America The Essential Learning Vol 2

1st Edition Shi Test Bank

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://testbankdeal.com/download/america-the-essential-learning-vol-2-1st-edition-sh
i-test-bank/
America The Essential Learning Vol 2 1st Edition Shi Test Bank

CHAPTER 03: Colonial Ways of Life, 1607-1750

TRUE/FALSE

1. People in the American colonies generally married at a younger age than those in Britain.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Moderate REF: p. 80

OBJ: 1. Explain the major factors that contributed to the demographic changes that took place in
the English colonies during the 18th century. TOP: Birth and Death Rates

2. Most colonists strongly believed in the inferiority of women.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 81

OBJ: 2. Describe women’s various roles in the English colonies.
TOP: “Women’s Work” in the Colonies

3. As the colonial era developed, the already stifling social position of women grew worse.

ANS: F PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 82

OBJ: 2. Describe women’s various roles in the English colonies.
TOP: “Women’s Work” in the Colonies

4. Southern colonies devoted their agricultural energies to the cultivation of cotton.

ANS: F PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 83

OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
TOP: The Southern Colonies

5. The Half-Way Covenant addressed the problem of New England’s unfavorable balance of
trade.

ANS: F PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 85

OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
TOP: Religion

6. The allegations of witchcraft in Salem in 1691–1692 may have resulted from hysteria that
came out of conflicts with Indians.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Moderate REF: p. 86

OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
TOP: Religion

7. New Englanders, more than southerners, turned to the sea for their livelihood.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 87

OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
TOP: Economy

Visit TestBankDeal.com to get complete for all chapters

 8. The colony of Pennsylvania was the great distribution point for various European ethnic
groups that immigrated to the colonies.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Moderate REF: p. 89

OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
TOP: The Middle Colonies

9. Because traveling at night was dangerous in the colonies, taverns became important during
the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Difficult REF: p. 96

OBJ: 5. Analyze the impact of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening on American thought.
TOP: The Urban Web

10. The Enlightenment had very little influence upon the lives of Americans.

ANS: F PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 98

OBJ: 5. Analyze the impact of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening on American thought.
TOP: The Enlightenment in America

11. Jonathan Edwards owned the largest plantation and the greatest number of slaves in South
Carolina.

ANS: F PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 101

OBJ: 5. Analyze the impact of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening on American thought.
TOP: The Great Awakening

12. George Whitefield was a great preacher who even impressed Ben Franklin with his
eloquence.

ANS: T PTS: 1 DIF: Moderate REF: p. 102

OBJ: 5. Analyze the impact of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening on American thought.
TOP: The Great Awakening

MULTIPLE CHOICE

1. In the Americas,
a. land was not plentiful.
b. land was not cheap.
c. workers were not scarce.
d. laborers were expensive.
e. all workers were white.
ANS: D PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 78
OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
NAT: Change and Continuity TOP: Economic Development | Population Growth
MSC: Remembering
2. Which of the following statements regarding population in the English colonies is most
accurate?
a. By 1650 the colonial population exceeded 1 million.
b. Colonists tended to marry earlier than those back home in England.
c. All colonists came in family units.
d. The majority of colonists worked in trade in order to earn a living.
e. Most colonists lived in large cities.
ANS: B PTS: 1 DIF: Moderate REF: p. 80
OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
NAT: Historical Documents TOP: Geographic Issues | Population Growth
MSC: Applying

3. Compared with back home in England,

a. the English colonies had a much lower death rate.
b. the English colonies had a much higher death rate.
c. English colonists tended to freeze to death much more frequently.
d. English colonists were much more susceptible to disease.
e. opportunity was rare in the colonies.
ANS: A PTS: 1 DIF: Moderate REF: p. 80
OBJ: 3. Compare the societies and economies of the southern, middle, and New England
colonies.
NAT: Comparisons and Connections TOP: Geographic Issues | Birth and Death Rates
MSC: Understanding

4. Many of those who came to colonial America as indentured servants were

a. young.
b. female.
c. well to do.
d. from France.
e. from Italy.
ANS: D PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 80
OBJ: 4. Describe the creation of race-based slavery during the 17th century and its impact on the
social and economic development of colonial America. NAT: Events and Processes
TOP: Social History | Colonial Ways of Life MSC: Understanding

5. Compared with other European colonizers, British America

a. had a few more women.
b. had many more women.
c. had the same amount of women.
d. had fewer women.
e. had many more women than men.
ANS: B PTS: 1 DIF: Easy REF: p. 81
OBJ: 2. Describe women’s various roles in the English colonies.
NAT: Historical Interpretations TOP: Social History | Women in the Colonies
MSC: Understanding

6. In most European colonies in the Americas,

a. women were perceived as men’s equals.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
was only natural that the ambition of sovereigns should impel them to try
and make their own power supreme at home, and to enlarge the boundaries
of their territories abroad. Absolute power and territorial aggrandisement
become the main objects of European kings. The nation is identified with
the king; the larger and the richer the territory he rules, the greater his glory
and circumstance. Before that all things give way. Differences of speech,
differences of race, differences of religion, differences of government,
count for nothing, and whole peoples are tossed about from one ruler to
another like counters at the table of the diplomatists, not in cynicism but in
sheer unconcern. Wrapped up in the supreme importance of gaining for
their respective masters one district or one town the more, politicians have
become wholly oblivious of everything else; until from the sheer necessity
of having some principle to which to appeal, they eventually evolved the
doctrine of the balance of power, which, when pushed to its logical
development in the succeeding century, meant little else than that, if one
European state managed to steal something, all the other states had the right
of stealing something too. In the nineteenth century, the cause of oppressed
nationalities has most powerfully influenced the map of Europe. It is the
glory and the boast of the greater powers to have assisted in the unification
of Italy, or the liberation of the Christian states of the Balkan Peninsula. At
the end of the seventeenth century it was quite otherwise. To establish
beyond all question the authority of the crown, to maintain a powerful and
perfectly equipped army, to astonish the world by the splendour of the
court, to push ever further and further away the frontiers of the nation, to
extend a lordly protection, little short of vassalage, to weaker countries,—
such were the objects of a patriot king, such the rewards of successful
statesmanship. The nation was focussed and crystallised into the person of
the king. It worked, fought, lived, conquered for him alone. In his glory it
saw its own reflected, it recognised him as its representative and its
champion, it surrendered its independence to him ungrudgingly, and in his
success it reaped its reward. The rights of peoples were not so much set
aside, as not even thought of, for everything was absorbed in the personality
of the king.
Of this type of kingship Louis . is always
looked upon as the representative if not the Louis XIV. the type of
seventeenth century kingship.
founder. Its founder he certainly was not, for
his was not the mind to found anything. There is nothing original, no
initiative, about Louis . He can use, he cannot produce. The productive
power seems wholly wanting in him. He is essentially a barren man,
singularly skilful in making use of the material with which he is provided,
but unable to add to it. It has often been pointed out how he inherited
everything which has made him great, and left nothing great behind him.
Condé and Turenne, Lionne and Servien, Colbert, Corneille, and Racine
were the products of the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, and only utilised by
Louis, while Villeroy and Tallard and Boileau were the work of his own
hands. The statement requires some
modification, but the principle which underlies Louis a man of second-rate
it is true. Nearly everything which was great in abilities.
France at the time of his accession to power Louis had the ability to use.
For the most part what became great in France during his reign was not
trained by him, and indeed in the case of Port Royal attained its greatness in
spite of him, and what was directly trained by him was not great. The
reason is not far to seek. It is the vice of an absolutely centralised
monarchy, where the king is all in all, that it cannot in the nature of things
tolerate any one greater than the king. The ministers are servants, and no
servant can be greater than his master. Even in
the Prussian monarchy of to-day there is no His determination to admit of
room for a Bismarck, still less could one have no rival.
been permitted to exist at the court of Louis . An absolute monarch sets
the standard of his ministers, if he absorbs the whole state into himself as
did Louis, and does not merely let things govern themselves as is the
fashion among Oriental despots. From the time of the death of Mazarin,
Louis determined he would never have another prime minister. He himself,
like Napoleon after him, would be the head and motive power of the whole
of the governmental and social machinery. He kept his word with singular
patience and pertinacity, and working harder probably than any sovereign
had worked, since the days of Philip ., never permitted a minister, not even
Louvois, to rise above the merest departmental independence. The result
was inevitable. A commonplace man himself, without insight, without
originality, without independence of mind, he could not inspire genius, and
could not tolerate it if he found it. He wanted diligence and accuracy, not
genius and statesmanship, clerks not ministers of state, and he got what he
wanted. It is significant that in all departments of administration except one,
when he had used up the men whom Richelieu and Mazarin had left to him,
he found no others to take their places. In diplomacy alone France remained
unrivalled to the end of the century, the one department of which Louis
himself was complete master, and in the conduct of which he was
thoroughly competent to take the lead.
But in spite of his deficiencies in the higher
qualities of statesmanship, not Aristides better His great kingly qualities.
deserved his title of the Just, than did Louis .
that of le Grand Monarque. It was essentially as a king that Louis was
great. No sovereign of modern days has had the kingly gifts in such rich
profusion. Dignity without awkwardness, courtesy without familiarity,
gallantry without coarseness, a winning manner, ready tact, chivalrous
bearing, refined mind, and modest demeanour, made the young king at once
the pride of the French court and the boast of the French nation. But
something more than this was required to make him the pattern and type of
European kingship. It was not merely that his social insight brought
instinctively to his lips the word which, within the bounds of good
breeding, would prove most pleasing or most effective to those whom he
wished to impress, or that his knowledge of character taught him almost
intuitively the best mode of approaching those whom he wished to win. It
was not only that his elaborate and punctual care for the etiquette and
ceremonial of the court could not fail to affect the mind with a sense of the
perfection of regal state, and attract it by a polished order of courtly
magnificence. Versailles was not the first court
in Europe to be distinguished by the splendour His theory of kingship.
of its ceremonial, and the refinement of its
manners, but Louis . was the first great sovereign in Europe who made
the perfection of his court an essential part of his system of policy. When
the Popes had ceased to be the common fathers of Western Christendom,
they applied themselves to make the seat of their power the centre of the
wider realm of art. Rome deposed from the throne of universal faith was to
be recompensed by the sceptre of universal culture. So when France was
assuming the headship of Europe, and was preparing to strike for the
dominion of the civilised world, her court was to be the epitome, the
representation of the world’s greatness. Mirrored there in a tiny but radiant
sphere was to be found all which makes humanity noble and life beautiful.
Intellect and birth, genius and beauty, culture and statesmanship, art and
devotion, all were to be there marshalled in an admirable perfection of
order, but shining one and all with a reflected light, illuminated by the rays
of the king, their sun. Not unthinkingly did Louis adopt the sun as his type.
According to his theory of government he was the centre, the life-giving
principle of the system in which he ruled. All that was young and beautiful
in France sprang into life at his bidding, and withered into decay when he
averted his face, all that was powerful drew its vigour from his favour,
while from less privileged lands the kings of the earth, like the Magi of old,
drawn by the light of his compelling rays, were to come from the ends of
the world to find under his protecting care the pattern of life and the home
of faith.
Sarcasm comes easy to the lips when
dealing with a theory such as this. Men cannot Truth of Thackeray’s
caricature.
stop the course of the winds of heaven by
building houses of cards, and no artificial arrangements of a court can
conceal national weakness or physical decay. The sturdy English pencil of
Thackeray has drawn out the hollowness of this theory of seventeenth
century kingship in the bitter sarcasm of the well-known sketches of Louis
le Roi in his later years. In the first appears the real Louis, insignificant,
decrepit, bald, and old, shaking and feeble with age, a living corpse rather
than a man. Opposite to him stands le Roi—the flowing peruke curled and
oiled, the royal robes bedecked with ribbons, flashing with jewels, the
tailor-made divinity that doth hedge a king, standing ready for the
monarch’s use on its skeleton frame. Lastly we see the human atom and its
gorgeous artificial covering united in Louis le Roi, and are bidden to reflect
how much of the Grand Monarque is the work of the tailor and the
wigmaker, and how little of God. The argument is true, the sarcasm is just.
Where the splendour of a court is part of the system of government,
represents and enforces the national dignity, sets the fashion to foreign
ambition, is the living embodiment of the power and genius of the state,
king and courtiers must not grow old. Queen Elizabeth, encouraging
protestations of love at the age of seventy, and Louis . attempting
artificially to conceal the advance of years, are spectacles offensive because
unnaturally theatrical. But their loathsomeness
never struck contemporaries as it does us. The French court at the head
of civilisation.
Louis . never lost the respect of Europe or
the love of his subjects. His kingliness was a fact which had so impressed
itself upon Europe, as both the cause and effect of the greatness of France
and the success of his policy, that men became insensible to the physical
incongruity. And they were right. From the court of Louis flowed out
influences far more potent than those which followed the feet of his soldiers
or the coaches of his diplomatists. Versailles set the fashion to the civilised
world. French manners, French dress, French speech, French art, French
literature, French preaching, French science became the property and the
models of civilised Europe. For a hundred years in every department of life,
from the turning of a couplet to the drilling of recruits, from the
composition of a panegyric to the design of a card-table, everything is ruled
by the French instinct of order, cramped by the French love of artificial
completeness, refined by the French genius for finish, illuminated by the
justness of French taste. There are few kings to whom it has been given to
dictate to civilisation for a century the principles by which she is to live.
The secret of the wonderful success of Louis . in all those
departments of life and of government which he understood lay in the close
personal attention which he gave to the matter in hand. His genius certainly
lay in his infinite
capacity for taking trouble. Even in his
earlier years, when his court was the gayest in Louis’s attention to business.
Europe, not only would he listen to all the
despatches of his ambassadors and personally Louis’s attention to business.
dictate the answers, but he actually kept up a
private correspondence with the more favoured of the envoys on matters of
which he did not wish the foreign office to have cognisance. Of important
negotiations, especially those in connection with the great treaties of his
reign, he took entire management himself, and frequently wrote his
directions to his representatives with his own hand. He was equally
punctilious about the smaller questions of etiquette which occupied so
much of the time and thought of ambassadors in the seventeenth century.
The order of an ambassador’s entry, the rules by which he is to be guided in
the decisive matters of covering and uncovering, giving or denying the
‘pas,’ the supreme necessity of trying to get in front of the Spanish
ambassador, if it could possibly be managed, are all laid down and
commented upon by Louis with the utmost sense of their importance.
Nothing was too great, nothing too small, for his personal care. The
negotiations for a partition treaty, the arrangements for a fête at Marli, the
design for the fortifications of Lille, the rebuke to be administered to a
malapert courtier or a forgetful servant were alike the subject of careful
consideration. ‘I have almost been obliged to wait’ is a phrase which has
become proverbial.
This minute attention to detail on the part of
the Crown in a nation gifted like the French Organisation the
characteristic of his
with a genius for completeness produced a government.
corresponding thoroughness of treatment in
every branch of the administration. Organisation was the order of the day.
During the years of Louis’s greatness, before the constant strain of the over-
ambitious wars had broken everything down, organisation is the note of his
government. The great ministers are organisers not statesmen. They are at
the very antipodes of genius to Richelieu. And they are organisers, not in
the sense in which Sully was an organiser, merely the rooter-out of patent
abuses, but in the far higher sense in which Charles Montague was an
organiser, one who laid down true principles of administration and
constructed the machinery necessary for carrying them out. Lionne
organised the French foreign office and diplomatic service, Colbert the
internal administration of France, Louvois the war office, on principles
which became the acknowledged principles of foreign, home, and military
administration among all countries for more than a century, some of which
will remain acknowledged principles for all time. It was this which enabled
France to take full advantage of her centralisation, which enabled her to
bear the extraordinary strain of unsuccessful war in the way she did, which
gave her such advantages in dealing with a huge unorganised mass like the
Empire, which left her even after all her losses at the end of the reign of
Louis . stronger than she had been at the beginning. To the ministers who
planned and carried it out belong justly the honours of the achievement, but
it would never have been carried out at all had it not been for the master
who inspired them.
Colbert had served his apprenticeship in the
household of Mazarin. Early in life the cardinal Training of Colbert in the
household of Mazarin.
had noticed his singular capacity for business,
and had taken him into his service from that of Le Tellier, and intrusted him
with the care of his household. The suggestions which Colbert made from
time to time to his master about the conduct of his business soon showed
Mazarin that he had in his new servant not merely an accurate clerk, but a
financial organiser, and gradually he placed in his hands the whole
management of his private affairs. The cardinal was at once frugal and
extravagant, avaricious and luxurious, and it was the duty of Colbert to buy
the best of everything in the cheapest market, and to surround his master
with comforts, while he doubled and trebled his fortune. It was no easy
task, for the cardinal was very particular. Shirts for Mazarin’s own use, the
trousseaux of his nieces, carpets for his palace, his wedding gift to the
young queen, all had to receive Colbert’s personal attention; while he was
more particularly responsible for the investments and commercial
undertakings by means of which the cardinal amassed his huge fortune.
Colbert was thoroughly fitted for the work he had to do. Gifted with a keen
eye for business, great shrewdness in his estimate of men, and unlimited
patience in his attention to details, unhampered by scruples, stimulated but
not led away by ambition, he unhesitatingly set himself to satisfy his
master’s avarice. He used the powers of the state to give the cardinal’s
merchandise priority in the markets, and to relieve it from the
overwhelming burden of the dues which pressed so hardly upon all other
merchants. Under his guidance the state itself as it were went into business
for the benefit of the prime minister, with the result that only seven years
after the end of the Fronde the cardinal died worth £2,000,000 of money,
and bequeathed on his deathbed the architect of his fortune to the young
king and to France as his most precious possession.
When Mazarin died the finances of the
country were under the control of Nicholas Nicholas Fouquet.
Fouquet, the brother of the Abbé Fouquet, who
had for some years been the head of Mazarin’s secret police. Nicholas
Fouquet was a man of great ability and vaulting ambition. Seeing
corruption all around him he quickly yielded to the prevailing vice, and
used his double position of Superintendant of the Finances and Procureur-
General to collect a large fortune. But unlike Mazarin there was no stain of
avarice about Fouquet. He was the prey of large schemes of ambition, the
dispenser of a magnificence more than royal. By a lavish use of his ill-
gotten wealth he became the owner of colonial settlements, the patron of art
and literature, the builder of the most magnificent palace in France, the
centre and head of a social côterie which might at any moment become a
political danger. But if Fouquet had many friends at court he had many
enemies in the country. His splendour and success made men jealous of
him, his reckless mismanagement made the business class distrust him, the
increase of the debt made all the bourgeois hate him, his unblushing
corruption gave his enemies the whip-hand over him, and when it was
known that the king would not support him a cabal was formed with
Colbert at its head to ruin him. There was no difficulty in proving charges
of peculation and mismanagement, the question was entirely whether his
faction at court was strong enough to save him. The ladies were on his side,
but the king, either because he was jealous of his political power and
thought him dangerous to the Crown, or because he was jealous of his
personal influence with Mdlle. de la Vallière, who at that moment exercised
unlimited sway over Louis’s susceptible heart, determined on his
destruction. He was induced to sell his office of
Procureur-General, which carried with it the Condemnation of Fouquet,
privilege of being tried only by the Parlement, 1661.
and then was suddenly arrested only a few days after he had entertained
Louis and his court with regal magnificence at his sumptuous palace of
Vaux. A special commission was formed in order to try him. For three years
the tedious trial spun out its weary length. At last he was found guilty of
crime against the state and banished. Louis’s jealousy and Colbert’s hate
were not to be appeased so easily. By a stretch of royal power almost
unprecedented Louis substituted a sentence of perpetual imprisonment for
that of banishment, and men have darkly whispered since, that even that
severe punishment did not exhaust the royal vengeance, and that the Iron
Mask so well known to French romance concealed the features of the
brilliant Superintendant of Finance who had dared to raise his eyes to the
mistress of the king!
The disgrace of Nicholas Fouquet placed the
whole internal administration of France in the Colbert appointed to succeed
him.
hands of Colbert, and he entered at once with
zeal on the business of its reorganisation. The finances demanded his first
attention. Under the mismanagement of Richelieu Mazarin and Fouquet all
the evils which Sully had suppressed had again reappeared. The tax-
gatherers and the financiers made large fortunes, while the treasury received
but a small percentage of the vast sums wrung from the people. The
expenses of the state were defrayed from day to day by the sale of offices,
by the creation of offices for the purpose of sale, and by loans raised at
ruinous interest. There was no check upon
peculation, no system of accounts, no thought Financial mismanagement.
of economy. France, like a happy-go-lucky
spendthrift in the hands of the Jews, was drifting aimlessly into bankruptcy
without even having money at command. Colbert determined on severe
measures. His experience in Mazarin’s household had taught him how
fortunes are made, and what sort of consideration was due to those who
became rich by lending money to the state. At
one stroke he repudiated the worst of the loans Remedial measures of Colbert.
raised by Fouquet, and diminished the interest
payable on those which he acknowledged. Having thus reduced the burden
of the debt to reasonable proportions he proceeded to deal with the
collection of the taxes. He remitted the longstanding arrears of taille, forced
the tax-gatherers to render accounts, took proceedings against the worst of
the peculators, and made them disgorge their stolen gains. Order was
restored in the administration as if by magic. Every penny of expense was
carefully considered, duly authorised, and properly accounted for.
Intendants were again appointed to superintend the farmers of revenue, the
taille was reassessed, the claims for exemption inquired into, the receipt-
books duly audited and checked. By these means he procured sufficient
money to pay the interest on the debt, and the expenses of the government
without increasing the taxes. In 1662, only a year after he became
Controller General, he was able to show a surplus of 45,000,000 of francs
without having increased the financial burdens on a single honest man.
But Colbert was not content with merely restoring order in the financial
administration. It was not sufficient in his eyes merely to take care that the
receipts should exceed the expenditure, and that opportunities for
peculation should be reduced to a minimum.
He was one of the first of ministers to realise Principles of his financial
how intimately the greatness and prosperity of policy.
a nation are bound up with a good financial system, to trace the wonderful
effect in developing the national wealth and promoting the national
happiness, produced by a system of taxation which carefully adjusts the
financial burden to the shoulders of those best able to bear it. Ministers of
finance before Colbert’s time had looked upon taxation solely from the
point of view of the government, had taxed those things upon which it was
most easy to levy taxes, and had levied the taxes in the way which ensured
to the government a certain income with very little trouble, quite regardless
of the effect of the system upon the tax-payer. Colbert on the contrary saw
that the secret of a good revenue lay not in the ease with which the tax was
collected, but in the ease with which it was paid. The interest of the
government and of the tax-payer were identical not antagonistic, and the
more the government could consult the convenience of the tax-payer, the
more the tax-payer would be able to afford for the convenience of
government. A good finance minister therefore would not content himself
with restoring order in the collection of taxes, and economy in the
disbursements of the treasury, but must apply himself to far greater and
more difficult problems, must study how to increase the resources of the
country to their utmost capacity, and how to adjust the necessary taxation so
as to interfere as little as possible with their development.
In the answer to these two questions lies the
whole secret of scientific finance. Colbert was Character of his protective
system.
the first finance minister to attempt to give a
scientific answer to them, that is, an answer based upon reasoned principle.
The reasoned principles adopted by Colbert have been in the main the
principles acted upon by most civilised countries from this day to our own.
They are principles which underlie the economical system known as
Protection, and are the application of the theory of national sovereignty to
economical subjects. The seventeenth century, as we have seen, was
essentially governed in all political thought by the theory of the solidarity of
nations under their kings. All Europe was coalescing into territorial entities
under their respective sovereigns. Every such territorial entity guarded itself
off from its neighbours by the acquisition of natural frontiers, and by the
equipment of a professional army, and emphasised its individuality by its
concentration under its king and by the representation of its king and his
interests diplomatically at other courts. The idea of a Europe united through
the Christian brotherhood of man had passed away. The idea of a Europe
united through the cosmopolitan brotherhood of man had not yet come.
Between those two theories of brotherhood, men were content to relapse
practically into a condition of enmity, and were engaged in building barriers
against their neighbours, in developing their own strength as much as
possible, and in preventing their neighbours from developing theirs. The
same principles governed men’s conduct in economics as in politics.
Economic independence was considered just as important for a nation as
political independence. To be as strong and resourceful as possible within
the territorial limits of the kingdom, to be as independent as possible
outside those limits were the recognised objects of every statesman. In the
eyes of Colbert it was just as necessary for France that she should not
depend upon the foreigner for her bread, as that she should not owe him
allegiance for her land. He would have thought it as reckless a piece of
criminal folly to derive the food-supply of the nation from certain rivals and
possible enemies, as to intrust to them the defence of the frontier.
Following out these principles Colbert set
before himself two great objects, to promote Encouragement of home trade
and manufactures.
within the limits of France itself the production
of wealth by all the means in the power of the government, and to prevent
the foreigner by the imposition of hostile tariffs from underselling the home
producer in any of the commodities necessary to the national well-being.
He endeavoured to abolish the provincial customs and local dues which
impeded the free circulation of trade from French province to province, and
actually succeeded in abolishing them over three-fourths of the country, in
spite of the most strenuous local opposition. He improved roads and
developed the canals which had been begun by Sully into a great system of
water communication. Of this system the celebrated canal of Languedoc,
between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, which has done so much to
promote the prosperity of France, was the most striking example. For more
than a century it remained without a rival. When at last other nations began
to realise the importance of quick and easy communication, French roads
and canals became the models upon which they worked, French engineering
talent the authority to which they appealed, and the Suez Canal in the
present day derives its ancestry from the canal of Languedoc and the genius
of Colbert. He encouraged manufactures of all sorts. Under his care French
lace, glass, tapestries, silks, and brocades, became the most celebrated in
the world. He introduced a more scientific system of dealing with the state
forests, promoted large breeding establishments for horses, encouraged the
formation of industrial and commercial companies, assisted the founding of
colonies, and protected the infant colonial trade by the formation of an
efficient navy. At the same time he relieved the peasantry from the heaviest
of the fiscal burdens which oppressed them by reducing the taille nearly a
half, and recouping the treasury by imposing indirect taxes, principally
upon articles of luxury which were paid by the consumer. He helped the
manufacturer by removing the export duties on articles manufactured at
home, while he imposed heavy import duties on similar articles imported
from abroad. There was, however, one serious
exception to this policy. So fearful was he lest Prohibition of corn
exportation.
France should ever become dependent on other
nations for her bread, that he absolutely refused to allow corn to be
exported under any circumstances. The surplus corn produced by the rich
corn fields of France over and above the wants of the nation would if freely
exported have formed one of the most lucrative sources of the national
wealth, for France in the seventeenth century was the corn-growing country
of Europe, but Colbert deliberately deprived himself of this source of
revenue, and kept the French agriculturist poor, in order to make food cheap
and ensure a large surplus of corn in the country.
The result of this policy, taken as a whole,
was undoubtedly most beneficial to France, in Condition of France after ten
years of Colbert’s
spite of the exaggeration of Colbert’s protective government, 1671.
measures. In the ten years, from 1661–71,
during which time Colbert had a real control over the national finances,
with the exception of the court expenses, not only was the debt largely
reduced, peculation checked, and the taxation greatly lightened and better
distributed, but new and fertilising streams of prosperity were tapped in the
establishment of manufactures and the opening of means of communication
which no misgovernment could again wholly close. By the year 1671,
France had gained for herself under Louis ., through the abilities of
Colbert, a position to which history does not afford any exact parallel.
United and concentrated far more thoroughly than any other country, with
the whole forces of the nation absolutely at the control of the king,
defended on all sides except one by a clearly defined and well-fortified
frontier, rich by the fertility of her soil and the industry and frugality of her
people, she was now adding riches to riches by the establishment of
manufactures and the promotion of commercial enterprise. Her colonies
were springing up in every part of the globe, her navy was formidable
enough to defend them from attack, her army second to none in discipline
and reputation. Her people were prosperous, contented and obedient; her
administrators just, careful and honest; her system of administration pure,
and based upon principles which made the security and independence of the
country the first consideration.
 On the other hand it did not require much
foresight to see that a system of scientific Dangers of the protective
finance which was based purely upon selfish system.
principles could not fail to lead to international
complications. If every nation of Europe were to construct for its own
advantage a hostile system of tariffs against other nations, excuses for war
would be endlessly multiplied. However self-sufficient a country may be
there must be many articles of convenience, if not of necessity, for which it
depends upon its neighbours. Let a nation increase its colonial empire as
much as possible, and keep its trade wholly to itself by an elaborate code of
navigation laws, even then international trade will not die nor foreign
smuggling be stopped. Protective duties and prohibitive legislation have
never yet succeeded in destroying the commercial dependence of one
civilised nation upon another. Nations which wish to protect their own trade
by tariffs can only do so by constructing a system which shall be injurious
to that of their neighbours, and is sure to lead to smuggling and reprisals. In
the sixteenth century trade adventurers looked after themselves, and it was
rare for the home government to consider itself compromised by high-
handed acts of piracy committed by its subjects on the other side of the
world. But when it was the action of governments themselves which led to
collisions between their subjects, they were bound in honour to defend their
own system. Tariff reprisals were instituted, and claims made of a right to
punish foreign smugglers, and search foreign ships for smuggled goods,
which were certain before long to lead to war in downright earnest. It has
often been said that the wars of the sixteenth century were wars of religion,
but those of the eighteenth century wars of tariffs. The Dutch war of 1672 is
adduced as the first great war of the latter class, which was the first great
war waged in Europe since the adoption of a scientific system of protective
duties by a first-class power. There is some exaggeration in this statement,
but it is undoubtedly true that, from the date of the adoption of a protective
system by France under the guidance of Colbert, there is not an important
war waged in Europe for a century and a half in which considerations of
tariffs and commerce do not play a large part; and it may well be doubted
whether the national organisation of finance any more than the national
organisation of defence, though steps along the path of civilisation, have
proved movements towards the attainment of peace.
 By the time he had completed his first
decade of personal rule the administrative Contrast between Louis and
talents of his ministers and his own gift for Colbert.
governing had indeed raised Louis to a pinnacle of glory and of reputation
far exceeding all other sovereigns of his time. His court was the most
splendid and the most polished in Europe. Round it were gathered the
genius of Turenne, the brilliance of Condé, the dignity of Corneille, the wit
of Molière, the finish of Boileau, the art of Racine. From Italy Bernini
brought his solid if too dramatic talent for the embellishment of Paris, while
the sweetness of Claude and the breadth of Le Brun were called upon to
minister to the greatness of the greatest of European sovereigns. In sharp
contrast to all this magnificence and grace stood the minister without whom
it could not have existed. Dour, grim, and harsh, Colbert moved through the
world without a friend, a man to whom ambition was life, and business
pleasure. Scrupulously honest, severely conscientious, strictly just,
painfully accurate, sincerely religious, he was wanting in humanity. He was
absolutely without heart and without sympathy. A man of religion, he
angered the clergy by trying to reduce the number of ‘religious’ because
they did not make wealth; a man of the people, he offended the populace by
reducing the number of holidays; a zealous Catholic, he displeased the
orthodox by the favour he extended to the Huguenot craftsmen, while he
made himself unpopular with the Huguenots because he deserted them in
the hour of their need, when the king turned against them. A man of
conscientious probity, he had no scruples in directing the judges to convict
strong and powerful prisoners who were accused of crime, in order that the
king’s galleys might be well manned, and even prevented galley slaves who
had served their time from being set free if they were still useful for the
king’s service. Less and more than human no wonder that men felt
instinctively that he was their enemy, however great the blessings of good
government which he had conferred upon them, and followed his coffin to
the grave with execrations in 1683.
In that, however, they were grossly unjust. They were visiting upon him
their dislike of the increased war taxation of which he was the mouthpiece
not the author. In the year 1671 France stood at
the parting of the ways. On each side stretched The choice of policy before
far into the future a long vista of glory and Louis, 1671.
prosperity, but she had to choose between them. Through the victories of
Richelieu and of Mazarin, through the administration of Colbert, through
the government of Louis, France stood at the head of the countries of
Europe in absolute security, without a rival who wished to attack her,
without an enemy whose attack she might justly fear. Entrenched within the
borders of a frontier easily defensible by the
genius of a Vauban, she might sit free from all Commercial supremacy open
possible danger until the floodgates of to France.
European warfare should reopen. Planting her colonies in America, in
Africa, in Madagascar, and among the islands of the West, pushing out the
operations of her trading companies to India and the Spice Islands of the
East, enjoying a pre-eminence through treaty over all other European
powers at the court of the Sultan and in the trade of the Levant, on the point
of gaining an influence, hitherto unparallelled and undreamed of, over the
vast expanse of the empire of China through her Jesuit missionaries, she
had but to stretch forth her hand to seize the crown of colonial empire and
of commercial supremacy, which was already threatening to fall from the
head of the Dutch. In the middle of the seventeenth century she had no
rivals to fear. The day of Spain and Portugal was over. Holland, though
vigorous, capable and persevering, could not stand out for long against the
pressure of her greater neighbours. She had gained her unique and glorious
position through their weakness, she could not maintain herself against
them in their strength. Already she was stricken to the knees by the English
Navigation Act and the war of 1651, and had had to recognise in England
an equal in naval power and a rival in commerce. But the day of England
had not yet come. In the lucid intervals of a mad and despicable policy,
Charles . did something to encourage the American plantations, and to
promote the operations of the East India Company, but it was quite certain
that the power of the state would never be thrown into commercial or
colonial competition with France, as long as Louis retained in his own
hands the means of rendering the king independent of parliamentary
control. It is moreover a significant fact that the most important and
permanent part of the English colonial empire, which was built up in the
eighteenth century, was not the result of colonial enterprise but of war.
Canada, the West Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, India itself were the
direct fruits of the long wars with France, which in their origin and essence
sprang from the military and political ambition of Louis . The rivalry
with France, which beginning in 1690 did not end till 1815, which produced
during that century and a quarter no less than seven distinct and prolonged
contests between the two nations, which gained for England mainly at the
expense of France a vast colonial empire, which lost for her her only
considerable plantations, was primarily and in its essence a military and
European rivalry. The wars were primarily and essentially wars to check the
military and political ascendency of France over Europe, and to preserve
the balance of power in Europe. They sprang from the policy adopted by
Louis . in 1672, when, no longer satisfied with pre-eminence in Europe,
he deliberately struck for supremacy over Europe. They followed from the
determination of William . and the Whig party in England to prevent such
a consummation at all costs. Had Louis turned his ambition into other
directions, followed where the policy of Colbert pointed the way, thrown
the energies of his government and the genius of his people into the path of
colonial development and commercial supremacy, pushed his fleets and his
armies along the savage tracks where the cupidity of his traders and the
self-sacrifice of his missionaries had first marked the road, he would have
had nothing to fear from the impotent stubbornness of the Dutch, or the
venal indolence of England. And if a century or half a century later England
had awoke from her trance and put forth her claims to dominion, a very
different task would have awaited her. She would have found an established
organised power to conquer, not a rival to outdo.
But it was not to be. The traditions of France
lay in the direction of military conquest not of Preference of military
supremacy by Louis.
commercial supremacy. With an army carefully
trained and organised by Louvois, with generals at his command like
Turenne, Condé and Vauban, with all the traditions of the French monarchy
behind him, with all the longing for glory within him, which was the very
atmosphere he breathed, with his intimate knowledge of European courts to
assist him, what wonder is it that Louis determined on the course which
seemed to combine the certainty of success with the maximum of glory?
There was no nation in Europe that could resist him. A combination of
nations was alone to be feared, and what combination could long resist the
disintegrating effects of his diplomacy and their own selfishness? What
league had ever been a military success? The resources of France seemed
inexhaustible, her armies invincible, her genius irresistible. In the distance
but not so very far removed from practical politics must come some day the
great question of the succession to the crown of Spain. When that question
was ripe for solution France must be in a position to solve it. Impelled alike
by the foresight of a statesman, the ambition of a king, and the flattery of a
court, Louis took the fatal step and plunged his country into a century and a
half of incessant war. With singular ease he had made himself master of
France, he now determined to be master of Europe too.
 CHAPTER X

LOUIS XIV. AND THE UNITED PROVINCES

Humiliation of Spain and the Pope—Purchase of Dunkirk—The war of devolution—
Alarm of Europe—Opposition of the Dutch—The Triple Alliance—The treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle—Overthrow of the Triple Alliance—Origin of the United
Provinces—Their constitution—Supremacy of the burghers—Unique position of
Holland—The House of Orange—Prosperity of the Dutch—Rivalry between the
republicans and the House of Orange—John Olden Barneveldt—Attempted
revolution of William .—Supremacy of the republican party—Character and
policy of John de Witt—War with England—The Act of Navigation—The Act of
Exclusion—Second war with England—The treaty of Breda—Danger from
France—The perpetual edict—Popular movement in favour of William .—
Murder of de Witt.

No sooner had Louis . taken the

management of affairs into his own hands, than Humiliation
Louis, 1661.
of Spain by
he began to let foreign countries understand
that France was now ruled by a sovereign who intended his will to be law,
and was not likely to abate one jot of the dignity which he thought due to
his crown. In the autumn of 1661, on the occasion of the solemn entry of a
Swedish envoy into London, the ambassadors of France and Spain in their
eagerness to gain precedence of each other came to blows in the narrow
streets. The carriage of d’Estrades, the French ambassador, was overturned,
his horse killed, and his suite forced to take refuge in the adjacent houses
wounded and beaten; while the victorious Spaniard proudly took his place
in the procession clothed with all the insolent dignity of success. Louis took
the matter up fiercely, dismissed d’Estrades for having been beaten, recalled
his own ambassador from Madrid, and demanded and actually obtained
from Philip ., under threat of war, the acknowledgment of the right of the
crown of France to precede that of Spain.
A few months later a tumult of a less
honourable character brought Louis into sharp Humiliation of the Pope by
Louis, 1662.
antagonism to the Pope. The French
ambassador at Rome, the duc de Créqui, had made himself very unpopular
by his intolerable pride, and some of the Corsican guards of the Vatican,
urged on it is said by the brother of the Pope, and smarting under the wrong
of a personal insult rendered to their body by some of the French suite,
made themselves the organs of the general hatred and of private revenge, by
a gross attack upon the ambassador’s wife as she was returning to her
palace. A page was killed, many of the servants wounded, and the duc de
Créqui, leaving Rome in real or assumed fear for his own life, demanded
from Alexander . a reparation which the Pope seemed very unwilling to
give. Louis immediately seized Avignon, assembled an army, appointed the
maréchal du Plessis-Praslin to the command, and ordered him to form the
siege of Rome and force the Pope to do justice to the outraged majesty of
France. Alexander was astonished at this unexpected display of energy, and
sent his nephew the cardinal Chigi in all haste to Paris to offer an humble
apology and obtain the best terms he could. He was the first legate say the
French historians ever sent by a Pope to ask for pardon. If so, the success of
the experiment hardly warranted its repetition. Louis remained for some
time obstinately irate, and was only pacified by imposing upon the Pope the
public humiliation of banishing his brother, disbanding his Corsican guard,
and erecting a pyramid in Rome as a perpetual memorial of his disgrace.
More substantial additions to the power of
Louis than the precedence of an ambassador or Purchase of Dunkirk, 1662.
the disgrace of a Pope soon followed. In 1662
he purchased the port of Dunkirk from England, and made it a harbour for
warships. In 1663 he sent the count of Schomberg, supported by French
officers and French money, secretly to the assistance of Portugal in her war
against Spain, and contributed materially to the gaining of the victory of
Villa Viciosa in 1665, which established the independence of the country.
At the same time he proceeded to read the
Grand Vizier a lesson by breaking the ancient Assistance given by Louis to
Portugal, and against the
league of friendship between France and the Turks, 1663–64.
Sultan, in consequence of an insult offered to
the French ambassador in 1661, sent French troops to assist in the defence
of Candia, which was then being besieged by the Turks, and supplied the
Emperor with a large sum of money and a contingent of 6000 Frenchmen
under La Feuillade and Coligny to resist the incursion of the Ottoman
armies into Hungary and Croatia in 1664. Chiefly owing to the irresistible
valour of the French troops, the imperial general, Montecuculli, was
enabled to inflict a crushing defeat upon the grand vizier himself at the
battle of S. Gothard on the Raab, and hurl the invaders back behind their
own frontiers.