THE STORY OF MANKIND
By Hendrik Van Loon, Ph.D.
Professor of the Social Sciences in Antioch College. Author of The Fall
of the Dutch Republic, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom, The Golden Book of
the Dutch Navigators, A Short Story of Discovery, Ancient Man.
To JIMMIE “What is the use of a book without pictures?” said Alice.
FOREWORD
For Hansje and Willem:
WHEN I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of mine who gave me my
love for books and pictures promised to take me upon a memorable
expedition. I was to go with him to the top of the tower of Old Saint
Lawrence in Rotterdam.
And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that of Saint Peter
opened a mysterious door. “Ring the bell,” he said, “when you come back
and want to get out,” and with a great grinding of rusty old hinges he
separated us from the noise of the busy street and locked us into a world
of new and strange experiences.
For the first time in my life I was confronted by the phenomenon of
audible silence. When we had climbed the first flight of stairs, I added
another discovery to my limited knowledge of natural phenomena—that
of tangible darkness. A match showed us where the upward road continued.
We went to the next floor and then to the next and the next until I had
lost count and then there came still another floor, and suddenly we had
plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with the roof of the
church, and it was used as a storeroom. Covered with many inches of dust,
there lay the abandoned symbols of a venerable faith which had been
discarded by the good people of the city many years ago. That which had
meant life and death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and
rubbish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved images
and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop between the outspread arms
of a kindly saint.
The next floor showed us from where we had derived our light. Enormous
open windows with heavy iron bars made the high and barren room the
roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars
and the air was filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise
of the town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed by
the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking of horses’
hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing sound of the patient
steam which had been set to do the work of man in a thousand different
ways—they had all been blended into a softly rustling whisper which
provided a beautiful background for the trembling cooing of the pigeons.
Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And after the first
ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel his way with a cautious
foot) there was a new and even greater wonder, the town-clock. I saw the
heart of time. I could hear the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid seconds—one—two—three—up
to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise when all the wheels seemed to stop
and another minute had been chopped off eternity. Without pause it began
again—one—two—three—until at last after a warning
rumble and the scraping of many wheels a thunderous voice, high above us,
told the world that it was the hour of noon.
On the next floor were the bells. The nice little bells and their terrible
sisters. In the centre the big bell, which made me turn stiff with fright
when I heard it in the middle of the night telling a story of fire or
flood. In solitary grandeur it seemed to reflect upon those six hundred
years during which it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good
people of Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in an
old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who twice each
week played a merry tune for the benefit of the country-folk who had come
to market to buy and sell and hear what the big world had been doing. But
in a corner—all alone and shunned by the others—a big black
bell, silent and stern, the bell of death.
Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and even more dangerous
than those we had climbed before, and suddenly the fresh air of the wide
heavens. We had reached the highest gallery. Above us the sky. Below us
the city—a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily crawling
hither and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular business,
and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the open country.
It was my first glimpse of the big world.
Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have gone to the top of
the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard work, but it repaid in full the
mere physical exertion of climbing a few stairs.
Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the land and the sky,
and I would listen to the stories of my kind friend the watchman, who
lived in a small shack, built in a sheltered corner of the gallery. He
looked after the clock and was a father to the bells, and he warned of
fires, but he enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and
thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost fifty
years before and he had rarely read a book, but he had lived on the top of
his tower for so many years that he had absorbed the wisdom of that wide
world which surrounded him on all sides.
History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him. “There,” he
would say, pointing to a bend of the river, “there, my boy, do you see
those trees? That is where the Prince of Orange cut the dikes to drown the
land and save Leyden.” Or he would tell me the tale of the old Meuse,
until the broad river ceased to be a convenient harbour and became a
wonderful highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp upon that
famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the sea might be free
to all.
Then there were the little villages, clustering around the protecting
church which once, many years ago, had been the home of their Patron
Saints. In the distance we could see the leaning tower of Delft. Within
sight of its high arches, William the Silent had been murdered and there
Grotius had learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still
further away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home of
the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of many an emperor,
the charity-boy whom the world came to know as Erasmus.
Finally the silver line of the endless sea and as a contrast, immediately
below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys and houses and gardens and
hospitals and schools and railways, which we called our home. But the
tower showed us the old home in a new light. The confused commotion of the
streets and the market-place, of the factories and the workshop, became
the well-ordered expression of human energy and purpose. Best of all, the
wide view of the glorious past, which surrounded us on all sides, gave us
new courage to face the problems of the future when we had gone back to
our daily tasks.
History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the
endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this
ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no
elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done.
Here I give you the key that will open the door.
When you return, you too will understand the reason for my enthusiasm.
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON.
CONTENTS
THE STORY OF MANKIND
HIGH Up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It
is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand
years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will
have gone by.
THE SETTING OF THE STAGE
WE live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark.
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
Whither are we bound?
Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question
mark further and further towards that distant line, beyond the horizon,
where we hope to find our answer.
We have not gone very far.
We still know very little but we have reached the point where (with a fair
degree of accuracy) we can guess at many things.
In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best belief) the
stage was set for the first appearance of man.
If we represent the time during which it has been possible for animal life
to exist upon our planet by a line of this length, then the tiny line just
below indicates the age during which man (or a creature more or less
resembling man) has lived upon this earth.
Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose of
conquering the forces of nature. That is the reason why we are going to
study him, rather than cats or dogs or horses or any of the other animals,
who, all in their own way, have a very interesting historical development
behind them.
In the beginning, the planet upon which we live was (as far as we now
know) a large ball of flaming matter, a tiny cloud of smoke in the endless
ocean of space. Gradually, in the course of millions of years, the surface
burned itself out, and was covered with a thin layer of rocks. Upon these
lifeless rocks the rain descended in endless torrents, wearing out the
hard granite and carrying the dust to the valleys that lay hidden between
the high cliffs of the steaming earth.
Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the clouds and saw how
this little planet was covered with a few small puddles which were to
develop into the mighty oceans of the eastern and western hemispheres.
Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been dead, gave birth to
life.
The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea.
For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents. But during
all that time it was developing certain habits that it might survive more
easily upon the inhospitable earth. Some of these cells were happiest in
the dark depths of the lakes and the pools. They took root in the slimy
sediments which had been carried down from the tops of the hills and they
became plants. Others preferred to move about and they grew strange
jointed legs, like scorpions and began to crawl along the bottom of the
sea amidst the plants and the pale green things that looked like
jelly-fishes. Still others (covered with scales) depended upon a swimming
motion to go from place to place in their search for food, and gradually
they populated the ocean with myriads of fishes.
Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had to search for
new dwelling places. There was no more room for them at the bottom of the
sea. Reluctantly they left the water and made a new home in the marshes
and on the mud-banks that lay at the foot of the mountains. Twice a day
the tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For the rest of the
time, the plants made the best of their uncomfortable situation and tried
to survive in the thin air which surrounded the surface of the planet.
After centuries of training, they learned how to live as comfortably in
the air as they had done in the water. They increased in size and became
shrubs and trees and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which
attracted the attention of the busy big bumble-bees and the birds who
carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth had become covered
with green pastures, or lay dark under the shadow of the big trees. But
some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea, and they had learned
how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills. We call such creatures
amphibious, which means that they are able to live with equal ease on the
land and in the water. The first frog who crosses your path can tell you
all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian.
Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted themselves more
and more to life on land. Some became reptiles (creatures who crawl like
lizards) and they shared the silence of the forests with the insects. That
they might move faster through the soft soil, they improved upon their
legs and their size increased until the world was populated with gigantic
forms (which the hand-books of biology list under the names of
Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Brontosaurus) who grew to be thirty to
forty feet long and who could have played with elephants as a full grown
cat plays with her kittens.
Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in the tops of
the trees, which were then often more than a hundred feet high. They no
longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking, but it was necessary
for them to move quickly from branch to branch. And so they changed a part
of their skin into a sort of parachute, which stretched between the sides
of their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet, and gradually they
covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made their tails into a
steering gear and flew from tree to tree and developed into true birds.
Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles died within a
short time. We do not know the reason. Perhaps it was due to a sudden
change in climate. Perhaps they had grown so large that they could neither
swim nor walk nor crawl, and they starved to death within sight but not
within reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the million
year old world-empire of the big reptiles was over.
The world now began to be occupied by very different creatures. They were
the descendants of the reptiles but they were quite unlike these because
they fed their young from the “mammae” or the breasts of the mother.
Wherefore modern science calls these animals “mammals.” They had shed the
scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of the bird, but they
covered their bodies with hair. The mammals however developed other habits
which gave their race a great advantage over the other animals. The female
of the species carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they
were hatched and while all other living beings, up to that time, had left
their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat, and the attacks of
wild beasts, the mammals kept their young with them for a long time and
sheltered them while they were still too weak to fight their enemies. In
this way the young mammals were given a much better chance to survive,
because they learned many things from their mothers, as you will know if
you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take care of
themselves and how to wash their faces and how to catch mice.
But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you know them well. They
surround you on all sides. They are your daily companions in the streets
and in your home, and you can see your less familiar cousins behind the
bars of the zoological garden.
And now we come to the parting of the ways when man suddenly leaves the
endless procession of dumbly living and dying creatures and begins to use
his reason to shape the destiny of his race.
One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in its ability to
find food and shelter. It had learned to use its fore-feet for the purpose
of holding its prey, and by dint of practice it had developed a hand-like
claw. After innumerable attempts it had learned how to balance the whole
of the body upon the hind legs. (This is a difficult act, which every
child has to learn anew although the human race has been doing it for over
a million years.)
This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to both, became the
most successful hunter and could make a living in every clime. For greater
safety, it usually moved about in groups. It learned how to make strange
grunts to warn its young of approaching danger and after many hundreds of
thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises for the purpose of
talking.
This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your first “man-like”
ancestor.
OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
WE know very little about the first “true” men. We have never seen their
pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an ancient soil we have
sometimes found pieces of their bones. These lay buried amidst the broken
skeletons of other animals that have long since disappeared from the face
of the earth. Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives
to the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have taken these
bones and they have been able to reconstruct our earliest ancestors with a
fair degree of accuracy.
The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and
unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much smaller than the people of
today. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had
coloured his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body, his arms
and legs too, were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but
strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. His
forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses
its teeth both as fork and knife. He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire
except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with
their smoke and their lava.
He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the pygmies of Africa
do to this very day. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves
and the roots of plants or he took the eggs away from an angry bird and
fed them to his own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient
chase, he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit.
These he would eat raw for he had never discovered that food tasted better
when it was cooked.
During the hours of day, this primitive human being prowled about looking
for things to eat.
When night descended upon the earth, he hid his wife and his children in a
hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders, for he was surrounded on all
sides by ferocious animals and when it was dark these animals began to
prowl about, looking for something to eat for their mates and their own
young, and they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where you
must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy because it was full
of fear and misery.
In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun, and during
the winter his children would freeze to death in his arms. When such a
creature hurt itself, (and hunting animals are forever breaking their
bones or spraining their ankles) he had no one to take care of him and he
must die a horrible death.
Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises, early
man liked to jabber. That is to say, he endlessly repeated the same
unintelligible gibberish because it pleased him to hear the sound of his
voice. In due time he learned that he could use this guttural noise to
warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened and he gave certain
little shrieks which came to mean “there is a tiger!” or “here come five
elephants.” Then the others grunted something back at him and their growl
meant, “I see them,” or “let us run away and hide.” And this was probably
the origin of all language.
But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know so very little.
Early man had no tools and he built himself no houses. He lived and died
and left no trace of his existence except a few collar-bones and a few
pieces of his skull. These tell us that many thousands of years ago the
world was inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from all
the other animals—who had probably developed from another unknown
ape-like animal which had learned to walk on its hind-legs and use its
fore-paws as hands—and who were most probably connected with the
creatures who happen to be our own immediate ancestors.
It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.
PREHISTORIC MAN
PREHISTORIC MAN BEGINS TO MAKE THINGS FOR HIMSELF.
EARLY man did not know what time meant. He kept no records of birthdays or
wedding anniversaries or the hour of death. He had no idea of days or
weeks or even years. But in a general way he kept track of the seasons for
he had noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the mild
spring—that spring grew into the hot summer when fruits ripened and
the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten and that summer ended when
sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and a number of
animals were getting ready for the long hibernal sleep.
But now, something unusual and rather frightening had happened. Something
was the matter with the weather. The warm days of summer had come very
late. The fruits had not ripened. The tops of the mountains which used to
be covered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy burden of
snow.
Then, one morning, a number of wild people, different from the other
creatures who lived in that neighbourhood, came wandering down from the
region of the high peaks. They looked lean and appeared to be starving.
They uttered sounds which no one could understand. They seemed to say that
they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the old inhabitants
and the newcomers. When they tried to stay more than a few days there was
a terrible battle with claw-like hands and feet and whole families were
killed. The others fled back to their mountain slopes and died in the next
blizzard.
But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All the time the
days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than they ought to have been.
Finally, in a gap between two high hills, there appeared a tiny speck of
greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A gigantic glacier came
sliding downhill. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the
noise of a dozen thunderstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of
granite suddenly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them
while they slept. Century old trees were crushed into kindling wood. And
then it began to snow.
It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and the animals fled
in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted his young upon his back and
followed them. But he could not travel as fast as the wilder creatures and
he was forced to choose between quick thinking or quick dying. He seems to
have preferred the former for he has managed to survive the terrible
glacial periods which upon four different occasions threatened to kill
every human being on the face of the earth.
In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself lest he freeze
to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover them with branches and
leaves and in these traps he caught bears and hyenas, which he then killed
with heavy stones and whose skins he used as coats for himself and his
family.
Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many animals were in the
habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now followed their example, drove the
animals out of their warm homes and claimed them for his own.
Even so, the climate was too severe for most people and the old and the
young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius bethought himself of the use
of fire. Once, while out hunting, he had been caught in a forest-fire. He
remembered that he had been almost roasted to death by the flames. Thus
far fire had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree was
dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smouldering branches from a
burning wood. This turned the cave into a cozy little room.
And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It was not rescued
until it had been well roasted. Man discovered that meat tasted better
when cooked and he then and there discarded one of the old habits which he
had shared with the other animals and began to prepare his food.
In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people with the cleverest
brains survived. They had to struggle day and night against cold and
hunger. They were forced to invent tools. They learned how to sharpen
stones into axes and how to make hammers. They were obliged to put up
large stores of food for the endless days of the winter and they found
that clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the rays of
the sun. And so the glacial period, which had threatened to destroy the
human race, became its greatest teacher because it forced man to use his
brain.
HIEROGLYPHICS
THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD OF HISTORY BEGINS
THESE earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European
wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. It is safe to say that
in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages and
would have developed a civilisation of their own. But suddenly there came
an end to their isolation. They were discovered.
A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to cross the sea and
the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of the
European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt.
The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation
thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the
possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore
leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit the
southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest
school of the human race.
The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers.
They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards
copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the
churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented a calendar which
proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time that it
has survived with a few changes until today. But most important of all,
the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit of future
generations. They had invented the art of writing.
We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take it
for granted that the world has always been able to read and write. As a
matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is quite
new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs, who can
only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who,
because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make use of
the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have gone
before.
In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they
found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have
something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not
interested in “anything foreign” and did not inquire into the origin of
these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls
of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus
reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art of
making such pictures had died several years before. Egypt deprived of its
independence had become a store-house filled with important historical
documents which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use to
either man or beast.
Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But in
the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit
eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies.
He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, quite
accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the problem of the
ancient Egyptian picture-language.
One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his
little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to
spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta. And
behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else
in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of
black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It
carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek language
was known. “All that is necessary,” so he reasoned, “is to compare the
Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their
secrets.”
The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve
the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion
began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta
stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of
fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but the
main principles of Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of
the valley of the Nile is better known to us than the story of the
Mississippi River. We possess a written record which covers four thousand
years of chronicled history.
As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means “sacred writing”)
have played such a very great role in history, (a few of them in modified
form have even found their way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know
something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to
preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming generations.
Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our
western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages writter{sic} in
the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and
how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not
difficult to understand the meaning of such messages.
Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of
the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a
great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try to
explain to you now.
Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of
papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly you came across a
picture of a man with a saw. “Very well,” you would say, “that means of
course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree.” Then you take another
papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of
eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the man with
the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture therefore
must mean something else. But what?
That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered that
the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call “phonetic writing”—a
system of characters which reproduce the “sound” (or phone) of the spoken
word and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words
into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes and
pothooks.
Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word
“saw” either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter’s
shop, or it means the past tense of the verb “to see.”
This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries.
First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented.
Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a
verb. After several hundred years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these
meanings and the picture {illust.} came to stand for a single letter, the
letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here is a modern
English sentence as it would have been written in hieroglyphics. {illust.}
The {illust.} either means one of these two round objects in your head,
which allow you to see or it means “I,” the person who is talking.
A {illust.} is either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents the
verb “to be” which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part of a
verb like “be-come” or “be-have.” In this particular instance it is
followed by {illust.} which means a “leaf” or “leave” or “lieve” (the
sound of all three words is the same).
The “eye” you know all about.
Finally you get the picture of a {illust.}. It is a giraffe It is part of
the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics developed.
You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.
“I believe I saw a giraffe.”
Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands of
years until they could write anything they wanted, and they used these
“canned words” to send messages to friends, to keep business accounts and
to keep a record of the history of their country, that future generations
might benefit by the mistakes of the past.
THE NILE VALLEY
THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE
THE history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food.
Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home.
The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at an early date. From
the interior of Africa and from the desert of Arabia and from the western
part of Asia people had flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich
farms. Together these invaders had formed a new race which called itself
“Remi” or “the Men” just as we sometimes call America “God’s own country.”
They had good reason to be grateful to a Fate which had carried them to
this narrow strip of land. In the summer of each year the Nile turned the
valley into a shallow lake and when the waters receded all the grainfields
and the pastures were covered with several inches of the most fertile
clay.
In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and made it possible
to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of which we have
any record. It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley. But
a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from
the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate
system of irrigation trenches spread it throughout the land.
While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend sixteen hours
out of every twenty-four gathering food for himself and the members of his
tribe, the Egyptian peasant or the inhabitant of the Egyptian city found
himself possessed of a certain leisure. He used this spare time to make
himself many things that were merely ornamental and not in the least bit
useful.
More than that. One day he discovered that his brain was capable of
thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing to do with the problems
of eating and sleeping and finding a home for the children. The Egyptian
began to speculate upon many strange problems that confronted him. Where
did the stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which
frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise with such
regularity that it was possible to base the calendar upon the appearance
and the disappearance of the annual floods? Who was he, himself, a strange
little creature surrounded on all sides by death and sickness and yet
happy and full of laughter?
He asked these many questions and certain people obligingly stepped
forward to answer these inquiries to the best of their ability. The
Egyptians called them “priests” and they became the guardians of his
thoughts and gained great respect in the community. They were highly
learned men who were entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the written
records. They understood that it is not good for man to think only of his
immediate advantage in this world and they drew his attention to the days
of the future when his soul would dwell beyond the mountains of the west
and must give an account of his deeds to Osiris, the mighty God who was
the Ruler of the Living and the Dead and who judged the acts of men
according to their merits. Indeed, the priests made so much of that future
day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that the Egyptians began to regard
life merely as a short preparation for the Hereafter and turned the
teeming valley of the Nile into a land devoted to the Dead.
In a strange way, the Egyptians had come to believe that no soul could
enter the realm of Osiris without the possession of the body which had
been its place of residence in this world. Therefore as soon as a man was
dead his relatives took his corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks it was
soaked in a solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch. The
Persian word for pitch was “Mumiai” and the embalmed body was called a
“Mummy.” It was wrapped in yards and yards of specially prepared linen and
it was placed in a specially prepared coffin ready to be removed to its
final home. But an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was
surrounded by pieces of furniture and musical instruments (to while away
the dreary hours of waiting) and by little statues of cooks and bakers and
barbers (that the occupant of this dark home might be decently provided
with food and need not go about unshaven).
Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the western
mountains but as the Egyptians moved northward they were obliged to build
their cemeteries in the desert. The desert however is full of wild animals
and equally wild robbers and they broke into the graves and disturbed the
mummy or stole the jewelry that had been buried with the body. To prevent
such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build small mounds of stones
on top of the graves. These little mounds gradually grew in size, because
the rich people built higher mounds than the poor and there was a good
deal of competition to see who could make the highest hill of stones. The
record was made by King Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops and who lived
thirty centuries before our era. His mound, which the Greeks called a
pyramid (because the Egyptian word for high was pir-em-us) was over five
hundred feet high.
It covered more than thirteen acres of desert which is three times as much
space as that occupied by the church of St. Peter, the largest edifice of
the Christian world.
During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were busy carrying the
necessary stones from the other side of the river—ferrying them
across the Nile (how they ever managed to do this, we do not understand),
dragging them in many instances a long distance across the desert and
finally hoisting them into their correct position. But so well did the
King’s architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow
passage-way which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the stone monster
has never yet been pushed out of shape by the weight of those thousands of
tons of stone which press upon it from all sides.
THE STORY OF EGYPT
THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT
THE river Nile was a kind friend but occasionally it was a hard
taskmaster. It taught the people who lived along its banks the noble art
of “team-work.” They depended upon each other to build their irrigation
trenches and keep their dikes in repair. In this way they learned how to
get along with their neighbours and their mutual-benefit-association quite
easily developed into an organised state.
Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neighbours and he became
the leader of the community and their commander-in-chief when the envious
neighbours of western Asia invaded the prosperous valley. In due course of
time he became their King and ruled all the land from the Mediterranean to
the mountains of the west.
But these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the word meant “the
Man who lived in the Big House”) rarely interested the patient and toiling
peasant of the grain fields. Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes
to his King than he thought just, he accepted the rule of Pharaoh as he
accepted the rule of Mighty Osiris.
It was different however when a foreign invader came and robbed him of his
possessions. After twenty centuries of independent life, a savage Arab
tribe of shepherds, called the Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five hundred
years they were the masters of the valley of the Nile. They were highly
un-popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who came to the
land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long wandering through the
desert and who helped the foreign usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers
and his civil servants.
But shortly after the year 1700 B.C. the people of Thebes began a
revolution and after a long struggle the Hyksos were driven out of the
country and Egypt was free once more.
A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered all of western Asia, Egypt
became part of the empire of Sardanapalus. In the seventh century B.C. it
became once more an independent state which obeyed the rule of a king who
lived in the city of Sais in the Delta of the Nile. But in the year 525
B.C., Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession of Egypt and in
the fourth century B.C., when Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great,
Egypt too became a Macedonian province. It regained a semblance of
independence when one of Alexander’s generals set himself up as king of a
new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies, who resided
in the newly built city of Alexandria.
Finally, in the year 89 B.C., the Romans came. The last Egyptian queen,
Cleopatra, tried her best to save the country. Her beauty and charm were
more dangerous to the Roman generals than half a dozen Egyptian army
corps. Twice she was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her
Roman conquerors. But in the year 30 B.C., Augustus, the nephew and heir
of Caesar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share his late uncle’s
admiration for the lovely princess. He destroyed her armies, but spared
her life that he might make her march in his triumph as part of the spoils
of war. When Cleopatra heard of this plan, she killed herself by taking
poison. And Egypt became a Roman province.
MESOPOTAMIA
MESOPOTAMIA—THE SECOND CENTRE OF EASTERN CIVILISATION
I AM going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid and I am going to
ask that you imagine yourself possessed of the eyes of a hawk. Way, way
off, in the distance, far beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you will
see something green and shimmering. It is a valley situated between two
rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the land of mystery
and wonder which the Greeks called Mesopotamia—the “country between
the rivers.”
The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the Babylonians
called the Purattu) and the Tigris (which was known as the Diklat). They
begin their course amidst the snows of the mountains of Armenia where
Noah’s Ark found a resting place and slowly they flow through the southern
plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf. They perform a
very useful service. They turn the arid regions of western Asia into a
fertile garden.
The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had offered them
food upon fairly easy terms. The “land between the rivers” was popular for
the same reason. It was a country full of promise and both the inhabitants
of the northern mountains and the tribes which roamed through the southern
deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and most exclusive
possession. The constant rivalry between the mountaineers and the
desert-nomads led to endless warfare. Only the strongest and the bravest
could hope to survive and that will explain why Mesopotamia became the
home of a very strong race of men who were capable of creating a
civilisation which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt.
THE SUMERIANS
THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF ASSYRIA
AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT
THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried to
find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and unsuspected
continent. An Austrian bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel
eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a voyage which
led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by western men until a
generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had
explored the ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most
curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of the temples of
Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of baked clay.
But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the end of
the eighteenth century that the first “cuneiform inscriptions” (so-called
because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called “Cuneus” in
Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr. Then it
took thirty years before a patient German school-master by the name of
Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the D, the A, the R and
the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius. And another twenty years had
to go by until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous
inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of
western Asia.
Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of
Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the
Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the
idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures
entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which showed little
connection with the pictures out of which they had been developed. A few
examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn
with a nail into a brick looked as follows: {illust.} This sign however
was too cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of “heaven”
was added to that of star the picture was simplified in this way {illust.}
which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from
{illust} into {illust.} and a fish changed from {illust.} into {illust.}
The sun was originally a plain circle {illust.} and became {illust.} If we
were using the Sumerian script today we would make an {illust.} look like
{illust.}. This system of writing down our ideas looks rather complicated
but for more than thirty centuries it was used by the Sumerians and the
Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races
which forced their way into the fertile valley.
The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First the
Sumerians came from the North. They were a white People who had lived in
the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops
of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial
little hills on top of which they built their altars. They did not know
how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their towers with
sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as you may see
in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor
to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians but we do
not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-sorbed by those races that
entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their towers however still
stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went
into exile in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of Babillli,
or towers of Babel.
In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered
Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-powered by the Akkadians, one
of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect
and who are known as the “Semites,” because in the olden days people
believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the three sons
of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to submit to
the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose great King
Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon
and who gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state the
best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the Hittites, whom you
will also meet in the Old Testament, over-ran the Fertile Valley and
destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They in turn were vanquished
by the followers of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves
Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast and
terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and Egypt and gathered
taxes from countless subject races until the end of the seventh century
before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe,
re-established Babylon and made that city the most important capital of
that day. Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged the
study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy and mathematics is
all based upon certain first principles which were discovered by the
Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded
this old land and overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years
later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the
Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek
province. Next came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and
Mesopotamia, the second centre of the world’s civilisation, became a vast
wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.
MOSES
THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
SOME time during the twentieth century before our era, a small and
unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left its old home, which was
situated in the land of Ur on the mouth of the Euphrates, and had tried to
find new pastures within the domain of the Kings of Babylonia. They had
been driven away by the royal soldiers and they had moved westward looking
for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set up their
tents.
This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as we call them, the
Jews. They had wandered far and wide, and after many years of dreary
peregrinations they had been given shelter in Egypt. For more than five
centuries they had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted
country had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told you in the
story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves useful to the foreign
invader and had been left in the undisturbed possession of their grazing
fields. But after a long war of independence the Egyptians had driven the
Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had come upon evil
times for they had been degraded to the rank of common slaves and they had
been forced to work on the royal roads and on the Pyramids. And as the
frontiers were guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it had been impossible for
the Jews to escape.
After many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable fate by
a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long time had dwelt in the desert and
there had learned to appreciate the simple virtues of his earliest
ancestors, who had kept away from cities and city-life and had refused to
let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign
civilisation.
Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the
patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent
after him and led his fellow tribesmen into the heart of the plain at the
foot of Mount Sinai. During his long and lonely life in the desert, he had
learned to revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and the
Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds depended for
life and light and breath. This God, one of the many divinities who were
widely worshipped in western Asia, was called Jehovah, and through the
teaching of Moses, he became the sole Master of the Hebrew race.
One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. It was whispered
that he had gone away carrying two tablets of rough-hewn stone. That
afternoon, the top of the mountain was lost to sight. The darkness of a
terrible storm hid it from the eye of man. But when Moses returned,
behold! there stood engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had
spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and the
blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment, Jehovah was
recognised by all the Jews as the Highest Master of their Fate, the only
True God, who had taught them how to live holy lives when he bade them to
follow the wise lessons of his Ten Commandments.
They followed Moses when he bade them continue their journey through the
desert. They obeyed him when he told them what to eat and drink and what
to avoid that they might keep well in the hot climate. And finally after
many years of wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and
prosperous. It was called Palestine, which means the country of the
“Pilistu” the Philistines, a small tribe of Cretans who had settled along
the coast after they had been driven away from their own island.
Unfortunately, the mainland, Palestine, was already inhabited by another
Semitic race, called the Canaanites. But the Jews forced their way into
the valleys and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple in
a town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace. As for Moses, he was
no longer the leader of his people. He had been allowed to see the
mountain ridges of Palestine from afar. Then he had closed his tired eyes
for all time. He had worked faithfully and hard to please Jehovah. Not
only had he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free and
independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews the first of
all nations to worship a single God.
THE PHOENICIANS
THE PHOENICIANS WHO GAVE US OUR ALPHABET
THE Phoenicians, who were the neighbours of the Jews, were a Semitic tribe
which at a very early age had settled along the shores of the
Mediterranean. They had built themselves two well-fortified towns, Tyre
and Sidon, and within a short time they had gained a monopoly of the trade
of the western seas. Their ships went regularly to Greece and Italy and
Spain and they even ventured beyond the straits of Gibraltar to visit the
Scilly islands where they could buy tin. Wherever they went, they built
themselves small trading stations, which they called colonies. Many of
these were the origin of modern cities, such as Cadiz and Marseilles.
They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a good profit. They
were not troubled by a conscience. If we are to believe all their
neighbours they did not know what the words honesty or integrity meant.
They regarded a well-filled treasure chest the highest ideal of all good
citizens. Indeed they were very unpleasant people and did not have a
single friend. Nevertheless they have rendered all coming generations one
service of the greatest possible value. They gave us our alphabet.
The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, invented by the
Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks as a clumsy waste of time.
They were practical business men and could not spend hours engraving two
or three letters. They set to work and invented a new system of writing
which was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few pictures
from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of the wedge-shaped
figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older
system for the advantage of speed and they reduced the thousands of
different images to a short and handy alphabet of twenty-two letters.
In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the AEgean Sea and
entered Greece. The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried
the improved system to Italy. The Romans modified the figures somewhat and
in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild
barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why this book is
written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not in the
hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the Sumerians.
THE INDO-EUROPEANS
THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER THE SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN WORLD
THE world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia had existed
almost thirty centuries and the venerable races of the Fertile Valley were
getting old and tired. Their doom was sealed when a new and more energetic
race appeared upon the horizon. We call this race the Indo-European race,
because it conquered not only Europe but also made itself the ruling class
in the country which is now known as British India.
These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites but they spoke a
different language which is regarded as the common ancestor of all
European tongues with the exception of Hungarian and Finnish and the
Basque dialects of Northern Spain.
When we first hear of them, they had been living along the shores of the
Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day they had packed their tents
and they had wandered forth in search of a new home. Some of them had
moved into the mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had
lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and that is why
we call them Aryans. Others had followed the setting sun and they had
taken possession of the plains of Europe as I shall tell you when I give
you the story of Greece and Rome.
For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the leadership of
Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great teacher many of them had
left their mountain homes to follow the swiftly flowing Indus river on its
way to the sea.
Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western Asia and there
they had founded the half-independent communities of the Medes and the
Persians, two peoples whose names we have copied from the old Greek
history-books. In the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the
Medes had established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this
perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan, made himself
king of all the Persian tribes and started upon a career of conquest which
soon made him and his children the undisputed masters of the whole of
western Asia and of Egypt.
Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians push their
triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon found themselves in
serious difficulties with certain other Indo-European tribes which
centuries before had moved into Europe and had taken possession of the
Greek peninsula and the islands of the AEgean Sea.
These difficulties led to the three famous wars between Greece and Persia
during which King Darius and King Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern
part of the peninsula. They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very
hard to get a foothold upon the European continent.
But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens proved unconquerable.
By cutting off the lines of supplies of the Persian armies, the Greek
sailors invariably forced the Asiatic rulers to return to their base.
It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient teacher, and Europe,
the young and eager pupil. A great many of the other chapters of this book
will tell you how the struggle between east and west has continued until
this very day.
THE AEGEAN SEA
THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO THE
WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his father told him the story of
Troy. He liked that story better than anything else he had ever heard and
he made up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave home, he
would travel to Greece and “find Troy.” That he was the son of a poor
country parson in a Mecklenburg village did not bother him. He knew that
he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first and do the
digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune
within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough money to equip an
expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia Minor, where he
supposed that Troy had been situated.
In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered with
grainfields. According to tradition it had been the home of Priamus the
king of Troy. Schliemann, whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his
knowledge, wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began to
dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his trench went
straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking and
carried him to the ruins of another buried town which was at least a
thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had written. Then
something very interesting occurred. If Schliemann had found a few
polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects, which
people had generally associated with the prehistoric men who had lived in
these regions before the coming of the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful
statuettes and very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that
was unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that fully ten
centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of the AEgean had been
inhabited by a mysterious race of men who in many ways had been the
superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and had
destroyed their civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of
originality. And this proved to be the case. In the late seventies of the
last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae, ruins which were so
old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their antiquity. There again,
beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round enclosure, Schliemann
stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which had been left behind by
those mysterious people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities
and who had built walls, so big and so heavy and so strong, that the
Greeks called them the work of the Titans, those god-like giants who in
very olden days had used to play ball with mountain peaks.
A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of the
romantic features of the story. The makers of these early works of art and
the builders of these strong fortresses were no sorcerers, but simple
sailors and traders. They had lived in Crete, and on the many small
islands of the AEgean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they had
turned the AEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange of goods
between the highly civilised east and the slowly developing wilderness of
the European mainland.
For more than a thousand years they had maintained an island empire which
had developed a very high form of art. Indeed their most important city,
Cnossus, on the northern coast of Crete, had been entirely modern in its
insistence upon hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly drained
and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians had been
the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto unknown bathtub. The
palace of their King had been famous for its winding staircases and its
large banqueting hall. The cellars underneath this palace, where the wine
and the grain and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so
greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given rise to
the story of the “labyrinth,” the name which we give to a structure with
so many complicated passages that it is almost impossible to find our way
out, once the front door has closed upon our frightened selves.
But what finally became of this great AEgean Empire and what caused its
sudden downfall, that I can not tell.
The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no one has yet been
able to decipher their inscriptions. Their history therefore is unknown to
us. We have to reconstruct the record of their adventures from the ruins
which the AEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the
AEgean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised race which had
recently come from the plains of northern Europe. Unless we are very much
mistaken, the savages who were responsible for the destruction of the
Cretan and the AEgean civilisation were none other than certain tribes of
wandering shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky peninsula
between the Adriatic and the AEgean seas and who are known to us as
Greeks.
THE GREEKS
MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE OF THE HELLENES WAS TAKING POSSESSION OF
GREECE
THE Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning to show the
first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon, had been
dead and buried several centuries, when a small tribe of shepherds left
their homes along the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in
search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, after Hellen,
the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According to the old myths these were the
only two human beings who had escaped the great flood, which countless
years before had destroyed all the people of the world, when they had
grown so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God, who lived on
Mount Olympus.
Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, the historian of the
fall of Athens, describing his earliest ancestors, said that they “did not
amount to very much,” and this was probably true. They were very
ill-mannered. They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies
to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect for
other people’s rights, and they killed the natives of the Greek peninsula
(who were called the Pelasgians) and stole their farms and took their
cattle and made their wives and daughters slaves and wrote endless songs
praising the courage of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic
advance-guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus.
But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw the castles of the
AEgeans and those they did not attack for they feared the metal swords and
the spears of the AEgean soldiers and knew that they could not hope to
defeat them with their clumsy stone axes.
For many centuries they continued to wander from valley to valley and from
mountain side to mountain side Then the whole of the land had been
occupied and the migration had come to an end.
That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The Greek farmer,
living within sight of the AEgean colonies, was finally driven by
curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours. He discovered that he could
learn many useful things from the men who dwelt behind the high stone
walls of Mycenae, and Tiryns.
He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered the art of handling
those strange iron weapons which the AEgeans had brought from Babylon and
from Thebes. He came to understand the mysteries of navigation. He began
to build little boats for his own use.
And when he had learned everything the AEgeans could teach him he turned
upon his teachers and drove them back to their islands. Soon afterwards he
ventured forth upon the sea and conquered all the cities of the AEgean.
Finally in the fifteenth century before our era he plundered and ravaged
Cnossus and ten centuries after their first appearance upon the scene the
Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece, of the AEgean and of the
coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy, the last great commercial stronghold
of the older civilisation, was destroyed in the eleventh century B.C.
European history was to begin in all seriousness.
THE GREEK CITIES
THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY STATES
WE modern people love the sound of the word “big.” We pride ourselves upon
the fact that we belong to the “biggest” country in the world and possess
the “biggest” navy and grow the “biggest” oranges and potatoes, and we
love to live in cities of “millions” of inhabitants and when we are dead
we are buried in the “biggest cemetery of the whole state.”
A citizen of ancient Greece, could he have heard us talk, would not have
known what we meant. “Moderation in all things” was the ideal of his life
and mere bulk did not impress him at all. And this love of moderation was
not merely a hollow phrase used upon special occasions: it influenced the
life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of their death.
It was part of their literature and it made them build small but perfect
temples. It found expression in the clothes which the men wore and in the
rings and the bracelets of their wives. It followed the crowds that went
to the theatre and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to sin
against the iron law of good taste or good sense.
The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their politicians and in
their most popular athletes. When a powerful runner came to Sparta and
boasted that he could stand longer on one foot than any other man in
Hellas the people drove him from the city because he prided himself upon
an accomplishment at which he could be beaten by any common goose. “That
is all very well,” you will say, “and no doubt it is a great virtue to
care so much for moderation and perfection, but why should the Greeks have
been the only people to develop this quality in olden times?” For an
answer I shall point to the way in which the Greeks lived.
The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the “subjects” of a mysterious
Supreme Ruler who lived miles and miles away in a dark palace and who was
rarely seen by the masses of the population. The Greeks on the other hand,
were “free citizens” of a hundred independent little “cities” the largest
of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large modern village. When a
peasant who lived in Ur said that he was a Babylonian he meant that he was
one of millions of other people who paid tribute to the king who at that
particular moment happened to be master of western Asia. But when a Greek
said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban he spoke of a small town,
which was both his home and his country and which recognised no master but
the will of the people in the market-place.
To the Greek, his fatherland was the place where he was born; where he had
spent his earliest years playing hide and seek amidst the forbidden rocks
of the Acropolis; where he had grown into manhood with a thousand other
boys and girls, whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your
own schoolmates. His Fatherland was the holy soil where his father and
mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high city-walls where
his wife and children lived in safety. It was a complete world which
covered no more than four or five acres of rocky land. Don’t you see how
these surroundings must have influenced a man in everything he did and
said and thought? The people of Babylon and Assyria and Egypt had been
part of a vast mob. They had been lost in the multitude. The Greek on the
other hand had never lost touch with his immediate surroundings. He never
ceased to be part of a little town where everybody knew every one else. He
felt that his intelligent neighbours were watching him. Whatever he did,
whether he wrote plays or made statues out of marble or composed songs, he
remembered that his efforts were going to be judged by all the free-born
citizens of his home-town who knew about such things. This knowledge
forced him to strive after perfection, and perfection, as he had been
taught from childhood, was not possible without moderation.
In this hard school, the Greeks learned to excel in many things. They
created new forms of government and new forms of literature and new ideals
in art which we have never been able to surpass. They performed these
miracles in little villages that covered less ground than four or five
modern city blocks.
And look, what finally happened!
In the fourth century before our era, Alexander of Macedonia conquered the
world. As soon as he had done with fighting, Alexander decided that he
must bestow the benefits of the true Greek genius upon all mankind. He
took it away from the little cities and the little villages and tried to
make it blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of his
newly acquired Empire. But the Greeks, removed from the familiar sight of
their own temples, removed from the well-known sounds and smells of their
own crooked streets, at once lost the cheerful joy and the marvellous
sense of moderation which had inspired the work of their hands and brains
while they laboured for the glory of their old city-states. They became
cheap artisans, content with second-rate work. The day the little
city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and were forced to
become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit died. And it has been
dead ever since.
GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT
THE GREEKS WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO TRY THE DIFFICULT EXPERIMENT OF
SELF-GOVERNMENT
IN the beginning, all the Greeks had been equally rich and equally poor.
Every man had owned a certain number of cows and sheep. His mud-hut had
been his castle. He had been free to come and go as he wished. Whenever it
was necessary to discuss matters of public importance, all the citizens
had gathered in the market-place. One of the older men of the village was
elected chairman and it was his duty to see that everybody had a chance to
express his views. In case of war, a particularly energetic and
self-confident villager was chosen commander-in-chief, but the same people
who had voluntarily given this man the right to be their leader, claimed
an equal right to deprive him of his job, once the danger had been
averted.
But gradually the village had grown into a city. Some people had worked
hard and others had been lazy. A few had been unlucky and still others had
been just plain dishonest in dealing with their neighbours and had
gathered wealth. As a result, the city no longer consisted of a number of
men who were equally well-off. On the contrary it was inhabited by a small
class of very rich people and a large class of very poor ones.
There had been another change. The old commander-in-chief who had been
willingly recognised as “headman” or “King” because he knew how to lead
his men to victory, had disappeared from the scene. His place had been
taken by the nobles—a class of rich people who during the course of
time had got hold of an undue share of the farms and estates.
These nobles enjoyed many advantages over the common crowd of freemen.
They were able to buy the best weapons which were to be found on the
market of the eastern Mediterranean. They had much spare time in which
they could practise the art of fighting. They lived in strongly built
houses and they could hire soldiers to fight for them. They were
constantly quarrelling among each other to decide who should rule the
city. The victorious nobleman then assumed a sort of Kingship over all his
neighbours and governed the town until he in turn was killed or driven
away by still another ambitious nobleman.
Such a King, by the grace of his soldiers, was called a “Tyrant” and
during the seventh and sixth centuries before our era every Greek city was
for a time ruled by such Tyrants, many of whom, by the way, happened to be
exceedingly capa-ble men. But in the long run, this state of affairs
became unbearable. Then attempts were made to bring about reforms and out
of these reforms grew the first democratic government of which the world
has a record.
It was early in the seventh century that the people of Athens decided to
do some housecleaning and give the large number of freemen once more a
voice in the government as they were supposed to have had in the days of
their Achaean ancestors. They asked a man by the name of Draco to provide
them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against the
aggressions of the rich. Draco set to work. Unfortunately he was a
professional lawyer and very much out of touch with ordinary life. In his
eyes a crime was a crime and when he had finished his code, the people of
Athens discovered that these Draconian laws were so severe that they could
not possibly be put into effect. There would not have been rope enough to
hang all the criminals under their new system of jurisprudence which made
the stealing of an apple a capital offence.
The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer. At last they found
some one who could do that sort of thing better than anybody else. His
name was Solon. He belonged to a noble family and he had travelled all
over the world and had studied the forms of government of many other
countries. After a careful study of the subject, Solon gave Athens a set
of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of moderation
which was part of the Greek character. He tried to improve the condition
of the peasant without however destroying the prosperity of the nobles who
were (or rather who could be) of such great service to the state as
soldiers. To protect the poorer classes against abuse on the part of the
judges (who were always elected from the class of the nobles because they
received no salary) Solon made a provision whereby a citizen with a
grievance had the right to state his case before a jury of thirty of his
fellow Athenians.
Most important of all, Solon forced the average freeman to take a direct
and personal interest in the affairs of the city. No longer could he stay
at home and say “oh, I am too busy today” or “it is raining and I had
better stay indoors.” He was expected to do his share; to be at the
meeting of the town council; and carry part of the responsibility for the
safety and the prosperity of the state.
This government by the “demos,” the people, was often far from successful.
There was too much idle talk. There were too many hateful and spiteful
scenes between rivals for official honor. But it taught the Greek people
to be independent and to rely upon themselves for their salvation and that
was a very good thing.
GREEK LIFE
HOW THE GREEKS LIVED
BUT how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time to look after
their families and their business if they were forever running to the
market-place to discuss affairs of state? In this chapter I shall tell
you.
In all matters of government, the Greek democracy recognised only one
class of citizens—the freemen. Every Greek city was composed of a
small number of free born citizens, a large number of slaves and a
sprinkling of foreigners.
At rare intervals (usually during a war, when men were needed for the
army) the Greeks showed themselves willing to confer the rights of
citizenship upon the “barbarians” as they called the foreigners. But this
was an exception. Citizenship was a matter of birth. You were an Athenian
because your father and your grandfather had been Athenians before you.
But however great your merits as a trader or a soldier, if you were born
of non-Athenian parents, you remained a “foreigner” until the end of time.
The Greek city, therefore, whenever it was not ruled by a king or a
tyrant, was run by and for the freemen, and this would not have been
possible without a large army of slaves who outnumbered the free citizens
at the rate of six or five to one and who performed those tasks to which
we modern people must devote most of our time and energy if we wish to
provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments. The slaves
did all the cooking and baking and candlestick making of the entire city.
They were the tailors and the carpenters and the jewelers and the
school-teachers and the bookkeepers and they tended the store and looked
after the factory while the master went to the public meeting to discuss
questions of war and peace or visited the theatre to see the latest play
of AEschylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary ideas of Euripides,
who had dared to express certain doubts upon the omnipotence of the great
god Zeus.
Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club. All the freeborn citizens
were hereditary members and all the slaves were hereditary servants, and
waited upon the needs of their masters, and it was very pleasant to be a
member of the organisation.
But when we talk about slaves, we do not mean the sort of people about
whom you have read in the pages of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It is true that
the position of those slaves who tilled the fields was a very unpleasant
one, but the average freeman who had come down in the world and who had
been obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miserable a
life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were more prosperous
than the poorer classes of the freemen. For the Greeks, who loved
moderation in all things, did not like to treat their slaves after the
fashion which afterward was so common in Rome, where a slave had as few
rights as an engine in a modern factory and could be thrown to the wild
animals upon the smallest pretext.
The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution, without which no
city could possibly become the home of a truly civilised people.
The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are performed by
the business men and the professional men. As for those household duties
which take up so much of the time of your mother and which worry your
father when he comes home from his office, the Greeks, who understood the
value of leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible minimum
by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity.
To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich nobles spent
their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked all the comforts which a
modern workman expects as his natural right. A Greek home consisted of
four walls and a roof. There was a door which led into the street but
there were no windows. The kitchen, the living rooms and the sleeping
quarters were built around an open courtyard in which there was a small
fountain, or a statue and a few plants to make it look bright. Within this
courtyard the family lived when it did not rain or when it was not too
cold. In one corner of the yard the cook (who was a slave) prepared the
meal and in another corner, the teacher (who was also a slave) taught the
children the alpha beta gamma and the tables of multiplication and in
still another corner the lady of the house, who rarely left her domain
(since it was not considered good form for a married woman to be seen on
the street too often) was repairing her husband’s coat with her
seamstresses (who were slaves,) and in the little office, right off the
door, the master was inspecting the accounts which the overseer of his
farm (who was a slave) had just brought to him.
When dinner was ready the family came together but the meal was a very
simple one and did not take much time. The Greeks seem to have regarded
eating as an unavoidable evil and not a pastime, which kills many dreary
hours and eventually kills many dreary people. They lived on bread and on
wine, with a little meat and some green vegetables. They drank water only
when nothing else was available because they did not think it very
healthy. They loved to call on each other for dinner, but our idea of a
festive meal, where everybody is supposed to eat much more than is good
for him, would have disgusted them. They came together at the table for
the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water, but as they
were moderate people they despised those who drank too much.
The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room also dominated
their choice of clothes. They liked to be clean and well groomed, to have
their hair and beards neatly cut, to feel their bodies strong with the
exercise and the swimming of the gymnasium, but they never followed the
Asiatic fashion which prescribed loud colours and strange patterns. They
wore a long white coat and they managed to look as smart as a modern
Italian officer in his long blue cape.
They loved to see their wives wear ornaments but they thought it very
vulgar to display their wealth (or their wives) in public and whenever the
women left their home they were as inconspicuous as possible.
In short, the story of Greek life is a story not only of moderation but
also of simplicity. “Things,” chairs and tables and books and houses and
carriages, are apt to take up a great deal of their owner’s time. In the
end they invariably make him their slave and his hours are spent looking
after their wants, keeping them polished and brushed and painted. The
Greeks, before everything else, wanted to be “free,” both in mind and in
body. That they might maintain their liberty, and be truly free in spirit,
they reduced their daily needs to the lowest possible point.
THE GREEK THEATRE
THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST FORM OF PUBLIC AMUSEMENT
AT a very early stage of their history the Greeks had begun to collect the
poems, which had been written in honor of their brave ancestors who had
driven the Pelasgians out of Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy.
These poems were recited in public and everybody came to listen to them.
But the theatre, the form of entertainment which has become almost a
necessary part of our own lives, did not grow out of these recited heroic
tales. It had such a curious origin that I must tell you something about
it in a separate chapter
The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every year they held solemn
processions in honor of Dionysos the God of the wine. As everybody in
Greece drank wine (the Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose of
swimming and sailing) this particular Divinity was as popular as a God of
the Soda-Fountain would be in our own land.
And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the vineyards, amidst a
merry mob of Satyrs (strange creatures who were half man and half goat),
the crowd that joined the procession used to wear goat-skins and to
hee-haw like real billy-goats. The Greek word for goat is “tragos” and the
Greek word for singer is “oidos.” The singer who meh-mehed like a goat
therefore was called a “tragos-oidos” or goat singer, and it is this
strange name which developed into the modern word “Tragedy,” which means
in the theatrical sense a piece with an unhappy ending, just as Comedy
(which really means the singing of something “comos” or gay) is the name
given to a play which ends happily.
But how, you will ask, did this noisy chorus of masqueraders, stamping
around like wild goats, ever develop into the noble tragedies which have
filled the theatres of the world for almost two thousand years?
The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is really very
simple as I shall show you in a moment.
The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and attracted large
crowds of spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed. But
soon this business of tree-hawing grew tiresome and the Greeks thought
dullness an evil only comparable to ugliness or sickness. They asked for
something more entertaining. Then an inventive young poet from the village
of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tremendous success.
He made one of the members of the goat-chorus step forward and engage in
conversation with the leader of the musicians who marched at the head of
the parade playing upon their pipes of Pan. This individual was allowed to
step out of line. He waved his arms and gesticulated while he spoke (that
is to say he “acted” while the others merely stood by and sang) and he
asked a lot of questions, which the bandmaster answered according to the
roll of papyrus upon which the poet had written down these answers before
the show began.
This rough and ready conversation—the dialogue—which told the
story of Dionysos or one of the other Gods, became at once popular with
the crowd. Henceforth every Dionysian procession had an “acted scene” and
very soon the “acting” was considered more important than the procession
and the meh-mehing.
AEschylus, the most successful of all “tragedians” who wrote no less than
eighty plays during his long life (from 526 to 455) made a bold step
forward when he introduced two “actors” instead of one. A generation later
Sophocles increased the number of actors to three. When Euripides began to
write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the fifth century, B.C., he
was allowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristophanes wrote those
famous comedies in which he poked fun at everybody and everything,
including the Gods of Mount Olympus, the chorus had been reduced to the
role of mere bystanders who were lined up behind the principal performers
and who sang “this is a terrible world” while the hero in the foreground
committed a crime against the will of the Gods.
This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a proper setting, and
soon every Greek city owned a theatre, cut out of the rock of a nearby
hill. The spectators sat upon wooden benches and faced a wide circle (our
present orchestra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a
seat). Upon this half-circle, which was the stage, the actors and the
chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where they made up
with large clay masks which hid their faces and which showed the
spectators whether the actors were supposed to be happy and smiling or
unhappy and weeping. The Greek word for tent is “skene” and that is the
reason why we talk of the “scenery” of the stage.
When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the people took it
very seriously and never went to the theatre to give their minds a
vacation. A new play became as important an event as an election and a
successful playwright was received with greater honors than those bestowed
upon a general who had just returned from a famous victory.
THE PERSIAN WARS
HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE AGAINST ASIATIC INVASION AND DROVE THE
PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN SEA
THE Greeks had learned the art of trading from the AEgeans who had been
the pupils of the Phoenicians. They had founded colonies after the
Phoenician pattern. They had even improved upon the Phoenician methods by
a more general use of money in dealing with foreign customers. In the
sixth century before our era they had established themselves firmly along
the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away trade from the
Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoenicians of course did not like
but they were not strong enough to risk a war with their Greek
competitors. They sat and waited nor did they wait in vain.
In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe of Persian
shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath and had conquered the greater
part of western Asia. The Persians were too civilised to plunder their new
subjects. They contented themselves with a yearly tribute. When they
reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek colonies of
Lydia recognize the Persian Kings as their over-Lords and pay them a
stipulated tax. The Greek colonies objected. The Persians insisted. Then
the Greek colonies appealed to the home-country and the stage was set for
a quarrel.
For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the Greek city-states
as very dangerous political institutions and bad examples for all other
people who were supposed to be the patient slaves of the mighty Persian
Kings.
Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety because their
country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the AEgean. But here their
old enemies, the Phoenicians, stepped forward with offers of help and
advice to the Persians. If the Persian King would provide the soldiers,
the Phoenicians would guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry
them to Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and Asia
made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe.
As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers to the Greeks asking
for “earth and water” as a token of their submission. The Greeks promptly
threw the messengers into the nearest well where they would find both
“earth and water” in large abundance and thereafter of course peace was
impossible.
But the Gods of High Olympus watched over their children and when the
Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops was near Mount Athos, the
Storm-God blew his cheeks until he almost burst the veins of his brow, and
the fleet was destroyed by a terrible hurricane and the Persians were all
drowned.
Two years later they returned. This time they sailed straight across the
AEgean Sea and landed near the village of Marathon. As soon as the
Athenians heard this they sent their army of ten thousand men to guard the
hills that surrounded the Marathonian plain. At the same time they
despatched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta was envious
of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her assistance. The other
Greek cities followed her example with the exception of tiny Plataea which
sent a thousand men. On the twelfth of September of the year 490,
Miltiades, the Athenian commander, threw this little army against the
hordes of the Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of
arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disorganised
Asiatic troops who had never been called upon to resist such an enemy.
That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow red with the flames
of burning ships. Anxiously they waited for news. At last a little cloud
of dust appeared upon the road that led to the North. It was Pheidippides,
the runner. He stumbled and gasped for his end was near. Only a few days
before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. He had hastened to join
Miltiades. That morning he had taken part in the attack and later he had
volunteered to carry the news of victory to his beloved city. The people
saw him fall and they rushed forward to support him. “We have won,” he
whispered and then he died, a glorious death which made him envied of all
men.
As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land near Athens
but they found the coast guarded and disappeared, and once more the land
of Hellas was at peace.
Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks were not idle.
They knew that a final attack was to be expected but they did not agree
upon the best way to avert the danger. Some people wanted to increase the
army. Others said that a strong fleet was necessary for success. The two
parties led by Aristides (for the army) and Themistocles (the leader of
the bigger-navy men) fought each other bitterly and nothing was done until
Aristides was exiled. Then Themistocles had his chance and he built all
the ships he could and turned the Piraeus into a strong naval base.
In the year 481 B.C. a tremendous Persian army appeared in Thessaly, a
province of northern Greece. In this hour of danger, Sparta, the great
military city of Greece, was elected commander-in-chief. But the Spartans
cared little what happened to northern Greece provided their own country
was not invaded, They neglected to fortify the passes that led into
Greece.
A small detachment of Spartans under Leonidas had been told to guard the
narrow road between the high mountains and the sea which connected
Thessaly with the southern provinces. Leonidas obeyed his orders. He
fought and held the pass with unequalled bravery. But a traitor by the
name of Ephialtes who knew the little byways of Malis guided a regiment of
Persians through the hills and made it possible for them to attack
Leonidas in the rear. Near the Warm Wells—the Thermopylae—a
terrible battle was fought.
When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the
corpses of their enemies.
But the pass had been lost and the greater part of Greece fell into the
hands of the Persians. They marched upon Athens, threw the garrison from
the rocks of the Acropolis and burned the city. The people fled to the
Island of Salamis. All seemed lost. But on the 20th of September of the
year 480 Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the
narrow straits which separated the Island of Salamis from the mainland and
within a few hours he destroyed three quarters of the Persian ships.
In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught. Xerxes was forced
to retire. The next year, so he decreed, would bring a final decision. He
took his troops to Thessaly and there he waited for spring.
But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of the hour. They
left the safe shelter of the wall which they had built across the isthmus
of Corinth and under the leadership of Pausanias they marched against
Mardonius the Persian general. The united Greeks (some one hundred
thousand men from a dozen different cities) attacked the three hundred
thou-sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy Greek
infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows. The Persians were
defeated, as they had been at Marathon, and this time they left for good.
By a strange coincidence, the same day that the Greek armies won their
victory near Plataea, the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy’s fleet near
Cape Mycale in Asia Minor.
Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end. Athens had
covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought bravely and well. If
these two cities had been able to come to an agreement, if they had been
willing to forget their little jealousies, they might have become the
leaders of a strong and united Hellas.
But alas, they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm to slip by, and
the same opportunity never returned.
ATHENS vs. SPARTA
HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG AND DISASTROUS WAR FOR THE LEADERSHIP
OF GREECE
ATHENS and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people spoke a common
language. In every other respect they were different. Athens rose high
from the plain. It was a city exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea,
willing to look at the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on
the other hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the
surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought. Athens was a
city of busy trade. Sparta was an armed camp where people were soldiers
for the sake of being soldiers. The people of Athens loved to sit in the
sun and discuss poetry or listen to the wise words of a philosopher. The
Spartans, on the other hand, never wrote a single line that was considered
literature, but they knew how to fight, they liked to fight, and they
sacrificed all human emotions to their ideal of military preparedness.
No wonder that these sombre Spartans viewed the success of Athens with
malicious hate. The energy which the defence of the common home had
developed in Athens was now used for purposes of a more peaceful nature.
The Acropolis was rebuilt and was made into a marble shrine to the Goddess
Athena. Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, sent far and wide
to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to make the city more
beautiful and the young Athenians more worthy of their home. At the same
time he kept a watchful eye on Sparta and built high walls which connected
Athens with the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day.
An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led to the final
conflict. For thirty years the war between Athens and Sparta continued. It
ended in a terrible disaster for Athens.
During the third year of the war the plague had entered the city. More
than half of the people and Pericles, the great leader, had been killed.
The plague was followed by a period of bad and untrustworthy leadership. A
brilliant young fellow by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor of
the popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the Spartan colony of
Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and everything was ready.
But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street brawl and was forced to flee. The
general who succeeded him was a bungler. First he lost his ships and then
he lost his army, and the few surviving Athenians were thrown into the
stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died from hunger and thirst.
The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens. The city was
doomed. After a long siege the town surrendered in April of the year 404.
The high walls were demolished. The navy was taken away by the Spartans.
Athens ceased to exist as the center of the great colonial empire which it
had conquered during the days of its prosperity. But that wonderful desire
to learn and to know and to investigate which had distinguished her free
citizens during the days of greatness and prosperity did not perish with
the walls and the ships. It continued to live. It became even more
brilliant.
Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece. But now, as
the home of the first great university the city began to influence the
minds of intelligent people far beyond the narrow frontiers of Hellas.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE, AND WHAT BECAME
OF THIS HIGH AMBITION
WHEN the Achaeans had left their homes along the banks of the Danube to
look for pastures new, they had spent some time among the mountains of
Macedonia. Ever since, the Greeks had maintained certain more or less
formal relations with the people of this northern country. The Macedonians
from their side had kept themselves well informed about conditions in
Greece.
Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had finished their disastrous
war for the leadership of Hellas, that Macedonia was ruled by an
extraordinarily clever man by the name of Philip. He admired the Greek
spirit in letters and art but he despised the Greek lack of self-control
in political affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly good people
waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the
difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and then he asked
his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he meant to pay to Persia
in return for the visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks one hundred and
fifty years before.
Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start upon this
well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the destruction of Athens
was left to Philip’s son Alexander, the beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest
of all Greek teachers.
Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the year 334 B.C. Seven
years later he reached India. In the meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia,
the old rival of the Greek merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been
worshipped by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the
Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king—he had overthrown
the Persian empire he had given orders to rebuild Babylon—he had led
his troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and had made the
entire world a Macedonian province and dependency. Then he stopped and
announced even more ambitious plans.
The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence of the Greek
mind. The people must be taught the Greek language—they must live in
cities built after a Greek model. The Alexandrian soldier now turned
school-master. The military camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres
of the newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the flood
of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly Alexander was
stricken with a fever and died in the old palace of King Hammurabi of
Babylon in the year 323.
Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay of a higher
civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish ambitions and his silly
vanities, had performed a most valuable service. His Empire did not long
survive him. A number of ambitious generals divided the territory among
themselves. But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world
brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.
They maintained their independence until the Romans added western Asia and
Egypt to their other domains. The strange inheritance of this Hellenistic
civilisation (part Greek, part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell
to the Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got such a
firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its influence in our own
lives this very day.
A SUMMARY
A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20
THUS far, from the top of our high tower we have been looking eastward.
But from this time on, the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is going to
grow less interesting and I must take you to study the western landscape.
Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to ourselves what
we have seen.
First of all I showed you prehistoric man—a creature very simple in
his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I told you how he was the
most defenceless of the many animals that roamed through the early
wilderness of the five continents, but being possessed of a larger and
better brain, he managed to hold his own.
Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life on
this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three times
as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however, that “wish
to survive” was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every living being
going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man
was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people manage
to exist through the long cold spells which killed many ferocious animals,
but when the earth became warm and comfortable once more, prehistoric man
had learned a number of things which gave him such great advantages over
his less intelligent neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very
serious one during the first half million years of man’s residence upon
this planet) became a very remote one.
I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding along
when suddenly (and for reasons that are not well understood) the people
who lived in the valley of the Nile rushed ahead and almost over night,
created the first centre of civilisation.
Then I showed you Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers,” which was
the second great school of the human race. And I made you a map of the
little island bridges of the AEgean Sea, which carried the knowledge and
the science of the old east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.
Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes, who
thousands of years before had left the heart of Asia and who had in the
eleventh century before our era pushed their way into the rocky peninsula
of Greece and who, since then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I
told you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states,
where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured (that is a
big word, but you can “figure out” what it means) into something quite
new, something that was much nobler and finer than anything that had gone
before.
When you look at the map you will see how by this time civilisation has
described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt, and by way of Mesopotamia and
the AEgean Islands it moves westward until it reaches the European
continent. The first four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and
Phoenicians and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember that the
Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples) have carried the
torch that was to illuminate the world. They now hand it over to the
Indo-European Greeks, who become the teachers of another Indo-European
tribe, called the Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward
along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves the rulers of
the western half of the Mediterranean just when the eastern half has
become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.
This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict between
the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises the victorious Roman
Empire, which is to take this Egyptian-Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to
the furthermost corners of the European continent, where it serves as the
foundation upon which our modern society is based.
I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold of these few
principles, the rest of our history will become a great deal simpler. The
maps will make clear what the words fail to tell. And after this short
intermission, we go back to our story and give you an account of the
famous war between Carthage and Rome.
ROME AND CARTHAGE
THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE
INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH OTHER
FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE WAS DESTROYED
THE little Phoenician trading post of Kart-hadshat stood on a low hill
which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of water ninety miles wide
which separates Africa from Europe. It was an ideal spot for a commercial
centre. Almost too ideal. It grew too fast and became too rich. When in
the sixth century before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed
Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with the Mother Country and
became an independent state—the great western advance-post of the
Semitic races.
Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits which for a
thousand years had been characteristic of the Phoenicians. It was a vast
business-house, protected by a strong navy, indifferent to most of the
finer aspects of life. The city and the surrounding country and the
distant colonies were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group
of rich men, The Greek word for rich is “ploutos” and the Greeks called
such a government by “rich men” a “Plutocracy.” Carthage was a plutocracy
and the real power of the state lay in the hands of a dozen big
ship-owners and mine-owners and merchants who met in the back room of an
office and regarded their common Fatherland as a business enterprise which
ought to yield them a decent profit. They were however wide awake and full
of energy and worked very hard.
As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her neighbours
increased until the greater part of the African coast, Spain and certain
regions of France were Carthaginian possessions, and paid tribute, taxes
and dividends to the mighty city on the African Sea.
Of course, such a “plutocracy” was forever at the mercy of the crowd. As
long as there was plenty of work and wages were high, the majority of the
citizens were quite contented, allowed their “betters” to rule them and
asked no embarrassing questions. But when no ships left the harbor, when
no ore was brought to the smelting-ovens, when dockworkers and stevedores
were thrown out of employment, then there were grumblings and there was a
demand that the popular assembly be called together as in the olden days
when Carthage had been a self-governing republic.
To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged to keep the
business of the town going at full speed. They had managed to do this very
successfully for almost five hun-dred years when they were greatly
disturbed by certain rumors which reached them from the western coast of
Italy. It was said that a little village on the banks of the Tiber had
suddenly risen to great power and was making itself the acknowledged
leader of all the Latin tribes who inhabited central Italy. It was also
said that this village, which by the way was called Rome, intended to
build ships and go after the commerce of Sicily and the southern coast of
France.
Carthage could not possibly tolerate such competition. The young rival
must be destroyed lest the Carthaginian rulers lose their prestige as the
absolute rulers of the western Mediterranean. The rumors were duly
investigated and in a general way these were the facts that came to light.
The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civilisation. Whereas
in Greece all the good harbours faced eastward and enjoyed a full view of
the busy islands of the AEgean, the west coast of Italy contemplated
nothing more exciting than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The
country was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants and
the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession of their hills
and their marshy plains.
The first serious invasion of this land came from the north. At an unknown
date certain Indo-European tribes had managed to find their way through
the passes of the Alps and had pushed southward until they had filled the
heel and the toe of the famous Italian boot with their villages and their
flocks. Of these early conquerors we know nothing. No Homer sang their
glory. Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome (written eight hundred
years later when the little city had become the centre of an Empire) are
fairy stories and do not belong in a history. Romulus and Remus jumping
across each other’s walls (I always forget who jumped across whose wall)
make entertaining reading, but the foundation of the City of Rome was a
much more prosaic affair. Rome began as a thousand American cities have
done, by being a convenient place for barter and horse-trading. It lay in
the heart of the plains of central Italy The Tiber provided direct access
to the sea. The land-road from north to south found here a convenient ford
which could be used all the year around. And seven little hills along the
banks of the river offered the inhabitants a safe shelter against their
enemies who lived in the mountains and those who lived beyond the horizon
of the nearby sea.
The mountaineers were called the Sabines. They were a rough crowd with an
unholy desire for easy plunder. But they were very backward. They used
stone axes and wooden shields and were no match for the Romans with their
steel swords. The sea-people on the other hand were dangerous foes. They
were called the Etruscans and they were (and still are) one of the great
mysteries of history. Nobody knew (or knows) whence they came; who they
were; what had driven them away from their original homes. We have found
the remains of their cities and their cemeteries and their waterworks all
along the Italian coast. We are familiar with their inscriptions. But as
no one has ever been able to decipher the Etruscan alphabet, these written
messages are, so far, merely annoying and not at all useful.
Our best guess is that the Etruscans came originally from Asia Minor and
that a great war or a pestilence in that country had forced them to go
away and seek a new home elsewhere. Whatever the reason for their coming,
the Etruscans played a great role in history. They carried the pollen of
the ancient civilisation from the east to the west and they taught the
Romans who, as we know, came from the north, the first principles of
architecture and street-building and fighting and art and cookery and
medicine and astronomy.
But just as the Greeks had not loved their AEgean teachers, in this same
way did the Romans hate their Etruscan masters. They got rid of them as
soon as they could and the opportunity offered itself when Greek merchants
discovered the commercial possibilities of Italy and when the first Greek
vessels reached Rome. The Greeks came to trade, but they stayed to
instruct. They found the tribes who inhabited the Roman country-side (and
who were called the Latins) quite willing to learn such things as might be
of practical use. At once they understood the great benefit that could be
derived from a written alphabet and they copied that of the Greeks. They
also understood the commercial advantages of a well-regulated system of
coins and measures and weights. Eventually the Romans swallowed Greek
civilisation hook, line and sinker.
They even welcomed the Gods of the Greeks to their country. Zeus was taken
to Rome where he became known as Jupiter and the other divinities followed
him. The Roman Gods however never were quite like their cheerful cousins
who had accompanied the Greeks on their road through life and through
history. The Roman Gods were State Functionaries. Each one managed his own
department with great prudence and a deep sense of justice, but in turn he
was exact in demanding the obedience of his worshippers. This obedience
the Romans rendered with scrupulous care. But they never established the
cordial personal relations and that charming friendship which had existed
between the old Hellenes and the mighty residents of the high Olympian
peak.
The Romans did not imitate the Greek form of government, but being of the
same Indo-European stock as the people of Hellas, the early history of
Rome resembles that of Athens and the other Greek cities. They did not
find it difficult to get rid of their kings, the descendants of the
ancient tribal chieftains. But once the kings had been driven from the
city, the Romans were forced to bridle the power of the nobles, and it
took many centuries before they managed to establish a system which gave
every free citizen of Rome a chance to take a personal interest in the
affairs of his town.
Thereafter the Romans enjoyed one great advantage over the Greeks. They
managed the affairs of their country without making too many speeches.
They were less imaginative than the Greeks and they preferred an ounce of
action to a pound of words. They understood the tendency of the multitude
(the “plebe,” as the assemblage of free citizens was called) only too well
to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They therefore placed the actual
business of running the city into the hands of two “consuls” who were
assisted by a council of Elders, called the Senate (because the word
“senex” means an old man). As a matter of custom and practical advantage
the senators were elected from the nobility. But their power had been
strictly defined.
Rome at one time had passed through the same sort of struggle between the
poor and the rich which had forced Athens to adopt the laws of Draco and
Solon. In Rome this conflict had occurred in the fifth century B. C. As a
result the freemen had obtained a written code of laws which protected
them against the despotism of the aristocratic judges by the institution
of the “Tribune.” These Tribunes were city-magistrates, elected by the
freemen. They had the right to protect any citizen against those actions
of the government officials which were thought to be unjust. A consul had
the right to condemn a man to death, but if the case had not been
absolutely proved the Tribune could interfere and save the poor fellow’s
life.
But when I use the word Rome, I seem to refer to a little city of a few
thousand inhabitants. And the real strength of Rome lay in the country
districts outside her walls. And it was in the government of these
outlying provinces that Rome at an early age showed her wonderful gift as
a colonising power.
In very early times Rome had been the only strongly fortified city in
central Italy, but it had always offered a hospitable refuge to other
Latin tribes who happened to be in danger of attack. The Latin neighbours
had recognised the advantages of a close union with such a powerful friend
and they had tried to find a basis for some sort of defensive and
offensive alliance. Other nations, Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians,
even Greeks, would have insisted upon a treaty of submission on the part
of the “barbarians,” The Romans did nothing of the sort. They gave the
“outsider” a chance to become partners in a common “res publica”—or
common-wealth.
“You want to join us,” they said. “Very well, go ahead and join. We shall
treat you as if you were full-fledged citizens of Rome. In return for this
privilege we expect you to fight for our city, the mother of us all,
whenever it shall be necessary.”
The “outsider” appreciated this generosity and he showed his gratitude by
his unswerving loyalty.
Whenever a Greek city had been attacked, the foreign residents had moved
out as quickly as they could. Why defend something which meant nothing to
them but a temporary boarding house in which they were tolerated as long
as they paid their bills? But when the enemy was before the gates of Rome,
all the Latins rushed to her defence. It was their Mother who was in
danger. It was their true “home” even if they lived a hundred miles away
and had never seen the walls of the sacred Hills.
No defeat and no disaster could change this sentiment. In the beginning of
the fourth century B.C. the wild Gauls forced their way into Italy. They
had defeated the Roman army near the River Allia and had marched upon the
city. They had taken Rome and then they expected that the people would
come and sue for peace. They waited, but nothing happened. After a short
time the Gauls found themselves surrounded by a hostile population which
made it impossible for them to obtain supplies. After seven months, hunger
forced them to withdraw. The policy of Rome to treat the “foreigner” on
equal terms had proved a great success and Rome stood stronger than ever
before.
This short account of the early history of Rome shows you the enormous
difference between the Roman ideal of a healthy state, and that of the
ancient world which was embodied in the town of Carthage. The Romans
counted upon the cheerful and hearty co-operation between a number of
“equal citizens.” The Carthaginians, following the example of Egypt and
western Asia, insisted upon the unreasoning (and therefore unwilling)
obedience of “Subjects” and when these failed they hired professional
soldiers to do their fighting for them.
You will now understand why Carthage was bound to fear such a clever and
powerful enemy and why the plutocracy of Carthage was only too willing to
pick a quarrel that they might destroy the dangerous rival before it was
too late.
But the Carthaginians, being good business men, knew that it never pays to
rush matters. They proposed to the Romans that their respective cities
draw two circles on the map and that each town claim one of these circles
as her own “sphere of influence” and promise to keep out of the other
fellow’s circle. The agreement was promptly made and was broken just as
promptly when both sides thought it wise to send their armies to Sicily
where a rich soil and a bad government invited foreign interference.
The war which followed (the so-called first Punic War) lasted twenty-four
years. It was fought out on the high seas and in the beginning it seemed
that the experienced Carthaginian navy would defeat the newly created
Roman fleet. Following their ancient tactics, the Carthaginian ships would
either ram the enemy vessels or by a bold attack from the side they would
break their oars and would then kill the sailors of the helpless vessel
with their arrows and with fire balls. But Roman engineers invented a new
craft which carried a boarding bridge across which the Roman infantrymen
stormed the hostile ship. Then there was a sudden end to Carthaginian
victories. At the battle of Mylae their fleet was badly defeated. Carthage
was obliged to sue for peace, and Sicily became part of the Roman domains.
Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. Rome (in quest of copper) had
taken the island of Sardinia. Carthage (in quest of silver) thereupon
occupied all of southern Spain. This made Carthage a direct neighbour of
the Romans. The latter did not like this at all and they ordered their
troops to cross the Pyrenees and watch the Carthaginian army of
occupation.
The stage was set for the second outbreak between the two rivals. Once
more a Greek colony was the pretext for a war. The Carthaginians were
besieging Saguntum on the east coast of Spain. The Saguntians appealed to
Rome and Rome, as usual, was willing to help. The Senate promised the help
of the Latin armies, but the preparation for this expedition took some
time, and meanwhile Saguntum had been taken and had been destroyed. This
had been done in direct opposition to the will of Rome. The Senate decided
upon war. One Roman army was to cross the African sea and make a landing
on Carthaginian soil. A second division was to keep the Carthaginian
armies occupied in Spain to prevent them from rushing to the aid of the
home town. It was an excellent plan and everybody expected a great
victory. But the Gods had decided otherwise.
It was the fall of the year 218 before the birth of Christ and the Roman
army which was to attack the Carthaginians in Spain had left Italy. People
were eagerly waiting for news of an easy and complete victory when a
terrible rumour began to spread through the plain of the Po. Wild
mountaineers, their lips trembling with fear, told of hundreds of
thousands of brown men accompanied by strange beasts “each one as big as a
house,” who had suddenly emerged from the clouds of snow which surrounded
the old Graian pass through which Hercules, thousands of years before, had
driven the oxen of Geryon on his way from Spain to Greece. Soon an endless
stream of bedraggled refugees appeared before the gates of Rome, with more
complete details. Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, with fifty thousand
soldiers, nine thousand horsemen and thirty-seven fighting elephants, had
crossed the Pyrenees. He had defeated the Roman army of Scipio on the
banks of the Rhone and he had guided his army safely across the mountain
passes of the Alps although it was October and the roads were thickly
covered with snow and ice. Then he had joined forces with the Gauls and
together they had defeated a second Roman army just before they crossed
the Trebia and laid siege to Placentia, the northern terminus of the road
which connected Rome with the province of the Alpine districts.
The Senate, surprised but calm and energetic as usual, hushed up the news
of these many defeats and sent two fresh armies to stop the invader.
Hannibal managed to surprise these troops on a narrow road along the
shores of the Trasimene Lake and there he killed all the Roman officers
and most of their men. This time there was a panic among the people of
Rome, but the Senate kept its nerve. A third army was organised and the
command was given to Quintus Fabius Maximus with full power to act “as was
necessary to save the state.”
Fabius knew that he must be very careful lest all be lost. His raw and
untrained men, the last available soldiers, were no match for Hannibal’s
veterans. He refused to accept battle but forever he followed Hannibal,
destroyed everything eatable, destroyed the roads, attacked small
detachments and generally weakened the morale of the Carthaginian troops
by a most distressing and annoying form of guerilla warfare.
Such methods however did not satisfy the fearsome crowds who had found
safety behind the walls of Rome. They wanted “action.” Something must be
done and must be done quickly. A popular hero by the name of Varro, the
sort of man who went about the city telling everybody how much better he
could do things than slow old Fabius, the “Delayer,” was made
commander-in-chief by popular acclamation. At the battle of Cannae (216)
he suffered the most terrible defeat of Roman history. More than seventy
thousand men were killed. Hannibal was master of all Italy.
He marched from one end of the peninsula to the other, proclaiming himself
the “deliverer from the yoke of Rome” and asking the different provinces
to join him in warfare upon the mother city. Then once more the wisdom of
Rome bore noble fruit. With the exceptions of Capua and Syracuse, all
Roman cities remained loyal. Hannibal, the deliverer, found himself
opposed by the people whose friend he pretended to be. He was far away
from home and did not like the situation. He sent messengers to Carthage
to ask for fresh supplies and new men. Alas, Carthage could not send him
either.
The Romans with their boarding-bridges, were the masters of the sea.
Hannibal must help himself as best he could. He continued to defeat the
Roman armies that were sent out against him, but his own numbers were
decreasing rapidly and the Italian peasants held aloof from this
self-appointed “deliverer.”
After many years of uninterrupted victories, Hannibal found himself
besieged in the country which he had just conquered. For a moment, the
luck seemed to turn. Hasdrubal, his brother, had defeated the Roman armies
in Spain. He had crossed the Alps to come to Hannibal’s assistance. He
sent messengers to the south to tell of his arrival and ask the other army
to meet him in the plain of the Tiber. Unfortunately the messengers fell
into the hands of the Romans and Hannibal waited in vain for further news
until his brother’s head, neatly packed in a basket, came rolling into his
camp and told him of the fate of the last of the Carthaginian troops.
With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio easily reconquered
Spain and four years later the Romans were ready for a final attack upon
Carthage. Hannibal was called back. He crossed the African Sea and tried
to organise the defences of his home-city. In the year 202 at the battle
of Zama, the Carthaginians were defeated. Hannibal fled to Tyre. From
there he went to Asia Minor to stir up the Syrians and the Macedonians
against Rome. He accomplished very little but his activities among these
Asiatic powers gave the Romans an excuse to carry their warfare into the
territory of the east and annex the greater part of the AEgean world.
Driven from one city to another, a fugitive without a home, Hannibal at
last knew that the end of his ambitious dream had come. His beloved city
of Carthage had been ruined by the war. She had been forced to sign a
terrible peace. Her navy had been sunk. She had been forbidden to make war
without Roman permission. She had been condemned to pay the Romans
millions of dollars for endless years to come. Life offered no hope of a
better future. In the year 190 B.C. Hannibal took poison and killed
himself.
Forty years later, the Romans forced their last war upon Carthage. Three
long years the inhabitants of the old Phoenician colony held out against
the power of the new republic. Hunger forced them to surrender. The few
men and women who had survived the siege were sold as slaves. The city was
set on fire. For two whole weeks the store-houses and the pal-aces and the
great arsenal burned. Then a terrible curse was pronounced upon the
blackened ruins and the Roman legions returned to Italy to enjoy their
victory.
For the next thousand years, the Mediterranean remained a European sea.
But as soon as the Roman Empire had been destroyed, Asia made another
attempt to dominate this great inland sea, as you will learn when I tell
you about Mohammed.
THE RISE OF ROME
HOW ROME HAPPENED
THE Roman Empire was an accident. No one planned it. It “happened.” No
famous general or statesman or cut-throat ever got up and said “Friends,
Romans, Citizens, we must found an Empire. Follow me and together we shall
conquer all the land from the Gates of Hercules to Mount Taurus.”
Rome produced famous generals and equally distinguished statesmen and
cut-throats, and Roman armies fought all over the world. But the Roman
empire-making was done without a preconceived plan. The average Roman was
a very matter-of-fact citizen. He disliked theories about government. When
someone began to recite “eastward the course of Roman Empire, etc., etc.,”
he hastily left the forum. He just continued to take more and more land
because circumstances forced him to do so. He was not driven by ambition
or by greed. Both by nature and inclination he was a farmer and wanted to
stay at home. But when he was attacked he was obliged to defend himself
and when the enemy happened to cross the sea to ask for aid in a distant
country then the patient Roman marched many dreary miles to defeat this
dangerous foe and when this had been accomplished, he stayed behind to
adminster{sic} his newly conquered provinces lest they fall into the hands
of wandering Barbarians and become themselves a menace to Roman safety. It
sounds rather complicated and yet to the contemporaries it was so very
simple, as you shall see in a moment.
In the year 203 B.C. Scipio had crossed the African Sea and had carried
the war into Africa. Carthage had called Hannibal back. Badly supported by
his mercenaries, Hannibal had been defeated near Zama. The Romans had
asked for his surrender and Hannibal had fled to get aid from the kings of
Macedonia and Syria, as I told you in my last chapter.
The rulers of these two countries (remnants of the Empire of Alexander the
Great) just then were contemplating an expedition against Egypt. They
hoped to divide the rich Nile valley between themselves. The king of Egypt
had heard of this and he had asked Rome to come to his support. The stage
was set for a number of highly interesting plots and counter-plots. But
the Romans, with their lack of imagination, rang the curtain down before
the play had been fairly started. Their legions completely defeated the
heavy Greek phalanx which was still used by the Macedonians as their
battle formation. That happened in the year 197 B.C. at the battle in the
plains of Cynoscephalae, or “Dogs’ Heads,” in central Thessaly.
The Romans then marched southward to Attica and informed the Greeks that
they had come to “deliver the Hellenes from the Macedonian yoke.” The
Greeks, having learned nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used their
new freedom in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states once
more began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good old
days. The Romans, who had little understanding and less love for these
silly bickerings of a race which they rather despised, showed great
forebearance. But tiring of these endless dissensions they lost patience,
invaded Greece, burned down Corinth (to “encourage the other Greeks”) and
sent a Roman governor to Athens to rule this turbulent province. In this
way, Macedonia and Greece became buffer states which protected Rome’s
eastern frontier.
Meanwhile right across the Hellespont lay the Kingdom of Syria, and
Antiochus III, who ruled that vast land, had shown great eagerness when
his distinguished guest, General Hannibal, explained to him how easy it
would be to invade Italy and sack the city of Rome.
Lucius Scipio, a brother of Scipio the African fighter who had defeated
Hannibal and his Carthaginians at Zama, was sent to Asia Minor. He
destroyed the armies of the Syrian king near Magnesia (in the year 190
B.C.) Shortly afterwards, Antiochus was lynched by his own people. Asia
Minor became a Roman protectorate and the small City-Republic of Rome was
mistress of most of the lands which bordered upon the Mediterranean.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME AFTER CENTURIES OF UNREST AND REVOLUTION BECAME
AN EMPIRE
WHEN the Roman armies returned from these many victorious campaigns, they
were received with great jubilation. Alas and alack! this sudden glory did
not make the country any happier. On the contrary. The endless campaigns
had ruined the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard work of Empire
making. It had placed too much power in the hands of the successful
generals (and their private friends) who had used the war as an excuse for
wholesale robbery.
The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity which had
characterised the lives of her famous men. The new Republic felt ashamed
of the shabby coats and the high principles which had been fashionable in
the days of its grandfathers. It became a land of rich people ruled by
rich people for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to
disastrous failure, as I shall now tell you.
Within less than a century and a half. Rome had become the mistress of
practically all the land around the Mediterranean. In those early days of
history a prisoner of war lost his freedom and became a slave. The Roman
regarded war as a very serious business and he showed no mercy to a
conquered foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and
children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves. And a like
fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and Macedonia and Spain
and Syria when they dared to revolt against the Roman power.
Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of machinery. Nowadays a
rich man invests his money in factories. The rich people of Rome
(senators, generals and war-profiteers) invested theirs in land and in
slaves. The land they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces. The
slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to be cheapest.
During most of the third and second centuries before Christ there was a
plentiful supply, and as a result the landowners worked their slaves until
they dropped dead in their tracks, when they bought new ones at the
nearest bargain-counter of Corinthian or Carthaginian captives.
And now behold the fate of the freeborn farmer!
He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her battles without
complaint. But when he came home after ten, fifteen or twenty years, his
lands were covered with weeds and his family had been ruined. But he was a
strong man and willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and waited
for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together with his
cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners who worked their
estates with slaves could underbid him all along the line. For a couple of
years he tried to hold his own. Then he gave up in despair. He left the
country and he went to the nearest city. In the city he was as hungry as
he had been before on the land. But he shared his misery with thousands of
other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy hovels in the
suburbs of the large cities. They were apt to get sick and die from
terrible epidemics. They were all profoundly discontented. They had fought
for their country and this was their reward. They were always willing to
listen to those plausible spell-binders who gather around a public
grievance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a grave
menace to the safety of the state.
But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. “We have our army
and our policemen,” they argued, “they will keep the mob in order.” And
they hid themselves behind the high walls of their pleasant villas and
cultivated their gardens and read the poems of a certain Homer which a
Greek slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters.
In a few families however the old tradition of unselfish service to the
Commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus, had
been married to a Roman by the name of Gracchus. She had two sons,
Tiberius and Gaius. When the boys grew up they entered politics and tried
to bring about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown that most
of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by two thousand noble
families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been elected a Tribune, tried to help
the freemen. He revived two ancient laws which restricted the number of
acres which a single owner might possess. In this way he hoped to revive
the valuable old class of small and independent freeholders. The
newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state. There were
street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the popular Tribune.
Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he entered the assembly and was beaten
to death. Ten years later his brother Gaius tried the experiment of
reforming a nation against the expressed wishes of a strong privileged
class. He passed a “poor law” which was meant to help the destitute
farmers. Eventually it made the greater part of the Roman citizens into
professional beggars.
He established colonies of destitute people in distant parts of the
empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right sort of people.
Before Gaius Gracchus could do more harm he too was murdered and his
followers were either killed or exiled. The first two reformers had been
gentlemen. The two who came after were of a very different stamp. They
were professional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of the other
was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following.
Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the victor in a great
battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teutons and the Cimbri had been
annihilated, was the popular hero of the disinherited freemen.
Now it happened in the year 88 B.C. that the Senate of Rome was greatly
disturbed by rumours that came from Asia. Mithridates, king of a country
along the shores of the Black Sea, and a Greek on his mother’s side, had
seen the possibility of establishing a second Alexandrian Empire. He began
his campaign for world-domination with the murder of all Roman citizens
who happened to be in Asia Minor, men, women and children. Such an act, of
course, meant war. The Senate equipped an army to march against the King
of Pontus and punish him for his crime. But who was to be
commander-in-chief? “Sulla,” said the Senate, “because he is Consul.”
“Marius,” said the mob, “because he has been Consul five times and because
he is the champion of our rights.”
Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be in actual
command of the army. He went west to defeat Mithridates and Marius fled to
Africa. There he waited until he heard that Sulla had crossed into Asia.
He then returned to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents, marched
on Rome and entered the city with his professional highwaymen, spent five
days and five nights, slaughtering the enemies of the Senatorial party,
got himself elected Consul and promptly died from the excitement of the
last fortnight.
There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having defeated
Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return to Rome and settle a
few old scores of his own. He was as good as his word. For weeks his
soldiers were busy executing those of their fellow citizens who were
suspected of democratic sympathies. One day they got hold of a young
fellow who had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were going
to hang him when some one interfered. “The boy is too young,” he said, and
they let him go. His name was Julius Caesar. You shall meet him again on
the next page.
As for Sulla, he became “Dictator,” which meant sole and supreme ruler of
all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome for four years, and he died
quietly in his bed, having spent the last year of his life tenderly
raising his cabbages, as was the custom of so many Romans who had spent a
lifetime killing their fellow-men.
But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they grew worse.
Another general, Gnaeus Pompeius, or Pompey, a close friend of Sulla, went
east to renew the war against the ever troublesome Mithridates. He drove
that energetic potentate into the mountains where Mithridates took poison
and killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a Roman captive.
Next he re-established the authority of Rome over Syria, destroyed
Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia, trying to revive the myth of
Alexander the Great, and at last (in the year 62) returned to Rome with a
dozen ship-loads of defeated Kings and Princes and Generals, all of whom
were forced to march in the triumphal procession of this enormously
popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty million dollars
in plunder.
It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed in the hands of a
strong man. Only a few months before, the town had almost fallen into the
hands of a good-for-nothing young aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who
had gambled away his money and hoped to reimburse himself for his losses
by a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer, had discovered
the plot, had warned the Senate, and had forced Catiline to flee. But
there were other young men with similar ambitions and it was no time for
idle talk.
Pompey organised a triumvirate which was to take charge of affairs. He
became the leader of this Vigilante Committee. Gaius Julius Caesar, who
had made a reputation for himself as governor of Spain, was the second in
command. The third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of
Crassus. He had been elected because he was incredibly rich, having been a
successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon an expedition
against the Parthians and was killed.
As for Caesar, who was by far the ablest of the three, he decided that he
needed a little more military glory to become a popular hero. He crossed
the Alps and conquered that part of the world which is now called France.
Then he hammered a solid wooden bridge across the Rhine and invaded the
land of the wild Teutons. Finally he took ship and visited England. Heaven
knows where he might have ended if he had not been forced to return to
Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had been appointed dictator for life.
This of course meant that Caesar was to be placed on the list of the
“retired officers,” and the idea did not appeal to him. He remembered that
he had begun life as a follower of Marius. He decided to teach the
Senators and their “dictator” another lesson. He crossed the Rubicon River
which separated the province of Cis-alpine Gaul from Italy. Everywhere he
was received as the “friend of the people.” Without difficulty Caesar
entered Rome and Pompey fled to Greece Caesar followed him and defeated
his followers near Pharsalus. Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and
escaped to Egypt. When he landed he was murdered by order of young king
Ptolemy. A few days later Caesar arrived. He found himself caught in a
trap. Both the Egyptians and the Roman garrison which had remained
faithful to Pompey, attacked his camp.
Fortune was with Caesar. He succeeded in setting fire to the Egyptian
fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning vessels fell on the roof of
the famous library of Alexandria (which was just off the water front,) and
destroyed it. Next he attacked the Egyptian army, drove the soldiers into
the Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new government under
Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word reached him that
Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates, had gone on the war-path.
Caesar marched northward, defeated Pharnaces in a war which lasted five
days, sent word of his victory to Rome in the famous sentence “veni, vidi,
vici,” which is Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” and returned to
Egypt where he fell desperately in love with Cleopatra, who followed him
to Rome when he returned to take charge of the government, in the year 46.
He marched at the head of not less than four different victory-parades,
having won four different campaigns.
Then Caesar appeared in the Senate to report upon his adventures, and the
grateful Senate made him “dictator” for ten years. It was a fatal step.
The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the Roman state. He made
it possible for freemen to become members of the Senate. He conferred the
rights of citizenship upon distant communities as had been done in the
early days of Roman history. He permitted “foreigners” to exercise
influence upon the government. He reformed the administration of the
distant provinces which certain aristocratic families had come to regard
as their private possessions. In short he did many things for the good of
the majority of the people but which made him thoroughly unpopular with
the most powerful men in the state. Half a hundred young aristocrats
formed a plot “to save the Republic.” On the Ides of March (the fifteenth
of March according to that new calendar which Caesar had brought with him
from Egypt) Caesar was murdered when he entered the Senate. Once more Rome
was without a master.
There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of Caesar’s glory.
One was Antony, his former secretary. The other was Octavian, Caesar’s
grand-nephew and heir to his estate. Octavian remained in Rome, but Antony
went to Egypt to be near Cleopatra with whom he too had fallen in love, as
seems to have been the habit of Roman generals.
A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Actium, Octavian
defeated Antony. Antony killed himself and Cleopatra was left alone to
face the enemy. She tried very hard to make Octavian her third Roman
conquest. When she saw that she could make no impression upon this very
proud aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman province.
As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did not repeat the
mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how people will shy at words. He was
very modest in his demands when he returned to Rome. He did not want to be
a “dictator.” He would be entirely satisfied with the title of “the
Honourable.” But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed him as
Augustus—the Illustrious—he did not object and a few years
later the man in the street called him Caesar, or Kaiser, while the
soldiers, accustomed to regard Octavian as their Commander-in-chief
referred to him as the Chief, the Imperator or Emperor. The Republic had
become an Empire, but the average Roman was hardly aware of the fact.
In 14 A.D. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the Roman people had
become so well established that he was made an object of that divine
worship which hitherto had been reserved for the Gods. And his successors
were true “Emperors”—the absolute rulers of the greatest empire the
world had ever seen.
If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired of anarchy
and disorder. He did not care who ruled him provided the new master gave
him a chance to live quietly and without the noise of eternal street
riots. Octavian assured his subjects forty years of peace. He had no
desire to extend the frontiers of his domains, In the year 9 A.D. he had
contem-plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been killed with
all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that the Romans made no
further attempts to civilise these wild people.
They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem of internal
reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two centuries of revolution
and foreign war had repeatedly killed the best men among the younger
generations. It had ruined the class of the free farmers. It had
introduced slave labor, against which no freeman could hope to compete. It
had turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and unhealthy
mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large bureaucracy—petty
officials who were underpaid and who were forced to take graft in order to
buy bread and clothing for their families. Worst of all, it had accustomed
people to violence, to blood-shed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain and
suffering of others.
Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our era was a
magnificent political structure, so large that Alexander’s empire became
one of its minor provinces. Underneath this glory there lived millions
upon millions of poor and tired human beings, toiling like ants who have
built a nest underneath a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of some
one else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields. They
lived in stables. They died without hope.
It was the seven hundred and fifty-third year since the founding of Rome.
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus was living in the palace of the
Palatine Hill, busily engaged upon the task of ruling his empire.
In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph the
Carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of Bethlehem.
This is a strange world.
Before long, the palace and the stable were to meet in open combat.
And the stable was to emerge victorious.
JOSHUA OF NAZARETH
THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM THE GREEKS CALLED JESUS
IN the autumn of the year of the city 783 (which would be 62 A.D., in our
way of counting time) AEsculapius Cultellus, a Roman physician, wrote to
his nephew who was with the army in Syria as follows:
My dear Nephew,
A few days ago I was called in to prescribe for a sick man named Paul. He
appeared to be a Roman citizen of Jewish parentage, well educated and of
agreeable manners. I had been told that he was here in connection with a
law-suit, an appeal from one of our provincial courts, Caesarea or some
such place in the eastern Mediterranean. He had been described to me as a
“wild and violent” fellow who had been making speeches against the People
and against the Law. I found him very intelligent and of great honesty.
A friend of mine who used to be with the army in Asia Minor tells me that
he heard something about him in Ephesus where he was preaching sermons
about a strange new God. I asked my patient if this were true and whether
he had told the people to rebel against the will of our beloved Emperor.
Paul answered me that the Kingdom of which he had spoken was not of this
world and he added many strange utterances which I did not understand, but
which were probably due to his fever.
His personality made a great impression upon me and I was sorry to hear
that he was killed on the Ostian Road a few days ago. Therefore I am
writing this letter to you. When next you visit Jerusalem, I want you to
find out something about my friend Paul and the strange Jewish prophet,
who seems to have been his teacher. Our slaves are getting much excited
about this so-called Messiah, and a few of them, who openly talked of the
new kingdom (whatever that means) have been crucified. I would like to
know the truth about all these rumours and I am
Six weeks later, Gladius Ensa, the nephew, a captain of the VII Gallic
Infantry, answered as follows:
My dear Uncle,
I received your letter and I have obeyed your instructions.
Two weeks ago our brigade was sent to Jerusalem. There have been several
revolutions during the last century and there is not much left of the old
city. We have been here now for a month and to-morrow we shall continue
our march to Petra, where there has been trouble with some of the Arab
tribes. I shall use this evening to answer your questions, but pray do not
expect a detailed report.
I have talked with most of the older men in this city but few have been
able to give me any definite information. A few days ago a pedler came to
the camp. I bought some of his olives and I asked him whether he had ever
heard of the famous Messiah who was killed when he was young. He said that
he remembered it very clearly, because his father had taken him to
Golgotha (a hill just outside the city) to see the execution, and to show
him what became of the enemies of the laws of the people of Judaea. He
gave me the address of one Joseph, who had been a personal friend of the
Messiah and told me that I had better go and see him if I wanted to know
more.
This morning I went to call on Joseph. He was quite an old man. He had
been a fisherman on one of the fresh-water lakes. His memory was clear,
and from him at last I got a fairly definite account of what had happened
during the troublesome days before I was born.
Tiberius, our great and glorious emperor, was on the throne, and an
officer of the name of Pontius Pilatus was governor of Judaea and Samaria.
Joseph knew little about this Pilatus. He seemed to have been an honest
enough official who left a decent reputation as procurator of the
province. In the year 755 or 756 (Joseph had forgotten when) Pilatus was
called to Jerusalem on account of a riot. A certain young man (the son of
a carpenter of Nazareth) was said to be planning a revolution against the
Roman government. Strangely enough our own intelligence officers, who are
usually well informed, appear to have heard nothing about it, and when
they investigated the matter they reported that the carpenter was an
excellent citizen and that there was no reason to proceed against him. But
the old-fashioned leaders of the Jewish faith, according to Joseph, were
much upset. They greatly disliked his popularity with the masses of the
poorer Hebrews. The “Nazarene” (so they told Pilatus) had publicly claimed
that a Greek or a Roman or even a Philistine, who tried to live a decent
and honourable life, was quite as good as a Jew who spent his days
studying the ancient laws of Moses. Pilatus does not seem to have been
impressed by this argument, but when the crowds around the temple
threatened to lynch Jesus, and kill all his followers, he decided to take
the carpenter into custody to save his life.
He does not appear to have understood the real nature of the quarrel.
Whenever he asked the Jewish priests to explain their grievances, they
shouted “heresy” and “treason” and got terribly excited. Finally, so
Joseph told me, Pilatus sent for Joshua (that was the name of the
Nazarene, but the Greeks who live in this part of the world always refer
to him as Jesus) to examine him personally. He talked to him for several
hours. He asked him about the “dangerous doctrines” which he was said to
have preached on the shores of the sea of Galilee. But Jesus answered that
he never referred to politics. He was not so much interested in the bodies
of men as in Man’s soul. He wanted all people to regard their neighbours
as their brothers and to love one single God, who was the father of all
living beings.
Pilatus, who seems to have been well versed in the doctrines of the Stoics
and the other Greek philosophers, does not appear to have discovered
anything seditious in the talk of Jesus. According to my informant he made
another attempt to save the life of the kindly prophet. He kept putting
the execution off. Meanwhile the Jewish people, lashed into fury by their
priests, got frantic with rage. There had been many riots in Jerusalem
before this and there were only a few Roman soldiers within calling
distance. Reports were being sent to the Roman authorities in Caesarea
that Pilatus had “fallen a victim to the teachings of the Nazarene.”
Petitions were being circulated all through the city to have Pilatus
recalled, because he was an enemy of the Emperor. You know that our
governors have strict instructions to avoid an open break with their
foreign subjects. To save the country from civil war, Pilatus finally
sacrificed his prisoner, Joshua, who behaved with great dignity and who
forgave all those who hated him. He was crucified amidst the howls and the
laughter of the Jerusalem mob.
That is what Joseph told me, with tears running down his old cheeks. I
gave him a gold piece when I left him, but he refused it and asked me to
hand it to one poorer than himself. I also asked him a few questions about
your friend Paul. He had known him slightly. He seems to have been a tent
maker who gave up his profession that he might preach the words of a
loving and forgiving God, who was so very different from that Jehovah of
whom the Jewish priests are telling us all the time. Afterwards, Paul
appears to have travelled much in Asia Minor and in Greece, telling the
slaves that they were all children of one loving Father and that happiness
awaits all, both rich and poor, who have tried to live honest lives and
have done good to those who were suffering and miserable.
I hope that I have answered your questions to your satisfaction. The whole
story seems very harmless to me as far as the safety of the state is
concerned. But then, we Romans never have been able to understand the
people of this province. I am sorry that they have killed your friend
Paul. I wish that I were at home again, and I am, as ever,
THE FALL OF ROME
THE TWILIGHT OF ROME
THE text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the year in which
Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor was driven off his
throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time falling.
The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not realise
how their old world was coming to an end. They complained about the unrest
of the times—they grumbled about the high prices of food and about
the low wages of the workmen—they cursed the profiteers who had a
monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin. Occasionally they
rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor. But the majority of the
people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever
their purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according to their
nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free show of
fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big cities, utterly
ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its usefulness and was
doomed to perish.
How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome made a fine showing of
outward glory. Well-paved roads connected the different provinces, the
imperial police were active and showed little tenderness for highwaymen.
The frontier was closely guarded against the savage tribes who seemed to
be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole world was
paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a score of able men were
working day and night to undo the mistakes of the past and bring about a
return to the happier conditions of the early Republic.
But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of which I have told
you in a former chapter, had not been removed and reform therefore was
impossible.
Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as Athens and
Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It had been able to
dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome as the ruler of the entire
civilised world was a political impossibility and could not endure. Her
young men were killed in her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by long
military service and by taxation. They either became professional beggars
or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave them board and lodging
in exchange for their services and made them “serfs,” those unfortunate
human beings who are neither slaves nor freemen, but who have become part
of the soil upon which they work, like so many cows, and the trees.
The Empire, the State, had become everything. The common citizen had
dwindled down to less than nothing. As for the slaves, they had heard the
words that were spoken by Paul. They had accepted the message of the
humble carpenter of Nazareth. They did not rebel against their masters. On
the contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed their
superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs of this world
which had proved such a miserable place of abode. They were willing to
fight the good fight that they might enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. But
they were not willing to engage in warfare for the benefit of an ambitious
emperor who aspired to glory by way of a foreign campaign in the land of
the Parthians or the Numidians or the Scots.
And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. The first Emperors
had continued the tradition of “leadership” which had given the old tribal
chieftains such a hold upon their subjects. But the Emperors of the second
and third centuries were Barrack-Emperors, professional soldiers, who
existed by the grace of their body-guards, the so-called Praetorians. They
succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity, murdering their way into
the palace and being murdered out of it as soon as their successors had
become rich enough to bribe the guards into a new rebellion.
Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of the northern
frontier. As there were no longer any native Roman armies to stop their
progress, foreign mercenaries had to be hired to fight the invader. As the
foreign soldier happened to be of the same blood as his supposed enemy, he
was apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle. Finally, by way of
experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle within the confines of the
Empire. Others followed. Soon these tribes complained bitterly of the
greedy Roman tax-gatherers, who took away their last penny. When they got
no redress they marched to Rome and loudly demanded that they be heard.
This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial residence. Constantine
(who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for a new capital. He chose Byzantium,
the gate-way for the commerce between Europe and Asia. The city was
renamed Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When Constantine
died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient administration,
divided the Empire between them. The elder lived in Rome and ruled in the
west. The younger stayed in Constantinople and was master of the east.
Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation of the Huns,
those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more than two centuries
maintained themselves in Northern Europe and continued their career of
bloodshed until they were defeated near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in the
year 451. As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun to
press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save themselves, were
thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The Emperor Valens tried to stop them,
but was killed near Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two years later,
under their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward and
attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed only a few palaces.
Next came the Vandals, and showed less respect for the venerable
traditions of the city. Then the Burgundians. Then the East Goths. Then
the Alemanni. Then the Franks. There was no end to the invasions. Rome at
last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway robber who could gather a
few followers.
In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was a sea-port and
strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, Odoacer, commander of a
regiment of the German mercenaries, who wanted the farms of Italy to be
divided among themselves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus
Augustulus, the last of the emperors who ruled the western division, from
his throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome. The eastern
Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, recognised him, and for
ten years Odoacer ruled what was left of the western provinces.
A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, invaded the newly
formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered Odoacer at his own dinner table,
and established a Gothic Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western part of
the Empire. This Patriciate state did not last long. In the sixth century
a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars invaded Italy,
destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a new state of which Pavia
became the capital.
Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and
despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The
schools had been burned down. The teachers had been starved to death. The
rich people had been thrown out of their villas which were now inhabited
by evil-smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen into decay.
The old bridges were gone and commerce had come to a standstill.
Civilisation—the product of thousands of years of patient labor on
the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans, which had
lifted man high above the most daring dreams of his earliest ancestors,
threatened to perish from the western continent.
It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to be the centre
of an Empire for another thousand years. But it hardly counted as a part
of the European continent. Its interests lay in the east. It began to
forget its western origin. Gradually the Roman language was given up for
the Greek. The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was written in
Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The Emperor became an
Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of Thebes had been
worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three thousand years before. When
missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity,
they went eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the vast
wilderness of Russia.
As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For twelve
generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of the day. One
thing—and one thing alone—saved Europe from complete
destruction, from a return to the days of cave-men and the hyena.
This was the church—the flock of humble men and women who for many
centuries had confessed themselves the followers of Jesus, the carpenter
of Nazareth, who had been killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be
saved the trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the
Syrian frontier.
RISE OF THE CHURCH
HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD
THE average intelligent Roman who lived under the Empire had taken very
little interest in the gods of his fathers. A few times a year he went to
the temple, but merely as a matter of custom. He looked on patiently when
the people celebrated a religious festival with a solemn procession. But
he regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and Neptune as something
rather childish, a survival from the crude days of the early republic and
not a fit subject of study for a man who had mastered the works of the
Stoics and the Epicureans and the other great philosophers of Athens.
This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The government insisted
that all people, Romans, foreigners, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, should pay
a certain outward respect to the image of the Emperor which was supposed
to stand in every temple, just as a picture of the President of the United
States is apt to hang in an American Post Office. But this was a formality
without any deeper meaning. Generally speaking everybody could honour,
revere and adore whatever gods he pleased, and as a result, Rome was
filled with all sorts of queer little temples and synagogues, dedicated to
the worship of Egyptian and African and Asiatic divinities.
When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began to preach their
new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man, nobody objected. The man
in the street stopped and listened Rome, the capital of the world, had
always been full of wandering preachers, each proclaiming his own
“mystery.” Most of the self-appointed priests appealed to the senses—promised
golden rewards and endless pleasure to the followers of their own
particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed that the so-called
Christians (the followers of the Christ or “anointed”) spoke a very
different language. They did not appear to be impressed by great riches or
a noble position. They extolled the beauties of poverty and humility and
meekness. These were not exactly the virtues which had made Rome the
mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to listen to a “mystery”
which told people in the hey-day of their glory that their worldly success
could not possibly bring them lasting happiness.
Besides, the preachers of the Christian mystery told dreadful stories of
the fate that awaited those who refused to listen to the words of the true
God. It was never wise to take chances. Of course the old Roman gods still
existed, but were they strong enough to protect their friends against the
powers of this new deity who had been brought to Europe from distant Asia?
People began to have doubts. They returned to listen to further
explanations of the new creed. After a while they began to meet the men
and women who preached the words of Jesus. They found them very different
from the average Roman priests. They were all dreadfully poor. They were
kind to slaves and to animals. They did not try to gain riches, but gave
away whatever they had. The example of their unselfish lives forced many
Romans to forsake the old religion. They joined the small communities of
Christians who met in the back rooms of private houses or somewhere in an
open field, and the temples were deserted.
This went on year after year and the number of Christians continued to
increase. Presbyters or priests (the original Greek meant “elder”) were
elected to guard the interests of the small churches. A bishop was made
the head of all the communities within a single province. Peter, who had
fol-lowed Paul to Rome, was the first Bishop of Rome. In due time his
successors (who were addressed as Father or Papa) came to be known as
Popes.
The church became a powerful institution within the Empire. The Christian
doctrines appealed to those who despaired of this world. They also
attracted many strong men who found it impossible to make a career under
the Imperial government, but who could exercise their gifts of leadership
among the humble followers of the Nazarene teacher. At last the state was
obliged to take notice. The Roman Empire (I have said this before) was
tolerant through indifference. It allowed everybody to seek salvation
after his or her own fashion. But it insisted that the different sects
keep the peace among themselves and obey the wise rule of “live and let
live.”
The Christian communities however, refused to practice any sort of
tolerance. They publicly declared that their God, and their God alone, was
the true ruler of Heaven and Earth, and that all other gods were
imposters. This seemed unfair to the other sects and the police
discouraged such utterances. The Christians persisted.
Soon there were further difficulties. The Christians refused to go through
the formalities of paying homage to the emperor. They refused to appear
when they were called upon to join the army. The Roman magistrates
threatened to punish them. The Christians answered that this miserable
world was only the ante-room to a very pleasant Heaven and that they were
more than willing to suffer death for their principles. The Romans,
puzzled by such conduct, sometimes killed the offenders, but more often
they did not. There was a certain amount of lynching during the earliest
years of the church, but this was the work of that part of the mob which
accused their meek Christian neighbours of every conceivable crime, (such
as slaughtering and eating babies, bringing about sickness and pestilence,
betraying the country in times of danger) because it was a harmless sport
and devoid of danger, as the Christians refused to fight back.
Meanwhile, Rome continued to be invaded by the Barbarians and when her
armies failed, Christian missionaries went forth to preach their gospel of
peace to the wild Teutons. They were strong men without fear of death.
They spoke a language which left no doubt as to the future of unrepentant
sinners. The Teutons were deeply impressed. They still had a deep respect
for the wisdom of the ancient city of Rome. Those men were Romans. They
probably spoke the truth. Soon the Christian missionary became a power in
the savage regions of the Teutons and the Franks. Half a dozen
missionaries were as valuable as a whole regiment of soldiers. The
Emperors began to understand that the Christian might be of great use to
them. In some of the provinces they were given equal rights with those who
remained faithful to the old gods. The great change however came during
the last half of the fourth century.
Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Constantine the Great,
was emperor. He was a terrible ruffian, but people of tender qualities
could hardly hope to survive in that hard-fighting age. During a long and
checkered career, Constantine had experienced many ups and downs. Once,
when almost defeated by his enemies, he thought that he would try the
power of this new Asiatic deity of whom everybody was talking. He promised
that he too would become a Christian if he were successful in the coming
battle. He won the victory and thereafter he was convinced of the power of
the Christian God and allowed himself to be baptised.
From that moment on, the Christian church was officially recognised and
this greatly strengthened the position of the new faith.
But the Christians still formed a very small minority of all the people,
(not more than five or six percent,) and in order to win, they were forced
to refuse all compromise. The old gods must be destroyed. For a short
spell the emperor Julian, a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the
pagan Gods from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds during
a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established the church in
all its glory. One after the other the doors of the ancient temples were
then closed. Then came the emperor Justinian (who built the church of
Saint Sophia in Constantinople), who discontinued the school of philosophy
at Athens which had been founded by Plato.
That was the end of the old Greek world, in which man had been allowed to
think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his desires.
The somewhat vague rules of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor
compass by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery and
ignorance had swept away the established order of things. There was need
of something more positive and more definite. This the Church provided.
During an age when nothing was certain, the church stood like a rock and
never receded from those principles which it held to be true and sacred.
This steadfast courage gained the admiration of the multitudes and carried
the church of Rome safely through the difficulties which destroyed the
Roman state.
There was however, a certain element of luck in the final success of the
Christian faith. After the disappearance of Theodoric’s Roman-Gothic
kingdom, in the fifth century, Italy was comparatively free from foreign
invasion. The Lombards and Saxons and Slavs who succeeded the Goths were
weak and backward tribes. Under those circumstances it was possible for
the bishops of Rome to maintain the independence of their city. Soon the
remnants of the empire, scattered throughout the peninsula, recognised the
Dukes of Rome (or bishops) as their political and spiritual rulers.
The stage was set for the appearance of a strong man. He came in the year
590 and his name was Gregory. He belonged to the ruling classes of ancient
Rome, and he had been “prefect” or mayor of the city. Then he had become a
monk and a bishop and finally, and much against his will, (for he wanted
to be a missionary and preach Christianity to the heathen of England,) he
had been dragged to the Church of Saint Peter to be made Pope. He ruled
only fourteen years but when he died the Christian world of western Europe
had officially recognised the bishops of Rome, the Popes, as the head of
the entire church.
This power, however, did not extend to the east. In Constantinople the
Emperors continued the old custom which had recognised the successors of
Augustus and Tiberius both as head of the government and as High Priest of
the Established Religion. In the year 1453 the eastern Roman Empire was
conquered by the Turks. Constantinople was taken, and Constantine
Paleologue, the last Roman Emperor, was killed on the steps of the Church
of the Holy Sophia.
A few years before, Zoe, the daughter of his brother Thomas, had married
Ivan III of Russia. In this way did the grand-dukes of Moscow fall heir to
the traditions of Constantinople. The double-eagle of old Byzantium
(reminiscent of the days when Rome had been divided into an eastern and a
western part) became the coat of arms of modern Russia. The Tsar who had
been merely the first of the Russian nobles, assumed the aloofness and the
dignity of a Roman emperor before whom all subjects, both high and low,
were inconsiderable slaves.
The court was refashioned after the oriental pattern which the eastern
Emperors had imported from Asia and from Egypt and which (so they
flattered themselves) resembled the court of Alexander the Great. This
strange inheritance which the dying Byzantine Empire bequeathed to an
unsuspecting world continued to live with great vigour for six more
centuries, amidst the vast plains of Russia. The last man to wear the
crown with the double eagle of Constantinople, Tsar Nicholas, was murdered
only the other day, so to speak. His body was thrown into a well. His son
and his daughters were all killed. All his ancient rights and prerogatives
were abolished, and the church was reduced to the position which it had
held in Rome before the days of Constantine.
The eastern church however fared very differently, as we shall see in the
next chapter when the whole Christian world is going to be threatened with
destruction by the rival creed of an Arab camel-driver.
MOHAMMED
AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN DESERT AND
WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD FOR THE GREATER
GLORY OF ALLAH, THE ONLY TRUE GOD
SINCE the days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said nothing of the
Semitic people. You will remember how they filled all the chapters devoted
to the story of the Ancient World. The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the
Phoenicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all of them Semites,
had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty centuries. They
had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had come from the
east and by the Indo-European Greeks who had come from the west. A hundred
years after the death of Alexander the Great, Carthage, a colony of
Semitic Phoenicians, had fought the Indo-European Romans for the mastery
of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and destroyed and for
eight hundred years the Romans had been masters of the world. In the
seventh century, however, another Semitic tribe appeared upon the scene
and challenged the power of the west. They were the Arabs, peaceful
shepherds who had roamed through the desert since the beginning of time
without showing any signs of imperial ambitions.
Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and in less than a
century they had pushed to the heart of Europe and proclaimed the glories
of Allah, “the only God,” and Mohammed, “the prophet of the only God,” to
the frightened peasants of France.
The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah (usually known as
Mohammed, or “he who will be praised,”); reads like a chapter in the
“Thousand and One Nights.” He was a camel-driver, born in Mecca. He seems
to have been an epileptic and he suffered from spells of unconsciousness
when he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of the angel Gabriel,
whose words were afterwards written down in a book called the Koran. His
work as a caravan leader carried him all over Arabia and he was constantly
falling in with Jewish merchants and with Christian traders, and he came
to see that the worship of a single God was a very excellent thing. His
own people, the Arabs, still revered queer stones and trunks of trees as
their ancestors had done, tens of thousands of years before. In Mecca,
their holy city, stood a little square building, the Kaaba, full of idols
and strange odds and ends of Hoo-doo worship.
Mohammed decided to be the Moses of the Arab people. He could not well be
a prophet and a camel-driver at the same time. So he made himself
independent by marrying his employer, the rich widow Chadija. Then he told
his neighbours in Mecca that he was the long-expected prophet sent by
Allah to save the world. The neighbours laughed most heartily and when
Mohammed continued to annoy them with his speeches they decided to kill
him. They regarded him as a lunatic and a public bore who deserved no
mercy. Mohammed heard of the plot and in the dark of night he fled to
Medina together with Abu Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened in the
year 622. It is the most important date in Mohammedan history and is known
as the Hegira—the year of the Great Flight.
In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier to proclaim
himself a prophet than in his home city, where every one had known him as
a simple camel-driver. Soon he was surrounded by an increasing number of
followers, or Moslems, who accepted the Islam, “the submission to the will
of God,” which Mohammed praised as the highest of all virtues. For seven
years he preached to the people of Medina. Then he believed himself strong
enough to begin a campaign against his former neighbours who had dared to
sneer at him and his Holy Mission in his old camel-driving days. At the
head of an army of Medinese he marched across the desert. His followers
took Mecca without great difficulty, and having slaughtered a number of
the inhabitants, they found it quite easy to convince the others that
Mohammed was really a great prophet.
From that time on until the year of his death, Mohammed was fortunate in
everything he undertook.
There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the first place, the
creed which Mohammed taught to his followers was very simple. The
disciples were told that they must love Allah, the Ruler of the World, the
Merciful and Compassionate. They must honour and obey their parents. They
were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their neighbours and were
admonished to be humble and charitable, to the poor and to the sick.
Finally they were ordered to abstain from strong drink and to be very
frugal in what they ate. That was all. There were no priests, who acted as
shepherds of their flocks and asked that they be supported at the common
expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques were merely large stone halls
without benches or pictures, where the faithful could gather (if they felt
so inclined) to read and discuss chapters from the Koran, the Holy Book.
But the average Mohammedan carried his religion with him and never felt
himself hemmed in by the restrictions and regulations of an established
church. Five times a day he turned his face towards Mecca, the Holy City,
and said a simple prayer. For the rest of the time he let Allah rule the
world as he saw fit and accepted whatever fate brought him with patient
resignation.
Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage the Faithful to
go forth and invent electrical machinery or bother about railroads and
steamship lines. But it gave every Mohammedan a certain amount of
contentment. It bade him be at peace with himself and with the world in
which he lived and that was a very good thing.
The second reason which explains the success of the Moslems in their
warfare upon the Christians, had to do with the conduct of those
Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do battle for the true faith. The
Prophet promised that those who fell, facing the enemy, would go directly
to Heaven. This made sudden death in the field preferable to a long but
dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans an enormous
advantage over the Crusaders who were in constant dread of a dark
hereafter, and who stuck to the good things of this world as long as they
possibly could. Incidentally it explains why even to-day Moslem soldiers
will charge into the fire of European machine guns quite indifferent to
the fate that awaits them and why they are such dangerous and persistent
enemies.
Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now began to enjoy his
power as the undisputed ruler of a large number of Arab tribes. But
success has been the undoing of a large number of men who were great in
the days of adversity. He tried to gain the good will of the rich people
by a number of regulations which could appeal to those of wealth. He
allowed the Faithful to have four wives. As one wife was a costly
investment in those olden days when brides were bought directly from the
parents, four wives became a positive luxury except to those who possessed
camels and dromedaries and date orchards beyond the dreams of avarice. A
religion which at first had been meant for the hardy hunters of the high
skied desert was gradually transformed to suit the needs of the smug
merchants who lived in the bazaars of the cities. It was a regrettable
change from the original program and it did very little good to the cause
of Mohammedanism. As for the prophet himself, he went on preaching the
truth of Allah and proclaiming new rules of conduct until he died, quite
suddenly, of a fever on June the seventh of the year 632.
His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was his father-in-law,
Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers of the prophet’s life. Two
years later, Abu-Bekr died and Omar ibn Al-Khattab followed him. In less
than ten years he conquered Egypt, Persia, Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine
and made Damascus the capital of the first Mohammedan world empire.
Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima, but
a quarrel broke out upon a point of Moslem doctrine and Ali was murdered.
After his death, the caliphate was made hereditary and the leaders of the
faithful who had begun their career as the spiritual head of a religious
sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built a new city on the
shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of Babylon and called it Bagdad,
and organising the Arab horsemen into regiments of cavalry, they set forth
to bring the happiness of their Moslem faith to all unbelievers. In the
year 700 A.D. a Mohammedan general by the name of Tarik crossed the old
gates of Hercules and reached the high rock on the European side which he
called the Gibel-al-tarik, the Hill of Tarik or Gibraltar.
Eleven years later in the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, he defeated the
king of the Visigoths and then the Moslem army moved northward and
following the route of Hannibal, they crossed the passes of the Pyrenees.
They defeated the Duke of Aquitania, who tried to halt them near Bordeaux,
and marched upon Paris. But in the year 732 (one hundred years after the
death of the prophet,) they were beaten in a battle between Tours and
Poitiers. On that day, Charles Martel (Charles with the Hammer) the
Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan con-quest. He drove the
Moslems out of France, but they maintained themselves in Spain where
Abd-ar-Rahman founded the Caliphate of Cordova, which became the greatest
centre of science and art of mediaeval Europe.
This Moorish kingdom, so-called because the people came from Mauretania in
Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was only after the capture of Granada,
the last Moslem stronghold, in the year 1492, that Columbus received the
royal grant which allowed him to go upon a voyage of discovery. The
Mohammedans soon regained their strength in the new conquests which they
made in Asia and Africa and to-day there are as many followers of Mohammed
as there are of Christ.
CHARLEMAGNE
HOW CHARLEMAGNE, THE KING OF THE FRANKS, CAME TO BEAR THE TITLE OF EMPEROR
AND TRIED TO REVIVE THE OLD IDEAL OF WORLD-EMPIRE
THE battle of Poitiers had saved Europe from the Mohammedans. But the
enemy within—the hopeless disorder which had followed the
disappearance of the Roman police officer—that enemy remained. It is
true that the new converts of the Christian faith in Northern Europe felt
a deep respect for the mighty Bishop of Rome. But that poor bishop did not
feel any too safe when he looked toward the distant mountains. Heaven knew
what fresh hordes of barbarians were ready to cross the Alps and begin a
new attack on Rome. It was necessary—very necessary—for the
spiritual head of the world to find an ally with a strong sword and a
powerful fist who was willing to defend His Holiness in case of danger.
And so the Popes, who were not only very holy but also very practical,
cast about for a friend, and presently they made overtures to the most
promising of the Germanic tribes who had occupied north-western Europe
after the fall of Rome. They were called the Franks. One of their earliest
kings, called Merovech, had helped the Romans in the battle of the
Catalaunian fields in the year 451 when they defeated the Huns. His
descendants, the Merovingians, had continued to take little bits of
imperial territory until the year 486 when king Clovis (the old French
word for “Louis”) felt himself strong enough to beat the Romans in the
open. But his descendants were weak men who left the affairs of state to
their Prime minister, the “Major Domus” or Master of the Palace.
Pepin the Short, the son of the famous Charles Martel, who succeeded his
father as Master of the Palace, hardly knew how to handle the situation.
His royal master was a devout theologian, without any interest in
politics. Pepin asked the Pope for advice. The Pope who was a practical
person answered that the “power in the state belonged to him who was
actually possessed of it.” Pepin took the hint. He persuaded Childeric,
the last of the Merovingians to become a monk and then made himself king
with the approval of the other Germanic chieftains. But this did not
satisfy the shrewd Pepin. He wanted to be something more than a barbarian
chieftain. He staged an elaborate ceremony at which Boniface, the great
missionary of the European northwest, anointed him and made him a “King by
the grace of God.” It was easy to slip those words, “Del gratia,” into the
coronation service. It took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out
again.
Pepin was sincerely grateful for this kindness on the part of the church.
He made two expeditions to Italy to defend the Pope against his enemies.
He took Ravenna and several other cities away from the Longobards and
presented them to His Holiness, who incorporated these new domains into
the so-called Papal State, which remained an independent country until
half a century ago.
After Pepin’s death, the relations between Rome and Aix-la-Chapelle or
Nymwegen or Ingelheim, (the Frankish Kings did not have one official
residence, but travelled from place to place with all their ministers and
court officers,) became more and more cordial. Finally the Pope and the
King took a step which was to influence the history of Europe in a most
profound way.
Charles, commonly known as Carolus Magnus or Charlemagne, succeeded Pepin
in the year 768. He had conquered the land of the Saxons in eastern
Germany and had built towns and monasteries all over the greater part of
northern Europe. At the request of certain enemies of Abd-ar-Rahman, he
had invaded Spain to fight the Moors. But in the Pyrenees he had been
attacked by the wild Basques and had been forced to retire. It was upon
this occasion that Roland, the great Margrave of Breton, showed what a
Frankish chieftain of those early days meant when he promised to be
faithful to his King, and gave his life and that of his trusted followers
to safeguard the retreat of the royal army.
During the last ten years of the eighth century, however, Charles was
obliged to devote himself exclusively to affairs of the South. The Pope,
Leo III, had been attacked by a band of Roman rowdies and had been left
for dead in the street. Some kind people had bandaged his wounds and had
helped him to escape to the camp of Charles, where he asked for help. An
army of Franks soon restored quiet and carried Leo back to the Lateran
Palace which ever since the days of Constantine, had been the home of the
Pope. That was in December of the year 799. On Christmas day of the next
year, Charlemagne, who was staying in Rome, attended the service in the
ancient church of St. Peter. When he arose from prayer, the Pope placed a
crown upon his head, called him Emperor of the Romans and hailed him once
more with the title of “Augustus” which had not been heard for hundreds of
years.
Once more Northern Europe was part of a Roman Empire, but the dignity was
held by a German chieftain who could read just a little and never learned
to write. But he could fight and for a short while there was order and
even the rival emperor in Constantinople sent a letter of approval to his
“dear Brother.”
Unfortunately this splendid old man died in the year 814. His sons and his
grandsons at once began to fight for the largest share of the imperial
inheritance. Twice the Carolingian lands were divided, by the treaties of
Verdun in the year 843 and by the treaty of Mersen-on-the-Meuse in the
year 870. The latter treaty divided the entire Frankish Kingdom into two
parts. Charles the Bold received the western half. It contained the old
Roman province called Gaul where the language of the people had become
thoroughly romanized. The Franks soon learned to speak this language and
this accounts for the strange fact that a purely Germanic land like France
should speak a Latin tongue.
The other grandson got the eastern part, the land which the Romans had
called Germania. Those inhospitable regions had never been part of the old
Empire. Augustus had tried to conquer this “far east,” but his legions had
been annihilated in the Teutoburg Wood in the year 9 and the people had
never been influenced by the higher Roman civilisation. They spoke the
popular Germanic tongue. The Teuton word for “people” was “thiot.” The
Christian missionaries therefore called the German language the “lingua
theotisca” or the “lingua teutisca,” the “popular dialect” and this word
“teutisca” was changed into “Deutsch” which accounts for the name
“Deutschland.”
As for the famous Imperial Crown, it very soon slipped off the heads of
the Carolingian successors and rolled back onto the Italian plain, where
it became a sort of plaything of a number of little potentates who stole
the crown from each other amidst much bloodshed and wore it (with or
without the permission of the Pope) until it was the turn of some more
ambitious neighbour. The Pope, once more sorely beset by his enemies, sent
north for help. He did not appeal to the ruler of the west-Frankish
kingdom, this time. His messengers crossed the Alps and addressed
themselves to Otto, a Saxon Prince who was recognised as the greatest
chieftain of the different Germanic tribes.
Otto, who shared his people’s affection for the blue skies and the gay and
beautiful people of the Italian peninsula, hastened to the rescue. In
return for his services, the Pope, Leo VIII, made Otto “Emperor,” and the
eastern half of Charles’ old kingdom was henceforth known as the “Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation.”
This strange political creation managed to live to the ripe old age of
eight hundred and thirty-nine years. In the year 1801, (during the
presidency of Thomas Jefferson,) it was most unceremoniously relegated to
the historical scrapheap. The brutal fellow who destroyed the old Germanic
Empire was the son of a Corsican notary-public who had made a brilliant
career in the service of the French Republic. He was ruler of Europe by
the grace of his famous Guard Regiments, but he desired to be something
more. He sent to Rome for the Pope and the Pope came and stood by while
General Napoleon placed the imperial crown upon his own head and
proclaimed himself heir to the tradition of Charlemagne. For history is
like life. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
THE NORSEMEN
WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE TENTH CENTURY PRAYED THE LORD TO PROTECT THEM FROM
THE FURY OF THE NORSEMEN
IN the third and fourth centuries, the Germanic tribes of central Europe
had broken through the defences of the Empire that they might plunder Rome
and live on the fat of the land. In the eighth century it became the turn
of the Germans to be the “plundered-ones.” They did not like this at all,
even if their enemies were their first cousins, the Norsemen, who lived in
Denmark and Sweden and Norway.
What forced these hardy sailors to turn pirate we do not know, but once
they had discovered the advantages and pleasures of a buccaneering career
there was no one who could stop them. They would suddenly descend upon a
peaceful Frankish or Frisian village, situated on the mouth of a river.
They would kill all the men and steal all the women. Then they would sail
away in their fast-sailing ships and when the soldiers of the king or
emperor arrived upon the scene, the robbers were gone and nothing remained
but a few smouldering ruins.
During the days of disorder which followed the death of Charlemagne, the
Northmen developed great activity. Their fleets made raids upon every
country and their sailors established small independent kingdoms along the
coast of Holland and France and England and Germany, and they even found
their way into Italy. The Northmen were very intelligent They soon learned
to speak the language of their subjects and gave up the uncivilised ways
of the early Vikings (or Sea-Kings) who had been very picturesque but also
very unwashed and terribly cruel.
Early in the tenth century a Viking by the name of Rollo had repeatedly
attacked the coast of France. The king of France, too weak to resist these
northern robbers, tried to bribe them into “being good.” He offered them
the province of Normandy, if they would promise to stop bothering the rest
of his domains. Rollo accepted this bargain and became “Duke of Normandy.”
But the passion of conquest was strong in the blood of his children.
Across the channel, only a few hours away from the European mainland, they
could see the white cliffs and the green fields of England. Poor England
had passed through difficult days. For two hundred years it had been a
Roman colony. After the Romans left, it had been conquered by the Angles
and the Saxons, two German tribes from Schleswig. Next the Danes had taken
the greater part of the country and had established the kingdom of Cnut.
The Danes had been driven away and now (it was early in the eleventh
century) another Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, was on the throne. But
Edward was not expected to live long and he had no children. The
circumstances favoured the ambitious dukes of Normandy.
In 1066 Edward died. Immediately William of Normandy crossed the channel,
defeated and killed Harold of Wessex (who had taken the crown) at the
battle of Hastings, and proclaimed himself king of England.
In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain
had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse
pirate was recognised as King of England.
Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so
much more interesting and entertaining?
FEUDALISM
HOW CENTRAL EUROPE, ATTACKED FROM THREE SIDES, BECAME AN ARMED CAMP AND
WHY EUROPE WOULD HAVE PERISHED WITHOUT THOSE PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS AND
ADMINISTRATORS WHO WERE PART OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
THE following, then, is the state of Europe in the year one thousand, when
most people were so unhappy that they welcomed the prophecy foretelling
the approaching end of the world and rushed to the monasteries, that the
Day of Judgement might find them engaged upon devout duties.
At an unknown date, the Germanic tribes had left their old home in Asia
and had moved westward into Europe. By sheer pressure of numbers they had
forced their way into the Roman Empire. They had destroyed the great
western empire, but the eastern part, being off the main route of the
great migrations, had managed to survive and feebly continued the
traditions of Rome’s ancient glory.
During the days of disorder which had followed, (the true “dark ages” of
history, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era,) the German tribes
had been persuaded to accept the Christian religion and had recognised the
Bishop of Rome as the Pope or spiritual head of the world. In the ninth
century, the organising genius of Charlemagne had revived the Roman Empire
and had united the greater part of western Europe into a single state.
During the tenth century this empire had gone to pieces. The western part
had become a separate kingdom, France. The eastern half was known as the
Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and the rulers of this federation
of states then pretended that they were the direct heirs of Caesar and
Augustus.
Unfortunately the power of the kings of France did not stretch beyond the
moat of their royal residence, while the Holy Roman Emperor was openly
defied by his powerful subjects whenever it suited their fancy or their
profit.
To increase the misery of the masses of the people, the triangle of
western Europe (look at page 128, please) was for ever exposed to attacks
from three sides. On the south lived the ever dangerous Mohammedans. The
western coast was ravaged by the Northmen. The eastern frontier
(defenceless except for the short stretch of the Carpathian mountains) was
at the mercy of hordes of Huns, Hungarians, Slavs and Tartars.
The peace of Rome was a thing of the remote past, a dream of the “Good Old
Days” that were gone for ever. It was a question of “fight or die,” and
quite naturally people preferred to fight. Forced by circumstances, Europe
became an armed camp and there was a demand for strong leadership. Both
King and Emperor were far away. The frontiersmen (and most of Europe in
the year 1000 was “frontier”) must help themselves. They willingly
submitted to the representatives of the king who were sent to administer
the outlying districts, PROVIDED THEY COULD PROTECT THEM AGAINST THEIR
ENEMIES.
Soon central Europe was dotted with small principalities, each one ruled
by a duke or a count or a baron or a bishop, as the case might be, and
organised as a fighting unit. These dukes and counts and barons had sworn
to be faithful to the king who had given them their “feudum” (hence our
word “feudal,”) in return for their loyal services and a certain amount of
taxes. But travel in those days was slow and the means of communication
were exceedingly poor. The royal or imperial administrators therefore
enjoyed great independence, and within the boundaries of their own
province they assumed most of the rights which in truth belonged to the
king.
But you would make a mistake if you supposed that the people of the
eleventh century objected to this form of government. They supported
Feudalism because it was a very practical and necessary institution. Their
Lord and Master usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a
steep rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his subjects.
In case of danger the subjects found shelter behind the walls of the
baronial stronghold. That is why they tried to live as near the castle as
possible and it accounts for the many European cities which began their
career around a feudal fortress.
But the knight of the early middle ages was much more than a professional
soldier. He was the civil servant of that day. He was the judge of his
community and he was the chief of police. He caught the highwaymen and
protected the wandering pedlars who were the merchants of the eleventh
century. He looked after the dikes so that the countryside should not be
flooded (just as the first noblemen had done in the valley of the Nile
four thousand years before). He encouraged the Troubadours who wandered
from place to place telling the stories of the ancient heroes who had
fought in the great wars of the migrations. Besides, he protected the
churches and the monasteries within his territory, and although he could
neither read nor write, (it was considered unmanly to know such things,)
he employed a number of priests who kept his accounts and who registered
the marriages and the births and the deaths which occurred within the
baronial or ducal domains.
In the fifteenth century the kings once more became strong enough to
exercise those powers which belonged to them because they were “anointed
of God.” Then the feudal knights lost their former independence. Reduced
to the rank of country squires, they no longer filled a need and soon they
became a nuisance. But Europe would have perished without the “feudal
system” of the dark ages. There were many bad knights as there are many
bad people to-day. But generally speaking, the rough-fisted barons of the
twelfth and thirteenth century were hard-working administrators who
rendered a most useful service to the cause of progress. During that era
the noble torch of learning and art which had illuminated the world of the
Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans was burning very low. Without the
knights and their good friends, the monks, civilisation would have been
extinguished entirely, and the human race would have been forced to begin
once more where the cave-man had left off.
CHIVALRY
CHIVALRY
IT was quite natural that the professional fighting-men of the Middle Ages
should try to establish some sort of organisation for their mutual benefit
and protection. Out of this need for close organisation, Knighthood or
Chivalry was born.
We know very little about the origins of Knighthood. But as the system
developed, it gave the world something which it needed very badly—a
definite rule of conduct which softened the barbarous customs of that day
and made life more livable than it had been during the five hundred years
of the Dark Ages. It was not an easy task to civilise the rough
frontiersmen who had spent most of their time fighting Mohammedans and
Huns and Norsemen. Often they were guilty of backsliding, and having vowed
all sorts of oaths about mercy and charity in the morning, they would
murder all their prisoners before evening. But progress is ever the result
of slow and ceaseless labour, and finally the most unscrupulous of knights
was forced to obey the rules of his “class” or suffer the consequences.
These rules were different in the various parts of Europe, but they all
made much of “service” and “loyalty to duty.” The Middle Ages regarded
service as something very noble and beautiful. It was no disgrace to be a
servant, provided you were a good servant and did not slacken on the job.
As for loyalty, at a time when life depended upon the faithful
per-formance of many unpleasant duties, it was the chief virtue of the
fighting man.
A young knight therefore was asked to swear that he would be faithful as a
servant to God and as a servant to his King. Furthermore, he promised to
be generous to those whose need was greater than his own. He pledged his
word that he would be humble in his personal behaviour and would never
boast of his own accomplishments and that he would be a friend of all
those who suffered, (with the exception of the Mohammedans, whom he was
expected to kill on sight).
Around these vows, which were merely the Ten Commandments expressed in
terms which the people of the Middle Ages could understand, there
developed a complicated system of manners and outward behaviour. The
knights tried to model their own lives after the example of those heroes
of Arthur’s Round Table and Charlemagne’s court of whom the Troubadours
had told them and of whom you may read in many delightful books which are
enumerated at the end of this volume. They hoped that they might prove as
brave as Lancelot and as faithful as Roland. They carried themselves with
dignity and they spoke careful and gracious words that they might be known
as True Knights, however humble the cut of their coat or the size of their
purse.
In this way the order of Knighthood became a school of those good manners
which are the oil of the social machinery. Chivalry came to mean courtesy
and the feudal castle showed the rest of the world what clothes to wear,
how to eat, how to ask a lady for a dance and the thousand and one little
things of every-day behaviour which help to make life interesting and
agreeable.
Like all human institutions, Knighthood was doomed to perish as soon as it
had outlived its usefulness.
The crusades, about which one of the next chapters tells, were followed by
a great revival of trade. Cities grew overnight. The townspeople became
rich, hired good school teachers and soon were the equals of the knights.
The invention of gun-powder deprived the heavily armed “Chevalier” of his
former advantage and the use of mercenaries made it impossible to conduct
a battle with the delicate niceties of a chess tournament. The knight
became superfluous. Soon he became a ridiculous figure, with his devotion
to ideals that had no longer any practical value. It was said that the
noble Don Quixote de la Mancha had been the last of the true knights.
After his death, his trusted sword and his armour were sold to pay his
debts.
But somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into the hands of a
number of men. Washington carried it during the hopeless days of Valley
Forge. It was the only defence of Gordon, when he had refused to desert
the people who had been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his
death in the besieged fortress of Khartoum.
And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in
winning the Great War.
POPE vs. EMPEROR
THE STRANGE DOUBLE LOYALTY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND HOW IT LED
TO ENDLESS QUARRELS BETWEEN THE POPES AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS
IT is very difficult to understand the people of by-gone ages. Your own
grandfather, whom you see every day, is a mysterious being who lives in a
different world of ideas and clothes and manners. I am now telling you the
story of some of your grandfathers who are twenty-five generations
removed, and I do not expect you to catch the meaning of what I write
without re-reading this chapter a number of times.
The average man of the Middle Ages lived a very simple and uneventful
life. Even if he was a free citizen, able to come and go at will, he
rarely left his own neighbourhood. There were no printed books and only a
few manuscripts. Here and there, a small band of industrious monks taught
reading and writing and some arithmetic. But science and history and
geography lay buried beneath the ruins of Greece and Rome.
Whatever people knew about the past they had learned by listening to
stories and legends. Such information, which goes from father to son, is
often slightly incorrect in details, but it will preserve the main facts
of history with astonishing accuracy. After more than two thousand years,
the mothers of India still frighten their naughty children by telling them
that “Iskander will get them,” and Iskander is none other than Alexander
the Great, who visited India in the year 330 before the birth of Christ,
but whose story has lived through all these ages.
The people of the early Middle Ages never saw a textbook of Roman history.
They were ignorant of many things which every school-boy to-day knows
before he has entered the third grade. But the Roman Empire, which is
merely a name to you, was to them something very much alive. They felt it.
They willingly recognised the Pope as their spiritual leader because he
lived in Rome and represented the idea of the Roman super-power. And they
were profoundly grateful when Charlemagne, and afterwards Otto the Great,
revived the idea of a world-empire and created the Holy Roman Empire, that
the world might again be as it always had been.
But the fact that there were two different heirs to the Roman tradition
placed the faithful burghers of the Middle Ages in a difficult position.
The theory behind the mediaeval political system was both sound and
simple. While the worldly master (the emperor) looked after the physical
well-being of his subjects, the spiritual master (the Pope) guarded their
souls.
In practice, however, the system worked very badly. The Emperor invariably
tried to interfere with the affairs of the church and the Pope retaliated
and told the Emperor how he should rule his domains. Then they told each
other to mind their own business in very unceremonious language and the
inevitable end was war.
Under those circumstances, what were the people to do, A good Christian
obeyed both the Pope and his King. But the Pope and the Emperor were
enemies. Which side should a dutiful subject and an equally dutiful
Christian take?
It was never easy to give the correct answer. When the Emperor happened to
be a man of energy and was sufficiently well provided with money to
organise an army, he was very apt to cross the Alps and march on Rome,
besiege the Pope in his own palace if need be, and force His Holiness to
obey the imperial instructions or suffer the consequences.
But more frequently the Pope was the stronger. Then the Emperor or the
King together with all his subjects was excommunicated. This meant that
all churches were closed, that no one could be baptised, that no dying man
could be given absolution—in short, that half of the functions of
mediaeval government came to an end.
More than that, the people were absolved from their oath of loyalty to
their sovereign and were urged to rebel against their master. But if they
followed this advice of the distant Pope and were caught, they were hanged
by their near-by Lege Lord and that too was very unpleasant.
Indeed, the poor fellows were in a difficult position and none fared worse
than those who lived during the latter half of the eleventh century, when
the Emperor Henry IV of Germany and Pope Gregory VII fought a two-round
battle which decided nothing and upset the peace of Europe for almost
fifty years.
In the middle of the eleventh century there had been a strong movement for
reform in the church. The election of the Popes, thus far, had been a most
irregular affair. It was to the advantage of the Holy Roman Emperors to
have a well-disposed priest elected to the Holy See. They frequently came
to Rome at the time of election and used their influence for the benefit
of one of their friends.
In the year 1059 this had been changed. By a decree of Pope Nicholas II
the principal priests and deacons of the churches in and around Rome were
organised into the so-called College of Cardinals, and this gathering of
prominent churchmen (the word “Cardinal” meant principal) was given the
exclusive power of electing the future Popes.
In the year 1073 the College of Cardinals elected a priest by the name of
Hildebrand, the son of very simple parents in Tuscany, as Pope, and he
took the name of Gregory VII. His energy was unbounded. His belief in the
supreme powers of his Holy Office was built upon a granite rock of
conviction and courage. In the mind of Gregory, the Pope was not only the
absolute head of the Christian church, but also the highest Court of
Appeal in all worldly matters. The Pope who had elevated simple German
princes to the dignity of Emperor could depose them at will. He could veto
any law passed by duke or king or emperor, but whosoever should question a
papal decree, let him beware, for the punishment would be swift and
merciless.
Gregory sent ambassadors to all the European courts to inform the
potentates of Europe of his new laws and asked them to take due notice of
their contents. William the Conqueror promised to be good, but Henry IV,
who since the age of six had been fighting with his subjects, had no
intention of submitting to the Papal will. He called together a college of
German bishops, accused Gregory of every crime under the sun and then had
him deposed by the council of Worms.
The Pope answered with excommunication and a demand that the German
princes rid themselves of their unworthy ruler. The German princes, only
too happy to be rid of Henry, asked the Pope to come to Augsburg and help
them elect a new Emperor.
Gregory left Rome and travelled northward. Henry, who was no fool,
appreciated the danger of his position. At all costs he must make peace
with the Pope, and he must do it at once. In the midst of winter he
crossed the Alps and hastened to Canossa where the Pope had stopped for a
short rest. Three long days, from the 25th to the 28th of January of the
year 1077, Henry, dressed as a penitent pilgrim (but with a warm sweater
underneath his monkish garb), waited outside the gates of the castle of
Canossa. Then he was allowed to enter and was pardoned for his sins. But
the repentance did not last long. As soon as Henry had returned to
Germany, he behaved exactly as before. Again he was excommunicated. For
the second time a council of German bishops deposed Gregory, but this
time, when Henry crossed the Alps he was at the head of a large army,
besieged Rome and forced Gregory to retire to Salerno, where he died in
exile. This first violent outbreak decided nothing. As soon as Henry was
back in Germany, the struggle between Pope and Emperor was continued.
The Hohenstaufen family which got hold of the Imperial German Throne
shortly afterwards, were even more independent than their predecessors.
Gregory had claimed that the Popes were superior to all kings because they
(the Popes) at the Day of Judgement would be responsible for the behaviour
of all the sheep of their flock, and in the eyes of God, a king was one of
that faithful herd.
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, commonly known as Barbarossa or Red Beard, set
up the counter-claim that the Empire had been bestowed upon his
predecessor “by God himself” and as the Empire included Italy and Rome, he
began a campaign which was to add these “lost provinces” to the northern
country. Barbarossa was accidentally drowned in Asia Minor during the
second Crusade, but his son Frederick II, a brilliant young man who in his
youth had been exposed to the civilisation of the Mohammedans of Sicily,
continued the war. The Popes accused him of heresy. It is true that
Frederick seems to have felt a deep and serious contempt for the rough
Christian world of the North, for the boorish German Knights and the
intriguing Italian priests. But he held his tongue, went on a Crusade and
took Jerusalem from the infidel and was duly crowned as King of the Holy
City. Even this act did not placate the Popes. They deposed Frederick and
gave his Italian possessions to Charles of Anjou, the brother of that King
Louis of France who became famous as Saint Louis. This led to more
warfare. Conrad V, the son of Conrad IV, and the last of the
Hohenstaufens, tried to regain the kingdom, and was defeated and
decapitated at Naples. But twenty years later, the French who had made
themselves thoroughly unpopular in Sicily were all murdered during the
so-called Sicilian Vespers, and so it went.
The quarrel between the Popes and the Emperors was never settled, but
after a while the two enemies learned to leave each other alone.
In the year 1278, Rudolph of Hapsburg was elected Emperor. He did not take
the trouble to go to Rome to be crowned. The Popes did not object and in
turn they kept away from Germany. This meant peace but two entire
centuries which might have been used for the purpose of internal
organisation had been wasted in useless warfare.
It is an ill wind however that bloweth no good to some one. The little
cities of Italy, by a process of careful balancing, had managed to
increase their power and their independence at the expense of both
Emperors and Popes. When the rush for the Holy Land began, they were able
to handle the transportation problem of the thousands of eager pilgrims
who were clamoring for passage, and at the end of the Crusades they had
built themselves such strong defences of brick and of gold that they could
defy Pope and Emperor with equal indifference.
Church and State fought each other and a third party—the mediaeval
city—ran away with the spoils.
THE CRUSADES
BUT ALL THESE DIFFERENT QUARRELS WERE FORGOTTEN WHEN THE TURKS TOOK THE
HOLY LAND, DESECRATED THE HOLY PLACES AND INTERFERED SERIOUSLY WITH THE
TRADE FROM EAST TO WEST. EUROPE WENT CRUSADING
DURING three centuries there had been peace between Christians and Moslems
except in Spain and in the eastern Roman Empire, the two states defending
the gateways of Europe. The Mohammedans having conquered Syria in the
seventh century were in possession of the Holy Land. But they regarded
Jesus as a great prophet (though not quite as great as Mohammed), and they
did not interfere with the pilgrims who wished to pray in the church which
Saint Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, had built on the spot
of the Holy Grave. But early in the eleventh century, a Tartar tribe from
the wilds of Asia, called the Seljuks or Turks, became masters of the
Mohammedan state in western Asia and then the period of tolerance came to
an end. The Turks took all of Asia Minor away from the eastern Roman
Emperors and they made an end to the trade between east and west.
Alexis, the Emperor, who rarely saw anything of his Christian neighbours
of the west, appealed for help and pointed to the danger which threatened
Europe should the Turks take Constantinople.
The Italian cities which had established colonies along the coast of Asia
Minor and Palestine, in fear for their possessions, reported terrible
stories of Turkish atrocities and Christian suffering. All Europe got
excited.
Pope Urban II, a Frenchman from Reims, who had been educated at the same
famous cloister of Cluny which had trained Gregory VII, thought that the
time had come for action. The general state of Europe was far from
satisfactory. The primitive agricultural methods of that day (unchanged
since Roman times) caused a constant scarcity of food. There was
unemployment and hunger and these are apt to lead to discontent and riots.
Western Asia in older days had fed millions. It was an excellent field for
the purpose of immigration.
Therefore at the council of Clermont in France in the year 1095 the Pope
arose, described the terrible horrors which the infidels had inflicted
upon the Holy Land, gave a glowing description of this country which ever
since the days of Moses had been overflowing with milk and honey, and
exhorted the knights of France and the people of Europe in general to
leave wife and child and deliver Palestine from the Turks.
A wave of religious hysteria swept across the continent. All reason
stopped. Men would drop their hammer and saw, walk out of their shop and
take the nearest road to the east to go and kill Turks. Children would
leave their homes to “go to Palestine” and bring the terrible Turks to
their knees by the mere appeal of their youthful zeal and Christian piety.
Fully ninety percent of those enthusiasts never got within sight of the
Holy Land. They had no money. They were forced to beg or steal to keep
alive. They became a danger to the safety of the highroads and they were
killed by the angry country people.
The first Crusade, a wild mob of honest Christians, defaulting bankrupts,
penniless noblemen and fugitives from justice, following the lead of
half-crazy Peter the Hermit and Walter-without-a-Cent, began their
campaign against the Infidels by murdering all the Jews whom they met by
the way. They got as far as Hungary and then they were all killed.
This experience taught the Church a lesson. Enthusiasm alone would not set
the Holy Land free. Organisation was as necessary as good-will and
courage. A year was spent in training and equipping an army of 200,000
men. They were placed under command of Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert, duke
of Normandy, Robert, count of Flanders, and a number of other noblemen,
all experienced in the art of war.
In the year 1096 this second crusade started upon its long voyage. At
Constantinople the knights did homage to the Emperor. (For as I have told
you, traditions die hard, and a Roman Emperor, however poor and powerless,
was still held in great respect). Then they crossed into Asia, killed all
the Moslems who fell into their hands, stormed Jerusalem, massacred the
Mohammedan population, and marched to the Holy Sepulchre to give praise
and thanks amidst tears of piety and gratitude. But soon the Turks were
strengthened by the arrival of fresh troops. Then they retook Jerusalem
and in turn killed the faithful followers of the Cross.
During the next two centuries, seven other crusades took place. Gradually
the Crusaders learned the technique of the trip. The land voyage was too
tedious and too dangerous. They preferred to cross the Alps and go to
Genoa or Venice where they took ship for the east. The Genoese and the
Venetians made this trans-Mediterranean passenger service a very
profitable business. They charged exorbitant rates, and when the Crusaders
(most of whom had very little money) could not pay the price, these
Italian “profiteers” kindly allowed them to “work their way across.” In
return for a fare from Venice to Acre, the Crusader undertook to do a
stated amount of fighting for the owners of his vessel. In this way Venice
greatly increased her territory along the coast of the Adriatic and in
Greece, where Athens became a Venetian colony, and in the islands of
Cyprus and Crete and Rhodes.
All this, however, helped little in settling the question of the Holy
Land. After the first enthusiasm had worn off, a short crusading trip
became part of the liberal education of every well-bred young man, and
there never was any lack of candidates for service in Palestine. But the
old zeal was gone. The Crusaders, who had begun their warfare with deep
hatred for the Mohammedans and great love for the Christian people of the
eastern Roman Empire and Armenia, suffered a complete change of heart.
They came to despise the Greeks of Byzantium, who cheated them and
frequently betrayed the cause of the Cross, and the Armenians and all the
other Levantine races, and they began to appreciate the virtues of their
enemies who proved to be generous and fair opponents.
Of course, it would never do to say this openly. But when the Crusader
returned home, he was likely to imitate the manners which he had learned
from his heathenish foe, compared to whom the average western knight was
still a good deal of a country bumpkin. He also brought with him several
new food-stuffs, such as peaches and spinach which he planted in his
garden and grew for his own benefit. He gave up the barbarous custom of
wearing a load of heavy armour and appeared in the flowing robes of silk
or cotton which were the traditional habit of the followers of the Prophet
and were originally worn by the Turks. Indeed the Crusades, which had
begun as a punitive expedition against the Heathen, became a course of
general instruction in civilisation for millions of young Europeans.
From a military and political point of view the Crusades were a failure.
Jerusalem and a number of cities were taken and lost. A dozen little
kingdoms were established in Syria and Palestine and Asia Minor, but they
were re-conquered by the Turks and after the year 1244 (when Jerusalem
became definitely Turkish) the status of the Holy Land was the same as it
had been before 1095.
But Europe had undergone a great change. The people of the west had been
allowed a glimpse of the light and the sunshine and the beauty of the
east. Their dreary castles no longer satisfied them. They wanted a broader
life. Neither Church nor State could give this to them.
They found it in the cities.
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY
WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES SAID THAT “CITY AIR IS FREE AIR”
THE early part of the Middle Ages had been an era of pioneering and of
settlement. A new people, who thus far had lived outside the wild range of
forest, mountains and marshes which protected the north-eastern frontier
of the Roman Empire, had forced its way into the plains of western Europe
and had taken possession of most of the land. They were restless, as all
pioneers have been since the beginning of time. They liked to be “on the
go.” They cut down the forests and they cut each other’s throats with
equal energy. Few of them wanted to live in cities. They insisted upon
being “free,” they loved to feel the fresh air of the hillsides fill their
lungs while they drove their herds across the wind-swept pastures. When
they no longer liked their old homes, they pulled up stakes and went away
in search of fresh adventures.
The weaker ones died. The hardy fighters and the courageous women who had
followed their men into the wilderness survived. In this way they
developed a strong race of men. They cared little for the graces of life.
They were too busy to play the fiddle or write pieces of poetry. They had
little love for discussions. The priest, “the learned man” of the village
(and before the middle of the thirteenth century, a layman who could read
and write was regarded as a “sissy”) was supposed to settle all questions
which had no direct practical value. Meanwhile the German chieftain, the
Frankish Baron, the Northman Duke (or whatever their names and titles)
occupied their share of the territory which once had been part of the
great Roman Empire and among the ruins of past glory, they built a world
of their own which pleased them mightily and which they considered quite
perfect.
They managed the affairs of their castle and the surrounding country to
the best of their ability. They were as faithful to the commandments of
the Church as any weak mortal could hope to be. They were sufficiently
loyal to their king or emperor to keep on good terms with those distant
but always dangerous potentates. In short, they tried to do right and to
be fair to their neighbours without being exactly unfair to their own
interests.
It was not an ideal world in which they found themselves. The greater part
of the people were serfs or “villains,” farm-hands who were as much a part
of the soil upon which they lived as the cows and sheep whose stables they
shared. Their fate was not particularly happy nor was it particularly
unhappy. But what was one to do? The good Lord who ruled the world of the
Middle Ages had undoubtedly ordered everything for the best. If He, in his
wisdom, had decided that there must be both knights and serfs, it was not
the duty of these faithful sons of the church to question the arrangement.
The serfs therefore did not complain but when they were too hard driven,
they would die off like cattle which are not fed and stabled in the right
way, and then something would be hastily done to better their condition.
But if the progress of the world had been left to the serf and his feudal
master, we would still be living after the fashion of the twelfth century,
saying “abracadabra” when we tried to stop a tooth-ache, and feeling a
deep contempt and hatred for the dentist who offered to help us with his
“science,” which most likely was of Mohammedan or heathenish origin and
therefore both wicked and useless.
When you grow up you will discover that many people do not believe in
“progress” and they will prove to you by the terrible deeds of some of our
own contemporaries that “the world does not change.” But I hope that you
will not pay much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors
almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. Other
centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts developed into an
understandable language. Writing—the art of preserving our ideas for
the benefit of future generations, without which no progress is possible
was invented only four thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces
of nature into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of
your own grandfather. It seems to me, therefore, that we are making
progress at an unheard-of rate of speed. Perhaps we have paid a little too
much attention to the mere physical comforts of life. That will change in
due course of time and we shall then attack the problems which are not
related to health and to wages and plumbing and machinery in general.
But please do not be too sentimental about the “good old days.” Many
people who only see the beautiful churches and the great works of art
which the Middle Ages have left behind grow quite eloquent when they
compare our own ugly civilisation with its hurry and its noise and the
evil smells of backfiring motor trucks with the cities of a thousand years
ago. But these mediaeval churches were invariably surrounded by miserable
hovels compared to which a modern tenement house stands forth as a
luxurious palace. It is true that the noble Lancelot and the equally noble
Parsifal, the pure young hero who went in search of the Holy Grail, were
not bothered by the odor of gasoline. But there were other smells of the
barnyard variety—odors of decaying refuse which had been thrown into
the street—of pig-sties surrounding the Bishop’s palace—of
unwashed people who had inherited their coats and hats from their
grandfathers and who had never learned the blessing of soap. I do not want
to paint too unpleasant a picture. But when you read in the ancient
chronicles that the King of France, looking out of the windows of his
palace, fainted at the stench caused by the pigs rooting in the streets of
Paris, when an ancient manuscript recounts a few details of an epidemic of
the plague or of small-pox, then you begin to under-stand that “progress”
is something more than a catchword used by modern advertising men.
No, the progress of the last six hundred years would not have been
possible without the existence of cities. I shall, therefore, have to make
this chapter a little longer than many of the others. It is too important
to be reduced to three or four pages, devoted to mere political events.
The ancient world of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria had been a world of
cities. Greece had been a country of City-States. The history of Phoenicia
was the history of two cities called Sidon and Tyre. The Roman Empire was
the “hinterland” of a single town. Writing, art, science, astronomy,
architecture, literature, the theatre—the list is endless—have
all been products of the city.
For almost four thousand years the wooden bee-hive which we call a town
had been the workshop of the world. Then came the great migrations. The
Roman Empire was destroyed. The cities were burned down and Europe once
more became a land of pastures and little agricultural villages. During
the Dark Ages the fields of civilisation had lain fallow.
The Crusades had prepared the soil for a new crop. It was time for the
harvest, but the fruit was plucked by the burghers of the free cities.
I have told you the story of the castles and the monasteries, with their
heavy stone enclosures—the homes of the knights and the monks, who
guarded men’s bodies and their souls. You have seen how a few artisans
(butchers and bakers and an occasional candle-stick maker) came to live
near the castle to tend to the wants of their masters and to find
protection in case of danger. Sometimes the feudal lord allowed these
people to surround their houses with a stockade. But they were dependent
for their living upon the good-will of the mighty Seigneur of the castle.
When he went about they knelt before him and kissed his hand.
Then came the Crusades and many things changed. The migrations had driven
people from the north-east to the west. The Crusades made millions of
people travel from the west to the highly civilised regions of the
south-east. They discovered that the world was not bounded by the four
walls of their little settlement. They came to appreciate better clothes,
more comfortable houses, new dishes, products of the mysterious Orient.
After their return to their old homes, they insisted that they be supplied
with those articles. The peddler with his pack upon his back—the
only merchant of the Dark Ages—added these goods to his old
merchandise, bought a cart, hired a few ex-crusaders to protect him
against the crime wave which followed this great international war, and
went forth to do business upon a more modern and larger scale. His career
was not an easy one. Every time he entered the domains of another Lord he
had to pay tolls and taxes. But the business was profitable all the same
and the peddler continued to make his rounds.
Soon certain energetic merchants discovered that the goods which they had
always imported from afar could be made at home. They turned part of their
homes into a workgshop.{sic} They ceased to be merchants and became
manufacturers. They sold their products not only to the lord of the castle
and to the abbot in his monastery, but they exported them to nearby towns.
The lord and the abbot paid them with products of their farms, eggs and
wines, and with honey, which in those early days was used as sugar. But
the citizens of distant towns were obliged to pay in cash and the
manufacturer and the merchant began to own little pieces of gold, which
entirely changed their position in the society of the early Middle Ages.
It is difficult for you to imagine a world without money. In a modern city
one cannot possible live without money. All day long you carry a pocket
full of small discs of metal to “pay your way.” You need a nickel for the
street-car, a dollar for a dinner, three cents for an evening paper. But
many people of the early Middle Ages never saw a piece of coined money
from the time they were born to the day of their death. The gold and
silver of Greece and Rome lay buried beneath the ruins of their cities.
The world of the migrations, which had succeeded the Empire, was an
agricultural world. Every farmer raised enough grain and enough sheep and
enough cows for his own use.
The mediaeval knight was a country squire and was rarely forced to pay for
materials in money. His estates produced everything that he and his family
ate and drank and wore on their backs. The bricks for his house were made
along the banks of the nearest river. Wood for the rafters of the hall was
cut from the baronial forest. The few articles that had to come from
abroad were paid for in goods—in honey—in eggs—in
fagots.
But the Crusades upset the routine of the old agricultural life in a very
drastic fashion. Suppose that the Duke of Hildesheim was going to the Holy
Land. He must travel thousands of miles and he must pay his passage and
his hotel-bills. At home he could pay with products of his farm. But he
could not well take a hundred dozen eggs and a cart-load of hams with him
to satisfy the greed of the shipping agent of Venice or the inn-keeper of
the Brenner Pass. These gentlemen insisted upon cash. His Lordship
therefore was obliged to take a small quantity of gold with him upon his
voyage. Where could he find this gold? He could borrow it from the
Lombards, the descendants of the old Longobards, who had turned
professional money-lenders, who seated behind their exchange-table
(commonly known as “banco” or bank) were glad to let his Grace have a few
hundred gold pieces in exchange for a mortgage upon his estates, that they
might be repaid in case His Lordship should die at the hands of the Turks.
That was dangerous business for the borrower. In the end, the Lombards
invariably owned the estates and the Knight became a bankrupt, who hired
himself out as a fighting man to a more powerful and more careful
neighbour.
His Grace could also go to that part of the town where the Jews were
forced to live. There he could borrow money at a rate of fifty or sixty
percent. interest. That, too, was bad business. But was there a way out?
Some of the people of the little city which surrounded the castle were
said to have money. They had known the young lord all his life. His father
and their fathers had been good friends. They would not be unreasonable in
their demands. Very well. His Lordship’s clerk, a monk who could write and
keep accounts, sent a note to the best known merchants and asked for a
small loan. The townspeople met in the work-room of the jeweller who made
chalices for the nearby churches and discussed this demand. They could not
well refuse. It would serve no purpose to ask for “interest.” In the first
place, it was against the religious principles of most people to take
interest and in the second place, it would never be paid except in
agricultural products and of these the people had enough and to spare.
“But,” suggested the tailor who spent his days quietly sitting upon his
table and who was somewhat of a philosopher, “suppose that we ask some
favour in return for our money. We are all fond of fishing. But his
Lordship won’t let us fish in his brook. Suppose that we let him have a
hundred ducats and that he give us in return a written guarantee allowing
us to fish all we want in all of his rivers. Then he gets the hundred
which he needs, but we get the fish and it will be good business all
around.”
The day his Lordship accepted this proposition (it seemed such an easy way
of getting a hundred gold pieces) he signed the death-warrant of his own
power. His clerk drew up the agreement. His Lordship made his mark (for he
could not sign his name) and departed for the East. Two years later he
came back, dead broke. The townspeople were fishing in the castle pond.
The sight of this silent row of anglers annoyed his Lordship. He told his
equerry to go and chase the crowd away. They went, but that night a
delegation of merchants visited the castle. They were very polite. They
congratulated his Lordship upon his safe return. They were sorry his
Lordship had been annoyed by the fishermen, but as his Lordship might
perhaps remember he had given them permission to do so himself, and the
tailor produced the Charter which had been kept in the safe of the
jeweller ever since the master had gone to the Holy Land.
His Lordship was much annoyed. But once more he was in dire need of some
money. In Italy he had signed his name to certain documents which were now
in the possession of Salvestro dei Medici, the well-known banker. These
documents were “promissory notes” and they were due two months from date.
Their total amount came to three hundred and forty pounds, Flemish gold.
Under these circumstances, the noble knight could not well show the rage
which filled his heart and his proud soul. Instead, he suggested another
little loan. The merchants retired to discuss the matter.
After three days they came back and said “yes.” They were only too happy
to be able to help their master in his difficulties, but in return for the
345 golden pounds would he give them another written promise (another
charter) that they, the townspeople, might establish a council of their
own to be elected by all the merchants and free citizens of the city, said
council to manage civic affairs without interference from the side of the
castle?
His Lordship was confoundedly angry. But again, he needed the money. He
said yes, and signed the charter. Next week, he repented. He called his
soldiers and went to the house of the jeweller and asked for the documents
which his crafty subjects had cajoled out of him under the pressure of
circumstances. He took them away and burned them. The townspeople stood by
and said nothing. But when next his Lordship needed money to pay for the
dowry of his daughter, he was unable to get a single penny. After that
little affair at the jeweller’s his credit was not considered good. He was
forced to eat humble-pie and offer to make certain reparations. Before his
Lordship got the first installment of the stipulated sum, the townspeople
were once more in possession of all their old charters and a brand new one
which permitted them to build a “city-hall” and a strong tower where all
the charters might be kept protected against fire and theft, which really
meant protected against future violence on the part of the Lord and his
armed followers.
This, in a very general way, is what happened during the centuries which
followed the Crusades. It was a slow process, this gradual shifting of
power from the castle to the city. There was some fighting. A few tailors
and jewellers were killed and a few castles went up in smoke. But such
occurrences were not common. Almost imperceptibly the towns grew richer
and the feudal lords grew poorer. To maintain themselves they were for
ever forced to exchange charters of civic liberty in return for ready
cash. The cities grew. They offered an asylum to run-away serfs who gained
their liberty after they had lived a number of years behind the city
walls. They came to be the home of the more energetic elements of the
surrounding country districts. They were proud of their new importance and
expressed their power in the churches and public buildings which they
erected around the old market place, where centuries before the barter of
eggs and sheep and honey and salt had taken place. They wanted their
children to have a better chance in life than they had enjoyed themselves.
They hired monks to come to their city and be school teachers. When they
heard of a man who could paint pictures upon boards of wood, they offered
him a pension if he would come and cover the walls of their chapels and
their town hall with scenes from the Holy Scriptures.
Meanwhile his Lordship, in the dreary and drafty halls of his castle, saw
all this up-start splendour and regretted the day when first he had signed
away a single one of his sovereign rights and prerogatives. But he was
helpless. The townspeople with their well-filled strong-boxes snapped
their fingers at him. They were free men, fully prepared to hold what they
had gained by the sweat of their brow and after a struggle which had
lasted for more than ten generations.
MEDIAEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT
HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES ASSERTED THEIR RIGHT TO BE HEARD IN THE ROYAL
COUNCILS OF THEIR COUNTRY
As long as people were “nomads,” wandering tribes of shepherds, all men
had been equal and had been responsible for the welfare and safety of the
entire community.
But after they had settled down and some had become rich and others had
grown poor, the government was apt to fall into the hands of those who
were not obliged to work for their living and who could devote themselves
to politics.
I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in Mesopotamia and in
Greece and in Rome. It occurred among the Germanic population of western
Europe as soon as order had been restored. The western European world was
ruled in the first place by an emperor who was elected by the seven or
eight most important kings of the vast Roman Empire of the German nation
and who enjoyed a great deal of imaginary and very little actual power. It
was ruled by a number of kings who sat upon shaky thrones. The every-day
government was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelets. Their
subjects were peasants or serfs. There were few cities. There was hardly
any middle class. But during the thirteenth century (after an absence of
almost a thousand years) the middle class—the merchant class—once
more appeared upon the historical stage and its rise in power, as we saw
in the last chapter, had meant a decrease in the influence of the castle
folk.
Thus far, the king, in ruling his domains, had only paid attention to the
wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But the new world of trade and
commerce which grew out of the Crusades forced him to recognise the middle
class or suffer from an ever-increasing emptiness of his exchequer. Their
majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes) would have as lief
consulted their cows and their pigs as the good burghers of their cities.
But they could not help themselves. They swallowed the bitter pill because
it was gilded, but not without a struggle.
In England, during the absence of Richard the Lion Hearted (who had gone
to the Holy Land, but who was spending the greater part of his crusading
voyage in an Austrian jail) the government of the country had been placed
in the hands of John, a brother of Richard, who was his inferior in the
art of war, but his equal as a bad administrator. John had begun his
career as a regent by losing Normandy and the greater part of the French
possessions. Next, he had managed to get into a quarrel with Pope Innocent
III, the famous enemy of the Hohenstaufens. The Pope had excommunicated
John (as Gregory VII had excommunicated the Emperor Henry IV two centuries
before). In the year 1213 John had been obliged to make an ignominious
peace just as Henry IV had been obliged to do in the year 1077.
Undismayed by his lack of success, John continued to abuse his royal power
until his disgruntled vassals made a prisoner of their anointed ruler and
forced him to promise that he would be good and would never again
interfere with the ancient rights of his subjects. All this happened on a
little island in the Thames, near the village of Runnymede, on the 15th of
June of the year 1215. The document to which John signed his name was
called the Big Charter—the Magna Carta. It contained very little
that was new. It re-stated in short and direct sentences the ancient
duties of the king and enumerated the privileges of his vassals. It paid
little attention to the rights (if any) of the vast majority of the
people, the peasants, but it offered certain securities to the rising
class of the merchants. It was a charter of great importance because it
defined the powers of the king with more precision than had ever been done
before. But it was still a purely mediaeval document. It did not refer to
common human beings, unless they happened to be the property of the
vassal, which must be safe-guarded against royal tyranny just as the
Baronial woods and cows were protected against an excess of zeal on the
part of the royal foresters.
A few years later, however, we begin to hear a very different note in the
councils of His Majesty.
John, who was bad, both by birth and inclination, solemnly had promised to
obey the great charter and then had broken every one of its many
stipulations. Fortunately, he soon died and was succeeded by his son Henry
III, who was forced to recognise the charter anew. Meanwhile, Uncle
Richard, the Crusader, had cost the country a great deal of money and the
king was obliged to ask for a few loans that he might pay his obligations
to the Jewish money-lenders. The large land-owners and the bishops who
acted as councillors to the king could not provide him with the necessary
gold and silver. The king then gave orders that a few representatives of
the cities be called upon to attend the sessions of his Great Council.
They made their first appearance in the year 1265. They were supposed to
act only as financial experts who were not supposed to take a part in the
general discussion of matters of state, but to give advice exclusively
upon the question of taxation.
Gradually, however, these representatives of the “commons” were consulted
upon many of the problems and the meeting of noblemen, bishops and city
delegates developed into a regular Parliament, a place “ou l’on parfait,”
which means in English where people talked, before important affairs of
state were decided upon.
But the institution of such a general advisory-board with certain
executive powers was not an English invention, as seems to ke the general
belief, and government by a “king and his parliament” was by no means
restricted to the British Isles. You will find it in every part of Europe.
In some countries, like France, the rapid increase of the Royal power
after the Middle Ages reduced the influence of the “parliament” to
nothing. In the year 1302 representatives of the cities had been admitted
to the meeting of the French Parliament, but five centuries had to pass
before this “Parliament” was strong enough to assert the rights of the
middle class, the so-called Third Estate, and break the power of the king.
Then they made up for lost time and during the French Revolution,
abolished the king, the clergy and the nobles and made the representatives
of the common people the rulers of the land. In Spain the “cortex” (the
king’s council) had been opened to the commoners as early as the first
half of the twelfth century. In the Germain Empire, a number of important
cities had obtained the rank of “imperial cities” whose representatives
must be heard in the imperial diet.
In Sweden, representatives of the people attended the sessions of the
Riksdag at the first meeting of the year 1359. In Denmark the Daneholf,
the ancient national assembly, was re-established in 1314, and, although
the nobles often regained control of the country at the expense of the
king and the people, the representatives of the cities were never
completely deprived of their power.
In the Scandinavian country, the story of representative government is
particularly interesting. In Iceland, the “Althing,” the assembly of all
free landowners, who managed the affairs of the island, began to hold
regular meetings in the ninth century and continued to do so for more than
a thousand years.
In Switzerland, the freemen of the different cantons defended their
assemblies against the attempts of a number of feudal neighbours with
great success.
Finally, in the Low Countries, in Holland, the councils of the different
duchies and counties were attended by representatives of the third estate
as early as the thirteenth century.
In the sixteenth century a number of these small provinces rebelled
against their king, abjured his majesty in a solemn meeting of the
“Estates General,” removed the clergy from the discussions, broke the
power of the nobles and assumed full executive authority over the
newly-established Republic of the United Seven Netherlands. For two
centuries, the representatives of the town-councils ruled the country
without a king, without bishops and without noblemen. The city had become
supreme and the good burghers had become the rulers of the land.
THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD
WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT OF THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY
HAPPENED TO LIVE
DATES are a very useful invention. We could not do without them but unless
we are very careful, they will play tricks with us. They are apt to make
history too precise. For example, when I talk of the point-of-view of
mediaeval man, I do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476,
suddenly all the people of Europe said, “Ah, now the Roman Empire has come
to an end and we are living in the Middle Ages. How interesting!”
You could have found men at the Frankish court of Charlemagne who were
Romans in their habits, in their manners, in their out-look upon life. On
the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people
in this world have never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man. All
times and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding generations play
tag with each other. But it is possible to study the minds of a good many
true representatives of the Middle Ages and then give you an idea of the
average man’s attitude toward life and the many difficult problems of
living.
First of all, remember that the people of the Middle Ages never thought of
themselves as free-born citizens, who could come and go at will and shape
their fate according to their ability or energy or luck. On the contrary,
they all considered themselves part of the general scheme of things, which
included emperors and serfs, popes and heretics, heroes and swashbucklers,
rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves. They accepted this divine
ordinance and asked no questions. In this, of course, they differed
radically from modern people who accept nothing and who are forever trying
to improve their own financial and political situation.
To the man and woman of the thirteenth century, the world hereafter—a
Heaven of wonderful delights and a Hell of brimstone and suffering—meant
something more than empty words or vague theological phrases. It was an
actual fact and the mediaeval burghers and knights spent the greater part
of their time preparing for it. We modern people regard a noble death
after a well-spent life with the quiet calm of the ancient Greeks and
Romans. After three score years of work and effort, we go to sleep with
the feeling that all will be well.
But during the Middle Ages, the King of Terrors with his grinning skull
and his rattling bones was man’s steady companion. He woke his victims up
with terrible tunes on his scratchy fiddle he sat down with them at dinner—he
smiled at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took a girl out for
a walk. If you had heard nothing but hair-raising yarns about cemeteries
and coffins and fearful diseases when you were very young, instead of
listening to the fairy stories of Anderson and Grimm, you, too, would have
lived all your days in a dread of the final hour and the gruesome day of
Judgment. That is exactly what happened to the children of the Middle
Ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks and only a few occasional
angels. Sometimes, their fear of the future filled their souls with
humility and piety, but often it influenced them the other way and made
them cruel and sentimental. They would first of all murder all the women
and children of a captured city and then they would devoutly march to a
holy spot and with their hands gory with the blood of innocent victims,
they would pray that a merciful heaven forgive them their sins. Yea, they
would do more than pray, they would weep bitter tears and would confess
themselves the most wicked of sinners. But the next day, they would once
more butcher a camp of Saracen enemies without a spark of mercy in their
hearts.
Of course, the Crusaders were Knights and obeyed a somewhat different code
of manners from the common men. But in such respects the common man was
just the same as his master. He, too, resembled a shy horse, easily
frightened by a shadow or a silly piece of paper, capable of excellent and
faithful service but liable to run away and do terrible damage when his
feverish imagination saw a ghost.
In judging these good people, however, it is wise to remember the terrible
disadvantages under which they lived. They were really barbarians who
posed as civilised people. Charlemagne and Otto the Great were called
“Roman Emperors,” but they had as little resemblance to a real Roman
Emperor (say Augustus or Marcus Aurelius) as “King” Wumba Wumba of the
upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of Sweden or Denmark. They
were savages who lived amidst glorious ruins but who did not share the
benefits of the civilisation which their fathers and grandfathers had
destroyed. They knew nothing. They were ignorant of almost every fact
which a boy of twelve knows to-day. They were obliged to go to one single
book for all their information. That was the Bible. But those parts of the
Bible which have influenced the history of the human race for the better
are those chapters of the New Testament which teach us the great moral
lessons of love, charity and forgiveness. As a handbook of astronomy,
zoology, botany, geometry and all the other sciences, the venerable book
is not entirely reliable. In the twelfth century, a second book was added
to the mediaeval library, the great encyclopaedia of useful knowledge,
compiled by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher of the fourth century before
Christ. Why the Christian church should have been willing to accord such
high honors to the teacher of Alexander the Great, whereas they condemned
all other Greek philosophers on account of their heathenish doctrines, I
really do not know. But next to the Bible, Aristotle was recognized as the
only reliable teacher whose works could be safely placed into the hands of
true Christians.
His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout way. They had gone
from Greece to Alexandria. They had then been translated from the Greek
into the Arabic language by the Mohammedans who conquered Egypt in the
seventh century. They had followed the Moslem armies into Spain and the
philosophy of the great Stagirite (Aristotle was a native of Stagira in
Macedonia) was taught in the Moorish universities of Cordova. The Arabic
text was then translated into Latin by the Christian students who had
crossed the Pyrenees to get a liberal education and this much travelled
version of the famous books was at last taught at the different schools of
northwestern Europe. It was not very clear, but that made it all the more
interesting.
With the help of the Bible and Aristotle, the most brilliant men of the
Middle Ages now set to work to explain all things between Heaven and Earth
in their relation to the expressed will of God. These brilliant men, the
so-called Scholasts or Schoolmen, were really very intelligent, but they
had obtained their information exclusively from books, and never from
actual observation. If they wanted to lecture on the sturgeon or on
caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments and Aristotle, and told
their students everything these good books had to say upon the subject of
caterpillars and sturgeons. They did not go out to the nearest river to
catch a sturgeon. They did not leave their libraries and repair to the
backyard to catch a few caterpillars and look at these animals and study
them in their native haunts. Even such famous scholars as Albertus Magnus
and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire whether the sturgeons in the land of
Palestine and the caterpillars of Macedonia might not have been different
from the sturgeons and the caterpillars of western Europe.
When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like Roger Bacon
appeared in the council of the learned and began to experiment with
magnifying glasses and funny little telescopes and actually dragged the
sturgen and the caterpillar into the lecturing room and proved that they
were different from the creatures described by the Old Testament and by
Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon was going too
far. When he dared to suggest that an hour of actual observation was worth
more than ten years with Aristotle and that the works of that famous Greek
might as well have remained untranslated for all the good they had ever
done, the scholasts went to the police and said, “This man is a danger to
the safety of the state. He wants us to study Greek that we may read
Aristotle in the original. Why should he not be contented with our
Latin-Arabic translation which has satisfied our faithful people for so
many hundred years? Why is he so curious about the insides of fishes and
the insides of insects? He is probably a wicked magician trying to upset
the established order of things by his Black Magic.” And so well did they
plead their cause that the frightened guardians of the peace forbade Bacon
to write a single word for more than ten years. When he resumed his
studies he had learned a lesson. He wrote his books in a queer cipher
which made it impossible for his contemporaries to read them, a trick
which became common as the Church became more desperate in its attempts to
prevent people from asking questions which would lead to doubts and
infidelity.
This, however, was not done out of any wicked desire to keep people
ignorant. The feeling which prompted the heretic hunters of that day was
really a very kindly one. They firmly believed—nay, they knew—that
this life was but the preparation for our real existence in the next
world. They felt convinced that too much knowledge made people
uncomfortable, filled their minds with dangerous opinions and led to doubt
and hence to perdition. A mediaeval Schoolman who saw one of his pupils
stray away from the revealed authority of the Bible and Aristotle, that he
might study things for himself, felt as uncomfortable as a loving mother
who sees her young child approach a hot stove. She knows that he will burn
his little fingers if he is allowed to touch it and she tries to keep him
back, if necessary she will use force. But she really loves the child and
if he will only obey her, she will be as good to him as she possibly can
be. In the same way the mediaeval guardians of people’s souls, while they
were strict in all matters pertaining to the Faith, slaved day and night
to render the greatest possible service to the members of their flock.
They held out a helping hand whenever they could and the society of that
day shows the influence of thousands of good men and pious women who tried
to make the fate of the average mortal as bearable as possible.
A serf was a serf and his position would never change. But the Good Lord
of the Middle Ages who allowed the serf to remain a slave all his life had
bestowed an immortal soul upon this humble creature and therefore he must
be protected in his rights, that he might live and die as a good
Christian. When he grew too old or too weak to work he must be taken care
of by the feudal master for whom he had worked. The serf, therefore, who
led a monotonous and dreary life, was never haunted by fear of to-morrow.
He knew that he was “safe”—that he could not be thrown out of
employment, that he would always have a roof over his head (a leaky roof,
perhaps, but roof all the same), and that he would always have something
to eat.
This feeling of “stability” and of “safety” was found in all classes of
society. In the towns the merchants and the artisans established guilds
which assured every member of a steady income. It did not encourage the
ambitious to do better than their neighbours. Too often the guilds gave
protection to the “slacker” who managed to “get by.” But they established
a general feeling of content and assurance among the labouring classes
which no longer exists in our day of general competition. The Middle Ages
were familiar with the dangers of what we modern people call “corners,”
when a single rich man gets hold of all the available grain or soap or
pickled herring, and then forces the world to buy from him at his own
price. The authorities, therefore, discouraged wholesale trading and
regulated the price at which merchants were allowed to sell their goods.
The Middle Ages disliked competition. Why compete and fill the world with
hurry and rivalry and a multitude of pushing men, when the Day of
Judgement was near at hand, when riches would count for nothing and when
the good serf would enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad knight
was sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno?
In short, the people of the Middle Ages were asked to surrender part of
their liberty of thought and action, that they might enjoy greater safety
from poverty of the body and poverty of the soul.
And with a very few exceptions, they did not object. They firmly believed
that they were mere visitors upon this planet—that they were here to
be prepared for a greater and more important life. Deliberately they
turned their backs upon a world which was filled with suffering and
wickedness and injustice. They pulled down the blinds that the rays of the
sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the Apocalypse
which told them of that heavenly light which was to illumine their
happiness in all eternity. They tried to close their eyes to most of the
joys of the world in which they lived that they might enjoy those which
awaited them in the near future. They accepted life as a necessary evil
and welcomed death as the beginning of a glorious day.
The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the future but had
tried to establish their Paradise right here upon this earth. They had
succeeded in making life extremely pleasant for those of their fellow men
who did not happen to be slaves. Then came the other extreme of the Middle
Ages, when man built himself a Paradise beyond the highest clouds and
turned this world into a vale of tears for high and low, for rich and
poor, for the intelligent and the dumb. It was time for the pendulum to
swing back in the other direction, as I shall tell you in my next chapter.
MEDIAEVAL TRADE
HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE MEDITERRANEAN A BUSY CENTRE OF TRADE
AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT DISTRIBUTING
CENTRE FOR THE COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA
THERE were three good reasons why the Italian cities should have been the
first to regain a position of great importance during the late Middle
Ages. The Italian peninsula had been settled by Rome at a very early date.
There had been more roads and more towns and more schools than anywhere
else in Europe.
The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, but there had
been so much to destroy that more had been able to survive. In the second
place, the Pope lived in Italy and as the head of a vast political
machine, which owned land and serfs and buildings and forests and rivers
and conducted courts of law, he was in constant receipt of a great deal of
money. The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and silver as did the
merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The cows and the eggs and
the horses and all the other agricultural products of the north and the
west must be changed into actual cash before the debt could be paid in the
distant city of Rome.
This made Italy the one country where there was a comparative abundance of
gold and silver. Finally, during the Crusades, the Italian cities had
become the point of embarkation for the Crusaders and had profiteered to
an almost unbelievable extent.
And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same Italian cities
remained the distributing centres for those Oriental goods upon which the
people of Europe had come to depend during the time they had spent in the
near east.
Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was a republic built
upon a mud bank. Thither people from the mainland had fled during the
invasions of the barbarians in the fourth century. Surrounded on all sides
by the sea they had engaged in the business of salt-making. Salt had been
very scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had been high. For
hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of this indispensable
table commodity (I say indispensable, because people, like sheep, fall ill
unless they get a certain amount of salt in their food). The people had
used this monopoly to increase the power of their city. At times they had
even dared to defy the power of the Popes. The town had grown rich and had
begun to build ships, which engaged in trade with the Orient. During the
Crusades, these ships were used to carry passengers to the Holy Land, and
when the passengers could not pay for their tickets in cash, they were
obliged to help the Venetians who were for ever increasing their colonies
in the AEgean Sea, in Asia Minor and in Egypt.
By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had grown to two
hundred thousand, which made Venice the biggest city of the Middle Ages.
The people were without influence upon the government which was the
private affair of a small number of rich merchant families. They elected a
senate and a Doge (or Duke), but the actual rulers of the city were the
members of the famous Council of Ten,—who maintained themselves with
the help of a highly organised system of secret service men and
professional murderers, who kept watch upon all citizens and quietly
removed those who might be dangerous to the safety of their high-handed
and unscrupulous Committee of Public Safety.
The other extreme of government, a democracy of very turbulent habits, was
to be found in Florence. This city controlled the main road from northern
Europe to Rome and used the money which it had derived from this fortunate
economic position to engage in manufacturing. The Florentines tried to
follow the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests and members of the guilds
all took part in the discussions of civic affairs. This led to great civic
upheaval. People were forever being divided into political parties and
these parties fought each other with intense bitterness and exiled their
enemies and confiscated their possessions as soon as they had gained a
victory in the council. After several centuries of this rule by organised
mobs, the inevitable happened. A powerful family made itself master of the
city and governed the town and the surrounding country after the fashion
of the old Greek “tyrants.” They were called the Medici. The earliest
Medici had been physicians (medicus is Latin for physician, hence their
name), but later they had turned banker. Their banks and their pawnshops
were to be found in all the more important centres of trade. Even today
our American pawn-shops display the three golden balls which were part of
the coat of arms of the mighty house of the Medici, who became rulers of
Florence and married their daughters to the kings of France and were
buried in graves worthy of a Roman Caesar.
Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where the merchants
specialised in trade with Tunis in Africa and the grain depots of the
Black Sea. Then there were more than two hundred other cities, some large
and some small, each a perfect commercial unit, all of them fighting their
neighbours and rivals with the undying hatred of neighbours who are
depriving each other of their profits.
Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been brought to these
distributing centres, they must be prepared for the voyage to the west and
the north.
Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where they were
reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in turn served as the
market places of northern and western France.
Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This ancient road led
across the Brenner pass, the old gateway for the barbarians who had
invaded Italy. Past Innsbruck, the merchandise was carried to Basel. From
there it drifted down the Rhine to the North Sea and England, or it was
taken to Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both bankers and
manufacturers and who prospered greatly by “shaving” the coins with which
they paid their workmen), looked after the further distribution to
Nuremberg and Leipzig and the cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on the
Island of Gotland) which looked after the needs of the Northern Baltic and
dealt directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old commercial centre of
Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the
sixteenth century.
The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had an interesting
story of their own. The mediaeval world ate a great deal of fish. There
were many fast days and then people were not permitted to eat meat. For
those who lived away from the coast and from the rivers, this meant a diet
of eggs or nothing at all. But early in the thirteenth century a Dutch
fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so that it could be
transported to distant points. The herring fisheries of the North Sea then
became of great importance. But some time during the thirteenth century,
this useful little fish (for reasons of its own) moved from the North Sea
to the Baltic and the cities of that inland sea began to make money. All
the world now sailed to the Baltic to catch herring and as that fish could
only be caught during a few months each year (the rest of the time it
spends in deep water, raising large families of little herrings) the ships
would have been idle during the rest of the time unless they had found
another occupation. They were then used to carry the wheat of northern and
central Russia to southern and western Europe. On the return voyage they
brought spices and silks and carpets and Oriental rugs from Venice and
Genoa to Bruges and Hamburg and Bremen.
Out of such simple beginnings there developed an important system of
international trade which reached from the manufacturing cities of Bruges
and Ghent (where the almighty guilds fought pitched battles with the kings
of France and England and established a labour tyranny which completely
ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic of Novgorod in
northern Russia, which was a mighty city until Tsar Ivan, who distrusted
all merchants, took the town and killed sixty thousand people in less than
a month’s time and reduced the survivors to beggary.
That they might protect themselves against pirates and excessive tolls and
annoying legislation, the merchants of the north founded a protective
league which was called the “Hansa.” The Hansa, which had its headquarters
in Lubeck, was a voluntary association of more than one hundred cities.
The association maintained a navy of its own which patrolled the seas and
fought and defeated the Kings of England and Denmark when they dared to
interfere with the rights and the privileges of the mighty Hanseatic
merchants.
I wish that I had more space to tell you some of the wonderful stories of
this strange commerce which was carried on across the high mountains and
across the deep seas amidst such dangers that every voyage became a
glorious adventure. But it would take several volumes and it cannot be
done here.
Besides, I hope that I have told you enough about the Middle Ages to make
you curious to read more in the excellent books of which I shall give you
a list at the end of this volume.
The Middle Ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a period of very
slow progress. The people who were in power believed that “progress” was a
very undesirable invention of the Evil One and ought to be discouraged,
and as they hap-pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to
enforce their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights. Here
and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into the forbidden
region of science, but they fared badly and were considered lucky when
they escaped with their lives and a jail sentence of twenty years.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of international
commerce swept over western Europe as the Nile had swept across the valley
of ancient Egypt. It left behind a fertile sediment of prosperity.
Prosperity meant leisure hours and these leisure hours gave both men and
women a chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in literature and
art and music.
Then once more was the world filled with that divine curiosity which has
elevated man from the ranks of those other mammals who are his distant
cousins but who have remained dumb, and the cities, of whose growth and
development I have told you in my last chapter, offered a safe shelter to
these brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain of the
established order of things.
They set to work. They opened the windows of their cloistered and studious
cells. A flood of sunlight entered the dusty rooms and showed them the
cobwebs which had gathered during the long period of semi-darkness.
They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gardens.
Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crumbling town walls,
and said, “This is a good world. We are glad that we live in it.”
At that moment, the Middle Ages came to an end and a new world began.
THE RENAISSANCE
PEOPLE ONCE MORE DARED TO BE HAPPY JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE ALIVE. THEY
TRIED TO SAVE THE REMAINS OF THE OLDER AND MORE AGREEABLE CIVILISATION OF
ROME AND GREECE AND THEY WERE SO PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS THAT THEY
SPOKE OF A RENAISSANCE OR RE-BIRTH OF CIVILISATION
THE Renaissance was not a political or religious movement. It was a state
of mind.
The men of the Renaissance continued to be the obedient sons of the mother
church. They were subjects of kings and emperors and dukes and murmured
not.
But their outlook upon life was changed. They began to wear different
clothes—to speak a different language—to live different lives
in different houses.
They no longer concentrated all their thoughts and their efforts upon the
blessed existence that awaited them in Heaven. They tried to establish
their Paradise upon this planet, and, truth to tell, they succeeded in a
remarkable degree.
I have quite often warned you against the danger that lies in historical
dates. People take them too literally. They think of the Middle Ages as a
period of darkness and ignorance. “Click,” says the clock, and the
Renaissance begins and cities and palaces are flooded with the bright
sunlight of an eager intellectual curiosity.
As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible to draw such sharp lines. The
thirteenth century belonged most decidedly to the Middle Ages. All
historians agree upon that. But was it a time of darkness and stagnation
merely? By no means. People were tremendously alive. Great states were
being founded. Large centres of commerce were being developed. High above
the turretted towers of the castle and the peaked roof of the town-hall,
rose the slender spire of the newly built Gothic cathedral. Everywhere the
world was in motion. The high and mighty gentlemen of the city-hall, who
had just become conscious of their own strength (by way of their recently
acquired riches) were struggling for more power with their feudal masters.
The members of the guilds who had just become aware of the important fact
that “numbers count” were fighting the high and mighty gentlemen of the
city-hall. The king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled
waters and caught many a shining bass of profit which they proceeded to
cook and eat before the noses of the surprised and disappointed
councillors and guild brethren.
To enliven the scenery during the long hours of evening when the badly
lighted streets did not invite further political and economic dispute, the
Troubadours and Minnesingers told their stories and sang their songs of
romance and adventure and heroism and loyalty to all fair women. Meanwhile
youth, impatient of the slowness of progress, flocked to the universities,
and thereby hangs a story.
The Middle Ages were “internationally minded.” That sounds difficult, but
wait until I explain it to you. We modern people are “nationally minded.”
We are Americans or Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians and speak English
or French or Italian and go to English and French and Italian
universities, unless we want to specialise in some particular branch of
learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn another
language and go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow. But the people of the
thirteenth or fourteenth century rarely talked of themselves as Englishmen
or Frenchmen or Italians. They said, “I am a citizen of Sheffield or
Bordeaux or Genoa.” Because they all belonged to one and the same church
they felt a certain bond of brotherhood. And as all educated men could
speak Latin, they possessed an international language which removed the
stupid language barriers which have grown up in modern Europe and which
place the small nations at such an enormous disadvantage. Just as an
example, take the case of Erasmus, the great preacher of tolerance and
laughter, who wrote his books in the sixteenth century. He was the native
of a small Dutch village. He wrote in Latin and all the world was his
audience. If he were alive to-day, he would write in Dutch. Then only five
or six million people would be able to read him. To be understood by the
rest of Europe and America, his publishers would be obliged to translate
his books into twenty different languages. That would cost a lot of money
and most likely the publishers would never take the trouble or the risk.
Six hundred years ago that could not happen. The greater part of the
people were still very ignorant and could not read or write at all. But
those who had mastered the difficult art of handling the goose-quill
belonged to an international republic of letters which spread across the
entire continent and which knew of no boundaries and respected no
limitations of language or nationality. The universities were the
strongholds of this republic. Unlike modern fortifications, they did not
follow the frontier. They were to be found wherever a teacher and a few
pupils happened to find themselves together. There again the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance differed from our own time. Nowadays, when a new
university is built, the process (almost invariably) is as follows: Some
rich man wants to do something for the community in which he lives or a
particular religious sect wants to build a school to keep its faithful
children under decent supervision, or a state needs doc-tors and lawyers
and teachers. The university begins as a large sum of money which is
deposited in a bank. This money is then used to construct buildings and
laboratories and dormitories. Finally professional teachers are hired,
entrance examinations are held and the university is on the way.
But in the Middle Ages things were done differently. A wise man said to
himself, “I have discovered a great truth. I must impart my knowledge to
others.” And he began to preach his wisdom wherever and whenever he could
get a few people to listen to him, like a modern soap-box orator. If he
was an interesting speaker, the crowd came and stayed. If he was dull,
they shrugged their shoulders and continued their way.
By and by certain young men began to come regularly to hear the words of
wisdom of this great teacher. They brought copybooks with them and a
little bottle of ink and a goose quill and wrote down what seemed to be
important. One day it rained. The teacher and his pupils retired to an
empty basement or the room of the “Professor.” The learned man sat in his
chair and the boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the
University, the “universitas,” a corporation of professors and students
during the Middle Ages, when the “teacher” counted for everything and the
building in which he taught counted for very little.
As an example, let me tell you of something that happened in the ninth
century. In the town of Salerno near Naples there were a number of
excellent physicians. They attracted people desirous of learning the
medical profession and for almost a thousand years (until 1817) there was
a university of Salerno which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great
Greek doctor who had practiced his art in ancient Hellas in the fifth
century before the birth of Christ.
Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany, who early in the
twelfth century began to lecture on theology and logic in Paris. Thousands
of eager young men flocked to the French city to hear him. Other priests
who disagreed with him stepped forward to explain their point of view.
Paris was soon filled with a clamouring multitude of Englishmen and
Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hungary and around the
old cathedral which stood on a little island in the Seine there grew the
famous University of Paris. In Bologna in Italy, a monk by the name of
Gratian had compiled a text-book for those whose business it was to know
the laws of the church. Young priests and many laymen then came from all
over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas. To protect themselves
against the landlords and the innkeepers and the boarding-house ladies of
the city, they formed a corporation (or University) and behold the
beginning of the university of Bologna.
Next there was a quarrel in the University of Paris. We do not know what
caused it, but a number of disgruntled teachers together with their pupils
crossed the channel and found a hospitable home in a little village on the
Thames called Oxford, and in this way the famous University of Oxford came
into being. In the same way, in the year 1222, there had been a split in
the University of Bologna. The discontented teachers (again followed by
their pupils) had moved to Padua and their proud city thenceforward
boasted of a university of its own. And so it went from Valladolid in
Spain to Cracow in distant Poland and from Poitiers in France to Rostock
in Germany.
It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these early professors
would sound absurd to our ears, trained to listen to logarithms and
geometrical theorems. The point however, which I want to make is this—the
Middle Ages and especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the
world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation, there was life,
there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless if somewhat bashful asking
of questions. And out of this turmoil grew the Renaissance.
But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene of the Mediaeval
world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of whom you ought to know more
than his mere name. This man was called Dante. He was the son of a
Florentine lawyer who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the
light of day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his ancestors
while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis of Assisi
upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross, but often when he went to
school, his frightened eyes would see the puddles of blood which told of
the terrible and endless warfare that raged forever between the Guelphs
and the Ghibellines, the followers of the Pope and the adherents of the
Emperors.
When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father had been one
before him, just as an American boy might become a Democrat or a
Republican, simply because his father had happened to be a Democrat or a
Republican. But after a few years, Dante saw that Italy, unless united
under a single head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered
jealousies of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Ghilbeiline.
He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a mighty emperor might
come and re-establish unity and order. Alas! he hoped in vain. The
Ghibellines were driven out of Florence in the year 1802. From that time
on until the day of his death amidst the dreary ruins of Ravenna, in the
year 1321, Dante was a homeless wanderer, eating the bread of charity at
the table of rich patrons whose names would have sunk into the deepest pit
of oblivion but for this single fact, that they had been kind to a poet in
his misery. During the many years of exile, Dante felt compelled to
justify himself and his actions when he had been a political leader in his
home-town, and when he had spent his days walking along the banks of the
Arno that he might catch a glimpse of the lovely Beatrice Portinari, who
died the wife of another man, a dozen years before the Ghibelline
disaster.
He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had faithfully served the
town of is birth and before a corrupt court he had been accused of
stealing the public funds and had been condemned to be burned alive should
he venture back within the realm of the city of Florence. To clear himself
before his own conscience and before his contemporaries, Dante then
created an Imaginary World and with great detail he described the
circumstances which had led to his defeat and depicted the hopeless
condition of greed and lust and hatred which had turned his fair and
beloved Italy into a battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked
and selfish tyrants.
He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year 1300 he had lost
his way in a dense forest and how he found his path barred by a leopard
and a lion and a wolf. He gave himself up for lost when a white figure
appeared amidst the trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and philosopher,
sent upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by Beatrice, who
from high Heaven watched over the fate of her true lover. Virgil then
takes Dante through Purgatory and through Hell. Deeper and deeper the path
leads them until they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands
frozen into the eternal ice surrounded by the most terrible of sinners,
traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame and success by lies
and by deceit. But before the two wanderers have reached this terrible
spot, Dante has met all those who in some way or other have played a role
in the history of his beloved city. Emperors and Popes, dashing knights
and whining usurers, they are all there, doomed to eternal punishment or
awaiting the day of deliverance, when they shall leave Purgatory for
Heaven.
It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the people of the
thirteenth century did and felt and feared and prayed for. Through it all
moves the figure of the lonely Florentine exile, forever followed by the
shadow of his own despair.
And behold! when the gates of death were closing upon the sad poet of the
Middle Ages, the portals of life swung open to the child who was to be the
first of the men of the Renaissance. That was Francesco Petrarca, the son
of the notary public of the little town of Arezzo.
Francesco’s father had belonged to the same political party as Dante. He
too had been exiled and thus it happened that Petrarca (or Petrarch, as we
call him) was born away from Florence. At the age of fifteen he was sent
to Montpellier in France that he might become a lawyer like his father.
But the boy did not want to be a jurist. He hated the law. He wanted to be
a scholar and a poet—and because he wanted to be a scholar and a
poet beyond everything else, he became one, as people of a strong will are
apt to do. He made long voyages, copying manuscripts in Flanders and in
the cloisters along the Rhine and in Paris and Liege and finally in Rome.
Then he went to live in a lonely valley of the wild mountains of Vaucluse,
and there he studied and wrote and soon he had become so famous for his
verse and for his learning that both the University of Paris and the king
of Naples invited him to come and teach their students and subjects. On
the way to his new job, he was obliged to pass through Rome. The people
had heard of his fame as an editor of half-forgotten Roman authors. They
decided to honour him and in the ancient forum of the Imperial City,
Petrarch was crowned with the laurel wreath of the Poet.
From that moment on, his life was an endless career of honour and
appreciation. He wrote the things which people wanted most to hear. They
were tired of theological disputations. Poor Dante could wander through
hell as much as he wanted. But Petrarch wrote of love and of nature and
the sun and never mentioned those gloomy things which seemed to have been
the stock in trade of the last generation. And when Petrarch came to a
city, all the people flocked out to meet him and he was received like a
conquering hero. If he happened to bring his young friend Boccaccio, the
story teller, with him, so much the better. They were both men of their
time, full of curiosity, willing to read everything once, digging in
forgotten and musty libraries that they might find still another
manuscript of Virgil or Ovid or Lucrece or any of the other old Latin
poets. They were good Christians. Of course they were! Everyone was. But
no need of going around with a long face and wearing a dirty coat just
because some day or other you were going to die. Life was good. People
were meant to be happy. You desired proof of this? Very well. Take a spade
and dig into the soil. What did you find? Beautiful old statues. Beautiful
old vases. Ruins of ancient buildings. All these things were made by the
people of the greatest empire that ever existed. They ruled all the world
for a thousand years. They were strong and rich and handsome (just look at
that bust of the Emperor Augustus!). Of course, they were not Christians
and they would never be able to enter Heaven. At best they would spend
their days in purgatory, where Dante had just paid them a visit.
But who cared? To have lived in a world like that of ancient Rome was
heaven enough for any mortal being. And anyway, we live but once. Let us
be happy and cheerful for the mere joy of existence.
Such, in short, was the spirit that had begun to fill the narrow and
crooked streets of the many little Italian cities.
You know what we mean by the “bicycle craze” or the “automobile craze.”
Some one invents a bicycle. People who for hundreds of thousands of years
have moved slowly and painfully from one place to another go “crazy” over
the prospect of rolling rapidly and easily over hill and dale. Then a
clever mechanic makes the first automobile. No longer is it necessary to
pedal and pedal and pedal. You just sit and let little drops of gasoline
do the work for you. Then everybody wants an automobile. Everybody talks
about Rolls-Royces and Flivvers and carburetors and mileage and oil.
Explorers penetrate into the hearts of unknown countries that they may
find new supplies of gas. Forests arise in Sumatra and in the Congo to
supply us with rubber. Rubber and oil become so valuable that people fight
wars for their possession. The whole world is “automobile mad” and little
children can say “car” before they learn to whisper “papa” and “mamma.”
In the fourteenth century, the Italian people went crazy about the newly
discovered beauties of the buried world of Rome. Soon their enthusiasm was
shared by all the people of western Europe. The finding of an unknown
manuscript became the excuse for a civic holiday. The man who wrote a
grammar became as popular as the fellow who nowadays invents a new
spark-plug. The humanist, the scholar who devoted his time and his
energies to a study of “homo” or mankind (instead of wasting his hours
upon fruitless theological investigations), that man was regarded with
greater honour and a deeper respect than was ever bestowed upon a hero who
had just conquered all the Cannibal Islands.
In the midst of this intellectual upheaval, an event occurred which
greatly favoured the study of the ancient philosophers and authors. The
Turks were renewing their attacks upon Europe. Constantinople, capital of
the last remnant of the original Roman Empire, was hard pressed. In the
year 1393 the Emperor, Manuel Paleologue, sent Emmanuel Chrysoloras to
western Europe to explain the desperate state of old Byzantium and to ask
for aid. This aid never came. The Roman Catholic world was more than
willing to see the Greek Catholic world go to the punishment that awaited
such wicked heretics. But however indifferent western Europe might be to
the fate of the Byzantines, they were greatly interested in the ancient
Greeks whose colonists had founded the city on the Bosphorus ten centuries
after the Trojan war. They wanted to learn Greek that they might read
Aristotle and Homer and Plato. They wanted to learn it very badly, but
they had no books and no grammars and no teachers. The magistrates of
Florence heard of the visit of Chrysoloras. The people of their city were
“crazy to learn Greek.” Would he please come and teach them? He would, and
behold! the first professor of Greek teaching alpha, beta, gamma to
hundreds of eager young men, begging their way to the city of the Arno,
living in stables and in dingy attics that they night learn how to decline
the verb [gr paidenw paideneis paidenei] and enter into the companionship
of Sophocles and Homer.
Meanwhile in the universities, the old schoolmen, teaching their ancient
theology and their antiquated logic; explaining the hidden mysteries of
the old Testament and discussing the strange science of their
Greek-Arabic-Spanish-Latin edition of Aristotle, looked on in dismay and
horror. Next, they turned angry. This thing was going too far. The young
men were deserting the lecture halls of the established universities to go
and listen to some wild-eyed “humanist” with his newfangled notions about
a “reborn civilization.”
They went to the authorities. They complained. But one cannot force an
unwilling horse to drink and one cannot make unwilling ears listen to
something which does not really interest them. The schoolmen were losing
ground rapidly. Here and there they scored a short victory. They combined
forces with those fanatics who hated to see other people enjoy a happiness
which was foreign to their own souls. In Florence, the centre of the Great
Rebirth, a terrible fight was fought between the old order and the new. A
Dominican monk, sour of face and bitter in his hatred of beauty, was the
leader of the mediaeval rear-guard. He fought a valiant battle. Day after
day he thundered his warnings of God’s holy wrath through the wide halls
of Santa Maria del Fiore. “Repent,” he cried, “repent of your godlessness,
of your joy in things that are not holy!” He began to hear voices and to
see flaming swords that flashed through the sky. He preached to the little
children that they might not fall into the errors of these ways which were
leading their fathers to perdition. He organised companies of boy-scouts,
devoted to the service of the great God whose prophet he claimed to be. In
a sudden moment of frenzy, the frightened people promised to do penance
for their wicked love of beauty and pleasure. They carried their books and
their statues and their paintings to the market place and celebrated a
wild “carnival of the vanities” with holy singing and most unholy dancing,
while Savonarola applied his torch to the accumulated treasures.
But when the ashes cooled down, the people began to realise what they had
lost. This terrible fanatic had made them destroy that which they had come
to love above all things. They turned against him, Savonarola was thrown
into jail. He was tortured. But he refused to repent for anything he had
done. He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy life. He had
willingly destroyed those who deliberately refused to share his own point
of view. It had been his duty to eradicate evil wherever he found it. A
love of heathenish books and heathenish beauty in the eyes of this
faithful son of the Church, had been an evil. But he stood alone. He had
fought the battle of a time that was dead and gone. The Pope in Rome never
moved a finger to save him. On the contrary, he approved of his “faithful
Florentines” when they dragged Savonarola to the gallows, hanged him and
burned his body amidst the cheerful howling and yelling of the mob.
It was a sad ending, but quite inevitable. Savonarola would have been a
great man in the eleventh century. In the fifteenth century he was merely
the leader of a lost cause. For better or worse, the Middle Ages had come
to an end when the Pope had turned humanist and when the Vatican became
the most important museum of Roman and Greek antiquities.
THE AGE OF EXPRESSION
THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF GIVING EXPRESSION TO THEIR NEWLY
DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED THEIR HAPPINESS IN POETRY AND IN
SCULPTURE AND IN ARCHITECTURE AND IN PAINTING AND IN THE BOOKS THEY
PRINTED
IN the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent seventy-two of
his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of Mount
St. Agnes near the good town of Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on
the river Ysel. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been
born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis. At the age
of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where Gerhard Groot, a brilliant
graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and Prague, and famous as a
wandering preacher, had founded the Society of the Brothers of the Common
Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who tried to live the simple
life of the early Apostles of Christ while working at their regular jobs
as carpenters and house-painters and stone masons. They maintained an
excellent school, that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught the
wisdom of the Fathers of the church. At this school, little Thomas had
learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and how to copy manuscripts. Then he
had taken his vows, had put his little bundle of books upon his back, had
wandered to Zwolle and with a sigh of relief he had closed the door upon a
turbulent world which did not attract him.
Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden death. In central
Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of Johannus Huss, the friend and
follower of John Wycliffe, the English reformer, were avenging with a
terrible warfare the death of their beloved leader who had been burned at
the stake by order of that same Council of Constance, which had promised
him a safe-conduct if he would come to Switzerland and explain his
doctrines to the Pope, the Emperor, twenty-three cardinals, thirty-three
archbishops and bishops, one hundred and fifty abbots and more than a
hundred princes and dukes who had gathered together to reform their
church.
In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that she might
drive the English from her territories and just then was saved from utter
defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc. And no sooner had this
struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy were at each other’s
throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and death for the supremacy of
western Europe.
In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of Heaven down upon a
second Pope who resided at Avignon, in southern France, and who retaliated
in kind. In the far east the Turks were destroying the last remnants of
the Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final crusade to
crush the power of their Tartar masters.
But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard. He had his
manuscripts and his own thoughts and he was contented. He poured his love
of God into a little volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ. It has
since been translated into more languages than any other book save the
Bible. It has been read by quite as many people as ever studied the Holy
Scriptures. It has influenced the lives of countless millions. And it was
the work of a man whose highest ideal of existence was expressed in the
simple wish that “he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little
corner with a little book.”
Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the Middle Ages.
Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the victorious Renaissance, with
the humanists loudly proclaiming the coming of modern times, the Middle
Ages gathered strength for a last sally. Monasteries were reformed. Monks
gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple, straightforward and honest
men, by the example of their blameless and devout lives, tried to bring
the people back to the ways of righteousness and humble resignation to the
will of God. But all to no avail. The new world rushed past these good
people. The days of quiet meditation were gone. The great era of
“expression” had begun.
Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many “big
words.” I wish that I could write this history in words of one syllable.
But it cannot be done. You cannot write a text-book of geometry without
reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped.
You simply have to learn what those words mean or do without mathematics.
In history (and in all life) you will eventually be obliged to learn the
meaning of many strange words of Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it
now?
When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression, I mean this:
People were no longer contented to be the audience and sit still while the
emperor and the pope told them what to do and what to think. They wanted
to be actors upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving
“expression” to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be
interested in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolo
Macchiavelli, then he “expressed” himself in his books which revealed his
own idea of a successful state and an efficient ruler. If on the other
hand he had a liking for painting, he “expressed” his love for beautiful
lines and lovely colours in the pictures which have made the names of
Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rafael and a thousand others household words
wherever people have learned to care for those things which express a true
and lasting beauty.
If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with an interest
in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da Vinci, who
painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and flying machines,
drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and “expressed” his joy and
interest in all things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in
sculpture and in curiously conceived engines. When a man of gigantic
strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush and the palette too soft
for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture and to architecture, and
hacked the most terrific creatures out of heavy blocks of marble and drew
the plans for the church of St. Peter, the most concrete “expression” of
the glories of the triumphant church. And so it went.
All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with men and women who
lived that they might add their mite to the sum total of our accumulated
treasures of knowledge and beauty and wisdom. In Germany, in the city of
Mainz, Johann zum Gansefleisch, commonly known as Johann Gutenberg, had
just invented a new method of copying books. He had studied the old
woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual letters of soft
lead could be placed in such a way that they formed words and whole pages.
It is true, he soon lost all his money in a law-suit which had to do with
the original invention of the press. He died in poverty, but the
“expression” of his particular inventive genius lived after him.
Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in Antwerp and
Froben in Basel were flooding the world with carefully edited editions of
the classics printed in the Gothic letters of the Gutenberg Bible, or
printed in the Italian type which we use in this book, or printed in Greek
letters, or in Hebrew.
Then the whole world became the eager audience of those who had something
to say. The day when learning had been a monopoly of a privileged few came
to an end. And the last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world,
when Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his cheap and popular editions.
Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Horace and Pliny, all the goodly
company of the ancient authors and philosophers and scientists, offered to
become man’s faithful friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies.
Humanism had made all men free and equal before the printed word.
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES
BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN THROUGH THE BONDS OF THEIR NARROW MEDIAEVAL
LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO HAVE MORE ROOM FOR THEIR WANDERINGS. THE EUROPEAN
WORLD HAD GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR AMBITIONS. IT WAS THE TIME OF THE
GREAT VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
THE Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travelling. But very
few people had ever ventured beyond the well-known beaten track which led
from Venice to Jaffe. In the thirteenth century the Polo brothers,
merchants of Venice, had wandered across the great Mongolian desert and
after climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their way to
the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty emperor of China. The
son of one of the Polos, by the name of Marco, had written a book about
their adventures, which covered a period of more than twenty years. The
astonished world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of the
strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of spelling Japan.
Many people had wanted to go east, that they might find this gold-land and
grow rich. But the trip was too far and too dangerous and so they stayed
at home.
Of course, there was always the possibility of making the voyage by sea.
But the sea was very unpopular in the Middle Ages and for many very good
reasons. In the first place, ships were very small. The vessels on which
Magellan made his famous trip around the world, which lasted many years,
were not as large as a modern ferryboat. They carried from twenty to fifty
men, who lived in dingy quarters (too low to allow any of them to stand up
straight) and the sailors were obliged to eat poorly cooked food as the
kitchen arrangements were very bad and no fire could be made whenever the
weather was the least bit rough. The mediaeval world knew how to pickle
herring and how to dry fish. But there were no canned goods and fresh
vegetables were never seen on the bill of fare as soon as the coast had
been left behind. Water was carried in small barrels. It soon became stale
and then tasted of rotten wood and iron rust and was full of slimy growing
things. As the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes
(Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth century seems to have
suspected their existence, but he wisely kept his discovery to himself)
they often drank unclean water and sometimes the whole crew died of
typhoid fever. Indeed the mortality on board the ships of the earliest
navigators was terrible. Of the two hundred sailors who in the year 1519
left Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around the world,
only eighteen returned. As late as the seventeenth century when there was
a brisk trade between western Europe and the Indies, a mortality of 40
percent was nothing unusual for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back.
The greater part of these victims died of scurvy, a disease which is
caused by lack of fresh vegetables and which affects the gums and poisons
the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion.
Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea did not attract
the best elements of the population. Famous discoverers like Magellan and
Columbus and Vasco da Gama travelled at the head of crews that were almost
entirely composed of ex-jailbirds, future murderers and pickpockets out of
a Job.
These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the courage and the
pluck with which they accomplished their hopeless tasks in the face of
difficulties of which the people of our own comfortable world can have no
conception. Their ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy. Since the
middle of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of a compass
(which had come to Europe from China by way of Arabia and the Crusades)
but they had very bad and incorrect maps. They set their course by God and
by guess. If luck was with them they returned after one or two or three
years. In the other case, their bleeched bones remained behind on some
lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled with luck. Life to
them was a glorious adventure. And all the suffering, the thirst and the
hunger and the pain were forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines
of a new coast or the placid waters of an ocean that had lain forgotten
since the beginning of time.
Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages long. The
subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating. But history, to give
you a true idea of past times, should be like those etchings which
Rembrandt used to make. It should cast a vivid light on certain important
causes, on those which are best and greatest. All the rest should be left
in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines. And in this chapter I
can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries.
Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
navigators were trying to accomplish just ONE THING—they wanted to
find a comfortable and safe road to the empire of Cathay (China), to the
island of Zipangu (Japan) and to those mysterious islands, where grew the
spices which the mediaeval world had come to like since the days of the
Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the introduction of
cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very quickly and could only be
eaten after a liberal sprinkling of pepper or nutmeg.
The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navigators of the
Mediterranean, but the honour for exploring the coast of the Atlantic goes
to the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal were full of that patriotic energy
which their age-old struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed.
Such energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new channels. In
the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered the kingdom of
Algarve in the southwestern corner of the Spanish peninsula and had added
it to his dominions. In the next century, the Portuguese had turned the
tables on the Mohammedans, had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and had
taken possession of Ceuta, opposite the Arabic city of Ta’Rifa (a word
which in Arabic means “inventory” and which by way of the Spanish language
has come down to us as “tariff,”) and Tangiers, which became the capital
of an African addition to Algarve.
They were ready to begin their career as explorers.
In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the Navigator, the son of
John I of Portugal and Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt (about whom
you can read in Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare) began to make
preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern Africa. Before
this, that hot and sandy coast had been visited by the Phoenicians and by
the Norsemen, who remembered it as the home of the hairy “wild man” whom
we have come to know as the gorilla. One after another, Prince Henry and
his captains discovered the Canary Islands—re-discovered the island
of Madeira which a century before had been visited by a Genoese ship,
carefully charted the Azores which had been vaguely known to both the
Portuguese and the Spaniards, and caught a glimpse of the mouth of the
Senegal River on the west coast of Africa, which they supposed to be the
western mouth of the Nile. At last, by the middle of the Fifteenth
Century, they saw Cape Verde, or the Green Cape, and the Cape Verde
Islands, which lie almost halfway between the coast of Africa and Brazil.
But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to the waters of
the Ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order of Christ. This was a
Portuguese continuation of the crusading order of the Templars which had
been abolished by Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King
Philip the Fair of France, who had improved the occasion by burning his
own Templars at the stake and stealing all their possessions. Prince Henry
used the revenues of the domains of his religious order to equip several
expeditions which explored the hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast
of Guinea.
But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and spent a great deal
of time and wasted a lot of money upon a search for the mysterious
“Presser John,” the mythical Christian Priest who was said to be the
Emperor of a vast empire “situated somewhere in the east.” The story of
this strange potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the
twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried to find “Presser
John” and his descendants Henry took part in the search. Thirty years
after his death, the riddle was solved.
In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land of Prester John
by sea, had reached the southernmost point of Africa. At first he called
it the Storm Cape, on account of the strong winds which had prevented him
from continuing his voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon pilots who
understood the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India
water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of Good Hope.
One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters of credit on the
house of Medici, started upon a similar mission by land. He crossed the
Mediterranean and after leaving Egypt, he travelled southward. He reached
Aden, and from there, travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf
which few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great,
eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the coast of
India where he got a great deal of news about the island of the Moon
(Madagascar) which was supposed to lie halfway between Africa and India.
Then he returned, paid a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the
Red Sea once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of Prester
John, who was no one less than the Black Negus (or King) of Abyssinia,
whose ancestors had adopted Christianity in the fourth century, seven
hundred years before the Christian missionaries had found their way to
Scandinavia.
These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers and
cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies by an eastern sea-route
was possible, it was by no means easy. Then there arose a great debate.
Some people wanted to continue the explorations east of the Cape of Good
Hope. Others said, “No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we
shall reach Cathay.”
Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that day were
firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a pancake but was
round. The Ptolemean system of the universe, invented and duly described
by Claudius Ptolemy, the great Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the
second century of our era, which had served the simple needs of the men of
the Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of the
Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish mathematician,
Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had convinced him that the earth was
one of a number of round planets which turned around the sun, a discovery
which he did not venture to publish for thirty-six years (it was printed
in 1548, the year of his death) from fear of the Holy Inquisition, a Papal
court which had been established in the thirteenth century when the
heresies of the Albigenses and the Waldenses in France and in Italy (very
mild heresies of devoutly pious people who did not believe in private
property and preferred to live in Christ-like poverty) had for a moment
threatened the absolute power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in
the roundness of the earth was common among the nautical experts and, as I
said, they were now debating the respective advantages of the eastern and
the western routes.
Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese mariner by the name
of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son of a wool merchant. He seems to have
been a student at the University of Pavia where he specialised in
mathematics and geometry. Then he took up his father’s trade but soon we
find him in Chios in the eastern Mediterranean travelling on business.
Thereafter we hear of voyages to England but whether he went north in
search of wool or as the captain of a ship we do not know. In February of
the year 1477, Colombo (if we are to believe his own words) visited
Iceland, but very likely he only got as far as the Faroe Islands which are
cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland by any one. Here
Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who in the tenth
century had settled in Greenland and who had visited America in the
eleventh century, when Leif’s vessel had been blown to the coast of
Vineland, or Labrador.
What had become of those far western colonies no one knew. The American
colony of Thorfinn Karlsefne, the husband of the widow of Leif’s brother
Thorstein, founded in the year 1003, had been discontinued three years
later on account of the hostility of the Esquimaux. As for Greenland, not
a word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440. Very likely
the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, which had just killed
half the people of Norway. However that might be, the tradition of a “vast
land in the distant west” still survived among the people of the Faroe and
Iceland, and Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered further
information among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands and then
went to Portugal where he married the daughter of one of the captains who
had served under Prince Henry the Navigator.
From that moment on (the year 1478) he devoted himself to the quest of the
western route to the Indies. He sent his plans for such a voyage to the
courts of Portugal and Spain. The Portuguese, who felt certain that they
possessed a monopoly of the eastern route, would not listen to his plans.
In Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose marriage in
1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were busy driving the Moors
from their last stronghold, Granada. They had no money for risky
expeditions. They needed every peseta for their soldiers.
Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for their ideas as
this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo (or Colon or Columbus, as we
call him,) is too well known to bear repeating. The Moors surrendered
Granada on the second of January of the year 1492. In the month of April
of the same year, Columbus signed a contract with the King and Queen of
Spain. On Friday, the 3rd of August, he left Palos with three little ships
and a crew of 88 men, many of whom were criminals who had been offered
indemnity of punishment if they joined the expedition. At two o’clock in
the morning of Friday, the 12th of October, Columbus discovered land. On
the fourth of January of the year 1493, Columbus waved farewell to the 44
men of the little fortress of La Navidad (none of whom was ever again seen
alive) and returned homeward. By the middle of February he reached the
Azores where the Portuguese threatened to throw him into gaol. On the
fifteenth of March, 1493, the admiral reached Palos and together with his
Indians (for he was convinced that he had discovered some outlying islands
of the Indies and called the natives red Indians) he hastened to Barcelona
to tell his faithful patrons that he had been successful and that the road
to the gold and the silver of Cathay and Zipangu was at the disposal of
their most Catholic Majesties.
Alas, Columbus never knew the truth. Towards the end of his life, on his
fourth voyage, when he had touched the mainland of South America, he may
have suspected that all was not well with his discovery. But he died in
the firm belief that there was no solid continent between Europe and Asia
and that he had found the direct route to China.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese, sticking to their eastern route, had been more
fortunate. In the year 1498, Vasco da Gama had been able to reach the
coast of Malabar and return safely to Lisbon with a cargo of spice. In the
year 1502 he had repeated the visit. But along the western route, the work
of exploration had been most disappointing. In 1497 and 1498 John and
Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to Japan but they had seen
nothing but the snowbound coasts and the rocks of Newfoundland, which had
first been sighted by the Northmen, five centuries before. Amerigo
Vespucci, a Florentine who became the Pilot Major of Spain, and who gave
his name to our continent, had explored the coast of Brazil, but had found
not a trace of the Indies.
In the year 1513, seven years after the death of Columbus, the truth at
last began to dawn upon the geographers of Europe. Vasco Nunez de Balboa
had crossed the Isthmus of Panama, had climbed the famous peak in Darien,
and had looked down upon a vast expanse of water which seemed to suggest
the existence of another ocean.
Finally in the year 1519 a fleet of five small Spanish ships under command
of the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand de Magellan, sailed westward (and
not eastward since that route, was absolutely in the hands of the
Portuguese who allowed no competition) in search of the Spice Islands.
Magellan crossed the Atlantic between Africa and Brazil and sailed
southward. He reached a narrow channel between the southernmost point of
Patagonia, the “land of the people with the big feet,” and the Fire Island
(so named on account of a fire, the only sign of the existence of natives,
which the sailors watched one night). For almost five weeks the ships of
Magellan were at the mercy of the terrible storms and blizzards which
swept through the straits. A mutiny broke out among the sailors. Magellan
suppressed it with terrible severity and sent two of his men on shore
where they were left to repent of their sins at leisure. At last the
storms quieted down, the channel broadened, and Magellan entered a new
ocean. Its waves were quiet and placid. He called it the Peaceful Sea, the
Mare Pacifico. Then he continued in a western direction. He sailed for
ninety-eight days without seeing land. His people almost perished from
hunger and thirst and ate the rats that infested the ships, and when these
were all gone they chewed pieces of sail to still their gnawing hunger.
In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called it the land of
the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the natives stole everything
they could lay hands on. Then further westward to the Spice Islands!
Again land was sighted. A group of lonely islands. Magellan called them
the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his master Charles V, the Philip
II of unpleasant historical memory. At first Magellan was well received,
but when he used the guns of his ships to make Christian converts he was
killed by the aborigines, together with a number of his captains and
sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships and
continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas, the famous Spice Islands;
they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor. There, one of the two ships, too
leaky to be of further use, remained behind with her crew. The “Vittoria,”
under Sebastian del Cano, crossed the Indian Ocean, missed seeing the
northern coast of Australia (which was not discovered until the first half
of the seventeenth century when ships of the Dutch East India Company
explored this flat and inhospitable land), and after great hardships
reached Spain.
This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken three years. It had
been accomplished at a great cost both of men and money. But it had
established the fact that the earth was round and that the new lands
discovered by Columbus were not a part of the Indies but a separate
continent. From that time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their
energies to the development of their Indian and American trade. To prevent
an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI (the only avowed
heathen who was ever elected to this most holy office) had obligingly
divided the world into two equal parts by a line of demarcation which
followed the 50th degree of longitude west of Greenwich, the so-called
division of Tordesillas of 1494. The Portuguese were to establish their
colonies to the east of this line, the Spaniards were to have theirs to
the west. This accounts for the fact that the entire American continent
with the exception of Brazil became Spanish and that all of the Indies and
most of Africa became Portuguese until the English and the Dutch colonists
(who had no respect for Papal decisions) took these possessions away in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the Rialto of Venice, the
Wall street of the Middle Ages, there was a terrible panic. Stocks and
bonds went down 40 and 50 percent. After a short while, when it appeared
that Columbus had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian
merchants recovered from their fright. But the voyages of da Gama and
Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water-route to
the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice, the two great commercial
centres of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, began to be sorry that
they had refused to listen to Columbus. But it was too late. Their
Mediterranean became an inland sea. The overland trade to the Indies and
China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days of Italian glory
were gone. The Atlantic became the new centre of commerce and therefore
the centre of civilisation. It has remained so ever since.
See how strangely civilisation has progressed since those early days,
fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile
began to keep a written record of history, From the river Nile, it went to
Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete and
Greece and Rome. An inland sea became the centre of trade and the cities
along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and philosophy
and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved westward once more and
made the countries that border upon the Atlantic become the masters of the
earth.
There are those who say that the world war and the suicide of the great
European nations has greatly diminished the importance of the Atlantic
Ocean. They expect to see civilisation cross the American continent and
find a new home in the Pacific. But I doubt this.
The westward trip was accompanied by a steady increase in the size of
ships and a broadening of the knowledge of the navigators. The
flat-bottomed vessels of the Nile and the Euphrates were replaced by the
sailing vessels of the Phoenicians, the AEgeans, the Greeks, the
Carthaginians and the Romans. These in turn were discarded for the square
rigged vessels of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. And the latter were
driven from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the English and the
Dutch.
At present, however, civilisation no longer depends upon ships. Aircraft
has taken and will continue to take the place of the sailing vessel and
the steamer. The next centre of civilisation will depend upon the
development of aircraft and water power. And the sea once more shall be
the undisturbed home of the little fishes, who once upon a time shared
their deep residence with the earliest ancestors of the human race.
BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS
CONCERNING BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS
THE discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had brought the
Christians of western Europe into close contact with the people of India
and of China. They knew of course that Christianity was not the only
religion on this earth. There were the Mohammedans and the heathenish
tribes of northern Africa who worshipped sticks and stones and dead trees.
But in India and in China the Christian conquerors found new millions who
had never heard of Christ and who did not want to hear of Him, because
they thought their own religion, which was thousands of years old, much
better than that of the West. As this is a story of mankind and not an
exclusive history of the people of Europe and our western hemisphere, you
ought to know something of two men whose teaching and whose example
continue to influence the actions and the thoughts of the majority of our
fellow-travellers on this earth.
In India, Buddha was recognised as the great religious teacher. His
history is an interesting one. He was born in the Sixth Century before the
birth of Christ, within sight of the mighty Himalaya Mountains, where four
hundred years before Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the first of the great
leaders of the Aryan race (the name which the Eastern branch of the
Indo-European race had given to itself), had taught his people to regard
life as a continuous struggle between Ahriman, and Ormuzd, the Gods of
Evil and Good. Buddha’s father was Suddhodana, a mighty chief among the
tribe of the Sakiyas. His mother, Maha Maya, was the daughter of a
neighbouring king. She had been married when she was a very young girl.
But many moons had passed beyond the distant ridge of hills and still her
husband was without an heir who should rule his lands after him. At last,
when she was fifty years old, her day came and she went forth that she
might be among her own people when her baby should come into this world.
It was a long trip to the land of the Koliyans, where Maha Maya had spent
her earliest years. One night she was resting among the cool trees of the
garden of Lumbini. There her son was born. He was given the name of
Siddhartha, but we know him as Buddha, which means the Enlightened One.
In due time, Siddhartha grew up to be a handsome young prince and when he
was nineteen years old, he was married to his cousin Yasodhara. During the
next ten years he lived far away from all pain and all suffering, behind
the protecting walls of the royal palace, awaiting the day when he should
succeed his father as King of the Sakiyas.
But it happened that when he was thirty years old, he drove outside of the
palace gates and saw a man who was old and worn out with labour and whose
weak limbs could hardly carry the burden of life. Siddhartha pointed him
out to his coachman, Channa, but Channa answered that there were lots of
poor people in this world and that one more or less did not matter. The
young prince was very sad but he did not say anything and went back to
live with his wife and his father and his mother and tried to be happy. A
little while later he left the palace a second time. His carriage met a
man who suffered from a terrible disease. Siddhartha asked Channa what had
been the cause of this man’s suffering, but the coachman answered that
there were many sick people in this world and that such things could not
be helped and did not matter very much. The young prince was very sad when
he heard this but again he returned to his people.
A few weeks passed. One evening Siddhartha ordered his carriage in order
to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his horses were frightened by the
sight of a dead man whose rotting body lay sprawling in the ditch beside
the road. The young prince, who had never been allowed to see such things,
was frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such trifles. The world
was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that all things must come
to an end. Nothing was eternal. The grave awaited us all and there was no
escape.
That evening, when Siddhartha returned to his home, he was received with
music. While he was away his wife had given birth to a son. The people
were delighted because now they knew that there was an heir to the throne
and they celebrated the event by the beating of many drums. Siddhartha,
however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had been lifted and
he had learned the horror of man’s existence. The sight of death and
suffering followed him like a terrible dream.
That night the moon was shining brightly. Siddhartha woke up and began to
think of many things. Never again could he be happy until he should have
found a solution to the riddle of existence. He decided to find it far
away from all those whom he loved. Softly he went into the room where
Yasodhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for his faithful
Channa and told him to follow.
Together the two men went into the darkness of the night, one to find rest
for his soul, the other to be a faithful servant unto a beloved master.
The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for many years were
just then in a state of change. Their ancestors, the native Indians, had
been conquered without great difficulty by the war-like Aryans (our
distant cousins) and thereafter the Aryans had been the rulers and masters
of tens of millions of docile little brown men. To maintain themselves in
the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population into different
classes and gradually a system of “caste” of the most rigid sort had been
enforced upon the natives. The descendants of the Indo-European conquerors
belonged to the highest “caste,” the class of warriors and nobles. Next
came the caste of the priests. Below these followed the peasants and the
business men. The ancient natives, however, who were called Pariahs,
formed a class of despised and miserable slaves and never could hope to be
anything else.
Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The old
Indo-Europeans, during their thousands of years of wandering, had met with
many strange adventures. These had been collected in a book called the
Veda. The language of this book was called Sanskrit, and it was closely
related to the different languages of the European continent, to Greek and
Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The three highest
castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures. The Pariah, however,
the despised member of the lowest caste, was not permitted to know its
contents. Woe to the man of noble or priestly caste who should teach a
Pariah to study the sacred volume!
The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in misery. Since this
planet offered them very little joy, salvation from suffering must be
found elsewhere. They tried to derive a little consolation from meditation
upon the bliss of their future existence.
Brahma, the all-creator who was regarded by the Indian people as the
supreme ruler of life and death, was worshipped as the highest ideal of
perfection. To become like Brahma, to lose all desires for riches and
power, was recognised as the most exalted purpose of existence. Holy
thoughts were regarded as more important than holy deeds, and many people
went into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and starved their
bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious contemplation of
the splendours of Brahma, the Wise, the Good and the Merciful.
Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wanderers who were
seeking the truth far away from the turmoil of the cities and the
villages, decided to follow their example. He cut his hair. He took his
pearls and his rubies and sent them back to his family with a message of
farewell, which the ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single
follower, the young prince then moved into the wilderness.
Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the mountains. Five young
men came to him and asked that they might be allowed to listen to his
words of wisdom. He agreed to be their master if they would follow him.
They consented, and he took them into the hills and for six years he
taught them all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindhya Mountains.
But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was still far from
perfection. The world that he had left continued to tempt him. He now
asked that his pupils leave him and then he fasted for forty-nine days and
nights, sitting upon the roots of an old tree. At last he received his
reward. In the dusk of the fiftieth evening, Brahma revealed himself to
his faithful servant. From that moment on, Siddhartha was called Buddha
and he was revered as the Enlightened One who had come to save men from
their unhappy mortal fate.
The last forty-five years of his life, Buddha spent within the valley of
the Ganges River, teaching his simple lesson of submission and meekness
unto all men. In the year 488 before our era, he died, full of years and
beloved by millions of people. He had not preached his doctrines for the
benefit of a single class. Even the lowest Pariah might call himself his
disciple.
This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and the merchants
who did their best to destroy a creed which recognised the equality of all
living creatures and offered men the hope of a second life (a
reincarnation) under happier circumstances. As soon as they could, they
encouraged the people of India to return to the ancient doctrines of the
Brahmin creed with its fasting and its tortures of the sinful body. But
Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples of the Enlightened
One wandered across the valleys of the Himalayas, and moved into China.
They crossed the Yellow Sea and preached the wisdom of their master unto
the people of Japan, and they faithfully obeyed the will of their great
master, who had forbidden them to use force. To-day more people recognise
Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their number surpasses that
of the combined followers of Christ and Mohammed.
As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his story is a simple
one. He was born in the year 550 B.C. He led a quiet, dignified and
uneventful life at a time when China was without a strong central
government and when the Chinese people were at the mercy of bandits and
robber-barons who went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and
murdering and turning the busy plains of northern and central China into a
wilderness of starving people.
Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He did not have much
faith in the use of violence. He was a very peaceful person. He did not
think that he could make people over by giving them a lot of new laws. He
knew that the only possible salvation would come from a change of heart,
and he set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing the character
of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the wide plains of eastern
Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested in religion as we
understand that word. They believed in devils and spooks as most primitive
people do. But they had no prophets and recognised no “revealed truth.”
Confucius is almost the only one among the great moral leaders who did not
see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the messenger of a divine
power; who did not, at some time or another, claim that he was inspired by
voices from above.
He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given to lonely
wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful flute. He asked for no
recognition. He did not demand that any one should follow him or worship
him. He reminds us of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially those of
the Stoic School, men who believed in right living and righteous thinking
without the hope of a reward but simply for the peace of the soul that
comes with a good conscience.
Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his way to visit
Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the founder of a philosophic
system called “Taoism,” which was merely an early Chinese version of the
Golden Rule.
Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue of supreme
self-possession. A person of real worth, according to the teaching of
Confucius, did not allow himself to be ruffled by anger and suffered
whatever fate brought him with the resignation of those sages who
understand that everything which happens, in one way or another, is meant
for the best.
At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number increased.
Before his death, in the year 478 B.C., several of the kings and the
princes of China confessed themselves his disciples. When Christ was born
in Bethlehem, the philosophy of Confucius had already become a part of the
mental make-up of most Chinamen. It has continued to influence their lives
ever since. Not however in its pure, original form. Most religions change
as time goes on. Christ preached humility and meekness and absence from
worldly ambitions, but fifteen centuries after Golgotha, the head of the
Christian church was spending millions upon the erection of a building
that bore little relation to the lonely stable of Bethlehem.
Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three centuries the
ignorant masses had made him into a real and very cruel God and had buried
his wise commandments under a rubbish-heap of superstition which made the
lives of the average Chinese one long series of frights and fears and
horrors.
Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring their Father
and their Mother. They soon began to be more interested in the memory of
their departed parents than in the happiness of their children and their
grandchildren. Deliberately they turned their backs upon the future and
tried to peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the
ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than disturb a
cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of a mountain, they
would plant their rice and wheat upon the barren rocks of the other slope
where nothing could possibly grow. And they preferred hunger and famine to
the desecration of the ancestral grave.
At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite lost their hold
upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia. Confucianism, with its
profound sayings and shrewd observations, added a touch of common-sense
philosophy to the soul of every Chinaman and influenced his entire life,
whether he was a simple laundry man in a steaming basement or the ruler of
vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded palace.
In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivilised
Christians of the western world came face to face with the older creeds of
the East. The early Spaniards and Portuguese looked upon the peaceful
statues of Buddha and contemplated the venerable pictures of Confucius and
did not in the least know what to make of those worthy prophets with their
far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion that these strange
divinities were just plain devils who represented something idolatrous and
heretical and did not deserve the respect of the true sons of the Church.
Whenever the spirit of Buddha or Confucius seemed to interfere with the
trade in spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the “evil influence”
with bullets and grape-shot. That system had certain very definite
disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage of ill-will which
promises little good for the immediate future.
THE REFORMATION
THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST COMPARED TO A GIGANTIC PENDULUM
WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE AND
THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE WERE FOLLOWED BY
THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM OF THE
REFORMATION
OF course you have heard of the Reformation. You think of a small but
courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the ocean to have “freedom of
religious worship.” Vaguely in the course of time (and more especially in
our Protestant countries) the Reformation has come to stand for the idea
of “liberty of thought.” Martin Luther is represented as the leader of the
vanguard of progress. But when history is something more than a series of
flattering speeches addressed to our own glorious ancestors, when to use
the words of the German historian Ranke, we try to discover what “actually
happened,” then much of the past is seen in a very different light.
Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad. Few
things are either black or white. It is the duty of the honest chronicler
to give a true account of all the good and bad sides of every historical
event. It is very difficult to do this because we all have our personal
likes and dislikes. But we ought to try and be as fair as we can be, and
must not allow our prejudices to influence us too much.
Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very Protestant centre of
a very Protestant country. I never saw any Catholics until I was about
twelve years old. Then I felt very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a
little bit afraid. I knew the story of the many thousand people who had
been burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition when the
Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their Lutheran and
Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real to me. It seemed to have
happened only the day before. It might occur again. There might be another
Saint Bartholomew’s night, and poor little me would be slaughtered in my
nightie and my body would be thrown out of the window, as had happened to
the noble Admiral de Coligny.
Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic country. I
found the people much pleasanter and much more tolerant and quite as
intelligent as my former countrymen. To my great surprise, I began to
discover that there was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as much
as a Protestant.
Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who
actually lived through the Reformation, did not see things that way. They
were always right and their enemy was always wrong. It was a question of
hang or be hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which was
no more than human and for which they deserve no blame.
When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, an easy date to
remember, and the year in which the Emperor Charles V was born, this is
what we see. The feudal disorder of the Middle Ages has given way before
the order of a number of highly centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of
all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle. He is the
grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maximilian of Habsburg, the last
of the mediaeval knights, and of his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles
the Bold, the ambitious Burgundian duke who had made successful war upon
France but had been killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The child
Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the greater part of the map, to all
the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins and aunts in
Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain,
together with all their colonies in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange
irony of fate, he has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the
counts of Flanders, which the Germans used as a prison during their recent
occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king and a German emperor,
he receives the training of a Fleming.
As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is never proved),
and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling through her domains
with the coffin containing the body of her departed husband), the child is
left to the strict discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans
and Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles grows up a
Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church, but quite averse to
religious intolerance. He is rather lazy, both as a boy and as a man. But
fate condemns him to rule the world when the world is in a turmoil of
religious fervour. Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and
from Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always at war.
At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon the human race in
utter disgust at so much hate and so much stupidity. Three years later he
dies, a very tired and disappointed man.
So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church, the second great
power in the world? The Church has changed greatly since the early days of
the Middle Ages, when it started out to conquer the heathen and show them
the advantages of a pious and righteous life. In the first place, the
Church has grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd of a flock
of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds himself with
artists and musicians and famous literary men. His churches and chapels
are covered with new pictures in which the saints look more like Greek
Gods than is strictly necessary. He divides his time unevenly between
affairs of state and art. The affairs of state take ten percent of his
time. The other ninety percent goes to an active interest in Roman
statues, recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new summer home, the
rehearsal of a new play. The Archbishops and the Cardinals follow the
example of their Pope. The Bishops try to imitate the Archbishops. The
village priests, however, have remained faithful to their duties. They
keep themselves aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of
beauty and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries where the monks
seem to have forgotten their ancient vows of simplicity and poverty and
live as happily as they dare without causing too much of a public scandal.
Finally, there are the common people. They are much better off than they
have ever been before. They are more prosperous, they live in better
houses, their children go to better schools, their cities are more
beautiful than before, their firearms have made them the equal of their
old enemies, the robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy
taxes upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the Reformation.
Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe, and then you will
understand how the revival of learning and art was bound to be followed by
a revival of religious interests. The Renaissance began in Italy. From
there it spread to France. It was not quite successful in Spain, where
five hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the people very
narrow minded and very fanatical in all religious matters. The circle had
grown wider and wider, but once the Alps had been crossed, the Renaissance
had suffered a change.
The people of northern Europe, living in a very different climate, had an
outlook upon life which contrasted strangely with that of their southern
neighbours. The Italians lived out in the open, under a sunny sky. It was
easy for them to laugh and to sing and to be happy. The Germans, the
Dutch, the English, the Swedes, spent most of their time indoors,
listening to the rain beating on the closed windows of their comfortable
little houses. They did not laugh quite so much. They took everything more
seriously. They were forever conscious of their immortal souls and they
did not like to be funny about matters which they considered holy and
sacred. The “humanistic” part of the Renaissance, the books, the studies
of ancient authors, the grammar and the text-books, interested them
greatly. But the general return to the old pagan civilisation of Greece
and Rome, which was one of the chief results of the Renaissance in Italy,
filled their hearts with horror.
But the Papacy and the College of Cardinals was almost entirely composed
of Italians and they had turned the Church into a pleasant club where
people discussed art and music and the theatre, but rarely mentioned
religion. Hence the split between the serious north and the more civilised
but easy-going and indifferent south was growing wider and wider all the
time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threatened the
Church.
There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the Reformation took
place in Germany rather than in Sweden or England. The Germans bore an
ancient grudge against Rome. The endless quarrels between Emperor and Pope
had caused much mutual bitterness. In the other European countries where
the government rested in the hands of a strong king, the ruler had often
been able to protect his subjects against the greed of the priests. In
Germany, where a shadowy emperor ruled a turbulent crowd of little
princelings, the good burghers were more directly at the mercy of their
bishops and prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums
of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which were a hobby of
the Popes of the Renaissance. The Germans felt that they were being
mulcted and quite naturally they did not like it.
And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany was the home of
the printing press. In northern Europe books were cheap and the Bible was
no longer a mysterious manu-script owned and explained by the priest. It
was a household book of many families where Latin was understood by the
father and by the children. Whole families began to read it, which was
against the law of the Church. They discovered that the priests were
telling them many things which, according to the original text of the Holy
Scriptures, were somewhat different. This caused doubt. People began to
ask questions. And questions, when they cannot be answered, often cause a
great deal of trouble.
The attack began when the humanists of the North opened fire upon the
monks. In their heart of hearts they still had too much respect and
reverence for the Pope to direct their sallies against his Most Holy
Person. But the lazy, ignorant monks, living behind the sheltering walls
of their rich monasteries, offered rare sport.
The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very faithful son of
the church Gerard Gerardzoon, or Desiderius Erasmus, as he is usually
called, was a poor boy, born in Rotterdam in Holland, and educated at the
same Latin school of Deventer from which Thomas a Kempis had graduated. He
had become a priest and for a time he had lived in a monastery. He had
travelled a great deal and knew whereof he wrote, When he began his career
as a public pamphleteer (he would have been called an editorial writer in
our day) the world was greatly amused at an anonymous series of letters
which had just appeared under the title of “Letters of Obscure Men.” In
these letters, the general stupidity and arrogance of the monks of the
late Middle Ages was exposed in a strange German-Latin doggerel which
reminds one of our modern limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned
and serious scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first
reliable version of the New Testament, which he translated into Latin
together with a corrected edition of the original Greek text. But he
believed with Sallust, the Roman poet, that nothing prevents us from
“stating the truth with a smile upon our lips.”
In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng-land, he took a
few weeks off and wrote a funny little book, called the “Praise of Folly,”
in which he attacked the monks and their credulous followers with that
most dangerous of all weapons, humor. The booklet was the best seller of
the sixteenth century. It was translated into almost every language and it
made people pay attention to those other books of Erasmus in which he
advocated reform of the many abuses of the church and appealed to his
fellow humanists to help him in his task of bringing about a great rebirth
of the Christian faith.
But nothing came of these excellent plans. Erasmus was too reasonable and
too tolerant to please most of the enemies of the church. They were
waiting for a leader of a more robust nature.
He came, and his name was Martin Luther.
Luther was a North-German peasant with a first-class brain and possessed
of great personal courage. He was a university man, a master of arts of
the University of Erfurt; afterwards he joined a Dominican monastery. Then
he became a college professor at the theological school of Wittenberg and
began to explain the scriptures to the indifferent ploughboys of his Saxon
home. He had a lot of spare time and this he used to study the original
texts of the Old and New Testaments. Soon he began to see the great
difference which existed between the words of Christ and those that were
preached by the Popes and the Bishops. In the year 1511, he visited Rome
on official business. Alexander VI, of the family of Borgia, who had
enriched himself for the benefit of his son and daughter, was dead. But
his successor, Julius II, a man of irreproachable personal character, was
spending most of his time fighting and building and did not impress this
serious minded German theologian with his piety. Luther returned to
Wittenberg a much disappointed man. But worse was to follow.
The gigantic church of St. Peter which Pope Julius had wished upon his
innocent successors, although only half begun, was already in need of
repair. Alexander VI had spent every penny of the Papal treasury. Leo X,
who succeeded Julius in the year 1513, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He
reverted to an old method of raising ready cash. He began to sell
“indulgences.” An indulgence was a piece of parchment which in return for
a certain sum of money, promised a sinner a decrease of the time which he
would have to spend in purgatory. It was a perfectly correct thing
according to the creed of the late Middle Ages. Since the church had the
power to forgive the sins of those who truly repented before they died,
the church also had the right to shorten, through its intercession with
the Saints, the time during which the soul must be purified in the shadowy
realms of Purgatory.
It was unfortunate that these Indulgences must be sold for money. But they
offered an easy form of revenue and besides, those who were too poor to
pay, received theirs for nothing.
Now it happened in the year 1517 that the exclusive territory for the sale
of indulgences in Saxony was given to a Dominican monk by the name of
Johan Tetzel. Brother Johan was a hustling salesman. To tell the truth he
was a little too eager. His business methods outraged the pious people of
the little duchy. And Luther, who was an honest fellow, got so angry that
he did a rash thing. On the 31st of October of the year 1517, he went to
the court church and upon the doors thereof he posted a sheet of paper
with ninety-five statements (or theses), attacking the sale of
indulgences. These statements had been written in Latin. Luther had no
intention of starting a riot. He was not a revolutionist. He objected to
the institution of the Indulgences and he wanted his fellow professors to
know what he thought about them. But this was still a private affair of
the clerical and professorial world and there was no appeal to the
prejudices of the community of laymen.
Unfortunately, at that moment when the whole world had begun to take an
interest in the religious affairs of the day it was utterly impossible to
discuss anything, without at once creating a serious mental disturbance.
In less than two months, all Europe was discussing the ninety-five theses
of the Saxon monk. Every one must take sides. Every obscure little
theologian must print his own opinion. The papal authorities began to be
alarmed. They ordered the Wittenberg professor to proceed to Rome and give
an account of his action. Luther wisely remembered what had happened to
Huss. He stayed in Germany and he was punished with excommunication.
Luther burned the papal bull in the presence of an admiring multitude and
from that moment, peace between himself and the Pope was no longer
possible.
Without any desire on his part, Luther had become the leader of a vast
army of discontented Christians. German patriots like Ulrich von Hutten,
rushed to his defence. The students of Wittenberg and Erfurt and Leipzig
offered to defend him should the authorities try to imprison him. The
Elector of Saxony reassured the eager young men. No harm would befall
Luther as long as he stayed on Saxon ground.
All this happened in the year 1520. Charles V was twenty years old and as
the ruler of half the world, was forced to remain on pleasant terms with
the Pope. He sent out calls for a Diet or general assembly in the good
city of Worms on the Rhine and commanded Luther to be present and give an
account of his extraordinary behaviour. Luther, who now was the national
hero of the Germans, went. He refused to take back a single word of what
he had ever written or said. His conscience was controlled only by the
word of God. He would live and die for his conscience
The Diet of Worms, after due deliberation, declared Luther an outlaw
before God and man, and forbade all Germans to give him shelter or food or
drink, or to read a single word of the books which the dastardly heretic
had written. But the great reformer was in no danger. By the majority of
the Germans of the north the edict was denounced as a most unjust and
outrageous document. For greater safety, Luther was hidden in the
Wartburg, a castle belonging to the Elector of Saxony, and there he defied
all papal authority by translating the entire Bible into the German
language, that all the people might read and know the word of God for
themselves.
By this time, the Reformation was no longer a spiritual and religious
affair. Those who hated the beauty of the modern church building used this
period of unrest to attack and destroy what they did not like because they
did not understand it. Impoverished knights tried to make up for past
losses by grabbing the territory which belonged to the monasteries.
Discontented princes made use of the absence of the Emperor to increase
their own power. The starving peasants, following the leadership of
half-crazy agitators, made the best of the opportunity and attacked the
castles of their masters and plundered and murdered and burned with the
zeal of the old Crusaders.
A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the Empire. Some
princes became Protestants (as the “protesting” adherents of Luther were
called) and persecuted their Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic
and hanged their Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526
tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering that
“the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination as their
princes.” This turned Germany into a checkerboard of a thousand hostile
little duchies and principalities and created a situation which prevented
the normal political growth for hundreds of years.
In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put to rest in the same
church where twenty-nine years before he had proclaimed his famous
objections to the sale of Indulgences. In less than thirty years, the
indifferent, joking and laughing world of the Renaissance had been
transformed into the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting, debating-society
of the Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes came to a
sudden end and the whole Western Europe was turned into a battle-field,
where Protestants and Catholics killed each other for the greater glory of
certain theological doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present
generation as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans.
RELIGIOUS WARFARE
THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES
THE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of religious
controversy.
If you will notice you will find that almost everybody around you is
forever “talking economics” and discussing wages and hours of labor and
strikes in their relation to the life of the community, for that is the
main topic of interest of our own time.
The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared worse. They never
heard anything but “religion.” Their heads were filled with
“predestination,” “transubstantition,” “free will,” and a hundred other
queer words, expressing obscure points of “the true faith,” whether
Catholic or Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they were
baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians or
Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augsburg catechism,
composed by Luther, or from the “institutes of Christianity,” written by
Calvin, or they mumbled the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were
printed in the English Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that
these alone represented the “True Faith.”
They heard of the wholesale theft of church property perpetrated by King
Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of England, who made himself the
supreme head of the English church, and assumed the old papal rights of
appointing bishops and priests. They had a nightmare whenever some one
mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its many torture
chambers, and they were treated to equally horrible stories of how a mob
of outraged Dutch Protestants had got hold of a dozen defenceless old
priests and hanged them for the sheer pleasure of killing those who
professed a different faith. It was unfortunate that the two contending
parties were so equally matched. Otherwise the struggle would have come to
a quick solution. Now it dragged on for eight generations, and it grew so
complicated that I can only tell you the most important details, and must
ask you to get the rest from one of the many histories of the Reformation.
The great reform movement of the Protestants had been followed by a
thoroughgoing reform within the bosom of the Church. Those popes who had
been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman and Greek antiquities,
disappeared from the scene and their place was taken by serious men who
spent twenty hours a day administering those holy duties which had been
placed in their hands.
The long and rather disgraceful happiness of the monasteries came to an
end. Monks and nuns were forced to be up at sunrise, to study the Church
Fathers, to tend the sick and console the dying. The Holy Inquisition
watched day and night that no dangerous doctrines should be spread by way
of the printing press. Here it is customary to mention poor Galileo, who
was locked up because he had been a little too indiscreet in explaining
the heavens with his funny little telescope and had muttered certain
opinions about the behaviour of the planets which were entirely opposed to
the official views of the church. But in all fairness to the Pope, the
clergy and the Inquisition, it ought to be stated that the Protestants
were quite as much the enemies of science and medicine as the Catholics
and with equal manifestations of ignorance and intolerance regarded the
men who investigated things for themselves as the most dangerous enemies
of mankind.
And Calvin, the great French reformer and the tyrant (both political and
spiritual) of Geneva, not only assisted the French authorities when they
tried to hang Michael Servetus (the Spanish theologian and physician who
had become famous as the assistant of Vesalius, the first great
anatomist), but when Servetus had managed to escape from his French jail
and had fled to Geneva, Calvin threw this brilliant man into prison and
after a prolonged trial, allowed him to be burned at the stake on account
of his heresies, totally indifferent to his fame as a scientist.
And so it went. We have few reliable statistics upon the subject, but on
the whole, the Protestants tired of this game long before the Catholics,
and the greater part of honest men and women who were burned and hanged
and decapitated on account of their religious beliefs fell as victims of
the very energetic but also very drastic church of Rome.
For tolerance (and please remember this when you grow older), is of very
recent origin and even the people of our own so-called “modern world” are
apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them very
much. They are tolerant towards a native of Africa, and do not care whether
he becomes a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, because neither Buddhism nor
Mohammedanism means anything to them. But when they hear that their
neighbour who was a Republican and believed in a high protective tariff,
has joined the Socialist party and now wants to repeal all tariff laws,
their tolerance ceases and they use almost the same words as those
employed by a kindly Catholic (or Protestant) of the seventeenth century,
who was informed that his best friend whom he had always respected and
loved had fallen a victim to the terrible heresies of the Protestant (or
Catholic) church.
“Heresy” until a very short time ago was regarded as a disease. Nowadays
when we see a man neglecting the personal cleanliness of his body and his
home and exposing himself and his children to the dangers of typhoid fever
or another preventable disease, we send for the board-of-health and the
health officer calls upon the police to aid him in removing this person
who is a danger to the safety of the entire community. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man or a woman who openly doubted
the fundamental principles upon which his Protestant or Catholic religion
had been founded, was considered a more terrible menace than a typhoid
carrier. Typhoid fever might (very likely would) destroy the body. But
heresy, according to them, would positively destroy the immortal soul. It
was therefore the duty of all good and logical citizens to warn the police
against the enemies of the established order of things and those who
failed to do so were as culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to
the nearest doctor when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are suffering
from cholera or small-pox.
In the years to come you will hear a great deal about preventive medicine.
Preventive medicine simply means that our doctors do not wait until their
patients are sick, then step forward and cure them. On the contrary, they
study the patient and the conditions under which he lives when he (the
patient) is perfectly well and they remove every possible cause of illness
by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching him what to eat and what to avoid, and
by giving him a few simple ideas of personal hygiene. They go even further
than that, and these good doctors enter the schools and teach the children
how to use tooth-brushes and how to avoid catching colds.
The sixteenth century which regarded (as I have tried to show you) bodily
illness as much less important than sickness which threatened the soul,
organised a system of spiritual preventive medicine. As soon as a child
was old enough to spell his first words, he was educated in the true (and
the “only true”) principles of the Faith. Indirectly this proved to be a
good thing for the general progress of the people of Europe. The
Protestant lands were soon dotted with schools. They used a great deal of
very valuable time to explain the Catechism, but they gave instruction in
other things besides theology. They encouraged reading and they were
responsible for the great prosperity of the printing trade.
But the Catholics did not lag behind. They too devoted much time and
thought to education. The Church, in this matter, found an invaluable
friend and ally in the newly-founded order of the Society of Jesus. The
founder of this remarkable organisation was a Spanish soldier who after a
life of unholy adventures had been converted and thereupon felt himself
bound to serve the church just as many former sinners, who have been shown
the errors of their way by the Salvation Army, devote the remaining years
of their lives to the task of aiding and consoling those who are less
fortunate.
The name of this Spaniard was Ignatius de Loyola. He was born in the year
before the discovery of America. He had been wounded and lamed for life
and while he was in the hospital he had seen a vision of the Holy Virgin
and her Son, who bade him give up the wickedness of his former life. He
decided to go to the Holy Land and finish the task of the Crusades. But a
visit to Jerusalem had shown him the impossibility of the task and he
returned west to help in the warfare upon the heresies of the Lutherans.
In the year 1534 he was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne. Together with
seven other students he founded a fraternity. The eight men promised each
other that they would lead holy lives, that they would not strive after
riches but after righteousness, and would devote themselves, body and
soul, to the service of the Church. A few years later this small
fraternity had grown into a regular organisation and was recognised by
Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus.
Loyola had been a military man. He believed in discipline, and absolute
obedience to the orders of the superior dignitaries became one of the main
causes for the enormous success of the Jesuits. They specialised in
education. They gave their teachers a most thorough-going education before
they allowed them to talk to a single pupil. They lived with their
students and they entered into their games. They watched them with tender
care. And as a result they raised a new generation of faithful Catholics
who took their religious duties as seriously as the people of the early
Middle Ages.
The shrewd Jesuits, however, did not waste all their efforts upon the
education of the poor. They entered the palaces of the mighty and became
the private tutors of future emperors and kings. And what this meant you
will see for yourself when I tell you about the Thirty Years War. But
before this terrible and final outbreak of religious fanaticism, a great
many other things had happened.
Charles V was dead. Germany and Austria had been left to his brother
Ferdinand. All his other possessions, Spain and the Netherlands and the
Indies and America had gone to his son Philip. Philip was the son of
Charles and a Portuguese princess who had been first cousin to her own
husband. The children that are born of such a union are apt to be rather
queer. The son of Philip, the unfortunate Don Carlos, (murdered afterwards
with his own father’s consent,) was crazy. Philip was not quite crazy, but
his zeal for the Church bordered closely upon religious insanity. He
believed that Heaven had appointed him as one of the saviours of mankind.
Therefore, whosoever was obstinate and refused to share his Majesty’s
views, proclaimed himself an enemy of the human race and must be
exterminated lest his example corrupt the souls of his pious neighbours.
Spain, of course, was a very rich country. All the gold and silver of the
new world flowed into the Castilian and Aragonian treasuries. But Spain
suffered from a curious economic disease. Her peasants were hard working
men and even harder working women. But the better classes maintained a
supreme contempt for any form of labour, outside of employment in the army
or navy or the civil service. As for the Moors, who had been very
industrious artisans, they had been driven out of the country long before.
As a result, Spain, the treasure chest of the world, remained a poor
country because all her money had to be sent abroad in exchange for the
wheat and the other necessities of life which the Spaniards neglected to
raise for themselves.
Philip, ruler of the most powerful nation of the sixteenth century,
depended for his revenue upon the taxes which were gathered in the busy
commercial bee-hive of the Netherlands. But these Flemings and Dutchmen
were devoted followers of the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and they had
cleansed their churches of all images and holy paintings and they had
informed the Pope that they no longer regarded him as their shepherd but
intended to follow the dictates of their consciences and the commands of
their newly translated Bible.
This placed the king in a very difficult position. He could not possibly
tolerate the heresies of his Dutch subjects, but he needed their money. If
he allowed them to be Protestants and took no measures to save their souls
he was deficient in his duty toward God. If he sent the Inquisition to the
Netherlands and burned his subjects at the stake, he would lose the
greater part of his income.
Being a man of uncertain will-power he hesitated a long time. He tried
kindness and sternness and promises and threats. The Hollanders remained
obstinate, and continued to sing psalms and listen to the sermons of their
Lutheran and Calvinist preachers. Philip in his despair sent his “man of
iron,” the Duke of Alba, to bring these hardened sinners to terms. Alba
began by decapitating those leaders who had not wisely left the country
before his arrival. In the year 1572 (the same year that the French
Protestant leaders were all killed during the terrible night of Saint
Bartholomew), he attacked a number of Dutch cities and massacred the
inhabitants as an example for the others. The next year he laid siege to
the town of Leyden, the manufacturing center of Holland.
Meanwhile, the seven small provinces of the northern Netherlands had
formed a defensive union, the so-called union of Utrecht, and had
recognised William of Orange, a German prince who had been the private
secretary of the Emperor Charles V, as the leader of their army and as
commander of their freebooting sailors, who were known as the Beggars of
the Sea. William, to save Leyden, cut the dykes, created a shallow inland
sea, and delivered the town with the help of a strangely equipped navy
consisting of scows and flat-bottomed barges which were rowed and pushed
and pulled through the mud until they reached the city walls.
It was the first time that an army of the invincible Spanish king had
suffered such a humiliating defeat. It surprised the world just as the
Japanese victory of Mukden, in the Russian-Japanese war, surprised our own
generation. The Protestant powers took fresh courage and Philip devised
new means for the purpose of conquering his rebellious subjects. He hired
a poor half-witted fanatic to go and murder William of Orange. But the
sight of their dead leader did not bring the Seven Provinces to their
knees. On the contrary it made them furiously angry. In the year 1581, the
Estates General (the meeting of the representatives of the Seven
Provinces) came together at the Hague and most solemnly abjured their
“wicked king Philip” and themselves assumed the burden of sovereignty
which thus far had been invested in their “King by the Grace of God.”
This is a very important event in the history of the great struggle for
political liberty. It was a step which reached much further than the
uprising of the nobles which ended with the signing of the Magna Carta.
These good burghers said “Between a king and his subjects there is a
silent understanding that both sides shall perform certain services and
shall recognise certain definite duties. If either party fails to live up
to this contract, the other has the right to consider it terminated.” The
American subjects of King George III in the year 1776 came to a similar
conclusion. But they had three thousand miles of ocean between themselves
and their ruler and the Estates General took their decision (which meant a
slow death in case of defeat) within hearing of the Spanish guns and
although in constant fear of an avenging Spanish fleet.
The stories about a mysterious Spanish fleet that was to conquer both
Holland and England, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth had succeeded
Catholic “Bloody Mary” was an old one. For years the sailors of the
waterfront had talked about it. In the eighties of the sixteenth century,
the rumour took a definite shape. According to pilots who had been in
Lisbon, all the Spanish and Portuguese wharves were building ships. And in
the southern Netherlands (in Belgium) the Duke of Parma was collecting a
large expeditionary force to be carried from Ostend to London and
Amsterdam as soon as the fleet should arrive.
In the year 1586 the Great Armada set sail for the north. But the harbours
of the Flemish coast were blockaded by a Dutch fleet and the Channel was
guarded by the English, and the Spaniards, accustomed to the quieter seas
of the south, did not know how to navigate in this squally and bleak
northern climate. What happened to the Armada once it was attacked by
ships and by storms I need not tell you. A few ships, by sailing around
Ireland, escaped to tell the terrible story of defeat. The others perished
and lie at the bottom of the North Sea.
Turn about is fair play. The British nod the Dutch Protestants now carried
the war into the territory of the enemy. Before the end of the century,
Houtman, with the help of a booklet written by Linschoten (a Hollander who
had been in the Portuguese service), had at last discovered the route to
the Indies. As a result the great Dutch East India Company was founded and
a systematic war upon the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Asia and
Africa was begun in all seriousness.
It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a curious lawsuit
was fought out in the Dutch courts. Early in the seventeenth century a
Dutch Captain by the name of van Heemskerk, a man who had made himself
famous as the head of an expedition which had tried to discover the North
Eastern Passage to the Indies and who had spent a winter on the frozen
shores of the island of Nova Zembla, had captured a Portuguese ship in the
straits of Malacca. You will remember that the Pope had divided the world
into two equal shares, one of which had been given to the Spaniards and
the other to the Portuguese. The Portuguese quite naturally regarded the
water which surrounded their Indian islands as part of their own property
and since, for the moment, they were not at war with the United Seven
Netherlands, they claimed that the captain of a private Dutch trading
company had no right to enter their private domain and steal their ships.
And they brought suit. The directors of the Dutch East India Company hired
a bright young lawyer, by the name of De Groot or Grotius, to defend their
case. He made the astonishing plea that the ocean is free to all comers.
Once outside the distance which a cannon ball fired from the land can
reach, the sea is or (according to Grotius) ought to be, a free and open
highway to all the ships of all nations. It was the first time that this
startling doctrine had been publicly pronounced in a court of law. It was
opposed by all the other seafaring people. To counteract the effect of
Grotius’ famous plea for the “Mare Liberum,” or “Open Sea,” John Selden,
the Englishman, wrote his famous treatise upon the “Mare Clausum” or
“Closed Sea” which treated of the natural right of a sovereign to regard
the seas which surrounded his country as belonging to his territory. I
mention this here because the question had not yet been decided and during
the last war caused all sorts of difficulties and complications.
To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander and Englishman,
before twenty years were over the most valuable colonies of the Indies and
the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon and those along the coast of China and
even Japan were in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian Company was
founded which conquered Brazil and in North America built a fortress
called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river which Henry Hudson had
discovered in the year 1609
These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch Republic to such an
extent that they could hire foreign soldiers to do their fighting on land
while they devoted themselves to commerce and trade. To them the
Protestant revolt meant independence and prosperity. But in many other
parts of Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the
last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys.
The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618 and which ended with
the famous treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was the perfectly natural result
of a century of ever increasing religious hatred. It was, as I have said,
a terrible war. Everybody fought everybody else and the struggle ended
only when all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and could fight no
longer.
In less than a generation it turned many parts of central Europe into a
wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought for the carcass of a dead
horse with the even hungrier wolf. Five-sixths of all the German towns and
villages were destroyed. The Palatinate, in western Germany, was plundered
twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million people was
reduced to four million.
The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of
Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was the product of a most careful
Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church. The
vow which he had made as a young man, that he would eradicate all sects
and all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best of his
ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent, Frederick, the
Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a son-in-law of James I of
England, had been made King of Bohemia, in direct violation of Ferdinand’s
wishes.
At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia. The young king looked in
vain for assistance against this formidable enemy. The Dutch Republic was
willing to help, but, engaged in a desperate war of its own with the
Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, it could do little. The Stuarts in
England were more interested in strengthening their own absolute power at
home than spending money and men upon a forlorn adventure in far away
Bohemia. After a struggle of a few months, the Elector of the Palatinate
was driven away and his domains were given to the Catholic house of
Bavaria. This was the beginning of the great war.
Then the Habsburg armies, under Tilly and Wallenstein, fought their way
through the Protestant part of Germany until they had reached the shores
of the Baltic. A Catholic neighbour meant serious danger to the Protestant
king of Denmark. Christian IV tried to defend himself by attacking his
enemies before they had become too strong for him. The Danish armies
marched into Germany but were defeated. Wallenstein followed up his
victory with such energy and violence that Denmark was forced to sue for
peace. Only one town of the Baltic then remained in the hands of the
Protestants. That was Stralsund.
There, in the early summer of the year 1630, landed King Gustavus Adolphus
of the house of Vasa, king of Sweden, and famous as the man who had
defended his country against the Russians. A Protestant prince of
unlimited ambition, desirous of making Sweden the centre of a great
Northern Empire, Gustavus Adolphus was welcomed by the Protestant princes
of Europe as the saviour of the Lutheran cause. He defeated Tilly, who had
just successfully butchered the Protestant inhabitants of Magdeburg. Then
his troops began their great march through the heart of Germany in an
attempt to reach the Habsburg possessions in Italy. Threatened in the rear
by the Catholics, Gustavus suddenly veered around and defeated the main
Habsburg army in the battle of Lutzen. Unfortunately the Swedish king was
killed when he strayed away from his troops. But the Habsburg power had
been broken.
Ferdinand, who was a suspicious sort of person, at once began to distrust
his own servants. Wallenstein, his commander-in-chief, was murdered at his
instigation. When the Catholic Bourbons, who ruled France and hated their
Habsburg rivals, heard of this, they joined the Protestant Swedes. The
armies of Louis XIII invaded the eastern part of Germany, and Turenne and
Conde added their fame to that of Baner and Weimar, the Swedish generals,
by murdering, pillaging and burning Habsburg property. This brought great
fame and riches to the Swedes and caused the Danes to become envious. The
Protestant Danes thereupon declared war upon the Protestant Swedes who
were the allies of the Catholic French, whose political leader, the
Cardinal de Richelieu, had just deprived the Huguenots (or French
Protestants) of those rights of public worship which the Edict of Nantes
of the year 1598 had guaranteed them.
The war, after the habit of such encounters, did not decide anything, when
it came to an end with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Catholic
powers remained Catholic and the Protestant powers stayed faithful to the
doctrines of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. The Swiss and Dutch
Protestants were recognised as independent republics. France kept the
cities of Metz and Toul and Verdun and a part of the Alsace. The Holy
Roman Empire continued to exist as a sort of scare-crow state, without
men, without money, without hope and without courage.
The only good the Thirty Years War accomplished was a negative one. It
discouraged both Catholics and Protestants from ever trying it again.
Henceforth they left each other in peace. This however did not mean that
religious feeling and theological hatred had been removed from this earth.
On the contrary. The quarrels between Catholic and Protestant came to an
end, but the disputes between the different Protestant sects continued as
bitterly as ever before. In Holland a difference of opinion as to the true
nature of predestination (a very obscure point of theology, but
exceedingly important the eyes of your great-grandfather) caused a quarrel
which ended with the decapitation of John of Oldenbarneveldt, the Dutch
statesman, who had been responsible for the success of the Republic during
the first twenty years of its independence, and who was the great
organising genius of her Indian trading company. In England, the feud led
to civil war.
But before I tell you of this outbreak which led to the first execution by
process-of-law of a European king, I ought to say something about the
previous history of England. In this book I am trying to give you only
those events of the past which can throw a light upon the conditions of
the present world. If I do not mention certain countries, the cause is not
to be found in any secret dislike on my part. I wish that I could tell you
what happened to Norway and Switzerland and Serbia and China. But these
lands exercised no great influence upon the development of Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I therefore pass them by with a
polite and very respectful bow. England however is in a different
position. What the people of that small island have done during the last
five hundred years has shaped the course of history in every corner of the
world. Without a proper knowledge of the background of English history,
you cannot understand what you read in the newspapers. And it is therefore
necessary that you know how England happened to develop a parliamentary
form of government while the rest of the European continent was still
ruled by absolute monarchs.
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION
HOW THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE “DIVINE RIGHT” OF KINGS AND THE LESS DIVINE
BUT MORE REASONABLE “RIGHT OF PARLIAMENT” ENDED DISASTROUSLY FOR KING
CHARLES II
CAESAR, the earliest explorer of north-western Europe, had crossed the
Channel in the year 55 B.C. and had conquered England. During four
centuries the country then remained a Roman province. But when the
Barbarians began to threaten Rome, the garrisons were called back from the
frontier that they might defend the home country and Britannia was left
without a government and without protection.
As soon as this became known among the hungry Saxon tribes of northern
Germany, they sailed across the North Sea and made themselves at home in
the prosperous island. They founded a number of independent Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms (so called after the original Angles or English and the Saxon
invaders) but these small states were for ever quarrelling with each other
and no King was strong enough to establish himself as the head of a united
country. For more than five hundred years, Mercia and Northumbria and
Wessex and Sussex and Kent and East Anglia, or whatever their names, were
exposed to attacks from various Scandinavian pirates. Finally in the
eleventh century, England, together with Norway and northern Germany
became part of the large Danish Empire of Canute the Great and the last
vestiges of independence disappeared.
The Danes, in the course of time, were driven away but no sooner was
England free, than it was conquered for the fourth time. The new enemies
were the descendants of another tribe of Norsemen who early in the tenth
century had invaded France and had founded the Duchy of Normandy. William,
Duke of Normandy, who for a long time had looked across the water with an
envious eye, crossed the Channel in October of the year 1066. At the
battle of Hastings, on October the fourteenth of that year, he destroyed
the weak forces of Harold of Wessex, the last of the Anglo-Saxon Kings and
established himself as King of England. But neither William nor his
successors of the House of Anjou and Plantagenet regarded England as their
true home. To them the island was merely a part of their great inheritance
on the continent—a sort of colony inhabited by rather backward
people upon whom they forced their own language and civilisation.
Gradually however the “colony” of England gained upon the “Mother country”
of Normandy. At the same time the Kings of France were trying desperately
to get rid of the powerful Norman-English neighbours who were in truth no
more than disobedient servants of the French crown. After a century of war
fare the French people, under the leadership of a young girl by the name
of Joan of Arc, drove the “foreigners” from their soil. Joan herself,
taken a prisoner at the battle of Compiegne in the year 1430 and sold by
her Burgundian captors to the English soldiers, was burned as a witch. But
the English never gained foothold upon the continent and their Kings were
at last able to devote all their time to their British possessions. As the
feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in one of those strange
feuds which were as common in the middle ages as measles and small-pox,
and as the greater part of the old landed proprietors had been killed
during these so-called Wars of the Roses, it was quite easy for the Kings
to increase their royal power. And by the end of the fifteenth century,
England was a strongly centralised country, ruled by Henry VII of the
House of Tudor, whose famous Court of Justice, the “Star Chamber” of
terrible memory, suppressed all attempts on the part of the surviving
nobles to regain their old influence upon the government of the country
with the utmost severity.
In the year 1509 Henry VII was succeeded by his son Henry VIII, and from
that moment on the history of England gained a new importance for the
country ceased to be a mediaeval island and became a modern state.
Henry had no deep interest in religion. He gladly used a private
disagreement with the Pope about one of his many divorces to declare
himself independent of Rome and make the church of England the first of
those “nationalistic churches” in which the worldly ruler also acts as the
spiritual head of his subjects. This peaceful reformation of 1034 not only
gave the house of Tudor the support of the English clergy, who for a long
time had been exposed to the violent attacks of many Lutheran
propagandists, but it also increased the Royal power through the
confiscation of the former possessions of the monasteries. At the same
time it made Henry popular with the merchants and tradespeople, who as the
proud and prosperous inhabitants of an island which was separated from the
rest of Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a great dislike for
everything “foreign” and did not want an Italian bishop to rule their
honest British souls.
In 1517 Henry died. He left the throne to his small son, aged ten. The
guardians of the child, favoring the modern Lutheran doctrines, did their
best to help the cause of Protestantism. But the boy died before he was
sixteen, and was succeeded by his sister Mary, the wife of Philip II of
Spain, who burned the bishops of the new “national church” and in other
ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband
Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded by Elizabeth,
the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the second of his six wives,
whom he had decapitated when she no longer pleased him. Elizabeth, who had
spent some time in prison, and who had been released only at the request
of the Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial enemy of everything Catholic
and Spanish. She shared her father’s indifference in the matter of
religion but she inherited his ability as a very shrewd judge of
character, and spent the forty-five years of her reign in strengthening
the power of the dynasty and in increasing the revenue and possessions of
her merry islands. In this she was most ably assisted by a number of men
who gathered around her throne and made the Elizabethan age a period of
such importance that you ought to study it in detail in one of the special
books of which I shall tell you in the bibliography at the end of this
volume.
Elizabeth, however, did not feel entirely safe upon her throne. She had a
rival and a very dangerous one. Mary, of the house of Stuart, daughter of
a French duchess and a Scottish father, widow of king Francis II of France
and daughter-in-law of Catherine of Medici (who had organised the murders
of Saint Bartholomew’s night), was the mother of a little boy who was
afterwards to become the first Stuart king of England. She was an ardent
Catholic and a willing friend to those who were the enemies of Elizabeth.
Her own lack of political ability and the violent methods which she
employed to punish her Calvinistic subjects, caused a revolution in
Scotland and forced Mary to take refuge on English territory. For eighteen
years she remained in England, plotting forever and a day against the
woman who had given her shelter and who was at last obliged to follow the
advice of her trusted councilors “to cutte off the Scottish Queen’s
heade.”
The head was duly “cutte off” in the year 1587 and caused a war with
Spain. But the combined navies of England and Holland defeated Philip’s
Invincible Armada, as we have already seen, and the blow which had been
meant to destroy the power of the two great anti-Catholic leaders was
turned into a profitable business adventure.
For now at last, after many years of hesitation, the English as well as
the Dutch thought it their good right to invade the Indies and America and
avenge the ills which their Protestant brethren had suffered at the hands
of the Spaniards. The English had been among the earliest successors of
Columbus. British ships, commanded by the Venetian pilot Giovanni Caboto
(or Cabot), had been the first to discover and explore the northern
American continent in 1496. Labrador and Newfoundland were of little
importance as a possible colony. But the banks of Newfoundland offered a
rich reward to the English fishing fleet. A year later, in 1497, the same
Cabot had explored the coast of Florida.
Then had come the busy years of Henry VII and Henry VIII when there had
been no money for foreign explorations. But under Elizabeth, with the
country at peace and Mary Stuart in prison, the sailors could leave their
harbour without fear for the fate of those whom they left behind. While
Elizabeth was still a child, Willoughby had ventured to sail past the
North Cape and one of his captains, Richard Chancellor, pushing further
eastward in his quest of a possible road to the Indies, had reached
Archangel, Russia, where he had established diplomatic and commercial
relations with the mysterious rulers of this distant Muscovite Empire.
During the first years of Elizabeth’s rule this voyage had been followed
up by many others. Merchant adventurers, working for the benefit of a
“joint stock Company” had laid the foundations of trading companies which
in later centuries were to become colonies. Half pirate, half diplomat,
willing to stake everything on a single lucky voyage, smugglers of
everything that could be loaded into the hold of a vessel, dealers in men
and merchandise with equal indifference to everything except their profit,
the sailors of Elizabeth had carried the English flag and the fame of
their Virgin Queen to the four corners of the Seven Seas. Meanwhile
William Shakespeare kept her Majesty amused at home, and the best brains
and the best wit of England co-operated with the queen in her attempt to
change the feudal inheritance of Henry VIII into a modern national state.
In the year 1603 the old lady died at the age of seventy. Her cousin, the
great-grandson of her own grandfather Henry VII and son of Mary Stuart,
her rival and enemy, succeeded her as James I. By the Grace of God, he
found himself the ruler of a country which had escaped the fate of its
continental rivals. While the European Protestants and Catholics were
killing each other in a hopeless attempt to break the power of their
adversaries and establish the exclusive rule of their own particular
creed, England was at peace and “reformed” at leisure without going to the
extremes of either Luther or Loyola. It gave the island kingdom an
enormous advantage in the coming struggle for colonial possessions. It
assured England a leadership in international affairs which that country
has maintained until the present day. Not even the disastrous adventure
with the Stuarts was able to stop this normal development.
The Stuarts, who succeeded the Tudors, were “foreigners” in England. They
do not seem to have appreciated or understood this fact. The native house
of Tudor could steal a horse, but the “foreign” Stuarts were not allowed
to look at the bridle without causing great popular disapproval. Old Queen
Bess had ruled her domains very much as she pleased. In general however,
she had always followed a policy which meant money in the pocket of the
honest (and otherwise) British merchants. Hence the Queen had been always
assured of the wholehearted support of her grateful people. And small
liberties taken with some of the rights and prerogatives of Parliament
were gladly overlooked for the ulterior benefits which were derived from
her Majesty’s strong and successful foreign policies.
Outwardly King James continued the same policy. But he lacked that
personal enthusiasm which had been so very typical of his great
predecessor. Foreign commerce continued to be encouraged. The Catholics
were not granted any liberties. But when Spain smiled pleasantly upon
England in an effort to establish peaceful relations, James was seen to
smile back. The majority of the English people did not like this, but
James was their King and they kept quiet.
Soon there were other causes of friction. King James and his son, Charles
I, who succeeded him in the year 1625 both firmly believed in the
principle of their “divine right” to administer their realm as they
thought fit without consulting the wishes of their subjects. The idea was
not new. The Popes, who in more than one way had been the successors of
the Roman Emperors (or rather of the Roman Imperial ideal of a single and
undivided state covering the entire known world), had always regarded
themselves and had been publicly recognised as the “Vice-Regents of Christ
upon Earth.” No one questioned the right of God to rule the world as He
saw fit. As a natural result, few ventured to doubt the right of the
divine “Vice-Regent” to do the same thing and to demand the obedience of
the masses because he was the direct representative of the Absolute Ruler
of the Universe and responsible only to Almighty God.
When the Lutheran Reformation proved successful, those rights which
formerly had been invested in the Papacy were taken over by the many
European sovereigns who became Protestants. As head of their own national
or dynastic churches they insisted upon being “Christ’s Vice-Regents”
within the limit of their own territory. The people did not question the
right of their rulers to take such a step. They accepted it, just as we in
our own day accept the idea of a representative system which to us seems
the only reasonable and just form of government. It is unfair therefore to
state that either Lutheranism or Calvinism caused the particular feeling
of irritation which greeted King-James’s oft and loudly repeated assertion
of his “Divine Right.” There must have been other grounds for the genuine
English disbelief in the Divine Right of Kings.
The first positive denial of the “Divine Right” of sovereigns had been
heard in the Netherlands when the Estates General abjured their lawful
sovereign King Philip II of Spain, in the year 1581. “The King,” so they
said, “has broken his contract and the King therefore is dismissed like
any other unfaithful servant.” Since then, this particular idea of a
king’s responsibilities towards his subjects had spread among many of the
nations who inhabited the shores of the North Sea. They were in a very
favourable position. They were rich. The poor people in the heart of
central Europe, at the mercy of their Ruler’s body-guard, could not afford
to discuss a problem which would at once land them in the deepest dungeon
of the nearest castle. But the merchants of Holland and England who
possessed the capital necessary for the maintenance of great armies and
navies, who knew how to handle the almighty weapon called “credit,” had no
such fear. They were willing to pit the “Divine Right” of their own good
money against the “Divine Right” of any Habsburg or Bourbon or Stuart.
They knew that their guilders and shillings could beat the clumsy feudal
armies which were the only weapons of the King. They dared to act, where
others were condemned to suffer in silence or run the risk of the
scaffold.
When the Stuarts began to annoy the people of England with their claim
that they had a right to do what they pleased and never mind the
responsibility, the English middle classes used the House of Commons as
their first line of defence against this abuse of the Royal Power. The
Crown refused to give in and the King sent Parliament about its own
business. Eleven long years, Charles I ruled alone. He levied taxes which
most people regarded as illegal and he managed his British kingdom as if
it had been his own country estate. He had capable assistants and we must
say that he had the courage of his convictions.
Unfortunately, instead of assuring himself of the support of his faithful
Scottish subjects, Charles became involved in a quarrel with the Scotch
Presbyterians. Much against his will, but forced by his need for ready
cash, Charles was at last obliged to call Parliament together once more.
It met in April of 1640 and showed an ugly temper. It was dissolved a few
weeks later. A new Parliament convened in November. This one was even less
pliable than the first one. The members understood that the question of
“Government by Divine Right” or “Government by Parliament” must be fought
out for good and all. They attacked the King in his chief councillors and
executed half a dozen of them. They announced that they would not allow
themselves to be dissolved without their own approval. Finally on December
1, 1641, they presented to the King a “Grand Remonstrance” which gave a
detailed account of the many grievances of the people against their Ruler.
Charles, hoping to derive some support for his own policy in the country
districts, left London in January of 1642. Each side organised an army and
prepared for open warfare between the absolute power of the crown and the
absolute power of Parliament. During this struggle, the most powerful
religious element of England, called the Puritans, (they were Anglicans
who had tried to purify their doctrines to the most absolute limits), came
quickly to the front. The regiments of “Godly men,” commanded by Oliver
Cromwell, with their iron discipline and their profound confidence in the
holiness of their aims, soon became the model for the entire army of the
opposition. Twice Charles was defeated. After the battle of Naseby, in
1645, he fled to Scotland. The Scotch sold him to the English.
There followed a period of intrigue and an uprising of the Scotch
Presbyterians against the English Puritan. In August of the year 1648
after the three-days’ battle of Preston Pans, Cromwell made an end to this
second civil war, and took Edinburgh. Meanwhile his soldiers, tired of
further talk and wasted hours of religious debate, had decided to act on
their own initiative. They removed from Parliament all those who did not
agree with their own Puritan views. Thereupon the “Rump,” which was what
was left of the old Parliament, accused the King of high treason. The
House of Lords refused to sit as a tribunal. A special tribunal was
appointed and it condemned the King to death. On the 30th of January of
the year 1649, King Charles walked quietly out of a window of White Hall
onto the scaffold. That day, the Sovereign People, acting through their
chosen representatives, for the first time executed a ruler who had failed
to understand his own position in the modern state.
The period which followed the death of Charles is usually called after
Oliver Cromwell. At first the unofficial Dictator of England, he was
officially made Lord Protector in the year 1653. He ruled five years. He
used this period to continue the policies of Elizabeth. Spain once more
became the arch enemy of England and war upon the Spaniard was made a
national and sacred issue.
The commerce of England and the interests of the traders were placed
before everything else, and the Protestant creed of the strictest nature
was rigourously maintained. In maintaining England’s position abroad,
Cromwell was successful. As a social reformer, however, he failed very
badly. The world is made up of a number of people and they rarely think
alike. In the long run, this seems a very wise provision. A government of
and by and for one single part of the entire community cannot possibly
survive. The Puritans had been a great force for good when they tried to
correct the abuse of the royal power. As the absolute Rulers of England
they became intolerable.
When Cromwell died in 1658, it was an easy matter for the Stuarts to
return to their old kingdom. Indeed, they were welcomed as “deliverers” by
the people who had found the yoke of the meek Puritans quite as hard to
bear as that of autocratic King Charles. Provided the Stuarts were willing
to forget about the Divine Right of their late and lamented father and
were willing to recognise the superiority of Parliament, the people
promised that they would be loyal and faithful subjects.
Two generations tried to make a success of this new arrangement. But the
Stuarts apparently had not learned their lesson and were unable to drop
their bad habits. Charles II, who came back in the year 1660, was an
amiable but worthless person. His indolence and his constitutional
insistence upon following the easiest course, together with his
conspicuous success as a liar, prevented an open outbreak between himself
and his people. By the act of Uniformity in 1662 he broke the power of the
Puritan clergy by banishing all dissenting clergymen from their parishes.
By the so-called Conventicle Act of 1664 he tried to prevent the
Dissenters from attending religious meetings by a threat of deportation to
the West Indies. This looked too much like the good old days of Divine
Right. People began to show the old and well-known signs of impatience,
and Parliament suddenly experienced difficulty in providing the King with
funds.
Since he could not get money from an unwilling Parliament, Charles
borrowed it secretly from his neighbour and cousin King Louis of France.
He betrayed his Protestant allies in return for 200,000 pounds per year,
and laughed at the poor simpletons of Parliament.
Economic independence suddenly gave the King great faith in his own
strength. He had spent many years of exile among his Catholic relations
and he had a secret liking for their religion. Perhaps he could bring
England back to Rome! He passed a Declaration of Indulgence which
suspended the old laws against the Catholics and Dissenters. This happened
just when Charles’ younger brother James was said to have become a
Catholic. All this looked suspicious to the man in the street People began
to fear some terrible Popish plot. A new spirit of unrest entered the
land. Most of the people wanted to prevent another outbreak of civil war.
To them Royal Oppression and a Catholic King—yea, even Divine Right,—were
preferable to a new struggle between members of the same race. Others
however were less lenient. They were the much-feared Dissenters, who
invariably had the courage of their convictions. They were led by several
great noblemen who did not want to see a return of the old days of
absolute royal power.
For almost ten years, these two great parties, the Whigs (the middle class
element, called by this derisive name be-cause in the year 1640 a lot of
Scottish Whiggamores or horse-drovers headed by the Presbyterian clergy,
had marched to Edinburgh to oppose the King) and the Tories (an epithet
originally used against the Royalist Irish adherents but now applied to
the supporters of the King) opposed each other, but neither wished to
bring about a crisis. They allowed Charles to die peacefully in his bed
and permitted the Catholic James II to succeed his brother in 1685. But
when James, after threatening the country with the terrible foreign
invention of a “standing army” (which was to be commanded by Catholic
Frenchmen), issued a second Declaration of Indulgence in 1688, and ordered
it to be read in all Anglican churches, he went just a trifle beyond that
line of sensible demarcation which can only be transgressed by the most
popular of rulers under very exceptional circumstances. Seven bishops
refused to comply with the Royal Command. They were accused of “seditious
libel.” They were brought before a court. The jury which pronounced the
verdict of “not guilty” reaped a rich harvest of popular approval.
At this unfortunate moment, James (who in a second marriage had taken to
wife Maria of the Catholic house of Modena-Este) became the father of a
son. This meant that the throne was to go to a Catholic boy rather than to
his older sisters, Mary and Anne, who were Protestants. The man in the
street again grew suspicious. Maria of Modena was too old to have
children! It was all part of a plot! A strange baby had been brought into
the palace by some Jesuit priest that England might have a Catholic
monarch. And so on. It looked as if another civil war would break out.
Then seven well-known men, both Whigs and Tories, wrote a letter asking
the husband of James’s oldest daughter Mary, William III the Stadtholder
or head of the Dutch Republic, to come to England and deliver the country
from its lawful but entirely undesirable sovereign.
On the fifth of November of the year 1688, William landed at Torbay. As he
did not wish to make a martyr out of his father-in-law, he helped him to
escape safely to France. On the 22nd of January of 1689 he summoned
Parliament. On the 13th of February of the same year he and his wife Mary
were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England and the country was saved for
the Protestant cause.
Parliament, having undertaken to be something more than a mere advisory
body to the King, made the best of its opportunities. The old Petition of
Rights of the year 1628 was fished out of a forgotten nook of the
archives. A second and more drastic Bill of Rights demanded that the
sovereign of England should belong to the Anglican church. Furthermore it
stated that the king had no right to suspend the laws or permit certain
privileged citizens to disobey certain laws. It stipulated that “without
consent of Parliament no taxes could be levied and no army could be
maintained.” Thus in the year 1689 did England acquire an amount of
liberty unknown in any other country of Europe.
But it is not only on account of this great liberal measure that the rule
of William in England is still remembered. During his lifetime, government
by a “responsible” ministry first developed. No king of course can rule
alone. He needs a few trusted advisors. The Tudors had their Great Council
which was composed of Nobles and Clergy. This body grew too large. It was
restricted to the small “Privy Council.” In the course of time it became
the custom of these councillors to meet the king in a cabinet in the
palace. Hence they were called the “Cabinet Council.” After a short while
they were known as the “Cabinet.”
William, like most English sovereigns before him, had chosen his advisors
from among all parties. But with the increased strength of Parliament, he
had found it impossible to direct the politics of the country with the
help of the Tories while the Whigs had a majority in the house of Commons.
Therefore the Tories had been dismissed and the Cabinet Council had been
composed entirely of Whigs. A few years later when the Whigs lost their
power in the House of Commons, the king, for the sake of convenience, was
obliged to look for his support among the leading Tories. Until his death
in 1702, William was too busy fighting Louis of France to bother much
about the government of England. Practically all important affairs had
been left to his Cabinet Council. When William’s sister-in-law, Anne,
succeeded him in 1702 this condition of affairs continued. When she died
in 1714 (and unfortunately not a single one of her seventeen children
survived her) the throne went to George I of the House of Hanover, the son
of Sophie, grand-daughter of James I.
This somewhat rustic monarch, who never learned a word of English, was
entirely lost in the complicated mazes of England’s political
arrangements. He left everything to his Cabinet Council and kept away from
their meetings, which bored him as he did not understand a single
sentence. In this way the Cabinet got into the habit of ruling England and
Scotland (whose Parliament had been joined to that of England in 1707)
without bothering the King, who was apt to spend a great deal of his time
on the continent.
During the reign of George I and George II, a succession of great Whigs
(of whom one, Sir Robert Walpole, held office for twenty-one years) formed
the Cabinet Council of the King. Their leader was finally recognised as
the official leader not only of the actual Cabinet but also of the
majority party in power in Parliament. The attempts of George III to take
matters into his own hands and not to leave the actual business of
government to his Cabinet were so disastrous that they were never
repeated. And from the earliest years of the eighteenth century on,
England enjoyed representative government, with a responsible ministry
which conducted the affairs of the land.
To be quite true, this government did not represent all classes of
society. Less than one man in a dozen had the right to vote. But it was
the foundation for the modern representative form of government. In a
quiet and orderly fashion it took the power away from the King and placed
it in the hands of an ever increasing number of popular representatives.
It did not bring the millenium to England, but it saved that country from
most of the revolutionary outbreaks which proved so disastrous to the
European continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
THE BALANCE OF POWER
IN FRANCE ON THE OTHER HAND THE “DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS” CONTINUED WITH
GREATER POMP AND SPLENDOUR THAN EVER BEFORE AND THE AMBITION OF THE RULER
WAS ONLY TEMPERED BY THE NEWLY INVENTED LAW OF THE “BALANCE OF POWER”
As a contrast to the previous chapter, let me tell you what happened in
France during the years when the English people were fighting for their
liberty. The happy combination of the right man in the right country at
the right moment is very rare in History. Louis XIV was a realisation of
this ideal, as far as France was concerned, but the rest of Europe would
have been happier without him.
The country over which the young king was called to rule was the most
populous and the most brilliant nation of that day. Louis came to the
throne when Mazarin and Richelieu, the two great Cardinals, had just
hammered the ancient French Kingdom into the most strongly centralised
state of the seventeenth century. He was himself a man of extraordinary
ability. We, the people of the twentieth century, are still surrounded by
the memories of the glorious age of the Sun King. Our social life is based
upon the perfection of manners and the elegance of expression attained at
the court of Louis. In international and diplomatic relations, French is
still the official language of diplomacy and international gatherings
because two centuries ago it reached a polished elegance and a purity of
expression which no other tongue had as yet been able to equal. The
theatre of King Louis still teaches us lessons which we are only too slow
in learning. During his reign the French Academy (an invention of
Richelieu) came to occupy a position in the world of letters which other
countries have flattered by their imitation. We might continue this list
for many pages. It is no matter of mere chance that our modern
bill-of-fare is printed in French. The very difficult art of decent
cooking, one of the highest expressions of civilisation, was first
practiced for the benefit of the great Monarch. The age of Louis XIV was a
time of splendour and grace which can still teach us a lot.
Unfortunately this brilliant picture has another side which was far less
encouraging. Glory abroad too often means misery at home, and France was
no exception to this rule Louis XIV succeeded his father in the year 1643.
He died in the year 1715. That means that the government of France was in
the hands of one single man for seventy-two years, almost two whole
generations.
It will be well to get a firm grasp of this idea, “one single man.” Louis
was the first of a long list of monarchs who in many countries established
that particular form of highly efficient autocracy which we call
“enlightened despotism.” He did not like kings who merely played at being
rulers and turned official affairs into a pleasant picnic. The Kings of
that enlightened age worked harder than any of their subjects. They got up
earlier and went to bed later than anybody else, and felt their “divine
responsibility” quite as strongly as their “divine right” which allowed
them to rule without consulting their subjects.
Of course, the king could not attend to everything in person. He was
obliged to surround himself with a few helpers and councillors. One or two
generals, some experts upon foreign politics, a few clever financiers and
economists would do for this purpose. But these dignitaries could act only
through their Sovereign. They had no individual existence. To the mass of
the people, the Sovereign actually represented in his own sacred person
the government of their country. The glory of the common fatherland became
the glory of a single dynasty. It meant the exact opposite of our own
American ideal. France was ruled of and by and for the House of Bourbon.
The disadvantages of such a system are clear. The King grew to be
everything. Everybody else grew to be nothing at all. The old and useful
nobility was gradually forced to give up its former shares in the
government of the provinces. A little Royal bureaucrat, his fingers
splashed with ink, sitting behind the greenish windows of a government
building in faraway Paris, now performed the task which a hundred years
before had been the duty of the feudal Lord. The feudal Lord, deprived of
all work, moved to Paris to amuse himself as best he could at the court.
Soon his estates began to suffer from that very dangerous economic
sickness, known as “Absentee Landlordism.” Within a single generation, the
industrious and useful feudal administrators had become the well-mannered
but quite useless loafers of the court of Versailles.
Louis was ten years old when the peace of Westphalia was concluded and the
House of Habsburg, as a result of the Thirty Years War, lost its
predominant position in Europe. It was inevitable that a man with his
ambition should use so favourable a moment to gain for his own dynasty the
honours which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs. In the year 1660
Louis had married Maria Theresa, daughter of the King of Spain. Soon
afterward, his father-in-law, Philip IV, one of the half-witted Spanish
Habsburgs, died. At once Louis claimed the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium)
as part of his wife’s dowry. Such an acquisition would have been
disastrous to the peace of Europe, and would have threatened the safety of
the Protestant states. Under the leadership of Jan de Witt,
Raadpensionaris or Foreign Minister of the United Seven Netherlands, the
first great international alliance, the Triple Alliance of Sweden, England
and Holland, of the year 1661, was concluded. It did not last long. With
money and fair promises Louis bought up both King Charles and the Swedish
Estates. Holland was betrayed by her allies and was left to her own fate.
In the year 1672 the French invaded the low countries. They marched to the
heart of the country. For a second time the dikes were opened and the
Royal Sun of France set amidst the mud of the Dutch marshes. The peace of
Nimwegen which was concluded in 1678 settled nothing but merely
anticipated another war.
A second war of aggression from 1689 to 1697, ending with the Peace of
Ryswick, also failed to give Louis that position in the affairs of Europe
to which he aspired. His old enemy, Jan de Witt, had been murdered by the
Dutch rabble, but his successor, William III (whom you met in the last
chapter), had checkmated all efforts of Louis to make France the ruler of
Europe.
The great war for the Spanish succession, begun in the year 1701,
immediately after the death of Charles II, the last of the Spanish
Habsburgs, and ended in 1713 by the Peace of Utrecht, remained equally
undecided, but it had ruined the treasury of Louis. On land the French
king had been victorious, but the navies of England and Holland had
spoiled all hope for an ultimate French victory; besides the long struggle
had given birth to a new and fundamental principle of international
politics, which thereafter made it impossible for one single nation to
rule the whole of Europe or the whole of the world for any length of time.
That was the so-called “balance of power.” It was not a written law but
for three centuries it has been obeyed as closely as are the laws of
nature. The people who originated the idea maintained that Europe, in its
nationalistic stage of development, could only survive when there should
be an absolute balance of the many conflicting interests of the entire
continent. No single power or single dynasty must ever be allowed to
dominate the others. During the Thirty Years War, the Habsburgs had been
the victims of the application of this law. They, however, had been
unconscious victims. The issues during that struggle were so clouded in a
haze of religious strife that we do not get a very clear view of the main
tendencies of that great conflict. But from that time on, we begin to see
how cold, economic considerations and calculations prevail in all matters
of international importance. We discover the development of a new type of
statesman, the statesman with the personal feelings of the slide-rule and
the cash-register. Jan de Witt was the first successful exponent of this
new school of politics. William III was the first great pupil. And Louis
XIV with all his fame and glory, was the first conscious victim. There
have been many others since.
THE RISE OF RUSSIA
THE STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS MOSCOVITE EMPIRE WHICH SUDDENLY BURST UPON THE
GRAND POLITICAL STAGE OF EUROPE
IN the year 1492, as you know, Columbus discovered America. Early in the
year, a Tyrolese by the name of Schnups, travelling as the head of a
scientific expedition for the Archbishop of Tyrol, and provided with the
best letters of introduction and excellent credit tried to reach the
mythical town of Moscow. He did not succeed. When he reached the frontiers
of this vast Moscovite state which was vaguely supposed to exist in the
extreme Eastern part of Europe, he was firmly turned back. No foreigners
were wanted. And Schnups went to visit the heathen Turk in Constantinople,
in order that he might have something to report to his clerical master
when he came back from his explorations.
Sixty-one years later, Richard Chancellor, trying to discover the
North-eastern passage to the Indies, and blown by an ill wind into the
White Sea, reached the mouth of the Dwina and found the Moscovite village
of Kholmogory, a few hours from the spot where in 1584 the town of
Archangel was founded. This time the foreign visitors were requested to
come to Moscow and show themselves to the Grand Duke. They went and
returned to England with the first commercial treaty ever concluded
between Russia and the western world. Other nations soon followed and
something became known of this mysterious land.
Geographically, Russia is a vast plain. The Ural mountains are low and
form no barrier against invaders. The rivers are broad but often shallow.
It was an ideal territory for nomads.
While the Roman Empire was founded, grew in power and disappeared again,
Slavic tribes, who had long since left their homes in Central Asia,
wandered aimlessly through the forests and plains of the region between
the Dniester and Dnieper rivers. The Greeks had sometimes met these Slavs
and a few travellers of the third and fourth centuries mention them.
Otherwise they were as little known as were the Nevada Indians in the year
1800.
Unfortunately for the peace of these primitive peoples, a very convenient
trade-route ran through their country. This was the main road from
northern Europe to Constantinople. It followed the coast of the Baltic
until the Neva was reached. Then it crossed Lake Ladoga and went southward
along the Volkhov river. Then through Lake Ilmen and up the small Lovat
river. Then there was a short portage until the Dnieper was reached. Then
down the Dnieper into the Black Sea.
The Norsemen knew of this road at a very early date. In the ninth century
they began to settle in northern Russia, just as other Norsemen were
laying the foundation for independent states in Germany and France. But in
the year 862, three Norsemen, brothers, crossed the Baltic and founded
three small dynasties. Of the three brothers, only one, Rurik, lived for a
number of years. He took possession of the territory of his brothers, and
twenty years after the arrival of this first Norseman, a Slavic state had
been established with Kiev as its capital.
From Kiev to the Black Sea is a short distance. Soon the existence of an
organised Slavic State became known in Constantinople. This meant a new
field for the zealous missionaries of the Christian faith. Byzantine monks
followed the Dnieper on their way northward and soon reached the heart of
Russia. They found the people worshipping strange gods who were supposed
to dwell in woods and rivers and in mountain caves. They taught them the
story of Jesus. There was no competition from the side of Roman
missionaries. These good men were too busy educating the heathen Teutons
to bother about the distant Slavs. Hence Russia received its religion and
its alphabet and its first ideas of art and architecture from the
Byzantine monks and as the Byzantine empire (a relic of the eastern Roman
empire) had become very oriental and had lost many of its European traits,
the Russians suffered in consequence.
Politically speaking these new states of the great Russian plains did not
fare well. It was the Norse habit to divide every inheritance equally
among all the sons. No sooner had a small state been founded but it was
broken up among eight or nine heirs who in turn left their territory to an
ever increasing number of descendants. It was inevitable that these small
competing states should quarrel among themselves. Anarchy was the order of
the day. And when the red glow of the eastern horizon told the people of
the threatened invasion of a savage Asiatic tribe, the little states were
too weak and too divided to render any sort of defence against this
terrible enemy.
It was in the year 1224 that the first great Tartar invasion took place
and that the hordes of Jenghiz Khan, the conqueror of China, Bokhara,
Tashkent and Turkestan made their first appearance in the west. The Slavic
armies were beaten near the Kalka river and Russia was at the mercy of the
Mongolians. Just as suddenly as they had come they disappeared. Thirteen
years later, in 1237, however, they returned. In less than five years they
conquered every part of the vast Russian plains. Until the year 1380 when
Dmitry Donskoi, Grand Duke of Moscow, beat them on the plains of Kulikovo,
the Tartars were the masters of the Russian people.
All in all, it took the Russians two centuries to deliver themselves from
this yoke. For a yoke it was and a most offensive and objectionable one.
It turned the Slavic peasants into miserable slaves. No Russian could hope
to survive un-less he was willing to creep before a dirty little yellow
man who sat in a tent somewhere in the heart of the steppes of southern
Russia and spat at him. It deprived the mass of the people of all feeling
of honour and independence. It made hunger and misery and maltreatment and
personal abuse the normal state of human existence. Until at last the
average Russian, were he peasant or nobleman, went about his business like
a neglected dog who has been beaten so often that his spirit has been
broken and he dare not wag his tail without permission.
There was no escape. The horsemen of the Tartar Khan were fast and
merciless. The endless prairie did not give a man a chance to cross into
the safe territory of his neighbour. He must keep quiet and bear what his
yellow master decided to inflict upon him or run the risk of death. Of
course, Europe might have interfered. But Europe was engaged upon business
of its own, fighting the quarrels between the Pope and the emperor or
suppressing this or that or the other heresy. And so Europe left the Slav
to his fate, and forced him to work out his own salvation.
The final saviour of Russia was one of the many small states, founded by
the early Norse rulers. It was situated in the heart of the Russian plain.
Its capital, Moscow, was upon a steep hill on the banks of the Moskwa
river. This little principality, by dint of pleasing the Tartar (when it
was necessary to please), and opposing him (when it was safe to do so),
had, during the middle of the fourteenth century made itself the leader of
a new national life. It must be remembered that the Tartars were wholly
deficient in constructive political ability. They could only destroy.
Their chief aim in conquering new territories was to obtain revenue. To
get this revenue in the form of taxes, it was necessary to allow certain
remnants of the old political organization to continue. Hence there were
many little towns, surviving by the grace of the Great Khan, that they
might act as tax-gatherers and rob their neighbours for the benefit of the
Tartar treasury.
The state of Moscow, growing fat at the expense of the surrounding
territory, finally became strong enough to risk open rebellion against its
masters, the Tartars. It was successful and its fame as the leader in the
cause of Russian independence made Moscow the natural centre for all those
who still believed in a better future for the Slavic race. In the year
1458, Constantinople was taken by the Turks. Ten years later, under the
rule of Ivan III, Moscow informed the western world that the Slavic state
laid claim to the worldly and spiritual inheritance of the lost Byzantine
Empire, and such traditions of the Roman empire as had survived in
Constantinople. A generation afterwards, under Ivan the Terrible, the
grand dukes of Moscow were strong enough to adopt the title of Caesar, or
Tsar, and to demand recognition by the western powers of Europe.
In the year 1598, with Feodor the First, the old Muscovite dynasty,
descendants of the original Norseman Rurik, came to an end. For the next
seven years, a Tartar half-breed, by the name of Boris Godunow, reigned as
Tsar. It was during this period that the future destiny of the large
masses of the Russian people was decided. This Empire was rich in land but
very poor in money. There was no trade and there were no factories. Its
few cities were dirty villages. It was composed of a strong central
government and a vast number of illiterate peasants. This government, a
mixture of Slavic, Norse, Byzantine and Tartar influences, recognised
nothing beyond the interest of the state. To defend this state, it needed
an army. To gather the taxes, which were necessary to pay the soldiers, it
needed civil servants. To pay these many officials it needed land. In the
vast wilderness on the east and west there was a sufficient supply of this
commodity. But land without a few labourers to till the fields and tend
the cattle, has no value. Therefore the old nomadic peasants were robbed
of one privilege after the other, until finally, during the first year of
the sixteenth century, they were formally made a part of the soil upon
which they lived. The Russian peasants ceased to be free men. They became
serfs or slaves and they remained serfs until the year 1861, when their
fate had become so terrible that they were beginning to die out.
In the seventeenth century, this new state with its growing territory
which was spreading quickly into Siberia, had become a force with which
the rest of Europe was obliged to reckon. In 1618, after the death of
Boris Godunow, the Russian nobles had elected one of their own number to
be Tsar. He was Michael, the son of Feodor, of the Moscow family of
Romanow who lived in a little house just outside the Kremlin.
In the year 1672 his great-grandson, Peter, the son of another Feodor, was
born. When the child was ten years old, his step-sister Sophia took
possession of the Russian throne. The little boy was allowed to spend his
days in the suburbs of the national capital, where the foreigners lived.
Surrounded by Scotch barkeepers, Dutch traders, Swiss apothecaries,
Italian barbers, French dancing teachers and German school-masters, the
young prince obtained a first but rather extraordinary impression of that
far-away and mysterious Europe where things were done differently.
When he was seventeen years old, he suddenly pushed Sister Sophia from the
throne. Peter himself became the ruler of Russia. He was not contented
with being the Tsar of a semi-barbarous and half-Asiatic people. He must
be the sovereign head of a civilised nation. To change Russia overnight
from a Byzantine-Tartar state into a European empire was no small
undertaking. It needed strong hands and a capable head. Peter possessed
both. In the year 1698, the great operation of grafting Modern Europe upon
Ancient Russia was performed. The patient did not die. But he never got
over the shock, as the events of the last five years have shown very
plainly.
RUSSIA vs. SWEDEN
RUSSIA AND SWEDEN FIGHT MANY WARS TO DECIDE WHO SHALL BE THE LEADING POWER
OF NORTH-EASTERN EUROPE
IN the year 1698, Tsar Peter set forth upon his first voyage to western
Europe. He travelled by way of Berlin and went to Holland and to England.
As a child he had almost been drowned sailing a homemade boat in the duck
pond of his father’s country home. This passion for water remained with
him to the end of his life. In a practical way it showed itself in his
wish to give his land-locked domains access to the open sea.
While the unpopular and harsh young ruler was away from home, the friends
of the old Russian ways in Moscow set to work to undo all his reforms. A
sudden rebellion among his life-guards, the Streltsi regiment, forced
Peter to hasten home by the fast mail. He appointed himself
executioner-in-chief and the Streltsi were hanged and quartered and killed
to the last man. Sister Sophia, who had been the head of the rebellion,
was locked up in a cloister and the rule of Peter be-gan in earnest. This
scene was repeated in the year 1716 when Peter had gone on his second
western trip. That time the reactionaries followed the leadership of
Peter’s half-witted son, Alexis. Again the Tsar returned in great haste.
Alexis was beaten to death in his prison cell and the friends of the old
fashioned Byzantine ways marched thousands of dreary miles to their final
destination in the Siberian lead mines. After that, no further outbreaks
of popular discontent took place. Until the time of his death, Peter could
reform in peace.
It is not easy to give you a list of his reforms in chronological order.
The Tsar worked with furious haste. He followed no system. He issued his
decrees with such rapidity that it is difficult to keep count. Peter
seemed to feel that everything that had ever happened before was entirely
wrong. The whole of Russia therefore must be changed within the shortest
possible time. When he died he left behind a well-trained army of 200,000
men and a navy of fifty ships. The old system of government had been
abolished over night. The Duma, or convention of Nobles, had been
dismissed and in its stead, the Tsar had surrounded himself with an
advisory board of state officials, called the Senate.
Russia was divided into eight large “governments” or provinces. Roads were
constructed. Towns were built. Industries were created wherever it pleased
the Tsar, without any regard for the presence of raw material. Canals were
dug and mines were opened in the mountains of the east. In this land of
illiterates, schools were founded and establishments of higher learning,
together with Universities and hospitals and professional schools. Dutch
naval engineers and tradesmen and artisans from all over the world were
encouraged to move to Russia. Printing shops were established, but all
books must be first read by the imperial censors. The duties of each class
of society were carefully written down in a new law and the entire system
of civil and criminal laws was gathered into a series of printed volumes.
The old Russian costumes were abolished by Imperial decree, and policemen,
armed with scissors, watching all the country roads, changed the
long-haired Russian mou-jiks suddenly into a pleasing imitation of
smooth-shaven west. Europeans.
In religious matters, the Tsar tolerated no division of power. There must
be no chance of a rivalry between an Emperor and a Pope as had happened in
Europe. In the year 1721, Peter made himself head of the Russian Church.
The Patriarchate of Moscow was abolished and the Holy Synod made its
appearance as the highest source of authority in all matters of the
Established Church.
Since, however, these many reforms could not be success-ful while the old
Russian elements had a rallying point in the town of Moscow, Peter decided
to move his government to a new capital. Amidst the unhealthy marshes of
the Baltic Sea the Tsar built this new city. He began to reclaim the land
in the year 1703. Forty thousand peasants worked for years to lay the
foundations for this Imperial city. The Swedes attacked Peter and tried to
destroy his town and illness and misery killed tens of thousands of the
peasants. But the work was continued, winter and summer, and the
ready-made town soon began to grow. In the year 1712, it was officially
de-clared to be the “Imperial Residence.” A dozen years later it had
75,000 inhabitants. Twice a year the whole city was flooded by the Neva.
But the terrific will-power of the Tsar created dykes and canals and the
floods ceased to do harm. When Peter died in 1725 he was the owner of the
largest city in northern Europe.
Of course, this sudden growth of so dangerous a rival had been a source of
great worry to all the neighbours. From his side, Peter had watched with
interest the many adventures of his Baltic rival, the kingdom of Sweden.
In the year 1654, Christina, the only daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the
hero of the Thirty Years War, had renounced the throne and had gone to
Rome to end her days as a devout Catholic. A Protestant nephew of Gustavus
Adolphus had succeeded the last Queen of the House of Vasa. Under Charles
X and Charles XI, the new dynasty had brought Sweden to its highest point
of development. But in 1697, Charles XI died suddenly and was succeeded by
a boy of fifteen, Charles XII.
This was the moment for which many of the northern states had waited.
During the great religious wars of the seventeenth century, Sweden had
grown at the expense of her neighbours. The time had come, so the owners
thought, to balance the account. At once war broke out between Russia,
Poland, Denmark and Saxony on the one side, and Sweden on the other. The
raw and untrained armies of Peter were disastrously beaten by Charles in
the famous battle of Narva in November of the year 1700. Then Charles, one
of the most interesting military geniuses of that century, turned against
his other enemies and for nine years he hacked and burned his way through
the villages and cities of Poland, Saxony, Denmark and the Baltic
provinces, while Peter drilled and trained his soldiers in distant Russia.
As a result, in the year 1709, in the battle of Poltawa, the Moscovites
destroyed the exhausted armies of Sweden. Charles continued to be a highly
picturesque figure, a wonderful hero of romance, but in his vain attempt
to have his revenge, he ruined his own country. In the year 1718, he was
accidentally killed or assassinated (we do not know which) and when peace
was made in 1721, in the town of Nystadt, Sweden had lost all of her
former Baltic possessions except Finland. The new Russian state, created
by Peter, had become the leading power of northern Europe. But already a
new rival was on the way. The Prussian state was taking shape.
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA
THE EXTRAORDINARY RISE OF A LITTLE STATE IN A DREARY PART OF NORTHERN
GERMANY, CALLED PRUSSIA
THE history of Prussia is the history of a frontier district. In the ninth
century, Charlemagne had transferred the old centre of civilisation from
the Mediterranean to the wild regions of northwestern Europe. His Frankish
soldiers had pushed the frontier of Europe further and further towards the
east. They had conquered many lands from the heathenish Slavs and
Lithuanians who were living in the plain between the Baltic Sea and the
Carpathian Mountains, and the Franks administered those outlying districts
just as the United States used to administer her territories before they
achieved the dignity of statehood.
The frontier state of Brandenburg had been originally founded by
Charlemagne to defend his eastern possessions against raids of the wild
Saxon tribes. The Wends, a Slavic tribe which inhabited that region, were
subjugated during the tenth century and their market-place, by the name of
Brennabor, became the centre of and gave its name to the new province of
Brandenburg.
During the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a
succession of noble families exercised the functions of imperial governor
in this frontier state. Finally in the fifteenth century, the House of
Hohenzollern made its appear-ance, and as Electors of Brandenburg,
commenced to change a sandy and forlorn frontier territory into one of the
most efficient empires of the modern world.
These Hohenzollerns, who have just been removed from the historical stage
by the combined forces of Europe and America, came originally from
southern Germany. They were of very humble origin. In the twelfth century
a certain Frederick of Hohenzollern had made a lucky marriage and had been
appointed keeper of the castle of Nuremberg. His descendants had used
every chance and every opportunity to improve their power and after
several centuries of watchful grabbing, they had been appointed to the
dignity of Elector, the name given to those sovereign princes who were
supposed to elect the Emperors of the old German Empire. During the
Reformation, they had taken the side of the Protestants and the early
seventeenth century found them among the most powerful of the north German
princes.
During the Thirty Years War, both Protestants and Catholics had plundered
Brandenburg and Prussia with equal zeal. But under Frederick William, the
Great Elector, the damage was quickly repaired and by a wise and careful
use of all the economic and intellectual forces of the country, a state
was founded in which there was practically no waste.
Modern Prussia, a state in which the individual and his wishes and
aspirations have been entirely absorbed by the interests of the community
as a whole this Prussia dates back to the father of Frederick the Great.
Frederick William I was a hard working, parsimonious Prussian sergeant,
with a great love for bar-room stories and strong Dutch tobacco, an
intense dislike of all frills and feathers, (especially if they were of
French origin,) and possessed of but one idea. That idea was Duty. Severe
with himself, he tolerated no weakness in his subjects, whether they be
generals or common soldiers. The relation between himself and his son
Frederick was never cordial, to say the least. The boorish manners of the
father offended the finer spirit of the son. The son’s love for French
manners, literature, philosophy and music was rejected by the father as a
manifestation of sissy-ness. There followed a terrible outbreak between
these two strange temperaments. Frederick tried to escape to England. He
was caught and court-martialed and forced to witness the decapitation of
his best friend who had tried to help him. Thereupon as part of his
punishment, the young prince was sent to a little fortress somewhere in
the provinces to be taught the details of his future business of being a
king. It proved a blessing in disguise. When Frederick came to the throne
in 1740, he knew how his country was managed from the birth certificate of
a pauper’s son to the minutest detail of a complicated annual Budget.
As an author, especially in his book called the “Anti-Macchiavelli,”
Frederick had expressed his contempt for the political creed of the
ancient Florentine historian, who had advised his princely pupils to lie
and cheat whenever it was necessary to do so for the benefit of their
country. The ideal ruler in Frederick’s volume was the first servant of
his people, the enlightened despot after the example of Louis XIV. In
practice, however, Frederick, while working for his people twenty hours a
day, tolerated no one to be near him as a counsellor. His ministers were
superior clerks. Prussia was his private possession, to be treated
according to his own wishes. And nothing was allowed to interfere with the
interest of the state.
In the year 1740 the Emperor Charles VI, of Austria, died. He had tried to
make the position of his only daughter, Maria Theresa, secure through a
solemn treaty, written black on white, upon a large piece of parchment.
But no sooner had the old emperor been deposited in the ancestral crypt of
the Habsburg family, than the armies of Frederick were marching towards
the Austrian frontier to occupy that part of Silesia for which (together
with almost everything else in central Europe) Prussia clamored, on
account of some ancient and very doubtful rights of claim. In a number of
wars, Frederick conquered all of Silesia, and although he was often very
near defeat, he maintained himself in his newly acquired territories
against all Austrian counter-attacks.
Europe took due notice of this sudden appearance of a very powerful new
state. In the eighteenth century, the Germans were a people who had been
ruined by the great religious wars and who were not held in high esteem by
any one. Frederick, by an effort as sudden and quite as terrific as that
of Peter of Russia, changed this attitude of contempt into one of fear.
The internal affairs of Prussia were arranged so skillfully that the
subjects had less reason for complaint than elsewhere. The treasury showed
an annual surplus instead of a deficit. Torture was abolished. The
judiciary system was improved. Good roads and good schools and good
universities, together with a scrupulously honest administration, made the
people feel that whatever services were demanded of them, they (to speak
the vernacular) got their money’s worth.
After having been for several centuries the battle field of the French and
the Austrians and the Swedes and the Danes and the Poles, Germany,
encouraged by the example of Prussia, began to regain self-confidence. And
this was the work of the little old man, with his hook-nose and his old
uniforms covered with snuff, who said very funny but very unpleasant
things about his neighbours, and who played the scandalous game of
eighteenth century diplomacy without any regard for the truth, provided he
could gain something by his lies. This in spite of his book,
“Anti-Macchiavelli.” In the year 1786 the end came. His friends were all
gone. Children he had never had. He died alone, tended by a single servant
and his faithful dogs, whom he loved better than human beings because, as
he said, they were never ungrateful and remained true to their friends.
THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM
HOW THE NEWLY FOUNDED NATIONAL OR DYNASTIC STATES OF EUROPE TRIED TO MAKE
THEMSELVES RICH AND WHAT WAS MEANT BY THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM
WE have seen how, during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the
states of our modern world began to take shape. Their origins were
different in almost every case. Some had been the result of the deliberate
effort of a single king. Others had happened by chance. Still others had
been the result of favourable natural geographic boundaries. But once they
had been founded, they had all of them tried to strengthen their internal
administration and to exert the greatest possible influence upon foreign
affairs. All this of course had cost a great deal of money. The mediaeval
state with its lack of centralised power did not depend upon a rich
treasury. The king got his revenues from the crown domains and his civil
service paid for itself. The modern centralised state was a more
complicated affair. The old knights disappeared and hired government
officials or bureaucrats took their place. Army, navy, and internal
administration demanded millions. The question then became where was this
money to be found?
Gold and silver had been a rare commodity in the middle ages. The average
man, as I have told you, never saw a gold piece as long as he lived. Only
the inhabitants of the large cities were familiar with silver coin. The
discovery of America and the exploitation of the Peruvian mines changed
all this. The centre of trade was transferred from the Mediterranean to
the Atlantic seaboard. The old “commercial cities” of Italy lost their
financial importance. New “commercial nations” took their place and gold
and silver were no longer a curiosity.
Through Spain and Portugal and Holland and England, precious metals began
to find their way to Europe The sixteenth century had its own writers on
the subject of political economy and they evolved a theory of national
wealth which seemed to them entirely sound and of the greatest possible
benefit to their respective countries. They reasoned that both gold and
silver were actual wealth. Therefore they believed that the country with
the largest supply of actual cash in the vaults of its treasury and its
banks was at the same time the richest country. And since money meant
armies, it followed that the richest country was also the most powerful
and could rule the rest of the world.
We call this system the “mercantile system,” and it was accepted with the
same unquestioning faith with which the early Christians believed in
Miracles and many of the present-day American business men believe in the
Tariff. In practice, the Mercantile system worked out as follows: To get
the largest surplus of precious metals a country must have a favourable
balance of export trade. If you can export more to your neighbour than he
exports to your own country, he will owe you money and will be obliged to
send you some of his gold. Hence you gain and he loses. As a result of
this creed, the economic program of almost every seventeenth century state
was as follows:
1. Try to get possession of as many precious metals as you can.
2. Encourage foreign trade in preference to domestic trade.
3. Encourage those industries which change raw materials into exportable
finished products.
4. Encourage a large population, for you will need workmen for your
factories and an agricultural community does not raise enough workmen.
5. Let the State watch this process and interfere whenever it is necessary
to do so.
Instead of regarding International Trade as something akin to a force of
nature which would always obey certain natural laws regardless of man’s
interference, the people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried
to regulate their commerce by the help of official decrees and royal laws
and financial help on the part of the government.
In the sixteenth century Charles V adopted this Mercantile System (which
was then something entirely new) and introduced it into his many
possessions. Elizabeth of England flattered him by her imitation. The
Bourbons, especially King Louis XIV, were fanatical adherents of this
doctrine and Colbert, his great minister of finance, became the prophet of
Mercantilism to whom all Europe looked for guidance.
The entire foreign policy of Cromwell was a practical application of the
Mercantile System. It was invariably directed against the rich rival
Republic of Holland. For the Dutch shippers, as the common-carriers of the
merchandise of Europe, had certain leanings towards free-trade and
therefore had to be destroyed at all cost.
It will be easily understood how such a system must affect the colonies. A
colony under the Mercantile System became merely a reservoir of gold and
silver and spices, which was to be tapped for the benefit of the home
country. The Asiatic, American and African supply of precious metals and
the raw materials of these tropical countries became a monopoly of the
state which happened to own that particular colony. No outsider was ever
allowed within the precincts and no native was permitted to trade with a
merchant whose ship flew a foreign flag.
Undoubtedly the Mercantile System encouraged the development of young
industries in certain countries where there never had been any
manufacturing before. It built roads and dug canals and made for better
means of transportation. It demanded greater skill among the workmen and
gave the merchant a better social position, while it weakened the power of
the landed aristocracy.
On the other hand, it caused very great misery. It made the natives in the
colonies the victims of a most shameless exploitation. It exposed the
citizens of the home country to an even more terrible fate. It helped in a
great measure to turn every land into an armed camp and divided the world
into little bits of territory, each working for its own direct benefit,
while striving at all times to destroy the power of its neighbours and get
hold of their treasures. It laid so much stress upon the importance of
owning wealth that “being rich” came to be regarded as the sole virtue of
the average citizen. Economic systems come and go like the fashions in
surgery and in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the
Mercantile System was discarded in favor of a system of free and open
competition. At least, so I have been told.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE HEARD STRANGE REPORTS OF
SOMETHING WHICH HAD HAPPENED IN THE WILDERNESS; OF THE NORTH AMERICAN
CONTINENT. THE DESCENDANTS OF THE MEN WHO HAD PUNISHED KING CHARLES FOR
HIS INSISTENCE UPON HIS “DIVINE RIGHTS” ADDED A NEW CHAPTER TO THE OLD
STORY OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT
FOR the sake of convenience, we ought to go back a few centuries and
repeat the early history of the great struggle for colonial possessions.
As soon as a number of European nations had been created upon the new
basis of national or dynastic interests, that is to say, during and
immediately after the Thirty Years War, their rulers, backed up by the
capital of their merchants and the ships of their trading companies,
continued the fight for more territory in Asia, Africa and America.
The Spaniards and the Portuguese had been exploring the Indian Sea and the
Pacific Ocean for more than a century ere Holland and England appeared
upon the stage. This proved an advantage to the latter. The first rough
work had already been done. What is more, the earliest navigators had so
often made themselves unpopular with the Asiatic and American and African
natives that both the English and the Dutch were welcomed as friends and
deliverers. We cannot claim any superior virtues for either of these two
races. But they were merchants before everything else. They never allowed
religious considerations to interfere with their practical common sense.
During their first relations with weaker races, all European nations have
behaved with shocking brutality. The English and the Dutch, however, knew
better where to draw the dine. Provided they got their spices and their
gold and silver and their taxes, they were willing to let the native live
as it best pleased him.
It was not very difficult for them therefore to establish themselves in
the richest parts of the world. But as soon as this had been accomplished,
they began to fight each other for still further possessions. Strangely
enough, the colonial wars were never settled in the colonies themselves.
They were decided three thousand miles away by the navies of the
contending countries. It is one of the most interesting principles of
ancient and modern warfare (one of the few reliable laws of history) that
“the nation which commands the sea is also the nation which commands the
land.” So far this law has never failed to work, but the modern airplane
may have changed it. In the eighteenth century, however, there were no
flying machines and it was the British navy which gained for England her
vast American and Indian and African colonies.
The series of naval wars between England and Holland in the seventeenth
century does not interest us here. It ended as all such encounters between
hopelessly ill-matched powers will end. But the warfare between England
and France (her other rival) is of greater importance to us, for while the
superior British fleet in the end defeated the French navy, a great deal
of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American continent. In
this vast country, both France and England claimed everything which had
been discovered and a lot more which the eye of no white man had ever
seen. In 1497 Cabot had landed in the northern part of America and
twenty-seven years later, Giovanni Verrazano had visited these coasts.
Cabot had flown the English flag. Verrazano had sailed under the French
flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed themselves the owners of
the entire continent.
During the seventeenth century, some ten small English colonies had been
founded between Maine and the Carolinas. They were usually a haven of
refuge for some particular sect of English dissenters, such as the
Puritans, who in the year 1620 went to New England, or the Quakers, who
settled in Pennsylvania in 1681. They were small frontier communities,
nestling close to the shores of the ocean, where people had gathered to
make a new home and begin life among happier surroundings, far away from
royal supervision and interference.
The French colonies, on the other hand, always remained a possession of
the crown. No Huguenots or Protestants were allowed in these colonies for
fear that they might contaminate the Indians with their dangerous
Protestant doctrines and would perhaps interfere with the missionary work
of the Jesuit fathers. The English colonies, therefore, had been founded
upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbours and rivals. They
were an expression of the commercial energy of the English middle classes,
while the French settlements were inhabited by people who had crossed the
ocean as servants of the king and who expected to return to Paris at the
first possible chance.
Politically, however, the position of the English colonies was far from
satisfactory. The French had discovered the mouth of the Saint Lawrence in
the sixteenth century. From the region of the Great Lakes they had worked
their way southward, had descended the Mississippi and had built several
fortifications along the Gulf of Mexico. After a century of exploration, a
line of sixty French forts cut off the English settlements along the
Atlantic seaboard from the interior.
The English land grants, made to the different colonial companies had
given them “all land from sea to sea.” This sounded well on paper, but in
practice, British territory ended where the line of French fortifications
began. To break through this barrier was possible but it took both men and
money and caused a series of horrible border wars in which both sides
murdered their white neighbours, with the help of the Indian tribes.
As long as the Stuarts had ruled England there had been no danger of war
with France. The Stuarts needed the Bourbons in their attempt to establish
an autocratic form of government and to break the power of Parliament. But
in 1689 the last of the Stuarts had disappeared from British soil and
Dutch William, the great enemy of Louis XIV succeeded him. From that time
on, until the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France and England fought for the
possession of India and North America.
During these wars, as I have said before, the English navies invariably
beat the French. Cut off from her colonies, France lost most of her
possessions, and when peace was declared, the entire North American
continent had fallen into British hands and the great work of exploration
of Cartier, Champlain, La Salle, Marquette and a score of others was lost
to France.
Only a very small part of this vast domain was inhabited. From
Massachusetts in the north, where the Pilgrims (a sect of Puritans who
were very intolerant and who therefore had found no happiness either in
Anglican England or Calvinist Holland) had landed in the year 1620, to the
Carolinas and Virginia (the tobacco-raising provinces which had been
founded entirely for the sake of profit), stretched a thin line of
sparsely populated territory. But the men who lived in this new land of
fresh air and high skies were very different from their brethren of the
mother country. In the wilderness they had learned independence and
self-reliance. They were the sons of hardy and energetic ancestors. Lazy
and timourous people did not cross the ocean in those days. The American
colonists hated the restraint and the lack of breathing space which had
made their lives in the old country so very unhappy. They meant to be
their own masters. This the ruling classes of England did not seem to
understand. The government annoyed the colonists and the colonists, who
hated to be bothered in this way, began to annoy the British government.
Bad feeling caused more bad feeling. It is not necessary to repeat here in
detail what actually happened and what might have been avoided if the
British king had been more intelligent than George III or less given to
drowsiness and indifference than his minister, Lord North. The British
colonists, when they understood that peaceful arguments would not settle
the difficulties, took to arms. From being loyal subjects, they turned
rebels, who exposed themselves to the punishment of death when they were
captured by the German soldiers, whom George hired to do his fighting
after the pleasant custom of that day, when Teutonic princes sold whole
regiments to the highest bidder.
The war between England and her American colonies lasted seven years.
During most of that time, the final success of the rebels seemed very
doubtful. A great number of the people, especially in the cities, had
remained loyal to their king. They were in favour of a compromise, and
would have been willing to sue for peace. But the great figure of
Washington stood guard over the cause of the colonists.
Ably assisted by a handful of brave men, he used his steadfast but badly
equipped armies to weaken the forces of the king. Time and again when
defeat seemed unavoidable, his strategy turned the tide of battle. Often
his men were ill-fed. During the winter they lacked shoes and coats and
were forced to live in unhealthy dug-outs. But their trust in their great
leader was absolute and they stuck it out until the final hour of victory.
But more interesting than the campaigns of Washington or the diplomatic
triumphs of Benjamin Franklin who was in Europe getting money from the
French government and the Amsterdam bankers, was an event which occurred
early in the revolution. The representatives of the different colonies had
gathered in Philadelphia to discuss matters of common importance. It was
the first year of the Revolution. Most of the big towns of the sea coast
were still in the hands of the British. Reinforcements from England were
arriving by the ship load. Only men who were deeply convinced of the
righteousness of their cause would have found the courage to take the
momentous decision of the months of June and July of the year 1776.
In June, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a motion to the
Continental Congress that “these united colonies are, and of right ought
to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all
allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between
them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be, totally
dissolved.”
The motion was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts. It was carried on
July the second and on July fourth, it was followed by an official
Declaration of Independence, which was the work of Thomas Jefferson, a
serious and exceedingly capable student of both politics and government
and destined to be one of the most famous of out American presidents.
When news of this event reached Europe, and was followed by the final
victory of the colonists and the adoption of the famous Constitution of
the year 1787 (the first of all written constitutions) it caused great
interest. The dynastic system of the highly centralised states which had
been developed after the great religious wars of the seventeenth century
had reached the height of its power. Everywhere the palace of the king had
grown to enormous proportions, while the cities of the royal realm were
being surrounded by rapidly growing acres of slums. The inhabitants of
those slums were showing signs of restlessness. They were quite helpless.
But the higher classes, the nobles and the professional men, they too were
beginning to have certain doubts about the economic and political
conditions under which they lived. The success of the American colonists
showed them that many things were possible which had been held impossible
only a short time before.
According to the poet, the shot which opened the battle of Lexington was
“heard around the world.” That was a bit of an exaggeration. The Chinese
and the Japanese and the Russians (not to speak of the Australians, who
had just been re-discovered by Captain Cook, whom they killed for his
trouble,) never heard of it at all. But it carried across the Atlantic
Ocean. It landed in the powder house of European discontent and in France
it caused an explosion which rocked the entire continent from Petrograd to
Madrid and buried the representatives of the old statecraft and the old
diplomacy under several tons of democratic bricks.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION PROCLAIMS THE PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTY,
FRATERNITY AND EQUALITY UNTO ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH
BEFORE we talk about a revolution it is just as well that we explain just
what this word means. In the terms of a great Russian writer (and Russians
ought to know what they are talking about in this field) a revolution is
“a swift overthrow, in a few years, of institutions which have taken
centuries to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that even
the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in their writings. It
is the fall, the crumbling away in a brief period, of all that up to that
time has composed the essence of social, religious, political and economic
life in a nation.”
Such a revolution took place in France in the eighteenth century when the
old civilisation of the country had grown stale. The king in the days of
Louis XIV had become EVERYTHING and was the state. The Nobility, formerly
the civil servant of the federal state, found itself without any duties
and became a social ornament of the royal court.
This French state of the eighteenth century, however, cost incredible sums
of money. This money had to be produced in the form of taxes.
Unfortunately the kings of France had not been strong enough to force the
nobility and the clergy to pay their share of these taxes. Hence the taxes
were paid entirely by the agricultural population. But the peasants living
in dreary hovels, no longer in intimate contact with their former
landlords, but victims of cruel and incompetent land agents, were going
from bad to worse. Why should they work and exert themselves? Increased
returns upon their land merely meant more taxes and nothing for themselves
and therefore they neglected their fields as much as they dared.
Hence we have a king who wanders in empty splendour through the vast halls
of his palaces, habitually followed by hungry office seekers, all of whom
live upon the revenue obtained from peasants who are no better than the
beasts of the fields. It is not a pleasant picture, but it is not
exaggerated. There was, however, another side to the so-called “Ancien
Regime” which we must keep in mind.
A wealthy middle class, closely connected with the nobility (by the usual
process of the rich banker’s daughter marrying the poor baron’s son) and a
court composed of all the most entertaining people of France, had brought
the polite art of graceful living to its highest development. As the best
brains of the country were not allowed to occupy themselves with questions
of political economics, they spent their idle hours upon the discussion of
abstract ideas.
As fashions in modes of thought and personal behaviour are quite as likely
to run to extremes as fashion in dress, it was natural that the most
artificial society of that day should take a tremendous interest in what
they considered “the simple life.” The king and the queen, the absolute
and unquestioned proprietors of this country galled France, together with
all its colonies and dependencies, went to live in funny little country
houses all dressed up as milk-maids and stable-boys and played at being
shepherds in a happy vale of ancient Hellas. Around them, their courtiers
danced attendance, their court-musicians composed lovely minuets, their
court barbers devised more and more elaborate and costly headgear, until
from sheer boredom and lack of real jobs, this whole artificial world of
Versailles (the great show place which Louis XIV had built far away from
his noisy and restless city) talked of nothing but those subjects which
were furthest removed from their own lives, just as a man who is starving
will talk of nothing except food.
When Voltaire, the courageous old philosopher, playwright, historian and
novelist, and the great enemy of all religious and political tyranny,
began to throw his bombs of criticism at everything connected with the
Established Order of Things, the whole French world applauded him and his
theatrical pieces played to standing room only. When Jean Jacques Rousseau
waxed sentimental about primitive man and gave his contemporaries
delightful descriptions of the happiness of the original inhabitants of
this planet, (about whom he knew as little as he did about the children,
upon whose education he was the recognised authority,) all France read his
“Social Contract” and this society in which the king and the state were
one, wept bitter tears when they heard Rousseau’s appeal for a return to
the blessed days when the real sovereignty had lain in the hands of the
people and when the king had been merely the servant of his people.
When Montesquieu published his “Persian Letters” in which two
distinguished Persian travellers turn the whole existing society of France
topsy-turvy and poke fun at everything from the king down to the lowest of
his six hundred pastry cooks, the book immediately went through four
editions and assured the writer thousands of readers for his famous
discussion of the “Spirit of the Laws” in which the noble Baron compared
the excellent English system with the backward system of France and
advocated instead of an absolute monarchy the establishment of a state in
which the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial powers should be in
separate hands and should work independently of each other. When Lebreton,
the Parisian book-seller, announced that Messieurs Diderot, d’Alembert,
Turgot and a score of other distinguished writers were going to publish an
Encyclopaedia which was to contain “all the new ideas and the new science
and the new knowledge,” the response from the side of the public was most
satisfactory, and when after twenty-two years the last of the twenty-eight
volumes had been finished, the somewhat belated interference of the police
could not repress the enthusiasm with which French society received this
most important but very dangerous contribution to the discussions of the
day.
Here, let me give you a little warning. When you read a novel about the
French revolution or see a play or a movie, you will easily get the
impression that the Revolution was the work of the rabble from the Paris
slums. It was nothing of the kind. The mob appears often upon the
revolutionary stage, but invariably at the instigation and under the
leadership of those middle-class professional men who used the hungry
multitude as an efficient ally in their warfare upon the king and his
court. But the fundamental ideas which caused the revolution were invented
by a few brilliant minds, and they were at first introduced into the
charming drawing-rooms of the “Ancien Regime” to provide amiable diversion
for the much-bored ladies and gentlemen of his Majesty’s court. These
pleasant but careless people played with the dangerous fireworks of social
criticism until the sparks fell through the cracks of the floor, which was
old and rotten just like the rest of the building. Those sparks
unfortunately landed in the basement where age-old rubbish lay in great
confusion. Then there was a cry of fire. But the owner of the house who
was interested in everything except the management of his property, did
not know how to put the small blaze out. The flame spread rapidly and the
entire edifice was consumed by the conflagration, which we call the Great
French Revolution.
For the sake of convenience, we can divide the French Revolution into two
parts. From 1789 to 1791 there was a more or less orderly attempt to
introduce a constitutional monarchy. This failed, partly through lack of
good faith and stupidity on the part of the monarch himself, partly
through circumstances over which nobody had any control.
From 1792 to 1799 there was a Republic and a first effort to establish a
democratic form of government. But the actual outbreak of violence had
been preceded by many years of unrest and many sincere but ineffectual
attempts at reform.
When France had a debt of 4000 million francs and the treasury was always
empty and there was not a single thing upon which new taxes could be
levied, even good King Louis (who was an expert locksmith and a great
hunter but a very poor statesman) felt vaguely that something ought to be
done. Therefore he called for Turgot, to be his Minister of Finance. Anne
Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne, a man in the early sixties, a
splendid representative of the fast disappearing class of landed gentry,
had been a successful governor of a province and was an amateur political
economist of great ability. He did his best. Unfortunately, he could not
perform miracles. As it was impossible to squeeze more taxes out of the
ragged peasants, it was necessary to get the necessary funds from the
nobility and clergy who had never paid a centime. This made Turgot the
best hated man at the court of Versailles. Furthermore he was obliged to
face the enmity of Marie Antoinette, the queen, who was against everybody
who dared to mention the word “economy” within her hearing. Soon Turgot
was called an “unpractical visionary” and a “theoretical-professor” and
then of course his position became untenable. In the year 1776 he was
forced to resign.
After the “professor” there came a man of Practical Business Sense. He was
an industrious Swiss by the name of Necker who had made himself rich as a
grain speculator and the partner in an international banking house. His
ambitious wife had pushed him into the government service that she might
establish a position for her daughter who afterwards as the wife of the
Swedish minister in Paris, Baron de Stael, became a famous literary figure
of the early nineteenth century.
Necker set to work with a fine display of zeal just as Turgot had done. In
1781 he published a careful review of the French finances. The king
understood nothing of this “Compte Rendu.” He had just sent troops to
America to help the colonists against their common enemies, the English.
This expedition proved to be unexpectedly expensive and Necker was asked
to find the necessary funds. When instead of producing revenue, he
published more figures and made statistics and began to use the dreary
warning about “necessary economies” his days were numbered. In the year
1781 he was dismissed as an incompetent servant.
After the Professor and the Practical Business Man came the delightful
type of financier who will guarantee everybody 100 per cent. per month on
their money if only they will trust his own infallible system.
He was Charles Alexandre de Calonne, a pushing official, who had made his
career both by his industry and his complete lack of honesty and scruples.
He found the country heavily indebted, but he was a clever man, willing to
oblige everybody, and he invented a quick remedy. He paid the old debts by
contracting new ones. This method is not new. The result since time
immemorial has been disastrous. In less than three years more than
800,000,000 francs had been added to the French debt by this charming
Minister of Finance who never worried and smilingly signed his name to
every demand that was made by His Majesty and by his lovely Queen, who had
learned the habit of spending during the days of her youth in Vienna.
At last even the Parliament of Paris (a high court of justice and not a
legislative body) although by no means lacking in loyalty to their
sovereign, decided that something must be done. Calonne wanted to borrow
another 80,000,000 francs. It had been a bad year for the crops and the
misery and hunger in the country districts were terrible. Unless something
sensible were done, France would go bankrupt. The King as always was
unaware of the seriousness of the situation. Would it not be a good idea
to consult the representatives of the people? Since 1614 no Estates
General had been called together. In view of the threatening panic there
was a demand that the Estates be convened. Louis XVI however, who never
could take a decision, refused to go as far as that.
To pacify the popular clamour he called together a meeting of the Notables
in the year 1787. This merely meant a gathering of the best families who
discussed what could and should be done, without touching their feudal and
clerical privilege of tax-exemption. It is unreasonable to expect that a
certain class of society shall commit political and economic suicide for
the benefit of another group of fellow-citizens. The 127 Notables
obstinately refused to surrender a single one of their ancient rights. The
crowd in the street, being now exceedingly hungry, demanded that Necker,
in whom they had confidence, be reappointed. The Notables said “No.” The
crowd in the street began to smash windows and do other unseemly things.
The Notables fled. Calonne was dismissed.
A new colourless Minister of Finance, the Cardinal Lomenie de Brienne, was
appointed and Louis, driven by the violent threats of his starving
subjects, agreed to call together the old Estates General as “soon as
practicable.” This vague promise of course satisfied no one.
No such severe winter had been experienced for almost a century. The crops
had been either destroyed by floods or had been frozen to death in the
fields. All the olive trees of the Provence had been killed. Private
charity tried to do some-thing but could accomplish little for eighteen
million starving people. Everywhere bread riots occurred. A generation
before these would have been put down by the army. But the work of the new
philosophical school had begun to bear fruit. People began to understand
that a shotgun is no effective remedy for a hungry stomach and even the
soldiers (who came from among the people) were no longer to be depended
upon. It was absolutely necessary that the king should do something
definite to regain the popular goodwill, but again he hesitated.
Here and there in the provinces, little independent Republics were
established by followers of the new school. The cry of “no taxation
without representation” (the slogan of the American rebels a quarter of a
century before) was heard among the faithful middle classes. France was
threatened with general anarchy. To appease the people and to increase the
royal popularity, the government unexpectedly suspended the former very
strict form of censorship of books. At once a flood of ink descended upon
France. Everybody, high or low, criticised and was criticised. More than
2000 pamphlets were published. Lomenie de Brienne was swept away by a
storm of abuse. Necker was hastily called back to placate, as best he
could, the nation-wide unrest. Immediately the stock market went up thirty
per cent. And by common consent, people suspended judgment for a little
while longer. In May of 1789 the Estates General were to assemble and then
the wisdom of the entire nation would speedily solve the difficult problem
of recreating the kingdom of France into a healthy and happy state.
This prevailing idea, that the combined wisdom of the people would be able
to solve all difficulties, proved disastrous. It lamed all personal effort
during many important months. Instead of keeping the government in his own
hands at this critical moment, Necker allowed everything to drift. Hence
there was a new outbreak of the acrimonious debate upon the best ways to
reform the old kingdom. Everywhere the power of the police weakened. The
people of the Paris suburbs, under the leadership of professional
agitators, gradually began to discover their strength, and commenced to
play the role which was to be theirs all through the years of the great
unrest, when they acted as the brute force which was used by the actual
leaders of the Revolution to secure those things which could not be
obtained in a legitimate fashion.
As a sop to the peasants and the middle class, Necker de-cided that they
should be allowed a double representation in the Estates General. Upon
this subject, the Abbe Sieyes then wrote a famous pamphlet, “To what does
the Third Estate Amount?” in which he came to the conclusion that the
Third Estate (a name given to the middle class) ought to amount to
everything, that it had not amounted to anything in the past, and that it
now desired to amount to something. He expressed the sentiment of the
great majority of the people who had the best interests of the country at
heart.
Finally the elections took place under the worst conditions imaginable.
When they were over, 308 clergymen, 285 noblemen and 621 representatives
of the Third Estate packed their trunks to go to Versailles. The Third
Estate was obliged to carry additional luggage. This consisted of
voluminous reports called “cahiers” in which the many complaints and
grievances of their constituents had been written down. The stage was set
for the great final act that was to save France.
The Estates General came together on May 5th, 1789. The king was in a bad
humour. The Clergy and the Nobility let it be known that they were
unwilling to give up a single one of their privileges. The king ordered
the three groups of representatives to meet in different rooms and discuss
their grievances separately. The Third Estate refused to obey the royal
command. They took a solemn oath to that effect in a squash court (hastily
put in order for the purpose of this illegal meeting) on the 20th of June,
1789. They insisted that all three Estates, Nobility, Clergy and Third
Estate, should meet together and so informed His Majesty. The king gave
in.
As the “National Assembly,” the Estates General began to discuss the state
of the French kingdom. The King got angry. Then again he hesitated. He
said that he would never surrender his absolute power. Then he went
hunting, forgot all about the cares of the state and when he returned from
the chase he gave in. For it was the royal habit to do the right thing at
the wrong time in the wrong way. When the people clamoured for A, the king
scolded them and gave them nothing. Then, when the Palace was surrounded
by a howling multitude of poor people, the king surrendered and gave his
subjects what they had asked for. By this time, however, the people wanted
A plus B. The comedy was repeated. When the king signed his name to the
Royal Decree which granted his beloved subjects A and B they were
threatening to kill the entire royal family unless they received A plus B
plus C. And so on, through the whole alphabet and up to the scaffold.
Unfortunately the king was always just one letter behind. He never
understood this. Even when he laid his head under the guillotine, he felt
that he was a much-abused man who had received a most unwarrantable
treatment at the hands of people whom he had loved to the best of his
limited ability.
Historical “ifs,” as I have often warned you, are never of any value. It
is very easy for us to say that the monarchy might have been saved “if”
Louis had been a man of greater energy and less kindness of heart. But the
king was not alone. Even “if” he had possessed the ruthless strength of
Napoleon, his career during these difficult days might have been easily
ruined by his wife who was the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria and
who possessed all the characteristic virtues and vices of a young girl who
had been brought up at the most autocratic and mediaeval court of that
age.
She decided that some action must be taken and planned a
counter-revolution. Necker was suddenly dismissed and loyal troops were
called to Paris. The people, when they heard of this, stormed the fortress
of the Bastille prison, and on the fourteenth of July of the year 1789,
they destroyed this familiar but much-hated symbol of Autocratic Power
which had long since ceased to be a political prison and was now used as
the city lock-up for pickpockets and second-story men. Many of the nobles
took the hint and left the country. But the king as usual did nothing. He
had been hunting on the day of the fall of the Bastille and he had shot
several deer and felt very much pleased.
The National Assembly now set to work and on the 4th of August, with the
noise of the Parisian multitude in their ears, they abolished all
privileges. This was followed on the 27th of August by the “Declaration of
the Rights of Man,” the famous preamble to the first French constitution.
So far so good, but the court had apparently not yet learned its lesson.
There was a wide-spread suspicion that the king was again trying to
interfere with these reforms and as a result, on the 5th of October, there
was a second riot in Paris. It spread to Versailles and the people were
not pacified until they had brought the king back to his palace in Paris.
They did not trust him in Versailles. They liked to have him where they
could watch him and control his correspondence with his relatives in
Vienna and Madrid and the other courts of Europe.
In the Assembly meanwhile, Mirabeau, a nobleman who had become leader of
the Third Estate, was beginning to put order into chaos. But before he
could save the position of the king he died, on the 2nd of April of the
year 1791. The king, who now began to fear for his own life, tried to
escape on the 21st of June. He was recognised from his picture on a coin,
was stopped near the village of Varennes by members of the National Guard,
and was brought back to Paris.
In September of 1791, the first constitution of France was accepted, and
the members of the National Assembly went home. On the first of October of
1791, the legislative assembly came together to continue the work of the
National Assembly. In this new gathering of popular representatives there
were many extremely revolutionary elements. The boldest among these were
known as the Jacobins, after the old Jacobin cloister in which they held
their political meetings. These young men (most of them belonging to the
professional classes) made very violent speeches and when the newspapers
carried these orations to Berlin and Vienna, the King of Prussia and the
Emperor decided that they must do something to save their good brother and
sister. They were very busy just then dividing the kingdom of Poland,
where rival political factions had caused such a state of disorder that
the country was at the mercy of anybody who wanted to take a couple of
provinces. But they managed to send an army to invade France and deliver
the king.
Then a terrible panic of fear swept throughout the land of France. All the
pent-up hatred of years of hunger and suffering came to a horrible climax.
The mob of Paris stormed the palace of the Tuilleries. The faithful Swiss
bodyguards tried to defend their master, but Louis, unable to make up his
mind, gave order to “cease firing” just when the crowd was retiring. The
people, drunk with blood and noise and cheap wine, murdered the Swiss to
the last man, then invaded the palace, and went after Louis who had
escaped into the meeting hall of the Assembly, where he was immediately
suspended of his office, and from where he was taken as a prisoner to the
old castle of the Temple.
But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their advance and the
panic changed into hysteria and turned men and women into wild beasts. In
the first week of September of the year 1792, the crowd broke into the
jails and murdered all the prisoners. The government did not interfere.
The Jacobins, headed by Danton, knew that this crisis meant either the
success or the failure of the revolution, and that only the most brutal
audacity could save them. The Legislative Assembly was closed and on the
21st of September of the year 1792, a new National Convention came
together. It was a body composed almost entirely of extreme
revolutionists. The king was formally accused of high treason and was
brought before the Convention. He was found guilty and by a vote of 361 to
360 (the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of Orleans) he was
condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the year 1793, he quietly
and with much dignity suffered himself to be taken to the scaffold. He had
never understood what all the shooting and the fuss had been about. And he
had been too proud to ask questions.
Then the Jacobins turned against the more moderate element in the
convention, the Girondists, called after their southern district, the
Gironde. A special revolutionary tribunal was instituted and twenty-one of
the leading Girondists were condemned to death. The others committed
suicide. They were capable and honest men but too philosophical and too
moderate to survive during these frightful years.
In October of the year 1793 the Constitution was suspended by the Jacobins
“until peace should have been declared.” All power was placed in the hands
of a small committee of Public Safety, with Danton and Robespierre as its
leaders. The Christian religion and the old chronology were abolished. The
“Age of Reason” (of which Thomas Paine had written so eloquently during
the American Revolution) had come and with it the “Terror” which for more
than a year killed good and bad and indifferent people at the rate of
seventy or eighty a day.
The autocratic rule of the King had been destroyed. It was succeeded by
the tyranny of a few people who had such a passionate love for democratic
virtue that they felt compelled to kill all those who disagreed with them.
France was turned into a slaughter house. Everybody suspected everybody
else. No one felt safe. Out of sheer fear, a few members of the old
Convention, who knew that they were the next candidates for the scaffold,
finally turned against Robespierre, who had already decapitated most of
his former colleagues. Robespierre, “the only true and pure Democrat,”
tried to kill himself but failed His shattered jaw was hastily bandaged
and he was dragged to the guillotine. On the 27th of July, of the year
1794 (the 9th Thermidor of the year II, according to the strange
chronology of the revolution), the reign of Terror came to an end, and all
Paris danced with joy.
The dangerous position of France, however, made it necessary that the
government remain in the hands of a few strong men, until the many enemies
of the revolution should have been driven from the soil of the French
fatherland. While the half-clad and half-starved revolutionary armies
fought their desperate battles of the Rhine and Italy and Belgium and
Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Great Revolution, five
Directors were appointed, and they ruled France for four years. Then the
power was vested in the hands of a successful general by the name of
Napoleon Bonaparte, who became “First Consul” of France in the year 1799.
And during the next fifteen years, the old European continent became the
laboratory of a number of political experiments, the like of which the
world had never seen before.
NAPOLEON
NAPOLEON
NAPOLEON was born in the year 1769, the third son of Carlo Maria
Buonaparte, an honest notary public of the city of Ajaccio in the island
of Corsica, and his good wife, Letizia Ramolino. He therefore was not a
Frenchman, but an Italian whose native island (an old Greek, Carthaginian
and Roman colony in the Mediterranean Sea) had for years been struggling
to regain its independence, first of all from the Genoese, and after the
middle of the eighteenth century from the French, who had kindly offered
to help the Corsicans in their struggle for freedom and had then occupied
the island for their own benefit.
During the first twenty years of his life, young Napoleon was a
professional Corsican patriot—a Corsican Sinn Feiner, who hoped to
deliver his beloved country from the yoke of the bitterly hated French
enemy. But the French revolution had unexpectedly recognised the claims of
the Corsicans and gradually Napoleon, who had received a good training at
the military school of Brienne, drifted into the service of his adopted
country. Although he never learned to spell French correctly or to speak
it without a broad Italian accent, he became a Frenchman. In due time he
came to stand as the highest expression of all French virtues. At present
he is regarded as the symbol of the Gallic genius.
Napoleon was what is called a fast worker. His career does not cover more
than twenty years. In that short span of time he fought more wars and
gained more victories and marched more miles and conquered more square
kilometers and killed more people and brought about more reforms and
generally upset Europe to a greater extent than anybody (including
Alexander the Great and Jenghis Khan) had ever managed to do.
He was a little fellow and during the first years of his life his health
was not very good. He never impressed anybody by his good looks and he
remained to the end of his days very clumsy whenever he was obliged to
appear at a social function. He did not enjoy a single advantage of
breeding or birth or riches. For the greater part of his youth he was
desperately poor and often he had to go without a meal or was obliged to
make a few extra pennies in curious ways.
He gave little promise as a literary genius. When he competed for a prize
offered by the Academy of Lyons, his essay was found to be next to the
last and he was number 15 out of 16 candidates. But he overcame all these
difficulties through his absolute and unshakable belief in his own
destiny, and in his own glorious future. Ambition was the main-spring of
his life. The thought of self, the worship of that capital letter “N” with
which he signed all his letters, and which recurred forever in the
ornaments of his hastily constructed palaces, the absolute will to make
the name Napoleon the most important thing in the world next to the name
of God, these desires carried Napoleon to a pinnacle of fame which no
other man has ever reached.
When he was a half-pay lieutenant, young Bonaparte was very fond of the
“Lives of Famous Men” which Plutarch, the Roman historian, had written.
But he never tried to live up to the high standard of character set by
these heroes of the older days. Napoleon seems to have been devoid of all
those considerate and thoughtful sentiments which make men different from
the animals. It will be very difficult to decide with any degree of
accuracy whether he ever loved anyone besides himself. He kept a civil
tongue to his mother, but Letizia had the air and manners of a great lady
and after the fashion of Italian mothers, she knew how to rule her brood
of children and command their respect. For a few years he was fond of
Josephine, his pretty Creole wife, who was the daughter of a French
officer of Martinique and the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, who had
been executed by Robespierre when he lost a battle against the Prussians.
But the Emperor divorced her when she failed to give him a son and heir
and married the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, because it seemed good
policy.
During the siege of Toulon, where he gained great fame as commander of a
battery, Napoleon studied Macchiavelli with industrious care. He followed
the advice of the Florentine statesman and never kept his word when it was
to his advantage to break it. The word “gratitude” did not occur in his
personal dictionary. Neither, to be quite fair, did he expect it from
others. He was totally indifferent to human suffering. He executed
prisoners of war (in Egypt in 1798) who had been promised their lives, and
he quietly allowed his wounded in Syria to be chloroformed when he found
it impossible to transport them to his ships. He ordered the Duke of
Enghien to be condemned to death by a prejudiced court-martial and to be
shot contrary to all law on the sole ground that the “Bourbons needed a
warning.” He decreed that those German officers who were made prisoner
while fighting for their country’s independence should be shot against the
nearest wall, and when Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero, fell into his
hands after a most heroic resistance, he was executed like a common
traitor.
In short, when we study the character of the Emperor, we begin to
understand those anxious British mothers who used to drive their children
to bed with the threat that “Bonaparte, who ate little boys and girls for
breakfast, would come and get them if they were not very good.” And yet,
having said these many unpleasant things about this strange tyrant, who
looked after every other department of his army with the utmost care, but
neglected the medical service, and who ruined his uniforms with Eau de
Cologne because he could not stand the smell of his poor sweating
soldiers; having said all these unpleasant things and being fully prepared
to add many more, I must confess to a certain lurking feeling of doubt.
Here I am sitting at a comfortable table loaded heavily with books, with
one eye on my typewriter and the other on Licorice the cat, who has a
great fondness for carbon paper, and I am telling you that the Emperor
Napoleon was a most contemptible person. But should I happen to look out
of the window, down upon Seventh Avenue, and should the endless procession
of trucks and carts come to a sudden halt, and should I hear the sound of
the heavy drums and see the little man on his white horse in his old and
much-worn green uniform, then I don’t know, but I am afraid that I would
leave my books and the kitten and my home and everything else to follow
him wherever he cared to lead. My own grandfather did this and Heaven
knows he was not born to be a hero. Millions of other people’s
grandfathers did it. They received no reward, but they expected none. They
cheerfully gave legs and arms and lives to serve this foreigner, who took
them a thousand miles away from their homes and marched them into a
barrage of Russian or English or Spanish or Italian or Austrian cannon and
stared quietly into space while they were rolling in the agony of death.
If you ask me for an explanation, I must answer that I have none. I can
only guess at one of the reasons. Napoleon was the greatest of actors and
the whole European continent was his stage. At all times and under all
circumstances he knew the precise attitude that would impress the
spectators most and he understood what words would make the deepest
impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before the backdrop
of the Sphinx and the pyramids, or addressed his shivering men on the
dew-soaked plains of Italy, made no difference. At all times he was master
of the situation. Even at the end, an exile on a little rock in the middle
of the Atlantic, a sick man at the mercy of a dull and intolerable British
governor, he held the centre of the stage.
After the defeat of Waterloo, no one outside of a few trusted friends ever
saw the great Emperor. The people of Europe knew that he was living on the
island of St. Helena—they knew that a British garrison guarded him
day and night—they knew that the British fleet guarded the garrison
which guarded the Emperor on his farm at Longwood. But he was never out of
the mind of either friend or enemy. When illness and despair had at last
taken him away, his silent eyes continued to haunt the world. Even to-day
he is as much of a force in the life of France as a hundred years ago when
people fainted at the mere sight of this sallow-faced man who stabled his
horses in the holiest temples of the Russian Kremlin, and who treated the
Pope and the mighty ones of this earth as if they were his lackeys.
To give you a mere outline of his life would demand couple of volumes. To
tell you of his great political reform of the French state, of his new
codes of laws which were adopted in most European countries, of his
activities in every field of public activity, would take thousands of
pages. But I can explain in a few words why he was so successful during
the first part of his career and why he failed during the last ten years.
From the year 1789 until the year 1804, Napoleon was the great leader of
the French revolution. He was not merely fighting for the glory of his own
name. He defeated Austria and Italy and England and Russia because he,
himself, and his soldiers were the apostles of the new creed of “Liberty,
Fraternity and Equality” and were the enemies of the courts while they
were the friends of the people.
But in the year 1804, Napoleon made himself Hereditary Emperor of the
French and sent for Pope Pius VII to come and crown him, even as Leo III,
in the year 800 had crowned that other great King of the Franks,
Charlemagne, whose example was constantly before Napoleon’s eyes.
Once upon the throne, the old revolutionary chieftain became an
unsuccessful imitation of a Habsburg monarch. He forgot his spiritual
Mother, the Political Club of the Jacobins. He ceased to be the defender
of the oppressed. He became the chief of all the oppressors and kept his
shooting squads ready to execute those who dared to oppose his imperial
will. No one had shed a tear when in the year 1806 the sad remains of the
Holy Roman Empire were carted to the historical dustbin and when the last
relic of ancient Roman glory was destroyed by the grandson of an Italian
peasant. But when the Napoleonic armies had invaded Spain, had forced the
Spaniards to recognise a king whom they detested, had massacred the poor
Madrilenes who remained faithful to their old rulers, then public opinion
turned against the former hero of Marengo and Austerlitz and a hundred
other revolutionary battles. Then and only then, when Napoleon was no
longer the hero of the revolution but the personification of all the bad
traits of the Old Regime, was it possible for England to give direction to
the fast-spreading sentiment of hatred which was turning all honest men
into enemies of the French Emperor.
The English people from the very beginning had felt deeply disgusted when
their newspapers told them the gruesome details of the Terror. They had
staged their own great revolution (during the reign of Charles I) a
century before. It had been a very simple affair compared to the upheaval
of Paris. In the eyes of the average Englishman a Jacobin was a monster to
be shot at sight and Napoleon was the Chief Devil. The British fleet had
blockaded France ever since the year 1798. It had spoiled Napoleon’s plan
to invade India by way of Egypt and had forced him to beat an ignominious
retreat, after his victories along the banks of the Nile. And finally, in
the year 1805, England got the chance it had waited for so long.
Near Cape Trafalgar on the southwestern coast of Spain, Nelson annihilated
the Napoleonic fleet, beyond a possible chance of recovery. From that
moment on, the Emperor was landlocked. Even so, he would have been able to
maintain himself as the recognised ruler of the continent had he
understood the signs of the times and accepted the honourable peace which
the powers offered him. But Napoleon had been blinded by the blaze of his
own glory. He would recognise no equals. He could tolerate no rivals. And
his hatred turned against Russia, the mysterious land of the endless
plains with its inexhaustible supply of cannon-fodder.
As long as Russia was ruled by Paul I, the half-witted son of Catherine
the Great, Napoleon had known how to deal with the situation. But Paul
grew more and more irresponsible until his exasperated subjects were
obliged to murder him (lest they all be sent to the Siberian lead-mines)
and the son of Paul, the Emperor Alexander, did not share his father’s
affection for the usurper whom he regarded as the enemy of mankind, the
eternal disturber of the peace. He was a pious man who believed that he
had been chosen by God to deliver the world from the Corsican curse. He
joined Prussia and England and Austria and he was defeated. He tried five
times and five times he failed. In the year 1812 he once more taunted
Napoleon until the French Emperor, in a blind rage, vowed that he would
dictate peace in Moscow. Then, from far and wide, from Spain and Germany
and Holland and Italy and Portugal, unwilling regiments were driven
northward, that the wounded pride of the great Emperor might be duly
avenged. The rest of the story is common knowledge. After a march of two
months, Napoleon reached the Russian capital and established his
headquarters in the holy Kremlin. On the night of September 15 of the year
1812, Moscow caught fire. The town burned four days. When the evening of
the fifth day came, Napoleon gave the order for the retreat. Two weeks
later it began to snow. The army trudged through mud and sleet until
November the 26th when the river Berezina was reached. Then the Russian
attacks began in all seriousness. The Cossacks swarmed around the “Grande
Armee” which was no longer an army but a mob. In the middle of December
the first of the survivors began to be seen in the German cities of the
East.
Then there were many rumours of an impending revolt. “The time has come,”
the people of Europe said, “to free ourselves from this insufferable
yoke.” And they began to look for old shotguns which had escaped the eye
of the ever-present French spies. But ere they knew what had happened,
Napoleon was back with a new army. He had left his defeated soldiers and
in his little sleigh had rushed ahead to Paris, making a final appeal for
more troops that he might defend the sacred soil of France against foreign
invasion.
Children of sixteen and seventeen followed him when he moved eastward to
meet the allied powers. On October 16, 18, and 19 of the year 1813, the
terrible battle of Leipzig took place where for three days boys in green
and boys in blue fought each other until the Elbe ran red with blood. On
the afternoon of the 17th of October, the massed reserves of Russian
infantry broke through the French lines and Napoleon fled.
Back to Paris he went. He abdicated in favour of his small son, but the
allied powers insisted that Louis XVIII, the brother of the late king
Louis XVI, should occupy the French throne, and surrounded by Cossacks and
Uhlans, the dull-eyed Bourbon prince made his triumphal entry into Paris.
As for Napoleon he was made the sovereign ruler of the little island of
Elba in the Mediterranean where he organised his stable boys into a
miniature army and fought battles on a chess board.
But no sooner had he left France than the people began to realise what
they had lost. The last twenty years, however costly, had been a period of
great glory. Paris had been the capital of the world. The fat Bourbon king
who had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing during the days of his
exile disgusted everybody by his indolence.
On the first of March of the year 1815, when the representatives of the
allies were ready to begin the work of unscrambling the map of Europe,
Napoleon suddenly landed near Cannes. In less than a week the French army
had deserted the Bourbons and had rushed southward to offer their swords
and bayonets to the “little Corporal.” Napoleon marched straight to Paris
where he arrived on the twentieth of March. This time he was more
cautious. He offered peace, but the allies insisted upon war. The whole of
Europe arose against the “perfidious Corsican.” Rapidly the Emperor
marched northward that he might crush his enemies before they should be
able to unite their forces. But Napoleon was no longer his old self. He
felt sick. He got tired easily. He slept when he ought to have been up
directing the attack of his advance-guard. Besides, he missed many of his
faithful old generals. They were dead.
Early in June his armies entered Belgium. On the 16th of that month he
defeated the Prussians under Blucher. But a subordinate commander failed
to destroy the retreating army as he had been ordered to do.
Two days later, Napoleon met Wellington near Waterloo. It was the 18th of
June, a Sunday. At two o’clock of the afternoon, the battle seemed won for
the French. At three a speck of dust appeared upon the eastern horizon.
Napoleon believed that this meant the approach of his own cavalry who
would now turn the English defeat into a rout. At four o’clock he knew
better. Cursing and swearing, old Blucher drove his deathly tired troops
into the heart of the fray. The shock broke the ranks of the guards.
Napoleon had no further reserves. He told his men to save themselves as
best they could, and he fled.
For a second time, he abdicated in favor of his son. Just one hundred days
after his escape from Elba, he was making for the coast. He intended to go
to America. In the year 1803, for a mere song, he had sold the French
colony of Louisiana (which was in great danger of being captured by the
English) to the young American Republic. “The Americans,” so he said,
“will be grateful and will give me a little bit of land and a house where
I may spend the last days of my life in peace and quiet.” But the English
fleet was watching all French harbours. Caught between the armies of the
Allies and the ships of the British, Napoleon had no choice. The Prussians
intended to shoot him. The English might be more generous. At Rochefort he
waited in the hope that something might turn up. One month after Waterloo,
he received orders from the new French government to leave French soil
inside of twenty-four hours. Always the tragedian, he wrote a letter to
the Prince Regent of England (George IV, the king, was in an insane
asylum) informing His Royal Highness of his intention to “throw himself
upon the mercy of his enemies and like Themistocles, to look for a welcome
at the fireside of his foes…”
On the 15th of July he went on board the “Bellerophon,” and surrendered
his sword to Admiral Hotham. At Plymouth he was transferred to the
“Northumberland” which carried him to St. Helena. There he spent the last
seven years of his life. He tried to write his memoirs, he quarrelled with
his keepers and he dreamed of past times. Curiously enough he returned (at
least in his imagination) to his original point of departure. He
remembered the days when he had fought the battles of the Revolution. He
tried to convince himself that he had always been the true friend of those
great principles of “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality” which the ragged
soldiers of the convention had carried to the ends of the earth. He liked
to dwell upon his career as Commander-in-Chief and Consul. He rarely spoke
of the Empire. Sometimes he thought of his son, the Duke of Reichstadt,
the little eagle, who lived in Vienna, where he was treated as a “poor
relation” by his young Habsburg cousins, whose fathers had trembled at the
very mention of the name of Him. When the end came, he was leading his
troops to victory. He ordered Ney to attack with the guards. Then he died.
But if you want an explanation of this strange career, if you really wish
to know how one man could possibly rule so many people for so many years
by the sheer force of his will, do not read the books that have been
written about him. Their authors either hated the Emperor or loved him.
You will learn many facts, but it is more important to “feel history” than
to know it. Don’t read, but wait until you have a chance to hear a good
artist sing the song called “The Two Grenadiers.” The words were written
by Heine, the great German poet who lived through the Napoleonic era. The
music was composed by Schumann, a German who saw the Emperor, the enemy of
his country, whenever he came to visit his imperial father-in-law. The
song therefore is the work of two men who had every reason to hate the
tyrant.
Go and hear it. Then you will understand what a thousand volumes could not
possibly tell you.
THE HOLY ALLIANCE
AS SOON AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN SENT TO ST. HELENA THE RULERS WHO SO OFTEN
HAD BEEN DEFEATED BY THE HATED “CORSICAN” MET AT VIENNA AND TRIED TO UNDO
THE MANY CHANGES THAT HAD BEEN BROUGHT ABOUT BY THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their Graces the Dukes, the
Ministers Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, together with the plain
Excellencies and their army of secretaries, servants and hangers-on, whose
labours had been so rudely interrupted by the sudden return of the
terrible Corsican (now sweltering under the hot sun of St. Helena) went
back to their jobs. The victory was duly celebrated with dinners, garden
parties and balls at which the new and very shocking “waltz” was danced to
the great scandal of the ladies and gentlemen who remembered the minuet of
the old Regime.
For almost a generation they had lived in retirement. At last the danger
was over. They were very eloquent upon the subject of the terrible
hardships which they had suffered. And they expected to be recompensed for
every penny they had lost at the hands of the unspeakable Jacobins who had
dared to kill their anointed king, who had abolished wigs and who had
discarded the short trousers of the court of Versailles for the ragged
pantaloons of the Parisian slums.
You may think it absurd that I should mention such a detail. But, if you
please, the Congress of Vienna was one long succession of such absurdities
and for many months the question of “short trousers vs. long trousers”
interested the delegates more than the future settlement of the Saxon or
Spanish problems. His Majesty the King of Prussia went so far as to order
a pair of short ones, that he might give public evidence of his contempt
for everything revolutionary.
Another German potentate, not to be outdone in this noble hatred for the
revolution, decreed that all taxes which his subjects had paid to the
French usurper should be paid a second time to the legitimate ruler who
had loved his people from afar while they were at the mercy of the
Corsican ogre. And so on. From one blunder to another, until one gasps and
exclaims “but why in the name of High Heaven did not the people object?”
Why not indeed? Because the people were utterly exhausted, were desperate,
did not care what happened or how or where or by whom they were ruled,
provided there was peace. They were sick and tired of war and revolution
and reform.
In the eighties of the previous century they had all danced around the
tree of liberty. Princes had embraced their cooks and Duchesses had danced
the Carmagnole with their lackeys in the honest belief that the Millennium
of Equality and Fraternity had at last dawned upon this wicked world.
Instead of the Millennium they had been visited by the Revolutionary
commissary who had lodged a dozen dirty soldiers in their parlor and had
stolen the family plate when he returned to Paris to report to his
government upon the enthusiasm with which the “liberated country” had
received the Constitution, which the French people had presented to their
good neighbours.
When they had heard how the last outbreak of revolutionary disorder in
Paris had been suppressed by a young officer, called Bonaparte, or
Buonaparte, who had turned his guns upon the mob, they gave a sigh of
relief. A little less liberty, fraternity and equality seemed a very
desirable thing. But ere long, the young officer called Buonaparte or
Bonaparte became one of the three consuls of the French Republic, then
sole consul and finally Emperor. As he was much more efficient than any
ruler that had ever been seen before, his hand pressed heavily upon his
poor subjects. He showed them no mercy. He impressed their sons into his
armies, he married their daughters to his generals and he took their
pictures and their statues to enrich his own museums. He turned the whole
of Europe into an armed camp and killed almost an entire generation of
men.
Now he was gone, and the people (except a few professional military men)
had but one wish. They wanted to be let alone. For awhile they had been
allowed to rule themselves, to vote for mayors and aldermen and judges.
The system had been a terrible failure. The new rulers had been
inexperienced and extravagant. From sheer despair the people turned to the
representative men of the old Regime. “You rule us,” they said, “as you
used to do. Tell us what we owe you for taxes and leave us alone. We are
busy repairing the damage of the age of liberty.”
The men who stage-managed the famous congress certainly did their best to
satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. The Holy Alliance, the main
result of the Congress, made the policeman the most important dignitary of
the State and held out the most terrible punishment to those who dared
criticise a single official act.
Europe had peace, but it was the peace of the cemetery.
The three most important men at Vienna were the Emperor Alexander of
Russia, Metternich, who represented the interests of the Austrian house of
Habsburg, and Talleyrand, the erstwhile bishop of Autun, who had managed
to live through the different changes in the French government by the
sheer force of his cunning and his intelligence and who now travelled to
the Austrian capital to save for his country whatever could be saved from
the Napoleonic ruin. Like the gay young man of the limerick, who never
knew when he was slighted, this unbidden guest came to the party and ate
just as heartily as if he had been really invited. Indeed, before long, he
was sitting at the head of the table entertaining everybody with his
amusing stories and gaining the company’s good will by the charm of his
manner.
Before he had been in Vienna twenty-four hours he knew that the allies
were divided into two hostile camps. On the one side were Russia, who
wanted to take Poland, and Prussia, who wanted to annex Saxony; and on the
other side were Austria and England, who were trying to prevent this grab
because it was against their own interest that either Prussia or Russia
should be able to dominate Europe. Talleyrand played the two sides against
each other with great skill and it was due to his efforts that the French
people were not made to suffer for the ten years of oppression which
Europe had endured at the hands of the Imperial officials. He argued that
the French people had been given no choice in the matter. Napoleon had
forced them to act at his bidding. But Napoleon was gone and Louis XVIII
was on the throne. “Give him a chance,” Talleyrand pleaded. And the
Allies, glad to see a legitimate king upon the throne of a revolutionary
country, obligingly yielded and the Bourbons were given their chance, of
which they made such use that they were driven out after fifteen years.
The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metternich, the Austrian
prime minister, the leader of the foreign policy of the house of Habsburg.
Wenzel Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg, was exactly what the name
suggests. He was a Grand Seigneur, a very handsome gentleman with very
fine manners, immensely rich, and very able, but the product of a society
which lived a thousand miles away from the sweating multitudes who worked
and slaved in the cities and on the farms. As a young man, Metternich had
been studying at the University of Strassburg when the French Revolution
broke out. Strassburg, the city which gave birth to the Marseillaise, had
been a centre of Jacobin activities. Metternich remembered that his
pleasant social life had been sadly interrupted, that a lot of incompetent
citizens had suddenly been called forth to perform tasks for which they
were not fit, that the mob had celebrated the dawn of the new liberty by
the murder of perfectly innocent persons. He had failed to see the honest
enthusiasm of the masses, the ray of hope in the eyes of women and
children who carried bread and water to the ragged troops of the
Convention, marching through the city on their way to the front and a
glorious death for the French Fatherland.
The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with disgust. It was
uncivilised. If there were any fighting to be done it must be done by
dashing young men in lovely uniforms, charging across the green fields on
well-groomed horses. But to turn an entire country into an evil-smelling
armed camp where tramps were overnight promoted to be generals, that was
both wicked and senseless. “See what came of all your fine ideas,” he
would say to the French diplomats whom he met at a quiet little dinner
given by one of the innumerable Austrian grand-dukes. “You wanted liberty,
equality and fraternity and you got Napoleon. How much better it would
have been if you had been contented with the existing order of things.”
And he would explain his system of “stability.” He would advocate a return
to the normalcy of the good old days before the war, when everybody was
happy and nobody talked nonsense about “everybody being as good as
everybody else.” In this attitude he was entirely sincere and as he was an
able man of great strength of will and a tremendous power of persuasion,
he was one of the most dangerous enemies of the Revolutionary ideas. He
did not die until the year 1859, and he therefore lived long enough to see
the complete failure of all his policies when they were swept aside by the
revolution of the year 1848. He then found himself the most hated man of
Europe and more than once ran the risk of being lynched by angry crowds of
outraged citizens. But until the very last, he remained steadfast in his
belief that he had done the right thing.
He had always been convinced that people preferred peace to liberty and he
had tried to give them what was best for them. And in all fairness, it
ought to be said that his efforts to establish universal peace were fairly
successful. The great powers did not fly at each other’s throat for almost
forty years, indeed not until the Crimean war between Russia and England,
France and Italy and Turkey, in the year 1854. That means a record for the
European continent.
The third hero of this waltzing congress was the Emperor Alexander. He had
been brought up at the court of his grand-mother, the famous Catherine the
Great. Between the lessons of this shrewd old woman, who taught him to
regard the glory of Russia as the most important thing in life, and those
of his private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau, who filled
his mind with a general love of humanity, the boy grew up to be a strange
mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental revolutionist. He had
suffered great indignities during the life of his crazy father, Paul I. He
had been obliged to wit-ness the wholesale slaughter of the Napoleonic
battle-fields. Then the tide had turned. His armies had won the day for
the Allies. Russia had become the saviour of Europe and the Tsar of this
mighty people was acclaimed as a half-god who would cure the world of its
many ills.
But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know men and women as
Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. He did not understand the strange
game of diplomacy. He was vain (who would not be under the circumstances?)
and loved to hear the applause of the multitude and soon he had become the
main “attraction” of the Congress while Metternich and Talleyrand and
Castlereagh (the very able British representative) sat around a table and
drank a bottle of Tokay and decided what was actually going to be done.
They needed Russia and therefore they were very polite to Alexander, but
the less he had personally to do with the actual work of the Congress, the
better they were pleased. They even encouraged his plans for a Holy
Alliance that he might be fully occupied while they were engaged upon the
work at hand.
Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties and meet
people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay but there was a very
different element in his character. He tried to forget something which he
could not forget. On the night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801 he
had been sitting in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg,
waiting for the news of his father’s abdication. But Paul had refused to
sign the document which the drunken officers had placed before him on the
table, and in their rage they had put a scarf around his neck and had
strangled him to death. Then they had gone downstairs to tell Alexander
that he was Emperor of all the Russian lands.
The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar who was a very
sensitive person. He had been educated in the school of the great French
philosophers who did not believe in God but in Human Reason. But Reason
alone could not satisfy the Emperor in his predicament. He began to hear
voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which he could square
himself with his conscience. He became very pious and began to take an
interest in mysticism, that strange love of the mysterious and the unknown
which is as old as the temples of Thebes and Babylon.
The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era had influenced the
character of the people of that day in a strange way. Men and women who
had lived through twenty years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite
normal. They jumped whenever the door-bell rang. It might mean the news of
the “death on the field of honour” of an only son. The phrases about
“brotherly love” and “liberty” of the Revolution were hollow words in the
ears of sorely stricken peasants. They clung to anything that might give
them a new hold on the terrible problems of life. In their grief and
misery they were easily imposed upon by a large number of imposters who
posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine which they dug out
of the more obscure passages of the Book of Revelations.
In the year 1814, Alexander, who had already consulted a large number of
wonder-doctors, heard of a new seeress who was foretelling the coming doom
of the world and was exhorting people to repent ere it be too late. The
Baroness von Krudener, the lady in question, was a Russian woman of
uncertain age and similar reputation who had been the wife of a Russian
diplomat in the days of the Emperor Paul. She had squandered her husband’s
money and had disgraced him by her strange love affairs. She had lived a
very dissolute life until her nerves had given way and for a while she was
not in her right mind. Then she had been converted by the sight of the
sudden death of a friend. Thereafter she despised all gaiety. She
confessed her former sins to her shoemaker, a pious Moravian brother, a
follower of the old reformer John Huss, who had been burned for his
heresies by the Council of Constance in the year 1415.
The next ten years the Baroness spent in Germany making a specialty of the
“conversion” of kings and princes. To convince Alexander, the Saviour of
Europe, of the error of his ways was the greatest ambition of her life.
And as Alexander, in his misery, was willing to listen to anybody who
brought him a ray of hope, the interview was easily arranged. On the
evening of the fourth of June of the year 1815, she was admitted to the
tent of the Emperor. She found him reading his Bible. We do not know what
she said to Alexander, but when she left him three hours later, he was
bathed in tears, and vowed that “at last his soul had found peace.” From
that day on the Baroness was his faithful companion and his spiritual
adviser. She followed him to Paris and then to Vienna and the time which
Alexander did not spend dancing he spent at the Krudener prayer-meetings.
You may ask why I tell you this story in such great detail? Are not the
social changes of the nineteenth century of greater importance than the
career of an ill-balanced woman who had better be forgotten? Of course
they are, but there exist any number of books which will tell you of these
other things with great accuracy and in great detail. I want you to learn
something more from this history than a mere succession of facts. I want
you to approach all historical events in a frame of mind that will take
nothing for granted. Don’t be satisfied with the mere statement that “such
and such a thing happened then and there.” Try to discover the hidden
motives behind every action and then you will understand the world around
you much better and you will have a greater chance to help others, which
(when all is said and done) is the only truly satisfactory way of living.
I do not want you to think of the Holy Alliance as a piece of paper which
was signed in the year 1815 and lies dead and forgotten somewhere in the
archives of state. It may be forgotten but it is by no means dead. The
Holy Alliance was directly responsible for the promulgation of the Monroe
Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine of America for the Americans has a very
distinct bearing upon your own life. That is the reason why I want you to
know exactly how this document happened to come into existence and what
the real motives were underlying this outward manifestation of piety and
Christian devotion to duty.
The Holy Alliance was the joint labour of an unfortunate man who had
suffered a terrible mental shock and who was trying to pacify his
much-disturbed soul, and of an ambitious woman who after a wasted life had
lost her beauty and her attraction and who satisfied her vanity and her
desire for notoriety by assuming the role of self-appointed Messiah of a
new and strange creed. I am not giving away any secrets when I tell you
these details. Such sober minded people as Castlereagh, Metternich and
Talleyrand fully understood the limited abilities of the sentimental
Baroness. It would have been easy for Metternich to send her back to her
German estates. A few lines to the almighty commander of the imperial
police and the thing was done.
But France and England and Austria depended upon the good-will of Russia.
They could not afford to offend Alexander. And they tolerated the silly
old Baroness because they had to. And while they regarded the Holy
Alliance as utter rubbish and not worth the paper upon which it was
written, they listened patiently to the Tsar when he read them the first
rough draft of this attempt to create the Brotherhood of Men upon a basis
of the Holy Scriptures. For this is what the Holy Alliance tried to do,
and the signers of the document solemnly declared that they would “in the
administration of their respective states and in their political relations
with every other government take for their sole guide the precepts of that
Holy Religion, namely the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity and
Peace, which far from being applicable only to private concerns must have
an immediate influence on the councils of princes, and must guide all
their steps as being the only means of consolidating human institutions
and remedying their imperfections.” They then proceeded to promise each
other that they would remain united “by the bonds of a true and
indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as fellow-countrymen,
they would on all occasions and in all places lend each other aid and
assistance.” And more words to the same effect.
Eventually the Holy Alliance was signed by the Emperor of Austria, who did
not understand a word of it. It was signed by the Bourbons who needed the
friendship of Napoleon’s old enemies. It was signed by the King of
Prussia, who hoped to gain Alexander for his plans for a “greater
Prussia,” and by all the little nations of Europe who were at the mercy of
Russia. England never signed, because Castlereagh thought the whole thing
buncombe. The Pope did not sign because he resented this interference in
his business by a Greek-Orthodox and a Protestant. And the Sultan did not
sign because he never heard of it.
The general mass of the European people, however, soon were forced to take
notice. Behind the hollow phrases of the Holy Alliance stood the armies of
the Quintuple Alliance which Metternich had created among the great
powers. These armies meant business. They let it be known that the peace
of Europe must not be disturbed by the so-called liberals who were in
reality nothing but disguised Jacobins, and hoped for a return of the
revolutionary days. The enthusiasm for the great wars of liberation of the
years 1812, 1818, 1814 and 1815 had begun to wear off. It had been
followed by a sincere belief in the coming of a happier day. The soldiers
who had borne the brunt of the battle wanted peace and they said so.
But they did not want the sort of peace which the Holy Alliance and the
Council of the European powers had now bestowed upon them. They cried that
they had been betrayed. But they were careful lest they be heard by a
secret-police spy. The reaction was victorious. It was a reaction caused
by men who sincerely believed that their methods were necessary for the
good of humanity. But it was just as hard to bear as if their intentions
had been less kind. And it caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering
and greatly retarded the orderly progress of political development.
THE GREAT REACTION
THEY TRIED TO ASSURE THE WORLD AN ERA OF UNDISTURBED PEACE BY SUPPRESSING
ALL NEW IDEAS. THEY MADE THE POLICE-SPY THE HIGHEST FUNCTIONARY IN THE
STATE AND SOON THE PRISONS OF ALL COUNTRIES WERE FILLED WITH THOSE WHO
CLAIMED THAT PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO GOVERN THEMSELVES AS THEY SEE FIT
To undo the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood was almost
impossible. Age-old fences had been washed away. The palaces of two score
dynasties had been damaged to such an extent that they had to be condemned
as uninhabitable. Other royal residences had been greatly enlarged at the
expense of less fortunate neighbours. Strange odds and ends of
revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the receding waters and
could not be dislodged without danger to the entire community. But the
political engineers of the Congress did the best they could and this is
what they accomplished.
France had disturbed the peace of the world for so many years that people
had come to fear that country almost instinctively. The Bourbons, through
the mouth of Talleyrand, had promised to be good, but the Hundred Days had
taught Europe what to expect should Napoleon manage to escape for a second
time. The Dutch Republic, therefore, was changed into a Kingdom, and
Belgium (which had not joined the Dutch struggle for independence in the
sixteenth century and since then had been part of the Habsburg domains,
firs t under Spanish rule and thereafter under Austrian rule) was made
part of this new kingdom of the Netherlands. Nobody wanted this union
either in the Protestant North or in the Catholic South, but no questions
were asked. It seemed good for the peace of Europe and that was the main
consideration.
Poland had hoped for great things because a Pole, Prince Adam Czartoryski,
was one of the most intimate friends of Tsar Alexander and had been his
constant advisor during the war and at the Congress of Vienna. But Poland
was made a semi-independent part of Russia with Alexander as her king.
This solution pleased no one and caused much bitter feeling and three
revolutions.
Denmark, which had remained a faithful ally of Napoleon until the end, was
severely punished. Seven years before, an English fleet had sailed down
the Kattegat and without a declaration of war or any warning had bombarded
Copenhagen and had taken away the Danish fleet, lest it be of value to
Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna went one step further. It took Norway
(which since the union of Calmar of the year 1397 had been united with
Denmark) away from Denmark and gave it to Charles XIV of Sweden as a
reward for his betrayal of Napoleon, who had set him up in the king
business. This Swedish king, curiously enough, was a former French general
by the name of Bernadotte, who had come to Sweden as one of
Napolean’s{sic} adjutants, and had been invited to the throne of that good
country when the last of the rulers of the house of Hollstein-Gottorp had
died without leaving either son or daughter. From 1815 until 1844 he ruled
his adopted country (the language of which he never learned) width great
ability. He was a clever man and enjoyed the respect of both his Swedish
and his Norwegian subjects, but he did not succeed in joining two
countries which nature and history had put asunder. The dual Scandinavian
state was never a success and in 1905, Norway, in a most peaceful and
orderly manner, set up as an independent kingdom and the Swedes bade her
“good speed” and very wisely let her go her own way.
The Italians, who since the days of the Renaissance had been at the mercy
of a long series of invaders, also had put great hopes in General
Bonaparte. The Emperor Napoleon, however, had grievously disappointed
them. Instead of the United Italy which the people wanted, they had been
divided into a number of little principalities, duchies, republics and the
Papal State, which (next to Naples) was the worst governed and most
miserable region of the entire peninsula. The Congress of Vienna abolished
a few of the Napoleonic republics and in their place resurrected several
old principalities which were given to deserving members, both male and
female, of the Habsburg family.
The poor Spaniards, who had started the great nationalistic revolt against
Napoleon, and who had sacrificed the best blood of the country for their
king, were punished severely when the Congress allowed His Majesty to
return to his domains. This vicious creature, known as Ferdinand VII, had
spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner of Napoleon. He had
improved his days by knitting garments for the statues of his favourite
patron saints. He celebrated his return by re-introducing the Inquisition
and the torture-chamber, both of which had been abolished by the
Revolution. He was a disgusting person, despised as much by his subjects
as by his four wives, but the Holy Alliance maintained him upon his
legitimate throne and all efforts of the decent Spaniards to get rid of
this curse and make Spain a constitutional kingdom ended in bloodshed and
executions.
Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when the royal family
had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The country had been used as a base of
supply for the armies of Wellington during the Peninsula war, which lasted
from 1808 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued to be a sort of
British province until the house of Braganza returned to the throne,
leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro as Emperor of Brazil,
the only American Empire which lasted for more than a few years, and which
came to an end in 1889 when the country became a republic.
In the east, nothing was done to improve the terrible conditions of both
the Slavs and the Greeks who were still subjects of the Sultan. In the
year 1804 Black George, a Servian swineherd, (the founder of the
Karageorgevich dynasty) had started a revolt against the Turks, but he had
been defeated by his enemies and had been murdered by one of his supposed
friends, the rival Servian leader, called Milosh Obrenovich, (who became
the founder of the Obrenovich dynasty) and the Turks had continued to be
the undisputed masters of the Balkans.
The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence, two thousand years
before, had been subjects of the Macedonians, the Romans, the Venetians
and the Turks, had hoped that their countryman, Capo d’Istria, a native of
Corfu and together with Czartoryski, the most intimate personal friends of
Alexander, would do something for them. But the Congress of Vienna was not
interested in Greeks, but was very much interested in keeping all
“legitimate” monarchs, Christian, Moslem and otherwise, upon their
respective thrones. Therefore nothing was done.
The last, but perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress was the
treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the Thirty Years War had not
only destroyed the prosperity of the country, but had turned it into a
hopeless political rubbish heap, consisting of a couple of kingdoms, a few
grand-duchies, a large number of duchies and hundreds of margravates,
principalities, baronies, electorates, free cities and free villages,
ruled by the strangest assortment of potentates that was ever seen off the
comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had changed this when he created a
strong Prussia, but this state had not survived him by many years.
Napoleon had blue-penciled the demand for independence of most of these
little countries, and only fifty-two out of a total of more than three
hundred had survived the year 1806. During the years of the great struggle
for independence, many a young soldier had dreamed of a new Fatherland
that should be strong and united. But there can be no union without a
strong leadership, and who was to be this leader?
There were five kingdoms in the German speaking lands. The rulers of two
of these, Austria and Prussia, were kings by the Grace of God. The rulers
of three others, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurtemberg, were kings by the Grace
of Napoleon, and as they had been the faithful henchmen of the Emperor,
their patriotic credit with the other Germans was therefore not very good.
The Congress had established a new German Confederation, a league of
thirty-eight sovereign states, under the chairmanship of the King of
Austria, who was now known as the Emperor of Austria. It was the sort of
make-shift arrangement which satisfied no one. It is true that a German
Diet, which met in the old coronation city of Frankfort, had been created
to discuss matters of “common policy and importance.” But in this Diet,
thirty-eight delegates represented thirty-eight different interests and as
no decision could be taken without a unanimous vote (a parliamentary rule
which had in previous centuries ruined the mighty kingdom of Poland), the
famous German Confederation became very soon the laughing stock of Europe
and the politics of the old Empire began to resemble those of our Central
American neighbours in the forties and the fifties of the last century.
It was terribly humiliating to the people who had sacrificed everything
for a national ideal. But the Congress was not interested in the private
feelings of “subjects,” and the debate was closed.
Did anybody object? Most assuredly. As soon as the first feeling of hatred
against Napoleon had quieted down—as soon as the enthusiasm of the
great war had subsided—as soon as the people came to a full
realisation of the crime that had been committed in the name of “peace and
stability” they began to murmur. They even made threats of open revolt.
But what could they do? They were powerless. They were at the mercy of the
most pitiless and efficient police system the world had ever seen.
The members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sincerely believed that
“the Revolutionary Principle had led to the criminal usurpation of the
throne by the former emperor Napoleon.” They felt that they were called
upon to eradicate the adherents of the so-called “French ideas” just as
Philip II had only followed the voice of his conscience when he burned
Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the sixteenth century a
man who did not believe in the divine right of the Pope to rule his
subjects as he saw fit was a “heretic” and it was the duty of all loyal
citizens to kill him. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the
continent of Europe, a man who did not believe in the divine right of his
king to rule him as he or his Prime Minister saw fit, was a “heretic,” and
it was the duty of all loyal citizens to denounce him to the nearest
policeman and see that he got punished.
But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school of
Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had been done
in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was
the great era of the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in
palaces and they were to be found in the lowest gin-shops. They peeped
through the key-holes of the ministerial cabinet and they listened to the
conversations of the people who were taking the air on the benches of the
Municipal Park. They guarded the frontier so that no one might leave
without a duly viseed passport and they inspected all packages, that no
books with dangerous “French ideas” should enter the realm of their Royal
masters. They sat among the students in the lecture hall and woe to the
Professor who uttered a word against the existing order of things. They
followed the little boys and girls on their way to church lest they play
hookey.
In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. The church had
suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church property
had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the generation
that had learned its cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the other
French philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason when the
Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in October of
the year 1793. The priests had followed the “emigres” into their long
exile. Now they returned in the wake of the allied armies and they set to
work with a vengeance.
Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours of
educating the young. Their order had been a little too successful in its
fight against the enemies of the church. It had established “provinces” in
every part of the world, to teach the natives the blessings of
Christianity, but soon it had developed into a regular trading company
which was for ever interfering with the civil authorities. During the
reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great reforming minister of Portugal,
they had been driven out of the Portuguese lands and in the year 1773 at
the request of most of the Catholic powers of Europe, the order had been
suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. Now they were back on the job, and
preached the principles of “obedience” and “love for the legitimate
dynasty” to children whose parents had hired shopwindows that they might
laugh at Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold which was to end her
misery.
But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were not a whit
better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, the poets and the
writers who had preached a holy war upon the usurper, were now branded as
dangerous “demagogues.” Their houses were searched. Their letters were
read. They were obliged to report to the police at regular intervals and
give an account of themselves. The Prussian drill master was let loose in
all his fury upon the younger generation. When a party of students
celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with noisy but harmless
festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prussian bureaucrats had visions of
an imminent revolution. When a theological student, more honest than
intelligent, killed a Russian government spy who was operating in Germany,
the universities were placed under police-supervision and professors were
jailed or dismissed without any form of trial.
Russia, of course, was even more absurd in these anti-revolutionary
activities. Alexander had recovered from his attack of piety. He was
gradually drifting toward melancholia. He well knew his own limited
abilities and understood how at Vienna he had been the victim both of
Metternich and the Krudener woman. More and more he turned his back upon
the west and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in
Constantinople, the old holy city that had been the first teacher of the
Slavs. The older he grew, the harder he worked and the less he was able to
accomplish. And while he sat in his study, his ministers turned the whole
of Russia into a land of military barracks.
It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened this
description of the Great Reaction. But it is just as well that you should
have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was not the first time that an
attempt had been made to set the clock of history back. The result was the
usual one.
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE
THE LOVE OF NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, HOWEVER WAS TOO STRONG TO BE DESTROYED
IN THIS WAY. THE SOUTH AMERICANS WERE THE FIRST TO REBEL AGAINST THE
REACTIONARY MEASURES OF THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA, GREECE AND BELGIUM AND
SPAIN AND A LARGE NUMBER OF OTHER COUNTRIES OF THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT
FOLLOWED SUIT AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS FILLED WITH THE RUMOUR OF
MANY WARS OF INDEPENDENCE
IT will serve no good purpose to say “if only the Congress of Vienna had
done such and such a thing instead of taking such and such a course, the
history of Europe in the nineteenth century would have been different.”
The Congress of Vienna was a gathering of men who had just passed through
a great revolution and through twenty years of terrible and almost
continuous warfare. They came together for the purpose of giving Europe
that “peace and stability” which they thought that the people needed and
wanted. They were what we call reactionaries. They sincerely believed in
the inability of the mass of the people to rule themselves. They
re-arranged the map of Europe in such a way as seemed to promise the
greatest possibility of a lasting success. They failed, but not through
any premeditated wickedness on their part. They were, for the greater
part, men of the old school who remembered the happier days of their quiet
youth and ardently wished a return of that blessed period. They failed to
recognise the strong hold which many of the revolutionary principles had
gained upon the people of the European continent. That was a misfortune
but hardly a sin. But one of the things which the French Revolution had
taught not only Europe but America as well, was the right of people to
their own “nationality.”
Napoleon, who respected nothing and nobody, was utterly ruthless in his
dealing with national and patriotic aspirations. But the early
revolutionary generals had proclaimed the new doctrine that “nationality
was not a matter of political frontiers or round skulls and broad noses,
but a matter of the heart and soul.” While they were teaching the French
children the greatness of the French nation, they encouraged Spaniards and
Hollanders and Italians to do the same thing. Soon these people, who all
shared Rousseau’s belief in the superior virtues of Original Man, began to
dig into their past and found, buried beneath the ruins of the feudal
system, the bones of the mighty races of which they supposed themselves
the feeble descendants.
The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of the great
historical discoveries. Everywhere historians were busy publishing
mediaeval charters and early mediaeval chronicles and in every country the
result was a new pride in the old fatherland. A great deal of this
sentiment was based upon the wrong interpretation of historical facts. But
in practical politics, it does not matter what is true, but everything
depends upon what the people believe to be true. And in most countries
both the kings and their subjects firmly believed in the glory and fame of
their ancestors.
The Congress of Vienna was not inclined to be sentimental. Their
Excellencies divided the map of Europe according to the best interests of
half a dozen dynasties and put “national aspirations” upon the Index, or
list of forbidden books, together with all other dangerous “French
doctrines.”
But history is no respecter of Congresses. For some reason or other (it
may be an historical law, which thus far has escaped the attention of the
scholars) “nations” seemed to be necessary for the orderly development of
human society and the attempt to stem this tide was quite as unsuccessful
as the Metternichian effort to prevent people from thinking.
Curiously enough the first trouble began in a very distant part of the
world, in South America. The Spanish colonies of that continent had been
enjoying a period of relative independence during the many years of the
great Napoleonic wars. They had even remained faithful to their king when
he was taken prisoner by the French Emperor and they had refused to
recognise Joseph Bonaparte, who had in the year 1808 been made King of
Spain by order of his brother.
Indeed, the only part of America to get very much upset by the Revolution
was the island of Haiti, the Espagnola of Columbus’ first trip. Here in
the year 1791 the French Convention, in a sudden outburst of love and
human brotherhood, had bestowed upon their black brethren all the
privileges hitherto enjoyed by their white masters. Just as suddenly they
had repented of this step, but the attempt to undo the original promise
led to many years of terrible warfare between General Leclerc, the
brother-in-law of Napoleon, and Toussaint l’Ouverture, the negro
chieftain. In the year 1801, Toussaint was asked to visit Leclerc and
discuss terms of peace. He received the solemn promise that he would not
be molested. He trusted his white adversaries, was put on board a ship and
shortly afterwards died in a French prison. But the negroes gained their
independence all the same and founded a Republic. Incidentally they were
of great help to the first great South American patriot in his efforts to
deliver his native country from the Spanish yoke.
Simon Bolivar, a native of Caracas in Venezuela, born in the year 1783,
had been educated in Spain, had visited Paris where he had seen the
Revolutionary government at work, had lived for a while in the United
States and had returned to his native land where the widespread discontent
against Spain, the mother country, was beginning to take a definite form.
In the year 1811, Venezuela declared its independence and Bolivar became
one of the revolutionary generals. Within two months, the rebels were
defeated and Bolivar fled.
For the next five years he was the leader of an apparently lost cause. He
sacrificed all his wealth and he would not have been able to begin his
final and successful expedition without the support of the President of
Haiti. Thereafter the revolt spread all over South America and soon it
appeared that Spain was not able to suppress the rebellion unaided. She
asked for the support of the Holy Alliance.
This step greatly worried England. The British shippers had succeeded the
Dutch as the Common Carriers of the world and they expected to reap heavy
profits from a declaration of independence on the part of all South
America. They had hopes that the United States of America would interfere
but the Senate had no such plans and in the House, too, there were many
voices which declared that Spain ought to be given a free hand.
Just then, there was a change of ministers in England. The Whigs went out
and the Tories came in. George Canning became secretary of State. He
dropped a hint that England would gladly back up the American government
with all the might of her fleet, if said government would declare its
disapproval of the plans of the Holy Alliance in regard to the rebellious
colonies of the southern continent. President Monroe thereupon, on the 2nd
of December of the year 1823, addressed Congress and stated that: “America
would consider any attempt on the part of the allied powers to extend
their system to any portion of this western hemisphere as dangerous to our
peace and safety,” and gave warning that “the American government would
consider such action on the part of the Holy Alliance as a manifestation
of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” Four weeks later,
the text of the “Monroe Doctrine” was printed in the English newspapers
and the members of the Holy Alliance were forced to make their choice.
Metternich hesitated. Personally he would have been willing to risk the
displeasure of the United States (which had allowed both its army and navy
to fall into neglect since the end of the Anglo-American war of the year
1812.) But Canning’s threatening attitude and trouble on the continent
forced him to be careful. The expedition never took place and South
America and Mexico gained their independence.
As for the troubles on the continent of Europe, they were coming fast and
furious. The Holy Alliance had sent French troops to Spain to act as
guardians of the peace in the year 1820. Austrian troops had been used for
a similar purpose in Italy when the “Carbonari” (the secret society of the
Charcoal Burners) were making propaganda for a united Italy and had caused
a rebellion against the unspeakable Ferdinand of Naples.
Bad news also came from Russia where the death of Alexander had been the
sign for a revolutionary outbreak in St. Petersburg, a short but bloody
upheaval, the so-called Dekaberist revolt (because it took place in
December,) which ended with the hanging of a large number of good patriots
who had been disgusted by the reaction of Alexander’s last years and had
tried to give Russia a constitutional form of government.
But worse was to follow. Metternich had tried to assure himself of the
continued support of the European courts by a series of conferences at
Aix-la-Chapelle at Troppau at Laibach and finally at Verona. The delegates
from the different powers duly travelled to these agreeable watering
places where the Austrian prime minister used to spend his summers. They
always promised to do their best to suppress revolt but they were none too
certain of their success. The spirit of the people was beginning to be
ugly and especially in France the position of the king was by no means
satisfactory.
The real trouble however began in the Balkans, the gateway to western
Europe through which the invaders of that continent had passed since the
beginning of time. The first outbreak was in Moldavia, the ancient Roman
province of Dacia which had been cut off from the Empire in the third
century. Since then, it had been a lost land, a sort of Atlantis, where
the people had continued to speak the old Roman tongue and still called
themselves Romans and their country Roumania. Here in the year 1821, a
young Greek, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, began a revolt against the Turks.
He told his followers that they could count upon the support of Russia.
But Metternich’s fast couriers were soon on their way to St Petersburg and
the Tsar, entirely persuaded by the Austrian arguments in favor of “peace
and stability,” refused to help. Ypsilanti was forced to flee to Austria
where he spent the next seven years in prison.
In the same year, 1821, trouble began in Greece. Since 1815 a secret
society of Greek patriots had been preparing the way for a revolt.
Suddenly they hoisted the flag of independence in the Morea (the ancient
Peloponnesus) and drove the Turkish garrisons away. The Turks answered in
the usual fashion. They took the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who
was regarded as their Pope both by the Greeks and by many Russians, and
they hanged him on Easter Sunday of the year 1821, together with a number
of his bishops. The Greeks came back with a massacre of all the
Mohammedans in Tripolitsa, the capital of the Morea and the Turks
retaliated by an attack upon the island of Chios, where they murdered
25,000 Christians and sold 45,000 others as slaves into Asia and Egypt.
Then the Greeks appealed to the European courts, but Metternich told them
in so many words that they could “stew in their own grease,” (I am not
trying to make a pun, but I am quoting His Serene Highness who informed
the Tsar that this “fire of revolt ought to burn itself out beyond the
pale of civilisation” and the frontiers were closed to those volunteers
who wished to go to the rescue of the patriotic Hellenes. Their cause
seemed lost. At the request of Turkey, an Egyptian army was landed in the
Morea and soon the Turkish flag was again flying from the Acropolis, the
ancient stronghold of Athens. The Egyptian army then pacified the country
“a la Turque,” and Metternich followed the proceedings with quiet
interest, awaiting the day when this “attempt against the peace of Europe”
should be a thing of the past.
Once more it was England which upset his plans. The greatest glory of
England does not lie in her vast colonial possessions, in her wealth or
her navy, but in the quiet heroism and independence of her average
citizen. The Englishman obeys the law because he knows that respect for
the rights of others marks the difference between a dog-kennel and
civilised society. But he does not recognize the right of others to
interfere with his freedom of thought. If his country does something which
he believes to be wrong, he gets up and says so and the government which
he attacks will respect him and will give him full protection against the
mob which to-day, as in the time of Socrates, often loves to destroy those
who surpass it in courage or intelligence. There never has been a good
cause, however unpopular or however distant, which has not counted a
number of Englishmen among its staunchest adherents. The mass of the
English people are not different from those in other lands. They stick to
the business at hand and have no time for unpractical “sporting ventures.”
But they rather admire their eccentric neighbour who drops everything to
go and fight for some obscure people in Asia or Africa and when he has
been killed they give him a fine public funeral and hold him up to their
children as an example of valor and chivalry.
Even the police spies of the Holy Alliance were powerless against this
national characteristic. In the year 1824, Lord Byron, a rich young
Englishman who wrote the poetry over which all Europe wept, hoisted the
sails of his yacht and started south to help the Greeks. Three months
later the news spread through Europe that their hero lay dead in
Missolonghi, the last of the Greek strongholds. His lonely death caught
the imagination of the people. In all countries, societies were formed to
help the Greeks. Lafayette, the grand old man of the American revolution,
pleaded their cause in France. The king of Bavaria sent hundreds of his
officers. Money and supplies poured in upon the starving men of
Missolonghi.
In England, George Canning, who had defeated the plans of the Holy
Alliance in South America, was now prime minis-ter. He saw his chance to
checkmate Metternich for a second time. The English and Russian fleets
were already in the Mediterranean. They were sent by governments which
dared no longer suppress the popular enthusiasm for the cause of the Greek
patriots. The French navy appeared because France, since the end of the
Crusades, had assumed the role of the defender of the Christian faith in
Mohammedan lands. On October 20 of the year 1827, the ships of the three
nations attacked the Turkish fleet in the bay of Navarino and destroyed
it. Rarely has the news of a battle been received with such general
rejoicing. The people of western Europe and Russia who enjoyed no freedom
at home consoled themselves by fighting an imaginary war of liberty on
behalf of the oppressed Greeks. In the year 1829 they had their reward.
Greece became an independent nation and the policy of reaction and
stability suffered its second great defeat.
It would be absurd were I to try, in this short volume, to give you a
detailed account of the struggle for national independence in all other
countries. There are a large number of excellent books devoted to such
subjects. I have described the struggle for the independence of Greece
because it was the first successful attack upon the bulwark of reaction
which the Congress of Vienna had erected to “maintain the stability of
Europe.” That mighty fortress of suppression still held out and Metternich
continued to be in command. But the end was near.
In France the Bourbons had established an almost unbearable rule of police
officials who were trying to undo the work of the French revolution, with
an absolute disregard of the regulations and laws of civilised warfare.
When Louis XVIII died in the year 1824, the people had enjoyed nine years
of “peace” which had proved even more unhappy than the ten years of war of
the Empire. Louis was succeeded by his brother, Charles X.
Louis had belonged to that famous Bourbon family which, although it never
learned anything, never forgot anything. The recollection of that morning
in the town of Hamm, when news had reached him of the decapitation of his
brother, remained a constant warning of what might happen to those kings
who did not read the signs of the times aright. Charles, on the other
hand, who had managed to run up private debts of fifty million francs
before he was twenty years of age, knew nothing, remembered nothing and
firmly intended to learn nothing. As soon as he had succeeded his brother,
he established a government “by priests, through priests and for priests,”
and while the Duke of Wellington, who made this remark, cannot be called a
violent liberal, Charles ruled in such a way that he disgusted even that
trusted friend of law and order. When he tried to suppress the newspapers
which dared to criticise his government, and dismissed the Parliament
because it supported the Press, his days were numbered.
On the night of the 27th of July of the year 1830, a revolution took place
in Paris. On the 30th of the same month, the king fled to the coast and
set sail for England. In this way the “famous farce of fifteen years” came
to an end and the Bourbons were at last removed from the throne of France.
They were too hopelessly incompetent. France then might have returned to a
Republican form of government, but such a step would not have been
tolerated by Metternich.
The situation was dangerous enough. The spark of rebellion had leaped
beyond the French frontier and had set fire to another powder house filled
with national grievances. The new kingdom of the Netherlands had not been
a success. The Belgian and the Dutch people had nothing in common and
their king, William of Orange (the descendant of an uncle of William the
Silent), while a hard worker and a good business man, was too much lacking
in tact and pliability to keep the peace among his uncongenial subjects.
Besides, the horde of priests which had descended upon France, had at once
found its way into Belgium and whatever Protestant William tried to do was
howled down by large crowds of excited citizens as a fresh attempt upon
the “freedom of the Catholic church.” On the 25th of August there was a
popular outbreak against the Dutch authorities in Brussels. Two months
later, the Belgians declared themselves independent and elected Leopold of
Coburg, the uncle of Queen Victoria of England, to the throne. That was an
excellent solution of the difficulty. The two countries, which never ought
to have been united, parted their ways and thereafter lived in peace and
harmony and behaved like decent neighbours.
News in those days when there were only a few short railroads, travelled
slowly, but when the success of the French and the Belgian revolutionists
became known in Poland there was an immediate clash between the Poles and
their Russian rulers which led to a year of terrible warfare and ended
with a complete victory for the Russians who “established order along the
banks of the Vistula” in the well-known Russian fashion Nicholas the
first, who had succeeded his brother Alexander in 1825, firmly believed in
the Divine Right of his own family, and the thousands of Polish refugees
who had found shelter in western Europe bore witness to the fact that the
principles of the Holy Alliance were still more than a hollow phrase in
Holy Russia.
In Italy too there was a moment of unrest. Marie Louise Duchess of Parma
and wife of the former Emperor Napoleon, whom she had deserted after the
defeat of Waterloo, was driven away from her country, and in the Papal
state the exasperated people tried to establish an independent Republic.
But the armies of Austria marched to Rome and soon every thing was as of
old. Metternich continued to reside at the Ball Platz, the home of the
foreign minister of the Habsburg dynasty, the police spies returned to
their job, and peace reigned supreme. Eighteen more years were to pass
before a second and more successful attempt could be made to deliver
Europe from the terrible inheritance of the Vienna Congress.
Again it was France, the revolutionary weather-cock of Europe, which gave
the signal of revolt. Charles X had been succeeded by Louis Philippe, the
son of that famous Duke of Orleans who had turned Jacobin, had voted for
the death of his cousin the king, and had played a role during the early
days of the revolution under the name of “Philippe Egalite” or “Equality
Philip.” Eventually he had been killed when Robespierre tried to purge the
nation of all “traitors,” (by which name he indicated those people who did
not share his own views) and his son had been forced to run away from the
revolutionary army. Young Louis Philippe thereupon had wandered far and
wide. He had taught school in Switzerland and had spent a couple of years
exploring the unknown “far west” of America. After the fall of Napoleon he
had returned to Paris. He was much more intelligent than his Bourbon
cousins. He was a simple man who went about in the public parks with a red
cotton umbrella under his arm, followed by a brood of children like any
good housefather. But France had outgrown the king business and Louis did
not know this until the morning of the 24th of February, of the year 1848,
when a crowd stormed the Tuilleries and drove his Majesty away and
proclaimed the Republic.
When the news of this event reached Vienna, Metternich expressed the
casual opinion that this was only a repetition of the year 1793 and that
the Allies would once more be obliged to march upon Paris and make an end
to this very unseemly democratic row. But two weeks later his own Austrian
capital was in open revolt. Metternich escaped from the mob through the
back door of his palace, and the Emperor Ferdinand was forced to give his
subjects a constitution which embodied most of the revolutionary
principles which his Prime Minister had tried to suppress for the last
thirty-three years.
This time all Europe felt the shock. Hungary declared itself independent,
and commenced a war against the Habsburgs under the leadership of Louis
Kossuth. The unequal struggle lasted more than a year. It was finally
suppressed by the armies of Tsar Nicholas who marched across the
Carpathian mountains and made Hungary once more safe for autocracy. The
Habsburgs thereupon established extraordinary court-martials and hanged
the greater part of the Hungarian patriots whom they had not been able to
defeat in open battle.
As for Italy, the island of Sicily declared itself independent from Naples
and drove its Bourbon king away. In the Papal states the prime minister,
Rossi, was murdered and the Pope was forced to flee. He returned the next
year at the head of a French army which remained in Rome to protect His
Holiness against his subjects until the year 1870. Then it was called back
to defend France against the Prussians, and Rome became the capital of
Italy. In the north, Milan and Venice rose against their Austrian masters.
They were supported by king Albert of Sardinia, but a strong Austrian army
under old Radetzky marched into the valley of the Po, defeated the
Sardinians near Custozza and Novara and forced Albert to abdicate in
favour of his son, Victor Emanuel, who a few years later was to be the
first king of a united Italy.
In Germany the unrest of the year 1848 took the form of a great national
demonstration in favour of political unity and a representative form of
government. In Bavaria, the king who had wasted his time and money upon an
Irish lady who posed as a Spanish dancer—(she was called Lola Montez
and lies buried in New York’s Potter’s Field)—was driven away by the
enraged students of the university. In Prussia, the king was forced to
stand with uncovered head before the coffins of those who had been killed
during the street fighting and to promise a constitutional form of
government. And in March of the year 1849, a German parliament, consisting
of 550 delegates from all parts of the country came together in Frankfort
and proposed that king Frederick William of Prussia should be the Emperor
of a United Germany.
Then, however, the tide began to turn. Incompetent Ferdinand had abdicated
in favour of his nephew Francis Joseph. The well-drilled Austrian army had
remained faithful to their war-lord. The hangman was given plenty of work
and the Habsburgs, after the nature of that strangely cat-like family,
once more landed upon their feet and rapidly strengthened their position
as the masters of eastern and western Europe. They played the game of
politics very adroitly and used the jealousies of the other German states
to prevent the elevation of the Prussian king to the Imperial dignity.
Their long train-ing in the art of suffering defeat had taught them the
value of patience. They knew how to wait. They bided their time and while
the liberals, utterly untrained in practical politics, talked and talked
and talked and got intoxicated by their own fine speeches, the Austrians
quietly gathered their forces, dismissed the Parliament of Frankfort and
re-established the old and impossible German confederation which the
Congress of Vienna had wished upon an unsuspecting world.
But among the men who had attended this strange Parliament of unpractical
enthusiasts, there was a Prussian country squire by the name of Bismarck,
who had made good use of his eyes and ears. He had a deep contempt for
oratory. He knew (what every man of action has always known) that nothing
is ever accomplished by talk. In his own way he was a sincere patriot. He
had been trained in the old school of diplomacy and he could outlie his
opponents just as he could outwalk them and outdrink them and outride
them.
Bismarck felt convinced that the loose confederation of little states must
be changed into a strong united country if it would hold its own against
the other European powers. Brought up amidst feudal ideas of loyalty, he
decided that the house of Hohenzollern, of which he was the most faithful
servant, should rule the new state, rather than the incompetent Habsburgs.
For this purpose he must first get rid of the Austrian influence, and he
began to make the necessary preparations for this painful operation.
Italy in the meantime had solved her own problem, and had rid herself of
her hated Austrian master. The unity of Italy was the work of three men,
Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi. Of these three, Cavour, the civil-engineer
with the short-sighted eyes and the steel-rimmed glasses, played the part
of the careful political pilot. Mazzini, who had spent most of his days in
different European garrets, hiding from the Austrian police, was the
public agitator, while Garibaldi, with his band of red-shirted
rough-riders, appealed to the popular imagination.
Mazzini and Garibaldi were both believers in the Republican form of
government. Cavour, however, was a monarchist, and the others who
recognised his superior ability in such matters of practical statecraft,
accepted his decision and sacrificed their own ambitions for the greater
good of their beloved Fatherland.
Cavour felt towards the House of Sardinia as Bismarck did towards the
Hohenzollern family. With infinite care and great shrewdness he set to
work to jockey the Sardinian King into a position from which His Majesty
would be able to assume the leadership of the entire Italian people. The
unsettled political conditions in the rest of Europe greatly helped him in
his plans and no country contributed more to the independence of Italy
than her old and trusted (and often distrusted) neighbour, France.
In that turbulent country, in November of the year 1852, the Republic had
come to a sudden but not unexpected end. Napoleon III the son of Louis
Bonaparte the former King of Holland, and the small nephew of a great
uncle, had re-established an Empire and had made himself Emperor “by the
Grace of God and the Will of the People.”
This young man, who had been educated in Germany and who mixed his French
with harsh Teutonic gutturals (just as the first Napoleon had always
spoken the language of his adopted country with a strong Italian accent)
was trying very hard to use the Napoleonic tradition for his own benefit.
But he had many enemies and did not feel very certain of his hold upon his
ready-made throne. He had gained the friendship of Queen Victoria but this
had not been a difficult task, as the good Queen was not particularly
brilliant and was very susceptible to flattery. As for the other European
sovereigns, they treated the French Emperor with insulting haughtiness and
sat up nights devising new ways in which they could show their upstart
“Good Brother” how sincerely they despised him.
Napoleon was obliged to find a way in which he could break this
opposition, either through love or through fear. He well knew the
fascination which the word “glory” still held for his subjects. Since he
was forced to gamble for his throne he decided to play the game of Empire
for high stakes. He used an attack of Russia upon Turkey as an excuse for
bringing about the Crimean war in which England and France combined
against the Tsar on behalf of the Sultan. It was a very costly and
exceedingly unprofitable enterprise. Neither France nor England nor Russia
reaped much glory.
But the Crimean war did one good thing. It gave Sardinia a chance to
volunteer on the winning side and when peace was declared it gave Cavour
the opportunity to lay claim to the gratitude of both England and France.
Having made use of the international situation to get Sardinia recognised
as one of the more important powers of Europe, the clever Italian then
provoked a war between Sardinia and Austria in June of the year 1859. He
assured himself of the support of Napoleon in exchange for the provinces
of Savoy and the city of Nice, which was really an Italian town. The
Franco-Italian armies defeated the Austrians at Magenta and Solferino, and
the former Austrian provinces and duchies were united into a single
Italian kingdom. Florence became the capital of this new Italy until the
year 1870 when the French recalled their troops from Home to defend France
against the Germans. As soon as they were gone, the Italian troops entered
the eternal city and the House of Sardinia took up its residence in the
old Palace of the Quirinal which an ancient Pope had built on the ruins of
the baths of the Emperor Constantine.
The Pope, however, moved across the river Tiber and hid behind the walls
of the Vatican, which had been the home of many of his predecessors since
their return from the exile of Avignon in the year 1377. He protested
loudly against this high-handed theft of his domains and addressed letters
of appeal to those faithful Catholics who were inclined to sympathise with
him in his loss. Their number, however, was small, and it has been
steadily decreasing. For, once delivered from the cares of state, the Pope
was able to devote all his time to questions of a spiritual nature.
Standing high above the petty quarrels of the European politicians, the
Papacy assumed a new dignity which proved of great benefit to the church
and made it an international power for social and religious progress which
has shown a much more intelligent appreciation of modern economic problems
than most Protestant sects.
In this way, the attempt of the Congress of Vienna to settle the Italian
question by making the peninsula an Austrian province was at last undone.
The German problem however remained as yet unsolved. It proved the most
difficult of all. The failure of the revolution of the year 1848 had led
to the wholesale migration of the more energetic and liberal elements
among the German people. These young fellows had moved to the United
States of America, to Brazil, to the new colonies in Asia and America.
Their work was continued in Germany but by a different sort of men.
In the new Diet which met at Frankfort, after the collapse of the German
Parliament and the failure of the Liberals to establish a united country,
the Kingdom of Prussia was represented by that same Otto von Bismarck from
whom we parted a few pages ago. Bismarck by now had managed to gain the
complete confidence of the king of Prussia. That was all he asked for. The
opinion of the Prussian parliament or of the Prussian people interested
him not at all. With his own eyes he had seen the defeat of the Liberals.
He knew that he would not be able to get rid of Austria without a war and
he began by strengthening the Prussian army. The Landtag, exasperated at
his high-handed methods, refused to give him the necessary credits.
Bismarck did not even bother to discuss the matter. He went ahead and
increased his army with the help of funds which the Prussian house of
Peers and the king placed at his disposal. Then he looked for a national
cause which could be used for the purpose of creating a great wave of
patriotism among all the German people.
In the north of Germany there were the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein
which ever since the middle ages had been a source of trouble. Both
countries were inhabited by a certain number of Danes and a certain number
of Germans, but although they were governed by the King of Denmark, they
were not an integral part of the Danish State and this led to endless
difficulties. Heaven forbid that I should revive this forgotten question
which now seems settled by the acts of the recent Congress of Versailles.
But the Germans in Holstein were very loud in their abuse of the Danes and
the Danes in Schleswig made a great ado of their Danishness, and all
Europe was discussing the problem and German Mannerchors and Turnvereins
listened to sentimental speeches about the “lost brethren” and the
different chancelleries were trying to discover what it was all about,
when Prussia mobilised her armies to “save the lost provinces.” As
Austria, the official head of the German Confederation, could not allow
Prussia to act alone in such an important matter, the Habsburg troops were
mobilised too and the combined armies of the two great powers crossed the
Danish frontiers and after a very brave resistance on the part of the
Danes, occupied the two duchies. The Danes appealed to Europe, but Europe
was otherwise engaged and the poor Danes were left to their fate.
Bismarck then prepared the scene for the second number upon his Imperial
programme. He used the division of the spoils to pick a quarrel with
Austria. The Habsburgs fell into the trap. The new Prussian army, the
creation of Bismarck and his faithful generals, invaded Bohemia and in
less than six weeks, the last of the Austrian troops had been destroyed at
Koniggratz and Sadowa and the road to Vienna lay open. But Bismarck did
not want to go too far. He knew that he would need a few friends in
Europe. He offered the defeated Habsburgs very decent terms of peace,
provided they would resign their chairmanship of the Confederation. He was
less merciful to many of the smaller German states who had taken the side
of the Austrians, and annexed them to Prussia. The greater part of the
northern states then formed a new organisation, the so-called North German
Confederacy, and victorious Prussia assumed the unofficial leadership of
the German people.
Europe stood aghast at the rapidity with which the work of consolidation
had been done. England was quite indifferent but France showed signs of
disapproval. Napoleon’s hold upon the French people was steadily
diminishing. The Crimean war had been costly and had accomplished nothing.
A second adventure in the year 1863, when a French army had tried to force
an Austrian Grand-Duke by the name of Maximilian upon the Mexican people
as their Emperor, had come to a disastrous end as soon as the American
Civil War had been won by the North. For the Government at Washington had
forced the French to withdraw their troops and this had given the Mexicans
a chance to clear their country of the enemy and shoot the unwelcome
Emperor.
It was necessary to give the Napoleonic throne a new coat of glory-paint.
Within a few years the North German Confederation would be a serious rival
of France. Napoleon decided that a war with Germany would be a good thing
for his dynasty. He looked for an excuse and Spain, the poor victim of
endless revolutions, gave him one.
Just then the Spanish throne happened to be vacant. It had been offered to
the Catholic branch of the house of Hohenzollern. The French government
had objected and the Hohenzollerns had politely refused to accept the
crown. But Napoleon, who was showing signs of illness, was very much under
the influence of his beautiful wife, Eugenie de Montijo, the daughter of a
Spanish gentleman and the grand-daughter of William Kirkpatrick, an
American consul at Malaga, where the grapes come from. Eugenie, although
shrewd enough, was as badly educated as most Spanish women of that day.
She was at the mercy of her spiritual advisers and these worthy gentlemen
felt no love for the Protestant King of Prussia. “Be bold,” was the advice
of the Empress to her husband, but she omitted to add the second half of
that famous Persian proverb which admonishes the hero to “be bold but not
too bold.” Napoleon, convinced of the strength of his army, addressed
himself to the king of Prussia and insisted that the king give him
assurances that “he would never permit another candidature of a
Hohenzollern prince to the Spanish crown.” As the Hohenzollerns had just
declined the honour, the demand was superfluous, and Bismarck so informed
the French government. But Napoleon was not satisfied.
It was the year 1870 and King William was taking the waters at Ems. There
one day he was approached by the French minister who tried to re-open the
discussion. The king answered very pleasantly that it was a fine day and
that the Spanish question was now closed and that nothing more remained to
be said upon the subject. As a matter of routine, a report of this
interview was telegraphed to Bismarck, who handled all foreign affairs.
Bismarck edited the dispatch for the benefit of the Prussian and French
press. Many people have called him names for doing this. Bismarck however
could plead the excuse that the doctoring of official news, since time
immemorial, had been one of the privileges of all civilised governments.
When the “edited” telegram was printed, the good people in Berlin felt
that their old and venerable king with his nice white whiskers had been
insulted by an arrogant little Frenchman and the equally good people of
Paris flew into a rage because their perfectly courteous minister had been
shown the door by a Royal Prussian flunkey.
And so they both went to war and in less than two months, Napoleon and the
greater part of his army were prisoners of the Germans. The Second Empire
had come to an end and the Third Republic was making ready to defend Paris
against the German invaders. Paris held out for five long months. Ten days
before the surrender of the city, in the nearby palace of Versailles,
built by that same King Louis XIV who had been such a dangerous enemy to
the Germans, the King of Prussia was publicly proclaimed German Emperor
and a loud booming of guns told the hungry Parisians that a new German
Empire had taken the place of the old harmless Confederation of Teutonic
states and stateless.
In this rough way, the German question was finally settled. By the end of
the year 1871, fifty-six years after the memorable gathering at Vienna,
the work of the Congress had been entirely undone. Metternich and
Alexander and Talleyrand had tried to give the people of Europe a lasting
peace. The methods they had employed had caused endless wars and
revolutions and the feeling of a common brotherhood of the eighteenth
century was followed by an era of exaggerated nationalism which has not
yet come to an end.
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE
BUT WHILE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE FIGHTING FOR THEIR NATIONAL
INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY LIVED HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED BY A
SERIES OF INVENTIONS, WHICH HAD MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM ENGINE OF THE
18TH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL AND EFFICIENT SLAVE OF MAN
THE greatest benefactor of the human race died more than half a million
years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low brow and sunken eyes, a
heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth. He would not have looked well in a
gathering of modern scientists, but they would have honoured him as their
master. For he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift up a
heavy boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our first
tools, and he did more than any human being who came after him to give man
his enormous advantage over the other animals with whom he shares this
planet.
Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use of a greater
number of tools. The first wheel (a round disc made out of an old tree)
created as much stir in the communities of 100,000 B.C. as the flying
machine did only a few years ago.
In Washington, the story is told of a director of the Patent Office who in
the early thirties of the last century suggested that the Patent Office be
abolished, because “everything that possibly could be invented had been
invented.” A similar feeling must have spread through the prehistoric
world when the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the people were able
to move from place to place without rowing or punting or pulling from the
shore.
Indeed one of the most interesting chapters of history is the effort of
man to let some one else or something else do his work for him, while he
enjoyed his leisure, sitting in the sun or painting pictures on rocks, or
training young wolves and little tigers to behave like peaceful domestic
animals.
Of course in the very olden days; it was always possible to enslave a
weaker neighbour and force him to do the unpleasant tasks of life. One of
the reasons why the Greeks and Romans, who were quite as intelligent as we
are, failed to devise more interesting machinery, was to be found in the
wide-spread existence of slavery. Why should a great mathematician waste
his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill the air with noise and
smoke when he could go to the marketplace and buy all the slaves he needed
at a very small expense?
And during the middle-ages, although slavery had been abolished and only a
mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds discouraged the idea of using
machinery because they thought this would throw a large number of their
brethren out of work. Besides, the Middle-Ages were not at all interested
in producing large quantities of goods. Their tailors and butchers and
carpenters worked for the immediate needs of the small community in which
they lived and had no desire to compete with their neighbours, or to
produce more than was strictly necessary.
During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church against
scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as rigidly as
before, a large number of men began to devote their lives to mathematics
and astronomy and physics and chemistry. Two years before the beginning of
the Thirty Years War, John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his little
book which described the new invention of logarithms. During the war
it-self, Gottfried Leibnitz of Leipzig had perfected the system of
infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the peace of Westphalia,
Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was born, and in that same
year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, died. Meanwhile the Thirty Years War
had destroyed the prosperity of central Europe and there was a sudden but
very general interest in “alchemy,” the strange pseudo-science of the
middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into gold. This
proved to be impossible but the alchemists in their laboratories stumbled
upon many new ideas and greatly helped the work of the chemists who were
their successors.
The work of all these men provided the world with a solid scientific
foundation upon which it was possible to build even the most complicated
of engines, and a number of practical men made good use of it. The
Middle-Ages had used wood for the few bits of necessary machinery. But
wood wore out easily. Iron was a much better material but iron was scarce
except in England. In England therefore most of the smelting was done. To
smelt iron, huge fires were needed. In the beginning, these fires had been
made of wood, but gradually the forests had been used up. Then “stone
coal” (the petrified trees of prehistoric times) was used. But coal as you
know has to be dug out of the ground and it has to be transported to the
smelting ovens and the mines have to be kept dry from the ever invading
waters.
These were two problems which had to be solved at once. For the time
being, horses could still be used to haul the coal-wagons, but the pumping
question demanded the application of special machinery. Several inventors
were busy trying to solve the difficulty. They all knew that steam would
have to be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam engine was very
old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century before Christ, has
described to us several bits of machinery which were driven by steam. The
people of the Renaissance had played with the notion of steam-driven war
chariots. The Marquis of Worcester, a contemporary of Newton, in his book
of inventions, tells of a steam engine. A little later, in the year 1698,
Thomas Savery of London applied for a patent for a pumping engine. At the
same time, a Hollander, Christian Huygens, was trying to perfect an engine
in which gun-powder was used to cause regular explosions in much the same
way as we use gasoline in our motors.
All over Europe, people were busy with the idea. Denis Papin, a Frenchman,
friend and assistant of Huygens, was making experiments with steam engines
in several countries. He invented a little wagon that was driven by steam,
and a paddle-wheel boat. But when he tried to take a trip in his vessel,
it was confiscated by the authorities on a complaint of the boatmen’s
union, who feared that such a craft would deprive them of their
livelihood. Papin finally died in London in great poverty, having wasted
all his money on his inventions. But at the time of his death, another
mechanical enthusiast, Thomas Newcomen, was working on the problem of a
new steam-pump. Fifty years later his engine was improved upon by James
Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year 1777, he gave the world the
first steam engine that proved of real practical value.
But during the centuries of experiments with a “heat-engine,” the
political world had greatly changed. The British people had succeeded the
Dutch as the common-carriers of the world’s trade. They had opened up new
colonies. They took the raw materials which the colonies produced to
England, and there they turned them into finished products, and then they
exported the finished goods to the four corners of the world. During the
seventeenth century, the people of Georgia and the Carolinas had begun to
grow a new shrub which gave a strange sort of woolly substance, the
so-called “cotton wool.” After this had been plucked, it was sent to
England and there the people of Lancastershire wove it into cloth. This
weaving was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen. Very soon a
number of improvements were made in the process of weaving. In the year
1730, John Kay invented the “fly shuttle.” In 1770, James Hargreaves got a
patent on his “spinning jenny.” Eli Whitney, an American, invented the
cotton-gin, which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had
previously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day. Finally
Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cartwright invented large
weaving machines, which were driven by water power. And then, in the
eighties of the eighteenth century, just when the Estates General of
France had begun those famous meetings which were to revolutionise the
political system of Europe, the engines of Watt were arranged in such a
way that they could drive the weaving machines of Arkwright, and this
created an economic and social revolution which has changed human
relationship in almost every part of the world.
As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the inventors
turned their attention to the problem of propelling boats and carts with
the help of a mechanical contrivance. Watt himself designed plans for a
“steam locomotive,” but ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year 1804,
a locomotive made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty tons at
Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district.
At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter by the name of
Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to convince Napoleon that with the use
of his submarine boat, the “Nautilus,” and his “steam-boat,” the French
might be able to destroy the naval supremacy of England.
Fulton’s idea of a steamboat was not original. He had undoubtedly copied
it from John Fitch, a mechanical genius of Connecticut whose cleverly
constructed steamer had first navigated the Delaware river as early as the
year 1787. But Napoleon and his scientific advisers did not believe in the
practical possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the
Scotch-built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the Seine, the
great Emperor neglected to avail himself of this formidable weapon which
might have given him his revenge for Trafalgar.
As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being a practical man
of business, he organised a successful steamboat company together with
Robert R. Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was
American Minister to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying to sell his
invention. The first steamer of this new company, the “Clermont,” which
was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York State, equipped with an
engine built by Boulton and Watt of Birmingham in England, began a regular
service between New York and Albany in the year 1807.
As for poor John Fitch, the man who long before any one else had used the
“steam-boat” for commercial purposes, he came to a sad death. Broken in
health and empty of purse, he had come to the end of his resources when
his fifth boat, which was propelled by means of a screw-propeller, had
been destroyed. His neighbours jeered at him as they were to laugh a
hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his funny flying
machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country an easy access to the broad
rivers of the west and his countrymen preferred to travel in flat-boats or
go on foot. In the year 1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed
himself by taking poison.
But twenty years later, the “Savannah,” a steamer of 1850 tons and making
six knots an hour, (the Mauretania goes just four times as fast,) crossed
the ocean from Savannah to Liverpool in the record time of twenty-five
days. Then there was an end to the derision of the multitude and in their
enthusiasm the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man.
Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had been building
locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from the mine-pit to smelting
ovens and cotton factories, built his famous “travelling engine” which
reduced the price of coal by almost seventy per cent and which made it
possible to establish the first regular passenger service between
Manchester and Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at
the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years later, this
speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the present time,
any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant of the puny little
motor-driven machines of Daimler and Levassor of the eighties of the last
century) can do better than these early “Puffing Billies.”
But while these practically-minded engineers were improving upon their
rattling “heat engines,” a group of “pure” scientists (men who devote
fourteen hours of each day to the study of those “theoretical” scientific
phenomena without which no mechanical progress would be possible) were
following a new scent which promised to lead them into the most secret and
hidden domains of Nature.
Two thousand years ago, a number of Greek and Roman philosophers (notably
Thales of Miletus and Pliny who was killed while trying to study the
eruption of Vesuvius of the year 79 when Pompeii and Herculaneum were
buried beneath the ashes) had noticed the strange antics of bits of straw
and of feather which were held near a piece of amber which was being
rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages had not been
interested in this mysterious “electric” power. But immediately after the
Renaissance, William Gilbert, the private physician of Queen Elizabeth,
wrote his famous treatise on the character and behaviour of Magnets.
During the Thirty Years War Otto von Guericke, the burgomaster of
Magdeburg and the inventor of the air-pump, constructed the first
electrical machine. During the next century a large number of scientists
devoted themselves to the study of electricity. Not less than three
professors invented the famous Leyden Jar in the year 1795. At the same
time, Benjamin Franklin, the most universal genius of America next to
Benjamin Thomson (who after his flight from New Hampshire on account of
his pro-British sympathies became known as Count Rumford) was devoting his
attention to this subject. He discovered that lightning and the electric
spark were manifestations of the same electric power and continued his
electric studies until the end of his busy and useful life. Then came
Volta with his famous “electric pile” and Galvani and Day and the Danish
professor Hans Christian Oersted and Ampere and Arago and Faraday, all of
them diligent searchers after the true nature of the electric forces.
They freely gave their discoveries to the world and Samuel Morse (who like
Fulton began his career as an artist) thought that he could use this new
electric current to transmit messages from one city to another. He
intended to use copper wire and a little machine which he had invented.
People laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance his own
experiments and soon he had spent all his money and then he was very poor
and people laughed even louder. He then asked Congress to help him and a
special Committee on Commerce promised him their support. But the members
of Congress were not at all interested and Morse had to wait twelve years
before he was given a small congressional appropriation. He then built a
“telegraph” between Baltimore and Washington. In the year 1887 he had
shown his first successful “telegraph” in one of the lecture halls of New
York University. Finally, on the 24th of May of the year 1844 the first
long-distance message was sent from Washington to Baltimore and to-day the
whole world is covered with telegraph wires and we can send news from
Europe to Asia in a few seconds. Twenty-three years later Alexander Graham
Bell used the electric current for his telephone. And half a century
afterwards Marconi improved upon these ideas by inventing a system of
sending messages which did away entirely with the old-fashioned wires.
While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his “telegraph,” Michael
Faraday, the Yorkshire-man, had constructed the first “dynamo.” This tiny
little machine was completed in the year 1881 when Europe was still
trembling as a result of the great July revolutions which had so severely
upset the plans of the Congress of Vienna. The first dynamo grew and grew
and grew and to-day it provides us with heat and with light (you know the
little incandescent bulbs which Edison, building upon French and English
experiments of the forties and fifties, first made in 1878) and with power
for all sorts of machines. If I am not mistaken the electric-engine will
soon entirely drive out the “heat engine” just as in the olden days the
more highly-organised prehistoric animals drove out their less efficient
neighbours.
Personally (but I know nothing about machinery) this will make me very
happy. For the electric engine which can be run by waterpower is a clean
and companionable servant of mankind but the “heat-engine,” the marvel of
the eighteenth century, is a noisy and dirty creature for ever filling the
world with ridiculous smoke-stacks and with dust and soot and asking that
it be fed with coal which has to be dug out of mines at great
inconvenience and risk to thousands of people.
And if I were a novelist and not a historian, who must stick to facts and
may not use his imagination, I would describe the happy day when the last
steam locomotive shall be taken to the Museum of Natural History to be
placed next to the skeleton of the Dynosaur and the Pteredactyl and the
other extinct creatures of a by-gone age.
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION
BUT THE NEW ENGINES WERE VERY EXPENSIVE AND ONLY PEOPLE OF WEALTH COULD
AFFORD THEM. THE OLD CARPENTER OR SHOEMAKER WHO HAD BEEN HIS OWN MASTER IN
HIS LITTLE WORKSHOP WAS OBLIGED TO HIRE HIMSELF OUT TO THE OWNERS OF THE
BIG MECHANICAL TOOLS, AND WHILE HE MADE MORE MONEY THAN BEFORE, HE LOST
HIS FORMER INDEPENDENCE AND HE DID NOT LIKE THAT
IN the olden days the work of the world had been done by independent
workmen who sat in their own little workshops in the front of their
houses, who owned their tools, who boxed the ears of their own apprentices
and who, within the limits prescribed by their guilds, conducted their
business as it pleased them. They lived simple lives, and were obliged to
work very long hours, but they were their own masters. If they got up and
saw that it was a fine day to go fishing, they went fishing and there was
no one to say “no.”
But the introduction of machinery changed this. A machine is really
nothing but a greatly enlarged tool. A railroad train which carries you at
the speed of a mile a minute is in reality a pair of very fast legs, and a
steam hammer which flattens heavy plates of iron is just a terrible big
fist, made of steel.
But whereas we can all afford a pair of good legs and a good strong fist,
a railroad train and a steam hammer and a cotton factory are very
expensive pieces of machinery and they are not owned by a single man, but
usually by a company of people who all contribute a certain sum and then
divide the profits of their railroad or cotton mill according to the
amount of money which they have invested.
Therefore, when machines had been improved until they were really
practicable and profitable, the builders of those large tools, the machine
manufacturers, began to look for customers who could afford to pay for
them in cash.
During the early middle ages, when land had been almost the only form of
wealth, the nobility were the only people who were considered wealthy. But
as I have told you in a previous chapter, the gold and silver which they
possessed was quite insignificant and they used the old system of barter,
exchanging cows for horses and eggs for honey. During the crusades, the
burghers of the cities had been able to gather riches from the reviving
trade between the east and the west, and they had been serious rivals of
the lords and the knights.
The French revolution had entirely destroyed the wealth of the nobility
and had enormously increased that of the middle class or “bourgeoisie.”
The years of unrest which followed the Great Revolution had offered many
middle-class people a chance to get more than their share of this world’s
goods. The estates of the church had been confiscated by the French
Convention and had been sold at auction. There had been a terrific amount
of graft. Land speculators had stolen thousands of square miles of
valuable land, and during the Napoleonic wars, they had used their capital
to “profiteer” in grain and gun-powder, and now they possessed more wealth
than they needed for the actual expenses of their households, and they
could afford to build themselves factories and to hire men and women to
work the machines.
This caused a very abrupt change in the lives of hundreds of thousands of
people. Within a few years, many cities doubled the number of their
inhabitants and the old civic centre which had been the real “home” of the
citizens was surrounded with ugly and cheaply built suburbs where the
workmen slept after their eleven or twelve hours, or thirteen hours, spent
in the factories and from where they returned to the factory as soon as
the whistle blew.
Far and wide through the countryside there was talk of the fabulous sums
of money that could be made in the towns. The peasant boy, accustomed to a
life in the open, went to the city. He rapidly lost his old health amidst
the smoke and dust and dirt of those early and badly ventilated workshops,
and the end, very often, was death in the poor-house or in the hospital.
Of course the change from the farm to the factory on the part of so many
people was not accomplished without a certain amount of opposition. Since
one engine could do as much work as a hundred men, the ninety-nine others
who were thrown out of employment did not like it. Frequently they
attacked the factory-buildings and set fire to the machines, but Insurance
Companies had been organised as early as the 17th century and as a rule
the owners were well protected against loss.
Soon, newer and better machines were installed, the factory was surrounded
with a high wall and then there was an end to the rioting. The ancient
guilds could not possibly survive in this new world of steam and iron.
They went out of existence and then the workmen tried to organise regular
labour unions. But the factory-owners, who through their wealth could
exercise great influence upon the politicians of the different countries,
went to the Legislature and had laws passed which forbade the forming of
such trade unions because they interfered with the “liberty of action” of
the working man.
Please do not think that the good members of Parliament who passed these
laws were wicked tyrants. They were the true sons of the revolutionary
period when everybody talked of “liberty” and when people often killed
their neighbours because they were not quite as liberty-loving as they
ought to have been. Since “liberty” was the foremost virtue of man, it was
not right that labour-unions should dictate to their members the hours
during which they could work and the wages which they must demand. The
workman must at all times, be “free to sell his services in the open
market,” and the employer must be equally “free” to conduct his business
as he saw fit. The days of the Mercantile System, when the state had
regulated the industrial life of the entire community, were coming to an
end. The new idea of “freedom” insisted that the state stand entirely
aside and let commerce take its course.
The last half of the 18th century had not merely been a time of
intellectual and political doubt, but the old economic ideas, too, had
been replaced by new ones which better suited the need of the hour.
Several years before the French revolution, Turgot, who had been one of
the unsuccessful ministers of finance of Louis XVI, had preached the novel
doctrine of “economic liberty.” Turgot lived in a country which had
suffered from too much red-tape, too many regulations, too many officials
trying to enforce too many laws. “Remove this official supervision,” he
wrote, “let the people do as they please, and everything will be all
right.” Soon his famous advice of “laissez faire” became the battle-cry
around which the economists of that period rallied.
At the same time in England, Adam Smith was working on his mighty volumes
on the “Wealth of Nations,” which made another plea for “liberty” and the
“natural rights of trade.” Thirty years later, after the fall of Napoleon,
when the reactionary powers of Europe had gained their victory at Vienna,
that same freedom which was denied to the people in their political
relations was forced upon them in their industrial life.
The general use of machinery, as I have said at the beginning of this
chapter, proved to be of great advantage to the state. Wealth increased
rapidly. The machine made it possible for a single country, like England,
to carry all the burdens of the great Napoleonic wars. The capitalists
(the people who provided the money with which machines were bought) reaped
enormous profits. They became ambitious and began to take an interest in
politics. They tried to compete with the landed aristocracy which still
exercised great influence upon the government of most European countries.
In England, where the members of Parliament were still elected according
to a Royal Decree of the year 1265, and where a large number of recently
created industrial centres were without representation, they brought about
the passing of the Reform Bill of the year 1882, which changed the
electoral system and gave the class of the factory-owners more influence
upon the legislative body. This however caused great discontent among the
millions of factory workers, who were left without any voice in the
government. They too began an agitation for the right to vote. They put
their demands down in a document which came to be known as the “People’s
Charter.” The debates about this charter grew more and more violent. They
had not yet come to an end when the revolutions of the year 1848 broke
out. Frightened by the threat of a new outbreak or Jacobinism and
violence, the English government placed the Duke of Wellington, who was
now in his eightieth year, at the head of the army, and called for
Volunteers. London was placed in a state of siege and preparations were
made to suppress the coming revolution.
But the Chartist movement killed itself through bad leadership and no acts
of violence took place. The new class of wealthy factory owners, (I
dislike the word “bourgeoisie” which has been used to death by the
apostles of a new social order,) slowly increased its hold upon the
government, and the conditions of industrial life in the large cities
continued to transform vast acres of pasture and wheat-land into dreary
slums, which guard the approach of every modern European town.
EMANCIPATION
THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION OF MACHINERY DID NOT BRING ABOUT THE ERA OF
HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY WHICH HAD BEEN PREDICTED BY THE GENERATION WHICH
SAW THE STAGE COACH REPLACED BY THE RAILROAD. SEVERAL REMEDIES WERE
SUGGESTED BUT NONE OF THESE QUITE SOLVED THE PROBLEM
IN the year 1831, just before the passing of the first Reform Bill Jeremy
Bentham, the great English student of legislative methods and the most
practical political reformer of that day, wrote to a friend: “The way to
be comfortable is to make others comfortable. The way to make others
comfortable is to appear to love them. The way to appear to love them is
to love them in reality.” Jeremy was an honest man. He said what he
believed to be true. His opinions were shared by thousands of his
countrymen. They felt responsible for the happiness of their less
fortunate neighbours and they tried their very best to help them. And
Heaven knows it was time that something be done!
The ideal of “economic freedom” (the “laissez faire” of Turgot) had been
necessary in the old society where mediaeval restrictions lamed all
industrial effort. But this “liberty of action” which had been the highest
law of the land had led to a terrible, yea, a frightful condition. The
hours in the fac-tory were limited only by the physical strength of the
workers. As long as a woman could sit before her loom, without fainting
from fatigue, she was supposed to work. Children of five and six were
taken to the cotton mills, to save them from the dangers of the street and
a life of idleness. A law had been passed which forced the children of
paupers to go to work or be punished by being chained to their machines.
In return for their services they got enough bad food to keep them alive
and a sort of pigsty in which they could rest at night. Often they were so
tired that they fell asleep at their job. To keep them awake a foreman
with a whip made the rounds and beat them on the knuckles when it was
necessary to bring them back to their duties. Of course, under these
circumstances thousands of little children died. This was regrettable and
the employers, who after all were human beings and not without a heart,
sincerely wished that they could abolish “child labour.” But since man was
“free” it followed that children were “free” too. Besides, if Mr. Jones
had tried to work his factory without the use of children of five and six,
his rival, Mr. Stone, would have hired an extra supply of little boys and
Jones would have been forced into bankruptcy. It was therefore impossible
for Jones to do without child labour until such time as an act of
Parliament should forbid it for all employers.
But as Parliament was no longer dominated by the old landed aristocracy
(which had despised the upstart factory-owners with their money bags and
had treated them with open contempt), but was under control of the
representatives from the industrial centres, and as long as the law did
not allow workmen to combine in labour-unions, very little was
accomplished. Of course the intelligent and decent people of that time
were not blind to these terrible conditions. They were just helpless.
Machinery had conquered the world by surprise and it took a great many
years and the efforts of thousands of noble men and women to make the
machine what it ought to be, man’s servant, and not his master.
Curiously enough, the first attack upon the outrageous system of
employment which was then common in all parts of the world, was made on
behalf of the black slaves of Africa and America. Slavery had been
introduced into the American continent by the Spaniards. They had tried to
use the Indians as labourers in the fields and in the mines, but the
Indians, when taken away from a life in the open, had lain down and died
and to save them from extinction a kind-hearted priest had suggested that
negroes be brought from Africa to do the work. The negroes were strong and
could stand rough treatment. Besides, association with the white man would
give them a chance to learn Christianity and in this way, they would be
able to save their souls, and so from every possible point of view, it
would be an excellent arrangement both for the kindly white man and for
his ignorant black brother. But with the introduction of machinery there
had been a greater demand for cotton and the negroes were forced to work
harder than ever before, and they too, like the Indians, began to die
under the treatment which they received at the hands of the overseers.
Stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to Europe and in
all countries men and women began to agitate for the abolition of slavery.
In England, William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, (the father of the
great historian whose history of England you must read if you want to know
how wonderfully interesting a history-book can be,) organised a society
for the suppression of slavery. First of all they got a law passed which
made “slave trading” illegal. And after the year 1840 there was not a
single slave in any of the British colonies. The revolution of 1848 put an
end to slavery in the French possessions. The Portuguese passed a law in
the year 1858 which promised all slaves their liberty in twenty years from
date. The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863 and in the same year Tsar
Alexander II returned to his serfs that liberty which had been taken away
from them more than two centuries before.
In the United States of America the question led to grave difficulties and
a prolonged war. Although the Declaration of Independence had laid down
the principle that “all men were created free and equal,” an exception had
been made for those men and women whose skins were dark and who worked on
the plantations of the southern states. As time went on, the dislike of
the people of the North for the institution of slavery increased and they
made no secret of their feelings. The southerners however claimed that
they could not grow their cotton without slave-labour, and for almost
fifty years a mighty debate raged in both the Congress and the Senate.
The North remained obdurate and the South would not give in. When it
appeared impossible to reach a compromise, the southern states threatened
to leave the Union. It was a most dangerous point in the history of the
Union. Many things “might” have happened. That they did not happen was the
work of a very great and very good man.
On the sixth of November of the year 1860, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois
lawyer, and a man who had made his own intellectual fortune, had been
elected president by the Republicans who were very strong in the
anti-slavery states. He knew the evils of human bondage at first hand and
his shrewd common-sense told him that there was no room on the northern
continent for two rival nations. When a number of southern states seceded
and formed the “Confederate States of America,” Lincoln accepted the
challenge. The Northern states were called upon for volunteers. Hundreds
of thousands of young men responded with eager enthusiasm and there
followed four years of bitter civil war. The South, better prepared and
following the brilliant leadership of Lee and Jackson, repeatedly defeated
the armies of the North. Then the economic strength of New England and the
West began to tell. An unknown officer by the name of Grant arose from
obscurity and became the Charles Martel of the great slave war. Without
interruption he hammered his mighty blows upon the crumbling defences of
the South. Early in the year 1863, President Lincoln issued his
“Emancipation Proclamation” which set all slaves free. In April of the
year 1865 Lee surrendered the last of his brave armies at Appomattox. A
few days later, President Lincoln was murdered by a lunatic. But his work
was done. With the exception of Cuba which was still under Spanish
domination, slavery had come to an end in every part of the civilised
world.
But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount of liberty, the
“free” workmen of Europe did not fare quite so well. Indeed, it is a
matter of surprise to many contemporary writers and observers that the
masses of workmen (the so-called proletariat) did not die out from sheer
misery. They lived in dirty houses situated in miserable parts of the
slums. They ate bad food. They received just enough schooling to fit them
for their tasks. In case of death or an accident, their families were not
provided for. But the brewery and distillery interests, (who could
exercise great influence upon the Legislature,) encouraged them to forget
their woes by offering them unlimited quantities of whisky and gin at very
cheap rates.
The enormous improvement which has taken place since the thirties and the
forties of the last century is not due to the efforts of a single man. The
best brains of two generations devoted themselves to the task of saving
the world from the disastrous results of the all-too-sudden introduction
of machinery. They did not try to destroy the capitalistic system. This
would have been very foolish, for the accumulated wealth of other people,
when intelligently used, may be of very great benefit to all mankind. But
they tried to combat the notion that true equality can exist between the
man who has wealth and owns the factories and can close their doors at
will without the risk of going hungry, and the labourer who must take
whatever job is offered, at whatever wage he can get, or face the risk of
starvation for himself, his wife and his children.
They endeavoured to introduce a number of laws which regulated the
relations between the factory owners and the factory workers. In this, the
reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries. To-day, the
majority of the labourers are well protected; their hours are being
reduced to the excellent average of eight, and their children are sent to
the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the carding-room of the
cotton mills.
But there were other men who also contemplated the sight of all the
belching smoke-stacks, who heard the rattle of the railroad trains, who
saw the store-houses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials, and
who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity would lead in
the years to come. They remembered that the human race had lived for
hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and industrial
competition. Could they change the existing order of things and do away
with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human happiness to
profits?
This idea—this vague hope for a better day—was not restricted
to a single country. In England, Robert Owen, the owner of many cotton
mills, established a so-called “socialistic community” which was a
success. But when he died, the prosperity of New Lanark came to an end and
an attempt of Louis Blanc, a French journalist, to establish “social
workshops” all over France fared no better. Indeed, the increasing number
of socialistic writers soon began to see that little individual
communities which remained outside of the regular industrial life, would
never be able to accomplish anything at all. It was necessary to study the
fundamental principles underlying the whole industrial and capitalistic
society before useful remedies could be suggested.
The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc and Francois
Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of these two, Marx is the best known. He was a
very brilliant Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany. He
had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to interest
himself in questions of labour and wages and unemployment. But his liberal
views made him very unpopular with the police authorities of Germany, and
he was forced to flee to Brussels and then to London, where he lived a
poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the New York Tribune.
No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on economic
subjects. But in the year 1864 he organised the first international
association of working men and three years later in 1867, he published the
first volume of his well-known treatise called “Capital.” Marx believed
that all history was a long struggle between those who “have” and those
who “don’t have.” The introduction and general use of machinery had
created a new class in society, that of the capitalists who used their
surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used by the labourers to
produce still more wealth, which was again used to build more factories
and so on, until the end of time. Meanwhile, according to Marx, the third
estate (the bourgeoisie) was growing richer and richer and the fourth
estate (the proletariat) was growing poorer and poorer, and he predicted
that in the end, one man would possess all the wealth of the world while
the others would be his employees and dependent upon his good will.
To prevent such a state of affairs, Marx advised working men of all
countries to unite and to fight for a number of political and economic
measures which he had enumerated in a Manifesto in the year 1848, the year
of the last great European revolution.
These views of course were very unpopular with the governments of Europe,
many countries, especially Prussia, passed severe laws against the
Socialists and policemen were ordered to break up the Socialist meetings
and to arrest the speakers. But that sort of persecution never does any
good. Martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an unpopular cause.
In Europe the number of socialists steadily increased and it was soon
clear that the Socialists did not contemplate a violent revolution but
were using their increasing power in the different Parliaments to promote
the interests of the labouring classes. Socialists were even called upon
to act as Cabinet Ministers, and they co-operated with progressive
Catholics and Protestants to undo the damage that had been caused by the
Industrial Revolution and to bring about a fairer division of the many
benefits which had followed the introduction of machinery and the
increased production of wealth.
THE AGE OF SCIENCE
BUT THE WORLD HAD UNDERGONE ANOTHER CHANGE WHICH WAS OF GREATER IMPORTANCE
THAN EITHER THE POLITICAL OR THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS. AFTER GENERATIONS
OF OPPRESSION AND PERSECUTION, THE SCIENTIST HAD AT LAST GAINED LIBERTY OF
ACTION AND HE WAS NOW TRYING TO DISCOVER THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS WHICH GOVERN
THE UNIVERSE
THE Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Greeks and the Romans,
had all contributed something to the first vague notions of science and
scientific investigation. But the great migrations of the fourth century
had destroyed the classical world of the Mediterranean, and the Christian
Church, which was more interested in the life of the soul than in the life
of the body, had regarded science as a manifestation of that human
arrogance which wanted to pry into divine affairs which belonged to the
realm of Almighty God, and which therefore was closely related to the
seven deadly sins.
The Renaissance to a certain but limited extent had broken through this
wall of Mediaeval prejudices. The Reformation, however, which had
overtaken the Renaissance in the early 16th century, had been hostile to
the ideals of the “new civilisation,” and once more the men of science
were threatened with severe punishment, should they try to pass beyond the
narrow limits of knowledge which had been laid down in Holy Writ.
Our world is filled with the statues of great generals, atop of prancing
horses, leading their cheering soldiers to glorious victory. Here and
there, a modest slab of marble announces that a man of science has found
his final resting place. A thousand years from now we shall probably do
these things differently, and the children of that happy generation shall
know of the splendid courage and the almost inconceivable devotion to duty
of the men who were the pioneers of that abstract knowledge, which alone
has made our modern world a practical possibility.
Many of these scientific pioneers suffered poverty and contempt and
humiliation. They lived in garrets and died in dungeons. They dared not
print their names on the title-pages of their books and they dared not
print their conclusions in the land of their birth, but smuggled the
manuscripts to some secret printing shop in Amsterdam or Haarlem. They
were exposed to the bitter enmity of the Church, both Protestant and
Catholic, and were the subjects of endless sermons, inciting the
parishioners to violence against the “heretics.”
Here and there they found an asylum. In Holland, where the spirit of
tolerance was strongest, the authorities, while regarding these scientific
investigations with little favour, yet refused to interfere with people’s
freedom of thought. It became a little asylum for intellectual liberty
where French and English and German philosophers and mathematicians and
physicians could go to enjoy a short spell of rest and get a breath of
free air.
In another chapter I have told you how Roger Bacon, the great genius of
the thirteenth century, was prevented for years from writing a single
word, lest he get into new troubles with the authorities of the church.
And five hundred years later, the contributors to the great philosophic
“Encyclopaedia” were under the constant supervision of the French
gendarmerie. Half a century afterwards, Darwin, who dared to question the
story of the creation of man, as revealed in the Bible, was denounced from
every pulpit as an enemy of the human race.
Even to-day, the persecution of those who venture into the unknown realm
of science has not entirely come to an end. And while I am writing this
Mr. Bryan is addressing a vast multitude on the “Menace of Darwinism,”
warning his hearers against the errors of the great English naturalist.
All this, however, is a mere detail. The work that has to be done
invariably gets done, and the ultimate profit of the discoveries and the
inventions goes to the mass of those same people who have always decried
the man of vision as an unpractical idealist.
The seventeenth century had still preferred to investigate the far off
heavens and to study the position of our planet in relation to the solar
system. Even so, the Church had disapproved of this unseemly curiosity,
and Copernicus who first of all had proved that the sun was the centre of
the universe, did not publish his work until the day of his death. Galileo
spent the greater part of his life under the supervision of the clerical
authorities, but he continued to use his telescope and provided Isaac
Newton with a mass of practical observations, which greatly helped the
English mathematician when he dis-covered the existence of that
interesting habit of falling objects which came to be known as the Law of
Gravitation.
That, for the moment at least, exhausted the interest in the Heavens, and
man began to study the earth. The invention of a workable microscope, (a
strange and clumsy little thing,) by Anthony van Leeuwenhoek during the
last half of the 17th century, gave man a chance to study the
“microscopic” creatures who are responsible for so many of his ailments.
It laid the foundations of the science of “bacteriology” which in the last
forty years has delivered the world from a great number of diseases by
discovering the tiny organisms which cause the complaint. It also allowed
the geologists to make a more careful study of different rocks and of the
fossils (the petrified prehistoric plants) which they found deep below the
surface of the earth. These investigations convinced them that the earth
must be a great deal older than was stated in the book of Genesis and in
the year 1830, Sir Charles Lyell published his “Principles of Geology”
which denied the story of creation as related in the Bible and gave a far
more wonderful description of slow growth and gradual development.
At the same time, the Marquis de Laplace was working on a new theory of
creation, which made the earth a little blotch in the nebulous sea out of
which the planetary system had been formed and Bunsen and Kirchhoff, by
the use of the spectroscope, were investigating the chemical composition
of the stars and of our good neighbour, the sun, whose curious spots had
first been noticed by Galileo.
Meanwhile after a most bitter and relentless warfare with the clerical
authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and
physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to
substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the
guesswork of the mediaeval quack.
Within a single generation (between 1810 and 1840) more progress was made
in every branch of science than in all the hundreds of thousands of years
that had passed since man first looked at the stars and wondered why they
were there. It must have been a very sad age for the people who had been
educated under the old system. And we can understand their feeling of
hatred for such men as Lamarck and Darwin, who did not exactly tell them
that they were “descended from monkeys,” (an accusation which our
grandfathers seemed to regard as a personal insult,) but who suggested
that the proud human race had evolved from a long series of ancestors who
could trace the family-tree back to the little jelly-fishes who were the
first inhabitants of our planet.
The dignified world of the well-to-do middle class, which dominated the
nineteenth century, was willing to make use of the gas or the electric
light, of all the many practical applications of the great scientific
discoveries, but the mere investigator, the man of the “scientific theory”
without whom no progress would be possible, continued to be distrusted
until very recently. Then, at last, his services were recognised. Today
the rich people who in past ages donated their wealth for the building of
a cathedral, construct vast laboratories where silent men do battle upon
the hidden enemies of mankind and often sacrifice their lives that coming
generations may enjoy greater happiness and health.
Indeed it has come to pass that many of the ills of this world, which our
ancestors regarded as inevitable “acts of God,” have been exposed as
manifestations of our own ignorance and neglect. Every child nowadays
knows that he can keep from getting typhoid fever by a little care in the
choice of his drinking water. But it took years and years of hard work
before the doctors could convince the people of this fact. Few of us now
fear the dentist chair. A study of the microbes that live in our mouth has
made it possible to keep our teeth from decay. Must perchance a tooth be
pulled, then we take a sniff of gas, and go our way rejoicing. When the
newspapers of the year 1846 brought the story of the “painless operation”
which had been performed in America with the help of ether, the good
people of Europe shook their heads. To them it seemed against the will of
God that man should escape the pain which was the share of all mortals,
and it took a long time before the practice of taking ether and chloroform
for operations became general.
But the battle of progress had been won. The breach in the old walls of
prejudice was growing larger and larger, and as time went by, the ancient
stones of ignorance came crumbling down. The eager crusaders of a new and
happier social order rushed forward. Suddenly they found themselves facing
a new obstacle. Out of the ruins of a long-gone past, another citadel of
reaction had been erected, and millions of men had to give their lives
before this last bulwark was destroyed.
ART
A CHAPTER OF ART
WHEN a baby is perfectly healthy and has had enough to eat and has slept
all it wants, then it hums a little tune to show how happy it is. To
grown-ups this humming means nothing. It sounds like “goo-zum, goo-zum,
goo-o-o-o-o,” but to the baby it is perfect music. It is his first
contribution to art.
As soon as he (or she) gets a little older and is able to sit up, the
period of mud-pie making begins. These mud-pies do not interest the
outside world. There are too many million babies, making too many million
mud-pies at the same time. But to the small infant they represent another
expedition into the pleasant realm of art. The baby is now a sculptor.
At the age of three or four, when the hands begin to obey the brain, the
child becomes a painter. His fond mother gives him a box of coloured
chalks and every loose bit of paper is rapidly covered with strange
pothooks and scrawls which represent houses and horses and terrible naval
battles.
Soon however this happiness of just “making things” comes to an end.
School begins and the greater part of the day is filled up with work. The
business of living, or rather the business of “making a living,” becomes
the most important event in the life of every boy and girl. There is
little time left for “art” between learning the tables of multiplication
and the past participles of the irregular French verbs. And unless the
desire for making certain things for the mere pleasure of creating them
without any hope of a practical return be very strong, the child grows
into manhood and forgets that the first five years of his life were mainly
devoted to art.
Nations are not different from children. As soon as the cave-man had
escaped the threatening dangers of the long and shivering ice-period, and
had put his house in order, he began to make certain things which he
thought beautiful, although they were of no earthly use to him in his
fight with the wild animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his
grotto with pictures of the elephants and the deer which he hunted, and
out of a piece of stone, he hacked the rough figures of those women he
thought most attractive.
As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Persians and all the
other people of the east had founded their little countries along the Nile
and the Euphrates, they began to build magnificent palaces for their
kings, invented bright pieces of jewellery for their women and planted
gardens which sang happy songs of colour with their many bright flowers.
Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic prairies,
enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters, composed songs
which celebrated the mighty deeds of their great leaders and invented a
form of poetry which has survived until our own day. A thousand years
later, when they had established themselves on the Greek mainland, and had
built their “city-states,” they expressed their joy (and their sorrows) in
magnificent temples, in statues, in comedies and in tragedies, and in
every conceivable form of art.
The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy administering
other people and making money to have much love for “useless and
unprofitable” adventures of the spirit. They conquered the world and built
roads and bridges but they borrowed their art wholesale from the Greeks.
They invented certain practical forms of architecture which answered the
demands of their day and age. But their statues and their histories and
their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imitations of Greek
originals. Without that vague and hard-to-define something which the world
calls “personality,” there can be no art and the Roman world distrusted
that particular sort of personality. The Empire needed efficient soldiers
and tradesmen. The business of writing poetry or making pictures was left
to foreigners.
Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the proverbial bull in the
china-shop of western Europe. He had no use for what he did not
understand. Speaking in terms of the year 1921, he liked the magazine
covers of pretty ladies, but threw the Rembrandt etchings which he had
inherited into the ash-can. Soon he came to learn better. Then he tried to
undo the damage which he had created a few years before. But the ash-cans
were gone and so were the pictures.
But by this time, his own art, which he had brought with him from the
east, had developed into something very beautiful and he made up for his
past neglect and indifference by the so-called “art of the Middle Ages”
which as far as northern Europe is concerned was a product of the Germanic
mind and had borrowed but little from the Greeks and the Latins and
nothing at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and Assyria, not to
speak of India and China, which simply did not exist, as far as the people
of that time were concerned. Indeed, so little had the northern races been
influenced by their southern neighbours that their own architectural
products were completely misunderstood by the people of Italy and were
treated by them with downright and unmitigated contempt.
You have all heard the word Gothic. You probably associate it with the
picture of a lovely old cathedral, lifting its slender spires towards high
heaven. But what does the word really mean?
It means something “uncouth” and “barbaric”—something which one
might expect from an “uncivilised Goth,” a rough backwoods-man who had no
respect for the established rules of classical art and who built his
“modern horrors” to please his own low tastes without a decent regard for
the examples of the Forum and the Acropolis.
And yet for several centuries this form of Gothic architecture was the
highest expression of the sincere feeling for art which inspired the whole
northern continent. From a previous chapter, you will remember how the
people of the late Middle Ages lived. Unless they were peasants and dwelt
in villages, they were citizens of a “city” or “civitas,” the old Latin
name for a tribe. And indeed, behind their high walls and their deep
moats, these good burghers were true tribesmen who shared the common
dangers and enjoyed the common safety and prosperity which they derived
from their system of mutual protection.
In the old Greek and Roman cities the market-place, where the temple
stood, had been the centre of civic life. During the Middle Ages, the
Church, the House of God, became such a centre. We modern Protestant
people, who go to our church only once a week, and then for a few hours
only, hardly know what a mediaeval church meant to the community. Then,
before you were a week old, you were taken to the Church to be baptised.
As a child, you visited the Church to learn the holy stories of the
Scriptures. Later on you became a member of the congregation, and if you
were rich enough you built yourself a separate little chapel sacred to the
memory of the Patron Saint of your own family. As for the sacred edifice,
it was open at all hours of the day and many of the night. In a certain
sense it resembled a modern club, dedicated to all the inhabitants of the
town. In the church you very likely caught a first glimpse of the girl who
was to become your bride at a great ceremony before the High Altar. And
finally, when the end of the journey had come, you were buried beneath the
stones of this familiar building, that all your children and their
grandchildren might pass over your grave until the Day of Judgement.
Because the Church was not only the House of God but also the true centre
of all common life, the building had to be different from anything that
had ever been constructed by the hands of man. The temples of the
Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans had been merely the shrine of a
local divinity. As no sermons were preached before the images of Osiris or
Zeus or Jupiter, it was not necessary that the interior offer space for a
great multitude. All the religious processions of the old Mediterranean
peoples took place in the open. But in the north, where the weather was
usually bad, most functions were held under the roof of the church.
During many centuries the architects struggled with this problem of
constructing a building that was large enough. The Roman tradition taught
them how to build heavy stone walls with very small windows lest the walls
lose their strength. On the top of this they then placed a heavy stone
roof. But in the twelfth century, after the beginning of the Crusades,
when the architects had seen the pointed arches of the Mohammedan
builders, the western builders discovered a new style which gave them
their first chance to make the sort of building which those days of an
intense religious life demanded. And then they developed this strange
style upon which the Italians bestowed the contemptuous name of “Gothic”
or barbaric. They achieved their purpose by inventing a vaulted roof which
was supported by “ribs.” But such a roof, if it became too heavy, was apt
to break the walls, just as a man of three hundred pounds sitting down
upon a child’s chair will force it to collapse. To overcome this
difficulty, certain French architects then began to re-enforce the walls
with “buttresses” which were merely heavy masses of stone against which
the walls could lean while they supported the roof. And to assure the
further safety of the roof they supported the ribs of the roof by
so-called “flying buttresses,” a very simple method of construction which
you will understand at once when you look at our picture.
This new method of construction allowed the introduction of enormous
windows. In the twelfth century, glass was still an expensive curiosity,
and very few private buildings possessed glass windows. Even the castles
of the nobles were without protection and this accounts for the eternal
drafts and explains why people of that day wore furs in-doors as well as
out.
Fortunately, the art of making coloured glass, with which the ancient
people of the Mediterranean had been familiar, had not been entirely lost.
There was a revival of stained glass-making and soon the windows of the
Gothic churches told the stories of the Holy Book in little bits of
brilliantly coloured window-pane, which were caught in a long framework of
lead.
Behold, therefore, the new and glorious house of God, filled with an eager
multitude, “living” its religion as no people have ever done either before
or since! Nothing is considered too good or too costly or too wondrous for
this House of God and Home of Man. The sculptors, who since the
destruction of the Roman Empire have been out of employment, haltingly
return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and buttresses and cornices
are all covered with carven images of Our Lord and the blessed Saints. The
embroiderers too are set to work to make tapestries for the walls. The
jewellers offer their highest art that the shrine of the altar may be
worthy of complete adoration. Even the painter does his best. Poor man, he
is greatly handicapped by lack of a suitable medium.
And thereby hangs a story.
The Romans of the early Christian period had covered the floors and the
walls of their temples and houses with mosaics; pictures made of coloured
bits of glass. But this art had been exceedingly difficult. It gave the
painter no chance to express all he wanted to say, as all children know
who have ever tried to make figures out of coloured blocks of wood. The
art of mosaic painting therefore died out during the late Middle Ages
except in Russia, where the Byzantine mosaic painters had found a refuge
after the fall of Constantinople and continued to ornament the walls of
the orthodox churches until the day of the Bolsheviki, when there was an
end to the building of churches.
Of course, the mediaeval painter could mix his colours with the water of
the wet plaster which was put upon the walls of the churches. This method
of painting upon “fresh plaster” (which was generally called “fresco” or
“fresh” painting) was very popular for many centuries. To-day, it is as
rare as the art of painting miniatures in manuscripts and among the
hundreds of artists of our modern cities there is perhaps one who can
handle this medium successfully. But during the Middle Ages there was no
other way and the artists were “fresco” workers for lack of something
better. The method however had certain great disadvantages. Very often the
plaster came off the walls after only a few years, or dampness spoiled the
pictures, just as dampness will spoil the pattern of our wall paper.
People tried every imaginable expedient to get away from this plaster
background. They tried to mix their colours with wine and vinegar and with
honey and with the sticky white of egg, but none of these methods were
satisfactory. For more than a thousand years these experiments continued.
In painting pictures upon the parchment leaves of manuscripts the
mediaeval artists were very successful. But when it came to covering large
spaces of wood or stone with paint which would stick, they did not succeed
very well.
At last, during the first half of the fifteenth century, the problem was
solved in the southern Netherlands by Jan and Hubert van Eyck. The famous
Flemish brothers mixed their paint with specially prepared oils and this
allowed them to use wood and canvas or stone or anything else as a
background for their pictures.
But by this time the religious ardour of the early Middle Ages was a thing
of the past. The rich burghers of the cities were succeeding the bishops
as patrons of the arts. And as art invariably follows the full
dinner-pail, the artists now began to work for these worldly employers and
painted pictures for kings, for grand-dukes and for rich bankers. Within a
very short time, the new method of painting with oil spread through Europe
and in every country there developed a school of special painting which
showed the characteristic tastes of the people for whom these portraits
and landscapes were made.
In Spain, for example, Velasquez painted court-dwarfs and the weavers of
the royal tapestry-factories, and all sorts of persons and subjects
connected with the king and his court. But in Holland, Rembrandt and Frans
Hals and Vermeer painted the barnyard of the merchant’s house, and they
painted his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumptious children and
the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy on the other hand,
where the Pope remained the largest patron of the arts, Michelangelo and
Correggio continued to paint Madonnas and Saints, while in England, where
the aristocracy was very rich and powerful and in France where the kings
had become uppermost in the state, the artists painted distinguished
gentlemen who were members of the government, and very lovely ladies who
were friends of His Majesty.
The great change in painting, which came about with the neglect of the old
church and the rise of a new class in society, was reflected in all other
forms of art. The invention of printing had made it possible for authors
to win fame and reputation by writing books for the multitudes. In this
way arose the profession of the novelist and the illustrator. But the
people who had money enough to buy the new books were not the sort who
liked to sit at home of nights, looking at the ceiling or just sitting. They
wanted to be amused. The few minstrels of the Middle Ages were not
sufficient to cover the demand for entertainment. For the first time since
the early Greek city-states of two thousand years before, the professional
playwright had a chance to ply his trade. The Middle Ages had known the
theatre merely as part of certain church celebrations. The tragedies of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had told the story of the
suffering of our Lord. But during the sixteenth century the worldly
theatre made its reappearance. It is true that, at first, the position of
the professional playwright and actor was not a very high one. William
Shakespeare was regarded as a sort of circus-fellow who amused his
neighbours with his tragedies and comedies. But when he died in the year
1616 he had begun to enjoy the respect of his neighbours and actors were
no longer subjects of police supervision.
William’s contemporary, Lope de Vega, the incredible Spaniard who wrote no
less than 1800 worldly and 400 religious plays, was a person of rank who
received the papal approval upon his work. A century later, Moliere, the
Frenchman, was deemed worthy of the companionship of none less than King
Louis XIV.
Since then, the theatre has enjoyed an ever increasing affection on the
part of the people. To-day a “theatre” is part of every well-regulated
city, and the “silent drama” of the movies has penetrated to the tiniest
of our prairie hamlets.
Another art, however, was to become the most popular of all. That was
music. Most of the old art-forms demanded a great deal of technical skill.
It takes years and years of practice before our clumsy hand is able to
follow the commands of the brain and reproduce our vision upon canvas or
in marble. It takes a life-time to learn how to act or how to write a good
novel. And it takes a great deal of training on the part of the public to
appreciate the best in painting and writing and sculpture. But almost any
one, not entirely tone-deaf, can follow a tune and almost everybody can
get enjoyment out of some sort of music. The Middle Ages had heard a
little music but it had been entirely the music of the church. The holy
chants were subject to very severe laws of rhythm and harmony and soon
these became monotonous. Besides, they could not well be sung in the
street or in the market-place.
The Renaissance changed this. Music once more came into its own as the
best friend of man, both in his happiness and in his sorrows.
The Egyptians and the Babylonians and the ancient Jews had all been great
lovers of music. They had even combined different instruments into regular
orchestras. But the Greeks had frowned upon this barbaric foreign noise.
They liked to hear a man recite the stately poetry of Homer and Pindar.
They allowed him to accompany himself upon the lyre (the poorest of all
stringed instruments). That was as far as any one could go without
incurring the risk of popular disapproval. The Romans on the other hand
had loved orchestral music at their dinners and parties and they had
invented most of the instruments which (in VERY modified form) we use
to-day. The early church had despised this music which smacked too much of
the wicked pagan world which had just been destroyed. A few songs rendered
by the entire congregation were all the bishops of the third and fourth
centuries would tolerate. As the congregation was apt to sing dreadfully
out of key without the guidance of an instrument, the church had
afterwards allowed the use of an organ, an invention of the second century
of our era which consisted of a combination of the old pipes of Pan and a
pair of bellows.
Then came the great migrations. The last of the Roman musicians were
either killed or became tramp-fiddlers going from city to city and playing
in the street, and begging for pennies like the harpist on a modern
ferry-boat.
But the revival of a more worldly civilisation in the cities of the late
Middle Ages had created a new demand for musicians. Instruments like the
horn, which had been used only as signal-instruments for hunting and
fighting, were remodelled until they could reproduce sounds which were
agreeable in the dance-hall and in the banqueting room. A bow strung with
horse-hair was used to play the old-fashioned guitar and before the end of
the Middle Ages this six-stringed instrument (the most ancient of all
string-instruments which dates back to Egypt and Assyria) had grown into
our modern four-stringed fiddle which Stradivarius and the other Italian
violin-makers of the eighteenth century brought to the height of
perfection.
And finally the modern piano was invented, the most wide-spread of all
musical instruments, which has followed man into the wilderness of the
jungle and the ice-fields of Greenland. The organ had been the first of
all keyed instruments but the performer always depended upon the
co-operation of some one who worked the bellows, a job which nowadays is
done by electricity. The musicians therefore looked for a handier and less
circumstantial instrument to assist them in training the pupils of the
many church choirs. During the great eleventh century, Guido, a
Benedictine monk of the town of Arezzo (the birthplace of the poet
Petrarch) gave us our modern system of musical annotation. Some time
during that century, when there was a great deal of popular interest in
music, the first instrument with both keys and strings was built. It must
have sounded as tinkly as one of those tiny children’s pianos which you
can buy at every toy-shop. In the city of Vienna, the town where the
strolling musicians of the Middle Ages (who had been classed with jugglers
and card sharps) had formed the first separate Guild of Musicians in the
year 1288, the little monochord was developed into something which we can
recognise as the direct ancestor of our modern Steinway. From Austria the
“clavichord” as it was usually called in those days (because it had
“craves” or keys) went to Italy. There it was perfected into the “spinet”
which was so called after the inventor, Giovanni Spinetti of Venice. At
last during the eighteenth century, some time between 1709 and 1720,
Bartolomeo Cristofori made a “clavier” which allowed the performer to play
both loudly and softly or as it was said in Italian, “piano” and “forte.”
This instrument with certain changes became our “pianoforte” or piano.
Then for the first time the world possessed an easy and convenient
instrument which could be mastered in a couple of years and did not need
the eternal tuning of harps and fiddles and was much pleasanter to the
ears than the mediaeval tubas, clarinets, trombones and oboes. Just as the
phonograph has given millions of modern people their first love of music
so did the early “pianoforte” carry the knowledge of music into much wider
circles. Music became part of the education of every well-bred man and
woman. Princes and rich merchants maintained private orchestras. The
musician ceased to be a wandering “jongleur” and became a highly valued
member of the community. Music was added to the dramatic performances of
the theatre and out of this practice, grew our modern Opera. Originally
only a few very rich princes could afford the expenses of an “opera
troupe.” But as the taste for this sort of entertainment grew, many cities
built their own theatres where Italian and afterwards German operas were
given to the unlimited joy of the whole community with the exception of a
few sects of very strict Christians who still regarded music with deep
suspicion as something which was too lovely to be entirely good for the
soul.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the musical life of Europe was in
full swing. Then there came forward a man who was greater than all others,
a simple organist of the Thomas Church of Leipzig, by the name of Johann
Sebastian Bach. In his compositions for every known instrument, from comic
songs and popular dances to the most stately of sacred hymns and
oratorios, he laid the foundation for all our modern music. When he died
in the year 1750 he was succeeded by Mozart, who created musical fabrics
of sheer loveliness which remind us of lace that has been woven out of
harmony and rhythm. Then came Ludwig van Beethoven, the most tragic of
men, who gave us our modern orchestra, yet heard none of his greatest
compositions because he was deaf, as the result of a cold contracted
during his years of poverty.
Beethoven lived through the period of the great French Revolution. Full of
hope for a new and glorious day, he had dedicated one of his symphonies to
Napoleon. But he lived to regret the hour. When he died in the year 1827,
Napoleon was gone and the French Revolution was gone, but the steam engine
had come and was filling the world with a sound that had nothing in common
with the dreams of the Third Symphony.
Indeed, the new order of steam and iron and coal and large factories had
little use for art, for painting and sculpture and poetry and music. The
old protectors of the arts, the Church and the princes and the merchants
of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no longer
existed. The leaders of the new industrial world were too busy and had too
little education to bother about etchings and sonatas and bits of carved
ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of
no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in
the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had
lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant
ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art
and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were
dying a slow death in the museums. And music became a monopoly of a few
“virtuosi” who took the music away from the home and carried it to the
concert-hall.
But steadily, although slowly, the arts are coming back into their own.
People begin to understand that Rembrandt and Beethoven and Rodin are the
true prophets and leaders of their race and that a world without art and
happiness resembles a nursery without laughter.
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR
A CHAPTER WHICH OUGHT TO GIVE YOU A GREAT DEAL OF POLITICAL INFORMATION
ABOUT THE LAST FIFTY YEARS, BUT WHICH REALLY CONTAINS SEVERAL EXPLANATIONS
AND A FEW APOLOGIES
IF I had known how difficult it was to write a History of the World, I
should never have undertaken the task. Of course, any one possessed of
enough industry to lose himself for half a dozen years in the musty stacks
of a library, can compile a ponderous tome which gives an account of the
events in every land during every century. But that was not the purpose of
the present book. The publishers wanted to print a history that should
have rhythm—a story which galloped rather than walked. And now that
I have almost finished I discover that certain chapters gallop, that
others wade slowly through the dreary sands of long forgotten ages—that
a few parts do not make any progress at all, while still others indulge in
a veritable jazz of action and romance. I did not like this and I
suggested that we destroy the whole manuscript and begin once more from
the beginning. This, however, the publishers would not allow.
As the next best solution of my difficulties, I took the type-written
pages to a number of charitable friends and asked them to read what I had
said, and give me the benefit of their advice. The experience was rather
disheartening. Each and every man had his own prejudices and his own
hobbies and preferences. They all wanted to know why, where and how I
dared to omit their pet nation, their pet statesman, or even their most
beloved criminal. With some of them, Napoleon and Jenghiz Khan were
candidates for high honours. I explained that I had tried very hard to be
fair to Napoleon, but that in my estimation he was greatly inferior to
such men as George Washington, Gustavus Wasa, Augustus, Hammurabi or
Lincoln, and a score of others all of whom were obliged to content
themselves with a few paragraphs, from sheer lack of space. As for Jenghiz
Khan, I only recognise his superior ability in the field of wholesale
murder and I did not intend to give him any more publicity than I could
help.
“This is very well as far as it goes,” said the next critic, “but how
about the Puritans? We are celebrating the tercentenary of their arrival
at Plymouth. They ought to have more space.” My answer was that if I were
writing a history of America, the Puritans would get fully one half of the
first twelve chapters; that however this was a history of mankind and that
the event on Plymouth rock was not a matter of far-reaching international
importance until many centuries later; that the United States had been
founded by thirteen colonies and not by a single one; that the most
prominent leaders of the first twenty years of our history had been from
Virginia, from Pennsylvania, and from the island of Nevis, rather than
from Massachusetts; and that therefore the Puritans ought to content
themselves with a page of print and a special map.
Next came the prehistoric specialist. Why in the name of the great
Tyrannosaur had I not devoted more space to the wonderful race of
Cro-Magnon men, who had developed such a high stage of civilisation 10,000
years ago?
Indeed, and why not? The reason is simple. I do not take as much stock in
the perfection of these early races as some of our most noted
anthropologists seem to do. Rousseau and the philosophers of the
eighteenth century created the “noble savage” who was supposed to have
dwelt in a state of perfect happiness during the beginning of time. Our
modern scientists have discarded the “noble savage,” so dearly beloved by
our grandfathers, and they have replaced him by the “splendid savage” of
the French Valleys who 35,000 years ago made an end to the universal rule
of the low-browed and low-living brutes of the Neanderthal and other
Germanic neighbourhoods. They have shown us the elephants the Cro-Magnon
painted and the statues he carved and they have surrounded him with much
glory.
I do not mean to say that they are wrong. But I hold that we know by far
too little of this entire period to re-construct that early west-European
society with any degree (however humble) of accuracy. And I would rather
not state certain things than run the risk of stating certain things that
were not so.
Then there were other critics, who accused me of direct unfairness. Why
did I leave out such countries as Ireland and Bulgaria and Siam while I
dragged in such other countries as Holland and Iceland and Switzerland? My
answer was that I did not drag in any countries. They pushed themselves in
by main force of circumstances, and I simply could not keep them out. And
in order that my point may be understood, let me state the basis upon
which active membership to this book of history was considered.
There was but one rule. “Did the country or the person in question produce
a new idea or perform an original act without which the history of the
entire human race would have been different?” It was not a question of
personal taste. It was a matter of cool, almost mathematical judgment. No
race ever played a more picturesque role in history than the Mongolians,
and no race, from the point of view of achievement or intelligent
progress, was of less value to the rest of mankind.
The career of Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian, is full of dramatic episodes.
But as far as we are concerned, he might just as well never have existed
at all. In the same way, the history of the Dutch Republic is not
interesting because once upon a time the sailors of de Ruyter went fishing
in the river Thames, but rather because of the fact that this small
mud-bank along the shores of the North Sea offered a hospitable asylum to
all sorts of strange people who had all sorts of queer ideas upon all
sorts of very unpopular subjects.
It is quite true that Athens or Florence, during the hey-day of their
glory, had only one tenth of the population of Kansas City. But our
present civilisation would be very different had neither of these two
little cities of the Mediterranean basin existed. And the same (with due
apologies to the good people of Wyandotte County) can hardly be said of
this busy metropolis on the Missouri River.
And since I am being very personal, allow me to state one other fact.
When we visit a doctor, we find out before hand whether he is a surgeon or
a diagnostician or a homeopath or a faith healer, for we want to know from
what angle he will look at our complaint. We ought to be as careful in the
choice of our historians as we are in the selection of our physicians. We
think, “Oh well, history is history,” and let it go at that. But the
writer who was educated in a strictly Presbyterian household somewhere in
the backwoods of Scotland will look differently upon every question of
human relationships from his neighbour who as a child, was dragged to
listen to the brilliant exhortations of Robert Ingersoll, the enemy of all
revealed Devils. In due course of time, both men may forget their early
training and never again visit either church or lecture hall. But the
influence of these impressionable years stays with them and they cannot
escape showing it in whatever they write or say or do.
In the preface to this book, I told you that I should not be an infallible
guide and now that we have almost reached the end, I repeat the warning. I
was born and educated in an atmosphere of the old-fashioned liberalism
which had followed the discoveries of Darwin and the other pioneers of the
nineteenth century. As a child, I happened to spend most of my waking
hours with an uncle who was a great collector of the books written by
Montaigne, the great French essayist of the sixteenth century. Because I
was born in Rotterdam and educated in the city of Gouda, I ran continually
across Erasmus and for some unknown reason this great exponent of
tolerance took hold of my intolerant self. Later I discovered Anatole
France and my first experience with the English language came about
through an accidental encounter with Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond,” a story
which made more impression upon me than any other book in the English
language.
If I had been born in a pleasant middle western city I probably should
have a certain affection for the hymns which I had heard in my childhood.
But my earliest recollection of music goes back to the afternoon when my
Mother took me to hear nothing less than a Bach fugue. And the
mathematical perfection of the great Protestant master influenced me to
such an extent that I cannot hear the usual hymns of our prayer-meetings
without a feeling of intense agony and direct pain.
Again, if I had been born in Italy and had been warmed by the sunshine of
the happy valley of the Arno, I might love many colourful and sunny
pictures which now leave me indifferent because I got my first artistic
impressions in a country where the rare sun beats down upon the
rain-soaked land with almost cruel brutality and throws everything into
violent contrasts of dark and light.
I state these few facts deliberately that you may know the personal bias
of the man who wrote this history and may understand his point-of-view.
The bibliography at the end of this book, which represents all sorts of
opinions and views, will allow you to compare my ideas with those of other
people. And in this way, you will be able to reach your own final
conclusions with a greater degree of fairness than would otherwise be
possible.
After this short but necessary excursion, we return to the history of the
last fifty years. Many things happened during this period but very little
occurred which at the time seemed to be of paramount importance. The
majority of the greater powers ceased to be mere political agencies and
became large business enterprises. They built railroads. They founded and
subsidized steam-ship lines to all parts of the world. They connected
their different possessions with telegraph wires. And they steadily
increased their holdings in other continents. Every available bit of
African or Asiatic territory was claimed by one of the rival powers.
France became a colonial nation with interests in Algiers and Madagascar
and Annam and Tonkin (in eastern Asia). Germany claimed parts of southwest
and east Africa, built settlements in Kameroon on the west coast of Africa
and in New Guinea and many of the islands of the Pacific, and used the
murder of a few missionaries as a welcome excuse to take the harbour of
Kisochau on the Yellow Sea in China. Italy tried her luck in Abyssinia,
was disastrously defeated by the soldiers of the Negus, and consoled
herself by occupying the Turkish possessions in Tripoli in northern
Africa. Russia, having occupied all of Siberia, took Port Arthur away from
China. Japan, having defeated China in the war of 1895, occupied the
island of Formosa and in the year 1905 began to lay claim to the entire
empire of Corea. In the year 1883 England, the largest colonial empire the
world has ever seen, undertook to “protect” Egypt. She performed this task
most efficiently and to the great material benefit of that much neglected
country, which ever since the opening of the Suez canal in 1868 had been
threatened with a foreign invasion. During the next thirty years she
fought a number of colonial wars in different parts of the world and in
1902 (after three years of bitter fighting) she conquered the independent
Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Meanwhile she
had encouraged Cecil Rhodes to lay the foundations for a great African
state, which reached from the Cape almost to the mouth of the Nile, and
had faithfully picked up such islands or provinces as had been left
without a European owner.
The shrewd king of Belgium, by name Leopold, used the discoveries of Henry
Stanley to found the Congo Free State in the year 1885. Originally this
gigantic tropical empire was an “absolute monarchy.” But after many years
of scandalous mismanagement, it was annexed by the Belgian people who made
it a colony (in the year 1908) and abolished the terrible abuses which had
been tolerated by this very unscrupulous Majesty, who cared nothing for
the fate of the natives as long as he got his ivory and rubber.
As for the United States, they had so much land that they desired no
further territory. But the terrible misrule of Cuba, one of the last of
the Spanish possessions in the western hemisphere, practically forced the
Washington government to take action. After a short and rather uneventful
war, the Spaniards were driven out of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the
Philippines, and the two latter became colonies of the United States.
This economic development of the world was perfectly natural. The
increasing number of factories in England and France and Germany needed an
ever increasing amount of raw materials and the equally increasing number
of European workers needed an ever increasing amount of food. Everywhere
the cry was for more and for richer markets, for more easily accessible
coal mines and iron mines and rubber plantations and oil-wells, for
greater supplies of wheat and grain.
The purely political events of the European continent dwindled to mere
insignificance in the eyes of men who were making plans for steamboat
lines on Victoria Nyanza or for railroads through the interior of
Shantung. They knew that many European questions still remained to be
settled, but they did not bother, and through sheer indifference and
carelessness they bestowed upon their descendants a terrible inheritance
of hate and misery. For untold centuries the south-eastern corner of
Europe had been the scene of rebellion and bloodshed. During the seventies
of the last century the people of Serbia and Bulgaria and Montenegro and
Roumania were once more trying to gain their freedom and the Turks (with
the support of many of the western powers), were trying to prevent this.
After a period of particularly atrocious massacres in Bulgaria in the year
1876, the Russian people lost all patience. The Government was forced to
intervene just as President McKinley was obliged to go to Cuba and stop
the shooting-squads of General Weyler in Havana. In April of the year 1877
the Russian armies crossed the Danube, stormed the Shipka pass, and after
the capture of Plevna, marched southward until they reached the gates of
Constantinople. Turkey appealed for help to England. There were many
English people who denounced their government when it took the side of the
Sultan. But Disraeli (who had just made Queen Victoria Empress of India
and who loved the picturesque Turks while he hated the Russians who were
brutally cruel to the Jewish people within their frontiers) decided to
interfere. Russia was forced to conclude the peace of San Stefano (1878)
and the question of the Balkans was left to a Congress which convened at
Berlin in June and July of the same year.
This famous conference was entirely dominated by the personality of
Disraeli. Even Bismarck feared the clever old man with his well-oiled
curly hair and his supreme arrogance, tempered by a cynical sense of humor
and a marvellous gift for flattery. At Berlin the British prime-minister
carefully watched over the fate of his friends the Turks. Montenegro,
Serbia and Roumania were recognised as independent kingdoms. The
principality of Bulgaria was given a semi-independent status under Prince
Alexander of Battenberg, a nephew of Tsar Alexander II. But none of those
countries were given the chance to develop their powers and their
resources as they would have been able to do, had England been less
anxious about the fate of the Sultan, whose domains were necessary to the
safety of the British Empire as a bulwark against further Russian
aggression.
To make matters worse, the congress allowed Austria to take Bosnia and
Herzegovina away from the Turks to be “administered” as part of the
Habsburg domains. It is true that Austria made an excellent job of it. The
neglected provinces were as well managed as the best of the British
colonies, and that is saying a great deal. But they were inhabited by many
Serbians. In older days they had been part of the great Serbian empire of
Stephan Dushan, who early in the fourteenth century had defended western
Europe against the invasions of the Turks and whose capital of Uskub had
been a centre of civilisation one hundred and fifty years before Columbus
discovered the new lands of the west. The Serbians remembered their
ancient glory as who would not? They resented the presence of the
Austrians in two provinces, which, so they felt, were theirs by every
right of tradition.
And it was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, that the archduke
Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was murdered on June 28 of the
year 1914. The assassin was a Serbian student who had acted from purely
patriotic motives.
But the blame for this terrible catastrophe which was the immediate,
though not the only cause of the Great World War did not lie with the
half-crazy Serbian boy or his Austrian victim. It must be traced back to
the days of the famous Berlin Conference when Europe was too busy building
a material civilisation to care about the aspirations and the dreams of a
forgotten race in a dreary corner of the old Balkan peninsula.
A NEW WORLD
THE GREAT WAR WHICH WAS REALLY THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW AND BETTER WORLD
THE Marquis de Condorcet was one of the noblest characters among the small
group of honest enthusiasts who were responsible for the outbreak of the
great French Revolution. He had devoted his life to the cause of the poor
and the unfortunate. He had been one of the assistants of d’Alembert and
Diderot when they wrote their famous Encyclopedie. During the first years
of the Revolution he had been the leader of the Moderate wing of the
Convention.
His tolerance, his kindliness, his stout common sense, had made him an
object of suspicion when the treason of the king and the court clique had
given the extreme radicals their chance to get hold of the government and
kill their opponents. Condorcet was declared “hors de loi,” or outlawed,
an outcast who was henceforth at the mercy of every true patriot. His
friends offered to hide him at their own peril. Condorcet refused to
accept their sacrifice. He escaped and tried to reach his home, where he
might be safe. After three nights in the open, torn and bleeding, he
entered an inn and asked for some food. The suspicious yokels searched him
and in his pockets they found a copy of Horace, the Latin poet. This
showed that their prisoner was a man of gentle breeding and had no
business upon the highroads at a time when every educated person was
regarded as an enemy of the Revolutionary state. They took Condorcet and
they bound him and they gagged him and they threw him into the village
lock-up, but in the morning when the soldiers came to drag him back to
Paris and cut his head off, behold! he was dead.
This man who had given all and had received nothing had good reason to
despair of the human race. But he has written a few sentences which ring
as true to-day as they did one hundred and thirty years ago. I repeat them
here for your benefit.
“Nature has set no limits to our hopes,” he wrote, “and the picture of the
human race, now freed from its chains and marching with a firm tread on
the road of truth and virtue and happiness, offers to the philosopher a
spectacle which consoles him for the errors, for the crimes and the
injustices which still pollute and afflict this earth.”
The world has just passed through an agony of pain compared to which the
French Revolution was a mere incident. The shock has been so great that it
has killed the last spark of hope in the breasts of millions of men. They
were chanting a hymn of progress, and four years of slaughter followed
their prayers for peace. “Is it worth while,” so they ask, “to work and
slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed beyond the
stage of the earliest cave men?”
There is but one answer.
That answer is “Yes!”
The World War was a terrible calamity. But it did not mean the end of
things. On the contrary it brought about the coming of a new day.
It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages. The
actors who played their parts upon that long-forgotten stage are all dead.
We can criticize them with a cool head. The audience that applauded their
efforts has dispersed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt their feelings.
But it is very difficult to give a true account of contemporary events.
The problems that fill the minds of the people with whom we pass through
life, are our own problems, and they hurt us too much or they please us
too well to be described with that fairness which is necessary when we are
writing history and not blowing the trumpet of propaganda. All the same I
shall endeavour to tell you why I agree with poor Condorcet when he
expressed his firm faith in a better future.
Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is
created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the
story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these terms
is the most dangerous. The word “modern” implies that we, the people of
the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement. Fifty years
ago the liberals of England who followed the leadership of Gladstone felt
that the problem of a truly representative and democratic form of
government had been solved forever by the second great Reform Bill, which
gave workmen an equal share in the government with their employers. When
Disraeli and his conservative friends talked of a dangerous “leap in the
dark” they answered “No.” They felt certain of their cause and trusted
that henceforth all classes of society would co-operate to make the
government of their common country a success. Since then many things have
happened, and the few liberals who are still alive begin to understand
that they were mistaken.
There is no definite answer to any historical problem.
Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish as those
sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished.
If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new and much
broader view of life. Then, go one step further and try to imagine
yourself in the position of your own great-great-grandchildren who will
take your place in the year 10,000. They too will learn history. But what
will they think of those short four thousand years during which we have
kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? They will think
of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglath Pileser, the Assyrian conqueror.
Perhaps they will confuse him with Jenghiz Khan or Alexander the
Macedonian. The great war which has just come to an end will appear in the
light of that long commercial conflict which settled the supremacy of the
Mediterranean when Rome and Carthage fought during one hundred and
twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. The Balkan troubles of the
19th century (the struggle for freedom of Serbia and Greece and Bulgaria
and Montenegro) to them will seem a continuation of the disordered
conditions caused by the Great Migrations. They will look at pictures of
the Rheims cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed by German guns as
we look upon a photograph of the Acropolis ruined two hundred and fifty
years ago during a war between the Turks and the Venetians. They will
regard the fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a
childish superstition which was perhaps natural in a race of men who had
burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even our hospitals and our
laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud will look
like slightly improved workshops of alchemists and mediaeval surgeons.
And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are not
“modern” at all. On the contrary we still belong to the last generations
of the cave-dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday.
The human race was given its first chance to become truly civilised when
it took courage to question all things and made “knowledge and
understanding” the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and
sensible society of human beings. The Great War was the “growing-pain” of
this new world.
For a long time to come people will write mighty books to prove that this
or that or the other person brought about the war. The Socialists will
publish volumes in which they will accuse the “capitalists” of having
brought about the war for “commercial gain.” The capitalists will answer
that they lost infinitely more through the war than they made—that
their children were among the first to go and fight and be killed—and
they will show how in every country the bankers tried their very best to
avert the outbreak of hostilities. French historians will go through the
register of German sins from the days of Charlemagne until the days of
William of Hohenzollern and German historians will return the compliment
and will go through the list of French horrors from the days of
Charlemagne until the days of President Poincare. And then they will
establish to their own satisfaction that the other fellow was guilty of
“causing the war.” Statesmen, dead and not yet dead, in all countries will
take to their typewriters and they will explain how they tried to avert
hostilities and how their wicked opponents forced them into it.
The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about these
apologies and vindications. He will understand the real nature of the
underlying causes and he will know that personal ambitions and personal
wickedness and personal greed had very little to do with the final
outburst. The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery,
was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and
iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is
slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth,
and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small group
of courageous leaders.
A Zulu in a frock coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle
and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a
sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human
being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.
If you do not understand this at first, read it again. It will become
clearer to you in a moment and it will explain many things that have
happened these last six years.
Perhaps I may give you another, more familiar, example, to show you what I
mean. In the movie theatres, jokes and funny remarks are often thrown upon
the screen. Watch the audience the next time you have a chance. A few
people seem almost to inhale the words. It takes them but a second to read
the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from twenty to
thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who do not read any more than
they can help, get the point when the brighter ones among the audience
have already begun to decipher the next cut-in. It is not different in
human life, as I shall now show you.
In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the Roman Empire
continued to live for a thousand years after the death of the last Roman
Emperor. It caused the establishment of a large number of “imitation
empires.” It gave the Bishops of Rome a chance to make themselves the head
of the entire church, because they represented the idea of Roman
world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless barbarian
chieftains into a career of crime and endless warfare because they were
for ever under the spell of this magic word “Rome.” All these people,
Popes, Emperors and plain fighting men were not very different from you or
me. But they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital issue
something living—something which was remembered clearly both by the
father and the son and the grandson. And so they struggled and sacrificed
themselves for a cause which to-day would not find a dozen recruits.
In still another chapter I have told you how the great religious wars took
place more than a century after the first open act of the Reformation and
if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years War with that on
Inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery took place at a time
when the first clumsy steam engines were already puffing in the
laboratories of a number of French and German and English scientists. But
the world at large took no interest in these strange contraptions, and
went on with a grand theological discussion which to-day causes yawns, but
no anger.
And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian will use the same
words about Europe of the out-going nineteenth century, and he will see
how men were engaged upon terrific nationalistic struggles while the
laboratories all around them were filled with serious folk who cared not
one whit for politics as long as they could force nature to surrender a
few more of her million secrets.
You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving at. The engineer
and the scientist and the chemist, within a single generation, filled
Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with their
telegraphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. They created a
new world in which time and space were reduced to complete insignificance.
They invented new products and they made these so cheap that almost every
one could buy them. I have told you all this before but it certainly will
bear repeating.
To keep the ever increasing number of factories going, the owners, who had
also become the rulers of the land, needed raw materials and coal.
Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of the people were still thinking in
terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and clinging to the old
notions of the state as a dynastic or political organisation. This clumsy
mediaeval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the highly
modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. It did its best,
according to the rules of the game which had been laid down centuries
before. The different states created enormous armies and gigantic navies
which were used for the purpose of acquiring new possessions in distant
lands. Whereever{sic} there was a tiny bit of land left, there arose an
English or a French or a German or a Russian colony. If the natives
objected, they were killed. In most cases they did not object, and were
allowed to live peacefully, provided they did not interfere with the
diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines or the gold mines or the
rubber plantations, and they derived many benefits from the foreign
occupation.
Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw materials wanted
the same piece of land at the same time. Then there was a war. This
occurred fifteen years ago when Russia and Japan fought for the possession
of certain terri-tories which belonged to the Chinese people. Such
conflicts, however, were the exception. No one really desired to fight.
Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and submarines
began to seem absurd to the men of the early 20th century. They associated
the idea of violence with the long-ago age of unlimited monarchies and
intriguing dynasties. Every day they read in their papers of still further
inventions, of groups of English and American and German scientists who
were working together in perfect friendship for the purpose of an advance
in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in a busy world of trade and of
commerce and factories. But only a few noticed that the development of the
state, (of the gigantic community of people who recognise certain common
ideals,) was lagging several hundred years behind. They tried to warn the
others. But the others were occupied with their own affairs.
I have used so many similes that I must apologise for bringing in one
more. The Ship of State (that old and trusted expression which is ever new
and always picturesque,) of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans
and the Venetians and the merchant adventurers of the seventeenth century
had been a sturdy craft, constructed of well-seasoned wood, and commanded
by officers who knew both their crew and their vessel and who understood
the limitations of the art of navigating which had been handed down to
them by their ancestors.
Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. First one part,
then another of the old ship of state was changed. Her dimensions were
increased. The sails were discarded for steam. Better living quarters were
established, but more people were forced to go down into the stoke-hole,
and while the work was safe and fairly remunerative, they did not like it
as well as their old and more dangerous job in the rigging. Finally, and
almost imperceptibly, the old wooden square-rigger had been transformed
into a modern ocean liner. But the captain and the mates remained the
same. They were appointed or elected in the same way as a hundred years
before. They were taught the same system of navigation which had served
the mariners of the fifteenth century. In their cabins hung the same
charts and signal flags which had done service in the days of Louis XIV
and Frederick the Great. In short, they were (through no fault of their
own) completely incompetent.
The sea of international politics is not very broad. When those Imperial
and Colonial liners began to try and outrun each other, accidents were
bound to happen. They did happen. You can still see the wreckage if you
venture to pass through that part of the ocean.
And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is in dreadful need
of men who will assume the new leadership—who will have the courage
of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are only at
the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of
seamanship.
They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. They will have to
fight their way to the top against every possible form of opposition. When
they reach the bridge, mutiny of an envious crew may cause their death.
But some day, a man will arise who will bring the vessel safely to port,
and he shall be the hero of the ages.
AS IT EVER SHALL BE
“The more I think of the problems of our lives, the more I am persuaded
that we ought to choose Irony and Pity for our “assessors and judges” as
the ancient Egyptians called upon “the Goddess Isis and the Goddess
Nephtys” on behalf of their dead. “Irony and Pity” are both of good
counsel; the first with her “smiles” makes life agreeable; the other
sanctifies it with her tears.” “The Irony which I invoke is no cruel
Deity. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly
disposed. Her mirth disarms and it is she who teaches us to laugh at
rogues and fools, whom but for her we might be so weak as to despise and
hate.”
And with these wise words of a very great Frenchman I bid you farewell. 8
Barrow Street, New York. Saturday, June 26, xxi.
AN ANIMATED CHRONOLOGY, 500,000 B.C.—A.D. 1922 THE END
CONCERNING THE PICTURES
CONCERNING THE PICTURES OF THIS BOOK AND A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
The day of the historical textbook without illustrations has gone.
Pictures and photographs of famous personages and equally famous
occurrences cover the pages of Breasted and Robinson and Beard. In this
volume the photographs have been omitted to make room for a series of
home-made drawings which represent ideas rather than events.
While the author lays no claim to great artistic excellence (being
possessed of a decided leaning towards drawing as a child, he was taught
to play the violin as a matter of discipline,) he prefers to make his own
maps and sketches because he knows exactly what he wants to say and cannot
possibly explain this meaning to his more proficient brethren in the field
of art. Besides, the pictures were all drawn for children and their ideas
of art are very different from those of their parents.
To all teachers the author would give this advice—let your boys and
girls draw their history after their own desire just as often as you have
a chance. You can show a class a photograph of a Greek temple or a
mediaeval castle and the class will dutifully say, “Yes, Ma’am,” and
proceed to forget all about it. But make the Greek temple or the Roman
castle the centre of an event, tell the boys to make their own picture of
“the building of a temple,” or “the storming of the castle,” and they will
stay after school-hours to finish the job. Most children, before they are
taught how to draw from plaster casts, can draw after a fashion, and often
they can draw remarkably well. The product of their pencil may look a bit
prehistoric. It may even resemble the work of certain native tribes from
the upper Congo. But the child is quite frequently prehistoric or
upper-Congoish in his or her own tastes, and expresses these primitive
instincts with a most astonishing accuracy.
The main thing in teaching history, is that the pupil shall remember
certain events “in their proper sequence.” The experiments of many years
in the Children’s School of New York has convinced the author that few
children will ever forget what they have drawn, while very few will ever
remember what they have merely read.
It is the same with the maps. Give the child an ordinary conventional map
with dots and lines and green seas and tell him to revaluate that
geographic scene in his or her own terms. The mountains will be a bit out
of gear and the cities will look astonishingly mediaeval. The outlines
will be often very imperfect, but the general effect will be quite as
truthful as that of our conventional maps, which ever since the days of
good Gerardus Mercator have told a strangely erroneous story. Most
important of all, it will give the child a feeling of intimacy with
historical and geographic facts which cannot be obtained in any other way.
Neither the publishers nor the author claim that “The Story of Mankind” is
the last word to be said upon the subject of history for children. It is
an appetizer. The book tries to present the subject in such a fashion that
the average child shall get a taste for History and shall ask for more.
To facilitate the work of both parents and teachers, the publishers have
asked Miss Leonore St. John Power (who knows more upon this particular
subject than any one else they could discover) to compile a list of
readable and instructive books.
The list was made and was duly printed.
The parents who live near our big cities will experience no difficulty in
ordering these volumes from their booksellers. Those who for the sake of
fresh air and quiet, dwell in more remote spots, may not find it
convenient to go to a book-store. In that case, Boni and Liveright will be
happy to act as middle-man and obtain the books that are desired. They
want it to be distinctly understood that they have not gone into the
retail book business, but they are quite willing to do their share towards
a better and more general historical education, and all orders will
receive their immediate attention.
AN HISTORICAL READING LIST FOR CHILDREN
“Don’t stop (I say) to explain that Hebe was (for once) the legitimate
daughter of Zeus and, as such, had the privilege to draw wine for the
Gods. Don’t even stop, just yet, to explain who the Gods were. Don’t
discourse on amber, otherwise ambergris; don’t explain that ‘gris’ in this
connection doesn’t mean ‘grease’; don’t trace it through the Arabic into
Noah’s Ark; don’t prove its electrical properties by tearing up paper into
little bits and attracting them with the mouth-piece of your pipe rubbed
on your sleeve. Don’t insist philologically that when every shepherd
‘tells his tale’ he is not relating an anecdote but simply keeping ‘tally’
of his flock. Just go on reading, as well as you can, and be sure that
when the children get the thrill of the story, for which you wait, they
will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to
answer.”—(“On the Art of Reading for Children,” by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch.)
The Days Before History
“How the Present Came From the Past,” by Margaret E. Wells, Volume I.
How earliest man learned to make tools and build homes, and the stories he
told about the fire-makers, the sun and the frost. A simple, illustrated
account of these things for children. “The Story of Ab,” by Stanley
Waterloo.
A romantic tale of the time of the cave-man. (A much simplified edition of
this for little children is “Ab, the Cave Man” adapted by William Lewis
Nida.) “Industrial and Social History Series,” by Katharine E. Dopp.
“The Tree Dwellers—The Age of Fear”
“The Early Cave-Men—The Age of Combat”
“The Later Cave-Men—The Age of the Chase”
“The Early Sea People—First Steps in the Conquest of the Waters”
“The Tent-Dwellers—The Early Fishing Men”
Very simple stories of the way in which man learned how to make pottery,
how to weave and spin, and how to conquer land and sea.
“Ancient Man,” written and drawn and done into colour by Hendrik Willem
van Loon.
The beginning of civilisations pictured and written in a new and
fascinating fashion, with story maps showing exactly what happened in all
parts of the world. A book for children of all ages.
The Dawn of History
“The Civilisation of the Ancient Egyptians,” by A. Bothwell Gosse.
“No country possesses so many wonders, and has such a number of works
which defy description.” An excellent, profusely illustrated account of
the domestic life, amusements, art, religion and occupations of these
wonderful people. “How the Present Came From the Past,” by Margaret E.
Wells, Volume II.
What the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Persians
contributed to civilisation. This is brief and simple and may be used as a
first book on the subject.
“Stories of Egyptian Gods and Heroes,” by F. H. Brooksbank.
The beliefs of the Egyptians, the legend of Isis and Osiris, the builders
of the Pyramids and the Temples, the Riddle of the Sphinx, all add to the
fascination of this romantic picture of Egypt.
“Wonder Tales of the Ancient World,” by Rev. James Baikie.
Tales of the Wizards, Tales of Travel and Adventure, and Legends of the
Gods all gathered from ancient Egyptian literature.
“Ancient Assyria,” by Rev. James Baikie.
Which tells of a city 2800 years ago with a street lined with beautiful
enamelled reliefs, and with libraries of clay.
“The Bible for Young People,” arranged from the King James version, with
twenty-four full page illustrations from old masters.
“Old, Old Tales From the Old, Old Book,” by Nora Archibald Smith.
“Written in the East these characters live forever in the West—they
pervade the world.” A good rendering of the Old Testament. “The Jewish
Fairy Book,” translated and adapted by Gerald Friedlander.
Stories of great nobility and beauty from the Talmud and the old Jewish
chap-books. “Eastern Stories and Legends,” by Marie L. Shedlock.
“The soldiers of Alexander who had settled in the East, wandering
merchants of many nations and climes, crusading knights and hermits
brought these Buddha Stories from the East to the West.”
Stories of Greece and Rome “The Story of the Golden Age,” by James
Baldwin.
Some of the most beautiful of the old Greek myths woven into the story of
the Odyssey make this book a good introduction to the glories of the
Golden Age. “A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
with pictures by Maxfield Parrish.
“The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy,” by Padraic Colum,
presented by Willy Pogany.
An attractive, poetically rendered account of “the world’s greatest
story.”
“The Story of Rome,” by Mary Macgregor, with twenty plates in colour.
Attractively illustrated and simply presented story of Rome from the
earliest times to the death of Augustus.
“Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls,” retold by W. H. Weston. “The Lays
of Ancient Rome,” by Lord Macaulay.
“The early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else
in Latin Literature.”
“Children of the Dawn,” by Elsie Finnemore Buckley.
Old Greek tales of love, adventure, heroism, skill, achievement, or defeat
exceptionally well told. Especially recommended for girls.
“The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,” by Charles Kingsley.
“The Story of Greece,” by Mary Macgregor, with nineteen plates in colour
by Walter Crane.
Attractively illustrated and simply presented—a good book to begin
on.
Christianity
“The Story of Jesus,” pictures from paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico,
Duccio, Ghirlandais, and Barnja-da-Siena. Descriptive text from the New
Testament, selected and arranged by Ethel Natalie Dana.
A beautiful book and a beautiful way to present the Christ Story. “A
Child’s Book of Saints,” by William Canton.
Sympathetically told and charmingly written stories of men and women whose
faith brought about strange miracles, and whose goodness to man and beast
set the world wondering. “The Seven Champions of Christendom,” edited by
F. J. H. Darton.
How the knights of old—St. George of England, St. Denis of France,
St. James of Spain, and others—fought with enchanters and evil
spirits to preserve the Kingdom of God. Fine old romances interestingly
told for children. “Stories From the Christian East,” by Stephen Gaselee.
Unusual stories which have been translated from the Coptic, the Greek, the
Latin and the Ethiopic. “Jerusalem and the Crusades,” by Estelle Blyth,
with eight plates in colour.
Historical stories telling how children and priests, hermits and knights
all strove to keep the Cross in the East.
Stories of Legend and Chivalry
“Stories of Norse Heroes From the Eddas and Sagas,” retold by E. M.
Wilmot-Buxton.
These are tales which the Northmen tell concerning the wisdom of
All-Father Odin, and how all things began and how they ended. A good book
for all children, and for story-tellers. “The Story of Siegfried,” by
James Baldwin.
A good introduction to this Northern hero whose strange and daring deeds
fill the pages of the old sagas. “The Story of King Arthur and His
Knights,” written and illustrated by Howard Pyle.
This, and the companion volumes, “The Story of the Champions of the Round
Table,” “The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions,” “The Story of the
Grail and the Passing of Arthur,” form an incomparable collection for
children. “The Boy’s King Arthur,” edited by Sidney Lanier, illustrated by
N. C. Wyeth.
A very good rendering of Malory’s King Arthur, made especially attractive
by the coloured illustrations. “Irish Fairy Tales,” by James Stephens,
illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
Beautifully pictured and poetically told legends of Ireland’s epic hero
Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book
for story-telling or reading aloud. “Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve
Peers of France,” by A. J. Church.
Stories from the old French and English chronicles showing the romantic
glamour surrounding the great Charlemagne and his crusading knights. “The
Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,” written and illustrated by Howard Pyle.
Both in picture and in story this book holds first place in the hearts of
children. “A Book of Ballad Stories,” by Mary Macleod.
Good prose versions of some of the famous old ballads sung by the
minstrels of England and Scotland. “The Story of Roland,” by James
Baldwin.
“There is, in short, no country in Europe, and no language, in which the
exploits of Charlemagne and Roland have not at some time been recounted
and sung.” This book will serve as a good introduction to a fine heroic
character. “The Boy’s Froissart,” being Sir John Froissart’s Chronicles of
Adventure, Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain.
“Froissart sets the boy’s mind upon manhood and the man’s mind upon
boyhood.” An invaluable background for the future study of history. “The
Boy’s Percy,” being old ballads of War, Adventure and Love from Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, edited by Sidney Lanier.
“He who walks in the way these following ballads point, will be manful in
necessary fight, loyal in love, generous to the poor, tender in the
household, prudent in living, merry upon occasion, and honest in all
things.” “Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims,” retold from Chaucer and
others by E. J H. Darton.
“Sometimes a pilgrimage seemed nothing but an excuse for a lively and
pleasant holiday, and the travellers often made themselves very merry on
the road, with their jests and songs, and their flutes and fiddles and
bagpipes.” A good prose version much enjoyed by boys and girls. “Joan of
Arc,” written and illustrated by M. Boutet de Monvel.
A very fine interpretation of the life of this great heroine. A book to be
owned by every boy and girl. “When Knights Were Bold,” by Eva March
Tappan.
Telling of the training of a knight, of the daily life in a castle, of
pilgrimages and crusades, of merchant guilds, of schools and literature,
in short, a full picture of life in the days of chivalry. A good book to
supplement the romantic stories of the time.
Adventurers in New Worlds
“A Book of Discovery,” by M. B. Synge, fully illustrated from authentic
sources and with maps.
A thoroughly fascinating book about the world’s exploration from the
earliest times to the discovery of the South Pole. A book to be owned by
older boys and girls who like true tales of adventure. “A Short History of
Discovery From the Earliest Times to the Founding of the Colonies on the
American Continent,” written and done into colour by Hendrik Willem van
Loon.
“Dear Children: History is the most fascinating and entertaining and
instructive of arts.” A book to delight children of all ages. “The Story
of Marco Polo,” by Noah Brooks. “Olaf the Glorious,” by Robert Leighton.
An historical story of the Viking age. “The Conquerors of Mexico,” retold
from Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico,” by Henry Gilbert. “The Conquerors of
Peru,” retold from Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” by Henry Gilbert.
“Vikings of the Pacific,” by A. C. Laut.
Adventures of Bering the Dane; the outlaw hunters of Russia; Benyowsky,
the Polish pirate; Cook and Vancouver; Drake, and other soldiers of
fortune on the West Coast of America. “The Argonauts of Faith,” by Basil
Mathews.
The Adventures of the “Mayflower” Pilgrims. “Pathfinders of the West,” by
A. C. Laut.
The thrilling story of the adventures of the men who discovered the great
Northwest.
“Beyond the Old Frontier,” by George Bird Grinnell.
Adventures of Indian Fighters, Hunters, and Fur-Traders on the Pacific
Coast. “A History of Travel in America,” by Seymour Dunbar, illustrated
from old woodcuts and engravings. 4 volumes.
An interesting book for children who wish to understand the problems and
difficulties their grandfathers had in the conquest of the West. This is a
standard book upon the subject of early travel, but is so readable as to
be of interest to older children.
“The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators,” by Hendrik Willem van Loon.
Fully illustrated from old prints.
The World’s Progress in Invention—Art—Music.
“Gabriel and the Hour Book,” by Evaleen Stein.
How a boy learned from the monks how to grind and mix the colours for
illuminating the beautiful hand-printed books of the time and how he
himself made books that are now treasured in the museums of France and
England. “Historic Inventions,” by Rupert S. Holland.
Stories of the invention of printing, the steam-engine, the
spinning-jenny, the safety-lamp, the sewing machine, electric light, and
other wonders of mechanism. “A History of Everyday Things in England,”
written and illustrated by Marjorie and C. V. B. Quennell. 2 Volumes.
A most fascinating book, profusely illustrated in black and white and in
colour, giving a vivid picture of life in England from 1066-1799. It tells
of wars and of home-life, of amusements and occupations, of art and
literature, of science and invention. A book to be owned by every boy and
girl. “First Steps in the Enjoyment of Pictures,” by Maude I. G. Oliver.
A book designed to help children in their appreciation of art by giving
them technical knowledge of the media, the draughtsmanship, the
composition and the technique of well-known American pictures. “Knights of
Art,” by Amy Steedman.
Stories of Italian Painters. Attractively illustrated in colour from old
masters. “Masters of Music,” by Anna Alice Chapin. “Story Lives of Men of
Science,” by F. J. Rowbotham. “All About Treasures of the Earth,” by
Frederick A. Talbot.
A book that tells many interesting things about coal, salt, iron, rare
metals and precious stones. “The Boys’ Book of New Inventions,” by Harry
E. Maule.
An account of the machines and mechancial{sic} processes that are making
the history of our time more dramatic than that of any other age since the
world began. “Masters of Space,” by Walter Kellogg Towers.
Stories of the wonders of telegraphing through the air and beneath the sea
with signals, and of speaking across continents. “All About Railways,” by
F. S. Hartnell. “The Man-of-War, What She Has Done and What She Is Doing,”
by Commander E. Hamilton Currey.
True stories about galleys and pirate ships, about the Spanish Main and
famous frigates, and about slave-hunting expeditions in the days of old.
The Democracy of To-Day.
“The Land of Fair Play,” by Geoffrey Parsons.
“This book aims to make clear the great, unseen services that America
renders each of us, and the active devotion each of us must yield in
return for America to endure.” An excellent book on our government for
boys and girls. “The American Idea as Expounded by American Statesmen,”
compiled by Joseph B. Gilder.
A good collection, including The Declaration of Independence, The
Constitution of the United States, the Monroe Doctrine, and the famous
speeches of Washington, Lincoln, Webster and Roosevelt. “The Making of an
American,” by Jacob A. Riis.
The true story of a Danish boy who became one of America’s finest
citizens. “The Promised Land,” by Mary Antin.
A true story about a little immigrant. “Before we came, the New World knew
not the Old; but since we have begun to come, the Young World has taken
the Old by the hand, and the two are learning to march side by side,
seeking a common destiny.”
Illustrated Histories in French.
(The colourful and graphic pictures make these histories beloved by all
children whether they read the text or not.) “Voyages et Glorieuses
Decouvertes des Grands Navigateurs et Explorateurs Francais, illustre par
Edy Segrand.” “Collection d’Albums Historiques.” Louis XI, texte de
Georges Montorgueil, aquarelles de Job. Francois I, texte de G. Gustave
Toudouze, aquarelles de Job. Henri IV, texte de Georges Montorgueil,
aquarelles de H. Yogel. Richelieu, texte de Th. Cahu, aquarelles de
Maurice Leloir. Le Roy Soleil, texte de Gustave Toudouze, aquarelles de
Mauriae Leloir. Bonaparte, texte de Georges Montorgueil, aquarelles de
Job. “Fabliaux et Contes du Moyen-Age”; illustrations de A. Robida
INDEX {Not included}