[389] Cp. chap. ii, § 1, towards the end.

[390] See Gregory’s Discovery, chap. vi.

[391] Not from 1340-1360, under Edward III, but later under Henry V, 1413-1422.—E. B.

Edward had Flemish and Bavarian allies.—H. G. W.

[392] From Dr. Tille in Helmolt’s History of the World.

[393] Charles Dickens in his American Notes mentions swine in Broadway, New York, in the middle nineteenth century.

[394] In these maritime adventures in the eastern Atlantic and the west African coast the Portuguese were preceded in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries by Normans, Catalonians, and Genoese. See Raymond Beazley, History of Exploration in the Middle Ages.—H. H. J.

[395] See Guillemard’s Ferdinand Magellan.

[396] For an interesting account of these American civilizations, see L. Spence, The Civilization of Ancient Mexico and Myths of Mexico and Peru.

[397] See Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and his History of the Conquest of Peru.

[398] See Cunninghame Graham’s A Vanished Arcadia.

[399] Machiavelli examines the causes of Cæsar’s collapse, but he holds that it was due to fortuna, against which Cæsar’s virtú could not prevail.—E. B.

[400] E. B. writes as follows: “I think better of Machiavelli than you do, and especially on two points. (1) He raises a real issue—whether, when a crisis besets the State, the ruler is not bound to abandon the rules of private morality, if by doing so he can preserve the State. If he abandons those rules, he does wrong—and Machiavelli admits that—but, at the same time, as the agent and organ of the State, he does right by preserving it, so far, at any rate, as it is right that it should be preserved. This is a real issue, which one cannot simply dismiss. E.g., all war is wrong, by the rules of private morality, because it is killing; but it may have a qualified and conditioned rightness if it is necessary to preserve the State, and if the State, as a scheme of good life, ought to be preserved. (2) Machiavelli did believe in the people. He only exalts the new prince, who arises to restore order and security in a troubled State. In normal times he believes that the people is a good judge of men: that ‘better than many fortresses is not to be hated by the people’; that the trite proverb, ‘He who founds himself on the people founds himself on mud,’ is untrue, except as applied to demagogues.”

[401] But he had a better reason for doing this in the fact that there was no heir to the throne. The Wars of the Roses, a bitter dynastic war, were still very vivid in the minds of English people.—F. H. H.

[402] Prescott’s Appendix to Robertson’s History of Charles V.

[403] Prescott.

[404] It was private conscience, rather than private property, that quarrelled with and limited princes. The Puritan Revolution in England (1640-1660) was a puritan revolution—it sprang from the religious motive first and foremost. The economic motive was secondary. The “economic interpretation of history” is always tempting, but men’s souls have always mattered more than their pockets. Englishmen fought Charles I for the sake of free consciences rather than for the sake of free pockets. This is a large issue, on which much could be written; but I feel sure that religion came first in our Civil War.—E. B.

I do not agree. Loath as I am to differ from E. B., I can find no evidence of any religious issue as important as the issue of taxation either in the English Civil War or the American War of Independence.—H. G. W.

I did not mention the Americans. I will surrender them to H. G. W.—E. B.

[405] Englishmen did try to control the foreign policy of James I, because it involved questions of religion, and because their primary concern was religious. They wanted foreign policy to be directed to the militant defence of Protestantism. James I, a good internationalist (in his way), and at any rate a lover of peace, wanted to secure European peace by diplomacy—and failed to do so. His parliaments, and all seventeenth-century parliaments, were vitally interested in foreign policy.—E. B.

[406] A very good general history of Great Britain, too little known as yet, is A. D. Innes’ History of the British Nation (1912).

[407] This is not the same Simon de Montfort as the leader of the crusades against the Albigenses, but his son.

[408] But Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hogarth, Gray, Gibbon, for instance!—G. M. And the golden age of the great cabinet-makers!—P. G.

Exactly! Culture taking refuge in the portraits, libraries, and households of a few rich people. No national culture in the court, nor among the commonalty; a steady decay.—H. G. W.

[409] Rise of the Dutch Republic.

[410] See his fragment of autobiography (The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, edited by John Murray).

[411] Frederick the Great of Prussia.

[412] Catherine the Great of Russia.

[413] Louis XVI of France and Charles III of Spain.

[414] Gibbon forgets here that cannon and the fundamentals of modern military method came to Europe with the Mongols.

[415] See for the expansion of the topics of this section, Hammond’s Town Labourer, Village Labourer, and Skilled Labourer. These three books are too little known to the general reader. They are not dry-as-dust compilations of statistics, but full of interesting matter and delightfully well written.

[416] “Our present public school system is candidly based on training a dominant master class. But the uprising of the workers and modern conditions are rapidly making the dominant method unworkable.... The change in the aim of schools will transform all the organizations and methods of schools, and my belief is that this change will make the new era.”—F. W. Sanderson, Head Master of Oundle, in an address at Leeds, February 16, 1920.

[417] The student who looks up the Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Goldsmith,” instead of going to the poem itself, will find some hostile comments thereon which are themselves now literature and history; they were written by Lord Macaulay (1800-59).

[418] Channing’s excellent new History of the United States to vol. iv. has been our handbook here.

[419] You are, I think, unjust to Great Britain and her “great power game.” She was not playing that game—or, so far as she was, she was acting against “France” to liberate the colonies from the French menace in the hinterland which alarmed them. Once liberated, they broke loose, somewhat selfishly, refusing to pay the piper, though they had enjoyed, and done much to call, the tune. Great Britain was indeed to blame, not on the “great power” ground, but on the “sovereignty” ground, which made her stickle for the “sovereignty” of the British parliament over colonial legislature. It wasn’t diplomatists, it was lawyers in both countries, who precipitated the struggle of 1776.—E. B.

But see §§ 2 and 3.—H. G. W.

[420] See Channing’s History of the United States, vol. ii.

[421] John Smith’s Travels.

[422] There is some doubt about the name of Carolina. Channing, in his short history, says it was named in honour of Charles II. Bassett says it was named originally Carolana, in honour of Charles I, in 1629, and kept the name, under the new form of Carolina in honour of Charles II. Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, vol. i. p. 265, speaks of Carolina, in 1629, as named “either in honour of Charles I or because the name had been given by Huguenots in 1562 in honour of Charles IX of France.” Another authority speaks of the name as used before, and now no doubt retained in honour of the English king; but, according to him, the name had not been used for the country (called, by the French, Florida), but for a fort in it, the arx Carolana. He adds that in 1629 the name Carolana is used, but Carolina appears afterwards, and becomes normal after 1662.—E. B.

[423] From the Spanish word Sabaña = “meadow.”—H. H. J.

[424] See for the fundamental differences of north and south, W. Wilson, The State, the historical sections at the beginning of the chapter on the United States Government.—E. B.

[425] An admirable account of negro slavery is to be found in Sir H. H. Johnston’s The Negro in the New World.

[426] I disbelieve in this “commercial selfishness” emphasized in the text. Modern American historians, such as Beer, themselves rebut the charge. On the whole, English commercial policy was fair. (1) If the colonists could only export certain “enumerated” commodities to England, the English market was the best, and they were given privileges there; while non-enumerated commodities could be exported anywhere, and even “enumerated” articles were in practice smuggled everywhere. (2) If the colonists had to import from England, it was their best market, and they got “drawbacks” on dutiable goods imported into England from the Continent when they took them out of England; while again in practice they freely smuggled goods from any country to America. (3) The English navigation laws, in the long run, encouraged American shipbuilding; and if some colonial manufactures were stopped in order that they might not compete with English manufactures, the amount of such restriction was slight. On all this, see Sir William Ashley, Surveys Historic and Economic, pp. 300 seqq.—E. B.

[427] See Tudor’s Life of James Otis.

[428] I disagree entirely with this. George, with the bulk of Parliament behind him, was out to insist on the sovereignty of the British Parliament (not of himself) over the colonists. Nor was it the Whig noblemen who opposed him, but Burke (conservatively inclined, and therefore up in arms for the traditional rights of the colonial legislatures) and Chatham (liberally inclined, and therefore up in arms for the principle of “no representation, no taxation”).—E. B.

[429] This again in my view is wrong. The system proposed, I read in an American writer, meant cheaper tea in the colonies. The objection taken by the colonists was legal.—E. B.

[430] I think this gives an erroneous impression that there was no real chance of reconciliation in 1776. There was. And indeed the whole separation was far from inevitable. If the British had (1) recognized the autonomy in each colony of its legislature, and (2) granted to the colonies cabinet government in place of government by governors sent from England, there would have been no schism. By 1839, the time of Lord Durham’s report, the British had learned to make the recognition and the grant; and with greater wisdom they could have made both in 1776. A great statesman in 1776 could have stopped the separation, and made history different. I am inclined to say that nothing is inevitable in history—except that when you don’t have good men, you don’t get good results. And that was the position under George III and Lord North.—E. B.

[431] The Tripoli Treaty, see Channing, vol. iii. chap. xviii.

[432] Wells, The Future in America.

[433] In 1776 Lord Dartmouth wrote that the colonists could not be allowed “to check or discourage a traffic so beneficent to the nation.”

[434] A very readable and remarkably well-illustrated book for the general reader upon the French Revolution is Wheeler’s French Revolution. Carlyle’s French Revolution has some splendid passages, but it is often unjust and evil-spirited. Madelin’s French Revolution is a good recent book.

[435] But see Rocquain’s L’Esprit révolutionnaire avant la Révolution. He traces the growth of a revolutionary spirit in the 18th century, and points to many predictions of a debacle in 18th-century French literature.—E. B.

[436] I disagree utterly and entirely with this view of Rousseau, which is quite unfair to the man who wrote Du Contrat Social. (1) He did not believe in the “state of nature”; he believed in the State, which had lifted man from being a brute that followed its nose into a reasoning being and a man. (2) He did not write to excuse breakers of the covenant. On the contrary, he wrote to preach the sovereignty of the general will, and he believed in the entire control of the individual by that will. Rousseau has been much misrepresented, and the text follows the misrepresentations. See Vaughan, The Political Writings of Rousseau, introduction to Du Contrat Social.—E. B.

[437] Article “France,” Encyclopædia Britannica.

[438] There is a very picturesque account of the storming of the Bastille in Carlyle’s French Revolution, book v, chap. vi.

[439] Carlyle is at his best on this flight, French Revolution, book iv, chaps. iv and v.

[440] Wiriath.

[441] The Declaration of Pillnitz was a diplomatic démarche that failed. Great Britain had definitely refused to intervene in favour of the French monarchy, and Austrian statesmanship proposed to save the collective face of European monarchy by a sounding announcement of sympathy with the French Bourbons, followed by a proviso that unanimity should be secured before intervention was attempted. French opinion (and most historians) concentrated on the announcement and overlooked the proviso.—P.G.

[442] The sour grapes of Champagne spread dysentery in the Prussian army.—P.G.

[443] The intelligence of the French army of the Revolution was largely due to a period of intelligent military thinking and writing which set in among French soldiers after the defeats of the army of Louis XV in the Seven Years War. Napoleon himself was full of traces of this inspiration.—P. G.

[444] I cannot agree that England was ever, at any moment, “a prospective ally” of France. There was a deep divergence of interests; and it is impossible to think of Pitt and the Whig nobles being in any way the allies of the France of 1793.—E. B.

[445] In his article, “French Revolutionary Wars,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

[446] In the thirteen months before June, 1794, there were 1220 executions; in the following seven weeks there were 1376.—P. G.

[447] Channing, vol. iii. chap. xviii.

[448] Two very useful books have been Holland Rose’s Personality of Napoleon and his Life of Napoleon I. A compact and convenient biography, with good battle maps, is R. M. Johnston’s Napoleon. Thomas Hardy’s great epic-drama, The Dynasts, is a magnificent picture of Napoleon’s career, historically very exact. It is one of the great stars of English literature, too little known as yet to the general public.

[449] See Mahan’s Life of Nelson.

[450] Gourgaud quoted by Holland Rose.

[451] The resumption of war was more directly due to the publication in France of the Sebastiani Report, a full account by the staff officer of the ports and strong places of Egypt and Syria. The alarm occasioned by this document hardened the determination of the British government to retain a garrison at Malta in spite of the obligation to evacuate it imposed by the Peace of Amiens.—P. G.

[452] All this is admirably told in Tolstoy’s wonderful War and Peace.

[453] The best textbook to follow in expanding this chapter is W. A. Phillips’ Confederation of Europe.

[454] See J. W. Headlam’s Life of Bismarck.

[455] W. A. Phillips’ Confederation of Europe is the leading textbook here. H. E. Egerton’s British Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century and L. S. Woolf’s International Government are very illuminating. See also Thatcher and Schwill’s convenient General History of Europe and Philip Guedalla’s Partition of Europe; 1715-1815.

[456] The Dukes of Savoy (ancestors of the present Italian kings) had been astride the Alps, ruling in France and Italy, for centuries; and their strategic position had long given them a European importance. The Dukes of Savoy had been kings since 1713, first as Kings of Sicily, 1713-20, and then (when Sicily was exchanged for Sardinia in 1720) as Kings of Sardinia.—E. B.

[457] An excellent book on the substance of this chapter is F. S. Marvin’s Century of Hope. Another is R. A. Gregory’s Discovery. See also Seignobos’ Political History of Contemporary Europe.

[458] But note Boyle and Sir Wm. Hamilton as conspicuous scientific men who were Irishmen.

[459] It is worth noting that nearly all the great inventors in England during the eighteenth century were working men, that inventions proceeded from the workshop, and not from the laboratory. It is also worth noting that only two of these inventors accumulated fortunes and founded families.—E. B.

[460] Here America led the old world.

[461] In Northumberland and Durham in the early days of coal mining they were so cheaply esteemed that it was unusual to hold inquests on the bodies of men killed in mine disasters.

[462] It is sometimes argued against Marx that the proportion of people who have savings invested has increased in many modern communities. These savings are technically “capital” and their owners “capitalists” to that extent, and this is supposed to contradict the statement of Marx that property concentrates into few and fewer hands. Marx used many of his terms carelessly and chose them ill, and his ideas were better than his words. When he wrote property he meant “property so far as it is power.” The small investor has remarkably little power over his invested capital.

[463] See J. H. Noyes, History of American Socialisms, and Eastlake, The Oneida Community.

[464] See his A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principles of the Formation of the Human Character.

[465] See F. Podmore, Life of Robert Owen, or his own Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself.

[466] Increases or diminutions of the passive shareholding class would not affect this concentration very materially. A shareholder has very little power over his property.

[467] I find in a book of essays and addresses by Professor Soddy an interesting and compact statement of certain resemblances in spirit between scientific research and modern socialism. I venture to quote a passage here because of its great significance at the present time.

“The immense acquisition,” he says, “to the wealth and resources of mankind which has been the result of the past century of science, should have been the golden opportunity of statesmen and humanitarians and the raw material out of which the sum total of human happiness could have been augmented. Instead, it has but revealed a growing incapacity and failure on the part of the altruist to appreciate the nature and power of the new weapon that science has placed in his hands, and an ever-increasing rapacity and far-sightedness on the part of the egotist to secure it for his own ends.

“For many a decade now, owing primarily and indisputably to the intellectual achievements of a comparative handful of men of communistic and cloisteral habit of thought, a steady shower of material benefits has been raining down upon humanity, and for these benefits men have fought in the traditional manner of the struggle when the fickle sunlight was the sole hazardous income of the world. The strong have fed and grown fat upon a larger and ever larger share of the manna. Initial slight differences of strength and sagacity have become so emphasized by the virile stream that the more successful are becoming monstrously so, and the unsuccessful less and less able to secure a full meal than before the shower began.

“Already it savours of indelicacy and tactlessness to recall that the exploiters of all this wealth are not its creators; that the spirit of acquisitiveness which has ensured success to them, rather than to their immediate neighbours, is the antithesis of the spirit by which the wealth was won.

“Amid all the sneers at the impracticability and visionary character of communist schemes, let it not be forgotten that science is a communism, neither theoretical nor on paper, but actual and in practice. The results of those who labour in the fields of knowledge for its own sake are published freely and pooled in the general stock for the benefit of all. Common ownership of all its acquisitions is the breath of its life. Secrecy or individualism of any kind would destroy its fertility.”

So far Professor Soddy, but let the writer add that there is this point about the scientific world not to be overlooked. Every worker in the latter is a specially educated man, and he is free to leave the communism of science if he thinks fit. This is very different from a communism imposed upon an unprepared mass of people containing large recalcitrant minorities or majorities. A communism sustained by a community of will based on education—an extension, that is, of the communism of scientific research to human affairs generally—is the ideal underlying the political ideas of most intelligent modern men.

[468] We may note a very interesting experiment in wages payment here that has been made by the American Oneida silver company. A committee on which the workers are strongly represented makes a summary week by week of the current prices of staple commodities and common necessities. Week by week it is noted that prices are so much per cent, above the normal figure of January, 1914 (or some such date), which is taken as the standard. On pay-day every worker receives his wages plus a percentage representing the higher prices, so that though the actual sums paid vary week by week, the purchasing power of the wages paid remains practically constant. Here, perhaps, we have a germ of a system that may grow to considerable importance. The burthen of rising prices is shifted to the employer, who can take them into account in fixing his prices.

[469] For a closely parallel view of religion to that given here, see that admirable book, Outspoken Essays, by Dean Inge, Essays VIII and IX on St. Paul and on Institutionalism and Mysticism.

[470] Town Topics, November 26th, 1919.

[471] Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid is worth noting here as one of the earliest correctives to these popular misconceptions of Darwinism.—G. M.

[472] Morley’s Life of Gladstone.

[473] R. A. Gregory’s Discovery.

[474] The great Oxford school of Literæ Humaniores, which means a serious study of Ancient Philosophy and Ancient History, was already thirty years old in Gladstone’s time, and was a really serious training in solid philosophy and solid history. It was all the more serious, as every candidate for Honours had to take two schools and to offer Mathematics as well as Literæ Humaniores. Both Peel (about 1810) and Gladstone (about 1830) took these two schools, and both gained Firsts in both. (This, by the way, is the only true and genuine “double first.”) Men with such a training were genuinely and nobly trained for statesmanship.—E. B.

With no knowledge of ethnology, no vision of history as a whole, misconceiving the record of geology, ignorant of the elementary ideas of biological science, of modern political, social, and economic science and modern thought and literature!—H. G. W.

[475] The old classical training had great faults, but not quite those which are here imputed to it. It was the education of an aristocratic leisured class who had not to earn their living. Hence it was (1) entirely idealist and non-utilitarian. It aimed not at fitting people for a paid profession, but at culture and inner development. (2) It depended enormously on leisure. The work done in compulsory work-hours was small in range, but severe, almost entirely classics and mathematics. These were intended as a training of the mind and a test of ability, but were not the real field of ambition. That lay in the large amount of time allotted to free study. Peel, Gladstone, Macaulay, Hallam, etc., show what was expected of the best men. Literature, modern history, French and Italian, theology and philosophy, and even a good deal of generalised science, were things you read in your free time. Think what Macaulay’s “schoolboy” was supposed to know, and reflect that practically none of it was taught in school hours! Some of the best papers on English literature that I ever read were done by a certain sixth form which had, I was told, no time at all given to the subject in the time-table. As the Head Master told me, “A good man was rather laughed at if he did not know Shakespeare and Milton.”

This conception of a small hard nucleus of compulsory work, combined with a wide margin of leisure, was very good for the best men, who used their free time in the right way, but left the weak men thoroughly uneducated. The reaction against it came with long hours, wide curriculum, and compulsory games, leaving no leisure either for study or for mischief.

The modern idea that school should teach all that a boy ought to know, is educationally disastrous; but it is the natural result of boys coming from uneducated homes. The home, not the school, is the real key to the wider and higher side of education. But this raises large questions.—G. M.

G. M., I submit, has not grasped the modern idea in education. The modern idea of a public school as exemplified in such a case as Oundle does not fill up the time of the boy with prescribed work and games; it leaves large spaces for self-development; but also it provides museums, a good collection of pictures, libraries, and an abundance of good music in addition to the mere “playing fields” of the old type of public school. And it inquires into the use a boy is making of his free energies. The phase of “cram” is over, but the new schools do provide good pasture, show the way thither, and “vet” a boy who displays no appetite. G. M. ignores entirely the clear statement in the text that Gladstone was a grossly ignorant man, and the instances given of the feebleness and worthlessness of the “generalized science” these boys of the old persuasion picked up. So far from the old classical training being the education of an aristocratic class, it was, as G. M. admits within a line or so, the education of a few individuals, the rest of the class remaining barbarians. It may have aimed at culture and inner development, but it missed its aim. Consequently, the bright lads of the Gladstone-Macaulay-Peel type who did not pick up a few enlightened ideas by accident or at home, were quite unable to carry their own class with them; it remained politically boorish. They had to appeal for understanding to classes whose education had been free from “classical” pretentiousness....

These notes submitted to E. B. at this stage provoked him to a warm protest. His sympathies were “heart and soul with G. M.,” and Mr. Gladstone, he declared with emphasis, was not an ignorant man. A little more must be said on this question. If the reader realize, what we have been trying to make clear in this history, that human progress is largely mental progress, a clearing and an enlargement of ideas, then he will understand why it is that the compiler of this Outline has given so much space here to these controversial notes upon the education of Mr. Gladstone. For the education of Mr. Gladstone was typical of that ruling-class education which has dominated British and European affairs, so far as they have been dominated by ideas, up to the present time. It is most significant of the differences and difficulties of our age that the statement, which seemed to the writer a simple statement of an obvious fact, that Mr. Gladstone was a profoundly ignorant man, should have so scandalized two of the editors of this work. No doubt Mr. Gladstone knew much and knew many things, and it is just because he did so and was in many respects the fine flower of the education of his period, that his ignorance is so interesting to us. Many Chinese mandarins knew much and many things—beautifully. And were ignorant men. Mr. Gladstone’s was not the ignorance of deficiency, but the ignorance of excess, a copious ignorance; it was not a failure to know this or that particular fact, an ignorance excusable enough, but a profound and sought-after and established ignorance of reality, so that he did not grasp the bearing of definite facts presented to him or of far-reaching ideas put before him, upon the great issues with which he was concerned. He lived, as it were, in a luminous and blinding cloud. That cloud, which I call his ignorance, my two editors call his wonderful and abounding culture. It was a culture that wrapped about and adorned the great goddess Reality. But indeed he is not to be adorned but stripped. She ceases to be herself or to bless her votary unless she is faced stark and faced fearlessly.—H. G. W.

[476] The impression made on me, an old Gladstonian, by Gladstone’s politics, was mainly twofold. (1) A strong assertion that politics were (as Aristotle said) a development of ethics, and concerned with discovering and doing what is Right, not what is convenient or profitable to any particular class or nation. (2) A strong subconscious suggestion that the highest education and culture and knowledge were useful for politics, which was in fact a very high practical art, demanding the highest qualities. Hence largely the horror we had of Dizzy. (3) A general sanguine conviction that Honesty was the best policy; that what was right would also prove to be ultimately the most profitable, so that there was no real conflict.

I do not say that Mr. G. acted consistently up to these principles, or that they could be acted up to; but they formed the milk of the word for most of us.—G. M.

I cannot agree that Gladstone was a prophet of nationalism. He was a prophet of Liberalism, and, as such, a hater of oppression. He protested against Bourbon oppression in Naples or Turkish oppression in Bulgaria or Armenia; but to protest against oppression is not to champion nationalism. Gladstone championed not nationalism, but internationalism; he emphasized the idea that “public right” should control the relations of states. The fine words which Mr. Asquith used to state the British cause in August, 1914, were (unless I am mistaken) an echo of Gladstone’s own words. A noble objection to oppression; a noble championing of the rule of public right—these were the staples of Gladstone’s prophecy. The pity was that, when it came to the actual handling of foreign affairs (e.g. in Egypt about 1884), Gladstone could not translate his ideals into practice.—E. B.