Horace G. Hutchinson

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

“ That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence. And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have forced their way in upon it from the north—rude, uncivilised tribes invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They and their sons for many generations have governed the land. ”

“ So, in this breathing space, all was triumph and splendour in Paris; but Napoleon had already, as we have seen, been thwarted in his great designs upon the East by the naval defeat which he suffered from the English in Egypt. He realised very clearly that England was the foe whom it was most essential that he should remove out of his way if he were to achieve all his ambitions for world power. ”

“ Napoleon was as ready to profess himself a good Catholic in France, as to pretend a leaning towards Mahommedanism in the East, in order to gain favour with the Orientals.
In spite of his lack of sympathy with mankind, he was a subtle judge of human nature. He observed men's weaknesses with a coldly critical eye. He knew that men—and Frenchmen more than most men, and perhaps women even more than men—are attracted and fascinated by show and splendour. Therefore, as First Consul, he caused all the ceremonies in connection with Government to be splendid ”

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

“ No sooner had the wars of religion ceased than there began those wars over the succession to the thrones of the newly formed or forming nations. It seems that as soon as the people began to have any sense of nationality, as we say—any feeling that as a nation they had an existence free and independent of the others—they at once found themselves faced by the danger of some one nation, or some one Royal house ruling several nations, becoming so strong as to take their liberty from them. ”

“ We may probably say that no other man has made so great a difference to the history of the world, by his last will and testament, as did the King of Spain by that will which left all his monarchy to the grandson of him who already was so great as to be called the Grand Monarque. ”

“ It is likely that until the latter half of the eighteenth century the people of Europe did not even begin to realise the full meaning of the great New World which Columbus had discovered for them in the West. Spain regarded it as a Tom Tiddler's ground where she would go and pick up gold. France and possibly England too had their foolish dreams. They expected enormous things from that vast continent of which the western limits were only gradually revealed to them. They expected enormous results which never were, nor ever could be realised. ”

“ The voice of the Anglo-Saxon communities would certainly speak even more forcibly than it does in the world's counsels if there were such union and such unity.
But, whatever view we may take as to that, we cannot but see that the English settlers in America could never, with even tolerable safety, have declared themselves independent of the British Government, if they had still had the French menace hanging over them. They could not possibly have dispensed with the support of the British army and navy. But after the defeat of the French in Canada they were free to assert themselves. ”

“ He was ruthless and subtle, and he was single-minded in his determination to make his king not only the despotic ruler of his own country but also powerful throughout Europe. The French monarch was served by his minister as effectively as our Henry VIII. by Wolsey and by Thomas Cromwell. Richelieu had put down a rising of the nobles against the Crown with severity as cruel as that of Henry's last, and worst, minister. The people of France had never secured the rights which the law gave them in England—though the Tudor kings paid those rights little respect—and they gave the nobles no support. ”

“ All through this portion of our story Christian Europe was constantly in peril from the Turk on the borders, and often far over the borders, of Austria and Hungary. Never was that menace greater than in 1683 when he was besieging Vienna with a great force. He was defeated by Poles and Germans. Yet at this supreme crisis Louis, the Catholic King of France, was secretly favouring the Moslems!
The story of our own country at this time is especially humiliating. Cromwell, in the early years of the half-century which we have been considering, had set England high in the estimation of the world. ”

“ In the first place, the numbers of the fighters on either side was small—ridiculously small, we may think. The total population of the countries was nothing like as dense as it is now. But even in proportion to that lesser population, the fighting forces were small. In the recent Great War we saw "nations in arms," as has been truly said. Every man who could possibly be spared from the peace work that had to be continued if people were to have food to eat and other bare necessities of life, was pressed into the fighting. In those older wars only a very few of the population fought. ”

“ In spite of the wars, the population had been growing in Europe, and when they ceased, in 1815, it began to grow even faster. Besides, there was growth of humanity all the world over, and especially in America. And the end of the wars allowed the produce of one country to be freely carried across sea and exchanged for the produce of another. It was especially in British ships that the produce was carried; and this carrying trade, as it is called, was a great cause of the wealth which Britain began to make in this century. ”

“ Finally war blazed out, from all this smouldering trouble, just before the middle of the century, when the Austrian Emperor abdicated in favour of Francis Joseph, his nephew, and the Hungarians refused to recognise the nephew as their king.
The Magyar orator and statesman, Kossuth, was the great figure in this gallant effort of the Hungarians for their liberty. In the early period of the struggle the Hungarians gained victories, and there was a moment when it seems that, had they pushed forward, they might have taken Vienna itself, Austria's capital city. ”

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

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

“ And yet this industrial era had to bring its own hardships, and, unhappily, its own hatreds. The class hatred, as it is called—the animosity felt by the man who works with his hands against the class that has the money and works with its brains—arose directly out of the conditions which the steam-engine produced. To-day, when that industrial era has lasted more {191} than a hundred years, it is that hatred which makes our life so very difficult for us all, both for the classes above and for the classes below. ”

“ It was the great trading concern known as the East India Company.
"Some have greatness thrust upon them"; and this was remarkably true of the empire of India which Great Britain was really compelled by the force of circumstances to assume. The trading company did not desire to govern the country: they wished to fulfil their original purpose of trade, of making money. It was the aggression of the French and the oppression of the native ruler of Bengal, as we have seen, which obliged them to fight for the very liberty to trade. ”

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

“ We have seen how one of the great needs of these countries of the old world was men to cultivate their war-wasted lands. This man-power they were constantly hoping to increase by acquiring slaves. Portugal did acquire slaves, who proved excellent workers, from Africa. The slaves which the first conquerors of the West brought to Spain were nearly useless. The Red Indian, as it became the fashion to call him later, has never been of any value, as the African negro and the East Indian "coolie" have been valuable, in the service of the white man. ”

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

“ These Boers had been the first to shoulder the white man's burden—if we like to put it in that way. They had been the first to drive out those black people who had owned the land before them—if we prefer to put it so. Whichever way we prefer, they had a right prior to that of those diamond finders, who came in and bought up their farms at great prices and were not at all welcome to the majority of the Boers whose farms did not happen to lie over diamond-producing strata. ”

“ The chief importance of this war of the Polish succession, for the general story, is that it resulted in a large increase of Russia's power over Poland. The successive rulers of Russia began to be more and more fully recognised as the heads of the Slav people and the supreme upholders of the Greek Church.
At the same time another power, a Protestant power, that of Prussia, was becoming more and more formidable along the shores of the Baltic to the north of Poland, and the time is near at hand when we shall see these two, Russia and Prussia, playing a very leading part in the story. ”

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

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

“ This was in strict accord with the counsel of the sage Confucius, whose expressed opinion was that the ruler should interfere as little as might be with the life of his people. And that life was still principally influenced by the doctrines of Confucius, no matter what religions were brought in.
Thus went the story of China through century after century, with violent dissensions, yet never dissensions deep enough or wide enough to create a real change in an empire so vast and in a people so unwilling to change. ”

“ In religion the Virginians were mainly of the Established English Church. In Maryland, the inhabitants were chiefly Roman Catholic. In New England, Puritans were in a large majority; and in Pennsylvania, the State of William Penn, the people were largely Quakers.
It was for the sake of religion that most of them, or their forbears, had left their native land. And just because the religions were so many and various, it was impossible that there could be any established Church among them in the land of their adoption. Men were free to serve God according to the dictates of their consciences. ”

“ It is that opposition, in the main, which has made the British Empire in India both possible and necessary—possible, because without that cleavage there might well have been a union of native strength sufficient to withstand the British domination, and necessary, because at every step the British found their trade and their peace imperilled by disturbances beyond the latest limits within which they had made good their authority. ”

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

“ It threatened the very existence of the white man in the East, and only a splendid heroism in resistance to heavy odds, and heroic efforts and forced marches to relieve a situation nearly desperate, saved the principal, though scanty, British force from being annihilated. Once more the British wonderfully won through to a final victory, but the events of the war had brought into clear light the long known fact that the government of British India was an affair which demanded the most direct attention of British statesmen, with all the resources at their disposal. ”