Chapter 95
[11] In 1788 the 131 bishops and archbishops of France had an average income of 100,000 francs, and 33 abbots and 27 abbesses had incomes ranging from 80,000 to 500,000 francs. The Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Strasbourg, had an income of more than 1,000,000 francs, and the 300 Benedictine monks at Cluny had an income of more than 1,800,000 francs.
[12] "The real importance of _Esprit des lois_ is not that of a formal treatise on law, or even on polity. It is that of an a.s.semblage of the most fertile, original, and inspiriting views on legal and political subjects, put in language of singular suggestiveness and vigour, ill.u.s.trated by examples which are always apt and luminous, permeated by the spirit of temperate and tolerant desire for human improvement and happiness, and almost unique in its entire freedom at once from doctrinairism, visionary enthusiasm, egotism, and an undue spirit of system. The genius of the author for generalization is so great, his instinct in political science so sure, that even the falsity of his premises frequently fails to vitiate his conclusions." (Saintsbury, George, in _Encyclopedia Britannica_, vol. XVIII, p. 777.)
[13] "By the captivating prospects which he held out of future progress, and by the picture which he drew of the capacity of society to improve itself, Turgot increased the impatience which his countrymen were beginning to feel against the despotic government, in whose presence amelioration seemed to be hopeless. These, and similar speculations of the time, stimulated the activity of the intellectual cla.s.ses, cheered them under the persecutions to which they were exposed, and emboldened them to attack the inst.i.tutions of their native land." (Buckle, H. T., _History of Civilisation in England_, vol. I, p. 597.)
[14] Duruy, V., _History of France_, p. 523.
[15] _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 11th ed., vol. viii, p. 204.
[16] "The real king of the eighteenth century was Voltaire; but Voltaire, in his turn, was a pupil of the English. Before Voltaire became acquainted with England, through his travels and his friends.h.i.+ps, he was not Voltaire, and the eighteenth century was still undeveloped." (Cousin, _History of Philosophy_.)
[17] "The first Frenchmen who in the eighteenth century turned their attention to England were amazed at the boldness with which, in that country, political and religious questions of the deepest moment were discussed--questions which no Frenchman in the preceding age had dared to broach. With wonder they discovered in England a comparative freedom of the public press, and saw with astonishment how in Parliament itself the government of the Crown was attacked with impunity, and the management of its revenues actually kept under control. To see the civilization and prosperity of England increasing, while the power of the upper cla.s.ses and the King diminished, was to them a revelation.... England, said Helvetius, is a country where the people are respected, a country where each citizen has a part in the management of affairs, where men of genius are allowed to enlighten the public upon its true interests." (Dabney, R. H., _Causes of the French Revolution_, p. 141.)
[18] Tennyson, in his "You ask me why," well describes the growth of const.i.tutional liberty in England when he says that England is:
"A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where freedom broadens slowly down, From precedent to precedent."
[19] James I, in 1604, had declared: "As it is atheism to dispute what G.o.d can do, so it is presumption and a high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do." For this att.i.tude the Commons continually contested his authority, his son lost his crown and his head, and his grandson was driven from the throne and from England. By contrast, and as showing the different att.i.tude toward self-government of the two peoples, the German Emperor William II, three centuries later, so continually boasted of his rule by divine right that "Me and G.o.d" became an international joke, and to his a.s.sumption the German people took little or no exception.
[20] The pa.s.sage of the Bill of Rights (1689) ended the divine-right-of- kings idea in England for all time. This prohibited the King from keeping a standing army in times of peace, gave every subject the right to pet.i.tion for a redress of grievances, gave Parliament the right of free debate, prohibited the King from interfering in any way with the proper execution of the laws, declared that members ought to be elected to Parliament without interference, and gave the Commons control of all forms of taxation.
[21] Though the English first developed regulated or const.i.tutional government, they themselves have no single written const.i.tution. Instead, the foundations of English const.i.tutional government rest on _Magna Charta_ (1215), the Pet.i.tion of Rights (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689), these three const.i.tuting "the Bible of English Liberty."
[22] At first used as a term of ridicule, from the very methodical manner in which the Wesleyans organized their campaigns.
[23] "If we except the great Puritan movement of the seventeenth century, no such appeal had been heard since the days when Augustine and his band of monks landed in Kent and set forth on their mission among the barbarous Saxons. The results answered fully to the zeal that awakened them. Better than the growing prosperity of extending commerce, better than all the conquests of the East or the West, was the new religious spirit which stirred the people of both England and America, and provoked the National Church to emulation in good works--which planted schools, checked intemperance, and brought into vigorous activity all that was best and bravest in a race that when true to itself is excelled by none."
(Montgomery, D. H., _English History_, p. 322.)
[24] The contrast between eighteenth-century England and France, in the matter of religious liberty, is interesting. In France the Church took care, during the whole of the eighteenth century, that the persecution process should go on. "In 1717 an a.s.sembly of seventy-four Protestants having been surprised at Andure, the men were sent to the galleys and the women to prison. An edict of 1724 declared that all who took part in a Protestant meeting, or who had any direct or indirect communication with a Protestant preacher, should have their heads shaved and be imprisoned for life, and the men condemned to perpetual servitude in the galleys. In 1745 and 1746, in the province of Dauphine, 277 Protestants were condemned to the galleys and a number of women flogged. From 1744 to 1752 six hundred Protestants in the east and south of France were condemned to various punishments. In 1774 the children of a Calvinist of Rennes were taken from him. Up to the very eve of the Revolution Protestant ministers were hanged in Languedoc, and dragoons were sent against their congregations."
(Dabney, R. H., _Causes of the French Revolution_, p. 42.)
[25] Back as early as 1695 the Commons had refused to renew the press- licensing act, enacted in 1637, to control heresy. This had confined printing to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and to twenty master printers and four letter founders for the realm. This refusal marks the beginning of the freedom of the press in England. In 1709 the copyright law was
[26] George III, always consistently wrong, opposed this extension of popular rights. In 1771 he wrote the Prime Minister, Lord North: "It is highly necessary that this strange and lawless method of publis.h.i.+ng debates in the papers should be put a stop to. But is not the House of Lords the best court to bring such miscreants before; as it can fine, as well as imprison, and has broader shoulders to support the odium of so salutary a measure."
[27] "It is evident that a nation perfectly ignorant of physical laws will refer to supernatural causes all the phenomena by which it is surrounded.
But as soon as natural science begins to do its work there are introduced the elements of a great change. Each successive discovery, by ascertaining the law that governs events, deprives them of that apparent mystery in which they were formerly involved. The love of the marvelous becomes proportionally diminished; and when any science has made such progress as to enable it to fortell the events with which it deals, it is clear that the whole of those events are at once withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the supernatural, and brought under the authority of natural power? Hence it is that, supposing other things equal, the superst.i.tion of a nation must always bear an exact proportion to the extent of its physical knowledge." (Buckle, H. T., _History of Civilization in England_, vol. 1, p. 269.)
[28] The Charter of this Society stated the purpose to be to increase knowledge by direct experiment, and that the object of the Society was the extension of natural knowledge, as opposed to that which is supernatural.
As an inst.i.tution embodying the idea of intellectual progress it was most bitterly a.s.sailed by partisans of the old flunking.
[29] Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester, for example, great manufacturing cities early in the nineteenth century, were insignificant villages in Cromwell's day. The steam engine made the coal and iron deposits of northern England of immense value, and the "smoky mill towns"
that arose in the north began to displace southern agricultural England in population, wealth, and importance.
[30] For example, in 1774 John Howard began his great work in prison reform; in 1772 pressing to death was abolished; in 1780 the ducking-stool was used for the last time; and soon thereafter the earlier laws relating to the death penalty were modified, and the slave trade abolished. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century as many as one hundred and sixty offenses were punishable by death.
[31] The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, a great admirer of French life and a propagandist for French ideas.
[32] Compare the American preamble with the following sentence from the _Social Contract_ (Book I, chap, ix) of Rousseau:
"I shall close this chapter and this book with a remark which ought to serve as a basis for the whole social system; it is that instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental pact, on the contrary, subst.i.tutes a moral and lawful equality for the physical inequality which nature imposed upon men, so that, although unequal in strength or intellect, they all become equal by convention and legal right."
[33] "I read attentively the _cahiers_ drawn up by the three Orders before their union in 1789. I see that here the change of a law is demanded, and there of a custom--and I make note of them. I continue thus to the end of this immense task, and, when I come to put side by side all these particular demands, I see, with a sort of terror, that what is called for is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the laws and of all the customs existing in the country; whereupon I instantly perceive the approach of the vastest and most dangerous revolutions that have taken place in the world." (De Tocqueville, A. C., _State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789_, p. 219.)
[34] For example, the clergy of Rodez and Saumur demanded "that there may be formed a plan of national education for the young"; the clergy of Lyons that education be restricted "to a teaching body whose members may not be removable except for negligence, misconduct, or incapacity; that it may no longer be conducted according to arbitrary principles, and that all public instructors be obliged to conform to a uniform plan adopted by the States- General"; the clergy of Blois that a system of colleges under church control be formed (R. 252); the n.o.bility of Lyons that "a national character be impressed on the education of both s.e.xes"; the n.o.bility of Paris that "public education be perfected and extended to all cla.s.ses of citizens"; the n.o.bility of Blois that "better facilities for the education of children, and elementary textbooks adapted to their capacity, wherein the rights of man and the social duties shall be clearly set forth" shall be provided, and to this end that "there be established a council composed of the most enlightened scholars of the capital and of the provinces and of the citizens of the different orders, to formulate a plan of national education, for the benefit of all cla.s.ses of society, and to edit elementary textbooks." The Third Estate of Blois demanded the establishment of free schools in all the rural parishes.
[35] See footnote 1, page 165. One of the great results of the French Revolution was the abolition of serfdom in central and western Europe. The last European nation to emanc.i.p.ate its serfs was Russia, where they were freed in 1861.
[36] "Great was the difference between France at the end of 1791 and at the end of 1793. At the former date all looked hopeful for the future; the king was the father of his people; the Const.i.tution of 1791 was to regenerate France, and set an example to Europe; all old inst.i.tutions had been renovated; everything was new, and popular on account of its novelty.... By the end of 1793 all looked threatening for the future; for the purpose of repelling her foreign foes, who included nearly the whole of Europe, France submitted to be ground down by the most despotic and arbitrary government ever known in modern history,--the Great Committee of Public Safety; the Reign of Terror was in full exercise, and it was doubtful whether the energy, audacity, and concentrated vigour of the Great Committee would enable France to be victorious over Europe, and thus secure for her the right of deciding on the character of their own government. She was to be successful, but at what a cost!" (Stephens, H.
M., _The French Revolution_, vol. II, p. 512.)
[37] The _Code Napoleon_, prepared in 1804, was the first modern code of civil laws, though Frederick the Great had earlier prepared a partial code of Prussian laws. What the _Justinian Code_ was to ancient Rome, this, organized into better form, was to modern France. This _Code_, prepared under Napoleon's direction, subst.i.tuted one uniform code of laws worthy of a modern nation for the thousands of local laws which formerly prevailed in France.
CHAPTER X
[1] The complaints were largely along such lines as that the instruction was confined to a few Latin authors; that instruction in the French language was neglected; that instruction in the history and geography of France should be introduced; that time was wasted "in copying and learning notebooks filled with vain distinctions and frivolous questions"; that training in the use of the French language should be subst.i.tuted for the disputations in Latin; that in religion the study of the Bible was neglected for books of devotion and propaganda compiled by the members of the Order; that moral casuistry and religious bigotry were taught; and that the discipline was unnecessarily severe and wrong in character.
[2] In 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, in 1767 from Spain, and in 1773 the Pope at Rome, "recognizing that the members of this Society have not a little troubled the Christian commonwealth, and that for the welfare of Christendom it were better that the Order should disappear," abolished the Society entirely. Forty years later it was reconst.i.tuted in a modernized form.
[3] Little boys wore their hair long and powdered, carried a sword, and had coats with gilded cuffs, while little girls were dressed in imitation of the lady of fas.h.i.+on. Proper deportment was an important part of a child's training.
[4] The iconoclastic nature of Rousseau's volume may be inferred from its opening sentence, in which he says: "Everything is good as it comes from the hand of the author of nature; everything degenerated in the hand of man." In another place he breaks out: "Man is born, lives, and dies in a state of slavery. At his birth he is st.i.tched into swaddling clothes, at his death he is nailed in his coffin; and as long as he preserves the human form he is held captive by our inst.i.tutions."
[5] "I do not presume to exclude ecclesiastics, but I protest against the exclusion of laymen. I dare claim for the nation an education which depends only on the State, because it belongs essentially to the State; because every State has an inalienable and indefeasible right to instruct its members; because, finally, the children of the State ought to be educated by the members of the State." (La Chalotais.)
[6] "Education cannot be too widely diffused, to the end that there may be no cla.s.s of citizens who may not be brought to partic.i.p.ate in its benefits. It is expedient that each citizen receive the education which is adapted to his needs." (Rolland.)
[7] Condorcet had not been a member of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, but for some years had been deeply interested in the idea of public education, and had published five articles on the subject. His Report was a sort of embodiment, in legal form, of his previous thinking on the question.
[8] All the educational aims of the past were now relegated to a second place, and man became a political animal, "brought into the world to know, to love, and to obey the Const.i.tution." The _Declaration of the Rights of Man_ became the new Catechism of childhood.
[9] This was created on a grand and visionary scale. Its purpose was to supply professors for the higher inst.i.tutions. It opened with a large attendance, and lectures on mathematics, science, politics, and languages were given by the most eminent scholars of the time. A normal school, though, it hardly was, and in 1795 it closed--a virtual failure. In 1808 Napoleon re-created it, on a less pretentious and a more useful scale, and since then it has continued and rendered useful service as a training- school for teachers for the higher secondary schools of France.
[10] A total of 105 of these Central Schools were to be established, five in Paris, and one in each of the one hundred chief towns in the departments. By 1796 there were 40, by 1797 there were 52, by 1798 there were 59, by 1799 there were 86, and by 1800 there were 91 such schools in existence. This, times considered, was a remarkable development.
[11] "The commercial depression of 1740 fell upon a generation of New Englanders whose minds no longer dwelt preeminently upon religious matters, but who were, on the contrary, preeminently commercial in their interests." (Green, M, L., _Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut_, p, 226.)
[12] Prominent in the Indiana const.i.tutional convention of 1816 were a number of Frenchmen of bearing and ability, then residing in the old territorial capital--Vincennes. How much they influenced the statement of the article on education is not known, but it reads as though French revolutionary ideas had been influential in shaping it.
[13] For the original Bill of 1779 in full, in the original spelling, see the _Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for Virginia_, 1900-01, pp. lxx-lxxv.
[14] Though Jefferson had been Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War; had repeatedly served in the Virginia legislature and in Congress; and had twice been President of the United States, he counted all these as of less importance than the three services mentioned, and in preparing the inscription to be placed on his tomb he included only these three.
CHAPTER XXI
[1] "As a man who sought after glory, and whose gloomy temper took umbrage at everything, Rousseau complained that his _emile_ did not obtain the same success as his other writings. He was truly hard to please! The anger of some, the ardent sympathy of others; on the one hand, the parliamentary decrees condemning the book and issuing a warrant for the author's arrest, the thunders of the Church, and the famous mandate of the Archbishop of Paris; on the other hand, the applause of the philosophers, of Clairant, Duclos, and d'Alembert,--what more, then, did he want? _emile_ was burned in Paris and Geneva, but it was read with pa.s.sion; it was twice translated in London, an honor which no French work had received up to then. In truth never did a book make more noise and thrust itself so much on the attention of men. By its defects, no less than by its qualities, by the inspired and prophetic character of its style, as well as by the paradoxical audacity of its ideas, _emile_ swayed opinion and stirred up the more generous parts of the human soul." (Compayre, G., _Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, p. 100.)