I. the priests of the Greek church, themselves bred up CHAP. in superstition; so that the Slavonic race, which was neither Protestant nor Catholic-which had neither 1763. been ravaged by the wars of religion, nor educated by the discussions of creeds-a new and rising power in the world, standing on the confines of Europe and Asia, not wholly Oriental and still less of the West, displayed the hardy but torpid vigor of a people not yet vivified by intelligence, still benumbed by blind belief, ignorance, and servitude. Its political unity existed in the strength of its monarchy, which organized its armies and commanded them without control; made laws, and provided for their execution; appointed all officers, and displaced them at will; directed the internal administration and the relations with foreign powers. The sovereign who held these absolute prerogatives was Catherine, a princess of a German Protestant house. Her ambition had secured the throne by adopting her husband's religion, conniving at his deposition, and not avenging his murder. Her love of pleasure solicited a licentiousness of moral opinion; her passion for praise sought to conciliate the good will of men of letters; so that she blended the adoption of the new philosophy with the grandeur, the crimes, and the voluptuousness of Asiatic despotism. If she invaded Poland, it would be under the pretext of protecting religious freedom; if she moved towards the Bosphorus, she would surround herself with the delusive halo of some imaginary restoration of the liberties of ancient Greece. At home respecting the property of the nobles, yet seeking to diminish the number of slaves;1 an apparent devotee to the faith of the Greek church, yet giving religious 'Storch: Economie Politique, iv. 252. I. CHAP. freedom to the Catholic and the Protestant, and even printing the Koran for the Mussulmans of her domin1763. ions: abroad, she bent neither to France nor to England. Her policy was thoroughly true to the empire that adopted her, and yet imbued with the philosophy of western Europe. With deserts near at hand to colonize, with the Mediterranean inviting her flag, she formed no wish of conquering Spanish colonies on the Pacific; and we shall find her conduct towards England, in its relations with America, held in balance between the impulse from the liberal systems of thought which she made it her glory to cherish, and the principle of monarchy which flattered her love of praise and was the basis of her power. Soon after the peace of Hubertsburg, the youthful heir to the Austrian dominions, which, with Prussia and Russia, shaped the politics of eastern and northern Europe, was elected the successor to the Imperial crown of Germany. As an Austrian prince, it was the passion of Joseph the Second to rival Frederic of Prussia. His mother, Maria Theresa, was a devotee in her attachment to the church. The son, hating the bigotry in which he was nurtured, inclined to skepticism and unbelief. The mother venerated with an absurd intensity of deference the prerogatives of an unmixed aristocratic descent; the son affected to deride all distinctions of birth, and asserted the right to freedom of mind with such integrity, that he refused to impair it when afterwards it came to be exercised against himself. But, in the conflict which he provoked with the past, he mixed philanthropy with selfishness, and his hasty zeal to abolish ancient abuses was subordinate to a passion for sequestering political immu I. nities, and concentrating all power in his own hands. CHAP. As a reformer, he therefore failed in every part of his dominions; and as he brought no enduring good to 1763 Hungary, but rather an example of violating its constitution, so we shall find the Austrian court the only great European power which, both as an ally of England and an enemy to republics, remained inflexibly opposed to America. Yet the efforts of Joseph the Second, ill-judged and vain as they were, illustrate the universality of the new influence.1 The German empire, of which he was so soon to be the head, was the creature and the symbol of the Middle Ages. Its life was gone. The forms of liberty were there, but the substance had perished under the baleful excess of aristocracy. The emperor was an elective officer, but his constituents were only princes. Of the nine electors, three were Roman Catholic Archbishops, owing their rank to the choice of others; but their constituents were of the unmixed nobility, to whom entrance into the electoral chapters was exclusively reserved. The sovereignty of the empire resided, not in the emperor, but in the great representative body of the whole country, or Diet, as it was called, which was composed of the emperor himself, of about one hundred independent prelates and princes, and of delegates from nine and forty independent towns. These last, besides the free cities of Bremen and Hamburg, had internally not only municipal liberties, but self-government, and were so many little republics, dotted throughout the land, from the Rhine to the Danube. But in the Diet, their votes counted as 'Klopstock: An den Kaiser, Werke, ii. 51. I. CHAP. nothing. As the people on the one side were not heard, so the dignity of the Imperial crown on the other 1763. brought no substantial power; and as the hundred princes were never disposed to diminish their separate independence, it followed that the German empire was but a vain shadow. The princes and nobles parcelled out the land, and ruled it in severalty with an authority which there was none to dispute, to guide, or to restrain. Nobility throughout Germany was strictly a caste. The younger son of a subordinate and impoverished noble family would not have wedded with the wealthiest plebeian heiress. Various chapters and ecclesiastical preferments were accessible to those only who were of unmixed aristocratic ancestry. It followed, that, in the breast of the educated commoner, no political passion was so strong as the hatred of nobility; for nowhere in the world was the pride of birth so great as in the petty German principalities. The numerous little princes-absolute within their own narrow limits over a hopeless people, whose fortunes they taxed at will, whose lives and services they not only claimed for the service of the state and of themselves, but as merchantable property which might be transferred to others-made up for the small extent of their dominions by an excess of self-adulation; though, after all, as was said of them by one of the greatest German poets, who was ready to praise merit wherever found, they were but "demi-men, who, in perfectly serious stupidity, thought themselves beings of a higher nature than we." But their pride was a Klopstock: Fürstenlob. Halbmenschen, die sich, in vollem, dummen Ernst für höhere I. pride which licked the dust, for "almost all of them CHAP. were venal and pensionary.' 991 The United Provinces of the Netherlands, the forerunner of nations in religious tolerance, were, from the origin of their confederacy, the natural friends of intellectual freedom. Here thought ranged through the wide domain of speculative reason. Here the literary fugitive found an asylum, and the boldest writings, which in other countries circulated by stealth, were openly published to the world. But in their European relations, the Netherlands were no more a great maritime power. They had opulent free ports in the West Indies, colonies in South America, Southern Africa, and the East Indies, with the best harbor in the Indian Ocean: their paths, as of old, were on the deep, and their footsteps in many waters. They knew they could be opulent only through commerce, and their system of mercantile policy was liberal beyond that of every nation in Europe. Even their colonial ports were less closely shut against the traffic with other countries. This freedom bore its fruits: they became wealthy beyond compare, reduced their debt, and were able so to improve their finances, that their funds, bearing only two per cent. interest, rose considerably above par. Ever the champions of the freedom of the seas, at the time of their greatest naval power, they had in their treaty of 1674 with England, embodied the safety of neutrals in time of war, limiting contraband articles of trade, and making goods on shipboard as safe as the ships that bore The authority is an English Lord Chancellor, speaking his mind to an English Duke. Hardwicke to Newcastle, 10th Sept., 1751; in VOL. V. 2 Coxe's Pelham Administration, ii. 1763. |