The Story Of Mankind - Part 24

This is part 24 of the story of mankind by Hendrik van Loon.

The Rise of Prussia The extraordinary rise of a little state in a dreary part of northern Germany,

Called Prussia.

The history of Prussia is the history of a frontier district.

In the 9th century,

Charlemagne had transferred the old center of civilization from the Mediterranean to the wild regions of the northwestern Europe.

His Frankish soldiers had pushed the frontier of Europe further and further towards the east.

They had conquered many lands from the heathenish Slavs and Lithuanians who were living in the plain between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains.

And the Franks administered those outlying districts just as the United States used to administer her territories before they achieved the dignity of statehood.

The frontier state of Brandenburg had been originally founded by Charlemagne to defend his eastern possessions against raids of the wild Saxon tribes.

The Wends,

A Slavic tribe which inhabited that region,

Were subjugated during the 10th century and their marketplace by the name of Brennibor became the center of and gave its name to the new province of Brandenburg.

During the 11th,

12th,

13th and 14th centuries,

A succession of noble families exercised the functions of imperial governor in this frontier state.

Finally,

In the 15th century,

The House of Hohenzollern made its appearance and,

As electors of Brandenburg,

Commenced to change a sandy and forlorn frontier territory into one of the most efficient empires of the modern world.

These Hohenzollerns,

Who have just been removed from the historical stage by the combined forces of Europe and America,

Came originally from southern Germany.

They were of very humble origin.

In the 12th century,

A certain Frederick of Hohenzollern had made a lucky marriage and had been appointed keeper of the castle of Nuremberg.

His descendants had used every chance and every opportunity to improve their power and,

After several centuries of watchful grabbing,

They had been appointed to the dignity of elector,

The name given to those sovereign princes,

Who were supposed to elect the emperors of the old German Empire.

During the Reformation,

They had taken the side of the Protestants and the early 17th century found them among the most powerful of the North German princes.

During the Thirty Years' War,

Both Protestants and Catholics had plundered Brandenburg and Prussia with equal zeal,

But under Frederick William,

The great elector,

The damage was quickly repaired and by a wise and careful use of all the economic and intellectual forces of the country,

A state was founded in which there was practically no waste.

Modern Prussia,

A state in which the individual and his wishes and aspirations have been entirely absorbed by the interests of the community as a whole,

This Prussia dates back to the father of Frederick the Great.

Frederick William I was a hard-working,

Persimmonous Prussian surgeon,

With a great love for bar-room stories and strong Dutch tobacco,

An intense dislike of all frills and feathers,

Especially if they were of French origin,

And possessed of one but one idea.

The idea was duty,

Severe with himself,

He tolerated no weakness in his subjects,

Whether they be generals or common soldiers.

The relation between himself and his son Frederick was never cordial,

To say the least.

The boorish manners of the father offended the finer spirit of the son.

The son's love for French manners,

Literature,

Philosophy and music,

Was rejected by the father as a manifestation of sissiness.

There followed a terrible outbreak between these two strange temperaments.

Frederick tried to escape to England.

He was caught and court-martialed and forced to witness the decapitation of his best friend who had tried to help him.

Thereupon,

As part of his punishment,

The young prince was sent to a little fortress somewhere in the province to be taught the details of his future business of being a king.

It proved a blessing in disguise.

When Frederick came to the throne in 1740,

He knew how his country was managed from the birth certificate of a pauper's son,

To the minutest details of a complicated annual budget.

As an author,

Especially in his book called the Anti-Machiavelli,

Frederick had expressed his contempt for the political creed of the ancient Florentine historian who had advised his princely pupils to lie and cheat whenever it was necessary to do so for the benefit of their country.

The ideal ruler in Frederick's volume was the first servant of his people,

The enlightened despot after the example of Louis XIV.

In practice,

However,

Frederick,

While working for his people twenty hours a day,

Tolerated no one to be near him as a counsellor.

His ministers were superior clerks.

Prussia was his private possession,

To be treated according to his own wishes,

And nothing was allowed to interfere with the interests of the state.

In the year 1740,

The emperor Charles VI of Austria died.

He had tried to make the position of his only daughter,

Maria Theresa,

Secure through a solemn treaty,

Written black on white,

Upon a large piece of parchment.

But no sooner had the old emperor been deposited in the ancestral crypt of the Habsburg family,

Than the armies of Frederick were marching towards the Austrian frontier to occupy that part of Silesia for which,

Together with almost everything else in Central Europe,

Prussia clamoured,

On account of some ancient and very doubtful rights of claim.

In a number of wars,

Frederick conquered all of Silesia,

And although he was often very near defeat,

He maintained himself in his newly acquired territories against all Austrian counterattacks.

Europe took due notice of the sudden appearance of a very powerful new state.

In the eighteenth century,

The Germans were a people who had been ruined by the great religious wars,

And who were not held in high esteem by anyone.

Frederick,

By an effort as sudden and quite as terrific as that of Peter of Russia,

Changed this attitude of contempt into one of fear.

The internal affairs of Prussia were arranged so skillfully that the subjects had less reason for complaint than elsewhere.

The treasury showed an annual surplus instead of a deficit.

Torture was abolished.

The judiciary system was improved.

Good roads and good schools and good universities,

Together with a scrupulously honest administration,

Made the people feel that whatever services were demanded of them,

They,

To speak the vernacular,

Got their money's worth.

After having been for several centuries the battlefield of the French and the Austrians and the Swedes and the Danes and the Poles,

Germany,

Encouraged by the example of Prussia,

Began to regain self-confidence.

And this was the work of the little old man,

With his hook nose and his old uniform's cover with snuff,

Who said very funny but very unpleasant things about his neighbors,

And who played the scandalous game of eighteenth-century diplomacy without any regard for the truth,

Provided he could gain something by his lies.

This in spite of his book,

Anti-Machiavelli.

In the year 1786,

The end came.

His friends were all gone,

Children he had never had.

He died alone,

Tended by a single servant and his faithful dogs,

Whom he loved better than human beings because,

As he said,

They were never ungrateful and remained true to their friends.

The mercantile system.

How the newly founded national or dynastic states of Europe tried to make themselves rich and what was meant by the mercantile system.

We have seen how,

During the sixteenth and the seventeenth century,

The states of our modern world began to take shape.

Their origins were different in almost every case.

Some had been the result of the deliberate effort of a single king.

Others had happened by chance.

Still others have been the result of favorable nature geographic boundaries.

But once they had been founded,

They had all of them tried to strengthen their internal administration and to exert the greatest possible influence upon foreign affairs.

All this,

Of course,

Had cost a great deal of money.

The medieval state,

With its lack of centralized power,

Did not depend upon a rich treasury.

The king got his revenues from the crown domains and his civil service paid for itself.

The modern centralized state was a more complicated affair.

The old knights disappeared and hired government officials or bureaucrats took their place.

Army,

Navy and internal administration demanded millions.

The question then became,

Where was this money to be found?

Gold and silver had been a rare commodity in the Middle Ages.

The average man,

As I have told you,

Never saw a gold piece as long as he lived.

Only the inhabitants of the large cities were familiar with silver coin.

The discovery of America and the exploitation of the Peruvian mines changed all this.

The center of trade was transferred from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard.

The old commercial cities of Italy lost their financial importance.

New commercial nations took their place,

And gold and silver were no longer a curiosity.

Through Spain and Portugal and Holland and England,

Precious metals began to find their way to Europe.

The 16th century had its own writers on the subject of political economy,

And they evolved a theory of national wealth,

Which seemed to them entirely sound and of the greatest possible benefit to their respective countries.

They reasoned that both gold and silver were actual wealth.

Therefore,

They believed that the country with the largest supply of actual cash in the vaults of its treasury and its banks was at the same time the richest country.

And since money meant armies,

It followed that the richest country was also the most powerful and could rule the rest of the world.

We call this system the mercantile system,

And it was accepted with the same unquestioning faith with which the early Christians believed in miracles,

And many of the present-day American businessmen believe in the tariff.

In practice,

The mercantile system worked out as follows.

To get the largest surplus of precious metals,

A country must have a favorable balance of export trade.

If you can export more to your neighbor than he exports to your own country,

He will owe you money and will be obliged to send you some of his gold.

Hence,

You gain and he loses.

As a result of this creed,

The economic program of almost every 17th century state was as follows.

1.

Try to get possession of as many precious metals as you can.

2.

Encourage foreign trade in preference to domestic trade.

3.

Encourage those industries which change raw materials into exportable finished products.

4.

Encourage a large population,

For you will need workmen for your factories,

And an agricultural community does not raise enough workmen.

5.

Let the state watch this process and interfere whenever it is necessary to do so.

Instead of regarding international trade as something akin to a force of nature,

Which would always obey certain natural laws,

Regardless of man's interference,

The people of the 16th and 17th century tried to regulate their commerce by the help of official decrees and royal laws and financial help on the part of the government.

In the 16th century Charles V adopted this mercantile system,

Which was then something entirely new,

And introduced it into his many possessions.

Elizabeth of England flattered him by her imitation.

The Berberans,

Especially King Louis XIV,

Were fanatical adherents of this doctrine,

And Colbert,

His great minister of finance,

Became the prophet of mercantilism,

To whom all Europe looked for guidance.

The entire foreign policy of Cromwell was a practical application of the mercantile system.

It was invariably directed against the rich rival Republic of Holland,

Or the Dutch shippers,

As the common carriers of the merchandise of Europe had certain leanings towards free trade,

And therefore had to be destroyed at all cost.

It will be easily understood how such a system must affect the colonies.

A colony under the mercantile system became merely a reservoir of gold and silver and spices,

Which was to be tapped for the benefit of the home country.

The Asiatic,

American and African supply of precious metals,

And the raw materials of these tropical countries,

Became a monopoly of the state,

Which happened to own that particular colony.

No outsider was ever allowed within the precinct,

And no native was permitted to trade with a merchant whose ship flew a foreign flag.

Undoubtedly,

The mercantile system encouraged the development of young industries in certain countries,

Where there had never been any manufacturing before.

It built roads and dug canals,

And made for better means of transportation.

It demanded greater skill among the worksmen,

And gave the merchant a better social position,

While it weakened the power of the landed aristocracy.

On the other hand,

It caused very great misery.

It made the natives in the colonies the victims of a most shameless exploitation.

It exposed the citizens of the home country to an even more terrible fate.

It helped in a great measure to turn every land into an armed camp,

And divided the world into little bits of territory,

Each working for its own direct benefit,

While striving at all times to destroy the power of its neighbors,

And get hold of their treasures.

It laid so much stress upon the importance of owning wealth,

That being rich came to be regarded as the sole virtue of the average citizen.

Economic systems come and go like the fashions in surgery,

And in the clothes of women,

And during the nineteenth century the mercantile system was discarded in favor of a system of free and open competition.

At least so I have been told.

The American Revolution.

At the end of the eighteenth century,

Europe heard strange reports of something which had happened in the wilderness.

Of the North American continent.

The descendants of the man who had punished King Charles for his insistence upon his divine rights,

Added a new chapter to the old story of the struggle for self-government.

For the sake of convenience we ought to go back a few centuries and repeat the early history of the great struggle for colonial possessions.

As soon as a number of European nations had been created upon the new basis of national or dynastic interests,

That is to say,

During and immediately after the Thirty Years' War,

Their rulers,

Backed up by the capital of their merchants and the ships of their trading companies,

Continued the fight for more territory in Asia,

Africa,

And America.

The Spaniards and the Portuguese had been exploring the Indian Sea and the Pacific Ocean for more than a century,

Ere Holland and England appeared upon the stage.

This proved an advantage to the latter.

The first rough work had already been done.

What is more,

The earliest navigators had so often made themselves unpopular with the Asiatic and American and African natives,

That both the English and the Dutch were welcomed as friends and deliverers.

We cannot claim any superior virtues for either of these two races.

But they were merchants before everything else.

They never allowed religious considerations to interfere with their practical common sense.

During their first relations with weaker races,

All European nations have behaved with shocking brutality.

The English and the Dutch,

However,

Knew better where to draw the line.

Provided they got their spices and their gold and silver and their taxes.

They were willing to let the native live,

As it best pleased him.

It was not very difficult for them,

Therefore,

To establish themselves in the richest parts of the world.

But as soon as this had been accomplished,

They began to fight each other for still further possessions.

Strangely enough,

The colonial wars were never settled in the colonies themselves.

They were decided three thousand miles away by the navies of the contending countries.

It is one of the most interesting principles of ancient and modern warfare,

One of the few reliable laws of history,

That the nation which commands the sea is also the nation which commands the land.

So far this law has never failed to work,

But the modern airplane may have changed it.

In the 18th century,

However,

There were no flying machines,

And it was the British Navy which gained for England her vast American and Indian and African colonies.

The series of naval wars between England and Holland in the 17th century does not interest us here.

It ended as all such encounters between hopelessly ill-matched powers will end.

But the warfare between England and France,

Her other rival,

Is of greater importance to us.

For while the superior British fleet in the end defeated the French Navy,

A great deal of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American continent.

In this vast country,

Both France and England claimed everything which had been discovered,

And a lot more which the eye of no white man had ever seen.

In 1497 Cabot had landed in the northern part of America,

And twenty-seven years later Giovanni Verrazzano had visited these coasts.

Cabot had flown the English flag,

Verrazzano had sailed under the French flag.

Hence,

Both England and France proclaimed themselves the owners of the entire continent.

During the 17th century,

Some ten small English colonies had been founded between Maine and the Carolinas.

They were usually a haven of refuge for some particular sect of English descenders,

Such as the Puritans,

Who in the year 1620 went to New England,

Or the Quakers,

Who settled in Pennsylvania in 1681.

They were small frontier communities,

Nestling close to the shores of the ocean,

Where people had gathered to make a new home and begin life among happier surroundings,

Far away from royal supervision and interference.

The French colonies,

On the other hand,

Always remained a possession of the crown.

No Huguenots or Protestants were allowed in these colonies,

For fear that they might contaminate the Indians with their dangerous Protestant doctrines,

And would perhaps interfere with the missionary work of the Jesuit fathers.

The English colonies,

Therefore,

Had been founded upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbors and rivals.

They were an expression of the commercial energy of the English middle classes,

While the French settlements were inhabited by people who had crossed the ocean as servants of the king and who expected to return to Paris at the first possible chance.

Politically,

However,

The position of the English colonies was far from satisfactory.

The French had discovered the mouth of the St.

Lawrence in the 16th century.

From the region of the Great Lakes,

They had worked their way southward,

Had descended the Mississippi,

And had built several fortifications along the Gulf of Mexico.

After a century of exploration,

A line of sixty French forts cut off the English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior.

The English land grants made to the different colonial companies had given them all land from sea to sea.

This sounded well on paper,

But in practice,

British territory ended where the line of French fortifications began.

To break through this barrier was possible,

But it took both man and money and caused a series of horrible border wars in which both sides murdered their white neighbors with the help of the Indian tribes.

As long as the Stuarts had ruled England,

There had been no danger of war with France.

The Stuarts needed the Bourbons in their attempt to establish an autocratic form of government and to break the power of Parliament.

But in 1689,

The last of the Stuarts had disappeared from British soil,

And Dutch William,

The great enemy of Louis XIV,

Succeeded him.

From that time on until the Treaty of Paris of 1763,

France and England fall for the possession of India and North America.

During these wars,

As I have said before,

The English navies invariably beat the French.

Cut off from her colonies,

France lost most of her possessions.

And when peace was declared,

The entire North American continent had fallen into British hands and the great work of exploration of Cartier,

Champlain,

Vassal,

Marquette,

And the score of others was lost to France.

Only a small part of this vast domain was inhabited.

From Massachusetts in the north,

Where the Pilgrims,

A sect of Puritans who were very intolerant and who therefore had found no happiness either in Anglican England or Calvinist Holland,

Had landed in the year 1620.

To the Carolinas and Virginia,

The tobacco-raising province,

Which had been founded entirely for the sake of profit,

Stretched a thin line of sparsely populated territory.

But the men who lived in this new land of fresh air in high skies were very different from their brethren of the mother country.

In the wilderness,

They had learned independence and self-reliance.

They were the sons of hardy and energetic ancestors.

Lazy and timorous people did not cross the ocean in those days.

The American colonists hated the restraint and the lack of breathing space which had made their lives in the old country so very unhappy.

They meant to be their own masters.

This the ruling classes of England did not seem to understand.

The government annoyed the colonists and the colonists,

Who hated to be bothered in this way,

Began to annoy the British government.

Bad feeling caused more bad feeling.

It is not necessary to repeat here in detail what actually happened and what might have been avoided if the British king had been more intelligent than George III,

Or less given to jousiness and indifference than his minister Lord North.

The British colonists,

When they understood that peaceful arguments would not settle the difficulties,

Took to arms.

From being loyal subjects they turned rebels,

Who exposed themselves to the punishment of death when they were captured by the German soldiers,

Whom George hired to do his fighting after the pleasant custom of that day,

When Teutonic princes sold whole regiments to the highest bidder.

The war between England and her American colonies lasted seven years.

During most of that time,

The final success of the rebels seemed very doubtful.

A great number of the people,

Especially in the cities,

Had remained loyal to their king.

They were in favor of a compromise and would have been willing to sue for peace.

But the great figure of Washington stood guard over the cause of the colonists.

Ably assisted by a handful of brave men,

He used his steadfast but badly equipped armies to weaken the forces of the king.

Time and again,

When defeat seemed unavoidable,

His strategy turned a tidal battle.

Often his men were ill-fed.

During the winter they lacked shoes and coats and were forced to live in unhealthy dugouts.

But their trust in their great leader was absolute,

And they stuck it out until the final hour of victory.

But more interesting than the campaigns of Washington or the diplomatic triumphs of Benjamin Franklin,

Who was in Europe getting money from the French government and the Amsterdam bankers,

Was an event which occurred early in the Revolution.

The representatives of the different colonies had gathered in Philadelphia to discuss matters of common importance.

It was the first year of the Revolution.

Most of the big towns of the sea coast were still in the hands of the British.

Reinforcements from England were arriving by the shipload.

Only men who were deeply convinced of the righteousness of their cause would have found the courage to take the momentous decision of the months of June and July of the year 1776.

In June,

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a motion to the Continental Congress that,

These united colonies are,

And of right ought to be,

Free and independent states,

That they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown,

And that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is,

And ought to be,

Totally dissolved.

The motion was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts.

It was carried on July the 2nd and on July 4th.

It was followed by an official declaration of independence,

Which was the work of Thomas Jefferson,

A serious and exceedingly capable student of both politics and government,

And destined to be one of the most famous of our American presidents.

When news of this event reached Europe,

And was followed by the final victory of the colonists and the adoption of the famous constitution of the year 1787,

The first of all written constitutions,

It caused great interest.

The dynastic system of the highly centralized states,

Which had been developed after the great religious wars of the great 17th century,

Had reached the height of its power.

Everywhere the population everywhere the palace of the king had grown to enormous proportions,

While the cities of the royal realm were being surrounded by rapidly growing acres of slums.

The inhabitants of those slums were showing signs of restlessness.

They were quite helpless.

The higher classes,

The nobles and the professional men,

They too were beginning to have certain doubts about the economic and political conditions under which they lived.

The success of the American colonists showed them that many things were possible,

Which had been held impossible only a short time before.

According to the poet,

The shot which opened the battle of Lexington was heard around the world.

That was a bit of an exaggeration.

The Chinese and the Japanese and the Russians,

Not to speak of the Australians,

Who had been rediscovered by Captain Cook,

Whom they killed for his trouble,

Never heard of it at all.

But it carried across the Atlantic Ocean.

It landed in the powder house of European discontent,

And in France it caused an explosion which rocked the entire continent from Petrograd to Madrid,

And buried the representatives of the old statecraft and the old diplomacy under several tons of democratic bricks.

This is the end of Part 24 of The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon.