Chapter 51 The Emperor Charles V The Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign of the Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs that Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the heir of being the greatest monarch since Charlemagne. His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the creation of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I, 1459-1519. Some families have fought, others have intrigued, their way to world power. The Habsburgs married their way. He began his career with Austria, Styria, part of Alzac and other districts, the original Habsburg patrimony. He married the ladies' names scarcely matters to us, the Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him after his first wife's death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he tried unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in succession to his father Frederick III in 1493 and married the Duchy of Milan. Finally, he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of Ferdinand de Nisabella, the Ferdinand de Nisabella of Columbus, who not only reigned over a freshly united Spain and over Sardinia and the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, but over all America, west of Brazil. So it was that this Charles V's, his grandson, inherited most of the American continent and between a third and a half of what the Turks had left of Europe. He succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When his grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516, he became practically king of the Spanish dominions, his mother being imbecile, and his grandfather maximally undying in 1519. He was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively tender age of 20. He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick upper lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of young and vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant young monarchs. Francis I had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the age of 21. Henry VIII had become king of England in 1509 at 18. It was the age of barber in India 1526-1530 and Suleiman the Magnificent in Turkey 1520. Both exceptionally capable monarchs and the Pope Leo X-1513 was also a very distinguished Pope. The Pope and Francis I attempted to prevent the election of Charles's emperor because they dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands of one man. Both Francis I and Henry VIII offered themselves to the imperial electors. But there was now a long established tradition of Habsburg emperors since 1273, and some energetic bribery secured the election for Charles. At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in the hands of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself and take control. He began to realize something of the threatening complexities of his exalted position. It was a position as unsound as it was splendid. From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation created by Luther's agitations in Germany. The emperor had one reason for siding with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope to his election. But he had been brought up in Spain, that most Catholic of countries, and he decided against Luther. So he came into conflict with the Protestant princes, and particularly the elector of Saxony. He found himself in the presence of an opening rift that was to split the outworn fabric of Christendom into two contending camps. His attempts to close that rift were strenuous and honest, and ineffective. There was an extensive peasant revolt in Germany, which interwoven with the general political and religious disturbance. And these internal troubles were complicated by attacks upon the empire from east and west alike. On the west of Charles was his spirited rival Francis I, to the east was the ever-advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in alliance with Francis, and clamoring for certain areas of tribute from the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain at his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective support in money from Germany. His social and political troubles were complicated by financial distresses. He was forced to ruin his borrowing. On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was north Italy. The general ship was dull on both sides. Their advances and retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German army invaded France, failed to take Marcel's, fell back into Italy, lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces, defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the Pope and Henry VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining excessive power, turned against Charles. The German troops in Milan, under the constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than follow their commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it, 1527. The Pope took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, while the looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last by the payment of 400,000 Ducats. Ten years of such confused fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found himself triumphed in Italy. In 1530 he was crowned by the Pope. He was the last German Emperor to be so crowned at Bologna. Meanwhile, the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had defeated and killed the King of Hungary in 1526. They held Budapest and in 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances and did his utmost to drive back the Turks. But he found the greatest difficulty in getting the German princes to unite even with this formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I remained implacable for a time and there was a new French war. But in 1538, Charles won his rival over to a more friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France. Francis and Charles then formed an alliance against the Turks. But the Protestant princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome, had formed a league, the Schmalkaldeic League, against the Emperor. And in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom, Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a struggle, a sanitary, irrotational bickering of princes for ascendancy, now flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and diplomacies. It was a snake sack of princely policies that was to go on writhing incurably right into the 19th century and to waste and desolate central Europe again and again. The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in these gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an exceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious dissensions that were tearing Europe into warring fragments as genuine theological differences. He gathered diets and councils in futile attempts at reconciliation. Formulae and confessions were tried over. The student of German history must struggle with the details of the religious peace of Nuremberg, the settlement at the diet of Ratisbon, the interim of Augsburg and the like. Here we do but mention them as details in the worried life of this culminating Emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly one of the multifarious princes and rulers in Europe seems to have been acting in good faith. The widespread religious trouble of the world, the desire of the common people for truth and social righteousness, the spreading knowledge of the time, all those things were merely counters in the imaginations of princely diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who had begun his career with a book against heresy, and who had been rewarded by the Pope, was the title of Defender of the Faith, being anxious to divorce his first wife in favour of a young lady named Anne Wallaine, and wishing also to loot the vast wealth of the Church in England, joined the company of Protestant princes in 1530. Sweden, Denmark and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side. The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the death of Martin Luther. We need no trouble about the incidents of the campaign. The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at Lokal. By something very like a breach of faith, Philip of Hesse, the Emperor's chief remaining antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks were bought off by the promise of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the great relief of the Emperor, Francis I died. So, by 1547, Charles got to a kind of settlement and made his last efforts to effect peace, where there was no peace. In 1552, all Germany was at war again. Only a precipitated flight from Innsbruck saved Charles from capture. And in 1552, with the Treaty of Passau came another unstable equilibrium. Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for 32 years. It is interesting to note how entirely the European mind was concentrated upon the struggle for European ascendancy. Neither Turks, French, English nor Germans had yet discovered any political interest in the great continent of America, nor any significance in the new sea routes to Asia. Great things were happening in America. Cortes, with a mere handful of men, had conquered the great Neolithic Empire of Mexico for Spain. Pizarro had crossed the Isthmus of Panama, 1530, and subjugated another wonderland, Peru. But as yet these events meant no more to Europe than a useful and stimulating influx of silver to the Spanish treasury. It was after the Treaty of Passau that Charles began to display his distinctive originality of mind. He was now entirely bored and disillusioned by his imperial greatness. A sense of the intolerable futility of these European rivalries came upon him. He had never been of a very sound constitution. He was naturally indolent, and he was suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdinand. And Spain and the Netherlands, he resigned to his son Philip. Then in a sort of magnificent dajeun, he retired to a monastery at Eusti. Among the oak and chestnut forests in the hills, to the north of the Tagus valley. There he died in 1558. Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement, this renunciation of the world by this tired majestic titan, world weary, seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his retreat was neither solitary nor austere. He had with him nearly a hundred and fifty attendants. His establishment had all the splendour and indulgences without the fatigues or a court. And Philip II was a dutiful son to whom his father's advice was a command. And if Charles had lost his living interest in the administration of European affairs, there were other motives of a more immediate sort to stir him, says Prescott. In the almost daily correspondence between Xixada or Gastelú and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is scarcely a letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor's eating or his illness. The one seems naturally to follow like a running commentary on the other. It is rare that such topics have formed the burden of communications with the Department of State. It must have been no easy matter for the Secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal of dispatches in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to make a detour so as to take charendula in his root and bring supplies to the royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish to serve for the Jor mayor that was to follow. The trout in the neighborhood Charles thought too small, so others of a larger size were to be sent from Valladolid. Fish of every kind was to his taste, as indeed was anything that in its nature or habits at all approached the fish. Eels, frogs, oysters occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare. Potted fish, especially anchovies, found in great favor with him, and he regretted that he had not brought a better supply of these from the low countries. On an eel pasty he particularly doted. In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III, granting him a dispensation from fasting and allowing him to break his fast early in the morning, even when he was to take the sacrament. Reading and doctoring, it was a return to elemental things. He had never acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read aloud to at meals after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what one narrator describes as a sweet and heavenly commentary. He also amused himself with mechanical toys, by listening to music or sermons, and by attending to the imperial business that still came drifting into him. The death of the empress, to whom he was greatly attached, had turned his mind towards religion, which in his case took a punctilious and ceremonial form. Every Friday in Lent he scorched himself with the rest of the monks with such good will as to draw blood. These exercises and the gout released a bigotry in Charles that had hitherto been restrained by considerations of policy. The appearance of protestant teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. Tell the grand inquisitor and his counsel from me to be at their post, and to lay the axe at the root of the evil before it spreads further. He expressed the doubt whether it would not be well in so black an affair to dispense with an ordinary court of justice, and to show no mercy, lest the criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of repeating his crime. He recommended as an example his own mode or proceeding in the Netherlands, where all who remained obstinate in their errors were burned alive, and those who were admitted to penitence were beheaded. And almost symbolical of his place and role in history was his preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an intuition that something great was dead in Europe, and sorely needed burial, and there was need to write finis over doom. He not only attended every actual funeral that was celebrated at Eustie, but he had services conducted for the absent dead. He held a funeral service in memory of his wife on the anniversary of her death, and finally he celebrated his own obsequies. The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of waxed lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The brethren in their conventional dress, and all the emperor's household clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque shrouded also in black, which had been raised in the centre of the chapel. The service for the burial of the dead was then performed, and amidst the dismal wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit that it might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The sorrowful attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their master's death was presented to their minds, or they were touched, it may be, with compassion, by the spittable display of weakness. Charles muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his household, the spectator of his own obsequies, and the doleful ceremony was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of the priest, in sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty. Within two months of this masquerade he was dead, and the brief greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with him. His realm was already divided between his brother and his son. The Holy Roman Empire struggled on, indeed, to the days of Napoleon I, but as an invalid and dying thing. To this day its unburied tradition still poisons the political heir. Chapter 52 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 52. The Age of Political Experiments of Grand Monarchy and Parliaments and Republicanism in Europe. The Latin Church was broken, the Holy Roman Empire was in extreme decay. The history of Europe, from the opening of the 16th century onward, is a story of peoples feeling their way, darkly, to some new method of government, better adapted to the new conditions that were arising. In the ancient world, over long periods of time, there had been changes of dynasty and even changes of ruling race and language, but the form of government, through monarch and temple, remained fairly stable, and still more stable was the ordinary way of living. In this modern Europe, since the 16th century, the dynastic changes are unimportant, and the interest of history lies in the wide and increasing variety of experiments in political and social organization. The political history of the world from the 16th century onward was, as we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious effort, of mankind, to adapt its political and social methods to certain new conditions that had now arisen. The effort to adapt was complicated, but the fact that the conditions themselves were changing was a steadily increasing rapidity. The adaptation, mainly unconscious and almost always unwilling, for man in general hates voluntary change, has lagged more and more behind the alterations in conditions. From the 16th century onward, the history of mankind is a story of political and social institutions becoming more and more plainly mistiffs, less comfortable and more vexatious, and of the slow reluctant realization of the need of a conscious and deliberate reconstruction of the whole scheme of human societies in the face of needs and possibilities new to all the former experiences of life. What are these changes in the conditions of human life that have disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant and trader with periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest that held human affairs in the old world in a sort of working-written for more than a hundred centuries? They are manifold and various, for human affairs are multitudinously complex, but the main changes seem all to turn upon one cause, namely the growth and extension of a knowledge of the nature of things, beginning first of all in small groups of intelligent people and spreading at first slowly and in the last 500 years very rapidly to larger and larger proportions of the general population. But there has also been a great change in human conditions due to a change in the spirit of human life. This change has gone on side by side with the increase in extension of knowledge and is softly connected with it. There has been an increasing disposition to treat a life based on the common and more elementary desires and gratifications as unsatisfactory and to seek relationship with and service and participation in a larger life. This is the common characteristic of all the great religions that have spread throughout the world in the last 20-odd centuries, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam alike. They have had to do with the spirit of man in a way that the older religions did not have to do. They are forces quite different in their nature and effect from the old fetishistic blood-sacrifice religions of priests and temple that they have in part modified and in part replaced. They have gradually evolved as self-respect in the individual and a sense of participation and responsibility in the common concerns of mankind that did not exist among the populations of the earlier civilizations. The first considerable change in the conditions of political and social life was the simplification and extended use of writing in the ancient civilizations which made larger empires and wider political understandings practicable and inevitable. The next movement forward came with the introduction of the horse and later on of the camel as a means of transport, the use of wheeled vehicles, the extension of roads and the increased military efficiency due to the discovery of terrestrial iron, then followed the profound economic disturbances due to the device of coined money and the change in the nature of debt, proprietorship and trade due to this convenient but dangerous convention. The empires grew in size and range and man's ideas grew likewise to correspond with these things. Came the disappearance of local gods, the age of theocracy and the teaching of the great world religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned and recorded history and geography, the first realization by man of his profound ignorance and the first systematic search for knowledge. For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly in Greece and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the Titanic barbarians, the westward drive of the Mongolian peoples, convulsive religious reconstruction and great pestilences put enormous strains upon political and social order. When civilization emerged again from this phase of conflict and confusion, slavery was no longer the basis of economic life and the first paper mills were preparing a new medium for collective information and cooperation in printed matter. Only at this point and that, the search for knowledge, the systematic scientific process was resumed. And now from the 16th century onward as an inevitable byproduct of systematic thought appeared a steadily increasing series of inventions and devices affecting the intercommunication and interaction of men with one another. They all tended towards wider range of action, greater mutual benefits or injuries, an increased cooperation and they came faster and faster. Men's minds had not been prepared for anything of the sort and until the great catastrophes at the beginning of the 20th century quickened men's minds. The historian has very little to tell of any intelligently planned attempts to meet the new conditions. This increasing flow at inventions was creating. The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity. Since history is the story not of individual lives but of communities, it is inevitable that the inventions that figure most in the historical record are inventions affecting communications. In the 16th century the chief new things that we have to note are the appearance of printed paper and the seaworthy ocean-going sailing ship using the new device of the mariners compass. The former cheapened, spread and revolutionized teaching, public information and discussion and the fundamental operations of political activity. The latter made the round world one. But almost equally important was the increased utilization in improvement of guns and gunpowder, which the Mongols had first brought westward in the 13th century. This destroyed the practical immunity of warrants in their castles and of old cities. Guns swept away feudalism, Constantinople fell to guns, Mexico and Peru fell before the terror of the Spanish guns. The 17th century saw the development of systematic scientific publication, a less conspicuous but ultimately far more pregnant innovation. Conspicuous among the leaders in this great forward step was Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. Afterwards, Lord Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England. He was the pupil and perhaps the mouthpiece of another Englishman, Dr. Gilbert, the experimental philosopher of Colchester, 1540-1603. This second Bacon, like the first, breached observation and experiment and he used the inspiring and fruitful form of a utopian story, the New Atlantis, to express his dream of a great service of scientific research. The Royal Society of London, the Florentine Society and later other national bodies for the encouragement of research and the publication and exchange of knowledge. These European scientific societies became fountains, not only of countless inventions, but also of a destructive criticism of the grotesque theological history of the world that had dominated and crippled human thought for many centuries. Neither the 17th nor the 18th century witnessed any innovations so immediately revolutionary in human conditions as printed paper on the ocean-going ship, but there was a steady accumulation of knowledge and scientific energy that was to bear its full fruits in the 19th century. The exploration and mapping of the world went on. Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand appeared on the map. In Great Britain in the 18th century, coke began to be used for metallurgical purposes, leading to a considerable cheapening of iron and to the possibility of casting and using it in larger pieces than had been possible before, when it had been smelted with wood and charcoal. Modern machinery dawned. Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and flower and fruit at the same time and continuously. With the onset of the 19th century, the real fruitation of science which indeed henceforth may never cease began. First came steam and steel, the railway, the great liner, whilst the bridges and buildings, machinery of almost limitless power, the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material human need, and then, still more wonderful, the hidden treasures of electrical science were open to men. We have compared the political and social life of man from the 16th century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner who lies in dreams while his prison burns about him. In the 16th century, the European mind was still going on with its Latin imperial dream, its dream of a holy Roman empire united under a Catholic church. But just as some uncontrollable element in our composition will insist at times upon introducing into our dreams the most absurd and destructive comments, so thrust into this dream we find the sleeping face and craving stomach of the Emperor Charles V, while Henry VIII of England and Luther tear the unity of Catholicism to threads. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the dream turned to personal monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this period tells with variations the story of an attempt to consolidate a monarchy, to make it absolute and to extend its power over weaker adjacent regions, and of the steady resistance, first of the landowners and then with the increase of foreign trade and home industry, of the growing trading and moneyed class, to the exaction and interference of the crown. There is no universal victory of either side. Here it is the king who gets the upper hand, while there it is the man of private property who beats the king. In one case we find a king becoming the sun and center of his national world, while just over his borders a sturdy mercantile class maintains a republic. So wide a range of variation shows how entirely experimental what local accidents were all the various governments of this period. A very common figure in these national dramas is the king's minister, often in the still Catholic country's apprelate, who stands behind the king, serves him and dominates him by his indispensable services. Here in the limits said to us it is impossible to tell these various national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland went protestant and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip II of Spain, the son of the emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII and his minister Volce, Queen Elizabeth and her minister Berlay prepared the foundations of an absolutism that was wrecked by the folly of James I and Charles I. Charles I was beheaded for treason to his people, 1649, a new turn in the political thought of Europe. For a dozen years until 1660 Britain was a republic and the crown was an unstable power, much over shadowed by parliament, until George III, 1760, 1820, made a strenuous and partly successful effort to restore its predominance. The King of France, on the other hand, was the most successful of all the European kings in perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers, Richelieu, 1585 to 1642 and Massarine, 1602 to 1661, built up the power of the crown in that country and the process was aided by the long reign and very considerable abilities of King Louis XIV, the Grand Monarch, 1643 to 1715. Louis XIV was indeed the patterned king of Europe. He was, within his limitations, an exceptionally capable king. His ambition was stronger than his base or passions, and he guided his country towards bankruptcy through all the complication of a spirited foreign policy with an elaborate dignity that still extorts our admiration. His immediate desire was to consolidate and extend France to the Rhine and Pyrenees and to absorb the Spanish Netherlands. His remote review saw the French kings as the possible successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He made bribery a state method almost more important than warfare. Charles II of England was in his pay and so were most of the Polish nobility presently to be described. His money, or rather the money of the tax-paying classes in France, went everywhere. But his prevailing occupation was splendor. His great palace at Versailles was its saloons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains and parks and prospects was the envy and admiration of the world. He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princeled in Europe was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means as his subjects and credits would permit. Everywhere, the nobility rebuilt or extended their chateau to the new pattern. A great industry of beautiful and elaborate fabrics and furnishings developed. The luxurious arts flourished everywhere. Sculpture in alabaster, fience, giltwoodwork, metalwork, stamped leather, much music, magnificent painting, beautiful printing and bindings, fine crockery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture went a strange race of gentlemen. In tall, powdered wigs, silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing canes and still more wonderful ladies, under towers of powdered hair and wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained wire. Through it all postured the great Louis, the son of his world, unaware of the meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those lower darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate. The German people remained politically divided throughout this period of the monarchies and experimental governments and a considerable number of ducal and princely courts appealed the splendors of their sallies on varying scales. The Thirty Years' War, 1618 to 1648, a devastating scramble amongst the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians for fluctuating political advantages sept the energies of Germany for a century. A map must show the crazy patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map of Europe according to the Peace of Westphalia, 1648. One sees a tangle of principalities, duke-dumps, three states and the like, some partly in and partly out of the empire. Sweden's arm, the reader will note, reached far into Germany and except for a few islands of territory within the imperial boundaries, France was still far from the Rhine. Amidst this patchwork, the Kingdom of Prussia, it became a kingdom in 1701, arose steadily to prominence and sustained a series of successful wars. Frederick the Great of Prussia, 1740 to 86, had his vercels at Potsdam, where his court spoke French, read French literature and rivaled the culture of the French king. In 1714, the Elector of Hanover became King of England adding one more to the list of monarchies, half in and half out of the empire. The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained the title of emperor, the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now there was also an emperor of the east again. After the fall of Constantinople, 1453, the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great, 1462 to 1505, claimed to be heir to the Byzantine throne and adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle upon his arms. His grandson, Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible, 1533 to 1584, assumed the imperial title of Caesar, Tsar. But only in the latter half of the 17th century did Russia cease to seem remote and asiatic to the European mind. The Tsar, Peter the Great, 1682 to 1725, brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He built a new capital for his empire, Petersburg, upon the Neva, that played the part of a window between Russia and Europe, and he set up his vercels at Peterhof, 18 miles away, employing a French architect who gave him a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park, and all the recognized appointments of grand monarchy. In Russia, as in Prussia, French became the language of the court. Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia, and Russia was the Polish kingdom, an ill-organized state of great-landed proprietors, too jealous of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a nominal kingship to the monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these three neighbors, in spite of the efforts of France to retain her as an independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a group of republican cantons. Venice was a republic. Italy, like so much of Germany, was divided among minor dukes and princes. The pope ruled like a prince in the papal states, too fearful now, of losing the allegiance of the remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and their subjects, or to remind the world of the common view of Christendom. There remained indeed no common political idea in Europe at all, Europe was given over altogether to division and diversity. All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a foreign policy of aggression against its neighbors and of aggressive alliances. We Europeans still live today in the last phase of this age of the multifarious sovereign states and still suffer from the hatreds, hostilities, and suspicions it engendered. The history of this time becomes more and more manifestly gossip, more and more unmeaning and very summed to a modern intelligence. You are told of how this war was caused by this king's mistress, and how the jealousy of one minister for another caused that. A titul title of bribes and rivalries discussed the intelligent student. The more permanently significant fact is that, in spite of the obstruction of a score frontiers, reading and thought, still spread and increased, and inventions multiplied. The 18th century saw the appearance of a literature profoundly skeptical and critical of the courts and policies of the time. In such a book as Voltaire's Candid, we have the expression of an infinite wariness with the planless confusion of the European world. End of Chapter 52 Chapter 53 of a short history of the world by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 53. The new empires of the Europeans in Asia and overseas. While Central Europe thus remained divided and confused, the Western Europeans and particularly the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the British, were extending the area of their struggles across the seas of all the world. The printing press had dissolved the political ideas of Europe into a vast and at first indeterminate fermentation. But that other great innovation, the ocean-going sailing ship, was inexorably extending the range of European experience to the furthermost limits of saltwater. The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern Atlantic Europeans were not for colonization, but for trade and mining. The Spaniards were first in the field. They claimed a million over the whole of this new world of America. Very soon, however, the Portuguese asked for a share. The Pope, it was one of the last acts of Rome as mistress of the world, divided the new continent between these two first-comers, giving Portugal, Brazil and everything else east of a line, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, and all the rest to Spain, 1494. The Portuguese at this time were also pushing overseas enterprise southward and eastward. In 1497 Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the Cape to Zanzibar and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java and the Moloques, and the Portuguese were setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa and two smaller possessions in India, Macau in China and a part of Timor are to this day Portuguese possessions. The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement paid little heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal, the English, the Danes and Swedes and presently the Dutch were soon staking out claims in North America and the West Indies, and his most Catholic majesty of France heeded the papal settlement as little as any Protestant. The wars of Europe extended themselves to these claims and possessions. In the long run the English were the most successful in this scramble for overseas possessions. The Danes and Swedes were too deeply entangled in the complicated affairs of Germany to sustain effective expeditions abroad. Sweden was wasted upon the German battlefields by a picturesque king, Gustavus Adolfus, the Protestant Lion of the North. The Dutch were the heirs of such small settlements as Sweden made in America, and the Dutch were too near French aggressions to hold their own against the British. In the Far East the chief rivals for empire were the British, Dutch and French, and in America the British, French and Spanish. The British had the supreme advantage of a water frontier, the silver streak of the English Channel against Europe. The tradition of the Latin Empire entangled them least. France had always thought too much in terms of Europe. Throughout the 18th century she was wasting her opportunities of expansion in West and East alike in order to dominate Spain, Italy and the German confusion. The religious and political dissensions of Britain in the 17th century had driven many of the English to seek a permanent home in America. They struck a route and increased and multiplied, giving the British a great advantage in the American struggle. In 1756 and 1760 the French lost Canada to the British and their American colonists, and a few years later the British trading company found itself completely dominant over French, and Portuguese in the Peninsula of India. The great Mongol Empire of Baba Akbar and their successors had now far gone into decay and the story of its practical capture by a London trading company, the British East India Company is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole history of conquest. This East India Company had been originally at the time of its incorporation under Queen Elizabeth no more than a company of sea adventurers. Step by step they had been forced to raise troops and arm their ships, and now this trading company with its tradition of gain found itself dealing not merely in spices and dyes and tea and jewels, but in the revenues and territories of the provinces and the destinies of India. It had come to buy and sell and it found itself achieving a tremendous piracy. There was no one to challenge its proceedings. Is it any wonder that its captains and commanders and officials, nay, even its clerks and common soldiers came back to England loaded with spoils? Men under such circumstances with a great and wealthy land at their mercy could not determine what they might or might not do. It was a strange land to them with a strange sunlight. Its brown people seemed a different race outside their range of sympathy. Its mysterious temples sustained fantastic standards of behavior. Englishmen at home were perplexed when presently these generals and officials came back to make dark accusations against each other of extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parliament passed a vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774. In 1788 Warren Hastings, a second great Indian administrator, was impeached and acquitted 1792. It was a strange and unprecedented situation in the world's history. The English Parliament found itself ruling over a London trading company, which in its turn was dominating an empire far greater and more populous than all the domains of the British crown. Just a bulk of the English people, India was a remote, fantastic, almost inaccessible land to which adventurous poor young men went out to return after many years very rich and very choleric old gentlemen. It was difficult for the English to conceive what the life of these countless brown millions in the eastern sunshine could be. Their imaginations declined the task. India remained romantically unreal. It was impossible for the English therefore to exert any effective supervision and control over the company's proceedings. And while the western European powers were thus fighting for these fantastic overseas empires, upon every ocean in the world, two great land conquests were in progress in Asia. China had thrown off the Mongol yoke in 1760 and flourished under the great native dynasty of the Ming until 1644. Then the Manchus and other Mongol people reconquered China and remained masters of China until 1912 meanwhile Russia was pushing east and groving to greatness in the world's affairs. The rise of this great central power of the old world, which is neither altogether of the east nor altogether of the west, is one of the utmost importance to our human destiny. Its expansion is very largely due to the appearance of Christian steppe people, the Cossacks, who formed a barrier between the feudal agriculture of Poland and Hungary to the west and the Tartar to the east. The Cossacks were the wild east of Europe and in many ways not unlike the wild west of the United States in the middle 19th century. All who had made Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well as the persecuted innocent, rebellious serfs, religious secretaries, thieves, vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum in the southern steppes and there made a fresh start and fought for life and freedom against Pol, Russian and Tartar alike. Doubtless fugitives from the Tartars to the east also contributed to the Cossack mixture. Slowly these border folk were incorporated in the Russian imperial service, much as the highland clans of Scotland were converted into regiments by the British government. New lands were offered them in Asia. They became a weapon against the dwindling power of the Mongolian nomads, first in Turkestan and then across Siberia as far as the Amur. The decay of Mongol energy in the 17th and 18th centuries is very difficult to explain. Within two or three centuries from the days of Jengis and Timurlain, Central Asia had relapsed from a period of world ascendancy to extreme political impotence. Changes of climate, unrecorded pestilences, infections of a malarial type may have played their part in this recession, which may be only a temporary recession measured by the scale of universal history of the Central Asian peoples. Some authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching from China also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any rate, by the 16th century the Mongol, Tartar and Turkish peoples were no longer pressing outward but were being invaded, subjugated and pushed back, both by Christian Russia in the west and by China in the east. All through the 17th century the Cossacks were spreading eastward from European Russia and settling wherever they found agricultural conditions. Cordon's of forts and stations formed a moving frontier to these settlements to the south where the two commands were still strong and active. To the northeast, however, Russia had no frontier until she reached right to the Pacific. End of chapter 53 Chapter 54 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 54 The American War of Independence The third quarter of the 18th century thus saw the remarkable and unstable spectacle of a Europe divided against itself and no longer with any unifying political or religious idea yet through the immense stimulation of men's imaginations by the printed book, the printed map and the opportunity of the new ocean-going shipping able in a disorganized and contentious manner to dominate all the coasts of the world. It was a planless, incoherent abolition of enterprise due to temporary and almost accidental advantages over the rest of mankind. By virtue of these advantages, this new and still largely empty continent of America was peopled mainly from Western European sources and South Africa and Australia and New Zealand marked down as prospective homes for European population. The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco da Gama to India was the perennial first motive of all sailors since the beginning of things, trade. But while in the already populous and productive East, the trade motive remained dominant and the European settlements remained trading settlements from which the European inhabitants hoped to return home to spend their money. The Europeans in America, dealing with communities at a very much lower level of productive activity, found a new inducement for persistence in the search for gold and silver. Particularly did the mines of Spanish America yield silver. The Europeans had to go to America not simply as armed merchants, but as prospectors, miners, searchers after natural products and presently as planters. In the north they sought furs, mines and plantations necessitated settlements. They obliged people to set up permanent overseas homes. Finally, in some cases, as when the English Puritans went to New England in the early 17th century to escape religious persecution, when in the 18th, Oklothorp sent people from the English debtor's prisons to Georgia, and when in the end of the 18th, the Dutch sent orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the Europeans frankly crossed the seas to find new homes for good. In the 19th century, and especially after the coming of the steamship, the stream of European immigration to the new empty lands of America and Australia rose from some decades to the scale of a great migration. So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Europeans, and the European culture was transplanted to much larger areas than those in which it had been developed. These new communities bringing already made civilization with them to these new lands grew up as it were unplanned and unperceived. The statecraft of Europe did not foresee them and was unprepared with any ideas about their treatment. The politicians and ministers of Europe continued to regard them as essentially expeditionary establishments, sources of revenue, possessions and dependencies long after their peoples had developed a keen sense of their separate social life. And also they continued to treat them as helplessly subject to the mother country long after the population had spread inland out of reach of any effectual punitive operations from the sea. Because until right into the 19th century it must be remembered the link of all these overseas empires was the ocean going sailing ship. On land the swiftest thing was still the horse and the cohesion and unity of political systems on land was still limited by the limitations of horse communications. Now at the end of the third quarter of the 18th century the northern two-thirds of North America was under the British crown. France had abandoned America except from Brazil which was Portuguese and one or two small islands and areas in French, British, Danish and Dutch hands, Florida, Louisiana, California and all America to the south was Spanish. It was the British colonies south of Maine and Lake Ontario that first demonstrated the inadequacy of the sailing ship to hold overseas populations together in one political system. These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin and character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settlements British. There were British Catholics in Maryland and British ultra-protestants in New England and while the New Englanders farmed their own land and denounced slavery the British in Virginia and the south were planters employing a swelling multitude of imported negro slaves. There was no natural common unity in such states to get from one to the other might mean a coasting voyage hardly less tedious than the transatlantic crossing. But the Union that diverse origin and natural conditions denied the British Americans was forced upon them by the selfishness and stupidity of the British government in London. They were taxed without any voice in the spending of the taxes. Their trade was sacrificed to British interests. The highly profitable slave trade was maintained by the British government in spite of the opposition of the Virginians who though quite willing to hold a new slaves feared to be swamped by an ever-growing barbaric black population. Britain at that time was lapsing towards an intense form of monarchy and the obstinate personality of George III 1760 to 1820 did much to force on a struggle between the home and the colonial governments. The conflict was precipitated by legislation which favored the London East India Company at the expense of the American shipper. Three cargoes of tea which were imported under the new conditions were thrown overboard in Boston Harbor by a band of men disguised as Indians 1773. Fighting only began in 1775 when the British government attempted to arrest two of the American leaders at Lexington near Boston. The first shots were fired in Lexington by the British. The first fighting occurred at Concord. So the American War of Independence began. Though for more than a year the colonists showed themselves extremely unwilling to sever their links with the mother land. It was not until the middle of 1776 that the Congress of the Insurgent States issued the Declaration of Independence. George Washington who like many of the leading colonists of the time had had a military training in the wars against the French was made commander-in-chief. In 1777 a British general, General Burgoyne in an attempt to reach New York from Canada was defeated at Freeman's farm and obliged to surrender at Saratoga. In the same year the French and Spanish declared war upon Great Britain, greatly hampering her sea communications. A second British army under General Cornwellis was caught in the Yorktown Peninsula in Virginia and obliged to capitulate in 1781. In 1783 peace was made in Paris and the 13 colonies from Maine to Georgia became a union of independent sovereign states. So the United States of America came into existence. Canada remained royal to the British flag. For four years these states had only a very feeble central government under certain articles of confederation and they seemed destined to break up into separate independent communities. Their immediate separation was delayed by the hostility of the British and a certain aggressiveness on the part of the French which brought home to them the immediate dangers of division. A constitution was drawn up and ratified in 1788 establishing a more efficient federal government with a president holding very considerable powers and the weak sense of national unity was invigorated by a second war with Britain in 1812. Nevertheless the area covered by the states was so wide and their interests so diverse at that time that given only the means of communication then available a disintegration of the union into separate states on the European scale of size was merely a question of time. Attendance at Washington meant a long tedious and insecure journey for the senators and congressmen of the remote or districts and the mechanical impediments to the diffusion of a common education and a common literature and intelligence were practically insurmountable. Forces were at work in the world however that were to arrest the process of differentiation altogether. Presently came the river steamboat and then the railway and the telegraph to save the United States from fragmentation and weave its dispersed people together again into the first of great modern nations. 22 years later the Spanish colonies in America were to follow the example of the 13 and break their connection with Europe but being more dispersed over the continent and separated by great mountainous chains and deserts and forests and by the Portuguese Empire of Brazil they did not achieve a union among themselves. They became a constellation of Republican states very prone at first to wars among themselves and to revolutions. Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occupied the mother country of Portugal and the monarchy had fled to Brazil. From that time on until they separated Portugal was rather a dependency of Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822 Brazil declared itself a separate empire under Pedro I a son of the Portuguese king but the new world has never been very favorable to monarchy. In 1889 the emperor of Brazil was shipped off quietly to Europe and the United States of Brazil fell into line with the rest of Republican America. End of chapter 54. Chapter 55 of A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 55 The French Revolution and the Restoration of Monarchy in France Britain had hardly lost the 13 colonies in America before a profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of grand monarchy was to remind Europe, still more vividly, of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrangements of the world. We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts but it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and aggressive but it was wasteful of the life and substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The peasants were ground down by taxation. The middle classes were dominated and humiliated by the nobility. In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged to call representatives of the different classes of the realm into consultation upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive expenditure. In 1789 the state general, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not assembled since 1610. For all that time France had been an absolute monarchy. Now the people found a means of expressing their long-fermenting discontent. Disputes immediately broke out between the three states due to the resolve of the third state, the commons, to control the assembly. The commons got the better of these disputes and the state's general became a national assembly clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British parliament kept the British crown in order. The king, Louis XVI, prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from the provinces, whereupon Paris and France revolted. The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In the east and northwest provinces many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burned by the peasants. Their title deeds carefully destroyed and the owners murdered or driven away. In a month the ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had collapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the Queen's Party fled abroad. A provisional city government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities and the new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily and plainly to resist the forces of the crown was brought into existence by these municipal bodies. The National Assembly found itself called upon to create a new political and social system for a new age. It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the utmost. It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the absolutist regime. It abolished tax exemptions, served them, aristocratic titles and privileges and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy in Paris. The King abandoned Versailles and its blenders and kept a diminished state in the Palace of the Tuileries in Paris. For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might struggle through to an effective modernized government. Much of its work was sound and still endures. If much was experimental and had to be done, much was ineffective. There was a clearing up of the penal code, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and persecutions for heresy were abolished. The ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy and the like gave place to 80 departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in the army was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple system of law courts was set up, but its value was much witiated by having the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of time. This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal and the judges, like the members of the assembly, were forced to play to the gallery and the whole vast property of the church was seized and administered by the state. Religious establishments not engaged in education or works of charity were broken up and the salaries of the clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing for the lower clergy in France who were often scandalously underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which struck at the very root idea of the Roman church, which centered everything upon the pope and in which all authority is from above downward. Practically the National Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church in France protestant, in organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts between the state priests, created by the National Assembly and their calcitrant non-juring priests who were loyal to Rome. In 1791 the experiment of constitutional monarchy in France was brought to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen, working in concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign armies gathered on the eastern frontier and one night in June the king and queen and their children slipped away from the tuleries and fled to join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles. They were caught at Varennes and brought back to France and then France flamed up into a passion of patriotic republicans. A republic was proclaimed open war with Austria and Prussia ensued and the king was tried and executed January 1793 on the model already set by England for treason to his people. And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the republic. There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad. At home, royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out. Abroad, France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world was to become republican. The use of France poured into the republican armies a powerful song spread through the land.  Before that chant and the leaping columns of French bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns, the foreign armies rolled back. Before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV. Everywhere they stood on foreign soil. They were in Brussels. They had overrun Savoy. They had raided to Mayans. They had seized the Sheld from Holland. Then the French government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of Louis and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to do because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic infantry and a brilliant artillery released from its aristocratic officers and many cramping conditions had destroyed the discipline of the navy and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this provocation united all England against France. Whereas there had been at first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy for the revolution. Of the fight that France made in the next few years against the European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drew the Austrians forever out of Belgium and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet frozen in a textile surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing its guns. For some time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and Verona says C. F. Atkinson what astonished the allies most of all was the number and the velocity of the republicans. These improvised armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tends were unprocurable for want of money and transportable for want of the enormous number of wagons that would have been required and also unnecessary for the discomfort that would have caused whole sale desertion in professional armies was cheerfully born by the men of 1793-1994. Supplies for armies of then unheard of size could not be carried in convoys and the French soon became familiar with living on the country. Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern system of war, rapidity of movement, full development of national strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious maneuvering, small professional armies, tents and full rations and chickeny. The first represented the decision compelling spirit the second, the spirit risking little to gain a little. And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting ze Marseilles and fighting for la France manifestly never quite clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under the sway of a fanatical leader Robespierre. This man is difficult to judge. He was a man of poor physique, naturally timid and a prick. But he had that most necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to save the republic as he conceived it. And he imagined it could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the republic. The living spirit of the republic it seemed had sprung from the slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There were insurrections, one in the west in the district of Lavendi where the people rose against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox clergy and were led by noblemen and priests. One in the south where lions and Marcells had risen and the royalists of Toulon had an English and Spanish garrison to which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists. The revolutionary tribunal went to work and a steady slaughtering began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mold. The queen was guillotined. Most of Robespierre's antagonists were guillotined. At the east who argued that there was no supreme being were guillotined. Day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived it seemed on blood and needed more and more as an opium taker needs more and more opium. Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown and guillotined. He was succeeded by a directory of five men which carried on the war of defense abroad and held France together at home for five years. Their reign formed a curious interlude in this history of violent changes. They took things as they found them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, South Germany and North Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated the directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of the liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the French government. Their wars became less and less the holy wars of freedom and more and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient regime. The last feature of grand monarchy which was disposed to discard was her traditional foreign policy. One discovers it still as vigorous under the directorate as if there had been no revolution. Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave that country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat. This was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies of the directorate to victory in Italy. Throughout the five years of the directorate he had been scheming and working for self advancement. Gradually he clambered to supreme power. He was a man of severely limited understanding but of ruthless directness and great energy. He had begun life as an extremist of the School of Robespierre. He owed his first promotion to that side. But he had no real grasp of the new forces that were working in Europe. His utmost political imagination carried him to a belated, untaughtry attempt to restore the Western Empire. He tried to destroy the remains of the old Holy Roman Empire to replace it by a new one centering upon Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor and became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French wife in order to marry an Austrian princess. He became practically monarch of France as first consul in 1799 and he made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation of Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris taking the crown from the Pope and putting it upon his own head himself as Charlemagne had directed. His son was crowned King of Rome. For some years Napoleon's reign was a career of victory. He conquered most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria and dominated all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the command of the sea from British and his fleet sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted by the British admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, 1805. Spain rose against him in 1808 and a British army under Wellington thrust the French army slowly northward out of the peninsula. In 1811, Napoleon who came into conflict was the Tsar Alexander I and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a great conglomerate army of 1600s men that was defeated and largely destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose against him Sweden turned against him the French armies were beaten back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated in 1814. He was exiled to Elba returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and was defeated by the allied British Belgians and Prussians at Waterloo. He died a British prisoner at St Helena in 1821. The forces released by the French Revolution were wasted and finished. A great congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna for, as far as possible, the state of affairs that the great storm had run to pieces. For nearly 40 years a sort of peace a peace of exhausted effort was maintained in Europe. End of Chapter 55 Chapter 56 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 56 The uneasy peace in Europe that followed the fall of Napoleon. Two main causes prevented that period from being a complete social and international peace and prepared the way for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned towards the restoration of unfair privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. The second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn up by the diplomatists of Vienna. The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards past conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here even the inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic Spanish colonies had followed the example of the United States and revolted against the European great power system when Napoleon set his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810. The George Washington of South America was General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt. It dragged on much as the United States War of Independence had dragged on and at last the suggestion was made by Austria in accordance with the spirit of the Holy Alliance that the European monarch should assist Spain in this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the prompt action of President Monroe of the United States in 1823 which conclusively warned of this projected monarchist restoration. He announced that the United States would regard any extension of the European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine the doctrine that there must be no extension of extra-American government in America which has kept the great power system out of America for nearly 100 years and permitted the new states of Spanish America to work out their destinies along their own lines. But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies it could at least under the protection of the concert of Europe do what it choose in Europe. A popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by French army in 1823 with a mandate from a European congress and small-chainously Austria suppressed a revolution in Naples. In 1824 Louis the 18th died and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles set himself to destroy the liberty of the press and universities and to restore absolute government. The sum of billion francs was voted to compensate the nobles for the château burnings and sequestrations of 1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this embodiment of the ancient regime and replaced him by Louis Philip the son of that Philip Duke of Orleans who was executed during the terror. The other continental monarchies in face of the open approval of the revolution by Great Britain and a strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria did not interfere in this affair. After all France was still a monarchy. This man Louis Philippe 1830 to 1848 remained the constitutional king of France for 18 years. Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings of the monarchists. The stresses that arose from the unscientific boundaries planned by the diplomatists of Vienna gathered force more deliberately but they were even more dangerous to the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and so reading different literatures and having different general ideas especially if those differences are exacerbated by religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interest such as the common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers can justify a close linking of peoples of this similar languages and faith. And even in Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy when as in Macedonia populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed but if the reader will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew it he will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned the maximum of local exasperation It destroyed the Dutch Republic quite needlessly it lumped together the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics of the old Spanish-Austrian Netherlands and set up a kingdom of the Netherlands It handed over not merely the old Republic of Venice but all of North Italy as far as Milan to the German-speaking Austrians French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces of Italy to restore the Kingdom of Sardinia Austria and Hungary already a sufficiently explosive mixture of discordant nationalities Germans, Hungarians Czechoslovaks, Yugoslavs Romanians and now Italians was made still more impossible by confirming Austria's Polish acquisitions of 1772 and 1795 The Catholic and Republican-spirited Polish people were chiefly given over to the less civilized rule of the Greek Orthodox Tsar but important districts went to Protestant Prussia The Tsar was also confirmed in his acquisition of the entirely alien Finns The very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were bound together under one king Germany, the readable sea was left in a particularly dangerous state of muddle Prussia and Austria were both partly in and partly out of a German confederation which included a multitude of minor states The king of Denmark came into the German confederation by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in Holstein Luxembourg was included in the German confederation though its ruler was also king of the Netherlands and though many of its peoples talked French here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who talk German and base their ideas on German literature the people who talk Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature and the people who talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature will all be far better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within the ring fence of their own speech is it any wonder that one of the most popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever the German tongue was spoken there was the German fatherland in 1830 French-speaking Belgium stirred up by the current revolution in France revolted against its Dutch association in the kingdom of the Netherlands the powers terrified at the possibilities of a republic or of annexation to France hurried in to pacify this situation and gave the Belgians a monarch Leopold I of Saxa Coburg Gotha there were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830 and a much more serious one in Russian Poland a republican government held out in Warsaw against Nicholas I who succeeded Alexander in 1825 and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and cruelty the Polish language was banned and the Greek Orthodox church was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state religion in 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks for six years they fought a desperate war while the governments of Europe looked on liberal opinion protested against this inactivity volunteers from every European country joined the insurgents and at last Britain, France and Russia took joint action the Turkish fleet was destroyed by the French and English at the Battle of Navarino 1827 and the Tsar invaded Turkey by the Treaty of Adrianople 1829 Greece was declared free but she was not permitted to resume her ancient republican traditions a German king was found for Greece one prince Otto of Bavaria and Christian governors were set up in the Denubian provinces which are now Romania and Serbia a part of the Yugoslav region much blood had still to run however before the Turk was altogether expelled from these lands end of chapter 56 chapter 57 of a short history of the world by H.G. Wells this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 57 the development of material knowledge throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and the opening years of the 19th century while these conflicts of the powers and princes were going on in Europe and the patchwork of the Treaty of Westphalia 1648 was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of the Treaty of Vienna 1815 and while the sailing ship was spreading European influence throughout the world a steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing up of men's ideas about the world in which they lived was in progress in the European modernized world it went on disconnected from political life and producing throughout the 17th and 18th centuries no striking immediate results in political life nor was it affecting popular thought very profoundly during this period these reactions were to come later and only in their full force in the latter half of the 19th century it was a process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous and independent spirited people without what the English call the private gentleman the scientific process could not have begun in Greece and could not have been renewed in Europe the universities played a part but not a leading part in the philosophical and scientific thought of this period endowed learning is apt to be timid lacking in initiative and resistant to innovation unless it has the spur of contact with independent minds we have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662 and its work in realizing the dream of Bacon's new Atlantis throughout the 18th century there was much clearing up of general ideas about matter and motion and mathematical advance a systematic development of the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope a renewed energy in classificatory natural history a great revival of anatomical science the science of geology foreshadowed by Aristotle and anticipated by Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 began its great task of interpreting the record of the rocks the progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy improved metallurgy affording the possibility of a larger and bolder handling of masses of metal and other materials reacted upon practical inventions machinery on a new scale and in a new abundance appeared to revolutionize industry in 1804 Treviček adapted the Watt engine to transport and made the first locomotive in 1825 the first railway between Stockton and Darlington was opened and Stephenson's rocket with a 13 ton train got up to a speed of 44 miles per hour from 1830 onward railways multiplied by the middle of the century a network of railways had spread all over Europe here was a sudden change had been long a fixed condition of human life the maximum rate of land transport after the Russian disaster Napoleon traveled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours this was a journey of about 1400 miles he was traveling with every conceivable advantage and he averaged under 5 miles an hour an ordinary traveler could not have done this distance in twice the time these were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between Rome and Gaul in the 1st century AD then, suddenly came this tremendous change the railway reduced this journey for an any ordinary traveler to less than 48 hours that is to say they reduced the chief European distances to about a tenth they made it possible to carry out administrative work in areas 10 times as great as any that had hitherto been workable under one administration the full significance of that possibility in Europe still remains to be realized Europe is still meted in boundaries drawn in the horse and road era in America the effects were immediate to the united states of America sprawling westward it meant the possibility of a continuous access to Washington, however far the frontier traveled across the continent it meant unity sustained on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible the steamboat was, if anything a little ahead of the steam engine in its earlier phases there was a steamboat the Charlotte Dundas on the 1st of Clyde Canal in 1802 and in 1807 an American named Fulton had a steamer the Clermont with British built engines upon the Hudson River above New York the first steam ship to put to sea was also an American the Phoenix which went from New York, Hoboken to Philadelphia so too was the first ship using steam she also had sails to cross the Atlantic the Savanna 1819 all these were paddle wheel boats and paddle wheel boats are not adapted to work in heavy seas the paddles smashed too easily and the boat is then disabled the screw steamship followed rather slowly many difficulties had to be surmounted before the screw was a practical thing not until the middle of the century did the tonnage of steamships upon the sea begin to overhaul that of sailing ships after that the evolution in sea transport was rapid for the first time men began to cross the seas and oceans with some certainty as does the date of their arrival the transatlantic crossing which had been an uncertain adventure of several weeks which might stretch to month was accelerated until in 1910 it was brought down in the case of the fastest boats to under 5 days a very notifiable hour of arrival concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea a new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse arose out of the investigations of Volta Galvani and Faraday into various electrical phenomena the electric telegraph came into existence in 1835 the first under seas cable was laid in 1851 between France and England in a few years the telegraph system had spread over the civilized world and the news which had hitherto traveled slowly from point to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth these things the steam railway and the electric telegraph were to the popular imagination of the middle 19th century the most striking and revolutionary of inventions but they were only the most conspicuous and clumsy first fruits of a far more extensive process technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary rapidity and to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of any previous age far less conspicuous at first in everyday life but finally far more important was the extension of man's power over various structural materials before the middle of the 18th century iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood charcoal was handled in small pieces and hammered and wrought into shape it was material for a craftsman quality and treatment were enormously dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the individual iron worker the largest masses of iron that could be dealt with under those conditions amounted at most in the 16th century to 2 or 3 tons there was a very definite upward limit therefore to the size of canon the blast furnace rose in the 18th century and developed with the use of coke not before the 18th century do we find rolled sheet iron 1728 unrolled rods and bars 1783 nasmus steam hammer came as late as 1838 the ancient world because of its metallurgical inferiority could not use steam the steam engine even the primitive pumping engine could not be developed before sheet iron was available the early engines seemed to the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits of iron mongry but most that the metallurgical science of the time could do as light as 1856 came the Bessemer process and presently 1864 the open earth process in which steel and every sort of iron could be melted purified and cast in a manner and upon a scale he thought to unheard of today in the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent steel swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan nothing in the previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in its consequences just a complete mastery over enormous masses of steel and iron and always their texture and quality which man has now achieved the railways and early engines of all sorts were the mere first triumphs of the new metallurgical methods presently came ships of iron and steel whilst bridges had a new way of building with steel upon a gigantic scale men realized too late that they had planned their railways with far too timid a gorge that they could have organized their traveling with far more steadiness and comfort upon a much bigger scale before the 19th century there were no ships in the world 2,000 tons burden now there is nothing wonderful about a 50,000 ton liner there are people who sneer at this kind of progress as being a progress in mere size but that sort of sneering merely marks the intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it the great ship or the steel frame building is not as they imagine a magnified version of the small ship or building of the past it is a thing different in kind more lightly and strongly built of finer and stronger materials instead of being a thing of precedent a rule of thumb it is a thing of subtle and intricate calculation in the old house or ship matter was dominant the material and its needs had to be slavishly obeyed in the new matter had been captured, changed, coerced think of the coal and iron and sand dragged out of the banks and pits wrenched, wrought, molten and cast to be flung at last a slender glittering pinnacle of steel and glass 600 feet above the crowded city we have given these particulars of the advance in man's knowledge of the metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration a parallel story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin and of a multitude of metals nickel and aluminum to name but two unknown before the 19th century dawn it is in this great and growing mastery our substances our different sorts of glass our rocks and plasters and the like our colors and textures that the main triumphs of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved yet we are still in the stage of the first fruits in the matter we have the power but we have still to learn how to use our power many of the first employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid or horrible the artist and the adapter have still hardly begun to work with the endless variety of substances now at their disposal parallel was this extension of mechanical possibilities the new science of electricity grew up it was only in the 80s of the 19th century that this body of inquiry began to yield results to impress the vulgar mind then suddenly came electrical light and electric traction and the transmutation of forces the possibility of sending power that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or heat as one choose along a copper wire as water is sent along a pipe began to come through to the ideas of ordinary people the British and French were at first deleting peoples and this great proliferation of knowledge but presently the Germans who had learned humility under Napoleon showed such zeal and pertinacity in scientific inquiry as to overhaul these leaders British science was largely the creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary centers of erudition the universities of Britain were at this time in a state of educational retrogression largely given over to a pedantic cunning of the Latin and Greek classics French education too was dominated by the classical tradition of the Jesuit schools and consequently it was not difficult for the Germans to organize a body of investigators small indeed in relation to the possibilities of the case but large in proportion to the little band of British and French inventors and experimentalists and those this work of research and experiment was making Britain and France the most rich and powerful countries in the world it was not making scientific and inventive men rich and powerful there is a necessary onwardliness about a sincere scientific man he is too preoccupied with his research to plan and scheme how to make money out of it the economic exploitation of his discoveries falls very easily and naturally therefore into the hands of a more acquisitive type and so we find that the crops of rich men which every fresh phase of scientific and technical progress has produced in Great Britain though they have not displayed quite the same passionate desire to insult and kill the goose that laid the national golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical professions have been quite content to let that profitable creature starve inventors and discoverers come by nature they sought for cleverer people to profit by in this matters the Germans were a little wiser the German learned did not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning they permitted its development the German businessman and manufacturer again had not quite the same contempt of the man of science as had his British competitor knowledge these Germans believed might be a cultivated crop responsive to fertilizers they did concede therefore an amount of opportunity to the scientific mind their public expenditure on scientific work was relatively greater and this expenditure was abundantly rewarded by the latter half of the 19th century the German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his department and in certain branches and particularly in chemistry Germany acquired a very great superiority over her western neighbors the scientific effort of the 60s and 70s in Germany began to tell after the 80s and the German gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial prosperity a fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the 80s a new type of engine came into use an engine in which the expensive force of an explosive mixture replaced the expensive force of steam the light highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were applied to the automobile and developed at last to reach such a pitch of lightness and efficiency as to render flight long known to be possible a practical achievement a successful flying machine but not a machine large enough to take up a human body was made by Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897 by 1909 the aeroplane was available for human locomotion there had seemed to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection of railways and automobile road traction but with the flying machine fresh reductions in the effective distance between one point of the earth's surface and another in the 18th century the distance from London to Edinburgh was an 8 days journey in 1918 the British Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the journey from London to Melbourne half way around the earth would probably in a few years time be accomplished in that same period of 8 days too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the time distances of one place from another they are merely one aspect of a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility the science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry for instance made quite parallel advances during the 19th century men learned so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple of crops got from the same area in the 17th century there was a still more extraordinary advance in medical science the average duration of life rose the daily efficiency increased the waste of life through ill health diminished now here all together we have such a change in human life as to constitute a fresh phase of history in a little more than a century this mechanical revolution has been brought about in that time man made a stride in the material conditions of his life, faster than he had done during the whole long interval between the paleolithic stage and the age of cultivation or between the days of Pepe in Egypt and those of George III a new gigantic material framework for human affairs has come into existence clearly it demands great readjustments of our social economical and political methods but these readjustments have necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution and they are still only in their opening stage today end of chapter 57