A Political and Social History of Modern Europe Part 35

[Sidenote: Warren Hastings]

To the extension and solidification of her empire in the East, Great Britain now devoted herself, and with encouraging results. It will be remembered that British predominance in India had already been a.s.sured by the brilliant and daring Clive, who had defeated the French, set up a puppet nawab in Bengal, and attempted to eliminate corruption from the administration, Clive's work was continued by a man no less famous, Warren Hastings (1732-1818), whose term as governor-general of India (1774-1785) covered the whole period of the American revolt. At the age of seven-teen, Hastings had first entered the employ of the British East India Company, and an apprentices.h.i.+p of over twenty years in India had browned his face and inured his lean body to the peculiarities of the climate, as well as giving him a thorough insight into the native character. When at last, in 1774, he became head of the Indian administration, Hastings inaugurated a policy which he pursued with tireless attention to details--a policy involving the transference of British headquarters to Calcutta, and a thorough reform of the police, military, and financial systems. In his wars and intrigues with native princes and in many of his financial transactions, a Parliament, which was inclined to censure, found occasion to attack his honor, and the famous Edmund Burke, with all the force of oratory and hatred, attempted to convict the great governor of "high crimes and misdemeanors." But the tirades of Burke were powerless against the man who had so potently strengthened the foundations of the British empire in India.

[Sidenote: Cornwallis]

In 1785 Hastings was succeeded by Lord Cornwallis--the same who had surrendered to Was.h.i.+ngton at Yorktown. Cornwallis was as successful in India as he had been unfortunate in America. His organization of the tax system proved him a wise administrator, and his reputation as a general was enhanced by the defeat of the rebellious sultan of Mysore.

The work begun so well by Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis, was ably carried on by subsequent administrators, [Footnote: For details concerning British rule in India between 1785 and 1858, see Vol. II, pp. 662 ff.] until in 1858 the crown finally took over the empire of the East India Company, an empire stretching northward to the Himalayas, westward to the Indus River, and eastward to the Brahmaputra.

[Sidenote: The Straits Settlements]

[Sidenote: Australia]

In the years immediately following the War of American Independence occurred two other important extensions of British power. One was the occupation of the "Straits Settlements" which gave Great Britain control of the Malay peninsula and of the Straits of Malacca through which the spice s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sed. But more valuable as a future home for English-speaking Europeans, and, therefore, as partial compensation for the loss of the United States, was the vast island-continent of Australia, which had been almost unknown until the famous voyage of Captain Cook to Botany Bay in 1770. For many years Great Britain regarded Australia as a kind of open-air prison for her criminals, and the first British settlers at Port Jackson (1788) were exiled convicts.

The introduction of sheep-raising and the discovery of gold made the island a more attractive home for colonists, and thenceforth its development was rapid. To-day, with an area of almost 3,000,000 square miles, and a population of some 4,800,000 English-speaking people, Australia is a commonwealth more populous than and three times as large as were the thirteen colonies with which Great Britain so unwillingly parted in 1783.

ADDITIONAL READING

BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY. A very brief survey: J. S. Ba.s.sett, _A Short History of the United States_ (1914), ch. viii, ix. The most readable and reliable detailed account of mercantilism as applied by the British to their colonies is to be found in the volumes of G. L. Beer, _The Origin of the British Colonial System_, 1578-1660 (1908); _The Old Colonial System_, 1660-1754, Part I, _The Establishment of the System_, 2 vols. (1912); _British Colonial Policy_, 1754-1765 (1907); and _The Commercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies_ (1893), a survey. From the English standpoint, the best summary is that of H. E.

Egerton, _A Short History of British Colonial Policy_ (1897). Other valuable works: C. M. Andrews, _Colonial Self-Government_ (1904), Vol.

V of the "American Nation" Series; O. M. d.i.c.kerson, _American Colonial Government, 1696-1765_ (1912), a study of the British Board of Trade in its relation to the American colonies, political, industrial, and administrative; G. E. Howard, _Preliminaries of the Revolution, 1763- 1775_ (1905), Vol. VIII of the "American Nation" Series; Reginald Lucas, _Lord North, Second Earl of Guilford_, 2 vols. (1913); and the standard treatises of H. L. Osgood and of J. A. Doyle cited in the bibliography to Chapter IX, above.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Sir G. 0. Trevelyan, _The American Revolution_, 4 vols. (1899-1912), and, by the same author, _George the Third and Charles Fox: the Concluding Part of the American Revolution_, 2 vols. (1914), scholarly and literary accounts, sympathetic toward the colonists and the English Whigs; Edward Channing, _A History of the United States_, Vol. III (1912), the best general work; C. H. Van Tyne, _The American Revolution_ (1905), Vol. IX of the "American Nation"

Series, accurate and informing; John Fiske, _American Revolution_, 2 vols. (1891), a very readable popular treatment; S. G. Fisher, _The Struggle for American Independence_, 2 vols. (1908), unusually favorable to the British loyalists in America; _Cambridge Modern History_, Vol. VII (1903), ch. v-vii, written in great part by J. A.

Doyle, the English specialist on the American colonies; J. B. Perkins, _France in the American Revolution_ (1911), entertaining and instructive; Arthur Ha.s.sall, _The Balance of Power_, 1715-1789 (1896), ch. xii, a very brief but suggestive indication of the international setting of the War of American Independence; J. W. Fortescue, _History of the British Army_, Vol. III (1902), an account of the military operations from the English standpoint.

THE REFORMATION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. A good general history: M. R. P.

Dorman, _History of the British Empire in the Nineteenth Century_, Vol.

I, 1793-1805 (1902), Vol. II, 1806-1900 (1904). On Ireland: W. O'C.

Morris, _Ireland_, 1494-1905, 2d ed. (1909). On Canada: Sir C. P.

Lucas, _A History of Canada_, 1763-1812 (1909). On India: Sir Alfred Lyall, _Warren Hastings_, originally published in 1889, reprinted (1908), an excellent biography; G. W. Hastings, _Vindication of Warren Hastings_ (1909), the best apology for the remarkable governor of India, and should be contrasted with Lord Macaulay's celebrated indictment of Hastings; Sir John Strachey, _Hastings and the Rohilla War_ (1892), favorable to Hastings' work in India. On Australia: Greville Tregarthen, _Australian Commonwealth_, 3d ed. (1901), a good outline, in the "Story of the Nations" Series; Edward Jenks, _A History of the Australasian Colonies_ (1896), an excellent summary; Edward Heawood, _A History of Geographical Discovery in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries_ (1912); Arthur Kitson, _Captain James Cook_ (1907).

CHAPTER XI

THE GERMANIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE IN DECLINE

[Sidenote: Backwardness of the Germanies]

In another connection we have already described the political condition of the Germanies in the sixteenth century. [Footnote: See above, pp. 10 ff.] Outwardly, little change was observable in the eighteenth. The Holy Roman Empire still existed as a nominal bond of union for a loose a.s.semblage of varied states. There was still a Habsburg emperor. There were still electors--the number had been increased from seven to nine [Footnote: Bavaria became an electorate in 1623 and Hanover in 1708; in 1778 Bavaria and the Palatinate were joined, again making eight.]--with some influence and considerable honor. There was still a Diet, composed of representatives of the princes and of the free cities, meeting regularly at Ratisbon. [Footnote: Ratisbon or Regensburg--in the Bavarian Palatinate. The Diet met there regularly after 1663.] But the empire was clearly in decline. The wave of national enthusiasm which Martin Luther evoked had spent itself in religious wrangling and dissension, and in the inglorious conflicts of the Thirty Years' War.

The Germans had become so many p.a.w.ns that might be moved back and forth upon the international chessboard by Habsburg and Bourbon gamesters.

Switzerland had been lost to the empire; both France and Sweden had deliberately dismembered other valuable districts. [Footnote: For the provisions of the treaties of Westphalia, see above, pp. 228 f.]

[Sidenote: Deplorable Results of the Thirty Years' War]

It seemed as though slight foundation remained on which a substantial political structure could be reared, for the social conditions in the Germanies were deplorable. It is not an exaggeration to say that during the Thirty Years' War Germany lost at least half of its population and more than two-thirds of its movable property. In the middle of the seventeenth century, at about the time Louis XIV succeeded to a fairly prosperous France, German towns and villages were in ashes, and vast districts turned into deserts. Churches and schools were closed by hundreds, and religious and intellectual torpor prevailed. Industry and trade were so completely paralyzed that by 1635 the Hanseatic League was virtually abandoned, because the free commercial cities, formerly so wealthy, could not meet the necessary expenses. Economic expansion and colonial enterprise, together with the consequent upbuilding of a well-to-do middle cla.s.s, were resigned to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, or England, without a protest from what had once been a proud burgher cla.s.s in Germany. This elimination of an influential bourgeoisie was accompanied by a sorry impoverishment and oppression of the peasantry. These native sons of the German soil had fondly hoped for better things from the religious revolution and agrarian insurrections of the sixteenth century; but they were doomed to failure and disappointment. The peasantry were in a worse plight in the eighteenth century in Germany than in any other country of western or central Europe.

[Sidenote: The German Princes]

The princes alone knew how to profit by the national prostration.

Enriched by the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in the sixteenth century and relieved of meddlesome interference on the part of the emperor or the Diet, they utilized the decline of the middle cla.s.s and the dismal serfdom of the peasantry to exalt their personal political power. They got rid of the local a.s.semblies or greatly curtailed their privileges, and gradually established petty tyrannies.

After the Thirty Years' War, it became fas.h.i.+onable for the heirs of German princ.i.p.alities to travel and especially to spend some time at the court of France. Here they imbibed the political ideas of the Grand Monarch, and in a short time nearly every petty court in the Germanics was a small-sized reproduction of the court of Versailles. In a silly and ridiculous way the princes aped their great French neighbor: they too maintained armies, palaces, and swarms of household officials, which, though a crus.h.i.+ng burden upon the people, were yet so insignificant in comparison with the real pomp of France, that they were in many instances the laughingstock of Europe. Beneath an external gloss of refinement, these princes were, as a cla.s.s, coa.r.s.e and selfish, and devoid of any compensating virtues. Neither the common people, whom they had impoverished, nor the Church, which they had robbed, was now strong enough to resist the growing absolutism and selfishness of the princes.

THE HABSBURG DOMINIONS

[Sidenote: Charles VI and his Hereditary Dominions]

At the opening of the eighteenth century, the largest and most important states of the Holy Roman Empire were those which owned the direct sovereignty of the Austrian Habsburgs. Charles VI (1711-1740), who as the Archduke Charles had vainly struggled against Louis XIV to secure the whole Spanish inheritance in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), reigned over extensive and scattered dominions.

Around Vienna, his capital city, were gathered his hereditary possessions: (1) Lower Austria, or Austria proper, on the Danube; (2) Inner Austria, which comprised Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola; (3) Further Austria, consisting of the mountainous regions about Innsbruck, commonly designated the Tyrol; and (4) Upper Austria, embracing Breisgau on the upper Rhine near the Black Forest. To this nucleus of lands, in the greater part of which the German language was spoken universally, had been added in course of time the Czech or Slavic kingdom of Bohemia with its German dependency of Silesia and its Slavic dependency of Moravia, and a portion of the Magyar kingdom of Hungary, with its Slavic dependencies of Croatia and Slavonia and its Rumanian dependency of Transylvania. Charles VI, like so many of his Habsburg ancestors, was also emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and was thereby accounted the foremost of German princes. But neither Bohemia nor Hungary was predominantly German in language or feeling, and Hungary was not even a part of the Holy Roman Empire.

[Sidenote: Conquests of Charles VI]

What additions were made to the Habsburg dominions by Charles VI were all of non-German peoples. The treaty of Utrecht had given him the Flemish- and French-speaking Belgian Netherlands and the Italian- speaking duchy of Milan and kingdom of the Two Sicilies. [Footnote: See above, p. 253, footnote.] A series of wars with the Ottoman Turks had enabled his family to press the Hungarian boundaries south as far as Bosnia and Serbia and to incorporate as a dependency of Hungary the Rumanian-speaking princ.i.p.ality of Transylvania. [Footnote: Definitely ceded by Turkey by the treaty of Karlowitz (1699).] Of course all these newer states of the Habsburgs remained outside of the Holy Roman Empire.

[Sidenote: Diversity of Habsburg Dominions]

Between the various peoples who were thus brought under the Habsburg sway, the bond was of loosest description. They spoke a dozen different languages and presented an even greater diversity of interests. They did not const.i.tute a compact, strongly centralized, national state like France. Charles VI ruled his territories by manifold t.i.tles: he was archduke of Austria, king of Bohemia, king of Hungary, duke of Milan, and prince of the Netherlands; and the administration of each of these five major groups was independent of the others. The single bond of union was the common allegiance to the Habsburg monarch.

[Sidenote: Check upon Habsburg Ambitions in the Germanies]

To adopt and pursue a policy which would suit all these lands and peoples would hardly be possible for any mortal: it certainly surpa.s.sed the wit of the Habsburgs. They had made an attempt in the seventeenth century to develop a vigorous German policy, to unify the empire and to strengthen their hold upon it, but they had failed dismally. The disasters of the Thirty Years' War, the jealousies and ambitions of the other German princes, the interested intervention of foreign powers, notably Sweden and France, made it brutally clear that Habsburg influence in the Germanies had already reached its highest pitch and that henceforth it would tend gradually to wane.

Blocked in the Germanies, the Austrian Habsburgs looked elsewhere to satisfy their aspirations. But almost equal difficulties confronted them. Extension to the southeast in the direction of the Balkan peninsula involved almost incessant warfare with the Turks. Increase of territory in Italy incited Spain, France, and Sardinia to armed resistance. Development of the trade of the Belgian Netherlands aroused the hostility of the influential commercial cla.s.ses in England, Holland, and France. The time and toil spent upon these non-German projects obviously could not be devoted to the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, not only were the Germanies a source of weakness to the Habsburgs, but the Habsburgs were a source of weakness to the Germanies.

[Sidenote: Continued Prestige of the Habsburgs]

Despite these drawbacks, the Habsburg family was still powerful. The natural resources and native wealth of many of the regions, the large, if rather cosmopolitan, armies which might be raised, the intricate marriage relations.h.i.+ps with most of the sovereign families of Europe, the champions.h.i.+p of the Catholic Church, the absolutist principles and practices of the reigning prince, all contributed to cloak the weaknesses, under a proud name and pretentious fame, of the imperial Austrian line.

[Sidenote: Question of the Habsburg Inheritance]

[Sidenote: The "Pragmatic Sanction" of Charles VI]

In the eighteenth century a particularly unkind fate seemed to attend the Habsburgs. We have already noticed how the extinction of the male line in the Spanish branch precipitated a great international war of succession, with the result that the Spanish inheritance was divided and the greater part pa.s.sed to the rival Bourbon family. Now Charles VI was obliged to face a similar danger in the Austrian inheritance. He himself had neither sons nor brothers, but only a daughter, Maria Theresa. Spurred on by the fate of his Spanish kinsman, Charles VI directed his energies toward securing a settlement of his possessions prior to his death. Early in his reign he promulgated a so-called Pragmatic Sanction which declared that the Habsburg dominions were indivisible and that, contrary to long custom, they might be inherited by female heirs in default of male. Then he subordinated his whole foreign policy to securing general European recognition of the right of Maria Theresa to succeed to all his territories. One after another of his manifold princ.i.p.alities swore to observe the Pragmatic Sanction.

One after another of the foreign powers--Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, Holland, the Empire, Poland, France, Spain, and Sardinia,--to whom liberal concessions were made--pledged their word and their honor most sacredly to preserve the Pragmatic Sanction. When Charles VI died in 1740, he left his daughter a disorganized state, a bankrupt treasury, and a small ill-disciplined army, but he bequeathed her an ample number of parchment guarantees. The cynical Prussian king remarked that 200,000 fighting men would have been a more useful legacy, and, as events proved, he was right.

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA. THE HOHENZOLLERNS

[Sidenote: The Hohenzollern Family]

Next to the Habsburgs, the most influential German family in the eighteenth century was the Hohenzollern. As far back as the tenth century, a line of counts was ruling over a castle on the hill of Zollern just north of what is now Switzerland. These counts slowly extended their lands and their power through the fortunes of feudal warfare and by means of a kindly interest on the part of the Holy Roman Emperors, until at length, in the twelfth century, a representative of the Hohenzollerns became by marriage burgrave of the important city of Nuremberg.

[Sidenote: Brandenburg]