IV. HOLLAND…

IV. HOLLAND

NOTE ON LITERATURE

The special interest of Dutch history for English and other readers led in past generations to a more general sociological study of it than was given to almost any other. L. Guicciardini's Description of the Low Countries (Descrizione ... di tutti Paesi Bassi, etc., Anversa, folio, 1567, 1581, etc.; trans. in French, 1568, etc.; in English, 1593; in Dutch, 1582; in Latin, 1613, etc.) is one of the fullest surveys of the kind made till recent times. Sir William Temple's Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1672) laid for English readers further foundations of an intelligent knowledge of the vital conditions of the State which had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the great commercial rival of England; and in the eighteenth century many English writers discussed the fortunes of Dutch commerce. An English translation was made of the remarkably sagacious work variously known as the Memoirs of John de Witt, the True Interest of Holland, and Political Maxims of the State of Holland (really written by De Witt's friend, Pierre Delacourt; De Witt, however, contributing two chapters), and much attention was given to it here and on the Continent. In addition to the many and copious histories written in the eighteenth century in Dutch, three or four voluminous and competent histories of the Low Countries were written in French--e.g., those of Dujardin (1757, etc., 8 vols. 4to), Cerisier (1777, etc., 10 vols. 12mo), Le Clerc (1723-28, 3 vols. folio), Wicquefort (1719, folio, proceeding from Peace of Muenster). Of late years, though the lesson is as important as ever, it appears to be less generally attended to. In our own country, however, have appeared Davies' History of Holland (1841, 3 vols.), a careful but not often an illuminating work, which oddly begins with the statement that "there is scarcely any nation whose history has been so little understood or so generally neglected as that of Holland"; T. Colley Grattan's earlier and shorter book (The Netherlands, 1830), which is still worth reading for a general view based on adequate learning; and the much better known works of Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856) and the History of the United Netherlands (1861-68), which deal minutely with only a period of fifty-five years of Dutch history, and of which, as of the work of Davies, the sociological value is much below the annalistic. All three are impaired as literature by their stale rhetoric. The same malady infects the second volume of the Industrial History of the Free Nations (1846), by W. Torrens M'Cullagh (afterwards M'Cullagh Torrens); but this, which deals with Holland, is the better section of that treatise, and it gives distinct help to a scientific conception of the process of Dutch history, as does J.R. M'Culloch's Essay on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Commerce in Holland, which is one of the best of his Essays and Treatises (2nd ed. 1859). The Holland of the late Professor Thorold Rogers has merit as a vivacious conspectus, but hardly rises to the opportunity.

Of the many French, Belgian, and German works on special periods of the history of the Low Countries, some have a special and general scientific interest. Among these is the research of M. Alphonse Wauters on Les libertes communales (Bruxelles, 1878). Barante's Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne (4th ed. 1838-40) contains much interesting matter on the Burgundian period. The assiduous research of M. Lefevre Pontalis, Jean de Witt, Grand Pensionnaire de Hollande (2 tom. 1884; Eng. trans. 2 vols.), throws a full light on one of the most critical periods of Dutch history.

Dutch works on the history of the Low Countries in general, and the United Provinces in particular, are many and voluminous; indeed, no history has been more amply written. The good general history of the Netherlands by N.G. van Kampen, which appeared in German in the series of Heeren and Uckert (1831-33), is only partially superseded by the Geschichte der Niederlande of Wenzelburger (Bd. i, 1879; ii, 1886), which is not completed. But the most readable general history of the Netherlands yet produced is that of P.J. Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk (1892, etc.), of which there is a competent but unfortunately abridged English translation (Putnams, vol. i, 1898). Standard modern Dutch works are those of J.A. Vijnne, Geschiedenis van het Vaderland, and J. van Lennep, De Geschiedenis van Nederland. For Belgian history in particular the authorities are similarly numerous. The Manuel de l'histoire de Belgique, by J. David (Louvain, 1847), will be found a good handbook of authorities, episodes, and chronology, though without any sociological element. The Histoire de Belgique of Th. Juste (Bruxelles, 1895, 3 tom. 4to) is comprehensive, but disfigured by insupportable illustrations.

Sec. 1. The Rise of the Netherlands

The case of Holland is one of those which at first sight seem to flout the sociological maxim that civilisations flourish in virtue partly of natural advantages and partly of psychological pressures. On the face of things, it would seem that the original negation of natural advantage could hardly be carried farther than here. A land pieced together out of drained marshes certainly tells more of man's effort than of Nature's bounty. Yet even here the process of natural law is perfectly sequent and intelligible.

One of the least-noted influences of the sea on civilisation is the economic basis it yields in the way of food-supply. Already in Caesar's time the Batavians were partly fishermen; and it may be taken as certain that through all the troubled ages down to the period of industry and commerce it was the resource of fishing that mainly maintained and retained population in the sea-board swamps of the Low Countries. Here was a harvest that enemies could not destroy, that demanded no ploughing and sowing, and that could not well be reaped by the labour of slaves. When war and devastation could absolutely depopulate the cultivated land, forcing all men to flee from famine, the sea for ever yielded some return to him who could but get afloat with net or line; and he who could sail the sea had a double chance of life and freedom as against land enemies. Thus a sea marsh could be humanly advantaged as against a fruitful plain, and could be a surer dwelling-place. The tables were first effectually turned when the Norse pirates attacked from the sea--an irresistible inroad which seems to have driven the sea-board Frisians (as it did the coast inhabitants of France) in crowds into slavery for protection, thus laying a broad foundation of popular serfdom.[725] When, however, the Norse empire began to fail, the sea as a source of sustenance again counted for civilisation; and when to this natural basis of population and subsistence there was added the peculiar stimulus set up by a religious inculcation or encouragement of a fish diet, the fishing-grounds of the continent became relatively richer estates than mines and vineyards. Venice and Holland alike owed much to the superstition which made Christians akreophagous on Fridays and fast-days and all through the forty days of Lent. When the plan of salting herrings was hit upon,[726] all Christian Europe helped to make the fortunes of the fisheries.

Net-making may have led to weaving; in any case weaving is the first important industry developed in the Low Countries. It depended mainly on the wool of England; and on the basis of the ancient seafaring there thus arose a sea-going commerce.[727] Further, the position of Flanders,[728] as a trade-centre for northern and southern Europe, served to make it a market for all manner of produce; and round such a market population and manufactures grew together. It belonged to the conditions that, though the territory came under feudal rule like every other in the medieval military period, the cities were relatively energetic all along,[729] theirs being (after the Dark Ages, when the work was largely done by the Church) the task of maintaining the sea-dykes[730] and water-ways, and theirs the wealth on which alone the feudal over-lords could hope to flourish in an unfruitful land. The over-lords, on their part, saw the expediency of encouraging foreigners to settle and add to their taxable population,[731] thus establishing the tradition of political tolerance long before the Protestant period. Hence arose in the Netherlands, after the Renaissance, the phenomenon of a dense industrial population flourishing on a soil which finally could not be made to feed them,[732] and carrying on a vast shipping trade without owning a single good harbour and without possessing home-grown timber wherewith to build their ships, or home-products to freight them.[733]

One of the determinants of this growth on a partially democratic footing was clearly the primary and peculiar necessity for combination by the inhabitants to maintain the great sea-dykes, the canals, and the embankments of the low-lying river-lands in the interior.[734] It was a public bond in peace, over and above the normal tie of common enmities. The result was a development of civic life still more rapid and more marked in inland Flanders,[735] where the territorial feudal power was naturally greater than in the maritime Dutch provinces. Self-ruling cities, such as Ghent and Antwerp, at their meridian, were too powerful to be effectively menaced by their immediate feudal lords. But on the side of their relations with neighbouring cities or States they all exhibited the normal foible; and it was owing only to the murderous compulsion put upon them by Spain in the sixteenth century that any of the provinces of the Netherlands became a federal republic. For five centuries after Charlemagne, who subdued them to his system, the Low Countries had undergone the ordinary slow evolution from pure feudalism to the polity of municipalities. In the richer inland districts the feudal system, lay and clerical, was at its height, the baronial castles being "here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom";[736] and when the growing cities began to feel their power to buy charters, the feudal formula was unchallenged,[737] while the mass of the outside population were in the usual "Teutonic" state of partial or complete serfdom. It was only by burning their suburbs and taking to the walled fortress that the people of Utrecht escaped the yoke of the Norsemen.[738]

Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh is responsible for the statement that "it seems doubtful whether any portion of the inhabitants of Holland were ever in a state of actual servitude or bondage," and that the northern provinces were more generally free from slavery than the others (Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, ii, 39). Motley (Rise of the Dutch Republic, as cited, pp. 17, 18) pronounces, on the contrary, that "in the northern Netherlands the degraded condition of the mass continued longest," and that "the number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht enormous." This is substantially borne out by Grattan, Netherlands, pp. 18, 34; Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, i, 159, 160, 305-11, Eng. tr. i, 203-8; Wauters, Les libertes communales, 1878, pp. 222-30. As is noted by Blok, the status of the peasantry fluctuated, the thirteenth century being one of partial retrogression. Cp. pp. 318, 319, as to the general depression of the peasant class. The great impulse to slavery, as above noted, seems to have been given by the Norse pirates in general and the later Norman invaders, who, under Godfrey, forced every "free" Frisian to wear a halter. The comparative protection accruing to slaves of the Church was embraced by multitudes. In the time of the Crusades, again, many serfs were sold or mortgaged to the Church by the nobles in order to obtain funds for their expedition.

The cities were thus the liberating and civilising forces;[739] and the application of townsmen's capital to the land was an early influence in improving rural conditions.[740] But there was no escape from the fatality of strife in the Teutonic any more than in the ancient Greek or in the contemporary Italian world. Flanders, having the large markets of France at hand, developed its clothmaking and other industries more rapidly than the Frisian districts, where weaving was probably earlier carried on;[741] and here serfdom disappeared comparatively early,[742] the nobility dwindling through their wars; but the new industrial strifes of classes, which grew up everywhere in the familiar fashion, naturally matured the sooner in the more advanced civilisation; and already at the beginning of the fourteenth century we find a resulting disintegration. The monopoly methods of the trade gilds drove much of the weaving industry into the villages; then the Franco-Flemish wars, wherein the townspeople, by expelling the French in despite of the nobility, greatly strengthened their position,[743] nevertheless tended, as did the subsequent civil wars, to drive trade into South Brabant.

In Flemish Ghent and Bruges the clashing interests of weavers and woollen-traders, complicated by the strife of the French (aristocratic) and anti-French (popular) factions, led to riots in which citizens and magistrates were killed (1301). At times these enmities reached the magnitude of civil war. At Ypres (1303) a combination of workmen demanded the suppression of rival industries in neighbouring villages, and in an ensuing riot the mayor and all the magistrates were slain; at Bruges (1302) a trade riot led to the loss of fifteen hundred lives.[744] When later the weaving trade had flourished in Brabant, the same fatality came about: plebeians rebelled against patrician magistrates--themselves traders or employers of labour--in the principal cities; and Brussels (1312) was for a time given up to pillage and massacre, put down only by the troops of the reigning duke. A great legislative effort was made in the "Laws of Cortenberg," framed by an assembly of nobles and city deputies, to regulate fiscal and industrial affairs in a stable fashion;[745] but after fifty years the trouble broke out afresh, and was ill-healed.[746] At length, in a riot in the rich city of Louvain (1379), sixteen of its patrician magistrates were slain, whereupon many took flight to England, but many more to Haarlem, Amsterdam, Leyden, and other Dutch cities.[747] Louvain never again recovered its trade and wealth;[748] and since the renewed Franco-Flemish wars of this period had nearly destroyed the commerce of Flanders,[749] there was a general gravitation of both merchandise and manufacture to Holland.[750] Thus arose Dutch manufactures in an organic connection with maritime commerce, the Dutch municipal organisation securing a balance of trade interests where that of the Flemish industrial cities had partially failed.

The commercial lead given by the Hanseatic League was followed in the Netherlands with a peculiar energy, and till the Spanish period the main part of Dutch maritime commerce was with northern Europe and the Hansa cities. So far as the language test goes, the original Hansards and the Dutch were of the same "Low Dutch" stock, which was also that of the Anglo-Saxons.[751] Thus there was seen the phenomenon of a vigorous maritime and commercial development among the continental branches of the race; while the English, having lost its early seafaring habits on its new settlement, lagged far behind in both developments. Kinship, of course, counted for nothing towards goodwill between the nations when it could not keep peace within or between the towns; and in the fifteenth century the Dutch cities are found at war with the Hansa, as they had been in the thirteenth with England, and were to be again. But the spirit of strife did its worst work at home. On the one hand, a physical schism had been set up in Friesland in the thirteenth century by the immense disaster of the inundation which enlarged the Zuyder Zee.[752] Of that tremendous catastrophe there are singularly few historic traces; but it had the effect of making two small countries where there had been one large one, what was left of West Friesland being absorbed in the specific province of Holland, while East Friesland, across the Zuyder Zee, remained a separate confederation of maritime districts.[753] To the south-west, again, the great Flemish cities were incurably jealous of each other's prosperity, as well as inwardly distracted by their class disputes; and within the cities of Holland, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while intelligible lines of cleavage between trades or classes are hard to find, the factions of Hoek and Kabbeljauw, the "Hooks" and the "Codfish," appear to have carried on a chronic strife, as irrational as any to be noted in the cities of Italy. Thus in the north as in the south, among Teutons as among "Latins" and among ancient Greeks, the primary instincts of separation checked democratic growth and coalition; though after the period of local feudal sovereignties the powerful monarchic and feudal forces in the Netherlands withheld the cities from internecine wars.

The most sympathetic historians are forced from the first to note the stress of mutual jealousy among the cities and districts of the Netherlands. "The engrained habit of municipal isolation," says one, "was the cause why the general liberties of the Netherlands were imperilled, why the larger part of the country was ultimately ruined, and why the war of independence was conducted with so much risk and difficulty, even in the face of the most serious perils" (Thorold Rogers, Holland, p. 26. Cp. pp. 35, 43; Motley, pp. 29, 30, 43; Grattan, pp. 39, 50, 51). Van Kampen avows (Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 131) that throughout the Middle Ages Friesland was unprogressive owing to constant feuds. Even as late as 1670 Leyden refused to let the Harle Maer be drained, because it would advantage other cities; and Amsterdam in turn opposed the reopening of the old Rhine channel because it would make Leyden maritime (Temple, Observations, i, 130, ch. iii).

As regards the early factions of the "Hooks" and the "Codfish" in the Dutch towns, the historic obscurity is so great that historians are found ascribing the names in contrary ways. Grattan (p. 49) represents the Hooks as the town party, and the Codfish as the party of the nobles; Motley (p. 21) reverses the explanation, noting, however, that there was no consistent cleavage of class or of principle (cp. M'Cullagh, pp. 99, 100). This account is supported by Van Kampen, i, 170, 171. The fullest survey of the Hook and Cod feud is given by Wenzelburger, Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 210-42. As to feuds of other parties in some of the cities see Van Kampen, i, 172. They included, for example, a class feud between the rich Vetkooper (fat-dealers) and the poor Schieringer (eel-fishers). See Davies, i, 180.

Thus dissident, and with feudal wars breaking out in every generation, the cities and provinces could win concessions from their feudal chiefs when the latter were in straits, as in the famous case of the "Great Privilege" extorted from the Duchess Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, after her father's overthrow by the Swiss; again in the case of her husband Maximilian after her death; and previously in the reaffirmation of the ill-observed Laws of Cortenberg, secured from the Duke of Brabant by the Louvainers in 1372; but they could never deliver themselves from the feudal superstition, never evolve the republican ideal. When the rich citizens exploited the poor, it was the local sovereign's cue, as of old, to win the populace; whereupon the patricians leant to the over-lord, were he even the King of France; or it might be that the local lord himself sought the intervention of his suzerain, who again was at times the first to meddle, and against whom, as against rival potentates, the cities would at times fight desperately for their recognised head, when he was not overtaxing or thwarting them, or endangering their commerce.[754] It was a medley of clashing interests, always in unstable equilibrium. And so when sovereign powers on a great scale, as the Dukes of Burgundy, followed by the Archduke Maximilian, and later by the Emperor Charles, came into the inheritance of feudal prestige, the Dutch and Flemish cities became by degrees nearly as subordinate as those of France and Germany, losing one by one their municipal privileges.[755] The monarchic superstition overbore the passions of independence and primary interest; and a strong feudal ruler could count on a more general and durable loyalty than was ever given to any citizen-statesman. James van Arteveldt, who guided Ghent in the fourteenth century, and whose policy was one of alliance with the English king against the French, the feudal over-lord, was "the greatest personality Flanders ever produced."[756] But though Arteveldt's policy was maintained even by his murderers, murdered he was by his fellow-citizens, as the great De Witt was to be murdered in Holland three hundred years later. The monarchised Netherlanders were republicans only in the last resort, as against insupportable tyranny. Philip of Burgundy, who heavily oppressed them, they called "The Good." At the end of the fifteenth century Maximilian was able, even before he became Emperor, not only to crush the "bread-and-cheese" rebellion of the exasperated peasantry in Friesland and Guelderland,[757] but to put down all the oligarchs who had rebelled against him, and finally to behead them by the dozen,[758] leaving the land to his son as a virtually subject State.

In the sixteenth century, under Charles V, the men of Ghent, grown once again a great commercial community,[759] exhibited again the fatal instability of the undeveloped democracy of all ages. Called upon to pay their third of a huge subsidy of 1,200,000 caroli voted by the Flemish States to the Emperor, they rang their bell of revolt and defied him, offering their allegiance to the King of France. That monarch, by way of a bargain, promptly betrayed the intrigue to his "brother," who thereupon marched in force through France to the rebel city, now paralysed by terror; and without meeting a shadow of resistance, penalised it to the uttermost, beheading a score of leading citizens, banishing many more, annulling its remaining municipal rights, and exacting an increased tribute.[760] It needed an extremity of grievance to drive such communities to an enduring rebellion. When Charles V abdicated at Brussels in favour of his son Philip in 1555, he had already caused to be put to death Netherlanders to the number at least of thousands for religious heresy;[761] and still the provinces were absolutely submissive, and the people capable of weeping collectively out of sympathy with the despot's infirmities.[762] He, on his part, born and educated among them, and knowing them well, was wont to say of them that there was not a nation under the sun which more detested the name of slavery, or that bore the reality more patiently when managed with discretion.[763] He spoke whereof he knew.

Sec. 2. The Revolt against Spain

That the people who endured so much at the hands of a despot should have revolted unsubduably against his son is to be explained in terms of certain circumstances little stressed in popular historiography. In the narratives of the rhetorical historians, no real explanation arises. The revolt figures as a stand for personal and religious freedom. But when Charles abdicated, after slaying his thousands, the Reformation had been in full tide for over thirty years; Calvin had built up Protestant Geneva to the point of burning Servetus; England had been for twenty years depapalised; France, with many scholars and nobles converted to Calvinism, was on the verge of a civil war of Huguenots and Catholics; the Netherlands themselves had been drenched in the blood of heretics; and still no leading man had thought of repudiating either Spain or Rome. Yet within thirteen years they were in full revolt, led by William of Orange, now turned Protestant. Seeing that mere popular Protestantism had spread far and gone fast, religious opinion was clearly not the determining force.

In reality, the conditio sine qua non was the psychological reversal effected by Philip when he elected to rule as a Spaniard, where his father had in effect ruled as a Fleming. Charles had always figured as a native of the Netherlands, at home among his people, friendly to their great men, ready to employ them in his affairs, even to the extent of partly ruling Spain through them. After his punishment of Ghent they were his boon subjects; and in his youth it was the Spaniards who were jealous of the Flemish and Dutch. This state of things had begun under his Flemish-German father, Philip I, who became King of Spain by marriage, and under whom the Netherland nobles showed in Spain a rapacity that infuriated the Spaniards against them. It was a question simply of racial predominance; and had the dynasty chosen to fix its capital in the north rather than in the south, it would have been the lot of the Netherlanders to exploit Spain--a task for which they were perfectly ready.

The gross rapacity of the Flemings in Spain under Philip I is admitted by Motley (Rise, as cited, pp. 31, 75); but on the same score feeling was passionately strong in Spain in the earlier years of the reign of Charles. Cp. Robertson, Charles V, bk. i (Works, ed. 1821, iv, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 77 78); and van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 277, 278. It took more than ten years to bring Charles in good relations with the Spaniards. See Mr. E. Armstrong's Introduction to Major Martin Hume's Spain, 1898, pp. 31-37, 57, 76. Even in his latter years they are found protesting against his customary absence from Spain, and his perpetual wars. Robertson, bk. vi, p. 494. Cp. bk. xii, vol. v, p. 417, as to the disregard shown him after his abdication.

While it lasted, the Flemish exploitation of Spain was as shameless as the Spanish exploitation of Italy. The Italian Peter Martyr Angleria, residing at the court of Spain, reckoned that in ten months the Flemings there remitted home over a million ducats (Robertson, bk. i, p. 53). A lad, nephew of Charles's Flemish minister Chievres, was appointed to the archbishopric of Toledo, in defiance of general indignation. The result was a clerico-popular insurrection. Everything goes to show that but for the Emperor's prudence his Flemings would have ruined him in Spain, by getting him to tyrannise for their gain, as Philip II later did for the Church's sake in the Netherlands.

It is not unwarrantable to say that had not Charles had the sagacity to adapt himself to the Spanish situation, learning to speak the language and even to tolerate the pride of the nobles[764] to a degree to which he never yielded before the claims of the burghers of the Netherlands, and had he not in the end identified himself chiefly with his Spanish interests, the history of Spain and the Netherlands might have been entirely reversed. Had he, that is, kept his seat of rule in the Netherlands, drawing thither the unearned revenues of the Americas, and still contrived to keep Spain subject to his rule, the latter country would have been thrown back on her great natural resources, her industry, and her commerce, which, as it was, developed markedly during his reign,[765] despite the heavy burdens of his wars. And in that case Spain might conceivably have become the Protestant and rebellious territory, and the Netherlands on the contrary have remained Catholic and grown commercially decrepit, having in reality the weaker potential economic basis.

The theorem that the two races were vitally opposed in "religious sentiment," and that "it was as certain that the Netherlanders would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards would be uncompromising persecutors" (Motley, p. 31), is part of the common pre-scientific conception of national development, and proceeds upon flat disregard of the historical evidence. It is well established that there was as much heresy of the more rational Protestant and Unitarian sort in Spain, to begin with, as in Holland. Under Ferdinand and Isabella the Inquisition seems to have struck mainly at Judaic and Moorish monotheistic heresy, which was not uncommon among the upper classes, while the lower were for the most part orthodox (Armstrong, Introd. to Major Hume's Spain, pp. 14, 18). Thus there is good ground for the surmise that Ferdinand's object was primarily the confiscation of the wealth of Jews and other rich heretics. (See U.R. Burke, History of Spain, 1895, ii, 101; Hume's ed. 1900, ii, 74.) In Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia there was general resistance to the Inquisition; in Cordova there was a riot against it; in Saragossa the Inquisitor was murdered before the altar (Armstrong, p. 18; Llorente, Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, ed. 1818, i, 185-213; M'Crie, Reformation in Spain, ed. 1856, pp. 52-53. Cp. U.R. Burke, as cited, ii, 97, 98, 101, 103, 111; Hume's ed. ii, 66, 70-71, 74-77, 82; as to the general and prolonged resistance of the people). During that reign Torquemada is credited with burning ten thousand persons in eighteen years (Prescott, History of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 178, citing Llorente. But see p. 746, note, as to possible exaggeration. Cp. Burke, ii, 113; Hume's ed. ii, 84). In the early Lutheran period the spread of scholarly Protestantism in Spain was extremely rapid (La Rigaudiere, Histoire des persecutions religieuses en Espagne, 1860, p. 245 sq.), and in the early years of Philip II it needed furious persecution to crush it, thousands leaving the kingdom (Prescott, Philip II, bk. ii, ch. iii; M'Crie, Reformation in Spain, ch. viii; De Castro, History of the Spanish Protestants, Eng. tr. 1851, passim). At the outset, 800 persons were arrested in Seville alone in one day; and the Venetian ambassador in 1562 testifies to the large number of Huguenots in Spain (Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, bk. v, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 136).

Had Philip II had Flemish sympathies and chosen to make Brussels his capital, the stress of the Inquisition could have fallen on the Netherlands as successfully as it actually did on Spain. His father's reign had proved as much. According to Motley, not only multitudes of Anabaptists but "thousands and tens of thousands of virtuous and well-disposed men and women" had then been "butchered in cold blood" (Rise, p. 43), without any sign of rebellion on the part of the provinces, whose leading men remained Catholic. In 1600 most of the inhabitants of Groningen were Catholics (Davies, ii, 347). A Protestant historian (Grattan, p. 93) admits that the Protestants "never, and least of all in these days, formed the mass." Another has admitted, as regards those of Germany, that "nothing had contributed more to the undisturbed progress of their opinions than the interregnum after Maximilian's death, the long absence of Charles, and the slackness of the reins of government which these occasioned" (Robertson, Charles V, bk. v, ed. cited of Works, vol. iv, p. 387). "It was only tanners, dyers, and apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 124). The same conditions would have had similar results in Spain, where many Catholics thought Philip much too religious for his age and station (Motley, p. 76).

It seems necessary to insist on the elementary fact that it was Netherlanders who put Protestants to death in the Netherlands; and that it was Spaniards who were burnt in Spain. In the Middle Ages "nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless than in the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 36; cp. p. 132). Grenvelle, most zealous of heresy-hunters, was a Burgundian; Viglius, an even bitterer persecutor, was a Frisian. The statement of Prescott (Philip II, Kirk's ed. 1894, p. 149) that the Netherlanders "claimed freedom of thought as their birthright" is a gratuitous absurdity. As regards, further, the old hallucination of "race types," it has to be noted that Charles, a devout Catholic and persecutor, was emphatically Teutonic, according to the established canons. His stock was Burgundo-Austrian on the father's side; his Spanish mother was of Teutonic descent; he had the fair hair, blue eyes, and hanging jaw and lip of the Teutonic Hapsburgs (see Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, cap. 341), and so had his descendants after him. On the other hand, William the Silent was markedly "Spanish" in his physiognomy (Motley, p. 56), and his reticence would in all ages pass for a Spanish rather than a "Teutonic" characteristic. Motley is reduced to such shifts of rhetoric concerning Philip II as the proposition (p. 75) that "the Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have evaporated." But his descendant, Philip IV, as seen in the great portraits of Velasquez, is, like him, a "typical" Teuton; and the stock preserved the Teutonic physiological tendency to gluttony, a most "un-Spanish" characteristic.

It is true that, as Buckle argues, the many earthquakes in Spain tended to promote superstitious fear; but then on his principles the Dutch seafaring habits, and the constant risks and frequent disasters of inundation, had the same primary tendency. For the rest, the one serious oversight in Buckle's theory of Spanish civilisation is his assumption (cp. 3-vol. ed. ii, 455-61; 1-vol. ed. p. 550) that Spanish "loyalty" was abnormal and continuous from the period of the first struggles with the Moors. As to this see the present writer's notes in the 1-vol. ed. of Buckle, as cited. Even Ferdinand, as an Aragonese, was disrespectfully treated by the Castilians (cp. Armstrong as cited, pp. 5, 31, etc.; De Castro, History of Religious Intolerance in Spain, Eng. tr. 1853, pp. 40, 41); and Philip I and Charles V set up a new resistance. An alien dynasty could set up disaffection in Spain as elsewhere.

It should be noted, finally, that the stiff ceremonialism which is held to be the special characteristic of Spanish royalty was a Burgundo-Teutonic innovation, dating from Philip I, and that even in the early days of Philip the Cortes petitioned "that the household of the Prince Don Carlos should be arranged on the old Spanish lines, and not in the pompous new-fangled way of the House of Burgundy" (Major Hume's Spain, p. 127). Prescott (Philip II, ed. cited, pp. 655, 659) makes the petition refer to the king's own household, and shows it to have condemned the king's excessive expenditure in very strong terms, saying the expense of his household was "as great as would be required for the conquest of a kingdom." At the same time the Cortes petitioned against bull-fights, which appear to have originated with the Moors, were strongly opposed by Isabella the Catholic, and were much encouraged by the Teutonic Charles V (U.R. Burke, History of Spain, 1895, ii, 2-4; Hume's ed. i, 328 sq.). In fine, the conventional Spain is a manufactured system, developed under a Teutonic dynasty. "To a German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her national system and ancient freedom" (Stubbs, Const. Hist. 4th ed. i, 5).

No doubt the Dutch disaffection to Philip, which began to reveal itself immediately after his accession, may be conceived as having economic grounds. Indeed, his creation of fresh bishoprics, and his manipulation of the abbey revenues, created instant and general resentment among churchmen and nobles,[766] as compared with his mere continuation of religious persecution; and despite his pledges to the contrary, certain posts in the Low Countries were conferred on Spaniards.[767] But had he shown his father's adaptability, all this could have been adjusted. Had he either lived at Brussels or made the Flemings feel that he held them an integral part of his empire, he would have had the zealous support of the upper classes in suppressing the popular heresy, which repelled them. Heresy in the Netherlands, indeed, seems thus far to have been on the whole rather licentious and anarchic than austere or "spiritual." The pre-Protestant movements of the Beguines, Beghards, and Lollards, beginning well, had turned out worse than the orders of friars in the south; and the decorous "Brethren of the Common Lot" were in the main "good churchmen," only a minority accepting Protestantism.[768] In face of the established formulas concerning the innate spirituality of the Teuton, and of the play of his "conscience" in his course at the Reformation, there stand the historic facts that in the Teutonic world alone was the Reformation accompanied by widespread antinomianism, debauchery, and destructive violence. In France, Spain, and Italy there were no such movements as the Anabaptist, which so far as it could go was almost a dissolution of sane society.[769] From Holland that movement drew much of its strength and leadership, even as, in a previous age, the antinomian movement of Tanquelin had there had its main success.[770] Such was the standing of Dutch Protestantism in 1555; and no edict against heresy could be more searching and merciless than that drawn up by Charles in 1550[771] without losing any upper-class loyalty. Philip did but strive to carry it out.[772]

Had Philip, further, maintained a prospect of chronic war for the nobility of the Netherlands, the accruing chances of wealth[773] would in all likelihood have sufficed to keep them loyal. In the early wars of his reign with France immense gains had been made by them in the way of ransoms and booty. When these ceased, luxury continuing, embarrassment became general.[774] But when Philip's energies were seen to be mainly bent on killing out heresy, the discontented nobles began to lean to the side of the persecuted commonalty. At the first formation of the Confederacy of the "Beggars" in 1566, almost the only zealous Protestant among the leaders was William's impetuous brother Louis of Nassau, a Calvinist by training, who had for comrade the bibulous Brederode. The name of "Gueux," given to the malcontents in contempt by the councillor Berlaimont, had direct application to the known poverty or embarrassment of the great majority.[775] There was thus undisguisedly at work in the Netherlands the great economic force which had brought about "the Reformation" in all the Teutonic countries; and the needy nobles insensibly grew Protestant as it became more and more clear that only the lands of the Church could restore their fortunes.[776] This holds despite the fact that the more intelligent Protestantism which latterly spread among the people was the comparatively democratic form set up by Calvin, which reached the Low Countries through France, finding the readier reception among the serious because of the prestige accruing to its austerity as against the moral disrepute which now covered the German forms.

[As to the proportional success of Lutheranism and Calvinism, see Motley, pp. 132, 133; and Grattan, pp. 110, 111. (On p. 110 of Grattan there is a transposition of "second" and "third" groups, which the context corrects.) Motley, an inveterate Celtophobe, is at pains to make out that the Walloons rebelled first and were first reconciled to Rome, "exactly like their Celtic ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier." He omits to comment on the fact that it was only the French form of Protestantism, that of Calvin, that became viable in the Netherlands at all, or on the fact that indecent Anabaptism flourished mainly in Friesland; though he admits that the Lutheran movement left all religious rights in the hands of the princes, the people having to follow the creed of their rulers. The "racial" explanation is mere obscurantism, here as always. The Walloons of South Flanders were first affected simply because they were first in touch with Huguenotism. That they were never converted in large numbers to Protestantism is later admitted by Motley himself (p. 797), who thereupon speaks of the "intense attachment to the Roman ceremonial which distinguished the Walloon population." Thus his earlier statement that they had rebelled against "papal Rome" is admittedly false. They had rebelled simply against the Spanish tyranny. Yet the false statement is left standing--one more illustration of the havoc that may be worked in a historian's intelligence by a prejudice. (For other instances see, in the author's volume The Saxon and the Celt, the chapters dealing with Mommsen and Burton.)

It was the Teutonic-speaking city populations of North Flanders and Brabant who became Protestants in mass after the troubles had begun (Motley, p. 798). When the Walloon provinces withdrew from the combination against Spain, the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges, and Ypres joined the Dutch Union of Utrecht. They were one and all reduced by the skill and power of Alexander of Parma, who thereupon abolished the freedom of Protestant worship. The Protestants fled in thousands to England and the Dutch provinces, the remaining population, albeit mostly Teutonic, becoming Catholic. At this moment one-and-a-half of the four-and-a-half millions of Dutch are Catholics; while in Belgium, where there are hardly any Protestants, the Flemish-speaking and French-speaking populations are nearly equal in numbers.

Van Kampen, who anticipated Motley in disparaging the Walloons as being Frenchly fickle (Geschichte, i, 366), proceeds to contend that even the Flemings are more excitable than the Dutch and other Teutons; but he notes later that as the Dutch poet Cats was much read and imitated in Belgium, he was thus proved to have expressed the spirit of the whole Netherlands (ii, 109). Once more, then, the racial theory collapses.]

Thus the systematic savagery of the Inquisition under Philip, for which the people at first blamed not at all the king but his Flemish minister, Cardinal Granvelle, served rather to make a basis and pretext for organised revolt than directly to kindle it. In so far as the people spontaneously resorted to violence, in the image-breaking riots, they compromised and imperilled the nationalist movement in the act of precipitating it. The king's personal equation, finally, served to make an enemy of the masterly William of Orange, who, financially embarrassed like the lesser nobility,[777] could have been retained as an administrator by a wise monarch. A matter so overlaid with historical declamation is hard to set in a clear light; but it may serve to say of William that he was made a "patriot," as was Robert the Bruce, by stress of circumstances;[778] and that in the one case as in the other it was exceptional character and capacity that made patriotism a success;[779] William in particular having to maintain himself against continual domestic enmity, patrician as well as popular. Nothing short of the ferocity and rapacity of the Spanish attack, indeed, could have long united the Netherlands. The first confederacy dissolved at the approach of Alva, who, strong in soldiership but incapable of a statesmanlike settlement, drove the Dutch provinces to extremities by his cruelty, caused a hundred thousand artisans and traders to fly with their industry and capital, exasperated even the Catholic ministers in Flanders by his proposed taxes, and finally by imposing them enraged into fresh revolt the people he had crushed and terrorised, till they were eager to offer the sovereignty to the queen of England. When Requesens came with pacificatory intentions, it was too late; and the Pacification of Ghent (1576) was but a breathing-space between grapples.

What finally determined the separation and independence of the Dutch Provinces was their maritime strength. Antwerp, trading largely on foreign bottoms, represented wealth without the then indispensable weapons. Dutch success begins significantly with the taking of Brill (1572) by the gang of William van der Marck, mostly pirates and ruffians, whose methods William of Orange could not endure.[780] But they had shown the military basis for the maritime States. It was the Dutch fleet that prevented Parma's from joining "the" Armada under Medina-Sidonia,[781] thereby perhaps saving England. Such military genius and energy as Parma's might have made things go hard with the Dutch States had he lived, or had he not been called off against his judgment to fight in France; but his death well balanced the assassination of William of Orange, who had thus far been the great sustainer and welder of the movement of independence. Plotted against and vilified by the demagogues of Ghent, betrayed by worthless fellow nobles, Teutonic and French alike; chronically insulted in his own person and humiliated in that of his brother John, whom the States treated with unexampled meanness; stupidly resisted in his own leadership by the same States, whose egoism left Maestricht to its fate when he bade them help, and who cast on him the blame when it fell; thwarted and crippled by the fanaticism and intolerant violence of the Protestant mobs of the towns; bereaved again and again in the vicissitude of the struggle, William turned to irrelevance all imputations of self-seeking; and in his unfailing sagacity and fortitude he finally matches any aristocrat statesman in history. Doubtless he would have served Philip well had Philip chosen him and trusted him. But as it lay in one thoroughly able man, well placed for prestige in a crisis, to knit and establish a new nation, so it lay in one fanatical dullard[782] to wreck half of his own empire, with the greatest captains of his age serving him; and to bring his fabled treasury to ruin while his despised rebels grew rich.

As to the vice of the Dutch constitution, the principle of the supremacy of "State rights," see M'Cullagh, p. 215; Motley, Rise, pp. 794, 795 (Pt. vi, ch. ii, end), and United Netherlands, ed. 1867, iv, 564. Wicquefort (L'histoire des Provinces-Unies, La Haye, 1719, pp. 5, 16), following Grotius, laid stress long ago on the fact that the Estates of each province recognised no superior, not even the entire body of the Republic. It was only the measure of central government set up in the Burgundo-Austrian and Spanish periods that made the Seven Provinces capable of enough united action to repel Spanish rule during a chronic struggle of eighty years. Cp. Van Kampen (i, 304), who points out (p. 306) that the word "State" first appears in Holland in the fifteenth century. It arose in Flanders in the thirteenth, and in Brabant in the fourteenth. Only in 1581, after some years of war, did the United Provinces set up a General Executive Council. In the same year the Prince of Orange was chosen sovereign (Motley, pp. 838, 841).

Sec. 3. The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce

The conquest of Flanders by Alexander of Parma, reducing its plains to wolf-haunted wildernesses, and driving the great mass of the remaining artisans from its ruined towns,[783] helped to consummate the prosperity of the United Provinces, who took over the industry of Ghent with the commerce of Antwerp.[784] Getting the start of all northern Europe in trade, they had become at the date of their assured independence the chief trading State in the world. Whatever commercial common sense the world had yet acquired was there in force. And inasmuch as the wealth and strength of these almost landless States, with their mostly poor soil and unavoidably heavy imposts, depended so visibly on quantity of trade turnover, they not only continued to offer a special welcome to all immigrants, but gradually learned to forego the congenial Protestant strife of sects. It was indeed a reluctantly-learned lesson. Even as local patriotisms constantly tended to hamper unity during the very period of struggle, so the primary spirit of self-assertion set the ruling Calvinistic party upon persecuting not only Catholics and Lutherans, but the new heresy of Arminianism:[785] so little does "patriotic" warfare make for fraternity in peace. The judicial murder of the statesman John van Olden Barneveldt (1619) at the hands of Maurice of Orange, whom he had guarded in childhood and trained to statesmanship, was accomplished as a sequel to the formal proscription of the Arminian heresy in the Synod of Dort; and Barneveldt was formally condemned for "troubling God's Church" as well as on the charge of treason.[786] On the same pretexts Grotius was thrown into prison; and the freedom of the press was suspended.[787] It was doubtless the shame of the memory of the execution of Barneveldt (the true founder of the Republic as such),[788] on an absolutely false charge of treason, and the observation of how, as elsewhere, persecution drove away population, that mainly wrought for the erection of tolerance (at least as between Protestant sects) into a State principle.

The best side of the Dutch polity was its finance, which was a lesson to all Europe. Already in the early stages of the struggle with Spain, the States were able on credit to make war, in virtue of their character for commercial honour. Where the king of Spain, with all his revenues mortgaged past hope,[789] got from the Pope an absolution from the payment of interest on the sums borrowed from Spanish and Genoese merchants, and so ruined his credit,[790] the Dutch issued tin money and paper money, and found it readily pass current with friends and foes.[791]

Of all the Protestant countries, excepting Switzerland, the Dutch States alone disposed of their confiscated church lands in the public interest.[792] There was indeed comparatively little to sell,[793] and the money was sorely needed to carry on the war; but the transaction seems to have been carried through without any corruption. It was the suggestion of what might be accomplished in statecraft by the new expertise of trade, forced into the paths of public spirit and checked by a stress of public opinion such as had never come into play in Venice. Against such a power as Spain, energy ruled by unteachable unintelligence, a world-empire financed by the expedients of provincial feudalism, the Dutch needed only an enduring resentment to sustain them, and this Philip amply elicited. Had he spent on light cruisers for the destruction of Dutch commerce the treasure he wasted on the Armadas against England and on his enormous operations by land, typified in the monstrous siege of Antwerp, he might have struck swiftly and surely at the very arteries of Dutch life; but in yielding to them the command of their primary source and channel of wealth, the sea, he insured their ultimate success. In the Franco-Spanish war of 1521-25 the French cruisers nearly ruined the herring fishery of Holland and Zealand;[794] and it was doubtless the memory of that plight that set the States on maintaining predominant power at sea.[795]

Throughout the war, which from first to last spread over eighty years, the Dutch commerce grew while that of Spain dwindled. Under Charles V, Flanders and Brabant alone had paid nearly two-thirds of the whole imperial taxation of the Netherlands;[796] but after a generation or two the United Provinces must have been on an equality of financial resources with those left under Spanish rule, even in a state of peace. Yet in this posture of things there had grown up a burden which represented, in the warring commercial State, the persistent principle of class parasitism; for at the Peace of Muenster (1648) the funded public debt of the province of Holland alone amounted to nearly 150,000,000 florins, bearing interest at five per cent.[797] Of this annual charge, the bulk must have gone into the pockets of the wealthier citizens, who had thus secured a mortgage on the entire industry of the nation. All the while, Holland was nominally rich in "possessions" beyond sea. When, in 1580, Philip annexed Portugal, with which the Dutch had hitherto carried on a profitable trade for the eastern products brought as tribute to Lisbon, they began to cast about for an Asiatic trade of their own, first seeking vainly for a north-east passage. The need was heightened when in 1586 Philip, who as a rule ignored the presence of Dutch traders in his ports under friendly flags, arrested all the Dutch shipping he could lay hands on;[798] and when in 1594 he closed to them the port of Lisbon, he forced them to a course which his successors bitterly rued. In 1595 they commenced trading by the Cape passage to the Indies, and a fleet sent out by Spain to put down their enterprise was as usual defeated.[799] Then arose a multitude of companies for the East Indian trade, which in 1602 were formed by the government into a great semi-official joint-stock concern, at once commercial and military, reminiscent of the Hanseatic League. The result was a long series of settlements and conquests. Amboyna and the Moluccas were seized from the Portuguese, now subordinate to Spain; Java, where a factory was founded in 1597, was in the next generation annexed; Henry Hudson, an English pilot in the Dutch Company's service, discovered the Hudson River and Bay in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam about 1624. In 1621 was formed the Dutch West India Company, which in fifteen years fitted out 800 ships of trade and war, captured 545 from the Spanish and Portuguese, with cargoes valued at 90,000,000 florins, and conquered the greater part of what had been the Portuguese empire in Brazil.

No such commercial development had before been seen in Europe. About 1560, according to Guicciardini,[800] 500 ships had been known to come and go in a day from Antwerp harbour in the island of Walcheren; but in the spring of 1599, it is recorded, 640 ships engaged solely in the Baltic trade discharged cargoes at Amsterdam;[801] and in 1610, according to Delacourt, there sailed from the ports of Holland in three days, on the eastward trade alone, 800 or 900 ships and 1,500 herring boats.[802] At the date of the Peace of Muenster these figures were left far behind, whence had arisen a reluctance to end the war, under which commerce so notably flourished. Many Hollanders, further, had been averse to peace in the belief that it would restore Antwerp and injure their commerce, even as Prince Maurice of Orange, the republic's general and stadthouder, had been averse to it as likely to lessen his power and revenue.[803] But between 1648 and 1669 the trade increased by fifty per cent.,[804] Holland taking most of the Spanish trade from the shipping of England and the Hansa, and even carrying much of the trade between Spain and her colonies. When the Dutch had thus a mercantile marine of 10,000 sail and 168,000 men, the English carried only 27,196 men; and the Dutch shipping was probably greater than that of all the rest of Europe together.[805]

This body of trade, as has been seen, was built up by a State which, broadly speaking, had a surplus wealth-producing power in only one direction, that of fishing; and even of its fishing, much was done on the coasts of other nations. In that industry, about 1610, it employed over 200,000 men; and the Greenland whale fishery, which was a monopoly from 1614 to 1645, began to expand rapidly when set free,[806] till in 1670 it employed 120 ships.[807] For the rest, though the country exported dairy produce, its total food product was not equal to its consumption; and as it had no minerals and no vineyards, its surplus wealth came from the four sources of fishing, freightage, extorted colonial produce, and profits on the handling of goods bought and sold. Par excellence, it was, in the phrase of Louis XIV, the nation of shopkeepers, of middlemen; and its long supremacy in the business of buying cheap and selling dear was due firstly to economy of means and consumption, and secondarily to command of accumulated money capital at low rates of interest. The sinking of interest was the first sign that the limits to its commercial expansion were being reached; but it belonged to the conditions that, with or without "empire," its advantage must begin to fall away as soon as rival States were able to compete with it in the economies of "production" in the sense of transport and transfer.

In such economies the Dutch superiority grew out of the specially practical basis of their marine--habitual fishing and the constant use of canals. There is no better way than the former of building up seamanship; and just as the Portuguese grew from hardy fishers to daring navigators, so the Dutch grew from thrifty fishers and bargemen to thrifty handlers of sea-freight, surpassing in economy the shippers of England as they did in seamanship the marine of Spain. Broadly speaking, the navies which owed most to royal fostering--as those of Spain, France, and in part England--were the later to reach efficiency in the degree of their artificiality; and the loss of one great Spanish navy after another in storms must be held to imply a lack of due experience on the part of their officers.

One of the worst military mistakes of Spain was the creation of great galleons in preference to small cruisers. The sight of the big ships terrorised the Dutch once, in 1606; but as all existing seacraft had been built up in small vessels, there was no sufficient science for the navigation of the great ones in stress of weather, or even for the building of them on sound lines. The English and Dutch, on the other hand, fought in vessels of the kind they had always been wont to handle, increasing their size only by slow degrees. In the reign of Henry VIII, again, nothing came of the English expeditions of discovery fitted out by him (Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, i, 321), but private voyages were successfully made by traders (id. pp. 321, 327).

In the seventeenth century, however, and until far on in the eighteenth, all Dutch shipping was more economically managed than the English. In all likelihood the Dutch traders knew and improved upon the systematic control of ship-construction which the Venetians and Genoese had first copied from the Byzantines, and in turn developed. (Above, p. 197.) Raleigh was one of the first to point out that the broad Dutch boats carried more cargo with fewer hands than those of any other nation (Observations touching Trade, in Works, ed. 1829, viii, 356). Later in the century Petty noted that the Dutch practised freight-economies and adaptations of every kind, having different sorts of vessels for different kinds of traffic (Essays in Political Arithmetic [1690], ed. 1699, pp. 179, 180, 182, 183). This again gave them the primacy in shipbuilding for the whole of Europe (Memoires de Jean De Witt, ptie. i, ch. vi), though they imported all the materials for the purpose. When Colbert began navy-building, his first care was to bring in Dutch shipwrights (Dussieux, Etude biographique sur Colbert, 1886, p. 101). Compare, as to the quick sailing of the Dutch, Motley, United Netherlands, ed. 1867, iv, 556. In the next century the English marine had similar economic advantages over the French, which was burdened by royal schemes for multiplying seamen (see Tucker, Essay on Trade, 4th ed. p. 37).

The frugality which pervaded the whole of Dutch life may, however, have had one directly disastrous effect. Sir William Temple noted that the common people were poorly fed (Observations upon the United Provinces, ch. iv: Works, ed. 1814, i, 133, 147); and though their fighting ships were manned by men of all nations, the tendency was to feed them in the native fashion. Such a practice would tell fatally in the sea-fights with the English. Cp. Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 123.

In addition to this expertness in handling, the Dutch traders seem to have bettered the lesson taught them by the practice of the Hansa, as to the importance of keeping up a high character for probity. At a time when British goods were open to more or less general suspicion as being of short measure or bad quality,[808] the Dutch practice was to insure by inspection the right quality and quantity of all packed goods, especially the salted herrings, which were still the largest source of Dutch income.[809] And that nothing might be left undone to secure the concourse of commerce to their ports, they maintained under almost every stress[810] of financial hardship the principle of minimum duties on imports of every description. The one notable exception to this policy of practically free trade--apart from the monopoly of the trade in the Indies--was the quite supererogatory veto on the importation of fish from other countries at a time when most of the fishing of Northern Europe was in Dutch hands.[811] Where imports were desirable they were encouraged. Thus it came about that landless Amsterdam was the chief European storehouse for grain, and treeless Holland the greatest centre of the timber trade. Before such a spectacle the average man held up his hands and confessed the incomparable ingenuity of the Hollanders. But others saw and stated the causation clearly enough. "Many writing on this subject," remarks Sir William Petty, "do magnifie the Hollanders as if they were more, and all other nations less, than men, as to the matters of trade and policy; making them angels, and all others fools, brutes, and sots, as to those particulars; whereas," he continues, giving a sound lesson in social science to his generation, "I take the foundation of their achievements to be originally in the situation of the country, whereby they do things inimitable by others, and have advantages whereof others are incapable."[812] And Sir Josiah Child, of the same generation, declared similarly against transcendentalism in such matters. "If any," he roundly declares, "shall tell me it is the nature of those people to be thrifty, I answer, all men by nature are alike; it is only laws, custom, and education that differ men; their nature and disposition, and the disposition of all people in the world, proceed from their laws."[813] For "laws" read "circumstances and institutions," adding reservations as to climate and temperament and variation of individual capacity and bias, and the proposition is the essence of all sociology. Economic lessons which Petty and Child could not master have since been learned; but their higher wisdom has hardly yet been assimilated.

The sufficient proof that Holland had no abnormal enlightenment even in commerce was that, like her rivals, she continued to maintain the system of monopoly companies. Her "empire" in the East, to which was falsely ascribed so much of her wealth, in reality stood for very little sound commerce. The East India Company being conducted on high monopoly lines, the profits were made rather through the smallness than the greatness of the trade done. Thus, while the Company paid enormous dividends,[814] the imports of spice were kept at a minimum, in order to maintain the price, large quantities being actually destroyed for the purpose. For a time they contrived to raise pepper to double the old Portuguese price.[815] Such methods brought it about that when the republic had in all 10,000 sail, the East India trade employed only ten or twelve ships.[816] All the while the small class of capitalists who owned the shares were able to satisfy the people that the merely monetary and factitious riches thus secured to the Company's shareholders was a form of public wealth.[817]

It is a complete error to say, as did Professor Seeley (Expansion of England, p. 112), that Holland "made her fortune in the world" because the war with Spain "threw open to her attack the whole boundless possessions of her antagonist in the New World, which would have been closed to her in peace. By conquest she made for herself an empire, and this empire made her rich." In the first place it was not in the New World that she mainly sought her empire, but in the East Indies, in the sphere of the Portuguese conquests. Her hold of Brazil lasted only from 1621 to 1654, and was not a great source of wealth, though she captured much Spanish and Portuguese shipping. But even her eastern trade was, as we have seen, small in quantity, and as a source of wealth was not to be compared with the herring fishery. In 1601 John Keymor declared that more wealth was produced by the northern fisheries "in one year than the King of Spain hath in four years out of the Indies" (Observations made upon the Dutch Fishing about the Year 1601--reprint in Phoenix, 1707, i, 225). The Dutch takings in six months' fishing were then reckoned at 3,600,000 barrels, valued at as many pounds sterling (id. p. 224); the fishing fleet numbered 4,100 sail of all kinds, with over 3,000 tenders, out of a roughly estimated total of 20,000; while the whole Indian fleet is stated at only 40 or 50, employing 5,000 or 6,000 men (id. p. 223), as against a total of some 200,000 of Dutch seafaring population. Howell, writing in 1622 (ed. Bennett, 1891, vol. i, 205), also puts the Amsterdam ships in the Indian trade at 40. Professor Seeley's statement cannot have proceeded on any comparison of the European Dutch trade with the revenue from the conquered "empire." It stands for an endorsement of the vulgar delusion that "possessions" are the great sources of a nation's wealth, though Seeley elsewhere (p. 294) protests against the "bombastic language of this school," and notes that "England is not, directly at least, any the richer" for her connection with her "dependencies."

Against the class-interest behind the East India Company the republican party, as led and represented by De Witt, were strongly arrayed. They could point to the expansion of the Greenland whaling trade that had followed on the abolition of the original monopoly in that adventure--an increase of from ten to fifteen times the old quantity of product[818]--and the treatise expounding their policy strongly condemned the remaining monopolies of all kinds. But there was no sufficient body of enlightened public opinion to support the attack; and the menaced interests spontaneously turned to the factor which could best maintain them against such pressure--the military power of the House of Orange. The capitalist monopolists and "imperialists" of the republic were thus the means first of artificially limiting its economic basis, and later of subverting its republican constitution--a disservice which somewhat outweighs the credit earned by them, as by the merchant oligarchies of Venice, for an admirable management of their army.[819]

Sec. 4. Home and Foreign Policy

The vital part played by William the Silent at the outset of the war of independence gave his house a decisive predominance in the affairs of the republic, grudging as had often been its support of him during life. As always, the state of war favoured the rule of the imperator, once the institution had been established. Fanatical clergy and populace alike were always loud in support of the lineage of the Deliverer; and with their help William's son Maurice was able to put to death Barneveldt. Then and afterwards, accordingly, war was more or less the Orange interest; and after the Peace of Muenster we find the republican party sedulous at once to keep the peace and to limit the power of the hereditary stadthouder. The latter, William II, aged twenty-four, having on his side the great capitalists, tried force in a fashion which promised desperate trouble,[820] but died at the crisis (1650), his only child being born a week after his death.

It was substantially the pressure of the Orange interest, thus situated, that led to the first naval war between Holland and England, both then republics, and both Protestant. Orangeist mobs, zealous for Charles I, as the father of the Princess of Orange, insulted the English republican ambassadors who had come to negotiate on Cromwell's impossible scheme for a union of the two republics; and the prompt result was the Navigation Act, intended[821] to hurt Dutch commerce. It was really powerless for that purpose; but the Dutch people in general believed otherwise, and, being not only independent but bellicose, they were as ready as Puritan England for a struggle at sea. While, however, they held their ground in the main as fighters, they suffered heavily in their trade. By 1653 they had lost over sixteen hundred ships through English privateering; so that the two years of the English war had done them more injury than the eighty years of the Spanish.[822] Accordingly, though forced again to war by Charles II, the republican party put it as a maxim of policy that Dutch prosperity depended on peace.[823] It is nevertheless one of the tragedies of their history that John de Witt, the great statesman who owed most heed to this maxim, was inveigled by the English Government into an ill-judged alliance against France,[824] and was then deserted by England, whereupon the republic was invaded by France, and De Witt was murdered by his own people. Of all the nations of Europe the Dutch were then the best educated; but no more than ancient Athens had their republic contrived to educate its mob. The result was a frightful moral catastrophe.

It is easy at this time of day to find fault with De Witt's policy of two hundred years ago, but hard to reckon aright the practical possibilities of his situation. Suffice it to say that the formation of the Triple Alliance of Holland, England, and Sweden against Louis XIV proved a ruinous mistake. France had supported the republic against Spain; and Louis had stood by it when Charles II invited him to join in dismembering it. Yet, after sending its fleet up the Medway and forcing Charles to the humiliating Peace of Breda, and in the full knowledge that he hated the republic which had harboured and criticised him, De Witt was persuaded by Sir William Temple, the English ambassador, to sign, albeit reluctantly,[825] a treaty of union (1668) which made France a strenuous enemy, and from which Charles nevertheless instantly drew back, making secretly a treacherous treaty with Louis, and leaving Holland open to French invasion. It was the bane of the diplomacy of the age to be perpetually planning alliances on all hands by way of maintaining the "balance of power"; and De Witt, while justly suspicious of England, could not be content to drop the system. His excuse was that Louis was avowedly bent on the acquisition or control of the Spanish Netherlands; and that after that there would be small security for the republic. Yet he had better have remained the ally of France than leant on the broken reeds of the friendship of Spain and the English king. Charles needed only to appeal to the English East India Company, whose monopoly was pitted against that of the Dutch Company, to secure a parliamentary backing for a fresh war with Holland; and the sudden invasion of the republic by France (1672) was the ruin of the De Witts. It was an Orange mob that murdered them; and the young William of Orange pensioned those who had formally accused them of treason.

The action of Charles in 1672 had been a masterpiece of baseness. After secretly betraying his Dutch allies to Louis, he caused his own fleet, before war had been declared, to attack a rich Dutch merchant fleet in the Channel, with the worthy result of a capture of only two ships. His declaration of war, when made, included such pretexts as that there is "scarce a town in their territories that is not filled with abusive pictures and false historical medals and pillars," which "alone were cause sufficient for our displeasure, and the resentment of all our subjects"; and he alleged breach of a non-existent article in the Treaty of Breda.[826] It was in this disgraceful war that Shaftesbury gave out as the true policy of England the maxim of Cato--Delenda est Carthago--and the end of it was that in 1673, after a war without triumphs, in which finally the English fleet under Rupert was defeated by that of the Dutch while the French fleet stood idly by (1673), the betrayed betrayer made peace with Holland once more (1674).

The hostility of France on the other hand practically ended Dutch republicanism, though at the same time it brought about the wreck of the "empire" of Louis XIV. Had he accepted the submission offered by De Witt, he might have made a sure ally of Holland as against England. But his policy of conquest, insolently formulated by his minister Louvois, first put the Dutch Government in the hands of the Prince of Orange, and then turned the English interest, despite the King, against France. It may be taken as a law of European politics that any power which arrogantly sets itself to overbear the others will itself, in the course of one or two generations at furthest, be beaten to its knees. The end of the insolent aggression of Louis came when, after William had become King of England and set up a new tradition of Protestant union against France, the military genius of Marlborough in the next reign reduced France to extremities. Meanwhile Holland was past its period of commercial climax, past the ideals of De Witt, past republicanism for another era. Henceforth it was to be subservient to its stadthouder, and to become ultimately a kingdom, on the failure of the republican movement at the French Revolution.

Sec. 5. The Decline of Commercial Supremacy

It follows from what has been seen of the conditions of its success that the Dutch trade could not continue to eclipse that of rival States with greater natural sources of wealth when once those States had learned to compete with Dutch methods. But it belonged to the culture-conditions that the rival States should take long to learn the lesson, and that the Dutch should be the first to adapt themselves to new circumstances. The blunders of their enemies lengthened the Dutch lease. Louis XIV gave one last vast demonstration of what Catholicism can avail to wreck States by revoking the Edict of Nantes (1686), and so driving from France a quarter of a million of industrious subjects, part of whom went to England, many to Switzerland, but most to Holland, conveying their capital and their handicrafts with them. The stroke hastened the financial as well as the military exhaustion of France in the next twenty-five years. England, on the other hand, maintained its trade monopolies, which, with the system of imposts, drove over to the Dutch and the French much trade that a better policy might have kept.[827] But all the Dutch advantages were consummated in the command of money capital at low rates of interest, and consequent capacity to trade for small profits.

This accumulation of money capital was the correlative of the main conditions of Dutch commerce. A community drawing its income--save for the great resource of fishing--from its middleman-profits and freightage, and from its manufacture of other nations' raw products in competition with their own manufacture, must needs save credit capital for its own commerce' sake. Thus, whereas the earlier Flemings were luxurious in their expenditure,[828] the Dutch middle-class were the most frugal in north-western Europe,[829] their one luxury being the laudable one of picture-buying. But when, through mere increase of population and consequently of trade, interest gradually fell[830] in the rival communities, who in turn could practise fishing, who had better harbours, who extended their marine commerce, began to manufacture for themselves, and had natural resources for barter and production that Holland wholly lacked, the Dutch trade slowly but surely fell away. And as against the sustaining force of their frugality and their systematic utilisation of their labour-power, the Dutch lay under burdens which outweighed even those imposed on France and England by bad government. Not only did the national debt force a multiplication of imposts on every article of home consumption,[831] but the constant cost of the maintenance of the sea-dykes was a grievous natural tax from which there was no escape. Nor would the creditor class on any score consent to forego their bond.

Thus it came about that after the Peace of Utrecht (1713), which left Holland deeper in debt than ever, there was an admitted decline in the national turnover from decade to decade. It is one of the fallacies of the non-economic interpretation of history to speak of the United Provinces as thenceforth showing a moral "languor";[832] the rational explanation is that their total economic nutrition was curtailed by the competing environment. Yet it must be admitted that the merchant class themselves, when called on by the stadthouder William IV to compare notes as to the decline, showed little recognition of the natural causes beyond dwelling on the effect of heavy taxes, which had been insisted on long before by the party of De Witt.[833] Dwelling as they do on the value of the old maxims of toleration, which were now beside the case, and failing to realise that the sheer produce of the other countries was a decisive factor in competition, they seem to invite such a reaction in economic theory as was set up by the French Physiocrats, who laid their finger on this as the central fact in industrial life.

France, indeed, had learned other vital lessons after the great defeat of Louis XIV. Nothing in the history of that age is more remarkable than the fashion in which the immense blunder of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was pro tanto cured under the Regency and under Louis XV by the infiltration of fresh population. Dean Tucker noted, what the Dutch merchants apparently did not, that "Flanders, all Germany on this side of the Rhine, Switzerland, Savoy, and some parts of Italy, pour their supernumerary hands every year into France" (Essay on Trade, 4th ed. p. 27). At that time (1750) there were said to be 10,000 Swiss and Germans in Lyons alone, and the numbers of immigrants in all the commercial towns were increasing (id. pp. 27, 28), the Government having become "particularly gentle and indulgent to foreigners." At that period, too, the French peasantry were prolific (id. p. 45).

Above all, the Dutch Provinces were bound to be outclassed in manufactures by England when England began to manufacture by machinery and by steam. Anciently well-forested,[834] they had long been nearly bare of wood, so that their fuel had become, as it still is, scarce and expensive.[835] They had done wonders with windmills; but when coal came into play as driving power the coal-producing State was bound to triumph. It must, however, be kept on record that when England's commerce had thus begun to distance that of her old rival in virtue of her mere economic basis, Englishmen were none the less ready to resort to wanton aggression. Throughout the eighteenth century the ideal of monopoly markets continued to rule in Europe; and that ideal it was that inspired the struggles of France and England for the possession of India and North America. In the course of those imperialist wars the Government of the elder Pitt gave to privateers the right to confiscate, as "contraband of war," nearly all manner of commerce between France and other nations, and in particular that of Holland, Pitt's aim being to force the Dutch into his alliance against France. The injury thus wrought to their trade was enormous. "Perhaps at no time in history were more outrageous injuries perpetrated on a neutral nation than those which the Dutch suffered from the English during the time of the elder Pitt's administration."[836] It was the method of imperialism; and the usual sequel was at hand in the revolt of the American Colonies. In that crisis also, because the Dutch Council of State, despite the wish of the stadthouder, refused to take part against the Colonies, the English Government as before gave letters of marque to privateers, and told the plundered Dutch that if they increased their fleet to protect their own commerce the action would be taken as hostile. "In 1779 the English commander, Fielding, captured the Dutch mercantile fleet, with four Dutch men-of-war; and in 1780 Yorke, the English Ambassador at The Hague, demanded subsidies from the States, whom his Government had just before plundered."[837]

Needless to say, Dutch wealth and power had greatly dwindled before this insult was ventured on by the rival people. Holland's primary source of wealth, the fisheries, had been in large part appropriated by other nations, in particular by Britain, now her great competitor in that as well as in other directions.[838] But all the while Holland's own "empire" was a main factor in her weakening. Deaf to the doctrine of De Witt, her rulers had continued to keep the East Indian trade on a monopoly basis, ruling their spice islands as cruelly and as blindly[839] as any rival could have done; and it was the false economics and false finance bound up with their East India Company that ruined the great Bank of Amsterdam, which at the French Revolution was found to have gambled away all its funds in the affairs of the Company, in breach of the oath of the magistrates, who were the sworn custodians of the treasure. So situated, the Government could or would make no effort in the old fashion against English tyranny. The State's economic basis being in large part gone, and the capitalistic interest incapable of unifying or inspiring the nation, Holland had, so to speak, to begin life over again. But it would be a delusion to suppose that the political decline meant misery; on the contrary, there was much less of that in Holland than in triumphant England. There were still wealthy citizens, as indeed always happens in times of decline of general wealth. At that very period "the Dutch were the largest creditors of any nation in Europe";[840] and Smith in 1776 testified that Holland was "in proportion to the extent of the land and the number of its inhabitants by far the richest country in Europe," adding that it "has accordingly the greatest share of the carrying trade of Europe,"[841] and again that its capitalists had much money in British stocks. But these were not as broad foundations as the old; nor were they easily expansible, or even maintainable. As soon, indeed, as the rise of other national debts enabled them to invest abroad, they did so. Temple has recorded how, when any part of the home debt was being paid off in his time, the scripholders "received it with tears, not knowing how to dispose of it to interest with such safety and ease." England soon began to relieve them of such anxiety. But though Holland could thus gain from the annual interest-tribute paid by borrowing States, as England does at this moment, such income in a time of shrinking industry stands only for the idle life of the endowed class, a factor neither industrially nor intellectually wholesome. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Keymor, an English observer who studied Dutch commercial life closely, exclaimed: "And not a Beggar there; everyone getting his own Living is admirable to behold."[842] This seems to have been an exaggeration, since in 1619 we find Howell praising the "strictness of their laws against mendicants, and their hospitals of all sorts for young and old, both for the relief of the one and the employment of the other."[843] Later there grew up, however carefully provided for,[844] a notably large pauper population; and so late as 1842 Laing, who liked Holland, wrote of it as "a country full of capitalists and paupers."[845] In the main, modern Dutch life has of necessity had to find sounder bases; and the chief feature in it during the past generation has been the new and great industrial expansion.

Sec. 6. The Culture Evolution

From first to last the culture-history of Holland illustrates clearly enough the importance of the freer political life to the life of the mind. It is in the period of independence that Holland begins to play a great part in European culture. Previously, the multitude of popular "chambers of rhetoric,"[846] and so forth, yielded no fine fruits; but in the stress of self-government the republic begins to produce scholars, thinkers, and men of science, who affect those of surrounding nations. Already in 1584, when nothing of the kind existed in France or England, a Dutch literary academy published a Dutch grammar;[847] and the republic was "the peculiarly learned State of Europe throughout the seventeenth century,"[848] producing more of original classical research and scholarly teaching in its small sphere than any other. Freedom and endowment of university teaching brought in such Germans as Gronovius and Graevius; and Leibnitz looked to little Holland as a model in many things for backward Germany.[849] Printing became one of the industries of the country; and the Elzevirs were long the great classic publishers for Europe. Free universities and a free press, indeed, were the main conditions of the Dutch classical renaissance.

The conditions of progress in belles lettres, on the other hand, being less propitious, the development was inferior. All Europe could buy Latin books printed in Holland; but few foreigners read Dutch, and the finer native literature was sustained only by the necessarily small class which had both leisure and culture. The very devotion to culture which, as was claimed by Grotius, made the well-to-do Dutch in his youth the greatest students of languages in Europe,[850] wrought rather for the importation of foreign literature than the fostering or elevation of the native. So that though the Catholic poetess Anna Bijns,[851] and later the Catholic Spreghel, "the Dutch Ennius" (1549-1612), and Hooft, "the Dutch Tacitus" (1581-1647), made worthy beginnings, there was no great florescence. In the terms of the case, the two former represent the general Catholic culture-influence; and Hooft, eminent alike as poet and historian, owed his artistic stimulus to the three youthful years he spent in Italy studying Italian literature.[852] Of the more celebrated native poets, Cats is prosaic, though to this day highly popular, suiting as he does the plane of taste developed under a strenuous commercialism; and Vondel alone, by his influence on Milton, enters into the blood of outside European literature.

Fanatical Calvinism,[853] again, was not primarily favourable to philosophic thought; and it is to the influence of Descartes, who made Holland his home for many years, that the possibility of the later great performance of Spinoza is to be ascribed. But the impulse, once given, and sustained by such an atmosphere as was set up by Bayle and other French refugees, developed a new culture-force; and in the eighteenth century the Dutch press was a disseminator of French and English rationalism, as well as of the classic erudition which still flourished. All along, though none of the supreme names in science is Dutch, scientific culture was in general higher than elsewhere.[854] Such influences made afresh for a revival of native literature, and throughout the eighteenth century it is the foreign stimulus that is seen at work. Thus Van Effen (1684-1725) read much English and wrote much French, but was also the best Dutch writer of his time; the brothers Van Haren (1710-79) were diplomatists, and friends of Voltaire; and the two lady novelists, Wolff and Deken, produced their three admired books (1782-92) under the influence of Richardson and Goethe.

But as against these debts to foreign example, the Dutch Republic in its time of flower produced a great and markedly native body of art, which to this day ranks in its kind with that of the great age in Italy. It may have been the example set in the Spanish Netherlands by the Austrian archdukes, after the severance, that gave the lead to the Dutch growth; but there is no imitation and nothing nationally second-rate in their total output. The Flemish Rubens (1577-1640) precedes by twenty-one years his pupil Vandyck and the great Spaniard Velasquez, and by nearly thirty years the Dutch Rembrandt; but no four contemporary masters were ever more individual; and the Dutch group of Rembrandt, Hals, Van der Helst, Gerard Dow, and the rest, will hold its own with the Flemish swarm headed by Rubens and Vandyck. It is worth while in this connection to note afresh how closely is art florescence bound up with economic forces. Dutch and Flemish art, like Italian, is in the first place substantially a product of economic demand, the commercial aristocracy of the Netherlands commissioning and buying pictures as did the clerical aristocracy of Italy. It has been denied that there is any economic explanation for the eventual arrest of great art in the Netherlands; but when we note the special conditions of the case the economic explanation will be found decisive.

Great art, it is true, always tends to set up a convention, which is the stoppage of greatness; but even great art can so arrest progress only when the economic and social sphere is curtailed; and the Dutch economic sphere, as we have seen, was practically non-expansive after the disaster of 1672, which date also begins a new period of ruinous war for Flanders. Rembrandt died in 1664. He and his contemporaries and their pupils had produced a body of painting immense in quantity; and the later and poorer generations, having such a body of classic work passed on to them, naturally and necessarily rested on their treasure. The population of the United Provinces, estimated to have reached a million-and-a-half in the Middle Ages,[855] had risen in the great period to three or three-and-a-half millions.[856] From this figure it positively fell away in the eighteenth century.[857] Here then was a shrinking population, loaded with old and new debt and overwhelmed with taxes, consciously growing poorer, with no prospect of recovery, and already stocked with a multitude of pictures[858] by great masters. That it should go on commissioning new pictures with the old munificence was impossible: it was more concerned to sell than to buy; and what demand had elicited lack of demand arrested. There is no clearer sociological case in history.

Sec. 7. The Modern Situation

After all that has come and gone, it is important to realise, in correction of the megalomaniac view of things, that Holland is to-day literally larger,[859] more populated,[860] and more productive than she was in the "palmy days"; and that her colonial "empire," now administered on just principles, includes a population of over 30,000,000. Over sixty years ago M'Culloch wrote that "though their commerce be much decayed, the Dutch, even at this moment, are the richest and most comfortable people of Europe."[861] The latter part of the statement would not be very far out to-day, though popular comfort perhaps does not now keep pace with population. Otherwise it no longer holds. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there began a vigorous revival of Dutch commerce and industry, Holland becoming once more expansive. From 1872 to 1906 Dutch exports, measured by weight, increased ninefold, imports sixfold, and transit trade over threefold; and the expansion steadily continues; the value of the transit trade rising from 9,392 million guilders in 1906 to 12,684 millions in 1910; while imports increased by nearly 30 per cent and exports by 26 per cent. Much of this expansion appears to be due to the advantages accruing to Holland as a free-trade country alongside of protectionist Germany, whose far greater natural resources redound largely to the gain of the free-trading neighbour.

In detail, the commercial situation of to-day is curiously like the old at many points. The debt is still relatively great--about L97,000,000 sterling;[862] and about a fourth of the whole expenditure is interest; another fourth going for "defence." Always making the best of their soil, alike with roots and cereals, the people go on increasing the area under cultivation and the yield per hectare.[863] Still, as of old, much food and raw material is imported to be exported again[864]--in large part to Germany. Fishing now employs only 20,000 men with over 5,300[865] boats; the annual product is valued at under L1,000,000; and of over 10,800 clearances of vessels from Dutch ports in 1910 only 4,533 were Dutch, representing a total mercantile navy of only 764.[866] But of Dutch vessels engaged in the carrying trade between foreign ports there were 4,383 in 1909,[867] with more than seven times the tonnage of the home navy. Thus the nation still subsists largely by playing middleman, partly by manufactures, partly by dairy and other produce, little by fishing,[868] but still largely by freightage. Java does not figure as a source of revenue for Holland, being administered in its own interest,[869] with less taxation of the people than goes on in British India.

Of the conditions which in Holland tell against increase of well-being, the most notable is the large birth-rate resulting there as elsewhere from the rapid modern expansion of industry. With a population less by 1,580,000 than that of Belgium, Holland has annually a larger surplus of births over deaths. It may be interesting to compare Dutch statistics with those of Portugal and Sweden, which have nearly the same population, as regards birth-rate and emigration. Each of the three States at 1895 had slightly over or under 5,000,000 inhabitants; and in 1909 slightly over or under 6,000,000. Their marriages and their emigration were:--

--------------------------------------------------------------------- Marriages. | Emigration. ----------------------------------------+---------------------------- |Portugal.| Holland.| Sweden.| Portugal.| Holland.|Sweden. -----------+---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+------- 1895 | 33,018 | 35,598 | 28,728 | 44,746 | 1,314 |14,982 | | | | | | 1908, 1909,| | | | | | or 1910 | 34,150 | 42,740 | 33,131 | 40,056 | 3,220 |23,529 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

The emigration from Portugal in 1895 was abnormal; but in 1896 the figures were 24,212, and in 1907 they reached 41,950. In Sweden in 1895 the excess of births over deaths was as high as 60,000. In Portugal it was 47,997; a figure which in 1896 fell to 38,134; rising again to 64,312 in 1909. In Holland, the average excess in 1879-84 was 54,751; in 1897 it had risen to 77,586; in 1909 to 90,483. Under such circumstances it needs the alleged doubling of Dutch commerce between 1872 and 1891, and the subsequent continued expansion, to maintain well-being. As it is, despite the tradition of good management of the poor, the number of the needy annually relieved temporarily or continuously by the charitable societies and communes[870] appears to be always over five per cent. of the population--or about twice the average proportion of paupers in the United Kingdom. The Dutch figures of course do not stand for the same order of poverty; and there is certainly not in Holland a proportional amount of the sordid misery that everywhere fringes the wealth of England. But it is clear that Holland is becoming relatively over-populated; and that the industrial conditions are not making steadily for popular elevation, standing as they do for low wages and grinding competition in many occupations.

Nor are these conditions favourable in Holland to general culture, as apart from forms of specialism, any more than in England. Dutch experts in recognised studies latterly hold their own with any--witness the names of Kuenen, Tiele, van t'Hoff, de Goeje, de Vries, Dozy, Kern, Lorentz, Waals--and the middle-class has probably a better average culture than prevails in England or the United States; but the lapsed Republic has yet to prove how much a small State may achieve in the higher civilisation. Meantime, it is plainly not smallness but too rapid increase in numbers that is the stumbling-block; and the possession of a relatively great "empire" in Java does not avail, for Holland any more than for England, to cure the social trouble at home.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 725: Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1-vol. ed. 1863, p. 18. For details of the different invasions see David, Manuel de l'histoire de Belgique, 1847, pp. 37, 39, 41, 49. Cp. van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, Ger. ed. i, 82-89. Wenzelburger notes that the "Norsemen" included not only Norwegians and Danes, but Saxons and even Frisians (Geschichte der Niederlande, 1879, i, 61).]

[Footnote 726: Dutch writers claim the invention for one of their nation in the fourteenth century (cp. M'Culloch, Treatises, p. 342; Rogers, Holland, pp. 26, 27). There is clear evidence, however, that fish-salting was carried on at Yarmouth as early as 1210, one Peter Chivalier being the patentee (see Torrens M'Cullagh's Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, ii, 29; Madox, History of the Exchequer, ch. xiii, Sec. 4, p. 326, cited by him; and Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, 1802, i, 384, 385). The practice was very common in antiquity; see Schuerer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Eng. tr. Div. ii, vol. i, p. 43.]

[Footnote 727: It is noteworthy that an English navy practically begins with King John, in whose reign it was that fishing began to flourish at Yarmouth. See Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, i, 374, 378, 384, 532.]

[Footnote 728: Originally the name Flanders covered only the territory of the city of Bruges. It was extended with the extension of the domain of the Counts of Flanders (David, Manuel, pp. 48, 49).]

[Footnote 729: Motley, p. 20; Grattan, pp. 38-40, 43, 56. At 1286 the Flemish cities were represented side by side with the nobles in the assembly of the provincial states. The same rights were acquired by the Dutch cities in the next century.]

[Footnote 730: Dykes existed as early as the Roman period (Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, Groningen, 1892, i, 315; Eng. tr. i, 211; Wenzelburger, Geschichte der Niederlande, 1878, i, 52). In the Middle Ages co-operative bodies took the work out of the Church's hands (Blok, pp. 315-17; tr. p. 212).]

[Footnote 731: Cp. Torrens M'Cullagh, Industrial History, ii, 22, 33; Motley, p. 18. The Counts of Holland seem to have led the way in encouraging towns and population. But Baldwin III of Flanders (circa 960) seems to have established yearly fairs free of tolls (De Witt, Memoires, French tr., ed. 1709. part i, ch. viii, p. 34).]

[Footnote 732: Compare the so-called Memoirs of John de Witt, French ed. (3e) 1709, ch. iii, p. 18; Petty, Essays in Political Arithmetic, ed. 1699, p. 178; Torrens M'Cullagh, as cited, ii, 26, 113-15, 270-71; M'Culloch, Treatises, p. 350. English corn was frequently exported to the Low Countries, as against imported textiles, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and early in the fifteenth (Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, i, 561, 644).]

[Footnote 733: Keymor, Observations on the Dutch Fishing about the year 1601, reprinted in The Phoenix, 1707, i, 223, 225; Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces, cc. iii, vi (1814 ed. of Works, i, 127, 163).]

[Footnote 734: Cp. De Witt, pp. 15, 16; Torrens M'Cullagh, Industrial History, ii, 36, 37, 46, 59; Grattan, Netherlands, p. 18; Blok, as above cited.]

[Footnote 735: As to the earlier development of the Flemish cities, cp. Blok, Geschiedenis, as cited, ii, 3; Eng. tr. i, 252; A. Wauters, Les libertes communales, Bruxelles, 1878, p. 746 and passim.]

[Footnote 736: Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, i, p. 15.]

[Footnote 737: See the charter of Middelburg in 1217, quoted by Motley, p. 19, and by Davies, i, 65.]

[Footnote 738: Davies, History of Holland, i, 26.]

[Footnote 739: Cp. David, Manuel, p. 217; Wauters, Les libertes communales, pp. 36, 287; Van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 141, 142.]

[Footnote 740: M'Cullagh, ii, 42.]

[Footnote 741: De Witt (i.e. Delacourt), however, gives the priority to Flanders (Memoires, as cited, pt. i. ch. viii, p. 34).]

[Footnote 742: The majority of the serfs seem to have been freed about 1230; and by 1300 the chiefs of the gilds were "more powerful than the nobles" (Grattan, p. 35; cp. p. 38, and Blok, as before cited).]

[Footnote 743: Cp. David, Manuel, pp. 78-88.]

[Footnote 744: De Witt, as cited, pp. 34, 35; M'Cullagh, p. 66; Grattan, p. 38.]

[Footnote 745: David, Manuel, pp. 142, 143; Grattan, p. 38.]

[Footnote 746: David, pp. 154-57.]

[Footnote 747: De Witt, p. 35; M'Cullagh, p. 67.]

[Footnote 748: David, Manuel, p. 158.]

[Footnote 749: Id. p. 107.]

[Footnote 750: Grattan. p. 43.]

[Footnote 751: Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, 3rd ed. pp. 8, 9.]

[Footnote 752: On this and previous floods see Blok, Geschiedenis, i, 313, 314; tr. i, 209, 210; Davies, vol. i, note C.]

[Footnote 753: Motley, p. 20.]

[Footnote 754: Cp. David, pp. 77, 78, 85, 92, 99, 101, 105, 108, 149; Motley, pp. 24, 28, 29; Grattan, pp. 42, 44, 46, 50, 54, 64.]

[Footnote 755: The town of Hoorn seems to have been virtually ruined by the punitive exactions of Charles the Bold (Davies, i, 269, 312).]

[Footnote 756: David, p. 94.]

[Footnote 757: Davies, i, 314.]

[Footnote 758: Motley, pp. 28-30.]

[Footnote 759: Largely through the union between Spain and England under the Tudor kings (Grattan, p. 66).]

[Footnote 760: Robertson, Charles V, b. vi; Motley, Rise. Histor. Introd. Sec. 11.]

[Footnote 761: Motley, p. 60, notes that the numbers have been put often at fifty thousand, and sometimes even at a hundred thousand; but this, as he admits, is incredible.]

[Footnote 762: And still the rhetorical historian, sworn to maintain the Teutonic character for "liberty," declaims in his elementary manner that that has been seen to be the "master passion" of the race from Caesar's time to Charles's (Motley, p. 49; compare pp. 25-29).]

[Footnote 763: Cited by Puffendorf, Introduction to the History of Europe, Eng. tr. 7th ed. 1711, i, 240.]

[Footnote 764: Robertson, Charles V, bk. vi, ed. cited, p. 495; Armstrong, as cited, pp. 78-82.]

[Footnote 765: Armstrong, as cited, pp. 83, 84.]

[Footnote 766: Motley, Rise, p. 138.]

[Footnote 767: Id. pp. 138, 139; Grattan, p. 87.]

[Footnote 768: Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1855, ii, 14-17, 172-77.]

[Footnote 769: Cp. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Pref. ch. viii, Sec. 12.]

[Footnote 770: Motley, Rise, p. 36.]

[Footnote 771: See it analysed in Motley, pp. 134, 135.]

[Footnote 772: Asked by his viceregent Margaret of Parma to introduce the Spanish Inquisition, he pointed out that already "the Inquisition of the Netherlands is much more pitiless than that of Spain" (Motley, p. 174; cp. p. 81).]

[Footnote 773: It was an old source of income (Davies, i, 617; cp. Motley, p. 78).]

[Footnote 774: "The aristocracy of the Netherlands was excessively extravagant, dissipated, and already considerably embarrassed in circumstances" (Motley, p. 129; cp. pp. 125, 130, 131).]

[Footnote 775: Cp. Grattan, p. 106; Motley, as last cited.]

[Footnote 776: See the admissions of Motley, p. 131.]

[Footnote 777: Motley, p. 125.]

[Footnote 778: See Davies, ii, 149, 150, for a criticism of William's development, worth considering as against the unmixed panegyric of Motley.]

[Footnote 779: Cp. M'Cullagh, p. 211.]

[Footnote 780: Motley, pp. 462-67, 506, 527, 829.]

[Footnote 781: Van Kampen, i, 512. Camden (Hist. of Elizabeth, trans. 3rd ed. 1635, p. 369) states that Parma was unready to sail when called upon, but adds that the Dutch ships of war lay so placed that he "could not put from shore."]

[Footnote 782: While Charles V spoke all the languages of his empire, Philip spoke only Spanish. Motley, p. 74. See the notes for a sample of his cast of mind.]

[Footnote 783: Davies, ii, 199.]

[Footnote 784: M'Culloch (Treatises, p. 347) states that even in its prosperous period Antwerp had little shipping of its own. He refers to Guicciardini's Descrizzione, but I cannot trace the testimony; and Guicciardini, while speaking of the multitudes of foreigners always at Antwerp (French tr. ed. 1625, fol. p. 114), mentions that the population included a great number of mariners (p. 95).]

[Footnote 785: Grattan, pp. 232, 233, 237; Davies, ii, 452-65, etc.; Motley, United Netherlands, ed. 1867, iv, 537.]

[Footnote 786: Van Kampen, ii, 35.]

[Footnote 787: Id. p. 37.]

[Footnote 788: Id. p. 36.]

[Footnote 789: Motley, Rise, p. 149; Prescott, Philip II, ed. cited, p. 659.]

[Footnote 790: Davies, ii, 304; Watson, Hist. of Reign of Philip II, ed. 1839, p. 527, citing Grotius, lib. v. In 1600, however, Philip III seems to have either acknowledged the debt to Genoa or borrowed anew to a large amount; and at his death he is said to have doubled the debt (Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae, ed. Bennett, 1891, i, 138).]

[Footnote 791: Davies, ii, 32, 33. Cp. G. Brandt, History of the Reformation in the Low Countries, Eng. tr. 1720, folio, bk. xi, i, 310.]

[Footnote 792: Cp. Motley, Rise, pp. 581, 646; United Netherlands, iv, 558; M'Cullagh, p. 206 (where the chronology is inaccurate).]

[Footnote 793: See Motley, Rise, pp. 37, 38, as to the curtailment of clerical wealth in the Netherlands from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries by the feudal superiors, who, unlike their over-lords, did not need to look to the Church for support.]

[Footnote 794: Grattan, p. 69; Davies, i, 294.]

[Footnote 795: Cp. the Memoires de Jean De Witt, as cited, p. 101, ptie. ii, ch. 2.]

[Footnote 796: Grattan, p. 71.]

[Footnote 797: Davies, ii, 636. Already at the death of Charles V the debt of the entire Netherlands was five or six million florins. At the armistice of 1609 the debt of the province of Holland alone was twenty-six millions. By 1648 the war was reckoned to have cost Spain in all fifteen hundred millions. M'Cullagh, ii, 330, 331.]

[Footnote 798: Davies, ii, 290.]

[Footnote 799: Of 250 Dutchmen who sailed, however, only 90 returned.]

[Footnote 800: Description des Pays Bas, ed. 1625, p. 319.]

[Footnote 801: Davies, ii, 328.]

[Footnote 802: Memoires de Jean De Witt, as cited, p. 21.]

[Footnote 803: Davies, ii, 407. The clergy were of the war party.]

[Footnote 804: Memoires cited, p. 194.]

[Footnote 805: M'Culloch, p. 353; Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, 1804, ii, 596; Petty, Essays, ed. 1699, p. 165; Keymor, Observations made upon the Dutch Fishing about 1601, rep. in The Phoenix, 1707, i, 223.]

[Footnote 806: Memoires cited, pp. 48, 50.]

[Footnote 807: Davies, iii, 556.]

[Footnote 808: Cp. Tucker, Essay on Trade, 4th ed. p. 57.]

[Footnote 809: Latterly the regulations failed to check fraud, and even hampered trade (M'Culloch, Treatises, p. 371). But for a long time the effect was to sustain the business credit of the Dutch.]

[Footnote 810: Cp. Memoires of Jean De Witt, p. 103, as to exceptions.]

[Footnote 811: Keymor, as cited, p. 224. Hamburg about the same period, as Keymor notes, enacted that foreigners should not be allowed to sell herrings in the port until its own boats had come in and sold theirs.]

[Footnote 812: Essays in Political Arithmetic, ed. 1699, p. 170. Cp. p. 181.]

[Footnote 813: New Discourse on Trade, 4th ed. p. 61.]

[Footnote 814: For the years 1605-10, an average of 36 per cent; for 1616, 62-1/2 per cent.]

[Footnote 815: M'Culloch, Treatises, pp. 366-67, and refs. It is told in the Memoires de Jean De Witt (as cited, p. 52, note, ptie. i, ch. xi) that cargoes of pepper were wilfully sunk near port.]

[Footnote 816: Memoires cited, pp. 24, 51, 52.]

[Footnote 817: M'Culloch, pp. 368-69. The Dutch ideal being almost necessarily one of small consumption and accumulation of nominal or money capital, there was no improvement in the popular standard of comfort.]

[Footnote 818: Memoires cited, ptie. i, ch. x, xi, pp. 47, 48, 50.]

[Footnote 819: Motley, United Netherlands, iv, 561, 562.]

[Footnote 820: As to the stress of party spirit in Holland about this period, see Davies, ii, 725, 726.]

[Footnote 821: See hereinafter, pt. vi, ch. ii, Sec. 5.]

[Footnote 822: Davies, ii, 721; Van Kampen, ii, 149. Cp. Temple, Essay upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland, Works, iii, 15, 16.]

[Footnote 823: Memoires de Jean De Witt, ptie. ii, ch. ii, iii (iii, iv). It is there noted (ch. ii, p. 113) that when in time of war the States-General gave letters of marque to privateers there were always bitter complaints that the Dutch privateers took Dutch goods as well as the enemy's. Again it is asked (p. 163), "What plunder is there for us to gain at sea when we are almost the only traffickers?"]

[Footnote 824: It is to be noted that De Witt diverged fatally from the doctrine of his friend Delacourt in thus leaning to foreign alliances, which Delacourt altogether opposed. See Lefevre Pontalis, Jean De Witt, 1884, i, 317-18, where an interesting account of the Memoires is given.]

[Footnote 825: Davies, iii, 68, 69; Rogers, Holland, p. 266. Temple was of course the unconscious instrument of the treachery of Charles. Cp. Lefevre Pontalis, Jean De Witt, i, 451-55.]

[Footnote 826: See the Declaration and the Dutch reply, printed in 1674, reprinted in The Phoenix, 1707, i, 271 sq.]

[Footnote 827: Cp. Child, New Discourse of Trade, 4th ed. pref. pp. xx-xxv; Tucker, Essay on Trade, 4th ed. pp. 28, 47-57.]

[Footnote 828: Cp. Grattan, p. 75.]

[Footnote 829: "Never any country traded so much and consumed so little; they buy infinitely, but it is to sell again." "They furnish infinite luxury, which they never practise, and traffic in pleasures which they never taste" (Temple, Observations, 1814 ed. of Works, i, 176). Cp. Motley, United Netherlands, iv, 559. Sometimes the citizens were taxed fifty per cent on their incomes.]

[Footnote 830: M'Culloch's dictum that the low rate of interest in Holland was wholly due to heavy taxation is an evident fallacy, framed in the interest of laissez-faire.]

[Footnote 831: It was a common saying at Amsterdam in the seventeenth century that every dish of fish was paid for once to the fisherman and six times to the State. As early as 1619 taxes on goods were nearly equal to their wholesale price (Howell, letter of May 1, 1619, in Epistolae Ho-elianae, Bennett's ed. 1891, vol. i, 27). See La Richesse de Hollande, 1778, ii, 21-42, for details of the extraordinary multiplication of Dutch taxes from the war-period onwards. In Temple's time a common fish-sauce paid thirty different duties (Observations, in Works, i, 187). And still taxes increased. Cp. Smith, Wealth of Nations, M'Culloch's ed. 1839, pp. 396, 397, 411.]

[Footnote 832: So Seeley, Expansion of England, p. 132.]

[Footnote 833: See the Dissertation drawn up on this occasion (1750), Eng. tr. 1751. It is largely quoted from by M'Culloch, Treatises, pp. 354-62.]

[Footnote 834: Wenzelburger, Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 51.]

[Footnote 835: Laing, Notes of a Traveller, 1842, p. 15.]

[Footnote 836: Rogers, Holland, pp. 362, 363.]

[Footnote 837: Rogers, p. 365.]

[Footnote 838: See Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. iv, ch. v, as to the British encouragement of fisheries in the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 839: Crawford, Eastern Archipelago, iii, 388; (cited by M'Culloch, p. 365); Temminck, Possessions Neerlandaises dans l'Inde Archipelagique, 1847-49, iii, 202-11.]

[Footnote 840: M'Culloch, p. 363.]

[Footnote 841: Wealth of Nations, bk. ii, ch. v, end.]

[Footnote 842: Keymor, Observations on the Dutch Fishing, in The Phoenix, as cited, p. 231.]

[Footnote 843: Epistolae Ho-elianae, Bennett's ed. 1891, i, 25.]

[Footnote 844: Child, New Discourses of Trade, 4th ed. p. 88. Cp. Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, cap. 491, note, citing Browne's work of 1668.]

[Footnote 845: Notes of a Traveller, p. 10.]

[Footnote 846: As to these see Motley, Rise, pp. 46-48. He admits that they were set up by French culture-contacts. But cp. Grattan, p. 75.]

[Footnote 847: Hallam, Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 249.]

[Footnote 848: Id. iv, 1.]

[Footnote 849: Cp. Biedermann, as cited in the author's Buckle and his Critics, pp. 169-73.]

[Footnote 850: Van Kampen, i, 608, 609.]

[Footnote 851: Her works were issued in 1528, 1540, and 1567.]

[Footnote 852: Cp. Mr. Gosse's article on Dutch literature, in Ency. Brit. 10th ed. vol. xii.]

[Footnote 853: As to this see Cerisier, vi, 267.]

[Footnote 854: Van Kampen, i, 607, 608; ii, 106; Motley, United Netherlands, iv, 570.]

[Footnote 855: Wenzelburger, i, 54.]

[Footnote 856: Motley, United Netherlands, iv, 556.]

[Footnote 857: At 1829 it was only 2,613,487.]

[Footnote 858: Some of course were destroyed by various causes. Rubens's "Descent from the Cross" at Antwerp, though repeatedly retouched, was ruined when Reynolds saw it; but the number of good pictures preserved in the Low Countries is immense.]

[Footnote 859: In 1833 there were 2,270,959 hectares of land = 8,768 square miles. In 1877 there were 3,297,268 hectares = 12,731 square miles--the result of systematic reclamation from sea and river.]

[Footnote 860: Population in 1897 slightly over 5,000,000; at the end of 1910, 5,945,155.]

[Footnote 861: Compare, however, the verdict of Laing, cited above, p. 325.]

[Footnote 862: An increase of some seven millions since 1900.]

[Footnote 863: Chief crops rye, oats, potatoes.]

[Footnote 864: The clear exports are chiefly margarine, butter, cheese, sugar, leather, paper, manufactured woollen and cotton cloths, flax, vegetables, potato-flour, oxen, and sheep. In 1891 Great Britain imported from the Netherlands L3,093,595 worth of margarine and L770,460 worth of butter; in 1909, L2,782,636 worth and L843,318 worth respectively; while sugar stood at L2,043,724. Oil seed rose from L345,210 in 1909 to L721,266 in 1910; and condensed milk in the latter year stood at L795,937.]

[Footnote 865: Increases of 5,000 men and 1,300 boats since 1900.]

[Footnote 866: An increase of 143 since 1900.]

[Footnote 867: An increase of 2,206 (over 100 per cent.) since 1891.]

[Footnote 868: This source of wealth, as we have seen, was much curtailed in the eighteenth century by British competition. Laing (Notes, pp. 7, 8) shows how small it had become at his time, but is quite mistaken in assuming that it had never been great.]

[Footnote 869: About 60 per cent. of the revenue is from Government produce and monopolies.]

[Footnote 870: The communes make provision only where charity does not; there is no poor-rate.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. SWITZERLAND

The best general history of Switzerland available in English is Mr. E. Salisbury's translation (1899) of the Short History of Prof. Daendliker. It has little merit as literature, but is abreast of critical research at all points. For the Reformation period, the older history of Vieusseux (Library of Useful Knowledge, 1840) is fuller and better, though now superseded as to early times. The work of Sir F.O. Adams and C.D. Cunningham on The Swiss Confederation, 1880 (translated and added to in French by M. Loumyer, 1890), is an excellent conspectus, especially for contemporary Swiss institutions. As regards the first half of the last century, Grote's Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland (1847, rep. 1876) are most illuminating.

Of fuller histories there are several in French and German. The longer Geschichte der Schweiz of Prof. Daendliker (1884-87) is good and instructive, though somewhat commonplace in its thinking. Dierauer's Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1887), which stops before the Reformation period, is excellent so far as it goes, and gives abundant references, which Daendliker's does not; though his Short History gives good bibliographies.

Zschokke's compendious Des Schweizerlands Geschichte (9te Aufgabe, 1853) is lucid and very readable, but is quite uncritical as to the medieval period. That is critically and decisively dealt with in Rilliet's Les Origines de la Confederation Suisse, 1868, and in Dierauer.

In more than one respect, the political evolution of Switzerland is the most interesting in the whole historic field. The physical basis, the determinations set up by it, the reactions, the gradual control of bias, the creation of stability out of centrifugal forces--all go to form the completest of all political cases.[871] Happier than those of Greece, if less renowned, the little clans of Switzerland have passed through the storms of outer and inner strife to a state of something like assured republican federation. And where old Greece and Renaissance Italy and Scandinavia have failed to attain to this even on the basis of a common language and "race," the Swiss Cantons have attained it in despite of a maximum diversity of speech and stock. As does Japan for Asia, they disprove for Europe a whole code of false generalisations.

The primary fact in the case, as in that of Greece, is the physical basis. Like Hellas, the Swiss land is "born divided"; and the first question that forces itself is as to how the Cantons, while retaining their home rule, have contrived to escape utterly ruinous inter-tribal strife, and to attain federal union. The answer, it speedily appears, begins with noting the fact that Swiss federation is a growth or aggregation, as it were, from a primary "cell-form." From the early confederation of the three Forest Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, and Unterwalden, a set of specially congruous units, led to alliance by their original isolation from the rest of Helvetia and their common intercourse through the Lake of Lucerne, came the example and norm for the whole. The primary influence of mere land-division is proved by the persistence of the cantonal spirit and methods to this day;[872] but the history of Switzerland is the history of the social union gradually forced on the Cantons by varying pressures from outside. That it is due to no quality of "race" is sufficiently proved by the fact that three or four languages, and more stocks, are represented in the Republic at this moment.

Sec. 1. The Beginnings of Union

In the union of the Forest Cantons, as in the rooting of several Swiss cities and the cultivation of remote valleys, the Church has been held to have played a constructive part. At the outset, according to some historians,[873] Schwytz and Uri and Unterwalden had but one church among them; hence a habit of congregation. But the actual records yield no evidence for this view, any more than for the other early dicta as to the racial distinctness of the people of the Forest Cantons, and their immemorial freedom. Broadly speaking, the early Swiss were for the most part serfs with customary rights. The first documentary trace of them is in the grant by Louis of Germany to the convent at Zurich, in the year 853, of his pagellus Uroniae, with its churches, houses, serfs, lands, and revenues.[874] This did not constitute the whole of the Canton; but it seems clear that the bulk of the population were in status serfs, though when attached to a royal convent they would have such privileges as would induce even freemen to accept the same state of dependence.[875] In the Canton of Schwytz, again, the people--there in larger part freemen--seem to have been always more or less at strife with the great monastery of Einsiedeln, founded about 946 by Kaiser Otto, and largely filled by men of aristocratic birth seeking a quiet life,[876] who held by the usual interests of their class as well as their corporation.[877] It was a question of ownership of pastures, the main economic basis in that region; and the descendants of the early settlers were fighting for their subsistence. Unterwalden, finally (then known only as the higher and lower valleys, Stanz or Stannes and Sarnen or Sarnon), was led in its development by Uri and Schwytz, each of which possessed some communal property, the former in respect of its beginnings as a royal domain, the latter in respect of the association of its freemen.

Whatever earlier combinations there may have been,[878] it is in the year 1291[879] that the first recorded pact was made between the three Cantons; and it arose out of their making a stand for their customary local rights as against the House of Hapsburg.[880] Uri had in 1231 been granted by King Henry VII of Germany, son of the emperor Frederick II, the cherished privilege of enrolment as an imperial fief, an act which in theory withdrew it from its former feudal subordination to the Count of Hapsburg; and in 1240 Frederick himself gave the same privilege to Schwytz.[881] On the unhinging of the imperial system after Frederick's death, the Hapsburgs, who even in his life had treated the Cantons as contumacious vassals, fought for their own claims; whereupon in due course was formed the Pact of 1291. Thus the Swiss Confederation broadly began in the special strife which arose between the new order of higher feudal princes and the civic or rural communes on the disintegration of the Germanic empire in the thirteenth century.[882] The familiar story of William Tell and the oath-taking at Ruetli or Gruetli in 1308 appears to be pure myth. There is no historic mention till over a hundred years later of any such acts by the Austrian bailiff as that story turns upon, or of any strife whatever in 1308. A pact of confederation had actually been made seventeen years earlier than that date; and a new and rather more definite pact was made on the same general grounds in 1315; but the romance of 1308 remains entirely unattested, and it bears the plainest marks of myth.

The histories of J. von Mueller, Zschokke, Vieusseux, and others of the first half of the nineteenth century, are vitiated as regards the early period by acceptance of the traditions; though the untrustworthiness of the Tell story had been pointed out as early as the year 1600 by Franz Guillimann of Fribourg, and again in the eighteenth century by Iselin, and by Freudenberger in his Guillaume Tell: Fable danoise, 1760. (See Daendliker's Short History of Switzerland, Eng. tr. 1899, pp. 53, 54.) A full and decisive examination of it will be found in Rilliet's Les origines de la Confederation Suisse, 1868. Compare Dierauer, Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, 1887, Buch ii, Kap. i, Sec. iii; Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, ed. 1882, pp. 337-41, and the essay William Tell in Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 1888. Some very judicial attempts have been made to show that there is reason to think some fighting occurred in 1308. See, for instance, the pamphlets Le Gruetli and La querelle sur les traditions concernant l'origine de la Confederation Suisse, by Prof. H. Bordier, in reply to Prof. Rilliet, 1869. Dierauer, again, declines to go the whole way in negation, and stands for the view "not fable, but legend--on some basis of fact" (as cited, i, 150). But even M. Bordier reduces Tell to a mere "somebody"; and every student surrenders the apple story, which is at least as old as the twelfth-century Danish version of it in Saxo Grammaticus.

M. Rilliet holds that the Swiss reproduction was not a local survival of the Teutonic myth, but a deliberate adaptation made in Lucerne from the abridgment of Saxo Grammaticus produced by a German monk, Gheysmer, about 1430 (Les origines, pp. 214-16, 327, 328). At Lucerne there was a local school of poetry of the kind then common in Holland; and the old ballad, which closely follows Saxo's tale, and which is the probable basis of the story as given in the later chronicles, seems to have been composed by way of securing for the Canton of Uri the main honours of the founding of the Confederation, which were being claimed by the sister Cantons. Whatever be the basis, the Tell legend is finally untenable, and the tradition of an immemorial state of freedom in the Forest Cantons is abandoned even by the conservative critics. See Bordier, La querelle, p. 7. The only point on which a case against the criticism of M. Rilliet seems to be made out is as regards his view that the Forest Cantons were not colonised before the eighth century. As M. Bordier contends, the grant of Louis of Germany seems to describe a long-settled district. M. Rilliet also goes somewhat beyond the evidence in assuming that Uri was mainly colonised under royal influence, Unterwalden by lay and ecclesiastical proprietors, and Schwytz by freemen (Les origines, pp. 20, 21).

The rise of a durable federation in the central Swiss group is thus a product of three main factors; the first being their primary physical union through the Lake of Lucerne, their common highway. But for this they would probably have been as hostile as were Uri and Glarus, which had fought from time immemorial.[883] Next was needed the chronic hostile pressure of an outside force, creating a common political interest. The septs of pre-Norman Ireland and England, and of the Scottish Highlands down till modern times, remained at strife long after Christianisation, because within their own country they were so free to struggle, and because the examples of forcible centralisation elsewhere were so remote and so hard to assimilate. But when the Forest Cantons emerge as such in history in the thirteenth century they are already menaced by a power which, without undertaking or compassing the toil of conquering them, habitually drives them to formal combination by its interference. Its continued pressure evolves the definite political agreement of 1315, after the victory of Morgarten, in which was made clear the special difficulty of conquering a race of mountaineers with the normal cavalry forces and armour-clad or servile infantry of medieval feudalism[884]--a difficulty which must rank as the third factor in the beginnings of Swiss independence.

Thus far the half-feudal, half-commercial city of Lucerne, though in touch with the Forest Cantons through the uniting lake, was their enemy, as being feudatory of the Hapsburgs; but as the chronic state of war was ruinous to its trade with Italy, and peculiarly harassing to all industry, the commercial element forced a coalition, and in 1332 Lucerne joined the Confederation as Fourth Canton. Now emerges in the affairs of the Confederation the element of civic class strife, so familiar in the republics of Italy; for the accession of Lucerne is promptly followed in that city by a conspiracy of nobles, which is put down by the help of the allied Cantons; whereupon the nobles are exiled and a civic council set up, the Duke of Austria being unable to hinder. The same trouble arises in the case of Zurich, the next accession to the union. In the ordinary medieval course there had there arisen an oligarchic government of aristocratic citizens in place of the early dominion of the Abbess; and the city was made an imperial fief by Frederick II. On this basis it made commercial treaties in the manner then common among the cities of Germany, joining the Swabian, Rhenish, and South-German Leagues, and developing a large trade with Italy and Germany, and even a silk manufacture. At length the large craftsman class revolted (1336) under the leadership of a dissentient patrician, Brun or Braun, who established a constitution in which he as burgomaster held office for life, with a council of thirteen gildmasters and thirteen aristocrats, six of the latter being named by Brun. For the firm support of the gilds he duly paid them by laws checking foreign competition in manufactured goods, and denying even to the rural population the right to manufacture. The dispossessed oligarchs kept up a raiding strife on the frontiers, till at length some who were permitted to return formed a conspiracy against the burgomaster, which he suppressed with slaughter. This leading to a league against the city among the Hapsburgs and the surrounding nobles and the Cantons in treaty with them, Zurich petitioned to join the Forest Confederation, and was readily accepted (1351), finally triumphing by their help.

Zurich on its part enabled the Forest Cantons to protect themselves against Austria by conquering Glarus (1351), which offered little resistance, and was ranked as a protected territory under the Confederation. This now formed a compact territorial group save for the Canton of Zug, intervening between Lucerne and Zurich. As that could not defend itself against its neighbours, it joined their Confederation perforce (1352), being received as a full member. The same status was readily granted to the city of Berne, which, imperially enfranchised in 1218, had carried on a remarkable independent policy on Italian lines, acquiring territory from the decaying nobles around by mortgage, purchase, and conquest, till in 1339 they combined against her. Succour was then given by the Forest Cantons, securing for Berne the victory of Laupen; and when in 1352 they invited her to join their union, her rulers accepted. So tepid, however, was still the spirit of union that at the Peace of Brandenburg in 1352, confirmed by that of Regensburg in 1355, Glarus and Zug consented to withdraw, returning for a time to the Austrian allegiance;[885] and the confederation of the remaining six Cantons was still one of the loosest cohesion, differing only in the fact of its territorial continuity and its organic growth from the many city-unions which flourished in Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[886] Only the three original Cantons were pledged to make no separate treaties; Zurich was specifically permitted to do so; in 1352 Berne was in alliance with the towns of Fribourg and Soleure; in the next generation Lucerne made a compact with the towns of Sempach and Richensee; and in 1393 a burgomaster of Zurich carried through a treaty of alliance with the common enemy, the Duke of Austria.

In this case the mass of the citizens were induced to reverse the policy and banish those who had planned it; but the right of the city to make such an alliance was not technically challenged by the Confederation; and even in Schwytz a few loyalists paid old feudal dues to Austria up till 1394. A more serious ground of division was the jealousy duly arising between the rural and the city Cantons, from which came about the forcible intervention of Schwytz in a dispute between the town and country sections of Zug. The remaining Cantons insisted on subjecting the action of both Zug and Schwytz to the verdict of the union, thus effectually establishing a precedent of federal practice; but in the first decade of the fifteenth century the Cantons of Schwytz and Glarus are found on their own account helping the men of Appenzell to win their independence; and when the successful Appenzellers, who had developed a turn for aggression and confiscation, sought to join the union, they were accepted only as allies by the Cantons individually, Berne holding aloof. Yet again, when the house of Austria (which had abandoned its claims on the Cantons in 1412) was under the ban of the Empire in 1415, and the city Cantons led a movement of attack upon its territories, Uri and the Appenzellers took no part; while in 1422 Uri and Unterwalden acted alone in their unsuccessful war with the Duke of Milan.

Thus far the Confederation, in its different degrees of union, had included only German-speaking Cantons; but in 1420 the French-speaking Valais (Ger. Wallis, from the Latin Vallis Poenina? or foreigners), in 1424 Upper Rhaetia, and in the same year the Romance-speaking Engadin, also in Rhaetia, won their virtual independence. In all, three leagues were formed in Rhaetia, forming their own confederation, known as the Grisons (="the Greys," the Graubuenden or Grey Leagues, from the colour of the peasants' smocks).

As the sphere of self-government widened, new risks of strife arose. All the while the older Cantons, in particular the cities, had been acquiring lands in the feudal fashion; and in 1440 a general scramble for an inheritance in Rhaetia evolved first a war between Zurich on the one hand and Schwytz and Glarus on the other, and next a joint coercion of Zurich by all the other Cantons. This led to a fresh alliance between Zurich and Austria, and a new and exceptionally ferocious war, lasting for four years. Meantime Basle, assailed by the Armagnacs under the dauphin of France, was succoured by the union and received into alliance. Next came the Burgundian wars, whereafter, not without much friction and quarrelling over booty, Soleure (Solothurn) and Fribourg were taken into the union, and a new pact framed (1481), defining afresh the general law of the Confederation. Lastly, after the Swabian war, the last in which the Swiss had to defend themselves against German aggression, the cities of Basle and Schaffhausen, become self-governing, were received into the League; and in 1513 Appenzell followed. Thus was rounded the number of thirteen Cantons, which constituted the Swiss Confederation till the end of the eighteenth century. They were: Schwytz (which gradually gave its name to the whole people), Uri, Unterwalden, Zurich (the "Forest" group), Lucerne, Glarus, Zug, Berne, Fribourg, Soleure, Basle, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell. Aargau and Thurgau, conquered in the wars with Austria in 1415 and 1460, remained subject lands, the property of the allied Cantons; and the Valais and the Grisons remained outside the union as connections or Zugewandte, the League proper being restricted to German-speaking Cantons. It will be seen too that the territory of the Confederation remained a compact and connected mass; the Vaud, the Valais, Ticino, and the Grisons forming a long band of territory outside.

Sec. 2. The Socio-Political Evolution

The outstanding feature of the Swiss social evolution up to the end of the fifteenth century is the acquisition of municipal estates by the chief cities, after the manner of those of Italy. The lead given by Berne was zealously followed by Zurich[887] and Lucerne, till nearly all the old feudal lordships around them had fallen into their hands by purchase, mortgage, or conquest; and by 1477 the Hapsburgs had not a rood of land left in all Helvetia, even the family castle being lost. It was impossible that the revenues thus acquired by the cities should fail in that age to enrich the patrician or ruling class, no matter how revolutions might alter its membership. Herein lay one of the effective checks to the growth of the Confederation from 1513 onwards. The rural Cantons and the aristocratic governments of the cities were alike disinclined to enfranchise the rural populations they held in feudal subjection; and the status of the mass of the townspeople and subject peasantry, though probably better than in France and Germany, was that of men without political rights,[888] save those secured by feudal or civic custom.

Nor can it be said that in the pre-Reformation period the flourishing Swiss cities did much for culture; a main part of the explanation doubtless being (1) the chronic stress of war, which in such communities tended to be borne by all classes alike.[889] When the Italian cities had produced Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; when England had produced Chaucer; and France the Roman de la Rose, Villon, Joinville, Froissart, and Comines, Switzerland had a literature only of average German lyrics and a few average medieval chronicles. But the comparison will be quite misleading if it be not kept in mind (2) that the whole Swiss population up till 1500 never amounted to a million, and that the surplus males were being constantly drained off in the fifteenth century in military service outside of Switzerland. The conditions which made for military strength and independence were entirely unfavourable to culture. There remains, however, to be noted in the case of German Switzerland (3) the fundamental drawback of relative homogeneity of race. The one important aspect of "race" in sociology is as a statement of relative lack of intellectual variability; and this condition in modern Europe can be seen to exist only at certain periods, in the case of one or two peoples, chiefly the Germanic.

If the whole process of the renascence of civilisation be considered seriatim, it will be found that the growth took place primarily in virtue of degree of access to (a) the remains of Graeco-Roman culture and (b) to Saracen lore; and, secondarily, in virtue of degree of admixture of physical type in the different communities. Thus (1) the first great new-birth (before the age of the Renaissance so-called) took place in Italy, in a population already highly mixed at the end of the Roman period and repeatedly invaded thereafter by northern stocks, from Odoaker down to the Normans. The reviving Italian culture, being communicated northwards through the Church and otherwise, is next developed by (2) the highly-mixed population of France and (3) that of England after the Norman Conquest--the Welsh element being here prominent. At the same time the literary germination set up in (4) ancient Ireland, under stormy conditions, by the early missionaries of the Graeco-Roman Church, reaches after some centuries the Scandinavian peoples by way of the Hebrides and (5) Iceland, where, however, after a brilliant start, the evolution is arrested by the restrictive environment, the main body of Scandinavian life being too homogeneous (though constantly at strife) for any complex evolution. In the south, again, the populations of (6) Spain and Portugal, mixed to begin with in the Roman period and later crossed by Teutonic invasion, became specially capable of variation after the subdual of the Moors, whose reaction on their conquerors was extensive and important.

All this while the Teutonic stocks in their old homes are noticeably backward, save where, as in (7) the Netherlands, they are in constant contact with other peoples on land and by sea. Culture begins to be at once original and brilliant in the Netherlands only in the period after (a) special contact with Spain and (b) the large immigration of Protestant refugees from other countries. At first strongly influenced by classical scholarship, it is later affected by the influence of France and England. All the more strictly Teutonic cultures were either unprogressive or similarly vitalised from without; and Germany, after the Thirty Years' War, begins almost afresh with an academic literature in Latin, to be followed by new native developments only on French and English stimuli.[890] But it is specially significant that (8) the German renascence of the eighteenth century takes place after (a) the large influx of French Protestant refugees at the end of the seventeenth, and after (b) a fresh influx of French taste, French teachers, and French literature under Frederick the Great, in whose armies, it should be remembered, there fought no fewer than nine generals of French Protestant descent, as well as others of alien heredity.

The case of Switzerland is thus on this side tolerably clear. Swiss intellectual life, long primitively Teutonic, begins to become notable only at the period of the Reformation, when for the merely diplomatic and military and commercial contacts of the past there is substituted a fresh differentiation and interaction from Italian, French, and German Protestantism--a new intellectual impulse--and from the influx of refugees, as in Holland. And the French-speaking city of Geneva, not yet a member of the Confederation, at once takes the lead. The Teutonic population, from the fifteenth century onwards, had in large numbers sought subsistence in mercenary soldiership. It was the medieval analogue to the emigration of to-day, the opening even serving to curtail the agricultural and pastoral life;[891] but the result, by the common consent of historians,[892] was disastrous to the higher life at home, the returning mercenaries being in many cases spoilt for steady industry, rural or civic. Their military success and prestige in fact tended to demoralise the Swiss as the success of Hellas against Persia tended to demoralise Athens, making them, in the words of Aristotle, unfitted to rest. Dwelling on past patriotic glories is never the way to discipline the mental life; and the Swiss militia of the end of the fifteenth century, wont to sell their services as fighters to French and Italians, often thus opposing each other, and otherwise wont to interpose arrogantly in other people's concerns,[893] were not on the line of social or intellectual progress. Pensions to leading men from the French and Italian courts wrought a further and even more sinister corruption. But after their defeat by Francis I in 1516 at the desperate battle of Marignano, becoming allies of France, the Swiss ceased to play the part of holders of the balances between contending neighbours; and after their heavy share in the loss of Francis at the battle of Pavia they grew for a time loth even to play the part of auxiliaries on a national footing, though individual enlistment continued. It is at this stage that the Reformation supervenes, creating a new source of strife between Canton and Canton, and so paralysing the Confederation for centuries.

Nowhere is the study of the process of the Reformation more instructive, more subversive of the conventional Protestant view, than in the case of Switzerland. In the first place, it is not the old Forest Cantons, with their ingrained independence and "Teutonic conscience," that do the work. They remained obstinately Catholic. Swiss Protestantism, under the independent lead of Zwingli, began indeed in Glarus and Schwytz, but became an effective movement only in the city of Zurich, and it is notable that in the primitive and poor Canton of Uri[894] there was as little buying of indulgences as there was heresy. The two phenomena went together in the richer Cantons, where the common desire to buy pardons evoked the protest against them. Indeed, the special traffic in indulgences in Germany and Switzerland, and the special laxity of life of their priesthoods, were concomitants of the special grossness of German life;[895] for in no other country did the Reformation proceed nakedly on the basis of protest against indulgence-selling. There the pardoners shamefully overrode all the official and accepted teaching of the Church as to indulgences; and the protests of Luther and Zwingli were properly demands for a reform on strictly orthodox grounds, as against an abuse which was locally excessive. But it lay in the economic and political conditions that when a movement of protest began it should succeed in view rather of the economic and social impulses to break with Rome than of the spontaneous desire for reform. In Germany in particular the movement among the upper and educated classes was nakedly financial as regarded the nobles, and to a large extent the reverse of ascetic among the scholars, many of whom, however, were much more spontaneously alive to the doctrinal crudities of the orthodox system than was Luther himself. It was the facile combination, on socio-political grounds, of the five forces of (1) moral indignation among the more conscientious leaders, (2) gain-seeking on the part of nobles and ruling burghers, (3) racial aversion to Italian priests and Italian revenue-drawing among the people in general, (4) critical revolt against primitive superstitions among the more learned, and (5) anti-clerical freethinking and licence among many who had served in the Italian wars,[896] that made the revolt proceed so rapidly in Germany and Switzerland. If the mass of the people, in all save the most primitive Swiss Cantons, were grossly eager to buy the indulgences so grossly offered by Samson and Tetzel, the people clearly were not zealous reformers to start with. Of those who most resented the traffic, many remained steady Catholics.

When, however, it became known that Samson carried away with him from Switzerland to Italy 800,000 crowns, besides other bullion and jewels, even the buyers of indulgences could share the general inclination to stop the enrichment of Italy at Swiss expense. The intellectual revolt of the educated supplied the basis of the revolution in church management; but without the accruing financial gains the former could have availed little; and while there was the usual violence on the part of the mob, the city authorities were judicious in their procedure. To the clergy they offered on the one hand freedom to marry, and on the other hand a provision for life. Thus in Zurich, under the skilful guidance of Zwingli, the whole chapter of twenty-four canons gave up their rights and property to the State, becoming preachers, teachers, or professors with life-allowances: a plan generally followed elsewhere, save where the parties fell to blows.[897] In Zurich the further steps were: 1523, ecclesiastical marriages; 1524, pictures abolished and monasteries dissolved; 1525, mass discontinued.

In French-speaking Geneva, destined to become the leading Swiss city, the process was more stormy. Having grown to importance under its bishops, it had been made an imperial city in 1420, thereby finding a foothold in its resistance to the constant claims of the House of Savoy, which in 1519 forced it into a defensive alliance with Fribourg. There were now two Genevan parties, the Savoyards and the republicans, which latter, imitating Swiss usage, called themselves Eidgenossen, whence the French corruption Huguenots, ultimately applied to the Calvinistic Protestants of France. Out of the faction strife came the religious, under the fanning of Farel; and in this case the anti-democratic leaning of the Savoyards kept the rich pro-Catholic, while the common people declared for Protestantism. In the end the latter took violent possession of the churches, destroying the altars and images, whereupon most of the Catholics fled, the city retaining the clerical lands; and there immigrated many French, Italian, and Savoyard Protestants. To the community thus made for him came Calvin in 1537.

Meanwhile, Berne, conquering the Pays de Vaud from the Duke of Savoy, made it Protestant. Elsewhere, some communes and districts passed and repassed between Catholicism and Protestantism as neighbouring influences prevailed; in some districts the peasants, hoping for release from tithes and taxes, welcomed the revolution, but renounced it when they found it made no difference to their lot.[898] The magistrates of Berne were prompt to make it clear that their Protestantism made no difference as to their tithe-drawing from their rural subjects.[899] When the period of transformation was over--with its bitter wars, which cost the life of Zwingli, its manifold exasperations, its Anabaptist convulsions, its forlorn and foredoomed peasant risings, its severance of old ties, and its profound impairment of the half-grown spirit of confederation--it was found that the old Cantons of Lucerne, Uri, Unterwalden, Schwytz, and Zug stood fast for Catholicism; that Soleure, after being for a time predominantly Protestant, had joined them, with Fribourg, making seven Catholic States; that the city Cantons of Berne, Zurich, Basle, and Schaffhausen were Protestant, as were Geneva and the Vaud, not yet in the union; and that Glarus and Appenzell were mixed. The achievement of the landamman OEbly of Glarus, in securing a peaceful and lasting compromise in his own Canton--the two bodies in some parishes actually agreeing to use the same church--was beyond the moral capacity of the mass of the Swiss people, for Appenzell bitterly divided into two parts, on religious lines. Each of the other Cantons imposed its ruling men's creed on its subjects. They were still as far from toleration in religion as from real democracy in politics.

While Protestantism, by dividing the realm of religion, doubtless wrought indirectly and ultimately for the intellectual freedom of Europe, it is clear that it had no such result for many generations in Switzerland. Calvin's rule in Geneva, while associated with a new activity in printing, chiefly of theological works,[900] became a byword for moral tyranny and cruelty. To say nothing of the executions of Servetus and Gruet for heresy, and the expulsions of other men, the records show that in that small population there were between 800 and 900 persons imprisoned between the years 1542 and 1546, and 58 put to death; no fewer than 34 being beheaded, hanged, or burned on charges of sedition in three months of 1545. Torture was freely applied, and any personal criticism of Calvin was more or less fiercely punished.[901] The conditions were much the same in Zurich and Berne, where a press censorship was set up (in Zurich as early as 1523), and zealously maintained for centuries. It prohibited, under heavy penalties, the sale of the works of Descartes, and in both places Cartesians were prosecuted;[902] while in Protestant Switzerland generally the Copernican theory was denounced as heresy, and the reformed Calendar, as a work of the Pope, was furiously rejected. So high did passion run that in Berne and Zurich any who married Catholics were severely punished.[903] The Zurich criminal calendar of the sixteenth century gives a sample of the Protestant city life of the period. There were 572 executions in all, 347 persons being beheaded, 61 burned, 55 hanged, 53 drowned. Only 33 were cases of murder; 2 were executed for abuse of Zwingli, who thus appears to have given a lead to Calvin; 73 for blasphemy, 56 for bestiality, and 338 for theft[904]--a clear economic clue.

Broadly speaking, the settled Protestant period was one of relapse alike from freedom and from union. Class division deepened and worsened throughout the seventeenth century;[905] the people of the subject lands were less than ever recognised as having rights,[906] Puritanism taking to oppression as spontaneously in Switzerland as in England; the stimulus given to culture and art in the controversial period died away, leaving retrogression;[907] and in the personal and the intellectual life alike clerical tyranny was universal.[908] The municipalities became more and more close corporations, as the gilds had become long before;[909] and at Berne in 1640 the city treasurer was put to death for exposing abuses.[910] After the Peasants' War of 1653 the aristocratic development was still further strengthened, till in Berne, Soleure, and Fribourg--Catholic and Protestant cities alike--the roll of burghers was closed (1680-90), Soleure stipulating that it should remain so till the number of reigning families was reduced to twenty-five.[911] The practice of taking pensions from France revived, for the old service of supplying mercenary troops; so that "the Swiss were never more shamelessly sold to the highest bidder" than in the seventeenth century.[912] As of old, the municipalities amassed and invested capital, Catholic Soleure lending great sums to France, while the still wealthier city of Berne lent money in all directions;[913] but though they raised handsome public buildings, it was the small ruling class and not the workers that were enriched. In the rural Cantons even the small economic advance made at the outset of the Reformation was lost.[914] It seems difficult to dispute that as a force for social progress the Reformation was naught.

One factor there was to its credit: the establishment of secondary schools, which had not previously existed in Switzerland, and the provision of better common schools;[915] and though the ecclesiastical and religious forces, as in Scotland, prevented the common schools being turned to any higher account at home than that of qualifying to read and write and learn catechisms, even that small tuition gave the Swiss some advantages in the neighbouring countries. All the while the higher political evolution went backwards. In 1586 the Catholic Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zug, Fribourg, and Soleure ejected from the League the Protestant State of Muelhausen; and, ignoring the laws of the Confederation, proceeded to make a separate offensive and defensive alliance among themselves, and with Spain and the Pope. As late as 1656 war broke out between Berne and Schwytz, Lucerne intervening, over a dispute about Protestant refugees; whereafter the principle of cantonal sovereignty reigned supreme for a hundred and forty years. It would seem difficult to maintain, in the face of all the facts, that Protestantism had made for peace, freedom, or civilisation.

On the other hand, the distribution of Protestantism in the Swiss Cantons disposes once for all of the theory that the "Teutonic conscience" or anything else of an ethnic order was the determining force at the Reformation. A rough conspectus of the language and religion of the Cantons as at the year 1900 will present the proof to the contrary:--

-------------------+----------------------------+------------------------ NAME. | LANGUAGE. | RELIGION. -------------------+----------------------------+------------------------ Berne |Five-sixths German-speaking |Seven-eighths Protestant Zurich |Nearly all German | " " Lucerne | " " " |Nearly all Catholic Vaud |Mostly French dialects |Nine-tenths Protestant Aargau |Mostly German |Four C. to five P. St. Gall | " " |Three-fifths Catholic Ticino |Italian dialects |Nearly all Catholic Fribourg |Half French, half German |Four-fifths Catholic Grisons |Half Romansch, three-eighths|Five-ninths Protestant | German, one-eighth Italian| Valais |(?) Half German, half French|Nearly all Catholic Thurgau |Nearly all German |Two-sevenths Catholic Basle | " " " |One-third Catholic Soleure |Nearly all German |Three-fourths Catholic Geneva |Predominantly French |Half-and-half Neuchatel | " " |Seven-eighths Protestant Schaffhausen | " German | " " Appenzell (Rh. Ext)| " " |Nine-tenths Protestant " (Rh. Int)| " " |Nearly all Catholic Glarus |Nearly all German |One-fourth Catholic Zug | " " " |Nearly all Catholic Schwytz | " " " | " " " Unterwalden | " " " | " " " Uri | " " " | " " " -------------------+----------------------------+------------------------

Here we have nearly every species of variation in terms of speech and creed. The one generalisation which appears to hold good to any extent in the matter is that Catholicism usually goes with an agricultural economy and Protestantism with manufactures; but here, too, there are exceptions, as Vaud, which, though Protestant, is predominantly agricultural or vine-rearing; Glarus, which is mainly pastoral and Protestant; the Grisons, agricultural and more than half Protestant; and Geneva, where there is a large minority of Catholics in industrial conditions. On the whole, we are warranted in assuming that in Switzerland, as in most other countries, the town workers were the readiest to innovate in religion; while race, so far as inferrible from language, had nothing to do with the choice made. What differences of life accrue to the creeds, as we shall see, depend on their one important social divergence, that of bias for and against illiteracy.

Sec. 3. The Modern Renaissance

In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the Swiss Confederation figured as "a weather-beaten ruin, ready to fall."[916] It would be hard to point out, in the domestic conditions, any that made for beneficent change, and there were many that rigidly precluded it; but some elements of variability there were, and from other countries there came the principle of fertilisation. Theological hatreds and disputations had in a manner destroyed their own standing-ground by the very stress of their barren activity; and even while press laws were banning new works of thought and science, the better minds were secretly yearning towards them. In cities like Geneva and Basle (the latter then the seat of the only Swiss university), reason must to some extent have played beneath the surface while all its open manifestations were struck at. At Basle, in the old days, Erasmus spent the main part of his life; and he must have had some congenial intercourse. But it is on the side of the physical sciences that new intellectual life is first seen to germinate in post-Reformation Switzerland. There, as elsewhere, inquiring men felt that nature was kindlier to question than the self-appointed oracles of Deity, and that the unending search for real knowledge brought more peace than ever came of the insistence that the ultimate truth was known. Refugee immigrants, chiefly French, seem to have begun the ferment; and it is at the hands of their descendants that Swiss science has grown.[917] Having reason to avoid alike politics and theology in their new home, and living in many cases on incomes from investments, they turned to the sciences as occupation and solace.

With this inner movement concurred the new influences from French and English science and literature, and from the reviving culture of Germany.[918] With the rest of Europe, too, Switzerland turned in an increasing degree to industry, and in the latter half of the eighteenth century had developed many new trades, involving considerable use of machinery.[919] Agriculture, too, improved,[920] and mercenary soldiering began to fall into disrepute[921] under the influence of the new pacific thought. Still the rural economic conditions were bad, and the country seemed to grow poorer while the towns grew richer.[922] The population, in fact, constantly tended to exceed the not easily widened limits of rural subsistence; and in place of foreign soldiering, the old remedy, there began a peaceful industrial emigration into the neighbouring countries, Swiss beginning to figure there in increasing numbers as waiters and servants.[923] All the while the tyranny of the city aristocracies was unmitigated, and the subject lands were steadily ill-treated.[924] In Berne, in 1776, only eighteen families were represented in the Council of Two Hundred; and there and in Zurich and Lucerne the civic regulations were as flagrantly partial to the ruling class as in France itself.[925] The new industrial conditions, however, were gradually preparing a political change; and the intellectual climate steadily altered. Voltaire tells in many amusing letters of the spread of Socinian heresy in the city of Calvin. In Geneva arose the abnormal figure of Jean Jacques Rousseau, descendant of a French refugee immigrant of Calvin's day; and though his city in 1762 formally burned his epoch-marking book on the Contrat Social, a popular reaction followed six years later. Democratic disturbances had repeatedly occurred before; but this time there was a growing force at work. An insurrection in 1770 was suppressed; another, in 1782, though at first successful, ended in the overthrow of the popular party by means of troops from France, Berne, and Zurich; but in the fateful year of 1789 yet another broke out, and this time the tide turned.

With the interference of the French Republic in Switzerland in 1797 on behalf of the Pays de Vaud, then subject to Berne, began the long convulsion which broke up the old Confederation and framed a new. In 1798 began the wildly premature attempt of the more visionary republicans to create a unitary republic out of Cantons which had retrograded even from the measure of union attained before the Reformation. It could not succeed; and the rapine inseparable from the French revolutionary methods could not but arouse an intense resistance, paralysing the aims of the progressive party. Out of years of miserable ferocious warfare, ended by Napoleon's withdrawal of the French troops in 1801, came the new Confederation of 1803, which, however, it needed the friendly but authoritative mediation of the First Consul to get the conservative Cantons to accept. For once the despot had secured, in a really disinterested fashion,[926] what the Revolution ought to have brought about. The old aristocratic tyrannies were subverted; the subject lands were freed; to the thirteen Cantons of the old union were added Aargau, Thurgau, St. Gall, Vaud, and Ticino; through all was set up a representative system, modified in the towns by a measure of the old aristocratic element; and the whole possessed what Switzerland never had before, and could hardly otherwise have attained--a central parliamentary system. In 1814 Berne would fain have resumed its tyranny over the Vaud and Aargau, a step which would have initiated a general return to the old regime. The Allies, however, brought about the completion of the Confederation on the new principles; and by the addition to its roll of Geneva, Neuchatel, and the Valais, and the cession to Berne of the Basle territory formerly annexed by France, created a compact and complete Switzerland, bounded in natural fashion by the Alps, the Jura, and the Rhine. And at this period, after so many vicissitudes, the culture life of Switzerland is found fully abreast of that of Europe in general. Sismondi, standing apart from France and Italy, and writing impartially the history of both, is the greatest historian of his day.

The later history of the Confederation, however, is one of the great illustrations of the perpetual possibility of strife and sunderance in communities. Sismondi lived to ban the democracy which would not be content to be ruled by the middle class. At 1820 the old spirit of class subsisted under the new institutions; the press was nearly everywhere under strict censorship; and the ideals which ruled elsewhere on the Continent seemed even more potent in Switzerland than elsewhere. There, as elsewhere, the system inevitably bred discontent; and in 1830, on the revolutionary initiative of Ticino, the most corruptly governed of all the Cantons, there ensued almost bloodless revolutions in the local governments, Radicals taking the place of Conservatives, and proceeding to reform alike administration and education. Then came the due reaction, the Catholic Cantons forming the League of Sarnen, while the extremists again pressed the ideal of a military State. Though morally strong enough to enforce peace in more than one embroilment of Cantons and parties, the Federal Diet was dangerously weak in the face of the new forces of religio-political reaction typified by the activity of the Jesuits, as well as the old trouble of cantonal selfishness, which affected even the tolls.[927] The resistance to Radicalism became a movement of clerical fanaticism, led by the cry of "religion in danger"; Catholics using it to foment local insurrections; Protestants, ecclesiastically led, using it to make a municipal revolution by violence at Zurich on the occasion of the proposal to give Strauss a university chair in 1839.[928] But the Jesuits--expelled from nearly every Catholic State in the eighteenth century, yet latterly cherished by the Swiss Catholics for their anti-Protestant services--were the chief mischief-makers; and at length the violences promoted from the headquarters at Lucerne led to Protestant reprisals which took the shape of a beginning of civil war. The collapse, however, of the Catholic "Sonderbund" or Secession-League in 1847, before the resolute military action of the Diet, marked the turning-point in modern Swiss politics. In 1848 was framed a new constitution, wholly Swiss-made, creating an effective Federal government, on a new basis of a Parliament of two Chambers. Now were definitely nationalised the systems of coinage, weights and measures, posts and telegraphs; and the Customs system was made one of complete internal free trade.

On this footing followed "long years of happiness, and a prosperity without precedent."[929] Yet even this constitution has had to be revised, to the end of guarding afresh against religious strifes and conflict of cantonal jurisdictions. In 1872 the centralising reformers carried in the Chambers a revision of the constitution; but under the referendum (a specialty of Swiss democracy, instituted in or after 1831 by the Catholic Conservative party in St. Gall, the Valais and Lucerne) it was rejected by a popular vote of 261,072 citizens to 255,609, and of thirteen cantons to nine. With a few modifications, however, it was carried in 1874 by a vote of 340,199 to 198,013, and of 14-1/2 Cantons to 7-1/2. The whole process is a great lesson as to the superiority of the methods of peace and persuasion to those of revolution and force. The referendum itself, first set up locally with the most reactionary intentions,[930] has come to be valued--whether wisely or unwisely--by Radicals and Conservatives alike; and while it seems to offer a possibility of appeals to demotic ignorance and passion[931] while these subsist, and to be unnecessary where they do not, it is at least a guarantee of the decisiveness of any great constitutional step taken under it. Historically speaking, the consummation thus far is a great democratic achievement, and the whole drift of Federal legislation is towards an increased stability of union. On the other hand, despite a characteristic menace from Bismarck,[932] the international position of Switzerland appears to be as safe as that of any other European State, great or small. Any attempt on its independence by any one Power would infallibly be resisted by others.

As regards the true political problems, those of domestic life, the Swiss case presents the usual elements. From dangerous religious strife (the Jesuits being excluded) it seems likely to be preserved in future by the rationalising force of the Socialist movement; but that movement in turn tells of the social problem. A country of not readily extensible resources, Switzerland exhibits nearly as clearly as does Holland the dangers of over-population. The old resource of foreign enlistment being done with,[933] surplus population forces a continual emigration, largely from the rural districts, where the lands are for the most part heavily mortgaged.[934] The active industrialism of the towns--with their large manufacture of clocks and watches, cottons and silks--involves a large importation of foreign food, with which native agriculture cannot advantageously compete. Thus, as in the eighteenth century, the pinch falls on the country, while the towns are in comparison thriving. The relatively high death-rate of recent years raises an old issue. Malthus has told[935] how in the eighteenth century a panic arose concerning the prudential habits of the population in the way of late marriages and small families, and how thereafter encouragements to early marriage had led to much worsening of the lot of many of the people. With a small birth-rate there had been a small death-rate; whereas the rising birth-rate went with rising misery.[936] Perhaps through the influence of his treatise, the movement of demand for increase of population seems to have died out, and the practice of prudence to have regained economic credit. It would appear, however, that within the past half-century the conditions as to population have again somewhat worsened. At 1850, when nearly half of all the men married per year in England were under twenty years of age, the normal marrying age in the Vaud was thirty or thirty-one; and there had existed in a number of the old Catholic Cantons laws inflicting heavy fines on young people who married without proving their ability to support a family.[937] The modern tendency is to abandon such paternal modes of interference; and it does not appear that personal prudence thus far replaces them, though on the other hand there was in the first half of last century a marked recognition by Swiss publicists of the sociological law of the matter.

Thus M. Edward Mallet of Geneva pointed out before 1850 that the chances of life had steadily gone on increasing with the lessening of the birth-rate for centuries back.[938] His tables run:--

----------------------------+--------+---------+------- LIFE CHANCES. | YEARS. | MONTHS. | DAYS. ----------------------------+--------+---------+------- | | | Towards end of 16th century | 8 | 7 | 26 In 17th century | 13 | 3 | 16 In the years 1701-1750 | 27 | 9 | 13 " " 1751-1800 | 31 | 3 | 5 " " 1801-1813 | 40 | 8 | 0 " " 1814-1833 | 45 | 0 | 29 ----------------------------+--------+---------+-------

The statistician's summary of the case is worth citing:--

"As prosperity advanced, marriages became fewer and later; the proportion of births was reduced, but greater numbers of the infants born were preserved. In the early and barbarous periods the excessive mortality was accompanied by a prodigious fecundity. In the last few years of the seventeenth century a marriage still produced five children and more; the probable duration of life was not twenty years, and Geneva had scarcely 17,000 inhabitants. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were scarcely three children to a marriage; and the probability of life exceeded thirty-two years. At the present time a marriage produces only two and three-quarter children; the probability of life is forty-five years; and Geneva, which exceeds 27,000 in population, has arrived at a high degree of civilisation and material prosperity. In 1836 the population appeared to have attained its summit: the births barely replaced the deaths."

But in 1910 the population of Geneva (Canton) was 154,159;[939] and the figures of Swiss emigration--averaging about 5,000 per annum--tell their own tale. Increasing industrialism, as usual, has meant conjugal improvidence. Once more the trouble is not smallness of population, but undue increase.

As Protestantism appears to increase slightly more than Catholicism, no blame can in this case be laid on the Catholic Church. But in Switzerland, as elsewhere, Catholicism tends to illiteracy. In the Protestant cantons the proportion of school-attending children is as one to five; in the half-and-half Cantons it is as one to seven; and in the Catholic it is as one to nine. This, and no tendency of race or direct tendency of creed, is the explanation of the relative superiority of Protestant to Catholic Cantons in point of comfort and freedom from mendicancy; for the Cantons remarked by travellers for their prosperity are indifferently French-and German-speaking, while the less prosperous are either German or mixed.[940] The fact that the three oldest Forest Cantons are among the more backward is a reminder that past-worship, there at its height, is always a snare to civilisation. Describing these cantons over half-a-century ago, Grote spoke severely of "their dull and stationary intelligence, their bigotry, and their pride in bygone power and exploits."[941] The reproach is in some measure applicable to other parts of Switzerland, as to other nations in general; and it must cease to be deserved before the Republic, cultured and well administered as it is, can realise republican ideals. But the existing Federation of the Helvetic Cantons, locally patriotic and self-seeking as they still are, is a hopeful spectacle--for this among other reasons, that it is a perpetual reminder of the possibility of federations of States, even at a stage of civilisation far short of any Utopia of altruism.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 871: "To one whose studies lie in the contemplation of historical phenomena [the Swiss Cantons] comprise between the Rhine and the Alps a miniature of all Europe.... To myself in particular they present an additional ... interest from a certain political analogy (nowhere else to be found in Europe) with ... the ancient Greeks" (Grote, Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland [1847], ed. 1876, pref.).]

[Footnote 872: "What the Cantons mostly stand chargeable with, is the feeling of cantonal selfishness" (Grote, as cited, p. 20). Compare, in the work of Sir F.O. Adams and C.D. Cunningham on The Swiss Confederation (ed. francaise par Loumyer, 1890, p. 29), the account of how, after the most fraternal meetings in common of the citizens of the different Cantons, "each confederate, on returning home, begins to yield to his old jealousy, and thinks of hardly anything but the particular interests of his Canton."]

[Footnote 873: Vieusseux, History of Switzerland, 1840, p. 39.]

[Footnote 874: Rilliet, Les origines de la Confederation Suisse, 1868, pp. 26-28; Dierauer, Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, 1887, i, 84.]

[Footnote 875: Rilliet, pp. 21, 27, 28.]

[Footnote 876: J. von Mueller, Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, ed. 1824, i, 287.]

[Footnote 877: Mueller, i, 288; Rilliet, pp. 39-42. The men of Schwytz were associated as concurrers with the powerful Counts of Lenzburg in disputes with the monastery.]

[Footnote 878: It seems just possible that a confederation of tribes existed in the Alps at the beginning of the fifth century--on the theory, that is, that the Bagaudae of that period were so called from a Celtic word Bagard, meaning a cluster. See the editorial note in Bohn ed. of Gibbon, iii, 379.]

[Footnote 879: Rilliet, pp. 88 ff.; Dierauer, i, 78.]

[Footnote 880: Having sworn an oath to stand by each other, they called themselves Eidgenossen=Oathfellows, Confederates. The old spellings, Eitgnozzen and Eidgnosschaft (Dierauer, i, 265, n.; Daendliker, Geschichte der Schweiz, i, 636--in the old Tell song), show how easily could arise the later French form "Huguenots."]

[Footnote 881: Dierauer, pp. 85, 90; Rilliet, pp. 50, 67, 68.]

[Footnote 882: Cp. Rilliet, p. 53.]

[Footnote 883: Rilliet, Origines, p. 33.]

[Footnote 884: At Morgarten the infantry of the Austrian force was in large part furnished by the other Germanic towns and Cantons of Zurich, Winterthur, Zug, Lucerne, Sempach, and Aargau. When the cavalry were discomfited, the foot would not be very energetic.]

[Footnote 885: This fact, as well as the unequal status of Glarus, was till recently slurred over in the patriotic tradition. See, for instance, the account of Vieusseux, History of Switzerland, pp. 58-60. Cp. the results of exact research in Dierauer, i, 217; Daendliker, Geschichte der Schweiz, 1884, i, 480, and Short History, Eng. tr. pp. 62, 63, 68, 69. Zug returned to the Confederation in 1368; Glarus, as a connection only, in 1387, and as a full member in 1394.]

[Footnote 886: Cp. Dierauer, i, 265, and Freeman, History of Federal Government, ed. 1893, pp. 5, 6.]

[Footnote 887: Zurich alone is said to have spent two million francs in buying land between 1358 and 1408.]

[Footnote 888: Cp. Zschokke, Des Schweizerlands Geschichte, Kap. 30, 9te Aufl., p. 147.]

[Footnote 889: Prof. Daendliker, in his Short History (Eng. tr. p. 41), has the odd expression that "in those times of the surging of party strife the towns formed a quiet refuge for the cultivation of the intellectual life." The whole of his own history goes to show that no such quiet cultivation took place, or could take place.]

[Footnote 890: Cp. the author's Buckle and his Critics, pp. 160-74.]

[Footnote 891: Zschokke, Des Schweizerlands Geschichte, 9te Aufl. 1853, p. 149.]

[Footnote 892: Cp. Daendliker, ii, 620, 722; Short History, pp. 124, 125, 131; Dierauer, ii, 473; Vieusseux, pp. 119, 124, 211; Zschokke, as above cited.]

[Footnote 893: Cp. Freeman, History of Federal Government, 2nd ed. pp. 272, 273.]

[Footnote 894: Vieusseux, p. 193.]

[Footnote 895: Cp. Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, Kap. 417; Daendliker, Geschichte der Schweiz, ii, 623-26; Zschokke, Des Schweizerlands Geschichte, Kap. 30, p. 148; Vieusseux, p. 118.]

[Footnote 896: On this see Vieusseux, p. 130.]

[Footnote 897: Vieusseux, pp. 128-32, 142.]

[Footnote 898: Zschokke, Kap. 32.]

[Footnote 899: Vieusseux, p. 140. Zurich, however, on Zwingli's urging, restricted villenage and lessened tithes (Daendliker, Short History, p. 135).]

[Footnote 900: The number printed rose speedily to thirty-eight in a year, then again to sixty. Two thousand men were employed in the printing industry (Daendliker, ii, 560).]

[Footnote 901: Daendliker, ii, 558, 559; Short History, p. 157.]

[Footnote 902: Daendliker, Geschichte, ii, 743.]

[Footnote 903: Id. Short History, p. 192.]

[Footnote 904: Id. Geschichte, ii, 626.]

[Footnote 905: Id. ib. ii, 722.]

[Footnote 906: Id. ib. ii, 609-12; Short History, pp. 172, 203.]

[Footnote 907: Id. Geschichte, ii, 731, 742-45.]

[Footnote 908: Id. ib. ii, 556 ff., 622 ff., 728, 729.]

[Footnote 909: Id. ib. i, 569-71. Only masters were admitted to membership.]

[Footnote 910: Id. Short History, pp. 169, 170, 179.]

[Footnote 911: Id. ib. p. 179.]

[Footnote 912: Id. ib. p. 192 The abuse was at its height in the Catholic Cantons, but the Protestant participated, even soon after the Reformation (id. p. 157; Geschichte, ii, 626).]

[Footnote 913: Id. Short History, p. 182.]

[Footnote 914: Id. Geschichte, i, 572; ii, 722; Short History, p. 169.]

[Footnote 915: Zschokke, as cited, p. 148; Daendliker, Short History, p. 153.]

[Footnote 916: Daendliker, Short History, p. 193.]

[Footnote 917: See the extremely interesting investigation of M. de Candolle in his Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siecles, 1873, p. 131 ff. Cp. Ph. Godet, Histoire litteraire de la Suisse francaise, 1890, p. 170, as to the general influence.]

[Footnote 918: Cp. Daendliker, Geschichte, iii, 43-103; Short History, pp. 194-99.]

[Footnote 919: Id. Geschichte, iii, 174-78.]

[Footnote 920: Id. ib. iii, 170-74. England is found learning from Switzerland on this side. In the volume of translations entitled Foreign Essays on Agriculture and the Arts, published in 1766, the majority of the papers are by Swiss writers. Hume ("Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," Essays, ed. 1825, i, 410) writes that in Switzerland in his day "we find at once the most skilful husbandmen and the most bungling tradesmen that are to be met with in Europe."]

[Footnote 921: Daendliker, Short History, p. 199. Under Louis XIV there had been 28,000 Swiss troops in the French service. In 1790 there were only 15,000. But there were six Swiss regiments in the Dutch army, four at Naples, and four in Spain (Vieusseux, p. 210).]

[Footnote 922: Daendliker, Geschichte, iii, 183,184.]

[Footnote 923: Id. ib. iii, 184.]

[Footnote 924: Id. Short History, p. 203.]

[Footnote 925: Daendliker, Short History, p. 204. In 1798 the French found in the Bernese treasury thirty millions of francs in gold and silver.]

[Footnote 926: Napoleon's sayings on Swiss politics, declaring in favour of cantonal home rule and federation, are among his most statesmanlike utterances; see them in Vieusseux, pp. 250-53. The originals are given in Thibaudeau's Memoires sur le Consulat, 1827.]

[Footnote 927: Cp. Grote's Seven Letters, 2nd ed. p. 21.]

[Footnote 928: See Grote's account, pp. 34, 35.]

[Footnote 929: Adams and Cunningham, La Confederation Suisse, ed. Loumyer, 1890, p. 23.]

[Footnote 930: Thus the Catholic clergy between 1840 and 1850 used it to reject measures of educational reform (Grote, p. 66; cp. p. 38). Adams and Cunningham do not appear to recognise this conservative origin, pointing rather (p. 87) to the fact that the Conservatives at first opposed the application of the referendum to Federal affairs, and attributing the first conception (p. 88) to the Radicals. There appears to be a conflict of evidence. In any case the system is now accepted all round.]

[Footnote 931: See the opinion of M. Droz concerning the drawbacks of the facultative referendum--that is, the permissible demand for it by 30,000 votes in cases where it is not obligatory as affecting the constitution--as cited by Adams and Cunningham, ed. Loumyer, p. 80.]

[Footnote 932: See M. Loumyer's note to his translation of Adams and Cunningham's work, p. 269.]

[Footnote 933: In 1830 there were still Swiss regiments in the French service, and a Swiss legion was enrolled by England for the Crimean War. This seems to be the last instance of the old practice.]

[Footnote 934: Adams and Cunningham, as cited, p. 303.]

[Footnote 935: Essay, bk. ii, ch. v.]

[Footnote 936: Id. 7th ed. pp. 173-75.]

[Footnote 937: Kay, The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe, 1850, i, 67, 68, 74, 76. Kay unfortunately does not go into history, and we are left to conjecture as to the course of opinion between the issue of Malthus's Essay and 1850.]

[Footnote 938: See Kay, as cited. Compare the earlier calculations to similar effect cited by Malthus.]

[Footnote 939: An increase of nearly 63,000 in eleven years.]

[Footnote 940: Cp. Kay, as cited, i, 9-11.]

[Footnote 941: Seven Letters, p. 31.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. PORTUGAL

Sec. 1. The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire

For European history Portugal is signalised in two aspects: first, as a "made" kingdom, set up by the generating of local patriotism in a medieval population not hereditarily different from that of the rest of the Peninsula; secondly, as a small State which attained and for a time wielded "empire" on a great scale. The beginnings of the local patriotism are not confidently to be gathered from the old chronicles,[942] which reduce the process for the most part to the calculated action of the Queen Theresa (fl. 1114-28), certainly one of the most interesting female figures in history. But the main process of growth is simple enough. A series of warrior kings made good their position on the one hand against Spain, and on the other conquered what is now the southern part of Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) from the Moors. Only in a limited degree did their administration realise the gains conceivable from a differentiation and rivalry of cultures in the Peninsula; but in view of the special need for such variation in a territory open to few foreign culture-contacts, the Portuguese nationality has counted substantially for civilisation. It would have counted for much more if in the militant Catholic period the Portuguese crown had not followed the evil lead of Spain in the three main steps of setting up the Inquisition, expelling the Jews, and expelling the Moriscoes.

On the Portuguese as on the northern European coasts, seafaring commerce arose on a basis of fishing;[943] agriculturally, save as to fruits and wines, Portugal was undeveloped; and the conquered Moorish territory, handed over by the king in vast estates to feudal lords, who gave no intelligent encouragement to cultivation, long remained sparsely populated.[944] The great commercial expansion began soon after King John II, egregiously known as "the Perfect," suddenly and violently broke the power of the feudal nobility (1483-84), a blow which made the king instantly a popular favourite, and which their feudal methods had left the nobles unable to return. In the previous generation Prince Henry the Navigator had set up a great movement of maritime discovery, directed to commercial ends; and from this beginning arose the remarkable but short-lived empire of Portugal in the Indies. That stands out from the later episodes of the Dutch and British empires in that, to begin with, the movement of discovery was systematically fostered and subsidised by the crown, Prince Henry giving the lead; and that in the sequel the whole commercial fruits of the process were the crown's monopoly--a state of things as unfavourable to permanence as could well be conceived. But even under more favourable conditions, though the Portuguese empire might have overborne the Dutch, it could hardly have maintained itself against the British. The economic and military bases, as in the case of Holland, were relatively too narrow for the superstructure.

What is most memorable in the Portuguese evolution is the simple process of discovery, which was scientifically and systematically conducted in the hope of sailing round Africa to India. The list of results is worth detailing. In 1419 Perestrello discovered the island of Porto Santa; in 1420 Zarco and Vaz found Madeira, not before charted; and in the next twenty years the Canary Islands, the Azores, Santa Maria, and St. Miguel swelled the list. In 1434 Cape Bojador was doubled by Gil Eannes, and the Rio d'Ouro was reached in 1436 by Baldaya; in 1441 Nuno Tristan attained Cape Blanco; in 1445 he found the river Senegal; D. Dias reaching Guinea in the same year, and Cape Verde in 1446. From Tristan's voyage of 1441 dates the slave trade, which now gave a sinister stimulus to the process of discovery; every cargo of negroes being eagerly bought for the cheap cultivation of the Moorish lands, still poorly populated under the feudal regimen.[945] The commercial and slave-trading purpose may in part account for the piecemeal nature of the advance;[946] for it was not till 1471 that the islands of Fernando Po were discovered and the Equator crossed; and not till 1484 that Cam reached the Congo.[947] But two years later Bartholomew Dias made the rest of the way to the Cape of Good Hope, a much greater advance than had before been made in thirty years; and after a pause in the chronicles of eleven years, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Calcutta. Meantime the Perfect king, preoccupied with the African route, made in 1488 his great mistake of finally dismissing Columbus from his court as a visionary. Had Portugal added the new hemisphere to her list of discoveries, it would have been stupendous indeed. As it is, this "Celtic" people, sailing in poor little vessels obviously not far developed from the primary fishing-smack, had done more for the navigation and charting of the world than all the rest of Europe besides.

And still the expansion went rapidly on; the reign of Manuel, "the Fortunate," reaping even more glory than that of his predecessor, who in turn had rewards denied to the pioneer promoter, Prince Henry. In the year 1500 Brazil was reached by Cabral, and Labrador by Corte-Real; and in 1501 Castella discovered the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. Amerigo Vespucci, whose name came into the heritage of the discovery of Columbus, explored the Rio Plata and Paraguay in 1501-3; Coutinho did as much for Madagascar and the Mauritius in 1506; Almeida in 1507 found the Maldive Islands; Malacca and Sumatra were attached by Sequiera in 1509; the Moluccas by Serrano in 1512; and the Ile de Bourbon in 1513 by Mascarenhas. In eastern Asia, again, Coelho in 1516 sailed up the coast of Cochin China and explored Siam; Andrade reached Canton in 1517 and Pekin in 1521; and in 1520 the invincible Magellan, entering the service of Spain,[948] achieved his great passage to the Pacific.[949] No such century of navigation had yet been seen; and all this dazzling enlargement of life and knowledge was being accomplished by one of the smallest of the European kingdoms, while England was laggardly passing from the point of Agincourt, by the way of the Wars of the Roses, to that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, producing at that stage, indeed, More's Utopia, but yielding no fruits meet therefor.

When, however, there followed on the process of discovery the process of commerce, the advantages accruing to the monarchic impulse and control were absent. Always as rigidly restrictive in its pursuit of discovery and commerce as the ancient Carthaginians had been,[950] the Portuguese crown was as much more restrictive than they in its practice as an absolute monarchy is more concentrated than an oligarchy. Whatever progress was achieved by the Portuguese in India was in the way of vigorous conquest and administration by capable governors like Albuquerque (d. 1515) and Da Castro (d. 1548), of whom the first showed not only military but conciliatory capacity, and planned what might have been a triumphant policy of playing off Hindu princes against Mohammedan. But the restrictive home-policy was fatal to successful empire-building where the conditions called for the most constant output of energy. Though the Portuguese race has shown greater viability in India than either the Dutch or the English, it could not but suffer heavily from the climate in the first days of adaptation. The death-rate among the early governors is startling; and the rank and file cannot have fared much better.[951] All the while swarms of the more industrious Portuguese, including many Jews, were passing to Brazil and settling there.[952] To meet this drain there was needed the freest opening in India to private enterprise; whereas the Portuguese crown, keeping in its own hands the whole of the Indian products extorted by its governors, and forcing them to send cargoes of gratis goods for the Crown to sell, limited enterprise in an unparalleled fashion.[953] The original work of discovery and factory-planting, indeed, could not have been accomplished by Portuguese private enterprise as then developed; but the monarchic monopoly prevented its growth. The Jews had been expelled (1496), and with them most of the acquired commercial skill of the nation;[954] the nobles had become as subservient to and dependent on the throne as those of Spain were later to be; and already the curse of empire was impoverishing the land as it was to do in Spain. As was fully realised in the eighteenth century by the great Pombal,[955] the mere possession of gold mines destroyed prosperity, the imaginary wealth driving out the real; but before Portugal was ruined by her Brazilian mines she was enfeebled by the social diseases that afflicted ancient Rome. Slave labour in the Moorish provinces drove out free; the rural population elsewhere thinned rapidly under the increasing drain of the expeditions of discovery, colonisation, and conquest; and only in the rapidly increasing population of Lisbon, which trebled in eighty years, was there any ostensible advance in wealth to show for the era of empire. Even in Lisbon, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the negro slaves outnumbered the free citizens.[956] And over these conditions of economic and political decadence reigned the Inquisition.

In Portugal, as in Spain, the period of incipient political decay is the period of brilliant literature; the explanation being that in both cases middle-class and upper-class incomes were still large and the volume of trade great, there being thus an economic demand for the arts, while the administration was becoming inept and the empire weakening. In both cases, too, there was less waste of energy in war than in the ages preceding. As Lope de Vega and Calderon build up a brilliant drama after the Armada and the loss of half the Netherlands, and Velasquez is sustained by Philip IV, so Camoens writes his epic, Gil Vicente his plays, and Barros his history, in the reign of John III, when Portugal is within a generation of being annexed to Spain, and within two generations of being bereft of her Asiatic empire by the Dutch. At such a stage, when wealth still abounds, and men for lack of science are indifferent to such phenomena as multiplication of slaves and rural depopulation, a large city public can evoke and welcome literature and art. It was so in Augustan Rome. And the sequel is congruous in all cases.

Mr. Morse Stephens in this connection affirms (Portugal, p. 259) that "it has always been the case in the history of a nation which can boast of a golden age, that the epoch of its greatest glory is that in which its literature chiefly flourished.... It was so with Portugal. The age which witnessed the careers of its famous captains and conquerors was also the age of its greatest poets and prose writers." The proposition on inquiry will be found to be inaccurate in its terms and fallacious in its implications. As thus: (1) Greek literature is, on the whole, at its highest in the period of Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Aristotle; while the period of "glory" or expansion must be placed either earlier or later, under Alexander, when the golden age of literature is past. (2) The synchronism equally breaks down in the case of Rome. There is little literature in the period of the triumph over Cartilage; and literature does not go on growing after Augustus, despite continued military "glory." Trajan had neither a Horace nor a Virgil. (3) In England the "glory" of Marlborough's victories evokes Addison, not Shakespeare, who does most of his greatest work under James I. And though Chaucer chanced to flourish under Edward III, there is no fine literature whatever alongside of the conquests of Henry V. (4) In Germany, Schiller and Goethe, Fichte and Hegel, wrote in a period of political subordination, and Heine before the period of Bismarckism. Who are the great writers since? (5) In France, the period of Napoleon is nearly blank of great writers. They abounded after the fall of his empire and the loss of his conquests. (6) The great literary period of Spain begins with the decline of the Spanish empire. (7) The great modern literature of the Scandinavian States has arisen without any national "glory" to herald it.

It is hardly necessary to bring further evidence. It remains only to point out that in Portugal itself the brilliant literary reign is not the period of discovery, since all the great exploration had been done before John III came to the throne. It is true that the retrospect of an age of conquest and effort may stimulate literature in a later generation; but the true causation is in a literary plus a social sequence, though the arrest of literary development is always caused socially and politically. Portuguese and Spanish literature and drama alike derive proximately from the Italian Renaissance. When both polities were in full decadence, with the Inquisition hung round their necks, their intellectual life necessarily drooped. But it is pure fallacy to suppose--and here Mr. Stephens would perhaps acquiesce--that a period of new conquest is needed to elicit new and original literature. Homer, Plato, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bacon, Moliere, Voltaire, Goethe, Leopardi, Poe, Balzac, Heine, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Tourguenief, Ruskin, Ibsen--these are in no rational sense by-products of militarism or "expansion." Given the right social and economic conditions, Spain and Portugal may in the twentieth century produce greater literature than they ever had, without owning a particle of foreign empire any more than do Sweden and Norway.

The causes of the decline of the Portuguese empire are very apparent. At the best, with its narrow economic basis in home production, it would have had a hard struggle to beat off the attack of the Dutch and English; but the royal policy, reducing all Portuguese life to dependence on the throne, had withered the national energies before the Dutch attack was made. Hence the easy fall of the crown to Philip of Spain when, the succession failing, he chose to grasp it (1581): the nation had for the time lost the power of self-determination; and under the Spanish dominion the Portuguese possessions in the Indies were defended against the Dutch and English with but a moiety even of the energy that a Portuguese king might have elicited. So the imposing beginnings came well-nigh to naught, the Portuguese empire lasting in its entirety, as a trade monopoly, for just a hundred years. Within the first thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century Dutch and English, Moslems, and even Danes, had captured from Spain-ruled Portugal the Moluccas, Java, most of its Indian territory, its Persian and Chinese settlements, and much of the coast of Brazil; and the two former enemies harried at sea what Oriental trade it had kept. The rest of the Indian settlements were lost in the next generation. "Empire" had run for Portugal the usual course.

It was at this stage that the new life of the nation began. In 1640 came the successful revolt against Spain; and the Dutch power in Brazil, which had seemed decisively established under Prince Maurice of Nassau, was entirely overthrown within ten years after his recall in 1644. In Portugal the revolution was primarily the work of the nobility, exasperated by Spanish arrogance and exclusiveness; but they were effectually supported by the people for the same reason; and the state of Spain, financially decrepit and embroiled in war abroad and rebellion in Catalonia, left the new dynasty of Braganza able to maintain itself, with French help, against the clerical and other elements of pro-Spanish reaction. The overthrow of the Dutch in Brazil was almost against the new king's will, for they had at first supported him against Spain; but the movement there was as spontaneous, and fully as well justified, as the revolt at home against Spain itself.

Sec. 2. The Colonisation of Brazil

Brazil was and is in fact for Portugal the analogue to the North American colonies of Britain. Where "empire" was sought in the Indies as a means of revenue, savage Brazil, after the gold-seeking rush of 1530 which first raised it above the status of a penal settlement, was a colony, resorted to by men--many of them Jews--seeking freedom from the Inquisition, and men driven from the soil by slave-labour seeking land to till for their own subsistence.[957] All things considered, it has been one of the soundest processes of colonisation in history. The low state of the autochthonous inhabitants is sufficient proof of Buckle's proposition that there the combination of great heat and great moisture made impossible a successful primary civilisation, nature being too unmanageable for the natural or primitive man.[958] The much higher development of pre-European civilisation not only in Mexico and Peru but among the North American Indians[959] can be explained in no other way. But that science may not in time so exploit the natural forces as to turn them to the account of a high tertiary civilisation is an assumption we are not entitled to make, though Buckle apparently inclined to it. When he wrote, the population of Brazil was computed at six millions. To-day it stands at over twenty-three millions;[960] and in Brazil the prospect has never been reckoned otherwise than hopeful. The progress all along, relatively to the obstacles, has been so great that there is no visible ground for anticipating any arrest in the near future.

In Brazil, from the first, individual and collective energy had the chance that the royal monopoly denied to the Asiatic settlements. There was here no exigible revenue to arrange for; and the first colonists, being left to themselves, set up local self-government with elected military magistrates called captains[961]--an evolution more remarkable than any which took place in the first century of English colonisation in North America. The first governor-general sent out, Alfonso de Sousa, had the wisdom to preserve and develop the system of captaincies;[962] and colonisation went steadily on throughout the century. It was first sought, as a matter of course, to enslave the natives; but the attempt led only to a race-war such as grew up later in the New England colonies; and in the Catholic as later in the Protestant colonies resort was had to the importation of negroes, already so common as slaves in Portugal. With a much slower rate of progress, the Brazilians have in the end come much better than the North Americans out of the social diseases thus set up.

In the first place, the Jesuits had a missionary success among the aborigines such as the Puritans never approached in North America, thus eventually arresting the race-struggle and securing the native stock as an element of population--a matter of obvious importance, in view of the factor of climate. And whereas the labours of the Jesuits in India had been turned to naught by the Inquisition which they brought in their train, Brazil was by the wisdom of the early governors saved from that scourge.[963] Thus fortunately restrained by the civil power, the Jesuits did a large part of the work of civilising Brazil. So long as the stage of race-war lasted--and till far on in the seventeenth century it was chronic and murderous[964]--they strove to protect the natives whom they converted.[965] It is noteworthy, too, that just before expelling the Jesuit order from Portugal in 1759, by which time it had become a wealthy and self-seeking trading corporation in Brazil,[966] the Marquis of Pombal secured the emancipation in Brazil[967] of all the Indians who had there been enslaved as a result of the old race-wars, thus giving effect to a law which the Jesuits had got passed in 1680 without being able to enforce it against the slave-owners.[968] And it is apparently due in part to the culture they maintained[969] that, though the emancipation of the negroes was to be delayed till late in the nineteenth century, an energetic plea was made for them by a Portuguese advocate of Batria at the time of the emancipation of the Indians.[970] Their own degeneration into a wealth-amassing corporation was an exact economic duplication of the process that had occurred in Europe among all the monastic and chivalrous orders of the Middle Ages in succession.[971]

In the eighteenth century Brazil, still limited, for its direct trade, to Portugal, so prospered that the loss of empire in Asia was much more than compensated even to the royal revenue of Portugal; the new discoveries of gold bringing for a time as much as L300,000 a year to the treasury under the system by which, the goldfields remaining free to their exploiters, the crown received a fifth of the total export.[972] The trouble was that the influx of gold in Portugal, as in Spain, paralysed industry; and the country became poorer in a double ratio to its bullion revenue;[973] and not till this was scientifically realised could a sound polity be raised. But in Portugal itself, after the advent of the anti-clerical Marquis of Pombal, there went on as striking a regeneration of government (1750-77) as occurred in Spain under Charles III; and though the storms of the French Revolution, and the tyrannous reactions which followed it, fell as heavily on Portugal as on the rest of the peninsula, its lot is to-day hopeful enough. In common with those of Spain and Italy, its literature shows plenty of fresh intellectual life; and, again as in their case, its worst trouble is a heritage of bad finance, rather than any lack of progressive intelligence. With sound government, the large outlet offered by Brazil to emigration should make Portugal a place of plenty--if, that is, its burden of debt be not too great. But herein lies a problem of special importance for the people of Great Britain. Portugal, like Britain, began to accumulate a national debt in the period of chronic European war; but between 1850 and 1890 the sum had actually multiplied tenfold, rising from twenty-five to two hundred and fifty-eight millions of milreis; and at the close of 1910 it stood at over one thousand millions, the interest upon which constitutes two-fifths of the total national expenditure. All the while, the balance of productivity is more and more heavily on the side of Brazil. As a similar evolution may conceivably take place within the next century or two in England, it will be of peculiar interest to note how Portugal handles the problem. When the English coal supply is exhausted, a vast debt, it is to be feared, may be left to a population ill-capable of sustaining it; and the apparently inevitable result will be such a drift of population from Britain to America or Australia as now goes from Portugal to Brazil, leaving the home population all the less able to bear its financial burden. It is difficult to see how any arrangement, save a composition with creditors, can meet the Portuguese case.[974] Yet within the last twenty years Lisbon has been enormously improved; and if but the law of 1844 prescribing compulsory education could be enforced, Portuguese resources might be so developed as to solve the problem progressively. As it is, the nation is still largely illiterate--a heavy handicap.

Meanwhile Brazil, after passing from the status of colony to that of kingdom or so-called "empire," has become a republic, like the other Iberian States of South America; and throughout the nineteenth century its development has been comparatively fortunate. The flight of the Portuguese king[975] thither in 1808 gave it independent standing without its paying the price of war; whence came free trade with the friendly States of Europe; and when on the return of the king it insisted on maintaining its independence under his son, against the jealous effort of the Portuguese Cortes to reduce it to a group of dependent provinces,[976] the tradition of freedom set up by its past prevailed. Thus the Brazilians effected peacefully what the English colonies in North America achieved only by an embittering and exhausting war; and so far as those of us can judge who are not at home in Portuguese literature, the culture evolution in Brazil at the date of the French Revolution had on some lines equalled that of the United States.[977] But where the United States were in educative and enriching contact with the relatively high civilisations of England and France, Brazil could still draw only on the relatively small intellectual and commercial stores of Portugal, with some addition from general commerce with Europe. It was in the latter half of the century, when intellectual influences from France had been prevalent, that Brazilian possibilities began to emphasise themselves.

North American evolution has in the nineteenth century been especially rapid because of several great economic factors: (1) the tobacco and cotton culture of the period before the civil war; (2) the very large immigration from Europe; (3) the rush for gold to California, hastening the development of the West; (4) the abundant yield of coal and iron, quickening every species of manufacture, especially after (5) a large influx of cheap European labour in the last decades of the nineteenth century. No one of these special factors has been potent in Brazil, save for the latterly rapid increase of immigration; there is no great staple of produce that thus far outgoes competition, unless it be caoutchouc; the precious metals are not now abundant; and there is practically no coal, though there is infinite iron. But these are conditions merely of a relatively slow development, not of unprogressiveness; and the presumption is that they will prove beneficent. The rapid commercial development of the United States is excessively capitalistic, in virtue largely of the factor of coal, and the consequent disproportionate stress of manufactures. The outstanding result is a hard-driven competitive life for the mass of the population, with the prospect ahead of industrial convulsions, in addition to the nightmare of the race-hatred between black and white--a desperate problem, from which Brazil seems to have been saved. There the problem of slavery was later faced than in the United States, partly, perhaps, because there the slave was less cruelly treated; but the result of the delay was altogether good. There was no civil war; the process of emancipation was gradual, beginning in 1871 and finishing with a leap in 1885-88; and no race-hatred has been left behind.[978] Those whose political philosophy begins and ends with a belief in the capacities of the "Anglo-Saxon race" would do well to note these facts.

In Brazil the process of emancipation, long favoured as elsewhere by the liberal minds,[979] was peacefully forced on by economic pressure. It was seen that slave labour was a constant check to the immigration of free labour, and therefore to the development of the country.[980] When this had become clear, emancipation was only a question of time. The same development would inevitably have come about in North America; and it is not a proof of any special "Anglo-Saxon" faculty for government that the process there was precipitated by one of the bloodiest wars of the modern world, and has left behind it one of the blackest problems by which any civilisation is faced. The frequent European comments on the revolutions of South America are apt to set up an illusion. All told, those crises represent perhaps less evil than was involved in the North American Civil War; and they are hardly greater moral evils than the peaceful growth of financial corruption in the North. In any case, the only revolution in Brazil since the outbreak of 1848 has been the no less peaceful than remarkable episode of 1889, which dethroned the Emperor Pedro II and made Brazil a republic. There was as much of pathos as of promise in the event, for Pedro had been one of the very best monarchs of the century; but at least the bloodless change was in keeping with his reign and his benign example,[981] and may indeed be reckoned a due result of them.

In fine, Brazil--in common with other parts of South America--has a fair chance of being one day the scene of a civilisation morally and socially higher than that now evolving in North America. What may be termed the coal-civilisations, with their factitious rapidity of exploitation, are in the nature of the case relatively ugly and impermanent. That cannot well be the highest civilisation which multiplies by the myriad its serfs of the mine, and by the million its slaves of the machine. In South America the lack of coal promises escape from the worst developments of capitalism,[982] inasmuch as labour there must be mainly spent on and served by the living processes and forces of nature, there so immeasurable and so inexhaustible of beauty. Fuel enough for sane industry is supplied by the richest woods on the planet; and the Brazilian climate, even now singularly wholesome over immense areas,[983] may become still more generally so by control of vegetation. It is a suggestive fact that there the common bent, though still far short of mastery, is in an exceptional degree towards the high arts of form and sound.[984] It may take centuries to evoke from a population which quietly embraces the coloured types of South America and Africa the aesthetic progress of which it is capable;[985] but the very fact that these types play their physical and artistic part in the growth is a promise special to the case. And if thus the "Latin" races--for it is Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and French-speaking Belgians who chiefly make up the immigrants, though there is a German element also--build up a humanly catholic and soundly democratic life in that part of the planet most prodigally served by nature, subduing to their need the vast living forces which overpowered the primitive man, and at the same time escaping the sinister gift of subterranean fuel--if thus they build up life rather than dead wealth, they will have furthered incomparably the general deed of man. But it is part of the hope set up by the slower rate of a progress which overtakes and keeps pace with nature, instead of forestalling the yearly service of the sun, that when it reaches greatness it will have outlived the instincts of racial pride and hate which have been the shame and the stumbling-block of the preceding ages. Should "little" Portugal be the root of such a growth, her part will surely have been sufficient. But in the meantime Portugal and Brazil alike suffer from illiteracy, the bane of the Catholic countries;[986] and that priest-wrought evil must be remedied if their higher life is to be maintained.

Until this vital drawback is removed the possible social gain to Portugal from the revolution of 1910 cannot be realised. A republic is more favourable to progress than a monarchy only in so far as it gives freer play and fuller furtherance to all forms of energy; and in the still priest-ridden Peninsula the resistance of sacerdotalism to democratic rule is a great stumbling-block. The Republic of Portugal needs time to establish itself aright. Citizens of more "advanced" countries are wont to criticise with asperity shortcomings of administration in the "new" States of our time which were fully paralleled in their own in the past. Englishmen who make comparisons between their own political system and that of countries whose constitutions have been reshaped within the present century would do well to consider the state of English government in the latter part of the eighteenth century, after a hundred years of constitutional freedom. Nay, in a country where the great parties in our own time perpetually accuse each other of gross and unscrupulous misgovernment, disparagements of the politics of countries which only recently attained self-government are obviously open to discount. Suffice it that Portugal, albeit by a via dolorosa of violence trodden by other peoples before her, has reaffirmed her part in the movement of civilisation towards a larger and a better life, thus giving the hundredth disproof to the formulas which deny the potentiality of advance to States which have known decadence.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 942: The Story of Portugal, by Mr. H. Morse Stephens, 1891, is the most trustworthy history of Portugal in English, giving as it does the main results of the work of the modern scientific school of Portuguese historians.]

[Footnote 943: Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, 1881, p. 283.]

[Footnote 944: H. Morse Stephens, Portugal, 1891, pp. 53, 87, 102, 236.]

[Footnote 945: Stephens, Portugal, pp. 148, 149, 182.]

[Footnote 946: Many of the dates are to some extent in dispute. Cp. Stephens, Portugal, pp. 144-56; and Mr. Major's Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, 1868, passim.]

[Footnote 947: There is a dubious-looking record that at this time a systematic attempt was made to Christianise the natives instead of enslaving them. See it in Dunham, History of Spain and Portugal, iii, 288-91.]

[Footnote 948: Thus the second great expansion of geographical knowledge, like the first, went to the credit of Spain through Portuguese mismanagement, Magellan being alienated by King Miguel's impolicy.]

[Footnote 949: I follow the dates fixed by Mr. Stephens, p. 175.]

[Footnote 950: See Dunham, iii, 286, as to the anger of John II at a pilot's remark that the voyage to Guinea was easily made. An attempted disclosure of the fact to Spain was ferociously punished.]

[Footnote 951: Cp. Stephens, pp. 181, 218.]

[Footnote 952: Id. p. 228.]

[Footnote 953: Stephens, pp. 177, 181, 192.]

[Footnote 954: Id. pp. 171-73.]

[Footnote 955: Conde da Carnota, The Marquis of Pombal, 2nd. ed. 1871, pp. 72-77.]

[Footnote 956: Stephens, p. 182.]

[Footnote 957: Stephens, pp. 227, 228.]

[Footnote 958: Introduction, 3-vol. ed. i, 103-108; 1-vol. ed. pp. 60-61. The formula of heat and moisture, however, applies only generally. One of the climatic troubles of the great province of Ceara in particular is that at times there is no wet season, and now and then even a drought of whole years. See ch. iii, Climatologie, by Henri Morize, in the compilation Bresil en 1889, pp. 41, 42.]

[Footnote 959: Cp. the extremely interesting treatises of Mr. Lucien Carr, The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, 1893), The Position of Women among the Huron-Iroquois Tribes (Salem, 1884), and on the _Food and Ornaments of Certain American Indians _(Worcester, Mass., 1895-97).]

[Footnote 960: Increase of eight millions since 1890.]

[Footnote 961: Stephens, p. 225.]

[Footnote 962: Mr. Stephens (p. 226) states that there were created three vast "chief captaincies." Baron de Rio-Branco, in his Esquisse de l'histoire du Bresil, in the compilation Bresil en 1889, specifies a division by the king (1532-35) into twelve hereditary captaincies. Both statements seem true. The policy of non-interference was wisely adhered to by later governors, though Thomas de Sousa (circa 1550) introduced a necessary measure of centralisation.]

[Footnote 963: Stephens, pp. 231, 232.]

[Footnote 964: Baron de Rio-Branco, Esquisse, as cited, pp. 127-32.]

[Footnote 965: Id. p. 149; Stephens, p. 231.]

[Footnote 966: Stephens, p. 359.]

[Footnote 967: By decree of June, 1755. Conde da Carnota, The Marquis of Pombal, as cited, p. 40.]

[Footnote 968: Rio-Branco, p. 132.]

[Footnote 969: As to which see Rio-Branco, p. 149.]

[Footnote 970: Id. p. 148.]

[Footnote 971: As to this see the author's Dynamics of Religion, pp. 24-27; and Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 375 sq.]

[Footnote 972: Stephens, pp. 348, 376.]

[Footnote 973: This is very trenchantly set forth in one of the writings of the Marquis of Pombal, given by Carnota in his memoir, pp. 75-77. Pombal was on this head evidently a disciple of the French physiocrats, or of Montesquieu, who lucidly embodies their doctrines on money (Esprit des Lois, 1748, xxi, 22; xxii, 1 sq.). On the general question of the impoverishment of Portugal by her American gold and silver mines, cp. Carnota pp. 4, 72-73, 207.]

[Footnote 974: This has been repeatedly suggested. See the pamphlet of Guilherme J.C. Henriquez (W.J. C. Henry) on Portugal, 1880.]

[Footnote 975: This had been several times proposed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Rio-Branco, p. 154).]

[Footnote 976: Rio-Branco, p. 163.]

[Footnote 977: Cp. Rio-Branco, Esquisse, as cited, p. 151.]

[Footnote 978: F.J. de Santa-Anna Nery, "Travail servile et travail libre," in vol. Bresil en 1889, pp. 205, 206; E. da Silva-Prado, "Immigration," ch. xvi of same compilation, pp. 489, 490.]

[Footnote 979: Rio-Branco, p. 186, note.]

[Footnote 980: From 1857 to 1871, the fifteen years preceding the process of emancipation, the total immigration was only 170,000. From 1873 to 1887 it amounted to 400,000, and it has since much increased. Cp. Santa-Anna Nery, as cited, p. 212; and E. da Silva-Prado, "Immigration" as cited, pp. 489-91.]

[Footnote 981: It is interesting to note that whereas he was, for a king, an accomplished and enlightened philosopher, of the theistic school of Coleridge, the revolutionist movement was made by the Brazilian school of Positivists. It would be hard to find a revolution in which both sides stood at so high an intellectual level.]

[Footnote 982: See, in Bresil en 1889, the remarks of M. da Silva-Prado, p. 559.]

[Footnote 983: See the section (ch. iii) on "Climatologie," by Henri Morize, in Bresil en 1889; in particular the section on "Immigration" (ch. xvi) by E. da Silva-Prado, pp. 503-505.]

[Footnote 984: See, in the same volume, the section (ch. xviii) on "L'Art," by da Silva-Prado. He shows that "Le Bresilien a la preoccupation de la beaute" (p. 556).]

[Footnote 985: The probabilities appear to be specially in favour of music, to which the native races and the negroes alike show a great predilection (id. pp. 545, 546). As M. da Silva-Prado urges, what is needed is a systematic home-instruction, as liberally carried out as was Pedro's policy of sending promising students of the arts to Europe. Thus far, though education is good, books have been relatively scarce because of their dearness. Here again the United States had an immense preliminary advantage in their ability to reproduce at low prices the works of English authors, paying nothing to the writers; a state of things which subsisted long after the States had produced great writers of their own.]

[Footnote 986: In Portugal, "by a law enacted in 1844, primary education is compulsory; but only a small fraction of the children of the lower classes really attend school" (Statesman's Year-Book). In Brazil there has been great educational progress in recent years; and in 1911 a decree was issued for the reform of the school system, a Board of Education being established with control over all the schools. Education is still non-compulsory.]

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