HOW GREAT BRITAIN ESTRANGED AMERICA. CHAPTER I. THE CONTINENT OF EUROPE. 1763. 1763. THE successes of the seven years' war were the triumphs of Protestantism. For the first time since the breach made in the church by Luther, the great Catholic powers, attracted by a secret consciousness of the decay of old institutions, banded themselves together to arrest the progress of change. In vain did the descendants of the feudal aristocracies lead to the field superior numbers; in vain did the pope bless their banners, as though uplifted against unbelievers. A wide-spread suspicion of insincerity weakened the influence of priestcraft, which relapsed from confident menace into a decorous compromise with skepticism. The Catholic monarchies, in their struggle against innovations, had encountered defeat; and the cultivated world stood ready to welcome a new era. The forms of religion, government, military service, and industry, which lent to the social organization of the middle age a compacted unity, were undermined; and the venerable fabric hung over the future as A mighty rock, Which has, from unimaginable years, Sustained itself with terror and with toil Over a gulf; and, with the agony With which it clings, seems slowly coming down. 1763. The dynasties which received their consecration from the Roman church would cease to array themselves in arms against the offspring of the reformers; in the long tumultuous strife, Protestantism had fulfilled its political ends, and was never again to convulse the world. But from Protestantism there came forth a principle of all-pervading energy, the common possession of civilized. man, and the harbinger of new changes in the state. The life-giving truth of the Reformation was the right of private judgment. This personal liberty in affairs of conscience had, by the illustrious teachings of Descartes, been diffused among the nations which adhered to the old faith, under the more comprehensive form of philosophical freedom. Everywhere throughout intelligent Europe and America, the separate man was growing aware of the inhering right to the unfettered culture and enjoyment of his whole moral and intellectual being. Individuality was the groundwork of new theories in politics, ethics, and industry. In Europe, where the human mind groped its way through heavy clouds of tradition, inquisitive activity turned from discussions on religion to the analysis of institutions and opinions. Having, in the days of Luther and Calvin, pleaded the Bible against popes and prelates and the one indivisible church, it now invoked the authority of reason, and applied it to every object of human thought: to science, speculative philosophy, and art; to the place of our planet in the order of the heavens, and the nature and destiny of the race that dwells on it; to every belief and every polity inherited from the past; to the priestly altar; to the royal throne. Skepticism was the method of the new reform; its tendency, revolution. Sad era for European humanity, which was to advance towards light and liberty only through universal doubt; and, before faith could be inspired by genial love to construct new governments, was doomed to gaze helplessly, as its received institutions crumbled away. The Catholic system embraced all society in its religious unity; Protestantism broke that religious unity into sects and fragments; philosophy carried analysis through the entire range of human thought and action, and appointed each individual the arbiter of his own belief and the director of his own powers. Society would be organized again, but not till after the recognition of the rights of the individual. Unity would once more be restored, but not through the canon and feudal law; for the new Catholic element was the people. 1763. Protestantism, albeit the reform in religion was the seed-plot of democratic revolutions, had at first been attended by the triumph of absolute monarchy throughout continental Europe, where even the Catholic powers themselves grew impatient of the authority of the pope over their temporal affairs. The Protestant king, who had just been the ally of our fathers in the seven years' war, presented the first great instance of the passage of feudal sovereignty into unlimited monarchy, resting on a standing military force. Still surrounded by danger, his inflexible and uncontrolled will stamped the impress of harshness even on his necessary policy, of tyranny on his errors of judg ment, and of rapine and violence on his measures for aggrandizement. Yet Prussia, which was the favorite disciple of Luther and the child of the Reformation, while it held the sword upright, bore with every creed and set reason free. It offered a shelter to Rousseau, and called in D'Alembert and Voltaire as its guests; it allowed Semler to hold the Bible under the light of criticism; it breathed into the boldly thoughtful Lessing widest hopes for the education of the race to a universal brotherhood on earth; it gave its youth to the teachings of Immanuel Kant, who, for power of analysis and universality, was inferior to none since Aristotle. "An army and a treasure do not constitute a power," said Vergennes; but Prussia had also philosophic liberty. All freedom of mind in Germany hailed the peace of Hubertsburg as its own victory. In every question of public law, Frederic, continuing to noble birth its prescriptive posts and leaving his people divided almost into castes, made the welfare of the kingdom paramount to privilege. He challenged justice under the law for the humblest against the highest. He among Protestants set the bright example of the equality of Catholics in worship and in civil condition. To heal the conflict of franchises in the several provinces of his realm, he planned a general code, of which the opening pages promulgate great principles of human rights, as the basis of Prussian law. His ear was open to the sorrows of the poor and the complaint of the crushed; and, as in time of war he shared peril and want with the common soldier, in peace the peasant that knocked at his palace gate was welcome to a hearing. "Title and noble birth," he would say, 66 are tom-fooleries; all turns upon personal merit." "Kings are nothing but men, and all men are equal." Thus he arraigned the haughtiness of hereditary station, yet without forming purposes or clear conceptions of useful change in the political constitution of his kingdom. Holding no colonies, he could calmly watch their growth to independence; and might welcome the experiment of the widely extending American commonwealth. 1763. If the number of active minds in cultivated Prussia was not yet large enough to give to forming opinion a popular aspect, in Russia, the immense empire which was extending itself along the Baltic and the Euxine, and had even crossed the Pacific to set up its banners in North-western America, free inquiry had something of solitary dignity, as the almost exclusive guest of the empress. First of the great powers of Europe in population, and exceeding all of them together in extent of European lands, the great Slavonic state was not proportionably strong and opulent. More than two thirds of its inhabitants were bondsmen and slaves, thinly scattered over vast domains. The slave held the plough; the slave bent over the anvil or threw the shuttle; the slave wrought the mines. The nobles, who directed the labor on their estates, in manufactures or the search for ores, read no books from abroad, and as yet had no native literature. The little science that faintly gleamed on the interior was diffused through the priests of the Greek church, themselves bred up in superstition; so that the Slavonic race, which was neither Protestant nor Catholic, which had neither been ravaged by the wars of religion nor educated by the discussions of creeds,- a new and rising |