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

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

was no union between the French mind and the Spanish mind, between the French people and the Spanish people, the union of the governments was simply the result of the family compact between its kings, which the engagement between France and the United States without the assent of Spain violated and annulled. The self-love of the Catholic king was touched, that his nephew should have formed a treaty with America without waiting for his advice. The independence of colonies was an example that might divest his crown of its possessions in both parts of America; and he dreaded the establishment of republicanism on the border of his transatlantic provinces, as more surely fatal than all the power of Great Britain.

The king of France, while he declared his wish to make no conquest whatever in the war, vainly held out to the king of Spain, with the consent of the United States, the acquisition of Florida; but that province had not power to allure Charles III. or his ministry, which was a truly Spanish ministry and wished to pursue a truly Spanish policy. There was indeed one word which, if pronounced, would be potent enough to alter their decision. That word was Gibraltar; but, as it was not spoken, the king of Spain declared that he would not enter into the quarrel of France and England; that he wished to close his life in tranquillity, and valued peace too highly to sacrifice it to the interests or opinions of another.

So the flags of France and the United States went together into the field against Great Britain, unsupported by any other government. The benefit then conferred on the United States was priceless; in return the revolution in America brought to France new life and hope.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BRITISH ABANDON PENNSYLVANIA.

MAY-JUNE 1778.

THE alliance of France with the United States waked in the heart of Europe the hope of the overthrow of the old colonial system of commercial monopoly. American independence was won not by arms alone, but in part by the sympathies of neutral princes and nations.

Both the great belligerents were involved in contradictions at home. The government of England, in seeking to suppress in her dependencies English rights by English arms, made war on the life of her own life. Inasmuch as the party of freedom and justice, which is indeed one for all mankind, was at least seen to be one and the same for the whole English race, it appeared more and more clearly that the total subjugation of America would be the prelude to the repression of liberty in the British isles.

The country, which in the seven years' war had been impelled by the elder Pitt to mighty deeds, found in the ministry no representative. Public spirit had been quelled, and personal interests prevailed over the general good. Even impending foreign war could not hush the turbulence of partisans. The administration, having no guiding principle, held its majority in the house of commons only by sufferance and the control of patronage. Insubordination showed itself in the fleet and in the army, and most among the officers. England had not known so bad a government since the reign of James II. It was neither beloved nor respected, and truly stood neither for the people nor for any branch of the aristocracy;