*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74772 ***







[Illustration: Cover art]





THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD


PERIOD III

The Development of the Modern World




[Frontispiece: A COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING THE FIRST LOCOMOTIVE
EVER MADE FOR A PUBLIC RAILWAY STANDING UPON THE SAME TRACK ALONG
WHICH IT HAULED THE FIRST TRAIN ON SEPTEMBER 27TH, 1825, AND THE
"FLYING SCOTSMAN" CROSSING THE OLD LINE AT DARLINGTON.]




  THE GREATEST STORY
  IN THE WORLD


  PERIOD III

  The Development of the Modern World



  BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON



  LONDON
  JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.




  FIRST EDITION ... 1926


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
  WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES




{v}

PREFACE TO PERIOD III

In this third and final volume of the Greatest Story in the World I
have tried to give an outline sketch of the happenings of the last
five centuries.  It is the period which must appeal more forcibly
than any earlier time to all of Anglo-Saxon race, because it is the
Anglo-Saxon race that plays by far the largest role in it, and a role
which becomes of constantly increasing interest right down to the
present day.  We first see Great Britain, in the gallant figures of
Elizabeth's sea-captains, as chief actor in thwarting the aims at
world empire of Spain.  A little while, and we see her again taking
the lead in abating the arrogance of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV.
of France.  But of far greater importance than even this checking of
the powers of the would-be masters of the world is that part which
fortune or Providence assigned to her to play so conspicuously
throughout the second half of the period which this volume
covers--the part of mother of nations.  It is thus that the
historian, J. R. Green, writes of her as she appeared to the world
after the United States had fought their way to independence--not a
nation broken by her loss, as all had perhaps expected to find her,
possibly a sadder and certainly a wiser nation, but, most surprising
of all, stronger and more adventurous.

These are Mr. Green's words: "From the moment of the Declaration of
Independence it mattered little whether England counted for less or
more with the {vi} nations around her.  She was no longer a mere
European power, no longer a mere rival of Germany or Russia or
France.  She was from that hour a mother of nations....  And to these
nations she was to give not only her blood and her speech, but the
freedom which she had won.  It is the thought of this which flings
its grandeur round the pettiest details of our story in the past.
The history of France has little result beyond France itself.  German
or Italian history has no direct issue outside the boundaries of
Germany or Italy.  But England is only a small part of the outcome of
English history.  Its greater issues lie not within the narrow limits
of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet to be.  The
struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen, the steady
love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping in the
past of our little island the future of mankind."

The greatest part, in fact, of this Greatest Story for the last
hundred and fifty years has been made in England.  That is, indeed,
much to say, but it is not too much.

In this volume I have thought best not to take up space with
description of the way in which men have so lately lived, have built
their houses, and so on.  I have assumed that all this would be more
or less familiar to my readers from other books and pictures and
talk.  And not even in vaguest outline have I attempted a sketch of
the Great War and its effects.  The moving picture which I have tried
to make intelligible stops before the curtain is rung up on that grim
tragedy whose import we do not even now fully understand.

And yet again my best thanks are due to Mr. R. B. Lattimer for
valuable criticisms and suggestions.




{vii}

CONTENTS


CHAPTER

  I. How Man sailed East and West
  II. The Stories of the Old East and of the New West
  III. Three Kings and a Monk
  IV. The Waning Power of Spain
  V. The Wars of Religion
  VI. The Growing Power of France
  VII. The Humbling of France
  VIII. From the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
  IX. The Seven Years' War
  X. How The United States won Independence
  XI. How the Stage was set for the French Revolution
  XII. The Revolution and the Terror
  XIII. The Napoleonic Wars
  XIV. The Expansion of the Anglo-Saxon and the Slav
  XV. Steam and Evolution
  XVI. The Resettlement of Europe
  XVII. The Settlement of America
  XVIII. "The White Man's Burden"
  SECTION I.--Africa
  SECTION II.--India and the Far East
  SECTION III.--The Far South
  Index




{viii}

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


Railway Centenary, 1925: Ancient and Modern Locomotives ...
_Frontispiece_

Ships of the Time of Henry VIII.

Mexican Picture Writing

Statue of Buddha

Sir Francis Drake

General Wolfe's Statue, Quebec

The Potala at Lhasa

The Taj Mahal, Agra

Warren Hastings

The Modern Palace of Versailles

Napoleon I.

H.M.S. "Victory" after Trafalgar

The Duke of Wellington

An Old Mail Coach

Old Hand Loom and Modern Power Loom

Garibaldi

Old Japan: Entrance to the Tombs, Tokio

A Street Scene in Modern Japan

A Scene in New Zealand: Mt. Pembroke




{1}

THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD


CHAPTER I

HOW MAN SAILED EAST AND WEST

Suddenly, at the end of the fifteenth century, the persons of our
story found the picture of the world which they carried in their
minds wonderfully expanded, rather as if it were a closed fist widely
opening.  Columbus in 1492 "discovered America": Vasco da Gama, in
1487, "rounded the Cape of Good Hope."

That is the way in which most of the history books state it for us;
but it is a statement which gives credit to Columbus for a little
more than he actually did, and does not put enough to the credit of
da Gama.  For it was not what we call America at all which Columbus
discovered in 1492, but only one of what we now know as the West
Indies, or West Indian Islands: and the mere "rounding" of the Cape
of Good Hope had been done by another before da Gama, but da Gama,
after "rounding" and sailing up the eastern coast of Africa, struck
across to the western coast of India.  As a feat of navigation his
voyage was far greater than that of Columbus.

{2}

[Sidenote: Vasco da Gama]

Thus Vasco da Gama, going eastward, reached the western coast of
India, and Columbus, going westward, reached the "West Indies."  The
name is worth noting.

These islands, as further exploration showed them to be, were called
"West Indies," because men had expected to reach India by sailing
west.  The geographers had no conception of the great continent of
America and the vast ocean of the Pacific that lay between the land
touched by Columbus and the land which he thought that he had touched.

No matter.  He came back with a very marvellous story--a story which
grew ever more marvellous as further exploration revealed the
astonishing truth.

What made this discovery of America so intensely exciting was that it
was discovery of a land wholly new and unexpected.  Although the
voyage of Vasco da Gama to India was a new and remarkable achievement
in navigation, the people in the West, the only people with whom this
"greatest story" has been concerned until this time, were tolerably
informed about the East.  But its story had never before come into
their own and mingled itself with their own so that each should have
an effect and make a change in the other, as did begin to happen now.

The "New World," as it was called, of America, unlike the East,
scarcely had a story at all.  A few, a very few, historical records
were discovered by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru.  The inhabitants
whom the Spaniards found there had been workers in gold and silver,
and the riches which Spain obtained by robbery of this treasure and,
later, by working the gold mines and silver mines from which the
precious metals were taken, made a large difference, as we shall see,
in the history of men in Europe.  But for the rest the "New World"
had no history, no activities, which worked into and altered the
history of the old.  {3} The old world was vastly affected by the
discovery nevertheless.  Just because it was so new, and occupied by
savages who were able to make very little resistance to invasion, it
enlarged the actual size of the world both for men's imaginations and
also as a place for them to live in.  But except for the treasure
which the Spaniards took, it had little to send back to the old
world.  All else was a going out of the old world to the new.

Da Gama did not discover a new world.  He merely--but it made a vast
difference to the story--proved possible a new and far more
convenient route to a country already known.  Thus he brought that
known land into contact with Europe so that the story of the far East
interpenetrated the European story as it never had done before.  The
whole, in fact, became one world-wide story.

The East had been sending her produce to the West ever since the
West--by which term we here mean Europe--had been civilised enough to
need and to value it.  There was a very ancient overland route from
the north-west of India through Persia and Mesopotamia to Tyre and
the Mediterranean coast.  Another way was oversea from some Indian
port as far as the head, that is to say the northern end, of the
Persian Gulf, and thence, as before, overland to a port on the coast
of Syria.  And thirdly, there was a route by longer sea, again
starting from India, calling perhaps at one or two ports in Arabia
and up through the Red Sea.  At a port in the Red Sea the goods would
be landed and taken, probably on camel-back, to the Nile, and would
be brought down the river and transhipped at its mouth into vessels
which would carry them to Venice or Genoa.

The chief Indian port from which the trading vessels sailed, whether
to the Persian Gulf or to the Red Sea, was Calicut, which we still
see marked on {4} the maps of India.  It is a town on what is called
the Malabar Coast, on the western side of India, low down towards the
west.

And not only did ships bearing the produce of India start from
Calicut, but Calicut was also the port to which came ships, some of
them of great size, from the farther East, bearing the silks of
China, the spices of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and so on.

All the carrying trade west of Calicut seems to have been in the
hands of Mahommedans, by far the most part of them being Arabs, at
the date of da Gama's adventurous voyage to India.  It was, of
course, by far the more adventurous and full of danger for that very
reason, because here was he, a Christian, and therefore to be
regarded as almost their natural enemy by all good Mahommedans,
coming to interfere with a trade which they had made their own.

It does not seem possible that they did not realise what his coming
was likely to mean for the future of that trade.  The Arab traders
themselves knew the eastern coast of Africa at least as far south as
Mozambique, for it was at this point that da Gama first came into
touch with them.  And it is probable that they knew the African coast
further south also.  They must have realised that ships going round
the Cape of Good Hope could carry goods from India to Europe very
much more cheaply than they could be transported by means which
involved several transhipments, the payment of duties at several
ports, and a longer or shorter carriage overland.

The wonder is that da Gama, going with only three vessels and of no
great size--they were of the kind that were known as caravels--was
ever allowed by the Moslems to come home again.  But he artfully
pretended to them that these three were only part of a larger fleet
from which they had become separated, {5} and it may be that this
pretence imposed upon the Arabs and deterred them from doing him any
injury.  As it was, he was imprisoned for awhile by one of the
Sultans, or rulers of a territory on the Indian coast, but by some
means he conciliated his captor and was allowed to trade and go home
again with his ships laden with silks, pearls, rubies, and a variety
of treasure.  The question that naturally occurs now is why it should
have been the Portuguese, of all the European nations, that were led
to undertake this sailing round Africa.  The answer is interesting,
because it involves an explanation of a curious idea of the
geographers of the day.

We saw, in the second volume of this Greatest Story, Arabs and Moors
established along the fertile fringe of Northern Africa.  Northward
of this fringe lay the Mediterranean; behind it, that is to say to
the south, the desert.  But the African tribes had penetrated and
traversed this desert.  They had learnt that there was, on the far
side of it, a fertile land again, a land which was later known as
Guinea.  And this land was watered by a great river, now known as the
Senegal river, flowing from the east and coming out into the sea in
the Gulf of Guinea.  It appeared to come from much the same direction
as that in which they rightly supposed lay the sources of the Nile,
the river of Egypt; and they seem to have imagined it a western
branch of that ancient river.  If they could mount up this branch
then far enough in their boats they deemed that they might come out
on the Nile, and so, if they pleased, arrive again on the
Mediterranean.

[Sidenote: The land of slaves]

Apart from this idea, the land in itself was rich and produced much
that they valued--gold dust and ivory in the elephants' tusks which
the natives brought or barter with them--but above the ivory and gold
and the rest of the rich products they valued the {6} natives
themselves, whom they captured and brought to markets in the
Mediterranean towns and sold for slaves.  Slaves had a value then
which is not easy for us to realise to-day when our great difficulty
is to find work for men to do.  At that time the difficulty was to
find men to do the work; and perhaps this was more true of Portugal
and Spain than of other European countries, because so much of their
territory lay uncultivated and waste by reason of the continual wars
which had been waged between the Christians and the Moors.  They
needed men badly to till those waste lands.  This fertile country
then, south of the extensive tract of desert, had much that might
attract the Spaniard or the Portugee.

We do not know very precisely why it was that little Portugal, rather
than great Spain, sent out the mariners which worked southward along
the western coast of Africa.  We do not know, but perhaps we may make
a guess.  Spain had a large stretch of coast, with many ports, along
the Mediterranean, and it is likely that Portuguese vessels would not
have been very welcome if they tried to trade in that direction.
Moreover, the Mediterranean swarmed with pirates, both of Mahommedan
and Christian nations.  It was no peaceful sea for the trader.
Again, Spain had a long coast line northward and north-eastward right
away to where the Pyrenees come up to the Bay of Biscay.  There was
no warm welcome there for ships encroaching on Spanish trade.
Therefore, if the Portuguese sailors were to be adventurous at all
there was no other very apparent direction for their enterprise to
take than that of the western coast of Africa and of the islands that
lay off it, such as Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde islands.

[Sidenote: Portuguese adventurers]

And there can be no doubt about the adventurous spirit of the
Portuguese sailors of that day.  They were inspired by the spirit of
adventure, but also--for {7} human motives are generally mixed--the
adventure attracted them by the profits to be gained in it, the gold
and the slaves.  Further, we have to credit them with a more noble
and spiritual motive, for they were inspired with a fervent
conviction that it was a work most pleasing to God to induce the
natives of new-found lands to become Christians.  The means employed
to this end were often cruel, but we ought to realise that it was a
very real motive, both with the Spaniard and the Portugee.  It is a
motive which gives dignity to their conquests.  They were not
undertaken solely for material gain.  Even if the means were cruel by
which they converted a savage, whether of Africa or of America, they
believed that it was in the truest sense a kindness to be thus cruel,
if by so dealing with his body his soul might be saved.

Such motives as the above had their influence not only with the
adventurers themselves, but also with the Governments of their
countries.  A member of the Royal family of Portugal, known in story
as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), especially favoured and
helped to equip these expeditions.  He was grandson of our own John
of Gaunt.  Perhaps his title of "Navigator" was cheaply earned, for
there is no evidence that he ventured far oversea himself, but the
distant voyages owed very much of their success to his assistance.

Thus the Portuguese crept farther and farther down the African coast
until at length they rounded it, and in the last years of the
fifteenth century da Gama achieved the great adventure.  He must have
deemed himself uncommonly fortunate to come home, with those three
"caravels," to his native land, and that he was considered to have
been favoured by fortune we may gather from Portugal's later conduct.
Her rulers were far from trusting that it would be always so--that
her trading ships might always go {8} safely voyaging in those seas
which the Moslems had hitherto deemed to be their own.  One fleet,
more powerful and more numerous than da Gama's poor three ships, was
sent out, and again another, greater still, until the Portuguese had
taken all the chief ports--Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Africa
itself, the ports commanding the entries of the Red Sea and of the
Persian Gulf--had penetrated farther east and captured the great
trading port of Malacca, had even landed in China, and had
established their headquarters at Goa, in the Indian peninsula.

It is not the least wonderful part of the whole surprising story that
they should have made this conquest so completely and so easily.  We
must attribute it to the superiority of their ships in comparison
with those of the Arabs and other Moslems in that sea, to their
better armament and to their greater skill in using these ships for
naval battle.  Had the Mahommedans of that ocean possessed anything
like the ships and the experience of marine warfare that sailors of
the same religion in the Mediterranean had acquired by perpetual
sea-fighting, it is not possible that Portugal could have dominated
them so decisively and at such slight cost to herself.  Besides that
the Portuguese could manœuvre far more skilfully with their ships,
and knew how to combine them for attack, the guns which their ships
carried seem to have been far more powerful than any that the Moslems
had, whether ashore or afloat; for not only do we find them gaining
the victory in all the naval battles, but they employed their ships'
guns in bombarding the ports and combining the bombardment from the
sea with attacks by their landing forces.

The result of it all was that within a dozen or so years of da Gama's
reaching India the Portuguese were the masters of those seas, and had
the whole of that trade in their hands.  And while Portugal thus {9}
worked her way to the dominance of the eastern sea, Spain was
confirming the conquests for which Columbus had pointed her the way
in the West.

[Sidenote: Atlantis]

For some years there had been vague rumours in Europe of an island
far out in the western sea, and a still more confident idea that if
men could sail westward far enough they would come to the eastern
side of Asia.  That was the goal at which they aimed, in the westward
sailing.  Columbus' special genius and courage inspired him to go
bravely on this western cruise, not troubling himself, as others had
done before him, with the search for that fabulous island, of
Atlantis, supposed to be somewhere in the mid-ocean, but holding his
way continuously towards the sunset until he did at length touch a
land which he thought to be that eastern Asia which he had set out to
look for.

We know how that it was something very different.  During the next
few years Spain kept sending out expedition after expedition, to find
out what sort of new world it was that this bold sailor had thus
reached.  To Spain fell the enterprise and the conquest first, but
not by any natural sequence of events, for it was truly due to the
genius of Columbus, who was a man of Genoa, and no son of Spain at
all, that the first enterprise of discovery was undertaken.  He could
not attempt it at his own cost.  His native state would not furnish
him with the means.  For four years he was trying to get his voyage
"financed," as we should say now--that is, get its expenses paid--by
the Governments either of Spain or of England.  He had a brother
working to this end at the English Court, while he was pleading his
own cause at the Court of Spain.  Our Henry VII. was just beginning
to listen favourably to the prayer of the brother, when Isabella,
joint ruler, with Ferdinand, of Spain, was won by the eloquence of
Christopher Columbus.  {10} Spain equipped the ships, and England,
whether for her good or her ill it is interesting to speculate, but
impossible surely to know, lost her chance of achieving the
astonishingly rich conquest which thus came to Spain.

For what the repeated Spanish expeditions established ever more
conclusively was the amazing richness of the new world, or, at least,
of that part of it which she was first to conquer.  And yet, at the
beginning, there was some disappointment.  We have seen how one of
the great needs of these countries of the old world was men to
cultivate their war-wasted lands.  This man-power they were
constantly hoping to increase by acquiring slaves.  Portugal did
acquire slaves, who proved excellent workers, from Africa.  The
slaves which the first conquerors of the West brought to Spain were
nearly useless.  The Red Indian, as it became the fashion to call him
later, has never been of any value, as the African negro and the East
Indian "coolie" have been valuable, in the service of the white man.

Thence, just at first, arose disappointment in Spain.  But later, as
the treasures in gold and silver and gems of the new land were
brought over and became known and appreciated, there was ever growing
joy and triumph over the El Dorado--the Golden Land--which had thus
surprisingly been added to the Spanish Crown.  There were new riches,
without limit, to be brought home, new souls, beyond number, to be
saved.  Priests went out with the conquerors.  It was a spiritual, as
well as a material conquest.  Immense treasure was taken when in 1521
Cortez made himself master of Mexico, and twelve years later the yet
greater wealth of Peru was added by the conquest of Pizarro.

And it was a conquest and a source of riches with which at first no
other country interfered.  We have {11} seen, however, that Columbus
in the first instance, sailing west, had supposed himself to arrive
on the eastern shore of Asia and of India--the eastern shore, that is
to say, of the very land at which the Portuguese arrived by sailing
east.  It was apparent then that if these voyagings were prolonged
far enough the ships must meet, or at least must cross each other's
path.  Therefore the two nations came to an agreement between
themselves for the amicable partition of the world.  It was arranged
that Spain should have all lands, that she should conquer from any
non-Christian peoples, to the west of a line drawn from north to
south half-way between the Azores and the West Indies, and that
Portugal should have the lands that she might similarly conquer to
the east of that line.  Each country would establish the Christian
Church in its conquered territories; and the division was sanctioned
by the Pope in a "Bull," as the Papal pronouncement is called, dated
as early as 1493.

The northern nations of Europe paid only a partial respect to the
Bull.  Before the close of the fifteenth century Henry VII. of
England had given a charter to a Venetian seaman--he had learnt his
seamanship in Venice, though he, like Columbus, was a Genoese by
birth--Cabot and his three sons to claim as England's possession any
non-Christian lands that they might discover in the West.  This
charter, however, was expressly stated to apply to the northern,
western, and eastern seas, but not the southern, a restriction which
obviously shows that the rights of Spain and Portugal in the south
were observed.

[Sidenote: America]

Long years before this, Northmen, as is told in the Saga of Eric the
Red, sailing from Iceland and going west, had come to a land which
they had called Vineland the Good.  It is supposed to have been
either Newfoundland or the mainland of North America.  Very likely
they touched both.  There is {12} a small grape that grows there
which might justify the name.  They tried to form a settlement there,
but the settlers were all murdered by the natives, and the attempt
was not repeated.  From the port of Bristol there was commerce with
Iceland.  There can be no doubt that sailors brought the account of
this enterprise, and of this Vineland, to Bristol.  When the Cabots
went westward it is likely that it was this land which they had a
mind to seek.

The result of their expedition was that they reached and explored the
western coasts of Newfoundland and of Labrador, but found nothing of
such promise as tempted them to bring back any glowing reports of the
new-found land.  Its effect was indeed to extinguish the interest of
England in these western voyages for many years.

In the very last year of the century the coast of South America was
touched by two expeditions, one Spanish, the other Portuguese.  The
former had on board that Amerigo Vespucci who later wrote an account
of the voyage and after whom America has its name.  The expedition
with which Amerigo sailed touched the coast of what we now call
Brazil, and it seems to have been a surprise to discover that this
part of the continent lay within the north and south line which had
been drawn on the chart to define the westernmost possession of the
Portuguese.

[Sidenote: A circumnavigation]

Within the first quarter of the following century the Spaniards
exploring northward had proved the continuity of the great continent
with that land which Cabot had reached.  Southward a Portugee,
Magellan, had sailed through the straits which bear his name, had
rounded Cape Horn and come out into the Pacific.  This boldest
perhaps of all seamen, in an age of bold seamen, pressed still
westward over the ocean, to meet his death from the spear of a native
in the far west islands of the Philippines.  He had, in fact, made
{13} real the vision of Columbus--to reach the East by sailing west.
His ship, the _Victoria_, returned safely to Europe, being the first
to accomplish a circumnavigation, or voyage round the world, in 1522.
The voyage had occupied three years all but a fortnight.

[Illustration: SHIPS OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII.]

And by this time the coast of the Pacific on the western side of
America had been reached at several points by travellers overland,
and the extent and contour of the New World could be tolerably well
mapped out except in its north-western quarter.




{14}

CHAPTER II

THE STORIES OF THE OLD EAST AND OF THE NEW WEST

The story of the New World before the coming of the Spaniards may be
told shortly because we know so little of it.

At its far north-westerly corner the Continent of America is divided
from Asia by a narrow strait.  It is a shallow strip of ocean, and
there is no doubt that there was a time when it did not exist as a
dividing barrier, and that animals--man among the rest--poured into
America from Asia at what was then a point of junction between them.

It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great
birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern
parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated.  The
so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South
America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic
immigrants.  One might almost say of them that they have no story, in
the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human
progress in other parts of the world.  Apart from what they have
learnt from the white man since the year 1500--and unhappily they
learned from him much evil, as well as good--they still represent
what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest
days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes.
They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he
passed into the second {15} of the three recognised phases and became
pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds.

[Sidenote: The Red Indian]

Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal
reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in
civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied
by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to
his service.  It has been said that America has no animals that could
serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle.  It may be
so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very
confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man
might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in
domesticating some of the native animals of America.  The only one
that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may
have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or
other species of the American wolf.  He had no horses before the
Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons
why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for
the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting
some supernatural creature of unknown powers.

But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless
numbers.  Who can say that they might not have been trained to do
service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia?  America has
its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the
invaluable servant of the Laplanders.  There are native mountain
sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are
species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.

Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals
capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of
America from passing into the pastoral stage.

{16}

And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that
there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came,
the Indians had cultivated plants--notably that maize, sometimes
called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been
imported into North America from the south.

[Illustration: MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.]

Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more
strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a
civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority
of {17} the inhabitants of the country had attained.  They found
finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone
monuments.  One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City
of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which
showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the
seasons of the year.  They had a means of communicating thoughts and
of recording facts by picture writing.  They had large works in
stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation.  When the
Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the
religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of
their worship.  They also had the hideous practice, but a practice
which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very
ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the
idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth
deity to grant them good harvests.

[Sidenote: Egypt and Mexico]

These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much
of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in
Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought
to point to Egypt as their source.  Is it at all possible that they
really may have come thence?  There is a theory about man's story in
the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to
be gaining adherents.

According to this theory, explorers, belonging to the date of the
ancient sun-worship in Egypt, pushed out from that country
adventurously in search of certain definite objects.  Chief among
those objects were gold and pearls.  And they were sought and prized
not only because of their rarity and beauty, but far more because
they were considered to have certain magical qualities, to be great
"life-givers."  The theory then is that the explorers--who were {18}
sun-worshippers, who offered human sacrifices, made stone-works,
understood irrigation and were distinguished by other practices and
beliefs--travelled widely in search for these "life-givers."  Traces
of their sojourn, it is claimed, are to be found in India, in the
chain of islands which is called Indonesia, thence onwards through
other islands of the Pacific, until finally we find them on the
American continent, in Mexico and Peru, and in various places in
North America.  Their traces are in the north of Europe also.  These
traces consist chiefly in large stone works.  One or other, and in
some places many, of the distinctive elements of the civilisation and
religion of ancient Egypt are to be found among the peoples who live
where the ancient stone works are.  Very commonly they have the
belief that there was once among them a ruling family who were
"children of the sun," whose forefather actually was the sun himself,
to whom, according to some legends, they would return at death.  It
was the belief that the Spaniards were the sun children, or sun-gods,
come again, which greatly assisted them in their conquest of Mexico,
and perhaps of Peru also.  In the latter country there still existed,
at the time of its conquest, the custom common among some of the
Pharaohs of Egypt, for the ruler to take his own sister for his
queen.  Besides its interest, this is a theory which gives a
plausible account of facts, such as the stone working and the widely
spread belief in the sun children, which are otherwise very difficult
to explain.  But it is not to be taken as proved, nor even as
generally accepted.

In Peru, exceptionally, the Spaniards found a distinct race, the
Incas, supposed to be descended from the sun, still ruling, and
ruling with a singular benevolence.  But throughout the whole of the
rest of the continent, North and South, the natives had {19} made
very little progress along any lines of civilisation.  Here and there
was some cultivation, chiefly of the Indian corn; but generally the
people were hunters, going nearly naked in the warmer regions, clad
in the skins of beasts in the colder climates, poorly armed with bows
and arrows.

Thus obscure and scanty is the story of this great newly found world
of the Spaniards.  In the East, on the other hand, were lands whose
stories dated, with actual records, thousands of years back.  There
was one, that wonderland of China, with earliest annals between two
and three thousand years before Christ--by no means the oldest annals
of humanity, but incomparably older than those of any other empire
that still exists.

[Sidenote: The permanence of China]

That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence.
And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of
that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it
so long together has been guided.  Again and again conquerors have
forced their way in upon it from the north--rude, uncivilised tribes
invading a highly civilised land.  Again and again the chiefs of the
invaders have established themselves on the throne of China.  They
and their sons for many generations have governed the land.  But the
country generally, with its vast extent and its large population, has
gone on its way very little troubled by the change of rulers.  Those
military conquerors have in fact been themselves conquered by the
higher civilisation in which they have found themselves.

The Chinese themselves appear to have come into the country from the
west.  Although they always have been a people who held soldiers and
the military caste in very low esteem, they gradually pushed out the
original natives until their empire had boundaries even more
extensive than its present wide limits.  {20} It is one of the many
wonders of this most singular nation, that though it relied so little
on force of arms it gained a very marked respect from all the other
peoples of the East.

[Sidenote: Confucius]

Since the empire grew to be so vast, it is not surprising that the
great men far from the centre became very independent, so that the
social conditions in the sixth century before Christ have been
likened to those feudal conditions which we saw prevailing in Europe
at a much later date.  Chinese rulers of provinces have been written
of as "feudal dukes."  And just at that time, when the country was in
the disturbed state which such conditions made inevitable, there
arose two great teachers of whom the younger, Confucius, exercised a
very extraordinary influence over all China, an influence that has
force even to-day.

He expounded sage maxims for man's conduct towards his fellow-men,
maxims not necessarily of his own invention but taken from wise men
before him.  "Do good," he enjoined, "not only to those who do good
to you, but to those who do you injury."  It had been said even
before him.  But to "do unto others as you would they should do unto
you" may be taken as the principal basis of his own teaching, and the
Christian goes no further, in respect of man's "duty to his
neighbour."  But about man's duty towards God Confucius had nothing
to say.  Obedience and piety of the son towards the father were,
according to him, "the beginning of virtue, that which distinguishes
man from the brutes."

And this relation and piety he conceived ought to prevail all through
the State.  The Emperor ought to act as the father of his people, and
the people ought to be obedient to him, like his sons.  But he
naïvely qualified this, in a way calculated to prevent the Emperor's
acting as a tyrannical parent, by saying {21} that he forfeited his
claim on this obedience if he governed wrongly.

Confucius never claimed, as did Mahomet, for instance, to be divinely
inspired.  He came as a mere man, preaching unselfishness and filial
piety and the duty of obedience and the beauty of goodness.  Those to
whom he preached accepted his words, and certainly in some large
measure formed their conduct accordingly.  It was a sermon advocating
peace in a country distracted by disturbances; and its ultimate
effect is that the Chinese even to-day are a peace-loving nation.
For all that, the great empire has been the scene of very frequent
war, both by invaders from without and rebels within; but unhappily
that is the state which has been usual throughout man's history
everywhere.

Confucius put the highest value on education.  In the second century
B.C. competitive examinations began to be held for selecting
ministers to posts in the Government--a curiously democratic measure,
and perhaps possible in no other country than China.  Some of the
scientific inventions, which have made much difference in the story
of the West, were known in China far earlier than elsewhere--the
power and use of gunpowder, for instance, and the art and craft of
printing.  China discovered them early; but after their first
discovery she did not develop them at all, as did the Western nations
when they relearned them or took them from her.

It was in the third century B.C. that one of the world's wonders, the
Great Wall of China, was built--running west from the sea to a length
of a thousand and four hundred miles, and going over mountain and
valley without deviation.  Its purpose was to act as a barrier, easy
of defence, against the wild tribes that pressed in from the north.
The Emperor under whom this mighty, though not wholly effective,
obstacle {22} was raised, was powerful enough to put down most of the
feudal dukes, and, much as the feudal dukes and lords in Europe were
replaced by the king's official tax collectors, so in China, Viceroys
of provinces, appointed by the Emperor, took the place of the dukes.
The Viceroys also were not always obedient to the central power, but
on the whole the change made for peace within the empire.

Confucianism then, as the doctrine of that great teacher was called,
was not a religion, but merely a system for the ordinance of man's
life on earth, without reference to a God; but about the same time as
Confucius, Buddha lived and founded the religion of Buddhism in
India; and in the first century A.D. Buddhist missionaries came to
China.  It is to this influence that the pagoda-shaped temples are
due which are a prominent feature in Chinese scenery, for it was in
this form that the Buddhist temples were roofed.  The new religion
gained numerous converts, and its monasteries are many in China to
this day; but it really seems to have made but little difference in
the lives of the people--for two reasons.  First because the Chinese
are least ready to change their way of life of any people in the
world, and secondly because the unselfishness, which is the leading
principle in the religion of Buddha, had been already preached as a
leading principle in the maxims of Confucius and of wise men of China
before him.

The general story of China nevertheless continues to be the story of
dissensions within the empire and of uncivilised tribes threatening
its borders on the north and west.  Among these we may notice that
there were Huns, akin to those who threatened, and from time to time
overran, parts of Europe also.

[Sidenote: The Nestorians]

Christianity was brought into the country probably in the sixth
century, by members of a Christian sect called Nestorians, after a
certain bishop Nestorius, {23} their founder.  His doctrine
respecting the divine and human natures of Christ was condemned as
unorthodox both by the Church of Rome and also by the head of the
Eastern Church, at Constantinople.  The sect had its headquarters in
Syria, and was dispersed by order of the Eastern Emperor.  The result
was that its members travelled and settled in Central and Eastern
Asia.  They were Asiatics and found themselves among peoples well
disposed towards them.  By this violent dispersal of them the Emperor
helped their doctrines to prevail as he never could have helped their
prevalence by his greatest favours.  Incidentally, one of the results
of his action was that silkworms, as we are told, were first carried
to the West by some of the Nestorians returning from the far
East--the ancient land whence silk had been brought for many
centuries.

Mahommedanism was introduced not very long after, and the most
interesting point to note about these successively introduced
religions is that all seem to have been permitted and even encouraged
with equal favour, or with equal indifference, by the Chinese rulers.
This was in strict accord with the counsel of the sage Confucius,
whose expressed opinion was that the ruler should interfere as little
as might be with the life of his people.  And that life was still
principally influenced by the doctrines of Confucius, no matter what
religions were brought in.

Thus went the story of China through century after century, with
violent dissensions, yet never dissensions deep enough or wide enough
to create a real change in an empire so vast and in a people so
unwilling to change.  We have to picture them living chiefly along
the river banks, cultivating the rice which was their principal food,
and with unwearied patience and industry making their silk, from the
cocoons spun by the caterpillars, their beautiful porcelain, their
lacquered {24} furniture and vessels, their ivory carvings, and so on.

And then, towards the end of the twelfth century, began to rise to
great power in Asia a people called the Mongols.  Huns, Tartars, and
Mongols we have to look on as closely related; and to some degree the
last two names are interchangeable.  They were divided into tribes
under the rule of chieftains called Khans; and over the whole was a
chosen ruler named the Khakan--the Khan of Khans.  Their numbers
grew.  They led the pastoral life.  As conquerors they were as
ruthless as the Huns from whom they were descended, and at length,
under the famous Kublai Khan, they possessed by far the greater
portion of Asia and Europe as far as the boundaries of Poland.
Before the end of the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, with his palace
at Peking, dominated the whole of China, and a vast portion of the
earth's surface besides.  It was to his court that the famous
Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, made his way.  He lived there no less
than seventeen years in all, and probably at no other time was it so
easy for a western traveller to go to China overland, because at no
other time has there been a single power which could ensure his
safety on so long a journey through lands in possession of such
lawless people.

On land, Kublai and his Mongols were irresistible, but they failed
entirely by sea in two expeditions sent out to attempt the conquest
of Japan.

Kublai's successors had little of what must have been his very
extraordinary genius, both for government and war.  In the middle of
the fourteenth century a Buddhist monk headed a revolution in China
which was completely successful, and ended with the expulsion of the
Mongol conquerors and the establishment of the monk on the throne as
Emperor, the first of the great Ming dynasty which lasted till {25}
1626.  It was the last native dynasty to rule in China, for in that
year, 1626, the Manchus came in as conquerors, and are there still.

The first of the Mings not only drove the Mongols out of China, but
defeated their principal armies so decisively that it was the
beginning of the end of their power in other parts of Asia and in
Europe.  The tribes broke away from their dependence on the Khakan,
or central ruler, and with that loss of union their military
predominance was lost and they ceased to take nearly so large a part
in our story.


[Sidenote: Japan]

In striking contrast with China, Japan is a land of no ancient story,
and of recent civilisation.  It was not until near the end of the
third century A.D. that Chinese writing and letters were brought into
the islands.  They were brought in from the independent kingdom of
Korea which we may see on the map running down southward from
Manchuria, that northern province from which the Manchus came to
conquer China.  It shows how little we really know of Japanese
history, that though there is a legend that Korea was conquered by
Japan about the beginning of the third century, modern historians are
in much doubt whether any such conquest actually occurred.  It was,
at all events, but temporary, and Korea soon regained independence.
Its fortunes, or misfortunes, however, play a very small part in this
Greatest Story.

Thus Chinese civilisation came to Japan, and was followed by Buddhism
replacing the ancient religion of Shinto in which ancestor worship
was the principal element.

Buddhism was essentially a religion of peace, and all the teaching of
Chinese civilisation was opposed to war.  The Chinese held the
profession of arms, the military caste, in the lowest esteem.
Therefore {26} it is very singular that Japan, in spite of Buddhism
and of this Chinese civilisation, gave highest possible honour to her
soldiers.  The Japanese had the greatest reverence for their
aristocracy, moreover---for their highly born--and the real
government was in the hands of one or other of the noble families.
The country was distracted for years and years by perpetual fighting
between two of these great families and their followers.  It is a
story which may recall our Wars of the Roses.

The conclusion of that long conflict was brought about in what
certainly was the greatest of naval battles ever fought up to that
time in any Asiatic sea.  It is called the Battle of Dannoura and its
date is 1188.  More than a thousand junks, as the native vessels are
still called, took part in it, and by the slaughter, both in the
actual fighting and afterwards, the defeated clan was all but wiped
out of existence.

It was cruel work, but it opened the way for a period of comparative
peace.  The mode of government was reformed.  There was the Mikado,
the Emperor, by whom all power was supposed to be wielded, and there
was also an official called the Shogun, the head of the army.
Perhaps we may best designate his powers by calling him
Commander-in-Chief.  But his authority was far more independent than
that of our highest military officer.  For centuries the Shogun
appears as the real power in the land, although in theory his power
is derived from the Mikado.

After the victorious repulse of the great Kublai Khan, above
mentioned, the Daimios, as the great nobles were called, again became
powerful and turbulent and the condition of the country when the
Portuguese first visited it, in the early years of the sixteenth
century, seems to have been not very unlike {27} that of Europe in
the worst days of the fighting among the feudal barons.

[Sidenote: India]

In that disordered condition we have to leave, for the time being,
the story of the Yellow Race in the Farthest East, and pass to the
story of India previous to the epoch-making voyage of da Gama.

In a former volume we noticed the "Indo-European" as one of the great
human families.  It is a word which indicates an immigration of a
people from Central Asia into India and also into Europe.  The
kinship of Indians with Europeans is testified by the likeness of
many words in the languages of both.  Especially is this likeness
apparent in the words which express simple things, conveying ideas
which people would be likely to wish to communicate to each other in
a primitive state of society.

The immigrants found a people in the land before them, and remnants
of that people still remain.  In India itself those survivors are
called Dravidians, and the Tamils of Ceylon are probably of the same
race.

The Indians or Hindus appear to have lived, from their first coming
into the land that we call India, in village communities, each
community independent of the rest and producing all that its members
needed.  It is very like the way in which we have seen that the
Germanic or Gothic tribes lived.

What is unlike those tribes is the "caste" system which still
prevails in India.  Their highest "caste" was that of the Brahmans or
priests who kept in their own families the many secrets of a
mysterious religion.  It consisted in "Nature worship," especially
worship of the forces that produce human food, and more particularly
worship of the sun.  Our knowledge of it is derived from their sacred
books, the Vedas and others.  The Brahmans claimed that they were
formed by the Creator of the world from his mouth; the {28} caste of
soldiers, the military caste, from his arm; the farmer caste from his
thigh, and the tillers of the soil from his feet.  There were other
castes.  The divisions were so very rigid that it was unlawful and
irreligious for one caste to do the work of another, to eat with
another, or to inter-marry.  The restrictions were many and severe,
and are but little relaxed even now.  They exist still as we find
them laid down in a Brahmany code called "The Laws of Manu," which is
supposed to date from the fifth century B.C.

[Sidenote: Buddha]

The institutions and manners of life in the East have been very slow
to change, in comparison with the West, and it is likely that the
life of these village communities continued for many centuries to be
much as it had been when the immigrants first came down from the
north to that valley of the Indus river which seems to have been
their earliest place of settlement.  And then, about 550 years before
Christ, or a little earlier, was born a wonderful man Buddha, son of
the Rajah of a small territory which is now Nepal.  Here and there
the headman of a village more powerful than those about him had begun
to exercise some authority over more villages than one and to be
called a rajah: and of one such Buddha was born.

[Illustration: STATUE OF BUDDHA.]

When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in
the world.  It appeared to him that the first cause of all that
misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of
pleasure.  He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of
these desires his misery would cease.  One might think that if this
were so the simple remedy for it all would be death.  But that was no
remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life
which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives
which each soul has to live through.  The only way then by which
man's misery could be relieved {29} was that he should strive by all
means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless,
that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying
his natural desires.  And so convinced was this young prince, or
rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be
assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and
child and all {30} his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world
preaching this doctrine.

No doubt it was developed by his followers--for he quickly gained a
numerous following--beyond his own first ideas.  It taught that the
final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won,
after many re-incarnations--that is to say, after living again and
again on the earth in different human bodies--by being absorbed into
some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana.  In
that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length,
and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it.

[Sidenote: Buddhism]

What he preached, then, was not quite unselfishness as we understand
it; for our unselfishness seems to imply an active concern for the
selves of other people.  Buddha's idea was much more passive than
active.  We might better call it selflessness.  His great thought was
how to get rid of all self, both a man's own self and that of all
others.  He did, however, devote himself to what we may describe even
in our sense as a perfectly unselfish life, for he not only denied
himself all but the barest necessities, but went through northern
India trying to save other men from what he considered, and pitied,
as their misery, by explaining to them how he thought they might
escape from it.

The theory of re-incarnation opened a way for the union of Buddhism
with the older Brahmanism, for the priests taught that in Buddha
himself was the incarnated soul of Vishnu, the supreme spirit of the
Brahmans.  So they taught, and who was there to contradict them?

For the regulation of social life the maxims of Buddha are such as
the highest Christian morality must approve.  Hatred was to be
conquered by love.  Wives, children, and servants were to be treated
with {31} wise kindness.  After a while, as has happened with other
religions, the followers of Buddhism split up into sects, and
especially into what were called the Northern and the Southern
Churches.  Although it was in the north of India that Buddha had
preached, it was there that his rules of life were modified and made
less severe.  The Southern Church observed them more strictly.

In the centuries that followed, the doctrines of Buddha won converts
far beyond India itself--in Tibet in the north, in Burma and Siam in
the east and south, and so to the Malay Peninsula and to the islands
of the Malay Archipelago.  Farther west it was carried down into
Ceylon.

Whatever, we may think of the religion of Buddha, it is obvious that
it was in no sense a "fighting religion."  It did not inspire its
followers to be soldiers.  Perhaps this is the reason why the Hindus
never seem to have been able to resist the incursions of warlike
neighbours.  In the fourth century B.C.  came Alexander of Macedon
and pushed his wonderful conquests into the very heart of India.  His
general, Seleucus, organised part of the conquered territory under
his rule, but it made little lasting impression on the story of the
country.  About the middle of the second century A.D., the wild
hordes of the Parthians, the people who gave such continual trouble
to the mighty Roman Empire, swept into Northern India, and with them
they brought Christianity.  Christianity, too, came early to that
Malabar coast where the Portuguese, more than a thousand years later,
found the Moslems in full possession.  But Christianity was not
imposed by force.

Although many wars have been fought for Christianity, it would be no
more right to speak of it, than of Buddhism itself, as a "fighting
religion."  Mahommedanism, on the contrary, has ever been the great
fighting religion of the world.

{32}

In the eighth century, while the Mahommedans in the West were making
themselves dominant in Spain, other armies of the same faith went
conquering eastwards through Central Asia to the very borders of
China.  They conquered, but they did not succeed in establishing any
permanent empire.  There was no power at their centre to control such
an extent of the world's surface.  The local princes became
practically independent again.  But in many parts the Mahommedan
religion remained.  It failed to make any impression in Tibet, where
the Great Llama, as the chief of the Tibetan Buddhists was called,
was ruler as well as high priest.

In India Mahommedanism established itself the more easily because
Buddhism was by that time a waning force in many parts and was being
re-absorbed by the older Brahmanism.  Spread by its missionaries,
called Mullahs, the new creed won its way right through the country
to Siam, down the Malay Peninsula and into the islands of the
archipelago.  It penetrated southward also.  We have noted that when
the Portuguese came to the western shores of Southern India in 1500
or so they found Sultans, as the heads of Mahommedan states were
called, in possession.  To these seaports, however, and to the
islands it is likely enough that the religion of Mahomet was brought
by the Arab traders as much as or more than by any overland route.

Of the principalities which gained, or regained, independence after
the flood of Moslem conquest had swept from West to East, that which
became of greatest importance in the story was the kingdom of
Afghanistan.  It has been of importance by reason of its geographical
position making it "the gate of India," as it has been called.  It is
the "gate" for such nations as Persia and Russia which might seek to
enter India from the west and north.

{33}

From the kingdom of Afghanistan itself a Moslem army swept again into
India about the year A.D. 1000.  A confederacy of Hindu princes
assembled a force to oppose it, but it is said that this army was
entirely demoralised by the sound--the first of its kind that they
had heard--of a gun brought by the invaders.  The rule of the Moslem
Viceroys, under which a large portion of Northern India was
administered as the result of this Afghan victory, seems to have been
equitable and effective, and in the course of the four centuries that
followed a great part of all India became Mahommedan.

[Sidenote: Timour, the Tartar]

At the end of that period appeared on the Indian scene the formidable
figure of Timour, the Tartar, sometimes known as Tamerlane or
Tambourlaine, meaning Tamer, or Timour, the Lame.  He too was a
Mahommedan, and doubtless was of the same stock as those Afghan
rulers who claimed Turkish descent; but that distant relationship did
not deter him from the invasion of India from the north.  He won his
way easily enough as far as Delhi, and there appears no reason why he
should not have pushed his conquests as far south as he wished.  He
returned to his own country, however, and shortly afterwards went
westward against the Ottoman Turks and very heavily defeated them at
Angora, the new capital of modern Turkey.

But for the lack of ships, it seems certain that Timour, with his
Tartar hordes, would have passed over into Europe--with what result
on our story no one can say.  But he had no means of crossing the
Dardanelles, and once more he went back to his own country.

Rather more than a thousand years later one of his descendants again
invaded India from the north, and made a beginning of that Mogul
empire which was to become far more widely and firmly established,
{34} under the great Akbar, towards the end of the sixteenth century.


Such, or somewhat such, are the main features of the stories of that
new world in the West and that old world in the East which were
opened up by the enterprise of Spain and Portugal about the year 1500.




{35}

CHAPTER III

THREE KINGS AND A MONK

Apart from the discovery of the West and of the new sea-route to the
East, the most important events in the early years of the sixteenth
century happened in Italy--Northern Italy.  We have seen that Italy
was almost the only country which showed no sign, as yet, of settling
down within something like the boundaries which delimited the
European nations up to the time of the Great War.  It must be
understood that this is a statement which takes no account of the
differences made by Napoleon's victories at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.  We may disregard them, for the moment, because
they were not lasting.

But the most important of all the events happening in Italy had
nothing to do with changes of territories or national boundaries.
Far more interesting and more helpful to the world was the growth of
that Renaissance, or new birth, of love of letters and of all
artistic beauty which we saw beginning with Dante and Petrarch and
Boccaccio, and some of the early Italian painters, sculptors, and
jewellers.  Moreover, we must not forget the glorious architecture
which goes by the name of Gothic, nor the noble buildings in that
Byzantine style which the influence of the Moors carried into Spain.

We should notice that a very great impetus was {36} given to that
study of Greek literature, which Petrarch and Boccaccio in particular
had revived, by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in the
middle of the fifteenth century; for it had the effect of scattering
the Greeks far and wide, seeking new homes and bringing their books
and their traditions with them.

And further, we ought to observe how this learning had been carried
into every country and corner of Europe by the establishment of
colleges and universities where it now became possible for every
student to read "the classics."  Their establishment was the work of
the Church or of wealthy men acting under the advice of the Church.
Moreover, for what we may call elementary education the teaching of
the children of the poorer classes, so far as they received any
teaching at all, was also the Church's work, for it was done by the
members of the monasteries and convents all over Christendom.  It is
well that we should bear this in mind, to the Church's credit, at
this moment, for the time is close at hand when we shall have to see
that same Church accused, and in large measure convicted, of acts
very greatly to her discredit.

All the while that the love of letters and of art was growing within
the walls of the fortified cities of Italy, the cities were
constantly at variance with one another, and even within their walls
civic strife seems to have been the rule rather than the exception;
but apart from these small local fights there were two principal
causes of unrest.  The first was the fact that the kings of France
were not at all disposed to regard the Alps as forming a natural
boundary of their possessions--they were constantly coveting the
fertile land of Northern Italy--and a second cause of unrest was the
desire, which was strong enough to unite for a time most of the other
states, to cripple the excessive power of Venice.

{37}

[Sidenote: The decline of Venice]

Several circumstances combined to make possible the curbing of that
power.  The Turks were strong enough at sea to demand the full
attention of the naval force of Venice, and her resources were vastly
diminished by the diversion of that Eastern trade, for which she had
held the gate into Europe, to the newly found sea-way round Africa.
The Pope took the lead against her.  He formed a league which was
joined by the Emperor and by the kings of France and Spain.  The
alliance was too strong for the single state, and after the first
battle Venice resigned nearly all her possessions on the mainland.
She ceased to be a danger to the neighbouring states.

There was, however, no such combination of circumstances to diminish
the power of France.  Within a few years after the beginning of the
century the French, by the capture of Genoa, had established
themselves in a strong position to menace the whole of Italy.  The
French king Louis XII. had some pretext for the menace, for he could
produce a kind of hereditary claim on the sovereignty both of Naples
and of Milan.  He had served the Pope against Venice, and after
rendering this assistance he was not disposed to withdraw his claims.
The Pope therefore arranged a new league against his late ally.
Spain, the Emperor, and England were parties to this, which was
called the Holy League--England under Henry VIII., who was not always
to prove himself so close a friend of the Pope!  The result was the
speedy expulsion from Italy of the French, chiefly by the Spanish
armies.  Very shortly afterwards the French king died and was
succeeded on the throne by his cousin Francis I. in 1515.

It has been my aim, through all the course of this Greatest Story, to
encumber it with as few names as possible, in order that the names of
the most {38} important actors may stand out the more clearly and be
remembered the more easily.  But just at the moment which the story
has now reached the names of four men, three being powerful kings and
one a humble cleric, stand out pre-eminently.  We might almost say
that the story of those four is the story of all Europe, so large is
their part in it.

Luther is the name of the cleric.  He was the leader in that great
schism, or cleaving off, of the Protestant Church--the Church which
"protested"--from the ancient Church of Rome.  It is that cleaving
off from the old and founding of the new, the reformed, Church, which
is called the Reformation.

The three great kings were Francis I. of France, above mentioned, our
own King Henry VIII., and--by far the greatest of the three--Charles
V.

It was the greatness of Charles V., the accident, as we may perhaps
call it, that he held, in his own person and by rightful succession,
the sovereignty of so many and extensive countries so far apart from
each other, which was one of the chief factors of the story at this
time.  For he was of the ancient house of the Habsburgs.  He was the
ruler of Austria.  He became Emperor.  He became King of Spain.  He
was Duke of Brabant and Count of Flanders and Holland.  He had a
claim of sovereignty over Burgundy.  The Pope purchased his help
against the Reformation movement of Luther by giving up to him such
sovereignty as he was able to enforce over the greater part of Italy.

We can see at once what was the position of France thus surrounded.
And we must always remember that it was the day of despotic monarchy,
when the king could make war or peace at his own pleasure and
regarded the lands over which he was king as his own private
property.  Especially of this despotic kind was the monarchy of
Francis.  He appears in {39} history as a brilliant figure,
ambitious, eager for deeds of arms, without depth of character or
fixed principles.  He came to the throne as a young man and at once
was attracted by the lure of Italy.

At first his arms had a rapid success, and he defeated the combined
forces of Spain, the Papal states, and Venice--Venice being then in
alliance with the Pope.  He was thus victorious over Italy in arms,
but the culture of Italy and of the Renaissance made a complete
conquest of him.  A new combination of Swiss, German, and Spanish
arms drove the French out of Italy, and Francis returned, strongly
influenced by that new light of art and letters which he had there
found.  From that invasion of Italy by the French we may date the
beginning of the Renaissance in France, whence it spread to other
nations of Europe.

[Sidenote: The "Cloth of Gold"]

It was in the year 1516 that Charles succeeded to the throne of Spain
and to the possession of all the wealth that the Spanish ships had
begun to bring in from the New World.  Three years later he was
elected Emperor, giving offence thereby to Henry VIII. of England, as
well as to Francis, since both had sought to be Emperor.  Their
common cause of offence led to their famous meeting known as the
"Field of the Cloth of Gold" by reason of the magnificence of the
decorations, the gay and splendid tents, and so on.  But it all ended
in nothing, or indeed less than nothing, except an exchange of
compliments, for almost immediately afterwards we find Henry, under
the influence of the great Cardinal Wolsey, pledged to support
Charles.  In the shifting alliances of the time it was nearly always
against France that England was engaged, notwithstanding that Henry's
sister had married Francis' predecessor on the throne of France.
Charles, on the other hand, was Henry's nephew.  But France was
constantly giving aid to Scotland, whether {40} secretly or openly,
in her continual fight with England.  Scotland, however, had just
been beaten to her very knees in the battle of Flodden, and had
little fighting left in her for the moment.  With such forces as
these opposed to France the wonder really is that she maintained her
power undiminished.  It is yet more wonderful that, under Francis,
she should have been ready for still further adventures in Italy.
Yet she did so adventure, and though she and her king met with
grievous disaster there--especially at the battle of Pavia where
Francis was made prisoner and whence he was taken to Madrid--we have
to notice that at the death of Francis, shortly before the middle of
the century, France was in possession of the provinces of Savoy and
Piedmont, both on the Italian side of the Alps--and this, although
Charles had been crowned "King of Italy" by the Pope nearly twenty
years earlier.  Probably the explanation lies chiefly in the fact
that the territories over which Charles ruled were so extensive, and
also so scattered, that it was impossible for him to bring any great
force together at any one place.  Moreover, on his south-eastern
border, in and around Austria, he was constantly menaced by the Turks
ever pressing up from Constantinople.  He seems to have tried to rid
himself of the Turkish trouble by handing over to his brother some of
the provinces on the side which lay most dangerously exposed; but
even so their defence must have remained practically on his hands.

He never made good his claim to Burgundy--in which matter again it is
rather wonderful that Francis should have been able to resist him.
And, not having Burgundy in his possession, he was obliged to
maintain a fleet able to command the seas on the west of France in
order to go to and fro between Spain and the Netherlands.  He must
also have a second fleet of ships for bringing treasure from the {41}
East; and, since Spain had a long sea-coast on the Mediterranean
where the Turks and pirates swarmed, he must have yet a third fleet
there for the protection of his trade.  Besides, he had a claim of
sovereignty over Naples and Sicily.

Therefore, with these, and other less important, calls upon his power
it is really not surprising, great although that power was, that it
did not prove equal to all he would have liked to demand of it.  And
further, in those states over which he had been elected Emperor, with
the rather vague authority and duties belonging to that title,
another cause arose of great and increasing trouble, the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Luther]

For the last few pages we have been occupied with kings and emperors:
it is time that our story concerned itself with the cleric of low
degree.  I put this phrase in place of that which was on my pen's tip
to write, namely, "humble cleric," because, however we may think of
Luther, "humble" he certainly does not appear.  Humble before God he
may indeed, as a good Christian, have been.  It was perhaps the most
striking feature in his character that he would not humble himself
before men--not even before that great man whom he had been taught to
look on as endowed with a quite special grace and blessing, the Pope
of Rome.  His origin was humble enough.  He was the son of a miner in
the German state of Saxony.  He had the education of a monk, was made
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony,
and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity.  He went on a pilgrimage
to Rome and came back grieving sorely over what he saw there.

The way in which the Pope and his council, called the Curia, had been
governing, or misgoverning, the Church, had given great offence for
many years.  The monasteries and the convents, that is to say, the
{42} establishments of the monks and the nuns, had done much useful
work in acquiring learning and in educating the people throughout
Christendom in religious and other knowledge.  Many of them were
doing good work still.  But the condition of most of them appears to
have become very bad, both monks and nuns being lazy, gluttonous, and
worse--setting the worst possible example to the common people.  They
were careful perhaps about the performance of the religious
ceremonies in the churches, but their religion had little or no
influence on the conduct of their lives.

Against Rome itself the complaint of Christendom was not only that it
did not exercise its authority to amend these ill practices, and that
the very same practices were followed in Rome itself, but also that
the Pope and his council exacted money, from the people generally and
even from the clergy themselves, and did not apply the money to the
purposes for which it had been demanded.  For the demand was made on
the plea that the money was needed to equip armies to fight the Turk,
and those armies were never summoned or put in movement.  The money
was diverted to increase the private wealth and pomp of Pope and
Cardinals and high church dignitaries at Rome.

So there was sufficient cause of offence, both at the centre and in
every part of the world over which the Pope claimed authority.  We
saw in the last volume how our own Wycliffe, and how Huss, in
Bohemia, had raised furious protests against these evils in the
Church.  The fire of those fierce protests was still smouldering.
The people understood the protests better.  The knowledge of the
Bible was not so entirely the possession of the clerics as it had
been.  The printing press had made many copies.  Moreover, the Greeks
and the knowledge of the Greek language, {43} in which the New
Testament was written, had been widely dispersed when the Turks took
Constantinople--the headquarters of the Greek Church.

Luther's first act of protest against the action of Rome was directed
against the sale of "Indulgences," as they were called.  These
"indulgences" were written pardons for sin.  They were even credited
with power to bring out of Purgatory a soul that was there already.
And they--that is to say, the parchments or papers with the pardon
written on them--could be bought.  They could be bought from people
called "pardoners" who sold them on behalf of Rome, and the Pope's
explanation was that the money was needed for the building at Rome of
the Cathedral of St. Peter.

[Sidenote: The burning of the "Bull"]

Luther boldly declared that the "indulgences" were valueless, because
no man, not even the Pope, had the power to forgive sins, and he
nailed a declaration to this effect on the door of the great church
at Wittenberg and sent another copy to his Archbishop.  At first the
Pope seems to have made light of the matter; but at length, as
Luther's supporters increased in number, he issued a Bull of
excommunication against Luther as a heretic, summoning him to Rome to
give an account of his actions, and commanding the burning of books
which he had written against Rome.  We have seen before what such a
Bull meant.  It had meant so much in the way of setting a man outside
the protection of the laws in this world, and in condemning him in
the world to come, that even the great Emperor Frederic had to yield
before it, cowed and vanquished.  The act of the monk of Wittenberg,
when he received it, was to throw it publicly on the fire kindled for
the very purpose in an open space of the city!

The fire created by the burning of the Papal document set all the
smouldering embers into a more {44} furious flame than ever before.
That burning of the Bull happened in 1520.

Luther did not go to Rome; but he did go, when summoned by Charles,
the Emperor, and appeared before him at the Diet, or meeting, of the
German States, held at Worms.  Charles, after listening to his
passionate pleadings, pronounced that he should receive the treatment
of a heretic, but he was allowed to leave Worms and start for his
home.  On the journey he was taken prisoner by the Elector of Saxony,
who had always been a friend to him.  It is supposed that this
capture was effected for his better protection.  In his imprisonment
he made the translation into German of the New Testament.  Later, he
translated the whole Bible.

It is not impossible that this capture was made with the cognisance
of Charles himself.  The course of events forced him to side with the
Pope and oppose the reformers, but there are several incidents which
show him much more anxious to make peace, if that were possible,
between the two parties, than to take a leading part in the strife.
He had much to attend to elsewhere.  In 1526 the Protestant states of
Germany had leagued themselves together for mutual support; and in
the very same year the Turks had made themselves masters of the whole
of Hungary, and reduced it to a Turkish province.

It was now only a year since Charles had released Francis, whom he
had taken prisoner at Pavia, after making a solemn compact with him;
yet Francis was already intriguing against him.  Francis had induced
the Pope of all people--the Pope whom Charles had so helped against
Francis--to be his ally against Charles.  Charles's reply was to send
a strong force into Italy which sacked Rome and took the Pope
prisoner.  Thus he disposed of that trouble.  He then again made
peace with Francis on liberal {45} terms.  The Pope was soon set at
liberty and returned to his see, but he seems to have learnt his
lesson--namely, that Charles held a power far too great to be
opposed, if he cared to put that power forth.  In 1530 Charles was
crowned King of Italy by the Pope and at the same time he received
the Pope's consecration as Emperor.

[Sidenote: Spread of Reformation]

Meanwhile the Turks had been extending their aggressions and besieged
Venice.  And the Reformation, that schism, or cleaving off, which
denied the authority of the Pope, spread more widely and took deeper
root.  Its direction of growth was chiefly northward, from Saxony
which is one of the Southern German states.  It worked up through
Germany and so to Scandinavia and Denmark, to the Netherlands and to
France.  The help of those German princes who had formed themselves
into a Protestant league was essential to Charles if he was to be
successful in repelling the Turks, and he consented to withdraw the
edicts condemning the so-called "heretics" which had been passed by
his own authority.

Finally he did march against the Turks, and though he did not gain
any striking victory, a peace on favourable terms was made with them
in 1538, after their fleet had suffered a heavy defeat from the
Venetians.  For the Turks were constantly at war at various points of
their wide empire.  On the eastern, the Persian side, there was
continual fighting, with the result that they maintained their hold
on Bagdad, the capital; but it was a possession which they always had
to keep strongly defended.  Their pirate fleets had established
themselves in Tunis and Algiers on the North African coast.  Charles
made two naval expeditions against them, in the first of which he
succeeded tolerably, but in the second had no success at all.  The
Moslem corsairs remained dominant in {46} the Mediterranean until
they suffered a notable defeat in the famous battle of Lepanto in
1571.

Luther died in 1546, boldly uttering, both by speech and writing, his
doctrines until the last.  He lived to see them firmly grounded in
Germany, and spreading north and west.  On the Continent of Europe
the kings were in opposition to them.  In England, exceptional
circumstances arose which disposed Henry VIII. to receive them with
favour.

Rather as Francis was attracted by the idea of adding to his French
possessions the northern and western provinces of Italy, so Henry
VIII. was tempted by the desire to regain for England some of the
continental territory that had once been hers.  It was largely to
this end that he had sought alliance with Spain and had helped Spain
and the Pope in driving the French out of Italy in 1512.  Later he
had the assistance of the King of Spain in an invasion of a part of
France which had belonged to England in a former reign.  He gained a
quick success, but before he could establish himself in the conquered
province the Spanish help was withdrawn.  The adventure gained
nothing for England, but cost her a large sum and created much
dissatisfaction among the people.

The idea of the Spanish alliance had been in the mind of Henry
VIII.'s father, before him, and to confirm it he had married his
eldest son to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon.  That eldest
son died, and left Catherine a widow.  Henry VIII. pursuing the same
policy, sought, and obtained, from the Pope a "dispensation," as it
was called--that is to say, a permission--to marry Catherine,
although she was his brother's widow.

[Sidenote: Henry VIII. and his Queens]

The alliance with Spain did not bring Henry nearly all that he had
hoped of it.  He was disgusted by the withdrawal from France of the
Spanish force that {47} we have just noted.  Catherine's children
died, with the exception of a daughter, Mary.  Perhaps his great
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, put it into Henry's head that there was a
curse on his marriage with his brother's widow, or perhaps it was a
thought that came to him without Wolsey's suggestion.  However it
came, it seems that it took possession of him.  He expressed doubts
about the legality of the marriage.  Also he had fallen in love with
a lady of the Court, Anne Boleyn.  He began to desire the annulment
of his marriage with Catherine in order that he might marry Anne
Boleyn, and approached the Pope with a request that he should
pronounce that marriage invalid and illegal.  It was, in effect,
asking the head of the Church, who, in theory, could do no wrong, and
was infallible, to confess that such infallible authority had erred.

The Pope was not at all anxious to make an enemy of Henry.  In the
troubles created by Luther's preaching and writing, Henry, so late as
1521, had appeared as a true friend to the Pope by ordering the
burning of all Luther's books.  So the Pope sent great Churchmen to
England to look into the matter of the marriage.  There was much talk
and many conferences, but in the end Henry must have realised, what
he probably had deemed probable from the beginning, that the Pope
would not reverse a former decision.  He could not get his marriage
declared to be illegal by the Church at Rome.  He determined to act
without that Church, to have the illegality pronounced by English
bishops, whom he could trust to express such opinions as he should
command them to utter, and to proceed in accordance with their views
thus expressed.  Catherine was divorced.  He married Anne Boleyn.

Once he had taken this step, he followed on the path to which it led,
never looking back.  The proud {48} Cardinal Wolsey fell from the
king's favour, largely by reason of his pride and arrogant
ostentation which had raised him up a number of enemies among the
English nobles, but he was succeeded by another adviser, Thomas
Cromwell, whose influence was even greater in determining the king to
be the absolute master of England.  Under Wolsey he had gone far in
this direction.  Parliament had power in its hands, because it had
the power of granting subsidies for the king's wars and expenses.
Wolsey had advised the king not to summon Parliament, but to extort
contributions from his subjects instead.  They did not give
cheerfully, nor to the full extent of the sums demanded, but they
gave grudgingly, in fear of punishment for some charge that would be
brought against them if they did not.

Under Cromwell's influence, the king did call his Parliament
together; but by that time, with his growing power, he had succeeded
in getting his own friends in a majority in that Parliament.  And in
order to put down any possible opposition in the Upper House, he did
not hesitate to bring to the executioner's block some of the noblest
and most venerable of the Peers.  It was a reign of terror, with
Henry as absolute despot.

And he made himself despotic in the Church no less; for that was the
final end of that path on which he made the first step when he
divorced Catherine and married Anne in defiance of Rome.  For first
came thunders, ever louder and louder, from Rome, answered by ever
louder defiance.  It was defiance that was not displeasing to a large
number in England.  Already, before any of the ideas of the
Reformation were introduced, we have noticed England growing restive
under the attempts of the Popes of Rome to dictate to her.  We may be
sure that this restiveness had been increased of later years.  Some
of the clergy {49} themselves, as we have seen, were none too pleased
at the demands which Rome made upon them for money for Turkish wars,
or for the building of St. Peter's Cathedral.  They were the less
pleased, because of a strong suspicion that it never was intended to
use the money for the purposes stated.

Henry, therefore, and his powerful and ruthless counsellor were able
to turn this dissatisfaction to their own use.  The clergy were very
ready to support Henry in asserting that the English Church was not
to be subservient to Rome.  Even the bishops in the Upper House
probably thought that they were doing a good work for the freedom of
the Church when they passed the Act called the Act of Supremacy which
made the King of England head of the English Church.  That Church was
indeed freed, by the Act, from the authority of Rome, but it was only
to put it under another authority, the authority of the English king.

And it gave equally little offence to the majority of the clergy when
the king drove the monks from their monasteries, and took their land
and its revenues for the service of the Crown or gave them to his
friends.  The good work of the monasteries had been done, and they
had passed the time of their usefulness, for their inmates no longer
studied to acquire knowledge, nor imparted it to the laity and their
children.  Only in the north of England did their suppression rouse
opposition and lead to a dangerous rising which the Crown's forces
put down with great severity.

But education had been spreading in England, as elsewhere in
Christendom, in spite of the religious troubles.  The new opening of
the ancient stores of classical literature, and their diffusion by
the printing press, could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of men
of intelligence.

The spirit of protest against Rome which Luther {50} preached had
this, at least, in common with the spirit in which Henry of England
acted, that both were bitterly and even violently opposed to the
Pope's claim of authority.  So this spirit of the Reformation made
its way in England without encountering the difficulties which it had
met in other parts of Europe.  The clergy, who, in an earlier reign,
would have opposed it, had now become subject, in part by their own
act, to the King of England rather than to the Pope of Rome.
Protestantism was accepted as the State religion.

In Ireland also Henry declared himself head of the Church as well as
king.  All Acts of the Irish Parliament, from his reign for several
centuries, had to receive the assent of England before they became
law.

Of the four great men who had so large a share in the making of our
story in the first half of the sixteenth century, the monk, the most
important figure of the four, was the first to die, in 1546.  The
next year saw the deaths of Francis and of Henry.  Charles, greatest
of the three kings, lived on until 1558, though he laid down his
honours two years or so earlier and retired to a monastery to end his
days.

By the death of Francis, Charles was relieved of his life-long enemy,
and took advantage of that relief to turn all his attention to the
Protestant princes of Germany who were leagued together to support
their faith by arms.  He defeated them at that time, and, using his
victory, as was his custom, with moderation, he drew up a document
called the "Interim," a statement of doctrines to which he hoped that
both Catholics and Protestants would agree.  It failed, however, to
satisfy either.  Five years later the Protestant princes again took
arms, and this time their Emperor, whom they found unprepared, had to
fly for his life.  The ultimate result was a treaty called {51} the
Peace of Religion, of which the most important provision was that the
Emperor permitted the Protestants, so far as the permission lay with
him to give, to hold their doctrines and perform their religious
services as they thought right.

[Sidenote: The Peace of Religion]

It was a beautiful name--the Peace of Religion--but unfortunately the
name of peace was not sufficient to ensure that peace would follow.
Even within the Protestant Church itself there soon arose acute
differences of opinion.

The doctrines of the monk won their way over most of North-Western
Europe.  Into Scandinavia and Denmark they were introduced with the
support and favour of the king himself.  They made little penetration
on the eastern side, for the simple reason that those particular
abuses against which they protested did not exist there.  Their
protest was mainly against evil practices in the Church of Rome.  But
over Russia, rising into greatness in the east of Europe, the Greek
Church prevailed.  Constantinople, until its capture by the Turks,
had been the capital city, the Holy Place, of that Church; but now
the Tsar of Russia claimed to be its head, speaking from his capital
city of Moscow.

We saw something of the break-up of the Mongol power, which had
extended over nearly the whole of Asia and threatened Europe also,
when we were recounting the story of China.  The blow that was dealt
it at the end of the fourteenth century by the Buddhist monk who
became the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty doubtless helped in its
break-up even so far away as its western border.  The centre of its
power was shattered.  It no longer had the strength that comes from
unity.  The Mongols fell apart into a number of independent tribes.
Early in the sixteenth century Russia began to throw off the
domination with which those Mongols, or Tartars, always threatened
{52} her, and from time to time exercised.  She had partly
amalgamated with the Tartars, and partly ruled over them, by the
middle of that century.

The knowledge of Russia began about the same time to be brought to
England, by traders who had found their way to Moscow by adventurous
voyages round the top of Scandinavia and so on to the White Sea,
whereon is the city of Archangel, and so down into the centre and
capital of the great country, travelling partly by river and partly
overland.  A treaty, for the exchange of the products of the two
countries, was made, and the English were allowed to build warehouses
for storing those goods which they brought in to trade with and those
Russian goods which they obtained in return.

It is of interest to note that this discovery of Muscovy, as Russia
for a long while was called in England, was made by sailors in search
of a very different land, namely, China.  For there was an idea in
the minds of the men of the fifteenth century that a way to China,
and all its riches, might be found by sea round the top of
Scandinavia and so eastward until China was reached.

And so, in fact, some sort of a way was ultimately found through
Behring's Straits--the narrow sea-way between the extreme north-east
of Asia and the extreme north-west of America.  But it is a way so
blocked by the ice for so large a part of the year as to be of no
practical use, and the discovery of the south-west passage round the
Cape took all the interest and zest out of the search for what was
called the North-West Passage.  Portuguese trading vessels had
reached China and Japan before the middle of the century and
missionaries of the Order of Jesus, or Jesuits, had introduced
Christianity into Japan as they had already brought it to India.
Spanish missionaries of the same great monastic order had {53}
carried Christianity westward into the New World.  Thousands of
Indians in Mexico and Peru and other countries conquered by the
Spaniards were baptised as Christians.  Churches and cathedrals built
by the labour of the natives, which cost the Spaniards nothing, began
to rise on the sites of the pagan temples.

[Sidenote: Cross and Crescent]

Thus both eastward and westward the Cross, the Christian emblem,
travelled with the conquering sword of those who went by sea; but on
land, and in the Mediterranean itself, the Mahommedan Crescent was
carried far by the scimitar, or curved blade, of the Moslem.

The Moslem Turks fought their way, as we have seen, so far, in
Europe, as Vienna, which they nearly, but not quite, captured.  On
the other side they had subdued Persia, and established themselves at
Bagdad.  Up to the year 1571 and the heavy defeat of their fleet at
Lepanto, they continued to be the strongest naval force in the
Mediterranean.  It was in the first half of the century that they
touched the highest point of their power and extended their sway most
widely.  In further course of the story we shall find them for the
most part on the defensive, striving, especially against the growing
might of Russia, to retain what they had won.

Towards the latter part of his reign that great king and emperor,
Charles V., had trouble in the most northern section of his wide
domain--in the Netherlands.  He put down, with severity, a rising of
the great city of Ghent, formidable, within its walls, because of the
privileges that had been granted to its burghers, because of the
wealth and of the numbers of its inhabitants and their independent
spirit.  This little trouble in the Netherlands might have sounded in
his ears, if they had been able to appreciate its meaning, as the
first note of an immense trouble that was to follow, for in the years
to come we shall find {54} unrest and fighting over almost the whole
stage, which has become world-wide, of our story; and we may trace
the origin of it all back to what now happened in that comparatively
small corner which was called the Netherlands.




{55}

CHAPTER IV

THE WANING POWER OF SPAIN

Charles V. resigning the Crown of Spain, gave it over to his son
Philip II., who married Mary, Queen of England.  He had already ceded
to him the kingdom of Naples.  With the Crown of Spain went the
Netherlands; and Charles would have wished his son to receive the
Imperial title also.  The Electors of Germany, however, refused to
elect Philip and, with the assent of Charles, Ferdinand, Charles's
younger brother, became the new Emperor.

Charles, although a firm supporter of the authority of the Church of
Rome, had done his best, by the publication of that "Interim"
mentioned in the last chapter, and by a merciful treatment of the
defeated Protestants, to bring the two parties together again.  He
failed; but he had made the effort.  The character of Philip did not
dispose him to follow his father in any attempts at peace-making.  He
was ardently jealous for the ecclesiastical authority of Rome and
appears to have had much of the tyrant's spirit: he was very
impatient of opposition, and showed no favour to any who differed
from him in opinion.  Heresy was, in his view, a sin against the
Church, which it was his duty to put down by the most effective means
in his power, wherever he might find it among his subjects.  Wherever
it was even so much as suspected, the strictest search should be made
for its unmasking.

{56}

And to him, being in this mood, there was a machine ready to his
hand--an institution of the Church known as the Inquisition.
Inquisition means inquiry; and the particular object for which the
Inquisition was instituted was to inquire into alleged instances of
heresy--that is to say, of doctrines and practices of which the
Church did not approve--and also into instances of the practice of
magic and sorcery, which were deemed to be miracles performed by men
with the aid of the devil.

The first institution of "Inquisitors," or officials appointed for
such inquiry, dated back to the early centuries of the Church's
existence, and in those early centuries the punishment which the
Inquisitors were allowed to impose on persons convicted of heresy
were very mild in comparison with later penalties.  They were not
allowed to inflict death, nor to use torture in order to extract
confession.

In the time of Philip II., the Inquisition in Spain, under the name
of the Holy Office, became largely independent of the Church of Rome.
It actually brought before its Courts bishops of the Church.  And it
shrank from no cruelty of torture inflicted on suspected persons, in
order to make them confess: it even tortured witnesses, to extract
from them the testimony, true or false, which the Inquisitors
desired.  Convicted persons were publicly burnt.  There was no appeal
from its decisions.  An accused person had scarcely a chance of
escaping conviction.  And the religious zeal of the Inquisitors was
quickened by the circumstance that the estates of the convicted were
confiscated and distributed to the Church, or partly to the Church
and partly to the Crown.

[Sidenote: Netherlands in revolt]

It is no more than fair to the Church of Rome to say that though the
severity and injustice of the Inquisition under the Church's direct
authority were harsh enough, they were far less cruel than under {57}
the Holy Office of Spain, which became a veritable terror.  The
Netherlanders had largely accepted reformed doctrines.  They had
become Protestant, that is to say heretics, in the eyes of Philip.
He had been their sovereign only a few years when he sent his
Inquisitors among them to root the heresy out by torture,
confiscation of estates, and by burning at the stake.  The natives
were brave and stubborn.  They resisted with armed force.

It had all the aspect of a vain, even a ridiculous resistance--bound
to fail, certain to be punished with relentless cruelty.  To enforce
obedience and to carry out measures of punishment, Philip sent an
army under command of a general notorious for his harsh severity, the
Duke of Alva.  In such an outlined sketch as this the details cannot
be given of the extraordinary struggle which the Netherlands, under
that very great leader and statesman, William of Orange, surnamed the
Silent, finally brought to a successful end against all the might of
Spain.  Again and again their endurance seemed on the point of being
overcome.  Once, at least, they were saved only by the desperate
expedient of breaking chasms in the raised dykes which protect that
low-lying land from the sea, and allowing the water to flood the
country.  They had a small naval force before this struggle began.
Dutch ships had helped Charles in that attempt which he made to put
down the Mahommedan pirates of the north coast of Africa.  Now, as
the fight with Spain went on, they added to their fleet.  With but a
few ships, they gained a victory, which meant much to them, over a
far larger Spanish fleet.  Some of the Spanish ships captured in that
battle helped to increase their own naval forces.

England, under Mary, whom Philip had married in 1554, naturally would
give Holland no help.  She had, besides, her own religious troubles,
for Mary, {58} under her husband's direction, was doing all that she
dared to bring England back under the authority of Rome.  No tribunal
with the name of Inquisition or of Holy Office was established, but
the persecution of Protestants, with torture and burning, went
forward almost as briskly as if there had been.  A small force came
to Holland's help from Germany, at one moment of the long struggle,
but little could be expected from that country, in which the states
were divided in their sympathies between Rome and the Reformation.
The attitude of France was uncertain and varied.  Her natural action
would have been to oppose Spain, as in the days of Francis and
Charles, but she was a Roman Catholic country.  She was distracted,
too, by her own troubles with her own Protestants, called Huguenots.
The form of Protestantism which had made its way in France was
somewhat different from that taught by Luther.  It inclined to the
doctrines taught by Calvin.  But Calvin was a reformer as earnest and
even more bitter than Luther himself in opposition to Rome.  It was
what has been called, after him, the Calvinistic form of
Protestantism which prevailed in the Netherlands also, and, with some
modification, in England and Scotland.  The details of the difference
we need not consider.  The main feature which they had in common and
which so affected this Greatest Story was their resistance to Rome.

[Sidenote: The Huguenots]

The origin of that name Huguenot, by which the Protestants in France
were known, is doubtful, nor does it greatly matter.  Beginning in
the reign of Francis, the reformed party in France grew stronger
during the reign of several succeeding kings.  There were two great
families in France at this time, the Bourbons and the Guises.  The
former became leaders of the Protestants and the latter of the
Catholics.  Civil war broke out in 1562.  Elizabeth of England {59}
sent troops to help the Huguenots, but the fortune of the war went
against them.  A Catholic League was formed for their extermination.
A general massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, in 1572,
has made that day lamentable in the reformed Church ever since.

Still the Protestants held on, in the far west of France, under the
leadership of that Henry of Navarre who became King of France in
1589.  To bring peace to his country he formally declared himself a
Catholic, but he so favoured the cause of reform that two years
before the end of the century he passed a famous measure, the Edict
of Nantes, by which the French Protestants were granted freedom to
think and act as they pleased in all religious matters, without
penalty of any kind.

Such being the divisions in France during the struggle of the
Netherlands against Spain, it was not likely that she would give much
assistance to either side.  Elizabeth sent a small army, which
effected little.  She might perhaps have been more liberal with her
help, but England had her full share of troubles too.  There was
still a large English party sympathising with Rome.  The change in
the State religion which Elizabeth effected as soon as she succeeded
her half-sister Mary--the Catholic and the wife of the King of
Spain--was not easy.  She found herself with a French war on her
hands, a war into which Philip had persuaded Mary towards the end of
her reign.  Almost its only result had been that Calais, England's
last possession in France, had been lost to her.

Elizabeth quickly made peace with France; and that peace included
Scotland also.  We have seen, and we shall see again, how ready
France always was to embarrass England by taking the side of Scotland
in the constant Scottish and English wars.  Elizabeth {60} made peace
with France; but since at this moment there really were two parties
dividing France, it was not easy to be at peace with both.
Elizabeth, as we also have seen, so far helped the Bourbons, the
Huguenots, as to send some troops to their aid; and for that aid
Havre, with its fine harbour at the mouth of the Seine, was handed
over to England.  But the Huguenots were defeated.  Havre was English
only for a very short time.

And Catholic France was now again helping Scotland, favouring the
cause of Mary, Queen of Scots, who married a short-lived French king.
In Scotland the reformed religion, of Calvin's type, had taken a hold
which was destined to grow firmer as time went on; but for the
present the Catholics were in strength there too.  Their queen was
Catholic.  She was hardly more than in name a queen, for she was but
a child when she came to the throne, and spent years of her short
life as Elizabeth's prisoner.  Finally she was executed, most
probably by Elizabeth's order, although it was an order which
Elizabeth denied.

It was almost wholly by their own stout courage that the United
Provinces, as they were called, of the Netherlands did at length gain
their freedom, and not only freedom to serve God as they saw fit, but
also freedom from the sovereignty of Spain.  It was a freedom which
was not formally acknowledged till many years later; but it was
practically won in 1579.  These United Provinces were seven in
number, of which one was called Holland: and this Holland came, after
a while, to be the name for the whole.  The seven lay in the north,
and were united as a federation under the rule of William of Orange.
The southern provinces remained for a while longer under the power of
Spain.

Into this new and free State came many of the reformed religion
flying from persecution in their {61} own countries.  Holland became
populous.  Her industries developed.  Her foreign trade increased.
She had a large trading fleet.  It ventured into those waters round
the Cape of Good Hope which the Portuguese claimed as their own.  It
disputed with them the trade of the islands in the Malay Archipelago.
And even here the fighting took on something of a religious
character, for the battle was between ships of Protestant Holland and
of Catholic Portugal.

Exactly the same character pertained to certain encounters of ships
which began to take place more and more frequently westward of the
line which the Pope's Bull had marked out to divide the sphere of
Portugal from that of Spain--encounters between the ships of
Elizabeth and of Philip of Spain.  By the year 1581 that line lost
what importance it ever had, because Philip made good, by force of
arms, his rather doubtful claim to the throne of Portugal.  For three
reigns, lasting over sixty years, the King of Spain was King of
Portugal also, although the smaller kingdom never lost her national
identity.

[Sidenote: England's Navy]

England had begun to have a considerable fleet.  She had long had
necessity for ships of war to protect her exports, principally of
wool, to the Continent.  She was under the necessity of making her
fleet stronger and stronger by reason of the growing strength, just
noted, of the Dutch fleet, which came from all the ports across the
Channel.  And especially she had need to strengthen it since Philip,
whose proposal of marriage Elizabeth had declined, threatened her
with his Armadas.  Hostility to England had become a religious duty
in his sight.  Elizabeth had been excommunicated.  The Act of
Supremacy, by virtue of which her father had been declared head of
the Church in England, had been passed again in her favour, in order
to wipe out the measures of reaction {62} towards Rome which had
marked the reign of Mary.  Ireland had risen in revolt in 1560, and a
joint expedition of Spaniards and Italians landed to aid the rebels.
They were overwhelmed and destroyed by one, Raleigh, whom Elizabeth
knighted as Sir Walter.

And so, on the English side, and on the side of all the princes of
Europe who professed the reformed religion, the war against Spain
became a religious war.  To waylay the Spanish treasure-ships from
the Indies was an adventure which appealed to the sailors of England.
It gratified them to get these treasures for their own and for their
Queen and country, and moreover it was this wealth, thus robbed from
the conquered Indies, with which the enemies of the reformed Church
built and equipped their ships of war.  So we have Drake and
Frobisher and other heroes adventuring into the Pacific and even
sailing round the world in vessels which seem to us almost
ridiculously small for such great enterprise.  They attacked any
Spanish ship they met, they landed and sacked Spanish settlements in
South America, they even ventured into the very harbours of Spain
herself, to "singe the King of Spain's beard," as they put it.

The King of Spain could not for ever endure these "singeings" so
insulting to his dignity.  In 1588 he launched, for the destruction
of England, the largest naval force ever seen.  It was that force
known to history as the Great Armada.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{63}

[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Our country was saved assuredly more by the storms of heaven than by
the valour of even such splendid fighting seamen as the troublous
times had produced.  Survivors of the vast fleet of Spain, after a
severe hammering by Drake in the Channel, completely circumnavigated
our islands, going eastward and northward through the Straits of
Dover and so round the north coasts of Scotland and down along {64}
the western shores, everywhere losing ships on the way.  Even now, in
such lonely places as some of the small islands lying to the north of
Scotland, are found evidences of the Spaniards' wreckage.  Only a
very small number of that Grand Armada sailed their crippled way back
into the harbours of Spain.

In the years that followed, England then being allied with Henry IV.
of France, her ships were seen more than once attacking the shipping
in the very harbours of proud Spain.

It is obvious, from the position as official head of the reformed
Church in which the Act of Supremacy had first placed our Henry
VIII., and had then confirmed, in a position of scarcely less
authority, his daughter Elizabeth, that the form which Protestantism
took in England, as the State religion, differed from its forms
elsewhere.  On the Continent, none of the rulers of the States that
had adopted the doctrines of Luther or of Calvin had thought of
claiming such a position.  In England under Henry and under Elizabeth
it must have seemed that, while protesting against the authority of
the Pope over the Church, Englishmen acquiesced in a like authority
vested in the Crown.  It was a transfer of allegiance.  But Luther,
and yet more so Calvin, would have bitterly resented that the Church
should be under any authority except that of her own choosing.
Moreover, the English Protestants retained many of the ceremonies and
services, and performed many of the rites, of the Church of Rome.
Calvin's ideal of worship was that it should consist in the simplest
and most direct communication of man with God, with no aids of
beautiful music and rich colour and other appeal to the emotions,
such as the Romans used.  All this he specially hated.  The rules of
life among pious followers of Calvin were extremely strict.  Austere
behaviour and a serious expression of countenance were rigidly {65}
demanded of them.  They regarded even the most innocent amusement as
contrary to the spirit of their religion.

This is perhaps a difference which it would be out of place, in a
story sketched in mere outlines, to mention even at such short length
as this, were it not that it was a difference which had serious
consequences in the reigns of those Scottish kings who succeeded
Elizabeth on the throne of England.  How that came about was thus:

[Sidenote: The Puritans]

In the reign of Mary, the Roman Catholic queen, very many English
Protestants had fled abroad.  They had gone to lands where the
Calvinistic doctrines were followed.  Under Elizabeth they ventured
back into their native land; and the form of Protestantism that they
found there was a shock to them.  They could not range themselves as
members of a Church that had practices which they detested.  They
formed themselves into a separate sect under the name of Puritans.
At once they found themselves in opposition to, not in conformity
with (and were therefore sometimes spoken of as Non-conformists), the
national Church.  They were subjected to persecution even by a
Protestant Government.  From denying the authority of the Crown as
head of the Church, it was not a very long step to denying the
authority of the Crown in other, less spiritual, matters.  And it was
this denial that led to Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, to the
cutting off of Charles I.'s head, to the sailing of the Pilgrim
Fathers to America, and all that was to follow therefrom.  Surely we
are justified in finding a space to note a difference of opinion in
which such astonishing things had their beginning.

During Elizabeth's reign our country was reduced to its insular
boundaries, and yet never before does there seem to have been a time
when England was {66} so aware of her greatness as she was under
Elizabeth.  Never, moreover, was there such a splendour of English
literary achievement, from the plays of Shakespeare downward.

The truth is that she really was doing a very great work, though
probably Englishmen of that day only dimly realised what that work
was.  She, with the Dutch and other Protestant States, was gradually
wearing down the greatness of Spain, and all that Spain stood for.

What Spain stood for was despotic power in Church and State.  Our
Henry and Elizabeth were despotic in both, but the Stuart kings who
succeeded them were not made of the right human stuff for despots,
and both Church and State won freedom under them.  Spain's power
suffered a gradual but constant diminution.  She was fighting on all
sides--constantly struggling with France or Italy.

And Elizabeth's seamen kept harrying her in every quarter of the
Atlantic and even in the far Pacific, The English Colony of
Newfoundland was established.  Elizabeth had relations as far east
and south as Persia, as far east and north as Muscovy, where Russia
was gradually consolidating herself.

Russia gained an important victory over the Turks in 1569.  Moscow,
her capital, was indeed burnt by invading Mongols as late as 1571,
but in the year following the conquerors were themselves defeated.
The other Slav State, Poland, gained a great accession of strength by
absorbing the large territories of Livonia and Lithuania.  During the
sixteenth century we do not find the Scandinavian nations taking much
direct part in the big story, but in 1587 the King of Sweden was King
of Poland also.  The general tendency of affairs in that part of the
world's stage, however, was for those two, Poland and Russia, to be
forming themselves into two strong nations of Slav people, {67} on
the eastern border of the Teutonic people of Germany.  That is an
element in the story to be borne in mind.

[Sidenote: Affairs in the East]

Farther eastward again, Russia was extending her power in Siberia and
working out towards that China of which there is still little story
to tell, because, of all nations of the world, she has ever changed
least and most slowly.  The day had not yet come for Russia's
reaching southward towards Constantinople on the one side or towards
India on the other.  The Turk was as yet so strong that she had to
fight hard to keep him out of her own borders.  She was still on the
defensive in that south-western corner of her empire.

But India had to suffer invasion nevertheless in this sixteenth
century by a people coming down from Afghanistan and the north.  They
were Mongols, usually given the name of Moguls.  They were a
Mahommedan people, and under the reign of the Grand Mogul, Akbar,
which covered nearly all the latter half of the century, they were
continually extending their rule over the Hindus.  It is in this
Mahommedan invasion that we see the real beginning of that division
and opposition in India of Hindus and Mahommedans which has played a
large part in the story of that country ever since, and which is a
principal cause of her troubles even to-day.  There were Moslems in
India before the coming of the so-called Moguls, but not in anything
like the same force or number.

On the eastern side of Afghanistan lay Persia, and beyond Persia, to
the west again, began the Turkish Empire.  Between the Persians and
these Ottoman Turks--Mahommedans both, but belonging to different
sects--fighting went on with little pause, and with no result of any
long duration.  Persia's position was difficult, for on the eastern
border she was always {68} subject to attack from the Moguls.  That
she kept her independence is due in part doubtless to the valour of
her soldiers, but also, in large part, to the engagements of the
Moguls with India and of the Turks with their European neighbours on
land and sea.  Even the heavy defeat of the Turkish navy at Lepanto
by no means put an end to their activities in the Mediterranean.  In
1573, two years after that battle, they lost Tunis; but were still
strong enough to regain that valuable port the very next year.




{69}

CHAPTER V

THE WARS OF RELIGION

Elizabeth died in 1603, and there was no descendant of Henry VIII. to
inherit the throne.  But Henry VII.'s daughter had married the King
of Scotland, and a grandson of Henry VII. now held the Scottish Crown
with the title of James VI.  On the death of Elizabeth he became
rightful hereditary King of England also, with the title of James I.

And now it might indeed seem as if the United Kingdom was about to
enter upon years of peace and glory.  Elizabeth's prudence and the
valour of her seamen had won her military fame.  Her alliance was
sought by princes as far off as the Tsar of Russia and the Sophy, as
the ruler was called, of Persia.  She had possessions in India, far
away in the East, in America far in the West.  For the first time in
her story she had Scotland as a second self, instead of a constant
enemy on her very border.  Ireland appeared to be subjugated.  And
she had no possessions on the Continent to draw her into troubles
with France.

This hopeful prospect was soon clouded over owing, in large measure,
to the folly of the Stuart kings, as that dynasty was called of which
the Scottish James was the first.  And yet, if it had not been for
their folly, and also for their weakness, it is possible that England
might have had to suffer even greater trials than did befall her, by
reason of the despotic power which had been won for the Crown by
Henry VIII, {70} and his great ministers Wolsey and Cromwell.  But
before that power could be broken, and the people could regain the
rights that legally were theirs under the provisions of Magna Carta,
the country had to suffer miserably through civil war and one of the
kings had to lose his head on the executioner's block.

James I. tried to govern as Henry VIII. had governed before him, that
is to say, he tried to govern without summoning a Parliament.
Legally it was Parliament only that could vote the money that the
king required to carry on the government.  James tried to extort this
money by what were politely called "loans."  If those from whom they
were demanded paid the required contributions, well and good.  If
they refused to pay, the Crown had sufficient power to misuse the
processes of the law so as to punish them for their refusal.

[Sidenote: The "middle class"]

Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the
nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he
did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all
who withstood him.  But by the time we come to the seventeenth
century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of
the nation.  It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in
Europe.  It was that change by which what was soon to be called the
"middle class" came into existence.

We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first
beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy.  It was
the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns
and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered.  After the
cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be
strong and to acquire much independence.  In our own land London was,
from a very early day, the chief city.  Its power was the greater
because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, {71}
its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to
fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the
chief citizen.  Our country never produced quite such important
citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were
called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of
Florence, and others.  We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with
the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands.
True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs
at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which
became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period.

It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the
dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as
necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen.
The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one
who lives in a city.  The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the
man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις,
which is Greek for "city."

Thus there grew everywhere a force of this kind, a force of burghers
or townsfolk, a middle class, which increased in power as the numbers
of townsmen and their riches increased.  In England the people, as
against the king, had an advantage which the people of Continental
countries had not, in their legal right to send representatives to
Parliament before contributing to the expense of government.  The
right existed, even while they were not able to enforce it.  And with
the growth of this new power of the middle class they began to have
greater power for its enforcement, or, at least, greater power to
resist the punishments which the king had tried to impose on those
who refused to supply him with money which had not been legally voted
for his use.

The Tudors, for all their masterfulness, had been {72} more prudent
than the Stuarts proved themselves.  Even Henry VIII., in Wolsey's
time, had consented to take only one-half of the sum which he had
demanded as a contribution from the people.  And we may often see
that these Tudors, although they dealt so despotically with their
nobility, appear to have kept a finger, as it were, on the pulse of
the nation, and to have known how to give way when that pulse beat
too forcibly in opposition.  Perhaps it takes a strong character to
yield, on occasion.  Certainly the Tudors had what we should call
strong characters, and they knew how to yield.  The Stuarts had less
strength, and they brought the country into cruel trouble by their
inability to yield.  Rather, perhaps, we should say, they yielded
when they should have stood firm, and stood firm when they should
have yielded.  Had they yielded more discreetly the people would have
had to wait longer for their freedom, though it is possible they
might have won it by less painful means.

And although James's prospects looked so fair when he came to the
throne of England, he yet came to a troubled inheritance.  There was
all that trouble between the State Church and the Puritans, a trouble
which grew greater and which perhaps the Scottish element that James
brought down to England with him increased.  The Scottish element, if
it were not Roman Catholic in religion, was mainly of the extreme
Puritan type.

There was this double source of trouble, therefore--the king's
illegal endeavour to govern and to extort supplies of money without a
Parliament, and the increasing tension between the persecuted Puritan
party and the party of the State Church.  Both Puritans and Catholics
had already suffered some persecution under Elizabeth, and under
James these persecutions became more severe.  It was only a year or
two after his accession that the Gunpowder Plot was {73}
discovered--a plot contrived by the Catholics to blow up the Houses
of Parliament and all the legislators therein.  After this discovery,
the persecution of the Catholics became more severe than ever.

[Sidenote: The Stuart Kings]

The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but
we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement
was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and
not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some
one were the Pope himself.  We have seen how difficult it was for
those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the
conditions which they found when they returned to England--the king
occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which
the Pope claimed.  They were very apt, then, to be critical in
matters of government as well as in matters of religion.  And the
actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to
provoke a great deal of criticism.  The feeling throughout England
began to be very strong against the Crown.  It was tension, strained
feeling, between a large section of the nation--a section that began
to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed,
of the middle class--and the king who was the head of the State
Church.

On the Continent there was tension quite as acute between the people
and the princes, but there it was tension not so much between any two
sections of the reformed Church, as between the people as members of
the reformed Church and the princes as representatives of the old
Church.  Moreover in some lands the princes and rulers themselves
were of the reformed religion.

In France it is the Catholic Crown and the State forces that we see
opposed to the Protestants, there called Huguenots.

In Germany a Catholic League is made by the {74} rulers of the States
that adhered to the old faith, and, in opposition, a Protestant Union
is formed by the princes of the States that have accepted the
doctrines of the Reformation.  But also in Germany, we see that, in
one of the States at least, a Catholic prince is set against a large
Protestant section of his people.  This was in Bohemia.

It was in France that the first violent outbreak, due to this
tension, occurred--a rising of the Huguenots under the great Prince
Condé.  It was quickly suppressed, and Condé was taken and
imprisoned.  That was a rising of very small and unimportant
character compared to one which happened three years later, in 1618,
as a consequence of the opposition which we have just noted, between
the king and people in Bohemia.

Bohemia was the land of Huss, one of the fore-runners of Luther's
Reformation.  The spirit of Protestantism was strong there.  By
attempting to persecute the Bohemians for their religious opinions
and practices the king at once made that spirit stronger still, and
the people appealed for support to the German princes of the
Protestant Union.  It was support, energetically given.

[Sidenote: Gustavus Adolphus]

The Bohemian king, on his side, had the help of the German rulers of
States in the Catholic League and also the promised help of France
and of Spain.  James of England was appealed to, but declined.  He
was very fully occupied at home.  But we see a new figure appearing
on the stage, a figure of most attractive and romantic interest--that
of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.

Sweden, and all Scandinavia, by which I mean Norway and Denmark also,
have not come very prominently on the stage of the Great Story.  Nor
will they be there now for a very long period at a time.  But at
least twice we shall see a Swedish king appearing {75} in a dramatic
fashion.  Little Denmark is also the occasional scene of a great
event.  One of these occasions arrived very soon after the date which
we have now reached.  That date is 1618, the year of the commencement
of what is known as the Thirty Years' War.  The principal leader of
the Protestant forces in that war was Gustavus Adolphus coming down
from Sweden at the head of his armies at a moment when his help was
sorely needed.

It was not the first time that he had made himself known and felt in
the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe.  About the year 1611, when
he came to the throne of Sweden, a design was formed of uniting
Sweden with Russia.  The throne of Russia was the object of much
dispute at the moment.  The year before, the Poles had invaded
Russia, had taken Moscow, and the son of the Polish king had been
crowned Tsar.  In the year of Gustavus's accession as King of Sweden,
the Poles were driven out of Moscow again.  We should remember that
the first rulers of Russia, those under whom she had begun to be a
nation, came from Sweden, and since there was no very apparent heir
to the throne it might have seemed to the Muscovites not unnatural
that a Swede should step into it.  In the end, quite a different
solution of the question was arrived at.  A Tsar of the family of
Romanoff, very distantly connected with the original sovereign
family, was put on the throne, and founded the dynasty which endured
until the last Tsar was deposed and done to death in the terrible
revolution which happened during the Great War.

It is impossible here to pursue all the ups and downs of the fighting
which went on in Germany, for Germany provided the principal
battle-fields through that war of thirty years' duration.  Knowing
what we do of modern warfare, it may seem difficult for us to
understand how the people of the countries that {76} were the scene
of such prolonged fighting could survive at all.  But we have to
understand that the way in which wars were fought in those days was
very different from the present manner.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War]

In the first place, the numbers of the fighters on either side was
small--ridiculously small, we may think.  The total population of the
countries was nothing like as dense as it is now.  But even in
proportion to that lesser population, the fighting forces were small.
In the recent Great War we saw "nations in arms," as has been truly
said.  Every man who could possibly be spared from the peace work
that had to be continued if people were to have food to eat and other
bare necessities of life, was pressed into the fighting.  In those
older wars only a very few of the population fought.  The rest might
go on with their ordinary work, for the most part of an agricultural
kind, so long as their land was lucky enough not to be the scene of
the fighting.

And the troops moved slowly, so that the campaign was restricted to
comparatively small spaces.  In the winter there was little or no
fighting.  The soldiers went into "winter quarters."  Probably this
was largely because the roads were so bad and the country was so
undrained and marshy, that it was almost impossible for them to move
about with any artillery and baggage horses.

Generally they went into the towns for their winter quarters.  And if
these towns had walls round them, as in those days many had, they
were tolerably secure within the walls, so long as they had collected
enough provisions, because there was no artillery powerful enough to
batter down a strongly built wall.

Doubtless the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, and the coming
and going of armies during so many years, was very great, even so.
It is said that in the principal areas ravaged by the war the
population {77} was reduced to one-third of what it had been before.
But a consideration of the leisurely way in which the fighting was
conducted, and the small number engaged in it, helps us to realise
how the people of the countries were able to endure it at all.  It
also helps us to understand how it was that it took so long to bring
the war to a conclusion.

The Protestant King of Denmark took the lead of the Union at the
beginning of the long struggle, and at first the Protestants suffered
many defeats.  The great leader of the Catholics, Wallenstein,
overran Denmark itself.  The outlook for the Protestant cause was as
black as it well could be.  At this darkest moment Gustavus Adolphus
came with his Swedes from the north, and the Catholics were driven
back.  Within a few years he was invading Germany, and in 1632 he
fought the very important battle of Lutzen, in which the Protestant
forces were completely victorious.  But it was a victory dearly
bought, for Gustavus himself was killed in the battle and the
Protestant cause found no other leader of equal ability.

The war dragged on.  Spain and France had come in as members of the
Catholic League, against the Protestants, but now there arose in
France a new policy which set these two Catholic nations in
opposition to each other.  It is an opposition that is closely
associated with the name of one man, the French king's great
minister, Richelieu.

We may note here one of the minor results of the Reformation.
Previously to the Reformation we find great ecclesiastics, that is to
say, men holding the highest positions in the Church, as great
ministers of the State also.  Our Cardinal Wolsey is an instance.
Indeed you will scarcely find an instance anywhere of a great
minister who was not a high ecclesiastic.  The reason is simple: they
were the men who had the {78} education, and nearly the only men.
But now many laymen were beginning to be men of learning also, and in
most of the Protestant countries the State and the Church were not
nearly so closely associated together as they still were in the Roman
Catholic countries.  Therefore we now begin to see that, whereas in
the Catholic countries the chief ministers of State continue to be
cardinals and great men of the Church, in the Protestant countries it
is so no longer.  The king's ministers are most often laymen.

[Sidenote: Richelieu's policy]

During part of the Thirty Years' War the great French cardinal,
Richelieu, had on his hands a heavy task in suppressing a most
formidable rising of the Huguenots, whose greatest strength was in
the west.  England sent a fleet to their assistance, but it effected
little.  They were compelled to yield, after very brave resistance,
and in 1629 was arranged that Peace of Alais, which is noted in
history as marking "the end of religious wars."  Under that treaty
the Huguenots were given equal political rights in France with the
Catholics.

Nevertheless in Germany the Thirty Years' War, which certainly had
its rise as a war about religion, dragged on for nearly a score of
years longer, until its final settlement by the Treaty of Westphalia
in 1648.

The terms of that treaty might have been less favourable to the
Protestants than they were had the two great Catholic nations of
France and Spain been in accord.  They had fallen, however, as we
have seen, into bitter opposition, which broke out into active war.
The real occasion of the war was, as before, the too masterful power
which was held in a single hand owing to the accident that the
Habsburg family, which governed in Austria, wore the Crown of Spain
also.  It still possessed those Southern States of the Netherlands
which had not won their independence, {79} and it had the Duchy of
Milan in Northern Italy as well as Naples in Southern Italy.  The
Habsburgs still surrounded France.  Richelieu's aim was to break this
circle.  He was ruthless and subtle, and he was single-minded in his
determination to make his king not only the despotic ruler of his own
country but also powerful throughout Europe.  The French monarch was
served by his minister as effectively as our Henry VIII. by Wolsey
and by Thomas Cromwell.  Richelieu had put down a rising of the
nobles against the Crown with severity as cruel as that of Henry's
last, and worst, minister.  The people of France had never secured
the rights which the law gave them in England--though the Tudor kings
paid those rights little respect--and they gave the nobles no
support.  In his first aim the great cardinal succeeded.  The king
became despotic in France.

His position in Europe, with so powerful an opponent in the field as
the King of Spain, was not so easily secured.  It was a curious twist
of policy which brought France to the assistance of the Protestant
Union in the later years of the Thirty Years' War--France, a Catholic
State and under the influence of a cardinal of the Catholic Church,
aiding Protestants against Catholics!  And it was the aid of France
which saved them, notwithstanding that the French armies twice
suffered defeat in Germany.

Of course the motive that brought France in on the Protestant side
was the opportunity of opposing Spain.

The Treaty of Westphalia, which really marked the end of the
religious wars much more definitely than the Peace of Alais, gave
France an extension of territory on her eastern border, at the cost
of Germany.  It gave Sweden compensation in money and in a fortress
or two on the Baltic for what she had done in the war.  Switzerland
had borne a share in the fighting on the {80} Protestant side, and
her independence was recognised by the treaty; and Holland, which had
been practically a free country for years, was now formally declared
to owe no dependence either to Spain or to the Emperor.  The
Emperor's power indeed, for a long while vague and declining, was now
diminished to almost nothing.

But though Holland stood thus finally free, we have to remember that
there still were what were called "the Spanish Netherlands," a
district, under the rule of Spain, not very different in its
boundaries from modern Belgium.  In these Spanish Netherlands
fighting between France and Spain continued, in spite of the Treaty
of Westphalia.  They met each other too in Italy, and the war
lingered on with changing results for more than ten years.  In
Germany the Protestants had gained religious freedom under the Treaty
of Westphalia, and the German princes of both Protestant and Catholic
faiths had been freed from the rather uncertain bond of union in
which they had been held by the Emperor.  Thus disunited, they had
little power, and the power of France became greater by their
weakness.

[Sidenote: Mazarin's policy]

Richelieu died in 1642 and another great churchman, Cardinal Mazarin,
became the king's chief minister in his place.  But in the following
year died also that king whom Richelieu had served faithfully, ably,
and unscrupulously.  He was succeeded by Louis XIV., the monarch
whose Court was so splendid, with himself as the centre of its glory,
that he is known as Le Roi Soleil--the Sun King.  He was a child of
four when he came to the throne.  The regent was his mother, and
since she was a daughter of Philip II. a reversal of the policy of
Richelieu was expected from her.  To the grievous disappointment of a
large party in France itself and also in Spain and Austria, she put
herself into the hands of Mazarin; and he was a {81} faithful
follower of Richelieu.  The war with Spain continued.  But in the
very year of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia there broke out
in France that uprising of the nobles and of the people which is
called the "Fronde."  It had a remarkable success at first; though a
success which did not endure.  Under the captaincy of the great
Prince Condé, who had led an earlier rising of the nobles against the
Crown and, before that, had taken a leading part on the Huguenots'
side, Mazarin was driven from Paris.

The strength of the two parties was so evenly divided, however, that
in this very same year Condé himself and a number of his adherents
were put under arrest.  Within three years from the middle of the
century the Queen Mother, with Mazarin as her minister, was
re-established in power and the old lines of policy were pursued,
both at home and abroad.

Our England, as we have seen, played little direct part in the long
drawn-out war between the Protestants and Catholics on the Continent.
Neither did she directly take any large part in the European contest
between the two great Catholic powers.  She did, nevertheless, come
into touch and into opposition with both France and Spain abroad.

The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken.
French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed
settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain
and Portugal the trade of the East.  In the West, in the New World,
Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the
English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South
America.  The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English
was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should
expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia,
named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without {82}
fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this
expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England
potatoes and tobacco.

Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement
of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first
years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established
on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec.

Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England
had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and
southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of
France--Louisiana.  At that time it formed but a small part of a far
larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession.
England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of
the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over
their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence.  In the meantime
settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New
England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia
southward.  Among these were the colonists who received the name of
the Pilgrim Fathers--pilgrims flying from England for their
religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the
great American nation.

[Sidenote: Religious differences]

We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced
them to go this pilgrimage.  Their principal motive was to escape
persecution on account of their religion.  That desire led to several
pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the
story.  It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the
Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands.  Some went to
Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the
St. Lawrence.  To understand the violent intolerance of any
differences of religious belief {83} and practice which produced
these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of
that date viewed those differences.

In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the
Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the
establishments of the Church.  They protested against these evils,
and also against the authority claimed by the Pope.  The Puritans in
England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we
may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority
claimed by the Crown as head of that Church.

On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally
incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it
was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible,
that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest
against anything he might choose to do or affirm.  And inevitably,
since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his
immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his
authority by their subjects.

Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first
against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism
of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against
their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all
agreeable to the despotic kings of that day.

Finally, we should note this point most particularly--that men had
lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible,
and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished
Israel and Judah--whole nations at a time--because certain sections
of those nations deviated from His true service.  Thence they derived
the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and
went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a
whole {84} was liable to divine punishment.  We must get that
conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by
it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely
intolerant of these religious differences.  It explains a great deal
of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in
the name of religion.  It explains why the nations were so ready to
send out of their midst any section that so differed from the
majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these
sections were so very willing to go.  The English Puritans who went
to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and
again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the
society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be
included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too
pleased to see them go--for the same reason, that the majority feared
lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the
people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference
of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as
wickedness) of this small section.

[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Puritans]

Ten years later than the expedition of the Pilgrim Fathers, that is
to say, in 1630, there was a further large emigration of Puritans
from Old England into New England.  Under Charles I. who had
succeeded James, and tried to pursue the same policy of governing and
extorting money without a Parliament, the strained feeling between
the Crown and the people grew more intense.  They formed themselves
into distinct parties--Royalists or Cavaliers on the outside, and
Puritans on the other.

The smouldering hostility broke into open war.  In the first battles
the Royalists had the advantage.  The Puritan armies were raw and
badly organised.  But in their ranks were men of ability and of stern
purpose.  Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell as {85} their
commander-in-chief a rigid discipline was imposed.  They went into
battle singing hymns, inspired by an intense conviction that they
were fighting in the service of the Lord.  It was a union of
discipline with zeal which the light-hearted and light-headed
Cavaliers could not match.

The Royalists wore gallant and gay attire and flowing curls, and
culled all the joys of life.  The Puritans dressed themselves in
sombre colours, set their faces into solemn lines and regarded even
innocent mirth and amusement as a sin.  The earnestness which marked
all their behaviour they brought to the business of fighting.

After the fortunes of the war had gone variously in several
campaigns, the Royalists suffered what really was a decisive defeat
in the battle of Naseby in 1645.  Their cause never recovered from it.

There was quartered in the north of England at this time a Scottish
army.  Charles had endeavoured to impose on the Church of Scotland
the form of Protestantism which was the State religion in England.
But the majority of the Scottish people professed a religion much
more nearly akin to that of the English Puritans.  They bound
themselves by a Covenant (whence its adherents were called
Covenanters) to oppose by all means in their power the priests and
the bishops whom the Scottish king of the United Kingdom tried to
force on them.  They took arms and made their way victoriously south
until they were bribed to stop and to establish themselves in
quarters in the north of England by part payment and part promise of
payment of a yearly sum.  And to the protection of that army Charles
fled, as his fortunes grew more and more desperate, after the defeat
at Naseby in 1646.  The payments promised to the Scots were much in
arrears.  After long negotiations they gave up their king into the
hands of the English Puritans in exchange {86} for a large sum of
money to quit the debt.  Once the king escaped, but was recaptured,
and in 1649, after a trial in which the verdict was certain from the
first, was executed on the block.

The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a
Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector.
The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there
was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was
all-powerful, ready to do his bidding.  And this was a power which he
had proved that he would not hesitate to use.  He was a man typical
of the Puritan spirit--absolutely convinced of the justice of his
cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of
suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies--a very
terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not
only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made
England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the
weak Stuart kings.

So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length
truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period
of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the
Reformation.  We have to look on those religious wars as one of the
two great features in our story during that half-century.  The other
principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans
into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour.

England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the
Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a
far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place
between English and French over the French settlements in the St.
Lawrence.  The French were defeated, but for the time being they were
allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{87}

[Illustration: GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{88}

Quebec had been founded as early as 1608.  It was not until 1641 that
the foundations were laid of Montreal.  But in the meantime Prince
Edward's Island, Nova Scotia, and several of the West Indian islands
had been occupied by English colonists.

Portugal during most of this half-century was under the Spanish king.
She regained her complete independence, under a king of her own, in
1640.  But by that time she had lost her empire in the East.  Spain,
sailing west from the New World, had arrived at the Philippine
Islands, which Portugal had reached going east.  Thus neither had
transgressed the famous Bull.  And yet East and West did meet in
those islands.  Drake, moreover, in his famous circumnavigation of
the world, had come to the neighbouring Spice Islands, going west.

Both English and Dutch had taken a hand in destroying the Portuguese
claims to any exclusive right of settlement in the East.  Between
English and Dutch, a decision was not reached so easily.  It was
largely on account of the excessive prices charged by the Dutch for
pepper and other spices brought from the East Indian islands that the
British East India Company was formed.  It received a charter from
the Crown to found settlements and claim trading rights for England.
The Dutch so stubbornly held and defended their trade in the islands
that the British gained no headway there until after the first half
of the century.  They did, however, make some trading settlements on
the mainland of India, of which the earliest was in Madras, in 1639.

But an immediate impression was made on the Dutch supremacy in the
islands the moment that the resolute policy of Cromwell took the
place of the easy indifference of the Stuarts.




{89}

CHAPTER VI

THE GROWING POWER OF FRANCE

The event of chief importance in the story of the second half of the
seventeenth century is the gradual shifting of the power in Europe
from the hand of Spain into the hand of France.  It was indeed in the
earlier half that Spain had begun to fail.  We have noticed more than
once how, with all the far-flung possessions of her great ruling
family of Habsburg--possessions in Italy, in Austria, in the
Netherlands--she held France surrounded and hemmed in.  On the other
hand, France had all the advantage which, as is well known, belongs
to the "central position."  She could throw her whole force into the
struggle on this side or on that far more easily than Spain could
mass her force on any one point.  And the very fact that Spain had so
many possessions to defend proved in the end her weakness.  She spent
her vast strength in the struggle.  Moreover, she had inflicted on
herself a great loss by driving out of the country the converted Jews
and the converted Mahommedans.  The last of the latter were expelled
in the tenth year of the seventeenth century, and the Jews had gone
long before.  Both were intelligent and industrious people, and Spain
thus lost a most valuable section of her population.

She had immense wealth coming to her from America, but the transport
of this wealth made a heavy demand on her fleet.  When Elizabeth was
{90} on the throne of England, English seamen, by their constant
attacks, drained much of the life-blood of the Spanish fleet.  Under
the vacillating rule of the Stuarts, English attacks on the Spanish
treasure ships grew inconsiderable, but another formidable menace to
Spain had arisen in the sea-power of the Dutch.

The naval power of Holland had been necessary to her during the war
of religion in which Spain had tried to crush out the Protestant
spirit.  As early as 1607 the Dutch fleet had practically destroyed
the principal fleet of Spain off Gibraltar.  The Dutch, as we have
seen, had taken the supremacy which the Portuguese had held in the
Malay Archipelago; and since Portugal till 1640 had been for sixty
years under the King of Spain, it was nearly equivalent to taking
that supremacy from Spain herself.  The victory which really was
decisive was won by the great Dutch admiral, Van Tromp, in 1639.  It
made Holland, so lately a mere province of Spain, the strongest
sea-power in the world.

[Sidenote: Cromwell as dictator]

And at this point, that is to say, in 1651, Cromwell, in his
masterful manner, passed the law called the Navigation Act which
directly challenged the naval power of Holland.  It provided that
ships trading to England should carry no other goods than those
produced in the country to which the ship belonged; and this was a
direct challenge to the Dutch because they had a great carrying
trade, and their ships brought to England the goods produced in many
other countries besides their own.  Moreover, the English claimed
that the ships of all other nations meeting English ships in the
Channel, should salute them by lowering their flags.  The English
admiral, Blake, meeting the Dutch fleet under Van Tromp in the
Channel, demanded that he should lower the Dutch flag accordingly,
and Van Tromp's reply was a broadside from his guns.

As always, the English seamen fought with astonishing {91} skill and
courage.  Probably in the whole course of this Greatest Story only
one other nation, and that the Dutch, has rivalled them in their
genius for the battle at sea.  After several actions the issue was
still open.  Van Tromp swept the Channel for a while, after an
English defeat, splicing a broom, by way of derision, to his
masthead.  But the English fleet was strengthened; Blake came forth
again from the Thames and harried Van Tromp successfully.  While
Cromwell was Protector neither side had the decisive mastery.  The
day of England's humiliation was to come later, when a Dutch fleet
sailed up the Thames and burned English ships at Chatham; but that
was not until again a weak Stuart was on the throne.

What Cromwell and his Puritans did was amazing.  He had Ireland in
rebellion on his hands.  He put down that rising with an iron
severity.  Rulers of England before him had established those
colonies of Scottish and other immigrants which are the source of the
present division of Ireland into the Free State in the south and the
Northern Ireland which is still directly under the English
Government.  Cromwell's plan to break up the centres of rebellion was
to shift sections of the Irish people themselves out of their homes
and plant them down in other parts of the same country.  It was a
policy that left a hatred of English rule which still lives in the
hearts of the descendants of the people so mistreated.  But for the
moment it brought a forced peace.

Also on his hands was a Scottish rising, of the Church party which
was opposed equally to English Puritans and to Scottish Covenanters.
That too he dealt with masterfully and severely.  He was a virtual
dictator.

The Parliament ventured to oppose him: he dissolved the Parliament.
With indifference to the form of all government recognised in
England, he chose eleven of his generals to act as his ministers.
The {92} Army, with Cromwell as its head, was for the time the
governing body.  He was greatly hated, and still more greatly feared.
Plots were formed against his life; but none were successful.  He
died peacefully in 1658 and his portentous figure goes out of the
story.

Like nearly every dictator, he left no under-study able to play his
part.  His son Richard, with little of his father's hardness, was
put, reluctantly, into his place.  He retired at the first
opportunity.  Within little more than a year of the great Protector's
death the Army weakened, and the Parliament, which he had overridden
by that Army's aid, regained its power.  The Stuart who was king by
hereditary right was recalled.  The tremendous episode of the
Commonwealth was, to outward seeming, almost as if it had not
happened.

Meanwhile, that is, in 1659, France and Spain had for the moment made
terms of peace, of which one article was that Louis XIV. should marry
a Bavarian princess, and another that France should take over from
Spain certain frontier fortresses and also a part of the Spanish
Netherlands.

That peace was maintained for some seven years, during which Spain
was much occupied by recurring wars with Portugal, Portugal having
thrown off the Spanish sovereignty in 1640.

But a new king came to the throne of Spain, and Louis put forward
further claims in the Netherlands.  Louis, at the moment, was in
alliance with Holland against England in the war which had been
provoked by the Navigation Act.

A peace was now formally made by the English Government with Holland,
which was quickly followed by an alliance between the two countries
so lately at war.  Yet, while this alliance was thus sealed by the
Government, Charles, King of England, on his own account, and in
return for sums of money advanced {93} to him by Louis, made a secret
treaty of alliance with the French.  Four years later, England and
France, as allies, declared war upon Holland.  A separate peace was
made between England and Holland two years later again; but between
France and Holland the war continued for another four years.  A
temporary peace was then agreed to, but yet again Louis, by further
claims, provoked the war anew; and it was while this war was in
progress that William of Holland became King of England, in
succession to James II., last of the Stuarts.

This conjunction naturally brought England and Holland into a really
active alliance, and so threw England into war with France.  It was a
war which at first went badly for the allies, both on sea and land,
and England was menaced with invasion by the French--a menace
dispelled by the great English naval victory of La Hogue in 1692.

[Sidenote: The Peace of Ryswick]

On land also the Dutch gained some successes, and in 1697 a general
peace, to which Spain was one of the signatories, was made at
Ryswick.  By a former treaty, some ten years earlier, Spain had given
up, as we have seen, part of her Netherlands possessions.  That
treaty had been broken, as usual, by the aggressive policy of the
Grand Monarque, Louis XIV.  But by the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697,
Spain recovered a portion of the Netherlands territory that had been
taken from her during the latter course of the war.  Nevertheless,
only a year later--as we are able to state now, though probably
nothing was known of it at the time--a secret pact was made between
England, France, and Holland for dividing up the Spanish dominions.

The whole story is one of false dealing between nations and of
alliances so quickly shifting as to be bewildering, and so guileful
as to be offensive to all faith in human nature.  But the very idea
that there {94} could be good faith between nations, or any other
guide for their conduct than the selfish interest of each, never
seems to have entered into the minds of the statesmen of that day.
They may have been men of honour in their personal dealings, but in
their international dealings such terms as honour and honesty were
empty words, conveying no meaning.

All through this portion of our story Christian Europe was constantly
in peril from the Turk on the borders, and often far over the
borders, of Austria and Hungary.  Never was that menace greater than
in 1683 when he was besieging Vienna with a great force.  He was
defeated by Poles and Germans.  Yet at this supreme crisis Louis, the
Catholic King of France, was secretly favouring the Moslems!

The story of our own country at this time is especially humiliating.
Cromwell, in the early years of the half-century which we have been
considering, had set England high in the estimation of the world.
But Cromwell had died, and with him had gone down much for which he
had so strongly stood.  Again two Stuarts succeeded one another on
England's throne, and the English king, like a very Petit Monarque,
became a pensionary, a paid creature, of the Grand Monarque of
France.  Charles II. of England, and James II. after him, with no
sense of responsibility, acted both as knaves and fools, though both
had good wits enough, had they used them rightly; and they brought
England into the very valley of humiliation.  Out of that humiliation
she was rescued by the accession to the English throne--jointly with
his English wife, daughter of James I.--of William of Orange, ruler
of Holland.  Englishmen of a later day have perhaps been less
grateful than they should be for what some will call the happy
accident, and others the Providential dispensation, that, at this
critical moment, she found a king who had a sense of duty to {95} his
subjects, and a king who brought so valuable an alliance as that of
his Dutch fellow-countrymen.

Had some such foreign source of strength not come to our country's
aid, had the succession continued in the Stuart line with other kings
like those Stuarts who had occupied the throne, it is not possible to
say what her fortunes might have been, but it is scarcely possible to
doubt that she must have fallen, for a while at least, under the
sovereignty of France.  As it was, she had fallen under a most
despotic rule by her own kings.  Partly under the pretence that he
was about to make war against France, and partly by expending money
that he had secretly received from the French king, Charles II. had
raised a large army.  He had employed it to stamp out all opposition
at home.  The Grand Monarque was a strict Roman Catholic, and he used
all his power over his royal pensioners in England to induce them to
bring England back into the fold of Rome.  But if anything were
needed to make the great majority of the English and Scottish people
yet more determined than before that the State religion should not be
that of Rome, a powerful influence towards the stiffening of that
determination was supplied by a measure passed by Louis in 1685 and
known in history as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

[Sidenote: Edict of Nantes revoked]

That Edict of Nantes had permitted to the Huguenots, the French
Protestants, freedom to practise their religion and to live under no
disadvantages, as compared with their fellow-countrymen of the Roman
Church.  The Revocation of the Edict not only withdrew those
permissions, but was accompanied and followed by a deadly persecution
under which many of the Huguenots lost their lives and the survivors
fled to Protestant countries, especially to England and to Holland.

It was a persecution and an expulsion very similar, {96} in its
motives and in its effects, to the flight from Spain of the converted
Jews and Mahommedans, and of the Pilgrim Fathers and other Puritans
from England.  It is curious that in each instance it was a flight of
a singularly industrious, intelligent, and valuable portion of the
population of each nation, and resulted in a serious loss to those
nations from which the exodus was made.  And as they were a loss to
those countries which they left, so were they a gain to those which
received them.  The Huguenots in England retain to this day those
characteristics of valuable citizens.  Years before, England had been
similarly fortunate in receiving the Flemish weavers who had fled
from Flanders before the Inquisition and the Spanish armies commanded
by the Duke of Alva.

France could very ill afford such a loss.  Louis XIV., who came to
the throne at the age of four years old in 1643 and lived until 1715,
reigning thus no less than seventy-two years, became towards the end
of the seventeenth century without dispute the greatest monarch in
Europe and in all the western world.  It is safest to limit his
greatness by that word "western," because in another part of the
world-stage there was at least one other monarch, the Emperor of
China, who could not conceive the possibility that there was a human
being so eminent as himself; and also in India there was a very
powerful sovereign of the Moguls who yielded an authority and lived
in a splendour perhaps as great as either of these.

Louis's court at least was splendid beyond all that had been seen in
the West, his courtiers more magnificent in their costumes and
brilliancy, more sumptuous in their expenditure.  Over the people on
their estates, the nobles had unbounded power.  Had the people been
in very name slaves they could not have been more enslaved in
reality.  But even the most powerful of the nobles was absolutely
subservient {97} to the king.  He had an army, which was immense for
those days, at his command.

Consider, for a moment, what that power meant, in the hands of one
who had been a king since four years old.  It meant that his will had
always been law to those about him.  He had heard only pleasant
words, because no one had dared tell him an unpleasant truth.  What
chance, then, had he, coming to manhood in such circumstances, of
knowing anything of the real truth about the world and about his
subjects?

[Sidenote: The French peasantry]

The real truth about his subjects was, though Louis did not know it,
that their state was as utterly miserable as that of human beings
well could be.  They were ground down not only by their local lords
and nobles, but also by the heavy taxes that they had to contribute
in order that the king should be able to keep up this magnificence in
his court, to pay so large an army and to wage costly wars.  It was
no part of the French constitution, as of the English, that the money
supplied for the purposes of government should be voted by the
Parliament.  It is true that English kings often tried, sometimes
successfully, to extract such money without a vote of Parliament; but
at least the law was there, for the people to appeal to, as a great
fact in the English constitution.  Its existence made a very great
difference.

Thus, while all went so gloriously with France upon the surface and
in the upper ranks, below, in those foundations on which, after all,
this splendid edifice was based, there was misery and increasing
poverty--poverty which could have only one end, that there would be
no money to pay for the wars and for the magnificence, and misery so
intolerable that men would rise and revolt against their conditions
of life, no matter how many should perish in the revolution.  We,
now, knowing what actually did come to pass, can see how the forces
were slowly accumulating which would {98} bring it all about.  But
from the eyes of men of that time, living in the midst of it, the end
was hidden; and most of all, as we may suppose, hidden from that
resplendent monarch himself.

We may observe as curious that in the varying struggle that we have
seen going on between France, Spain, England, and Holland during this
half-century, we hear so little of Germany taking a hand.  Certain of
the German States did, as a matter of fact, play some small part,
directly, in that struggle, either as Protestants in alliance with
the Protestant Dutch, or later in their own defence against the
claims of the French king; but the reason why Germany, as a whole,
took no continuous or large share, by direct action at the centre,
was in the first place that her power was much broken up--she was
split into a number of separate States, with no strong central
authority to combine their action; secondly, that indirectly she
really was playing a part that was important--serving as a guard to
keep back the Turk on the south-eastern corner of Europe.

Always we have to remember, in considering the action of our story at
this period, that there was this menace from the Turk pressing in on
the side of Austria and Hungary.  The power of Russia was rising, but
she was continuously engaged in wars farther north--with Sweden and
with Poland.  The fortunes of these wars went variously, and to no
decisive result.  At one time we do indeed see Poland and Russia in
alliance against the Turk; but no decision was reached in that war
either.  Peter the Great, well named for the greatness to which he
brought his country, came to the Russian throne in 1682.  But great
Russia was as yet only in process of establishing herself and was
beset by enemies.  She was soon to be a very prominent actor in the
world's story, but her time had not then come.

{99}

Turkey was fighting on all her land borders, and carrying on an
indecisive naval war with the Venetians the while.  The Venetians
gained part of Greece from the Turks; the Austrians took Belgrade
from them; several of the Balkan States maintained their
independence.  Evidently the fighting force of the Turks was not as
powerful as it had been.  By the end of the century they were more
concerned with keeping the large empire that they had won than in
adding to it by further conquests; and they made peace, for the time
being, with Russia, Poland, Austria, and Venice.

As yet there was no Italian nation to play a part in the contest
which had now ended in the transference to France of the
overmastering power in the world which had been Spain's.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession]

We have noticed how a secret pact had been made between England,
France, and Holland for partitioning the domains of Spain.  But the
King of Spain, dying in 1700, gave, by will, the whole of his
possessions to Philip of Aragon, grandson of Louis XIV.  The
inheritor was an infant.  The Grand Monarque did not hesitate, in
spite of the secret pact, to accept the inheritance on his grandson's
behalf.  It was an arrangement which would have given his family more
power than even the house of Habsburg had possessed.  It menaced the
liberty of England, of Holland, and of all Europe.  The War of the
Spanish Succession, which occupied the first years of the eighteenth
century, was waged to oppose it.  England's portion in that war in
the Netherlands is commonly known to Englishmen as the Wars of
Marlborough, from the great leader, the Duke of Marlborough, who
commanded in them.

England and Holland, then, had been drawn into natural alliance,
after years of fighting, by the establishment on the throne of
England of William of Orange who married Mary, the heiress to the
Crown; but James II., the rightful king, still lived.  He was king
{100} by right of inheritance, but had used his kingship so
wrongfully, in such direct opposition to the wishes of his people,
that he had been driven from the throne and from the country.  He
fled to France where he could be sure of a friendly welcome from a
Catholic king.  The favour that he had shown, contrary to the law of
England, to English Catholics had been a great part of his wrongdoing
in the eyes of his people.  Moreover, Louis was well disposed to aid
any enemy of the ruler of Holland.

So there came assistance of French troops for James, a landing in
Catholic Ireland, and a march, leading to the famous Battle of the
Boyne, wherein, in 1690, James and his Catholics suffered a defeat,
at the hands of William and his Protestants, which meant the end in
England of the Stuarts, the Jacobite kings.  That battle further
meant the firm establishment as King of England, Scotland, and
Ireland of this ruler of Holland who was married to Mary, the
daughter of the last Jacobite king.  It was his own father-in-law
that William succeeded on the throne, and the father-in-law still
lived.

He lived, and not only was made welcome at the Court of France, but
also had many faithful to his cause in England.  But William ruled
wisely, and his hold on power grew steadily.  The Dutch guards that
he had brought with him from Holland gave offence to his English
subjects.  He had the sound sense to remove the offence and send the
guards back to Holland.  The very idea that the king should have what
we call "a standing army" was still new and strange to Englishmen.
They had been accustomed to armies raised for special wars, but not
until rather lately to soldiers maintained under arms in time of
peace.  The idea of a foreign regiment in their midst was naturally
not agreeable.

It was in the last year of the century that William {101} sent back
his Dutch guards, and surely gained, rather than lost, in security on
the throne by doing so.  He died three years later.  His wife had
died before him, and he was succeeded by yet another daughter of
James II., "the good Queen Anne," wisest of the Stuart monarchs.

[Sidenote: Settlement of America]

All through the troubles of that last half-century Englishmen in
increasing numbers sought refuge from them in America where land,
fertile land, appeared to be unlimited for all who chose to take it
and could keep it against the attacks of the Red Indians whom they
drove out.  Spain was predominant in Mexico and in South America, and
in North America she claimed and insecurely held a land of indefinite
boundaries which she called Florida.  But it was a land of woods and
prairies of unknown extent whither the Spanish conquerors did not go.
The very name Florida has a Spanish sound; and in the same way
Louisiana, with its capital city of New Orleans, tells the story of
French settlement.  It was farther north, however, along the shores
of that great St. Lawrence estuary running up into Canada, that
English and French fell, as we have seen already, to fighting for the
new lands.  From Virginia southwards, the settlement that Sir Walter
Raleigh had so named in honour of his queen, nearly up to the St.
Lawrence, were vast lands along the eastern sea-board which the
English explored without meeting enemies other than the Indians.

From time to time there were hideous massacres of the white men; but
the Indians were too poorly armed and generally too disunited to make
serious opposition to the settlers.  There was a settlement of the
Dutch, at an early date, a little southward of the present New York;
and farther south again a settlement of the Swedes; but both became
incorporated in the larger numbers of the English.

Just as the name Florida speaks of Spain, and {102} Louisiana of the
Grand Monarque of France, so we find other States on the eastern
sea-board with names that have a story to tell us of our own
monarchs.  For there are, besides Elizabeth's Virginia.  Mary's
Maryland, and the Carolinas of the Charleses; later, Georgia, of the
Georges.  The titles, however, do not indicate the dates of the
settlement of the various States which bear them.

It is well to have the atlas open at the map of North America when we
discuss these colonies.  We shall see thereon a name Pennsylvania,
which tells us of the pilgrims led out by the Quaker, Penn.
Maryland, we should note, which is called after the Catholic queen,
was resorted to largely by the Catholics.  New England was the centre
of Puritan migration.  There was a religious reason, in the first
instance, for many of the settlements in America.  We have seen
before how glad men were to be quit of those of an alien religion
from their midst; and also how glad those aliens were to go.
Montreal, on its first settlement, in 1542, was a Catholic
establishment.  The Jesuits were pressing out to the farthest West in
this quarter of the globe, converting the Red Indians, as they also
pressed eastward about the same time to India, China, and to Japan.
But Montreal had to become a military and an industrial settlement
too.  All the early settlers, whatever interpretation they put on the
Bible, had to carry the sword, as well as the Cross, with them.  They
had, in truth, scant semblance of right in their complaint that the
Indians were always ready to turn and massacre them.  Were they not
expelling the Indians, who had done them no manner of harm, out of
their own homes?

The French, in these early days, explored and claimed possession of
an immense territory in North America.  We may trace it all along
both sides of the gulf and the river of St. Lawrence, and westward to
{103} the Great Lakes.  Southward we may trace it along wide lands
watered by the Ohio, and down the Mississippi until we come out at
New Orleans.  Mobile, at the river's mouth, was even earlier settled
by the French.

All this, from the Great Lakes southward, lay westward and inland of
the English settlement along the coast.  But the limits of the
territories claimed were not very clearly drawn; at first it was only
by a fort here and there, and not by any continuous settlement, that
possession of the vast lands was claimed and partially made good by
the white men.  The upper Mississippi was explored before the end of
the century, and some settlement had been made of the Canadian
north-west.

[Sidenote: Settlements in the East]

Progress, as ever, was more slow in the East.  It was in 1652 that
the Dutch colonised the Cape of Good Hope.  Amongst those Dutch
colonists, and of the same reformed religion, were a number of the
Huguenots from France.  In 1661 the English colonised the Gold Coast,
on the west of Africa, where the Portuguese had previously been in
possession, and in the same year Portugal ceded to the English Crown
what soon proved to be of the greatest importance to England in the
East, the province of Bombay in India.

So saying, we have to understand that the hold of any of the western
nations on India was almost confined to the coasts and to the ports.
It did not go far into the country.

Bombay, in this sense of its coastal trading towns, was transferred
by the Crown to the East India Company a year or two later, and some
twenty-five years later again a disaster happened which made its
possession of the first value to England, for in the attempt to
increase their holding in Bengal the English were so heavily defeated
that they were driven out of that province altogether.  Bengal and
Madras had {104} been separated for purposes of the administration of
their Governments some years before.  But now the headquarters of the
Company were established in Bombay, after the temporary loss of
Bengal.  It was in the first year of the new century that Calcutta
was founded.

Thus went the story along the Indian coasts; but in India itself the
Mahommedan power of the Moguls, which we have spoken of before, was
now rising to its zenith.  This was in the reign of the great
Aurungzeb.  And at the same time, in spite of this supremacy of the
Moguls, arose into prominence two principal races of the Hindus, the
Mahrattas and the Sikhs.  The power of all three was to be greatly
diminished in the years to come, but their rise is of particular
interest because it is the division between Mahommedans and Hindus
which is the main cause of unrest in India to-day, and also the
reason why the native Indians are incapable of uniting so as to throw
off a foreign yoke altogether.  If that yoke were removed the
fighting between these opposed elements would certainly be fatal to
the well-being of the country.  It is just about the date at which we
have now arrived in this Greatest Story that we see the two elements
most clearly in opposition.

Another event of much importance for England's future empire in India
happened about the same date on India's north-west border: that state
of Afghanistan, at length, after prolonged and doubtful fighting
against Persia, finally gained its independence.  Its importance is
that it thus became what we call a "buffer state," preventing the
direct collision of Russia with the Indian Empire.  That threatened
collision, and the value of the "buffer state," was not in evidence
in the story at this time; but it was at this time that the
foundation of its future value to England was laid.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{105}

[Illustration: THE POTALA AT LHASA, FROM THE W.S.W.  From Fergusson's
_History of Indian and Eastern Architecture_.  _From a photograph by
Lieut. F. M. Bailey_.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Court of the Great Mogul in India is one of {106} those two which
were mentioned a few pages back as rivalling in its splendour that of
the Grand Monarque himself.  The other is that of China, where a new
dynasty, the Manchus, came by conquest to the throne.  As usual, it
was by way of invasion of a people from the north, more warlike and
less civilised than the Chinese.  As usual, the warlike conquerors
lost their own characteristics among the multitudes of the more
civilised nation.  But they kept the throne till close on the end of
the eighteenth century, and by enforcing some sort of authority, from
Pekin as a centre, they brought the empire to greater prosperity than
it had known during the very many previous years in which it had been
distracted by feuds between the local chieftains.  Tibet, the land of
the "Forbidden City" of Lhasa, with its wonderful Potala, the palace
of the holy Lama, was conquered and absorbed for a while into the
huge empire.

But the fortunes of China and the glories of the Emperor's court had
very little influence in the making of the great world story.  It was
a land, a vast land, apart.  And it did not move.  How stationary it
was is indicated by the curious fact that although China is credited
with the invention and use of gunpowder before any of the western
nations, the only artillery that they had for their defence against
the Manchu invaders was cast for them by the Jesuits, Jesuit
missionaries from the West.  With a beautiful impartiality, the
Jesuits are said to have cast cannon for the Manchus also.  It is
truly a remarkable circumstance that these emissaries, devoted, at
the imminent risk of their lives, to carrying the Christian faith all
over the world, should be thus engaged in making munitions of war.
But the members of this singular religious order were always
practical, always active as politicians in all the countries into
which they went.  And there were none which they did not penetrate.

{107}

[Sidenote: Populations of East and West]

At first the Jesuits were made welcome in China, but a reaction
against all western people seems to have taken place when the Manchu
emperor was firmly established on his throne.  Japan also set her
face against the new trade that was carried out in Dutch and
Portuguese vessels.  Moreover, in 1662 the Dutch suffered a heavy
reverse in being driven out of the island of Formosa, after long and
hard fighting.  The beginning of the eighteenth century really saw
the doors of the far East more firmly closed to the West than they
had been fifty years before.  The far East therefore was, for the
time being, even less in the world story than it had been.  But it
had its own story, which sufficed for itself, and it was a story in
which very many actors played a part.  The western lands were still
what we should reckon very thinly populated.  Our England, for
instance, nearly certainly did not have a population of more than
five millions and a half at the end of the seventeenth century.  But
already there must have been a relatively dense population in China.
In Pekin, in an appalling earthquake that happened in 1661, it is
said that 400,000 people lost their lives.  Now the total population
of London in 1685 is put at only a little more than half a million,
and London was already far and away the largest town in our country,
seventeen times larger than Bristol, which then was second to it in
numbers.  North of the Trent, the country was still scarcely
civilised or settled at all.  But after nightfall the unlighted
streets of the cities were probably more dangerous than any part of
the country.  Near London even, at a much later date, it was the law
that all the covert near the high roads should be cut away so as to
leave less shelter for the lurking highwaymen; but still the
picturesque Dick Turpins abounded.  And high roads, roads along which
a coach might go, ever so slowly, sometimes drawn by oxen, were few,
and these few were bad.  Great men {108} travelled with six horses to
their coach and a large following, not for honour and glory but
because it was likely that the pulling power of six horses and even
more might be required to draw the coach through the marshy places of
the road--and in the undrained and unenclosed country the marshy
places were many.  Nor were the numerous retainers for vain show:
they were for necessary protection, and at any moment might have to
use their arms.

When the fields began to be enclosed and drained, they would grow
more corn or pasture and so help to support a larger population; but
the enclosing meant that much of the waste, where the poor people had
picked firewood and perhaps caught or killed some game, were taken
from them.  And as it was in England, so too was it in other European
countries as they advanced in civilisation.


In the main, then, the story of the latter half of the seventeenth
century is the story of the shifting of the great power in the world
from Spain to France.  The story of the early years of the eighteenth
century is in the main the story of the opposition of the other
nations to the carrying out of the provisions of the will of the King
of Spain by which he bequeathed all that was Spain's to the grandson
of the French king.  Had those provisions been faithfully executed
they would have thrown so great power and wealth into the hands of
the ruler of France that no other nation could have lived at ease
under so vast a menace.  Already France had submitted to some check
in agreeing to the provisions of the Peace of Ryswick.  But she was
arrogant and aggressive still.




{109}

CHAPTER VII

THE HUMBLING OF FRANCE

We may probably say that no other man has made so great a difference
to the history of the world, by his last will and testament, as did
the King of Spain by that will which left all his monarchy to the
grandson of him who already was so great as to be called the Grand
Monarque.  He willed away his vast territories, as it had been a
five-acre field, and his subjects, of many nationalities, as they had
been the sheep or cattle thereon.

And the Grand Monarque, by accepting the gift on behalf of his infant
grandson, united his enemies so that they forgot their own mutual
quarrels and formed a great alliance against him.

But he was very strong.  He had a huge army, he had great wealth, and
he had the advantage of being at the centre of the theatre of
conflict, while his foes were on the circumference.

The most formidable in the alliance against him were the English and
the Dutch.  William III., husband of Mary, daughter of James II., was
on the English throne.  As Protestants and Stuarts, Mary and her
sister Anne, who succeeded in 1702, in some degree conciliated both
parties in England.  William III., besides being married to England's
queen, was himself of the English Royal line, being a grandson of
Charles I.  An Act of Settlement, as it was called, {110} had been
passed by the English Parliament which should exclude, after Anne's
death, a son born to James II. by a second marriage.  This son, a
Catholic, thus excluded, received welcome at the French Court and
became the centre of Jacobite intrigues for the Crown of England.  It
was his recognition as King of England by Louis XIV. which determined
William III. to support with all his forces what came to be known as
the Grand Alliance against France.  William, however, died suddenly
as the result of an accident before the war really began.

Queen Anne then, came to the throne, and the command of the allied
English and Dutch forces was taken by John Churchill, later Duke of
Marlborough.  He proved himself a great general.  His first great
victory was in the battle of Blenheim in 1704, followed by that of
Ramillies two years later.  The French had received so heavy a
beating that the Grand Monarque sought peace; but the terms offered
did not satisfy the victors.

The war was not restricted to the Netherlands.  The little country of
Portugal was in the alliance; so too was, for a while, another small
country, the Duchy of Savoy in the north-west corner of Italy.  Later
Savoy went over to the Habsburg party.  The Emperor was on the side
of the allies.

Besides the Netherlands, the allies were victorious in Bavaria, in
Italy, and for a moment in Spain itself.  The approach of an English
army to Madrid actually forced the king to leave his throne and his
capital; but that advance was not maintained, the allies were
defeated in Spain, and he was re-established.  Between English and
French, the war was fought so far from home as Canada--much to the
English advantage in the peace by which it was concluded.  But before
Louis would make peace on terms that the allies were willing to
accept, his armies had to suffer further defeat in the {111}
Netherlands at the hands of Marlborough.  Oudenarde in 1708 and
Malplaquet in the following year are the places and dates of these
two English victories which were really decisive of the war.

Marlborough's success and the ascendancy which he and his duchess had
gained over the queen, made him many enemies at home.  We begin about
this time to hear of the two great political parties, Tories and
Whigs.  Marlborough was of the latter party, which was in power till
1710, in which year they lost place to the former.  Marlborough was
dismissed from his command in the year following; and with his
dismissal negotiations for peace were renewed.

[Sidenote: Peace of Utrecht]

It was not until 1713 that its terms were finally agreed, in the
Peace of Utrecht; and in the main it gave the allies what they had
fought for.  Certain frontier fortress towns were ceded to the
Netherlands by France.  Louis, as representing the Habsburg house,
gave up all claim to the Spanish Netherlands.  The King of Spain was
recognised as ruler in his own country, but renounced all right to
the French Crown.  On the other hand, it was the Peace of Utrecht
that made Austria dominant for many years in Italy.  In Canada,
England gained a large territory from the French.

Look where we may on the scene of the great story in this period, we
find great misery everywhere.  No sooner had the wars of religion
ceased than there began those wars over the succession to the thrones
of the newly formed or forming nations.  It seems that as soon as the
people began to have any sense of nationality, as we say--any feeling
that as a nation they had an existence free and independent of the
others--they at once found themselves faced by the danger of some one
nation, or some one Royal house ruling several nations, becoming so
strong as to take their liberty from them.  First were the Habsburgs
{112} and next the power of Spain, then that of France: nor have we
even so by any means come to the end of these wars of succession.  We
have to hear of more.  The nations could no longer endure the idea of
an empire such as Charlemagne's, with authority over them.

The Emperor, still so-called, had little power: it was scarcely more
than nominal over the German States by which he was elected.  About
the date of the Peace of Utrecht, an event took place in those German
States which was to be of much importance in the future.  That was
the accession of the Elector--the ruler who had a vote for the
election of the Emperor--of Brandenburg, to the throne of Prussia.
Its import, of course, was not seen at the time, but it was the
beginning of the dominance of Prussia over Germany.

The Emperor, with such power as he might command, had been one of the
allies against Louis, but he had his own troubles on his
north-eastern boundary to occupy his attention.  We have before now,
in course of the story, seen a King of Sweden coming down from the
north and fighting in Germany.  That was in the days of the great
Gustavus Adolphus, commanding the Protestant forces and dying in the
hour of victory at Lutzen, near Leipsic.

[Sidenote: Charles XII]

Now, in the early years of the eighteenth century, we have another
King of Sweden, Charles XII., fighting in Germany; but it is no
religious war that he is waging.  He is fighting in the first place
to maintain his right to his kingdom of Sweden.  Kings of Sweden had
at one time or other coveted the throne of Poland.  But also more
than one King of Poland had laid claim to the throne of Sweden.  And
now, although this claim had been formally renounced, Charles XII.
had no sooner acceded, than Danes (including Norwegians), Poles, and
Russians united to dethrone {113} him.  That very remarkable ruler,
Peter the Great, was at this time Tsar.

The young King of Sweden first met and defeated the Danes, next the
Russians, and then marched his victorious troops into Poland, which
he conquered and overran.  As a result of his victories he seems to
have gained little, however, beyond the maintenance of his own throne
in Sweden, and, after remaining two years or more in Poland, he set a
king of his own nomination, Leszynska, on its throne, made peace with
his enemies and went back to his own country.  Three years later,
however, he was again fighting in Russia, and it was during this
campaign, that his armies pushed into Germany also.  In Russia he
finally suffered an overwhelming defeat at Pultowa: this was in 1709,
and one result of that disaster was that his nominee lost the crown
of Poland.

After Pultowa, Charles fled to the Turks, engaged them as his allies
and persuaded them to send an army of invasion into Russia; but after
a short campaign peace was made between Russia and Turkey, and in
1714 Charles returned to his own country.  He died four years later;
and thereafter Sweden was no more a great actor in our story.  The
power of Russia, on the other hand, continually increased, and within
a few years Russian armies were victoriously overrunning Sweden
itself.  The Swedes, nevertheless, preserved their independence, but
were no longer dangerously aggressive to the nations south of the
Baltic.




{114}

CHAPTER VIII

FROM THE PEACE OF UTRECHT TO THE PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE

In the last, short, chapter I tried to tell the story of the early
years of the eighteenth century up to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.
Principally it is the story of the humbling of France, and of the
checking of the ambition of Louis XIV. to unite in his descendants,
together with the Crown of France, all that was included in the
monarchy of Spain.  That ambitious design was checked, and from now
onward we shall see that a great motive in the story is the
preservation of what became known as "the balance of power in
Europe"; so that no one nation should have too preponderant a
superiority over the rest.

The purpose of the present chapter is to carry forward the story to
the middle of the century, or, more precisely, to another very
important peace treaty, that between England and France, signed at
Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748.

The Peace of Utrecht had indeed included in its provisions a
settlement between England and France; but within a few years war
broke out again in Europe, which involved both these countries, and
again it was war over the succession to thrones.  There was war over
the succession to the throne of Poland, to the throne of Austria,
and, although it is not written of {115} by historians as a war of
succession, it really was a small war of the same kind in which
England very soon found herself engaged in Scotland..  And, as ever
of old, France and her Catholic king sided with the Scottish
Catholics against the English Protestant king.  The Court of France
had, as we have noted, given welcome and shelter to the son, by his
second marriage, of James II., who had a claim by birth to the
English Crown.

[Sidenote: Hanoverian English Kings]

But by a recent law of England no Catholic could succeed to the
throne.  The Act of Settlement gave the Crown of England to George,
Elector of Hanover, who was a Protestant and son of a Protestant
grand-daughter of James I.  It was thus that the Hanoverian dynasty,
represented by our present King George V., attained the throne of
England.  Until Queen Victoria's accession, the sovereignty of
Hanover, which became a kingdom when the Bourbon king was restored to
the throne of France, also belonged to the King of England.  But the
laws of Hanover did not recognise succession through the female line,
or admit of a queen as ruler; and therefore the two Crowns were
separated when Victoria became sovereign of England.

The son of James II. came over to Scotland in 1715 and raised a
revolt there, with the aid of some of the Highland clans; but this
rising, known in history, from its date, as "The Fifteen," was easily
put down and made no abiding mark on the story.

The next, which really was of some importance, of the wars of
succession was that waged about the throne of Poland.  It was a
throne, as we have seen, in frequent dispute, but generally the
trouble was fought out between Russia, Sweden, and Poland itself,
with eastern German States taking some hand in it.  Usually these
German States acted as a kind of buffer between that particular
trouble and the West of Europe, {116} rather as Austria, southward,
acted as a buffer for the West against the Turk.  But now the King of
France was drawn into the fight, because he had married a daughter of
the Leszynska whom Charles of Sweden had made King of Poland for a
few years before the disastrous overthrow of the Swedes at Pultowa.
Russia supported the cause of a rival candidate to the throne, and
Leszynska and his French allies were defeated.  The chief importance
of this war of the Polish succession, for the general story, is that
it resulted in a large increase of Russia's power over Poland.  The
successive rulers of Russia began to be more and more fully
recognised as the heads of the Slav people and the supreme upholders
of the Greek Church.

At the same time another power, a Protestant power, that of Prussia,
was becoming more and more formidable along the shores of the Baltic
to the north of Poland, and the time is near at hand when we shall
see these two, Russia and Prussia, playing a very leading part in the
story.

For the moment, however, the western nations are perhaps not
considering them greatly.  They are occupied with wars amongst
themselves.  France and Spain are in arms against each other within a
very few years after the peace signed at Utrecht.  In the
Mediterranean, fighting is nearly perpetual.  Venice takes part of
Greece from the Turks, and the Turks regain it.  Italy and the
islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily are the scenes of battles
and exchanges of territory.  But still we have to remember what we
have seen reason to note before, that we should quite misunderstand
the effect of the wars if we were to estimate them by anything like
the scale which the last Great War has painfully made known to us.
The fighting was all done by the professional soldiers, and the
numbers engaged were what we should deem {117} very small, even in
comparison with the far smaller population of the countries at that
date.  The area of the fighting was restricted, so that comparatively
small tracts were laid waste; nor was the land so cultivated as it is
now.  There were not the same crops to be destroyed.

[Sidenote: The Austrian Succession]

After the war over the Spanish Succession, which terminated with the
Peace of Utrecht in 1713, the most important of the wars of the same
kind was that over the succession to the Austrian throne, which begun
in 1740 on the accession of Maria Theresa, who was the daughter and
heiress of the Emperor and Austrian Grand Duke, Charles VI.

Frederick II., King of Prussia, known in history as Frederick the
Great, appears to have thought the opportunity good for getting a
slice of Austrian territory for himself.  It was that land which was
called Silesia, and he claimed it on the ground that it had at one
time belonged to the Electors of Brandenburg.  The Electors of
Brandenburg, we shall remember, had become rulers of the kingdom of
Prussia.

Frederick was a great general, and two successive victories quickly
induced Maria Theresa to make peace with him, ceding him a portion of
that Silesia for which he had gone to war.

Maria Theresa was married to Francis of Lorraine, who was Grand Duke
of Tuscany.  She was of the Habsburg house.  Louis XIV. was a
Bourbon--a younger branch of the Capet family--and in direct descent
from the Henry IV., who was the first of the Bourbons to be King of
France.  And of the same Bourbon family was the King of Spain and of
Southern Italy and Sicily--"the Two Sicilies," as they were called.

Nearly thirty years before his death, the Emperor Charles had secured
the assent of the great powers of Europe to his decree that if he
died without sons his {118} daughter should succeed to the Austrian
dominions.  The Bourbons, with others, had assented.  Nevertheless,
directly Charles died and Maria Theresa, according to this
arrangement, claimed to succeed him, they took sides with the Elector
of Bavaria, who claimed the throne.

For allies, she had only England, with Hanover, in the north, and, in
the south, the small but ancient kingdom of Savoy, often, in course
of the story, the object of fighting between France and Spain, yet
still, after varying fortunes, maintaining its independence.
Moreover, Sardinia, which had long been a Spanish possession, now
belonged to Savoy.  The armies of this small State had a great
reputation, due to the genius for generalship shown by Prince Eugene
of Savoy both against the Turks and in Marlborough's service.

Mainly, however, it was the valour and devotion of the Hungarians
that saved Austria for Maria Theresa.  The armies of France and
Bavaria advanced through Russian territory, but they were flung back
by Hungarians and Austrians.  Maria Theresa returned to the throne
from which she had fled.  Her principal enemy, the Bavarian Elector,
who had been chosen as Emperor, died, and her own husband, Francis,
was elected Emperor in his place.

In the north, England and France met in the battles of Dettingen and
Fontenoy.  The English were assisted by the Dutch, for Holland was
now a member of the alliance, but neither of the allies gained much
glory in the campaign.  They did at least divert some of the strength
of France from the Austrian battlefields, while the armies of Savoy
occupied the attention of Spain in Italy and also of such troops as
France had to spare for that quarter of the far-flung war.  Frederick
the Great broke his word, with the cynicism which the Prussian has
always shown since, and took the field {119} on the side of France
and Bavaria.  Again he was victorious.  He was confirmed in
possession of Silesia, though he assented to the election of Francis
as Emperor.

[Sidenote: Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle]

The result of this various fighting was summed up in the Provisions
of the famous Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed at that place in 1748.
Maria Theresa was established on the Austrian throne, with the formal
assent of the other powers.  Her dominion in Northern Italy,
including Milan and Tuscany, was confirmed.  And the territory of
Savoy was extended.  In the south, the Bourbon king of the Two
Sicilies retained these dominions.  Thus, in the main, the position
of neither Spain nor of France was greatly affected.  We may note
that one of the treaty provisions put Genoa under the protection of
France.  That may seem a detail rather small for attention in so
outlined a story as this.  It is, however, a detail of which the
importance must be realised when we observe that Genoa claimed a
sovereignty over the little island of Corsica.  Corsica shortly
afterwards rebelled against this sovereignty, with the ultimate
result that the island was annexed by France in 1755.  And in 1769
was born, in Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was in direct consequence, therefore, of this protectorate of
Genoa by France under the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and of France's
annexation of Corsica a few years later, that Napoleon was born a
French subject.  That seemingly accidental circumstance was of some
importance in the world's history.

The disposition of the various States in Italy, made by this Peace of
1748, was maintained with little disturbance until the armies of the
French Republic, under the leadership of the wonderful Corsican,
broke up every European disposition.

If France, in the course of this war over the Austrian succession,
had possessed an army free for an attack {120} in any force on
England, it might have gone very hardly for our country.  The son of
James II., known as the Old Pretender (pretender to the Crown of
England) was still living at the French Court in 1745; and in that
year his son, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, landed in
Scotland, and led that rising which is known from its date as "the
Forty-five."  With the Highland clans to aid, he gained victories
over the English generals sent against him, he conquered practically
all Scotland and made his way southward in England as far as Derby.

If he had shown determination, if he had pushed on towards London, it
is quite likely that much of the future story of England and of the
whole Anglo-Saxon community in the world might have to be written
very differently.  For England was not warmly devoted to her
Hanoverian kings.  The Young Pretender might have picked up many more
adherents as he went south.  Had a French force been poured in to his
assistance at this critical moment, it seems to be the opinion of
historians that his cause would have been won.

But no French force appeared.  Probably France had all her available
armies fully engaged.  Charles Edward did not show determination.  He
went back to Edinburgh, and the clans, held together by no central
authority, but only by their sympathy with the Scottish royal family
of Stuart, dispersed to their Highland homes.  For a while the
Pretender played the king in Edinburgh, but at length a strong
English force under the Duke of Cumberland was sent to Scotland.  A
decisive engagement was fought on the wild moor of Culloden, near
Inverness.  It settled for all time the fate of the Stuart dynasty,
and set the Hanoverians firmly on the throne of England.  The clans
which had arisen for the Stuarts in the previous attempt by the Old
Pretender in "the {121} Fifteen" had suffered slight punishment at
the hands of the victorious English.  After "the Forty-five," on the
contrary, their punishment was cruelly severe; but it had at least
the effect of quelling their spirit so that they did not imperil the
peace of the realm again.

[Sidenote: Ireland's misfortunes]

At the same moment, towards the middle of this eighteenth century,
Ireland was in terrible suffering also.  In 1739 had happened her
worst famine, due to failure of the potatoes on which most of the
people depended, almost entirely, for their livelihood.  It was
estimated that no less than one-fifth of the population actually
died, and there can be no doubt that the effect of that starvation on
the survivors must have been to weaken the stock for more than one
generation.

And we are obliged to confess, with shame, that England's dealing
with Ireland during all that half-century was as cruel and selfish as
it was stupid and short-sighted.  There was a moment when it seems as
if the people of the smaller island were anxious for union with the
greater; but that union was opposed by a section of the English
themselves--especially the powerful section interested in the trade
of wool with the continent of Europe.  A law passed as far back as
the second half of the seventeenth century prohibited the Irish from
exporting cattle.  Consequently they had largely devoted their
excellent pasture to producing sheep, for the wool.  The English wool
traders wished to keep this profitable commerce to themselves.  To
attain that selfish end they opposed the proposed union, which
presumably would have put the Irish wool producers on the same
footing as the English.  Further, under William III., they succeeded
in passing through Parliament a bill prohibiting the Irish from
either making up their home-grown wool or from exporting it.

{122}

The not unnatural result was that the unfortunate Irish turned to all
sorts of secret devices for shipping their wool, contrary to the
provisions of this extraordinarily cruel law, to France; and this
secret traffic is generally regarded as the starting-point of all the
many secret societies, the Whiteboys, the Fenians, and so on, which
have figured largely in Ireland's later political story.  So much of
the bitter feud between England and Ireland has been due to the folly
and injustice of the former nation!  For all our just pride in the
greatness of our country, we must try to keep a clear vision and not
let that proper pride blind us to England's faults.

One of the reasons why I suggested that a French force landing in
England in "the Forty-five" might have changed the subsequent story
of the Anglo-Saxon people, is that it might have had the result of
modifying those very stupid measures by which England drove her
American colonies to revolt, and so caused the separation from the
mother land of the United States.  It is always interesting to
speculate about what might have happened to the world story had this
or the other event gone just a little differently.  It is
interesting; but we can never know the answers to such questioning.
The story of that lamentable separation belongs to the second half of
the century with which we are now dealing.  For the moment
preparation is in making for it by the continual increase of the
English colonists and their continual expansion over more and more of
the virgin land.  But still the French are in possession of all that
vast extent then included under the name of Louisiana.

In a former chapter we saw how unmeasured were the hopes of Spain
regarding that fabled city of El Dorado, which seems to have been
imagined as built and paved with gold.  In the new world which the
voyagers of the previous century had begun to open {123} out for men
of Europe, no vision seemed impossible to realise, and the French, in
their American possessions, appear to have deemed that they had found
something equivalent to a city of gold--a land with boundless
possibilities of wealth.  Nor were the less imaginative English
immune from the like delusive dreams.  We had our "South Sea Bubble";
the French their "Mississippi Bubble."

Bubble was the name applied to those schemes only when they had
proved themselves, by bursting, to be filled with nothing more
substantial or golden than the air.  The English bubble, at its
inception, was a grave business proposition styled the South Sea
Company.  The French equivalent was the Mississippi Company, or
Compagnie de l'Occident.  Like the East India Company, these were
formed by persons who subscribed funds for exploiting the wealth,
real or imaginary, of the countries indicated by the titles of each.
Shares in both one and the other rose to ridiculous values; and the
bursting of the one, as of the other, brought ruin to very many in
both countries.

[Sidenote: The French bourgeois]

Nevertheless the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in the middle of the
eighteenth century was the starting-point from which began a
remarkable commercial prosperity in France.  It was a prosperity of
the bourgeois, the burghers or dwellers in the towns, who developed
the industries and trades, but it did not reach down to the paysans,
the peasants or dwellers in the country.  They were in a very bad
way, ground down by heavy taxes and by the enforced labour demanded
from them by the seigneurs, or landowners.

France had expected great things from her Compagnie de l'Occident,
and her extensive colony of Louisiana; but the trading stations which
she established in increasing number in the East brought her far
richer gains.  The war of the Austrian Succession engaged England and
France in fighting on {124} battlefields as far apart as Canada and
Louisiana in the West, and India in the East; and in the East the
French, under Dupleix, at first had the advantage again and again.
They repulsed an attack of the English on Pondicherry and they
captured Madras.  Indications, for the moment, pointed towards an
Indian Empire for France as far more likely than an English Indian
Empire.  In the West, England fared better, but the results of the
victories of either side were largely neutralised by that
far-reaching Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which provided that both
should relinquish their recent conquests to the other.  So the
apparent effect of that far-off fighting was to show England
increasing in strength westward, but losing, relatively to France, in
the East.  The events of the next few years were to prove that
appearance true for the West, but completely to disprove it in the
East.  And we should note here once again that it was mainly on the
sea-coasts of India, not inland, that the French established
themselves.  In the interior, the great empire of the Moguls was
passing from its zenith of power.  The most remarkable monument to
its glory is that surpassingly beautiful Taj Mahal, regarded as one
of the world's wonders--the shrine erected by the Mogul emperor in
memory of his best beloved wife.  And as the Mogul supremacy wanes,
the power of the Hindu States of Mahratta and Sindhia increases, so
that the balance is nearly equal between the Mahommedans and the
Buddhists.

[Sidenote: Taj Mahal]

[Illustration: THE TAJ MAHAL, AGRA.]

The little kingdom of Afghanistan which we have seen rise on the
north-eastern frontier of India established its complete independence
towards the middle of the century, after long fighting, with varying
fortune, against Persia.  On her other boundary, westward and
northward, Persia was engaged, on the whole successfully, in
perpetual fighting against the Turk; but the result, except as it
indicated a decrease {125} in Turkey's striking force, had little or
no effect on the Great Story.  Under the famous Shah Nadir, Persian
armies had penetrated as far eastward as Delhi.  But after Nadir's
death, in 1747, his eastern conquests were lost.

On its north-western border, India was menaced by Chinese armies,
that conquered the warlike Ghurkas and subdued Nepal.  At no other
moment of our story does China appear so successful or so aggressive
in arms or so likely to play an important part in the world drama.
Her great emperor Keenlung had come to the throne in 1735, commencing
a reign of no less than sixty years.  Nor even then did he leave the
throne to die, but voluntarily relinquished it to his son--to the
fifteenth, in seniority, of his many sons.

This, however, was the farthest limit of Chinese extension in the
direction of India.  The Ghurkas, a {126} tribe of martial hill-men
destined to distinguished service under the British flag in later
years, soon regained their independence.  China contented herself
with a much disputed sovereignty over the more northern province of
Tibet.




{127}

CHAPTER IX

THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR

It is likely that until the latter half of the eighteenth century the
people of Europe did not even begin to realise the full meaning of
the great New World which Columbus had discovered for them in the
West.  Spain regarded it as a Tom Tiddler's ground where she would go
and pick up gold.  France and possibly England too had their foolish
dreams.  They expected enormous things from that vast continent of
which the western limits were only gradually revealed to them.  They
expected enormous results which never were, nor ever could be
realised.  But they had no idea whatever of the yet more enormous
effect which the finding of the new continent really was to have on
the story.  All that was hidden from their eyes.

The settlement between the nations agreed at Aix-la-Chapelle was
called a "Peace," but it was a settlement that left one of the States
of Europe in a situation which did not promise that the peace would
last long.  That State was Prussia.  We have seen her establishing
herself and gaining strength.  She had taken Silesia from Austria,
and Austria had agreed to that loss in the terms of the peace, but
yet longed for an opportunity to regain the loss.  France and Spain
were knit together in an alliance known as the Family Compact,
because the rulers of both countries were of the Bourbon family.
Austria, under Maria Theresa, joined {128} their family alliance, and
brought in Saxony with her, for Saxony was no less jealous of the
power of Prussia than Austria herself.  Russia, under the Tsarina
Elizabeth, was anxious about the growing strength of this Teutonic
State on her border; and on her side she brought Sweden into the
large conspiracy which had for its object the break up of the power
of Prussia and a partition between the conspirators of the Prussian
territories.

It was a conspiracy which came to the knowledge of Frederick, the
Prussian king.

For many years the interests of England and of France had been in
conflict both West and East, in America and in India.  The opposition
was approaching the point at which war must result from it.  Now, in
the European position just indicated, England saw the opportunity of
getting a strong helper against France.  She allied herself with
Frederick, who had carried the States of Brunswick and of
Hesse-Cassel with him; and together they declared war upon nearly all
Europe.  France, Austria, Spain, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony were
against them.

It has the sound of a combination of overwhelming force as opposed to
the English and the Prussian kings, even though the immense power of
Russia was then only in its infancy.  England was not likely to send
very large armies to the Continent, and an English force of 50,000
retreated before the French and was disbanded very early in the war.
But Frederick had a genius for the creation and organisation of
armies, and had occupied it, during the eight years following the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in making the Prussian army the finest
military machine which the modern world had seen.

[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War]

The war which ensued, known as the Seven Years' War from the time
that it lasted, is most remarkable for its dramatic changes of
fortune.  Frederick began {129} by a victory in Saxony, yet more than
once he was so heavily defeated that he almost gave up the fight in
despair.  It is said that he thought of suicide.  England, when the
elder Pitt was Prime Minister, gave assistance in form of large
subsidies of money rather than large forces of men or arms, and
without these subsidies Frederick must have given in.  A mixed force
of English and Hanoverians did indeed fight under the Duke of
Brunswick and drove back the French from their attacks on Hanover in
1758 and again in 1759, but except for this last success everything
went heavily against Frederick in the fourth year of the war.  In the
year following, contingents of Russian and Austrian armies were
actually occupying Berlin when he fell upon the main Austrian force
at Torgau on the Elbe.  The victory that he there gained, over heavy
odds, turned the tide of the fighting in his favour when it was at
its lowest ebb.

Still the struggle continued, with Frederick and his war-weary troops
chiefly on the defensive, exhausted.  And to that exhaustion and to
his encircling foes he would in all likelihood have been compelled to
own defeat, had it not been for the death at the beginning of 1762 of
one of his chief enemies, the Tsarina of Russia, and the accession of
a Tsar who was his friend.  Russia, from a foe became an ally and
carried Sweden with her.  England, however, had become tired of the
war and made alliance with France and Spain by the Peace of Paris in
1763, and in the same year the protagonists, or chief fighters,
Prussia and Austria, themselves came to terms.  Prussia retained
Silesia.  The final result of the seven years' fighting, with these
singular alternations of victories and defeats, was to leave the map
of Europe practically unchanged.  From that point of view all the
bloodshed had been for nothing.

From another, a larger and more just point of view, {130} however, we
are obliged to realise that perhaps no other one war in the whole of
the story has made more difference to its future course.  If we
consider its effect on the Continent alone, we must realise that it
laid the foundation on which the union of the German States into a
compact nation was later to be built.  It established Prussia in far
greater strength than before, because, if she had not added to her
possessions, she had at least held her own while her enemies vainly
dashed themselves against her.  Austria had perforce to acquiesce at
length in the loss of Silesia and also in the recognition of this
strong State of Northern Germany set up against her own strength in
the south.  Prussia was to prove the nucleus round and under which
the unity of Germany should be built, and it was this war which set
firm the foundations of that building.

And as to who was the master mason in that building we can have no
doubt whatever.

We have come across many men in course of this Greatest Story to whom
the title of Great has been given, but surely to none more rightly
than to this great King of Prussia.  His courage in the hour of
defeat has been indicated by the above very brief sketch of the war.
It was only by the most steadfast courage combined with rare military
genius that he came out of that seven years' fighting unshattered.
But his genius served his country in peaceful as well as warlike
interests.  He was an absolute despot, yet he used himself and his
despotic power entirely for his country's good.  He set the example,
in his own court, of a rigid, a scraping economy.  He did all in his
power to develop the industries of the country, by road making, by
improved means of transport, and by every possible expedient.  He
encouraged education and brought men of letters like Voltaire to the
Prussian court.  He was rough and passionate, but a very hard worker,
and {131} all his work was given to the strengthening and
enlightening of his subjects.

Taken from this point of view, then, the Seven Years' War is seen to
have had a very great effect on our story.

But let us regard it also in its effects on the far larger stage upon
which the story is being enacted, now that the Old East and the New
West have begun to form part of it.

[Sidenote: The War overseas]

In the very same year, 1757, that Frederick gained two of his most
effective victories, those of Rosbach and of Leuthen, in the first of
which he broke up the French armies and in the second the armies of
Austria, England was gaining success no less important against France
far overseas.  We have spoken of the East India Company of merchants
settled as traders in various places along the coasts of India.  It
was thus, establishing stations on the coast, that the Portuguese,
first, had come; and so too the French and English after them.
Already, before the Seven Years' War, we have also noticed sundry
clashes of arms between the English and the French, in which the
advantage had gone heavily against the former.  Both nations were
obliged to keep a certain force of troops under arms for their
protection in a country where the friendship of the natives was
uncertain.  The natives were of various races; the land was divided
between many rulers of different States; and there was the one
outstanding division of religion between Hindus and Mahommedans.

It may seem a strange thing to say, but really it was the French
ambition to found a French Empire in India which led to the
foundation of the British Empire.  Under their able and ambitious
leader, Dupleix, the French began to push inland from their coastal
stations and forcibly to claim authority in some of the native
States.  It was, of course, an authority {132} which they exercised
in favour of their own people and against the English traders.  When
the Seven Years' War broke out, English and French in India as
elsewhere were declared and open enemies.  It was at this very moment
that the Nawab, the native ruler, of Bengal, began to quarrel with
the English.  Naturally he was supported by the French.  At first
things went badly for the English in some fighting which led to no
decisive result, but in the following year--the year of Rosbach and
of Leuthen--the British, under Clive, gained a victory of the
greatest importance over the troops of the Nawab, supported by the
French, at Plassey.

It seems to have been quite a revelation to the natives that the
British were able to fight at all, and from this time forward their
prestige was established in the East, The battle which mainly decided
the issue, as between English and French, was not fought until three
years later, for at Plassey there had been only a few French
supporting the native forces.  But at Wandewash, in 1760, the battle
was between British and French almost wholly, and its result was a
decisive British victory.  From that time forward Britain was always
regarded as the principal European power in India and on all the
eastern sea-coasts.

That was the mark made in the East on this greatest of all stories by
the Seven Years' War.

Its mark was planted no less deeply on the western side.  Montreal
and Quebec were French towns at the beginning of the war.  Moreover,
Montcalm, the French governor, had established the authority of the
French, supported by a chain of forts, right away west as far as the
Mississippi.  Take out the atlas, and, remembering that the French
possession of Louisiana at that time stretched right up from New
Orleans at the Mississippi's mouth to the Great Lakes, you will
realise what this meant to the British people in America.  {133} It
meant that they were completely hemmed in and shut off from all
access to the West.

[Sidenote: Canada gained by England]

Pitt seems to have realised it.  He sent out a strong force, which
was ably helped by the militia called up from the British who were
settled in America.  Montcalm appears to have shown much genius for
friendship with the Indians, and he had many of their tribes to aid
his French forces.  But the British gained post after post, and the
crowning victory was won by Wolfe in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham,
which dominate Quebec.  Canada was won for Great Britain.  The way to
the almost boundless West was opened to men of British race.
France's dream of Western empire was broken as completely as her
dream of empire in the East.  Florida, moreover, became British under
the terms of the Peace of Paris, being assigned to Great Britain in
return for Cuba and the Philippine Islands which had been taken from
the Spaniards during the war.

1760, the year of the Wandewash battle in India, saw two great
battles in Europe, one on land, at Minden, and one on sea, in
Quiberon Bay, in both of which the French were heavily beaten.  They
happened at a moment when Frederick's fortunes were at low ebb, and
were sorely needed.  In the land battles the French were broken by a
charge of the English line which seems to have been delivered
contrary to all then recognised rules of war.  At sea the French
fleet was practically destroyed by the English under Admiral Hawke
just when it was actually preparing for an invasion of England.

And the rewards of these conquests, both East and West, were
confirmed to Britain by that Peace of Paris which terminated the
Seven Years' War.




{134}

CHAPTER X

HOW THE UNITED STATES WON INDEPENDENCE

We have come to a moment in our story at which the events which
modified it most importantly occurred, not in Europe at all, but in
that new West which was still British.  Before considering them,
however, it will be well to gather up some loose ends of the European
story.

There had been some rearrangement of territory, in the year 1767,
between Denmark and Sweden, by which most of what we may see on
modern maps marked as Schleswig-Holstein was given over to Denmark in
exchange for the Duchy of Oldenburg; but a rearrangement of far more
importance was that which is known as the first partition of Poland
in 1772.  It was a mutual arrangement, between the three strong
powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, to dismember and embody as
parts of themselves such pieces of Polish territory as lay most
neighbourly to their own boundaries.

The Seven Years' War had been in large measure brought about by a
rather similar design against Prussia and Poland seems to have been
one of the consenting parties, if not an active partaker, in that
proposed robbery.  Now a robbery yet more audacious was not only
proposed but actually perpetrated upon her.  She was powerless to
resist; though there had been a time when she was a great power and
{135} Russia was scarcely heard of, Austria no more than the boundary
buffer state between the Teuton and the Slav, and Prussia of no
account whatever in the story.  This first partition was followed by
a second and yet a third rather more than twenty years afterwards.
By that latest division she was almost wholly swallowed up in Russia
and ceased to exist as an independent State until her comparatively
recent resuscitation.

[Sidenote: Expansion of Russia]

On whatever side we now look of the boundaries of Russia we see them
continuously extending.  Her armies defeat the Tartars eastward, the
Turks southward; she destroys a large Turkish fleet; she gains the
extensive region called White Russia, and the Crimea, and sends
conquering armies into the Balkan States, where the Bulgarian Slavs
are establishing themselves ever more firmly as an independent
nation.  Largely it is by reason of the growing power of Russia that
the Turks, are more and more compelled to fight for their existence
and for their hold on even a part of their wide conquests in Europe.
They are no longer fighting to extend them.  And at the same time,
that is to say, in 1768, Egypt, under the Mamelukes, throws off the
domination of the Ottomans.  Originally these Mamelukes themselves
were Turkish--a bodyguard of Turkish slaves enrolled for the
protection of the Egyptian rulers.  They had revolted and seized the
government soon after the reign of Saladin.  And it is worthy of note
that in the midst of all the fighting which goes on in and around the
Balkans between Venetians, Turks, Russians, and others, the little
mountain State of Montenegro always retains her independence.  Though
often attacked, she is never subdued.  Her story may remind us of
those valiant and invincible Swiss, for doubtless it is because of
the mountainous character of the two countries alike, giving the
defence such a great advantage over the {136} attack, that the heroic
defenders of both kept their homeland free against enemies whose
numbers were many times greater than their own.


Now, turning to the far western side of the stage, the leading
feature of the drama is that the British had established themselves
as the great power in America.  They had little to fear now from the
French.  And the reason why that fact is of such vast importance in
the story is that, had it not been for that freedom from the French
menace, the independence of the United States could not possibly have
been won as, and at the time when, it was won.  We may regard that
independence as a good thing or a bad thing for the world: we may
think it better for the world that there should be this great free
nation in the West, not united by any political ties with Europe; or
we may, on the contrary, deem that the peace and prosperity of man
would be better served if the United States belonged to that
confederation of States which we call the British Empire--although
"Empire" is rather a misleading name for it.  The voice of the
Anglo-Saxon communities would certainly speak even more forcibly than
it does in the world's counsels if there were such union and such
unity.

But, whatever view we may take as to that, we cannot but see that the
English settlers in America could never, with even tolerable safety,
have declared themselves independent of the British Government, if
they had still had the French menace hanging over them.  They could
not possibly have dispensed with the support of the British army and
navy.  But after the defeat of the French in Canada they were free to
assert themselves.

[Sidenote: George III]

And again whatever be our opinion about this great splitting up into
two branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock, we of England are painfully
obliged to realise {137} that it was England's fault.  It came about
owing to the obstinacy and the despotic ideas of that king of the
Hanoverian Royal family, George III., who was on the throne of Great
Britain.  He even tried his hardest, but in vain, to suppress the
newspapers which dared to comment on matters of public interest at
home.  As a foreigner, and very ignorant of the temper of the people,
he was in some degree to be excused.  He could scarcely be expected
to know better than he did.

There were those about him whom we might have expected to know
better--his Prime Ministers, and notably Lord Grenville and Lord
North.  But Lord Grenville was as proud and arrogant as the king
himself, and Lord North was not at all a clever man, and, besides,
was the absolute servant of his king, not daring to assert his voice
against his master's, as Pitt, who had been Prime Minister a little
while before, had dared often and long.

We have to realise that the actual government was very much in the
hands of the king at this date.  Then, as now, it was nominally the
Parliament that governed.  The Cabinet, in fact, does most of the
business to-day.  Under George III. it was George III. that governed,
because the Parliament was full of "the king's friends," as they were
called--members whom affection or bribery or some other form of
interest influenced so that they could be relied on to support any
measures which the king wished to be carried.

The population and the wealth of the British colonies in America had
grown very rapidly.  At the beginning of George III.'s reign the
colonists are said to have numbered nearly a million and a half,
which was then just about a fourth of the population of the mother
country.  And there was already half a million of slaves in the South.

{138}

The slaves were already creating a difference between the South and
the North, or, shall we say, were emphasising and widening the
difference created by the different type of colonist by which the two
districts were populated.  For Virginia and the other southern States
had been occupied largely by emigrants from the West of England and
by aristocratic families, and with the slaves to work for them they
tended to divide up the country into large estates; whereas in the
North, whither the emigrants had come from a lower social stratum at
home, and where they had no slaves to work for them, the holdings
were small.

In religion the Virginians were mainly of the Established English
Church.  In Maryland, the inhabitants were chiefly Roman Catholic.
In New England, Puritans were in a large majority; and in
Pennsylvania, the State of William Penn, the people were largely
Quakers.

It was for the sake of religion that most of them, or their forbears,
had left their native land.  And just because the religions were so
many and various, it was impossible that there could be any
established Church among them in the land of their adoption.  Men
were free to serve God according to the dictates of their consciences.

Each State was governed by an Assembly elected by its own people and
by a Governor appointed by the Crown.  The States had their
"charters"--documents in which were drawn up their rights and their
duties--and so long as they acted within the provisions of those
characters the Governor had no right or reason to interfere.  The
right of taxing themselves for the purpose of administering their own
affairs was given them.  The home Government derived a revenue from
the colonies by the duties charged on articles which they imported by
sea.  And the colonies were obliged {139} by their charters to engage
in no trade overseas except with the home country.

This last provision had not been faithfully observed, and a
considerable trade was going on illicitly between the British and the
Spanish colonies.  Britain, short of money by reason of the cost of
the Seven Years' War, raised the import duties and enforced the
prohibition against trading with the Spaniards.

Certain of the expenses of the war had been incurred for the
protection of the colonies, and though they might not welcome this
action of the home Government they could not legally resist it.  Nor
did they.  But then the king and his minister Grenville imposed, or
sought to impose, on them a tax which surely was illegal and which
surely they were within their rights in resisting.

[Sidenote: The Stamp Act]

It was imposed by the piece of legislation known as the Stamp Act,
because its object was to levy money from the colonists by making it
illegal for them to buy and sell certain articles within the colonies
themselves unless they bore a government stamp; for which stamp
payment had to be made to the home Government.

It was a manifest breach of the agreement which had been made with
the colonists, and the principal effect of the passing of this Stamp
Act in 1765 was that the colonists called together a Congress of
delegates from all the colonies and passed a protest against the Act
and a demand for its repeal.  More than that; when the ship came into
Boston harbour carrying the first batch of the stamps to be used for
the new tax, they had the stamps seized and retained.  It was open
defiance.  It was defiance by something like three millions of
determined people, the population having nearly doubled itself since
the beginning of George III.'s reign.  Pitt's generous comment upon
it is well known: "Three millions of people so dead to all {140}
feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have
been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest."

It was chiefly Pitt's influence which led to the repeal of the Act in
1766; but much of the good effect of its repeal must have been
spoiled by a measure called the "Declaratory Act," passed at the same
time, declaring that the power of the British Parliament was supreme
over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever."  It was as much as to
say, "We yield on this particular point, but we maintain that our
right over you is despotic whensoever we think fit to exercise it."
It did, in fact, claim to enslave, as Pitt indicated, these people,
because, as we have seen all through the story, it was by insistence
on the right to tax themselves that Britons had painfully won
liberty: it was a right expressed in the words "no taxation without
representation": and here was a declaration directly opposed to that
right, for it declared that the home Government might tax the
colonists, although they had no representation in the home Government!

But for the moment the trouble passed.  The colonists had all the
substance of victory in the repeal of the Stamp Act: they could
afford to disregard the shadowy threat of the Declaratory Act.  They
may have thought that, since the king and Parliament had yielded to
their resistance once, they were not likely to challenge that
resistance again.  But King George appears to have been incapable of
learning.  Seven years later the trouble broke out anew, again
provoked by the question of taxation.  The colonists protested
against import duties which they considered illegal and oppressive,
and their protest was met by the withdrawal of all the duties
objected to except that on tea.  They accepted this withdrawal, and
this exception, amicably; but they countered the exception by
generally refusing to drink tea, so that no {141} tea was imported
and no duty on it was payable.  It was a situation which would be
laughable if the consequences had not been so tragic.

[Sidenote: Opposition to the tea duty]

Despite the non-tea-drinking resolution, English ships laden with tea
put into Boston harbour towards the end of 1773, doubtless with a
view to landing it.  Whether or no it would have been landed we can
never know, for the ships while in harbour were boarded by a mob
disguised as wild Indians and all the tea-chests were thrown into the
sea.

Again it would be laughable but for the tragic consequence.  The
colonial Governments deplored the lawless act and were ready to make
compensation.  But the king, who had ever bewailed what he called
"the fatal compliance" in the repeal of the Stamp Act, would accept
no expression of regret.  Measures were introduced into Parliament
for closing the port of Boston to all commerce, by way of punishment
for the act of "hooliganism," as we now should call it, and virtually
all the liberties granted by charter to the State of Massachusetts,
of which Boston was the chief city, were withdrawn.  Troops were sent
out to enforce these decrees, and the general in command was
appointed Governor of the State with powers such as had never before
been vested in any governor of any American colony.

The citizens of Massachusetts refused to obey the enactments of the
Governor, and all the colonies in America sooner or later came to the
support of Massachusetts.  And that is no matter for our wonder,
seeing that they must have felt that what was done to Massachusetts
to-day might be done to them to-morrow.  They must quickly have
realised that their best hope of liberty lay in opposing a united
front to the servitude that threatened them.  It might seem but a
slender hope; yet we may remember that those colonists of a new world
were far more apt to make {142} good fighters than agriculturists or
townsfolk in a long settled land.  They were still surrounded by
hostile tribes of Red Indians.  Many of themselves, and most of their
forefathers, must have lived with rifle ever ready at hand, for
protection against sudden attack, while they went about their tasks
of peace.  They were doubtless quick-witted, as men needs must be who
are constantly facing new conditions.  They were tough, determined
men, and in their struggle to be free they found a man to lead
them--George Washington.

Of their tough quality the British soldiers made experience in the
first serious clash of arms at Bunker's Hill.  I cannot tell you, in
a story of barest outlines like this, the details of the long
drawn-out fighting, how the cause of the colonists' freedom seemed
now and again all but lost, how the fortunes of the war went this way
and that.  For its changes were scarcely less remarkable than those
of the Seven Years' War in Europe.  The quality that served the
colonists best and enabled them to win through was that essentially
British quality of refusing to believe themselves defeated.  They
endured with an extraordinary steadfastness and they recovered
themselves when beaten to the ground with a marvellous resilience.

Even after fighting had begun, a reconciliation might have been made
had the counsels of Lord Chatham prevailed at home.  George
Washington was representative of the great landowners of Virginia.
By their traditions, and also owing to the fact that their state lay
far south of that Massachusetts which was the immediate sufferer by
the British tyranny, the Virginians clung more closely and longer to
the mother country than any of the other colonial children.  But
their clinging was of no use.  Chatham's good counsel was rejected.
Washington, as leader of the nation in war, was probably the more
looked up to {143} because he had tried so hard for peace.  His face
now was set as firmly towards the prosecution of the war as it had
been towards peace while any hope of favourable peace was left.  And
every year of the war's duration revealed more and more his rare
character for wisdom, determination, and moderation.

[Sidenote: Course of the War]

A solemn and formal declaration of the independence of the United
States of America was made on July 4th, 1776, but all that year and
the greater part of the next the fighting went hardly for the
colonists until, in October, 1777, the British under Burgoyne
suffered their first serious--and it was very serious--defeat at
Saratoga.

It was a disaster to the British arms which had far-reaching effects.
France was still seething with discontent over the loss of colonies
in the Seven Years' War.  Now, encouraged by the event of Saratoga,
she declared war on Great Britain.  Spain shortly followed her lead.
And in the same year Lord Chatham died.  A little later Holland took
the side of the enemies of Great Britain also, provoked by the claims
of Britain to search the ships of neutral nations for arms or other
"contraband of war" which they might be carrying for the Americans.
Sweden, Russia, and Denmark united in an "armed neutrality" compact
against her, to enforce the freedom of the seas and the right which
they claimed for their ships to cross the ocean without liability to
be searched.

A further effect of Saratoga was that the British armies took the
field no more in the northern States, but concentrated in the south.
There they held their own, if not more than their own, until in 1781
a second blow, even more calamitous than that of Saratoga, befell
them.  The generals in command of the sections of the British did not
work in harmony.  Lord Cornwallis was disappointed in the support
which he had expected, and entrenched himself behind {144} defensive
lines in York Town in Virginia.  The French fleet held the sea.
Washington marched round and cut him off from supplies by land.  He
was driven by famine to surrender, with all his army.

It was the end of the war.  It was the establishment, never again to
be shaken, of the independence of the United States of America.  It
looked grievously like the end of Great Britain as a leading power in
the world.  Ireland rose against her in a clamour for what virtually
was independence, Spain claimed Gibraltar as the price of peace, and
France demanded that Great Britain should give over to her the
greater part of British India.

Then, in that very dark hour for England, deliverance came, as more
than once before, from the sea.  Lord Rodney had already struck a
disabling blow at a main portion of the Spanish fleet off Cape St.
Vincent; and now, in 1782, he dealt what really was a shattering
stroke on the French fleet in the West Indies.  These naval victories
and the repulse of the French and Spanish ships beleaguering
Gibraltar disposed those nations to agree to terms of peace in which
England could acquiesce without dishonour.  She lost nothing to
France; to Spain she resigned the island of Minorca and gave back
Florida; and--she lost the United States.




{145}

CHAPTER XI

HOW THE STAGE WAS SET FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Thus England's star went setting in the West; but in the East
coincidentally it rose continuously to greater glory.  Plassey had
given Bengal into her hands; Wandewash had made her authority
dominant in Southern India.  But as yet it was not England, the
nation and the King of England, that held this scarcely defined
authority.  It was the great trading concern known as the East India
Company.

"Some have greatness thrust upon them"; and this was remarkably true
of the empire of India which Great Britain was really compelled by
the force of circumstances to assume.  The trading company did not
desire to govern the country: they wished to fulfil their original
purpose of trade, of making money.  It was the aggression of the
French and the oppression of the native ruler of Bengal, as we have
seen, which obliged them to fight for the very liberty to trade.
Further, they were compelled to maintain some kind of order in the
districts in which they thus became supreme.  It was not easy for
them to do this under their charter as traders.  The government of
the native princes of Bengal was inefficient and corrupt and the
people under them were in misery.  An Act of the British Parliament
in 1773 appointed a Governor-General with powers over all the British
possessions in {146} India.  Warren Hastings, a civilian in the
Company's service, was the first to hold that high post, and with a
strong hand he reduced to nothing the powers of the worst of the
native rulers and made the government of the better among them less
ineffective and corrupt.  With the rulers of some of the independent
States he entered into treaties and alliances.  The idea of Britain's
Indian Empire seems to have been born in the brain of Warren Hastings.

[Sidenote: Warren Hastings]

And the peculiar conditions of India made the realisation of that
idea not only possible but inevitable.  Through the whole of her
story Hindustan has been a land of constant strife between various
races settled on her soil and between those settled races and warlike
tribes coming down upon her from the north through the passes of her
great boundary mountains, the Himalayas.  But the greatest cleavage
of all among her people was that which still exists between the
Moslems and the Hindus of the Buddhist faith.  All the many divisions
have been causes of jealousies and fighting, but none so constant and
prolonged as those due to these two opposed faiths.  It is that
opposition, in the main, which has made the British Empire in India
both possible and necessary--possible, because without that cleavage
there might well have been a union of native strength sufficient to
withstand the British domination, and necessary, because at every
step the British found their trade and their peace imperilled by
disturbances beyond the latest limits within which they had made good
their authority.  They were impelled, for their own mere safety, to
push that authority further and further again.  And it was a
necessity imposed on them also by consideration for the sufferings of
the natives in some of the worst governed States.  It was a veritable
"white man's burden" laid, of no will of their own, and sometimes
sorely against their will, upon their shoulders.

[Illustration: WARREN HASTINGS]

{147}

Warren Hastings had to stand a prolonged trial on his return home for
what almost certainly were acts of exceeding harshness in his
dealings with some of the native rulers.  He was acquitted; and it is
not possible for us now to try him over again.  Almost certainly he
dealt very hardly; but almost as certainly no man who did not deal
very hardly could have done {148} what he did to bring a large part
of India under a government which gave its subjects greater peace and
happiness than they had known before.

As we know, there was another power besides the French with which
Great Britain came into collision in the East--the Dutch.  Ever since
the middle of the eighteenth century there had been much ill-will in
Holland against England.  Holland only a little while before had been
the chief naval power in the Northern seas.  Her ships had even come
conquering and destroying far up the Thames.  And now the Dutch saw
that supremacy gradually taken from them; the British Government
actually passing resolutions to restrain their free right of traffic
on the high seas.  And at the same time Great Britain was taking
much, and constantly more and more, of the carrying trade away from
Holland; Great Britain was trading more and more, on her own behalf
and on that of other nations, with the East; Great Britain was
bringing to the West, from her ever-growing Eastern possessions, the
produce of the East which used to be brought from the Dutch colonies
in Dutch ships; some of these colonies and trading settlements
themselves were being taken from the Dutch by the British; and where
the Dutch rights were not very firmly established British traders set
up settlements to compete with them.

A state of actual war between the countries existed from 1780 to
1784.  The terms of the treaty which put an end to that active
warfare could not put an end to their constant trade rivalry in the
East in which Great Britain was usually the gainer and Holland the
loser.  By the date of the great convulsions caused by the French
Revolution we find Holland so diminished in power as to be ready to
do the bidding of Great Britain and of Prussia.

It was thus that Britain's star rose higher and {149} brighter in the
East even as it sank in the West, and if we look to the far southern
quarter of the world stage we find it in the ascendant there also,
for in 1787 New Zealand was declared a British possession, and that
declaration was followed in the next year by the colonisation of New
South Wales.  The beginning of the British occupation of the west
coast of Africa dates from the same time.  On every side therefore,
except along that eastern fringe of the American continent where the
colonists had gloriously won their independence, the British, the
Anglo-Saxons, were extending their sway.

[Sidenote: Poyning's Act Repealed]

There was one people, British yet not Anglo-Saxon, very, much nearer
the home centre, who made a bold claim, and in part a successful
claim, at this moment for their independence--the Irish.  By a law of
George I., known as Poyning's Act, from its proposer, no measure
passed by the Parliament of Ireland could become law until it had
received the assent of the King of England.  It was this law of which
the Irish, under the lead of Grattan, their great orator, obtained
the repeal in the year 1782, taking advantage of the dire straits in
which England then found herself.  It needs but a moment's thought to
show that this repeal meant all the difference between a dependent
and an independent Parliament in Ireland.  It put Irishmen into the
position that they were free to legislate in all Irish matters
without interference from England.  Irishmen in large numbers had
before this emigrated to America, and naturally had been active in
inflaming the anti-English feeling in the colonies.  Besides all
political reasons, and the real grievances under which the Irish had
suffered from the English, the fact that the great majority of them
were Catholics was an added occasion why these people of a Celtic
origin could not be at rest under the government of the Anglo-Saxon
Protestants.

{150}

[Sidenote: Church of Rome in Ireland]

The political power of the Church of Rome, that is to say, the power
of the Pope to interfere in the government, had received some severe
checks even in the countries where Roman Catholicism was the religion
of the State.  As early as 1753 the Pope had yielded to the King of
Spain the power to make appointments to the high dignities in the
Church; but still the Romish Church meddled with politics abroad.
Such interference was resented by the despotic kings of the Bourbon
branch of the great Capet stock, both in France and Spain.  The
political activities of the very able and energetic order of Jesuits
gave special offence to the Governments.  Portugal had commenced the
campaign against them by driving them out as early as 1759.  In
France their activities were suppressed five years later.  In 1767
they were expelled from Spain, and within a very few years such
pressure was put upon the Pope that he was obliged to break up their
order in Italy itself.  We have seen how Spain was ground beneath the
heel of the Inquisition--not acting under orders from Rome but on its
own initiative.  Now, that is to say, in 1774, the Spanish Government
asserted itself to confine the judicial power of the Inquisition to
ecclesiastical cases; that is to say, that its officials might only
arrest and try and punish the people guilty, or suspected of guilt,
against the laws of the Church.  Before that, it had been in the
habit of arresting and trying and punishing persons suspected of
breaking the common law of the land, the civil law.  The
Inquisition's claim to try these civil cases had been without legal
warrant, but the Government had not till now found the courage to
resist it.  And this withdrawal of all such cases out of the hands of
the Inquisition gave a blow that was really deadly to the power of
that cruel and dreaded institution, though it was not finally
abolished until nearly half a century later.

Thus, in all these strongholds of the Roman {151} Catholic faith the
political activity of the Church was checked.  It received no such
check, however, in Ireland.  That island was as true a stronghold of
the old faith as any of those others and had escaped, as they had
not, much, both of the darkening of the faith in the Middle Ages, and
also of the storms that shook it in the Reformation.  Rome's
authority received no check from any Government in Ireland, because
it had never come up against the authority of an Irish Government.
During the years in which other Governments were growing restive
under the political interference of the Church, and latterly of the
Jesuits more particularly, there was no independent Government in
Ireland, and the native leaders of Ireland were ready enough to
welcome any form of interference with England's Government.  For this
reason the Church continued to be politically active in
Ireland--always in opposition to Protestant England--without arousing
the hostility to which it had been obliged to yield in other Catholic
countries.

And now the course of this Greatest Story has brought us to the years
in which the centre of the stage begins to be occupied by the tragic
figure of France struggling in the throes of her revolution.  Even at
that time, although communication was comparatively very difficult
and slow, the tremors of the revolution were felt over nearly all the
world stage.  Temporarily it changed the map of Europe beyond
recognition.  And not only temporarily, but for all time, it changed
the minds of men not only in Europe, but nearly the whole world over.




{152}

CHAPTER XII

THE REVOLUTION AND THE TERROR

The position in Europe at this time, that is to say, about 1790, was
singular and interesting.  That continent, always since the
establishment of the power of Rome the stage on which the principal
world drama was played, was in the enjoyment of a peace which was
unexpected.  A time of extreme tension, during which war on a great
scale had seemed most probable, had just been safely passed--war
provoked by the ambition of Russia still further to extend her vast
territories, and especially to acquire the port of Constantinople.

But first it seemed good to her to proceed to a second partition of
Poland, and Poland lay at her mercy, unless some foreign power
intervened.  Annexation perhaps would be a better word than
partition, for she had little thought of letting in another to share
with her.

[Sidenote: Alliance against Rome]

Another power, however, namely Prussia, with Frederick as its king,
claimed a share, and drew the Emperor and King of Austria into
alliance with him.  Austria, also, demanded her slice of Polish land,
and in consequence of these conflicting claims, the whole scheme was
allowed to drop for the time being.

The next act in the drama was that Prussia and Austria fell to
quarrelling over the latter's proposal to annex Bavaria, and of that
quarrel Russia took {153} advantage to seek the alliance of Austria
with the design of parcelling out between the Russian and the
Austrian powers, the territory of the Turks in Europe and
establishing herself as mistress of Constantinople.

Again it was Prussia that stepped in to foil the scheme, and this
time Prussia had once again on her side her old ally, Great Britain.
The American war and the formation of that Northern League, as it was
called, of the neutral powers who opposed Great Britain's claim to
search their ships, and so on, had made a breach of that friendship,
for Prussia had been a member of the League.  But now that trouble
was healed.  The two old allies had come together again over the
business of restoring the Stadholder, the constitutional ruler, of
Holland, who had been driven out by a revolutionary movement.
Holland also, therefore, came as a third into the alliance, now
reformed, between Great Britain and Prussia for the special purpose,
as was said, of preserving the Turkish Empire.  The real motive of
the compact was probably to hold Russia in check; but no doubt the
other way of putting it sounded more unselfish.  A very great
struggle appeared imminent.  But the danger passed, yet again, as
soon as Austria realised the strength of the opposition.  She
withdrew from the war with Turkey, and Russia, left alone, did not
press it.  The war cloud passed.  Men might again draw their breath
freely after a time of breathless suspense in which the worst had
been expected.  They were free to sit in the audience and look on at
the great events that quickly followed upon each other in France.

In course of telling this greatest of all stories I have thought it
worth to turn aside now and again from the direct narrative in order
to attempt a brief sketch of the peoples that have played a leading
part in it.  The tough tenacity of the Jews, the subtle intellectual
curiosity of the Greeks, the determination and {154} directness of
purpose of the Romans have been such important moving forces in the
history of the world that they claim to be considered.  No less
consideration is due at this point to the national character of the
French.  It is largely because of that character that the Revolution
took place at all.  It was a Revolution not only in the government of
France, but in the thoughts of men all over the world.  And it was
largely because of the French national character that Napoleon's
empire, rising out of the ruin wrought by the Revolution, had force
to extend itself even more widely than that of Charlemagne.

We are able to realise something of the qualities of the national
character which had such remarkable results; but I think we are
obliged to confess ourselves unable to give a very perfect account of
the causes which made it such as it was.  For the French nation,
after all, as its very name implies, is the nation of the Franks; and
the Franks were but one of the many Gothic tribes which came breaking
through the weakened defences of the later Roman Empire.  Then,
having so broken through, they found themselves in contact with the
settlers already in possession of the land; and no doubt this contact
modified more than a little the national character which they brought
with them.  Probably most of the settlers whom they would find, and
by whose influence they would be affected, would be of the Latin
race; and therefore the blend would be in the main a Franco-Latin
blend.

But this Franco-Latin is really nothing more, as we have just said,
than a Gothic-Latin--or Germano-Latin, if you like--and the other
Gothic or German tribes coming in would be subject to just the same
blend, so far as we can see, and therefore we should naturally expect
to find the same characteristics in them all.

But certainly we do not.  Certainly the Batavians, {155} who settled
to the northward of the Franks, and the Burgundians who settled to
their westward, did not show the same blend.  We have seen how the
subtlety of Louis XI. proved too much at last for the audacity of his
great Burgundian vassal, Charles the Bold, and after Burgundy had
become part of the French kingdom its national characteristics do
seem gradually to have blended nearly into identity with those of the
French.

The Visigoths passing on into Spain became subject to other
influences.  They do not come into the comparison.

But the Batavians and the peoples of the Netherlands generally, where
the Batavians settled, were very different from the French.
Doubtless there was an increasing blend of Latin as the invaders went
south, but an adequate reason for their difference is hard to find.

[Sidenote: The French character]

At all events what we can say confidently is that the French
developed, and still express, a national character of their own which
is distinct from that of the others that broke through the bounds.
It is also different from that of those German peoples who did not
break through, who remained east of the Roman Empire's palisades.

One distinguishing characteristic of the French is that they are very
"quick at the uptake," as we say: their minds respond quickly to
suggestion, and they act quickly on the ideas thus quickly grasped.
Thinking and acting more quickly than, say, Britons or Germans, they
also set a much higher value on presenting to themselves a clear
reason for any action that they undertake.  The Briton, and in less
degree the German, is tolerably well content to do the act which
appears likely to give the best result, without troubling himself
much as to what account he would give of the action if he were
required to explain just {156} why, in accordance with what law of
right reason, he so acted.  The French mind is not at ease unless it
can refer an act back to some such reason as its motive.  And one of
the tendencies of that disposition of mind is that, if the French
once perceive a reason of this kind clearly, they act according to it
and are very readily obedient to its prompting.

So it was that when the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote about
Egalité, Fraternité, and Liberté, with the idea that all men were
created equal (and therefore ought to be equal always), that all men
ought to live in brotherly love, and that all men should be free,
these ideas won an immediate influence over the minds of Frenchmen
that they would not have exercised over the minds of Britons or
Germans.  No doubt they are pleasant ideas, and would be very
welcome, if they could be practically realised, to all reasonable men
of any country; but on the French their effect was such that the
nation at once had an eager desire to act on them.  Frenchmen deemed
that they might bring about the millennium, or a heaven on earth, by
striving for their realisation.

Rousseau, then, and other writers inspired with his sentiments,
prepared the minds of men in France for revolution.  Many, with an
ardour for freedom from the hard conditions which bound them, went as
volunteers to help the Americans fighting against England.  Those who
returned came back with their ardour further kindled.

Now most of the historians write as if the immediate occasion of the
Revolution was the misery, the oppression, the poverty, and the
hunger of the lowest classes in the towns and in the country.  Yet
other historians, perhaps more judicious, tell us that, evil as their
condition was, it was certainly no worse than that of the lowest
classes elsewhere on the Continent.  Let us admit, at any rate, that
it was a cruelly evil {157} condition and left much to be desired.
What was different in France was the very rigid division between the
classes of society and the fact, noticed before, that the king had
all the real power in his own hands.  The nobles and large landowners
had none, except over their own dependants.

Thus there was no link, no connexion, between the Government and the
great mass of the governed: the governed were dumb; they could not
make their voices heard.

[Sidenote: The "States General"]

The reckless extravagance of three successive French kings had
exhausted the treasury.  Money was needed for the bare necessities of
Government, for the pay of soldiers and officials.  His ministers
having failed to devise a means of raising the sums required, the
king, Louis XVI., called together the "States General," a measure to
which the Government had not resorted since the early years of the
seventeenth century.

This States General was an assembly of the whole nation of France
represented by deputies elected by the three great classes, the
nobles, the Church, and the commoners.  Each class elected its own
deputies and sent them up to Paris to take counsel together and
assist the Government in its distress.

The deputies of the three estates came to Paris in 1789, and though
they did not succeed in finding money for the Government, they did
succeed in finding a voice for the people.  And it was by this voice
that the Revolution was declared.

Trouble began over the manner in which votes were to be recorded.
The clergy and the nobles demanded that each estate should give a
single vote on any measure under discussion, and since clergy and
nobles were likely to cast similar votes, the result would then be
that the commoners would be outvoted.  The commoners demanded that
the votes of all three {158} estates should be given in mass, a vote
by each deputy.  And since the deputies of the commoners outnumbered
the other two combined, this would give them a majority.  The clergy
and nobles thereupon began their deliberations and excluded the
deputies of the third estates from the assembly hall.

The deputies of the people, thus isolated, went in a body to the
neighbouring tennis court, and there began their deliberations apart
from the deputies of the other classes.  They assumed the name of the
National Assembly and took an oath not to dissolve until they had
given France a constitution under which men might live in the desired
condition of equality, brotherhood, and liberty.  They commenced
their sitting on June 20th, 1789.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{159}

[Illustration: THE MODERN PALACE OF VERSAILLES, FRANCE.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

On July 14th the mob of Paris rose, and broke the walls of the
Bastille, the great State prison, loosing the captives.  The whole
city was in their hands.  The troops within the city were of the same
mind as the mob.

Similar risings, with like effects, occurred nearly all over France.

In October the mob marched on Versailles and the king's palace; they
sacked the palace and compelled the king and Royal family to come to
live in Paris, where they were practically prisoners.

The Assembly effected something towards getting money to carry on
with, by printing paper money and paying the debts of the Government
with the notes.  And continually the most violent of the extreme
party gained more and more power in it, most notably the Jacobins, so
called from a club whose members gathered in what had once been a
house of the Jacobin friars.

In the spring of 1791 the king and Royal family attempted to escape,
secretly, out of France, but were recognised before they reached the
frontier and {160} forcibly brought back.  The aristocrats all over
the country had fled from the persecution, or had been caught in the
attempt, and forced to return.  Large numbers were imprisoned, given
a form of trial and decapitated by the guillotine.  A mob stormed the
Tuileries, where the Royal family were living, and the king barely
escaped with his life.  He implored the help and mercy of the
Assembly, and for the time being the whole of the Royal family were
kept closely imprisoned.

Amidst all these horrors, in the autumn of 1792 a French army showed
the first sign of what the soldiers of revolutionary France could do
by the defeat of a force of Prussians and Austrians marching on Paris
to restore Louis to the throne.  One of the immediate results was
that, early in the following year, the king was tried for treason and
conspiracy against the nation, was sentenced to death and beheaded.
He was soon followed to the guillotine by the queen, his wife.  Their
son, styled Louis XVII., though he never reigned, died in prison.

That was an act which at once bound the enemies of France into some
sort of unity against her.  Hitherto there had been much division of
opinion, in England especially, about the events of the Revolution.
There had been sympathy with a people fighting to be free.

The act of king-killing and of queen-killing alienated all sympathy
among the nations ruled by kings.  They made a solid ring around
republican France, and France herself fell more and more into the
hands of the extremists, governing by terror and by executions.  All
suspected of sympathy with the aristocrats fell by the guillotine.
Even the deposed revolutionary leaders themselves, who had not gone
far enough to please the yet more murderous leaders that followed
them, were arraigned and executed.

{161}

The Reign of Terror, as it was well named, reached its terrible
height when Robespierre was chief man in the Government, and after he
too, failing in an attempt to commit suicide, had suffered the death
to which he had consigned a thousand others, the murders committed in
the name of justice and patriotism abated.  The worst of the Terror
passed.

[Sidenote: France and her foes]

So here was this poor vexed country, thus cruelly misgoverned, ringed
round by the kings under arms.  What chance had she?  Perhaps her
best chance lay in the fact that in spite of the misery there was
much enthusiasm in the people.  After Robespierre's death in 1794
they might draw breath and consider what all the bloodshed had meant,
and they might conclude that it meant that they had won France for
themselves, for the French people, out of the hands of the king.
Therefore it was their own France, their own country, that they saw
now menaced by the ring of monarchs.  England, Prussia, Austria
Spain--in whichever direction France looked she saw an enemy.

She had, as before in the days of the Habsburg menace, the advantage
of her central position.  Moreover, she had the advantage of one
single purpose, namely, her very existence, over those enemies who,
although they might coalesce against her, yet had their own rivalries
and jealousies.  On the northern frontier, where the troops of
Austria, Prussia, England, and Holland were gathered, the fortunes of
war went badly, for a time, for France.  There was a moment when the
Allies, if they had shown unity of purpose and determination, might
have marched on Paris with but little opposition.  Besides the enemy
on the frontier, the republic had her own enemies, who were still in
favour of the monarchy, within, especially in the district of La
Vendée in the west and in some of the large towns of the south.

The indecision of the Allies allowed France a {162} breathing space,
and she made wonderful use of her opportunity.

We have to realise two points in particular, first the singular and
tragic condition of the French armies at the moment--short of pay,
short of equipment, short of seasoned soldiers, and especially short
of experienced leaders, because most of those who should have led
them had been executed or were in prison expecting execution--and
secondly the fact that the methods of making war and of fighting
battles were in a transition state, from the old fashion to the new.

The old fashion of fighting had been, roughly speaking, for the
armies to advance in a mass, firing as they went, until one yielded
and fell back or until they clashed together with the bayonet.  Now
the new method was introduced of keeping a big body of troops in
reserve, to throw in, and so gain a decision in the battle, after the
first encounter of the others.  And gradually that disposition of the
troops developed into the throwing forward of a single line of
shooters in advance of the main body--skirmishers as they came to be
called, when the thinning of the line was brought to its extreme.

Together with that new way of fighting battles, there came in a new
idea of war.  For the old idea had been chiefly to capture some
important city or fortress of the enemy, and so to gain a decision in
the campaign.  The new idea was that a decision might be most quickly
and convincingly reached by destroying the enemy's army.  And, with
that new idea, the value of time seems to have been appreciated more
fully--the importance, that is to say, of arriving in numbers at a
certain place before the enemy could have time to mass his forces
there, and so of beating his armies piecemeal, before they could be
concentrated.

As a very rough sketch, that may perhaps serve {163} to give a notion
of the way in which war and battles were changing.

It was out of the great danger menacing her very life as a nation
that France was now able to draw new strength.  The Government passed
a decree that all men of suitable age were liable to conscription to
the army.  They were called on to fight for their own hearths and
homes.  It was not unlike the idea which had inspired the earliest
Roman legions.

[Sidenote: Republican victories]

The Allies had lost their opportunity.  They did not drive their
stroke home.  France, with much reinforced armies, took the offensive
again.  She poured into the Netherlands and into Holland.  It was
indeed only due to the inexperience of her own commanders, and to the
interference of her Government with the generals, that the defeats of
the Allies were no heavier than they were.  A conclusion, for the
time being, of the fighting on that front was reached in 1795, when
the Austrians retired from the Netherlands--which were then annexed
to the French Republic--when Prussia made a separate peace with her,
when the English armies were withdrawn, and when Holland was allowed
to retain her nominal independence with the style of the Batavian
Republic.

And so, ingloriously for the Allies, ended the first coalition
against Revolutionary France.  The young Republic was for the moment
saved; yet it must have been hard to think that the salvation could
be more than temporary, so many and so strong were her foes.  Her
crisis brought forth, for her rescue, the extraordinary being whom
most historians agree in deeming the greatest military genius in the
whole course of man's story--Napoleon Bonaparte, born, as we have
seen, in that little island of Corsica only lately ceded to France by
Genoa.  It is ever difficult to say to what degree this or that
remarkable man has influenced the story of mankind, but we can hardly
{164} have a doubt of the immense effect due to the genius of
Napoleon.

He came into notice first in course of the attack by the Republican
troops on Toulon, which was held by Royalists aided by some English
and Spanish ships.  He was a Colonel of Artillery then, and conducted
certain artillery operations with a masterly success.

After the death of Robespierre the chief power in the Government was
put into the hands of a Council of five Directors.  Together, they
were called the Directory.  It was their special business to see that
the laws were carried out.  The Paris mob did not appreciate the
carrying out of the laws, and rose in protest, with the militia,
called the National Guard, supporting them.  They marched on the
Tuileries, where the Government offices were established.  The
President, warned in time, summoned that young officer of artillery,
Napoleon Bonaparte, who was then in Paris, with his batteries, for
their defence.  Napoleon placed his guns to command the streets
approaching the Tuileries, and when the columns of the mob appeared
he opened fire on them with grapeshot.  Grapeshot: consider the
effect of it on those dense columns of humanity advancing through a
street!  Even the Paris mob, frantic with enthusiasm, could not stand
such butchery.  They wavered, halted, then streamed back, mangled and
beaten.  The Directory, the Government of the country, was saved.
The reputation of that artillery officer, first heard of at Toulon,
was made.  He was appointed to the command of what was known as the
Army of the Interior.

[Sidenote: France and the kings]

It was in 1795 that Prussia had made peace, that Austria had yielded
the Netherlands, and that all immediate danger to France from the
north had passed.  And it was in the same year that the "whiff of
grapeshot" ploughed its furrows through these living masses, {165}
and may be said to have ended the French Revolution, properly
so-called.  From that time forward the story is not of revolution in
the heart of France but of France struggling with, and strangling,
the kings of Europe.  And the struggle and the strangling are all
dominated by one man and his amazing personality--Napoleon.




{166}

CHAPTER XIII

THE NAPOLEONIC WARS

We have seen the Austrians fighting and suffering defeat from France
in the Netherlands.  There was another battle ground where these two
had now to meet, and that was in the beautiful country of Northern
Italy where the Austrian Habsburgs and the Bourbons of France and
Spain had met many a time.  Of all the Allies, Austria had the right
to feel most bitterly towards the French, for the queen whom the
French had beheaded was daughter of the Austrian Empress.

[Sidenote: Napoleon I]

As early as 1792 the armies of revolutionary France had swept over
Savoy--at that time an independent State with which Sardinia was
conjoined.  Sardinians were now in the coalition against France, and
there was a Sardinian army co-operating with the Austrians in North
Italy.  In 1796 Napoleon was put in command of the Army of Italy, and
at once he gave evidence of those qualities which made him the master
mind in war.

[Illustration: THE GREAT NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.  (From an Engraving
after a Portrait by Paul Delarothe.)]

It is impossible here even to touch on his campaigns in any detail;
nor is it possible to select any one campaign or a single battle as a
type of his generalship or his tactics, because perhaps the chief
reason of all his success is that he was so very able to vary them
according to the needs of each case.  It was this, that there was no
reckoning what he was likely to do, that confused his enemies so
greatly.

But in all his campaigns we find a common point, {167} that he
realised probably more fully than any of his opponents the value of
time, and had so masterly a power of organisation that he nearly
always arrived at the place where he had determined to give battle
before his enemies were ready for him.

{168}

It was just so with this his first campaign in Italy.  He was across
the Alps, with his army, and into Milan and the Austrian dominions
far quicker than he had been expected; and here he did execute one of
his most favourite manœuvres, which, at all events, might always
be foreseen if the opportunity for it were given him.  He thrust his
army in between the armies of the Austrians eastward and the
Sardinians westward and so disabled the latter, and less powerful,
foe from any valuable co-operation at the very outset.  Then, turning
eastward, he defeated the Austrians again and again, driving them
from Italy and pursuing them far along the road to Vienna.

He turned southward thence and seized the lands of Venice.  In the
treaty which ended this campaign, in 1797, France gained the
Netherlands, the Ionian Islands, and territory along the Rhine and in
Albania.  The following year the French were in Rome, which they
captured, making the Pope a prisoner and establishing what was called
the Tiberine Republic.

We have to note that in all these early battles of the French
Republic, the victors--for they were nearly always victorious--came
with the pretence, at all events, that their purpose was to relieve
the populace from their burdens, their dukes and archdukes and kings.
Accordingly they set up this Tiberine Republic along the Tiber, and
the Transpadane Republic, of the country beyond the river Po, and the
Cis-Alpine Republic on this side of the Alps, and so on.  We have
already seen how they had set up the Batavian Republic in Holland.
By these fine promises and pretences they gained much favour with the
civil population in all countries.  In 1798 Napoleon was no longer in
Italy: he was in Egypt, intent on extending the French power over the
East--thus quickly had events moved since France, only three or four
years before, had been fighting for her very existence among the
nations of Europe!

{169}

It was English sea-power that foiled him in that Eastern enterprise,
and in the following years he was back again--badly needed.  For
there was war again with the Austrians, who had recuperated their
forces in North Italy, and the fortunes of the war were going all
against the French.  They had been forced to retire from Italy and
from a part of Switzerland which they had held.  French armies,
moreover, had suffered defeat on the Rhine, and in consequence the
Directory had fallen from popular favour.

[Sidenote: The First Consul]

Rather as our Cromwell had once appeared, backed by his Ironsides, in
Parliament, so now Napoleon made a dramatic entry into the Council
Hall of the French Government.  There was a cry from some of the
legislators of "No Dictator," which Napoleon's friends, doubtless
according to plan, chose to interpret as an attack on Napoleon's
person.  His soldiers entered, and turned the Assembly out of the
Hall.  The Assembly was dissolved, and a new constitution formed
which entrusted the Government for ten years to three consuls, of
whom Napoleon was nominated as the First Consul.  The other two might
be relied on to do his dictates.  Thus, by the end of 1799 he was the
virtual ruler of France.

By his diplomacy he came to terms with Russia, but Austrian armies
still held North Italy.  Taking the command again of the Army of
Italy, he repeated the chief incidents of the former campaign.  Again
he crossed the Alps unexpectedly; again he beat the Austrians in
Lombardy; the terms of the treaty which had ended the former battles
were reaffirmed in 1801, and before the end of 1800 French victories
on the Rhine had re-established the position there.  Again there was
a breathing space.

Beyond question we have to look on Napoleon as one of the most
extraordinary of all the actors in our story.  His intellectual
powers, whether for the {170} organization of war or of peace, must
have been almost more than human: his absence of any love for his
fellows and of any kindness of heart must appear almost equally below
the human mark.  He had no regard for truth or for morality or
religion in any form.  Christian worship, abolished in France by the
earlier revolutionary Governments, had been re-established.  Napoleon
was as ready to profess himself a good Catholic in France, as to
pretend a leaning towards Mahommedanism in the East, in order to gain
favour with the Orientals.

In spite of his lack of sympathy with mankind, he was a subtle judge
of human nature.  He observed men's weaknesses with a coldly critical
eye.  He knew that men--and Frenchmen more than most men, and perhaps
women even more than men--are attracted and fascinated by show and
splendour.  Therefore, as First Consul, he caused all the ceremonies
in connection with Government to be splendid; he encouraged or
commanded his officers and civil servants to be richly dressed, and
their wives and daughters to wear gorgeous gowns.

So, in this breathing space, all was triumph and splendour in Paris;
but Napoleon had already, as we have seen, been thwarted in his great
designs upon the East by the naval defeat which he suffered from the
English in Egypt.  He realised very clearly that England was the foe
whom it was most essential that he should remove out of his way if he
were to achieve all his ambitions for world power.  As a first step
he renewed that Armed Neutrality against her which had been formed by
the Northern Powers when she was at war with the United States, and
insisted on searching neutral vessels to see whether they were
carrying what is called "contraband of war."

He forced Denmark, contrary to her will, into the compact.  Against
the unfortunate Denmark, then, {171} England declared war, in order
to drive her to withdraw from the compact into which she had been
forced so unwillingly; and compelled that withdrawal by a
bombardment, under Nelson, of Copenhagen.  It was here that Nelson,
who was then only second in command, is recorded to have put up his
telescope to his blind eye in order not to see the signal to break
off the engagement which had been hoisted by the superior admiral.

Another special effort against England had been made by the French in
1797, who landed a force in Ireland; but it was not supported as had
been expected by the native Irish and was broken to pieces the year
following by the English troops.  Ireland was then no part of the
United Kingdom; but in 1801 was passed the Act of Union, whereby the
two did become incorporated.

By 1803 there was again a state of active war between Great Britain
and France, and Napoleon was threatening an invasion.  He now had the
navy of Spain to aid his own; but against him was a coalition of
Russia, Austria, and Sweden.  From the idea of invading England, he
was called eastward and southward by the pressure of Austria and
Russia, and there the French gained a great victory over the
Austrians in the autumn of 1805.

[Sidenote: Trafalgar]

Four days later the united fleets of France and Spain met the British
at Trafalgar, where Nelson destroyed them as a fighting force, but at
the grievous cost to Britain of his own life.

Six weeks later again Napoleon fought the crowning land battle of
that campaign at Austerlitz, when the Russian and Austrian armies
suffered a crushing defeat which, for a time, ended the fighting and
gave Europe another short spell of peace.

A principal result of this victory was the dissolution of that
so-called Holy Roman Empire which had {172} existed since the days of
Charlemagne.  The title of German Emperor was no longer known.  The
electors were abolished.  Kings were appointed by Napoleon to govern
Wurtemberg and Bavaria, Hanover was given to Prussia, and other
German States were formed into the Confederation of the Rhine.  The
ruler of Austria retained the title of Emperor of that country.
Eighteen months earlier in the story a new emperor altogether had
been created--Napoleon himself, as Emperor of the French.

[Illustration: H.M.S. "VICTORY" AFTER TRAFALGAR.]

The cession of Hanover to Prussia cost France nothing, for Hanover
was a kingdom under the Hanoverian King of England, to whom it was
restored at the end of the wars.  It was separated, as we have
noticed already, from England when Queen Victoria came to the throne,
because the Hanoverian succession was governed by the Salic Law which
allows no female to succeed or to transmit the succession.

By this period in his career Napoleon was no longer posing as a
republican come to free peoples from their kings.  On the contrary,
he became himself a {173} king-maker on the most extensive scale.
Naples and Holland each had a brother of Napoleon's imposed on it as
ruler.  A little later it was the turn of Spain.  One of his Marshals
was named as successor to the throne of Sweden.

[Sidenote: The "Continental System"]

And now Prussia engaged his attentions.  She had been a doubtful
friend of both sides, for she had received Hanover from the hand of
the victor and yet she professed to be the friend of England.  In a
single day Napoleon utterly smashed the elaborate Prussian fighting
machine; and it was actually from Berlin that he proclaimed that
state of blockade against England sometimes called the Continental
system--as we should now say "boycotting England"--declaring her as
an outlaw, outside the protection of the law of nations, and
commanding that no Continental port should receive her ships.

This was in 1806.  In 1807 came Russia's turn to receive
chastisement.  We may observe, however, that neither of the Eastern
Empires, Russia or Austria, seems to have been disabled from further
fighting by defeat.  They had vast territories to retreat to and
recuperate.

So far then has gone the tide of Napoleon's success, ever mounting.
But now, in 1808, we begin to see it turn towards the ebb, and again
it is England, though on land this time, that is chief in so turning
it, for now begins the story of what we call the Peninsular War,
waged in Spain and Portugal.

At first it is a story of England, of Wellington, on the defensive.
Napoleon in person is in command of the French.  He is once more
called away eastward, to deal with Austria, and again he deals with
her drastically.  Once more he crushes her armies and extorts from
her a peace which gives a large slice of her territories to France.

And something more it now pleased him to take {174} from Austria, a
daughter of the great house of Habsburg as his wife--for he had
obtained a divorce from his first wife.  The daughter of the oldest,
proudest family in the whole Western world was thus married to the
Corsican adventurer, become Emperor of the French!

It appeared indeed as if there was nothing in Europe which he might
not take, if he so pleased.  He treated spiritual power when it was
opposed to him precisely as he dealt with kings, for the Pope's reply
to his annexation of the papal dominions in Italy was to
excommunicate him; and that excommunication Napoleon countered by
sending soldiers to climb the walls of the Vatican, the Pope's palace
in Rome, and bring out the Pope a prisoner.

Still Wellington stood firmly against his troops on a line near the
boundary between Spain and Portugal, holding back the tide.  Russia,
despite Napoleon, had opened her ports to British ships, wherefore
once more he declared war upon her.  And now, marching into the heart
of Russia in the autumn days, which constantly grew shorter, of 1812,
he came to Moscow to find it in flames and its inhabitants gone.
Destroy the enemy's army in the field had always been Napoleon's
maxim, but now he found no enemy to destroy.  That enemy had all the
East on which he might fall back.  To pursue farther would be
madness.  Through the snows of winter, with the Cossacks hanging on
their flanks and rear and taking every opportunity to attack, began
that return of the French Grand Army from Russia which is one of the
most pathetic scenes in all the story.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{175}

[Illustration: THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

That tragedy was his ruin.  The powers of Europe gathered about him
again in the spring of 1813.  He fought brilliantly on the defensive
beyond the Rhine, but against increasing odds, and in the autumn of
that year suffered the defeat that finally broke him, at {176}
Leipsic.  Already, earlier in the year, Wellington had taken the
offensive triumphantly in the Peninsula, had pushed the French back,
had driven and pursued them across the Pyrenees and was on their
heels in the South of France.

For two months longer, after the blow at Leipsic, Napoleon fought on,
till he made a fatal error in turning upon the rear of the allies to
cut off their communications.  Their effective reply was to disregard
that threat, and to march straight upon the defenceless Paris which
they occupied on the last day of March, 1814.  He was formally
deposed by a vote of his own Senate, and on April 4th he abdicated.

He was taken by a British ship to Elba and imprisoned there.  The
Bourbon monarch was brought back to the throne of France.  A congress
of the Powers sat at Vienna to restore and regulate the affairs of
Europe.  Then in February of 1815 came the appalling news that
Napoleon had escaped, was back in the South of France, the old
soldiers, fascinated by his name and his victories, flocking to
him--so he marched to Paris with an army that ever grew as he went.
Louis XVIII. fled.  The Emperor was on his throne again.

Once more the Powers gathered; but for Napoleon the only two that
mattered were the British and the Prussians, close upon the French
boundary, in Belgium.  As ever of old, he sought to break these up
before others should come to strengthen them.  The Prussians had to
meet the French armies first, and had to admit defeat, had to
retreat.  Napoleon marched on to meet the British at Waterloo; and
all through the long June day his soldiers charged again and again,
only to break upon the steadfast red line.

Towards evening the Prussians, far less shattered by their defeat of
two days before than Napoleon had supposed, appeared upon the French
right flank.  {177} That apparition was the beginning of the end.
Wellington ordered an advance of his whole army.  The French defeat
became a rout.  The Emperor preceded the remnants of his broken force
to Paris, where, yet again, he signed his abdication.  He had an idea
of escaping to America, but the British ships were on the look-out,
and, foiled in this, he voluntarily gave himself up to one of them.

[Sidenote: The Code Napoleon]

His final destiny was the Island of St. Helena, where he lived in
failing health till his death six years later.  One good work at
least he did, in directing his lawyers to draw up into a code, called
the Code Napoleon, the laws of France, which also were the laws which
he imposed on a large part of conquered Europe.  Based on the
existing system of laws, it embodied many wise and liberal changes
and is widely accepted even to-day.  He was twenty-six years of age
when he won his first victories in Italy in 1796.  He had become
virtual ruler of France by 1799, was acclaimed Emperor in 1804, and
set kings, chiefly of his own family, on the thrones of Europe from
1806 onward, was prisoner in Elba in 1814, and finally in St. Helena
in 1815--surely the most amazing chapter in the whole of this
Greatest Story!




{178}

CHAPTER XIV

THE EXPANSION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON AND THE SLAV

In such manner this tragedy, called the French Revolution, was played
to its dénouement at Waterloo on the European stage, and on its
conclusion, despite all the agony, we find that stage strangely
little altered.  Norway had been separated from Denmark and joined to
Sweden.  Belgium was no longer Austrian, and Belgium and Holland were
united as the kingdom of the Netherlands.  Austria had become
independent of the rest of Germany and was dominant in Italy, but all
main boundaries of the greater nations' territories were restored
nearly as they were before.

A great change, however, had been wrought in the minds of men, by the
French Revolution in the first place and by the Napoleonic wars in
the second.  Kings had been so thrown from their pedestals and set up
again that they could never more have the sanctity in the eye of the
people which they had long enjoyed.  The exaggerated reverence paid
to social rank, surviving from the exaggerated regard paid to the
knight by popular opinion in the Middle Ages, had gone.  The no less
exaggerated ideas on the subject of liberty with which the Revolution
had opened had been modified by the inevitable discovery that it is
impossible for men to live together in anarchy and without
discipline.  Indeed there was a marked reaction in thought for a
{179} few years after the Revolution, because men had realised the
excesses to which these liberal ideas could lead.  But still all that
was best in those ideas was retained.  The principle was conceded
that no class should be treated as slaves by the class above.  Even
the humblest was recognised to have his rights as man.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson which had to be learnt by
all men, kings, nobles, and poor men alike, from those cruel years in
Europe; and it was more important than changes in territorial
possessions.

[Sidenote: Anglo-Saxon world-power]

But if political boundaries were little altered in Europe by the
fighting of the Napoleonic wars, a very extensive change will be seen
to have occurred during those years if we take the whole world-stage
into our view.  The Anglo-Saxon had been extending his possessions
and his domination almost immeasurably.

Since Great Britain was the strongest sea-power, and at war, at one
time or other of the Napoleonic period, with France, Spain, and
Holland--that is to say, with all the colonising nations, except
Portugal--it was only to be expected that she should have captured
nearly all the colonial possessions of each.  And this actually is
what had occurred.  Moreover, on her own account she had established
new settlements in places which seemed favourable for trade.

The boundaries of Canada and most of what now is British in the North
of America had been settled by the wars with the French in that
region, and by the War of American Independence, before the French
Revolution and all that followed it.  One of its consequences was
indeed a renewed and lamentable outbreak of war, in 1812, between the
now independent States and the mother country.  The integrity of
Canada was threatened by it at one moment, but in the end the
boundaries were left as before.

{180} New Zealand, as we have seen, had been declared a British
possession in 1787.  British colonists had established themselves in
New South Wales in the year following.  Honduras had become British
some years earlier.  And Britain had her African West Coast
Settlement at Sierra Leone.

Then in 1795 Ceylon was ceded to her by the Dutch, and from that time
onward until the end of the wars almost every year added to her
colonies.  Already she had many of the West Indian islands.  Now she
acquired Trinidad, a little later St. Lucia, and in the same year
Tasmania and British Guiana.  In 1800 she gained Malta.  In 1806 the
Cape of Good Hope and the Seychelles, which had been held by the
Dutch, were given up to her.  A year later she took the island of
Heligoland.  Mauritius passed to her by capitulation in 1810; and at
the conclusion of the war she was confirmed by the King of the
Netherlands in her unquestioned domination in South Africa.  All the
while, moreover, she was consolidating and extending her hold on
India.

Many of these settlements and acquisitions were no more than the
formation of so many nuclei or starting centres whence the
Anglo-Saxon was swiftly to extend his power over vast regions--in
Australia most notably.

But despite all this nearly world-wide expansion of what we have now
to begin to call the old Anglo-Saxon stock, an addition which was to
prove of scarcely, if at all, less importance in the story was made
to the territories of the younger branch of that stock when the
United States, in 1803, purchased Louisiana.

It was of immense importance, not only because of the territory's own
very considerable extent and richness, but also because it so lay, as
we have seen already, as to prevent the expansion westward of the
people of British race who were settled in America {181} along the
shores of the Atlantic.  For the Louisiana of the French was vastly
more extensive than the State which now has that name.  It reached up
right from New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi to the
neighbourhood of the Great Lakes, so that the United States were
absolutely cut off from the west by this French barrier westward, and
by the British Canadians northward.  It was a happy circumstance for
the world that this purchase was peacefully made and that
Anglo-Saxons--continually strengthened, we should note, by successive
immigrations of Celts from Ireland--were thus left free to fight
their way to the west against the tribes of the Red Indians, and to
cultivate the wild.

Those unfortunate Red Indians are to be pitied for the fate which
came upon them.  Again and again they combined and took savage
vengeance on the pioneers of the white men who were evicting them
from their age-long homes.  But they had no equal chance, and step by
step were driven back or tamed.

[Sidenote: Gradual expansion westward]

Limitless therefore, until the Pacific, was now the gradual expansion
of the Anglo-Saxon westward, and world-wide, as we have just seen,
the expansion from his ancient stock in other quarters.

But there was also another race that, all through these years of
storm in Europe, was spreading itself extensively--though more from
its own centre outwards, and in a less scattered manner--the Slav or
Slavonic race.  All round its already great circumference the Russian
Empire was growing.  On its immense Eastern borders were vast areas
still inhabited by nomad tribes, mainly remnants of those great
Tartar hordes which had been wont to sweep over all that now was
Russia.  Modern Russia stretched her conquering arm ever farther and
farther over them till she came up against the borders of China and,
in the far north-east, to the Pacific Ocean.  Across the {182}
Straits of Behring she joined hands in Alaska with the Anglo-Saxon
when he pushed up into the extreme north-west of his new Continent:
for until the United States acquired Alaska, by purchase, in 1867, it
was a Russian possession.  In the North of Europe Russia had won
Finland from Sweden after the fighting of 1808 and 1809.  In the
extreme south she had been victoriously at war with Persia, and a
result of that war was that the Persian province of Georgia became
Russian.  Also she was nearly continuously, and on the whole
victoriously again, fighting with the Turk, of which fighting the
general outcome was that she gained more and more territory in the
Balkan region and more and more authority in those Balkan States
which remained nominally independent.

And let me say now a word which will have to apply to all the rest of
the story, so far as it touches these Balkan States, Danubian
Principalities, and so on: that the changes which have taken place in
their governments and political conditions have been so many and so
quickly varied that it is quite impossible to give them place in this
story.  They are changes, moreover, of relatively little importance
for the story as a whole.  The population is almost inextricably
mixed, with the Slav generally predominating.  Among this mixture the
Turk appears quite alien in blood, as he is in religion, and
therefore it seems only natural and right, that Russia, as the
leading Slav nation, with the headquarters of the Greek Church, which
is the national Church of the Slav, at her southern capital city of
Moscow, should extend, as she did, her sway over the Balkans and that
the domination of the Turk should continually recede.  Perhaps the
really most interesting outcome of all this anti-Turk fighting is the
independence won by Greece and acknowledged by Turkey in 1820, after
some ten years of intermittent wars.

{183}

[Sidenote: The power of Russia]

In the main we have to realise that by this date Russia had taken
over what used to be Austria's part in the defence of Christendom
against the Moslem Turk.  Not indeed that Austria had lost
importance, except, maybe, in comparison with Russia, for she had
become for the moment the most important of the Teutonic States.
Prussia was still her chief rival among them, but until the other
German States were brought to act together under Prussia's lead
Austria was singly the most powerful of them all.

In a second Persian war, Russia gained a large territory in the
Caucasian district which reached right down to the borders of
Armenia.  The unfortunate Poland, already thrice divided, had become
nominally a kingdom, but was subject to Russia's dictation, and in
1831 she was annexed by that vast and ever-increasing empire---a
domination from which she has only recently been delivered as a
result of the Great War.

Thus it is that, on all sides except the west, where she was up
against the solid Teuton block of the German States, the great Slav
monster, whose appropriate emblem was the bear, was stretching its
huge grasping paws ever farther.

The Turk had suffered losses not only from Russia, and not only in
Europe, but also in that land of Egypt where he had been sovereign.
Napoleon had given the Turkish armies a bad battering there before
the end of the eighteenth century.  Now, in 1811, the Turkish power
received a blow much more lastingly severe in a revolt of the
Egyptians themselves.  They revolted against the rule of the
Mamelukes, originally a bodyguard of Turkish slaves formed to protect
the sovereign of Egypt.  The Mamelukes had continued to be
influential in the government all through the Turkish regime.  But
the popular rising against them now was completely successful; they
were massacred {184} without mercy, and Egypt passed into the hands
of a ruler entirely independent of Turkish dominance.  Under that
rule she so prospered that within less than half a century she went
pushing up northward, just as the old Pharaohs had thrust up
thousands of years before, into Syria, and won that province also
back from Turkey.




{185}

CHAPTER XV

STEAM AND EVOLUTION

The realisation of the power of steam, and its application to
machinery, have made a greater difference in this Greatest Story than
any other single event that ever happened in it before or since.  It
is a realisation that came just before the end of the eighteenth
century, and it made a greater difference between the story of the
nineteenth century and that of all the centuries before it than there
ever had been between any two former periods.  That is indeed a large
claim to make for it, but it is none too large.

Hitherto, the force that man had made use of to do his work had been,
with few exceptions, the force of his own muscles or those of his
horses or oxen.  He had used the winds to blow his ships along.  He
had used both wind and water to turn his corn-grinding mills.  He had
used explosive gunpowder to propel his missiles.  Earlier still, he
had used the resilient force of wood, for his bows, to shoot his
arrows, and this was perhaps his first use of the forces of Nature
which surrounded him and which he, like everything else, without
knowing it, obeyed.  But now, all at once, he discovered the use of
another exceedingly strong force, in steam.  The real wealth of the
world consists more truly in man's power to control and turn to his
own use the forces of Nature than in anything else.  Hitherto he had
possessed scarcely any of this {186} true wealth, because his force
was limited by the muscular power of himself and his domestic
animals.  Now he had a servant whose power to do work for him was
almost without limit.  The steam-engine was invented.

When we speak of a steam-engine the first idea it brings to mind is a
locomotive engine drawing a train or driving a ship; but it was not
to this that the steam-engine was turned on its first invention, nor
is it perhaps its most important use.

[Sidenote: The first steam-engine]

Its first use was as a stationary engine, and the purposes to which
those stationary engines could be, and soon were, turned are far too
many to tell.  Already some previous inventions in hand-worked and
foot-worked machines had greatly increased the manufacture of textile
goods in England.

But now cotton and wool began to be made into thread by the
steam-driven machines.  By them, the thread was woven into sheets and
pieces.  They cut and finished metal and wood into the shapes needed
for a thousand different articles of daily use--furniture,
agricultural implements, pots and pans, and so forth.  They made and
combined and pieced together parts of new machines for the making of
yet more and more useful things.  They had the power to hammer out
great sheets of metal, and the delicacy to make a thread of wire or a
needle.  They became more and more efficient and fine as experience
led to improvements, but it would be true to say that even in the
very early days of their development a machine which it took only one
man to mind and keep in working order could do as much work as had
been done by twenty men who were served only by their own hands and
muscles.  Thus, if we may regard the productive work accomplished as
the true wealth of the nation, we find it already increased by twenty
times as the result of this engine.

{187}

But it is no use producing more unless there are people who want that
increased produce.  And that is exactly what there were just at this
moment.  In spite of the wars, the population had been growing in
Europe, and when they ceased, in 1815, it began to grow even faster.
Besides, there was growth of humanity all the world over, and
especially in America.  And the end of the wars allowed the produce
of one country to be freely carried across sea and exchanged for the
produce of another.  It was especially in British ships that the
produce was carried; and this carrying trade, as it is called, was a
great cause of the wealth which Britain began to make in this century.

She needed that replenishment, because it was very largely by the
help of her money that the allies--especially Prussia when she was in
the coalition--had been able to keep their armies in the field
against France.  The British were very heavily taxed in and after the
Napoleonic wars even as in and after what we now call the Great War.

This Industrial Era, of which the application of steam power was the
principal cause, had been in progress many years before the
steam-engines were used for drawing railway trains.  Perhaps 1775 may
be given as the date of the first practical steam-engine in Great
Britain; yet it was not till 1830 that the first steam-worked railway
line was opened to the public.  But once this new mode of travel was
introduced it quickly superseded the old mail-coach traffic and
gradually drove the coaches off the road.

Besides her carrying trade across the seas, Britain had the good
fortune to find iron ore close to her coal in her North Midlands.
Wherever those two were found together--the coal to heat the water
into steam for the driving of the machines, and the iron as the chief
material of the machines themselves and of a thousand things made by
them--the conditions favoured {189} manufacturing.  So, in such
places, both in England and elsewhere, there grew up the large and
ever-increasing towns, as the people gathered to work together in the
factories.  For though the machines might do the work of twenty men,
many more than twenty times the former total of work was performed
within the space that each of these big towns occupied.

[Sidenote: Hand loom and power loom]

[Illustration: OLD HAND LOOM AND MODERN POWER LOOM.  (By kind
permission of Northrop Loom Co., Blackburn.)]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{188}

[Illustration: AN OLD MAIL COACH.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

But all this work done in the towns by the machines meant that less
work was done in the villages, and the {190} country cottages.  There
was no longer any profitable sale for the cloth woven at home by the
little machines which the women used to work with hand and foot,
because the very same, or almost the same, could be made so much more
cheaply by the big steam-driven machines.

And while a machine attended by one man did the work formerly done by
twenty, what about the other nineteen?  Obviously, at first, they
fell out of work.  Therefore, when the steam-engines first came in
they produced great hardship, great unemployment.  The men rose up
against them in organised gangs of machine-breakers.  Very many
machines were broken up.

[Sidenote: Conditions of industry]

But everywhere authority prevailed in the long run: the
machine-breakers were put down.  Men had to learn, sometimes at the
cost of much suffering, to adapt themselves to a changed condition
which had come to stay.  The point of principal importance in the
change is that it enabled the earth to support a larger population
than had been possible before.  We may notice this as a main result
of each of the successive big changes.  In the first known phase of
human society we find man in the hunting stage; that passes into the
pastoral stage, of keeping domestic animals, which supported more
human beings than the hunting stage could.  After the pastoral came
the agricultural, with again an increase in the numbers that the
earth could support, and lastly has come this industrial stage in
which many more can be fed and clothed and kept in tolerable comfort
than ever before.

And yet this industrial era had to bring its own hardships, and,
unhappily, its own hatreds.  The class hatred, as it is called--the
animosity felt by the man who works with his hands against the class
that has the money and works with its brains--arose directly out of
the conditions which the steam-engine produced.  To-day, when that
industrial era has lasted more {191} than a hundred years, it is that
hatred which makes our life so very difficult for us all, both for
the classes above and for the classes below.  And we are compelled to
realise that the hate is largely due to the hard treatment of the
lower classes by the higher in those early years.  It is quite
different now; there is little or no animosity, as I believe, felt by
the upper classes in any country towards the lower, but I do believe
that the lower classes are in some part justified in thinking that
their better treatment has been won by their own effort rather than
freely given by those above them.  In the East the same animosities
have not been aroused, for the Eastern industries have not developed
along the same lines and have not caused the same difficulties.

In the industrial West, and everywhere that the white man has made
his settlements, the hand workers are now protected by their
organisation into Trades Unions--combinations of workers formed
principally in order to bargain with the employers about the wages
and the hours of work and the conditions under which the work is to
be done.

At the beginning of the industrial era the workers were not able to
come together in this way; so the employer made his bargain with each
man separately, and, as many were anxious to get work, the employer
could engage them very cheaply and make them work very hard.  Nor was
it only the men, or only the fully grown women, that were thus made
to labour long hours for low pay.  Even little children, because
their labour could be engaged so cheaply, were hired to work many
hours a day at such jobs about the machines and factories as a child
could do.  Very often the conditions as to ventilation, and so on,
under which the work had to be done, were such as would not be
allowed by the law now; but no one then seems to have considered the
hardships of the men and women and, above all, of the children.  We
may believe it {192} was out of thoughtlessness and lack of
recognition of their sufferings, rather than sheer cruelty, on the
employer's part, that all this was done; but done it was, and it has
left a bitterness of feeling which still lasts.

So the wealth of the world, as measured by its productive labour and
its power of supporting human life, increased vastly; and its
population increased vastly therewith.  At the same time it is very
much to be doubted whether the happiness of the people generally
increased.  But gradually, by coming together into the combinations
of which I have spoken, and so being able to say to the employer,
"You will not get any of us to work for you unless you give us so
much money for so many hours of work"--gradually, by this argument,
and sometimes by carrying it into actual effect by "striking," and
ceasing to work altogether, they have won better and better terms for
themselves.  Employers now recognise that the workman should receive
such a wage as the profits of the industry in which he is engaged
suffice to pay him.  Perhaps some of our more recent labour trouble
is due to the worker's claim to be paid a larger wage than the
industry can afford, if it is to turn out its products at a cost at
which any one will buy them.  And if it cannot turn them out at such
cost, it must, and it will, stop producing them altogether; so that
thus the workman is unemployed.

Further remarkable discoveries followed.  Coal gas was used for
lighting, and was later superseded by electricity.  Electricity was
used to give motion to machinery in place of steam.  The telegraph
was invented and the telephone.  Engines were constructed to work by
means of petrol firing within themselves--by internal combustion, as
it is called--whence came motor-cars and flying machines.  Wireless
telegraphy made its marvellous appearance.  {193} Radio-activity with
its terrifying possibilities has been discovered.  But no one, not
even all of these together, made a new start, with a new chapter in
the story, at all in the same sense as did the application of the
power of steam.  All these others were rather in the nature of a
development from that starting-point.  They were further successful
efforts on the part of man to "harness," as has been said--which
means, to control for his own purposes--the forces of Nature.

[Sidenote: Evolution]

There was, however, one scientific discovery of about the middle of
the nineteenth century, which is of very remarkable interest in man's
history, because it gave quite a new direction to his thoughts about
his own origin.  It is that discovery which is summed up in the word
"Evolution," and which is associated especially with the name of
Darwin.

Its main importance consists in its revelation that, whatever we may
think about the origin of man's soul, there can be no reasonable
doubt that his bodily form, his bones and all his organs, have
descended to him from ancestors belonging to the same common stock as
the apes or monkeys.  Up to the middle of the nineteenth century man
had regarded himself as specially created in his present form.  He
had also supposed all other living things to have been similarly
created as they are.  From 1850 or so, onward, he had to realise that
all the many and complicated forms of life, both of plants and
animals, have developed--"evolved" was the word adopted for the
process--from the very simplest forms, even from single tiny cells.

It required countless ages for such a process; but the discoveries of
geologists and astronomers--the earth-diggers and the
star-gazers--combined to show that such countless ages not only
might, but must, be assigned to the process.  Our universe and our
earth are by many millions of years older than men had thought.

{194}

But perhaps the chief fact of all, about this new discovery, is that
it turned men's eyes forward, instead of backward.  They began to
look with a new hope towards the future of the race of men.
Heretofore there had been an idea that the "Golden Age," when man was
very good and very happy, lay somewhere in the remote past, and that
present man had very much deteriorated.  The new discovery showed him
that he was, on the contrary, continually "evolving" into something
higher, or, at the least, that, as he now is, he has evolved from
something very much lower, even from the very lowest tiny atom that
has any sort of life.  It was an enlivening, hope-giving discovery.

But let us not ascribe to it, as some, at its first coming, almost
certainly did, more than its due.  It revealed to man the origin of
his body; perhaps, but of less certainty, it showed him the origin of
his mind.  That it tells him anything of the origin of his spiritual
self is really only asserted by those who virtually deny that he has
any spiritual side at all in his nature.  Or so, let me say to avoid
dogmatic assertion, it seems to me that they deny it.




{195}

CHAPTER XVI

THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE

When Napoleon had been finally chained down, under the ward of the
British Government, on the rock of St. Helena, the Emperors of Russia
and Austria and the King of Prussia made a compact, which was called
the Holy Alliance, with the principal and excellent object of
maintaining peace.  It is not easy to estimate how far it succeeded
in that good aim, because we cannot be sure how many wars were
checked by the existence of the alliance.  Probably we ought to give
it credit for some negative results of this kind which do not make
any show in the story.

It had one curious effect, at all events.  The Spanish settlements in
South America had taken advantage of the distracted condition of
Europe to declare their independence of the mother country.  Spain
appealed to the Holy Alliance to help her in regaining them, and the
Alliance received the appeal favourably.  But, before anything came
of it, the United States put forward a famous declaration, known as
the Monroe Doctrine, saying that they would not tolerate any
interference, or any further colonisation, by any European Power, in
either of the American Continents.  Even so, Spain and the Holy
Alliance might possibly have proceeded with their project had Great
Britain favoured it.  But Great Britain, on the contrary, was found
to be not at all in its favour--for one thing her {196} own
experience in attempting to bring American colonists under a home
Government which they disliked had not been encouraging--so the idea
of putting pressure on the Spaniards in South America was at once and
finally abandoned.  It could not have been undertaken with any
prospect of success if two nations so dominant at sea as Great
Britain and the United States were opposed to it.

This Holy Alliance was formed between the three most powerful and
most despotic rulers in Europe.  Its essential idea was to maintain
peace and order, but, as was evident from this very design of
forcibly helping Spain to bring back her South American sheep into
the home fold, it was peace and order according to the ideas of these
despotic rulers.  That is to say, that its ideals were in no accord
with the spirit of freedom which had been let loose by the French
Revolution, and was still working throughout the world, although for
the moment it had lost some of its vitality because of the alarm
excited by the extreme violence of that Revolution.

Both the allied Emperors had within their boundaries peoples over
whom they held a sovereignty by force, and much against the will of
the governed.  The Russian great bear had his paw on a prostrate, but
always protesting, Poland.  The Austrian double-headed eagle had
occasion to be on watchful guard in two directions, both east and
south-west.  The rulers of all the States of Italy held their
governments virtually under Austrian direction, and by none, except
perhaps the Pope, whom she had been influential in restoring to his
Papal States, was she beloved.

[Sidenote: Austro-Hungarian War]

But she had more cause for anxious watchfulness on the east.  In
course of the gradual relaxing of the Turk's grip on Europe, that
Oriental power had been forced to relinquish Hungary to Austria at
the end of the nineteenth century.  The population of Hungary {197}
was mixed, but by far the largest blend in the mixture was of people
of Magyar race, which had affinity with the Finns, the natives of
Finland.  The language and the chief men were Magyar.  They never
blended kindly with the Germanic Austrians, and were jealous in
maintaining their own national identity.  In 1833 they obtained the
concession that the debates in their own Parliament might be
conducted in the Magyar language.  But there was ever this constant
friction, the Austrian Crown trying to reduce the Hungarians to more
complete dependence and the Hungarians constantly striving for more
freedom.  Finally war blazed out, from all this smouldering trouble,
just before the middle of the century, when the Austrian Emperor
abdicated in favour of Francis Joseph, his nephew, and the Hungarians
refused to recognise the nephew as their king.

The Magyar orator and statesman, Kossuth, was the great figure in
this gallant effort of the Hungarians for their liberty.  In the
early period of the struggle the Hungarians gained victories, and
there was a moment when it seems that, had they pushed forward, they
might have taken Vienna itself, Austria's capital city.  But they did
not so push on.  The Austrian armies were reinforced, and then
Austria called in the help of her friend in the Holy Alliance,
Russia.  That was a combination against which the Hungarians could
not well be successful.  Their revolt was put down with cruel
severity.  For the time being they gave up the idea of independence,
though their sense of a nationality distinct from that of their
conquerors remained as vivid as ever.

This rising, and its suppression, occurred in the years 1848 and
1849.  By the year 1866 a rift had appeared in the Alliance so-called
Holy; and Austria was actually at war with Prussia.  The war arose
out of a work of spoliation done by the two allies two years {198}
before, when they had combined to take the provinces of
Schleswig-Holstein from under the rule of Denmark.  The population of
those provinces was in part Scandinavian and in part Germanic, so
that they were divided in their political desires, some of the people
favouring union with Denmark and others wishing to be taken into the
Confederation of German States.  On their own part they were claiming
their independence of the Danish rule.  There was therefore a certain
excuse for the action of these two Holy Allies; but now, when they
had done the act of robbery, they quarrelled over the division of the
spoils.  Prussia claimed to take both Schleswig and Holstein under
her own dominance.  Austria said that she should at least be given
one of them for her share.  The result was the outbreak of that which
has been called the Seven Weeks' War, in which Prussia was completely
victorious.

And in this brief campaign there were Hungarian legions fighting on
the side of Prussia against Austria, their own sovereign.  That,
however, did not imply that Austria's sovereignty was weakened, and
in the following year, that is, in 1867, Francis Joseph the Austrian
Emperor, was formally crowned King of Hungary at Buda-Pesth, the
Hungarian capital.

In this way Austria and Hungary came to stand in a curious position
towards one another.  They were two kingdoms under the same ruler--a
double kingdom.

Another outcome of that Schleswig-Holstein conflict and of the Seven
Weeks' War was that the Confederation of the German States was
reconstituted.  The old single confederation was broken up into a
North German Confederation, of which Prussia was the head, and a
South German Confederation, the river Maine being taken as the
boundary between them.  Austria stood apart politically, though
geographically belonging to the Southern group.

{199}

In spite of her defeat then, Austria maintained her old dominance
over Hungary, but she did not succeed in maintaining for long the far
less definite dominance which the European Powers had assigned to
her, at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, over the various
States of Italy.

Italy was later than any other land of Europe in settling down into
the national boundaries which remained without any break of
importance until the Great War.  We may indeed say that the very idea
of Italy as a single nation had scarcely existed before the year 1830
or thereabouts.  Men did not regard Italy as a unit; but thought of
Tuscany, of Venice, of the Papal States, of the Kingdom of Naples,
and so on.

[Sidenote: The Young Italy Party]

But the year 1831 was epoch-making, as we say, for Italy, because it
was the year in which the great Italian patriot Mazzini began to gain
men's attention.  He formed what was styled the "Young Italy" party,
of which the leading idea might be called, according to a phrase now
in common use, "Italy for the Italians."  He had this good ground to
work on, that the people of Italy, speaking of the country as we know
it to-day, were for the most part of the same stock and, with certain
local differences, spoke the same language.

Mazzini then, and his "Young Italy" party, went working and speaking
to inspire the people with their own views.  Already there was a
widespread hatred of the Austrians, which made these views
acceptable.  In 1846 a Pope of liberal tendencies came to the papal
throne and accorded his subjects a measure of freedom which gave
offence and alarm to the Austrians.  They sent an army to subvert
these popular measures, and on that there was a general rush to arms
on part of the peoples of Central and Northern Italy.

For a while all went in favour of the Italian arms, but the Austrians
brought reinforcements, the tide {200} of Italian success was stayed,
was driven back; by the middle of the century all was as before the
rising--except that a keen national spirit had been aroused in the
Italian people.

For a while it could not find expression.  But in the year 1859 it at
length found outlet by the help of a neighbour who had not usually
played the part of Italy's friend in our story.  Already, ten years
before, the French had taken a hand in the internal struggles of
Italy.  They had captured Rome, when its citizens had declared for a
republic and had driven out their Pope; and had restored the Pope to
the sovereignty of his Papal States.

But in the interval strange things had been happening in France.  The
Bourbon who was brought back to the French throne at the end of the
Napoleonic wars, and his younger brother who succeeded him, ruled not
much more wisely than their fathers.  Bitter experience had taught
them nothing.  In 1830 the mob of Paris rose against the king, forced
him to flee for his life, and elected his relative, Louis Philippe,
of the younger, the Orleans, branch, king in his stead.  He was
acceptable to the people as the son of that Philippe who had been,
entitled Philippe "Egalité," because he took the side of the people
in the early days of the French Revolution.

Louis Philippe ruled France from 1830 to 1848, and then his
government also gave offence.  Again, there was a rising of the
people of Paris, supported by the old soldiers of the National Guard,
which the king had unwisely disbanded.  Again the rising was
successful, and now it was no longer a king of any kind that the vote
of the people called to govern them.  They declared for a republic,
and as President they elected one of the deputies to the Assembly.
The name of that deputy was Louis Napoleon, and he was nephew of the
great Emperor.  Twice he had made attempts {201} to seize the
government by force, but each time with so little success as to seem
merely ridiculous.

From the moment of his election he began to have difficulties with
the Assembly.  Its members still seem to have regarded their
President as a man of small account, an adventurer, trading on the
reputation of his name, who twice had made himself a laughing stock.
Then, on a certain night in 1851, he sent soldiers to the houses of
the leaders who opposed him in the Assembly.  The soldiers took the
surprised statesmen from their beds and threw them into prisons.  The
next morning Paris awoke to find its walls placarded with the
announcement that the Assembly was dissolved and that Paris was under
martial law.

[Sidenote: Napoleon III]

The people were reconciled to the surprising stroke by the right of
universal suffrage--every man of age to have a vote--being restored
to them.  There was an attempt at a counter-stroke; but after some
hundreds had been shot down, as by that "whiff of grapeshot" with
which this Napoleon's uncle had dispersed the Paris mob years before,
all further trouble ceased.  Yet another change in the constitution
of the government appointed Louis Napoleon ruler of France for ten
years.  Less than a year later he was proclaimed Emperor of the
French with the style of Napoleon III.; for the title of Napoleon II.
had been given to the son of Napoleon I. who had died without ever
reigning as Emperor.

There had been many adventures in the new Emperor's life.  In his
young days he had served with the Italian revolutionists against the
Papal States, and had thus a rather personal interest in the Young
Italy movement of Mazzini.  It is certain too, and very natural, that
he felt the influence of his name, and the tradition of his uncle's
glory.  The very fact that he had followed that uncle to the imperial
throne would strengthen that influence.  In obedience to it he was
{202} impelled to lead France to further adventures, in some small
imitation of that uncle's grandiose schemes.  Moreover, his hold on
the throne was none too secure: the more distraction he could find
abroad for the restless spirit of the people, the less risk there was
of disturbances to shake him from the throne at home.

Some such blend of motives seems to have driven him to be constantly
seeking occasions to put his armies in the field.  He found such
occasion first against Russia--against Russia, and in support of the
Turk!

It was a curious reversal of all that seems right and natural, though
already we have seen the Turk strangely and occasionally allied with
one Christian power against another.  But generally we have found the
Turk regarded as the common foe against whom all Christendom must
combine.  The truth is that the Turk was no longer at this time the
power to be dreaded that he had been.  He had for long been standing
on the defensive in Europe, trying, but on the whole rather failing,
to hold what he had won.

And on the other hand Russia, now the Turk's principal foe, had
become so powerful that all Europe was afraid of her, afraid of her
upsetting that "balance of power" in Europe of which we now begin to
hear a good deal.  In particular, she was reaching down to get
Constantinople for her port; and France, and other nations of Europe,
conceived it their business to see that she did not get it, with all
the increase of power that it would bring her.

[Sidenote: The Crimean War]

To that opinion Napoleon III., a man of character and abilities which
have puzzled all historians, but certainly a man of much astuteness,
had brought opinion in Great Britain.  Great Britain was beginning,
on her own account, to fear the Russian push down towards the
northern bounds of her Indian possessions.  And so now, that is to
say, most particularly in 1854, {203} we see another reversal,
another happening rather different from all that the story has been
wont to show us.  For we see now those old enemies, England and
France, in friendly alliance together, partners in the very fruitless
enterprise known as the Crimean War.  It was fought with much
bloodshed and misery and cost to all three nations involved, and
ended in a barren victory for the English and French.

Possibly it did check the Russians in their movement towards
Constantinople, possibly it did something to maintain that much
desired balance of power; but of positive result there was little or
even none.

Nor did the Crimean War put a final end to the troubles between
Russia and Turkey.  Russia, as the great Slav power, was sure to find
herself opposed to Turkey, who ruled over the Slavs in portions of
the Balkans.  There was war between them again, thirty years later,
in 1877, but yet again its result solved no problems.

Shortly after the conclusion of his Crimean enterprise the Emperor
went adventuring again--on the adventure at which I have already
hinted--and this time, it must be admitted, with a far more evident
mark set upon the world's story as its outcome.  For in 1859, in
conjunction with the Sardinian army, we find him helping the
Italians, inspired by their new sense of nationality, to express
their hatred for the domination of Austria.  Again following the
footsteps of his great uncle, he defeated the Austrians in two
successive battles in the North of Italy, and drove them out of
Lombardy.

Meanwhile, under the popular leader Garibaldi, the southern part of
the peninsula had been won for the Italian people in 1860.  An
Italian Parliament, so called for the first time, was summoned, and
the King of Sardinia elected King of Italy, though not yet with a
kingship over the whole of what we now call Italy.  {204} There were,
still outstanding, Venice and the Papal States.  As the price of her
help, France received the Sardinian provinces of Savoy and Nice.

[Illustration: GARIBALDI.]

In 1866, however, this new Italy took the side of Prussia against
Austria in their fight over Schleswig-Holstein.  Both on land and sea
the Italians were defeated, but no doubt they kept employed some of
the Austrian force which, but for Italy's help, might have been used
against Prussia, and as the recompense that help Italy was given
Venice and the Venetian territory at the end of the Seven Weeks' War.

{205}

Garibaldi with his followers defeated the Papal troops, and entered
Rome in the following year, but the French, again appearing as the
Pope's friend, stepped in, recaptured Rome for the Pope, and forced
Garibaldi and his army to surrender.  It was largely due to
Garibaldi's gallant efforts, nevertheless, that the Papal States were
shortly afterwards finally incorporated into the kingdom of Italy,
and in the following year, that is, in 1871, Rome became the capital
of the kingdom and the seat of Government.  The temporal power of the
Pope was at an end; the national unity of Italy was virtually
complete.

France, at that moment, had little enough attention to spare for
affairs other than her own.  Trouble had arisen between Napoleon III.
and the King of Prussia, leader of that Northern Confederation of
German States which Bismarck had firmly welded together, over the
succession to the Spanish throne.  Save for that Franco-German
trouble, Spain, since her great days, has made little mark on the
Greatest Story.  As we have already seen before, so now again, she
played her own part, cut off from the main stage behind the barrier
formed by the Pyrenees.  It was a troubled drama.  One king and then
another was tried and found wanting.  An experiment with a republican
form of government had even less success.  A solution was found in
going back to a representative of the old royal family in 1875; and
his successor is on the throne of Spain to-day.

[Sidenote: Franco-German War]

As to that Franco-German war which resulted in 1870 from the dispute
over the Spanish succession, it is still debated whether its actual
outbreak was due to the ambition and machinations of Bismarck and the
military spirit in Prussia or to the restlessness and ambition of
Napoleon.  Certain it is that he was very ready to take offence with
Prussia which had already baulked him in a design of purchasing from
Holland {206} the Duchy of Luxemburg.  That project had to be
abandoned, and Luxemburg remained a Grand Duchy attached to the
throne of Holland, until 1890, when a queen came to the Dutch Crown
and Luxemburg passed under the Salic Law to the eldest male of the
same family.  Napoleon had expected that he would be helped, in the
fight against Prussia, by Austria and also by the Southern
Confederation of the States of Germany.  But he had under-estimated
the skill with which Bismarck held all the Teutonic States together.
Neither of these came to his assistance when he declared war.  And
within a very short time after that declaration it became equally
certain that he had wholly under-estimated the power and the
readiness for action of the Prussian fighting machine.

In the course of a few weeks consistently disastrous for France, two
of her principal armies laid down their arms, and at Sedan the
Emperor himself was taken prisoner.  Paris was besieged, and yielded
under stress of famine early in 1871.  Peace was made on the terms
that France should pay a money indemnity and should give up to
Germany Alsace and Lorraine.  There was the usual anarchical
interlude of the Commune, when the mob obtained temporary possession
of Paris; and finally a republican form of government was adopted
which still endures.  Those provinces which Germany thus took from
France remained under German rule until given back to her at the end
of the Great War.

One result of the war of 1870 to 1871 was that the domination of
Prussia over the rest of the German States was yet more firmly
established.  The Southern, as well as the Northern, were brought
into one group, and the King of Prussia assumed the supremacy over
all with the title of German Emperor.

[Sidenote: Norway and Sweden]

That severance of Alsace and Lorraine from France was the last change
of really large importance made in {207} the map of Europe during the
nineteenth century.  It was almost the latest made before the Great
War.  In Scandinavia there was a later rearrangement, where Norway,
who had for a long while chafed under her union with Sweden and
desired freedom and recognition as a separate nation, attained her
aim in 1905.




{208}

CHAPTER XVII

THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA

When the United States of America had once acquired the extensive
territory known at the beginning of the century as Louisiana there
was no effective bar to their extension westward until they came to
the shore of the Pacific.  There were hostile Indians, and deserts
difficult to traverse in the slow-going wagons, but the westward
progress of the pioneers went on with no serious sets-back and at a
pace which was very wonderful considering the conditions.  When the
railway era came--we may date its beginning approximately at
1830--the progress was much accelerated.

The population of the States grew very fast, both by the increase of
the old settlers and by immigration, especially from Ireland.
Ireland never had been happy in her Union with England, and her
people were discontented and very ready to try their fortunes under
the American flag.  Just before the middle of the century the potato,
on which the Irish people chiefly live, had failed almost entirely,
and there had been cruel famine and distress, which further
encouraged them to emigrate.

Thus America grew great.  We have seen that as early as 1823 she had
put forth that announcement known as the Monroe Doctrine, which
proclaimed that she deemed the whole of the vast South American
Continent, as well as the whole of the North which lay {209} south of
the Canadian border, to be her concern, and hers alone.  She would
allow no European nation to interfere there.

[Sidenote: The South American states]

That did not imply that she herself would seek to upset arrangements
already made.  What did happen in that South American section was
that it was divided into a number of States, which never became
united, as did the States of the North.  Most of them, very soon
after their settlement, had become self-governing, their mother
countries in Europe being too war-weary to make very serious efforts
to retain them.  Spanish was the language of the majority, but in the
State which had by far the largest territory of all, that of Brazil,
which had rather unexpectedly fallen to the share of Portugal under
the dispensation sanctioned by the famous Bull of Pope Alexander, the
common language was Portuguese.  The population in all of them varied
from pure European to pure Indian, with every possible degree of
mixture between.  Side by side, on the north-east shoulder of the
Continent, were, and are, the three Guianas, the British, French, and
Dutch.

But whereas these three still are European possessions, over all the
rest of the Continent the settlers soon threw off all allegiance to
their mother lands, as also did Mexico, once known as New Spain, at
the southern end of the Northern Continent.

Both Mexico and Brazil started their independent careers with
governors of the style of Emperor, but in Mexico he was very soon
ousted and a republican government instituted.  In all the Spanish
States of South America, too, the form of government was republican;
but there was an Emperor of Brazil, of the royal family of Portugal,
though quite independent of the Portuguese Government, throughout
most of the century, until she too elected to become republican.  The
Continent is for the greater part exceedingly {210} rich and fertile,
and supplies to Europe a great deal of its surplus products of very
many kinds.  Were it not for the frequent revolutions and changes of
government, which make property insecure and distract the people from
productive work, all these States might be far more prosperous even
than they are.  Naturally enough they always have had many immigrants
of the Latin race.  Italians especially have been going out to the
States of that Southern Continent in very large numbers.  The United
States have attracted the peoples of more Northern Europe, the
Germans and Scandinavia.  Of Canada the population has been swelled
by English, Irish and, largely, by Scottish immigration.  The French
have not gone there in great numbers, but we must always remember
that there is a considerable population, in certain parts of Canada,
that is French in race and in speech--the descendants of the original
French settlers.

Even after they had acquired Louisiana, the people of the United
States did not find themselves with an entirely unimpeded course to
the West, for Mexico, independent since 1822, possessed all or most
of that territory which you may now see marked on the map as Texas,
New Mexico, and Upper California, all of which passed, by conquest or
by arrangement, into the hands of the United States shortly before
the middle of the century.  The transfer of California was
immediately followed by a violent rush of Eastern Americans to the
West, where gold, in great quantities, had just been found.

Thus, or somewhat thus, the general political boundaries of the
United States and of the other countries of the two American
Continents came to be as they are; but there was at least one moment
when the Union of the States itself was in grievous danger of
breaking up.

[Sidenote: The slavery question]

Between the States in the North and those in the {211} South there
were certain differences in interests and outlook which were very
likely to lead to a quarrel.  There had been some difference even in
their original settlers.  As already noticed, those who went to New
England and the Northern States generally were for the most part of
the Puritan persuasion, of a humbler social rank, and with more rigid
religious views than those who settled in Virginia and other States
of the South.  The latter were largely of the landowning class at
home, and when they came to America formed large estates and worked
them by slave labour--negro slaves brought from America, or the
descendants of those Africans.

When Louisiana was taken over from the French, slavery was in use all
over its then vast extent.  In the Northern section, soon to be known
as the State of Missouri, slavery was abolished.  It was retained in
the South.

The idea of the slavery of the black races was not repugnant to the
conscience of men of that day.  It was not until later, and only
after the great English philanthropist Wilberforce had devoted his
whole life to the cause, that slavery was abolished in the British
and French West Indies.  The condition of the slaves, once they had
arrived, was not, generally, so very bad, but the horrors that they
suffered in the passage from Africa to America were unspeakable; the
death-rate was terribly heavy; and the slave raids in Africa itself
made the lives of the wretched negroes in their native country
miserably anxious even if they evaded capture.

But the consciences of white men were not alive to these miseries
then, even as they were not alive to the miseries inflicted by the
industrial system on many who worked under it.  When consciences did
begin to be stirred, it was only in accordance with human nature that
expressions of disgust with the conditions of slavery should be
uttered by the people of the {212} Northern States, who were not
owners of slaves, and should be keenly resented by those in the South
who did own slaves and whose sugar crops and cotton and maize were
cultivated by slave labour.

Thus came division between slave States and non-slave States, that is
to say, States in which slavery was the law of the land and States in
which it was not.  Now and again a slave would escape, and the right
claimed by the master of an escaped slave to follow him and recapture
him would naturally be resented in a State which did not recognise
slavery.

So dissatisfaction arose, and so it grew, over this slave question,
between the Abolitionists, as they were called--that is, those who
favoured the abolition of slavery generally, and of the slave trade
in particular--and the anti-Abolitionists.  Nearly all the North was
of the former, nearly all the South of the latter persuasion.

And this divergence about slavery was but one point of difference
among several.  The question of tariff--the duties to be paid on
goods entering American ports--was another.  There were
Protectionists and Free-traders then and there, as there are here and
now.  There were States in the South that claimed the right to
"nullify," as it was called, in respect of goods brought to their
ports, the Act of Congress which imposed the duties.  The
nullifaction claim--the claim to "make nothing of" the Act--was
disallowed; and thence arose more bitterness.

[Sidenote: The War of Secession]

So the embers of discontent went smouldering until active war broke
out between the two sections in 1861; and it broke out over a
difference, which was not actually a difference over slaves or
tariffs although it originated in those questions.  The point on
which it broke out was this: that the Southern States claimed for
themselves the right to secede, to cut themselves off, from the
Union.  That is why the war is called {213} the War of Secession.
They even called themselves by a distinctive name, not the "United,"
but the "Confederate" States.  The North resisted, and refused them
the right to break away and govern themselves as they wished.  It
was, perhaps we may think, a singular position to be taken by those
United States which had lately fought so well and triumphantly to
gain their own independent right to self-governance, but almost
certainly it is a good thing for mankind that they did take that
attitude.  Had the attempted "secession" succeeded, the States of
North America might have been as disunited as the States of South
America; and so might never have stood, as they do, a strong force
for peace in the world.

The War of Secession was waged with varying fortune, at first rather
favouring the South, though always it was the South which, as the
chief battlefield, had to endure the worst of the misery.  It was a
particularly cruel war in the divisions that it caused between
friends and even between families.  There were moments when the cause
of the North was in great danger; but the North was able to dispose
of rather larger forces and perhaps of a tougher type of soldiery,
although the endurance and the aptitude for strategy and fighting
seem to have been remarkable on both sides among armies of which only
a small minority were soldiers by profession and training.  The
Northern advantages were compensated by the very remarkable military
ability for war of the Southern leaders.

The sympathies of Europe and of England generally were rather with
the South than with the North, and England gave some just cause of
offence to the North by allowing the South to fit out privateering
vessels in British ports.

It was not until after four years of fighting, that is to say, in
1865, that the end came with the surrender {214} of General Lee's
Southern army to the forces of General Grant at Appomatox in
Virginia.  That was the end of the fighting, and peace terms were
agreed very shortly afterwards.  The claim of any State or collection
of States to break away from the Union has never been put forward
since, and the authority of Congress was confirmed over the whole
Union.

The effects of the war were grievous for the vanquished.  Their
fairest territories had been overrun by the troops of both sides,
their crops had been ruined and, heaviest blow of all, their slaves
were emancipated so that there was the less labour available to
repair the losses.  All the money that they might have spent in
hiring labour had gone in the war, and the problems of the peace were
scarcely less difficult than those of the war.

It was very many years before the South recovered, and it has
scarcely recovered now.  Nor has the bitter feeling of the South
towards the North, which arose from the war and from the many
differences of which it was the outcome, even yet wholly died away.
As lately as 1924 a member of one of the old Virginian families told
me that the Great War, of 1914-1918, by summoning Americans from
North, South, East, and West to serve in the same regiments and in a
common cause, had done more to bring them together and create a sense
of unity, and dispel the misunderstandings, than anything that had
happened in all the years between the American War of Secession and
the Great War.

[Sidenote: Maximilian in Mexico]

While the United States were thus in the agonies of their Civil
contest, an attempt was made to interfere with the affairs of Mexico
which was in direct defiance of that Monroe Doctrine already
mentioned.  Just as there is now, at this time of writing, so were
there then, Europeans and European property in Mexico which the
Government of the country was not able to make {215} tolerably
secure.  It did not seem to be putting out much effort to secure
them.  Europe thought then, as she is perhaps justified in thinking
now, that if the United States forbade any foreign interference with
the American Continents it was their business to see that the States
of those Continents behaved themselves in a reasonable manner.  At
that moment the United States were obviously unable to undertake any
such responsibility.  Europeans in Mexico therefore appealed to
Europe, and especially to Napoleon III., to enforce a better
government on the country.  It was the sort of appeal to which the
character of Napoleon, made him peculiarly ready to respond, and
under his promise of support Maximilian, brother of Francis Joseph of
Austria, went out to take over the government of Mexico, with the
title of Emperor.  His reception was by no means as warm as he had
expected.  On the contrary, he found his own partisans inferior in
force to those of the opposing faction.  For a brief while he held a
nominal rule over some two-thirds of the country.  The French troops
supporting him were quite insufficient to put down the native
republican bands.  His position was very shaky even at its best.

Then in 1865 the United States, freed from their Civil War,
reasserted the Monroe Doctrine, and made some demonstrations under
arms which clearly indicated that they were ready to give active
effect to it.  Upon that, Napoleon recalled his French troops, and
the already shaky position of the Mexican Emperor at once became
desperate.  He was captured, tried by a court martial, condemned, and
shot.

So, tragically and ingloriously, ended what really was Europe's one
and only attempt at action opposed to the doctrine enunciated by
Monroe.

A certain implication, or what has been considered an implication, of
that doctrine, namely, that the {216} United States shall abstain
from any interference with affairs foreign to her own two Continents,
even as she has forbidden the foreigner to interfere with them--this
implication she violated, most happily for Europe, in the Great War.
But she had already violated it in her own Spanish war, of 1898,
which followed on Spain's ineffective attempts to restore reasonably
good government in Cuba, that island which lies in a position to
guard the Gulf of Mexico and the Panama Canal.  Spain was unable to
enforce respect for the lives and property of Americans in the
island, and, not unjustifiably, the United States, after some years
of long-suffering, resolved that the Spanish rule must be overthrown.
Even America herself shared in the general surprise that the complete
defeat of Spain was so easy; and she was genuinely surprised also to
find the sympathy of Great Britain cordially with her in the short
war.

And as its results, not only Cuba itself, but also the far-off
Philippines, those Spanish-owned islands where Portuguese going East
and Spaniards going West had unexpectedly met a few centuries before,
were given over to the United States.

Nearly at the same time certain Samoan Islands and the Hawaiian group
of islands were annexed to the United States.  Therefore she too must
now shoulder her portion of what Kipling has well called "the white
man's burden."




{217}

CHAPTER XVIII

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN


SECTION I.--AFRICA

I have taken the above heading for this chapter because it indicates
truly the manner in which the dominion of the white man over many of
the coloured races has been thrust upon him.  There is a good deal of
misunderstanding on the subject.  Really the world-wide dominion of
the British Empire, to take the most conspicuous example, has been
forced upon the mother country.  There is an idea, and some of our
rival nations have specially encouraged it, that those overseas
dominions have been won by our aggressive spirit, land-grabbing and
desirous of ever acquiring new possessions.  Even we ourselves are
rather apt to attribute it to the adventurousness of our ancestors;
as if they had gone out seeking adventures like the knights-errant of
old.

If we regard the events as they actually did happen we must confess
the process much more prosaic.  No doubt very adventurous and heroic
deeds were done during its course.  We have every right to be proud
of our Anglo-Saxon race on their account.  But our principal reason
for pride is to be found in what the race has done, less in
aggression, than in defence.  It was Britain that was very largely
concerned in humbling the overweening ambition of Spain, in baulking
{218} the arrogance of Louis XIV., in thwarting the projects for
world empire of Napoleon.

But what happened in the spread of the white man's power all over the
world was that he went here and there, in the first place, and
settled, for purposes of trade.  We have seen the Portuguese going
down the west coast of Africa for slaves and gold and ivory; Spain
crossing the Atlantic for the treasures of El Dorado, the supposed
city of gold; Portuguese, Dutch, and English going easterly to India,
and farther, all to see what they could bring back.

They settled.  Then they found that, in order to trade peaceably, and
with tolerable security, they had to take control of the city or
territory in which they settled.

That is, in few words, the story of the whole process.  The
settlements were at first along the coasts, and then gradually
extended inland, as the boundaries of the districts already settled
were everywhere threatened by the unsettled peoples outside the
boundaries.  We saw the process in action in the British Empire in
India.

That is the common story.  It is a little varied by the special
circumstances of such countries as Australia and parts of South
America which favoured the raising of sheep and cattle.  There the
settlers extended their boundaries not so much for security as to
gain more pasture lands.

Somewhat thus, then, is the manner in which the white man has been
forced, if he would develop the earth so as to afford support for its
increasing population, to take this burden on his shoulders.

Africa, being so accessible to Europe, was the first of the new
countries to which Europeans went trading in their ships.  In a very
early chapter of the story we have seen that many of the ports along
the north coast of Africa, which is the Southern Mediterranean {219}
shore, were nests of pirates preying upon the trading shipping.  That
was a condition of affairs which became more and more intolerable to
Europe as the trade increased.  It was with the approval of all
Europe that the French in 1830 captured and took Algiers, which was
the headquarters of the Moorish pirates.  They extended that
possession over the whole of Algeria till they reached the Turkish
possession of Tripoli, which, again, extended to Egypt easterly.

[Sidenote: Egypt]

Egypt had freed herself from the suzerainty of Turkey about the date,
1830, of France's annexation of Algiers.  Under an able ruler she
developed her resources and was well governed, but from about 1870
onward, under a far less able successor, both government and finance
fell into confusion.

In 1876 the British Government acquired by purchase the larger number
of the shares in the Suez Canal.  As a short cut to India, the Suez
Canal was of vital interest to Great Britain.  It was of vital
interest, too, that the traffic through it should be safe and well
conducted.  This led to an inquiry into the condition of the Egyptian
government, which showed that unless these conditions were bettered
it was most unlikely that the Canal would be properly controlled and
made safe.

The outcome was that the English and French established themselves in
a joint control--it was called a Dual Control--over Egypt, in 1879.

Three years later, again, Egypt revolted against this control.
England asked France to join her in forcibly putting down the revolt.
France declined.  England then invited the aid of Italy, for Italy
had an interest both in Egyptian affairs generally, and in the Suez
Canal especially, because she had established a coaling station,
where her ships might replenish their coal supplies, in Eritrea, a
district far down on the {220} west shore of the Red Sea.  But Italy
also declined.  Therefore Great Britain went in alone to restore
order.

The revolt was effectually quelled; but Great Britain dared not leave
the country to the mercies of a native or of a Turkish ruler.  She
had to stay, in the very interests of Egypt herself.  At the moment
of writing, Egypt has been given a large share of self-government, of
which she still has to prove herself altogether worthy.

And this burden of Egypt, thus undertaken, led on to the shouldering
of yet another, of the country southward, the Sudan.  Really it is a
burden inseparable from the burden of Egypt, because the Nile, which
is Egypt's very life-blood, passes through it, and because it is, or
it was, the home of wandering slave-making Arab tribes always liable
to inflict raids on Egypt itself.

Hence arose expeditions and again expeditions, in some of which Great
Britain's arms suffered heavy reverse, against one or other of the
fanatical Arab leaders who arose and assumed the title of Mahdi.  The
loss which stands out most tragically in England's memory is that of
General Gordon, at Khartoum, in 1885.  It was not until 1898, and the
decisive defeat of the Mahdi by Lord Kitchener, that the problem of
the Sudan could be regarded as tolerably solved.  We may note that
the manner of fighting of the Arabs was to charge in cavalry masses.
It is mode of attack which gives a target terribly exposed to the
fire of modern machine guns; and that gun has greatly diminished the
danger of civilised troops charged by those desert warriors.

In the south of Africa the burden of the white man had at first lain
chiefly on the shoulders of the Dutch, and the story of South Africa
in the nineteenth century is mainly the story of the shifting of that
burden to the {221} British.  It was in the year of the battle of
Waterloo that the Dutch possessions, from the Cape of Good Hope
northward, were ceded to Great Britain by the King of the Netherlands.

[Sidenote: The Boers]

But the Boers, as the colonial Dutch were called--the name is akin to
German _bauer_, a peasant--were, and are, a people who valued their
nationality and their independence.  It was not for more than thirty
years that they formally acknowledged the British rule, which in the
meantime had been extended to include the district of Natal.  After a
few years of experience of that rule, the Boers made a great "trek,"
or exodus, and established themselves farther north, beyond the
British domination, in what was then called the Orange Free State.

And there it is possible they might have dwelt for many generations
as a free republic of farmers had it not been for the discovery, some
twenty years later, of the diamond mines in the Transvaal district,
farther north again, whither the Boers had by that time extended
their occupation.

The effect of that discovery was to attract to the region of the
diamond mines a rush, chiefly of British, but of variously mixed,
nationality.  Ten years later the Transvaal was proclaimed a British
possession, and almost immediately the Boers went to war to maintain
its independence.

The war was inglorious for Great Britain and involved a serious
disaster to a considerable British force.  It ended in a compromise
which did not promise much security for the future.  The Boers
acknowledged the suzerainty of Great Britain and, subject to that not
very clearly defined control, were conceded the right of managing
affairs in the Transvaal.  That was in 1881.

And from that time until the end of the century trouble grew and grew
between the increasing {222} population of the diamond fields and the
increasing numbers and strength of the Transvaal Boers.  Britain's
position was difficult.  These Boers had been the first to shoulder
the white man's burden--if we like to put it in that way.  They had
been the first to drive out those black people who had owned the land
before them--if we prefer to put it so.  Whichever way we prefer,
they had a right prior to that of those diamond finders, who came in
and bought up their farms at great prices and were not at all welcome
to the majority of the Boers whose farms did not happen to lie over
diamond-producing strata.

From that point of view, all the argument seems to be on the Boers'
side.  But there is another point of view.  These diamond searchers
had come in in a perfectly peaceful way.  They brought much wealth to
the Boer Government which taxed them very severely, and really did
not give them fair and decent treatment.  The result was the breaking
out, in 1899, of the great Boer War which went for a while so hardly
for Great Britain that it looked at one moment as if her armies might
be forced right back to the sea.  Not only the Transvaal Boers but
those of the Free State, and of Natal, joined together.  Fortunately
for Great Britain, Cape Colony, where the British element was
largest, stood firmly for the Empire.  At length the fortune of war
turned, as more and more British troops arrived from oversea.  By
1903 it was ended: the Boers surrendered at discretion.

And then was done one of the noblest and most generous and most
courageous acts that the whole of this Greatest Story is able to show
in the way of the treatment of a vanquished people by the victors: a
very large part of the independent rule for which the vanquished foe
had been fighting was voluntarily given to him.  It was a tremendous
experiment--tremendous, in the most literal sense of the word; {223}
that is to say, an experiment to be feared.  It seemed an immense
risk to take--thus to rely on the sense of gratitude of a beaten foe.
But that foe showed himself as generous in acceptance of the
experiment as Great Britain in making it.  He proved his gratitude by
devoted service for the Empire in the Great War.  It was a tremendous
experiment, wonderfully justified.

[Sidenote: The division of Africa]

It is not needful, for the purposes of this story, to go over in
detail the possessions, and their boundaries, of the various white
nations in Africa.  The French have a huge area in the north-west,
reaching right down from Algeria to a junction with the Congo River.
The Belgian Congo lies between that French area and British Rhodesia,
which joins the other British colonies farther south.  Great Britain
has Nigeria on the west coast and British East Africa on the east.
Portugal has Angola on the one side and Mozambique on the other, with
the large island of Madagascar, which is French, lying off it.
Abyssinia, easterly of the Sudan and bounded on the east again by the
British and the Italian Somalilands, is by far the greatest and most
interesting of the African countries still in the possession of a
coloured race.  Even Morocco, just westerly of Algiers, is now under
French protection, and on either side of it lies a territory that is
under Spain.

These many and very different countries have not been won for the
white man without heavy fighting with the natives whom the white
intruders found there.  Great Britain has had its severe campaigns
against the Kaffirs and the Zulus in the south.  The Italians have
received very rough handling from the Abyssinians.  Spain and France
still have their troubles in the north.  But the white man has
prevailed, and must prevail increasingly as his better science puts
better instruments of war into his hands.

{224}

There remains one great nation not yet named in this chapter which
also had extensive possessions in Africa until the Great
War--Germany.  It was not until rather a late date in the story that
Germany, under the strong hand of Bismarck, had been welded into a
nation at all.  The year 1884, when the German Colonisation Society
was founded, may be taken as the date when she set to work with the
deliberate and avowed purpose of taking her place among the
colonising nations.  It was less a matter, with her, of shouldering a
burden thrust upon her, than of going out of her way to seek the
burden, in her fear lest the other nations should possess themselves
of all the unclaimed spaces before she could stretch out a hand for
them.

Acting from this motive, she obtained, on the west coast of Africa,
the large territory of the Cameroons--now, since the Great War, under
the French mandate--of German South-West Africa--now under the
mandate of the Union of South Africa--and of German East Africa--now
under the mandate of Great Britain.

Of all these, the last was perhaps of chief importance from the point
of view of the Anglo-Saxon dominance, because there was a small
portion of its north-eastern boundary where it joined with the
Belgian Congo, and it was just this, and only this, junction which
intervened between the Anglo-Saxon protectorate of Uganda on the
north and the long lake of which the southern shore was part of
Rhodesia.  That is to say, that this junction of Germany with Belgium
alone prevented an all-British route, by river, lake, or land, from
the Mediterranean mouth of the Nile to the Cape of Good Hope.

With the mandate to Great Britain of German East Africa, which was
one of the results of the Great War, that intervention has been
removed.

{225}

This then, in bare outline, is the way in which the burden of Africa
has been distributed on the shoulders of the white men.



SECTION II.--INDIA AND THE FAR EAST

[Sidenote: India]

Already we have seen something of the way in which the burden of
India came to be borne--the British East India Company, which was
purely a trading concern, being forced to take military measures, for
the defence of its trading stations and for the maintenance of good
order, at one time against the French who were aiming at the
establishment of an empire and at another against the native rulers,
or rather the mis-rulers, of the Indian States.

It was thus that the Company came to have an army in its pay and to
hold the control over extensive lands and many peoples.  It was a
position never contemplated when the Company was formed, nor was it a
position entirely welcome to its directors.  Continual additions had
been made to the territories over which its control spread.  The most
notable perhaps were the addition of Cashmere in 1846, of the Punjab
in 1849, and of Oudh in 1856.  Farther east even than India, to the
Straits Settlements and even to China itself, the authority reached
of this vastly overgrown trading concern.  Obviously it involved a
control which could far better be undertaken directly by the British
Government than by a Company acting under its charter.  But with that
typically British tendency to let things go on as they are going
until it is impossible so to let them go any longer, nothing was done
to transfer the Company's power to the Crown until the crisis came in
the shape of the most formidable rising of a coloured people which
the white man ever has {226} been called on to meet in the whole
course of taking up his burden.  It is that known as the Indian
Mutiny--"mutiny," because it was mainly the affair of the native
soldiers in the Company's pay.  This was in the years 1857 and 1858.
It threatened the very existence of the white man in the East, and
only a splendid heroism in resistance to heavy odds, and heroic
efforts and forced marches to relieve a situation nearly desperate,
saved the principal, though scanty, British force from being
annihilated.  Once more the British wonderfully won through to a
final victory, but the events of the war had brought into clear light
the long known fact that the government of British India was an
affair which demanded the most direct attention of British statesmen,
with all the resources at their disposal.  The East India Company
were relieved of their far too heavy burdens.  The Crown took over
their responsibilities both in India and in the farther East.

The responsibilities of India were not only those which arose from
the troubles incidental to a rule over peoples of different race and
of religions--the Moslem and the Hindu--which brought them often into
collision with each other.  There was another trouble which began to
menace like a dark cloud on the north-eastern boundary of the
country, where lay the independent State of Afghanistan bordering
with Persia on its east and with Russia on its north.

Russia had taken no part in that overseas colonisation by the other
great powers of Europe.  She had vast spaces enough, contiguous to
her own bounds, over which she spread.  Gradually she had annexed all
Turkestan, which brought her into direct contact with Afghanistan,
and she had been at frequent war with Persia over the question of the
Russo-Persian boundary on Persia's north-west.  Both Persia and
Russia had ambitions to absorb that independent {227} Afghanistan
which lay in the corner where they joined, and where, but for
Afghanistan, they would join British India also.  It was Britain's
policy to maintain Afghanistan independent, as a buffer between her
and those others, especially against Russia.

But it was to Persia, in the first place, that she had to say "hands
off," when Persia advanced to the important position of Herat, within
Afghan territory, in 1852.  The result of campaigning and fighting
lasting over some five years was that a friendly agreement was
reached with Persia, which settled boundaries and left Herat to the
Afghans.

[Sidenote: Russia's menace to India]

But in 1887 Russia, from the north, pushed down, and was across the
Afghan boundary and advancing to that same Herat, when she was
checked only by very forcible representations made to her by Great
Britain.  Britain herself had pushed her own Indian frontier forward
by the acquisition of Beluchistan in 1878.  Russia withdrew her
forces for the time being, but all through that century and for some
years of the present, the dread that she would come down upon India
was always in the minds of British statesmen.  There was more than
one moment when war seemed imminent.  Possibly it was nothing but
Russia's own doubt of her effective fighting power which averted it.
No suspicion of her internal weakness was entertained in Europe
generally until it was revealed by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and
yet more clearly by the Great War of 1914-1918.  But there is little
doubt that this small State of Afghanistan, which arose out of the
Moslem spread towards the East many centuries before, saved Britain
and Russia from disastrous collision.  She had played the game that a
small State thus situated was likely to play, intriguing with the
great powers on either side of her and taking advantage of their
rivalry.  More than once there has been war between her and Great
Britain.  But she {228} remains an independent State and Britain's
friend to-day.

On India's north-eastern side Britain extended her Empire by the
acquisition of Assam in 1826, and later by that of Burma in 1886.
The French had taken to themselves Annam and Tongking in 1884, and
thus the British Burmese territory marched with French Indo-China, as
it was called, and both were bounded on their northern side by the
great Chinese Empire which stretched right up to Siberia.

[Sidenote: Affairs in China]

For the last hundred years or so, the story of China has been largely
the story of her efforts to prevent the foreigner from coming into
China and playing any part in her story.

Nevertheless we find the white man pushing on, in his eternal quest
for trade, not to be denied, founding trading stations at Chinese
ports.  Generally it is only in submission to a show of force, or to
its active application, that these trading facilities, warehouses and
so on, are permitted to him.  He is obliged to fight to be allowed to
establish them, and further, we find him fighting again to punish the
native people who have disregarded the agreements they have made with
him and who sometimes have killed the peaceful traders.

Out of the troubles thus arising came war between Britain and China
as early as 1840.  The Chinese were quite incapable of seriously
opposing the large British force which was sent out.  The result was
the conclusion of a commercial treaty which opened five principal
ports of China to British trading vessels and gave Britain possession
of the island of Hongkong.  In 1854 Shanghai, one of the five ports
above named, was opened to the trade of all nations.

But still the attitude of the people and of the Government was
hostile to the foreigner.  At any moment an uprising and a general
massacre might {229} happen.  A few white missionaries, chiefly of
British and American nationality, penetrated into the country,
preaching Christianity at constant risk of their lives.

The year 1860 saw a great change in the relations of the white men
and the Chinese.  Hitherto any fighting between them had been near
the coast and the great ports.  Now, as a protest against the
ill-treatment of which the foreign traders were the victims and the
bad faith with which the Chinese broke the treaties, and also to
insist on the establishment of legations of the European Powers to
protect the interests of their nations, a strong combined force of
British and French marched on Pekin, the capital city, and looted and
burnt the sacred Summer Palace from which the Emperor had fled.

The really important result of the campaign was the shock which it
gave the Chinese and the conviction which it brought home to them of
the strength and determination of the white men.  Thereafter they
treated the foreign traders with a consideration never paid them
before, and ministers representing foreign powers had their appointed
residences in Pekin.

It is true that as lately as 1900 a combined foreign force was
obliged to march in extreme haste on Pekin in order to save those
ministers, who were in great peril there.  But it was peril arising
out of an insurrection against the Government, rather than
immediately from the Government's own action.  Nevertheless it is
also true that the very clever old Empress, who was then ruler of
China, deliberately contrived to convert the activities of the
revolutionaries into an attack upon the foreigners, rather than upon
the Government itself.  And it is to be noted that in co-operation
with that combined army, which thus again invaded China's once sacred
capital, was a force of the other branch of the yellow race, the
island branch, the Japanese.

{230}

The story of that island branch is certainly no less interesting than
that of the continental.  At what point far back in the story they
branched off from a common stock we do not know, but it is more than
probable that they came from the same original source.  We found
Kublai Khan, when master of China and of an immense part of the world
besides, sending out from China an expedition against the islanders,
of which the fate was much like that of the Grand Armada which the
masterful power of Spain launched against our own islands.  Japan
kept her independence then, and has fought for it again and asserted
it conclusively far later.

[Sidenote: The awakening of Japan]

She too, in her story, seems to have repeated, as did China,
something very like the series of changes through which society
passed in Europe, with its feudalism and the rest of it.  But whereas
in modern China this feudalism seems to belong to some era very, very
far back in her story, so that she has almost lost all memory of it,
with Japan, on the contrary, it is a very recent chapter--later even
than with us of Europe.  It is a condition from which she has indeed
only just shaken herself free.  1867 is generally given as the date
at which Japanese feudalism passed.  And it passed in a fashion for
which there is certainly no parallel in Western story.  The Daimios,
who were the feudal lords, of their own accord agreed, as the only
means of ending their mutual fighting, to give up their local powers
into the hands of the Mikado.

The white men knew very little about Japan until the sixteenth
century.  No overland travellers, like Marco Polo, had been there to
bring back news to the West.  About the middle of the sixteenth
century a few Portuguese trading vessels touched it, and the very
famous Jesuit missionary Xavier introduced Christianity.  Here,
however, as elsewhere, the Jesuits seem to have caused trouble by
interfering with politics, {231} and the exclusion of the foreigners
was enforced more strictly than ever.  Gradually, especially towards
the end of the eighteenth century, trade with foreigners began to
grow, chiefly with the Dutch, the Russians, and the Americans.

But still Japan continued, like China, to hold aloof as much as
possible from all intercourse with the West, and with its science and
progress.  America at length took the decided step of sending a
strong naval force and demanding the opening of a port to American
ships of trade.  This was in 1850, but the real opening up of the
country did not begin until after the end of feudalism and the
establishment of the Mikado's single power in 1867.  And then a most
extraordinary change did happen--a change perhaps more extraordinary
than any other of which we find record in the whole history of
mankind.

We may describe the story of China for many centuries as the story of
a people buried in a profound sleep.  She shows but little immediate
sign of awaking from that slumber even to-day.  The story of Japan in
the latter half of the nineteenth century we may designate as the
most astonishing awakening of a nation out of slumber that the world
has ever known.

Even now the part played by great China is only a passive, a negative
part (except, of course, so far as her own people are concerned), but
the part played by little Japan, though perfectly passive until some
two-thirds of the nineteenth century had gone, has been startlingly
vigorous and effective.  The truth is that beneath the slumbering
surface the spirit of the people had always been active, inquiring,
ready for any novelty that struck them as valuable--in great contrast
to the indifference of the Chinese.  Their seclusion had been forced
upon them by their rulers.  When that enforcement ceased, they
welcomed with very keen intelligence all the progress in science and
thought which steam {233} and evolution had given to the West.  In
religion and in art they seem to have been satisfied to follow their
own traditions, but they took every possible opportunity to learn
lessons that might be of practical use.  Military experts were called
from Germany and naval experts from Great Britain to teach the art of
war by land and sea.  Scientific, educational, and legal advisers
were engaged.  The nation set itself with astonishing quickness to
learn all that the West could teach it, and within a few years the
efficiency of both army and navy were very thoroughly proved.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{232}

[Illustration: OLD JAPAN: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMBS, TOKIO.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Sidenote: Korea]

On the coast of China, just opposite Japan, lay the independent State
of Korea.  Its people were of the yellow race--not great fighters,
but they had successfully resisted some rather half-hearted efforts
of the Chinese to subdue them.  Against the Chinese they invoked
Japanese help--and not in vain.  Japan had an interest in this
country which lay just opposite her own islands, across a narrow sea,
and which gave an outlet for her own surplus population.  Over the
Korean question, then, Japan and China came to war in 1894.  The
Japanese armies met and repeatedly defeated the Chinese, in the north
of Korea and in the Chinese province of Manchuria just northward
again.  At sea, it was evident that Japan still had much to learn,
for the Chinese for a while had rather the better of the naval
engagements.  Finally the Japanese prevailed there also.

One result of that war was that Korea was formally declared
independent, but the Government was so feeble that the Japanese, in
the years that followed, gained more and more power over it.  By the
terms of peace, the large island of Formosa was ceded to Japan.  But
the war's most important result was to reveal to the Western powers
the weakness of China.  Russia, thwarted in her advances towards
India, was pushing but eastward into Manchuria, and now {234}
encouraged China to resist some of the demands of the victorious
Japanese.  In compensation, she obtained for herself certain
advantages, as the friend of China.  China handed to her Manchuria,
partly as the result of pressure, partly of friendly persuasion.
What was of still more importance for her was that she acquired the
ice-free harbour of Port Arthur; for hitherto her only Pacific port
had been Vladivostock, farther north and often ice-bound.

It mattered comparatively little to Japan that Great Britain and
Germany, to balance these gains of Russia, demanded and took for
themselves, from the enfeebled hands of the Chinese, ports in the
same neighbourhood.  What did matter was that the menace of Russian
power, and Russia's insatiable desire to expand, became more and more
formidable to her.  But among the peace terms which she had not
failed to extort from China was a large money indemnity, and that
money she spent in buying ships of war.

So then, in 1904, as Russia grew more and more aggressive in her
eastward push, Japan, confident in her German-instructed army and her
British-instructed and greatly enlarged fleet, ventured on a kind of
David and Goliath contest.  She declared war on the vast power.

[Sidenote: The Russo-Japanese War]

And, just as, through the test applied by this surprising little
island power in the Pacific, had been revealed the essential weakness
of great China, so now, to the astonishment of the world, was
revealed by the very same test the weakness of great Russia.  The
Russian fleet, sailing from the Gulf of Finland, circumnavigated the
world to come into touch with the Japanese fleet awaiting it in
Japan's home waters; and at the very first touch that sea-worn fleet
of Russia was sent to the bottom, save for such inconsiderable
remnants as the Japanese allowed to remain afloat or to run ashore.

{235}

On land the fighting was hard.  Port Arthur, strongly fortified, held
out bravely, but was invested and forced to yield.  The Japanese
armies were victorious, driving the Russians back, but at price of a
continually lengthening line of communications as the battle rolled
north.  The victories had cost Japan the very utmost that she could
afford.  She consented to terms of peace which surprised Europe by
their moderation.  But the details were of little importance compared
with the astonishing achievement.  This little island State, scarcely
emerged out of its feudal era, had become, at a stroke, a great
modern power, the naval ruler of the Pacific, Great Britain's
counterpart in the East, and her ally on equal terms.

She might now gratify her wish about Korea, and formally declared it
a Japanese protectorate in 1910.  The Russian menace was rolled back,
by the restoration of Manchuria in the same year.

In the Great War Japan more than confirmed her claim to high place
among the nations.  She was active in scouring the sea for German
marauders of commerce, and very early in the war captured the port
which Germany had occupied in the Pacific, and so eliminated any
threat to her authority with which that occupation might threaten her.

Within so few years did Japan thus pass, from taking no part whatever
in the Great Story, to be one of the foremost actors.

Southward of the Japanese islands, the next most important group is
that of the Philippines, transferred, as we saw, from the sovereignty
of Spain to that of the United States as a result of the
Spanish-American war of 1897-8.  Southward again, we come to those
islands of the Malay Archipelago chiefly dominated by the Dutch,
although Britain also has important possessions there and on the
Malay Peninsula itself.

And so, working yet farther southward through {237} innumerable
islands, we arrive at the huge British colonial territory of
Australia, with the two islands of New Zealand some twelve hundred
miles away towards the south-east.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{236}

[Illustration: A STREET SCENE IN MODERN JAPAN.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------


SECTION III.--THE FAR SOUTH

[Sidenote: The far South]

That vast and wonderful responsibility, the burden of Australia, was
laid so lightly upon the Anglo-Saxon's shoulders that he has scarcely
felt the weight of it at all.  Although second to none, and equalled
only by one, namely America, in its immense possibilities, it has
been less costly in blood and treasure than any other.  Partly this
is because Australasia lies so remote that no other nation has
contested its possession with Great Britain, and partly because the
Australian native himself is (or was, for he has nearly disappeared)
so poor a specimen of humanity that he could put up no effective
fight for the home lands from which the white man was evicting him.

That is a remark, however, which by no means applies to the native
people of New Zealand, the Maoris.  They were and are a fine people
of a very quick intelligence, very brave, and distinguished for their
oratory.  We need not be surprised that they are so different from
the Australian natives, because, although we often think of Australia
and New Zealand as near neighbours, they are, as already mentioned,
twelve hundred miles apart.  It is tolerably certain, from the
likeness of the language and other indications, that the Maoris are
of the same stock as the Samoans, in Polynesia.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the white man began to
take much notice of these great lands in the South.  New Zealand was
the first to be proclaimed a British possession, in 1787, and the
{238} following year is the date of the beginning of the settlement
of New South Wales.  The founding of the next Australian colony,
Queensland, was not until 1824, and five years later again began the
colonisation of Western Australia.  South Australia was recognised as
a separate colony in 1834, and Victoria in 1851.

[Sidenote: Australia]

Of the settlement, and the claiming for the Anglo-Saxon, of these
glorious and vast possessions, there is but little to say in this
story, because each successive settlement was accomplished with
comparatively little interference by the natives and with none
whatever from any other white nation.  The coast was found to have
some splendid harbours, most of the interior was excellent grazing
land, and later, profitable gold mines were discovered.

The chief drawback of Australia as a cattle and sheep producing
country has always been its liability to long droughts when no rain
falls and the grass perishes and the stock dies for lack of food and
water.  Much trouble arose at one time from the foolish and
short-sighted action of the Government at home in transporting
criminals thither.  In the first instance they were sent to New South
Wales and later to Queensland also.  Many of these convicts escaped
into the bush, and, banding themselves together, became a terror, by
the name of bushrangers, to peaceful farmers.  Obviously the families
of the convicts could not have been brought up in circumstances
likely to turn them into good citizens.  It is all the more to the
credit of the country that it has such a fine population to-day.

The folly and the wickedness of thus filling up a grand new country
with the refuse ejected from the old was gradually realised.
Transportation of criminals ceased in 1868.

The Australian colonies continued to govern themselves as separate
units, under a constitution granted them by the Crown in 1850, for
just fifty years.  In {239} 1900, by their own request, they were
welded into the Commonwealth of Australia, with a Governor-General
appointed by the Crown.  The federated States are six, that is to
say, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and
Western Australia on the main land, with the island State of Tasmania
to the south.

Thus, shortly, it is possible to relate the story of the white man's
acquisition of this great continent of the South; but though its
story is so short and simple the importance of the part that it is
likely to play in the future of this Greatest of all Stories is quite
beyond our estimate, but is certain to be very large.  Its vacant
spaces, ready for the immigrant, are vast.  The difficulties created
by the droughts are being gradually overcome, as the means of
irrigation are improved.  The population is vigorous and efficient.
Australia sent fighters of splendid bravery and splendid loyalty to
aid the mother country in the Great War.  The world has yet to learn
the possibilities of this young and still undeveloped continent.


The story of New Zealand is very much the story of Australia, except
that the New Zealand white settlers did, for a while, suffer much
anxiety in their protracted warfare with the coloured race that they
found there.  It was not until 1861 that the Maoris took up arms in
any force against the whites who were gradually driving them out of
their ancient territories.  Had they known how to combine and act
together, and to take advantage of the concealment of the bush, they
might have been really dangerous to the white man's rule.  But
jealousies between the tribes prevented their combination, and a
Quixotic pride in braving death and danger seems to have caused them
to deem it the act of a coward to creep upon the enemy undetected.
They chose rather to dash themselves upon {241} the defence in
frontal attacks which cost them very heavy losses.  Even so the war
dragged on, in a series of intermittent fighting, for ten long years,
and in the terms of peace which ended it the Maoris secured for
themselves better conditions than before.  Their bravery and fine
qualities had made an impression, and they received a liberal
recognition of their rights.  They have proved themselves good
friends and citizens of the Empire in the years since.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{240}

[Illustration: A SCENE IN NEW ZEALAND: MT. PEMBROKE.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Sidenote: New Zealand]

The products of New Zealand are very similar to those of Australia.
On the whole its climate is more agreeable, because cooler, to the
European.  As a stock-raising country it has the advantage of not
being subject to the same risk of droughts.  Assuredly the white race
thrives there and produces grand specimens of humanity.  Even New
Zealand has perhaps not yet begun to play its full part in this
Greatest Story, but it has relatively little or none of the vast
empty space of the great Australian country.  We may know, more or
less, the role that New Zealand is to play.  Of Australia's share in
the drama of the future it is scarcely possible to make even a
conjecture.


Thus then, in broad and simple lines, I have tried to sketch the
manner in which the white man, and the Anglo-Saxon more than all
other white men, has been shouldering the world's burden.  That is a
political sketch, showing the movements of some of the societies of
men and some of the changes in the boundaries of States.  But during
the last hundred years of our Greatest Story the principal events
have been five, of which three only have been of this political
character.  There is the unification of Italy into a nation, that is
the earliest.  There is the consolidation of the German States into
the national unity of Germany, that is the second.  There is the
assumption of his burden by {242} the white man, and especially of
the Anglo-Saxon, all the world over--that is the third.

The fourth and fifth are not of a political character at all; though
more important in our story than any political event.  First of these
last two, because it came first in time, though I am not sure whether
we should rate it first in importance, is the application of steam
power to the working of machinery.  The second is the discovery of
evolution, with all that the word implies, and its turning of men's
eyes with glad hope towards a splendid future for human life on the
earth, instead of a despairing regret for a vainly imagined splendour
in the past.




{243}

INDEX


ABOLITIONISTS, and Anti-Abolitionists, 212, 213

Abraham, Plains of, 133

Abyssinia, 223

Act of Settlement, the, 109, 115

Act of Supremacy, the, 49, 61

Afghanistan, 32 _et passim_, 104, 226, 227, 228

Africa, 4 _et passim_, 218 _et seq._

Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 114, 119

Akbar, Grand Mogul, 34, 67

Alaska, 182

Algiers, 45, 219, 223

Alsace, 206

Alva, Duke of, 57

Angola, 223

Anne, Queen, 101, 109, 110

Anne Boleyn, 47

Appomatox, 214

Assam, 208

Atlantis, 9

Aurungzeb, 104

Austerlitz, battle of, 171

Australia, 237 _et seq._


BALKAN States, the, 182

Barbadoes, 81

Bastille, the, 158

Batavians, the, 155

Bavaria, Elector of, 118

Beluchistan, 227

Bengal, 103, 104

Bermuda, 81

Bismarck, 205, 206

Blake, Admiral, 90

Boers, the, 221

Boer War, the great, 222

Bombay, 103, 104

Boston, U.S.A., 139, 141

Bourbons, the, 58, 60

Boyne, the, battle of, 100

Brahmans, the, 27

Brandenburg, Elector of, 112

Brazil, Emperor of, 208

Bristol, 107

Buddha, 22, 28, 29

Buddhism, 25 _et seq._

Bunker's Hill, battle of, 142

Burgoyne, General, 143

Burma, 208


CABOT, Sebastian, 11, 12

Calais, lost to England, 59

Calcutta, 104

Calendar Stone, the, 17

Calicut, 3, 4

Calvin, 58, 64

Cameroons, the, 224

Carolina, 102

Cashmere, 225

Catherine of Aragon, 41, 47

Catholic League, the, 73

Cavaliers, the, 84 _et seq._

Charles I., 65, 84, 85

Charles II., 94, 95

Charles V., 38 _et seq._

Charles XII., of Sweden, 112, 113

Chatham, Lord, 142, 143

Children of the Sun, the, 18

China, 19 _et seq._, 228 _et seq._

Clive, 131

Cloth of Gold, Field of, 39

Columbus, 1 _et seq._, 9

Commonwealth of Australia, 239

Confucius, 20, 21

Condé, Prince, 74, 81

Congo, the, 223

Congress, in America, 139

Constantinople, 36 _et passim_

Continental system, the, 173

Copenhagen, battle of, 171

Cornwallis, Lord, 143

Corsica, 119

Cortez, 10

Covenanters, the, 85

Crimean War, 203

Cromwell, Oliver, 65 et seq., 84 _et seq._

Cromwell, Richard, 92

Cromwell, Thomas, 48

Cuba, 216

Culloden, battle of, 120

Cumberland, Duke of, 120


DA GAMA, Vasco, 1 _et seq._

Daimios, the, 26, 230

Dannoura, battle of, 26

Darwin, 193

Declaration of Independence, 143

Declaratory Act, 140

Dettingen, battle of, 118

Diet of Worms, the, 44

Directory, the, 164

Drake, Sir Francis, 63, 88

Dual Control, the, 219

Dupleix, 124, 131


EAST India Company, 225 _et seq._

Edict of Nantes, 59

Egypt, 219 _et seq._

Elba, 175

El Dorado, 10

Elizabeth, Queen, 58 _et seq._

Eric the Red, 11

Eritrea, 219

Eugene, of Savoy, 118

Evolution, 193 _et seq._


FAMILY Compact, the, 127

Ferdinand, of Spain, 9

Ferdinand, Emperor, 55

First Consul, 169

Flodden, battle of, 40

Florida, 82, 101

Fontenoy, battle of, 118

Formosa, island, 107, 223

Francis I., 37 _et seq._

Francis Joseph, 197, 198

Francis, of Lorraine, 117, 118

Franco-German War, 205, 206

Frederick the Great, 117 _et seq._, 128 _et seq._

French, character of, 154 _et seq._

French Indo-China, 208

Frobisher, 62

"Fronde," the, 81


GARIBALDI, 203, 205

Genoa, 119

George I., 115

George III., 137 _et seq._

George V., 115

Georgia, 102, 182

German Colonisation Society, the, 224

German East Africa, 224

German Emperor, the, 206

German South-West Africa, 224

Ghurkas, the, 125

Goa, 8

Gold Coast, 103

Good Hope, Cape of, 104

Gordon, General, 240

Grand Alliance, the, 110

Grand Army, in Russia, 174

Grant, General, 214

Great Armada, 62

Great Llama, 32

Great Wall of China, 21

Great War, 227, 235

Grenville, Lord, 107, 139

Guinea, Gulf of, 5

Guises, the, 58

Gunpowder, discovered, 21

Gunpowder Plot, 72, 73

Gustavus Adolphus, 74 _et seq._


HABSBURGS, the, 78 _et passim_.

Hastings, Warren, 146

Havre, handed to England, 60

Hawaiian Islands, 216

Hawke, Admiral, 133

Henry VIII., 37 _et seq._

Henry IV., of Navarre, 59

Henry, Prince, the Navigator, 7

Herat, 227

Holland, 60 _et passim_

Holy Alliance, the, 195

Holy Roman Empire, dissolved, 171

Hongkong, 208

Huguenots, the, 73 _et seq._, 82

Huns, the, 22, 24


INCAS, the, of Peru, 18

Indian Mutiny, 226

Indulgences, sale of, 43

Industrial Era, 187 _et seq._

Inquisition, the, 56 _et seq._

"Interim," the, 50

Ireland, her ill-treatment, 121; Secret Societies in, 122

Isabella, of Spain, 9

Italian Parliament, the first, 203


JAMES I., of England, 69

James II., 93, 94, 109

Japan, 24 _et passim_, 230 _et seq._

Jesuits, the, 53, 54 _et passim_


KAFFIRS, the, 223

Keenlung, 125

Khakan, the, 24

Khartoum, 220

Kitchener, Lord, 220

Korea, 25, 233, 235

Kossuth, 197

Kublai Khan, 24, 26, 228


LA HOGUE, battle of, 93

Lama, the Grand, 100

La Vendée, 161

Laws of Manu, 28

Lee, General, 214

Leipsic, battle of, 176

Lepanto, battle of, 46, 68

Le Roi Soleil, 80

Leszynska, 113, 116

Leuthen, battle of, 131, 132

Lhasa, 106

London, 107

Lord Mayor, the, 71

Lorraine, 206

Louis XII., 37

Louis XIV., 80 _et seq._

Louis XVI., 157 _et seq._

Louis Napoleon, 200 _et seq._

Louis Philippe, 200

Louisiana, 82, 101 _et seq._, 180, 181

Luther, 38 _et seq._, 58, 64

Lutzen, battle of, 77


MADAGASCAR, 223

Madras, 88, 103, 124

Magellan, 12

Magyars, the, 197

Mahdi, the, 220

Mahrattas, the, 104

Malacca, 8

Malay Archipelago, 235

Malay Peninsula, 235

Malplaquet, battle of, 111

Mamelukes, the, 135, 183

Manchuria, 133, 234, 235

Manchus, 25, 106

Maria Theresa, 117 _et seq._

Marlborough, Duke of, 99 _et seq._

Maoris, the, 237, 239, 240

Mary, Queen of England, 55 _et seq._

Mary, Queen of Scots, 60

Mary, wife of William III., 99, 100, 109

Maryland, 102

Massachusetts, State of, 14

Maximilian, of Mexico, 215

Mazarin, Cardinal, 80, 81

Mazzini, 199, 201

Mexico, 208, 214, 215

Middle Class, the, 71

Mikado, the, 26, 230, 231

Minden, battle of, 133

Ming, dynasty, 24

Mississippi Bubble, 123

Mississippi, river, 103, 132

Mobile, 103

Moguls, the, 67

Mongols, the, 24 _et passim_; their decline, 51

Monroe Doctrine, the, 208, 214, 215

Montcalm, 132, 133

Montreal, 102, 132

Montenegro, 135

Morocco, 223

Mozambique, 223

Muscovy, 52, 66


NANTES, Edict of, revoked, 95

Napoleon Bonaparte, 119, 163 _et seq._

Naseby, battle of, 85

Natal, 221

National Assembly, the, 158

National Guard, the, 164

Navigation Act, the, 90, 92

Nawab, the, of Bengal, 131

Nelson, Lord, 171

Nestorians, the, 22, 23

Netherlands, the, 53 _et seq._

Newfoundland, 82

New Orleans, 103

New South Wales, 149, 238, 239

New Zealand, 149, 237 _et seq._

Nigeria, 223

Nirvana, 30

Northern League, the, 153

North German Confederation, 198, 205

North, Lord, 137

Nova Scotia, 88


OHIO, 103

Oldenburg, Duchy of, 134

Old Pretender, the, 120

Orange Free State, 221

Oudenarde, battle of, 111

Oudh, 225


PAVIA, battle of, 40

Peace of Alais, 78

Peace of Paris, 129

Peace of Religion, the, 51

Pekin, 106, 107, 209

Peninsular War, the, 173

Pennsylvania, 102

Persia, 226, 227

Peter the Great, 98, 113

Philip of Aragon, 99

Philip II., of Spain, 55 _et seq._

Philippine Islands, the, 88, 216, 235

Pilgrim Fathers, the, 65, 82, 84

Pitt, the elder, 129, 139 _et seq._

Pizarro, 10

Plassey, battle of, 131

Poland, 66 _et passim_

Polo, Marco, 24

Pondicherry, 124

Port Arthur, 234

Potala, the, 105, 106

Poyning's Act, 149

Prince Edward's Island, 88

Printing, in China, 21

Protestant Union, the, 74

Prussia, increasing power of, 116 _et seq._

Pultowa, battle of, 113

Punjab, the, 225

Puritans, the, 65 _et seq._, 84


QUEBEC, 82, 132

Queensland, 238, 239

Quiberon Bay, battle of, 133


RALEIGH, Sir Walter, 62

Renaissance, the, 35 _et seq._

Rhodesia, 223

Richelieu, Cardinal, 77 _et seq._

Robespierre, 161

Rodney, Lord, 144

Romanoffs, the, 75

Rosbach, battle of, 131, 132

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 156

Royalists, the, 84 _et seq._

Russia, 66 _et passim_, 226 _et seq._

Russo-Japanese War, 227

Ryswick, peace of, 93, 108


ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S Day, 59

St. Helena, island, 177

St. Lawrence, the, 82, 101, 102

Samoan Islands, 216

Saratoga, 143

Schleswig-Holstein, 134, 198

Secession, War of, 213

Sedan, 206

Seleucus, 31

Senegal, river, 5

Seven Years' War, 128 _et seq._, 198, 204

Shah Nadir, 125

Shakespeare, 66

Shanghai, 208

Sikhs, the, 104

Silesia, 117, 119

Silkworms, 23

Slavery, 211

Somaliland, 223

South Australia, 238, 239

South German Confederation, 198

South Sea Bubble, 123

Spanish-American War, 216

Spice Islands, 88

Stadholder, the, 153

Stamp Act, the, 139

States General, the, 157

States of America, Constitution of, 138

Steam Power, 185 _et seq._

Straits Settlements, 225

Suez Canal, 219

Summer Palace, sack of, 209


TAJ MAHAL, the, 124

Tartars, the, 24 _et passim_

"The Fifteen," 115

"The Forty-five," 120

Thirty Years' War, 75 _et seq._

Tiberine, Republic, 168

Timour, the Lame, 33

Tongking, 208

Tories, 111

Torgau, battle of, 129

Toulon, 164

Trafalgar, battle of, 171

Transvaal, 221

Treaty of Westphalia, 78, 79

Tripoli, 219

Tuileries, the, 164

Tunis, 45, 68, 219

Turkestan, 226

Turks, the, 36 _et passim_


UGANDA, 224

Union of South Africa, 224

United Provinces, 60

Utrecht, peace of, 111, 112, 114


VAN TROMP, 90

Venice, 37 _et passim_

Versailles, palace sacked, 158

Vespucci, Amerigo, 12

Victoria, 238, 239

Victoria, Queen, 115

Vineland, 12

Virginia, 81, 101

Vishnu, 30

Vladivostock, 234

Voltaire, 130


WALLENSTEIN, Count, 77

Wandewash, battle of, 131

Washington, George, 142, 144

Waterloo, battle of, 176

Wellington, Duke of, 173

Western Australia, 238, 239

Whigs, 111

William of Orange, 57 _et seq._

William III., 94 _et seq._

Wolfe, General, 87, 133

Wolsey, Cardinal, 39, 47

Wilberforce, 211


XAVIER, 230


YORK Town, 144

Young Italy, party, 119, 201

Young Pretender, the, 120


ZULUS, the, 223



THE END




THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD


By HORACE G. HUTCHINSON, B.A.

Vol. I--From the Beginning of History to the Dawn of the Christian
Era.  With Map and Illustrations.  3_s._ 6_d._

It is admittedly difficult to give to beginners just the proper
modicum of knowledge of ancient history to make the later ages
understandable, but such a task should not be impossible, and it is
hoped that this book, which has avoided dates, names and details as
far as is consistent with sensible teaching, may not fail entirely in
its object.

The scene is laid in that centre of all early civilization, the
Mediterranean, and the fortunes of all the mighty nations that lived
and fought round its shores are traced in bold outline: Egypt, Crete,
Babylon--the Jews, Greeks and Romans--all contribute their chapters
to this wonderful story.  The author finally gathers all the threads
together, and leaves the reader at Rome at the dawn of the new era of
Christianity.


Vol. II--The Further Story of the Old World up to the Discovery of
the New.  With Map and Illustrations.  3_s._  6_d._

The "Greatest Story" is here taken up at the point at which it was
left in the first volume; that is, about the year 100 A.D.
Throughout that first volume our land of Britain scarcely had a
place.  In the latter part of the period--100 A.D.-1500 A.D.--which
this second volume covers, men of Britain played a great role.  The
World story thus becomes, in some measure, England's also.  Moreover,
where there have seemed to be two or more ways open for the telling
of the story, the author has always tried to adopt what he calls the
English way, the way which seemed likely to bring it most warmly and
intimately to English hearts and minds.  He has tried to adapt it for
scholars perhaps a year or so older than for those for whom the first
volume was written.


Vol. III--The Development of the Modern World.  With Illustrations.
3_s._ 6_d._

This third and final volume deals with the period which must appeal
more forcibly than any earlier time to all of Anglo-Saxon race.

The author, in his preface, explains how his work has been inspired
by Green's famous statement--that "England is only a small part of
the outcome of English history.  Its greater issues lie, not within
the narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of
nations yet to be.  The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her
statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at large,
were shaping in the past of our little island the future of mankind."









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