1763. The dynasties which received their consecration from the Roman church would cease to array themselves in arms against the offspring of the reformers; in the long tumultuous strife, Protestantism had fulfilled its political ends, and was never again to convulse the world. But from Protestantism there came forth a principle of all-pervading energy, the common possession of civilized man, and the harbinger of new changes in the state. The life-giving truth of the Reformation was the right of private judgment. This personal liberty in affairs of conscience had, by the illustrious teachings of Descartes, been diffused among the nations which adhered to the old faith, under the more comprehensive form of philosophical freedom. Everywhere throughout intelligent Europe and America, the separate man was growing aware of the inhering right to the unfettered culture and enjoyment of his whole moral and intellectual being. Individuality was the groundwork of new theories in politics, ethics, and industry. In Europe, where the human mind groped its way through heavy clouds of tradition, inquisitive activity turned from discussions on religion to the analysis of institutions and opinions. Having, in the days of Luther and Calvin, pleaded the Bible against popes and prelates and the one indivisible church, it now invoked the authority of reason, and applied it to every object of human thought: to science, speculative philosophy, and art; to the place of our planet in the order of the heavens, and the nature and destiny of the race that dwells on it; to every belief and every polity inherited from the past; to the priestly altar; to the royal throne. Skepticism was the method of the new reform; its tendency, revolution. Sad era for European humanity, which was to advance towards light and liberty only through universal doubt; and, before faith could be inspired by genial love to construct new governments, was doomed to gaze helplessly, as its received institutions crumbled away. The Catholic system embraced all society in its religious unity; Protestantism broke that religious unity into sects and fragments; philosophy carried analysis through the entire range of human thought and action, and appointed each individual the arbiter of his own belief and the director of his own powers. Society would be organized again, but not till after the recognition of the rights of the individual. Unity would once more be restored, but not through the canon and feudal law; for the new Catholic element was the people. 1763. Protestantism, albeit the reform in religion was the seed-plot of democratic revolutions, had at first been attended by the triumph of absolute monarchy throughout continental Europe, where even the Catholic powers themselves grew impatient of the authority of the pope over their temporal affairs. The Protestant king, who had just been the ally of our fathers in the seven years' war, presented the first great instance of the passage of feudal sovereignty into unlimited monarchy, resting on a standing military force. Still surrounded by danger, his inflexible and uncontrolled will stamped the impress of harshness even on his necessary policy, of tyranny on his errors of judgment, and of rapine and violence on his measures for aggrandizement. Yet Prussia, which was the favorite disciple of Luther and the child of the Reformation, while it held the sword upright, bore with every creed and set reason free. It offered a shelter to Rousseau, and called in D'Alembert and Voltaire as its guests; it allowed Semler to hold the Bible under the light of criticism; it breathed into the boldly thoughtful Lessing widest hopes for the education of the race to a universal brotherhood on earth; it gave its youth to the teachings of Immanuel Kant, who, for power of analysis and universality, was inferior to none since Aristotle. 66 An army and a treasure do not constitute a power," said Vergennes; but Prussia had also philosophic liberty. All freedom of mind in Germany hailed the peace of Hubertsburg as its own victory. In every question of public law, Frederic, continuing to noble birth its prescriptive posts and leaving his people divided almost into castes, made the welfare of the kingdom paramount to privilege. He challenged justice under the law for the humblest against the highest. He among Protestants set the bright example of the equality of Catholics in worship and in civil condition. To heal the conflict of franchises in the several provinces of his realm, he planned a general code, of which the opening pages promulgate great principles of human rights, as the basis of Prussian law. His ear was open to the sorrows of the poor and the complaint of the crushed; and, as in time of war he shared peril and want with the common soldier, in peace the peasant that knocked at his palace gate was welcome to a hearing. "Title and noble birth," he would say, "are tom-fooleries; all turns upon personal merit." "Kings are nothing but men, and all men are equal." Thus he arraigned the haughtiness of hereditary station, yet without forming purposes or clear conceptions of useful change in the political constitution of his kingdom. Holding no colonies, he could calmly watch their growth to independence; and might welcome the experiment of the widely extending American commonwealth. 1763. If the number of active minds in cultivated Prussia was not yet large enough to give to forming opinion a popular aspect, in Russia, the immense empire which was extending itself along the Baltic and the Euxine, and had even crossed the Pacific to set up its banners in North-western America, free inquiry had something of solitary dignity, as the almost exclusive guest of the empress. First of the great powers of Europe in population, and exceeding all of them together in extent of European lands, the great Slavonic state was not proportionably strong and opulent. More than two thirds of its inhabitants were bondsmen and slaves, thinly scattered over vast domains. The slave held the plough; the slave bent over the anvil or threw the shuttle; the slave wrought the mines. The nobles, who directed the labor on their estates, in manufactures or the search for ores, read no books from abroad, and as yet had no native literature. The little science that faintly gleamed on the interior was diffused through the priests of the Greek church, themselves bred up in superstition; so that the Slavonic race, which was neither Protestant nor Catholic, which had neither been ravaged by the wars of religion nor educated by the discussions of creeds, a new and rising -- 1763. 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 dis-. placed them at will; directed the internal administration and the relations with foreign powers. The sovereign who held these absolute prerogatives was Catharine, a princess of a German Protestant house. Her ambition had secured the throne by conforming to her husband's religion, conniving at his deposition, and not avenging his murder. Her love of pleasure protected a licentiousness of moral opinion; her passion for praise sought to conciliate the good-will of men of letters: so that she blended the patronage 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 halo of some imaginary restoration of the liberties of Greece. At home respecting the property of the nobles, yet seeking to diminish the number of slaves; an apparent devotee to the faith of the Greek church, yet giving religious freedom to the Catholic and the Protestant, and even printing the Koran for the Mussulmans of her dominions, 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 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 II. to rival Frederic of Prussia. His mother, Maria Theresa, was a devotee to the church. The son, hating the bigotry in which he was nurtured, inclined to skepticism and unbelief; and asserted the right to freedom of mind with such integ rity 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 immunities, and concentrating all power in his own hands. As a reformer, he therefore failed in every part of his dominions; and as he brought no enduring good to Hungary, but rather an example of violating its constitution, so we shall find 1763. 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 II., ill-judged and vain as they were, illustrate the universality of the new influence. 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 electoral chapters composed of nobles descended from an unmixed aristocratic ancestry. 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 |