Edward Potts Cheyney

“ The point of view of The American Nation is that the purpose of the historian is to tell what has been done, and, quite as much, what has been purposed, by the thinking, working, and producing people who make public opinion. Hence the work is intended to select and characterize the personalities who have stood forth as leaders and as seers; not simply the founders of commonwealths or the statesmen of the republic, but also the great divines, the inspiring writers, and the captains of industry. ”

“ The limits of Portuguese discovery and dominion were soon reached; and as the fifteenth century advanced, Spain emerged not only as one of the great powers of Europe but as the first exploring, conquering, and colonizing nation of America. A century before any other European state obtained a permanent foothold in the New World, Spain began the creation of a great colonial empire there, which was soon occupied by her settlers, administered by a department of her government, converted by her missionaries, and made famous throughout Europe by the wealth which it brought to the mother-country. ”

“ Nevertheless, when Elizabeth died Anglicanism was the national church in a sense in which it had not been before, and in exactly the same sense as that in which the Roman Catholic church was the church of Spain. A generation had grown up which had seen no other religious system in authority, whose beliefs and duties were taught them by its clergy, and whose sentiments and devotion naturally gathered around it as their object. ”

“ As Europe in the fifteenth century became more wealthy and more familiar with the products of the whole world, as the nobles learned to demand more luxuries, and a wealthy merchant class grew up which was able to gratify the same tastes as the nobles, the demand of the West upon the East became more insistent than ever. Therefore, the men, the nation, the government that could find a new way to the East might claim a trade of indefinite extent and extreme profit. ”

“ Europe could feed herself with unspiced food, she could clothe herself with plain clothing, but for luxuries, adornments, refinements, whether in food, in personal ornament, or in furnishing her palaces, her manor- houses, her churches, or her wealthy merchants' dwellings, she must, in the fifteenth century, still look to Asia, as she had always done. It is true that in the later Middle Ages many articles of beauty and ornament were produced in the more advanced Western countries; but not spices nor drugs, nor precious stones, nor any great variety of dyes. ”

“ The rising colonies of the New World, especially those which promised religious liberty, and above all that one of them whose Quaker founder held doctrines so like their own, must have exerted, notwithstanding their alien race and tongue, an almost irresistible attraction upon them. In view of the political and religious history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is therefore no wonder that a vast number of Germans emigrated to America, and that in Pennsylvania were soon to be found numerous representatives of every religious sect that existed in the fatherland. ”

“ They were as completely dominated by the ideal of a single united national church, one in doctrine, organization, and form of worship, as was the queen herself. Nevertheless, a group of men arose among them, under the general name of Independents, to whom the very idea of a national church seemed idolatrous; who found in the Scriptures, or were driven by the logic of their position, to one plan of church government only—the absolute independence of each congregation of Christian believers. ”

“ Yet Germany as a nation has, of all the nations of Europe, exercised the least influence on the fortunes of America. Neither the emperor nor any German prince has ever exercised any direct or indirect power over any American territory. ”

“ European needs sent explorers on their voyages of discovery, and European ambitions equipped adventurers for their expeditions of conquest; the commercial projects of England, France, Holland, and Sweden led to the establishment of the principal New-World colonies; the economic exigencies and the political and religious struggles of Europe sent a flood of settlers to people them; the institutions of Spain, France, Holland, and England all found a lodgment in the western continent; and those of England became the basis of the great nation which has reached so distinct a primacy in America. ”

“ In practice the absolute power was no less a reality, since by royal decree the king not only made war and peace, determined upon foreign and internal policy, established religion, and codified law, but also disposed of the property of his subjects through arbitrary taxation. A systematic scheme of government, in which all lines should converge upward to the sovereign, could be drawn more justly for France in the seventeenth century than for any political structure since the Notitia Dignitatum was drawn up for the later Roman Empire. ”

“ The Dutch are not an emigrating people. Yet those who did emigrate carried with them such an assertive character and so highly developed a group of institutions that they exercised a deep and permanent influence over communities like New York, in which they soon ceased to be the dominant element; while their institutions in Holland made such a strong impression upon English sojourners in their midst that some of their characteristics reappeared long afterwards in American colonies in which no Dutchman had ever settled. ”

“ The Turkish thirst for conquest brought under the control of that race, in the half-century between 1450 and 1500, half the western termini of the trade-routes with the East. It crushed out all semblance of independence in the settlements of the European merchants in Asia Minor and on the Black Sea, and left to them a bare foothold for purposes of trade under the most burdensome restrictions. These conquests were very destructive to life and property. ”

“ In the sixteenth century there were twelve dukes, thirteen marquises, and thirty-six counts in Castile, some of whom had princely estates and power. The heads of such families as that of Mendoza or Gruzman or Lara or Haro or Medina Celi were among the greatest men in Europe. Yet the highest of these nobles was still an immeasurable distance below the king. The option of royal estates, the seizure of the grand masterships, the enforcement and extension of all latent powers of the monarchy had freed the Spanish kings from all danger of control by the great nobility. ”

“ Men learned to be bold, and the merchants of each European country carried their national commerce over all parts of Europe and far beyond its limits to the newly discovered lands. English, Dutch, French, and Danish merchants met in the ports of the White Sea and in those of the Mediterranean, and competed with one another for the commerce of the East and the New World. Trading to a distance was the chief commercial phenomenon of the sixteenth century, and was more influential than any other one factor in the transformation of commerce then in progress. ”

“ Its myriad population, its hundreds of cities, its vast wealth, its advanced civilization, its rivers, bridges, and ships, its manufactures and active trade, the fact that it was the easternmost country of Asia, washed by the waters of the external ocean—all made Cathay a land of intense interest to the rising curiosity of thirteenth-century Europe. ”

“ The fifteenth century was a period of extension of geographical knowledge, of which the discovery of America was a part; the sixteenth century was a time of preparation, during which European events were taking place which were of the first importance to America, even though none of the colonies which were to make up the United States were yet in existence. From the time of the settlement forward, the only population of America that has counted in history has been of European origin. The institutions that characterize the New World are fundamentally those of Europe. ”

“ The princes, nobles, and cities had so frequently allied themselves with foreign states against the emperor and against one another, their policy had been so constantly regulated by their own interests alone, in entire disregard of those of the nation at large, and the religious divisions had been settled on such a sectional basis, that there was now no thought of derogating from their independence for the sake of the central power of Germany. ”

“ Thus the fragmentary and embryonic group of Iberian nations of the fifteenth century grew into the powerful Spanish monarchy of the sixteenth. A single centralized government was created, and the divided currents of national life were gathered by it into one great stream. Notwithstanding many survivals of mediaeval conditions and later reversions to the earlier type, internal warfare and domestic disorder disappeared from the peninsula, and divergence of foreign policy no longer weakened its influence in Europe. ”

“ He must not be so much of a country gentleman as to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder of either than his wife; nor of the next sort of them whose aim reaches no further than to be Justice of the Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff, who reads no book but statutes, and studies nothing but how to make a speech interlarded with Latin that may amaze his disagreeing poor neighbours, and fright them rather than persuade them into quietness. ”

“ A vast mass of new trade came into existence; spices and other Oriental products, now that they were imported by the Portuguese and afterwards by Spanish, Dutch, French, and English, by direct routes and by water carriage, were greatly cheapened in price, and thus made attainable by many more people and much more extensively consumed. The early explorers of America failed to find either the route to the East or the Eastern goods which they sought, but they found other articles for which a demand in Europe either already existed or was ultimately created. ”

“ Gradually, as habits in Europe changed, other products came to be of enormous production and value. Sugar stands in the first rank of these later products; tobacco, cocoa, and many others followed close upon it. As colonists from Europe became established in the New World they must be provided with European and Asiatic goods, and this gave additional material for commerce. Besides creating an increased commerce with the East and a new commerce with the West, the awakened spirit of enterprise and the new discoveries widened the radius of trade of each nation. ”

“ The primary governmental division of the country, the shire, was the sphere of much activity; but it was not automatic, and acted wholly or almost wholly in response to pressure from above. The ultimate unit of local government, the parish, township, or manor, had many and interesting functions, but they were for the most part either declining survivals of earlier powers, or new forms of activity imposed upon it from above. It had the necessary officials and the political rights to enable it to do a great deal, but it showed few signs of vigorous life. ”

“ Councils, corregidores, inspectors, and various other instruments of royal power fast sapped the strength of older institutions and gave authority and efficiency to the royal government; but they were expensive and the crown was poor. Moreover, these institutions were only the permanent elements in a policy which had a thousand temporary occasions of expense. Not even Ferdinand and Isabella could carry out so vigorous a regime unless provided with larger revenues. They determined, therefore, to emancipate the crown from its poverty. ”

“ For whole centuries Italians had made up an appreciable part of the population of many cities of the Levant; the galleys of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa lay at their wharves discharging produce of the West and loading the products of the East; a large part of the income of the local potentates, or governors, was made up of export and import duties, harbor charges, and other impositions paid by the Western merchants. The prosperity of these Greek and Saracen seaboard cities was as largely dependent on this trade as was that of the merchants who came there for its sake. ”

“ Thus the luxuries of the East were distributed through Europe. With occasional interruptions, frequent changes in detail, and constant difficulties, the same general routes and methods of transfer and exchange had been followed for centuries. It was the oldest, the most extensive, and the most lucrative trade known to Europe. It stretched over the whole known world, its lines converging from the eastward and southward to the cities of Syria, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea coast, and diverging thence to the westward and northward throughout Europe. ”

“ Distant trading proved to have different requirements from anything that had gone before: it needed the political backing of some strong national government; it needed, or was considered to need, a monopoly of trade; and it needed the capital of many men.
These requirements were not felt in Portugal and Spain as they were in the other countries of Europe, because each of those countries had control of an extensive and lucrative field of commerce, and because in them government itself took the direction of all distant trading. ”

“ It was not likely that the two most vigorous, free, and commercially enterprising states of Europe would allow themselves long to be excluded from the most attractive and lucrative trade in the world. After England, in her resistance to the Armada in 1588, applied the touchstone to the naval prestige of Spain and showed its hollowness, her merchants and mariners took heart and pressed directly to the East. ”

“ Almost within the first decade of the sixteenth century an Englishman cries out: "The Indies are discovered and vast treasures brought from thence every day. Let us, therefore, bend our endeavors thitherwards, and if the Spaniards or Portuguese suffer us not to join with them, there will be yet region enough for all to enjoy." [Footnote: Lord Herbert (1511) , quoted in Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, II., 39.] Soon England, France, and the Netherlands were sending exploring and trading expeditions abroad, and somewhat later they all aimed at colonial empires comparable with that of Spain. ”

“ Then came the opening up of direct commerce by sea with the East Indies, the discovery of America, and the awakening of ambition, enterprise, and effort on the part of new nations to make still further explorations and to develop new lines of commerce. The old organization of commerce was profoundly altered when its centre of gravity was shifted westward to the Atlantic seaboard, and Europe got its Oriental products for the most part by an ocean route. Cities which had for ages had the advantage of a good situation were now unfavorably placed. ”