy the social ills, but of all governments that the world has ever seen, the most ineffectual and pernicious was the Polish. Since the sixteenth century, the monarchy had been elective, with the result that the reign of every sovereign was disfigured by foreign intrigues and domestic squabbles over the choice of his successor, and also that the noble electors were able not only to secure liberal bribes but to wring from the elect such concessions as gradually reduced the kingship to an ornamental figurehead. Most of the later kings were foreigners who used what little power was left to them in furtherance of their native interests rather than of the welfare of Poland. Thus the kings in the first half of the eighteenth century were German electors of Saxony, who owed their new position to the interested friendship of Austria, Prussia, or Russia, and to the large sums of money which they lavished upon the Polish magnates; these same Saxon rulers cheerfully applied the Polish resources to their German policies.

Another absurdity of the Polish constitution was the famous "liberum veto," a kind of gentlemen's agreement among the magnates, whereby no law whatsoever could be enacted by the Diet if a single member felt it was prejudicial to his interests, and objected. In the course of the seventeenth century the principle of the liberum veto had been so far extended as to recognize the lawful right of any one of the ten thousand noblemen of Poland to refuse to obey a law which he had not approved. This amounted to anarchism. And anarchism, however beautiful it might appear as an ideal, was hardly a trustworthy weapon with which to oppose the greedy, hard-hearted, despotic monarchs who governed all the surrounding countries.

[Sidenote: Steady Decline of Ottoman Power during Seventeenth Century]

The Ottoman Empire was not in such sore straits as Poland, but its power and prestige were obviously waning. In another place we have reviewed the achievements of the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--how they overran the Balkan peninsula, captured Constantinople, put an end to the ancient Græco-Roman Empire and under Suleiman the Magnificent extended their conquests along the northern coast of Africa and in Europe across the Danube into the very heart of Hungary. Although the sea-power of the Turks suffered a serious reverse at Lepanto (1571), their continued land advances provoked in Christendom the liveliest apprehension throughout the seventeenth century. After a twenty-five-years conflict they took Crete from Venice. They subjugated to their dominion the Tatars and Russians immediately north of the Black Sea. They exacted homage from the princes of Rumania and Transylvania. They annexed Hungary. For a time they received tribute from the king of Poland. In 1683 they laid siege to the city of Vienna and would have taken it had not the patriotic Polish monarch, John Sobieski, brought timely aid to the beleaguered Austrians. That was the high-water mark of the Mohammedan advance in Europe.

Thenceforth the Turkish boundaries gradually receded. An alliance of Venice, Poland, the pope, and Austria waged long and arduous warfare with the Ottomans, and the resulting treaty of Karlowitz, signed at the very close of the seventeenth century, gave the greater part of Hungary, including Transylvania, to the Austrian Habsburgs, extended the southern boundary of Poland to the Dniester River, and surrendered important trading centers on the Dalmatian and Greek coasts to the Venetians. Two subsequent wars between the sultan and the Habsburgs definitely freed the whole of Hungary from the Ottoman yoke. The reasons for the wane of Turkey's power are scarcely to be sought in the inherent strength of her neighbors, for, with the possible exception of Austria and Russia, they were notoriously weak and had seldom been able or willing to work together in behalf of any common cause. The real reasons lay rather in the character and nature of the Turkish power itself. Domestic, not foreign, difficulties prepared the way for future disasters.

[Sidenote: Nature of the Turkish Conquests]

It should be borne in mind that the Turks never constituted a majority of the population of their European possessions. They were a mere body of conquerors, who in frenzies of religious or martial enthusiasm, inspired with the idea that Divine Providence was using them as agents for the spread of Mohammedanism, had fought valiantly with the sword or cunningly taken advantage of their enemies' quarrels to plant over wide areas the crescent in place of the cross. In the conquered regions, the native Christian peoples were reduced to serfdom, and the Turkish conquerors became great landholders and the official class. To extend, even to maintain, such an artificial order of things, the Turks would be obliged to keep their military organization always at the highest pitch of excellence and to preserve their government from weakness and corruption. In neither of these respects did the Turks ultimately succeed.

[Sidenote: Corruption In the Turkish Government]

The sultans of the eighteenth century were not of the stuff of which a Suleiman the Magnificent had been made. To the grim risks of battle they preferred the cushioned ease of the palace, and all their powers of administration and government were quite consumed in the management of the household and the harem. Actual authority was gradually transferred to the Divan, or board of ministers, whose appointments or dismissals were the results of palace intrigues, sometimes petty but more often bloody. Corruption ate its way through the entire office- holding element of the Ottoman state: positions were bought and sold from the Divan down to the obscure village, and office was held to exist primarily for financial profit and secondarily as a means of oppressing the subject people.

The army, on which so much in the Turkish state depended, naturally reflected the demoralized condition of the government. While Peter the Great was organizing a powerful army in Russia, and Frederick the Great was perfecting the Prussian military machine, the Ottoman army steadily declined. It failed to keep pace with the development of tactics and of firearms in western Europe, and fell behind the times. The all- prevalent corruption ruined its discipline, and its regularly organized portion--the "janissaries"--became the masters rather than the servants of the sultans and of the whole Turkish government.

It was the fortune of the Russian tsarina--Catherine the Great--to appreciate the real weakness of both Turkey and Poland and to turn her neighbors' distress to the profit of her own country.

[Sidenote: Catherine's Interference in Poland]

No sooner had Catherine secured the Russian crown and by her inactivity permitted Frederick the Great to bring the Seven Years' War to a successful issue, than the death of Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, gave her an opportunity to interfere in Polish affairs. She was not content with the Saxon line which was more or less under Austrian influence, and, with the astute aid of Frederick, she induced the Polish nobles to elect one of her own courtiers and favorites, Stanislaus Poniatowski, who thus in 1764 became the last king of an independent Poland.

With the accession of Stanislaus, the predominance of Russia was fully established in Poland. Russia entered into an execrable agreement with Prussia and Austria to uphold the anarchical constitution of the unhappy and victimized country. When patriotic Poles made efforts--as they now frequently did--to reform their government, to abolish the liberum veto, and to strengthen the state, they found their attempts thwarted by the allies either by force of arms or by bribes of money. The racial animosities and the religious differences within Poland afforded sufficient pretexts for the intervention of the neighboring Powers, especially Prussia and Russia.

A popular insurrection of Polish Catholics against the intolerable meddling of foreigners was crushed by the troops of Catherine, with the single result that the Russians, in pursuing some fleeing insurgents across the southern frontier, violated Turkish territory and precipitated a war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia.

[Sidenote: Catherine's War with the Turks, 1768-1774]

This Turkish War lasted from 1768 to 1774. The Ottoman government was profoundly alarmed by the Russian foreign policy, believing that the intrigues in Poland would end in the annexation of that state to Russia and the consequent upsetting of the balance of power in the East, and that, Poland once being disposed of, the turn of Turkey would come next. The Turks, moreover, were egged on by the French government, which, anxious also to preserve the balance of power and to defend the liberties of Poland, was too financially embarrassed itself to undertake a great war against Prussia and Russia.

This war between Russia and Turkey fully confirmed the belief that the power of the latter was waning. The Ottoman troops, badly armed and badly led, suffered a series of reverses. The Russians again occupied Azov, which Peter the Great had been compelled to relinquish; they overran Moldavia and Wallachia; they seized Bucharest; and they seemed likely to cross the Danube. Catherine went so far as to fan a revolt among the Greek subjects of the sultan.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774): Russia on the Black Sea]

At length, in 1774, the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji was concluded between the belligerents. It was most important in marking the southern extension of Russia. By its provisions, (1) Turkey formally ceded Azov and adjacent territory to Russia and renounced sovereignty over all land north of the Black Sea; (2) Turkey recovered Wallachia, Moldavia, and Greece, on condition that they should be better governed; (3) Russia obtained the right of free navigation for her merchant ships in Turkish waters; and (4) Russia was recognized as the protector of certain churches in the city of Constantinople.

Within a few years after the signature of the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Catherine established Russian control over the various Tatar principalities north of the Black Sea, whose sovereignty Turkey had renounced, and by a supplementary agreement in 1792, the Dniester River was fixed upon as the boundary between the Russian and Ottoman empires.

The Turkish policy of Catherine the Great bore three significant results. In the first place, Russia acquired a natural boundary in southern Europe, and became the chief Power on the Black Sea, whence her ships might pass freely through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles out into the Mediterranean to trade with western Europe. Russia's second "window to the west" was gained. Then, in the second place, Russia was henceforth looked upon as the natural ally and friend of oppressed nationalities within the Turkish Empire. Finally, the special clause conferring on Russia the protectorate of certain churches in Constantinople afforded her a pretext for a later claim to protect Christians throughout the Ottoman state and consequently to interfere incessantly in Turkish affairs. Since the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, Turkey has declined with ever-increasing rapidity, and Russia has become an eager candidate for a liberal share of the spoils.

[Sidenote: Catherine and the Partition of Poland] [Sidenote: First Partition, 1772]

Even while the Turkish War was in progress, Catherine the Great had not lost sight of her Polish policy. Frederick of Prussia had doubtless hoped that she would, in order that he might have a free rein to direct a distribution of territory entirely satisfactory to himself and to Prussia But the wily tsarina was never so immersed in other matters that she neglected Russian interests in Poland. In 1772, therefore, she joined with Frederick and with Maria Theresa of Austria in making the first partition of Poland. Russia took all the country which lay east of the Dona and Dnieper rivers. Prussia took West Prussia except the town of Danzig. Austria took Galicia and the city of Cracow. In all, Poland was deprived of about a fourth of her territory.

[Sidenote: Second Partition, 1793] [Sidenote: Third and Last Partition, 1795]

The partition of 1772 sobered the Polish people and brought them to a full realizing sense of the necessity of radical political reform. But the shameful and hypocritical attitude of the neighboring sovereigns continued to render their every effort abortive. For another twenty-one years the wretched country struggled on, a victim of selfish foreign tutelage. Although both Frederick and Maria Theresa died in the interval, their successors proved themselves quite as willing to coöperate with the implacable tsarina. In 1793 Russia and Prussia effected the second partition of Poland, and in 1795, following a last desperate attempt of the Poles to establish a new government, they admitted Austria to a share in the final dismemberment of the unhappy country. Desperately did the brave Kosciuszko try to stem the tide of invasion which poured in from all sides. His few forces, in spite of great valor, were no match for the veteran allies, and the defense was vain. "Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell." King Stanislaus Poniatowski resigned his crown and betook himself to Petrograd. Poland ceased to exist as an independent state.

By the partitions of 1793 and 1795, Austria obtained the upper valley of the Vistula, and Prussia the lower, including the city of Warsaw, while the rest--the major share--went to Russia. Little Russia (Ruthenia) and approximately all of Lithuania thus passed into the hands of the tsarina. Russia thenceforth bordered immediately on Prussia and Austria and became geographically a vital member of the European family of nations.

Catherine the Great survived the third and final partition of Poland but a year, dying in 1796. If it can be said of Peter that he made Russia a European Power, it can be affirmed with equal truth that Catherine made Russia a Great Power. The eighteenth century had witnessed a marvelous growth of Russia in Europe. She had acquired territory and a capital on the Baltic. She had secured valuable ports on the Black Sea. She had pushed her boundaries westward into the very center of the Continent.

The rise of Russia was at the expense of her neighbors. Sweden had surrendered her eastern provinces and lost her control of the Baltic. Turkey had abandoned her monopoly of the shores and trade of the Black Sea. Poland had disappeared from the map.

ADDITIONAL READING

THE RISE OF RUSSIA. Elementary sketches: J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe, Vol. I (1907), ch. iv; H. O. Wakeman, The Ascendancy of France, 1598-1715 (1894), ch. viii, xii, xiii; Arthur Hassall, The Balance of Power, 1715-1789 (1896), ch. v, xi; A. H. Johnson, The Age of the Enlightened Despot, 1660-1789 (1910), ch. iv, v; H. T. Dyer, A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople, 3d ed. rev. by Arthur Hassall, 6 vols. (1901), ch. xxxvi, xxxviii, xli, xlix, 1. More detailed histories: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V (1908), ch. xvi-xix, and Vol. VI (1909), ch. x, xix; Histoire générale, Vol. V, ch. xvi-xviii, xx, Vol. VI, ch. xvii-xix, xxi, xxii, Vol. VII, ch. viii, ix, excellent chapters in French by such eminent scholars as Louis Leger and Alfred Rambaud; V. 0. Kliuchevsky, A History of Russia, Eng. trans. by C. J. Hogarth, 3 vols. (1911-1913), authoritative on the early history of Russia, but comes down only to 1610; Alfred Rambaud, Histoire de la Russie depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours, 6th ed. (1914), ch. xiv-xxxii,--an earlier edition of this standard work was translated into English by Leonora B. Lang and published in two volumes, of which the larger part treats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; James Mayor, Economic History of Russia, Vol. I (1914), Book I, ch. iv-vii, especially useful for the economic and social reforms of Peter the Great. On the Russian sovereigns: R. N. Bain, The First Romanovs, 1613-1725 (1905), and, by the same author, Pupils of Peter the Great: a History of the Russian Court and Empire from 1697 to 1740 (1897); Eugene Schuyler, Peter the Great, 2 vols. (1884), a scholarly work; Kazimierz Waliszewski, Peter the Great, an admirable study trans. from the French by Lady Mary Loyd (1900), and, by the same author, though not as yet translated, L'héritage de Pierre le Grand: règne des femmes, gouvernement des favoris, 1725-1741 (1900) and La dernière des Romanov, Elisabeth R (1902); Alexander Bruckner, Peter der Grosse (1879), and, by the same author, Katharina die Zweite (1883), important German works, in the Oncken Series; E. A. B. Hodgetts, The Life of Catherine the Great of Russia (1914), a recent fair-minded treatment in English. On the expansion of the Russian people: Alfred Rambaud, The Expansion of Russia, 2d ed. (1904); F. A. Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641- 1850; Hans Übersberger, Russlands Orientpolitik in den letzten zwei Jahrhunderten, Vol. I, down to 1792 (1913).

THE DECLINE OF SWEDEN, TURKEY, AND POLAND. On Sweden: R. N. Bain, Scandinavia, a Political History of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, 1513-1900 (1905), and, by the same author, Charles XII (1899) in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series. On Turkey: Stanley Lane- Poole, Turkey (1889), in the "Story of the Nations" Series, and E. A. Freeman, The Ottoman Power in Europe, its Nature, its Growth, and its Decline (1877), suggestive outlines by eminent English historians; Nicolae Jorga, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 5 vols. (1908-1913), particularly Vols. III, IV, the best and most up-to- date history of the Ottoman Empire; Joseph von Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 10 vols. (1827-1835), an old work, very detailed and still famous, of which Vols. VI-VIII treat of the eighteenth century prior to 1774. On Poland: W. A. Phillips, Poland (1915), ch. i-vi, a convenient volume in the "Home University Library"; R. N. Bain, Slavonic Europe: a Political History of Poland and Russia from 1447 to 1796 (1908), ch. v-xix; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII (1904), ch. xvii; W. R. A. Morfill, Poland (1893), in the "Story of the Nations" Series; R. H. Lord, The Second Partition of Poland: a Study in Diplomatic History (1915), scholarly and well-written; R. N. Bain, The Last King of Poland and his Contemporaries (1909); U. L. Lehtonen, Die polnischen Provinzen Russlands unter Katharina II in den Jahren 1772-1782 (1907), a German translation of an important Finnish work. An excellent French account of international relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, affecting Russia, Sweden, Poland, and Turkey, is Émile Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique étrangère, 4th ed., Vol. I (1906), ch. viii, x, xiii.

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Part III

"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY"

Our narrative of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus far has been full of intrigue, dynastic rivalry, and colonial competition. We have sat with red-robed cardinals in council to exalt the monarch of France; we have witnessed the worldwide wars by which Great Britain won and lost vast imperial domains; we have followed the thundering march of Frederick's armies through the Germanies, wasted with war; but we have been blind indeed if the glare of bright helmets and the glamour of courtly diplomacy have hidden from our eyes a phenomenon more momentous than even the growth of Russia or the conquest of New France. It is the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Driven on by insatiable ambition, not content to be lords of the world of business, with ships and warehouses for castles and with clerks for retainers, the bourgeoisie have placed their lawyers in the royal service, their learned men in the academies, their economists at the king's elbow, and with restless energy they push on to shape state and society to their own ends. In England they have already helped to dethrone kings and have secured some hold on Parliament, but on the Continent their power and place is less advanced.

For the eighteenth century is still the grand age of monarchs, who take Louis XIV as the pattern of princely power and pomp. "Benevolent despots" they are, these monarchs meaning well to govern their people with fatherly kindness. But their plans go wrong and their reforms fall flat, while the bourgeoisie become self-conscious and self-reliant, and rise up against the throne of the sixteenth Louis in France. It is the bourgeoisie that start the revolutionary cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," and it is this cry in the throats of the masses which sends terror to the hearts of nobles and kings. Desperately the old order--the old régime--defends itself. First France, then all Europe, is affected. Revolutionary wars convulse the Continent. Never had the world witnessed wars so disastrous, so bloody.

Yet the triumph of the bourgeoisie is not assured. The Revolution has been but one battle in the long war between the rival aristocracies of birth and of business--a war in which peasants and artisans now give their lives for illusory dreams of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," now fight their feudal lords, and now turn on their pretended liberators, the bourgeoisie. For already it begins to dawn on the dull masses that "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" are chiefly for their masters.

The old regime, its decay, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the disappointment of the common people,--these are the bold landmarks on which the student must fix his attention, while in the following chapters we sketch the condition of Europe in the eighteenth century, and trace the course of the French Revolution, the career of Napoleon, and the restoration of "law and order" under Metternich.

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XIII. EUROPEAN SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

AGRICULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: General Backwardness]

If some "Rip Van Winkle" of the sixteenth century could have slept for two centuries to awake in 1750, he would have found far less to marvel at in the common life of the people than would one of us. Much of the farming, even of the weaving, buying, and selling, was done just as it had been done centuries before; and the great changes that were to revolutionize the life and work of the people were as yet hardly dreamed of. In fact, there was so much in common between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that the reader who has already made himself familiar with the manor and the gild, as described in Chapter II, will find himself quite at home in the "old regime," as the order of things in the eighteenth century is now termed.

One might still see the countless little agricultural villages and manor houses nestling among the hills or dotting the plains, surrounded by green fields and fringed with forest or wasteland. The simple villagers still cultivated their strips in the common fields in the time-honored way, working hard for meager returns. A third of the land stood idle every year; it often took a whole day merely to scratch the surface of a single acre with the rude wooden plow then in use; cattle were killed off in the autumn for want of good hay; fertilizers were only crudely applied, if at all; many a humble peasant was content if his bushel of seed brought him three bushels of grain, and was proud if his fatted ox weighed over four hundred pounds, though a modern farmer would grumble at results three or four times as good.

[Sidenote: "Gentlemen Farmers" and "Husbandry"] [Sidenote: "Rotation of Crops"]

There were some enterprising and prosperous landowners who used newer and better methods, and even wrote books about "husbandry," as agriculture was called. The Dutch, especially, learned to cultivate their narrow territory carefully, and from them English farmers learned many secrets of tillage. They grew clover and "artificial grasses"--such as rye--for their cattle, cultivated turnips for winter fodder, tilled the soil more thoroughly, used fertilizers more diligently, and even learned how to shift their crops from field to field according to a regular plan, so that the soil would not lose its fertility and would not have to be left idle or "fallow" every third year.

[Sidenote: Survival of Primitive Methods]

These new methods were all very fine for "gentlemen farmers," but for the average peasant the old "open-field" system was an effective barrier to progress. He could not plant new crops on his strips in the grain fields, for custom forbade it; he could not breed his cows scientifically, while they ran in with the rest of the village cattle. At best he could only work hard and pray that his cows would not catch contagion from the rest, and that the weeds from his neighbor's wheat- patch might not spread into his own, for between such patches there was neither wall nor fence.

[Sidenote: Survival of Serfdom] [Sidenote: Sorry Condition of the Peasantry]

Primitive methods were not the only survivals of manorial life. Actual serfdom still prevailed in most of the countries of Europe except France [Footnote: Even in France, some serfdom still survived.] and England, and even in these countries nominal freedom lifted the peasantry but little above the common lot. It is true, indeed, that countless differences in the degree and conditions of servitude existed between Russians and Frenchmen, and even between peasants in the same country or village. The English or French plowman, perhaps, might not be sold to fight for other countries like the Hessians, nor could he be commanded to marry an undesired bride, as were of the tenants of a Russian nobleman. But in a general way we may say that all the peasants of Europe suffered from much the same causes. With no voice in making the laws, they were liable to heavy fines or capital punishment for breaking the laws. Their advice was not asked when taxes were levied or apportioned, but upon them fell the heaviest burdens of the state.

It was vexatious to pay outrageous fees for the use of a lord's mill, bridge, oven, or wine-press, to be haled to court for an imaginary offense, or to be called from one's fields to war, or to work on the roads without pay. It was hard for the hungry serf to see the fat deer venturing into his very dooryard, and to remember that the master of the mansion house was so fond of the chase that he would not allow his game to be killed for food for vulgar plowmen.

But these and similar vexations sank into insignificance in comparison with the burdens of the taxes paid to lord, to church, and to king. In every country of Europe the peasants were taxed, directly or indirectly, for the support of the three pillars of the "old regime." The form of such taxation in England differed widely from that in Hungary; in Sweden, from that in Spain. But beneath discrepancies of form, the system was essentially the same. Some idea of the triple taxation that everywhere bore so heavily upon the peasantry may be obtained from a brief resume of the financial obligations of an ordinary French peasant to his king, his Church, and his lord.

[Sidenote: Peasant Obligations to Landlord]

To the lord the serf owed often three days' labor a week, in addition to stated portions of grain and poultry. In place of servile work the freeman paid a "quit-rent," that is, a sum of money instead of the services which were considered to accompany the occupation of land. Double rent was paid on the death of the peasant, and, if the farm was sold, one-fifth of the price went to the lord. Sometimes, however, a freeman held his land without quit-rent, but still had numerous obligations which had survived from medieval times, such as the annual sum paid for a "military protection" which he neither demanded nor received.

[Sidenote: Peasant Obligation to Church]

The second obligation was to the church--the tithe or tenth, which usually amounted every year to a twelfth or a fifteenth of the gross produce of the peasant's land.

[Sidenote: Peasant Obligations to King and State]

Heaviest of all were the taxes levied by the king. The taille, or land tax, was the most important. The amount was not fixed, but was supposed to be proportional to the value of the peasant's land and dwelling. In practice the tax-collectors often took as much as they could get. and a shrewd peasant would let his house go to pieces and pretend to be utterly destitute in order that the assessors might not increase the valuation of his property.

The other direct taxes were the poll tax, i.e., a certain sum which everybody alike must pay, and the income tax, usually a twentieth part of the income. Finally, there were indirect taxes, such as the salt gabelle. Thus, in certain provinces every person had to buy seven pounds of salt a year from the government salt-works at a price ten times its real value. Road-making, too, was the duty of the peasant, and the corvée, or labor on roads, often took several weeks in a year.

[Sidenote: Burden of Taxation on Peasants]

All these burdens--dues to the lord, tithes to the church, taxes to the king--left the peasant but little for himself. It is so difficult to get exact figures that we can put no trust in the estimate of a famous writer that dues, tithes, and taxes absorbed over four-fifths of the French peasant's produce: nevertheless, we may be sure that the burden was very great. In a few favored districts of France and England farmers were able to pay their taxes and still live comfortably. But elsewhere the misery of the people was such as can hardly be imagined. With the best of harvests they could barely provide for their families, and a dry summer or long winter would bring them to want. There was only the coarsest of bread--and little of that; meat was a luxury; and delicacies were for the rich. We read how starving peasants in France tried to appease their hunger with roots and herbs, and in hard times succumbed by thousands to famine. One-roomed mud huts with leaky thatched roofs, bare and windowless, were good enough dwellings for these tillers of the soil. In the dark corners of the dirt-floors lurked germs of pestilence and death. Fuel was expensive, and the bitter winter nights must have found many a peasant shivering supperless on his bed of straw.

True, the gloom of such conditions was relieved here and there by a prosperous village or a well-to-do peasant. But, speaking in a general way, the sufferings of the poorer European peasants and serfs can hardly be exaggerated. It was they who in large part had paid for the wars, theaters, palaces, and pleasures of the courts of Europe.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: Growth of Towns]

Let us now turn our eyes from the country to the city, for in the towns are to be found the bourgeoisie, the class in which we are most interested. The steady expansion of commerce and industry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been attended by a remarkable development of town life. Little villages had grown, until in 1787 there were 78 towns of over 10,000 inhabitants each. London, the greatest city in Europe, had increased in population from about half a million in 1685 to over a million in 1800. Paris was at least half as large; Amsterdam was a great city; and several German towns like Hamburg, Bremen, and Frankfort were important trading centers.

The towns had begun to lose some of their medieval characteristics. They had spread out beyond their cramping walls; roomy streets and pleasant squares made the newer sections more attractive. The old fortifications, no longer needed for protection, served now as promenades. City thoroughfares were kept cleaner, sometimes well paved with cobbles; and at night the feeble but cheerful glow of oil street- lamps lessened the terrors of the belated burgher who had been at the theater or listened to protracted debates at the great town hall.

[Sidenote: Industry Gild Regulation]

The life of the town was nourished by industry and commerce. Industry in the eighteenth century meant far more than baking bread, making clothes, cobbling shoes, and fashioning furniture for use in the town; it meant the production on a large scale of goods to sell in distant places,--cloth, clocks, shoes, beads, dishes, hats, buttons, and what not. Many of these articles were still manufactured under the regulations of the old craft gilds. For although the gild system was pretty well broken up in England, it still maintained its hold on the Continent. In France the division of crafts had become so complicated that innumerable bickerings arose between cobblers' gilds and shoemakers' gilds, between watch-makers and clock-makers. In Germany conditions were worse. The gilds, now aristocratic and practically hereditary corporations, used their power to prevent all competition, to keep their apprentices and journeymen working for little or nothing, to insure high profits, and to prevent any technical improvements which might conceivably injure them. "A hatter who improved his wares by mixing silk with the wool was attacked by all the other hatters; the inventor of sheet lead was opposed by the plumbers; a man who had made a success in print-cloths was forced to return to antiquated methods by the dyers."

[Sidenote: Government Regulation of Industry: Mercantilism]

To gild regulation was added government regulation. It will be remembered that many seventeenth-century statesmen had urged their kings to make laws for the greater prosperity of industry, and that Colbert had given the classic expression in France to the mercantilist idea that wealth could be cultivated by regulating and encouraging manufactures. In order that French dyers might acquire a reputation for thorough work, he issued over three hundred articles of instruction for the better conduct of the dyeing business. In an age when unscrupulous English merchants were hurting the market with poorly woven fabrics, French weavers were given careful orders about the quality of the thread, the breadth of the cloth, and the fineness of the weave. It is said that in 1787 the regulations for French manufactures filled eight volumes in quarto; and other governments, while less thorough, were equally convinced of the wisdom of such a policy.

The mercantilist was not content with making rules for established industries. In justice to him it should be explained that he was anxious to plant new trades. Privileges, titles of nobility, exemption from taxation, generous grants of money, and other favors were accorded to enterprising business men who undertook to introduce new branches of manufacture.

In general, however, the efforts of such mercantilists as Colbert have been adversely criticized by economists. The regulations caused much inconvenience and loss to many manufacturers, and the privileges granted to new enterprises often favored unstable and unsuitable industries at the expense of more natural and valuable trades. It is impossible to estimate the value to France of Colbert's pet industries, and equally impossible to see what would have happened had industry been allowed free rein. But we must not entirely condemn the system simply because its faults are so obvious and its benefits so hard to ascertain.

[Sidenote: Restrictions on Commerce]

Commerce, like industry, was subject to restrictions and impeded by antiquated customs. Merchants traversing the country were hindered by poor roads; at frequent intervals they must pay toll before passing a knight's castle, a bridge, or a town gate. Customs duties were levied on commerce between the provinces of a single kingdom. And the cost of transportation was thus made so high that the price of a cask of wine passing from the Orléanais to Normandy--two provinces in northwestern France--increased twenty-fold.

From our past study of the commercial and colonial wars of the eighteenth century, especially those between France and Great Britain, we have already learned that mercantilist ideas were still dominant in foreign commerce. We have noted the heavy protective tariffs which were designed to shut out foreign competition. We have discussed the Navigation Acts, by means of which England encouraged her ship-owners. We have also mentioned the absorption, by specially chartered companies, of the profits of the lucrative European trade with the Indies. The East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Dutch East India Company, and the French Compagnie des Indes were but a few famous examples of the chartered companies which still practically monopolized the trade of most non-European countries.

[Sidenote: Great Growth of Commerce]

Customs and companies may have been injurious in many respects, but commerce grew out of all bounds. The New World gave furs, timber, tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, dyes, gold, and silver, in return for negro slaves, manufactures, and Oriental wares; and the broad Atlantic highways were traversed by many hundreds of heavily laden ships. The spices, jewels, tea, and textiles of the Far East made rich cargoes for well-built East Indiamen. Important, too, was the traffic which occupied English and Dutch merchant fleets in the Baltic; and the flags of many nations were carried by traders coastwise along all the shores of Europe. Great Britain at the opening of the eighteenth century possessed a foreign commerce estimated at $60,000,000, and that of France was at least two-thirds as great. During the century the volume of commerce was probably more than quadrupled.

It is difficult to realize the tremendous importance of this expansion of commerce and industry. It had erected colonial empires, caused wars, lured millions of peasants from their farms, and built populous cities. But most important of all--it had given strength to the bourgeoisie.

[Sidenote: Rise of the Bourgeoisie]

Merchants, bankers, wholesalers, rich gild-masters, and even less opulent shopkeepers, formed a distinct "middle class," between the privileged clergy and nobility on the one hand, and the oppressed peasant and artisan, or manual laborer, on the other. The middle class, often called by the French word bourgeoisie because it dwelt in towns or bourgs, was strongest in England, the foremost commercial nation of Europe, was somewhat weaker in France, and very much weaker in less commercial countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Russia.

If the bourgeoisie was all-powerful in the world of business, it was influential in other spheres. Lawyers came almost exclusively from commercial families. Judges, local magistrates, keepers of prisons, government secretaries, intendants, all the world of officialdom was thronged with scions of bourgeois families. The better and older middle-class families prided themselves on their wealth, influence, and culture. They read the latest books on science and philosophy; they sometimes criticized the religious ideas of the past; and they eagerly discussed questions of constitutional law and political economy.

[Sidenote: Ambition of the Bourgeoisie]

Ambition came quite naturally with wealth and learning. The bourgeoisie wanted power and privilege commensurate with their place in business and administration. It seemed unbearable that a foppish noble whose only claims to respect were a moldy castle and a worm-eaten patent of nobility should everywhere take precedence over men of means and brains. Why should the highest social distinctions, the richest sinecures, and the posts of greatest honor in the army and at court be closed to men of ignoble birth, as if a man were any better for the possession of a high-sounding title?

Moreover, the bourgeoisie desired a more direct say in politics. In England, to be sure, the sons of rich merchants were frequently admitted to the nobility, and commercial interests were pretty well represented in Parliament. In France, however, the feudal nobility was more arrogant and exclusive, and the government less in harmony with middle-class notions. The extravagant and wasteful administration of royal money was censured by every good business man. It was argued that if France might only have bourgeois representation in a national parliament to regulate finance and to see that customs duties, trade- laws, and foreign relations were managed in accordance with business interests, then all would be well.

THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES

Thus far, in analyzing social and economic conditions in the eighteenth century, we have concerned ourselves with the lowest class, the peasants and day laborers, and with the middle class or bourgeoisie-- the "Third Estate" of France and the "Commons" of Great Britain. All of these were technically unprivileged or ignoble classes. The highest place in society was reserved for the classes of the privileged, the clergy and the nobility, constituting the First and the Second Estates, respectively. And it is to these that we must now direct our attention.

[Sidenote: Small Number of "Privileged"]

The privileged classes formed a very small minority of the population. Of the 25,000,000 inhabitants of France, probably less than 150,000 were nobles and 130,000 clerics; about one out of every hundred of the people was therefore privileged.

[Sidenote: Large Number of "Privileges"]

This small upper class was distinguished from the common herd by rank, possessions, and privileges. The person of noble birth, i.e., the son of a noble, was esteemed to be inherently finer and better than other men; so much so that he would disdain to marry a person of the lower class. He was addressed in terms of respect--"my lord," "your Grace"; common men saluted him as their superior. His clothes were more gorgeous than those of the plain people; on his breast glittered the badges of honorary societies, and his coach was proudly decorated with an ancestral coat of arms. His "gentle" birth admitted him to the polite society of the court and enabled him to seek preferment in church or army.

More substantial than marks of honor were the actual possessions of nobles and clergy. Each noble bequeathed to his eldest son a castle or a mansion with more or less territory from which to collect rents or feudal dues. Bishops, abbots, and archbishops received their office by election or appointment rather than by inheritance, and, being unmarried, could not transmit their stations to children. But in countries where the wealth of the Church had not been confiscated by Protestants, the "prince of the Church" often enjoyed during his lifetime magnificent possessions. The bishop of Strassburg had an annual income approximating 500,000 francs. Castles, cathedrals, palaces, rich vestments, invaluable pictures, golden chalices, rentals from broad lands, tithes from the people,--these were the property of the clergy. It is estimated that the clergy and nobility each owned one-fifth of France, and that one-third of all the land of Europe, one- half the revenue, and two-thirds the capital, were in the hands of Christian churches.

The noble families, possessing thousands of acres, and monopolizing the higher offices of church and army, were further enriched, especially in France, by presents of money from the king, by pensions, by grants of monopolies, and by high-salaried positions which entailed little or no work. "One young man was given a salary of $3600 for an office whose sole duty consisted in signing his name twice a year."

[Sidenote: Exemption from Taxation]

With all their wealth the first two orders contributed almost nothing to lighten the financial burdens of the state. [Footnote: Exemption from taxation was often and similarly granted to bourgeois incumbents of government offices.] The Church in France claimed exemption from taxation, but made annual gifts to the king of several hundred thousand dollars, though such grants represented less than one per cent of its income. The nobles, too, considered the payment of direct taxes a disgrace to their gentle blood, and did not hesitate by trickery to evade indirect taxation, leaving the chief burdens to fall upon the lower classes, and most of all upon the peasantry.

[Sidenote: Failure of the Privileged to Perform Real Services] [Sidenote: The Higher Nobility]

All these advantages, privileges, and immunities might be looked upon as a fitting reward which medieval Europe had given to her nobles for protecting peaceable plowmen from the marauding bands then so common, and which she had bestowed upon her clergy for preserving education, for encouraging agriculture, for fostering the arts, for tending the poor, the sick, and the traveler, and for performing the offices of religion. But long before the eighteenth century the protective functions of feudal nobles had been transferred to the royal government. No longer useful, the hereditary nobility was merely burdensome, and ornamental. Such as could afford it, spent their lives in the cities or at the royal court where they rarely did anything worth while, unless it were to invent an unusually delicate compliment or to fashion a flawless sonnet. Their morals were not of the best--it was almost fashionable to be vicious--but their manners were perfect.

Meanwhile, the landed estates of these absentee lords were in charge of flint-hearted agents, whose sole mission was to squeeze money from the peasants, to make them pay well for mill, bridge, and oven, to press to the uttermost every claim which might give the absent master a larger revenue.

[Sidenote: The Country Gentry]

The poorer noble, the "country gentleman," was hardly able to live so extravagant a life, and accordingly remained at home, sometimes making friends of the villagers, standing god-father to peasant-children, or inviting heavy-booted but light-hearted plowmen to dance in the castle courtyard. But often his life was dull enough, with rents hard to collect, and only hunting, drinking, and gossip to pass the time away.

[Sidenote: The Clergy]

A similar and sharper contrast was observable between the higher and lower clergy, in England as well as in Roman Catholic countries. Very frequently dissipated young nobles were nominated bishops or abbots: they looked upon their office as a source of revenue, but never dreamed of discharging any spiritual duties. While a Cardinal de Rohan with 2,500,000 livres a year astonished the court of France with his magnificence and luxury, many a shabby but faithful country curate, with an uncertain income of less than $150 a year, was doing his best to make both ends meet, with a little to spare for charity.

RELIGIOUS AND ECCLESIASTICAL CONDITIONS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: The Catholic Church]

The great ecclesiastical organization that had dominated the middle ages was no longer the one church of Europe, but was still the most impressive. Although the Protestant Revolt of the sixteenth century had established independent denominations in the countries of northern Europe, as we have seen in Chapter IV, Roman Catholic Christianity remained the state religion of Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, the Austrian Netherlands, Bavaria, Poland, and several of the Swiss Cantons. Moreover, large sections of the population of Ireland, Bohemia, Hungary, Asia, and America professed Catholic Christianity.

Orthodox Roman Catholics held fast to their faith in dogmas and sacraments and looked for spiritual guidance, correction, and comfort to the regular and secular clergy of their Church. The "secular" hierarchy of pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons, did not cease its pious labor "in the world"; nor was there lack of zealous souls willing to forego the pleasures of this world, that they might live holier lives as monks, nuns, or begging friars,-- the "regular" clergy.

[Sidenote: Relations of the Catholic Church with Lay States]

In its relations with lay states, the Roman Catholic Church had changed more than in its internal organization. Many Protestant rulers now recognized the pope merely as an Italian prince, [Footnote: The pope, it will be remembered, ruled the central part of Italy as a temporal prince.] and head of an undesirable religious sect--Roman Catholics were either persecuted, or, as in Great Britain, deprived of political and civil rights. The Pope, on the other hand, could hardly regard as friends those who had denied the spiritual mission and confiscated the temporal possessions of the Church.

In Roman Catholic countries, too, the power of the pope had been lessened. The old dispute whether pope or king should control the appointment of bishops, abbots, and other high church officers had at last been settled in favor of the king. The pope consented to recognize royal appointees, provided they were "godly and suitable" men; in return he usually received a fee ("annate") from the newly appointed prelate. Other taxes the pope rarely ventured to levy; but good Roman Catholics continued to pay "Peter's Pence" as a free-will offering, and the bishops occasionally taxed themselves for his benefit. In other ways, also, the power of the Church was curtailed. Royal courts now took cognizance of the greater part of those cases which had once been within the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts;[Footnote: Blasphemy, contempt of religion, and heresy were, however, still matters for church courts.] the right of appeal to the Roman Curia was limited; and the lower clergy might be tried in civil courts. Finally, papal edicts were no longer published in a country without the sanction of the king. These curtailments of papal privilege were doubtless important, but they meant little or nothing to the millions of peasants and humble workmen who heard Mass, were confessed, and received the sacraments as their fathers had done before them.

[Sidenote: Surviving Privileges of the Church]

Besides their incalculable influence over the souls of men, the clergy were an important factor in the civil life of Roman Catholic countries. Education was mostly under their auspices; they conducted the hospitals and relieved the poor. Marriages were void unless solemnized in the orthodox manner, and, in the eye of the law, children born outside of Christian wedlock might not inherit property. Heretics who died unshriven, were denied the privilege of burial in Catholic cemeteries.

Of the exemption of the clergy from taxation, and of the wealth of the Church, we have already spoken, as well as of the high social rank of its prelates--a rank more in keeping with that of wealthy worldly noblemen than with that of devout "servants of the Lord." But we have yet to mention the influence of the Church in suppressing heresy.

In theory the Roman Catholic religion was still obligatory in Catholic states. Uniformity of faith was still considered essential to political unity. Kings still promised at coronation faithfully to extirpate heretical sects. In Spain, during the first half of the eighteenth century hundreds of heretics were condemned by the Inquisition and burned at the stake; only toward the close of the century was there an abatement of religious intolerance. In France, King Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and in the eighteenth century one might have found laws on the French statute-books directing that men who attended Protestant services should be made galley-slaves, that medical aid should be withheld from impenitent heretics, and that writers of irreligious books should suffer death. Such laws were very poorly enforced, however, and active religious persecution was dying out in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. But toleration did not mean equality; full civil and political rights were still denied the several hundred thousand Huguenots in France.

[Sidenote: Summary of Weaknesses in the Catholic Church]

The strength of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century was impaired by four circumstances: (1) the existence of bitterly antagonistic Protestant sects; (2) the growth of royal power and of the sentiment of nationalism, at the expense of papal power and of internationalism; (3) the indolence and worldliness of some of the prelates; and (4) the presence of internal dissensions. The first three circumstances should be clear from what has already been said, but a word of explanation is necessary about the fourth.

[Sidenote: Jansenism]

The first of these dissensions arose concerning the teachings of a certain Flemish bishop by the name of Cornelius Janssen (1585-1638), [Footnote: Janssen is commonly cited by the Latin version of his name-- Jansenius.] whose followers, known as Jansenists, had possessed themselves of a sort of hermitage and nunnery at Port-Royal in the vicinity of Paris. Jansenism found a number of earnest disciples and able exponents, whose educational work and reforming zeal brought them into conflict with the Jesuits. The Jesuits accused the Jansenists of heresy, affirming that Janssen's doctrine of conversion-by-the-will-of- God was in last analysis practically Calvin's predestination. For some years the controversy raged. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a famous mathematician and experimenter in physics, defended the Jansenists eloquently and learnedly, but Jesuits had the ear of Louis XIV and broke up the little colony at Port-Royal. Four years later the pope issued a famous bull, called "Unigenitus" (1713), definitively condemning Jansenist doctrines as heretical; but the sect still lived on, especially in Holland, and "Unigenitus" was disliked by many orthodox Roman Catholics, who thought its condemnations too sweeping and too severe.

[Sidenote: Febronianism]

A second dispute, questioning the authority of the papacy, centered in a German theologian [Footnote: Johann Nikolaus von Hoatheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier. His famous work was published in 1763.] who wrote under the Latin name of Febronius. Febronianism was an attempted revival of the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century and closely resembled "Gallicanism," as the movement in favor of the "Liberties of the Gallican Church" was called. These "Liberties" had been formulated in a French declaration of 1682 and involved two major claims: (1) that the pope had no right to depose or otherwise to interfere with temporal monarchs, and (2) that in spiritual affairs the general council of bishops (œcumenical council) was superior to the sovereign pontiff. This twofold movement towards nationalism and representative church government was most strongly controverted by the Jesuits, who took their stand on the assertion that the pope was supreme in all things. By the opponents of the Jesuits, this looking "beyond the mountains" to the Roman Curia for ultimate authority was called Ultramontanism (beyond-the-mountainism). In almost every Catholic country of Europe the struggle between Ultramontanism and Febronianism aroused controversy, and the nature of papal supremacy remained a mooted point well into the nineteenth century.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Jesuit Order]

Towards the close of the eighteenth century Ultramontanism received a serious though temporary setback by the suppression of the Jesuits (1773). For over two centuries members of the Society of Jesus had been famed as schoolmasters, preachers, controversialists, and missionaries; but in the eighteenth century the order became increasingly involved in temporal business; its power and wealth were abused; its political entanglements incurred the resentment of reforming royal ministers; and some of its missionaries became scandalously lax in their doctrines. The result was the suppression of the order, first in Portugal (1759), then in other countries, and finally altogether by a papal decree of 1773. [Footnote: In Russia, where the order of suppression was not enforced, the Jesuits kept their corporate organization. Subsequently, on 7 August, 1814, the entire society was restored by papal bull, and is now in a flourishing condition in many countries.]

[Sidenote: The Anglican Church]

We shall next consider the Anglican Church, whose complete independence from the papacy, it will be remembered, was established by Henry VIII of England, and whose doctrinal position had been defined in the Thirty-nine Articles of Elizabeth's reign. It was the state Church of England, Ireland, and Wales, and had scattering adherents in Scotland and in the British colonies. Like the Roman Catholic Church in France, the Anglican Church enjoyed in the British Isles, excepting Scotland, special privileges, great wealth, and the collection of tithes from Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike. It was intensely national, independent of papal control or other foreign influence, and patriotic in spirit. It retained a hierarchical government similar to that of the Roman Catholics. As in France, the bishops were inclined to use the emoluments without doing the work of their office, while the country curates were very poor.

In its relations with others, the Anglican Church was not very liberal. In England, Protestant (Calvinistic) Dissenters had been granted liberty of worship in 1689 (Toleration Act) but still they might not hold civil, military, or political office without the special dispensation of Parliament. Baptism, registration of births and deaths, and marriage could be performed legally only by Anglican clergymen. Non-Anglicans were barred from Oxford and could take no degree at Cambridge University.

Worst of all was the lot of the Roman Catholics. In England they had practically no civil, political, or religious rights. By a law of 1700 [Footnote: Repealed in 1778, but on condition that Roman Catholics should deny the temporal power of the pope and his right to depose kings.] the Roman Catholic must abjure the Mass or lose his property, and priests celebrating Mass were liable to life imprisonment. In Ireland the communicants of the "Church of Ireland" (Anglican) constituted a very small minority, [Footnote: Even in the nineteenth century, there were only about 500,000 Anglicans out of a population of somewhat less than 6,000,000.] while the native Roman Catholics, comprising over four-fifths of the population, were not only seriously hindered from exercising their own religion, not only deprived of their political rights, not only made subservient to the economic interests of the Protestants, but actually forced to pay the tithe to support English bishops and curates, who too often lived in England, since their parishioners were all Roman Catholics.

[Sidenote: Protestant Sects in England: Baptists]

The Dissenters from the Anglican Church embraced many different creeds. We have already spoken of the Calvinistic Presbyterians and Separatists. Besides these, several new sects had appeared. The Baptist Church was a seventeenth-century off-shoot of Separatism. To Calvinistic theology and Congregational Church government, the Baptists had added a belief in adult baptism, immersion, and religious liberty.

[Sidenote: Unitarians]

A group of persons who denied the divinity of Christ, thereby departing widely from usual Protestantism as well as from traditional Catholicism, came into some prominence in the eighteenth century through secessions from the Anglican Church and through the preaching of the scientist Joseph Priestley, and gradually assumed the name of Unitarians. It was not until 1844 that the sect obtained complete religious liberty in England.

[Sidenote: Quakers]

A most remarkable departure from conventional forms was made under the leadership of George Fox, the son of a weaver, whose followers, loosely organized as the Society of Friends, were often derisively called Quakers, because they insisted that true religion was accompanied by deep emotions and quakings of spirit. Although severely persecuted, [Footnote: In 1685 as many as 1460 Quakers lay in English prisons.] the Quakers grew to be influential at home, and in the colonies, where they founded Pennsylvania (1681). Their refusal to take oaths, their quaint "thee" and "thou," their simple and somber costumes, and their habit of sitting silent in religious meeting until the spirit should move a member to speak, made them a most picturesque body. Professional ministers and the ceremonial observance of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, they held to be forms destructive of spontaneous religion. War, they said, gave free rein to un-Christian cruelty, selfishness, and greed; and, therefore, they would not fight. They were also vigorous opponents of negro slavery.

[Sidenote: Methodists]

The Methodist movement did not come until the eighteenth century. By the year 1740, a group of earnest Oxford students had won the nickname of "Methodists" by their abstinence from frivolous amusements and their methodical cultivation of fervor, piety, and charity. Their leader, John Wesley (1703-1791), was a man of remarkable energy, rising at four in the morning, filling every moment with work, living frugally on £28 a year, visiting prisons, and exhorting his companions to piety. The Methodist leaders were very devout and orthodox Anglicans, but they were so anxious "to spread Scriptural Holiness over the land" that they preached in open fields as well as in churches. Wesley and other great orators appealed to the emotions of thousands of miners, prisoners, and ignorant weavers, and often moved them to tears. It is said that John Wesley preached more than 40,000 sermons.

The Methodist preachers gradually became estranged from the Anglican Church, established themselves as a new dissenting sect, and dropped much of the Anglican ritual. The influence of their preaching was very marked, however, and many orthodox Anglican clergymen traveled about preaching to the lower classes. This "evangelical movement" is significant because it showed that a new class of industrial workers had grown up without benefit of the church or protection of the state. We shall subsequently hear more of them in connection with the events of the Industrial Revolution.

[Sidenote: Lutheran Churches on the Continent]

In the eighteenth century, Lutheranism was the state religion of Denmark (including Norway), Sweden, and of several German states, notably Prussia, Saxony, and Brunswick. The Lutheran churches retained much of the old ritual and episcopal government. Ecclesiastical lands, however, had been secularized, and Lutheran pastors were supported by free-will offerings and state subventions. In Prussia, [Footnote: Later, in 1817, the Lutherans and Calvinists of Prussia were brought together, under royal pressure, to form the "Evangelical Church." According to the king, this was not a fusion of the two Protestant faiths, but merely an external union.] Denmark, and Sweden the church recognized the king as its summus episcopus or supreme head.

[Sidenote: Reformed Churches]

Zwinglian and Calvinistic churches were usually called "Reformed" or "Presbyterian" and represented a more radical deviation than Lutheranism from Roman Catholic theology and ritual, holding the Lord's Supper to be but a commemorative ceremony, doing away with altar- lights, crucifixes, and set prayers, and governing themselves by synods of priests or presbyters. In the eighteenth century Presbyterianism was still the established religion of Scotland, and of the Dutch Netherlands. In France the Huguenots, in Switzerland the French- speaking Calvinists and German-speaking Zwinglians, and numerous congregations in southern Germany still represented the Reformed Church of Calvin and Zwingli. [Footnote: For the Orthodox Church in Russia, see above, pp. 122, 372, 380. Some reforms in the ritual had been introduced by a certain Nikon, a patriarch of the seventeenth century.]

[Sidenote: Growth of Skepticism. Deism]

One of the most noteworthy features of the eighteenth century was the appearance of a large number of doubters of Christianity. In the comparatively long history of the Christian Church, there had often been reformers, who attacked specific doctrines or abuses, but never before, with the possible exception of Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, [Footnote: See above, pp. 124, 182 ff.] had there been such a considerable and influential number who ventured to assail the very foundations of the Christian belief. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a number of English philosophers, imbued with enthusiasm for the discovery of scientific laws, went on to apply the newer scientific methods to religion. They claimed that the Bible was untrustworthy, that the dogmas and ceremonies of the churches were useless if not actually harmful, and that true religion was quite natural in man and independent of miraculous revelation. God, they asserted, had created the universe and established laws for it. He would not upset these laws to answer the foolish prayers of a puny human being. Men served God best by discounting miracles, discrediting "superstition," and living in accordance with natural law. Just what this law was, they left largely to the common sense of each man to determine. As a result, the positive side of Deism, as the body of the new teachings was called, was lost in vagueness, and the negative side --the mere denial of orthodox Christianity--became uppermost in men's minds.

Deism was important in several ways, especially for France, whence it was carried from England. (1) For a large part of the most intelligent and influential classes, it destroyed reverence for the Church, and prepared the way for the religious experiments of the French Revolution. (2) It gave an impetus to philosophers who evolved great systems and exhibited wonderful ingenuity and confidence in formulating laws which would explain the why, what, whence, and whither of human life. (3) While casting doubt on the efficacy of particular religions, it demanded toleration for all. (4) Finally, it was responsible for a great increase of indifference to religion. People too lazy or too ignorant to understand the philosophic basis of Deism, used the arguments of Deists in justification of their contempt for religion, and to many people disbelief and intelligence seemed to be synonymous. We have considered Deism here for its significant bearing on the religious situation in the eighteenth century. In the following section we shall see how it was part and parcel of the scientific and intellectual spirit of the times.

SCIENTIFIC AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: Art]

As we have observed in an earlier chapter, both science and art flowered in the sixteenth century. The great men of the eighteenth century, however, devoted themselves almost exclusively to science; and the artists of the time were too insincere, too intent upon pleasing shallow-brained and frivolous courtiers, to produce much that was worth while. Great numbers of plays were written, it is true, but they were hopelessly dull imitations of classic models. Imitative and uninspired likewise were statues and paintings and poems. One merit they possessed. If a French painter lacked force and originality, he could at least portray with elegance and charm a group of fine ladies angling in an artificial pool. Elegance, indeed, redeemed the eighteenth century from imitative dullness and stupid ostentation: elegance expressed more often in perfumes, laces, and mahogany than in paint or marble. The silk-stockinged courtier accompanying his exquisitely perfect bow with a nicely worded compliment was surely as much an artist as the sculptor. Nor can one help feeling that the chairs of Louis XV were made not to sit in, but to admire; for their curving mahogany legs look too slenderly delicate, their carved and gilded backs too uncomfortable, for mere use. Chairs and fine gentlemen were alike useless, and alike elegant.

[Sidenote: The New Science]

More substantial were the achievements of eighteenth-century scientists. From philosophers of an earlier century--Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650)--they learned to question everything, to seek new knowledge by actual experiment, to think boldly. You must not blindly believe in God, they said, you must first prove His existence. Or, if you will learn how the body is made, it will not do to believe what Hippocrates or any other Greek authority said about it; you must cut rabbits open and see with your own eyes where heart and lungs are hidden beneath the coat of fur. Seeing and thinking for oneself were the twin principles of the new scientific method.

[Sidenote: Isaac Newton]

The new science found many able exponents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of them all Sir Isaac Newton (1646-1727) was probably the most illustrious. Coming from a humble family in a little English village, Newton at an early age gave evidence of uncommon intelligence. At Cambridge University he astonished his professors and showed such great skill in mathematics that he was given a professor's chair when only twenty-three years old.

For Descartes, Newton conceived great admiration, and, like Descartes, he applied himself to experimentation as well as to formal mathematics. His boyish ingenuity in the construction of windmills, kites, and water-clocks was now turned to more serious ends. Like other scientists of the day, he experimented with chemicals in his laboratory, and tried different combinations of lenses, prisms, and reflectors, until he was able to design a great telescope with which to observe the stars.

His greatest achievement was in astronomy. Galileo, Copernicus, and other investigators had already concluded that the earth is but one of many similar bodies moving around the sun, which in turn is only one of countless suns--for every star is a sun. Now Newton wondered what held these mighty spheres in their places in space, for they appeared to move in definite and well-regulated orbits without any visible support or prop. It is alleged that the answer to the problem was suggested by the great philosopher's observation of a falling apple. The same invisible force that made the apple fall to the ground must, he is said to have reasoned, control the moon, sun, and stars. The earth is pulled toward the sun, as the apple to the earth, but it is also pulled toward the stars, each of which is a sun so far away that it looks to us very small. The result is that the earth neither falls to the sun nor to any one star, but moves around the sun in a regular path.

This suggestive principle by which every body in the universe is pulled towards every other body, Newton called the law of universal gravitation. Newton's law [Footnote: It was really only a shrewd guess, but it appears to work so well that we often call it a "law."] was expressed in a simple mathematical formula [Footnote: "The force increases directly in proportion to the product of the masses, and inversely in proportion to the square of the distance."] by means of which physics and astronomy were developed as mathematical sciences. When a modern astronomer foretells an eclipse of the sun or discusses the course of a comet, or when a physicist informs us that he has weighed the earth, he is depending directly or indirectly upon Newton's discovery.

[Sidenote: Experimental and Applied Science]

The brilliance of Sir Isaac Newton's individual achievement should not obscure the fame of a host of other justly celebrated scientists and inventors. One of Newton's contemporaries, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716), elaborated a new and valuable branch of mathematics, the differential calculus, [Footnote: The credit for this achievement was also claimed by Newton.] which has proved to be of immense service in modern engineering. At the same time, the first experiments were being made with the mysterious potencies of electricity: the electrical researches of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), his discovery that flashes of lightning are merely electrical phenomena and his invention of the lightning rod are too familiar to need repeating; the work of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) and of Count Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), two famous Italian physicists, is less well known, but their labors contributed much to the development of physical science, and their memory is perpetuated whenever the modern electrician refers to a "voltaic cell" or when the tinsmith speaks of "galvanized" iron. In this same period, the first important advances were made in the construction of balloons, and the conquest of the air was begun. In the eighteenth century, moreover, the foundations of modern chemistry were laid by Joseph Priestley (1733- 1804), Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), and Henry Cavendish (1731-1810); oxygen was discovered, water was decomposed into its elements, and the nomenclature of modern chemistry had its inception. In medicine and surgery, too, pioneer work was done by John Hunter (1728-1793), a noted Scotch surgeon and anatomist, and by the Swiss professor Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), the "father of modern physiology"; the facts which eighteenth-century physicians discovered regarding the circulation of the blood made possible more intelligent and more effective methods of treating disease; and just at the close of the eighteenth century, Edward Jenner (1749-1823), an English physician, demonstrated that the dread disease of smallpox could be prevented by vaccination. Geographical knowledge was vastly extended by the voyages of scientific explorers, like the English navigator Captain James Cook [Footnote: The Captain Cook who discovered, or rediscovered, Australia. See above, P. 340.] (1728-1779) and the French sailor Louis de Bougainville (1739-1811), in the hitherto uncharted expanses of the southern Pacific. Furthermore, since these explorers frequently brought home specimens of unfamiliar tropical animals and plants, rich material was provided for zoology and botany, which, thanks to the efforts of the Frenchman Georges de Buffon (1707-1788) and of the Swede Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), were just becoming important sciences.

[Sidenote: Popularity of the New Science]

One reason for the rapid development of natural science in the eighteenth century was the unprecedented popularity and favor enjoyed by scientists. Kings granted large pensions to scientists; British ministers bestowed remunerative offices, and petty princes showered valuable gifts upon them. Pretentious observatories with ponderous telescopes were built, often at public expense, in almost every country of Europe. Groups of learned men were everywhere banded together in "academies" or "societies." The "Royal Society" of London, founded in 1662, listened to reports of the latest achievements in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. The members of the _Académie française (French Academy) were granted pensions by Louis XIV and even reckoned Newton among their honorary members.

Never before had there been such interest in science, and never before had there been such opportunity to learn. Printing was now well developed; the learned societies and observatories published reports of the latest development in all branches of knowledge. Encyclopedias were gotten out professing to embody in one set of volumes the latest information relative to all the new sciences. Books were too expensive for the common person, but not so for the bourgeoisie, nor for numerous nobles. Indeed, it became quite the fashion in society to be a "savant," a scientist, a philosopher, to dabble in chemistry, perhaps even to have a little laboratory or a telescope, and to dazzle one's friends with one's knowledge.

[Sidenote: The Spirit of Progress and Reform]

It seemed as if the golden age was dawning: the human mind seemed to be awakening from the slumber of centuries to con the world, to unravel the mysteries of life, and to discover the secrets of the universe. Confident that only a little thought would be necessary to free the world from vice, ignorance, and superstition, thinkers now turned boldly to attack the vexing problems of religion and morality, to criticize state, society, and church, and to point the way to a new and earthly paradise.

This tendency--this enthusiasm--has usually been styled "rationalism" because its champions sought to make everything rational or reasonable. Its foremost representatives were to be found in Great Britain between 1675 and 1725. They wrote many books discussing abstruse problems of philosophy, which can have slight interest for us; but certain ideas they had of very practical importance, ideas which probably found their most notable expression in the writings of John Locke (1632-1704). Locke argued (1) that all government exists, or should exist, by consent of the governed--by a "social" contract, as it were; (2) that education should be more widespread; (3) that superstition and religious formalism should not be allowed to obscure "natural laws" and "natural religion"; and (4) that religious toleration should be granted to all but atheists.

The ideas of these English philosophers were destined to exercise a far greater influence upon France than upon England. They found delighted admirers among the nobility, ardent disciples among the bourgeoisie, and eloquent apostles in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Without a doubt, the foremost figure in the intellectual world of the eighteenth century was François Marie Arouet, or, as he called himself, François M. A. de Voltaire (1694-1778). Even from his boyhood he had been a clever hand at turning verses, and had fully appreciated his own cleverness. His businesslike father did not enjoy the boy's poetry, especially if it was written when young François should have been studying law. But François had a mind of his own; he liked to show his cleverness in gay society and relished making witty rhymes about the foibles of public ministers or the stupidity of the prince regent of France.

His sharp tongue and sarcastic pen were a source of constant danger to Voltaire. For libel the regent had him imprisoned a year in the Bastille. Some years later he was beaten by the lackeys of an offended nobleman, again sent to the Bastille, and then exiled three years in England.

At times he was the idol of Paris, applauded by philosophes and petted by the court, or again he would be a refugee from the wrath of outraged authorities. For a great part of his life he resided at Cirey in Lorraine,--with his mistress, his books, his half-finished plays, and his laboratory--for Voltaire, like all philosophes, had to play at science. Here he lived in constant readiness to flee over the border if the king should move against him. For a time he lived in Germany as the protégé of Frederick the Great, but he treated that irascible monarch with neither tact nor deference, and soon left Berlin to escape the king's ire. He visited Catherine the Great of Russia. He also lived at Geneva for a while, but even there he failed to keep peace with the magistrates.

Such conflicts with established authority only increased his fame. Moreover, his three years' exile in England (1726-1729) had been of untold value, for they had given him a first-hand acquaintance with English rationalism. He had been brought up to discount religious "superstition" but the English thinkers provided him with a well- considered philosophy. Full of enthusiasm for the ideas of his English friends, he wrote Letters on the English--a triumph of deistic philosophy and sarcastic criticism of church and society.

The opinions which Voltaire henceforth never ceased to expound had long been held by English rationalists. He combined (1) admiration for experimental science with (2) an exalted opinion of his own ability to reason out the "natural laws" which were supposed to lie at the base of human nature, religion, society, the state, and the universe in general. (3) He was a typical Deist, thinking that the God who had made the myriad stars of the firmament and who had promulgated eternal laws for the universe, would hardly concern Himself with the soul of Pierre or Jean. To him all priests were impostors, and sacraments meaningless mummery, and yet he would not abolish religion entirely. Voltaire often said that he believed in a "natural religion," but never explained it fully. Indeed, he was far more interested in tearing down than in building up, and disposed rather to scoff at the priests, teachings, and practices of the Catholic Church than to convert men to a better religion. (4) Likewise in his criticism of government and of society, he confined himself mostly to bitter denunciations of contemporaneous conditions, without offering a substitute or suggesting practical reforms. His nearest approach to the practical was his admiration for English institutions, but he never explained how the "liberties" of England were to be transplanted into France.

Voltaire was not an acutely original thinker. Nevertheless, his innumerable tragedies, comedies, histories, essays, and letters established his reputation as the most versatile and accomplished writer of his age. But all the "hundred volumes" of Voltaire are rarely read today. They are clever, to be sure, witty, graceful,--but admittedly superficial. He thought that he could understand at a glance the problems upon which more earnest men had spent their lives; he would hurriedly dash off a tragedy, or in spare moments write a pretentious history. He was not always accurate but he was always clever.

Let us remember him as, at the age of eighty-four, he pays a famous visit to Paris,--a sprightly old man with wrinkled face, and with sharp old eyes peering out from either side of the long nose, beaming with pride at the flattery of his admirers, sparkling with pleasure as he makes a witty repartee. The ladies call him a most amusing old cynic. Cynic he is, and old. His life work has been scoffing. Yet Voltaire is unquestionably the intellectual dictator of Europe. His genius for satire and his fearless attacks on long-standing abuses have made him hated, and feared, and admired. He has given tone and character to the Old Régime.

[Sidenote: Diderot and the Encyclopedists]

Voltaire was not alone in the work of spreading discontent. Less famous but hardly less brilliant or versatile, was Denis Diderot (1713-1784). His great achievement was the editing of the Encyclopedia. The gathering of all human knowledge into one set of volumes--an encyclopedia--had been for generations a favorite idea in Europe. Diderot associated with himself the most distinguished mathematicians, astronomers, scientists, and philosophers of the time in the compilation of a work which in seventeen volumes [Footnote: Not counting pictorial supplements.] undertook to summarize the latest findings of the scholarship of the age. Over four thousand copies had been subscribed when the Encyclopedia appeared in 1765. It proved to be more than a monument of learning: it was a manifesto of radicalism. Its contributors were the apostles of rationalism and deism, [Footnote: Some went even further and practically denied the existence of God.] and their criticism of current ideas about religion, society, and science won many disciples to the new ideas.

The mission of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists (as the editors of the Encyclopedia are called) was to disseminate knowledge and to destroy prejudice, especially in religion. Practical specific reforms were suggested by Montesquieu, Rousseau, Beccaria, and Adam Smith.

[Sidenote: Montesquieu]

Montesquieu (1689-1755), a French lawyer-nobleman, a student of natural science, and an admirer of Newton, was the foremost writer of the eighteenth century on the practice of government. In his Persian Letters, and more especially in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), he argued that government is a complicated matter and, to be successful, must be adapted to the peculiarities of a particular people. Theoretically he preferred a republic, and the Constitution of the United States consciously embodied many of his theories. Practically, he considered the government of Great Britain very admirable, and although it sheltered many abuses, as we shall presently see, [Footnote: See below, pp. 432 ff.] nevertheless he urged the French to pattern their political organization after it. Moderation was the motto of Montesquieu.

[Sidenote: Rousseau]

A more radical reformer was Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). In his life Rousseau was everything he should not have been. He was a failure as footman, as servant, as tutor, as secretary, as music copier, as lace maker. He wandered in Turin, Paris, Vienna, London. His immorality was notorious,--he was not faithful in love, and his children were sent to a foundling asylum. He was poverty-stricken, dishonest, discontented, and, in his last years, demented.

Yet this man, who knew so little how to live his own life, exercised a wonderful influence over the lives of others. Sordid as was his career, the man himself was not without beautiful and generous impulses. He loved nature in an age when other men simply studied nature. He liked to look at the clear blue sky, or to admire the soft green fields and shapely trees, and he was not ashamed to confess it. The emotions had been forgotten while philosophers were praising the intellect: Rousseau reminded the eighteenth century that after all it may be as sane to enjoy a sunset as to solve a problem in algebra. Rousseau possessed the soul of a poet.

To him right feeling was as important as right thinking, and in this respect he quarreled with the rationalists who claimed that common sense alone was worth while. Rousseau was a Deist--at most he believed but vaguely in a "Being, whatever He may be, Who moves the universe and orders all things." But he detested the cold reasoning of philosophers who conceived of God as too much interested in watching the countless stars obey His eternal laws, to stoop to help puny mortals with their petty affairs. "0 great philosophers!" cried Rousseau, "How much God is obliged to you for your easy methods and for sparing Him work." And again Rousseau warns us to "flee from those [Voltaire and his like] who, under the pretense of explaining nature, sow desolating doctrines in the hearts of men, and whose apparent skepticism is a hundred times more ... dogmatic" than the teachings of priests. Rousseau was not an orthodox Christian, nor a calmly rational Deist; he simply felt that "to love God above all things, and your neighbor as yourself, is the sum of the law."

This he reproached the philosophers with not doing. Rousseau had seen and felt the bitter suffering of the poor, and he had perceived the cynical indifference with which educated men often regarded it. Science and learning seemed to have made men only more selfish. Indeed, the ignorant peasant seemed to him humbler and more virtuous than the pompous pedant. In a passionate protest--his Discourse on Arts and Sciences (1749)--Rousseau denounced learning as the badge of selfishness and corruption, for it was used to gratify the pride and childish curiosity of the rich, rather than to right the wrongs of the poor.

In fact, it were better, he contended, that all men should be savages, than that a few of the most cunning, cruel, and greedy should make slaves of the rest. His love of nature, his contempt for the silly showiness and shallow hypocrisy of eighteenth-century society, made the idea a favorite one. He loved to dream of the times [Footnote: It must be confessed that here Rousseau was dreaming of times that probably never existed.] when men were all free and equal, when nobody claimed to own the land which God had made for all, when there were no wars to kill, no taxes to oppress, no philosophers to deceive the people.

In an essay inquiring What is the Origin of Inequality among Men (1753), Rousseau sought to show how vanity, greed, and selfishness had found lodgment in the hearts of these "simple savages," how the strongest had fenced off plots of land for themselves and forced the weak to acknowledge the right of private property. This, said Rousseau, was the real origin of inequality among men, of the tyranny of the strong over the weak; and this law of private property "for the profit of a few ambitious men, subjected thenceforth all the human race to labor, servitude, and misery."

The idea was applied to government in a treatise entitled the Social Contract (1761). The "social-contract" theory was not new, but Rousseau made it famous. He taught that government, law, and social conventions were the outcome of an agreement or contract by which at the misty dawn of history all members of the state had voluntarily bound themselves. All governments exercised their power in last analysis by virtue of this social contract, by will of the people. Laws, therefore, should be submitted to popular vote. The republic is the best form of government, because it is the most sensitive to the desires of the people. This idea of "popular sovereignty," or rule of the people, was in men's minds when they set up a republic in France fourteen years after the death of Rousseau.

Rousseau's cry, "Back to nature," had still another aspect. He said that children should be allowed to follow their natural inclinations, instead of being driven to study. They should learn practical, useful things, instead of Latin and Greek. "Let them learn what they must do when they are men, and not what they must forget."

It is hard to fix limits to the influence of Rousseau's writings. True, both the orthodox Catholics and the philosophical Deists condemned him. But his followers were many, both bourgeois and noble. "Back to nature" became the fad of the day, and court ladies pretended to live a "natural" life and to go fishing. His theory of the social contract, his contention that wealth should not be divided among a few, his idea that the people should rule themselves,--these were to be the inspiration of the republican stage of the French Revolution, and in time to permeate all Europe.

[Sidenote: Beccaria]

The spirit of reform was applied not only against the clergy, the nobles, the monarchy, and faulty systems of law and education, but likewise to the administration of justice. Hitherto the most barbarous "punishments" had been meted out. A pickpocket might be hung for stealing a couple of shillings [Footnote: In England.]; for a more serious offense the criminal might have his bones broken and then be laid on his back on a cart-wheel, to die in agony while crowds looked on and jeered. In a book entitled Crimes and Punishments (1764), an Italian marquis of the name of Beccaria (1738-1794) held that such punishments were not only brutal and barbarous, but did not serve to prevent crimes as effectually as milder sentences, promptly and surely administered. Beccaria's ideas are the basis of our modern laws, although the death penalty still lingers in a few cases.

[Sidenote: Political Economy: the Physiocrats]

In yet another sphere--that of economics--philosophers were examining the old order of things, and asking, as ever, "Is it reasonable?" As we have repeatedly observed, most governments had long followed the mercantilist plan more or less consistently. But in the eighteenth century, François Quesnay, a bourgeois physician at the court of Louis XV, announced to his friends that mercantilism was all wrong. He became the center of a little group of philosophers who called themselves "economists," and who taught that a nation's wealth comes from farming and mining; that manufacturers and traders produce nothing new, but merely exchange or transport commodities. The manufacturers and merchants should therefore be untaxed and unhampered. Laissez- faire--"Let them do as they will." Let the farmers pay the taxes. The foremost disciple of laisser-faire in France was Turgot (1727-1781). As minister of finance under Louis XVI he attempted to abolish duties and restrictions on commerce, but his efforts were only partially successful.

[Sidenote: Adam Smith]

Meanwhile, a Scotchman, who had visited France and had known Quesnay, was conveying the new ideas across the Channel. It was Adam Smith, the "father of political economy." Smith was quite in harmony with the philosophic spirit, with its "natural rights," "natural religion," and "natural laws." He was a professor of "moral philosophy" in the University of Glasgow, and as an incident of his philosophical speculations, he thought out a system of political economy, i.e., the "laws" by which a nation might increase its wealth, on the lines suggested by Quesnay. Adam Smith's famous book The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the year of American independence. It was a declaration of independence for industry. Let each man, each employer of labor, each seller of merchandise follow his own personal business interests without let or hindrance, for in so doing he is "led by an invisible hand" to promote the good of all. Let the government abolish all monopolies, [Footnote: He was somewhat inconsistent in approving joint-stock monopolies and shipping regulations.] all restrictions on trade, all customs duties, all burdens on industry. Thus only can the true wealth of a nation be promoted.

Smith's opinions were so plausible and his arguments so ingenious that his doctrines steadily gained in influence, and in the first half of the nineteenth century pretty generally triumphed. In actual practice the abolition of restrictions on industry was destined to give free rein to the avarice and cruelty of the most selfish employers, to enrich the bourgeoisie, and to leave the lower classes more miserable than ever. The "Wealth of Nations" was to be the wealth of the bourgeoisie. But meanwhile, it was to destroy mercantilism.

[Sidenote: Conclusion]

We have now completed our survey of the social, religious, and intellectual conditions in the Europe of the eighteenth century. Before our eyes have passed poverty-stricken peasants plowing their fields, prosperous merchants who demand power, frivolous nobles squandering their lives and fortunes, worldly bishops neglecting their duties, humble priests remaining faithful, sober Quakers refusing to fight, earnest astronomers who search the skies, sarcastic Deists who scoff at priests, and bourgeois philosophers who urge reform. The procession is not quite done. Last of all come the kings in their royal ermine and ministers in robes of state. To them we dedicate a new chapter. It will be the last occasion on which kings will merit such detailed attention.

ADDITIONAL READING

GENERAL SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE. Brief outlines: J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe, Vol. I (1907), ch. viii, ix; H. E. Bourne, The Revolutionary Period in Europe, 1763-1815 (1914), ch. i, iii; Clive Day, History of Commerce (1907). More detailed accounts: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VI; and Histoire générale, Vol. VII, ch. xiii-xvii. The most scholarly and exhaustive study of social conditions is that of Maxime Kovalevsky, Die oekonomische Entwicklung Europas bis zum Beginn der kapitalistischen Wirtschaftsform, trans. into German from Russian by Leo Motzkin, 7 vols. (1901-1914), especially Vols. VI, VII.

FRENCH SOCIETY ON THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION. Shailer Mathews, The French Revolution (reprint, 1912), ch. i-v, a clear summary; E. J. Lowell, The Eve of the French Revolution (1892), probably the best introduction in English; Alexis de Tocqueville, The State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789, Eng. trans. by Henry Reeve, 3d ed. (1888), a brilliant and justly famous work; H. A. Taine, The Ancient Régime, Eng. trans. by John Durand, new rev. ed. (1896), another very celebrated work, better on the literary and philosophical aspects of the Old Régime than on the economic; Albert Sorel, _L'Europe et la Révolution française, Vol. I (1885) of this monumental history is an able presentation of French social conditions in the eighteenth century; Arthur Young, Travels in France, 1787, 1788, and 1789, valuable observations of a contemporary English gentleman-farmer on conditions in France, published in several editions, notably in the Bohn Library. Detailed treatises in French: Histoire de France, Vol. IX, Part I (1910), Règne de Louis XVI, 1774-1789, by H. Carré, P. Sagnac, and E. Lavisse, especially livres III, IV; Emile Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l'industrie en France avant 1789, Vol. II (1901), livre VII; Maxime Kovalevsky, La France économique et sociale à la veille de la Révolution, 2 vols. (1909- 1911), an admirable study of common life both rural and urban; Georges d'Avenel, Histoire économique de la propriété, des salaires, etc., 1200-1800, 6 vols. (1894-1912), elaborate treatments of such topics as money, land, salaries, the wealthy and bourgeois classes, the growth of private expenses, etc.; Albert Babeau's careful monographs on many phases of the Old Régime, such as Les voyageurs en France (1885), La ville (1884), La vie rurale (1885), Les artisans et les domestiques (1886), Les bourgeois (1886), La vie militaire, 2 vols. (1890), Le village (1891), La province, 2 vols. (1894); Nicolas Karéiev, Les paysans et la question paysanne en France dans le dernier quart du XVIIIe siècle, Fr. trans. (1899); Edmé Champion, La France d'après les cahiers de 1789 (1897). Also see books listed under THE FRENCH MONARCHY, 1743-1789, p. 463, below.

ENGLISH SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Brief surveys: A. L. Cross, History of England and Greater Britain (1914), ch. xliv; G. T. Warner, Landmarks in English Industrial History, 11th ed. (1912), ch. xiv; H. de B. Gibbins, Industry in England, 6th ed. (1910), ch. xvii- xx; G. H. Perris, The Industrial History of Modern England (1914), ch. i. Fuller treatments: H. D. Traill and J. S. Mann (editors), Social England, illus. ed., 6 vols. in 12 (1909), ch. xvi-xviii; W. G. Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (1891); E. S. Roscoe, The English Scene in the Eighteenth Century (1912); Sir H. T. Wood, Industrial England in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century (1910); Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act, 1688- 1835, The Manor and the Borough, 2 parts (1908), and The Story of the King's Highway (1913); W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, London ed., 7 vols. (1907), particularly full on social and intellectual conditions. Special studies and monographs: A. Andréadès, History of the Bank of England, Eng. trans. by Christabel Meredith (1909), an authoritative review by a Greek scholar; Sir Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (1903), charmingly written but not always trustworthy; J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760-1832 (1911); J. E. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 7 vols. (1866-1902), a monumental work, of which Vol. VII deals with the eighteenth century; R. E. Prothero, English Farming Past and Present (1912); E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Inclosure (1912); A. H. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (1909); Wilhelm Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, new ed. trans. into English by Ruth Kenyon (1908); R. M. Gamier, History of the English Landed Interest, its Customs, Laws and Agriculture, 2 vols. (1892-1893), and, by the same author, Annals of the British Peasantry (1895). For interesting contemporary accounts of English agriculture in the eighteenth century, see the journals of Arthur Young, A Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties (1768), A Six Months' Tour through the North of England, 4 vols. (1791), and The Farmer's Tour through the East of England, 4 vols. (1791). Also see books listed under THE BRITISH MONARCHY, 1760-1800, pp. 461 f., below.

SPECIAL STUDIES OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN OTHER COUNTRIES. For Scotland: H. G. Graham, Social Life in Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (1900). For Hungary: Henry Marczali, Hungary in the Eighteenth Century (1910). For Russia: James Mavor, An Economic History of Russia, Vol. I (1914), Book II, ch. i-iv. For Spain: Georges Desdevises du Dezert, L'Espagne de l'ancien régime, 3 vols. (1897-1904). For the Germanies: Karl Biedermann, Deutschland im achtsehnten Jahrhundert, 2 vols. in 3 (1867-1880).

ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The general histories of Christianity, cited in the bibliography to Chapter IV, above, should be consulted. Additional information can be gathered from the following. On the Catholic Church: William Barry, The Papacy and Modern Times (1911), ch. v; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V (1908), ch. iv, on Gallicanism and Jansenism, by Viscount St. Cyres, a vigorous opponent of Ultramontanism; Histoire générale, Vol. VI, ch. vi, and Vol. VII, ch. xvii, both by Émile Chénon; Joseph de Maistre, Du pape, 24th ed. (1876), and De l'église gallicane, most celebrated treatments of Gallicanism from the standpoint of an Ultramontane and orthodox Roman Catholic; C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, 2d ed., 5 vols. (1860), the best literary account of Jansenism; R. B. C. Graham, A Vanished Arcadia: being some account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767 (1901); Paul de Crousaz-Crétet, L'église et l'état, ou les deux puissances au XVIIIe siècle, 1713-1789 (1893), on the relations of church and state; Léon Mention, Documents relatifs aux rapports du clergé avec la royauté de 1682 à 1789, 2 vols. (1893- 1903), containing many important documents. On Protestantism in England: H. O. Wakeman, An Introduction to the History of the Church of England, 5th ed. (1898), ch. xviii, xix; J. H. Overton and Frederic Relton, A History of the Church of England, 1714-1800 (1906), being Vol. VII of a comprehensive work ed. by W. R. W. Stephens and William Hunt; John Stoughton, Religion under Queen Anne and the Georges, 1702- 1800, 2 vols. (1878); H. W. Clark, History of English Nonconformity, 2 vols. (1911-1913), especially Vol. II, Book IV, ch. i, ii, on Methodism; W. C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912); F. J. Snell, Wesley and Methodism (1900); and T. E. Thorpe, Joseph Priestley (1906).

DEISM AND THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. V, ch. xxiii, and Vol. VIII, ch. i; Histoire générale, Vol. VI, ch. x, and Vol. VII, ch. xv, two excellent chapters on natural science, 1648-1788, by Paul Tannery; Sir Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science (1893); Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3d ed., 2 vols. (1902), an interesting account of the English Deists and of the new political and economic theorists, and, by the same author, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1909); Edmund Gosse, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, 1660-1780 (1911); J. M. Robertson, A Short History of Free Thought, 3d rev. ed., 2 vols. (1915), a sympathetic treatment of deism and rationalism; C. S. Devas, The Key to the World's Progress (1906), suggestive criticism of the thought of the eighteenth century from the standpoint of a well- informed Roman Catholic. On the most celebrated French philosophers of the time, see the entertaining and enthusiastic biographies by John (Viscount) Morley, Rousseau, 2 vols. (1873), Diderot and the Encyclopædists, 2 vols. (1891), Voltaire (1903), and the essays on Turgot, etc., scattered throughout his Critical Miscellanies, 4 vols. (1892-1908). There is a convenient little biography of Montesquieu by Albert Sorel, Eng. trans. by Gustave Masson (1887), and useful monographs by J. C. Collins, Bolingbroke, a Historical Study; and Voltaire in England (1886). Such epochal works as Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Voltaire's Letters on the English and Philosophical Dictionary, and Rousseau's Social Contract and Émile, are readily procurable in English. On the rise of political economy: Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats (1897); Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines from the Time of the Physiocrats, Eng. trans. (1915), Book I, ch. i, ii; L. L. Price, A Short History of Political Economy in England from Adam Smith to Arnold Toynbee, 7th ed. (1911); R. B. (Viscount) Haldane, Life of Adam Smith (1887) in the "Great Writers" Series; John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (1895), containing copious extracts from Smith's letters and papers; Georges Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France de 1756 à 1770, 2 vols. (1910), scholarly and elaborate. There is a two- volume edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1910) in "Everyman's Library," with an admirable introductory essay by E. R. A. Seligman.

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