Petersburg had to be gained over by varying forms of corruption.

As

The ideas of reform' which permeated Europe in the midst of the break-up of the old order consisted in the abolition of the last relics of mediævalism-the system of the 'dark ages'-by the action of absolute princes themselves, friends of the new order of ideas, and therefore what was then termed 'enlightened.' The whole political system of the philosophers consisted in placing the omnipotence of the State at the service of the infallibility of reason. Mercier de la Rivière said, the State' must govern according to the ideas of men of social orders,' and, so governing, it must be all powerful. Such conceptions naturally gave rise to the most profound contempt for the English Constitution. Here, says Letrosne, we can make in a moment reforms which change the whole condition of the country, while in England such reforms are always at the mercy of political parties. Rousseau also had nothing but ridicule for the 'stupidity of the English nation.' The idea of the most advanced continental reformers was then by no means to abolish absolute power, but to obtain the use of it; not to increase the freedom of individual men, but to constrain them in the right direction-a direction good for all nations, or rather all mankind apart from their various nationalities. Thus Lessing loudly declared that he had no notion of what a mere love of one's country might be. In 1784 Schiller declared: I write as a citizen of the world; I early exchanged 'the narrow boundaries of my own country for the vast 'world.' 'Germans,' he cried, seek not to form a nation; 'be contented with being men.' In his 'Don Carlos,' published in 1787, the Marquess of Posa is his ideal reformer; he says:Man is more than you think, and will break the 'yoke of his long sleep... be generous, be strong, and scatter happiness about. . . . See around you how rich 'nature is in her liberty. . . . Consecrate to the happiness of 'the people that power which for so long has been devoted to the greatness of the throne.' This adjuration was no mere piece of rhetoric, but expressed the confidence then. generally felt in the omnipotence of the State for good or evil. Liberty' was then understood to mean the reign of ' enlightenment,' as the love of philosophy' was 'virtue.' Much was permitted to those who professed such virtue.' The authorship of 'La Pucelle' was not thought any degra

* Contrat Social, liv. iii. ch. xv.

6

† Act iii. scene 10.

dation to Voltaire, any more than the Rêve de d'Alembert' to Diderot, or his Confessions' to Rousseau; such things rather contributed to their celebrity. Catherine II., who cleverly duped the philosophers, since in reality she no more possessed the virtue they esteemed than the virtue to which they were indifferent, was an especial object of their admiration. Ah! my friends, what a sovereign!' exclaimed Diderot. You must all recognise in her the soul of Brutus in the form ' of Cleopatra.' Not without apparent reason, then, did absolute rulers view with indulgence the caprices or even the turbulence of such philosophers. They felt they could hold them well in hand and make use of them as a sort of intellectual condottieri at their service.

A strange mixture of good and evil, of wise reforms and futile arbitrary acts, characterised the governments of that day. Everywhere, but especially in Italy and Germany, intellectual culture was encouraged, schools opened, and universities extended. Religious toleration reigned in Prussia. Gustavus III. introduced it into Sweden, and even the prince bishops patronised it. In 1783 the Bishop Elector of Trier made a decree in favour of dissenters for the honour of religion and the increase of commerce.' Torture was abolished in Tuscany and Sweden, and was generally falling into desuetude. Serfdom was suppressed in Baden in 1783, and in Denmark in 1788. It was diminished and attenuated in Prussia by Frederick, and in Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Hungary by Joseph II., who in less than five years attempted and in great part carried out by his absolute decrees, a revolution greater than that effected by the Constituent Assembly of France. He abolished the ancient territorial divisions and established in their place thirteen governments, each divided into 'circles;' he suppressed the various national and provincial diets, and (in the French fashion) instituted intendants' in their place. The burgomasters became his nominees, and the political functions of the nobility were abolished, while they and the clergy were alike subjected to taxation. He sought to impose the German tongue on his Hungarians, Croatians, Czechs, Poles, and Slavs, while he restricted commerce by a system of the most rigorous protection. It is true that he built many schools and hospitals, and ameliorated the condition of the peasantry, but his ideal was to form a State, all the subjects of which should be equal, under a uniform despotism, which by education should form all its citizens upon one model. Though he decreed religious toleration, yet, in 1777, he

declared that there ought to be only one religion-a religion which should guide all the inhabitants of his empire to efficiently contribute to the welfare of the State. And, indeed, philosophy had introduced a new religion into Europe, and one the hostility of which to the system of former days showed itself plainly in the actions even of rulers who supposed, or professed, themselves to be the main supporters of Catholicism. As we said before, Christendom, the ideal Christian republic, which was for a brief time realised under Innocent III. and which took common action in the earlier crusades, had no longer more than a nominal existence. The only common action taken by the Catholic Powers in the eighteenth century was that which brought about the suppression of the Jesuits. That famous company, which had so largely contributed to help on the despotism of the Catholic monarchs and to suppress all forms of dissent, had now to reap what it had so industriously and efficiently sown. The sovereigns of France, Spain, Naples, Parma, and Portugal had expelled the Jesuits from their domains, as their absolute and unconstitutional power enabled them to do. But they were by no means content with merely carnal weapons. They desired that the head of the Church should also smite them with the spiritual sword. Accordingly, the representatives of the most faithful,' most Catholic,' and very Christian' kings made their representations to the Holy See to this effect, and they did so with scant courtesy and small consideration. Their demands were arrogant and menacing. They insisted that the Pope, as a temporal sovereign, should forbid every member of the hated order to enter his territory, and should, as supreme spiritual ruler, suppress them. When Clement XIII. tried to resist ever the weakest of the allied sovereigns-the Duke of ParmaFrance immediately seized Avignon, while Naples occupied Beneventum. Only when his successor had capitulated and actually suppressed the company was the Holy See allowed to recover its States.

In the general movement of the European Governments towards an augmentation of despotic power, the Catholic States had to contend with that still powerful body, the Roman Church. That Church had also itself followed the common impulse towards centralisation, till it had come to realise the old Roman imperial power transferred to the domain of religion. A body so rich and apparently defenceless as the Church became a common object of attack. It was not to be expected that rulers who had humiliated and

subjected their nobles, and dispersed the national or provincial assemblies of their States, should be content to see within their realms a corporate body numerous, rich, powerful, well disciplined, and under the control of a foreign sovereign. The ideal to which they looked with envy was a church similar to that of Russia, the illustrious monarch of which was declared * by Voltaire to be the only rational one, inasmuch as she paid the priests, whose mouths were opened or shut at her orders. Even in Catholic Spain there was a constant struggle to depress the Church from the beginning of the reign of Philip V. to the end of that of Charles III. Pombal followed suit in Portugal, while Ferdinand of Parma and Leopold of Tuscany were active in the same direction, suppressing convents, and even interfering in the details of public worship. The Republic of Venice imitated the monarchies, and the very prince bishops of Germany joined the movement. In 1785 those of Trier, Mainz, Köln, and Strasburg sent a formal notice to the Roman curia intimating that, if they were not allowed to reject papal bulls when they thought fit so to do, they would convoke a national council.

Thus it was that, when the French Revolution broke out, it found ready to its hand accepted maxims and received views which had but to be vigorously applied in order, as it seemed, to make an end for good and all of the despised and detested tyranny of centuries past. Yet, by the irony of fate, the very measures thus initiated, by occasioning war with Europe and the rise of Napoleon, served to raise papal absolutism in the spiritual domain to a far higher level than it had ever before attained under the most powerful of the mediæval pontiffs.

It was the decrees of the Constituent Assembly in favour of the civil constitution of the clergy which finally decided Louis XVI. to demand the intervention of Europe, and which let loose civil war in France. M. Sorel himself says:

'One may say that of all the errors of the Assembly that was the most calamitous; it exercised the most dissolving action on the State and nation, and opened the abyss into which the Revolution plunged headlong. The Assembly was led into it less by a false appreciation of what was politically expedient than by the blinding effect of its own passions. The strongest sentiment of the most "enlightened " of the eighteenth century was anti-religious passion. In their eyes the Church not only represented a tyranny, but they hated it as a privi

* In a letter to Count Schouvalof of December 3, 1768.

leged and very opulent corporation. They ardently desired to suppress its privileges, confiscate its wealth, and reduce its members to an equality with other citizens.' (Vol. ii. p. 115.)

It would have been possible to do this without producing a fatal crisis. The Church would, of course, have protested, but the necessities of the moment and the intense national sentiment which had been evolved would have sufficed to cause the acceptance of a measure which harmonised with the principles of the new constitution. But the assembly made a profound mistake when it attempted at one and the same time to proclaim freedom of worship, while erecting a new State Church on an exaggeration of the principles of 1682. Professed freethinkers, inveterate enemies of all religious belief and of every church; legists, experts in all the subtleties of the Roman civil law, but quite indifferent or hostile to Christian doctrine; Protestants, just emancipated from iniquitous laws which regarded their faith as treason, with a few Jansenists and unfrocked priests, composed the strange council which sat at Paris pretending to found a new State Church. The decrees of that council were such as might have been expected. Pastors were to be nominated by an electoral college of each district, the members of which might be of any religion or of none, and the loudly vaunted religious freedom was soon violated in the persons of the nonjuring clergy and their followers. They, as we know, quickly became objects, first of suspicion, then of active hostility, and ultimately of furious persecution. Thus, as M. Sorel observes, this assembly of philosophers found itself led by the force of logic to 'violate, almost as soon as decreed, one of the principles 'most passionately demanded by the philosophy of the age— "religious toleration.'

We will next follow our author in a brief survey of the various nations of Europe at this eventful period.

Holland owed much to France. Henry IV. and Louis XIII. had largely aided the establishment of the Dutch Republic, and an active and influential French party had existed in Holland since the end of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, there, also existed a germ of hostility to a French alliance, because the independence of Holland was more directly threatened by the preponderance of France than even by that of the house of Austria, while it had little to fear from England. Thus it came about that the Dutch Government joined with England and Sweden in resisting