FOOTNOTES:

It is noteworthy that the French Academy, which gave the immediate suggestion for the constitution of the English Royal Society, contained almost no authors save belletrists and ecclesiastics. In the list of members down to 1671 (Relationcited, p. 336), I find no writer on science save De la Chambre, the King's physician. And the first important undertaking of the Academy (projected about 1637) was aDictionary. Sprat (p. 56) suggests that the Royal Society has usefully influenced the Academy in the direction of the study of things rather than words. (Compare the avowed literary ideal of the authors of theRelation, p. 373.) But although the French group from the first tended mainly to literary pursuits, they too aimed at a "free way of reasoning," "et de ce premier âge de l'Académie, ils en parlent comme d'un âge d'or, durant lequel avec toute l'innocence et toute lalibertédes premiers siècles, sans bruit, et sans pompe, et sans autres loix que celles de l'amitié, ils goûtoient ensemble tout ce que la société des esprits, et la vie raisonnable, ont de plus doux et de plus charmant" (Relation, p. 7).And even while Sprat was writing, the French were making up their scientific leeway. In 1664-65 there was published in English a translation ofA General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy and other(sic)Natural Knowledge made in the Assembly of theBeaux EspritsatParis,by the most Ingenious Persons of that Nation(2 vols. sm. folio), wherein, though the scientific discussions are distinctly amateurish, there are many speculations likely to stimulate both French and English experiment. There is indeed little to choose in point of solidity between the early themes of the English Royal Society and those of the French Academy. On the other hand, the French Government specially promoted exact study. In 1666 Colbert established theAcadémie Royale des Sciences, for the promotion of Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, building a laboratory and an observatory, and inviting to France Cassini and Huygens(Life of Colbert by Bernard, in ed. of Colbert'sLast Testament, 1695). Colbert further founded theAcadémie Royale d'Architecturein 1671; and had set up what came to be theAcadémie des Inscriptionsin his own house. All three bodies did excellent work. (See the acknowledgment, as regards science, in Lawrence'sLectures on Comparative Anatomy, etc., 1819, p. 13.) In France, besides, the philosophy and science of Descartes made way from the first, and it was his works that first gave Locke "a relish for philosophical things." On the other hand, Sprat, who was not without an eye to literature, and made a reputation by his style, acutely notes (p. 42) that "in the Wars themselves (which is a time wherein all Languages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busie and active times there arise more new thoughts of some men, which must be signifi'd and varied by new expressions)" the English speech "received many fantastical terms ... and with all it was enlarg'd by many sound and necessary Forms and Idioms which it before wanted"; and he proposes an authoritative dictionary on the lines of the French project.

And even while Sprat was writing, the French were making up their scientific leeway. In 1664-65 there was published in English a translation ofA General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy and other(sic)Natural Knowledge made in the Assembly of theBeaux EspritsatParis,by the most Ingenious Persons of that Nation(2 vols. sm. folio), wherein, though the scientific discussions are distinctly amateurish, there are many speculations likely to stimulate both French and English experiment. There is indeed little to choose in point of solidity between the early themes of the English Royal Society and those of the French Academy. On the other hand, the French Government specially promoted exact study. In 1666 Colbert established theAcadémie Royale des Sciences, for the promotion of Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, building a laboratory and an observatory, and inviting to France Cassini and Huygens(Life of Colbert by Bernard, in ed. of Colbert'sLast Testament, 1695). Colbert further founded theAcadémie Royale d'Architecturein 1671; and had set up what came to be theAcadémie des Inscriptionsin his own house. All three bodies did excellent work. (See the acknowledgment, as regards science, in Lawrence'sLectures on Comparative Anatomy, etc., 1819, p. 13.) In France, besides, the philosophy and science of Descartes made way from the first, and it was his works that first gave Locke "a relish for philosophical things." On the other hand, Sprat, who was not without an eye to literature, and made a reputation by his style, acutely notes (p. 42) that "in the Wars themselves (which is a time wherein all Languages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busie and active times there arise more new thoughts of some men, which must be signifi'd and varied by new expressions)" the English speech "received many fantastical terms ... and with all it was enlarg'd by many sound and necessary Forms and Idioms which it before wanted"; and he proposes an authoritative dictionary on the lines of the French project.

The English naturalists would have nothing to do with theology, "these two subjects, God and the Soul, being only forborn."[1176]Reasoning from the development of military faculty in the Civil War, they decided that "greater things are produced by the free way than the formal"[1177]—a principle already put forth by Renaudot, in the preface to the reports of the French Academy, as the guide of their procedure. By attending solely to results and questions of concrete fact, the inquirers were "not only free from Faction, but from the very causes and beginnings of it";[1178]and in the language of the time they held that "by this means there was a race of young Men provided against the next Age, whose minds receiving from them their just Impressions of sober and generous knowledge, were invincibly arm'd against all the inchantments of Enthusiasm"[1179]—that is, of religious fanaticism. And with this recoil from fanaticism there went the stirring and energetic curiosity of people habituated to action by years of war, and needing some new excitement to replace the old. While many turned to debauchery, others took to "experiment."[1180]Says Sprat:—

"The late times of Civil War and confusion, to make somerecompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage with them, that they stirr'd up men's minds from long ease and a lazy rest, and made them active, industrious, and inquisitive: it being the usual benefit that follows upon Tempests and Thunders in the State, as well as in the skie, that they purifie and cleer the Air which they disturb. But now, since the King's return, the blindness of the former Age and the miseries of this last are vanish'd away: now men are generally weary of the Relicks of Antiquity, and satiated with Religious Disputes; now not only the eyes of men but their hands are open, and prepar'd to labour; Now there is a universal desire and appetite after Knowledge, after the peaceable, the fruitful, nourishing knowledge; and not after that of antient Sects, which only yielded hard indigestible arguments, or sharp contentions, instead of food: which when the minds of men requir'd bread, gave them only a stone, and for fish a serpent."[1181]

Here too, then, there was reaction. It could not suffice to lift the plane of national life, which was determined by the general conditions and the general culture; nor did it alter the predominance ofbelles lettresin the reading of the educated; but it served to sow in that life the seed of science, destined to work through the centuries a gradual transformation of activity and thought which should make impossible the old political strifes and generate new. Out of experiment came invention, machinery, theory, new scepticism, rationalism, democracy. It is difficult to measure, but not easy to over-estimate, the gain to intellectual life from even a partial discrediting of the old preoccupation with theology, which in the centuries between Luther and Spinoza stood for an "expense of spirit" that is depressing to think of. Down even to our own day, the waste of labour and learning continues; but from the time when two-thirds of Europe had been agonised by wars set up or stimulated by theological disputes, the balance begins to lean towards saner things. The second generation after that in which there arose a "free way of reasoning"[1182]saw the beginnings of "Freethinking" in those religious problems which were for the present laid aside, and the foundation of a new experiential philosophy. New and great reactions against these were to come; reactions of endowed clericalism, of popular sloth, of new "enthusiasm" generated innew undergrowths of ignorance, of recoil from terrific democratic revolution. But the new principle was to persist.

§ 4

It is not easy, at this time of day, to accept as a scientific product the confused theory of constitutionalism which gradually grew up in English politics from William the Third onwards. The theory in all its forms is in logic so invertebrate, and in morals so far from satisfying any fairly developed sense of political justice, that we are apt to dismiss it in derision. In so far, indeed, as it proceeds on a formulation of the "social contract" it is always severely handled by the school of Sir Henry Maine, which here represents the anxiety of the upper classes since the French Revolution to find some semblance of rational answer to the moral plea that all men are entitled to political enfranchisement and social help on the simple ground of reciprocity, supposed to be canonised for Christians in the "Golden Rule." Locke, of course, was not thinking of the working mass when he wrote his Letters on Government, any more than when he helped to draw up a constitution for South Carolina endorsing slavery.[1183]But he was at least much nearer rational morals than were his antagonists; the provisions for liberty of conscience in the South Carolina Constitution are notably far in advance of any official view ever previously promulgated; and in subsuming the "social contract" he was but following Hooker and Milton, and indeed adapting Aristotle, an authority whom Locke's later critics are wont to magnify.

Sir Frederick Pollock, in hisIntroduction to the History of the Science of Politics(p. 20), assumes to have saved Aristotle from the criticism which assails the "social contract" theory, by saying that Aristotle regards a "clanless and masterless man" as a monster or an impossibility, whereas the "theorists of the social contract school" take such a man to be the social unit. There is really no reason to suppose that Aristotle would have denied a pre-political state of nomadic barbarism such as is vaguely figured by Thucydides (i, 2); and as a matter of fact he does expressly posit a process of society-making by compact, first by the utility-seeking combination of families in a village, later by the villagesjoining themselvesinto a State, whose express purpose is "good life" (Politics, I, ii). It does not cancel this to say that Aristotle also makes the State"prior" in the rational order to man, for his "prior" (I, ii, 12-14) is not a historical but a metaphysical or ethical proposition. In the third book, again (c. 9), he endorses a proposition of Lycophron which virtually affirms the social contract.And just as the school of Maine attacks the social contract theory for giving a false view of the origin of society, so did Bodin long ago, and at least as cogently, attack Aristotle and Cicero for defining a State as a society of men assembled to live well and happily. Bodin insists (De la République, 1580, l. i, c. i, p. 5; l. i, c. vi, p. 48; l. iv, c. i,ad init.p. 350) that all States originated in violence, the earliest being found full of slaves. It is true that Aristotle at the outset implies that slavery is as old as the family, but he still speaks of States as voluntary combinations for a good end. As to the first kings he is also vague and contradictory, and is criticised by Bodin accordingly. Aristotle was doubtless adaptable to the monarchic as well as to the democratic creed; but Bodin's criticism suggests that in the sixteenth century he was felt to be too favourable to the latter.It may be worth while to remark that the notion of an unsociable "state of nature" prior to a "social contract" was effectively criticised by Sir William Temple in hisEssay upon the Origin and Nature of Government(1672). With a really scientific discrimination he points to food conditions as mainly determining gregation or segregation among animals, observing: "Nor do I know, if men are like sheep, why they need any government, or, if they are like wolves, how they can suffer it" (Works, ed. 1814, i, 9, 10). In the next generation, again, the ultra-Hobbesian view was keenly attacked and confuted by Shaftesbury within a few years of Locke's death (Characteristics, early edd. i, 109-11; ii, 310-21). As I have elsewhere pointed out (Buckle and his Critics, p. 395), the "contract" theory lent itself equally to Whiggism and to High Toryism.Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find the Radical Bentham (Fragment on Government, 1776) deriding it as held by the Tory Blackstone. But Rousseau himself (preface to theDiscours sur l'inégalité) avowedly handled the "State of Nature" as an ideal, not as a historical truth; and Blackstone did the same. It is therefore only a new species of abstract fallacy, and one for which there is no practical excuse, to argue as does the school of Maine (cp. Pollock, as cited, pp. 63, 75, 79, etc.) that the theories in question are responsible for the French Revolution in general, or the Reign of Terror in particular. Revolutions occur for reasons embodied in states of life: they avail themselves of the theories that lie to hand. The doctrine that "all are born equal" or "free" comes from the Institutes of Justinian, and is laid down in so many words by Bishop Sherborne of Chichester in 1536, and by theorthodox Spanish Jesuit Suarez early in the seventeenth century (Tractatus de Legibus, l. ii, c. ii, § 3). The first-mentioned passage is cited by Stubbs, iii, 623-24, and the second by Hallam,Literature of Europe, iii, 160.

And just as the school of Maine attacks the social contract theory for giving a false view of the origin of society, so did Bodin long ago, and at least as cogently, attack Aristotle and Cicero for defining a State as a society of men assembled to live well and happily. Bodin insists (De la République, 1580, l. i, c. i, p. 5; l. i, c. vi, p. 48; l. iv, c. i,ad init.p. 350) that all States originated in violence, the earliest being found full of slaves. It is true that Aristotle at the outset implies that slavery is as old as the family, but he still speaks of States as voluntary combinations for a good end. As to the first kings he is also vague and contradictory, and is criticised by Bodin accordingly. Aristotle was doubtless adaptable to the monarchic as well as to the democratic creed; but Bodin's criticism suggests that in the sixteenth century he was felt to be too favourable to the latter.

It may be worth while to remark that the notion of an unsociable "state of nature" prior to a "social contract" was effectively criticised by Sir William Temple in hisEssay upon the Origin and Nature of Government(1672). With a really scientific discrimination he points to food conditions as mainly determining gregation or segregation among animals, observing: "Nor do I know, if men are like sheep, why they need any government, or, if they are like wolves, how they can suffer it" (Works, ed. 1814, i, 9, 10). In the next generation, again, the ultra-Hobbesian view was keenly attacked and confuted by Shaftesbury within a few years of Locke's death (Characteristics, early edd. i, 109-11; ii, 310-21). As I have elsewhere pointed out (Buckle and his Critics, p. 395), the "contract" theory lent itself equally to Whiggism and to High Toryism.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find the Radical Bentham (Fragment on Government, 1776) deriding it as held by the Tory Blackstone. But Rousseau himself (preface to theDiscours sur l'inégalité) avowedly handled the "State of Nature" as an ideal, not as a historical truth; and Blackstone did the same. It is therefore only a new species of abstract fallacy, and one for which there is no practical excuse, to argue as does the school of Maine (cp. Pollock, as cited, pp. 63, 75, 79, etc.) that the theories in question are responsible for the French Revolution in general, or the Reign of Terror in particular. Revolutions occur for reasons embodied in states of life: they avail themselves of the theories that lie to hand. The doctrine that "all are born equal" or "free" comes from the Institutes of Justinian, and is laid down in so many words by Bishop Sherborne of Chichester in 1536, and by theorthodox Spanish Jesuit Suarez early in the seventeenth century (Tractatus de Legibus, l. ii, c. ii, § 3). The first-mentioned passage is cited by Stubbs, iii, 623-24, and the second by Hallam,Literature of Europe, iii, 160.

The derivation was bound to warp the theory; but such as it is, it represents the beginning of a new art, and therefore of a new science, of representative government. A variety of forces combined to prevent anarchy on the one hand, and on the other the fatal consolidation of the monarch's power which took place in France.[1184]The new English king was a Protestant, and therefore religiously acceptable to the people; but he was a Dutchman, and therefore racially obnoxious; for fierce commercial jealousy had long smouldered between the two peoples, and war had fanned it into flames that had burned wide. Further, he was a "latitudinarian" in religious matters, and zealous to appoint latitudinarian bishops; and the retirement from London forced on him by his asthma deepened tenfold the effect of his normal coldness of manner towards all and sundry. In the very Church whose cause he had saved, he was unpopular not only with the out-and-out zealots of political divine right, but with the zealous Churchmen as such, inasmuch as he favoured the Dissenters as far as he dared. So hampered and frustrated was he that it seems as if nothing but his rare genius for fighting a losing battle could have saved him, despite the many reasons the nation had for adhering to him.

One of these reasons, which counted for much, was the political effect of a National Debt in attaching creditors as determined supporters to the Government. The highest sagacity, perhaps, could not have framed a better device than this for establishing a new dynasty; albeit the device was itself made a ground of hostile criticism, and was, of course, resorted to as a financial necessity, or at least as a resource pointed to by Dutch example, not as a stroke of statecraft. What prudence and conciliation could do, William sought to do. And yet, with all his sanity and enlightenment, he failed utterly to apply his tolerant principles to that part of his administration which most sorely needed them—the government of Ireland. Even in England he could not carry tolerance nearly as far as he wished;[1185]but in Ireland he was forced to acquiesce inProtestant tyranny of the worst description. The bigotry of his High Church subjects was too strong for him. On the surrender of the last adherents of James at Limerick he concluded a treaty which gave the Irish Catholics the religious freedom they had had under Charles II when the Cromwellian oppression was removed; but the English Parliament refused to sanction it, save on the condition that nobody should sit in the Irish Parliament without first repudiating the Catholic doctrines. This was not the first virtual breach of faith by England towards Ireland; and it alone might have sufficed to poison union between the two countries; but it was only the first step in a renewal of the atrocious policy of the past.[1186]

At the Restoration the ex-Cromwellian diplomatists had contrived to arrange matters so that the monstrous confiscations made under the Commonwealth should be substantially maintained; though the settlement of 1653 had been made in entire disregard of the Act of Oblivion by Charles I in 1648; and though Charles II avowed in the House of Lords in 1660 that they had "showed much affection to him abroad." So base were the tactics of the Protestants that many Irish were charged with having forfeited their lands by signing under compulsion the engagement to renounce the House of Stuart; while those who had compelled them to the act now held the lands as royalists. But the decisive evil was the base indolence of the King. As Halifax said of him, he "would slide from an asking face";[1187]and what Clarendon called "thatimbecillitas frontiswhich kept him from denying"[1188]made him solve the intolerable strife of suitors by leaving possession in the main to those who had it. The adventurers and soldiers finally relinquished only one-third of their estates;[1189]and only a few hundreds of favoured Irish were restored to their old lands, under burden of compensation to the dispossessed holders.[1190]

When the resort of James II to Ireland gave power to the oppressed population, it was a matter of course that reprisals shouldbe attempted. The English historian glibly decides that they should not have been permitted; that the King "ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable"; and that "whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not been committed,was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place so long ago that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society."[1191]Thus does the race which claims to be civilised prescribe a course of action for that which it declares to be uncivilised.[1192]It is further suggested that the English interest in the Irish Parliament would have "willingly" granted James a "very considerable sum" to indemnify the despoiled natives for whom during a quarter of a century it had never moved a finger. There is not the least reason to believe in any such willingness; and it was in the ordinary way of things that the wronged race should not exhibit a moderation and magnanimity of which the wrongers had never for a moment shown themselves capable. The Irish Parliament of 1689, indeed, took care to indemnify all purchasers and mortgagees, while dispossessing original holders under the Cromwellian Settlement;[1193]but it passed an Act of Attainder in the fashion of the age; and when the Protestant cause triumphed, the revenge taken was a hundredfold greater than the provocation.

It was the legislature, not the crown, that did the work. Under the tolerant and statesmanlike King, the Irish Protestant Parliament proceeded to pass law after law making the life of Catholics one of cruel humiliation and intolerable wrong. There is nothing in civilised history to compare with the process by which religious and racial hatred in combination once more set the miserable Irish nation on the rack. The extreme political insanity of the course taken is doubtless to be attributed to the propagandist madness of James, who had just before sought to give all Ireland over to Catholicism. Fanaticism bred fanaticism. But the fact remains that the Protestant fanatics began in the reign of William a labour of hate which, carried on in succeeding reigns, at length made Ireland the darkest problem in our politics.

Hassencamp (pp. 117, 125) insists that the penal laws "were not dictated by any considerations of religion, but were merely the offspring of the spirit of domination," citing for this view Burke,Letter to a Peer(Works, Bohn ed. iii, 296), andLetter to Sir Hercules Langrishe(Id. ib.p. 321). But this is an attempt to dissociate religion from persecution in the interestsof religious credit, and will not bear criticism. Burke, in fact, contradicts himself, assigning the religious motive in an earlier page (292) of theLetter to a Peer, and again in theLetter to Langrishe(p. 301). When the Protestants went on heaping injuries on the Catholics in the knowledge that the people remained fixed in Catholicism, they were only acting as religious persecutors have always done. On Burke's and Hassencamp's view, persecution could never take place from religious motives at all. No doubt the race feeling was fundamental, but the two barbaric instincts were really combined. Cp. Macaulay'sHistory, ch. vi (2-vol. ed. 1877, i, 390-93).

As regards Irish trade, commercial malice had already effected all that religious malice could wish. Even in the reign of Henry VIII a law was passed forbidding the importation of Irish wool into England; and in the next century Strafford sought further to crush the Irish woollen trade altogether in the English interest, throwing the Irish back on their linen trade and agriculture, which he encouraged.[1194]Strafford's avowed object was the keeping Ireland thoroughly subject to the English crown by making the people dependent on England for their chief clothing; and to the same end he proposed to hold for the crown a monopoly of all Irish trade in salt.[1195]Cromwell, on his part, was sane enough to leave Irish shipping on the same footing as English under his Navigation Act; but in 1663 the Restoration Parliament put Ireland on the footing of a foreign State, thus destroying her shipping trade once for all,[1196]and arresting her natural intercourse with the American colonies. In the same year, a check was placed on the English importation of Irish fat cattle: two years later, the embargo was laid on lean cattle and dead meat; still later, it was laid on sheep, swine, pork, bacon, mutton, and cheese. In William's reign, new repressions were effected. The veto on wool export having led to woollen manufactures, which were chiefly in the hands of Dissenters and Catholics,[1197]the Irish Parliament, consisting of Episcopalian landlords, was induced in 1698 to put heavy export duties on Irish woollens; and this failing of its full purpose, in the following year the English Parliament absolutely prohibited all export of manufactured wool from Ireland.[1198]

To this policy of systematic iniquity the first offset was a measure of protection to the Irish linen trade in 1703; and thisbenefaction went almost solely into the hands of the Scotch settlers in Ulster.[1199]Even thereafter the linen trade of Ireland was so maimed and restricted by English hindrances that it was revived only by continual bounties from 1743 to 1773. And this twice restored and subsidised industry, thus expressly struck out of native and put in Protestant and alien hands, has been in our own age repeatedly pointed to as a proof of the superiority of the Protestant and non-Celtic inhabitants over the others in energy and enterprise. As a matter of fact, many of the Scots who benefited by the bounties of 1703 in Ulster had recently immigrated because of the poverty and over-population of their own country, where their energy and enterprise could do nothing. Irish energy and enterprise, on the other hand, had been chronically strangled, during two hundred years, by English and Protestant hands, with a persevering malice to which there is no parallel in human history; and the process is seen at its worst after the "glorious Revolution" of 1688.

Modern English writers of the Conservative school, always eager to asperse Ireland, never capable of frankly avowing the English causation of Irish backwardness, think it a sufficient exculpation of their ancestors' crimes to say that Irishmen have not taken up the old industries since they have been free to do so. Thus the late Mr. H.D. Traill meets Irish comment on Strafford's treatment of the Irish woollen trade by saying that the complainants "in these days prefer other and less worthy industries to those which they have now been free to practise, if they chose, for generations" (Strafford, 1889, p. 137). This is a fair sample of the fashion in which racial and political prejudices prompt men otherwise honourable to devices worthy of baseness. It should be unnecessary to point out, in reply, that when the Irish industries had been so long extirpated as to be lost arts, it was simply impossible that they could be successfully restoredin competitionwith the highly developed machine industry of England. Other countries set up new industries under high protective duties. This Ireland could not do. But the most obvious considerations are missed by malice.

The beginnings of modern parliamentary government thus coincide with the recommencement, in the worst spirit, of the principal national crime thus far committed by England; and this not by the choice of, but in despite of, the king, at the hands of the Parliament. In the next reign the same sin lies at the same door, the monarchdoing nothing. The fact should serve better than any monarchic special pleading to show us that the advance towards freedom is a warfare not merely with despots and despotic institutions, but with the spirit of despotism in the average man; a warfare in which, after a time, the opposing forces are seldom positive right and wrong, but as a rule only comparative right and wrong, evil being slowly eliminated by the alternate play of self-regarding instinct. Gross and wilful political evil, we say, was wrought in the first stages of the new progress towards political justice. But that is only another way of saying that even while gross political evil was being wrought, men were on the way towards political justice. A clear perception of the whole process, when men attain to it, will mean that justice is about to be attained.

§ 5

Even while the spirit of religion and the spirit of separateness were working such wrong in Ireland, the spirit of separateness was fortunately defeated in Scotland, where it had yet burned strongly enough to make perpetual division seem the destiny of the two kingdoms. We learn how much political institutions count for when we realise that in Scotland, just before the parliamentary union with England, there was as furious an aversion to all things English as there has ever been shown in France of late years to things German. The leading Scots patriots were not only bitterly averse to union, but hotly bent on securing that the line of succession in Scotland after Anne should not be the same as that in England; this because they held that Scottish liberties could never be secure under an English king. The stern Fletcher of Saltoun, a Republican at heart, had to play in part the game of the Jacobites, much as he abominated their cause. But both alike were defeated, with better results than could possibly have followed on any separation of the crowns; and the vehement opposition of the great mass of the Scots people to the Parliamentary Union was likewise defeated, in a manner hard to understand. The heat of the popular passion in Scotland is shown by the infamously unjust execution of the English Captain Green and two of his men[1200]on a charge of killing a missing Scotch captain and crew who were not even proved to be dead, and were afterwards found to be alive. The fanatical remnant of theCovenanters was as bitter against union as the Jacobites. Yet in the teeth of all this violence of feeling the Union was carried, and this not wholly by bribery,[1201]as was then alleged, and as might be suspected from the analogy of the later case of Ireland, but through the pressure of common-sense instinct among the less noisy. There was indeed an element of bribery in the English allowance of liberal compensation to the shareholders of the African Company (better known as the Darien Company), who thus had good cash in exchange for shares worth next to nothing; and in a certain sense the reluctant English concession to Scotland of freedom of trade was a bribe. But it is by such concessions that treaties are secured; and it needed a very clear self-interest to bring round a Scotch majority to union in the teeth of a popular hostility much more fierce than is shown in our own day in the not altogether disparate case of Ulster, as regards Home Rule. Burton and Macaulay agreed[1202]that the intense wish and need of the Scottish trading class to participate in the trade of England (as they had done to much advantage under Cromwell, but had been hindered from doing after the Restoration) was what brought about the passing of the Act of Union in the Scots Parliament. No doubt the moderate Presbyterians saw that their best security lay in union;[1203]but that recognition could never have overridden the stiff-necked forces of fanaticism and race hatred[1204]were it not for the call of plain pecuniary advantage. A transformation had begun in Scotland. The country which for a hundred and fifty years had been distracted by fanatical strifes, losing its best elements of culture under the spell of Judaic bibliolatry, had at length, under the obscure influence of English example, begun to move out of the worst toils of the secondary barbarism, not indeed into a path of pure civilisation—the harm had gone too deep for that—but towards a life of secular industry which at least prepared a soil for a better life in the centuries to come; and even for a time, under the stimulus of the new thought of France, developed a brilliant and various scientific literature. The Darien scheme may be taken as a turning-point in Scottish history; an act of commercial enterprise then arousing an amount of energy and sensation that had for centuries been seen only in connection with strokes of State and sect. It is notagreeable to idealising prejudice to accept Emerson's saying[1205]that the greatest ameliorator in human affairs has been "selfish, huckstering trade"; but, barring the strict force of the superlative, the claim is valid. It is the blackest count in the indictment against England for her[1206]treatment of Ireland that she deliberately closed to the sister nation the door which the Scotch, by refusing union on other terms when union was highly expedient in the view of English statesmen, forced her to open to them.

FOOTNOTES:[1145]Armand Carrel (Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre, ed. Bruxelles, 1836, p. 8) notes the "apathetic indifference" to which Cromwell's imperialist rule had reduced the middle classes.[1146]It is to be noted in this connection that at first the secret was very well kept. There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury and Lauderdale were kept in the dark as to the Treaty of Dover, in which Charles agreed with Louis to introduce Catholicism in England. Macaulay's suggestion to the contrary comes of his determination to hear nothing in Shaftesbury's defence.[1147]This is accepted by Armand Carrel, who calls him (Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre, p. 6) "homme d'une immoralité profonde."[1148]It is to be regretted that Green, while admitting that Mr. Christie was "in some respects" successful in his vindication of Shaftesbury, should have left his own account of Shaftesbury's character glaringly unfair. Verbally following Burnet, he pronounces Ashley "at best a Deist" in his religion, and adds that his life was "that of a debauchee," going on to couple the terms "Deist and debauchee" in a very clerical fashion. And yet in the previous paragraph he admits that "the debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact,temperate by nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess impossible." The non-correction of the flat contradiction must apparently be set down to Green's ill-health. As a matter of fact, the charge of debauchery is baseless. Long before Mr. Christie, one of the annotators of Burnet'sHistory(ed. 1838, p. 64,note) defended Shaftesbury generally, and pointed out that "in private life we have no testimony that he was depraved." Cp. Christie,Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1871, i, 316.[1149]History of His Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 290.[1150]My old friend, Mr. Alfred Marks, whose masterly book,Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?(Burns and Oates, 1905), decisively establishes the suicide theory, and disposes of the counter-theory of Mr. John Pollock, did not dispute the fact of the vague plotting of Coleman. No one can say how much of such loose and futile scheming there was.[1151]How odious it was may be gathered from Dryden'sAnnus Mirabilisand Marvell'sCharacter of Holland, pieces in which two men of genius exhibit every stress of vulgar ill-feeling that we can detect in the Jingo press and poets of our own day.[1152]Dryden's charge, inThe Medal, of "bartering his venal wit for sums of gold" during the Rebellion, is pure figment. It is an established fact that even as Councillor of State, to which office there was attached a salary of £1,000, Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, received no salary at all. See note to Mr. Christie's (Globe) ed. of Dryden's poems, pp. 127, 128.[1153]Christie'sLife of Ashley Cooper, ii, 293,note. Perhaps it is not sufficiently considered by Mr. Christie that Sidney regarded France as a possible ally for the overthrow of monarchy in England. Cp. Hallam, ii, 460-61. His position was not that of an ordinary Parliamentary bribe-taker. See Ludlow'sMemoirs, iii, 165,et seq.And the English Government had sought to have him assassinated.[1154]In 1603 Lord Mountjoy in Ireland laid it down as the doctrine of the Church of England that his master was "by right of descent an absolute king," and that it was unlawful for his subjects "upon any cause to raise arms against him." These words, says Dr. Gardiner (History 1604-43, i, 370), "truly expressed the belief with which thousands of Englishmen had grown up during the long struggle with Rome." For earlier discussions see Stubbs, i, 593, More'sUtopia, bk. i, and Hooper'sEarly Writings, ed. 1843, p. 75.[1155]As Hallam notes (Middle Ages, 11th ed. ii, 157), the French bishops in the ninth century had claimed sacerdotal rights of deposing kings in as full a degree as the Popes did later. In that period, however, bishops were often anti-papal; and the papal claim practically arose in the Roman and clerical resistance to the nomination of Popes by the Emperor, though Pope John VIII had in his time gone even further than Gregory VII did later, claiming power to choose the Emperor.Id.pp. 165-83.[1156]Buckle is wrong (i, 394) in dating the beginning of the revival of the doctrine "about 1681." Saunderson's edition of Usher was first published in 1660.[1157]The words of Thomas are extremely explicit: "Si [principes] non habeant justum principatum sed usurpatum, vel si injusta præcipiant, non tenentur eis subditi obedire."Summa, pt. ii, q. civ, art. 6. The right of the Pope to depose an apostate prince was, of course, constantly affirmed.[1158]Tractatus de Legibus, lib. ii, c. ii, § 3.[1159]Hallam,Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 161.[1160]Hallam, as last cited, p. 162. Bayle notes (art. "Althusius," andnotes) that the treatise was much denounced in Germany.[1161]Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. i, ch. x, § 8.[1162]Amsterdam, 1689-90, 2 vols.[1163]It is to be noted that "Passive Obedience" had different degrees of meaning for those who professed to believe in it. For some it meant merely not taking arms against the sovereign, and did not imply that he was entitled to active obedience in all things. See Hallam, ii, 463.[1164]Filmer begins hisPatriarcha(1680) with the remark that the doctrine of natural freedom and the right to choose governments had been "a common opinion ... since the time that school divinity began to flourish." Like Salmasius, he fathers the doctrine on the Papacy; and, indeed, the Church of Rome had notoriously employed it in its strifes with kings, at its own convenience; but it had as notoriously been put forward by many lay communities on their own behalf, and had been practically acted on in England over and over again. And it is clearly laid down in the third century by Tertullian,Ad Scapulam, ii.[1165]Memoirs, 2nd ed. p. 177.[1166]Though it is substantially maintained by Grotius,De Jure Belli et Pacis, 1625, I, iii, 9-12.[1167]Johnson was moved to pronounce Dryden the most excessive of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to "Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (Life, in vol. i ofProse Works of Dryden, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist atmosphere.[1168]Toland's ed., 1700, p. 55.[1169]Essay (xvi of pt. ii) on theIdea of a Perfect Commonwealth. Cp. Essay vii, on the tendencies of the British Government, where Harrington's unpracticality is sufficiently indicated.[1170]Cp. Carrel,Contre-Révolution, p. 212, as to the "profound discouragement" that had fallen on the people in 1685. Cp. p. 213.[1171]"Our late Warrs and Schisms having almost wholly discouraged men from the study of Theologie." W. Charleton,The Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature, 1657, p. 50. (Cp. Baxter,The Reformed Pastor, 1656; ed. 1835, pp. 95-100.) Charleston, as his title and that of his previous work on Atheism show, uses no ecclesiastical arguments.[1172]The French Academy, formally founded in 1635, had in a similar way originated in a private gathering some six years before (Olivet et Pelisson,Relation concernant l'Histoire de l'Académie Françoise, ed. 1672, p. 5). There may of course have been many such private groups in England in the period of the Commonwealth.[1173]History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 53.[1174]P. 67. Sprat mentions that many physicians gave great help (p. 130).[1175]P. 53.[1176]History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 83. The Frenchbeaux espritswere not afraid to discuss now and then the soul, or even God, contriving to do it without theological heat. See theCollectioncited, Conferences 6, 16, 79, 87, 142, etc.[1177]History, p. 73.[1178]P. 91.[1179]P. 53.[1180]So too with the non-combatants. Note, for instance, Locke's recoil from the scholastic philosophy, and his early eager interest in chemistry, medicine, and meteorology. Anthony à Wood records him as a student "of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never-contented"—that is to say, argumentative.[1181]History of the Royal Society, p. 152.[1182]Sprat, of course, carried the "free way of reasoning" only to a certain length, feeling obliged to deprecate "that some Philosophers, by their carelessness of a Future Estate, have brought a discredit on knowledge itself" (p. 367); and "that many Modern Naturalists have bin negligent in the Worship of God"; but he still insisted that "the universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a rational Religion" (p. 366). Compare theDiscourse of Things above Reason, by a Fellow of the Royal Society(1681), attributed to Boyle, and published with a tract on the same theme by another Fellow.[1183]If, that is, the section providing for slavery be his. It probably was not. See Mr. Fox Bourne'sLife of Locke, 1876, i, 239. His influence may reasonably be traced in the remarkable provisions for the freedom of sects—under limitation of theism.Id.pp. 241-43. Mr. Fox Bourne does not deal with the slavery clause.[1184]Thoughtful observers already recognised in the time of James II that if England developed on the French lines religious freedom would disappear from Europe. See the tractateL'Europe esclave si Angleterre ne rompt ses fers, Cologne, 1677.[1185]This may be taken as certain; but it is not clear how far he wished to go. Ranke (History of England, Eng. tr. iv, 437) and Hassencamp (History of Ireland, Eng. tr. p. 117) are satisfied with the evidence as to his having promised the German emperor to do his utmost to repeal the penal laws against the Catholics, and his having offered the Irish Catholics, before the Battle of Aghrim, religious freedom, half the churches in Ireland, and half their old possessions. For this we have only a private letter. However this point may be decided, the Treaty of Limerick is plain evidence. On the point of William's responsibility for the breach of that Treaty, see the excellent sketch ofThe Past History of Irelandby Mr. Bouverie-Pusey (1894).[1186]Cp. the author'sSaxon and the Celt, 1897, pp. 146-56.[1187]A Character of King Charles II, ed. 1750, p. 45.[1188]Continuation of the Life of Clarendon, in 1-vol. ed. ofHistory, 1843, p. 1006.[1189]Hallam, iii, 396, following Carte and Leland.[1190]Bishop Trench (Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of Ireland, Dublin rep. 1843, pp. 84-93) declares that not only were all re-appropriations to be compensated, but the 54 nominees added to the original list of 500 loyalist officers to be rewarded had not received an acre of land as late as 1675. Hallam sums up on Anglican lines that the Catholics could not "reasonably murmur against the confiscation of half their estates, after a civil war wherein it was evident that so large a proportion of themselves were concerned." In reality, much more than half the land had been confiscated; and all the while the bulk of it remained in the hands of men who had themselves been in rebellion! The settlement was simply a racial iniquity.[1191]Macaulay, ch. vi, Student's ed. i, 393.[1192]Id.ib.[1193]For a full account of the procedure see Thomas Davis's work,The Patriot Parliament of 1689, rep. with introd. by Sir C. Gavan Duffy, 1893.[1194]Cp. the author'sSaxon and Celt, pp. 160, 161, andnote.[1195]H.D. Traill,Strafford, 1889, p. 81.[1196]Lecky,History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, i, 174.[1197]See Petty,Essays in Political Arithmetic, ed. 1699, p. 186.[1198]The checking of the Irish wool trade was strongly urged by Temple in the English interest (Essay on the Advancement of Trade in Ireland, Works, iii, 10).[1199]See Dr. Hill Burton'sHistory of the Reign of Queen Anne, 1880, iii, 160-63. This measure seems to have been overlooked by Mr. Lecky in his narrative,History of Ireland, i, 178.[1200]Green's ship and crew were first seized without form of law in reprisal for the seizure in England, by the East India Company, of a Scotch ship belonging to the old Darien Company, whose trade the India Company held to be a breach of its monopoly. The charge of slaying a Scotch captain was an afterthought.[1201]On this see Burton, viii, 178-85; and cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. iii, 160, as to the rise of the trading spirit.[1202]Burton'sHistory of Scotland, viii, 3,note.[1203]Id.viii, 168.[1204]"It is a marvel how the Edinburgh press of that day could have printed the multitude of denunciatory pamphlets against the Union" (Burton, viii, 131). "The aristocratic opponents of the Union did their utmost to inflame the passions of the people" (id.p. 137, cp. p. 158, etc.).[1205]Following Hallam,Middle Ages, iii, 327.[1206]Properly speaking, the action of "England" was the action of the merchant class, which in this case most exerted itself and got its way.

[1145]Armand Carrel (Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre, ed. Bruxelles, 1836, p. 8) notes the "apathetic indifference" to which Cromwell's imperialist rule had reduced the middle classes.

[1146]It is to be noted in this connection that at first the secret was very well kept. There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury and Lauderdale were kept in the dark as to the Treaty of Dover, in which Charles agreed with Louis to introduce Catholicism in England. Macaulay's suggestion to the contrary comes of his determination to hear nothing in Shaftesbury's defence.

[1147]This is accepted by Armand Carrel, who calls him (Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre, p. 6) "homme d'une immoralité profonde."

[1148]It is to be regretted that Green, while admitting that Mr. Christie was "in some respects" successful in his vindication of Shaftesbury, should have left his own account of Shaftesbury's character glaringly unfair. Verbally following Burnet, he pronounces Ashley "at best a Deist" in his religion, and adds that his life was "that of a debauchee," going on to couple the terms "Deist and debauchee" in a very clerical fashion. And yet in the previous paragraph he admits that "the debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact,temperate by nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess impossible." The non-correction of the flat contradiction must apparently be set down to Green's ill-health. As a matter of fact, the charge of debauchery is baseless. Long before Mr. Christie, one of the annotators of Burnet'sHistory(ed. 1838, p. 64,note) defended Shaftesbury generally, and pointed out that "in private life we have no testimony that he was depraved." Cp. Christie,Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1871, i, 316.

[1149]History of His Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 290.

[1150]My old friend, Mr. Alfred Marks, whose masterly book,Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?(Burns and Oates, 1905), decisively establishes the suicide theory, and disposes of the counter-theory of Mr. John Pollock, did not dispute the fact of the vague plotting of Coleman. No one can say how much of such loose and futile scheming there was.

[1151]How odious it was may be gathered from Dryden'sAnnus Mirabilisand Marvell'sCharacter of Holland, pieces in which two men of genius exhibit every stress of vulgar ill-feeling that we can detect in the Jingo press and poets of our own day.

[1152]Dryden's charge, inThe Medal, of "bartering his venal wit for sums of gold" during the Rebellion, is pure figment. It is an established fact that even as Councillor of State, to which office there was attached a salary of £1,000, Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, received no salary at all. See note to Mr. Christie's (Globe) ed. of Dryden's poems, pp. 127, 128.

[1153]Christie'sLife of Ashley Cooper, ii, 293,note. Perhaps it is not sufficiently considered by Mr. Christie that Sidney regarded France as a possible ally for the overthrow of monarchy in England. Cp. Hallam, ii, 460-61. His position was not that of an ordinary Parliamentary bribe-taker. See Ludlow'sMemoirs, iii, 165,et seq.And the English Government had sought to have him assassinated.

[1154]In 1603 Lord Mountjoy in Ireland laid it down as the doctrine of the Church of England that his master was "by right of descent an absolute king," and that it was unlawful for his subjects "upon any cause to raise arms against him." These words, says Dr. Gardiner (History 1604-43, i, 370), "truly expressed the belief with which thousands of Englishmen had grown up during the long struggle with Rome." For earlier discussions see Stubbs, i, 593, More'sUtopia, bk. i, and Hooper'sEarly Writings, ed. 1843, p. 75.

[1155]As Hallam notes (Middle Ages, 11th ed. ii, 157), the French bishops in the ninth century had claimed sacerdotal rights of deposing kings in as full a degree as the Popes did later. In that period, however, bishops were often anti-papal; and the papal claim practically arose in the Roman and clerical resistance to the nomination of Popes by the Emperor, though Pope John VIII had in his time gone even further than Gregory VII did later, claiming power to choose the Emperor.Id.pp. 165-83.

[1156]Buckle is wrong (i, 394) in dating the beginning of the revival of the doctrine "about 1681." Saunderson's edition of Usher was first published in 1660.

[1157]The words of Thomas are extremely explicit: "Si [principes] non habeant justum principatum sed usurpatum, vel si injusta præcipiant, non tenentur eis subditi obedire."Summa, pt. ii, q. civ, art. 6. The right of the Pope to depose an apostate prince was, of course, constantly affirmed.

[1158]Tractatus de Legibus, lib. ii, c. ii, § 3.

[1159]Hallam,Literature of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 161.

[1160]Hallam, as last cited, p. 162. Bayle notes (art. "Althusius," andnotes) that the treatise was much denounced in Germany.

[1161]Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. i, ch. x, § 8.

[1162]Amsterdam, 1689-90, 2 vols.

[1163]It is to be noted that "Passive Obedience" had different degrees of meaning for those who professed to believe in it. For some it meant merely not taking arms against the sovereign, and did not imply that he was entitled to active obedience in all things. See Hallam, ii, 463.

[1164]Filmer begins hisPatriarcha(1680) with the remark that the doctrine of natural freedom and the right to choose governments had been "a common opinion ... since the time that school divinity began to flourish." Like Salmasius, he fathers the doctrine on the Papacy; and, indeed, the Church of Rome had notoriously employed it in its strifes with kings, at its own convenience; but it had as notoriously been put forward by many lay communities on their own behalf, and had been practically acted on in England over and over again. And it is clearly laid down in the third century by Tertullian,Ad Scapulam, ii.

[1165]Memoirs, 2nd ed. p. 177.

[1166]Though it is substantially maintained by Grotius,De Jure Belli et Pacis, 1625, I, iii, 9-12.

[1167]Johnson was moved to pronounce Dryden the most excessive of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to "Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (Life, in vol. i ofProse Works of Dryden, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist atmosphere.

[1168]Toland's ed., 1700, p. 55.

[1169]Essay (xvi of pt. ii) on theIdea of a Perfect Commonwealth. Cp. Essay vii, on the tendencies of the British Government, where Harrington's unpracticality is sufficiently indicated.

[1170]Cp. Carrel,Contre-Révolution, p. 212, as to the "profound discouragement" that had fallen on the people in 1685. Cp. p. 213.

[1171]"Our late Warrs and Schisms having almost wholly discouraged men from the study of Theologie." W. Charleton,The Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature, 1657, p. 50. (Cp. Baxter,The Reformed Pastor, 1656; ed. 1835, pp. 95-100.) Charleston, as his title and that of his previous work on Atheism show, uses no ecclesiastical arguments.

[1172]The French Academy, formally founded in 1635, had in a similar way originated in a private gathering some six years before (Olivet et Pelisson,Relation concernant l'Histoire de l'Académie Françoise, ed. 1672, p. 5). There may of course have been many such private groups in England in the period of the Commonwealth.

[1173]History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 53.

[1174]P. 67. Sprat mentions that many physicians gave great help (p. 130).

[1175]P. 53.

[1176]History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 83. The Frenchbeaux espritswere not afraid to discuss now and then the soul, or even God, contriving to do it without theological heat. See theCollectioncited, Conferences 6, 16, 79, 87, 142, etc.

[1177]History, p. 73.

[1178]P. 91.

[1179]P. 53.

[1180]So too with the non-combatants. Note, for instance, Locke's recoil from the scholastic philosophy, and his early eager interest in chemistry, medicine, and meteorology. Anthony à Wood records him as a student "of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never-contented"—that is to say, argumentative.

[1181]History of the Royal Society, p. 152.

[1182]Sprat, of course, carried the "free way of reasoning" only to a certain length, feeling obliged to deprecate "that some Philosophers, by their carelessness of a Future Estate, have brought a discredit on knowledge itself" (p. 367); and "that many Modern Naturalists have bin negligent in the Worship of God"; but he still insisted that "the universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a rational Religion" (p. 366). Compare theDiscourse of Things above Reason, by a Fellow of the Royal Society(1681), attributed to Boyle, and published with a tract on the same theme by another Fellow.

[1183]If, that is, the section providing for slavery be his. It probably was not. See Mr. Fox Bourne'sLife of Locke, 1876, i, 239. His influence may reasonably be traced in the remarkable provisions for the freedom of sects—under limitation of theism.Id.pp. 241-43. Mr. Fox Bourne does not deal with the slavery clause.

[1184]Thoughtful observers already recognised in the time of James II that if England developed on the French lines religious freedom would disappear from Europe. See the tractateL'Europe esclave si Angleterre ne rompt ses fers, Cologne, 1677.

[1185]This may be taken as certain; but it is not clear how far he wished to go. Ranke (History of England, Eng. tr. iv, 437) and Hassencamp (History of Ireland, Eng. tr. p. 117) are satisfied with the evidence as to his having promised the German emperor to do his utmost to repeal the penal laws against the Catholics, and his having offered the Irish Catholics, before the Battle of Aghrim, religious freedom, half the churches in Ireland, and half their old possessions. For this we have only a private letter. However this point may be decided, the Treaty of Limerick is plain evidence. On the point of William's responsibility for the breach of that Treaty, see the excellent sketch ofThe Past History of Irelandby Mr. Bouverie-Pusey (1894).

[1186]Cp. the author'sSaxon and the Celt, 1897, pp. 146-56.

[1187]A Character of King Charles II, ed. 1750, p. 45.

[1188]Continuation of the Life of Clarendon, in 1-vol. ed. ofHistory, 1843, p. 1006.

[1189]Hallam, iii, 396, following Carte and Leland.

[1190]Bishop Trench (Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of Ireland, Dublin rep. 1843, pp. 84-93) declares that not only were all re-appropriations to be compensated, but the 54 nominees added to the original list of 500 loyalist officers to be rewarded had not received an acre of land as late as 1675. Hallam sums up on Anglican lines that the Catholics could not "reasonably murmur against the confiscation of half their estates, after a civil war wherein it was evident that so large a proportion of themselves were concerned." In reality, much more than half the land had been confiscated; and all the while the bulk of it remained in the hands of men who had themselves been in rebellion! The settlement was simply a racial iniquity.

[1191]Macaulay, ch. vi, Student's ed. i, 393.

[1192]Id.ib.

[1193]For a full account of the procedure see Thomas Davis's work,The Patriot Parliament of 1689, rep. with introd. by Sir C. Gavan Duffy, 1893.

[1194]Cp. the author'sSaxon and Celt, pp. 160, 161, andnote.

[1195]H.D. Traill,Strafford, 1889, p. 81.

[1196]Lecky,History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, i, 174.

[1197]See Petty,Essays in Political Arithmetic, ed. 1699, p. 186.

[1198]The checking of the Irish wool trade was strongly urged by Temple in the English interest (Essay on the Advancement of Trade in Ireland, Works, iii, 10).

[1199]See Dr. Hill Burton'sHistory of the Reign of Queen Anne, 1880, iii, 160-63. This measure seems to have been overlooked by Mr. Lecky in his narrative,History of Ireland, i, 178.

[1200]Green's ship and crew were first seized without form of law in reprisal for the seizure in England, by the East India Company, of a Scotch ship belonging to the old Darien Company, whose trade the India Company held to be a breach of its monopoly. The charge of slaying a Scotch captain was an afterthought.

[1201]On this see Burton, viii, 178-85; and cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. iii, 160, as to the rise of the trading spirit.

[1202]Burton'sHistory of Scotland, viii, 3,note.

[1203]Id.viii, 168.

[1204]"It is a marvel how the Edinburgh press of that day could have printed the multitude of denunciatory pamphlets against the Union" (Burton, viii, 131). "The aristocratic opponents of the Union did their utmost to inflame the passions of the people" (id.p. 137, cp. p. 158, etc.).

[1205]Following Hallam,Middle Ages, iii, 327.

[1206]Properly speaking, the action of "England" was the action of the merchant class, which in this case most exerted itself and got its way.

INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION

At all times within the historic period trade and industry have reacted profoundly on social life; and as we near the modern period in our own history the connection becomes more and more decisively determinant. In the oldest culture-history at all known to us, as we have seen, the commercial factor affects everything else; and at no time in European annals do we fail to note some special scene or area in which trade furnishes to politicians special problems. Thus the culture-history of Italy, as we have also seen, is in past epochs inseparably bound up with her commercial history. But as regards the north of Europe, it is in the modern period that we begin specially to recognise trade as playing a leading part in politics, national and international. The Mediterranean tradition is first seen powerfully at work in the history of the Hansa towns: then comes the great development of Flanders, then that of Holland, then that of England, which gained so much from the influx of Flemish and Dutch Protestant refugees in the reign of Philip II, but which was checked in its commercial growth, under Elizabeth and James alike, by their policy of granting monopolies to favourites.

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