"D'autres nations font céder des intérêts de commerce With Four Maps and Three Indexes LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.. 39, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1925 Baker PREFACE In any single volume dealing with the story of Europe and its world during a period of a hundred years, however it may be entitled, the chief difficulty of a writer is to judge what can best be omitted from the mass of material. The period here treated was one of violent transition. The two conflicting agencies always controlling human stability and progress, the principle affecting social life that the community should be supreme in all directions of human effort, and the increasing tendency to a belief that advance was stayed by interference of society in the freedom of the individual, were at close grips. Throughout the century this clash becomes more marked, leading in Western Europe, and wherever the unsatisfied restlessness of Western Europe penetrated, to a searching enquiry into the principles of organized society, and to a questioning of the authority on which the society rested. This process had been in action for a very long time, even before the Reformation movement completely wrecked the communal society of the West. But the old theories on which the social order had rested, though consistently opposed or ignored, had still remained as the expression of the social life, regulating the real or supposed interests of the community. For instance, that social aspect of the communal life of which one may find examples in old household books and accounts of mediæval travel, the custom of entertainment at the great man's cost of an unnecessary multitude of dependents and guests, though dying out under absentee Hanoverians in commercial Britain, survived in France to the detriment of the monarchy in the crowd of great nobles and churchmen who lived on the King at Versailles. Another mischievous survival lay in the claim by the noble of a volume of little perquisites originally given by the community to the chief in return for social service which had long since ceased to be performed. Of the long growth of empirical enquiry which accompanied this contest of ideas, the eighteenth century saw the harvest, V resulting in much anarchy and confusion, and strenuous contest of half-digested theories with new conditions of active commercial life. The century was essentially one of movement, of action, of wide travel and adventure, of infinite expansion into other continents. Hardy men brought European methods of living into the waste places of the earth and, defying hardship and rigour of climate and wild beasts and disease and hunger, cleared the forests and made settlements in savage lands, or became a ruling caste as conquerors of ancient civilities. The vogue of deliberative assemblies, which had caused the murder of Charles I. and the substitution of William the Dutchman for James II., had on the European continent given way to dynastic rule. Here the members of the assemblies who had bought their seats were compelled to register the decrees of the sovereign. In the islands where, by an extravagance of treachery, the revolution in form of government had been successful, the powers of the community were disposed in the interests of a remorseless moneyed bureaucracy that for half a century exercised every art of corrupt and incompetent rule. Contemporary works have been almost entirely the ground of my information, later histories only occasionally supplementing them. But ethical principles had ceased to count in this time of gross material action, so that, although there is a very great mass of material for use, its use must be guarded throughout by a watch for the selfish tendencies of nations, parties and individuals. Whether pamphlets, letters, diary or history, every word, with the rarest exception, must be treated as written for partisan purposes. An example is the treatment of the character of King George III. and his supposed part in the American Revolution. Except for spiteful suggestion and backstairs gossip there are in contemporary documents no facts that bear out in the slightest degree the obloquy with which the defeated Whigs have succeeded, through Macaulay and others, in traducing the King's character. I have tried for an impartial judgment on events: strong opinions, justified, I hope, by contemporary facts, are expressed only where it has appeared to me that history has been falsified in the interests of political parties. Unfortunately for the historian the people in the eighteenth |