could be no good government but under an administration that should crush to atoms all parties of the aristocracy, and interpret law in favor of liberty. He died like a hero struck down. on the field of battle after the day was lost; in heart, more than ever, the great commoner. With logical consistency, the house of lords refused to attend his funeral.

By this time the news of the French alliance with the United States had spread through Europe. It was received at St. Petersburg with lively satisfaction. In England, the king, the ministry, parliament, the British nation, all were unwilling to speak the word independence, wishing at least to retain some preference by compact. Custom, mutual confidence, sameness of language and of civil law, the habit of using English manufactures, their cheapness and merit, of themselves secured to England almost a monopoly of American commerce for a generation, and yet she stickled for the formal concession of special commercial advantages. Deluded by the long usage of monopoly, she would not see that equality was all she needed. Once more Hartley, as an informal agent from Lord North, repaired to Paris to seek of Franklin an offer of some alliance, or at least of some favor in trade. Franklin answered him as he answered other emissaries, that the Americans enjoyed independence already; its acknowledgment would secure to Britain equal but not superior advantages in commerce. Fox was satisfied with this offer, and on the tenth, when it was moved in the house of commons to enlarge the powers of the commissioners, he held up to view that greater benefits to trade would follow from friendly relations with independent America than from nominal dependence.

Fox was in the right, but was not heeded. Jackson, the former faithful agent of Connecticut, the fellow-laborer with Franklin for the rights of the colonies, ever consistent with himself, even when he became secretary of Grenville, refused to be of the commission for peace, because he saw that it was a delusion accorded by the king to quiet Lord North and to unite the nation. Long before the commissioners arrived, the United States had taken its part. On the twenty-first of April, Washington gave his opinion to a member of congress: "Nothing short of independence can possibly do. A peace on any

other terms would be a peace of war. The injuries we have received from the British nation were so unprovoked, and have been so great and so many, that they can never be forgotten. Our fidelity as a people, our character as men, are opposed to a coalition with them as subjects." The twenty-second was a day of general public fasting and humiliation, with prayers to Almighty God to strengthen and perpetuate the union. Assembled on that day in a house for public worship, congress resolved" to hold no conference or treaty with any commissioners on the part of Great Britain, unless they shall, as a preliminary thereto, either withdraw their fleets and armies, or in positive and express terms acknowledge the independence of the states." "Lord North is two years too late with his political manœuvre," responded George Clinton, then governor of New York. Jay met not a single American "willing to accept peace under Lord North's terms." "No offers," wrote Robert Morris, "ought to have a hearing of one moment, unless preceded by acknowledgment of our independence, because we can never be a happy people under their domination. Great Britain would still enjoy the greatest share and most valuable parts of our trade."

Since Britain would grant no peace, on the tenth the French king despatched from Toulon a fleet, bearing Gerard as his minister to the congress of the United States, that the alliance between France and America might be riveted. On the twentyninth, when, in the presence of Franklin and his newly arrived colleague John Adams, Voltaire was solemnly received by the French academy, philosophic France gave the right hand of fellowship to America as its child by adoption. The numerous assembly demanded a visible sign of this union; and, in the presence of all that was most distinguished in letters and philosophy, Franklin and Voltaire kissed each other, in recognition that the war for American independence was a war for freedom of mind.

Many causes combined to procure the alliance of France and the American republic; but the force which brought all influences harmoniously together, overruling the timorous levity of Maurepas and the dull reluctance of Louis XVI., was the movement of intellectual freedom.

The spirit of free inquiry penetrated the Catholic world as

it penetrated the Protestant world. Each of their methods of reform recognised that every man shares in the eternal reason. Luther, as he climbed on his knees the marble steps of a church at Rome, heard a voice within him cry out: "Justification is by faith alone;" and he vindicated man's individuality from the point of view of religion. Descartes, meditating on a November night on the banks of the Danube, summoned each individual mind, in the consciousness of its freedom, to bring to judgment all tradition and all received opinion, and to prove all things, that it may hold fast only that which approves itself to be true.

A practical difference marked the kindred systems: the one was the method of continuity and gradual reform; the other of an instantaneous, complete, and thoroughly radical revolution. The principle of the reformation waked up a superstitious world, "asleep in lap of legends old," but did not renounce all external authority; and so it escaped premature conflicts. By the principle of Descartes, the individual man at once and altogether stood aloof from king, church, universities, public opinion, traditional science, all external authority and all other beings, and, turning every intruder out of the inner temple of the mind, kept guard at its portal to bar the entry to every belief that had not first obtained a passport from his own reason. No one ever applied the theory of Descartes with rigid inflexibility; a man can as little move without the weight of the superincumbent atmosphere, as escape altogether the opinions of the age in which he sees the light; but the theory was there, and it rescued philosophy from bondage to monkish theology, forbade to the church all inquisition into private opinion, and gave to reason, and not to civil magistrates, the maintenance of truth. The nations that learned their lessons of liberty from Luther and Calvin went forward in their natural development, and their institutions grew and shaped themselves according to the increasing public intelligence. The nations that learned their lessons of liberty from Descartes were led to question everything, and to attempt the renewal of society through the destruction of the past. The progress of liberty in all Protestant countries was marked by moderation. The German Lessing, the antitype of Luther, said to his

VOL. V.-17

countrymen: "Don't put out the candles till day breaks." America conducted a revolution on the highest principles of freedom with such circumspection that it seemed to be only a war against innovation. On the other hand, free thought in France, as pure in its source as free thought in America, became speculative and skeptical and impassioned. As it broke its chains, it started up with a sentiment of revenge against the terrorism and oppression, which for centuries had sequestered the rights of mind and assumed to rule the world. Inquiry took up with zeal every question in science, politics, and morals. Free thought paid homage to the "majesty of nature;" investigated the origin of species; analyzed the air we breathe; pursued the discoveries of Columbus and Copernicus; mapped the skies; explored oceans and measured the earth; revived ancient learning; revelled in the philosophy of Greece, which was untrammelled by national theology; nursed the republican sentiment by study of the history of Athens and Rome; spoke words for liberty on the stage; and adapted the round of learning to the common understanding. Now it translated and scattered abroad the new American constitutions, and the proud intellect of France was in a maze; Turgot and Condorcet melted with admiration and sympathy as they read the organic laws, in which the unpretending law-givers of a new continent had introduced into the world of real life the ideas that for them dwelt only in hope. All influences that favored freedom of mind conspired together. Anti-prelatical Puritanism was embraced by anti-prelatical skepticism. The exiled Calvin was welcomed home as he returned by way of New England and the states where Huguenots and Presbyterians prevailed. One great current of vigorous living opinion, which there was no power in France capable of resisting, swept through society, driving all the clouds in the sky in one direction. Ministers and king and nation were hurried along together.

The wave of free thought broke as it rolled against the Pyrenees. The Bourbon of France was compelled by the public opinion of France into an alliance with America; in Spain no intellectual activity existed that could drive the Bourbon of Spain beyond the narrow range of thought in palaces. The Spanish people did not share the passion of

the French, for they had not had the training of the French. In France, there was no inquisition; in Spain, the king would have submitted his own son to its tribunal. Descartes, the philosophizing soldier of France, emancipated thought; Loyola, the contemplative soldier of Spain, organized repression; for the proud Corneille, so full of republican fire, Spain had the monkish Calderon. In Spain no poet like Molière unfrocked hypocrisy. Not only had she no Calvin, no Voltaire, no Rousseau; she had no Pascal to mock at casuistry; no prelate to instruct her princes in the rights of the people like Fénelon, or defend her church against Rome, or teach the equality of all men before God like Bossuet; no controversies through the press like those with the Huguenots; no edict of toleration like that of Nantes. A richly endowed church always leans to Arminianism and justification by works; it was so in Spain, where the spiritual instincts of man, which are the life of freedom, had been trodden under foot, and alms-giving to professed mendicants usurped the place of charity. Natural science in its progress gently strips from religion the follies of superstition, and purifies and spiritualizes faith; in Spain it was dreaded as of kin to the Islam; and, as the material world was excluded from its rightful place among the objects of study, it avenged itself by overlaying religion. The idea was lost in the symbol; to the wooden or metal cross was imputed the worth of inward piety; religious feeling was cherished by magnificent ceremonies to delight the senses; penitence in this world made atonement by using the hair shirt, the scourge, and maceration; the immortal soul was thought to be purged by material flames; by the confessional the merciless inquisition kept spies over opinion in every house, and quelled free thought by the dungeon, the torture, and the stake. Nothing was left in Spain that could tolerate Protestantism, least of all the stern Protestantism of America; nothing congenial to free thought, least of all to free thought as it was in France.

France was alive with the restless spirit of inquiry; the country beyond the Pyrenees was still benumbed by superstition, priestcraft, and tyranny over mind, and the church through its organization maintained a stagnant calm. As there