From the library of 
 Paul Hibbert Clyde 
 

 
 DUKE UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 
 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 By HENDRIK VAN LOON, AB. Ph.D. 
 
 Author of The Fall of the Dutch Republic, The Riae of the Dutch 
 Kingdom, The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators, 
 
 A Short Story of Discovery, Ancient Man. 
 
 •aOUTCW 
 
 This book is fully illustrated with eight three-color 
 pages, over one hundred black and white pictures and 
 numerous animated maps and half-tones drawn by the 
 author. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/storyofmankind01vanl_0 
 
THE SCENE OF OUR HISTORY IS LAID UPON A LITTLE PLANET, LOST IN THE VASTNESS OF THI 
 
 UNIVERSE. 
 
First Printing, November, 1921 
 Second Printing, December, 1921 
 Third Printing, January, 1922 
 Fourth Printing, February, 1922 
 Fifth Printing, February, 1922 
 Sixth Printing, March, 1922 
 Seventh Printing, April, 1922 
 Eighth Printing, May, 1922 
 Ninth Printing, May, 1922 
 Tenth Printing, June, 1922 
 Eleventh Printing, July, 1922 
 Twelfth Printing, July, 1922 
 Thirteenth Printing, August, 1922 
 Fourteenth Printing, August, 1922 
 Fifteenth Printing, September, 1922 
 Sixteenth Printing, September, 1922 
 Seventeenth Printing, September, 1922 
 Eighteenth Printing, October, 1922 
 Nineteenth Printing, November, 1922 
 Twentieth Printing, December, 1922 
 Twenty-first Printing, April, 1923 
 Twenty-second Printing, July, 1923 
 Twenty-third Printing, August, 1923 
 Twenty-fourth Printing, September, 1923 
 Twenty-fifth Printing, November, 1923 
 
 Twenty-sixth Printing, June, 1924 (Newbery Medal Edition) 
 Twenty-seventh Printing, October, 1924 “ “ “ 
 
 Twenty-eighth Printing, July, 192S “ “ “ 
 
 Twenty-ninth Printing, December, 1925 “ “ 
 
 Thirtieth Printing, May, 1926 “ “ 
 
 Thirty-first Printing, October, 1926 “ “ “ 
 
 Thirty-second Printing, Nov., 1926 (Enlarged, Newbery Medal Ed.) 
 Thirty-third Printing, Feb., 1927 “ “ “ “ 
 
 Thirty-fourth Printing, Feb., 1928 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Copyright, 1921, 1926, By 
 Boni & Liveright, Inc. 
 
 Copyright in All Countries 
 
 Printed in the United States oj America 
 
To JIMMIE 
 
 5 ‘What is the use of a book without pictures ?” said Alice, 
 
 % 
 
 & 
 

 FOREWORD 
 
 For Hansje and Willem: 
 
 When I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of 
 mine who gave me my love for books and pictures promised 
 to take me upon a memorable expedition. I was to go with 
 him to the top of the tower of Old Saint Lawrence in Rotter¬ 
 dam. 
 
 And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that 
 of Saint Peter opened a mysterious door. “Ring the bell,” 
 he said, “when you come back and want to get out,” and with 
 a great grinding of rusty old hinges he separated us from the 
 noise of the busy street and locked us into a world of new and 
 strange experiences. 
 
 For the first time in my life I was confronted by the phe¬ 
 nomenon of audible silence. When we had climbed the first 
 flight of stairs, I added another discovery to my limited knowl¬ 
 edge of natural phenomena—that of tangible darkness. A 
 match showed us where the upward road continued. We went 
 to the next floor and then to the next and the next until I had 
 lost count and then there came still another floor, and suddenly 
 we had plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with 
 the roof of the church, and it was used as a storeroom. Cov¬ 
 ered with many inches of dust, there lay the abandoned symbols 
 of a venerable faith which had been discarded by the good 
 people of the city many years ago. That which had meant life 
 and death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and rub- 
 
 
X 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 bish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved 
 images and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop be¬ 
 tween the outspread arms of a kindly saint. 
 
 The next floor showed us from where we had derived our 
 light. Enormous open windows with heavy iron bars made 
 the high and barren room the roosting place of hundreds of 
 pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars and the air was 
 filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise of the 
 town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed 
 by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking 
 of horses’ hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing 
 sound of the patient steam which had been set to do the work 
 of man in a thousand different ways—they had all been 
 blended into a softly rustling whisper which provided a beau¬ 
 tiful background for the trembling cooing of the pigeons. 
 
 Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And 
 after the first ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel 
 his way with a cautious foot) there was a new and even greater 
 wonder, the town-clock. I saw the heart of time. I could hear 
 the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid seconds—one—two—three— 
 up to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise when all the wheels 
 seemed to stop and another minute had been chopped off eter¬ 
 nity. Without pause it began again—one—two—three—until 
 at last after a warning rumble and the scraping of many wheels 
 a thunderous voice, high above us, told the world that it was 
 the hour of noon. 
 
 On the next floor were the bells. The nice little bells and 
 their terrible sisters. In the centre the big bell, which made 
 me turn stiff with fright when I heard it in the middle of the 
 night telling a story of fire or flood. In solitary grandeur it 
 seemed to reflect upon those six hundred years during which 
 it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good people of 
 Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in 
 an old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who 
 twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of the 
 country-folk who had come to market to buy and sell and hear 
 what the big world had been doing. But in a corner—all alone 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 xi 
 
 and shunned by the others—a big black bell, silent and stern, 
 the bell of death. 
 
 Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and 
 even more dangerous than those we had climbed before, and 
 suddenly the fresh air of the wide heavens. We had reached 
 the highest gallery. Above us the sky. Below us the city— 
 a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily crawling hither 
 and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular business, 
 and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the 
 open country. 
 
 It was my first glimpse of the big world. 
 
 Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have 
 gone to the top of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard 
 work, but it repaid in full the mere physical exertion of climb¬ 
 ing a few stairs. 
 
 Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the 
 land and the sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind 
 friend the watchman, who lived in a small shack, built in a 
 sheltered corner of the gallery. He looked after the clock 
 and was a father to the bells, and he warned of fires, but he 
 enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and 
 thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school al¬ 
 most fifty years before and he had rarely read a book, but he 
 had lived on the top of his tower for so many years that he had 
 absorbed the wisdom of that wide world which surrounded him 
 on all sides. 
 
 History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him. 
 “There,” he would say, pointing to a bend of the river, “there, 
 my boy, do you see those trees? That is where the Prince of 
 Orange cut the dikes to drown the land and save Leyden.” 
 Or he would tell me the tale of the old Meuse, until the broad 
 river ceased to be a convenient harbour and became a wonder¬ 
 ful highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp upon 
 that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the 
 sea might be free to all. 
 
 Then there were the little villages, clustering around the 
 protecting church which once, many years ago, had been the 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 XII 
 
 home of their Patron Saints. In the distance we could see the 
 leaning tower of Delft. Within sight of its high arches, 
 William the Silent had been murdered and there Grotius had 
 learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still further 
 away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home 
 of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of 
 many an emperor, the charity-boy whom the world came to 
 know as Erasmus. 
 
 Finally the silver line of the endless sea and as a contrast, 
 immediately below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys 
 and houses and gardens and hospitals and schools and rail¬ 
 ways, which we called our home. But the tower showed us 
 the old home in a new light. The confused commotion of the 
 streets and the market-place, of the factories and the work¬ 
 shop, became the well-ordered expression of human energy 
 and purpose. Best of all, the wide view of the glorious past, 
 which surrounded us on all sides, gave us new courage to face 
 the problems of the future when we had gone back to our daily 
 tasks. 
 
 History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time 
 has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy 
 task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the bene¬ 
 fit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are 
 strong and it can be done. 
 
 Here I give you the key that will open the door. 
 
 When you return, you too will understand the reason for 
 my enthusiasm. 
 
 Hendrik Willem van Loon. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAon 
 
 1. The Setting of the Stage. . «. « S 
 
 2. Our Earliest Ancestors . .. 9 
 
 3. Prehistoric Man Begins to Make Things for Himself . . 13 
 
 4. The Egyptians Invent the Art of Writing and the Record 
 
 of History Begins.17 
 
 5. The Beginning of Civilisation in the Valley of the Nile . 22 
 
 6 . The Rise and Fall of Egypt.27 
 
 7. Mesopotamia, the Second Centre of Eastern Civilisation . 29 
 
 8. The Sumerian Nail Writers, Whose Clay Tablets Tell Us 
 
 the Story of Assyria and Babylonia, the Great Semitic 
 Melting-Pot.32 
 
 9- The Story of Moses, the Leader of the Jewish People . . 38 
 
 10. The Phoenicians, Who Gave Us Our Alphabet ... 42 
 
 11. The Indo-European Persians Conquer the Semitic and the 
 
 Egyptian World.44 
 
 32. The People of the .ZEgean Sea Carried the Civilisation 
 
 of Old Asia Into the Wilderness of Europe ... 48 
 
 18. Meanwhile the Indo-European Tribe of the Hellenes Was 
 
 Taking Possession of Greece.54 
 
 14. The Greek Cities That Were Really States .... 59 
 
 15. The Greeks Were the First People to Try the Difficult 
 
 Experiment of Self-Government.62 
 
 16. How the Greeks Lived.66 
 
 17. The Origins of the Theatre, the First Form of Public 
 
 Amusement..71 
 
 xiii 
 
xiv CONTENTS 
 
 18 . How the Greeks Defended Europe Against an Asiatic In¬ 
 vasion and Drove the Persians Back Across the ASgean Sea 
 
 19- How Athens and Sparta Fought a Long and Disastrous War 
 for the Leadership of Greece. 
 
 20. Alexander the Macedonian Establishes a Greek World- 
 
 Empire, and What Became of This High Ambition . 
 
 21. A Short Summary of Chapters 1 to 20. 
 
 22. The Semitic Colony of Carthage on the Northern Coast of 
 
 Africa and the Indo-European City of Rome on the West 
 Coast of Italy Fought Each Other for the Possession of 
 the Western Mediterranean and Carthage Was Destroyed 
 
 23. How Rome Happened. 
 
 24. How the Republic of Rome, After Centuries of Unrest and 
 
 Revolution, Became an Empire. 
 
 25. The Story of Joshua of Nazareth, Whom the Greeks Called 
 
 Jesus » . 
 
 26. The Twilight of Rome. 
 
 27. How Rome Became the Centre of the Christian World . 
 
 28. Ahmed, the Camel Driver, Who Became the Prophet of the 
 
 Arabian Desert, and Whose Followers Almost Conquered 
 the Entire Known World for the Greater Glory of 
 Allah, the “Only True God”. 
 
 29. How Charlemagne, the King of the Pranks, Came to Bear 
 
 the Title of Emperor and Tried to Revive the Old Ideal 
 of World-Empire. 
 
 SO. Why the People of the Tenth Century Prayed the Lord 
 to Protect Them from the Fury of the Norsemen . 
 
 31. How Central Europe, Attacked from Three Sides, Became 
 
 an Armed Camp and Why Europe Would Have Perished 
 Without Those Professional Soldiers and Administrators 
 Who Were Part of the Feudal System. 
 
 32. Chivalry. 
 
 S3. The Strange Double Loyalty of the People of the Middle 
 Ages, and How It Led to Endless Quarrels Between the 
 Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors. 
 
 PASH 
 
 74 
 
 81 
 
 83 
 
 85 
 
 88 
 
 105 
 
 109 
 
 119 
 
 124 
 
 131 
 
 138 
 
 144 
 
 150 
 
 155 
 
 159 
 
 162 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 xv 
 
 34. But All These Different Quarrels Were Forgotten When 
 
 the Turks Took the Holy Land, Desecrated the Holy 
 Places and Interfered Seriously with the Trade from 
 East to West. Europe Went Crusading .... 
 
 35. Why the People of the Middle Ages Said That “City Air 
 
 Is Free Air” . . 
 
 36. How the People of the Cities Asserted Their Right 
 
 to Be Heard in the Royal Councils of Their Country . 
 
 37. What the People of the Middle Ages Thought of the 
 
 World in Which They Happened to Live .... 
 
 38. How the Crusades Once More Made the Mediterranean a 
 
 Busy Centre of Trade and How the Cities of the Italian 
 Peninsula Became the Great Distributing Centre for the 
 Commerce with Asia and Africa. 
 
 39. People Once More Dared to Be Happy Just Because They 
 
 Were Alive. They Tried to Save the Remains of the 
 Older and More Agreeable Civilisation of Rome and 
 Greece and They Were so Proud of Their Achievements 
 That They Spoke of a “Renaissance” or Re-birth of 
 Civilisation. 
 
 40. The People Began to Feel the Need of Giving Expression 
 
 to Their Newly Discovered Joy of Living. They Ex¬ 
 pressed Their Happiness in Poetry and in Sculpture and 
 in Architecture and Painting, and in the Books They 
 Printed. 
 
 41. But Now That People Had Broken Through the Bonds of 
 
 Their Narrow Mediaeval Limitations, They Had to Have 
 More Room for Their Wanderings. The European World 
 Had Grown Too Small for Their Ambitions. It was the 
 Time of the Great Voyages of Discovery .... 
 
 42. Concerning Buddha and Confucius. 
 
 43. The Progress of the Human Race is Best Compared to a 
 
 Gigantic Pendulum Which Forever Swings Forward and 
 Backward. The Religious Indifference and the Artistic 
 and Literary Enthusiasm of the Renaissance Were Fol¬ 
 lowed by the Artistic and Literary Indifference and the 
 Religious Enthusiasm of the Reformation .... 
 
 44. The Age of the Great Religious Controversies . . . 
 
 PAOE 
 
 168 
 
 174 
 
 184 
 
 191 
 
 198 
 
 206 
 
 219 
 
 224 
 
 241 
 
 251 
 
 262 
 
Xvi 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAG* 
 
 45. How the Struggle Between the “Divine Right of Kings” 
 
 and the Less Divine but More Reasonable “Right of 
 Parliament’’ Ended Disastrously for King Charles I . 279 
 
 4 6 . In France, on the Other Hand, the “Divine Right of Kings” 
 
 Continued with Greater Pomp and Splendor Than Ever 
 Before and the Ambition of the Ruler Was Only Tempered 
 by the Newly Invented Law of the “Balance of Power” . 296 
 
 47. The Story of the Mysterious Muscovite Empire Which Sud¬ 
 
 denly Burst upon the Grand Political Stage of Europe 301 
 
 48. Russia and Sweden Fought Many Wars to Decide Who 
 
 Shall Be the Leading Power of Northeastern Europe 308 
 
 49. The Extraordinary Rise of a Little State in a Dreary Part 
 
 of Northern Germany, Called Prussia.313 
 
 50. How the Newly Founded National or Dynastic States of 
 
 Europe Tried to Make Themselves Rich and What Was 
 Meant by the Mercantile System.317 
 
 \ 
 
 51. 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 Men 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 . 323 
 
 52. The Great French Revolution Proclaims the Principles 
 
 of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality Unto All the People 
 of the Earth. 334 
 
 53. Napoleon. 349 
 
 54. As Soon as Napoleon Had Been Sent to St. Helena, the 
 
 Rulers Who So Often Had Been Defeated by the Hated 
 
 “Corsican” Met at Vienna and Tried to Undo the Many 
 Changes Which Had Been Brought About by the French 
 Revolution. 36l 
 
 55. They Tried to Assure the World an Era of Undisturbed 
 Peace by Suppressing All New Ideas. They Made the 
 Police-Spy the Highest Functionary in the State and 
 Soon the Prisons of All Countries Were Filled With 
 Those Who Claimed That People Have the Right to 
 Govern Themselves as They See Fit. 373 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 56, The Love of National Independence, However, Was Too 
 
 Strong to Be Destroyed in This Way. The South Ameri¬ 
 cans Were the First to Rebel Against the Reactionary 
 Measures of the Congress of Vienna. Greece and Bel¬ 
 gium and Spain and a Large Number of Other Countries 
 of the European Continent Followed Suit and the 
 Nineteenth Century Was Filled with the Rumor of Many 
 Wars of Independence. 
 
 57, But While the People of Europe Were Fighting for Their 
 
 National Independence, the World in Which They Lived 
 Had Been Entirely Changed by a Series of Inventions, 
 Which Had Made the Clumsy Old Steam-Engine of the 
 Eighteenth Century the Most Faithful and Efficient 
 Slave of Man. 
 
 58.. The New Engines Were Very Expensive and Only People 
 of Wealth Could Afford Them. The Old Carpenter or 
 Shoemaker Who Had Been His Own Master in His Little 
 Workshop Was Obliged to Hire Himself Out to the Own¬ 
 ers of the Big Mechanical Tools, and While He Made 
 More Money than Before, He Lost His Former Independ¬ 
 ence and He Did Not Like That. 
 
 59- The General Introduction of Machinery Did Not Bring 
 About the Era of Happiness and Prosperity Which Had 
 Been Predicted by the Generation Which Saw the Stage 
 Coach Replaced by the Railroad. Several Remedies 
 Were Suggested, but None of These Quite Solved the 
 Problem . 
 
 60. But the World Had Undergone Another Change Which Was 
 
 of Greater Importance Than Either the Political or the 
 Industrial Revolutions. After Generations of Oppres¬ 
 sion and Persecution, the Scientist Had at Last Gained 
 Liberty of Action and He Was Now Trying to Discover 
 the Fundamental Laws Which Govern the Universe 
 
 61. A Chapter of Art. 
 
 62. The Last Fifty Years, Including Several Explanations 
 
 and a Few Apologies. 
 
 63. The Great War, Which Was Really the Struggle for a 
 
 New and Better World. 
 
 After Seven Years. 
 
 64. Animated Chronology. 
 
 65. Concerning the Pictures. 
 
 66. An Historical Reading List for Children . . . . 
 
 67. Index. 
 
 xvii 
 
 PAOb 
 
 381 
 
 402 
 
 413 
 
 420 
 
 427 
 
 433 
 
 446 
 
 456 
 
 467 
 
 483 
 
 489 
 
 491 
 
 500 
 
LIST OF COLORED PICTURES 
 
 The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon a Little Planet, Lost in the 
 
 Vastness of the Universe. Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Greece.84 
 
 Rome.126 
 
 The Norsemen Are Coming.. . .156 
 
 The Castle.164 
 
 The Mediaeval World.o; «... 194 
 
 A New World.238 
 
 Buddha Goes into the Mountains . . . „ ... 246 
 
 Moscow •• ••••• 306 
 
LIST OF HALF TONE PICTURES 
 
 The Temple. 
 
 The Mountain-pass. 
 
 The Mediaeval Town.. 
 
 The Cathedral.. 
 
 The Blockhouse in the Wilderness . . . . 
 
 Off for Trafalgar. 
 
 The Modern City ....... 
 
 The Dirigible . • o * • «. 
 
 FACING 
 
 PAGE 
 
 68 
 
 148 
 
 180 
 
 220 
 
 328 
 
 862 
 
 404 
 
 430 
 
LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS 
 
 PACE 
 
 1. High Up in the North.1 
 
 2. It Rained Incessantly.4 
 
 3. The Ascent of Man.5 
 
 4. The Plants Leave the Sea.6 
 
 5. The Growth of the Human Skull.9 
 
 6. Pre-history and History.11 
 
 7. Prehistoric Europe.15 
 
 8. The Valley of Egypt.23 
 
 9. The Building of the Pyramids.25 
 
 10. Mesopotamia, the Melting-pot of the Ancient World ... 30 
 
 11. A Tower of Babel.34 
 
 12. Nineveh.35 
 
 13. The Holy City of Babylon.36 
 
 14. The Wanderings of the Jews.39 
 
 15. Moses Sees the Holy Land.41 
 
 16. The Phoenician Trader. 42 
 
 17. The Story of a Word.45 
 
 18. The Indo-Europeans and Their Neighbours.46 
 
 19- The Trojan Horse.48 
 
 20. Schliemann Digs for Troy.49 
 
 21. Mycenae in Argolis. 50 
 
 22. The iEgean Sea.51 
 
 23. The Island-Bridges Between Asia and Europe .... 52 
 
 xxiii 
 
xxiv LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 24. An iEgean City on the Greek Mainland ...... 54 
 
 25. The Achaeans Take an ^Egean City.55 
 
 26. The Fall of Cnossus.56 
 
 27. Mount Olympus, Where the Gods Lived.59 
 
 28. A Greek City-State.63 
 
 29- Greek Society.67 
 
 SO. The Persian Fleet is Destroyed Near Mount Athos ... 75 
 
 31. The Battle of Marathon.76 
 
 32. Thermopylae. tu . 78 
 
 33. The Battle of Thermopylae . . . r », . 78 
 
 34. The Persians Burn Athens ........ 79 
 
 35. Carthage.. 89 
 
 36. Spheres of Influence . . 90 
 
 37. How the City of Rome Happened . . . ; . •« . . 92 
 
 38. A Fast Roman Warship.. . 97 
 
 39. Hannibal Crosses the Alps. . 99 
 
 40. Hannibal and the CEF.. . 101 
 
 41. The Death of Hannibal.. . 103 
 
 42. How Rome Happened. . 105 
 
 43. Civilisation Goes Westward.107 
 
 44. Caesar Goes West.114 
 
 45. The Great Roman Empire.117 
 
 46. The Holy Land.121 
 
 47- When the Barbarians Got Through With a Roman City . .126 
 
 48. The Invasions of the Barbarians.128 
 
 49- A Cloister. .133 
 
 50. The Goths Are Coming! . . 134 
 
LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS xxv 
 
 PAG* 
 
 51. The Flight of Mohammed.139 
 
 52. The Struggle Between the Cross and the Crescent . . .143 
 
 53. The Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality . . . 147 
 
 54. The Home of the Norsemen.151 
 
 55. The Norsemen Go to Russia.152 
 
 56. The Normans Look Across the Channel.152 
 
 57. The World of the Norsemen.153 
 
 58. Henry IV at Canossa.165 
 
 59. The First Crusade.170 
 
 60. The World of the Crusaders. .171 
 
 61. The Crusaders Take Jerusalem . . . . . . 172 
 
 62. The Crusader’s Grave.. . . . 173 
 
 63. The Castle and the City.. . .179 
 
 64. The Belfry.182 
 
 65. Gunpowder.183 
 
 66. The Spreading of the Idea of Popular Sovereignty . . .185 
 
 67. The Home of Swiss Liberty.188 
 
 68. The Abjuration of Philip II.189 
 
 69- Mediaeval Trade.199 
 
 70. Great Nowgorod.202 
 
 71. The Hansa Ship.204 
 
 72. The Mediaeval Laboratory.. . . 209 
 
 73. The Renaissance.210 
 
 74. Dante. Kl .212 
 
 75. John Huss.. . . 220 
 
 76. The Manuscript and the Printed Book 222 
 
 77. Marco Polo. 225 
 
xxvi LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 78. How the World Grew Larger.227 
 
 79- The World of Columbus.230 
 
 80. The Great Discoveries. Western Hemisphere .... 233 
 
 81. The Great Discoveries. Eastern Hemisphere .... 234 
 
 82. Magellan.237 
 
 83. The Three Great Religions.. 243 
 
 84. The Great Moral Leaders.249 
 
 85. Luther Translates the Bible.257 
 
 86. The Inquisition.263 
 
 87. The Night of St. Bartholomew.268 
 
 88. Leyden Delivered by the Cutting of the Dikes .... 269 
 
 89. The Murder of William the Silent . .270 
 
 90. The Armada is Coming!.271 
 
 91. The Death of Hudson.273 
 
 92. The Thirty Years War.275 
 
 93. Amsterdam in 1648 . 277 
 
 94. The English Nation.280 
 
 95. The Hundred Years War.281 
 
 96. John and Sebastian Cabot See the Coast of Newfoundland . . 284 
 
 97. The Elizabethan Stage.285 
 
 98. The Balance of Power.299 
 
 99- The Origin of Russia.303 
 
 100. Peter the Great in the Dutch Shipyard.308 
 
 101. Peter the Great Builds His New Capital.310 
 
 102. The Voyage of the Pilgrims.318 
 
 103. How Europe Conquered the World ...... 321 
 
 104. Sea Power. 322 
 
LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS xxvii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 105. The Fight for Liberty ......... 323 
 
 106. The Pilgrims.324 
 
 107. How the White Man Settled in North America .... 325 
 
 108. In the Cabin of the Mayflower .327 
 
 109. The French Explore the West.328 
 
 110. The First Winter in New England.329 
 
 111. George Washington.331 
 
 112. The Great American Revolution.332 
 
 113. The Guillotine. 337 
 
 114. Louis XVI.339 
 
 115. The Bastille.342 
 
 116. The French Revolution Invades Holland.347 
 
 117. The Retreat from Moscow. 355 
 
 118. The Battle of Waterloo.. . 358 
 
 119- Napoleon Goes Into Exile.359 
 
 120. The Spectre Which Frightened the Holy Alliance . . . 364 
 
 121. The Real Congress of Vienna.367 
 
 122. The Monroe Doctrine.385 
 
 123. Giuseppe Mazzini.395 
 
 124. The First Steamboat.407 
 
 125. The Origin of the Steamboat.408 
 
 126. The Origin of the Automobile.409 
 
 127. Man-power and Machine-power.414 
 
 128. The Factory.416 
 
 129. The Philosopher.427 
 
 130. Galileo.429 
 
 131. Gothic Architecture.437 
 
sxviii LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS 
 
 PAGli 
 
 132. The Troubadour.442 
 
 133. The Pioneer.447 
 
 134. The Conquest of the West.451 
 
 135. War.457 
 
 136. The Spread of the Imperial Idea.460 
 
 137. A World in Flames.468 
 
 138. Sea Power.470 
 
 139. Man Power.472 
 
 140. Propaganda.474 
 
 141. America Goes Abroad.477 
 
 142. The Iron Man.478 
 
 143-147. Animated Chronology.483 
 
 148. The End.488 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there 
 stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles 
 wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this 
 rock to sharpen its beak. 
 
 When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day 
 of eternity will have gone by. 
 
We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. 
 
 Who are we ? 
 
 Where do we come from? 
 
 Whither are we bound? 
 
 Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing 
 this question mark further and further towards that distant 
 line, beyond the horizon, where we hope to find our answer. 
 
 We have not gone very far. 
 
 We still know very little but we have reached the point 
 where (with a fair degree of accuracy) we can guess at many 
 things. 
 
 In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best 
 belief) the stage was set for the first appearance of man. 
 
 If we represent the time during which it has been possible for 
 animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length, 
 
 —SW*— 
 
 25 
 
 then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which 
 man (or a creature more or less resembling man) has lived 
 upon this earth. 
 
 Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for 
 the purpose of conquering the forces of nature. That is the 
 reason why we are going to study him, rather than cats or 
 dogs or horses or any of the other animals, who, all in their 
 own way, have a very interesting historical development behind 
 them. 
 
 3 
 
4 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 In the beginning, the planet 
 upon which we live was (as far 
 as we now know) a large ball of 
 flaming matter, a tiny cloud of 
 smoke in the endless ocean of 
 space. Gradually, in the course 
 of millions of years, the surface 
 burned itself out, and was cov¬ 
 ered with a thin layer of rocks. 
 Upon these lifeless rocks the 
 rain descended in endless tor¬ 
 rents, wearing out the hard 
 granite and carrying the dust to 
 the valleys that lay hidden be- 
 
 IT RAINED INCESSANTLY 
 
 tween the high cliffs of the steaming earth. 
 
 Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the 
 clouds and saw how this little planet was covered with a few 
 small puddles which were to develop into the mighty oceans of 
 the eastern and western hemispheres. 
 
 Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been 
 dead, gave birth to life. 
 
 The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea. 
 
 For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents. 
 But during all that time it was developing certain habits that 
 it might survive more easily upon the inhospitable earth. Some 
 of these cells were happiest in the dark depths of the lakes and 
 the pools. They took root in the slimy sediments which had 
 been carried down from the tops of the hills and they became 
 plants. Others preferred to move about and they grew 
 strange jointed legs, like scorpions and began to crawl along 
 the bottom of the sea amidst the plants and the pale green things 
 that looked like jelly-fishes. Still others (covered with scales) 
 depended upon a swimming motion to go from place to place 
 in their search for food, and gradually they populated the ocean 
 with myriads of fishes. 
 
 Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had 
 to search for new dwelling places. There was no more room 
 
THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 
 
 5 
 
 for them at the bottom of the sea. Reluctantly they left the 
 water and made a new home in the marshes and on the mud- 
 banks that lay at the foot of the mountains. Twice a day the 
 tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For the rest 
 of the time, the plants made the best of their uncomfortable 
 situation and tried to survive in the thin air which surrounded 
 the surface of the planet. After centuries of training, they 
 learned how to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in 
 the water. They increased in size and became shrubs and trees 
 and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which 
 attracted the attention of the busy big bumble-bees and the 
 
 THE ASCENT OF MAN 
 
6 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 birds who carried the seeds far 
 and wide until the whole earth 
 had become covered with green 
 pastures, or lay dark under the 
 shadow of the big trees. 
 
 But some of the fishes too 
 had begun to leave the sea, and 
 they had learned how to breathe 
 with lungs as well as with gills. 
 
 ,We call such creatures amphibi¬ 
 ous, which means that they are 
 able to live with equal ease on 
 the land and in the water. The 
 first frog who crosses your path 
 can tell you all about the pleasures of the double existence of 
 the amphibian. 
 
 Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted 
 themselves more and more to life on land. Some became rep¬ 
 tiles (creatures who crawl like lizards) and they shared the 
 silence of the forests with the insects. That they might move 
 faster through the soft soil, they improved upon their legs 
 and their size increased until the world was populated with 
 gigantic forms (which the hand-books of biology list under 
 the names of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Bron¬ 
 tosaurus) who grew to be thirty to forty feet long and who 
 could have played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with 
 her kittens. 
 
 Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in 
 the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred 
 feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose 
 of walking, but it was necessary for them to move quickly from 
 branch to branch. And so they changed a part of their skin 
 into a sort of parachute, which stretched between the sides of 
 their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet, and gradually 
 they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made 
 their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and 
 developed into true birds. 
 
THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 
 
 7 
 
 Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles 
 died within a short time. We do not know the reason. Per¬ 
 haps it was due to a sudden change in climate. Perhaps they 
 had grown so large that they could neither swim nor walk nor 
 crawl, and they starved to death within sight but not within 
 reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the 
 million year old world-empire of the big reptiles was over. 
 
 The world now began to be occupied by very different 
 creatures. They were the descendants of the reptiles but they 
 were quite unlike these because they fed their young from the 
 “mammas” or the breasts of the mother. Wherefore modern 
 science calls these animals “mammals.” They had shed the 
 scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of the bird, 
 but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals how¬ 
 ever developed other habits which gave their race a great ad¬ 
 vantage over the other animals. The female of the species 
 carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they were 
 hatched and while all other living beings, up to that time, had 
 left their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat, 
 and the attacks of wild beasts, the mammals kept their young 
 with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were 
 still too weak to fight their enemies. In this way the young 
 mammals were given a much better chance to survive, because 
 they learned many things from their mothers, as you will know 
 if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take 
 care of themselves and how to wash their faces and how to 
 catch mice. 
 
 But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you 
 know them well. They surround you on all sides. They are 
 your daily companions in the streets and in your home, and you 
 can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the zo¬ 
 ological garden. 
 
 And now we come to the parting of the ways when man 
 suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and 
 dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the 
 destiny of his race. 
 
 One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in 
 
8 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 its ability to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its 
 fore-feet for the purpose of holding its prey, and by dint of 
 practice it had developed a hand-like claw. After innumer¬ 
 able attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the 
 body upon the hind legs. (This is a difficult act, which every 
 child has to learn anew although the human race has been 
 doing it for over a million years.) 
 
 This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to 
 both, became the most successful hunter and could make a 
 living in every clime. For greater safety, it usually moved 
 about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to 
 warn its young of approaching danger and after many hun¬ 
 dreds of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises 
 for the purpose of talking. 
 
 This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your 
 first “man-like” ancestor. 
 
OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS 
 
 i 
 
 We know very little about the first “true” men. We have 
 never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an 
 ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their bones. 
 These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals 
 that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. 
 Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to 
 the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have 
 taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our 
 earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE HUMAN SKULL 
 
 The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very 
 ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much 
 
 9 
 
10 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 smaller than the people of today. The heat of the snn and the 
 biting wind of the cold winter had coloured his skin a dark 
 brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs too, 
 were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but 
 strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a mon¬ 
 key. His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a 
 wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He 
 wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the 
 rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke 
 and their lava. 
 
 He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the 
 pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the 
 pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or 
 he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his 
 own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, 
 he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a 
 rabbit. These he would eat raw for he had never discovered 
 that food tasted better when it was cooked. 
 
 During the hours of day, this primitive human being 
 prowled about looking for things to eat. 
 
 When night descended upon the earth, he hid his wife and 
 his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders, 
 for he was surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and 
 when it was dark these animals began to prowl about, looking 
 for something to eat for their mates and their own young, and 
 they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where 
 you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy 
 because it was full of fear and misery. 
 
 In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the 
 sun, and during the winter his children would freeze to death 
 in his arms. When such a creature hurt itself, (and hunting 
 animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their 
 ankles) he had no one to take care of him and he must die a 
 horrible death. 
 
 Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their 
 strange noises, early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he 
 endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it 
 
OUK EARLIEST ANCESTORS 
 
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 RlAhJ 
 
 II 
 
 wnwj 
 
 ’1/CT4Q iw» catss Tue b'J**r>»As ^fCRumtic 
 
 PREHISTORY AND HISTORY 
 
12 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 pleased him to hear the sound of his voice. In due time he 
 learned that he could use this guttural noise to warn his fellow 
 beings whenever danger threatened and he gave certain little 
 shrieks which came to mean “there is a tiger!” or “here come 
 five elephants.” Then the others grunted something back at 
 him and their growl meant, “I see them,” or “let us run away 
 and hide.” And this was probably the origin of all language. 
 
 But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know 
 so very little. Early man had no tools and he built himself 
 no houses. He lived and died and left no trace of his exist¬ 
 ence except a few collar-bones and a few pieces of his skull. 
 These tell us that many thousands of years ago the world was 
 inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from 
 all the other animals—who had probably developed from an¬ 
 other unknown ape-like animal which had learned to walk on 
 its hind-legs and use its fore-paws as hands—and who were 
 most probably connected with the creatures who happen to be 
 our own immediate ancestors. 
 
 It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness. 
 
PREHISTORIC MAN 
 
 PREHISTORIC MAN BEGINS TO MAKE 
 THINGS FOR HIMSELF 
 
 Early man did not know what time meant. He kept 
 no records of birthdays or wedding anniversaries or the hour 
 of death. He had no idea of days or weeks or even years. 
 But in a general way he kept track of the seasons for he had 
 noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the mild 
 spring—that spring grew into the hot summer when fruits 
 ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten and 
 that summer ended when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves 
 from the trees and a number of animals were getting ready 
 for the long hibernal sleep. 
 
 But now, something unusual and rather frightening had 
 happened. Something was the matter with the weather. The 
 warm days of summer had come very late. The fruits had 
 not ripened. The tops of the mountains which used to be cov¬ 
 ered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy 
 burden of snow. 
 
 Then, one morning, a number of wild people, different 
 from the other creatures who lived in that neighbourhood, came 
 wandering down from the region of the high peaks. They 
 looked lean and appeared to be starving. They uttered sounds 
 which no one could understand. They seemed to say that 
 they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the 
 old inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay 
 
 13 
 
14 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 more than a few days there was a terrible battle with claw-like 
 hands and feet and whole families were killed. The others fled 
 back to their mountain slopes and died in the next blizzard. 
 
 But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All 
 the time the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than 
 they ought to have been. 
 
 Finally, in a gap between two high hills, there appeared a 
 tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A 
 gigantic glacier came sliding downhill. Huge stones were 
 being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thun¬ 
 derstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite sud¬ 
 denly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them 
 while they slept. Century old trees were crushed into kindling 
 wood. And then it began to snow. 
 
 It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and 
 the animals fled in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted 
 his young upon his back and followed them. But he could not 
 travel as fast as the wilder creatures and he was forced to 
 choose between quick thinking or quick dying. He seems to 
 have preferred the former for he has managed to survive the 
 terrible glacial periods which upon four different occasions 
 threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth. 
 
 In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself 
 lest he freeze to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover 
 them with branches and leaves and in these traps he caught 
 bears and hyenas, which he then killed with heavy stones and 
 whose skins he used as coats for himself and his family. 
 
 Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many 
 animals were in the habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now 
 followed their example, drove the animals out of their warm 
 homes and claimed them for his own. 
 
 Even so, the climate was too severe for most people and 
 the old and the young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius 
 bethought himself of the use of fire. Once, while out hunting, 
 he had been caught in a forest-fire. He remembered that he 
 had been almost roasted to death by the flames. Thus far fire 
 had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree 
 
PREHISTORIC MAN 
 
 15 
 
 PREHISTORIC EUROPE 
 
16 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 was dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smoulder¬ 
 ing branches from a burning wood. This turned the cave into 
 a cozy little room. 
 
 And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It 
 was not rescued until it had been well roasted. Man discovered 
 that meat tasted better when cooked and he then and there 
 discarded one of the old habits which he had shared with the 
 other animals and began to prepare his food. 
 
 In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people 
 with the cleverest brains survived. They had to struggle day 
 and night against cold and hunger. They were forced to invent 
 tools. They learned how to sharpen stones into axes and how 
 to make hammers. They were obliged to put up large stores 
 of food for the endless days of the winter and they found that 
 clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the 
 rays of the sun. And so the glacial period, which had threat¬ 
 ened to destroy the human race, became its greatest teacher 
 because it forced man to use his brain. 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 
 
 THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF 
 WRITING AND THE RECORD OF 
 HISTORY BEGINS 
 
 These earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great 
 European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things 
 It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have 
 given up the ways of savages and would have developed a 
 civilisation of their own. But suddenly there came an end to 
 their isolation. They were discovered. 
 
 A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to 
 cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way 
 to the wild people of the European continent. He came from 
 Africa. His home was in Egypt. 
 
 The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civili¬ 
 sation thousands of years before the people of the west had 
 dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. 
 And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in 
 their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of 
 the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the 
 human race. 
 
 The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were 
 excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. Thej 7 built 
 temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which 
 served as the earliest models for the churches in which we wor¬ 
 ship nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved 
 
 17 
 
18 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time 
 that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most 
 important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve 
 speech for the benefit of future generations. They had in¬ 
 vented the art of writing. 
 
 We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and maga¬ 
 zines that we take it for granted that the world has always been 
 able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most 
 important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written 
 documents we should be like cats and dogs, who can only teach 
 their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, 
 because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can 
 make use of the experience of those generations of cats and 
 dogs that have gone before. 
 
 In the first century before our era, when the Homans came 
 to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pic¬ 
 tures which seemed to have something to do with the history 
 of the country. But the Romans were not interested in “any¬ 
 thing foreign” and did not inquire into the origin of these queer 
 figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of 
 the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the 
 papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had 
 understood the holy art of making such pictures had died sev¬ 
 eral years before. Egypt deprived of its independence had 
 become a store-house filled with important historical documents 
 which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use 
 to either man or beast. 
 
 Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land 
 of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the 
 name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to pre¬ 
 pare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did 
 not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, 
 quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the 
 problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language. 
 
 One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary' 
 life of his little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the 
 Nile) decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 
 
 19 
 
 the ruins of the Nile Delta. And behold! he found a stone 
 which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt 
 it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of 
 black basalt was different from anything that had ever been 
 discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was 
 in Greek. The Greek language was known. “All that is 
 necessary,” so he reasoned, “is to compare the Greek text with 
 the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets.” 
 
 The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than 
 twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French 
 professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the 
 Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In 
 the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the mean¬ 
 ing of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from 
 overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had 
 become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is 
 better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. 
 We possess a written record which covers four thousand years 
 of chronicled history. 
 
 As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means 
 “sacred writing”) have played such a very great role in his¬ 
 tory, (a few of them in modified form have even found their 
 way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something 
 about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago 
 to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming 
 generations. 
 
 Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every 
 Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to 
 strange messages written in the form of little pictures which 
 tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters 
 there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to 
 understand the meaning of such messages. 
 
 Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The 
 clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long 
 before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object 
 which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now. 
 
go 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were 
 examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hiero¬ 
 glyphics. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with 
 a saw. “Very well,” you would say, “that means of course that 
 a farmer went out to cut down a tree.” Then you take another 
 papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age 
 of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture 
 of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle 
 saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But 
 what? 
 
 That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. 
 He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what 
 we now call “phonetic writing”—a system of characters which 
 reproduce the “sound” (or phone) of the spoken word and 
 which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words 
 into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes 
 and pothooks. 
 
 Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. 
 The word “saw” either means a certain tool which you will find 
 in a carpenter’s shop, or it means the past tense of the verb 
 “to see.” 
 
 This is what had happened to the word during the course 
 of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool 
 which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it 
 had become the past participle of a verb. After several hun¬ 
 dred years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and 
 
 the picture 
 
 came to stand for a single letter, the 
 
 letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here 
 is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in 
 
 hieroglyphics. 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 
 
 n 
 
 The 
 
 D 
 
 either means one of these two round objects 
 
 in your head, which allow you to see or it means “I,” the per¬ 
 son who is talking. 
 
 A 
 
 is either an insect which gathers honey, or it 
 
 represents the verb “to be” which means to exist. Again, it 
 may be the first part of a verb like “be-come” or “be-have.” 
 
 In this particular instance it is followed by 
 
 which 
 
 means a “leaf” or “leave” or “lieve” (the sound of all three 
 words is the same). 
 
 The “eye” you know all about. 
 
 Finally you get the picture of a 
 
 It is a giraffe. 
 
 It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyph¬ 
 ics developed. 
 
 You can now read that sentence without much difficulty. 
 
 “I believe I saw a giraffe.” 
 
 Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it 
 during thousands of years until they could write anything they 
 wanted, and they used these “canned words” to send messages 
 to friends, to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the 
 history of their country, that future generations might benefit 
 by the mistakes of the past. 
 
THE NILE VALLEY 
 
 1 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE 
 VALLEY OF THE NILE 
 
 The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in 
 search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has 
 travelled to make his home. 
 
 The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at 
 an early date. From the interior of Africa and from the desert 
 of Arabia and from the western part of Asia people had 
 flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich farms. 
 Together these invaders had formed a new race which called 
 itself “Remi” or “the Men” just as we sometimes call America 
 “God’s own country.” They had good reason to be grateful 
 to a Fate which had carried them to this narrow strip of land. 
 In the summer of each year the Nile turned the valley into a 
 shallow lake and when the waters receded all the grainfields 
 and the pastures were covered with several inches of the most 
 fertile clay. 
 
 In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and 
 made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first 
 large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all 
 the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated 
 system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from 
 the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even 
 more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it through¬ 
 out the land. 
 
 22 
 
THE NILE VALLEY 
 
 23 
 
 While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend 
 sixteen hours out of every twenty-four gathering food for him¬ 
 self and the members of his tribe, the Egyptian peasant or the 
 inhabitant of the Egyptian city found himself possessed of a 
 certain leisure. He used this spare time to make himself many 
 things that were merely ornamental and not the least bit 
 useful. 
 
 More than that. One day he discovered that his brain was 
 capable of thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing 
 to do with the problems of eating and sleeping and finding a 
 home for the children. The Egyptian began to speculate upon 
 many strange problems that confronted him. Where did the 
 stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which 
 
24 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise 
 with such regularity that it was possible to base the calendar 
 upon the appearance and the disappearance of the annual 
 floods? Who was he, himself, a strange little creature sur¬ 
 rounded on all sides by death and sickness and yet happy and 
 full of laughter? 
 
 He asked these many questions and certain people oblig¬ 
 ingly stepped forward to answer these inquiries to the best of 
 their ability. The Egyptians called them “priests” and they 
 became the guardians of his thoughts and gained great respect 
 in the community. They were highly learned men who were 
 entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the written records. 
 They understood that it is not good for man to think only of 
 his immediate advantage in this world and they drew his at¬ 
 tention to the days of the future when his soul would dwell 
 beyond the mountains of the west and must give an account 
 of his deeds to Osiris, the mighty God who was the Ruler of 
 the Living and the Dead and who judged the acts of men 
 according to their merits. Indeed, the priests made so much 
 of that future day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that the 
 Egyptians began to regard life merely as a short preparation 
 for the Hereafter and turned the teeming valley of the Nile 
 into a land devoted to the Dead. 
 
 In a strange way, the Egyptians had come to believe that 
 no soul could enter the realm of Osiris without the possession 
 of the body which had been its place of residence in this world. 
 Therefore as soon as a man was dead his relatives took his 
 corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks it was soaked in a 
 solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch. The 
 Persian word for pitch was “Mumiai” and the embalmed body 
 was called a “Mummy.” It was wrapped in yards and yards 
 of specially prepared linen and it was placed in a specially 
 prepared coffin ready to be removed to its final home. But 
 an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was sur¬ 
 rounded by pieces of furniture and musical instruments (to 
 while away the dreary hours of waiting) and by little statues 
 of cooks and bakers and barbers (that the occupant of this 
 
THE NILE VALLEY 
 
 25 
 
 THE BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS 
 
 dark home might be decently provided with food and need not 
 go about unshaven). 
 
 Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the 
 western mountains but as the Egyptians moved northward 
 they were obliged to build their cemeteries in the desert. The 
 desert however is full of wild animals and equally wild robbers 
 and they broke into the graves and disturbed the mummy or 
 stole the jewelry that had been buried with the body. To pre¬ 
 vent such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build small 
 mounds of stones on top of the graves. These little mounds 
 gradually grew in size, because the rich people built higher 
 mounds than the poor and there was a good deal of competi¬ 
 tion to see who could make the highest hill of stones. The 
 
26 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 record was made by King Khufu, whom the Greeks called 
 Cheops and who lived thirty centuries before our era. His 
 mound, which the Greeks called a pyramid (because the 
 Egyptian word for high was pir-em-us) was over five hundred 
 feet high. 
 
 It covered more than thirteen acres of desert which is three 
 times as much space as that occupied by the church of St. 
 Peter, the largest edifice of the Christian world. 
 
 During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were 
 busy carrying the necessary stones from the other side of the 
 river—ferrying them across the Nile (how they ever managed 
 to do this, we do not understand), dragging them in many in¬ 
 stances a long distance across the desert and finally hoisting 
 them into their correct position. But so well did the King’s 
 architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow 
 passage-way which leads to the roy al tomb in the heart of the 
 stone monster has never yet been pushed out of shape by the 
 weight of those thousands of tons of stone which press upon 
 it from all sides. 
 
THE STORY OF EGYPT 
 
 THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT 
 
 The river Nile was a kind friend but occasionally it was 
 a hard taskmaster. It taught the people who lived along its 
 banks the noble art of “team-work.” They depended upon 
 each other to build their irrigation trenches and keep their 
 dikes in repair. In this way they learned how to get along 
 with their neighbours and their mutual-benefit-association quite 
 easily developed into an organised state. 
 
 Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neigh¬ 
 bours and he became the leader of the community and their 
 commander-in-chief when the envious neighbours of western 
 Asia invaded the prosperous valley. In due course of time 
 he became their King and ruled all the land from the Mediter¬ 
 ranean to the mountains of the west. 
 
 But these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the 
 word meant “the Man who lived in the Big House”) rarely 
 interested the patient and toiling peasant of the grain fields. 
 Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes to his King 
 than he thought just, he accepted the rule of Pharaoh as he 
 accepted the rule of Mighty Osiris. 
 
 It was different however when a foreign invader came 
 and robbed him of his possessions. After twenty centuries of 
 independent life, a savage Arab tribe of shepherds, called the 
 Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five hundred years they were 
 the masters of the valley of the Nile. They were highly un- 
 
 27 
 
28 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who 
 came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long 
 wandering through the desert and who helped the foreign 
 usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers and his civil servants. 
 
 But shortly after the year 1700 b.c. the people of Thebes 
 began a revolution and after a long struggle the Hyksos were 
 driven out of the country and Egypt was free once more. 
 
 A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered all of 
 western Asia, Egypt became part of the empire of Sardan- 
 apalus. In the seventh century b.c. it became once more an 
 independent state which obeyed the rule of a king who lived in 
 the city of Sais in the Delta of the Nile. But in the year 525 
 b.c., Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession of 
 Egypt and in the fourth century b.c., when Persia was con¬ 
 quered by Alexander the Great, Egypt too became a Mace¬ 
 donian province. It regained a semblance of independence 
 when one of Alexander’s generals set himself up as king of a 
 new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies, 
 who resided in the newly built city of Alexandria. 
 
 Finally, in the year 39 b.c., the Romans came. The last 
 Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, tried her best to save the country. 
 Her beauty and charm were more dangerous to the Roman 
 generals than half a dozen Egyptian army corps. Twice she 
 was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her Roman 
 conquerors. But in the year 30 b.c., Augustus, the nephew 
 and heir of Csesar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share 
 his late uncle’s admiration for the lovely princess. He de¬ 
 stroyed her armies, but spared her life that he might make her 
 march in his triumph as part of the spoils of war. When 
 Cleopatra heard of this plan, she killed herself by taking poi¬ 
 son. And Egypt became a Roman province. 
 
MESOPOTAMIA 
 
 MESOPOTAMIA—THE SECOND CENTRE OF 
 EASTERN CIVILISATION 
 
 I am going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid 
 and I am going to ask that you imagine yourself possessed 
 of the eyes of a hawk. Way, way off, in the distance, far 
 beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you will see something 
 green and shimmering. It is a valley situated between two 
 rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the 
 land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Meso¬ 
 potamia—the “country between the rivers.” 
 
 The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the 
 Babylonians called the Purattu) and the Tigris (which was 
 known as the Diklat). They begin their course amidst the 
 snows of the mountains of Armenia where Noah’s Ark found 
 a resting place and slowly they flow through the southern 
 plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf. 
 They perform a very useful service. They turn the arid 
 regions of western Asia into a fertile garden. 
 
 The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had 
 offered them food upon fairly easy terms. The “land be¬ 
 tween the rivers” was popular for the same reason. It was a 
 country full of promise and both the inhabitants of the north¬ 
 ern mountains and the tribes which roamed through the 
 southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and 
 most exclusive possession. The constant rivalry between the 
 
 29 
 
30 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 MESOPOTAMIA, THE MELTING POT OF THE ANCIENT WORLD 
 
MESOPOTAMIA 
 
 31 
 
 mountaineers and the desert-nomads led to endless warfare. 
 Only the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive and 
 that will explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very 
 strong race of men who were capable of creating a civilisation 
 which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt. 
 
THE SUMERIANS 
 
 THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY 
 TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF ASSYRIA 
 AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC 
 MELTING-POT 
 
 The fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. 
 Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and 
 stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Aus¬ 
 trian bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel east¬ 
 ward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a 
 voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not 
 visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile 
 a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had explored the 
 ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most 
 curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of 
 the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of 
 baked clay. 
 
 But Europe was busy with many other things and it was 
 not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first 
 “cuneiform inscriptions” (so-called because the letters were 
 wedge-shaped and wedge is called “Cuneus” in Latin) were 
 brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr. 
 Then it took thirty years before a patient German school¬ 
 master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four 
 letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Per¬ 
 sian King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by 
 
 32 
 
THE SUMERIANS 
 
 33 
 
 until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous 
 inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail¬ 
 writing of western Asia. 
 
 Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writ¬ 
 ings, the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The 
 Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest 
 inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of 
 scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures 
 entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which 
 showed little connection with the pictures out of which they 
 had been developed. A few examples will show you what I 
 mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into 
 
 a brick looked as follows: 
 
 This sign however was too 
 
 cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of 
 “heaven” was added to that of star the picture was simplified 
 
 in this way 
 
 which made it even more of a puzzle. 
 
 In the same way an ox changed from 
 
 into 
 
 and a fish changed from 
 
 into 
 
 The sun 
 
 was originally a plain circle 
 If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an 
 
 . This system of writing down our 
 
34 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty cen¬ 
 turies it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and 
 the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races 
 which forced their way into the fertile valley. 
 
 The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and 
 conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They 
 were a white people who had lived in the mountains. They 
 
 had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of 
 hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed arti¬ 
 ficial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They 
 did not know how to build stairs and they therefore sur¬ 
 rounded their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers 
 have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad 
 stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to an¬ 
 other. We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumeri¬ 
 ans but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab* 
 
THE SUMERIANS 
 
 35 
 
 sorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later 
 date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of 
 Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile 
 in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of Bab- 
 Illi, or towers of Babel. 
 
 In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had 
 entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over- 
 
 NINEVEH 
 
 powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the 
 desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are 
 known as the “Semites,” because in the olden days people be¬ 
 lieved them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the 
 three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians 
 were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another 
 Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built him¬ 
 self a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who 
 gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state 
 
36 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the 
 Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over¬ 
 ran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not 
 carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers 
 of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyr¬ 
 ians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast 
 and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and 
 Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until 
 the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when 
 
 THE HOLY CITY OF BABYLON 
 
THE SUMERIANS 
 
 37 
 
 the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and 
 made that city the most important capital of that day. 
 Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged 
 the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy 
 and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which 
 were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 b.c. a 
 crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and 
 overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years 
 later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, 
 who turned the Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many 
 Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next came the Romans 
 and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the sec¬ 
 ond centre of the world’s civilisation, became a vast wilderness 
 where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory. 
 
MOSES 
 
 THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE 
 JEWISH PEOPLE 
 
 Some time during the twentieth century before our era, 
 a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left 
 its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth 
 of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures within 
 the domain of the Kings of Babylonia. They had been driven 
 away by the royal soldiers and they had moved westward 
 looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they 
 might set up their tents. 
 
 This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as 
 we call them, the Jews. They had wandered far and wide, 
 and after many years of dreary peregrinations they had been 
 given shelter in Egypt. For more than five centuries they 
 had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted coun¬ 
 try had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told 
 you in the story of Egypt) they had managed to make them¬ 
 selves useful to the foreign invader and had been left in the 
 undisturbed possession of their grazing fields. But after a 
 long war of independence the Egyptians had driven the 
 Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had 
 come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank 
 of common slaves and they had been forced to work on the 
 royal roads and on the Pyramids. And as the frontiers were 
 
~T?iE Alrtrty 
 
 MOSES 
 
 39 
 
 THE WANDERINGS OF THE JEWS 
 
40 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it had been impossible for 
 the Jews to escape. 
 
 After many years of suffering they were saved from their 
 miserable fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long 
 time had dwelt in the desert and there had learned to appre¬ 
 ciate the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors, who had kept 
 away from cities and city-life and had refused to let them¬ 
 selves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign 
 civilisation. 
 
 Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways 
 of the patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian 
 troops that were sent after him and led his fellow tribesmen 
 into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai. Dur¬ 
 ing his long and lonely life in the desert, he had learned to 
 revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and the 
 Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shep¬ 
 herds depended for life and light and breath. This God, one 
 of the many divinities who were widely worshipped in western 
 Asia, was called Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses, 
 he became the sole Master of the Hebrew race. 
 
 One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. 
 It was whispered that he had gone away carrying two tablets 
 of rough-hewn stone. That afternoon, the top of the mountain 
 was lost to sight. The darkness of a terrible storm hid it from 
 the eye of man. But when Moses returned, behold! there stood 
 engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had spoken 
 unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and 
 the blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment, 
 Jehovah was recognised by all the Jews as the Highest Master 
 of their Fate, the only True God, who had taught them how 
 to live holy lives when he bade them to follow the wise lessons 
 of his Ten Commandments. 
 
 They followed Moses when he bade them continue their 
 journey through the desert. They obeyed him when he told 
 them what to eat and drink and what to avoid that they might 
 keep well in the hot climate. And finally after many years of 
 wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and 
 
MOSES 
 
 41 
 
 prosperous. It was called Palestine, which means the country 
 of the “Pilistu” the Philistines, a small tribe of Cretans who 
 had settled along the coast after they had been driven away 
 from their own island. Unfortunately, the mainland, Pales¬ 
 tine, was already inhabited by another Semitic race, called the 
 Canaanites. But the Jews forced their way into the valleys 
 and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple 
 
 in a town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace. 
 
 As for Moses, he was no longer the leader of his people. He 
 had been allowed to see the mountain ridges of Palestine from 
 afar. Then he had closed his tired eyes for all time. He had 
 worked faithfully and hard to please Jehovah. Not only had 
 he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free and 
 independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews 
 the first of all nations to worship a single God. 
 
THE PHOENICIANS 
 
 THE PHOENICIANS WHO GAVE US OUR 
 ALPHABET 
 
 The Phoenicians, who were the neighbours of the Jews, 
 were a Semitic tribe which at a very early age had settled along 
 the shores of the Mediterranean. They had built themselves 
 two well-fortified towns, Tyre and Sidon, and within a short 
 time they had gained a monopoly of the trade of the western 
 seas. Their ships went regularly to Greece and Italy and 
 
 THE PHOENICIAN TRADER 
 42 
 
THE PHOENICIANS 
 
 43 
 
 Spain and they even ventured beyond the straits of Gibraltar 
 to visit the Scilly islands where they could buy tin. Wherever 
 they went, they built themselves small trading stations, which 
 they called colonies. Many of these were the origin of mod¬ 
 ern cities, such as Cadiz and Marseilles. 
 
 They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a 
 good profit. They were not troubled by a conscience. If we 
 are to believe all their neighbours they did not know what the 
 words honesty or integrity meant. They regarded a well-filled 
 treasure chest the highest ideal of all good citizens. Indeed 
 they were very unpleasant people and did not have a single 
 friend. Nevertheless they have rendered all coming genera¬ 
 tions one service or the greatest possible value. They gave 
 us our alphabet. 
 
 The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, 
 invented by the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks 
 as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical business men 
 and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters. 
 They set to work and invented a new system of writing which 
 was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few 
 pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of 
 the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed 
 the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed 
 and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short 
 and handy alphabet of twenty-two letters. 
 
 In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the 
 iEgean Sea and entered Greece. The Greeks added a few 
 letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy. 
 The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught 
 them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild 
 barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why 
 this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin 
 and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the naiC 
 script of the Sumerians. 
 
THE INDO-EUROPEANS 
 
 THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER 
 THE SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN 
 WORLD 
 
 The world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoe¬ 
 nicia had existed almost thirty centuries and the venerable 
 races of the Fertile Valley were getting old and tired. Their 
 doom was sealed when a new and more energetic race appeared 
 upon the horizon. We call this race the Indo-European race, 
 because it conquered not only Europe but also made itself the 
 ruling class in the country which is now known as British India. 
 
 These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites 
 but they spoke a different language which is regarded as the 
 common ancestor of all European tongues with the exception 
 of Hungarian and Finnish and the Basque dialects of North¬ 
 ern Spain. 
 
 When we first hear of them, they had been living along the 
 shores of the Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day 
 they had packed their tents and they had wandered forth in 
 search of a new home. Some of them had moved into the 
 mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had 
 lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and 
 that is why we call them Aryans. Others had followed the 
 setting sun and they had taken possession of the plains of 
 Europe as I shall tell you when I give you the story of Greece 
 and Rome. 
 
 44 
 
THE INDO-EUROPEANS 
 
 45 
 
 For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the 
 leadership of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great 
 teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to follow 
 the swiftly flowing Indus river on its way to the sea. 
 
 Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western 
 Asia and there they had founded the half-independent com¬ 
 munities of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose 
 
 names we have copied from the old Greek history-books. In 
 the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Medes had 
 established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this 
 perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan, 
 made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon 
 a career of conquest which soon made him and his children the 
 undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt. 
 
 Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians 
 push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon 
 
46 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
THE INDO-EUROPEANS 
 
 47 
 
 found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo- 
 European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe 
 and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands 
 of the .ZEgean Sea. 
 
 These difficulties led to the three famous wars between 
 Greece and Persia during which King Darius and King 
 Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula. 
 They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to 
 get a foothold upon the European continent. 
 
 But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens 
 proved unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies 
 of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the 
 Asiatic rulers to return to their base. 
 
 It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient 
 teacher, and Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great 
 many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the 
 struggle between east and west has continued until this wry 
 day. 
 
THE iEGEAN SEA 
 
 THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED 
 THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO 
 THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE 
 
 When Heinrich Schlie- 
 mann was a little boy his 
 father told him the story of 
 Troy. He liked that story 
 better than anything else he 
 had ever heard and he made 
 up his mind, that as soon as he 
 was big enough to leave home, 
 he would travel to Greece and 
 “find Troy.” That he was the 
 son of a poor country parson 
 in a Mecklenburg village did 
 not bother him. He knew 
 that he would need money but 
 he decided to gather a fortune first and do the digging after¬ 
 wards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune 
 within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough money to 
 equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia 
 Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated. 
 
 In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high 
 mound covered with grainfields. According to tradition it had 
 been the home of Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann, 
 
 48 
 
THE AEGEAN SEA 
 
 49 
 
 SCHLIEMANN DIGS FOR TROY 
 
 whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge, 
 wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began 
 to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his 
 trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he 
 Avas looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried 
 town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy 
 of which Homer had written. Then something very interest¬ 
 ing occurred. If Schliemann had found a feAv polished stone 
 hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one 
 would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such ob¬ 
 jects, which people had generally associated with the prehis¬ 
 toric men who had lived in these regions before the coming of 
 the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very 
 costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was 
 unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that 
 
60 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of 
 the ADgean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men 
 who in many ways had been the superiors of the wild Greek 
 tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their 
 civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of origi¬ 
 nality. And this proved to be the case. In the late seventies of 
 
 MYCENAE IN ARGOLIS 
 
 the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycense, ruins 
 which were so old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their 
 antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a 
 small round enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful 
 treasure-trove, which had been left behind by those mysterious 
 people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and 
 who had built walls, so big and so heavy and so strong, that 
 the Greeks called them the work of the Titans, those god-like 
 
THE .EGEAN SEA 
 
 51 
 
 giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with 
 mountain peaks. 
 
 A very careful study of these many relics has done away 
 with some of the romantic features of the story. The makers 
 of these early works of art and the builders of these strong 
 fortresses were no sorcerers, but simple sailors and traders. 
 They had lived in Crete, and on the many small islands of the 
 
 .ZEgean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they had 
 turned the iEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange 
 of goods between the highly civilised east and the slowly de¬ 
 veloping wilderness of the European mainland. 
 
 For more than a thousand years they had maintained an 
 island empire which had developed a very high form of art. 
 Indeed their most important city, Cnossus, on the northeiv 
 coast of Crete, had been entirely modern in its insistence upon 
 hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly drained 
 and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians 
 
52 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
THE AEGEAN SEA 
 
 53 
 
 had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto 
 unknown bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous 
 for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The 
 cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain 
 and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so 
 greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given 
 rise to the story of the “labyrinth,” the name which we give 
 to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is 
 almost impossible to find our way out, once the front door has 
 closed upon our frightened selves. 
 
 But what finally became of this great iEgean Empire and 
 what caused its sudden downfall, that I can not tell. 
 
 The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no 
 one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their 
 history therefore is unknown to us. We have to reconstruct 
 the record of their adventures from the ruins which the 
 iEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the 
 iEgean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised race 
 which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe. 
 Unless we are very much mistaken, the savages who were 
 responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the iEgean 
 civilisation were none other than certain tribes of wandering 
 shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky penin¬ 
 sula between the Adriatic and the iEgean seas and who are 
 known to us as Greeks. 
 
THE GREEKS 
 
 MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE 
 OF THE HELLENES WAS TAKING 
 POSSESSION OF GREECE 
 
 The Pyramids were a thousand years old and were begin¬ 
 ning to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the 
 wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several cen¬ 
 turies, when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along 
 
 AN A3GEAN CITY ON THE GREEK MAINLAND 
 54 
 
THE GREEKS 
 
 55 
 
 THE ACH^ANS' TAKE AN AEGEAN CITY 
 
 the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in 
 search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, 
 after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According 
 to the old myths these were the only two human beings who 
 had escaped the great flood, which countless years before had 
 destroyed all the people of the world, when they had grown 
 so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God, who lived 
 on Mount Olympus. 
 
 Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, 
 the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest an¬ 
 cestors, said that they “did not amount to very much,” and 
 this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They 
 lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild 
 dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect 
 for other people’s rights, and they killed the natives of the 
 Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole 
 their farms and took their cattle and made their wives and 
 daughters slaves and wrote endless songs praising the courage 
 of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic advance- 
 guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponne#um, 
 
56 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw 
 the castles of the iEgeans and those they did not attack for 
 they feared the metal swords and the spears of the iEgean 
 soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat them with 
 their clumsy stone axes. 
 
 For many centuries they continued to wander from valley 
 to valley and from mountain side to mountain side. Then the 
 whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had 
 come to an end. 
 
 That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The 
 Greek farmer, living within sight of the iEgean colonies, 
 ivas finally driven by curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours. 
 He discovered that he could learn many useful things from 
 the men who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenee and 
 Tiryns. 
 
 He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered 
 the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the 
 iEgeans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes. He 
 came to understand the mysteries of navigation. He began 
 to build little boats for his own use. 
 
 And when he had learned everything the iEgeans could 
 
 THE FALL OF CNOSSUS 
 
THE GREEKS 
 
 57 
 
 teach him he turned upon his teachers and drove them back 
 to their islands. Soon afterwards he ventured forth upon the 
 sea and conquered all the cities of the .ZEgean. Finally in the 
 fifteenth century before our era he plundered and ravaged 
 Cnossus and ten centuries after their first appearance upon 
 the scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece, 
 of the .ZEgean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy, 
 the last great commercial stronghold of the older civilisation, 
 was destroyed in the eleventh century b.c. European history 
 was to begin in all seriousness. 
 
THE GREEK CITIES 
 
 THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY 
 
 STATES 
 
 We modern people love the sound of the word “big.” We 
 pride ourselves upon the fact that we belong to the “biggest” 
 country in the world and possess the “biggest” navy and grow 
 the “biggest” oranges and potatoes, and we love to live in 
 cities of “millions” of inhabitants and when we are dead we 
 are buried in the “biggest cemetery of the whole state.” 
 
 A citizen of ancient Greece, could he have heard us talk, 
 would not have known what we meant. “Moderation in all 
 things” was the ideal of his life and mere bulk did not impress 
 him at all. And this love of moderation was not merely a 
 hollow phrase used upon special occasions: it influenced the 
 life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of 
 their death. It was part of their literature and it made them 
 build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the 
 clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets 
 of their wives. It followed the crowds that went to the thea¬ 
 tre and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to 
 sin against the iron law of good taste or good sense. 
 
 The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their poli¬ 
 ticians and in their most popular athletes. When a powerful 
 runner came to Sparta and boasted that he could stand longer 
 on one foot than any other man in Hellas the people drove him 
 from the city because he prided himself upon an accomplish- 
 
 58 
 
THE GREEK CITIES 
 
 59 
 
 ment at which he could be beaten by any common goose. 
 
 “That is all very well,” you will say, “and no doubt it is a 
 great virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection, 
 but why should the Greeks have been the only people to de¬ 
 velop this quality in olden times?” For an answer I shall 
 point to the way in which the Greeks lived. 
 
 The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the “sub¬ 
 jects” of a mysterious Supreme Ruler who lived miles and 
 
 MOUNT OLYMPUS WHERE THE GODS LIVED 
 
 miles away in a dark palace and who was rarely seen by the 
 masses of the population. The Greeks on the other hand, 
 were “free citizens” of a hundred independent little “cities” 
 the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large 
 modern village. When a peasant who lived in Ur said that he 
 was a Babylonian he meant that he was one of millions of 
 other people who paid tribute to the king who at that particular 
 moment happened to be master of western Asia. But when 
 a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban 
 he spoke of a small town, which was both his home and his 
 
60 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 country and which recognised no master but the will of the 
 people in the market-place. 
 
 To the Greek, his fatherland was the place where he was 
 born; where he had spent his earliest years playing hide and 
 seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis; where he had 
 grown into manhood with a thousand other boys and girls, 
 whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own 
 schoolmates. His Fatherland was the holy soil where his father 
 and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high 
 city-walls where his wife and children lived in safety. It was 
 a complete world which covered no more than four or five 
 acres of rocky land. Don’t you see how these surroundings 
 must have influenced a man in everything he did and said and 
 thought? The people of Babylon and Assyria and Egypt 
 had been part of a vast mob. They had been lost in the multi¬ 
 tude. The Greek on the other hand had never lost touch with 
 his immediate surroundings. He never ceased to be part of a 
 little town where everybody knew every one else. He felt 
 that his intelligent neighbours were watching him. Whatever 
 he did, whether he wrote plays or made statues out of marble 
 or composed songs, he remembered that his efforts were going 
 to be judged by all the free-born citizens of his home-town who 
 knew about such things. This knowledge forced him to strive 
 after perfection, and perfection, as he had been taught from 
 'childhood, was not possible without moderation. 
 
 In this hard school, the Greeks learned to excel in many 
 things. They created new forms of government and new forms 
 of literature and new ideals in art which we have never been 
 able to surpass. They performed these miracles in little vil¬ 
 lages that covered less ground than four or five modern city 
 blocks. 
 
 And look, what finally happened! 
 
 In the fourth century before our era, Alexander of Mace¬ 
 donia conquered the world. As soon as he had done with 
 fighting, Alexander decided that he must bestow the benefits 
 of the true Greek genius upon all mankind. He took it away 
 from the little cities and the little villages and tried to make 
 
THE GREEK CITIES 
 
 61 
 
 it blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of 
 his newly acquired Empire. But the Greeks, removed from 
 the familiar sight of their own temples, removed from the well- 
 known sounds and smells of their own crooked streets, at once 
 lost the cheerful joy and the marvellous sense of moderation 
 which had inspired the work of their hands and brains while 
 they laboured for the glory of their old city-states. They be¬ 
 came cheap artisans, content with second-rate work. The day 
 the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and 
 were forced to become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit 
 died. And it has been dead ever since. 
 
GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 THE GREEKS WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO 
 TRY THE DIFFICULT EXPERIMENT OF 
 SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 In the beginning, all the Greeks had been equally rich and 
 equally poor. Every man had owned a certain number of 
 cows and sheep. His mud-hut had been his castle. He had 
 been free to come and go as he wished. Whenever it was nec¬ 
 essary to discuss matters of public importance, all the citizens 
 had gathered in the market-place. One of the older men of the 
 village was elected chairman and it was his duty to see that 
 everybody had a chance to express his views. In case of war, 
 a particularly energetic and self-confident villager was chosen 
 commander-in-chief, but the same people who had voluntarily 
 given this man the right to be their leader, claimed an equal 
 right to deprive him of his job, once the danger had been 
 averted. 
 
 But gradually the village had grown into a city. Some 
 people had worked hard and others had been lazy. A few 
 had been unlucky and still others had been just plain dishon¬ 
 est in dealing with their neighbours and had gathered wealth. 
 As a result, the city no longer consisted of a number of men 
 who were equally well-off. On the contrary it was inhabited 
 by a small class of very rich people and a large class of very 
 poor ones. 
 
 There had been another change. The old commander-in* 
 
 62 
 
GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 63 
 
 chief who had been willingly recognised as “headman” or 
 “King” because he knew how to lead his men to victory, had 
 disappeared from the scene. His place had been taken by the 
 nobles—a class of rich people who during the course of time 
 had got hold of an undue share of the farms and estates. 
 
 These nobles enjoyed many advantages over the common 
 crowd of freemen. They were able to buy the best weapons 
 which were to be found on the market of the eastern Mediter¬ 
 ranean. They had much spare time in which they could prac- 
 
 A GREEK CITY-STATE 
 
 tise the art of fighting. They lived in strongly built houses 
 and they could hire soldiers to fight for them. They were con¬ 
 stantly quarrelling among each other to decide who should 
 rule the city. The victorious nobleman then assumed a sort of 
 Kingship over all his neighbours and governed the town until 
 he in turn was killed or driven away by still another ambitious 
 nobleman. 
 
 Such a King, by the grace of his soldiers, was called a 
 “Tyrant” and during the seventh and sixth centuries before 
 our era every Greek city was for a time ruled by such Tyrants, 
 many of whom, by the way, happened to be exceedingly capa- 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 t>4* 
 
 ble men. But in the long run, this state of affairs became un¬ 
 bearable. Then attempts were made to bring about reforms 
 and out of these reforms grew the first democratic government 
 of which the world has a record. 
 
 It was early in the seventh century that the people of 
 Athens decided to do some housecleaning and give the large 
 number of freemen once more a voice in the government as 
 they were supposed to have had in the days of their Achsean 
 ancestors. They asked a man by the name of Draco to pro¬ 
 vide them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against 
 the aggressions of the rich. Draco set to work. Unfortu¬ 
 nately he was a professional lawyer and very much out of touch 
 with ordinary life. In his eyes a crime was a crime and when 
 he had finished his code, the people of Athens discovered that 
 these Draconian laws were so severe that they could not pos¬ 
 sibly be put into effect. There would not have been rope 
 enough to hang all the criminals under their new system of 
 jurisprudence which made the stealing of an apple a capital 
 offence. 
 
 The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer. 
 At last they found some one who could do that sort of thing 
 better than anybody else. His name was Solon. He belonged 
 to a noble family and he had travelled all over the world and 
 had studied the forms of government of many other countries. 
 After a careful study of the subject, Solon gave Athens a set 
 of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of 
 moderation which was part of the Greek character. He tried 
 to improve the condition of the peasant without however de¬ 
 stroying the prosperity of the nobles who were (or rather who 
 could be) of such great service to the state as soldiers. To pro¬ 
 tect the poorer classes against abuse on the part of the judges 
 (who were always elected from the class of the nobles because 
 they received no salary) Solon made a provision whereby a 
 citizen with a grievance had the right to state his case before 
 a jury of thirty of his fellow Athenians. 
 
 Most important of all, Solon forced the average freeman 
 to take a direct and personal interest in the affairs of the city. 
 
GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 65 
 
 No longer could he stay at home and say “oh, I am too busy 
 today” or “it is raining and I had better stay indoors.” He 
 was expected to do his share; to be at the meeting of the town 
 council; and carry part of the responsibility for the safety and 
 the prosperity of the state. 
 
 This government by the “demos,” the people, was often far 
 from successful. There was too much idle talk. There were 
 too many hateful and spiteful scenes between rivals for official 
 honor. But it taught the Greek people to be independent and 
 to rely upon themselves for their salvation and that was a very 
 good thing. 
 
GREEK LIFE 
 
 HOW THE GREEKS LIVED 
 
 But how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time 
 to look after their families and their business if they were 
 forever running to the market-place to discuss affairs of state ? 
 In this chapter I shall tell you. 
 
 In all matters of government, the Greek democracy recog¬ 
 nised only one class of citizens—the freemen. Every Greek 
 city was composed of a small number of free bom citizens, a 
 large number of slaves and a sprinkling of foreigners. 
 
 At rare intervals (usually during a war, when men were 
 needed for the army) the Greeks showed themselves willing to 
 confer the rights of citizenship upon the “barbarians” as they 
 called the foreigners. But this was an exception. Citizenship 
 was a matter of birth. You were an Athenian because your 
 father and your grandfather had been Athenians before you. 
 But however great your merits as a trader or a soldier, if you 
 were born of non-Athenian parents, you remained a “for¬ 
 eigner” until the end of time. 
 
 The Greek city, therefore, whenever it was not ruled by a 
 king or a tyrant, was run by and for the freemen, and this 
 would not have been possible without a large army of slaves 
 who outnumbered the free citizens at the rate of six or five 
 to one and who performed those tasks to which we modern 
 people must devote most of our time and energy if we wish to 
 provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments. 
 
 66 
 
GREEK LIFE 
 
 37 
 
 The slaves did all the cooking and baking and candlestick 
 making of the entire city. They were the tailors and the car¬ 
 penters and the jewelers and the school-teachers and the book¬ 
 keepers and they tended the store and looked after the factory 
 while the master went to the public meeting to discuss ques¬ 
 tions of war and peace or visited the theatre to see the latest 
 play of iEschylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary ideas 
 
 GREEK SOCIETY 
 
 of Euripides, who had dared to express certain doubts upon 
 the omnipotence of the great god Zeus. 
 
 Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club. All the 
 freeborn citizens were hereditary members and all the slaves 
 were hereditary servants, and waited upon the needs of their 
 masters, and it was very pleasant to be a member of the or¬ 
 ganisation. 
 
 But when we talk about slaves, we do not mean the sort of 
 
68 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 people about whom you have read in the pages of “Uncle 
 Tom’s Cabin.” It is true that the position of those slaves who 
 tilled the fields was a very unpleasant one, but the average 
 freeman who had come down in the world and who had been 
 obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miser¬ 
 able a life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were 
 more prosperous than the poorer classes of the freemen. For 
 the Greeks, who loved moderation in all things, did not like to 
 treat their slaves after the fashion which afterward was so 
 common in Rome, where a slave had as few rights as an engine 
 in a modern factory and could be thrown to the wild animals 
 upon the smallest pretext. 
 
 The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution, 
 without which no city could possibly become the home of a truly 
 civilised people. 
 
 The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are 
 performed by the business men and the professional men. As 
 for those household duties which take up so much of the time 
 of your mother and which worry your father when he comes 
 home from his office, the Greeks, who understood the value of 
 leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible mini¬ 
 mum by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity. 
 
 To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich 
 nobles spent their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked 
 all the comforts which a modern workman expects as his natu¬ 
 ral right. A Greek home consisted of four walls and a roof. 
 There was a door which led into the street but there were no 
 windows. The kitchen, the living rooms and the sleeping quar¬ 
 ters were built around an open courtyard in which there was a 
 small fountain, or a statue and a few plants to make it look 
 bright. Within this courtyard the family lived when it did not 
 rain or when it was not too cold. In one corner of the yard the 
 cook (who was a slave) prepared the meal and in another 
 corner, the teacher (who was also a slave) taught the children 
 the alpha beta gamma and the tables of multiplication and in 
 still another corner the lady of the house, who rarely left her 
 
THE TEMPLE 
 

 
GREEK LIFE 
 
 69 
 
 domain (since it was not considered good form for a married 
 woman to be seen on the street too often) was repairing her 
 husband’s coat with her seamstresses (who were slaves,) and 
 in the little office, right off the door, the master was inspecting 
 the accounts which the overseer of his farm (who was a slave) 
 had just brought to him. 
 
 When dinner was ready the family came together but the 
 meal was a very simple one and did not take much time. The 
 Greeks seem to have regarded eating as an unavoidable evil 
 and not a pastime, which kills many dreary hours and eventu¬ 
 ally kills many dreary people. They lived on bread and on 
 wine, with a little meat and some green vegetables. They 
 drank water only when nothing else was available because 
 they did not think it very healthy. They loved to call on each 
 other for dinner, but our idea of a festive meal, where every¬ 
 body is supposed to eat much more than is good for him, would 
 have disgusted them. They came together at the table for 
 the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water, 
 but as they were moderate people they despised those who 
 drank too much. 
 
 The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room 
 also dominated their choice of clothes. They liked to be clean 
 and well groomed, to have their hair and beards neatly cut, 
 to feel their bodies strong with the exercise and the swimming 
 of the gymnasium, but they never followed the Asiatic fashion 
 which prescribed loud colours and strange patterns. They 
 wore a long white coat and they managed to look as smart as 
 a modern Italian officer in his long blue cape. 
 
 They loved to see their wives wear ornaments but they 
 thought it very vulgar to display their wealth (or their wives) 
 in public and whenever the women left their home they were as 
 inconspicuous as possible. 
 
 In short, the story of Greek life is a story not only of mod¬ 
 eration but also of simplicity. “Things,” chairs and tables and 
 books and houses and carriages, are apt to take up a great 
 deal of their owner’s time. In the end they invariably make 
 
70 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 him their slave and his hours are spent looking after their 
 wants, keeping them polished and brushed and painted. The 
 Greeks, before everything else, wanted to be “free,” both in 
 mind and in body. That they might maintain their liberty, and 
 be truly free in spirit, they reduced their daily needs to the 
 lowest possible point. 
 
THE GREEK THEATRE 
 
 THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST 
 FORM OF PUBLIC AMUSEMENT 
 
 At a very early stage of their history the Greeks had be¬ 
 gun to collect the poems, which had been written in honor of 
 their brave ancestors who had driven the Pelasgians out of 
 Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy. These poems were 
 recited in public and everybody came to listen to them. But 
 the theatre, the form of entertainment which has become almost 
 a necessary part of our own lives, did not grow out of these 
 recited heroic tales. It had such a curious origin that I must 
 tell you something about it in a separate chapter. 
 
 The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every 
 year they held solemn processions in honor of Dionysos the 
 God of the wine. As everybody in Greece drank wine (the 
 Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose of swimming 
 and sailing) this particular Divinity was as popular as a God 
 of the Soda-Fountain would be in our own land. 
 
 And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the 
 vineyards, amidst a merry mob of Satyrs (strange creatures 
 who were half man and half goat), the crowd that joined the 
 procession used to wear goat-skins and to hee-haw like real 
 billy-goats. The Greek word for goat is “tragos” and the 
 Greek word for singer is “oidos.” The singer who meh-mehed 
 like a goat therefore was called a “tragos-oidos” or goat singer, 
 and it is this strange name which developed into the modern 
 
 71 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 72 
 
 Word “Tragedy,” which means in the theatrical sense a piece 
 with an unhappy ending, just as Comedy (which really means 
 the singing of something “comos” or gay) is the name given 
 to a play which ends happily. 
 
 But how, you will ask, did this noisy chorus of masquer¬ 
 aders, stamping around like wild goats, ever develop into the 
 noble tragedies which have filled the theatres of the world for 
 almost two thousand years? 
 
 The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is 
 really very simple as I shall show you in a moment. 
 
 The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and 
 attracted large crowds of spectators who stood along the side 
 of the road and laughed. But soon this business of hee-hawing 
 grew tiresome and the Greeks thought dullness an evil only 
 comparable to ugliness or sickness. They asked for some¬ 
 thing more entertaining. Then an inventive young poet from 
 the village of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved 
 a tremendous success. He made one of the members of the 
 goat-chorus step forward and engage in conversation with the 
 leader of the musicians who marched at the head of the parade 
 playing upon their pipes of Pan. This individual was al¬ 
 lowed to step out of line. He waved his arms and gesticulated 
 while he spoke (that is to say he “acted” while the others merely 
 stood by and sang) and he asked a lot of questions, which the 
 bandmaster answered according to the roll of papyrus upon 
 which the poet had written down these answers before the 
 show began. 
 
 This rough and ready conversation—the dialogue—which 
 told the story of Dionysos or one of the other Gods, became 
 at once popular with the crowd. Henceforth every Diony¬ 
 sian procession had an “acted scene” and very soon the “acting” 
 was considered more important than the procession and the 
 meh-mehing. 
 
 iEschylus, the most successful of all “tragedians” who wrote 
 no less than eighty plays during his long life (from 526 to 455) 
 made a bold step forward when he introduced two “actors” 
 instead of one. A generation later Sophocles increased the 
 
THE GREEK THEATRE 
 
 73 
 
 number of actors to three. When Euripides began to write 
 his terrible tragedies in the middle of the fifth century, b.c., 
 he was allowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristo¬ 
 phanes wrote those famous comedies in which he poked fun at 
 everybody and everything, including the Gods of Mount Olym¬ 
 pus, the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere by¬ 
 standers who were lined up behind the principal performers 
 and who sang “this is a terrible world” while the hero in the 
 foreground committed a crime against the will of the Gods. 
 
 This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a 
 proper setting, and soon every Greek city owned a theatre, cut 
 out of the rock of a nearby hill. The spectators sat upon 
 wooden benches and faced a wide circle (our present orches¬ 
 tra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a seat). 
 Upon this half-circle, which was the stage, the actors and the 
 chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where 
 they made up with large clay masks which hid their faces and 
 which showed the spectators whether the actors were supposed 
 to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping. The Greek 
 word for tent is “skene” and that is the reason why we talk 
 of the “scenery” of the stage. 
 
 When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the 
 people took it very seriously and never went to the theatre to 
 give their minds a vacation. A new play became as impor¬ 
 tant an event as an election and a successful playwright was 
 received with greater honors than those bestowed upon a gen¬ 
 eral who had just returned from a famous victory. 
 
THE PERSIAN WARS 
 
 HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE 
 AGAINST ASIATIC INVASION AND DROVE 
 THE PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN 
 SEA 
 
 The Greeks had learned the art of trading from the 
 -ZEgeans who had been the pupils of the Phoenicians. They 
 had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern. They had 
 even improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general 
 use of money in dealing with foreign customers. In the sixth 
 century before our era they had established themselves firmly 
 along the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away 
 trade from the Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoeni¬ 
 cians of course did not like but they were not strong enough to 
 risk a war with their Greek competitors. They sat and waited 
 nor did they wait in vain. 
 
 In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe 
 of Persian shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath and 
 had conquered the greater part of western Asia. The Per¬ 
 sians were too civilised to plunder their new subjects. They 
 contented themselves with a yearly tribute. When they 
 leached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek 
 colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian Kings as their over- 
 Lords and pay them a stipulated tax. The Greek colonies 
 objected. The Persians insisted. Then the Greek colonies 
 
THE PERSIAN WARS 
 
 75 
 
 appealed to the home-country and the stage was set for a 
 quarrel. 
 
 For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the 
 Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and 
 bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be the 
 patient slaves of the mighty Persian Kings. 
 
 Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety be¬ 
 cause their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the 
 
 THE PERSIAN FLEET IS DESTROYED NEAR MOUNT ATHOS 
 
 iEgean. But here their old enemies, the Phoenicians, stepped 
 forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians. If the 
 Persian King would provide the soldiers, the Phoenicians would 
 guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry them to 
 Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and 
 Asia made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe. 
 
 As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers 
 to the Greeks asking for “earth and water” as a token of their 
 submission. The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into 
 the nearest well where they would find both “earth and water” 
 in large abundance and thereafter of course peace was im¬ 
 possible. 
 
76 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 But the Gods of High Olympus watched over their chil¬ 
 dren and when the Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops 
 was near Mount Athos, the Storm-God blew his cheeks until 
 he almost hurst the veins of his brow, and the fleet was de¬ 
 stroyed by a terrible hurricane and the Persians were all 
 drowned. 
 
 Two years later more Persians came. This time they 
 sailed across the iEgean Sea and landed near the village of 
 
 THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 
 
 Marathon. As soon as the Athenians heard this they sent 
 their army of ten thousand men to guard the hills that sur¬ 
 rounded the Marathonian plain. At the same time they des¬ 
 patched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta 
 was envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her 
 assistance. The other Greek cities followed her example with 
 the exception of tiny Plataea which sent a thousand men. On 
 the twelfth of September of the year 490, Miltiades, the Athen¬ 
 ian commander, threw this little army against the hordes of the 
 
THE PERSIAN WARS 
 
 77 
 
 Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of 
 arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disor¬ 
 ganised Asiatic troops who had never been called upon to re¬ 
 sist such an enemy. 
 
 That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow 
 red with the flames of burning ships. Anxiously they waited 
 for news. At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the 
 road that led to the North. It was Pheidippides, the runner. 
 He stumbled and gasped for his end was near. Only a few 
 days before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. ITe 
 had hastened to join Miltiades. That morning he had taken 
 part in the attack and later he had volunteered to carry the 
 news of victory to his beloved city. The people saw him fall 
 and they rushed forward to support him. “We have won,” 
 he whispered and then he died, a glorious death which made him 
 envied of all men. 
 
 As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land 
 near Athens but they found the coast guarded and disap¬ 
 peared, and once more the land of Hellas was at peace. 
 
 Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks 
 were not idle. They knew that a final attack was to be expected 
 but they did not agree upon the best way to avert the danger. 
 Some people wanted to increase the army. Others said that 
 a strong fleet was necessary for success. The two parties led by 
 Aristides (for the army) and Themistocles (the leader of the 
 bigger-navy men) fought each other bitterly and nothing was 
 done until Aristides was exiled. Then Themistocles had his 
 chance and he built all the ships he could and turned the Piraeus 
 into a strong naval base. 
 
 In the year 481 b.c. a tremendous Persian army appeared 
 in Thessaly, a province of northern Greece. In this hour of 
 danger, Sparta, the great military city of Greece, was elected 
 commander-in-chief. But the Spartans cared little what hap¬ 
 pened to northern Greece provided their own country was not 
 invaded. They neglected to fortify the passes that led into 
 Greece. 
 
78 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 A small detachment of Spar¬ 
 tans under Leonidas had been 
 told to guard the narrow road be¬ 
 tween the high mountains and 
 the sea which connected Thessaly 
 with the southern provinces. 
 Leonidas obeyed his orders. He 
 fought and held the pass with 
 unequalled bravery. But a 
 traitor by the name of Ephialtes 
 who knew the little byways of 
 Malis guided a regiment of Per¬ 
 sians through the hills and made 
 it possible for them to attack 
 Leonidas in the rear. Near the 
 Warm Wells— the Thermopylae 
 a terrible battle was fought. 
 When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead 
 under the corpses of their enemies. 
 
 But the pass had been lost and the greater part of Greece 
 fell into the hands of the Persians. They marched upon 
 Athens, threw the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis and 
 
 THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE 
 
THE PERSIAN WARS 
 
 79 
 
 burned the city. The people fled to the Island of Salamis. All 
 seemed lost. But on the 20th of September of the year 480 
 Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the 
 narrow straits which separated the Island of Salamis from the 
 mainland and within a few hours he destroyed three quarters 
 of the Persian ships. 
 
 In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught. 
 
 THE PERSIANS BURN ATHENS 
 
 Xerxes was forced to retire. The next year, so he decreed, 
 would bring a final decision. He took his troops to Thessaly 
 and there he waited for spring. 
 
 But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of 
 the hour. They left the safe shelter of the wall which they had 
 built across the isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership 
 of Pausanias they marched against Mardonius the Persian 
 general. The united Greeks (some one hundred thousand men 
 from a dozen different cities) attacked the three hundred thou- 
 
80 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy 
 Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows. 
 The Persians were defeated, as they had been at Marathon, and 
 this time they left for good. By a strange coincidence, the 
 same day that the Greek armies won their victory near Plataea, 
 the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy’s fleet near Cape My- 
 cale in Asia Minor. 
 
 Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end. 
 Athens had covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought 
 bravely and well. If these two cities had been able to come to 
 an agreement, if they had been willing to forget their little 
 jealousies, they might have become the leaders of a strong and 
 united Hellas. 
 
 But alas, they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm 
 to slip by, and the same opportunity never returned. 
 
ATHENS vs. SPARTA 
 
 HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG 
 AND DISASTROUS WAR FOR THE LEADER¬ 
 SHIP OF GREECE 
 
 Athens and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people 
 spoke a common language. In every other respect they were 
 different. Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city 
 exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, willing to look at 
 the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on the other 
 hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the 
 surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought. 
 Athens was a city of busy trade. Sparta was an armed camp 
 where people were soldiers for the sake of being soldiers. The 
 people of Athens loved to sit in the sun and discuss poetry or 
 listen to the wise words of a philosopher. The Spartans, on the 
 other hand, never wrote a single line that was considered litera¬ 
 ture, but they knew how to fight, they liked to fight, and they 
 sacrificed all human emotions to their ideal of military pre¬ 
 paredness. 
 
 No wonder that these sombre Spartans viewed the success 
 of Athens with malicious hate. The energy which the defence of 
 the common home had developed in Athens was now used for 
 purposes of a more peaceful nature. The Acropolis was re¬ 
 built and was made into a marble shrine to the Goddess Athena. 
 Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, sent far and 
 wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to 
 
 81 
 
82 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 make the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more 
 worthy of their home. At the same time he kept a watchful 
 eye on Sparta and built high walls which connected Athens 
 with the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day. 
 
 An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led 
 to the final conflict. For thirty years the war between Athens 
 and Sparta continued. It ended in a terrible disaster for 
 Athens. 
 
 During the third year of the war the plague had entered 
 the city. More than half of the people and Pericles, the great 
 leader, had been killed. The plague was followed by a period 
 of bad and untrustworthy leadership. A brilliant young fel¬ 
 low by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor of the 
 popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the Spartan 
 colony of Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and 
 everything was ready. But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street 
 brawl and was forced to flee. The general who succeeded him 
 was a bungler. First he lost his ships and then he lost his 
 army, and the few surviving Athenians were thrown into the 
 stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died from hunger and 
 thirst. 
 
 The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens. 
 The city was doomed. After a long siege the town surrendered 
 in April of the year 404. The high walls were demolished. 
 The navy was taken away by the Spartans. Athens ceased to 
 exist as the center of the great colonial empire which it had 
 conquered during the days of its prosperity. But that won¬ 
 derful desire to learn and to know and to investigate which 
 had distinguished her free citizens during the days of great¬ 
 ness and prosperity did not perish with the walls and the 
 ships. It continued to live. It became even more brilliant. 
 
 Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece. 
 But now, as the home of the first great university the city be¬ 
 gan to influence the minds of intelligent people far beyond 
 the narrow frontiers of Hellas, 
 
ALEXANDER THE GREAT 
 
 ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTAB¬ 
 LISHES A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE, AND 
 WHAT BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION 
 
 W hen the Achgeans had left their homes along the banks of 
 the Danube to look for pastures new, they had spent some 
 time among the mountains of Macedonia. Ever since, the 
 Greeks had maintained certain more or less formal relations 
 with the people of this northern country. The Macedonians 
 from their side had kept themselves well informed about con¬ 
 ditions in Greece. 
 
 Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had fin¬ 
 ished their disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas, that 
 Macedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man by 
 the name of Philip. He admired the Greek spirit in letters and 
 art but he despised the Greek lack of self-control in political 
 affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly good people waste its 
 men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the 
 difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and then 
 he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he 
 meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes 
 had paid the Greeks one hundred and fifty years before. 
 
 Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start 
 upon this well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the 
 destruction of Athens was left to Philip’s son Alexander, the 
 beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of all Greek teachers. 
 
 83 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 S4 
 
 Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the 
 year 334 b.c. Seven years later he reached India. In the 
 meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek 
 merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped 
 by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the 
 Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king—he had 
 overthrown the Persian empire—he had given orders to re¬ 
 build Babylon—he had led his troops into the heart of the 
 Himalayan mountains and had made the entire world a Mace¬ 
 donian province and dependency. Then he stopped and an¬ 
 nounced even more ambitious plans. 
 
 The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influ¬ 
 ence of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek 
 language—they must live in cities built after a Greek model. 
 The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The mili¬ 
 tary camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres of the 
 newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the 
 flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when sud¬ 
 denly Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old 
 palace of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323. 
 
 Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile 
 clay of a higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish 
 ambitions and his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable 
 service. His Empire did not long survive him. A number of 
 ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves. 
 But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world 
 brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge. 
 
 They maintained their independence until the Romans 
 added western Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The 
 strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek, 
 part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell to the 
 Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got 
 such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its in¬ 
 fluence in our own lives this very day. 
 
GREECE 
 
IV-• 
 
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 1 . 
 
 
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 % 
 
 
 V 
 
 I 
 
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 i 
 
 t 
 
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 ’i 
 
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A SUMMARY 
 
 A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20 
 
 Thus far, from the top of our high tower we have been 
 looking eastward. But from this time on, the history of Egypt 
 and Mesopotamia is going to grow less interesting and I must 
 take you to study the western landscape. 
 
 Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to 
 ourselves what we have seen. 
 
 First of all I showed you prehistoric man—a creature very 
 simple in his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I 
 told you how he was the most defenceless of the many animals 
 that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents, 
 but being possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed to 
 hold his own. 
 
 Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold 
 weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was 
 obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished 
 to survive. Since, however, that “wish to survive” w r as (and is) 
 the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to 
 the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to 
 work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people man¬ 
 age to exist through the long cold spells which killed many 
 ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and com¬ 
 fortable once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of 
 things which gave him such great advantages over his less in¬ 
 telligent neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious 
 
86 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 one during the first half million years of man’s residence upon 
 this planet) became a very remote one. 
 
 I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly 
 plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not 
 well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile 
 rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of 
 civilisation. 
 
 Then I showed you Mesopotamia, “the land between the 
 rivers,” which was the second great school of the human race. 
 And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the iEgean 
 Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old 
 east to the young west, where lived the Greeks. 
 
 Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hel¬ 
 lenes, who thousands of years before had left the heart of 
 Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed 
 their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since 
 then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told 
 you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states, 
 where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured 
 (that is a big word, but you can “figure out” what it means) 
 into something quite new, something that was much nobler and 
 finer than anything that had gone before. 
 
 When you look at the map you will see how by this time 
 civilisation has described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt, 
 and by way of Mesopotamia and the ADgean Islands it moves 
 westward until it reaches the European continent. The first 
 four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoeni¬ 
 cians and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember 
 that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peo¬ 
 ples) have carried the torch that was to illuminate the world. 
 They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who be¬ 
 come the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the 
 Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward 
 along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves 
 the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when 
 the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) pos¬ 
 session. 
 
A SUMMARY 
 
 87 
 
 This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible con¬ 
 flict between the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises 
 the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian- 
 Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to the furthermost corners of 
 the European continent, where it serves as the foundation upon 
 which our modern society is based. 
 
 I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold 
 of these few principles, the rest of our history will become a 
 great deal simpler. The maps will make clear what the words 
 fail to tell. And after this short intermission, we go back to 
 our story and give you an account of the famous war between 
 Carthage and Rome. 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE 
 NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE 
 INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE 
 WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH 
 OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE 
 WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTH¬ 
 AGE WAS DESTROYED 
 
 The little Phoenician trading post of Kart-hadshat stood 
 on a low hill which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of 
 water ninety miles wide which separates Africa from Europe. 
 It was an ideal spot for a commercial centre. Almost too ideal. 
 It grew too fast and became too rich. When in the sixth cen¬ 
 tury before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed 
 Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with the Mother 
 Country and became an independent state—the great western 
 advance-post of the Semitic races. 
 
 Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits 
 which for a thousand years had been characteristic of the 
 Phoenicians. It was a vast business-house, protected by a 
 strong navy, indifferent to most of the finer aspects of life. 
 The city and the surrounding country and the distant colonies 
 were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group of 
 rich men. The Greek word for rich is “ploutos” and the Greeks 
 
 88 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 89 
 
 called such a government by “rich men” a “Plutocracy.” Car¬ 
 thage was a plutocracy and the real power of the state lay in 
 the hands of a dozen big ship-owners and mine-owners and 
 merchants who met in the back room of an office and regarded 
 their common Fatherland as a business enterprise which ought 
 
 CARTHAGE 
 
 to yield them a decent profit. They were however wide awake 
 and full of energy and worked very hard. 
 
 As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her 
 neighbours increased until the greater part of the African 
 coast, Spain and certain regions of France were Carthaginian 
 possessions, and paid tribute, taxes and dividends to the mighty 
 city on the African Sea. 
 
 Of course, such a “plutocracy” was forever at the mercy of 
 
90 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the crowd. As long as there was plenty of work and wages 
 were high, the majority of the citizens were quite contented, 
 allowed their “betters” to rule them and asked no embarrassing 
 questions. But when no ships left the harbor, when no ore 
 was brought to the smelting-ovens, when dockworkers and 
 
 SPHERES OF INFLUENCE 
 
 stevedores were thrown out of employment, then there were 
 grumblings and there was a demand that the popular assembly 
 be called together as in the olden days when Carthage had 
 been a self-governing republic. 
 
 To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged 
 to keep the business of the town going at full speed. They 
 had managed to do this very successfully for almost five hun- 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 91 
 
 dred years when they were greatly disturbed by certain rumors 
 which reached them from the western coast of Italy. It was 
 said that a little village on the banks of the Tiber had sud¬ 
 denly risen to great power and was making itself the acknowl¬ 
 edged leader of all the Latin tribes who inhabited central Italy. 
 It was also said that this village, which by the way was called 
 Rome, intended to build ships and go after the commerce of 
 Sicily and the southern coast of France. 
 
 Carthage could not possibly tolerate such competition. The 
 young rival must be destroyed lest the Carthaginian rulers 
 lose their prestige as the absolute rulers of the western Medi¬ 
 terranean. The rumors were duly investigated and in a gen¬ 
 eral way these were the facts that came to light. 
 
 The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civili¬ 
 sation. Whereas in Greece all the good harbours faced east¬ 
 ward and enjoyed a full view of the busy islands of the zEgean, 
 the west coast of Italy contemplated nothing more exciting 
 than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The country 
 was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants 
 and the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession 
 of their hills and their marshy plains. 
 
 The first serious invasion of this land came from the north. 
 At an unknown date certain Indo-European tribes had man¬ 
 aged to find their way through the passes of the Alps and had 
 pushed southward until they had filled the heel and the toe of 
 the famous Italian boot with their villages and their flocks. 
 Of these early conquerors we know nothing. No Homer sang 
 their glory. Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome 
 (written eight hundred years later when the little city had be¬ 
 come the centre of an Empire) are fairy stories and do not be¬ 
 long in a history. Romulus and Remus jumping across each 
 other’s walls (I always forget who jumped across whose wall) 
 make entertaining reading, but the foundation of the City of 
 Rome was a much more prosaic affair. Rome began as a thou¬ 
 sand American cities have done, by being a convenient place 
 for barter and horse-trading. It lay in the heart of the plains 
 
92 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 tbbL'r»B. cry of Ha ppev 
 
 X T/ie £oj?x AC/toss the fr/t/a/s 
 
 ZT T/Je Toljl.- Hj>M /w/} 
 
 JC 
 
 Tue Fonrmej> cry J>a/w i/^at a /?<v^ , 
 
 HOW THE CITY OF ROME HAPPENED 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 93 
 
 of central Italy. The Tiber provided direct access to the sea. 
 The land-road from north to south found here a convenient 
 ford which could be used all the year around. And seven little 
 hills along the banks of the river offered the inhabitants a safe 
 shelter against their enemies who lived in the mountains and 
 those who lived beyond the horizon of the nearby sea. 
 
 The mountaineers were called the Sabines. They were a 
 rough crowd with an unholy desire for easy plunder. But they 
 were very backward. They used stone axes and wooden 
 shields and were no match for the Romans with their steel 
 swords. The sea-people on the other hand were dangerous 
 foes. They were called the Etruscans and they were (and 
 still are) one of the great mysteries of history. Nobody knew 
 (or knows) whence they came; who they were; what had driven 
 them away from their original homes. We have found the re¬ 
 mains of their cities and their cemeteries and their waterworks 
 all along the Italian coast. We are familiar with their inscrip¬ 
 tions. But as no one has ever been able to decipher the Etrus¬ 
 can alphabet, these written messages are, so far, merely an¬ 
 noying and not at all useful. 
 
 Our best guess is that the Etruscans came originally from 
 Asia Minor and that a great war or a pestilence in that coun¬ 
 try had forced them to go away and seek a new home elsewhere. 
 Whatever the reason for their coming, the Etruscans played a 
 great role in history. They carried the pollen of the ancient 
 civilisation from the east to the west and they taught the 
 Romans who, as we know, came from the north, the first prin¬ 
 ciples of architecture and street-building and fighting and art 
 and cookery and medicine and astronomy. 
 
 But just as the Greeks had not loved their iEgean teachers, 
 in this same way did the Romans hate their Etruscan masters. 
 They got rid of them as soon as they could and the oppor¬ 
 tunity offered itself when Greek merchants discovered the 
 commercial possibilities of Italy and when the first Greek 
 vessels reached Rome. The Greeks came to trade, but they 
 stayed to instruct. They found the tribes who inhabited the 
 
94 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Roman country-side (and who were called the Latins) quite 
 willing to learn such things as might be of practical use. At 
 once they understood the great benefit that could be derived 
 from a written alphabet and they copied that of the Greeks. 
 They also understood the commercial advantages of a well- 
 regulated system of coins and measures and weights. Eventu¬ 
 ally the Romans swallowed Greek civilisation hook, line and 
 sinker. 
 
 They even welcomed the Gods of the Greeks to their 
 country. Zeus was taken to Rome where he became known as 
 Jupiter and the other divinities followed him. The Roman Gods 
 however never were quite like their cheerful cousins who had ac¬ 
 companied the Greeks on their road through life and through 
 history. The Roman Gods were State Functionaries. Each 
 one managed his own department with great prudence and a 
 deep sense of justice, but in turn he was exact in demanding the 
 obedience of his worshippers. This obedience the Romans ren¬ 
 dered with scrupulous care. But they never established the 
 cordial personal relations and that charming friendship which 
 had existed between the old Hellenes and the mighty residents 
 of the high Olympian peak. 
 
 The Romans did not imitate the Greek form of govern¬ 
 ment, but being of the same Indo-European stock as the peo¬ 
 ple of Hellas, the early history of Rome resembles that of 
 Athens and the other Greek cities. They did not find it diffi¬ 
 cult to get rid of their kings, the descendants of the ancient 
 tribal chieftains. But once the kings had been driven from 
 the city, the Romans were forced to bridle the power of the 
 nobles, and it took many centuries before they managed to 
 establish a system which gave every free citizen of Rome a 
 chance to take a personal interest in the affairs of his town. 
 
 Thereafter the Romans enjoyed one great advantage over 
 the Greeks. They managed the affairs of their country with¬ 
 out making too many speeches. They were less imaginative 
 than the Greeks and they preferred an ounce of action to a 
 pound of words. They understood the tendency of the multi- 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 95 
 
 tude (the “plebs,” as the assemblage of free citizens was called) 
 only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They 
 therefore placed the actual business of running the city into 
 the hands of two “consuls” who were assisted by a council of 
 Elders, called the Senate (because the word “senex” means an 
 old man). As a matter of custom and practical advantage the 
 senators were elected from the nobility. But their power had 
 been strictly defined. 
 
 Rome at one time had passed through the same sort of 
 struggle between the poor and the rich which had forced 
 Athens to adopt the laws of Draco and Solon. In Rome this 
 conflict had occurred in the fifth century b. c. As a result the 
 freemen had obtained a written code of laws which protected 
 them against the despotism of the aristocratic judges by the 
 institution of the “Tribune.” These Tribunes were city-magis¬ 
 trates, elected by the freemen. They had the right to protect 
 any citizen against those actions of the government officials 
 which were thought to be unjust. A consul had the right to 
 condemn a man to death, but if the case had not been abso¬ 
 lutely proved the Tribune could interfere and save the poor 
 fellow’s life. 
 
 But when I use the word Rome, I seem to refer to a little 
 city of a few thousand inhabitants. And the real strength of 
 Rome lay in the country districts outside her walls. And it 
 was in the government of these outlying provinces that Rome 
 at an early age showed her wonderful gift as a colonising 
 power. 
 
 In very early times Rome had been the only strongly for¬ 
 tified city in central Italy, but it had always offered a hospitable 
 refuge to other Latin tribes who happened to be in danger of 
 attack. The Latin neighbours had recognised the advantages 
 of a close union with such a powerful friend and they had tried 
 to find a basis for some sort of defensive and offensive alli¬ 
 ance. Other nations, Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, 
 even Greeks, would have insisted upon a treaty of submission 
 on the part of the “barbarians.” The Romans did nothing of 
 
96 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the sort. They gave the “outsider” a chance to become part¬ 
 ners in a common “res publica”—or common-wealth. 
 
 “You want to join us,” they said. “Very well, go ahead 
 and join. We shall treat you as if you were full-fledged citi¬ 
 zens of Rome. In return for this privilege we expect you to 
 fight for our city, the mother of us all, whenever it shall be nec¬ 
 essary.” 
 
 The “outsider” appreciated this generosity and he showed 
 his gratitude by his unswerving loyalty. 
 
 Whenever a Greek city had been attacked, the foreign resi¬ 
 dents had moved out as quickly as they could. Why defend 
 something which meant nothing to them but a temporary 
 boarding house in which they were tolerated as long as they 
 paid their bills? But when the enemy was before the gates 
 of Rome, all the Latins rushed to her defence. It was their 
 Mother who was in danger. It was their true “home” even if 
 they lived a hundred miles away and had never seen the walls 
 of the sacred Hills. 
 
 No defeat and no disaster could change this sentiment. In 
 the beginning of the fourth century b.c. the wild Gauls forced 
 their way into Italy. They had defeated the Roman army near 
 the River Allia and had marched upon the city. They had 
 taken Rome and then they expected that the people would 
 come and sue for peace. They waited, but nothing happened. 
 After a short time the Gauls found themselves surrounded by 
 a hostile population which made it impossible for them to obtain 
 supplies. After seven months, hunger forced them to with¬ 
 draw. The policy of Rome to treat the “foreigner” on equal 
 terms had proved a great success and Rome stood stronger than 
 ever before. 
 
 This short account of the early history of Rome shows you 
 the enormous difference between the Roman ideal of a healthy 
 state, and that of the ancient world which was embodied in the 
 town of Carthage. The Romans counted upon the cheerful 
 and hearty co-operation between a number of “equal citi¬ 
 zens.” The Carthaginians, following the example of Egypt 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 97 
 
 and western Asia, insisted upon the unreasoning (and there¬ 
 fore unwilling) obedience of “Subjects” and when these failed 
 they hired professional soldiers to do their fighting for them. 
 
 You will now understand why Carthage was bound to fear 
 such a clever and powerful enemy and why the plutocracy of 
 Carthage was only too willing to pick a quarrel that they might 
 destroy the dangerous rival before it was too late. 
 
 But the Carthaginians, being good business men, knew that 
 
 it never pays to rush matters. They proposed to the Romans 
 that their respective cities draw two circles on the map and 
 that each town claim one of these circles as her own “sphere 
 of influence” and promise to keep out of the other fellow’s cir¬ 
 cle. The agreement was promptly made and was broken just 
 as promptly when both sides thought it wise to send their 
 armies to Sicily where a rich soil and a bad government in¬ 
 vited foreign interference. 
 
 The war which followed (the so-called first Punic War) 
 lasted twenty-four years. It was fought out on the high seas 
 and in the beginning it seemed that the experienced Car- 
 
98 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 thaginian navy would defeat the newly created Roman fleet. 
 Following their ancient tactics, the Carthaginian ships would 
 either ram the enemy vessels or by a bold attack from the side 
 they would break their oars and would then kill the sailors of 
 the helpless vessel with their arrows and with fire balls. But 
 Roman engineers invented a new craft which carried a board¬ 
 ing bridge across which the Roman infantrymen stormed the 
 hostile ship. Then there was a sudden end to Carthaginian 
 victories. At the battle of Mylae their fleet was badly defeated. 
 Carthage was obliged to sue for peace, and Sicily became part 
 of the Roman domains. 
 
 Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. Rome (in 
 quest of copper) had taken the island of Sardinia. Carthage 
 (in quest of silver) thereupon occupied all of southern Spain. 
 This made Carthage a direct neighbour of the Romans. The 
 latter did not like this at all and they ordered their troops to 
 cross the Pyrenees and watch the Carthaginian army of occu¬ 
 pation. 
 
 The stage was set for the second outbreak between the two 
 rivals. Once more a Greek colony was the pretext for a war. 
 The Carthaginians were besieging Saguntum on the east coast 
 of Spain. The Saguntians appealed to Rome and Rome, as 
 usual, was willing to help. The Senate promised the help of 
 the Latin armies, but the preparation for this expedition took 
 some time, and meanwhile Saguntum had been taken and had 
 been destroyed. This had been done in direct opposition to 
 the will of Rome. The Senate decided upon war. One Roman 
 army was to cross the African sea and make a landing on Car¬ 
 thaginian soil. A second division was to keep the Carthaginian 
 armies occupied in Spain to prevent them from rushing to the 
 aid of the home town. It was an excellent plan and every¬ 
 body expected a great victory. But the Gods had decided 
 otherwise. 
 
 It was the fall of the year 218 before the birth of Christ 
 and the Roman army which was to attack the Carthaginians in 
 Spain had left Italy. People were eagerly waiting for news of 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 99 
 
 HANNIBAL CROSSES THE ALPS 
 
100 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 an easy and complete victory when a terrible rumour began to 
 spread through the plain of the Po. Wild mountaineers, their 
 lips trembling with fear, told of hundreds of thousands of 
 brown men accompanied by strange beasts “each one as big as 
 a hour^e,” who had suddenly emerged from the clouds of snow 
 which surrounded the old Graian pass through which Hercules, 
 thousands of years before, had driven the oxen of Geryon on 
 his way from Spain to Greece. Soon an endless stream of 
 bedraggled refugees appeared before the gates of Rome, with 
 more complete details. Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, with 
 fifty thousand soldiers, nine thousand horsemen and thirty- 
 seven fighting elephants, had crossed the Pyrenees. He had 
 defeated the Roman army of Scipio on the banks of the Rhone 
 and he had guided his army safely across the mountain passes 
 of the Alps although it was October and the roads were thickly 
 covered with snow and ice. Then he had joined forces with 
 the Gauls and together they had defeated a second Roman 
 army just before they crossed the Trebia and laid siege to 
 Placentia, the northern terminus of the road which connected 
 Rome with the province of the Alpine districts. 
 
 The Senate, surprised but calm and energetic as usual, 
 hushed up the news of these many defeats and sent two fresh 
 armies to stop the invader. Hannibal managed to surprise 
 these troops on a narrow road along the shores of the Trasi- 
 mene Lake and there he killed all the Roman officers and most 
 of their men. This time there was a panic among the people 
 of Rome, but the Senate kept its nerve. A third army was 
 organised and the command was given to Quintus Fabius Max¬ 
 imus with full power to act “as was necessary to save the state.” 
 
 Fabius knew that he must be very careful lest all be lost. 
 His raw and untrained men, the last available soldiers, were 
 no match for Hannibal’s veterans. He refused to accept battle 
 but forever he followed Hannibal, destroyed everything eat¬ 
 able, destroyed the roads, attacked small detachments and gen¬ 
 erally weakened the morale of the Carthaginian troops by a 
 most distressing and annoying form of guerilla warfare. 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 101 
 
 HANNIBAL AND THE C. 
 
102 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Such methods however did not satisfy the fearsome crowds 
 who had found safety behind the walls of Rome. They wanted 
 “action.” Something must be done and must be done quickly. 
 A popular hero by the name of Varro, the sort of man who 
 went about the city telling everybody how much better he could 
 do things than slow old Fabius, the “Delayer,” was made 
 commander-in-chief by popular acclamation. At the battle of 
 Cannae (216) he suffered the most terrible defeat of Roman 
 history. More than seventy thousand men were killed. Han¬ 
 nibal was master of all Italy. 
 
 He marched from one end of the peninsula to the other, 
 proclaiming himself the “deliverer from the yoke of Rome” 
 and asking the different provinces to join him in warfare upon 
 the mother city. Then once more the wisdom of Rome bore 
 noble fruit. With the exceptions of Capua and Syracuse, all 
 Roman cities remained loyal. Hannibal, the deliverer, 
 found himself opposed by the people whose friend he pre¬ 
 tended to be. He was far away from home and did not like 
 the situation. He sent messengers to Carthage to ask for fresh 
 supplies and new men. Alas, Carthage could not send him 
 either. 
 
 The Romans with their boarding-bridges, were the mas¬ 
 ters of the sea. Hannibal must help himself as best he could. 
 He continued to defeat the Roman armies that were sent out 
 against him, but his own numbers were decreasing rapidly and 
 the Italian peasants held aloof from this self-appointed “de¬ 
 liverer.” 
 
 After many years of uninterrupted victories, Hannibal 
 found himself besieged in the country which he had just con¬ 
 quered. For a moment, the luck seemed to turn. Hasdrubal, 
 his brother, had defeated the Roman armies in Spain. He had 
 crossed the Alps to come to HannibaFs assistance. He sent 
 messengers to the south to tell of his arrival and ask the other 
 army to meet him in the plain of the Tiber. Unfortunately the 
 messengers fell into the hands of the Romans and Hannibal 
 waited in vain for further news until his brother’s head, neatly 
 
ROME AND CARTHAGE 
 
 103 
 
 packed in a basket, came rolling into his camp and told him 
 of the fate of the last of the Carthaginian troops. 
 
 With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio 
 easily reconquered Spain and four years later the Romans 
 were ready for a final attack upon Carthage. Hannibal was 
 called back. He crossed the African Sea and tried to organise 
 the defences of his home-city. In the year 202 at the battle 
 of Zama, the Carthaginians w T ere defeated. Hannibal fled to 
 Tyre. From there he went to Asia Minor to stir up the Syrians 
 and the Macedonians against Rome. He accomplished very 
 little but his activities among these Asiatic powers gave the 
 Romans an excuse to carry their warfare into the territory of 
 the east and annex the greater part of the iEgean world. 
 
 Driven from one city to an¬ 
 other, a fugitive without a home, 
 
 Hannibal at last knew that the 
 end of his ambitious dream had 
 come. His beloved city of Car¬ 
 thage had been ruined by the 
 war. She had been forced to 
 sign a terrible peace. Her navy 
 had been sunk. She had been 
 forbidden to make war without 
 Roman permission. She had 
 been condemned to pay the Ro¬ 
 mans millions of dollars for end¬ 
 less years to come. Life offered 
 no hope of a better future. In the year 190 b.c. Hannibal took 
 poison and killed himself. 
 
 Forty years later, the Romans forced their last war upon 
 Carthage. Three long years the inhabitants of the old Phoeni¬ 
 cian colony held out against the power of the new republic. 
 Hunger forced them to surrender. The few men and women 
 who had survived the siege were sold as slaves. The city was 
 set on fire. For two whole weeks the store-houses and the pal- 
 
104 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 aces and the great arsenal burned. Then a terrible curse was 
 pronounced upon the blackened ruins and the Roman legions 
 returned to Italy to enjoy their victory. 
 
 For the next thousand years, the Mediterranean remained 
 a European sea. But as soon as the Roman Empire had been 
 destroyed, Asia made another attempt to dominate this great 
 inland sea, as you will learn when I tell you about Mohammed. 
 
THE RISE OF ROME 
 
 HOW ROME HAPPENED 
 
 The Roman Empire was an accident. No one planned it. 
 It “happened.” No famous general or statesman or cut¬ 
 throat ever got up and said “Friends, Romans, Citizens, we 
 must found an Empire. Follow me and together we shall con¬ 
 quer all the land from the Gates of Hercules to Mount Tau¬ 
 rus.” 
 
 Rome produced famous generals and equally distinguished 
 statesmen and cut-throats, and Roman armies fought all over 
 the world. But the Roman empire-making was done without 
 
 HOW ROME HAPPENED 
 105 
 
106 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 a preconceived plan. The average Roman was a very matter- 
 of-fact citizen. He disliked theories about government. When 
 someone began to recite “eastward the course of Roman Em¬ 
 pire, etc., etc.,” he hastily left the forum. He just continued 
 to take more and more land because circumstances forced him 
 to do so. He was not driven by ambition or by greed. Both 
 by nature and inclination he was a farmer and wanted to stay 
 at home. But when he was attacked he was obliged to defend 
 himself and when the enemy happened to cross the sea to ask 
 for aid in a distant country then the patient Roman marched 
 many dreary miles to defeat this dangerous foe and when this 
 had been accomplished, he stayed behind to adminster his 
 newly conquered provinces lest they fall into the hands of 
 wandering Barbarians and become themselves a menace to 
 Roman safety. It sounds rather complicated and yet to the 
 contemporaries it was so very simple, as you shall see in a mo¬ 
 ment. 
 
 In the year 203 b.c. Scipio had crossed the African Sea 
 and had carried the war into Africa. Carthage had called Han¬ 
 nibal back. Badly supported by his mercenaries, Hannibal 
 had been defeated near Zama. The Romans had asked for his 
 surrender and Hannibal had fled to get aid from the kings of 
 Macedonia and Syria, as I told you in my last chapter. 
 
 The rulers of these two countries (remnants of the Empire 
 of Alexander the Great) just then were contemplating an ex¬ 
 pedition against Egypt. They hoped to divide the rich Nile 
 valley between themselves. The king of Egypt had heard of 
 this and he had asked Rome to come to his support. The stage 
 was set for a number of highly interesting plots and counter¬ 
 plots. But the Romans, with their lack of imagination, rang 
 the curtain down before the play had been fairly started. 
 Their legions completely defeated the heavy Greek phalanx 
 which was still used by the Macedonians as their battle forma¬ 
 tion. That happened in the year 197 b.c. at the battle in the 
 plains of Cynoscephalse or “Dogs’ Heads,” in central Thessaly. 
 
 The Romans then marched southward to Attica and in¬ 
 formed the Greeks that they had come to “deliver the Hellenes 
 
THE RISE OF ROME 
 
 107 
 
 from the Macedonian yoke.” The Greeks, having learned 
 nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used their new freedom 
 in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states once more 
 began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good 
 old days. The Romans, who had little understanding and less 
 love for these silly bickerings of a race which they rather de¬ 
 spised, showed great forbearance. But tiring of these endless 
 
 CIVILIZATION GOES WESTWARD 
 
 dissensions they lost patience, invaded Greece, burned down 
 Corinth (to “encourage the other Greeks”) and sent a Roman 
 governor to Athens to rule this turbulent province. In this 
 way, Macedonia and Greece became buffer states which pro¬ 
 tected Rome’s eastern frontier. 
 
 Meanwhile right across the Hellespont lay the Kingdom of 
 Syria, and Antiochus III, who ruled that vast land, had shown 
 great eagerness when his distinguished guest, General Han- 
 
108 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 nibal, explained to him how easy it would be to invade Italy 
 and sack the city of Rome. 
 
 Lucius Scipio, a brother of Scipio the African fighter who 
 had defeated Hannibal and his Carthaginians at Zama, was 
 sent to Asia Minor. He destroyed the armies of the Syrian 
 king near Magnesia (in the year 190 b.c.) Shortly after¬ 
 wards, Antiochus was lynched by his own people. Asia Minor 
 became a Roman protectorate and the small City-Republic of 
 Rome was mistress of most of the lands which bordered upon 
 the Mediterranean. 
 
THE ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME AFTER CEN¬ 
 TURIES OF UNREST AND REVOLUTION BE¬ 
 CAME AN EMPIRE 
 
 When the Roman armies returned from these many vic¬ 
 torious campaigns, they were received with great jubilation. 
 Alas and alack! this sudden glory did not make the country any 
 happier. On the contrary. The endless campaigns had ruined 
 the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard work of Em¬ 
 pire making. It had placed too much power in the hands of the 
 successful generals (and their private friends) who had used 
 the war as an excuse for wholesale robbery. 
 
 The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity 
 which had characterised the lives of her famous men. The 
 new Republic felt ashamed of the shabby coats and the high 
 principles which had been fashionable in the days of its grand¬ 
 fathers. It became a land of rich people ruled by rich people 
 for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to dis¬ 
 astrous failure, as I shall now tell you. 
 
 Within less than a century and a half, Rome had become 
 the mistress of practically all the land around the Mediter¬ 
 ranean. In those early days of history a prisoner of war lost 
 his freedom and became a slave. The Roman regarded war as 
 a very serious business and he showed no mercy to a conquered 
 foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and 
 children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves. 
 
 109 
 
110 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 And a like fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and 
 Macedonia and Spain and Syria when they dared to revolt 
 against the Roman power. 
 
 Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of 
 machinery. Nowadays a rich man invests his money in fac¬ 
 tories. The rich people of Rome (senators, generals and war- 
 profiteers) invested theirs in land and in slaves. The land 
 they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces. The 
 slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to 
 be cheapest. During most of the third and second centuries 
 before Christ there was a plentiful supply, and as a result the 
 landowners worked their slaves until they dropped dead in their 
 tracks, when they bought new ones at the nearest bargain-coun¬ 
 ter of Corinthian or Carthaginian captives. 
 
 And now behold the fate of the freeborn farmer! 
 
 He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her 
 battles without complaint. But when he came home after ten, 
 fifteen or twenty years, his lands were covered with weeds and 
 his family had been ruined. But he was a strong man and 
 willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and waited 
 for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together 
 with his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners 
 who worked their estates with slaves could underbid him all 
 along the line. For a couple of years he tried to hold his own. 
 Then he gave up in despair. He left the country and he went 
 to the nearest city. In the city he was as hungry as he had been 
 before on the land. But he shared his misery with thousands 
 of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy 
 hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were apt 
 to get sick and die from terrible epidemics. They were all pro¬ 
 foundly discontented. They had fought for their country and 
 this was their reward. They were always willing to listen to 
 those plausible spell-binders who gather around a public griev¬ 
 ance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a 
 grave menace to the safety of the state. 
 
 But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. 
 “We have our army and our policemen,” they argued, “they 
 
THE ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 111 
 
 will keep the mob in order.” And they hid themselves behind 
 the high walls of their pleasant villas and cultivated their gar¬ 
 dens and read the poems of a certain Homer which a Greek 
 slav? had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters. 
 
 In a few families however the old tradition of unselfish 
 servce to the Commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daugh¬ 
 ter of Scipio Africanus, had been married to a Roman by the 
 nam? of Gracchus. She had two sons, Tiberius and Gaius. 
 When the boys grew up they entered politics and tried to bring 
 about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown 
 that most of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by 
 two thousand noble families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been 
 elected a Tribune, tried to help the freemen. He revived two 
 ancient laws which restricted the number of acres which a sin¬ 
 gle owner might possess. In this way he hoped to revive the 
 valuable old class of small and independent freeholders. The 
 newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state. 
 There were street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the 
 popular Tribune. Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he 
 entered the assembly and was beaten to death. Ten years later 
 his brother Gaius tried the experiment of reforming a nation 
 against the expressed wishes of a strong privileged class. He 
 passed a “poor law” which was meant to help the destitute 
 farmers. Eventually it made the greater part of the Roman 
 citizens into professional beggars. 
 
 He established colonies of destitute people in distant parts 
 of the empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right 
 sort of people. Before Gaius Gracchus could do more harm he 
 too was murdered and his followers were either killed or exiled. 
 The first two reformers had been gentlemen. The two who 
 came after were of a very different stamp. They were pro¬ 
 fessional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of the 
 other was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following. 
 
 Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the vic¬ 
 tor in a great battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teu¬ 
 tons and the Cimbri had been annihilated, was the popular hero 
 of the disinherited freemen. 
 
112 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Now it happened in the year 88 b.c. that the Semite of 
 Rome was greatly disturbed by rumours that came from Asia. 
 Mithridates, king of a country along the shores of the I'lack 
 Sea, and a Greek on his mother’s side, had seen the possibility 
 of establishing a second Alexandrian Empire. He began his 
 campaign for world-domination with the murder of all Roman 
 citizens who happened to be in Asia Minor, men, women and 
 children. Such an act, of course, meant war. The Senate 
 equipped an army to march against the King of Pontus and 
 punish him for his crime. But who was to be commander-in- 
 chief? “Sulla,” said the Senate, “because he is Consul.” 
 “Marius,” said the mob, “because he has been Consul five times 
 and because he is the champion of our rights.” 
 
 Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be 
 in actual command of the army. He went east to defeat 
 Mithridates and Marius fled to Africa. There he waited 
 until he heard that Sulla had crossed into Asia. He then re¬ 
 turned to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents, 
 marched on Rome and entered the city with his professional 
 highwaymen, spent five days and five nights, slaughtering his 
 enemies in the Senatorial party, got himself elected Consul and 
 promptly died from the excitement of the last fortnight. 
 
 There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having 
 defeated Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return 
 to Rome and settle a few old scores of his own. He was as 
 good as his word. For weeks his soldiers were busy executing 
 those of their fellow citizens who were suspected of democratic 
 sympathies. One day they got hold of a young fellow who 
 had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were 
 going to hang him when some one interfered. “The boy is too 
 young,” he said, and they let him go. His name was Julius 
 Csesar. You shall meet him again on the next page. 
 
 As for Sulla, he became “Dictator,” which meant sole and 
 supreme ruler of all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome 
 for four years, and he died quietly in his bed, having spent the 
 last year of his life tenderly raising his cabbages, as was the 
 
THE ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 113 
 
 custom of so many Romans who had spent a lifetime killing 
 their fellow-men. 
 
 But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they 
 grew worse. Another general, Gnseus Pompeius, or Pompey, 
 a close friend of Sulla, went east to renew the war against the 
 ever troublesome Mithridates. He drove that energetic poten¬ 
 tate into the mountains where Mithridates took poison and 
 killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a Roman 
 captive. Next he re-established the authority of Rome over 
 Syria, destroyed Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia, 
 trying to revive the myth of Alexander the Great, and at last 
 (in the year 62 ) returned to Rome with a dozen ship-loads of 
 defeated Kings and Princes and Generals, all of whom were 
 forced to march in the triumphal procession of this enormously 
 popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty 
 million dollars in plunder. 
 
 It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed 
 in the hands of a strong man. Only a few months before, the 
 town had almost fallen into the hands of a good-for-nothing 
 young aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who had gambled 
 away his money and hoped to reimburse himself for his losses by 
 a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer, had dis¬ 
 covered the plot, had warned the Senate, and had forced Cati¬ 
 line to flee. But there were other young men with similar am¬ 
 bitions and it was no time for idle talk. 
 
 Pompey organised a triumvirate which was to take charge 
 of affairs. He became the leader of this Vigilante Commit¬ 
 tee. Gaius Julius Caesar, who had made a reputation for him¬ 
 self as governor of Spain, was the second in command. The 
 third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of Crassus. 
 He had been elected because he was incredibly rich, having been 
 a successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon 
 an expedition against the Parthians and was killed. 
 
 As for Caesar, who was by far the ablest of the three, he 
 decided that he needed a little more military glory to become 
 a popular hero. He crossed the Alps and conquered that part 
 of the world which is now called France. Then he hammered 
 
114 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 a solid wooden bridge across the Rhine and invaded the land 
 of the wild Teutons. Finally he took ship and visited England. 
 Heaven knows where he might have ended if he had not been 
 forced to return to Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had 
 been appointed dictator for life. This of course meant that 
 Csesar was to be placed on the list of the “retired officers,” and 
 the idea did not appeal to him. He remembered that he had 
 begun life as a follower of Marius. He decided to teach the 
 
 CESAR GOES WEST 
 
 Senators and their “dictator” another lesson. He crossed the 
 Rubicon River which separated the province of Cis-alpine Gaul 
 from Italy. Everywhere he was received as the “friend of the 
 people.” Without difficulty Csesar entered Rome and Pompey 
 fled to Greece. Csesar followed him and defeated his followers 
 near Pharsalus. Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and 
 escaped to Egypt. When he landed he was murdered by order 
 of young king Ptolemy. A few days later Csesar arrived. 
 He found himself caught in a trap. Both the Egyptians and 
 
THE ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 115 
 
 the Roman garrison which had remained faithful to Pompey, 
 attacked his camp. 
 
 Fortune was with Caesar. He succeeded in setting fire to 
 the Egyptian fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning 
 vessels fell on the roof of the famous library of Alexandria 
 (which was just off the water front,) and destroyed it. Next 
 he attacked the Egyptian army, drove the soldiers into the 
 Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new government 
 under Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word 
 reached him that Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates, 
 had gone on the war-path. Caesar marched northward, de¬ 
 feated Pharnaces in a war which lasted five days, sent word of 
 his victory to Rome in the famous sentence “veni, vidi, vici,” 
 which is Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” and returned 
 to Egypt where he fell desperately in love with Cleopatra, who 
 followed him to Rome when he returned to take charge of the 
 government, in the year 46. He marched at the head of not 
 less than four different victory-parades, having won four dif¬ 
 ferent campaigns. 
 
 Then Caesar appeared in the Senate to report upon his ad¬ 
 ventures, and the grateful Senate made him “dictator” for 
 ten years. It was a fatal step. 
 
 The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the 
 Roman state. He made it possible for freemen to become 
 members of the Senate. He conferred the rights of citizenship 
 upon distant communities as had been done in the early days 
 of Roman history. He permitted “foreigners” to exercise in¬ 
 fluence upon the government. He reformed the administra¬ 
 tion of the distant provinces which certain aristocratic families 
 had come to regard as their private possessions. In short he 
 did many things for the good of the majority of the people but 
 which made him thoroughly unpopular with the most powerful 
 men in the state. Half a hundred young aristocrats formed a 
 plot “to save the Rejmblic.” On the Ides of March (the fif¬ 
 teenth of March according to that new calendar w r hich Caesar 
 had brought with him from Egypt) Caesar was murdered when 
 he entered the Senate. Once more Rome w r as without a master. 
 
116 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 THE GREAT ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
THE ROMAN EMPIRE 
 
 117 
 
 There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of 
 Caesar’s glory. One was Antony, his former secretary. The 
 other was Octavian, Caesar’s grand-nephew and heir to his es¬ 
 tate. Octavian remained in Rome, but Antony went to Egypt 
 to be near Cleopatra with whom he too had fallen in love, as 
 seems to have been the habit of Roman generals. 
 
 A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Ac- 
 tium, Octavian defeated Antony. Antony killed himself and 
 Cleopatra was left alone to face the enemy. She tried very 
 hard to make Octavian her third Roman conquest. When she 
 saw that she could make no impression upon this very proud 
 aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman prov¬ 
 ince. 
 
 As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did 
 not repeat the mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how 
 people will shy at words. He was very modest in his demands 
 when he returned to Rome. He did not want to be a “dicta¬ 
 tor.” He would be entirely satisfied with the title of “the Hon¬ 
 ourable.” But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed 
 him as Augustus—the Illustrious—he did not object and a few 
 years later the man in the street called him Ceesar, or Kaiser, 
 while the soldiers, accustomed to regard Octavian as their Com¬ 
 mander-in-chief referred to him as the Chief, the Imperator or 
 Emperor. The Republic had become an Empire, but the aver¬ 
 age Roman was hardly aware of the fact. 
 
 In 14 a.d. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the 
 Roman people had become so well established that he was made 
 an object of that divine worship which hitherto had been re¬ 
 served for the Gods. And his successors were true “Emper¬ 
 ors”—the absolute rulers of the greatest empire the world had 
 ever seen. 
 
 If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired 
 of anarchy and disorder. He did not care who ruled him pro¬ 
 vided the new master gave him a chance to live quietly and 
 without the noise of eternal street riots. Octavian assured his 
 subjects forty years of peace. He had no desire to extend the 
 frontiers of his domains. In the year 9 a.d. he had contem- 
 
118 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was 
 inhabited by the Teutons. But Varus, his general, had been 
 killed with all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that 
 the Romans made no further attempts to civilise these wild 
 people. 
 
 They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem 
 of internal reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two 
 centuries of revolution and foreign war had repeatedly killed 
 the best men among the younger generations. It had ruined 
 the class of the free farmers. It had introduced slave labor, 
 against which no freeman could hope to compete. It had 
 turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and 
 unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large 
 bureaucracy—petty officials who were underpaid and who were 
 forced to take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for 
 their families. Worst of all, it had accustomed people to vio¬ 
 lence, to blood shed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain and 
 suffering of others. 
 
 Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our 
 era was a magnificent political structure, so large that Alex¬ 
 ander’s empire became one of its minor provinces. Underneath 
 this glory there lived millions upon millions of poor and tired 
 human beings, toiling like ants who have built a nest under¬ 
 neath a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of some one 
 else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields. 
 They lived in stables. They died without hope. 
 
 It was the seven hundred and fifty-third year since the 
 founding of Rome. Gaius Julius Csesar Octavianus Augustus 
 was living in the palace of the Palatine Hill, busily engaged 
 upon the task of ruling his empire. 
 
 In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph 
 the Carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of 
 Bethlehem. 
 
 This is a strange world. 
 
 Before long, the palace and the stable were to meet in open 
 combat. 
 
 And the stable was to emerge victorious. 
 
* 
 
 JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 
 
 THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM 
 THE GREEKS CALLED JESUS 
 
 In the autumn of the year of the city 815 (which would be 
 62 a.d., in our way of counting time) iEsculapius Cultellus, a 
 Roman physician, wrote to his nephew who was with the army 
 in Syria as follows: 
 
 My dear Nephew, 
 
 A few days ago I was called in to prescribe for a sick man 
 named Paul. He appeared to be a Roman citizen of Jewish 
 parentage, well educated and of agreeable manners. I had 
 been told that he was here in connection with a law-suit, an ap¬ 
 peal from one of our provincial courts, Csesarea or some such 
 place in the eastern Mediterranean. He had been described to 
 me as a “wild and violent” fellow who had been making 
 speeches against the People and against the Law. I found him 
 very intelligent and of great honesty. 
 
 A friend of mine who used to be with the army in Asia 
 Minor tells me that he heard something about him in Ephesus 
 where he was preaching sermons about a strange new God. I 
 asked my patient if this were true and whether he had told the 
 people to rebel against the will of our beloved Emperor. Paul 
 answered me that the Kingdom of which he had spoken was 
 not of this world and he added many strange utterances which 
 I did not understand, but which were probably due to his 
 fever. 
 
 119 
 
120 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 His personality made a great impression upon me and I 
 was sorry to hear that he was killed on the Ostian Road a few 
 days ago. Therefore I am writing this letter to you. When 
 next you visit Jerusalem, I want you to find out something 
 about my friend Paul and the strange Jewish prophet, who 
 seems to have been his teacher. Our slaves are getting much 
 excited about this so-called Messiah, and a few of them, who 
 openly talked of the new kingdom (whatever that means) have 
 been crucified. I would like to know the truth about all these 
 rumours and I am 
 
 Your devoted Uncle, 
 
 AESCULAPIUS CULTELLUS. 
 
 Six weeks later, Gladius Ensa, the nephew, a captain of the 
 VII Gallic Infantry, answered as follows: 
 
 My dear Uncle, 
 
 I received your letter and I have obeyed your instructions. 
 
 Two weeks ago our brigade was sent to Jerusalem. There 
 have been several revolutions during the last century and there 
 is not much left of the old city. We have been here now for a 
 month and to-morrow we shall continue our march to Petra, 
 where there has been trouble with some of the Arab tribes. I 
 shall use this evening to answer your questions, but pray do 
 not expect a detailed report. 
 
 I have talked with most of the older men in this city but 
 few have been able to give me any definite information. A 
 few days ago a pedler came to the camp. I bought some of 
 his olives and I asked him whether he had ever heard of the 
 famous Messiah who was killed when he was young. He said 
 that he remembered it very clearly, because his father had 
 taken him to Golgotha (a hill just outside the city) to see 
 the execution, and to show him what became of the enemies of 
 the laws of the people of Judasa. He gave me the address of 
 one Joseph, who had been a personal friend of the Messiah 
 and told me that I had better go and see him if I wanted to 
 know more. 
 
JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 
 
 121 
 
 This morning I went to call on Joseph. He was quite an 
 old man. He had been a fisherman on one of the fresh-water 
 lakes. His memory was clear, and from him at last I got a 
 fairly definite account of what had happened during the trou¬ 
 blesome days before I was born. 
 
 Tiberius, our great and glorious emperor, was on the throne, 
 and an officer of the name of Pontius Pilatus was governor of 
 
 THE HOLY LAND 
 
 Judaea and Samaria. Joseph knew little about this Pilatus. 
 He seemed to have been an honest enough official who left a 
 decent reputation as procurator of the province. In the year 
 783 or 784 (Joseph had forgotten when) Pilatus was called to 
 Jerusalem on account of a riot. A certain young man (the 
 son of a carpenter of Nazareth) was said to be planning a 
 revolution against the Roman government. Strangely enough 
 our own intelligence officers, who are usually well informed, 
 
122 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 appear to have heard nothing about it, and when they inves¬ 
 tigated the matter they reported that the carpenter was an 
 excellent citizen and that there was no reason to proceed against 
 him. But the old-fashioned leaders of the Jewish faith, accord¬ 
 ing to Joseph, were much upset. They greatly disliked his 
 popularity with the masses of the poorer Hebrews. The 
 “Nazarene” (so they told Pilatus) had publicly claimed that a 
 Greek or a Roman or even a Philistine, who tried to live a de¬ 
 cent and honourable life, was quite as good as a Jew who spent 
 his days studying the ancient laws of Moses. Pilatus does not 
 seem to have been impressed by this argument, but when the 
 crowds around the temple threatened to lynch Jesus, and kill 
 all his followers, he decided to take the carpenter into custody 
 to save his life. 
 
 He does not appear to have understood the real nature of 
 the quarrel. Whenever he asked the Jewish priests to explain 
 their grievances, they shouted “heresy” and “treason” and got 
 terribly excited. Finally, so Joseph told me, Pilatus sent for 
 Joshua (that was the name of the Nazarene, but the Greeks 
 who live in this part of the world always refer to him as Jesus) 
 to examine him personally. He talked to him for several 
 hours. Pie asked him about the “dangerous doctrines” which 
 he was said to have preached on the shores of the sea of Galilee. 
 But Jesus answered that he never referred to politics. He was 
 not so much interested in the bodies of men as in Man’s soul. 
 He wanted all people to regard their neighbours as their 
 brothers and to love one single God, who was the father of all 
 living beings. 
 
 Pilatus, who seems to have been well versed in the doctrines 
 of the Stoics and the other Greek philosophers, does not ap¬ 
 pear to have discovered anything seditious in the talk of Jesus. 
 According to my informant he made another attempt to save 
 the life of the kindly prophet. He kept putting the execution 
 off. Meanwhile the Jewish people, lashed into fury by their 
 priests, got frantic with rage. There had been many riots in 
 Jerusalem before this and there were only a few Roman sol¬ 
 diers within calling distance. Reports were being sent to the 
 
JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 
 
 123 
 
 Roman authorities in Csesarea that Pilatus had “fallen a vic¬ 
 tim to the teachings of the Nazarene.” Petitions were being 
 circulated all through the city to have Pilatus recalled, because 
 he was an enemy of the Emperor. You know that our gov¬ 
 ernors have strict instructions to avoid an open break with 
 their foreign subjects. To save the country from civil war, 
 Pilatus finally sacrificed his prisoner, Joshua, who behaved 
 with great dignity and who forgave all those who hated him. 
 He was crucified amidst the howls and the laughter of the 
 Jerusalem mob. 
 
 That is what Joseph told me, with tears running down his 
 old cheeks. I gave him a gold piece when I left him, but he 
 refused it and asked me to hand it to one poorer than himself. 
 I also asked him a few questions about your friend Paul. He 
 had known him slightly. He seems to have been a tent maker 
 who gave up his profession that he might preach the words of 
 a loving and forgiving God, who was so very different from 
 that Jehovah of whom the Jewish priests are telling us all 
 the time. Afterwards, Paul appears to have travelled much 
 in Asia Minor and in Greece, telling the slaves that they were 
 all children of one loving Father and that happiness awaits all, 
 both rich and poor, who have tried to live honest lives and have 
 done good to those who were suffering and miserable. 
 
 I hope that I have answered your questions to your satis¬ 
 faction. The whole story seems very harmless to me as far as 
 the safety of the state is concerned. But then, we Romans 
 never have been able to understand the people of this province. 
 I am sorry that they have killed your friend Paul. I wish that 
 I were at home again, and I am, as ever, 
 
 Your dutiful nephew, 
 
 Gladius Ensa. 
 
THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF ROME 
 
 The text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the 
 year in which Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor 
 was driven off his throne. But Rome, which was not built in 
 a day, took a long time falling. The process was so slow and 
 so gradual that most Romans did not realise how their old 
 world was coming to an end. They complained about the un¬ 
 rest of the times—they grumbled about the high prices of food 
 and about the low wages of the workmen—they cursed the 
 profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and 
 the gold coin. Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually 
 rapacious governor. But the majority of the people during the 
 first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their 
 purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according to 
 their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a 
 free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the 
 big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had 
 outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish. 
 
 How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome 
 made a fine showing of outward glory. Well-paved roads con¬ 
 nected the different provinces, the imperial police were active 
 and showed little tenderness for highwaymen. The frontier 
 was closely guarded against the savage tribes who seemed to 
 be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole 
 world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a 
 
THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 125 
 
 score of able men were working day and night to undo the 
 mistakes of the past and bring about a return to the happier 
 conditions of the early Republic. 
 
 But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of 
 which I have told you in a former chapter, had not been 
 removed and reform therefore was impossible. 
 
 Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as 
 Athens and Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It 
 had been able to dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome 
 as the ruler of the entire civilised world was a political impos¬ 
 sibility and could not endure. Her young men were killed in 
 her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by long military 
 service and by taxation. They either became professional 
 beggars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave 
 them board and lodging in exchange for their services and 
 made them “serfs,” those unfortunate human beings who are 
 neither slaves nor freemen, but who have become part of the 
 soil upon which they work, like so many cows, and the trees. 
 
 The Empire, the State, had become everything. The com¬ 
 mon citizen had dwindled down to less than nothing. As for 
 the slaves, they had heard the words that were spoken by Paul. 
 They had accepted the message of the humble carpenter of 
 Nazareth. They did not rebel against their masters. On the 
 contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed 
 their superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs 
 of this world which had proved such a miserable place of abode. 
 They were willing to fight the good fight that they might enter 
 into the Kingdom of Heaven. But they were not willing to 
 engage in warfare for the benefit of an ambitious emperor who 
 aspired to glory by way of a foreign campaign in the land of 
 the Parthians or the Numidians or the Scots. 
 
 And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. 
 The first Emperors had continued the tradition of “leader¬ 
 ship” which had given the old tribal chieftains such a hold upon 
 their subjects. But the Emperors of the second and third 
 centuries were Barrack-Emperors, professional soldiers, who 
 existed by the grace of their body-guards, the so-called Prae- 
 
126 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 torians. They succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity, 
 murdering their way into the palace and being murdered out 
 of it as soon as their successors had become rich enough to bribe 
 the guards into a new rebellion. 
 
 Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of 
 the northern frontier. As there were no longer any native 
 Roman armies to stop their progress, foreign mercenaries had 
 to be hired to fight the invader. As the foreign soldier hap¬ 
 pened to be of the same blood as his supposed enemy, he was 
 
 WHEN THE BARBARIANS GOT THROUGH WITH A ROMAN CITY 
 
 apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle. Finally, 
 by way of experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle 
 within the confines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon 
 these tribes complained bitterly of the greedy Roman tax- 
 gatherers, who took away their last penny. When they got 
 no redress they marched to Rome and loudly demanded that 
 they be heard. 
 
 This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial resi¬ 
 dence. Constantine (who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for 
 a new capital. He chose Byzantium, the gate-way for the 
 commerce between Europe and Asia. The city was renamed 
 
ROME 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 127 
 
 Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When Con¬ 
 stantine died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient 
 administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder 
 lived in Rome and ruled in the west. The younger stayed in 
 Constantinople and was master of the east. 
 
 Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation 
 of the Huns, those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more 
 than two centuries maintained themselves in Northern Europe 
 and continued their career of bloodshed until they were de¬ 
 feated near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in the year 451. 
 As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun 
 to press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save 
 themselves, were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The 
 Emperor Yalens tried to stop them, but was killed near 
 Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two years later, under 
 their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward 
 and attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed 
 only a few palaces. Next came the Vandals, and showed less 
 respect for the venerable traditions of the city. Then the 
 Burgundians. Then the East Goths. Then the Alemanni. 
 Then the Franks. There was no end to the invasions. Rome 
 at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway robber 
 who could gather a few followers. 
 
 In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was 
 a sea-port and strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, 
 Odoacer, commander of a regiment of the German mercen¬ 
 aries, who wanted the farms of Italy to be divided among them¬ 
 selves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus Augustulus, the 
 last of the emperors who ruled the western division, from his 
 throne, and proclaimed himself Patrician or ruler of Rome. 
 The eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, 
 recognised him, and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was 
 left of the western provinces. 
 
 A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, 
 invaded the newly formed Patriciate, took Ravenna, murdered 
 Odoacer at his own dinner table, and established a Gothic 
 
128 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS 
 
THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 129 
 
 Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western part of the Empire. 
 This Patriciate state did not last long. In the sixth century a 
 motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars 
 invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established 
 a new state of which Pavia became the capital. 
 
 Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter 
 neglect and despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered 
 time and again. The schools had been burned down. The 
 teachers had been starved to death. The rich people had been 
 thrown out of their villas which were now inhabited by evil¬ 
 smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen into 
 decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come 
 to a standstill. Civilisation—the product of thousands of years 
 of patient labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and 
 Greeks and Romans, which had lifted man high above the 
 most daring dreams of his earliest ancestors, threatened to 
 perish from the western continent. 
 
 It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to 
 be the centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But 
 it hardly counted as a part of the European continent. Its 
 interests lay in the east. It began to forget its western origin. 
 Gradually the Roman language was given up for the Greek. 
 The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was writ¬ 
 ten in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The 
 Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like 
 kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the 
 Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the 
 Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went 
 eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the 
 vast wilderness of Russia. 
 
 As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. 
 For twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were 
 the order of the day. One thing—and one thing alone—saved 
 Europe from complete destruction, from a return to the days 
 of cave-men and the hyena. 
 
 This was the church—the flook of humble men and women 
 
130 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 who for many centuries had confessed themselves the fol¬ 
 lowers of Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, who had been 
 killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be saved the 
 trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the 
 Syrian frontier. 
 
RISE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE 
 CHRISTIAN WORLD 
 
 The average intelligent Roman who lived under the Em¬ 
 pire had taken very little interest in the gods of his fathers. 
 A few times a year he went to the temple, but merely as a 
 matter of custom. He looked on patiently when the people 
 celebrated a religious festival with a solemn procession. But he 
 regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and Neptune as 
 something rather childish, a survival from the crude days of 
 the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man 
 who had mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans 
 and the other great philosophers of Athens. 
 
 This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The 
 government insisted that all people, Romans, foreigners, 
 Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, should pay a certain outward re¬ 
 spect to the image of the Emperor which was supposed to stand 
 in every temple, just as a picture of the President of the 
 United States is apt to hang in an American Post Office. But 
 this was a formality without any deeper meaning. Generally 
 speaking everybody could honour, revere and adore whatever 
 gods he pleased, and as a result, Rome was filled with all 
 sorts of queer little temples and synagogues, dedicated to the 
 worship of Egyptian and African and Asiatic divinities. 
 
 When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began 
 to preach their new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man, 
 
 131 
 
132 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 nobody objected. The man in the street stopped and listened. 
 Rome, the capital of the world, had always been full of wander¬ 
 ing preachers, each proclaiming his own “mystery.” Most of 
 the self-appointed priests appealed to the senses—promised 
 golden rewards and endless pleasure to the followers of their 
 own particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed 
 that the so-called Christians (the followers of the Christ or 
 “anointed”) spoke a very different language. They did not 
 appear to be impressed by great riches or a noble position. 
 They extolled the beauties of poverty and humility and meek¬ 
 ness. These were not exactly the virtues which had made 
 Rome the mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to 
 listen to a “mystery” which told people in the hey-day of their 
 glory that their worldly success could not possibly bring them 
 lasting happiness. 
 
 Besides, the preachers of the Christian mystery told dread¬ 
 ful stories of the fate that awaited those who refused to listen to 
 the words of the true God. It was never wise to take chances. 
 Of course the old Roman gods still existed, but were they 
 strong enough to protect their friends against the powers of 
 this new deity who had been brought to Europe from distant 
 Asia? People began to have doubts. They returned to listen 
 to further explanations of the new creed. After a while they 
 began to meet the men and women who preached the words of 
 Jesus. They found them very different from the average 
 Roman priests. They were all dreadfully poor. They were 
 kind to slaves and to animals. They did not try to gain riches, 
 but gave away whatever they had. The example of their un¬ 
 selfish lives forced many Romans to forsake the old religion. 
 They joined the small communities of Christians who met in 
 the back rooms of private houses or somewhere in an open field, 
 and the temples were deserted. 
 
 This went on year after year and the number of Christians 
 continued to increase. Presbyters or priests (the original 
 Greek meant “elder”) were elected to guard the interests of 
 the small churches. A bishop was made the head of all the 
 communities within a single province. Peter, who had fol- 
 
RISE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 133 
 
 lowed Paul to Rome, was the first Bishop of Rome. In due 
 time his successors (who were addressed as Father or Papa) 
 came to be known as Popes. 
 
 The church became a powerful institution within the Em¬ 
 pire. The Christian doctrines appealed to those who despaired 
 of this world. They also attracted many strong men who 
 found it impossible to make a career under the Imperial gov- 
 
 A CLOISTER 
 
 ernment, but who could exercise their gifts of leadership among 
 the humble followers of the Nazarene teacher. At last the 
 state was obliged to take notice. The Roman Empire (I have 
 said this before) was tolerant through indifference. It allowed 
 everybody to seek salvation after his or her own fashion. But 
 it insisted that the different sects keep the peace among them¬ 
 selves and obey the wise rule of “live and let live.” 
 
 The Christian communities however, refused to practise any 
 
134 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 sort of tolerance. They publicly declared that their God, and 
 their God alone, was the true ruler of Heaven and Earth, 
 and that all other gods were impostors.. This seemed unfair 
 to the other sects and the police discouraged such utterances. 
 The Christians persisted. 
 
 Soon there were further difficulties. The Christians refused 
 to go through the formalities of paying homage to the em¬ 
 peror. They refused to appear when they were called upon 
 to join the army. The Roman magistrates threatened to 
 
 punish them. The Christians answered that this miserable 
 world was only the ante-room to a very pleasant Heaven and 
 that they were more than willing to suffer death for their 
 principles. The Romans, puzzled by such conduct, sometimes 
 killed the offenders, but more often they did not. There was 
 a certain amount of lynching during the earliest years of the 
 church, but this was the work of that part of the mob which 
 accused their meek Christian neighbours of every conceivable 
 crime, (such as slaughtering and eating babies, bringing about 
 sickness and pestilence, betraying the country in times of dan¬ 
 ger) because it was a harmless sport and devoid of danger, as 
 the Christians refused to fight hack. 
 
RISE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 135 
 
 Meanwhile, Rome continued to be invaded by the Barbar¬ 
 ians and when her armies failed, Christian missionaries went 
 forth to preach their gospel of peace to the wild Teutons. 
 They were strong men without fear of death. They spoke a 
 language which left no doubt as to the future of unrepentant 
 sinners. The Teutons were deeply impressed. They still 
 had a deep respect for the wisdom of the ancient city of Rome. 
 Those men were Romans. They probably spoke the truth. 
 Soon the Christian missionary became a power in the savage 
 regions of the Teutons and the Franks. Half a dozen mis¬ 
 sionaries were as valuable as a whole regiment of soldiers. 
 The Emperors began to understand that the Christian might 
 be of great use to them. In some of the provinces they were 
 given equal rights with those who remained faithful to the old 
 gods. The great change however came during the last half 
 of the fourth century. 
 
 Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Con¬ 
 stantine the Great, was emperor. He was a terrible ruffian, 
 but people of tender qualities could hardly hope to survive 
 in that hard-fighting age. During a long and checkered career, 
 Constantine had experienced many ups and downs. Once, 
 when almost defeated by his enemies, he thought that he would 
 try the power of this new Asiatic deity of whom everybody was 
 talking. He promised that he too would become a Christian 
 if he were successful in the coming battle. He won the victory 
 and thereafter he was convinced of the power of the Christian 
 God and allowed himself to be baptised. 
 
 From that moment on, the Christian church was officially 
 recognised and this greatly strengthened the position of the 
 new faith. 
 
 But the Christians still formed a very small minority of 
 all the people, (not more than five or six percent,) and in order 
 to win, they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old 
 gods must be destroyed. For a short spell the emperor Julian, 
 a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan Gods 
 from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds dur¬ 
 ing a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established 
 
136 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the 
 ancient temples were then closed. Then came the emperor 
 Justinian (who built the church of Saint Sophia in Constan¬ 
 tinople ), who discontinued the school of philosophy at Athens 
 which had been founded by Plato. 
 
 That was the end of the old Greek world, in which man 
 had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own 
 dreams according to his desires. The somewhat vague rules 
 of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor compass 
 by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery 
 and ignorance had swept away the established order of things. 
 There was need of something more positive and more definite. 
 This the Church provided. 
 
 During an age when nothing was certain, the church stood 
 like a rock and never receded from those principles which it 
 held to be true and sacred. This steadfast courage gained the 
 admiration of the multitudes and carried the church of Rome 
 safely through the difficulties which destroyed the Roman state. 
 
 There was however, a certain element of luck in the final 
 success of the Christian faith. After the disappearance of 
 Theodoric’s Roman-Gothic kingdom, in the fifth century, 
 Italy was comparatively free from foreign invasion. The 
 Lombards and Saxons and Slavs who succeeded the Goths were 
 weak and backward tribes. Under those circumstances it was 
 possible for the bishops of Rome to maintain the independence 
 of their city. Soon the remnants of the empire, scattered 
 throughout the peninsula, recognised the Dukes of Rome (or 
 bishops) as their political and spiritual rulers. 
 
 The stage was set for the appearance of a strong man. 
 He came in the year 590 and his name was Gregory. He be¬ 
 longed to the ruling classes of ancient Rome, and he had 
 been “prefect” or mayor of the city. Then he had become 
 a monk and a bishop and finally, and much against his will, 
 (for he wanted to be a missionary and preach Christianity to 
 the heathen of England,) he had been dragged to the Church 
 of Saint Peter to be made Pope. He ruled only fourteen 
 years but when he died the Christian world of western Europe 
 
RISE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 1ST 
 
 had officially recognised the bishops of Rome, the Popes, as 
 the head of the entire church. 
 
 This power, however, did not extend to the east. In Con¬ 
 stantinople the Emperors continued the old custom which had 
 recognised the successors of Augustus and Tiberius both as 
 head of the government and as High Priest of the Established 
 Religion. In the year 1453 the eastern Roman Empire was 
 conquered by the Turks. Constantinople was taken, and Con¬ 
 stantine Paleologue, the last Roman Emperor, was killed on 
 the steps of the Church of the Holy Sophia. 
 
 A few years before, Zoe, the daughter of his brother 
 Thomas, had married Ivan III of Russia. In this way did the 
 grand-dukes of Moscow fall heir to the traditions of Constan¬ 
 tinople. The double-eagle of old Byzantium (reminiscent of 
 the days when Rome had been divided into an eastern and a 
 western part) became the coat of arms of modern Russia. 
 The Tsar who had been merely the first of the Russian nobles, 
 assumed the aloofness and the dignity of a Roman emperor 
 before whom all subjects, both high and low, were incon¬ 
 siderable slaves. 
 
 The court was refashioned after the oriental pattern which 
 the eastern Emperors had imported from Asia and from Egypt 
 and which (so they flattered themselves) resembled the court 
 of Alexander the Great. This strange inheritance which the 
 dying Byzantine Empire bequeathed to an unsuspecting world 
 continued to live with great vigour for six more centuries, 
 amidst the vast plains of Russia. The last man to wear the 
 croton with the double eagle of Constantinople, Tsar Nicholas, 
 was murdered only the other day, so to speak. His body was 
 thrown into a well. His son and his daughters were all killed. 
 All his ancient rights and prerogatives were abolished, and the 
 church was reduced to the position which it had held in Rome 
 before the days of Constantine. 
 
 The western church however fared very differently, as we 
 shall see in the next chapter when the whole Christian world is 
 going to be threatened with destruction by the rival creed of 
 an Arab camel-driver. 
 
MOHAMMED 
 
 AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME 
 THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN DESERT, 
 AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CON¬ 
 QUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD 
 FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF ALLAH, THE 
 ONLY TRUE GOD 
 
 Since fhe days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said 
 nothing of the Semitic people. You will remember how they 
 filled all the chapters devoted to the story of the Ancient World. 
 The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, 
 the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all of them Semites, had been 
 the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty centuries. They 
 had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had 
 come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who 
 had come from the west. A hundred years after the death of 
 Alexander the Great, Carthage, a colony of Semitic Phoeni¬ 
 cians, had fought the Indo-European Romans for the mastery 
 of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and de¬ 
 stroyed and for eight hundred years the Romans had been mas¬ 
 ters of the world. In the seventh century, however, another 
 Semitic tribe appeared upon the scene and challenged the 
 power of the west. They were the Arabs, peaceful shepherds 
 who had roamed through the desert since the beginning of time 
 without showing any signs of imperial ambitions. 
 
 Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and 
 
 138 
 
MOHAMMED 
 
 139 
 
 in less than a century they had pushed to the heart of Europe 
 and proclaimed the glories of Allah, “the only God,” and 
 Mohammed, “the prophet of the only God,” to the frightened 
 peasants of France. 
 
 The story of AJimed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah, 
 (usually known as Mohammed, or “he who will be praised,”) 
 reads like a chapter in the “Thousand and One Nights.” He 
 was a camel-driver, born in Mecca. He seems to have been an 
 epileptic and he suffered from spells of unconsciousness when 
 he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of the angel 
 Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book 
 called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him 
 all over Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish 
 merchants and with Christian traders, and he came to see that 
 the worship of a single God was a very excellent thing. His 
 own people, the Arabs, still revered queer stones and trunks 
 of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of thousands of 
 years before. In Mecca, their holy city, stood a little square 
 building, the Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends 
 of Hoo-doo worship. 
 
 Mohammed decided to be the 
 Moses of the Arab people. He 
 could not well be a prophet and 
 a camel-driver at the same time. 
 
 So he made himself independent 
 by marrying his employer, the 
 rich widow Chadija. Then he 
 told his neighbours in Mecca 
 that he was the long-expected 
 prophet sent by Allah to save the 
 world. The neighbours laughed 
 most heartily and when Moham¬ 
 med continued to annoy them 
 with his speeches they decided to 
 kill him. They regarded him as 
 a lunatic and a public bore who deserved no mercy. Mohammed 
 heard of the plot and in the dark of night he fled to Medina 
 
 THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED 
 
140 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 together with Abu Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened 
 in the year 622 . It is the most important date in Mohammedan 
 history and is known as the Hegira—the year of the Great 
 Flight. 
 
 In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier 
 to proclaim himself a prophet than in his home city, where 
 every one had known him as a simple camel-driver. Soon he 
 wajS surrounded by an increasing number of followers, or 
 Moslems, who accepted the Islam, “the submission to the will 
 of God,” which Mohammed praised as the highest of all virtues. 
 For seven years he preached to the people of Medina. Then 
 he believed himself strong enough to begin a campaign against 
 his former neighbours who had dared to sneer at him and his 
 Holy Mission in his old camel-driving days. At the head of 
 an army of Medinese he marched across the desert. His fol¬ 
 lowers took Mecca without great difficulty, and having slaught¬ 
 ered a number of the inhabitants, they found it quite easy to 
 convince the others that Mohammed was really a great prophet. 
 
 From that time on until the year of his death, Mohammed 
 was fortunate in everything he undertook. 
 
 There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the 
 first place, the creed which Mohammed taught to his followers 
 was very simple. The disciples were told that they must love 
 Allah, the Ruler of the World, the Merciful and Compas¬ 
 sionate. They must honour and obey their parents. They 
 were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their neigh¬ 
 bours and were admonished to be humble and charitable, to the 
 poor and to the sick. Finally they were ordered to abstain 
 from strong drink and to be very frugal in what they ate. That 
 was all. There were no priests, who acted as shepherds of 
 their flocks and asked that they be supported at the common 
 expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques were merely 
 large stone halls without benches or pictures, where the faith¬ 
 ful could gather (if they felt so inclined) to read and discuss 
 chapters from the Koran, the Holy Book. But the average 
 Mohammedan carried his religion with him and never felt 
 himself hemmed in by the restrictions and regulations of an 
 
MOHAMMED 
 
 141 
 
 established church. Five times a day he turned his face towards 
 Mecca, the Holy City, and said a simple prayer. For the 
 rest of the time he let Allah rule the world as he saw fit and 
 accepted whatever fate brought him with patient resignation. 
 
 Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage 
 the Faithful to go forth and invent electrical machinery or 
 bother about railroads and steamship lines. But it gave every 
 Mohammedan a certain amount of contentment. It bade 
 him be at peace with himself and with the world in which he 
 lived and that was a very good thing. 
 
 The second reason which explains the success of the Mos¬ 
 lems in their warfare upon the Christians, had to do with the 
 conduct of those Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do 
 battle for the true faith. The Prophet promised that those 
 who fell, facing the enemy, would go directly to Heaven. 
 This made sudden death in the field preferable to a long but 
 dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans 
 an enormous advantage over the Crusaders who were in con¬ 
 stant dread of a dark hereafter, and who stuck to the good 
 things of this world as long as they possibly could. Incident¬ 
 ally it explains why even to-day Moslem soldiers will charge 
 into the fire of European machine guns quite indifferent to 
 the fate that awaits them and why they are such dangerous 
 and persistent enemies. 
 
 Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now 
 began to enjoy his power as the undisputed ruler of a large 
 number of Arab tribes. But success has been the undoing of 
 a large number of men who were great in the days of adversity. 
 He tried to gain the good will of the rich people by a num¬ 
 ber of regulations which could appeal to those of wealth. 
 He allowed the Faithful to have four wives. As one wife 
 was a costly investment in those olden days when brides were 
 bought directly from the parents, four wives became a positive 
 luxury except to those who possessed camels and dromedaries 
 and date orchards beyond the dreams of avarice. A religion 
 which at first had been meant for the hardy hunters of the 
 high-skied desert was gradually transformed to suit the needs 
 
 I 
 
142 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars of the cities* 
 It was a regrettable change from the original program and it 
 did very little good to the cause of Mohammedanism. As for 
 the prophet himself, he went on preaching the truth of Allah 
 and proclaiming new rules of conduct until he died, quite 
 suddenly, of a fever on June the seventh of the year 632. 
 
 His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was 
 his father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers 
 of the prophet’s life. Two years later, Abu-Bekr died and 
 Omar ibn Al-Khattab followed him. In less than ten years 
 he conquered Egypt, Persia, Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine 
 and made Damascus the capital of the first Mohammedan world 
 empire. 
 
 Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed’s 
 daughter, Fatima, but a quarrel broke out upon a point of 
 Moslem doctrine and Ali was murdered. After his death, 
 the caliphate was made hereditary and the leaders of the faith¬ 
 ful who had begun their career as the spiritual head of a re¬ 
 ligious sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built 
 a new city on the shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of 
 Babylon and called it Bagdad, and organising the Arab horse¬ 
 men into regiments of cavalry, they set forth to bring the 
 happiness of their Moslem faith to all unbelievers. In the 
 year 700 a.d. a Mohammedan general by the name of Tarik 
 crossed the old Gates of Hercules and reached the high rock 
 on the European side which he called the Gibel-al-tarik, the 
 Hill of Tarik or Gibraltar. 
 
 Eleven years later in the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, 
 he defeated the king of the Visigoths and then the Moslem 
 army moved northward and following the route of Hannibal, 
 they crossed the passes of the Pyrenees. They defeated the 
 Duke of Aquitania, who tried to halt them near Bor¬ 
 deaux, and marched upon Paris. But in the year 732 (one 
 hundred years after the death of the prophet,) they were 
 beaten in a battle between Tours and Poitiers. On that 
 day, Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer), the Frank¬ 
 ish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan con- 
 
MOHAMMED 
 
 143 
 
 quest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they main¬ 
 tained themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the 
 Caliphate of Cordova, which became the greatest centre of 
 science and art of mediasval Europe. 
 
 This Moorish kingdom, so-called because the people came 
 from Mauretania in Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was 
 only after the capture of Granada, the last Moslem stronghold, 
 
 >'fe. 
 
 
 
 
 
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 THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT 
 
 in the year 1492, that Columbus received the royal grant which 
 allowed him to go upon a voyage of discovery. The Moham¬ 
 medans soon regained their strength in the new conquests 
 which they made in Asia and Africa and to-day there are as 
 many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ. 
 
CHARLEMAGNE 
 
 HOW CHARLEMAGNE, THE KING OF THE 
 FRANKS, CAME TO BEAR THE TITLE OF 
 EMPEROR AND TRIED TO REVIVE THE OLD 
 IDEAL OF WORLD-EMPIRE 
 
 The battle of Poitiers had saved Europe from the Mo¬ 
 hammedans. But the enemy within—the hopeless disorder 
 which had followed the disappearance of the Roman police 
 officer—that enemy remained. It is true that the new converts 
 of the Christian faith in Northern Europe felt a deep respect 
 for the mighty Bishop of Rome. But that poor bishop did 
 not feel any too safe when he looked toward the distant moun¬ 
 tains. Heaven knew what fresh hordes of barbarians were 
 ready to cross the Alps and begin a new attack on Rome. It 
 was necessary—very necessary—for the spiritual head of the 
 world to find an ally with a strong sword and a powerful 
 fist who was willing to defend His Holiness in case of dan¬ 
 ger. 
 
 And so the Popes, who were not only very holy but 
 also very practical, cast about for a friend, and presently 
 they made overtures to the most promising of the Germanic 
 tribes who had occupied north-western Europe after the fall 
 of Rome. They were called the Franks. One of their earliest 
 kings, called Merovech, had helped the Romans in the battle of 
 the Catalaunian fields in the year 451 when they defeated the 
 Huns. His descendants, the Merovingians, had continued to 
 
 144 
 
CHARLEMAGNE 
 
 145 
 
 take little bits of imperial territory until the year 486 when 
 king Clovis (the old French word for “Louis”) felt himself 
 strong enough to beat the Romans in the open. But his 
 descendants were weak men who left the affairs of state to 
 their Prime minister, the “Major Domus” or Master of the 
 Palace. 
 
 Pepin the Short, the son of the famous Charles Martel, 
 who succeeded his father as Master of the Palace, hardly 
 knew how to handle the situation. His royal master was a 
 devout theologian, without any interest in politics. Pepin 
 asked the Pope for advice. The Pope who was a practical 
 person answered that the “power in the state belonged to him 
 who was actually possessed of it.” Pepin took the hint. He 
 persuaded Childeric, the last of the Merovingians to become 
 a monk and then made himself king with the approval of the 
 other Germanic chieftains. But this did not satisfy the shrewd 
 Pepin. He wanted to be something more than a barbarian 
 chieftain. He staged an elaborate ceremony at which Boniface, 
 the great missionary of the European northwest, anointed 
 him and made him a “King by the grace of God.” It was 
 easy to slip those words, “Dei gratia,” into the coronation 
 service. It took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out 
 again. 
 
 Pepin was sincerely grateful for this kindness on the part 
 of the church. He made two expeditions to Italy to defend 
 the Pope against his enemies. He took Ravenna and several 
 other cities away from the Longobards and presented them 
 to His Holiness, who incorporated these new domains into 
 the so-called Papal State, which remained an independent 
 country until half a century ago. 
 
 After Pepin’s death, the relations between Rome and Aix- 
 la-Chapelle or Nymwegen or Ingelheim, (the Frankish Kings 
 did not have one official residence, but travelled from place to 
 place with all their ministers and court officers,) became more 
 and more cordial. Finally the Pope and the King took a step 
 which was to influence the history of Europe in a most pro¬ 
 found way. 
 
 Charles, commonly known as Carolus Magnus or Char- 
 
146 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 lemagne, succeeded Pepin in the year 768. He had conquered 
 the land of the Saxons in eastern Germany and had 
 built towns and monasteries all over the greater part of north¬ 
 ern Europe. At the request of certain enemies of Abd-ar- 
 Rahman, he had invaded Spain to fight the Moors. But in 
 the Pyrenees he had been attacked by the wild Basques and 
 had been forced to retire. It was upon this occasion that Ro¬ 
 land, the great Margrave of Brittany, showed what a Frankish 
 chieftain of those early days meant when he promised to be 
 faithful to his King, and gave his life and that of his trusted 
 followers to safeguard the retreat of the royal army. 
 
 During the last ten years of the eighth century, however, 
 Charles was obliged to devote himself exclusively to affairs of 
 the South. The Pope, Leo III, had been attacked by a band 
 of Roman rowdies and had been left for dead in the street. 
 Some kind people had bandaged his wounds and had helped 
 him to escape to the camp of Charles, where he asked for 
 help. An army of Franks soon restored quiet and carried Leo 
 back to the Lateran Palace which ever since the days of Con¬ 
 stantine, had been the home of the Pope. That was in Decem¬ 
 ber of the year 799. On Christmas day of the next year, 
 Charlemagne, who was staying in Rome, attended the service 
 in the ancient church of St. Peter. When he arose from prayer, 
 the Pope placed a crown upon his head, called him Emperor of 
 the Romans and hailed him once more with the title of “Augus¬ 
 tus” which had not been heard for hundreds of years. 
 
 Once more Northern Europe was part of a Roman Empire, 
 but the dignity was held by a German chieftain who could 
 read just a little and never learned to write. But he could 
 fight and for a short while there was order and even the rival 
 emperor in Constantinople sent a letter of approval to his 
 “dear Brother.” 
 
 Unfortunately this splendid old man died in the year 814. 
 His sons and his grandsons at once began to fight for the 
 largest share of the imperial inheritance. Twice the Caro- 
 lingian lands were divided, by the treaties of Verdun in the 
 year 843 and by the treaty of Mersen-on-the-Meuse in the 
 
CHARLEMAGNE 
 
 147 
 
 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE OF GERMAN NATIONALITY 
 
148 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 year 870. The latter treaty divided the entire Frankish King¬ 
 dom into two parts. Charles the Bold received the western 
 half. It contained the old Roman province called Gaul where 
 the language of the people had become thoroughly romanized. 
 The Franks soon learned to speak this language and this 
 accounts for the strange fact that a purely Germanic land 
 like France should speak a Latin tongue. 
 
 The other grandson got the eastern part, the land which 
 the Romans had called Germania. Those inhospitable re¬ 
 gions had never been part of the old Empire. Augustus had 
 tried to conquer this “far east,” but his legions had been annihi¬ 
 lated in the Teutoburg Wood in the year 9 and the people had 
 never been influenced by the higher Roman civilisation. They 
 spoke the popular Germanic tongue. The Teuton word for 
 “people” was “thiot.” The Christian missionaries therefore 
 called the German language the “lingua theotisca” or the 
 “lingua teutisca,” the “popular dialect” and this word “teu- 
 tisca” was changed into “Deutsch” which accounts for the name 
 “Deutschland.” 
 
 As for the famous Imperial Crown, it very soon slipped 
 off the heads of the Carolingian successors and rolled back onto 
 the Italian plain, where it became a sort of plaything of a 
 number of little potentates who stole the crown from each other 
 amidst much bloodshed and wore it (with or without the per¬ 
 mission of the Pope) until it was the turn of some more am¬ 
 bitious neighbour. The Pope, once more sorely beset by his 
 enemies, sent north for help. He did not appeal to the ruler 
 of the west-Frankish kingdom, this time. His messengers 
 crossed the Alps and addressed themselves to Otto, a Saxon 
 Prince who was recognised, as the greatest chieftain of the 
 different Germanic tribes. 
 
 Otto, who shared his people’s affection for the blue skies 
 and the gay and beautiful people of the Italian peninsula, 
 hastened to the rescue. In return for his services, the Pope, 
 Leo VIII, made Otto “Emperor,” and the eastern half of 
 Charles’ old kingdom was henceforth known as the “Holy 
 Roman Empire of the German Nation.” 
 
THE MOUNTAIN-PASS 
 

CHARLEMAGNE 
 
 149 
 
 This strange political creation managed to live to the ripe 
 old age of eight hundred and thirty-nine years. In the year 
 1801, (during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson,) it was 
 most unceremoniously relegated to the historical scrapheap. 
 The brutal fellow who destroyed the old Germanic Empire was 
 the son of a Corsican notary-public who had made a brilliant 
 career in the service of the French Republic. He was ruler 
 of Europe by the grace of his famous Guard Regiments, but 
 he desired to be something more. He sent to Rome for the 
 Pope and the Pope came and stood by while General Napoleon 
 placed the imperial crown upon his own head and proclaimed 
 himself heir to the tradition of Charlemagne. For history is 
 like life. The more things change, the more they remain 
 the same. 
 
THE NORSEMEN 
 
 WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE TENTH CENTURY 
 PRAYED THE LORD TO PROTECT THEM 
 FROM THE FURY OF THE NORSEMEN 
 
 In the third and fourth centuries, the Germanic tribes of 
 central Europe had broken through the defences of the Em¬ 
 pire that they might plunder Rome and live on the fat of the 
 land. In the eighth century it became the turn of the Germans 
 to be the “plundered-ones.” They did not like this at all, even 
 if their enemies were their first cousins, the Norsemen, who 
 lived in Denmark and Sweden and Norway. 
 
 What forced these hardy sailors to turn pirate we do not 
 know, but once they had discovered the advantages and pleas¬ 
 ures of a buccaneering career there was no one who could stop 
 them. They would suddenly descend upon a peaceful Frank¬ 
 ish or Frisian village, situated on the mouth of a river. They 
 would kill all the men and steal all the women. Then they 
 would sail away in their fast-sailing ships and when the sol¬ 
 diers of the king or emperor arrived upon the scene, the rob¬ 
 bers were gone and nothing remained but a few smouldering 
 ruins. 
 
 During the days of disorder which followed the death of 
 Charlemagne, the Northmen developed great activity. Their 
 fleets made raids upon every country and their sailors estab¬ 
 lished small independent kingdoms along the coast of Holland 
 and France and England and Germany, and they even found 
 
 150 
 
THE NORSEMEN 
 
 151 
 
 their way into Italy. The Northmen were very intelligent. 
 They soon learned to speak the language of their subjects and 
 gave up the uncivilised ways of the early Vikings (or Sea- 
 Kings) who had been very picturesque but also very unwashed 
 and terribly cruel. 
 
 THE HOME OF THE NORSEMEN 
 
 Early in the tenth century a Viking by the name of Rollo 
 had repeatedly attacked the coast of France. The king of 
 France, too weak to resist these northern robbers, tried to 
 bribe them into “being good.” He offered them the province 
 of Normandy, if they would promise to stop bothering the rest 
 of his domains. Rollo accepted this bargain and became “Duke 
 of Normandy.” 
 
152 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 But the passion of conquest was strong in the blood of his 
 children. Across the channel, only a few hours away from the 
 European mainland, they could see the white cliffs and the 
 green fields of England. Poor England had passed through 
 difficult days. For two hundred years it had been a Roman 
 colony. After the Romans left, it had been conquered by the 
 
 THE NORMANS LOOK ACROSS THE CHANNEL 
 
THE NORSEMEN 
 
 153 
 
 THE WORLD OF THE NORSEMEN 
 
154 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Angles and the Saxons, two German tribes from Schleswig. 
 Next the Danes had taken the greater part of the country 
 and had established the kingdom of Cnut. The Danes had 
 been driven away and now (it was early in the eleventh cen¬ 
 tury) another Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, was on the 
 throne. But Edward was not expected to live long and he 
 had no children. The circumstances favoured the ambitious 
 dukes of Normandy. 
 
 In 1066 Edward died. Immediately William of Nor¬ 
 mandy crossed the channel, defeated and killed Harold of 
 Wessex (who had taken the crown) at the battle of Hastings, 
 and proclaimed himself king of England. 
 
 In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a 
 German chieftain had become a Homan Emperor. Now in 
 the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised 
 as King of England. 
 
 Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth 
 of history is so much more interesting and entertaining? 
 
FEUDALISM 
 
 HOW CENTRAL EUROPE, ATTACKED FROM 
 THREE SIDES, BECAME AN ARMED CAMP 
 AND WHY EUROPE WOULD HAVE PER¬ 
 ISHED WITHOUT THOSE PROFESSIONAL 
 SOLDIERS AND ADMINISTRATORS WHO 
 WERE PART OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM 
 
 The following, then, is the state of Europe in the year one 
 thousand, when most people were so unhappy that they wel¬ 
 comed the prophecy foretelling the approaching end of the 
 world and rushed to the monasteries, that the Day of Judge¬ 
 ment might find them engaged upon devout duties. 
 
 At an unknown date, the Germanic tribes had left their old 
 home in Asia and had moved westward into Europe. By 
 sheer pressure of numbers they had forced their way into the 
 Roman Empire. They had destroyed the great western em¬ 
 pire, but the eastern part, being off the main route of the 
 great migrations, had managed to survive and feebly continued 
 the traditions of Rome’s ancient glory. 
 
 During the days of disorder which had followed, (the true 
 “dark ages” of history, the sixth and seventh centuries of our 
 era,) the German tribes had been persuaded to accept the 
 Christian religion and had recognised the Bishop of Rome 
 as the Pope or spiritual head of the world. In the ninth cen¬ 
 tury, the organising genius of Charlemagne had revived the 
 Roman Empire and had united the greater part of western 
 
 155 
 
156 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Europe into a single state. During the tenth century this 
 empire had gone to pieces. The western part had become a 
 separate kingdom, France. The eastern half was known as the 
 Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and the rulers of 
 this federation of states then pretended that they were the 
 direct heirs of Caesar and Augustus. 
 
 Unfortunately the power of the kings of France did not 
 stretch beyond the moat of their royal residence, while the 
 Holy Roman Emperor was openly defied by his powerful 
 subjects whenever it suited their fancy or their profit. 
 
 To increase the misery of the masses of the people, the tri¬ 
 angle of western Europe (look at page 128, please) was for ever 
 exposed to attacks from three sides. On the south lived the 
 ever dangerous Mohammedans. The western coast was ravaged 
 by the Northmen. The eastern frontier (defenceless except 
 for the short stretch of the Carpathian mountains) was at 
 the mercy of hordes of Huns, Hungarians, Slavs and Tartars. 
 
 The peace of Rome was a thing of the remote past, a dream 
 of the “Good Old Days” that were gone for ever. It was a 
 question of “fight or die,” and quite naturally people preferred 
 to fight. Forced by circumstances, Europe became an armed 
 camp and there was a demand for strong leadership. Both 
 King and Emperor were far away. The frontiersmen (and 
 most of Europe in the year 1000 was “frontier”) must help 
 themselves. They willingly submitted to the representatives 
 of the king who were sent to administer the outlying dis¬ 
 tricts, provided they could protect them against their enemies. 
 
 Soon central Europe was dotted with small principalities, 
 each one ruled by a duke or a count or a baron or a bishop, as 
 the case might be, and organised as a fighting unit. These 
 dukes and counts and barons had sworn to be faithful to the 
 king who had given them their “feudum” (hence our word 
 “feudal,”) in return for their loyal services and a certain 
 amount of taxes. But travel in those days was slow and the 
 means of communication were exceedingly poor. The royal 
 or imperial administrators therefore enjoyed great independ¬ 
 ence, and within the boundaries of their own province they 
 
THE NORSEMEN ARE COMING 
 

FEUDALISM 
 
 157 
 
 assumed most of the rights which in truth belonged to the king. 
 
 But you would make a mistake if you supposed that the 
 people of the eleventh century objected to this form of gov¬ 
 ernment. They supported Feudalism because it was a very 
 practical and necessary institution. Their Lord and Master 
 usually lived in a big stone house erected on the top of a steep 
 rock or built between deep moats, but within sight of his 
 subjects. In case of danger the subjects found shelter behind 
 the walls of the baronial stronghold. That is why they tried 
 to live as near the castle as possible and it accounts for the 
 many European cities which began their career around a feudal 
 fortress. 
 
 But the knight of the early middle ages was much more 
 than a professional soldier. He was the civil servant of that 
 day. He was the judge of his community and he was the 
 chief of police. He caught the highwaymen and protected 
 the wandering pedlars who were the merchants of the eleventh 
 century. He looked after the dikes so that the countryside 
 should not be flooded (just as the first noblemen had done 
 in the valley of the Nile four thousand years before). He 
 encouraged the Troubadours who wandered from place to place 
 telling the stories of the ancient heroes who had fought in the 
 great wars of the migrations. Besides, he protected the churches 
 and the monasteries within his territory, and although he could 
 neither read nor write, (it was considered unmanly to know 
 such things,) he employed a number of priests who kept his 
 accounts and who registered the marriages and the births and 
 the deaths which occurred within the baronial or ducal do¬ 
 mains. 
 
 In the fifteenth century the kings once more became strong 
 enough to exercise those powers which belonged to them because 
 they were “anointed of God.” Then the feudal knights lost 
 their former independence. Reduced to the rank of country 
 squires, they no longer filled a need and soon they became a 
 nuisance. But Europe would have perished without the “feu¬ 
 dal system” of the dark ages. There were many bad knights 
 as there are many bad people to-day. But generally speaking, 
 
158 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the rough-fisted barons of the twelfth and thirteenth century 
 were hard-working administrators who rendered a most useful 
 service to the cause of progress. During that era the noble 
 torch of learning and art which had illuminated the world of 
 the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans was burning 
 very low. Without the knights and their good friends, the 
 monks, civilisation would have been extinguished entirely, and 
 the human race would have been forced to begin once more 
 where the cave-man had left off. 
 
CHIVALRY 
 
 CHIVALRY 
 
 It was quite natural that the professional fighting-men of 
 the Middle Ages should try to establish some sort of organisa¬ 
 tion for their mutual benefit and protection. Out of this need 
 for close organisation, Knighthood or Chivalry was born. 
 
 We know very little about the origins of Knighthood. But 
 as the system developed, it gave the world something which it 
 needed very badly—a definite rule of conduct which softened 
 the barbarous customs of that day and made life more livable 
 than it had been during the five hundred years of the Dark 
 Ages. It was not an easy task to civilise the rough frontiers¬ 
 men who had spent most of their time fighting Mohammedans 
 and Huns and Norsemen. Often they were guilty of back¬ 
 sliding, and having vowed all sorts of oaths about mercy and 
 charity in the morning, they would murder all their prisoners 
 before evening. But progress is ever the result of slow and 
 ceaseless labour, and finally the most unscrupulous of knights 
 was forced to obey the rules of his “class” or suffer the con¬ 
 sequences. 
 
 These rules were different in the various parts of Europe, 
 but they all made much of “service” and “loyalty to duty.” The 
 Middle Ages regarded service as something very noble and 
 beautiful. It was no disgrace to be a servant, provided you 
 were a good servant and did not slacken on the job. As for 
 loyalty, at a time when life depended upon the faithful per- 
 
 159 
 
160 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 formance of many unpleasant duties, it was the chief virtue 
 of the fighting man. 
 
 A young knight therefore was asked to swear that he would 
 be faithful as a servant to God and as a servant to his King. • 
 Furthermore, he promised to be generous to those whose need 
 was greater than his own. He pledged his word that he would 
 be humble in his personal behaviour and would never boast of 
 his own accomplishments and that he would be a friend of all 
 those who suffered, (with the exception of the Mohammedans, 
 whom he was expected to kill on sight). 
 
 Around these vows, which were merely the Ten Command¬ 
 ments expressed in terms which the people of the Middle Ages 
 could understand, there developed a complicated system of 
 manners and outward behaviour. The knights tried to model 
 their own lives after the example of those heroes of Arthur’s 
 Round Table and Charlemagne’s court of whom the Trouba¬ 
 dours had told them and of whom you may read in many de¬ 
 lightful books which are enumerated at the end of this volume. 
 They hoped that they might prove as brave as Lancelot and 
 as faithful as Roland. They carried themselves with dignity 
 and they spoke careful and gracious words that they might be 
 known as True Knights, however humble the cut of their coat 
 or the size of their purse. 
 
 In this way the order of Knighthood became a school of those 
 good manners which are the oil of the social machinery. Chiv¬ 
 alry came to mean courtesy and the feudal castle showed the 
 rest of the world what clothes to wear, how to eat, how to ask 
 a lady for a dance and the thousand and one little things of 
 every-day behaviour which help to make life interesting and 
 agreeable. 
 
 Like all human institutions, Knighthood was doomed to 
 perish as soon as it had outlived its usefulness. 
 
 The crusades, about which one of the next chapters tells, 
 were followed by a great revival of trade. Cities grew over¬ 
 night. The townspeople became rich, hired good school teach¬ 
 ers and soon were the equals of the knights. The invention 
 of gun-powder deprived the heavily armed “Chevalier” of his 
 
CHIVALRY 
 
 161 
 
 former advantage and the use of mercenaries made it impos¬ 
 sible to conduct a battle with the delicate niceties of a chess 
 tournament. The knight became superfluous. Soon he be¬ 
 came a ridiculous figure, with his devotion to ideals that had no 
 longer any practical value. It was said that the noble Don 
 Quixote de la Mancha had been the last of the true knights. 
 After his death, his trusted sword and his armour were sold 
 to pay his debts. 
 
 But somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into 
 the hands of a number of men. Washington carried it during 
 the hopeless days of Valley Forge. It was the only defence 
 of Gordon, when he had refused to desert the people who had 
 been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his death in the 
 besieged fortress of Khartoum. 
 
 And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable 
 strength in winning the Great War. 
 
POPE vs. EMPEROR 
 
 THE STRANGE DOUBLE LOYALTY OF THE 
 PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND HOW 
 IT LED TO ENDLESS QUARRELS BETWEEN 
 THE POPES AND THE HOLY ROMAN EM¬ 
 PERORS 
 
 It is very difficult to understand the people of by-gone 
 ages. Your own grandfather, whom you see every day, is a 
 mysterious being who lives in a different world of ideas and 
 clothes and manners. I am now telling you the story of some 
 of your grandfathers who are twenty-five generations removed, 
 and I do not expect you to catch the meaning of what I write 
 without re-reading this chapter a number of times. 
 
 The average man of the Middle Ages lived a very simple 
 and uneventful life. Even if he was a free citizen, able to 
 come and go at will, he rarely left his own neighbourhood. 
 There were no printed books and only a few manuscripts. 
 Here and there, a small band of industrious monks taught 
 reading and writing and some arithmetic. But science and his¬ 
 tory and geography lay buried beneath the ruins of Greece and 
 Rome. 
 
 Whatever people knew about the past they had learned by 
 listening to stories and legends. Such information, which goes 
 from father to son, is often slightly incorrect in details, but 
 it will preserve the main facts of history with astonishing accu¬ 
 racy. After more than two thousand years, the mothers of 
 India still frighten their naughty children by telling them that 
 
 162 
 
POPE vs. EMPEROR 
 
 163 
 
 “Iskander will get them,” and Iskander is none other than 
 Alexander the Great, who visited India in the year 330 before 
 the birth of Christ, but whose story has lived through all these, 
 ages. 
 
 The people of the early Middle Ages never saw a text¬ 
 book of Roman history. They were ignorant of many things 
 which every school-boy to-day knows before he has entered 
 the third grade. But the Roman Empire, which is merely a 
 name to you, was to them something very much alive. They 
 felt it. They willingly recognised the Pope as their spiritual 
 leader because he lived in Rome and represented the idea of 
 the Roman super-power. And they w'ere profoundly grate¬ 
 ful when Charlemagne, and afterwards Otto the Great, re¬ 
 vived the idea of a world-empire and created the Holy Roman 
 Empire, that the world might again be as it always had been. 
 
 But the fact that there were two different heirs to the 
 Roman tradition placed the faithful burghers of the Middle 
 Ages in a difficult position. The theory behind the mediaeval 
 political system was both sound and simple. While the worldly 
 master (the emperor) looked after the physical well-being of 
 his subjects, the spiritual master (the Pope) guarded their 
 souls. 
 
 In practice, however, the system worked very badly. The 
 Emperor invariably tried to interfere with the affairs of the 
 church and the Pope retaliated and told the Emperor how 
 he should rule his domains. Then they told each other to mind 
 their own business in very unceremonious language and the 
 inevitable end was war. 
 
 Under those circumstances, what were the people to do? 
 A good Christian obeyed both the Pope and his King. But 
 the Pope and the Emperor were enemies. Which side should 
 a dutiful subject and an equally dutiful Christian take? 
 
 It was never easy to give the correct answer. When the 
 Emperor happened to be a man of energy and was sufficiently 
 well provided with money to organise an army, he was very 
 apt to cross the Alps and march on Rome, besiege the Pope 
 
164 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 in his own palace if need be, and force His Holiness to obey 
 the imperial instructions or suffer the consequences. 
 
 But more frequently the Pope was the stronger. Then the 
 Emperor or the King together with all his subjects was excom¬ 
 municated. This meant that all churches were closed, that no 
 one could be baptised, that no dying man could be given abso¬ 
 lution—in short, that half of the functions of mediaeval govern¬ 
 ment came to an end. 
 
 More than that, the people were absolved from their oath of 
 loyalty to their sovereign and were urged to rebel against their 
 master. But if they followed this advice of the distant Pope 
 and were caught, they were hanged by their near-by Liege 
 Lord and that too was very unpleasant. 
 
 Indeed, the poor fellows were in a difficult position and 
 none fared worse than those who lived during the latter half of 
 the eleventh century, when the Emperor Henry IV of Ger¬ 
 many and Pope Gregory VII fought a two-round battle which 
 decided nothing and upset the peace of Europe for almost fifty 
 years. 
 
 In the middle of the eleventh century there had been a 
 strong movement for reform in the church. The election of the 
 Popes, thus far, had been a most irregular affair. It was to the 
 advantage of the Holy Roman Emperors to have a well-dis¬ 
 posed priest elected to the Holy See. They frequently came 
 to Rome at the time of election and used their influence for 
 the benefit of one of their friends. 
 
 In the year 1059 this had been changed. By a decree of 
 Pope Nicholas II the principal priests and deacons of the 
 churches in and around Rome were organised into the so- 
 called College of Cardinals, and this gathering of prominent 
 churchmen (the word “Cardinal” meant principal) was given 
 the exclusive power of electing the future Popes. 
 
 In the year 1073 the College of Cardinals elected a priest 
 by the name of Hildebrand, the son of very simple parents in 
 Tuscany, as Pope, and he took the name of Gregory VII. 
 His energy was unbounded. His belief in the supreme powers 
 of his holy office was built upon a granite rock of conviction 
 

 THE CASTLE 
 
POPE vs. EMPEROR 
 
 165 
 
 and courage. In the mind of Gregory, the Pope was not only 
 the absolute head of the Christian church, but also the highest 
 Court of Appeal in all worldly matters. The Pope who had 
 elevated simple German princes to the dignity of Emperor 
 could depose them at will. He could veto any law passed by 
 duke or king or emperor, but whosoever should question a 
 papal decree, let him beware, for the punishment would be 
 swift and merciless. 
 
 Gregory sent ambassadors to all the European courts to 
 inform the potentates of Europe of his new laws and asked 
 them to take due notice of their contents. William the Con¬ 
 queror promised to be good, but Plenry IV, who since the age 
 of six had been fighting with his subjects, had no intention of 
 submitting to the Papal will. He called together a college of 
 German bishops, accused Gregory of every crime under the 
 sun and then had him deposed by the council of Worms. 
 
 The Pope answered with excommunication and a demand 
 that the German princes rid themselves of their unworthy ruler. 
 The German princes, only too happy to be rid of Henry, asked 
 the Pope to come to Augsburg and help them elect a new Em¬ 
 peror. 
 
 HENRY IV AT CANOSSA 
 
 Gregory left Rome and 
 travelled northward. Henry, 
 who was no fool, appreciated 
 the danger of his position. At 
 all costs he must make peace 
 with the Pope, and he must do 
 it at once. In the midst of win¬ 
 ter he crossed the Alps and 
 hastened to Canossa where the 
 Pope had stopped for a short 
 rest. Three long days, from 
 the 25th to the 28th of January 
 of the year 1077, Henry, 
 dressed as a penitent pilgrim 
 (but with a warm sweater un- 
 
166 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 derneath his monkish garb), waited outside the gates of the 
 castle of Canossa. Then he was allowed to enter and was 
 pardoned for his sins. But the repentance did not last long. 
 As soon as Henry had returned to Germany, he behaved 
 exactly as before. Again he was excommunicated. For the 
 second time a council of German bishops deposed Greg¬ 
 ory, but this time, when Henry crossed the Alps he was at 
 the head of a large army, besieged Rome and forced Gregory 
 to retire to Salerno, where he died in exile. This first violent 
 outbreak decided nothing. As soon as Henry was back in 
 Germany, the struggle between Pope and Emperor was con¬ 
 tinued. 
 
 The Hohenstaufen family which got hold of the Imperial 
 German Throne shortly afterwards, were even more independ¬ 
 ent than their predecessors. Gregory had claimed that the 
 Popes were superior to all kings because they (the Popes) at 
 the Day of Judgement would be responsible for the behaviour 
 of all the sheep of their flock, and in the eyes of God, a king 
 was one of that faithful herd. 
 
 Frederick of Hohenstaufen, commonly known as Barba- 
 rossa or Red Beard, set up the counter-claim that the Empire 
 had been bestowed upon his predecessor “by God himself” 
 and as the Empire included Italy and Rome, he began a cam¬ 
 paign which was to add these “lost provinces” to the northern 
 country. Barbarossa was accidentally drowned in Asia Minor 
 during the second Crusade, but his son Frederick II, a brilliant 
 young man who in his youth had been exposed to the civilisa¬ 
 tion of the Mohammedans of Sicily, continued the war. The 
 Popes accused him of heresy. It is true that Frederick seems 
 to have felt a deep and serious contempt for the rough Chris¬ 
 tian world of the North, for the boorish German Knights and 
 the intriguing Italian priests. But he held his tongue, went 
 on a Crusade and took Jerusalem from the infidel and was 
 duly crowned as King of the Holy City. Even this act did not 
 placate the Popes. They deposed Frederick and gave his 
 Italian possessions to Charles of Anjou, the brother of that 
 King Louis of France who became famous as Saint Louis. 
 
POPE vs. EMPEROR 
 
 167 
 
 This led to more warfare. Conrad V, the son of Conrad IV, 
 and the last of the Hohenstaufens, tried to regain the kingdom, 
 and was defeated and decapitated at Naples. But twenty years 
 later, the French who had made themselves thoroughly un¬ 
 popular in Sicily were all murdered during the so-called Sici¬ 
 lian Vespers, and so it went. 
 
 The quarrel between the Popes and the Emperors was 
 never settled, but after a while the two enemies learned to 
 leave each other alone. 
 
 In the year 1273, Rudolph of Hapsburg was elected Em¬ 
 peror. He did not take the trouble to go to Rome to be 
 crowned. The Popes did not object and in turn they kept 
 away from Germany. This meant peace but two entire cen¬ 
 turies which might have been used for the purpose of internal 
 organisation had been wasted in useless warfare. 
 
 It is an ill wind however that bloweth no good to some one. 
 The little cities of Italy, by a process of careful balancing, 
 had managed to increase their power and their independence 
 at the expense of both Emperors and Popes. When the rush 
 for the Holy Land began, they were able to handle the trans¬ 
 portation problem of the thousands of eager pilgrims who were 
 clamoring for passage, and at the end of the Crusades they 
 had built themselves such strong defences of brick and of gold 
 that they could defy Pope and Emperor with equal indif¬ 
 ference. 
 
 Church and State fought each other and a third party—the 
 mediaeval city—ran away with the spoils. 
 
THE CRUSADES 
 
 BUT ALL THESE DIFFERENT QUARRELS 
 WERE FORGOTTEN WHEN THE TURKS 
 TOOK THE HOLY LAND, DESECRATED THE 
 HOLY PLACES AND INTERFERED SERI¬ 
 OUSLY WITH THE TRADE FROM EAST TO 
 WEST. EUROPE WENT CRUSADING 
 
 During three centuries there had been peace between Chris¬ 
 tians and Moslems except in Spain and in the eastern Roman 
 Empire, the two states defending the gateways of Europe. 
 The Mohammedans having conquered Syria in the seventh 
 century were in possession of the Holy Land. But they re¬ 
 garded Jesus as a great prophet (though not quite as great 
 as Mohammed), and they did not interfere with the pilgrims 
 who wished to pray in the church which Saint Helena, the 
 mother of the Emperor Constantine, had built on the spot of 
 the Holy Grave. But early in the eleventh century, a Tartar 
 tribe from the wilds of Asia, called the Seljuks or Turks, 
 became masters of the Mohammedan state in western Asia and 
 then the period of tolerance came to an end. The Turks took 
 all of Asia Minor away from the eastern Roman Emperors 
 and they made an end to the trade between east and west. 
 
 Alexis, the Emperor, who rarely saw anything of his Chris¬ 
 tian neighbours of the west, appealed for help and pointed to 
 the danger which threatened Europe should the Turks take 
 Constantinople. 
 
 168 
 
THE CRUSADER 
 
 169 
 
 The Italian cities which had established colonies along the 
 coast of Asia Minor and Palestine, in fear for their posses¬ 
 sions, reported terrible stories of Turkish atrocities and Chris¬ 
 tian suffering. All Europe got excited. 
 
 Pope Urban II, a Frenchman from Reims, who had been 
 educated at the same famous cloister of Cluny which had 
 trained Gregory VII, thought that the time had come for 
 action. The general state of Europe was far from satisfactory. 
 The primitive agricultural methods of that day (unchanged 
 since Roman times) caused a constant scarcity of food. There 
 was unemployment and hunger and these are apt to lead to 
 discontent and riots. Western Asia in older days had fed mil¬ 
 lions. It was an excellent field for the purpose of immigration. 
 
 Therefore at the council of Clermont in France in the year 
 1095 the Pope arose, described the terrible horrors which the 
 infidels had inflicted upon the Holy Land, gave a glowing de¬ 
 scription of this country which ever since the days of Moses 
 had been overflowing with milk and honey, and exhorted the 
 knights of France and the people of Europe in general to 
 leave wife and child and deliver Palestine from the Turks. 
 
 A wave of religious hysteria swept across the continent. 
 All reason stopped. Men would drop their hammer and saw, 
 walk out of their shop and take the nearest road to the east 
 to go and kill Turks. Children would leave their homes to “go 
 to Palestine” and bring the terrible Turks to their knees by 
 the mere appeal of their youthful zeal and Christian piety. 
 Fully ninety percent of those enthusiasts never got within 
 sight of the Holy Land. They had no money. They were 
 forced to beg or steal to keep alive. They became a danger 
 to the safety of the highroads and they were killed by the 
 angry country people. 
 
 The first Crusade, a wild mob of honest Christians, default¬ 
 ing bankrupts, penniless noblemen and fugitives from justice, 
 following the lead of half-crazy Peter the Hermit and Walter- 
 without-a-Cent, began their campaign against the Infidels by 
 murdering all the Jews whom they met by the way. They 
 got as far as Hungary and then they were all killed. 
 
170 
 
 Y*IE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 This experience taught the Church a lesson. Enthusiasm 
 alone would not set the Holy Land free. Organisation was 
 as necessary as good-will and courage. A year was spent in 
 training and equipping an army of 200,000 men. They were 
 placed under command of Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert, duke 
 of Normandy, Robert, count of Flanders, and a number of 
 other noblemen, all experienced in the art of war. 
 
 In the year 1096 this second crusade started upon its long 
 voyage. At Constantinople the knights did homage to the 
 
 THE FIRST CRUSADE 
 
 Emperor. (For as I have told you, traditions die hard, and 
 a Roman Emperor, however poor and powerless, was still held 
 in great respect). Then they crossed into Asia, killed all the 
 Moslems who fell into their hands, stormed Jerusalem, mas¬ 
 sacred the Mohammedan population, and marched to the Holy 
 Sepulchre to give praise and thanks amidst tears of piety and 
 gratitude. But soon the Turks were strengthened by the arri¬ 
 val of fresh troops. Then they retook Jerusalem and in turn 
 killed the faithful followers of the Cross. 
 
THE CRUSADER 
 
 171 
 
 THE WORLD OF THE CRUSADERS 
 
172 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 During the next two centuries, seven other crusades took 
 place. Gradually the Crusaders learned the technique of the 
 trip. The land voyage was too tedious and too dangerous. 
 They preferred to cross the Alps and go to Genoa or Venice 
 where they took ship for the east. The Genoese and the Vene¬ 
 tians made this trans-Mediterranean passenger service a very 
 profitable business. They charged exorbitant rates, and when 
 the Crusaders (most of whom had very little money) could not 
 pay the price, these Italian “profiteers” kindly allowed them 
 to “work their way across.” In return for a fare from Venice 
 to Acre, the Crusader undertook to do a stated amount of 
 fighting for the owners of his vessel. In this way Venice greatly 
 increased her territory along the coast of the Adriatic and in 
 Greece, where Athens became a Venetian colony, and in the 
 islands of Cyprus and Crete and Rhodes. 
 
 All this, however, helped 
 little in settling the question 
 of the Holy Land. After 
 the first enthusiasm had 
 worn off, a short crusading 
 trip became part of the lib¬ 
 eral education of every well- 
 bred young man, and there 
 never was any lack of can¬ 
 didates for service in Pales¬ 
 tine. But the old zeal was 
 gone. The Crusaders, who 
 had begun their warfare 
 with deep hatred for the 
 Mohammedans and great 
 love for the Christian peo¬ 
 ple of the eastern Roman THE crusaders take Jerusalem 
 Empire and Armenia, suf¬ 
 fered a complete change of heart. They came to despise the 
 Greeks of Byzantium, who cheated them and frequently be¬ 
 trayed the cause of the Cross, and the Armenians and all the 
 other Levantine races, and they began to appreciate the vir- 
 
THE CRUSADER 173 
 
 tues of their enemies who proved to be generous and fair 
 opponents. 
 
 Of course, it would never do to say this openly. But when 
 the Crusader returned home, he was likely to imitate the man¬ 
 ners which he had learned from his heathenish foe, compared 
 to whom the average western knight was still a good deal of a 
 country bumpkin. He also brought with him several new 
 food-stuffs, such as peaches and spinach which he planted in his 
 garden and grew for his own benefit. He gave up the bar¬ 
 barous custom of wearing a load of heavy armour and appeared 
 in the flowing robes of silk or cotton which were the traditional 
 habit of the followers of the Prophet and were originally worn 
 by the Turks. Indeed the Crusades, which had begun as a 
 punitive expedition against the Heathen, became a course of 
 general instruction in civilisation for millions of young Euro¬ 
 peans. 
 
 From a military and politi¬ 
 cal point of view the Crusades 
 were a failure. Jerusalem and 
 a number of cities were taken 
 and lost. A dozen little king¬ 
 doms were established in Syria 
 and Palestine and Asia Minor, 
 but they were re-conquered by 
 the Turks and after the year 
 1244 (when Jerusalem became 
 definitely Turkish) the status 
 of the Holy Land was the same 
 as it had been before 1095. 
 
 But Europe had undergone a 
 great change. The people of 
 the west had been allowed a glimpse of the light and the sun¬ 
 shine and the beauty of the east. Their dreary castles no 
 longer satisfied them. They wanted a broader life. Neither 
 Church nor State could give this to them. 
 
 They found it in the cities. 
 
 THE CRUSADER’S GRAVE 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY 
 
 
 WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
 SAID THAT “CITY AIR IS FREE AIR” 
 
 The early part of the Middle Ages had "been an era of 
 pioneering and of settlement. A new people, who thus far 
 had lived outside the wild range of forest, mountains and 
 marshes which protected the north-eastern frontier of the Ro- 
 ,man Empire, had forced its way into the plains of western 
 Europe and had taken possession of most of the land. They 
 were restless, as all pioneers have been since the beginning of 
 time. They liked to be “on the go.” They cut down the 
 forests and they cut each other’s throats with equal energy. 
 Few of them wanted to live in cities. They insisted upon being 
 “free,” they loved to feel the fresh air of the hillsides fill their 
 lungs while they drove their herds across the wind-swept pas¬ 
 tures. When they no longer liked their old homes, they pulled 
 up stakes and went away in search of fresh adventures. 
 
 The weaker ones died. The hardy fighters and the cou¬ 
 rageous women who had followed their men into the wilder¬ 
 ness survived. In this way they developed a strong race of 
 men. They cared little for the graces of life. They were too 
 busy to play the fiddle or write pieces of poetry. They had 
 little love for discussions. The priest, “the learned man” of the 
 village (and before the middle of the thirteenth century, a lay¬ 
 man who could read and write was regarded as a “sissy”) was 
 supposed to settle all questions which had no direct practical 
 
 174 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY 
 
 175 
 
 value. Meanwhile the German chieftain, the Frankish Baron, 
 the Northman Duke (or whatever their names and titles) occu¬ 
 pied their share of the territory which once had been part of 
 the great Roman Empire and among the ruins of past glory, 
 they built a world of their own which pleased them mightily 
 and which they considered quite perfect. 
 
 They managed the affairs of their castle and the surround¬ 
 ing country to the best of their ability. They were as faithful 
 to the commandments of the Church as any weak mortal could 
 hope to be. They were sufficiently loyal to their king or em¬ 
 peror to keep on good terms with those distant but always dan¬ 
 gerous potentates. In short, they tried to do right and to be 
 fair to their neighbours without being exactly unfair to their 
 own interests- 
 
 It was not an ideal world in which they found themselves. 
 The greater part of the people were serfs or “villeins,” farm¬ 
 hands who were as much a part of the soil upon which they 
 lived as the cows and sheep whose stables they shared. Their 
 fate was not particularly happy nor was it particularly un¬ 
 happy. But what was one to do? The good Lord who ruled 
 the world of the Middle Ages had undoubtedly ordered every¬ 
 thing for the best. If He, in his wisdom, had decided that 
 there must be both knights and serfs, it was not the duty of 
 these faithful sons of the church to question the arrangement. 
 The serfs therefore did not complain but when they were too 
 hard driven, they would die off like cattle which are not fed 
 and stabled in the right way, and then something would be has¬ 
 tily done to better their condition. But if the progress of the 
 world had been left to the serf and his feudal master, we would 
 still be living after the fashion of the twelfth century, saying 
 “abracadabra” when we tried to stop a tooth-ache, and feeling 
 a deep contempt and hatred for the dentist who offered to help 
 us with his “science,” which most likely was of Mohammedan 
 or heathenish origin and therefore both wicked and useless. 
 
 When you grow up you will discover that many people do 
 not believe in “progress” and they will prove to you by the 
 terrible deeds of some of our own contemporaries that “the 
 
176 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 world does not change.” But I hope that you will not pay 
 much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors 
 almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. 
 Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts 
 developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art 
 of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, 
 without which no progress is possible—was invented only four 
 thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature 
 into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of 
 your own grandfather. It seems to me, therefore, that we are 
 making progress at an unheard-of rate of speed. Perhaps we 
 have paid a little too much attention to the mere physical com¬ 
 forts of life. That will change in due course of time and we 
 shall then attack the problems which are not related to health 
 and to wages and plumbing and machinery in general. 
 
 But please do not be too sentimental about the “good old 
 days.” Many people who only see the beautiful churches and 
 the great works of art which the Middle Ages have left behind 
 grow quite eloquent when they compare our own ugly civilisa¬ 
 tion with its hurry and its noise and the evil smells of back¬ 
 firing motor trucks with the cities of a thousand years ago. 
 But these mediaeval churches were invariably surrounded by 
 miserable hovels compared to which a modern tenement house 
 stands forth as a luxurious palace. It is true that the noble 
 Lancelot and the equally noble Parsifal, the pure young hero 
 who went in search of the Holy Grail, were not bothered by 
 the odor of gasoline. But there were other smells of the barn¬ 
 yard variety—odors of decaying refuse which had been thrown 
 into the street—of pig-sties surrounding the Bishop’s palace— 
 of unwashed people who had inherited their coats and hats 
 from their grandfathers and who had never learned the bless¬ 
 ing of soap. I do not want to paint too unpleasant a picture. 
 But when you read in the ancient chronicles that the King of 
 France, looking out of the windows of his palace, fainted at 
 the stench caused by the pigs rooting in the streets of Paris, 
 when an ancient manuscript recounts a few details of an epi¬ 
 demic of the plague or of small-pox, then you begin to under- 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY 
 
 177 
 
 stand that “progress” is something more than a catchword used 
 by modern advertising men. 
 
 No, the progress of the last six hundred years would not 
 have been possible without the existence of cities. I shall, 
 therefore, have to make this chapter a little longer than many 
 of the others. It is too important to be reduced to three or 
 four pages, devoted to mere political events. 
 
 The ancient world of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria 
 had been a world of cities. Greece had been a country of City- 
 States. The history of Phoenicia was the history of two cities 
 called Sidon and Tyre. The Roman Empire was the “hinter¬ 
 land” of a single town. Writing, art, science, astronomy, ar¬ 
 chitecture, literature, the theatre—the list is endless—have all 
 been products of the city. 
 
 For almost four thousand years the wooden bee-hive which 
 we call a town had been the workshop of the world. Then came 
 the great migrations. The Roman Empire was destroyed. 
 The cities were burned down and Europe once more became a 
 land of pastures and little agricultural villages. During the 
 Dark Ages the fields of civilisation had lain fallow. 
 
 The Crusades had prepared the soil for a new crop. It 
 was time for the harvest, but the fruit was plucked by the 
 burghers of the free cities. 
 
 I have told you the story of the castles and the monasteries, 
 with their heavy stone enclosures—the homes of the knights 
 and the monks, who guarded men’s bodies and their souls. 
 You have seen how a few artisans (butchers and bakers and an 
 occasional candle stick maker) came to live near the castle 
 to tend to the wants of their masters and to find protection 
 in case of danger. Sometimes the feudal lord allowed these 
 people to surround their houses with a stockade. But they 
 were dependent for their living upon the good-will of the 
 mighty Seigneur of the castle. When he went about they knelt 
 before him and kissed his hand. 
 
 Then came the Crusades and many things changed. The 
 migrations had driven people from the north-east to the west. 
 The Crusades made millions of people travel from the west to 
 
ITS 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the highly civilised regions of the south-east. They discovered 
 that the world was not bounded by the four walls of their little 
 settlement. They came to appreciate better clothes, more com¬ 
 fortable houses, new dishes, products of the mysterious Orient. 
 After their return to their old homes, they insisted that they 
 be supplied with those articles. The peddler with his pack 
 upon his back—the only merchant of the Dark Ages—added 
 these goods to his old merchandise, bought a cart, hired a few 
 ex-crusaders to protect him against the crime wave which fol¬ 
 lowed this great international war, and went forth to do busi¬ 
 ness upon a more modern and larger scale. His career was 
 not an easy one. Every time he entered the domains of an¬ 
 other Lord he had to pay tolls and taxes. But the business 
 was profitable all the same and the peddler continued to make 
 his rounds. 
 
 Soon certain energetic merchants discovered that the goods 
 which they had always imported from afar could be made at 
 home. They turned part of their homes into a work shop. 
 They ceased to be merchants and became manufacturers. They 
 sold their products not only to the lord of the castle and to the 
 abbot in his monastery, but they exported them to nearby towns. 
 The lord and the abbot paid them with products of their farms, 
 eggs and wines, and with honey, which in those early days was 
 used as sugar. But the citizens of distant towns were obliged 
 to pay in cash and the manufacturer and the merchant began to 
 own little pieces of gold, which entirely changed their position 
 in the society of the early Middle Ages. 
 
 It is difficult for you to imagine a world without money. 
 In a modern city one cannot possibly live without money. All 
 day long you carry a pocket full of small discs of metal to 
 “pay your way.” You need a nickel for the street-car, a dollar 
 for a dinner, three cents for an evening paper. But many 
 people of the early Middle Ages never saw a piece of coined 
 money from the time they were bom to the day of their death. 
 The gold and silver of Greece and Home lay buried beneath 
 the ruins of their cities. The world of the migrations, which 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY 
 
 179 
 
 had succeeded the Empire, was an agricultural world. Every 
 farmer raised enough grain and enough sheep and enough 
 cows for his own use. 
 
 The mediawal knight was a country squire and was rarely 
 forced to pay for materials in money. His estates produced 
 
 THE CASTLE AND THE CITY 
 
 everything that he and his family ate and drank and wore on 
 their backs. The bricks for his house were made along the 
 banks of the nearest river. Wood for the rafters of the hall 
 was cut from the baronial forest. The few articles that had to 
 come from abroad were paid for in goods—in honey—in eggs 
 —in fagots. 
 
180 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 But the Crusades upset the routine of the old agricultural 
 life in a very drastic fashion. Suppose that the Duke of Hil- 
 desheim was going to the Holy Land. He must travel thou¬ 
 sands of miles and he must pay his passage and his hotel-bills. 
 At home he could pay with products of his farm. But he 
 could not well take a hundred dozen eggs and a cart-load of 
 hams with him to satisfy the greed of the shipping agent of 
 Venice or the inn-keeper of the Brenner Pass. These gentle¬ 
 men insisted upon cash. His Lordship therefore was obliged 
 to take a small quantity of gold with him upon his voyage. 
 Where could he find this gold? He could borrow it from the 
 Lombards, the descendants of the old Longobards, who had 
 turned professional money-lenders, who seated behind their 
 exchange-table (commonly known as “banco” or bank) were 
 glad to let his Grace have a few hundred gold pieces in ex¬ 
 change for a mortgage upon his estates, that they might be re¬ 
 paid in case His Lordship should die at the hands of the Turks. 
 
 That was dangerous business for the borrower. In the end, 
 the Lombards invariably owned the estates and the Knight 
 became a bankrupt, who hired himself out as a fighting man to 
 a more powerful and more careful neighbour. 
 
 His Grace could also go to that part of the town where the 
 Jews were forced to live. There he could borrow money at a 
 rate of fifty or sixty percent, interest. That, too, was bad 
 business. But was there a way out? Some of the people of the 
 little city which surrounded the castle were said to have money. 
 They had known the young lord all his life. His father and 
 their fathers had been good friends. They would not be un¬ 
 reasonable in their demands. Very well. His Lordship’s 
 clerk, a monk who could write and keep accounts, sent a note 
 to the best known merchants and asked for a small loan. The 
 townspeople met in the work-room of the jeweller who made 
 chalices for the nearby churches and discussed this demand. 
 They could not well refuse. It would serve no purpose to 
 ask for “interest.” In the first place, it was against the re¬ 
 ligious principles of most people to take interest and in the 
 
THE MEDLEVAL TOWN 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY 
 
 181 
 
 second place, it would never be paid except in agricultural 
 products and of these the people had enough and to spare. 
 
 “But,” suggested the tailor who spent his days quietly sit¬ 
 ting upon his table and who was somewhat of a philosopher, 
 “suppose that we ask some favour in return for our money. 
 We are all fond of fishing. But his Lordship won’t let us 
 fish in his brook. Suppose that we let him have a hundred 
 ducats and that he give us in return a written guarantee al¬ 
 lowing us to fish all we want in all of his rivers. Then he gets 
 the hundred which he needs, but we get the fish and it will be 
 good business all around.” 
 
 The day his Lordship accepted this proposition (it seemed 
 such an easy way of getting a hundred gold pieces) he signed 
 the death-warrant of his own power. His clerk drew up the 
 agreement. His Lordship made his mark (for he could not 
 sign his name) and departed for the East. Two years later 
 he came back, dead broke. The townspeople were fishing in 
 the castle pond. The sight of this silent row of anglers annoyed 
 his Lordship. He told his equerry to go and chase the crowd 
 away. They went, hut that night a delegation of merchants 
 visited the castle. They were very polite. They congratu¬ 
 lated his Lordship upon his safe return. They were sorry his 
 Lordship had been annoyed by the fishermen, but as his Lord- 
 ship might perhaps remember he had given them permission 
 to do so himself, and the tailor produced the Charter which 
 had been kept in the safe of the jeweller ever since the master 
 had gone to the Holy Land. 
 
 His Lordship was much annoyed. But once more he was 
 in dire need of some money. In Italy he had signed his name 
 to certain documents which were now in the possession of Sal- 
 vestro dei Medici, the well-known banker. These documents 
 were “promissory notes” and they were due two months from 
 date. Their total amount came to three hundred and forty 
 pounds, Flemish gold. Under these circumstances, the noble 
 knight could not well show the rage which filled his heart and 
 his proud soul. Instead, he suggested another little loan. The 
 merchants retired to discuss the matter. 
 
182 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 After three days they came back and said “yes.” They 
 were only too happy to be able to help their master in his diffi¬ 
 culties, but in return for the 345 golden pounds would he give 
 them another written promise (another charter) that they, 
 the townspeople, might establish a council of their own to be 
 elected by all the merchants and free citizens of the city, said 
 council to manage civic affairs without interference from the 
 side of the castle? 
 
 His Lordship was con¬ 
 foundedly angry. But again, 
 he needed the money. He said 
 yes, and signed the charter. 
 
 Next week, he repented. He 
 called his soldiers and went to 
 the house of the jeweller and 
 asked for the documents which 
 his crafty subjects had cajoled 
 out of him under the pressure 
 of circumstances. He took 
 them away and burned them. 
 
 The townspeople stood by and 
 said nothing. But when next 
 his Lordship needed money to 
 pay for the dowry of his daugh¬ 
 ter, he was unable to get a 
 single penny. After that little 
 affair at the jeweller’s his credit 
 was not considered good. He was forced to eat humble-pie 
 and offer to make certain reparations. Before his Lordship 
 got the first installment of the stipulated sum, the townspeople 
 were once more in possession of all their old charters and a 
 brand new one which permitted them to build a “city-hall” and 
 a strong tower where all the charters might be kept protected 
 against fire and theft, which really meant protected against 
 future violence on the part of the Lord and his armed followers. 
 
 This, in a very general way, is what happened during the 
 centuries which followed the Crusades. It was a slow process. 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL CITY 
 
 183 
 
 this gradual shifting of power from the castle to the city. There 
 was some fighting. A few tailors and jewellers were killed and 
 a few castles went up in smoke. But such occurrences were 
 not common. Almost imperceptibly the towns grew richer 
 and the feudal lords grew poorer. To maintain themselves 
 they were for ever forced to excharge charters of civic liberty 
 in return for ready cash. The cities grew. They offered an 
 asylum to run away serfs who gained their liberty after they 
 had lived a number of years behind the city walls. They came 
 to be the home of the more 
 energetic elements of the 
 surrounding country dis¬ 
 tricts. They were proud of 
 their new importance and 
 expressed their power in the 
 churches and public build¬ 
 ings which they erected 
 around the old market 
 place, where centuries be¬ 
 fore the barter of eggs and 
 sheep and honey and salt 
 had taken place. They 
 wanted their children to 
 have a better chance in life 
 than they had enjoyed 
 themselves. They hired 
 monks to come to their city and be school teachers. When 
 they heard of a man who could paint pictures upon boards of 
 wood, they offered him a pension if he would come and cover 
 the walls of their chapels and their town hall with scenes from 
 the Holy Scriptures. 
 
 Meanwhile his Lordship, in the dreary and drafty halls of 
 his castle, saw all this up-start splendour and regretted the 
 day when first he had signed away a single one of his sovereign 
 rights and prerogatives. But he was helpless. The towns¬ 
 people with their well-filled strong-boxes snapped their fingers 
 at him. They were free men, fully prepared to hold what they 
 had gained by the sweat of their brow and after a struggle 
 which had lasted for more than ten generations. 
 
 GUNPOWDER 
 
MEDIAEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES ASSERTED 
 THEIR RIGHT TO BE HEARD IN THE 
 ROYAL COUNCILS OF THEIR COUNTRY 
 
 As long as people were “nomads,” wandering tribes of shep¬ 
 herds, all men had been equal and had been responsible for the 
 welfare and safety of the entire community. 
 
 But after they had settled down and some had become rich 
 and others had grown poor, the government was apt to fall into 
 the hands of those who were not obliged to work for their living 
 and who could devote themselves to politics. 
 
 I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in 
 Mesopotamia and in Greece and in Rome. It occurred among 
 the Germanic population of western Europe as soon as order 
 had been restored. The western European world was ruled 
 in the first place by an emperor who was elected by the seven 
 or eight most important kings of the vast Roman Empire of 
 the German nation and who enjoyed a great deal of imaginary 
 and very little actual power. It was ruled by a number of 
 kings who sat upon shaky thrones. The every-day govern¬ 
 ment was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelets. Their 
 subjects were peasants or serfs. There were few cities. There 
 was hardly any middle class. But during the thirteenth cen¬ 
 tury (after an absence of almost a thousand years) the middle 
 class—the merchant class—once more appeared upon the his- 
 
 184 
 
MEDIAEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 185 
 
 THE SPREADING OF THE IDEA OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY 
 
186 
 
 THE story of mankind 
 
 torical stage and its rise in power, as we saw in the last chapter, 
 had meant a decrease in the influence of the castle folk. 
 
 Thus far, the king, in ruling his domains, had only paid 
 attention to the wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But the 
 new world of trade and commerce which grew out of the 
 Crusades forced him to recognise the middle class or suffer 
 from an ever-increasing emptiness of his exchequer. Their 
 majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes) would 
 have as lief consulted their cows and their pigs as the good 
 burghers of their cities. But they could not help themselves. 
 They swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded, but not 
 without a struggle. 
 
 In England, during the absence of Bichard the Lion 
 Hearted (who had gone to the Holy Land, but who was spend¬ 
 ing the greater part of his crusading voyage in an Austrian 
 jail) the government of the country had been placed in the 
 hands of John, a brother of Bichard, who was his inferior in 
 the art of war, but his equal as a bad administrator. John had 
 begun his career as a regent by losing Normandy and the 
 greater part of the French possessions. Next, he had man¬ 
 aged to get into a quarrel with Pope Innocent III, the famous 
 enemy of the Hohenstaufens. The Pope had excommunicated 
 John (as Gregory VII had excommunicated the Emperor 
 Henry IV two centuries before). In the year 1213 John had 
 been obliged to make an ignominious peace just as Henry IV 
 had been obliged to do in the year 1077. 
 
 Undismayed by his lack of success, John continued to abuse 
 his royal power until his disgruntled vassals made a prisoner 
 of their anointed ruler and forced him to promise that he 
 would be good and would never again interfere with the ancient 
 rights of his subjects. All this happened on a little island in 
 the Thames, near the village of Bunnymede, on the 15th of 
 June of the year 1215. The document to which John signed 
 his name was called the Big Charter—the Magna Carta. It 
 contained very little that was new. It re-stated in short and 
 direct sentences the ancient duties of the king and enumerated 
 the privileges of his vassals. It paid little attention to tb« 
 
MEDIAEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 187 
 
 rights (if any) of the vast majority of the people, the peasants, 
 but it offered certain securities to the rising class of the mer¬ 
 chants. It was a charter of great importance because it defined 
 the powers of the king with more precision than had ever been 
 done before. But it was still a purely mediaeval document. It 
 did not refer to common human beings, unless they happened to 
 be the property of the vassal, which must be safe-guarded 
 against royal tyranny just as the Baronial woods and cows 
 were protected against an excess of zeal on the part of the 
 royal foresters. 
 
 A few years later, however, we begin to hear a very different 
 note in the councils of His Majesty. 
 
 John, who was bad, both by birth and inclination, solemnly 
 had promised to obey the great charter and then had broken 
 every one of its many stipulations. Fortunately, he soon died 
 and was succeeded by his son Henry III, who was forced to 
 recognise the charter anew. Meanwhile, Uncle Richard, the 
 Crusader, had cost the country a great deal of money and the 
 king was obliged to ask for a few loans that he might paj'- his 
 obligations to the Jewish money-lenders. The large land-own¬ 
 ers and the bishops who acted as councillors to the king could 
 not provide him with the necessary gold and silver. The king 
 then gave orders that a few representatives of the cities be 
 called upon to attend the sessions of his Great Council. They 
 made their first appearance in the year 1265. They were sup¬ 
 posed to act only as financial experts who were not supposed 
 to take a part in the general discussion of matters of state, but 
 to give advice exclusively upon the question of taxation. 
 
 Gradually, however, these representatives of the “commons” 
 were consulted upon many of the problems and the meeting 
 of noblemen, bishops and city delegates developed into a regu¬ 
 lar Parliament, a place “oii l’on parlait,” which means in Eng¬ 
 lish where people talked, before important affairs of state were 
 decided upon. 
 
 But the institution of such a general advisory board with 
 certain executive powers was not an English invention, as 
 seems to be the general belief, and government by a “king and 
 
188 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 his parliament” was by no means restricted to the British Isles. 
 You will find it in every part of Europe. In some countries, 
 like France, the rapid increase of the Royal power after the 
 Middle Ages reduced the influence of the “parliament” to noth¬ 
 ing. In the year 1302 representatives of the cities had been 
 admitted to the meeting of the French Parliament, but five 
 centuries had to pass before this “Parliament” was strong 
 enough to assert the rights of the middle class, the so-called 
 
 THE HOME OF SWISS LIBERTY 
 
 Third Estate, and break the power of the king. Then they 
 made up for lost time and during the French Revolution, abol¬ 
 ished the king, the clergy and the nobles and made the repre¬ 
 sentatives of the common people the rulers of the land. In 
 Spain the “cortes” (the king’s council) had been opened to the 
 commoners as early as the first half of the twelfth century. 
 In the German Empire, a number of important cities had ob¬ 
 tained the rank of “imperial cities” whose representatives must 
 be heard in the imperial diet. 
 
 In Sweden, representatives of the people attended the ses¬ 
 sions of the Riksdag at the first meeting of the year 1359. In 
 
MEDIAEVAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 189 
 
 Denmark the Daneholf, the ancient national assembly, was re¬ 
 established in 1314, and, although the nobles often regained con¬ 
 trol of the country at the expense of the king and the people, 
 the representatives of the cities were never completely deprived 
 of their power. 
 
 In the Scandinavian country, the story of representative 
 government is particularly interesting. In Iceland, the “Al¬ 
 thing,” the assembly of all free landowners, who managed the 
 affairs of the island, began to hold regular meetings in the ninth 
 
 THE ABJURATION OF PHILIP II 
 
 century and continued to do so for more than a thousand 
 years. 
 
 In Switzerland, the freemen of the different cantons de¬ 
 fended their assemblies against the attempts of a number of 
 feudal neighbours with great success. 
 
 Finally, in the Low Countries, in Holland, the councils of 
 the different duchies and counties were attended by represen¬ 
 tatives of the third estate as early as the thirteenth century. 
 
 In the sixteenth century a number of these small provinces 
 rebelled against their king, abjured his majesty in a solemn 
 meeting of the “Estates General,” removed the clergy from 
 
190 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the discussions, broke the power of the nobles and assumed full 
 executive authority over the newly-established Republic of the 
 United Seven Netherlands. For two centuries, the representa¬ 
 tives of the town-councils ruled the country without a king, 
 without bishops and without noblemen. The city had become 
 supreme and the good burghers had become the rulers of the 
 land. 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD 
 
 WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
 THOUGHT OF THE WORLD IN WHICH 
 THEY HAPPENED TO LIVE 
 
 Dates are a very useful invention. We could not do with¬ 
 out them but unless we are very careful, they will play tricks 
 with us. They are apt to make history too precise. For ex¬ 
 ample, when I talk of the point-of-view of mediaeval man, I 
 do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476, 
 suddenly all the people of Europe said, “Ah, now the Roman 
 Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle 
 Ages. How interesting!” 
 
 You could have found men at the Frankish court of Charle¬ 
 magne who were Romans in their habits, in their manners, in 
 their out-look upon life. On the other hand, when you grow 
 up you will discover that some of the people in this world have 
 never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man. All times 
 and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding generations 
 play tag with each other. But it is possible to study the minds 
 of a good many true representatives of the Middle Ages and 
 then give you an idea of the average man’s attitude toward 
 life and the many difficult problems of living. 
 
 First of all, remember that the people of the Middle Ages 
 never thought of themselves as free-born citizens, who could 
 come and go at will and shape their fate according to their 
 ability or energy or luck. On the contrary, they all considered 
 
 191 
 
192 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 themselves part of the general scheme of things, which included 
 emperors and serfs, popes and heretics, heroes and swashbuck¬ 
 lers, rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves. They ac¬ 
 cepted this divine ordinance and asked no questions. In this, 
 of course, they differed radically from modern people who ac¬ 
 cept nothing and who are forever trying to improve their own 
 financial and political situation. 
 
 To the man and woman of the thirteenth century, the world 
 hereafter—a Heaven of wonderful delights and a Hell of brim¬ 
 stone and suffering—meant something more than empty words 
 or vague theological phrases. It was an actual fact and the 
 mediaeval burghers and knights spent the greater part of their 
 time preparing for it. We modern people regard a noble 
 death after a well-spent life with the quiet calm of the ancient 
 Greeks and Romans. After three score years of work and ef¬ 
 fort, we go to sleep with the feeling that all will be well. 
 
 But during the Middle Ages, the King of Terrors with 
 His grinning skull and his rattling bones was man’s steady com¬ 
 panion. He woke his victims up with terrible tunes on his 
 scratchy fiddle—he sat down with them at dinner—he smiled 
 at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took a girl 
 out for a walk. If you had heard nothing but hair-raising 
 yarns about cemeteries and coffins and fearful diseases when 
 you were very young, instead of listening to the fairy stories 
 of Andersen and Grimm, you, too, would have lived all your 
 days in a dread of the final hour and the gruesome day of 
 Judgment. That is exactly what happened to the children of 
 the Middle Ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks 
 and only a few occasional angels. Sometimes, their fear of 
 the future filled their souls with humility and piety, but often 
 it influenced them the other way and made them cruel and 
 sentimental. They would first of all murder all the women 
 and children of a captured city and then they would devoutly 
 march to a holy spot and with their hands gory with the blood 
 of innocent victims, they would pray that a merciful heaven for¬ 
 give them their sins. Yea, they would do more than pray, they 
 would weep bitter tears and would confess themselves the most 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD 
 
 193 
 
 wicked of sinners. But the next day, they would once more 
 butcher a camp of Saracen enemies without a spark of mercy 
 in their hearts. 
 
 Of course, the Crusaders were Knights and obeyed a some¬ 
 what different code of manners from the common men. But in 
 such respects the common man was just the same as his mas¬ 
 ter. He, too, resembled a shy horse, easily frightened by a 
 shadow or a silly piece of paper, capable of excellent and faith¬ 
 ful service but liable to run away and do terrible damage when 
 his feverish imagination saw a ghost. 
 
 In judging these good people, however, it is wise to re¬ 
 member the terrible disadvantages under which they lived. 
 They were really barbarians who posed as civilised people. 
 Charlemagne and Otto the Great were called “Roman Emper¬ 
 ors,” but they had as little resemblance to a real Roman Em¬ 
 peror (say Augustus or Marcus Aurelius) as “King” Wumba 
 Wumba of the Upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers 
 of Sweden or Denmark. They were savages who lived amidst 
 glorious ruins but who did not share the benefits of the civi¬ 
 lisation which their fathers and grandfathers had destroyed. 
 They knew nothing. They were ignorant of almost every fact 
 which a boy of twelve knows to-day. They were obliged to go 
 to one single book for all their information. That was the 
 Bible. But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the 
 history of the human race for the better are those chapters of 
 the New Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of 
 love, charity and forgiveness. As a handbook of astronomy, 
 zoology, botany, geometiy and all the other sciences, the ven¬ 
 erable book is not entirely reliable. In the twelfth century, a 
 second book was added to the mediaeval library, the great en¬ 
 cyclopaedia of useful knowledge, compiled by Aristotle, the 
 Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ. Why 
 the Christian church should have been willing to accord such 
 high honors to the teacher of Alexander the Great, whereas 
 they condemned all other Greek philosophers on account of 
 their heathenish doctrines, I really do not know. But next to 
 the Bible, Aristotle was recognized as the only reliable teacher 
 
194 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 whose works could be safely placed into the hands of true 
 Christians. 
 
 His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout 
 way. They had gone from Greece to Alexandria. They had 
 then been translated from the Greek into the Arabic language 
 by the Mohammedans who conquered Egypt in the seventh 
 century. They had followed the Moslem armies into Spain and 
 the philosophy of the great Stagirite (Aristotle was a native of 
 Stagira in Macedonia) was taught in the Moorish universities 
 of Cordova. The Arabic text was then translated into Latin 
 by the Christian students who had crossed the Pyrenees to get 
 a liberal education and this much travelled version of the fa¬ 
 mous books was at last taught at the different schools of north¬ 
 western Europe. It was not very clear, but that made it all 
 the more interesting. 
 
 With the help of the Bible and Aristotle, the most brilliant 
 men of the Middle Ages now set to work to explain all things 
 between Heaven and Earth in their relation to the expressed 
 will of God. These brilliant men, the so-called Scholiasts or 
 Schoolmen, were really very intelligent, but they had obtained 
 their information exclusively from books, and never from ac¬ 
 tual observation. If they wanted to lecture on the sturgeon 
 or on caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments and 
 Aristotle, and told their students everything these good books 
 had to say upon the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons. 
 They did not go out to the nearest river to catch a sturgeon. 
 They did not leave their libraries and repair to the backyard 
 to catch a few caterpillars and look at these animals and study 
 them in their native haunts. Even such famous scholars as 
 Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire whether 
 the sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the caterpillars of 
 Macedonia might not have been different from the sturgeons 
 and the caterpillars of western Europe. 
 
 When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like 
 Roger Bacon appeared in the council of the learned and began 
 to experiment with magnifying glasses and funny little tele¬ 
 scopes and actually dragged the sturgeon and the caterpillar 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL WOELD 
 
 195 
 
 into the lecturing room and proved that they were different 
 from the creatures described by the Old Testament and by 
 Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon 
 was going too far. When he dared to suggest that an hour 
 of actual observation was worth more than ten years with 
 Aristotle and that the works of that famous Greek might as 
 well have remained untranslated for all the good they had ever 
 done, the scholiasts went to the police and said, “This man is 
 a danger to the safety of the state. He wants us to study 
 Greek that we may read Aristotle in the original. Why should 
 he not be contented with our Latin-Arabic translation which 
 has satisfied our faithful people for so many hundred years? 
 Why is he so curious about the insides of fishes and the insides 
 of insects? He is probably a wicked magician trying to upset 
 the established order of things by his Black Magic.” And so 
 well did they plead their cause that the frightened guardians 
 of the peace forbade Bacon to write a single word for more 
 than ten years. When he resumed his studies he had learned 
 a lesson. He wrote his books in a queer cipher which made it 
 impossible for his contemporaries to read them, a trick wliich 
 became common as the Church became more desperate in its 
 attempts to prevent people from asking questions which would 
 lead to doubts and infidelity. 
 
 This, however, was not done out of any wicked desire to 
 keep people ignorant. The feeling which prompted the heretic 
 hunters of that day was really a very kindly one. They firmly 
 believed—nay, they knew—that this life was but the prepara¬ 
 tion for our real existence in the next world. They felt con¬ 
 vinced that too much knowledge made people uncomfortable, 
 filled their minds with dangerous opinions and led to doubt 
 and hence to perdition. A mediaeval Schoolman who saw one 
 of his pupils stray away from the revealed authority of the 
 Bible and Aristotle, that he might study things for himself, felt 
 as uncomfortable as a loving mother who sees her young child 
 approach a hot stove. She knows that he will burn his little 
 fingers if he is allowed to touch it and she tries to keep him 
 back, if necessary she will use force. But she really loves 
 
196 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the child and if he will only obey her, she will be as good to him 
 as she possibly can be. In the same way the mediaeval guard¬ 
 ians of people’s souls, while they were strict in all matters 
 pertaining to the Faith, slaved day and night to render the 
 greatest possible service to the members of their flock. They 
 held out a helping hand whenever they could and the society 
 of that day shows the influence of thousands of good men and 
 pious women who tried to make the fate of the average mortal 
 as bearable as possible. 
 
 A serf was a serf and his position would never change. But 
 the Good Lord of the Middle Ages who allowed the serf to 
 remain a slave all his life had bestowed an immortal soul upon 
 this humble creature and therefore he must be protected in his 
 rights, that he might live and die as a good Christian. When 
 he grew too old or too weak to work he must be taken care 
 of by the feudal master for whom he had worked. The serf, 
 therefore, who led a monotonous and dreary life, was never 
 haunted by fear of to-morrow. He knew that he was “safe”—- 
 that he could not be thrown out of employment, that he would 
 always have a roof over his head (a leaky roof, perhaps, but 
 a roof all the same), and that he would always have something 
 to eat. 
 
 This feeling of “stability” and of “safety” was found in all 
 classes of society. In the towns the merchants and the artisans 
 established guilds which assured every member of a steady in¬ 
 come. It did not encourage the ambitious to do better than 
 their neighbours. Too often the guilds gave protection to 
 the “slacker” who managed to “get by.” But they estab¬ 
 lished a general feeling of content and assurance among the 
 labouring classes which no longer exists in our day of general 
 competition. The Middle Ages were familiar with the dangers 
 of what we modern people call “corners,” when a single rich 
 man gets hold of all the available grain or soap or pickled her¬ 
 ring, and then forces the world to buy from him at his own 
 price. The authorities, therefore, discouraged wholesale trad¬ 
 ing and regulated the price at which merchants were allowed 
 to sell their goods. 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL WORLD 
 
 197 
 
 The Middle Ages disliked competition. Why compete and 
 fill the world with hurry and rivalry and a multitude of push¬ 
 ing men, when the Day of Judgement was near at hand, when 
 riches would count for nothing and when the good serf would 
 enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad knight was 
 sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno? 
 
 In short, the people of the Middle Ages were asked to sur¬ 
 render part of their liberty of thought and action, that they 
 might enjoy greater safety from poverty of the body and pov¬ 
 erty of the soul. 
 
 And with a very few exceptions, they did not object. They 
 firmly believed that they were mere visitors upon this planet— 
 that they were here to be prepared for a greater and more im¬ 
 portant life. Deliberately they turned their backs upon a 
 world which was filled with suffering and wickedness and in¬ 
 justice. They pulled down the blinds that the rays of the 
 sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the 
 Apocalypse which told them of that heavenly light which was 
 to illumine their happiness in all eternity. They tried to close 
 their eyes to most of the joys of the world in which they lived 
 that they might enjoy those which awaited them in the near 
 future. They accepted life as a necessary evil and welcomed 
 death as the beginning of a glorious day. 
 
 The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the 
 future but had tried to establish their Paradise right here upon 
 this earth. They had succeeded in making life extremely pleas¬ 
 ant for those of their fellow men who did not happen to be 
 slaves. Then came the other extreme of the Middle Ages, 
 when man built himself a Paradise beyond the highest clouds 
 and turned this world into a vale of tears for high and low, 
 for rich and poor, for the intelligent and the dumb. It was 
 time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, as 
 I shall tell you in my next chapter. 
 
MEDIAEVAL TRADE 
 
 HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE 
 MEDITERRANEAN A BUSY CENTRE OF 
 TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE 
 ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT 
 DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE COM¬ 
 MERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA 
 
 There were three good reasons why the Italian cities should 
 have been the first to regain a position of great importance 
 during the late Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been 
 settled by Rome at a very early date. There had been more 
 roads and more towns and more schools than anywhere else 
 in Europe. 
 
 The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, 
 but there had been so much to destroy that more had been able 
 to survive. In the second place, the Pope lived in Italy and 
 as the head of a vast political machine, which owned land and 
 serfs and buildings and forests and rivers and conducted courts 
 of law, he was in constant receipt of a great deal of money. 
 The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and silver as did 
 the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The 
 cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural 
 products of the north and the west must be changed into actual 
 cash before the debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome. 
 
 198 
 
MEDIAEVAL TRADE 
 
 199 
 
 MEDIAEVAL TRADE 
 
200 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 This made Italy the one country where there was a compara¬ 
 tive abundance of gold and silver. Finally, during the Cru¬ 
 sades, the Italian cities had become the point of embarkation 
 for the Crusaders and had profiteered to an almost unbeliev¬ 
 able extent. 
 
 And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same 
 Italian cities remained the distributing centres for those Orien¬ 
 tal goods upon which the people of Europe had come to de¬ 
 pend during the time they had spent in the near east. 
 
 Of these toAvns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was 
 a republic built upon a mud bank. Thither people from the 
 mainland had fled during the invasions of the barbarians in the 
 fourth century. Surrounded on all sides by the sea they had 
 engaged in the business of salt-making. Salt had been very 
 scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had been high. 
 For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of 
 this indispensable table commodity (I say indispensable, be¬ 
 cause people, like sheep, fall ill unless they get a certain amount 
 of salt in their food). The people had used this monopoly to 
 increase the power of their city. At times they had even dared 
 to defy the power of the Popes. The town had grown rich and 
 had begun to build ships, which engaged in trade with the 
 Orient. During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry 
 passengers to the Holy Land, and when the passengers could 
 not pay for their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help the 
 Venetians who were for ever increasing their colonies in the 
 fEgean Sea, in Asia Minor and in Egypt. 
 
 By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had 
 grown to two hundred thousand, which made Venice the big¬ 
 gest city of the Middle Ages. The people were without in¬ 
 fluence upon the government which was the private affair of a 
 small number of rich merchant families. They elected a senate 
 and a Doge (or Duke), but the actual rulers of the city were 
 the members of the famous Council of Ten,—who maintained 
 themselves with the help of a highly organised system of secret- 
 service men and professional murderers, who kept watch upon 
 all citizens and quietly removed those who might be dangerous 
 
MEDIAEVAL TRADE 
 
 201 
 
 to the safety of their high-handed and unscrupulous Commit¬ 
 tee of Public Safety. 
 
 The other extreme of government, a democracy of very 
 turbulent habits, was to be found in Florence. This city con¬ 
 trolled the main road from northern Europe to Rome and used 
 the money which it had derived from this fortunate economic 
 position to engage in manufacturing. The Florentines tried to 
 follow the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests and mem¬ 
 bers of the guilds all took part in the discussions of civic affairs. 
 This led to great civic upheaval. People were forever being di¬ 
 vided into political parties and these parties fought each other 
 with intense bitterness and exiled their enemies and confiscated 
 their possessions as soon as they had gained a victory in the 
 council. After several centuries of this rule by organised mobs, 
 the inevitable happened. A powerful family made itself master 
 of the city and governed the town and the surrounding country 
 after the fashion of the old Greek “tyrants.” They were called 
 the Medici. The earliest Medici had been physicians (medicus 
 is Latin for physician, hence their name), but later they had 
 turned banker. Their banks and their pawnshops were to be 
 found in all the more important centres of trade. Even to¬ 
 day our American pawn-shops display the three golden balls 
 which were part of the coat of arms of the mighty house of 
 the Medici, who became rulers of Florence and married their 
 daughters to the kings of France and were buried in graves 
 worthy of a Roman Caesar. 
 
 Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where 
 the merchants specialised in trade with Tunis in Africa and 
 the grain depots of the Black Sea. Then there were more than 
 two hundred other cities, some large and some small, each a per¬ 
 fect commercial unit, all of them fighting their neighbours and 
 rivals with the undying hatred of neighbours who are depriving 
 each other of their profits. 
 
 Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been 
 brought to these distributing centres, they must be prepared 
 for the voyage to the west and the north. 
 
 Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where 
 
202 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 they were reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in 
 turn served as the market places of northern and western 
 France. 
 
 Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This an¬ 
 cient road led across the Brenner pass, the old gateway for 
 the barbarians who had invaded Italy. Past Innsbruck, the 
 merchandise was carried to Basel. From there it drifted down 
 the Rhine to the North Sea and England, or it was taken to 
 
 GREAT NOVGOROD 
 
 Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both bankers 
 and manufacturers and who prospered greatly by “shaving” 
 the coins with which they paid their workmen), looked after 
 the further distribution to Nuremberg and Leipzig and the 
 cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on the Island of Gotland) 
 which looked after the needs of the Northern Baltic and dealt 
 directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old commercial 
 centre of Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in 
 the middle of the sixteenth century. 
 
 The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had 
 an interesting story of their own. The mediaeval world ate a 
 great deal of fish. There were many fast days and then people 
 
MEDIAEVAL TRADE 
 
 2DS 
 
 were not permitted to eat meat. For those who lived away 
 from the coast and from the rivers, this meant a diet of eggs 
 or nothing at all. But early in the thirteenth century a Dutch 
 fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so that it 
 could be transported to distant points. The herring fisheries 
 of the North Sea then became of great importance. But some 
 time during the thirteenth century, this useful little fish (for 
 reasons of its own) moved from the North Sea to the Baltic and 
 the cities of that inland sea began to make money. All the 
 world now sailed to the Baltic to catch herring and as that fish 
 could only be caught during a few months each year (the rest 
 of the time it spends in deep water, raising large families of 
 little herrings) the ships would have been idle during the rest 
 of the time unless they had found another occupation. They 
 were then used to carry the wheat of northern and central Rus¬ 
 sia to southern and western Europe. On the return voyage 
 they brought spices and silks and carpets and Oriental rugs 
 from Venice and Genoa to Bruges and Hamburg and Bremen. 
 
 Out of such simple beginnings there developed an impor¬ 
 tant system of international trade which reached from the 
 manufacturing cities of Bruges and Ghent ( where the almighty 
 guilds fought pitched battles with the kings of France and 
 England and established a labour tyranny which completely 
 ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic 
 of Novgorod in northern Russia, which was a mighty city until 
 Tsar Ivan, who distrusted all merchants, took the town and 
 killed sixty thousand people in less than a month’s time and re¬ 
 duced the survivors to beggary. 
 
 That they might protect themselves against pirates and 
 excessive tolls and annoying legislation, the merchants of the 
 north founded a protective league which was called the 
 “Hansa.” The Hansa, which had its headquarters in Liibeck, 
 was a voluntary association of more than one hundred cities. 
 The association maintained a navy of its own which patrolled 
 the seas and fought and defeated the Kings of England and 
 Denmark when they dared to interfere with the rights and the 
 privileges of the mighty Hanseatic merchants. 
 
20 4 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 I wish that I had more space to tell you some of the won¬ 
 derful stories of this strange commerce which was carried on 
 across the high mountains and across the deep seas amidst 
 such dangers that every voyage became a glorious adventure. 
 But it would take several volumes and it cannot be done here. 
 
 Besides, I hope that I have told you enough about the Middle 
 Ages to make you curious to read more in the excellent books 
 of which I shall give you a list at the end of this volume. 
 
 The Middle Ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a 
 period of very slow progress. The people who were in power 
 believed that “progress” was a very undesirable invention of 
 the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap- 
 
MEDIAEVAL TRADE 
 
 205 
 
 pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to enforce 
 their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights. 
 Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into 
 the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were 
 considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail 
 sentence of twenty years. 
 
 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of inter¬ 
 national commerce swept over western Europe as the Nile 
 had swept across the valley of ancient Egypt. It left behind 
 a fertile sediment of prosperity. Prosperity meant leisure 
 hours and these leisure hours gave both men and women a 
 chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in literature 
 and art and music. 
 
 Then once more was the world filled with that divine curi¬ 
 osity which has elevated man from the ranks of those other 
 mammals who are his distant cousins but who have remained 
 dumb, and the cities, of whose growth and development I have 
 told you in my last chapter, offered a safe shelter to these 
 brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain 
 of the established order of things. 
 
 They set to work. They opened the windows of their 
 cloistered and studious cells. A flood of sunlight entered the 
 dusty rooms and showed them the cobwebs which had gathered 
 during the long period of semi-darkness. 
 
 They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gar¬ 
 dens. 
 
 Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crum¬ 
 bling town walls, and said, “This is a good world. We are 
 glad that we live in it.” 
 
 At that moment, the Middle Ages came to an end and a new 
 world began. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 PEOPLE ONCE MORE DARED TO BE HAPPY 
 JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE ALIVE. THEY 
 TRIED TO SAVE THE REMAINS OF THE 
 OLDER AND MORE AGREEABLE CIVILISA¬ 
 TION OF ROME AND GREECE AND THEY 
 WERE SO PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVE¬ 
 MENTS THAT THEY SPOKE OF A RENAIS¬ 
 SANCE OR RE-BIRTH OF CIVILISATION 
 
 The Renaissance was not a political or religious move* 
 ment. It was a state of mind. 
 
 The men of the Renaissance continued to be the obedient 
 sons of the mother church. They were subjects of kings and 
 emperors and dukes and murmured not. 
 
 But their outlook upon life was changed. They began to 
 wear different clothes—to speak a different language—to live 
 different lives in different houses. 
 
 They no longer concentrated all their thoughts and their 
 efforts upon the blessed existence that awaited them in Heaven. 
 They tried to establish their Paradise upon this planet, and, 
 truth to tell, they succeeded in a remarkable degree. 
 
 I have quite often warned you against the danger that 
 lies in historical dates. People take them too literally. They 
 think- of the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignor- 
 
 206 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 207 
 
 ance. “Click,” says the clock, and the Renaissance begins and 
 cities and palaces are flooded with the bright sunlight of an 
 eager intellectual curiosity. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible to draw such 
 sharp lines. The thirteenth century belonged most decidedly 
 to the Middle Ages. All historians agree upon that. But was 
 it a time of darkness and stagnation merely? By no means. 
 People were tremendously alive. Great states were being 
 founded. Large centres of commerce were being developed. 
 High above the turretted towers of the castle and the peaked 
 roof of the town-hall, rose the slender spire of the newly built 
 Gothic cathedral. Everywhere the world was in motion. The 
 high and mighty gentlemen of the city-hall, who had just be¬ 
 come conscious of their own strength (by way of their recently 
 acquired riches) were struggling for more power with their 
 feudal masters. The members of the guilds who had just be¬ 
 come aware of the important fact that “numbers count” were 
 fighting the high and mighty gentlemen of the city-hall. The 
 king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled 
 waters and caught many a shining bass of profit which they 
 proceeded to cook and eat before the noses of the surprised and 
 disappointed councillors and guild brethren. 
 
 To enliven the scenery during the long hours of evening 
 when the badly lighted streets did not invite further political 
 and economic dispute, the Troubadours and Minnesingers told 
 their stories and sang their songs of romance and adventure 
 and heroism and loyalty to all fair women. Meanwhile youth, 
 impatient of the slowness of progress, flocked to the universi¬ 
 ties, and thereby hangs a story. 
 
 The Middle Ages were “internationally minded.” That 
 sounds difficult, but wait until I explain it to you. We modern 
 people are “nationally minded.” We are Americans or Eng¬ 
 lishmen or Frenchmen or Italians and speak English or French 
 or Italian and go to English and French and Italian univer¬ 
 sities, unless we want to specialise in some particular branch 
 of learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn 
 
208 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 another language and go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow. 
 But the people of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rarely 
 talked of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians. 
 They said, “I am a citizen of Sheffield or Bordeaux or Genoa.” 
 Because they all belonged to one and the same church they felt 
 a certain bond of brotherhood. And as all educated men could 
 speak Latin, they possessed an international language which 
 removed the stupid language barriers which have grown up 
 in modem Europe and which place the small nations at such 
 an enormous disadvantage. Just as an example, take the case 
 of Erasmus, the great preacher of tolerance and laughter, who 
 wrote his books in the sixteenth century. lie was the native 
 of a small Dutch village. He wrote in Latin and all the world 
 was his audience. If he were alive to-day, he would write in 
 Dutch. Then only five or six million people would be able to 
 read him. To be understood by the rest of Europe and Amer¬ 
 ica, his publishers would be obliged to translate his books into 
 twenty different languages. That would cost a lot of money 
 and most likely the publishers would never take the trouble 
 or the risk. 
 
 Six hundred years ago that could not happen. The greater 
 part of the people were still very ignorant and could not read 
 or write at all. But those who had mastered the difficult art 
 of handling the goose quill belonged to an international repub¬ 
 lic of letters which spread across the entire continent and which 
 knew of no boundaries and respected no limitations of lan¬ 
 guage or nationality. The universities were the strongholds of 
 this republic. Unlike modem fortifications, they did not fol¬ 
 low the frontier. They were to be found wherever a teacher 
 and a few pupils happened to find themselves together. There 
 again the Middle Ages and the Renaissance differed from our 
 own time. Nowadays, when a new university is built, the 
 process (almost invariably) is as follows: Some rich man 
 wants to do something for the community in which he lives or 
 a particular religious sect wants to build a school to keep its 
 faithful children under decent supervision, or a state needs doc- 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 209 
 
 tors and lawyers and teachers. The university begins as a 
 large sum of money which is deposited in a bank. This money 
 is then used to construct buildings and laboratories and dormi¬ 
 tories. Finally professional teachers are hired, entrance exami¬ 
 nations are held and the university is on the way. 
 
 But in the Middle 
 Ages things were done 
 differently. A wise man 
 said to himself, “I have 
 discovered a great truth. 
 
 I must impart my knowl¬ 
 edge to others.” And he 
 began to preach his wis¬ 
 dom wherever and when¬ 
 ever he could get a few 
 people to listen to him, 
 like a modem soap-box 
 orator. If he was an in¬ 
 teresting speaker, the 
 crowd came and stayed. 
 
 If he was dull, they 
 shrugged their shoulders 
 and continued their way. 
 
 By and by certain young men began to come regularly to hear 
 the words of wisdom of this great teacher. They brought copy¬ 
 books with them and a little bottle of ink and a goose quill and 
 wrote down what seemed to be important. One day it rained. 
 The teacher and his pupils retired to an empty basement or 
 the room of the “Professor.” The learned man sat in his chair 
 and the boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the 
 University, the “universitas,” a corporation of professors and 
 students during the Middle Ages, when the “teacher” counted 
 for everything and the building in which he taught counted for 
 veiy little. 
 
 • As an example, let me tell you of something that happened 
 in the ninth century. In the town of Salerno near Naples there 
 were a number of excellent physicians. They attracted people 
 
210 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 desirous of learning the medical profession and for almost a 
 thousand years (until 1817) there was a university of Salerno 
 which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great Greek doc¬ 
 tor who had practised his art in ancient Hellas in the fifth 
 century before the birth of Christ. 
 
 Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany, 
 who early in the twelfth century began to lecture on theology 
 and logic in Paris. Thousands of eager young men flocked 
 to the French city to hear him. Other priests who disagreed 
 with him stepped forward to explain their point of view. Paris 
 was soon filled with a clamouring multitude of Englishmen and 
 Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hungary 
 and around the old cathedral which stood on a little island in 
 the Seine there grew the famous University of Paris. 
 
 In Bologna in Italy, a monk by the name of Gratian had 
 compiled a text-book for those whose business it was to know 
 the laws of the church. Young priests and many laymen then 
 came from all over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas. 
 To protect themselves against the landlords and the innkeepers 
 and the boarding-house ladies of the city, they formed a cor¬ 
 poration (or University) and behold the beginning of the uni¬ 
 versity of Bologna. 
 
 Next there was a quarrel in 
 the University of Paris. We do 
 not know what caused it, but a 
 number of disgruntled teachers 
 together with their pupils 
 crossed the channel and found a 
 hospitable home in a little village 
 on the Thames called Oxford, 
 and in this way the famous Uni¬ 
 versity of Oxford came into be¬ 
 ing. In the same way, in the 
 year 1222, there had been a split 
 in the University of Bologna. 
 
 The discontented teachers (again 
 
 followed by their pupils) had THE RENAISSANCE 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 211 
 
 moved to Padua and their proud city thenceforward boasted 
 of a university of its own. And so it went from Valladolid in 
 Spain to Cracow in distant Poland and from Poitiers in Franee 
 to Rostock in Germany. 
 
 It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these 
 early professors would sound absurd to our ears, trained to 
 listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point, 
 however, which I want to make is this—the Middle Ages and 
 especially the thirteenth century were not a time when the 
 world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation, 
 there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a restless 
 if somewhat bashful asking of questions. And out of this 
 turmoil grew the Renaissance. 
 
 But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene 
 of the Mediaeval world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of 
 whom you ought to know more than his mere name. This 
 man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer 
 who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the light of 
 day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his 'ancestors 
 while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis 
 of Assisi upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross, but 
 often when he went to school, his frightened eyes would see the 
 puddles of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare 
 that raged forever between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, 
 the followers of the Pope and the adherents of the Emperors. 
 
 When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father 
 had been one before him, just as an American boy might be¬ 
 come a Democrat or a Republican, simply because his father 
 had happened to be a Democrat or a Republican. But after a 
 few years, Dante saw that Italy, unless united under a single 
 head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered jeal¬ 
 ousies of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Ghibelline. 
 
 He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a 
 mighty emperor might come and re-establish unity and order. 
 Alas! he hoped in vain. The Ghibellines were driven out of 
 Florence in the year 1302. From that time on until the day 
 of liis death amidst the dreary ruins of Ravenna, in the year 
 1321, Dante was a homeless wanderer, eating the bread of 
 
212 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 charity at the table of rich patrons whose names would have 
 sunk into the deepest pit of oblivion but for this single fact, 
 that they had been kind to a poet in his misery. During the 
 many years of exile, Dante felt compelled to justify himself 
 and his actions when he had 
 been a political leader in his 
 home-town, and when he had 
 spent his days walking along 
 the banks of the Arno that he 
 might catch a glimpse of the 
 lovely Beatrice Portinari, who 
 died the wife of another man, a 
 dozen years before the Ghibel- 
 line disaster. 
 
 He had failed in the ambi¬ 
 tions of his career. He had 
 faithfully served the town of 
 his birth and before a corrupt 
 court he had been accused of 
 stealing the public funds and 
 had been condemned to be 
 burned alive should he venture 
 back within the realm of the 
 city of Florence. To clear 
 himself before his own con¬ 
 science and before his contem¬ 
 poraries, Dante then created 
 an Imaginary World and with 
 great detail he described the 
 circumstances which had led to 
 his defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed and lust 
 and hatred which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a 
 battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked and selfish 
 tyrants. 
 
 He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year 
 1300 he had lost his way in a dense forest and how he found 
 his path barred by a leopard and a lion and a wolf. He gave 
 himself up for lost when a white figure appeared amidst the 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 213 
 
 trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and philosopher, sent 
 upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by Bea¬ 
 trice, who from high Heaven watched over the fate of her 
 true lover. Virgil then takes Dante through Purgatory and 
 through Hell. Deeper and deeper the path leads them until 
 they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands frozen 
 into the eternal ice surrounded by the most terrible of sinners, 
 traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame and 
 success by lies and by deceit. But before the two wanderers 
 have reached this terrible spot, Dante has met all those who 
 in some way or other have played a role in the history of his 
 beloved city. Emperors and Popes, dashing knights and 
 whining usurers, they are all there, doomed to eternal punish¬ 
 ment or awaiting the day of deliverance, when they shall 
 leave Purgatory for Heaven. 
 
 It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the 
 people of the thirteenth century did and felt and feared and 
 prayed for. Through it all moves the figure of the lonely 
 Florentine exile, forever followed by the shadow of his own 
 despair. 
 
 And behold! when the gates of death were closing upon 
 the sad poet of the Middle Ages, the portals of life swung 
 open to the child who was to be the first of the men of the 
 Renaissance. That was Francesco Petrarca, the son of the 
 notary public of the little town of Arezzo. 
 
 Francesco’s father had belonged to the same political party 
 as Dante. He too had been exiled and thus it happened that 
 Petrarca (or Petrarch, as we call him) was born away from 
 Florence. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Montpellier 
 in France that he might become a lawyer like his father. But 
 the boy did not want to be a jurist. He hated the law. He 
 wanted to be a scholar and a poet—and because he wanted to 
 be a scholar and a poet beyond everything else, he became one, 
 as people of a strong will are apt to do. He made long 
 voyages, copying manuscripts in Flanders and in the cloisters 
 along the Rhine and in Paris and Liege and finally in Rome. 
 Then he went to five in a lonely valley of the wild mountains 
 
214 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of Vaucluse, and there he studied and wrote and soon he had 
 become so famous for his verse and for his learning that both 
 the University of Paris and the king of Naples invited him 
 to come and teach their students and subjects. On the way 
 to his new job, he was obliged to pass through Rome. The 
 people had heard of his fame as an editor of half-forgotten 
 Roman authors. They decided to honour him and in the 
 ancient forum of the Imperial City, Petrarch was crowned with 
 the laurel wreath of the Poet. 
 
 From that moment on, his life was an endless career of 
 honour and appreciation. He wrote the things which people 
 wanted most to hear. They were tired of theological dispu¬ 
 tations. Poor Dante could wander through hell as much as 
 he wanted. But Petrarch wrote of love and of nature and the 
 sun and never mentioned those gloomy things which seemed 
 to have been the stock in trade of the last generation. And 
 when Petrarch came to a city, all the people flocked out to 
 meet him and he was received like a conquering hero. If he 
 happened to bring his young friend Boccaccio, the story teller, 
 with him, so much the better. They were both men of their 
 time, full of curiosity, willing to read everything once, digging 
 in forgotten and musty libraries that they might find still an¬ 
 other manuscript of Virgil or Ovid or .Lucretius or any of the 
 other old Latin poets. They were good Christians. Of course 
 they were! Everyone was. But no need of going around with 
 a long face and wearing a dirty coat just because some day 
 or other you were going to die. Life was good. People were 
 meant to be happy. You desired proof of this? Very well. 
 Take a spade and dig into the soil. What did you find? 
 Beautiful old statues. Beautiful old vases. Ruins of ancient 
 buildings. All these things were made by the people of the 
 greatest empire that ever existed. They ruled all the world 
 for a thousand years. They were strong and rich and hand¬ 
 some (just look at that bust of the Emperor Augustus!). Of 
 course, they were not Christians and they would never be 
 able to enter Heaven. At best they would spend their days 
 in purgatory, where Dante had just paid them a visit. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 215 
 
 But who cared? To have lived in a world like that of 
 ancient Rome was heaven enough for any mortal being. And 
 anyway, we live but once. Let us be happy and cheerful for 
 the mere joy of existence. 
 
 Such, in short, was the spirit that had begun to fill the 
 narrow and crooked streets of the many little Italian cities. 
 
 You know what we mean by the “bicycle craze” or the 
 “automobile craze.” Some one invents a bicycle. People who 
 for hundreds of thousands of years have moved slowly and 
 painfully from one place to another go “crazy” over the pros¬ 
 pect of rolling rapidly and easily over hill and dale. Then 
 a clever mechanic makes the first automobile. No longer is it 
 necessary to pedal and pedal and pedal. You just sit and 
 let little drops of gasoline do the work for you. Then every¬ 
 body wants an automobile. Everybody talks about Rolls- 
 Royces and Flivvers and carburetors and mileage and oil. Ex¬ 
 plorers penetrate into the hearts of unknown countries that 
 they may find new supplies of gas. Forests arise in Sumatra 
 and in the Congo to supply us with rubber. Rubber and oil 
 become so valuable that people fight wars for their possession. 
 The whole world is “automobile mad” and little children can 
 say “car” before they learn to whisper “papa” and “mamma.” 
 
 In the fourteenth century, the Italian people went crazy 
 about the newly discovered beauties of the buried world of 
 Rome. Soon their enthusiasm was shared by all the people of 
 western Europe. The finding of an unknown manuscript be¬ 
 came the excuse for a civic holiday. The man who wrote a 
 grammar became as popular as the fellow who nowadays invents 
 a new spark-plug. The humanist, the scholar who devoted his 
 time and his energies to a study of “homo” or mankind (instead 
 of wasting his hours upon fruitless theological investigations), 
 that man was regarded with greater honour and a deeper re¬ 
 spect than was ever bestowed upon a hero who had just con¬ 
 quered all the Cannibal Islands. 
 
 In the midst of this intellectual upheaval, an event occurred 
 which greatly favoured the study of the ancient philosophers 
 and authors. The Turks were renewing their attacks upon 
 
216 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Europe. Constantinople, capital of the last remnant of the 
 original Roman Empire, was hard pressed. In the year 1393 
 the Emperor, Manuel Paleologue, sent Emmanuel Chrysoloras 
 to western Europe to explain the desperate state of old Byzan¬ 
 tium and to ask for aid. This aid never came. The Roman 
 Catholic world was more than willing to see the Greek Catholic 
 world go to the punishment that awaited such wicked heretics. 
 But however indifferent western Europe might be to the fate 
 of the Byzantines, they were greatly interested in the ancient 
 Greeks whose colonists had founded the city on the Bosphorus 
 five centuries after the Trojan war. They wanted to learn 
 Greek that they might read Aristotle and Homer and Plato. 
 They wanted to learn it very badly, but they had no books and 
 no grammars and no teachers. The magistrates of Florence 
 heard of the visit of Chrysoloras. The people of their city 
 were “crazy to learn Greek.” Would he please come and 
 teach them? He would, and behold! the first professor of 
 Greek teaching alpha, beta, gamma to hundreds of eager young 
 men, begging their way to the city of the Arno, living in stables 
 and in dingy attics that they might learn how to decline the verb 
 iraidevco iraiSeveis iraiSevei and enter into the companionship of 
 Sophocles and Homer. 
 
 Meanwhile in the universities, the old schoolmen, teaching 
 their ancient theology and their antiquated logic; explaining 
 the hidden mysteries of the old Testament and discussing the 
 strange science of their Greek-Arabic-Spanish-Latin edition of 
 Aristotle, looked on in dismay and horror. Next, they turned 
 angry. This thing was going too far. The young men were 
 deserting the lecture halls of the established universities to 
 go and listen to some wild-eyed “humanist” with his new¬ 
 fangled notions about a “reborn civilization.” 
 
 They went to the authorities. They complained. But one 
 cannot force an unwilling horse to drink and one cannot 
 make unwilling ears listen to something which does not really 
 interest them. The schoolmen were losing ground rapidly. Here 
 and there they scored a short victory. They combined forces 
 with those fanatics who hated to see other people enjoy a 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 217 
 
 happiness which was foreign to their own souls. In Florence, 
 the centre of the Great Rebirth, a terrible fight was fought 
 between the old order and the new. A Dominican monk, sour 
 of face and bitter in his hatred of beauty, was the leader of 
 the mediaeval rear-guard. He fought a valiant battle. Day 
 after day he thundered his warnings of God’s holy wrath 
 through the wide halls of Santa Maria del Fiore. “Repent,” 
 he cried, “repent of your godlessness, of your joy in things 
 that are not holy!” He began to hear voices and to see flaming 
 swords that flashed through the sky. He preached to the 
 little children that they might not fall into the errors of these 
 ways which were leading their fathers to perdition. He or¬ 
 ganised companies of boy-scouts, devoted to the service of the 
 great God whose prophet he claimed to be. In a sudden mo¬ 
 ment of frenzy, the frightened people promised to do penance 
 for their wicked love of beauty and pleasure. They carried 
 their books and their statues and their paintings to the market 
 place and celebrated a wild “carnival of the vanities” with holy 
 singing and most unholy dancing, while Savonarola applied his 
 torch to the accumulated treasures. 
 
 But when the ashes cooled down, the people began to realise 
 what they had lost. This terrible fanatic had made them de¬ 
 stroy that which they had come to love above all things. They 
 turned against him, Savonarola was thrown into jail. He was 
 tortured. But he refused to repent for anything he had done. 
 He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy life. He 
 had willingly destroyed those who deliberately refused to 
 share his own point of view. It had been his duty to eradicate 
 evil wherever he found it. A love of heathenish books and 
 heathenish beauty in the eyes of this faithful son of the Church, 
 had been an evil. But he stood alone. He had fought the 
 battle of a time that was dead and gone. The Pope in Rome 
 never moved a finger to save him. On the contrary, he ap¬ 
 proved of his “faithful Florentines” when they dragged Savon¬ 
 arola to the gallows, hanged him and burned his body amidst 
 the cheerful howling and yelling of the mob. 
 
 It was a sad ending, but quite inevitable. Savonarola 
 
218 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 would have been a great man in the eleventh century. In the 
 fifteenth century he was merely the leader of a lost cause. 
 For better or worse, the Middle Ages had come to an end when 
 the Pope had turned humanist and when the Vatican became 
 the most important museum of Roman and Greek antiquities. 
 
THE AGE OF EXPRESSION 
 
 THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF 
 GIVING EXPRESSION TO THEIR NEWLY 
 DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EX¬ 
 PRESSED THEIR HAPPINESS IN POETRY 
 AND IN SCULPTURE AND IN ARCHITEC¬ 
 TURE AND IN PAINTING AND IN THE 
 BOOKS THEY PRINTED 
 
 In the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent 
 seventy-two of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls 
 of the cloister of Mount St. Agnes near the good town of 
 Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on the river Ysel. He 
 was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born 
 in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis. 
 At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where 
 Gerhard Groot, a brilliant graduate of the universities of 
 Paris, Cologne and Prague, and famous as a wandering 
 preacher, had founded the Society of the Brothers of the 
 Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who 
 tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ 
 while working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house- 
 painters and stone masons. They maintained an excellent 
 school, that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught 
 the wisdom of the Fathers of the church. At this school, 
 little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and 
 how to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had 
 
 ■219 
 
220 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 put his little bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to 
 Zwolle and with a sigh of relief he had closed the door upon a 
 turbulent world which did not attract him. 
 
 Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden 
 death. In central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of 
 Johannes Huss, the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the 
 English reformer, were avenging with a terrible warfare the 
 death of their beloved leader who had 
 been burned at the stake by order of 
 that same Council of Constance, 
 which had promised him a safe-con¬ 
 duct if he would come to Switzerland 
 and explain his doctrines to the Pope, 
 the Emperor, twenty-three cardinals, 
 thirty-three archbishops and bishops, 
 one hundred and fifty abbots and 
 more than a hundred princes and 
 dukes who had gathered together to 
 reform their church. 
 
 In the west, France had been 
 fighting for a hundred years that 
 she might drive the English from 
 her territories and just then was 
 saved from utter defeat by the for¬ 
 tunate appearance of Joan of Arc. 
 
 And no sooner had this struggle come 
 to an end than France and Burgundy 
 were at each other’s throats, engaged 
 upon a struggle of life and death 
 for the supremacy of western Europe. 
 
 In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of 
 Heaven down upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon, 
 in southern France, and who retaliated in kind. In the 
 far east the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the 
 Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final 
 crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters. 
 
 JOHN HUSS 
 
THE CATHEDRAL 
 

THE AGE OF EXPRESSION 
 
 221 
 
 But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never 
 heard. He had his manuscripts and his own thoughts and 
 he was contented. He poured his love of God into a little 
 volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ. It has since 
 been translated into more languages than any other book 
 save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people 
 as ever studied the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the 
 lives of countless millions. And it was the work of a man 
 whose highest ideal of existence was expressed in the simple 
 wish that “he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little 
 corner with a little book.” 
 
 Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the 
 Middle Ages. Surrounded on all sides by the forces of the 
 victorious Renaissance, with the humanists loudly proclaim¬ 
 ing the coming of modern times, the Middle Ages gathered 
 strength for a last sally. Monasteries were reformed. Monks 
 gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple, straight¬ 
 forward and honest men, by the example of their blameless 
 and devout lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of 
 righteousness and humble resignation to the will of God. But 
 all to no avail. The new world rushed past these good people. 
 The days of quiet meditation were gone. The great era of 
 “expression” had begun. 
 
 Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use 
 so many “big words.” I wish that I could write this history in 
 words of one syllable. But it cannot be done. You cannot 
 write a text-book of geometry without reference to a hypote¬ 
 nuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped. You 
 simply have to learn what those words mean or do without 
 mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually 
 be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of 
 Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now? 
 
 When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression, 
 I mean this: People were no longer contented to be the 
 audience and sit still while the emperor and the pope told 
 them what to do and what to think. They wanted to be actors 
 
goo 
 
 «V«V<V 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving “expression” 
 to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be in¬ 
 terested in statesmanship like the Florentine historian, Niccolo 
 Macchiavelli, then he “expressed” himself in his books which 
 revealed his own idea of a successful state and an efficient 
 ruler. If on the other hand he had a liking for painting, he 
 
 THE MANUSCRIPT AND THE PRINTED BOOK 
 
 “expressed” his love for beautiful lines and lovely colours in 
 the pictures which have made the names of Giotto, Fra An¬ 
 gelico, Rafael and a thousand others household words wher¬ 
 ever people have learned to care for those things which express 
 a true and lasting beauty. 
 
 If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with 
 an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leo¬ 
 nardo da Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with 
 his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the 
 Lombardian plains and “expressed” his joy and interest in all 
 
THE AGE OE EXPRESSION 
 
 223 
 
 things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in 
 sculpture and in curiously conceived engines. When a man of 
 gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush and 
 the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture 
 and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out 
 of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church 
 of St. Peter, the most concrete “expression” of the glories 
 of the triumphant church. And so it went. 
 
 All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with 
 men and women who lived that they might add their mite to 
 the sum total of our accumulated treasures of knowledge and 
 beauty and wisdom. In Germany, in the city of Mainz, Johann 
 zum Gansefleisch, commonly known as Johann Gutenberg, had 
 just invented a new method of copying books. He had studied 
 the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which in¬ 
 dividual letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that 
 they formed words and whole pages. It is true, he soon lost 
 all his money in a law-suit which had to do with the original 
 invention of the press. He died in poverty, but the “expres¬ 
 sion” of his particular inventive genius lived after him. 
 
 Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in 
 Antwerp and Froben in Basel were flooding the world with 
 carefully edited editions of the classics printed in the Gothic 
 letters of the Gutenberg Bible, or printed in the Italian type 
 which we use in this book, or printed in Greek letters, or in 
 Hebrew. 
 
 Then the whole world became the eager audience of those 
 who had something to say. The day when learning had been 
 a monopoly of a privileged few came to an end. And the 
 last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world, when 
 Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his cheap and popular 
 editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Horace and 
 Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and 
 philosophers and scientists, offered to become man’s faithful 
 friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had 
 made all men free and equal before the printed word. 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN 
 THROUGH THE BONDS OF THEIR NARROW 
 MEDIAEVAL LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO 
 HAVE MORE ROOM FOR THEIR WANDER¬ 
 INGS. THE EUROPEAN WORLD HAD 
 GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR AMBI¬ 
 TIONS. IT WAS THE TIME OF THE GREAT 
 VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY 
 
 The Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travel¬ 
 ling. But very few people had ever ventured beyond the well- 
 known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaffe. In the 
 thirteenth century the Polo brothers, merchants of Venice, 
 had wandered across the great Mongolian desert and after 
 climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their 
 way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty 
 emperor of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name 
 of Marco, had written a book about their adventures, which 
 covered a period of more than twenty years. The astonished 
 world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of 
 the strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of 
 spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go east, that 
 they might find this gold-land and grow rich. But the trip was 
 too far and too dangerous and so they stayed at home. 
 
 Of course, there was always the possibility of making the 
 
 224 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 225 
 
 voyage by sea. But the sea was very unpopular in the Middle 
 Ages and for many very good reasons. In the first place, ships 
 were very small. The vessels on which Magellan made his 
 famous trip around the world, which lasted many years, were 
 not as large as a modern ferryboat. They carried from twenty 
 to fifty men, who lived in dingy quarters (too low to allow any 
 of them to stand up straight) and the sailors were obliged to 
 
 MARCO POLO 
 
 eat poorly cooked food as the kitchen arrangements were very 
 bad and no fire could be made whenever the weather was the 
 least bit rough. The medkeval world knew how to pickle her¬ 
 ring and how to dry fish. But there were no canned goods 
 and fresh vegetables were never seen on the hill of fare as 
 soon as the coast had been left behind. Water was carried in 
 small barrels. It soon became stale and then tasted of rotten 
 wood and iron rust and was full of slimy growing things. As 
 the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes 
 
226 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 (Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth century 
 seems to have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept 
 his discovery to himself) they often drank unclean water and 
 sometimes the whole crew died of typhoid fever. Indeed the 
 mortality on board the ships of the earliest navigators was 
 terrible. Of the two hundred sailors who in the year 1519 left 
 Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around 
 the world, only eighteen returned. As late as the seventeenth 
 century when there was a brisk trade between western Europe 
 and the Indies, a mortality of 40 percent was nothing unusual 
 for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater 
 part of these victims died of scurvy, a disease which is caused 
 by lack of fresh vegetables and which affects the gums and 
 poisons the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion. 
 
 Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea 
 did not attract the best elements of the population. Famous 
 discoverers like Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama 
 travelled at the head of crews that were almost entirely com¬ 
 posed of ex-jailbirds, future murderers and pickpockets out 
 of a job. 
 
 These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the 
 courage and the pluck with which they accomplished their 
 hopeless tasks in the face of difficulties of which the people of 
 our own comfortable world can have no conception. Their 
 ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy. Since the middle 
 of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort of a 
 compass (which had come to Europe from China by way of 
 Arabia and the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect 
 maps. They set their course by God and by guess. If luck 
 was with them they returned after one or two or three years. 
 In the other case, their bleached bones remained behind on 
 some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gam¬ 
 bled with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure. And 
 all the suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were 
 forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast 
 or the placid waters of an ocean fhat Had lain forgotten since 
 the beginning of time. 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 227 
 
 HDW the world grew t^argeb. 
 
228 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages 
 long. The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating. 
 But history, to give you a true idea of past times, should be 
 like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should 
 cast a vivid light on certain important causes, on those which 
 are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow 
 or should be indicated by a few lines. And in this chapter I 
 can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries. 
 
 Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries the navigators were trying to accomplish just one 
 thing —they wanted to find a comfortable and safe road to the 
 empire of Cathay (China), to the island of Zipangu (Japan) 
 and to those mysterious islands, where grew the spices which 
 the mediaeval world had come to like since the days of the 
 Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the 
 introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very 
 quickly and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of 
 pepper or nutmeg. 
 
 The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navi¬ 
 gators of the Mediterranean, but the honour for exploring the 
 coast of the Atlantic goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Por¬ 
 tugal were full of that patriotic energy which their age-old 
 struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed. Such 
 energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new channels. 
 In the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered 
 the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the 
 Spanish peninsula and had added it to his dominions. In the 
 next century, the Portuguese had turned the tables on the 
 Mohammedans, had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and had 
 taken possession of Ceuta, opposite the Arabic city of Ta’Rifa 
 (a word which in Arabic means “inventory” and which by way 
 of the Spanish language has come down to us as “tariff,”) and 
 Tangiers, which became the capital of an African addition to 
 Algarve. 
 
 They were ready to begin their career as explorers. 
 
 In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 229 
 
 Navigator, the son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the 
 daughter of John of Gaunt (about whom you can read in 
 Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare) began to make 
 preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern 
 Africa. Before this, that hot and sandy coast had been visited 
 by the Phoenicians and by the Norsemen, who remembered it 
 as the home of the hairy “wild man” whom we have come to 
 know as the gorilla. One after another, Prince Henry 
 and his captains discovered the Canary Islands—re-discovered 
 the island of Madeira which a century before had been visited 
 by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which had 
 been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards, 
 and caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Senegal River on 
 the west coast of Africa, which they supposed to be the western 
 mouth of the Nile. At last, by the middle of the Fifteenth 
 Century, they saw Cape Verde, or the Green Cape, and the 
 Cape Verde Islands, which lie almost halfway between the 
 coast of Africa and Brazil. 
 
 But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to 
 the waters of the Ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order 
 of Christ. This was a Portuguese continuation of the cru¬ 
 sading order of the Templars which had been abolished by 
 Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King 
 Philip the Fair of France, w r ho had improved the occasion by 
 burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their 
 possessions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains 
 of his religious order to equip several expeditions which ex¬ 
 plored the hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea. 
 
 But he was still very much a son of the Middle Ages and 
 spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a 
 search for the mysterious “Prester John,” the mythical Chris¬ 
 tian Priest who was said to be the Emperor of a vast empire 
 “situated somewhere in the east.” The story of this strange 
 potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the 
 twelfth century. For three hundred years people had tried 
 to find “Prester John” and his descendants. Henry took part 
 
230 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 in the search. Thirty years after his death, the riddle was 
 solved. 
 
 In the year 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land 
 
 Ttft U/OQLD Ai COLUM 30J BCL/a *7 70 ' 
 
 THE WORLD OF COLUMBUS 
 
 of Prester John by sea, had reached the southernmost point 
 of Africa. At first he called it the Storm Cape, on account of 
 the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 231 
 
 voyage toward the east, but the Lisbon pilots who understood 
 the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India 
 water route, changed the name into that of the Cape of Good 
 Hope. 
 
 One year later, Pedro de Covilham, provided with letters 
 of credit on the house of Medici, started upon a similar mis¬ 
 sion by land. He crossed the Mediterranean and after leaving 
 Egypt, he travelled southward. He reached Aden, and from 
 there, travelling through the waters of the Persian Gulf which 
 few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great, 
 eighteen centuries before, he visited Goa and Calicut on the 
 coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the 
 island of the Moon (Madagascar) which was supposed to lie 
 halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid 
 a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea 
 once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of 
 Prester John, who was no one less than the Black Negus (or 
 King) of Abyssinia, whose ancestors had adopted Christianity 
 in the fourth century, seven hundred years before the Christian 
 missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia. 
 
 These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geog¬ 
 raphers and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies 
 by an eastern sea-route was possible, it was by no means easy. 
 Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to con¬ 
 tinue the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others 
 said, “No, we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we 
 shall reach Cathay.” 
 
 Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that 
 day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a 
 pancake but was round. The Ptolemean system of the universe, 
 invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy, the great 
 Egyptian geographer, who had lived in the second century of 
 our era, which had served the simple needs of the men of the 
 Middle Ages, had long been discarded by the scientists of the 
 Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish 
 mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies had con- 
 
232 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 vinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets 
 which turned around the sun, a discovery which he did not ven¬ 
 ture to publish for thirty-six years (it was printed in 1543, 
 the year of his death) from fear of the Holy Inquisition, a 
 Papal court which had been established in the thirteenth cen¬ 
 tury when the heresies of the Albigenses and the Waldenses 
 in France and in Italy (very mild heresies of devoutly pious 
 people who did not believe in private property and preferred 
 to live in Christ-like poverty) had for a moment threatened the 
 absolute power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in the 
 roundness of the earth was common among the nautical ex¬ 
 perts and, as I said, they were now debating the respective 
 advantages of the eastern and the western routes. 
 
 Among the advocates of the western route was a Genoese 
 mariner by the name of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son 
 of a wool merchant. He seems to have been a student at the 
 University of Pavia where he specialised in mathematics and 
 geometry. Then he took up his father’s trade but soon we find 
 him in Chios in the eastern Mediterranean travelling on busi¬ 
 ness. Thereafter we hear of voyages to England but whether 
 be went north in search of wool or as the captain of a ship we 
 do not know. In February of the year 1477, Colombo (if we 
 are to believe his own words) visited Iceland, but very likely 
 he only got as far as the Faroe Islands which are cold enough 
 in February to be mistaken for Iceland by any one. Here 
 Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who 
 in the tenth century had settled in Greenland and who had 
 visited America in the eleventh century, when Leif’s vessel 
 had been blown to the coast of Vineland, or Labrador. 
 
 What had become of those far western colonies no one 
 knew. The American colony of Thorfinn Karlsefne, the hus¬ 
 band of the widow of Leif’s brother Thorstein, founded in the 
 year 1003, had been discontinued three years later on account 
 of the hostility of the Esquimaux. As for Greenland, not a 
 word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440. 
 Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 233 
 
 which had just killed half the people of Norway. However 
 that might be, the tradition of a “vast land in the distant west” 
 still survived among the people of the Faroe and Iceland, and 
 
 
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 r " e 
 
 CAm a : 
 
 WiM§^ 
 
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 ubwBu 
 
 THE GREAT DISCOVERIES, WESTERN HEMISPHERE 
 
 Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered further inlorma- 
 tion among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands and 
 then went to Portugal where he married the daughter of one 
 
234 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of the captains who had served under Prince Henry the 
 Navigator. 
 
 From that moment on (the year 1478) he devoted himself 
 
 THE GREAT DISCOVERIES, EASTERN HEMISPHERE 
 
 to the quest of the western route to the Indies. He sent his 
 plans for such a voyage to the courts of Portugal and Spain. 
 The Portuguese, who felt certain that they possessed a monop- 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 235 
 
 oly of the eastern route, would not listen to his plans. In 
 Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose 
 marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were 
 busy driving the Moors from their last stronghold, Granada. 
 They had no money for risky expeditions. They needed every 
 peseta for their soldiers. 
 
 Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for 
 their ideas as this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo 
 (or Colon or Columbus, as we call him,) is too well known to 
 bear repeating. The Moors surrendered Granada on the sec¬ 
 ond of January of the year 1492. In the month of April of the 
 same year, Columbus signed a contract with the King and 
 Queen of Spain. On Friday, the 3rd of August, he left Palos 
 with three little ships and a crew of 88 men, many of whom 
 were criminals who had been offered indemnity of punishment 
 if they joined the expedition. At two o’clock in the morning 
 of Friday, the 12th of October, Columbus discovered land. On 
 the fourth of January of the year 1493, Columbus waved fare¬ 
 well to the 44 men of the little fortress of La Navidad (none 
 of whom was ever again seen alive) and returned homeward. 
 By the middle of February he reached the Azores where the 
 Portuguese threatened to throw him into gaol. On the fifteenth 
 of March, 1493, the admiral reached Palos and together with 
 his Indians (for he was convinced that he had discovered some 
 outlying islands of the Indies and called the natives red 
 Indians) he hastened to Barcelona to tell his faithful patrons 
 that he had been successful and that the road to the gold and 
 the silver of Cathay and Zipangu was at the disposal of their 
 most Catholic Majesties. 
 
 Alas, Columbus never knew the truth. Towards the end 
 of his life, on his fourth voyage, when he had touched the main¬ 
 land of South America, he may have suspected that all was 
 not well with his discovery. But he died in the firm belief 
 that there was no solid continent between Europe and Asia 
 and that he had found the direct route to China. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Portuguese, sticking to their eastern route, 
 
286 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 had been more fortunate. In the year 1498, Vasco da Gama 
 had been able to reach the coast of Malabar and return safely 
 to Lisbon with a cargo of spice. In the year 1502 he had 
 repeated the visit. But along the western route, the work of 
 exploration had been most disappointing. In 1497 and 1498 
 John and Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to Japan 
 but they had seen nothing but the snowbound coasts and the 
 rocks of Newfoundland, which had first been sighted by the 
 Northmen, five centuries before. Amerigo Vespucci, a Floren¬ 
 tine who became the Pilot Major of Spain, and who gave his 
 name to our continent, had explored the coast of Brazil, but 
 had found not a trace of the Indies. 
 
 In the year 1513, seven years after the death of Columbus, 
 the truth at last began to dawn upon the geographers of 
 Europe. Vasco Nunez de Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of 
 Panama, had climbed the famous peak in Darien, and had 
 looked down upon a vast expanse cf water which seemed to 
 suggest the existence of another ocean. 
 
 Finally in the year 1519 a fleet of five small Spanish ships 
 under command of the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand de 
 Magellan, sailed westward (and not eastward since that route, 
 was absolutely in the hands of the Portuguese who allowed no 
 competition) in search of the Spice Islands. Magellan crossed 
 the Atlantic between Africa and Brazil and sailed southward. 
 He reached a narrow channel between the southernmost point 
 of Patagonia, the “land of the people with the big feet,” and 
 the Fire Island (so named on account of a fire, the only sign of 
 the existence of natives, which the sailors watched one night). 
 For almost five weeks the ships of Magellan were at the mercy 
 of the terrible storms and blizzards which swept through the 
 straits. A mutiny broke out among the sailors. Magellan 
 suppressed it with terrible severity and sent two of his men 
 on shore where they were left to repent of their sins at leisure. 
 At last the storms quieted down, the channel broadened, and 
 Magellan entered a new ocean. Its waves were quiet and 
 placid. He called it the Peaceful Sea, the Mare Pacifico. 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 SJ37 
 
 Then he continued in a western direction. He sailed for 
 ninety-eight days without seeing land. His people almost 
 perished from hunger and thirst and ate the rats that infested 
 the ships, and when these were all gone they chewed pieces of 
 sail to still their gnawing hunger. 
 
 In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called 
 
 MAGELLAN 
 
 it the land of the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the 
 natives stole everything they could lay hands on. Then fur¬ 
 ther westward to the Spice Islands! 
 
 Again land was sighted. A group of lonely islands. Ma¬ 
 gellan called them the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his 
 master Charles V, the Philip II of unpleasant historical mem¬ 
 ory. At first Magellan was well received, but when he used 
 the guns of his ships to make Christian converts he was killed 
 
238 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 by the aborigines, together with a number of his captains and 
 sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships 
 and continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas, the 
 famous Spice Islands; they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor. 
 There, one of the two ships, too leaky to be of further use, 
 remained behind with her crew. The “Vittoria,” under Sebas¬ 
 tian del Cano, crossed the Indian Ocean, missed seeing the 
 northern coast of Australia (which was not discovered until 
 the first half of the seventeenth century when ships of the 
 Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable 
 land), and after great hardships reached Spain. 
 
 This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken 
 three years. It had been accomplished at a great cost both of 
 men and money. But it had established the fact that the earth 
 was round and that the new lands discovered by Columbus were 
 not a part of the Indies but a separate continent. From that 
 time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their energies to the 
 development of their Indian and American trade. To prevent 
 an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI (the 
 only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy 
 office) had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts 
 by a line of demarcation which followed the 50th degree of 
 longitude west of Greenwich, the so-called division of Tor- 
 desillas of 1494. The Portuguese were to establish their colo¬ 
 nies to the east of this line, the Spaniards were to have theirs 
 to the west. This accounts for the fact that the entire Ameri¬ 
 can continent with the exception of Brazil became Spanish and 
 that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese 
 until the English and the Dutch colonists (who had no respect 
 for Papal decisions) took these possessions away in the seven¬ 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries. 
 
 When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the 
 Rialto of Venice, the Wall street of the Middle Ages, there 
 was a terrible panic. Stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50 
 percent. After a short while, when it appeared that Columbus 
 had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian merchants 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES 
 
 239 
 
 recovered from their fright. But the voyages of da Gama and 
 Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water- 
 route to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice, 
 the two great commercial centres of the Middle Ages and the 
 Renaissance, began to be sorry that they had refused to listen 
 to Columbus. But it was too late. Their Mediterranean be¬ 
 came an inland sea. The overland trade to the Indies and 
 China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days 
 of Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new 
 centre of commerce and therefore the centre of civilisation. 
 It has remained so ever since. 
 
 See how strangely civilisation has progressed since those 
 early days, fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the 
 Valley of the Nile began to keep a written record of history, 
 From the river Nile, it went to Mesopotamia, the land be« 
 tween the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete and Greece and 
 Rome. An inland sea became the centre of trade and the cities 
 along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and 
 philosophy and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved 
 westward once more and made the countries that border upon 
 the Atlantic become the masters of the earth. 
 
 There are those who say that the world war and the suicide 
 of the great European nations has greatly diminished the 
 importance of the Atlantic Ocean. They expect to see civilisa¬ 
 tion cross the American continent and find a new home in the 
 Pacific. But I doubt this. 
 
 The westward trip was accompanied by a steady increase in 
 the size of ships and a broadening of the knowledge of the navi¬ 
 gators. The flat-bottomed vessels of the N ile and the Euphra¬ 
 tes were replaced by the sailing vessels of the Phoenicians, the 
 /Egeans, the Greeks, the Carthaginians and the Romans. 
 These in turn were discarded for the square rigged vessels of 
 the Portuguese and the Spaniards. And the latter were driven 
 from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the English and the 
 Dutch. 
 
 At present, however, civilisation no longer depends upon 
 
240 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ships. Aircraft has taken and will continue to take the place 
 of the sailing vessel and the steamer. The next centre of 
 civilisation will depend upon the development of aircraft and 
 water power. And the sea once more shall be the undisturbed 
 home of the little fishes, who once upon a time shared their deep 
 residence with the earliest ancestors of the human race. 
 
BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 
 
 CONCERNING BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 
 
 The discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had 
 brought the Christians of western Europe into close contact 
 with the people of India and of China. They knew of course 
 that Christianity was not the only religion on this earth. There 
 were the Mohammedans and the heathenish tribes of northern 
 Africa who worshipped sticks and stones and dead trees. But 
 in India and in China the Christian conquerors found new 
 millions who had never heard of Christ and who did not want 
 to hear of Him, because they thought their own religion, which 
 was thousands of years old, much better than that of the West. 
 As this is a story of mankind and not an exclusive history of 
 the people of Europe and our western hemisphere, you ought 
 to know something of two men whose teaching and whose 
 example continue to influence the actions and the thoughts 
 of the majority of our fellow-travellers on this earth. 
 
 In India, Buddha was recognised as the great religious 
 teacher. His history is an interesting one. He was born in 
 the Sixth Century before the birth of Christ, within sight of the 
 mighty Himalaya Mountains, where four hundred years before 
 Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the first of the great leaders of 
 the Aryan race (the name which the Eastern branch of the 
 Indo-European race had given to itself), had taught his peo^ 
 pie to regard life as a continuous struggle between Ahriman, 
 and Ormuzd, the Gods of Evil and Good. Buddha’s 
 
 241 
 
242 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 father was Suddhodana, a mighty chief among the tribe of the 
 Sakiyas. His mother, Maha Maya, was the daughter of a 
 neighbouring king. She had been married when she was a very 
 young girl. But many moons had passed beyond the distant 
 ridge of hills and still her husband was without an heir who 
 should rule his lands after him. At last, when she was fifty 
 years old, her day came and she went forth that she might be 
 among her own people when her baby should come into this 
 world. 
 
 It was a long trip to the land of the Koliyans, where Maha 
 Maya had spent her earliest years. One night she was resting 
 among the cool trees of the garden of Lumbini. There her son 
 was born. He was given the name of Siddhartha, but we know 
 him as Buddha, which means the Enlightened One. 
 
 In due time, Siddhartha grew up to be a handsome young 
 prince and when he was nineteen years old, he was married to 
 his cousin Yasodhara. During the next ten years he lived 
 far away from all pain and all suffering, behind the protecting 
 walls of the royal palace, awaiting the day when he should 
 succeed his father as King of the Sakiyas. 
 
 But it happened that when he was thirty years old, he drove 
 outside of the palace gates and saw a man who was old and 
 worn out with labour and whose weak limbs could hardly carry 
 the burden of life. Siddhartha pointed him out to his coach¬ 
 man, Channa, but Channa answered that there were lots of 
 poor people in this world and that one more or less did not 
 matter. The young prince was very sad but he did not say 
 anything and went back to live with his wife and his father 
 and his mother and tried to be happy. A little while later he 
 left the palace a second time. His carriage met a man who 
 suffered from a terrible disease. Siddhartha asked Channa 
 what had been the cause of this man’s suff ering, but the coach¬ 
 man answered that there were many sick people in this world 
 and that such things could not be helped and did not matter 
 very much. The young prince was very sad when he heard this 
 but again he returned to his people. 
 
 A few weeks passed. One evening Siddhartha ordered his 
 
BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 
 
 243 
 
 THE THREE GREAT RELIGIONS. 
 
244 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 carriage in order to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his 
 horses were frightened by the sight of a dead man whose rot¬ 
 ting body lay sprawling in the ditch beside the road. The young 
 prince, who had never been allowed to see such things, was 
 frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such trifles. The 
 world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that all 
 things must come to an end. Nothing was eternal. The grave 
 awaited us all and there was no escape. 
 
 That evening, when Siddliartha returned to his home, he 
 w’as received with music. While he was away his wife had 
 given birth to a son. The people were delighted because now 
 they knew that there was an heir to the throne and they cele¬ 
 brated the event by the beating of many drums. Siddhartha, 
 however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had been 
 lifted and he had learned the horror of man’s existence. The 
 sight of death and suffering followed him like a terrible dream. 
 
 That night the moon was shining brightly. Siddhartha 
 woke up and began to think of many things. Never again 
 could he be happy until he should have found a solution to the 
 riddle of existence. He decided to find it far away from all 
 those whom he loved. Softly he went into the room where 
 Yasodhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for 
 his faithful Channa and told him to follow. 
 
 Together the two men went into the darkness of the night, 
 one to find rest for his soul, the other to be a faithful servant 
 unto a beloved master. 
 
 The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for 
 many years were just then in a state of change. Their ances¬ 
 tors, the native Indians, had been conquered without great diffi¬ 
 culty by the war-like Aryans (our distant cousins) and there¬ 
 after the Aryans had been the rulers and masters of tens of 
 millions of docile little brown men. To maintain themselves in 
 the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population into 
 different classes and gradually a system of “caste” of the most 
 rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives. The descend¬ 
 ants of the Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest 
 “caste,” the class of warriors and nobles. Next came the caste 
 
BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 
 
 245 
 
 of the priests. Below these followed the peasants and the busi¬ 
 ness men. The ancient natives, however, who were called 
 Pariahs, formed a class of despised and miserable slaves and 
 never could hope to be anything else. 
 
 Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The 
 old Indo-Europeans, during their thousands of years of wan¬ 
 dering, had met with many strange adventures. These had 
 been collected in a book called the Veda. The language of 
 this book was called Sanskrit, and it was closely related to the 
 different languages of the European continent, to Greek and 
 Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The 
 three highest castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures. 
 The Pariah, however, the despised member of the lowest caste, 
 was not permitted to know its contents. Woe to the man of 
 noble or priestly caste who should teach a Pariah to study the 
 sacred volume! 
 
 The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in 
 misery. Since this planet offered them very little joy, salva¬ 
 tion from suffering must be found elsewhere. They tried to 
 derive a little consolation from meditation upon the bliss of 
 their future existence. 
 
 Brahma, the all-creator who was regarded by the Indian 
 people as the supreme ruler of life and death, was worshipped 
 as the highest ideal of perfection. To become like Brahma, to 
 lose all desires for riches and power, was recognised as the most 
 exalted purpose of existence. Holy thoughts were regarded 
 as more important than holy deeds, and many people went 
 into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and starved 
 their bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious 
 contemplation of the splendours of Brahma, the Wise, the 
 Good and the Merciful. 
 
 Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wan¬ 
 derers who were seeking the truth far away from the turmoil 
 of the cities and the villages, decided to follow their example. 
 He cut his hair. He took his pearls and his rubies and sent 
 them back to his family with a message of farewell, which the 
 
246 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single follower, the 
 young prince then moved into the wilderness. 
 
 Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the moun¬ 
 tains. Five young men came to him and asked that they might 
 be allowed to listen to his words of wisdom. He agreed to be 
 their master if they would follow him. They consented, and 
 he took them into the hills and for six years he taught them 
 all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindhya Mountains. 
 But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was still 
 far from perfection. The world that he had left continued to 
 tempt him. He now asked that his pupils leave him and then 
 he fasted for forty-nine days and nights, sitting upon the roots 
 of an old tree. At last he received his reward. In the dusk of 
 the fiftieth evening, Brahma revealed himself to his faithful 
 servant. From that moment on, Siddhartha was called Buddha 
 and he was revered as the Enlightened One who had come to 
 save men from their unhappy mortal fate. 
 
 The last forty-five years of his life, Buddha spent within 
 the valley of the Ganges River, teaching his simple lesson of 
 submission and meekness unto all men. In the year 488 before 
 our era, he died, full of years and beloved by millions of people. 
 He had not preached his doctrines for the benefit of a single 
 class. Even the lowest Pariah might call himself his disciple. 
 
 This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and 
 the merchants who did their best to destroy a creed which rec¬ 
 ognised the equality of all living creatures and offered men the 
 hope of a second life (a reincarnation) under happier circum¬ 
 stances. As soon as they could, they encouraged the people of 
 India to return to the ancient doctrines of the Brahmin creed 
 with its fasting and its tortures of the sinful body. But 
 Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples of the 
 Enlightened One wandered across the valleys of the Hima¬ 
 layas, and moved into China. They crossed the Yellow Sea 
 and preached the wisdom of their master unto the people of 
 Japan, and they faithfully obeyed the will of their great mas¬ 
 ter, who had forbidden them to use force. To-day more people 
 recognise Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their 
 
BUDDHA GOES INTO THE MOUNTAINS 
 
BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 247 
 
 number surpasses that of the combined followers of Christ and 
 Mohammed. 
 
 As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his 
 story is a simple one. He was born in the year 55 0 b.c. He 
 led a quiet, dignified and uneventful life at a time when China 
 was without a strong central government and when the Chinese 
 people were at the mercy of bandits and robber-barons who 
 went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and murdering 
 and turning the busy plains of northern and central China into 
 a wilderness of starving people. 
 
 Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He 
 did not have much faith in the use of violence. He was a very 
 peaceful person. He did not think that he could make people 
 over by giving them a lot of new laws. He knew that the only 
 possible salvation would come from a change of heart, and he 
 set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing the char¬ 
 acter of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the wide plains 
 of eastern Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested 
 in religion as we understand that word. They believed in 
 devils and spooks as most primitive people do. But they had 
 no prophets and recognised no “revealed truth.” Confucius 
 is almost the only one among the great moral leaders who did 
 not see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the messenger 
 of a divine power; who did not, at some time or another, claim 
 that he was inspired by voices from above. 
 
 He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given 
 to lonely wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful 
 flute. He asked for no recognition. He did not demand that 
 any one should follow him or worship him. He reminds us 
 of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially those of the Stoic 
 School, men who believed in right living and righteous think¬ 
 ing without the hope of a reward but simply for the peace of 
 the soul that comes with a good conscience. 
 
 Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his 
 way to visit Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the 
 founder of a philosophic system called “Taoism,” which was 
 merely an early Chinese version of the Golden Rule. 
 
243 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue 
 of supreme self-possession. A person of real worth, according 
 to the teaching of Confucius, did not allow himself to be 
 ruffled by anger and suffered whatever fate brought him with 
 the resignation of those sages who understand that everything 
 which happens, in one way or another, is meant for the best. 
 
 At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number 
 increased. Before his death, in the year 478 b.c., several of the 
 kings and the princes of China confessed themselves his disci¬ 
 ples. When Christ was born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of 
 Confucius had already become a part of the mental make-up 
 of most Chinamen. It has continued to influence their lives 
 ever since. Not however in its pure, original form. Most reli¬ 
 gions change as time goes on. Christ preached humility and 
 meekness and absence from worldly ambitions, but fifteen 
 centuries after Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was 
 spending millions upon the erection of a building that bore 
 little relation to the lonely stable of Bethlehem. 
 
 Lao-Tse taught the Golden Buie, and in less than three 
 centuries the ignorant masses had made him into a real and 
 very cruel God and had buried his wise commandments under 
 a rubbish-heap of superstition which made the lives of the aver¬ 
 age Chinese one long series of frights and fears and horrors. 
 
 Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring 
 their Father and their Mother. They soon began to be more 
 interested in the memory of their departed parents than in the 
 happiness of their children and their grandchildren. Delib¬ 
 erately they turned their backs upon the future and tried to 
 peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the 
 ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than 
 disturb a cemetary situated upon the sunny and fertile side of 
 a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon the 
 barren rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly 
 grow. And they preferred hunger and famine to the desecra¬ 
 tion of the ancestral grave. 
 
 At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite 
 lost their hold upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia. 
 
BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS 249 
 
 THE GREAT MORAL LEADERS. 
 
250 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Confucianism, with its profound sayings and shrewd observa¬ 
 tions, added a touch of common-sense philosophy to the soul of 
 every Chinaman and influenced his entire life, whether he was 
 a simple laundryman in a steaming basement or the ruler of 
 vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded 
 palace. 
 
 In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivi¬ 
 lised Christians of the western world came face to face with 
 the older creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and Portu¬ 
 guese looked upon the peaceful statues of Buddha and con¬ 
 templated the venerable pictures of Confucius and did not in 
 the least know what to make of those worthy prophets with 
 their far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion that 
 these strange divinities were just plain devils who represented 
 something idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the 
 respect of the true sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit 
 of Buddha or Confucius seemed to interfere with the trade in 
 spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the “evil influence” 
 with bullets and grapeshot. That system had certain very 
 definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage 
 of ill-will which promises little good for the immediate future. 
 
THE REFORMATION 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST 
 COMPARED TO A GIGANTIC PENDULUM 
 WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND 
 BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFER¬ 
 ENCE AND THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY 
 ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE 
 WERE FOLLOWED BY THE ARTISTIC AND 
 LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE RE¬ 
 LIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMA¬ 
 TION 
 
 Of course you have heard of the Reformation. You think 
 of a small but courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the 
 ocean to have “freedom of religious worship.” Vaguely in the 
 course of time (and more especially in our Protestant coun¬ 
 tries) the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of 
 “liberty of thought.” Martin Luther is represented as the 
 leader of the vanguard of progress. But when history is 
 something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed 
 to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the 
 German historian Ranke, we try to discover what “actually 
 happened,” then much of the past is seen in a very different 
 light. 
 
 Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely 
 bad. Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of 
 
 251 
 
252 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the honest chronicler to give a true account of all the good and 
 bad sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do 
 this because we all have our personal likes and dislikes. But 
 we ought to try and be as fair as we can be, and must not allow 
 our prejudices to influence us too much. 
 
 Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very 
 Protestant centre of a very Protestant country. I never saw 
 any Catholics until I was about twelve years old. Then I felt 
 very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid. 
 I knew the story of the many thousand people who had been 
 burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition 
 when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their 
 Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real 
 to me. It seemed to have happened only the day before. It 
 might occur again. There might be another Saint Bartholo¬ 
 mew’s night, and poor little me would be slaughtered in my 
 nightie and my body would be thrown out of the window, as 
 had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny. 
 
 Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Cath¬ 
 olic country. I found the people much pleasanter and much 
 more tolerant and quite as intelligent as my former country¬ 
 men. To my great surprise, I began to discover that there 
 was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as much as a 
 Protestant. 
 
 Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries, who actually lived through the Reformation, did 
 not see things that way. They were always right and their 
 enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be 
 hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which 
 was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame. 
 
 When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, 
 an easy date to remember, and the year in which the Emperor 
 Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudal disorder 
 of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a num¬ 
 ber of highly centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of 
 all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle. 
 He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maxi- 
 
THE REFORMATION 
 
 253 
 
 milian of Habsburg, the last of the mediaeval knights, and of 
 his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious 
 Burgundian duke who had made successful war upon France, 
 but had been killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The 
 child Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the greater part of 
 the map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles, 
 cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in 
 Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies 
 in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he 
 has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of 
 Flanders, which the Germans used as a prison during their 
 recent occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king 
 and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming. 
 
 As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is 
 never proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is trav¬ 
 elling through her domains with the coffin containing the body 
 of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict disci¬ 
 pline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and 
 Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles 
 grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church, 
 but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy, 
 both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule 
 the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour. 
 Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from 
 Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always 
 at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon 
 the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much 
 stupidity. Three years later he dies, a very tired and disap¬ 
 pointed man. 
 
 So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church, 
 the second great power in the world ? The Church has changed 
 greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages, when it started 
 out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of 
 a pious and righteous life. In the first place, the Church has 
 grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd of a flock 
 of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds 
 himself with artists and musicians and famous literary men. 
 
254 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 His churches and chapels are covered with new pictures in 
 which the saints look more like Greek Gods than is strictly 
 necessary. He divides his time unevenly between affairs of 
 state and art. The affairs of state take ten percent of his time. 
 The other ninety percent goes to an active interest in Roman 
 statues, recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new sum¬ 
 mer home, the rehearsal of a new play. The Archbishops and 
 the Cardinals follow the example of their Pope. The Bishops 
 try to imitate the Archbishops. The village priests, however, 
 have remained faithful to their duties. They keep themselves 
 aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of beauty 
 and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries where 
 the monks seem to have forgotten their ancient vows of sim¬ 
 plicity and poverty and live as happily as they dare without 
 causing too much of a public scandal. 
 
 Finally, there are the common people. They are much 
 better off than they have ever been before. They are more 
 prosperous, they live in better houses, their children go to bet¬ 
 ter schools, their cities are more beautiful than before, their 
 firearms have made them the equal of their old enemies, the 
 robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy taxes 
 upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the 
 Reformation. 
 
 Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe, 
 and then you will understand how the revival of learning and 
 art was bound to be followed by a revival of religious inter¬ 
 ests. The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread 
 to France. It was not quite successful in Spain, where 
 five hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the 
 people very narrow minded and very fanatical in all religious 
 matters. The circle had grown wider and wider, but once the 
 Alps had been crossed, the Renaissance had suffered a change. 
 
 The people of northern Europe, living in a very different 
 climate, had an outlook upon life which contrasted strangely 
 with that of their southern neighbours. The Italians lived out 
 in the open, under a sunny sky. It was easy for them to laugh 
 and to sing and to be happy. The Germans, the Dutch, the 
 
THE REFORMATION 
 
 255 
 
 English, the Swedes, spent most of their time indoors, listen¬ 
 ing to the rain beating on the closed windows of their com¬ 
 fortable little houses. They did not laugh quite so much. They 
 took everything more seriously. They were forever conscious 
 of their immortal souls and they did not like to be funny about 
 matters which they considered holy and sacred. The “human¬ 
 istic” part of the Renaissance, the books, the studies of ancient 
 authors, the grammar and the text-books, interested them 
 greatly. But the general return to the old pagan civilisation 
 of Greece and Rome, which was one of the chief results of the 
 Renaissance in Italy, filled their hearts with horror. 
 
 But the Papacy and the College of Cardinals was almost 
 entirely composed of Italians and they had turned the Church 
 into a pleasant club where people discussed art and music and 
 the theatre, but rarely mentioned religion. Hence the split 
 between the serious north and the more civilised but easy-going 
 and indifferent south was growing wider and wider all the 
 time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threat¬ 
 ened the Church. 
 
 There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the 
 Reformation took place in Germany rather than in Sweden * 
 or England. The Germans bore an ancient grudge against 
 Rome. The endless quarrels between Emperor and Pope had 
 caused much mutual bitterness. In the other European coun¬ 
 tries where the government rested in the hands of a strong 
 king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects 
 against the greed of the priests. In Germany, where a shadowy 
 emperor ruled a turbulent crowd of little princelings, the good 
 burghers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and 
 prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums 
 of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which 
 were a hobby of the Popes of the Renaissance. The Germans 
 felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturally they did 
 not like it. 
 
 And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany 
 was the home of the printing press. In northern Europe booka 
 were cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manu- 
 
256 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 script owned and explained by the priest. It was a household 
 book of many families where Latin was understood by the 
 father and by the children. Whole families began to read it, 
 which was against the law of the Church. They discovered that 
 the priests were telling them many things which, according to 
 the original text of the Holy Scriptures, were somewhat differ¬ 
 ent. This caused doubt. People began to ask questions. And 
 questions, when they cannot be answered, often cause a great 
 deal of trouble. 
 
 The attack began when the humanists of the North opened 
 fire upon the monks. In their heart of hearts they still had 
 too much respect and reverence for the Pope to direct their 
 sallies against his Most Holy Person. But the lazy, ignorant 
 monks, living behind the sheltering walls of their rich monas¬ 
 teries, offered rare sport. 
 
 The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very 
 faithful son of the church. Gerard Gerardzoon, or Desiderius 
 Erasmus, as he is usually called, was a poor boy, born in 
 Rotterdam in Holland, and educated at the same Latin school 
 of Deventer from which Thomas a Kempis had graduated. 
 
 ‘ He had become a priest and for a time he had lived in a monas¬ 
 tery. He had travelled a great deal and knew whereof he wrote. 
 When he began his career as a public pamphleteer (he would 
 have been called an editorial writer in our day) the world was 
 greatly amused at an anonymous series of letters which had 
 just appeared under the title of “Letters of Obscure Men.” 
 In these letters, the general stupidity and arrogance of the 
 monks of the late Middle Ages was exposed in a strange 
 German-Latin doggerel which reminds one of our modern 
 limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned and serious 
 scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first 
 reliable version of the New Testament, which he translated 
 into Latin together with a corrected^ edition of the original 
 Greek text. But he believed with Horace, the Roman poet, 
 that nothing prevents us from “stating the truth with a smile 
 upon our lips.” 
 
 In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng- 
 
THE REFORMATION 
 
 257 
 
 land, he took a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book, 
 called the “Praise of Folly,” in which he attacked the monks 
 and their credulous followers with that most dangerous of all 
 weapons, humor. The booklet was the best seller of the six¬ 
 teenth century. It was translated into almost every language 
 and it made people pay attention to those other books of 
 Erasmus in which he advocated reform of the many abuses of 
 
 the church and appealed to his 
 in his task of bringing about a 
 faith. 
 
 But nothing came of these 
 excellent plans. Erasmus was 
 too reasonable and too tolerant 
 to please most of the enemies 
 of the church. They were wait¬ 
 ing for a leader of a more 
 robust nature. 
 
 He came, and his name was 
 Martin Luther. 
 
 Luther was a North-Ger¬ 
 man peasant with a first-class 
 brain and possessed of great 
 personal courage. He was a 
 university man, a master of arts 
 of the University of Erfurt; 
 afterwards he joined a Domin- 
 
 fellow humanists to help him 
 great rebirth of the Christian 
 
 LUTHER TRANSLATES 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 ican monastery. Then he became a college professor at the 
 theological school of Wittenberg and began to explain the 
 scriptures to the indifferent ploughboys of his Saxon home. He 
 had a lot of spare time and this he used to study the original 
 texts of the Old and New Testaments. Soon he began to see 
 the great difference which existed between the words of Christ 
 and those that were preached by the Popes and the Bishops. 
 
 In the year 1511, he visited Rome on official business. 
 Alexander VI, of the family of Borgia, who had enriched him¬ 
 self for the benefit of his son and daughter, was dead. But his 
 
258 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 successor, Julius II, a man of irreproachable personal char¬ 
 acter, was spending most of his time fighting and building and 
 did not impress this serious minded German theologian with 
 his piety. Luther returned to Wittenberg a much disappointed 
 man. But worse was to follow. 
 
 The gigantic church of St. Peter which Pope Julius had 
 wished upon his innocent successors, although only half begun, 
 was already in need of repair. Alexander VI had spent every 
 penny of the Papal treasury. Leo X, who succeeded Julius 
 in the year 1513, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He reverted 
 to an old method of raising ready cash. He began to sell 
 “indulgences.” An indulgence was a piece of parchment which 
 in return for a certain sum of money, promised a sinner a de¬ 
 crease of the time which he would have to spend in purgatory. 
 It was a perfectly correct thing according to the creed of the 
 late Middle Ages. Since the church had the power to forgive 
 the sins of those who truly repented before they died, the 
 church also had the right to shorten, through its intercession 
 with the Saints, the time during which the soul must be puri¬ 
 fied in the shadowy realms of Purgatory. 
 
 It was unfortunate that these Indulgences must be sold for 
 money. But they offered an easy form of revenue and besides, 
 those who were too poor to pay, received theirs for nothing. 
 
 Now it happened in the year 1517 that the exclusive terri¬ 
 tory for the sale of indulgences in Saxony was given to a 
 Dominican monk by the name of Johan Tetzel. Brother 
 Johan was a hustling salesman. To tell the truth he was a 
 little too eager. His business methods outraged the pious 
 people of the little duchy. And Luther, who was an honest 
 fellow, got so angry that he did a rash thing. On the 31st of 
 October of the year 1517, he went to the court church and upon 
 the doors thereof he posted a sheet of paper with ninety-five 
 statements (or theses), attacking the sale of indulgences. 
 These statements had been written in Latin. Luther had no 
 intention of starting a riot. He was not a revolutionist. He 
 objected to the institution of the Indulgences and he wanted his 
 fellow professors to know what he thought about them. But 
 
THE REFORMATION 
 
 259 
 
 this was still a private affair of the clerical and professorial 
 world and there was no appeal to the prejudices of the com¬ 
 munity of laymen. 
 
 Unfortunately, at that moment when the whole world had 
 begun to take an interest in the religious affairs of the day, 
 it was utterly impossible to discuss anything, without at once 
 creating a serious mental disturbance. In less than two 
 months, all Europe was discussing the ninety-five theses of 
 the Saxon monk. Every one must take sides. Every obscure 
 little theologian must print his own opinion. The papal au¬ 
 thorities began to be alarmed. They ordered the Wittenberg 
 professor to proceed to Rome and give an account of his action. 
 Luther wisely remembered what had happened to Huss. He 
 stayed in Germany and he was punished with excommunica¬ 
 tion. Luther burned the papal bull in the presence of an 
 admiring multitude and from that moment, peace between him¬ 
 self and the Pope was no longer possible. 
 
 Without any desire on his part, Luther had become the 
 leader of a vast army of discontented Christians. German 
 patriots like Ulrich von Hutten, rushed to his defence. The 
 students of Wittenberg and Erfurt and Leipzig offered to 
 defend him should the authorities try to imprison him. The 
 Elector of Saxony reassured the eager young men. No harm 
 would befall Luther as long as he stayed on Saxon ground. 
 
 All this happened in the year 1520. Charles V was twenty 
 years old and as the ruler of half the world, was forced to 
 remain on pleasant terms with the Pope. He sent out calls 
 for a Diet or general assembly in the good city of Worms on 
 the Rhine and commanded Luther to be present and give an 
 account of his extraordinary behaviour. Luther, who now 
 was the national hero of the Germans, went. He refused to 
 take back a single word of what he had ever written or said. 
 His conscience was controlled only by the word of God. He 
 would live and die for his conscience. 
 
 The Diet of Worms, after due deliberation, declared 
 Luther an outlaw before God and man, and forbade all Ger¬ 
 mans to give him shelter or food or drink, or to read a single 
 
260 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 word of the books which the dastardly heretic had written. 
 But the great reformer was in no danger. By the majority 
 of the Germans of the north the edict was denounced as a most 
 unjust and outrageous document. For greater safety, Luther 
 was hidden in the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the Elector 
 of Saxony, and there he defied all papal authority by trans¬ 
 lating the entire Bible into the German language, that all the 
 people might read and know the word of God for themselves. 
 
 By this time, the Reformation was no longer a spiritual 
 and religious affair. Those who hated the beauty of the mod¬ 
 ern church building used this period of unrest to attack and 
 destroy what they did not like because they did not understand 
 it. Impoverished knights tried to make up for past losses by 
 grabbing the territory which belonged to the monasteries. 
 Discontented princes made use of the absence of the Emperor 
 to increase their own power. The starving peasants, follow¬ 
 ing the leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of 
 the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and 
 plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old 
 Crusaders. 
 
 A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the 
 Empire. Some princes became Protestants (as the “protest¬ 
 ing” adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their 
 Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their 
 Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526 
 tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering 
 that “the subjects should all be of the same religious denomi¬ 
 nation as their princes.” This turned Germany into a checker¬ 
 board of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and 
 created a situation which prevented the normal political 
 growth for hundreds of years. 
 
 In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put 
 to rest in the same church where twenty-nine years before he 
 had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of Indul¬ 
 gences. In less than thirty years, the indifferent, joking and 
 laughing world of the Renaissance had been transformed into 
 the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting, debating-society of the 
 
THE REFORMATION 
 
 261 
 
 Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes 
 came to a sudden end and the whole of western Europe was 
 turned into a battle-field, where Protestants and Catholics 
 killed each other for the greater glory of certain theological 
 doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present genera¬ 
 tion as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans. 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS 
 CONTROVERSIES 
 
 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of 
 religious controversy. 
 
 If you will notice you will find that almost everybody 
 around you is forever “talking economics” and discussing 
 wages and hours of labor and strikes in their relation to the 
 life of the community, for that is the main topic of interest 
 of our own time. 
 
 The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared 
 worse. They never heard anything but “religion.” Their 
 heads were filled with “predestination,” “transubstanti- 
 tion,” “free will,” and a hundred other queer words, express¬ 
 ing obscure points of “the true faith,” whether Catholic or 
 Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they were 
 baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians 
 or Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augs¬ 
 burg catechism, composed by Luther, or from the “institutes 
 of Christianity,” written by Calvin, or they mumbled the 
 Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were printed in the Eng¬ 
 lish Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that these 
 alone represented the “True Faith.” 
 
 They heard of the wholesale theft of church property per¬ 
 petrated by King Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of 
 England, who made himself the supreme head of the English 
 
 262 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 263 
 
 church, and assumed the old papal rights of appointing bish¬ 
 ops and priests. They had a nightmare whenever some one 
 mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its 
 many torture chambers, and they were treated to equally hor¬ 
 rible stories of how a mob of outraged Dutch Protestants had 
 got hold of a dozen defenceless old priests and hanged them 
 for the sheer pleasure of 
 killing those who professed 
 a different faith. It was 
 unfortunate that the two 
 contending parties were so 
 equally matched. Other¬ 
 wise the struggle would 
 have come to a quick solu¬ 
 tion. Now it dragged on 
 for eight generations, and 
 it grew so complicated that 
 I can only tell you the most 
 important details, and 
 must ask you to get the 
 rest from one of the many 
 histories of the Reforma¬ 
 tion. 
 
 The great reform move¬ 
 ment of the Protestants 
 had been followed by a 
 thoroughgoing reform 
 within the bosom of the 
 Church. Those popes who 
 had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman and 
 Greek antiquities, disappeared from the scene and their place 
 was taken by serious men who spent twenty hours a day ad¬ 
 ministering those holy duties which had been placed in theif 
 hands. 
 
 The long and rather disgraceful happiness of the monas¬ 
 teries came to an end. Monks and nuns were forced to be up 
 at sunrise, to study the Church Fathers, to tend the sick and 
 
 THE INQUISITION 
 
264 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 console the dying. The Holy Inquisition watched day and 
 night that no dangerous doctrines should be spread by way of 
 the printing press. Here it is customary to mention poor 
 Galileo, who was locked up because he had been a little too 
 indiscreet in explaining the heavens with his funny little tele¬ 
 scope and had muttered certain opinions about the behaviour 
 of the planets which were entirely opposed to the official views 
 of the church. But in all fairness to the Pope, the clergy and 
 the Inquisition, it ought to be stated that the Protestants were 
 quite as much the enemies of science and medicine as the Cath¬ 
 olics and with equal manifestations of ignorance and intoler¬ 
 ance regarded the men who investigated things for themselves 
 as the most dangerous enemies of mankind. 
 
 And Calvin, the great French reformer and the tyrant 
 (both political and spiritual) of Geneva, not only assisted the 
 French authorities when they tried to hang Michael Servetus 
 (the Spanish theologian and physician who had become famous 
 as the assistant of Vesalius, the first great anatomist), but 
 when Servetus had managed to escape from his French jail and 
 had fled to Geneva, Calvin threw this brilliant man into prison 
 and after a prolonged trial, allowed him to be burned at the 
 stake on account of his heresies, totally indifferent to his fame 
 as a scientist. 
 
 And so it went. We have few reliable statistics upon the 
 subject, but on the whole, the Protestants tired of this game 
 long before the Catholics, and the greater part of honest men 
 and women who were burned and hanged and decapitated on 
 account of their religious beliefs fell as victims of the very ener¬ 
 getic but also very drastic church of Rome. 
 
 For tolerance (and please remember this when you grow 
 older), is of very recent origin and even the people of our own 
 so-called “modern world” are apt to be tolerant only upon such 
 matters as do not interest them very much. They are tolerant 
 towards a native of Africa, and do not care whether he becomes 
 a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, because neither Buddhism nor 
 Mohammedanism means anything to them. But when they 
 hear that their neighbour who was a Republican and believed 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 265 
 
 in a high protective tariff, has joined the Socialist party and 
 now wants to repeal all tariff laws, their tolerance ceases and 
 they use almost the same words as those employed by a kindly 
 Catholic (or Protestant) of the seventeenth century, who was 
 informed that his best friend whom he had always respected 
 and loved had fallen a victim to the terrible heresies of the 
 Protestant (or Catholic) church. 
 
 “Heresy” until a very short time ago was regarded as a 
 disease. Nowadays when we see a man neglecting the per¬ 
 sonal cleanliness of his body and his home and exposing himself 
 and his children to the dangers of typhoid fever or another 
 preventable disease, we send for the board-of-health and the 
 health officer calls upon the police to aid him in removing this 
 person who is a danger to the safety of the entire community. 
 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man 
 or a woman who openly doubted the fundamental principles 
 upon which his Protestant or Catholic religion had been 
 founded, was considered a more terrible menace than a typhoid 
 carrier. Typhoid fever might (very likely would) destroy the 
 body. But heresy, according to them, would positively destroy 
 the immortal soul. It was therefore the duty of all good and 
 logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of the 
 established order of things and those who failed to do so were 
 as culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the 
 nearest doctor when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are 
 suffering from cholera or small-pox. 
 
 In the years to come you will hear a great deal about pre¬ 
 ventive medicine. Preventive medicine simply means that our 
 doctors do not wait until their patients are sick, then step for¬ 
 ward and cure them. On the contrary, they study the patient 
 and the conditions under which he lives when he (the patient) 
 is perfectly well and they remove every possible cause of illness 
 by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching him what to eat and what 
 to avoid, and by giving him a few simple ideas of personal 
 hygiene. They go even further than that, and these good 
 doctors enter the schools and teach the children how to use 
 tooth-brushes and how to avoid catching colds. 
 
266 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 The sixteenth century which regarded (as I have tried to 
 show you) bodily illness as much less important than sickness 
 which threatened the soul, organised a system of spiritual pre¬ 
 ventive medicine. As soon as a child was old enough to spell 
 his first words, he was educated in the true (and the“only 
 true”) principles of the Faith. Indirectly this proved to be a 
 good thing for the general progress of the people of Europe. 
 The Protestant lands were soon dotted with schools. They 
 used a great deal of very valuable time to explain the Cate¬ 
 chism, but they gave instruction in other things besides the¬ 
 ology. They encouraged reading and they were responsible 
 for the great prosperity of the printing trade. 
 
 But the Catholics did not lag behind. They too devoted 
 much time and thought to education. The Church, in this mat¬ 
 ter, found an invaluable friend and ally in the newly-founded 
 order of the Society of Jesus. The founder of this remarkable 
 organisation was a Spanish soldier who after a life of unholy 
 adventures had been converted and thereupon felt himself 
 bound to serve the church just as many former sinners, who 
 have been shown the errors of their way by the Salvation Army, 
 devote the remaining years of their lives to the task of aiding 
 and consoling those who are less fortunate. 
 
 The name of this Spaniard was Ignatius de Loyola. He 
 was born in the year before the discovery of America. He had 
 been wounded and lamed for life and while he was in the hos¬ 
 pital he had seen a vision of the Holy Virgin and her Son, who 
 bade him give up the wickedness of his former life. He de¬ 
 cided to go to the Holy Land and finish the task of the Cru¬ 
 sades. But a visit to Jerusalem had shown him the impossi¬ 
 bility of the task and he returned west to help in the warfare 
 upon the heresies of the Lutherans. 
 
 In the year 1534 he was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne. 
 Together with seven other students he founded a fraternity. 
 The eight men promised each other that they would lead holy 
 lives, that they would not strive after riches but after righteous¬ 
 ness, and would devote themselves, body and soul, to the serv¬ 
 ice of the Church. A few years later this small fraternity 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 267 
 
 had grown into a regular organisation and was recognised by 
 Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus. 
 
 Loyola had been a military man. He believed in discipline, 
 and absolute obedience to the orders of the superior dignitaries 
 became one of the main causes for the enormous success of the 
 Jesuits. They specialised in education. They gave their 
 teachers a most thorough-going education before they allowed 
 them to talk to a single pupil. They lived with their students 
 and they entered into their games. They watched them with 
 tender care. And as a result they raised a new generation of 
 faithful Catholics who took their religious duties as seriously 
 as the people of the early Middle Ages. 
 
 The shrewd Jesuits, however, did not waste all their efforts 
 upon the education of the poor. They entered the palaces 
 of the mighty and became the private tutors of future emperors 
 and kings. And what this meant you will see for yourself 
 when I tell you about the Thirty Years War. But before 
 this terrible and final outbreak of religious fanaticism, a great 
 many other things had happened. 
 
 Charles V was dead. Germany and Austria had been left 
 to his brother Ferdinand. All his other possessions, Spain and 
 the Netherlands and the Indies and America had gone to his 
 son Philip. Philip was the son of Charles and a Portuguese 
 princess who had been first cousin to her own husband. The 
 children that are born of such a union are apt to be rather 
 queer. The son of Philip, the unfortunate Don Carlos, (mur¬ 
 dered afterwards with his own father’s consent,) was crazy. 
 Philip was not quite crazy, but his zeal for the Church bordered 
 closely upon religious insanity. He believed that Heaven had 
 appointed him as one of the saviours of mankind. Therefore, 
 whosoever was obstinate and refused to share his Majesty’s 
 views, proclaimed himself an enemy of the human race and 
 must be exterminated lest his example corrupt the souls of 
 his pious neighbours. 
 
 Spain, of course, was a very rich country. All the gold and 
 silver of the new world flowed into the Castilian and Ara- 
 gonian treasuries. But Spain suffered from a curious eco- 
 
268 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 nomic disease. Her peasants were hard working men and 
 even harder working women. But the better classes main¬ 
 tained a supreme contempt for any form of labour, outside of 
 employment in the army or navy or the civil service. As for 
 the Moors, who had been very industrious artisans, they had 
 been driven out of the country long before. As a result, Spain, 
 the treasure chest of the world, remained a poor country be¬ 
 cause all her money had to be sent abroad in exchange for the 
 wheat and the other necessities of life which the Spaniards 
 neglected to raise for themselves. 
 
 Philip, ruler of the most 
 powerful nation of the six¬ 
 teenth century, depended for 
 his revenue upon the taxes 
 which were gathered in the 
 busy commercial bee-liive of 
 the Netherlands. But these 
 Flemings and Dutchmen were 
 devoted followers of the doc¬ 
 trines of Luther and Calvin 
 and they had cleansed their 
 churches of all images and holy 
 paintings and they had in¬ 
 formed the Pope that they no 
 longer regarded him as their 
 shepherd but intended to follow 
 the dictates of their consciences and the commands of their 
 newly translated Bible. 
 
 This placed the king in a very difficult position. He could 
 not possibly tolerate the heresies of his Dutch subjects, but 
 he needed their money. If he allowed them to be Protestants 
 and took no measures to save their souls he was deficient in 
 his duty toward God. If he sent the Inquisition to the Neth¬ 
 erlands and burned his subjects at the stake, he would lose the 
 greater part of his income. 
 
 Being a man of uncertain will-power he hesitated a long 
 time. He tried kindness and sternness and promises and 
 
 THE NIGHT OF 
 ST. BARTHOLOMEW 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 269 
 
 threats. The Hollanders remained obstinate, and continued to 
 sing psalms and listen to the sermons of their Lutheran and 
 Calvinist preachers. Philip in his despair sent his “man of 
 iron,” the Duke of Alba, to bring these hardened sinners to 
 terms. Alba began by decapitating those leaders who had not 
 wisely left the country before his arrival. In the year 1572. 
 (the same year that the French Protestant leaders were all 
 killed during the terrible night of Saint Bartholomew), he 
 
 LEYDEN DELIVERED BY THE CUTTING OF THE DYKES 
 
 attacked a number of Dutch cities and massacred the inhabit¬ 
 ants as an example for the others. The next year he laid siege 
 to the town of Leyden, the manufacturing center of Holland. 
 
 Meanwhile, the seven small provinces of the northern 
 Netherlands had formed a defensive union, the so-called union 
 of Utrecht, and had recognised William of Orange, a German 
 prince who had been the private secretary of the Emperor 
 Charles V, as the leader of their army and as commander of 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 870 
 
 their freebooting sailors, who were known as the Beggars of 
 the Sea. William, to save Leyden, cut the dykes, created a 
 shallow inland sea, and delivered the town with the help of a 
 strangely equipped navy consisting of scows and flat-bottomed 
 barges which were rowed and pushed and pulled through the 
 mud until they reached the city walls. 
 
 It was the first time that an army of the invincible Spanish 
 king had suffered such a humiliating defeat. It surprised the 
 world just as the Japanese victory of Mukden, in the Russian- 
 Japanese war, surprised our own generation. The Protestant 
 powers took fresh courage and 
 Philip devised new means for 
 the purpose of conquering his 
 rebellious subjects. He hired 
 a poor half-witted fanatic to 
 go and murder William of 
 Orange. But the sight of their 
 dead leader did not bring the 
 Seven Provinces to their knees. 
 
 On the contrary it made them 
 furiously angry. In the year 
 1581, the Estates General (the 
 meeting of the representatives 
 of the Seven Provinces) came 
 together at the Hague and 
 most solemnly abjured their 
 “wicked king Philip” and them¬ 
 selves assumed the burden of sovereignty which thus far had 
 been invested in their “King by the Grace of God.” 
 
 This is a very important event in the history of the great 
 struggle for political liberty. It was a step which reached 
 much further than the uprising of the nobles which ended with 
 the signing of the Magna Carta. These good burghers said 
 “Between a king and his subjects there is a silent understand¬ 
 ing that both sides shall perform certain services and shall 
 recognise certain definite duties. If either party fails to live 
 up to this contract, the other has the right to consider it ter- 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 271 
 
 minated.” The American subjects of King George III in 
 the year 1776 came to a similar conclusion. But they had three 
 thousand miles of ocean between themselves and their ruler 
 and the Estates General took their decision (which meant a 
 slow death in case of defeat) within hearing of the Spanish 
 guns and although in constant fear of an avenging Spanish 
 fleet. 
 
 The stories about a mysterious Spanish fleet that was to con¬ 
 quer both Holland and England, when Protestant Queen 
 Elizabeth had succeeded Catholic “Bloody Mary” was an old 
 one. For years the sailors of 
 the waterfront had talked 
 about it. In the eighties of 
 the sixteenth century, the 
 rumour took a definite shape. 
 
 According to pilots who had 
 been in Lisbon, all the Spanish 
 and Portuguese wharves were 
 building ships. And in the 
 southern Netherlands (in Bel¬ 
 gium) the Duke of Parma was 
 collecting a large expedition¬ 
 ary force to be carried from 
 Ostend to London and Am¬ 
 sterdam as soon as the fleet 
 should arrive. 
 
 In the year 1586 the Great Armada set sail for the north. 
 But the harbours of the Flemish coast were blockaded by a 
 Dutch fleet and the Channel was guarded by the English, and 
 the Spaniards, accustomed to the quieter seas of the south, did 
 not know how to navigate in this squally and bleak northern 
 climate. What happened to the Armada once it was attacked 
 by ships and by storms I need not tell you. A few ships, by 
 sailing around Ireland, escaped to tell the terrible story of 
 defeat. The others perished and lie at the bottom of the North 
 Sea. 
 
 Turn about is fair play. The British and the Dutch Prot- 
 
272 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 estants now carried the war into the territory of the enemy. 
 Before the end of the century, Houtman, with the help of a 
 booklet written by Linschoten (a Hollander who had been in 
 the Portuguese service), had at last discovered the route to 
 the Indies. As a result the great Dutch East India Company 
 was founded and a systematic war upon the Portuguese and 
 Spanish colonies in Asia and Africa was begun in all serious¬ 
 ness. 
 
 It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a 
 curious lawsuit was fought out in the Dutch courts. Early in 
 the seventeenth century a Dutch Captain by the name of van 
 Heemskerk, a man who had made himself famous as the head 
 of an expedition which had tried to discover the North Eastern 
 Passage to the Indies and who had spent a winter on the frozen 
 shores of the island of Nova Zembla, had captured a Portu¬ 
 guese ship in the straits of Malacca. You will remember that 
 the Pope had divided the world into two equal shares, one of 
 which had been given to the Spaniards and the other to the 
 Portuguese. The Portuguese quite naturally regarded the 
 water which surrounded their Indian islands as part of their 
 own property and since, for the moment, they were not at war 
 with the United Seven Netherlands, they claimed that the 
 captain of a private Dutch trading company had no right to 
 enter their private domain and steal their ships. And they 
 brought suit. The directors of the Dutch East India Company 
 hired a bright young lawyer, by the name of De Groot or 
 Grotius, to defend their case. He made the astonishing plea 
 that the ocean is free to all comers. Once outside the distance 
 which a cannon ball fired from the land can reach, the sea is 
 or (according to Grotius) ought to be, a free and open highway 
 to all the ships of all nations. It was the first time that this 
 startling doctrine had been publicly pronounced in a court 
 of law. It was opposed by all the other seafaring people. To 
 counteract the effect of Grotius’ famous plea for the “Mare 
 Liberum,” or “Open Sea,” John Selden, the Englishman, 
 wrote his famous treatise upon the “Mare Clausum” or “Closed 
 Sea” which treated of the natural right of a sovereign to regard 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 273 
 
 the seas which surrounded his country as belonging to his terri¬ 
 tory. I mention this here because the question had not yet 
 been decided and during the last war caused all sorts of diffi¬ 
 culties and complications. 
 
 To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander 
 and Englishman, before twenty years were over the most 
 valuable colonies of the Indies and the Cape of Good Hope and 
 Ceylon and those along the coast of China and even Japan were 
 in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian Company was 
 founded which conquered Brazil and in North America built 
 
 iSpU'U'' ■ ■'/V'Siit 
 
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 THE DEATH OF HUDSON 
 
 a fortress called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river 
 which Henry Hudson had discovered in the year 1609. 
 
 These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch 
 Republic to such an extent that they could hire foreign sol¬ 
 diers to do their fighting on land while they devoted themselves 
 to commerce and trade. To them the Protestant revolt meant 
 independence and prosperity. But in many other parts of 
 Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the 
 last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys. 
 
 The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618 
 and which ended with the famous treaty of Westphalia in 1648 
 was the perfectly natural result of a century of ever increasing 
 
274 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 religious hatred. It was, as I have said, a terrible war. Every¬ 
 body fought everybody else and the struggle ended only when 
 all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and could fight no 
 longer. 
 
 In less than a generation it turned many parts of central 
 Europe into a wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought 
 for the carcass of a dead horse with the even hungrier wolf. 
 Five-sixths of all the German towns and villages were de¬ 
 stroyed. The Palatinate, in western Germany, was plundered 
 twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million 
 people was reduced to four million. 
 
 The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of 
 the House of Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was 
 the product of a most careful Jesuit training and was a most 
 obedient and devout son of the Church. The vow which he had 
 made as a young man, that he would eradicate all sects and 
 all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best of 
 his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent, 
 Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a 
 son-in-law of James I of England, had been made King of 
 Bohemia, in direct violation of Ferdinand’s wishes. 
 
 At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia. The 
 young king looked in vain for assistance against this formid¬ 
 able enemy. The Dutch Republic was willing to help, but, 
 engaged in a desperate war of its own with the Spanish branch 
 of the Habsburgs, it could do little. The Stuarts in England 
 were more interested in strengthening their own absolute power 
 at home than spending money and men upon a forlorn adven¬ 
 ture in far away Bohemia. After a struggle of a few months, 
 the Elector of the Palatinate was driven away and his domains 
 were given to the Catholic house of Bavaria. This was the be¬ 
 ginning of the great war. 
 
 Then the Habsburg armies, under Tilly and Wallenstein, 
 fought their way through the Protestant part of Germany 
 until they had reached the shores of the Baltic. A Catholic 
 neighbour meant serious danger to the Protestant king of 
 Denmark. Christian IV tried to defend himself by attacking 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 
 
 275 
 
 THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 
 
276 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 his enemies before they had become too strong for him. The 
 Danish armies marched into Germany but were defeated. 
 Wallenstein followed up his victory with such energy and vio¬ 
 lence that Denmark was forced to sue for peace. Only one 
 town of the Baltic then remained in the hands of the Protes¬ 
 tants. That was Stralsund. 
 
 There, in the early summer of the year 1630, landed King 
 Gustavus Adolphus of the house of Vasa, king of Sweden, 
 and famous as the man who had defended his country against 
 the Russians. A Protestant prince of unlimited ambition, 
 desirous of making Sweden the centre of a great Northern 
 Empire, Gustavus Adolphus was welcomed by the Protestant 
 princes of Europe as the saviour of the Lutheran cause. He 
 defeated Tilly, who had just successfully butchered the Prot¬ 
 estant inhabitants of Magdeburg. Then his troops began their 
 great march through the heart of Germany in an attempt to 
 reach the Habsburg possessions in Italy. Threatened in the 
 rear by the Catholics, Gustavus suddenly veered around and 
 defeated the main Habsburg army in the battle of Liitzen. 
 Unfortunately the Swedish king was killed when he strayed 
 away from his troops. But the Habsburg power had been 
 broken. 
 
 Ferdinand, who was a suspicious sort of person, at once 
 began to distrust his own servants. Wallenstein, his com¬ 
 mander-in-chief, was murdered at his instigation. When the 
 Catholic Bourbons, who ruled France and hated their Habs¬ 
 burg rivals, heard of this, they joined the Protestant Swedes. 
 The armies of Louis XIII invaded the eastern part of Ger¬ 
 many, and Turenne and Conde added their fame to that of 
 Baner and Weimar, the Swedish generals, by murdering, pil¬ 
 laging and burning Habsburg property. This brought great 
 fame and riches to the Swedes and caused the Danes to become 
 envious. The Protestant Danes thereupon declared war upon 
 the Protestant Swedes who were the allies of the Catholic 
 French, whose political leader, the Cardinal de Richelieu, had 
 just deprived the Huguenots (or French Protestants) of those 
 
RELIGIOUS WARFARE 277 
 
 rights of public worship which the Edict of Nantes of the year 
 1598 had guaranteed them. 
 
 The war, after the habit of such encounters, did not decide 
 anything, when it came to an end with the treaty of West¬ 
 phalia in 1648. The Catholic powers remained Catholic and 
 the Protestant powers stayed faithful to the doctrines of 
 Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. The Swiss and Dutch Prot¬ 
 estants were recognised as independent republics. France 
 kept the cities of Metz and Toul and Verdun and a part of 
 Alsace. The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist as a sort 
 of scare-crow state, without men, without money, without hope 
 and without courage. 
 
 AMSTERDAM IN 1648 
 
 The only good the Thirty Years War accomplished was a 
 negative one. It discouraged both Catholics and Protestants 
 from ever trying it again. Henceforth they left each other in 
 peace. This however did not mean that religious feeling and 
 theological hatred had been removed from this earth. On the 
 contrary. The quarrels between Catholic and Protestant 
 came to an end, but the disputes between the different Prot¬ 
 estant sects continued as bitterly as ever before. In Holland 
 a difference of opinion as to the true nature of predestination 
 (a very obscure point of theology, but exceedingly important 
 in the eyes of your great-grandfather) caused a quarrel which 
 
278 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ended with the decapitation of John of Oldenbarneveldt, the 
 Dutch statesman, who had been responsible for the success of 
 the Republic during the first twenty years of its independence, 
 and who was the great organising genius of her Indian trading 
 company. In England, the feud led to civil war. 
 
 But before I tell you of this outbreak which led to the first 
 execution by process-of-law of a European king, I ought to 
 say something about the previous history of England. In this 
 book I am trying to give you only those events of the past 
 which can throw a light upon the conditions of the present 
 world. If I do not mention certain countries, the cause is not 
 to be found in any secret dislike on my part. I wish that I 
 could tell you what happened to Norway and Switzerland and 
 Serbia and China. But these lands exercised no great influ¬ 
 ence upon the development of Europe in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries. I therefore pass them by with a polite 
 and very respectful bow. England however is in a different 
 position. What the people of that small island have done dur¬ 
 ing the last five hundred years has shaped the course of history 
 in every corner of the world. Without a proper knowledge of 
 the background of English history, you cannot understand 
 what you read in the newspapers. And it is therefore necessary 
 that you know how England happened to develop a parliamen¬ 
 tary form of government while the rest of the European conti¬ 
 nent was still ruled by absolute monarchs. 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 HOW THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE “DIVINE 
 RIGHT’’ OF KINGS AND THE LESS DIVINE 
 BUT MORE REASONABLE “RIGHT OF PAR- 
 LIAMENT” ENDED DISASTROUSLY FOR 
 KING CHARLES I 
 
 Gesar, the earliest explorer of north-western Europe, had 
 crossed the Channel in the year 55 b.c. and had conquered 
 England. During four centuries the country then remained 
 a Roman province. But when the Barbarians began to 
 threaten Rome, the garrisons were called back from the fron¬ 
 tier that they might defend the home country and Britannia 
 was left without a government and without protection. 
 
 As soon as this became known among the hungry Saxon 
 tribes of northern Germany, they sailed across the North Sea 
 and made themselves at home in the prosperous island. They 
 founded a number of independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 
 (so called after the original invaders, the Angles or English and 
 the Saxons) but these small states were for ever quarrelling with 
 each other and no King was strong enough to establish him¬ 
 self as the head of a united country. For more than five hun¬ 
 dred years, Mercia and Northumbria and Wessex and Sussex 
 and Kent and East Anglia, or whatever their names, were 
 exposed to attacks from various Scandinavian pirates. Finally 
 in the eleventh century, England, together with Norway and 
 northern Germany became part of the large Danish Empire 
 
 279 
 
280 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of Canute the Great and the last vestiges of independence 
 disappeared. 
 
 The Danes, in the course of time, were driven away but no 
 sooner was England free, than it was conquered for the fourth 
 time. The new enemies were the descendants of another tribe 
 of Norsemen who early in the tenth century had invaded 
 France and had founded the Duchy of Normandy. William, 
 
 Duke of Normandy, who for a long time had looked across the 
 water with an envious eye, crossed the Channel in October 
 of the year 1066. At the battle of Hastings, on October the 
 fourteenth of that year, he destroyed the weak forces of Harold 
 of Wessex, the last of the Anglo-Saxon Kings and established 
 himself as King of England. But neither William nor his 
 successors of the House of Anjou and Plantagenet regarded 
 England as their true home. To them the island was merely a 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 281 
 
 part of their great inheritance on the continent—a sort of 
 colony inhabited by rather backward people upon whom they 
 forced their own language and civilisation. Gradually how¬ 
 ever the “colony” of England gained upon the “Mother 
 country” of Normandy. At the same time the Kings of 
 
 
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 THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 
 
 France were trying desperately to get rid of the powerful Nor- 
 man-English neighbours who were in truth no more than dis¬ 
 obedient servants of the French crown. After a century of war¬ 
 fare the French people, under the leadership of a young girl by 
 the name of Joan of Arc, drove the “foreigners” from their 
 soil. Joan herself, taken a prisoner at the battle of Compiegne 
 
282 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 in the year 1430 and sold by her Burgundian captors to the 
 English soldiers, was burned as a witch. But the English 
 never gained foothold upon the continent and their Kings were 
 at last able to devote all their time to their British possessions. 
 As the feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in one of 
 those strange feuds which were as common in the middle ages 
 as measles and small-pox, and as the greater part of the old 
 landed proprietors had been killed during these so-called Wars 
 of the Roses, it was quite easy for the Kings to increase their 
 royal power. And by the end of the fifteenth century, Eng¬ 
 land was a strongly centralised country, ruled by Henry VII 
 of the House of Tudor, whose famous Court of Justice, the 
 “Star Chamber” of terrible memory, suppressed all attempts 
 on the part of the surviving nobles to regain their old influence 
 upon the government of the country with the utmost severity. 
 
 In the year 1509 Henry VII was succeeded by his son 
 Henry VIII, and from that moment on the history of Eng¬ 
 land gained a new importance for the country ceased to be a 
 medieval island and became a modern state. 
 
 Henry had no deep interest in religion. He gladly used a 
 private disagreement with the Pope about one of his many 
 divorces to declare himself independent of Rome and make 
 the church of England the first of those “nationalistic churches” 
 in which the worldly ruler also acts as the spiritual head of his 
 subjects. This peaceful reformation of 1534 not only gave 
 the house of Tudor the support of the English clergy, who 
 for a long time had been exposed to the violent attacks of many 
 Lutheran propagandists, but it also increased the Royal power 
 through the confiscation of the former possessions of the mon¬ 
 asteries. At the same time it made Henry popular with the 
 merchants and tradespeople, who as the proud and prosperous 
 inhabitants of an island which was separated from the rest of 
 Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a great dislike for 
 everything “foreign” and did not want an Italian bishop to rule 
 their honest British souls. 
 
 In 1547 Henry died. He left the throne tc his small son, 
 aged ten. The guardians of the child, favoring the modern 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 283 
 
 Lutheran doctrines, did their best to help the cause of Protes¬ 
 tantism. But the boy died before he was sixteen, and was suc¬ 
 ceeded by his sister Mary, the wife of Philip II of Spain, who 
 burned the bishops of the new “national church” and in other 
 ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband. 
 
 Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded 
 by Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, 
 the second of his six wives, whom he had decapitated when she 
 no longer pleased him. Elizabeth, who had spent some time in 
 prison, and who had been released only at the request of the 
 Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial enemy of every¬ 
 thing Catholic and Spanish. She shared her father’s indiffer¬ 
 ence in the matter of religion but she inherited his ability as a 
 very shrewd judge of character, and spent the forty-five years 
 of her reign in strengthening the power of the dynasty and in 
 increasing the revenue and possessions of her merry islands. 
 In this she was most ably assisted by a number of men who 
 gathered around her throne and made the Elizabethan age a 
 period of such importance that you ought to study it in detail 
 in one of the special books of which I shall tell you in the bibli¬ 
 ography at the end of this volume. 
 
 Elizabeth, however, did not feel entirely safe upon her 
 throne. She had a rival and a very dangerous one. Mary, 
 of the house of Stuart, daughter of a French duchess and a 
 Scottish father, widow of king Francis II of France and 
 daughter-in-law of Catherine of Medici (who had organised 
 the murders of Saint Bartholomew’s night), was the mother of 
 a little boy who was afterwards to become the first Stuart king 
 of England. She was an ardent Catholic and a willing friend 
 to those who were the enemies of Elizabeth. Her own lack 
 of political ability and the violent methods which she employed 
 to punish her Calvinistic subjects, caused a revolution in Scot¬ 
 land and forced Mary to take refuge on English territory. For 
 eighteen years she remained in England, plotting forever and 
 a day against the woman who had given her shelter and who 
 was at last obliged to follow the advice of her trusted coun¬ 
 cilors “to cutte off the Scottish Queen’s heade.” 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 284 
 
 The head was duly “cutte off” in the year 1587 and caused 
 a war with Spain. But the combined navies of England and 
 Holland defeated Philip’s Invincible Armada, as we have al¬ 
 ready seen, and the blow which had been meant to destroy the 
 power of the two great anti-Catholic leaders was turned into a 
 profitable business adventure. 
 
 For now at last, after many years of hesitation, the Eng¬ 
 lish as well as the Dutch thought it their good right to invade 
 the Indies and America and avenge the ills which their Protes- 
 
 JOHN AND SEBASTIAN CABOT SEE THE COAST OF NEWFOUNDLAND 
 
 tant brethren had suffered at the hands of the Spaniards. The 
 English had been among the earliest successors of Columbus. 
 British ships, commanded by the Venetian pilot Giovanni Ca- 
 boto (or Cabot), had been the first to discover and explore the 
 northern American continent in 1496. Labrador and New¬ 
 foundland were of little importance as a possible colony. But 
 the banks of Newfoundland offered a rich reward to the 
 English fishing fleet. A year later, in 1497, the same Cabot 
 had explored the coast of Florida. 
 
 Then had come the busy years of Henry VII and Henry 
 VIII when there had been no money for foreign explorations. 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 285 
 
 But under Elizabeth, \yth the country at peace and Mary 
 Stuart in prison, the sailors could leave their harbour without 
 fear for the fate of those whom they left behind. While Eliza¬ 
 beth was still a child, Willoughby had ventured to sail past the 
 North Cape and one of his captains, Richard Chancellor, push¬ 
 ing further eastward in his quest of a possible road to the In¬ 
 dies, had reached Archangel, Russia, where he had established 
 diplomatic and commercial relations with the mysterious rulers 
 of this distant Muscovite Empire. During the first years of 
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE 
 
 Elizabeth’s rule this voyage had been followed up by many 
 others. Merchant adventurers, working for the benefit of a 
 “joint stock Company” had laid the foundations of trading 
 companies which in later centuries were to become colonies. 
 Half pirate, half diplomat, willing to stake everything on a 
 single lucky voyage, smugglers of everything that could be 
 loaded into the hold of a vessel, dealers in men and merchandise 
 with equal indifference to everything except their profit, the 
 sailors of Elizabeth had carried the English flag and the fame 
 
286 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of their Virgin Queen to the four corners of the Seven Seas. 
 Meanwhile William Shakespeare kept her Majesty amused at 
 home, and the best brains and the best wit of England co-op¬ 
 erated with the queen in her attempt to change the feudal in¬ 
 heritance of Henry VIII into a modern national state. 
 
 In the year 1603 the old lady died at the age of seventy. 
 Her cousin, the great-grandson of her own grandfather Henry 
 VII and son of Mary Stuart, her rival and enemy, succeeded 
 her as James I. By the Grace of God, he found himself the 
 ruler of a country which had escaped the fate of its continental 
 rivals. While the European Protestants and Catholics were 
 killing each other in a hopeless attempt to break the power of 
 their adversaries and establish the exclusive rule of their own 
 particular creed, England was at peace and “reformed” at 
 leisure without going to the extremes of either Luther or 
 Loyola. It gave the island kingdom an enormous advantage in 
 the coming struggle for colonial possessions. It assured Eng¬ 
 land a leadership in international affairs which that country 
 has maintained until the present day. Not even the disastrous 
 adventure with the Stuarts was able to stop this normal de¬ 
 velopment. 
 
 The Stuarts, who succeeded the Tudors, were “foreigners” 
 in England. They do not seem to have appreciated or under¬ 
 stood this fact. The native house of Tudor could steal a horse, 
 but the “foreign” Stuarts were not allowed to look at the 
 bridle without causing great popular disapproval. Old Queen 
 Bess had ruled her domains very much as she pleased. In 
 general however, she had always followed a policy which meant 
 money in the pocket of the honest (and otherwise) British mer¬ 
 chants. Hence the Queen had been always assured of the 
 wholehearted support of her grateful people. And small lib¬ 
 erties taken with some of the rights and prerogatives of Parlia¬ 
 ment were gladly overlooked for the ulterior benefits which 
 were derived from her Majesty’s strong and successful foreign 
 policies. 
 
 Outwardly King James continued the same policy. But he 
 lacked that personal enthusiasm which had been so very typical 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 287 
 
 of his great predecessor. Foreign commerce continued to be 
 encouraged. The Catholics were not granted any liberties. 
 But when Spain smiled pleasantly upon England in an effort 
 to establish peaceful relations, James was seen to smile back. 
 The majority of the English people did not like this, but 
 James was their King and they kept quiet. 
 
 Soon there were other causes of friction. King James and 
 his son, Charles I, who succeeded him in the year 1625 both 
 firmly believed in the principle of their “divine right” to ad¬ 
 minister their realm as they thought fit without consulting the 
 wishes of their subjects. The idea was not new. The Popes, 
 who in more than one way had been the successors of the 
 Roman Emperors (or rather of the Roman Imperial ideal of 
 a single and undivided state covering the entire known world), 
 had always regarded themselves and had been publicly rec¬ 
 ognised as the “Vice-Regents of Christ upon Earth.” No one 
 questioned the right of God to rule the world as He saw fit. 
 As a natural result, few ventured to doubt the right of the 
 divine “Vice-Regent” to do the same thing and to demand the 
 obedience of the masses because he was the direct representa¬ 
 tive of the Absolute Ruler of the Universe and responsible 
 only to Almighty God. 
 
 When the Lutheran Reformation proved successful, those 
 rights which formerly had been vested in the Papacy were 
 taken over by the many European sovereigns who became 
 Protestants. As head of their own national or dynastic 
 churches they insisted upon being “Christ’s Vice-Regents” 
 within the limit of their own territory. The people did not ques¬ 
 tion the right of their rulers to take such a step. They accepted 
 it, just as we in our own day accept the idea of a representa¬ 
 tive system which to us seems the only reasonable and just 
 form of government. It is unfair therefore to state that either 
 Lutheranism or Calvinism caused the particular feeling of irri¬ 
 tation which greeted King James’s oft and loudly repeated 
 assertion of his “Divine Right.” There must have been other 
 grounds for the genuine English disbelief in the Divine Right 
 of Kings. 
 
288 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 The first positive denial of the “Divine Right” of sovereigns 
 had been heard in the Netherlands when the Estates General 
 abjured their lawful sovereign King Philip II of Spain, in the 
 year 1581. “The King,” so they said, “has broken his contract 
 and the King therefore is dismissed like any other unfaithful 
 servant.” Since then, this particular idea of a king’s respon¬ 
 sibilities towards his subjects had spread among many of the 
 nations who inhabited the shores of the North Sea. They were 
 in a very favourable position. They were rich. The poor peo¬ 
 ple in the heart of central Europe, at the mercy of their 
 Ruler’s body-guard, could not afford to discuss a problem 
 which would at once land them in the deepest dungeon of the 
 nearest castle. But the merchants of Holland and England 
 who possessed the capital necessary for the maintenance of 
 great armies and navies, who knew how to handle the almighty 
 weapon called “credit,” had no such fear. They were willing 
 to pit the “Divine Right” of their own good money against 
 the “Divine Right” of any Habsburg or Bourbon or Stuart. 
 They knew that their guilders and shillings could beat the 
 clumsy feudal armies which were the only weapons of the King. 
 They dared to act, where others were condemned to suffer 
 in silence or run the risk of the scaffold. 
 
 When the Stuarts began to annoy the people of England 
 with their claim that they had a right to do what they pleased 
 and never mind the responsibility, the English middle classes 
 used the House of Commons as their first line of defence 
 against this abuse of the Royal Power. The Crown refused to 
 give in and the King sent Parliament about its own business. 
 Eleven long years, Charles I ruled alone. He levied taxes 
 which most people regarded as illegal and he managed his 
 British kingdom as if it had been his own country estate. He 
 had capable assistants and we must say that he had the cour¬ 
 age of his convictions. 
 
 Unfortunately, instead of assuring himself of the support 
 of his faithful Scottish subjects, Charles became involved in 
 a quarrel with the Scotch Presbyterians. Much against his 
 will, but forced by his need for ready cash, Charles was at 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 289 
 
 last obliged to call Parliament together once more. It met in 
 April of 1640 and showed an ugly temper. It was dissolved 
 a few weeks later. A new Parliament convened in November. 
 This one was even less pliable than the first one. The mem¬ 
 bers understood that the question of “Government by Divine 
 Right” or “Government by Parliament” must be fought out 
 for good and all. They attacked the King in his chief council¬ 
 lors and executed half a dozen of them. They announced that 
 they would not allow themselves to be dissolved without their 
 own approval. Finally on December 1 , 1641, they presented 
 to the King a “Grand Remonstrance” which gave a detailed ac¬ 
 count of the many grievances of the people against their Ruler. 
 
 Charles, hoping to derive some support for his own policy 
 in the country districts, left London in January of 1642. Each 
 side organised an army and prepared for open warfare be¬ 
 tween the absolute power of the crown and the absolute power 
 of Parliament. During this struggle, the most powerful relig¬ 
 ious element of England, called the Puritans, (they were 
 Anglicans who had tried to purify their doctrines to the most 
 absolute limits), came quickly to the front. The regiments of 
 “Godly men,” commanded by Oliver Cromwell, with their 
 iron discipline and their profound confidence in the holiness of 
 their aims, soon became the model for the entire army of the 
 opposition. Twice Charles was defeated. After the battle 
 of Naseby, in 1645, he fled to Scotland. The Scotch sold him 
 to the English. 
 
 There followed a period of intrigue and an uprising 
 of the Scotch Presbyterians against the English Puritan. 
 In August of the year 1648 after the three-days’ battle of 
 Preston Pans, Cromwell made an end to this second civil war, 
 and took Edinburgh. Meanwhile his soldiers, tired of further 
 talk and wasted hours of religious debate, had decided to act 
 on their own initiative. They removed from Parliament all 
 those who did not agree with their own Puritan views. There¬ 
 upon the “Rump,” which was what was left of the old Parlia¬ 
 ment, accused the King of high treason. The House of Lords 
 refused to sit as a tribunal. A, special tribunal was appointed 
 
290 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 and it condemned the King to death. On the 30th of January 
 of the year 1649, King Charles walked quietly out of a win¬ 
 dow of White Hall onto the scaff old. That day, the Sovereign 
 People, acting through their chosen representatives, for the 
 first time executed a ruler who had failed to understand his own 
 position in the modern state. 
 
 The period which followed the death of Charles is usually 
 called after Oliver Cromwell. At first the unofficial Dictator 
 of England, he was officially made Lord Protector in the year 
 1653. He ruled five years. He used this period to continue 
 the policies of Elizabeth. Spain once more became the arch 
 enemy of England and war upon the Spaniard was made a na¬ 
 tional and sacred issue. 
 
 The commerce of England and the interests of the traders 
 were placed before everything else, and the Protestant creed of 
 the strictest nature was rigourously maintained. In maintaining 
 England’s position abroad, Cromwell was successful. As a 
 social reformer, however, he failed very badly. The world is 
 made up of a number of people and they rarely think alike. 
 In the long run, this seems a very wise provision. A govern¬ 
 ment of and by and for one single part of the entire commun¬ 
 ity cannot possibly survive. The Puritans had been a great 
 force for good when they tried to correct the abuse of the 
 royal power. As the absolute Rulers of England they became 
 intolerable. 
 
 When Cromwell died in 1658, it was an easy matter for the 
 Stuarts to return to their old kingdom. Indeed, they were 
 welcomed as “deliverers” by the people who had found the 
 yoke of the meek Puritans quite as hard to bear as that of auto¬ 
 cratic King Charles. Provided the Stuarts were willing to for¬ 
 get about the Divine Right of their late and lamented father 
 and were willing to recognise the superiority of Parliament, the 
 people promised that they would be loyal and faithful subjects. 
 
 Two generations tried to make a success of this new ar¬ 
 rangement. But the Stuarts apparently had not learned their 
 lesson and were unable to drop their bad habits. Charles II, 
 who came back in the year 1660, was an amiable but worthless 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 291 
 
 person. His indolence and his constitutional insistence upon 
 following the easiest course, together with his conspicuous suc¬ 
 cess as a liar, prevented an open outbreak between himself and 
 his people. By the act of Uniformity in 1662 he broke the 
 power of the Puritan clergy by banishing all dissenting clergy¬ 
 men from their parishes. By the so-called Conventicle Act of 
 1664 he tried to prevent the Dissenters from attending religious 
 meetings by a threat of deportation to the West Indies. This 
 looked too much like the good old days of Divine Right. Peo¬ 
 ple began to show the old and well-known signs of impatience, 
 and Parliament suddenly experienced difficulty in providing 
 the King with funds. 
 
 Since he could not get money from an unwilling Parliament, 
 Charles borrowed it secretly from his neighbour and cousin, 
 King Louis of France. He betrayed his Protestant allies in 
 return for 200,000 pounds per year, and laughed at the poor 
 simpletons of Parliament. 
 
 Economic independence suddenly gave the King great faith 
 in his own strength. He had spent many years of exile among 
 his Catholic relations and he had a secret liking for their reli¬ 
 gion. Perhaps he could bring England back to Rome! He 
 passed a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended the old 
 laws against the Catholics and Dissenters. This happened just 
 when Charles’ younger brother James was said to have become 
 a Catholic. All this looked suspicious to the man in the street. 
 People began to fear some terrible Popish plot. A new spirit 
 of unrest entered the land. Most of the people wanted to pre¬ 
 vent another outbreak of civil war. To them Royal Oppres¬ 
 sion and a Catholic King—yea, even Divine Right,—were 
 preferable to a new struggle between members of the same 
 race. Others however were less lenient. They were the much- 
 feared Dissenters, who invariably had the courage of their con¬ 
 victions. They were led by several great noblemen who did 
 not want to see a return of the old days of absolute royal 
 power. 
 
 For almost ten years, these two great parties, the WhigS 
 (the middle class element, called by this derisive name be» 
 
292 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 cause in the year 1640 a lot of Scottish Whiggamores or horse* 
 drovers headed by the Presbyterian clergy, had marched to 
 Edinburgh to oppose the King) and the Tories (an epithet 
 originally used against the Royalist Irish adherents but now 
 applied to the supporters of the King) opposed each other, but 
 neither wished to bring about a crisis. They allowed Charles to 
 die peacefully in his bed and permitted the Catholic James II 
 to succeed his brother in 1685. But when James, after threaten¬ 
 ing the country with the terrible foreign invention of a “stand¬ 
 ing army” (which was to be commanded by Catholic French¬ 
 men), issued a second Declaration of Indulgence in 1688, and 
 ordered it to be read in all Anglican churches, he went just a 
 trifle beyond that line of sensible demarcation which can only be 
 transgressed by the most popular of rulers under very ex¬ 
 ceptional circumstances. Seven bishops refused to comply 
 with the Royal Command. They were accused of “seditious 
 libel.” They were brought before a court. The jury which 
 pronounced the verdict of “not guilty” reaped a rich harvest 
 of popular approval. 
 
 At this unfortunate moment, James (who in a second mar¬ 
 riage had taken to wife Maria of the Catholic house of Modena- 
 Este) became the father of a son. This meant that the throne 
 was to go to a Catholic boy rather than to his older sisters, 
 Mary and Anne, who were Protestants. The man in the street 
 again grew suspicious. Maria of Modena was too old to have 
 children! It was all part of a plot! A strange baby had been 
 brought into the palace by some Jesuit priest that England 
 might have a Catholic monarch. And so on. It looked as if 
 another civil war would break out. Then seven well-known 
 men, Whigs and Tories, wrote a letter asking the hus¬ 
 band of James’s oldest daughter Mary, William III the Stadt- 
 holder or head of the Dutch Republic, to come to England and 
 deliver the country from its lawful but entirely undesirable 
 sovereign. 
 
 On the fifth of November of the year 1688, William landed 
 at Torbay. As he did not wish to make a martyr out of his 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 293 
 
 father-in-law, he helped him to escape safely to France. On 
 the 22nd of January of 1689 he summoned Parliament. On 
 the 13th of February of the same year he and his wife Mary 
 were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England and the country 
 was saved for the Protestant cause. 
 
 Parliament, having undertaken to be something more than 
 a mere advisory body to the King, made the best of its oppor¬ 
 tunities. The old Petition of Rights of the year 1628 was 
 fished out of a forgotten nook of the archives. A second and 
 more drastic Bill of Rights demanded that the sovereign of 
 England should belong to the Anglican church. Furthermore 
 it stated that the king had no right to suspend the laws or 
 permit certain privileged citizens to disobey certain laws. It 
 stipulated that “without consent of Parliament no taxes could 
 be levied and no army could be maintained.” Thus in the year 
 1689 did England acquire an amount of liberty unknown in 
 any other country of Europe. 
 
 But it is not only on account of this great liberal measure 
 that the rule of William in England is still remembered. Dur¬ 
 ing his lifetime, government by a “responsible” ministry first 
 developed. No king of course can rule alone. He needs a few 
 trusted advisors. The Tudors had their Great Council which 
 was composed of Nobles and Clergy. This body grew too 
 large. It was restricted to the small “Privy Council.” In the 
 course of time it became the custom of these councillors to meet 
 the king in a cabinet in the palace. Hence they were called 
 the “Cabinet Council.” After a short while they were known 
 as the “Cabinet.” 
 
 William, like most English sovereigns before him, had 
 chosen his advisors from among all parties. But with the in¬ 
 creased strength of Parliament, he had found it impossible to 
 direct the politics of the country with the help of the Tories 
 while the Whigs had a majority in the house of Commons. 
 Therefore the Tories had been dismissed and the Cabinet Coun¬ 
 cil had been composed entirely of Whigs. A few years later 
 when the Whigs lost their power in the House of Commons, the 
 
294 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 king, for the sake of convenience, was obliged to look for his 
 support among the leading Tories. Until his death in 1702, 
 William was too busy fighting Louis of France to bother much 
 about the government of England. Practically all important 
 affairs had been left to his Cabinet Council. When William’s 
 sister-in-law, Anne, succeeded him in 1702 this condition of 
 affairs continued. When she died in 1714 (and unfortunately 
 not a single one of her seventeen children survived her) the 
 throne went to George I of the House of Hanover, the son of 
 Sophie, grand-daughter of James I. 
 
 This somewhat rustic monarch, who never learned a word 
 of English, was entirely lost in the complicated mazes of Eng¬ 
 land’s political arrangements. He left everything to his Cabi¬ 
 net Council and kept away from their meetings, which bored 
 him as he did not understand a single sentence. In this way 
 the Cabinet got into the habit of ruling England and Scot¬ 
 land (whose Parliament had been joined to that of England 
 in 1707) without bothering the King, who was apt to spend 
 a great deal of his time on the continent. 
 
 During the reign of George I and George II, a succession of 
 great Whigs (of whom one, Sir Robert Walpole, held office for 
 twenty-one years) formed the Cabinet Council of the King. 
 Their leader was finally recognised as the official leader not 
 only of the actual Cabinet but also of the majority party in 
 power in Parliament. The attempts of George III to take 
 matters into his own hands and not to leave the actual busi¬ 
 ness of government to his Cabinet were so disastrous that 
 they were never repeated. And from the earliest years of the 
 eighteenth century on, England enjoyed representative govern¬ 
 ment, with a responsible ministry which conducted the affairs 
 of the land. 
 
 To be quite true, this government did not represent all 
 classes of society. Less than one man in a dozen had the right 
 to vote. But it was the foundation for the modern represent¬ 
 ative form of government. In a quiet and orderly fashion it 
 took the power away from the King and placed it in the hands 
 
THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 
 
 295 
 
 of an ever increasing number of popular representatives. It did 
 not bring the millenium to England, but it saved that coun¬ 
 try from most of the revolutionary outbreaks which proved so 
 disastrous to the European continent in the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries. 
 
THE BALANCE OF POWER 
 
 IN FRANCE ON THE OTHER HAND THE “DI¬ 
 VINE RIGHT OF KINGS” CONTINUED WITH 
 GREATER POMP AND SPLENDOUR THAN 
 EVER BEFORE AND THE AMBITION OF 
 THE RULER WAS ONLY TEMPERED BY 
 THE NEWLY INVENTED LAW OF THE 
 “BALANCE OF POWER” 
 
 As a contrast to the previous chapter, let me tell you what 
 happened in France during the years when the English peo¬ 
 ple were fighting for their liberty. The happy combination 
 of the right man in the right country at the right moment is very 
 rare in History. Louis XIV was a realisation of this ideal, as 
 far as France was concerned, but the rest of Europe would 
 have been happier without him. 
 
 The country over which the young king was called to rule 
 was the most populous and the most brilliant nation of that 
 day. Louis came to the throne when Mazarin and Richelieu, 
 the two great Cardinals, had just hammered the ancient French 
 Kingdom into the most strongly centralised state of the seven¬ 
 teenth century. He was himself a man of extraordinary abil¬ 
 ity. We, the people of the twentieth century, are still sur¬ 
 rounded by the memories of the glorious age of the Sun King. 
 Our social life is based upon the perfection of manners and the 
 elegance of expression attained at the court of Louis. In in¬ 
 ternational and diplomatic relations, French is still the official 
 
 296 
 
THE BALANCE OF POWER 
 
 297 
 
 language of diplomacy and international gatherings because 
 two centuries ago it reached a polished elegance and a purity 
 of expression which no other tongue had as yet been able to 
 equal. The theatre of King Louis still teaches us lessons 
 which we are only too slow in learning. During his reign the 
 French Academy (an invention of Richelieu) came to occupy 
 a position in the world of letters which other countries have 
 flattered by their imitation. We might continue this list for 
 many pages. It is no matter of mere chance that our modern 
 bill-of-fare is printed in French. The very difficult art of 
 decent cooking, one of the highest expressions of civilisation, 
 was first practised for the benefit of the great Monarch. The 
 age of Louis XIV was a time of splendour and grace which can 
 still teach us a lot. 
 
 Unfortunately this brilliant picture has another side which 
 was far less encouraging. Glory abroad too often means 
 misery at home, and France was no exception to this rule. 
 Louis XIV succeeded his father in the year 1643. He died in 
 the year 1715. That means that the government of France 
 was in the hands of one single man for seventy-two years, 
 almost two whole generations. 
 
 It will be well to get a firm grasp of this idea, “one single 
 man.” Louis was the first of a long list of monarchs who in 
 many countries established that particular form of highly effi¬ 
 cient autocracy which we call “enlightened despotism.” He 
 did not like kings who merely played at being rulers and 
 turned official affairs into a pleasant picnic. The Kings of 
 that enlightened age worked harder than any of their subjects. 
 They got up earlier and went to bed later than anybody else, 
 and felt their “divine responsibility” quite as strongly as their 
 “divine right” which allowed them to rule without consulting 
 their subjects. 
 
 Of course, the king could not attend to everything in per¬ 
 son. He was obliged to surround himself with a few helpers 
 and councillors. One or two generals, some experts upon for¬ 
 eign politics, a few clever financiers and economists would do 
 for this purpose. But these dignitaries could act only through 
 
298 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 their Sovereign. They had no individual existence. To the 
 mass of the people, the Sovereign actually represented in his 
 own sacred person the government of their country. The 
 glory of the common fatherland became the glory of a single 
 dynasty. It meant the exact opposite of our own American 
 ideal. France was ruled of and by and for the House of Bour¬ 
 bon. 
 
 The disadvantages of such a system are clear. The King 
 grew to be everything. Everybody else grew to be nothing at 
 all. The old and useful nobility was gradually forced to give 
 up its former shares in the government of the provinces. A lit¬ 
 tle Royal bureaucrat, his fingers splashed with ink, sitting be¬ 
 hind the greenish windows of a government building in far¬ 
 away Paris, now performed the task which a hundred years 
 before had been the duty of the feudal Lord. The feudal Lord, 
 deprived of all work, moved to Paris to amuse himself as best 
 he could at the court. Soon his estates began to suffer from 
 that very dangerous economic sickness, known as “Absentee 
 Landlordism.” Within a single generation, the industrious 
 and useful feudal administrators had become the well-man¬ 
 nered but quite useless loafers of the court of Versailles. 
 
 Louis was ten years old when the peace of Westphalia was 
 concluded and the House of Habsburg, as a result of the 
 Thirty Years War, lost its predominant position in Europe. 
 It was inevitable that a man with his ambition should use so 
 favourable a moment to gain for his own dynasty the honours 
 which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs. In the year 
 1660 Louis had married Maria Theresa, daughter of the King 
 of Spain. Soon afterward, his father-in-law, Philip IV, one 
 of the half-witted Spanish Habsburgs, died. At once Louis 
 claimed the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) as part of his 
 wife’s dowry. Such an acquisition would have been disastrous 
 to the peace of Europe, and would have threatened the safety 
 of the Protestant states. Under the leadership of Jan de Witt, 
 Raadpensionaris or Foreign Minister of the United Seven 
 Netherlands, the first great international alliance, the Triple 
 Alliance of Sweden, England and Holland, of the year 1664, 
 
THE BALANCE OF POWER 
 
 299 
 
 was concluded. It did not last long. With money and fair 
 promises Louis bought up both King Charles and the Swedish 
 Estates. Holland was betrayed by her allies and was left to 
 her own fate. In the year 1672 the French invaded the low 
 countries. They marched to the heart of the country. For a 
 second time the dikes were opened and the Royal Sun of 
 France set amidst the mud of the Dutch marshes. The peace 
 
 THE BALANCE OF POWER 
 
 of Nimwegen which was concluded in 1678 settled nothing but 
 merely anticipated another war. 
 
 A second war of aggression from 1689 to 1697, ending with 
 the Peace of Ryswick, also failed to give Louis that position in 
 the affairs of Europe to which he aspired. His old enemy, 
 Jan de Witt, had been murdered by the Dutch rabble, but hir 
 successor, William III (whom you met in the last chapter), 
 had checkmated all efforts of Louis to make France the ruler of 
 Europe. 
 
 The great war for the Spanish succession, begun in the 
 
SO 0 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 year 1701, immediately after the death of Charles II, the last 
 of the Spanish Habsburgs, and ended in 1713 by the Peace 
 of Utrecht, remained equally undecided, but it had ruined the 
 treasury of Louis. On land the French king had been victor¬ 
 ious, but the navies of England and Holland had spoiled all 
 hope for an ultimate French victory; besides the long struggle 
 had given birth to a new and fundamental principle of inter¬ 
 national politics, which thereafter made it impossible for one 
 single nation to rule the whole of Europe or the whole of the 
 world for any length of time. 
 
 That was the so-called “balance of power.” It was not a 
 written law but for three centuries it has been obeyed as closely 
 as are the laws of nature. The people who originated the idea 
 maintained that Europe, in its nationalistic stage of develop¬ 
 ment, could only survive when there should be an absolute bal¬ 
 ance of the many conflicting interests of the entire continent. 
 No single power or single dynasty must ever be allowed to 
 dominate the others. During the Thirty Years War, the 
 Habsburgs had been the victims of the application of this law. 
 They, however, had been unconscious victims. The issues dur¬ 
 ing that struggle were so clouded in a haze of religious strife 
 that we do not get a very clear view of the main tendencies 
 of that great conflict. But from that time on, we begin to see 
 how cold, economic considerations and calculations prevail in 
 all matters of international importance. We discover the de¬ 
 velopment of a new type of statesman, the statesman with the 
 personal feelings of the slide-rule and the cash-register. Jan 
 de Witt was the first successful exponent of this new school 
 of politics. William III was the first great pupil. And Louis 
 XIV with all his fame and glory, was the first conscious victim. 
 There have been many others since. 
 
THE RISE OF RUSSIA 
 
 THE STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS MOSCOVITE 
 EMPIRE WHICH SUDDENLY BURST UPON 
 THE GRAND POLITICAL STAGE OF EU 
 ROPE 
 
 In the year 1492, as you know, Columbus discovered Amer¬ 
 ica. Early in the year, a Tyrolese by the name of Schnups, 
 travelling as the head of a scientific expedition for the 
 Archbishop of Tyrol, and provided with the best letters 
 of introduction and excellent credit tried to reach the mythical 
 town of Moscow. He did not succeed. When he reached the 
 frontiers of this vast Moscovite state which was vaguely sup¬ 
 posed to exist in the extreme Eastern part of Europe, he was 
 firmly turned back. No foreigners were wanted. And 
 Schnups went to visit the heathen Turk in Constantinople, in 
 order that he might have something to report to his clerical 
 master when he came back from his explorations. 
 
 Sixty-one years later, Richard Chancellor, trying to dis¬ 
 cover the North-eastern passage to the Indies, and blown by 
 an ill wind into the White Sea, reached the mouth of the Dwina 
 and found the Moscovite village of Kholmogory, a few hours 
 from the spot where in 1584 the town of Archangel was found¬ 
 ed. This time the foreign visitors were requested to come 
 to Moscow and show themselves to the Grand Duke. They 
 went and returned to England with the first commercial treaty 
 ever concluded between Russia and the western world. Other 
 
 331 
 
302 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 nations soon followed and something became known of this 
 mysterious land. 
 
 Geographically, Russia is a vast plain. The Ural moun¬ 
 tains are low and form no barrier against invaders. The 
 rivers are broad but often shallow. It was an ideal territory for 
 nomads. 
 
 While the Roman Empire was founded, grew in power and 
 disappeared again, Slavic tribes, who had long since left their 
 homes in Central Asia, wandered aimlessly through the forests 
 and plains of the region between the Dniester and Dnieper 
 rivers. The Greeks had sometimes met these Slavs and a few 
 travellers of the third and fourth centuries mention them. 
 Otherwise they were as little known as were the Nevada In¬ 
 dians in the year 1800. 
 
 Unfortunately for the peace of these primitive peoples, a 
 very convenient trade-route ran through their country. This 
 was the main road from northern Europe to Constantinople. 
 It followed the coast of the Baltic until the Neva was reached. 
 Then it crossed Lake Ladoga and went southward along the 
 Volkhov river. Then through Lake Ilmen and up the small 
 Lovat river. Then there was a short portage until the Dnieper 
 was reached. Then down the Dnieper into the Black Sea. 
 
 The Norsemen knew of this road at a very early date. In 
 the ninth century they began to settle in northern Russia, just 
 as other Norsemen were laying the foundation for independent 
 states in Germany and France. But in the year 862, three 
 Norsemen, brothers, crossed the Baltic and founded three small 
 dynasties. Of the three brothers, only one, Rurik, lived for a 
 number of years. He took possession of the territory of his 
 brothers, and twenty years after the arrival of this first Norse¬ 
 man, a Slavic state had been established with Kiev as its 
 capital. 
 
 From Kiev to the Black Sea is a short distance. Soon the 
 existence of an organised Slavic State became known in Con¬ 
 stantinople. This meant a new field for the zealous mission¬ 
 aries of the Christian faith. Byzantine monks followed the 
 Dnieper on their way northward and soon reached the heart of 
 
THE RISE OF RUSSIA 
 
 303 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIA 
 
304 * 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Russia. They found the people worshipping strange gods 
 who were supposed to dwell in woods and rivers and in moun¬ 
 tain caves. They taught them the story of Jesus. There was 
 no competition from the side of Roman missionaries. These 
 good men were too busy educating the heathen Teutons to 
 bother about the distant Slavs. Hence Russia received its reli¬ 
 gion and its alphabet and its first ideas of art and architecture 
 from the Byzantine monks and as the Byzantine empire (a 
 relic of the eastern Roman empire) had become very oriental 
 and had lost many of its European traits, the Russians suffered 
 in consequence. 
 
 Politically speaking these new states of the great Russian 
 plains did not fare well. It was the Norse habit to divide 
 every inheritance equally among all the sons. No sooner had 
 a small state been founded but it was broken up among eight 
 or nine heirs who in turn left their territory to an ever increas¬ 
 ing number of descendants. It was inevitable that these small 
 competing states should quarrel among themselves. Anarchy 
 was the order of the day. And when the red glow of the east¬ 
 ern horizon told the people of the threatened invasion of a sav¬ 
 age Asiatic tribe, the little states were too weak and too divided 
 to render any sort of defence against this terrible enemy. 
 
 It was in the year 1224 that the first great Tartar invasion 
 took place and that the hordes of Jenghiz Khan, the conqueror 
 of China, Bokhara, Tashkent and Turkestan made their first 
 appearance in the west. The Slavic armies were beaten near 
 the Kalka river and Russia was at the mercy of the Mongo¬ 
 lians. Just as suddenly as they had come they disappeared. 
 Thirteen years later, in 1237, however, they returned. In less 
 than five years they conquered every part of the vast Russian 
 plains. Until the year 1380 when Dmitry Donskoi, Grand 
 Duke of Moscow, beat them on the plains of Kulikovo, the 
 Tartars were the masters of the Russian people. 
 
 All in all, it took the Russians two centuries to deliver 
 themselves from this yoke. For a yoke it was and a most 
 offensive and objectionable one. It turned the Slavic peasants 
 into miserable slaves. No Russian could hope to survive un- 
 
THE RISE OF RUSSIA 
 
 305 
 
 less he was willing to creep before a dirty little yellow man who 
 sat in a tent somewhere in the heart of the steppes of southern 
 Russia and spat at him. It deprived the mass of the people of 
 all feeling of honour and independence. It made hunger and 
 misery and maltreatment and personal abuse the normal state 
 of human existence. Until at last the average Russian, were he 
 peasant or nobleman, went about his business like a neglected 
 dog who has been beaten so often that his spirit has been broken 
 and he dare not wag his tail without permission. 
 
 There was no escape. The horsemen of the Tartar Khan 
 were fast and merciless. The endless prairie did not give a 
 man a chance to cross into the safe territory of his neighbour. 
 He must keep quiet and bear what his yellow master decided 
 to inflict upon him or run the risk of death. Of course, Europe 
 might have interfered. But Europe was engaged upon busi¬ 
 ness of its own, fighting the quarrels between the Pope and 
 the emperor or suppressing this or that or the other heresy. 
 And so Europe left the Slav to his fate, and forced him to 
 work out his own salvation. 
 
 The final saviour of Russia was one of the many small states, 
 founded by the early Norse rulers. It was situated in the heart 
 of the Russian plain. Its capital, Moscow, was upon a steep 
 hill on the banks of the Moskwa river. This little principality, 
 by dint of pleasing the Tartar (when it was necessary to 
 please), and opposing him (when it was safe to do so), had, 
 during the middle of the fourteenth century made itself the 
 leader of a new national life. It must be remembered that the 
 Tartars were wholly deficient in constructive political ability. 
 They could only destroy. Their chief aim in conquering new 
 territories was to obtain revenue. To get this revenue in the 
 form of taxes, it was necessary to allow certain remnants of 
 the old political organization to continue. Hence there were 
 many little towns, surviving by the grace of the Great Khan, 
 that they might act as tax-gatherers and rob their neighbours 
 for the benefit of the Tartar treasury. 
 
 The state of Moscow, growing fat at the expense of the 
 surrounding territory, finally became strong enough to risk 
 
306 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 open rebellion against its masters, the Tartars. It was success¬ 
 ful and its fame as the leader in the cause of Russian inde¬ 
 pendence made Moscow the natural centre for all those who 
 still believed in a better future for the Slavic race. In the year 
 1453, Constantinople was taken by the Turks. Ten years 
 later, under the rule of Ivan III, Moscow informed the 
 western world that the Slavic state laid claim to the worldly 
 and spiritual inheritance of the lost Byzantine Empire, and 
 such traditions of the Roman empire as had survived in Con¬ 
 stantinople. A generation afterwards, under Ivan the Terrible, 
 the grand dukes of Moscow were strong enough to adopt the 
 title of Caasar, or Tsar, and to demand recognition by the west¬ 
 ern powers of Europe. 
 
 In the year 1598, with Feodor the First, the old Muscovite 
 dynasty, descendants of the original Norseman Rurik, came to 
 an end. For the next seven years, a Tartar half-breed, by the 
 name of Boris Godunow, reigned as Tsar. It was during 
 this period that the future destiny of the large masses of the 
 Russian people was decided. This Empire was rich in land 
 but very poor in money. There was no trade and there were 
 no factories. Its few cities were dirty villages. It was com¬ 
 posed of a strong central government and a vast number of 
 illiterate peasants. This government, a mixture of Slavic, 
 Norse, Byzantine and Tartar influences, recognised noth¬ 
 ing beyond the interest of the state. To defend this state, it 
 needed an army. To gather the taxes, which were necessary 
 to pay the soldiers, it needed civil servants. To pay these many 
 officials it needed land. In the vast wilderness on the east 
 and west there was a sufficient supply of this commodity. But 
 land without a few labourers to till the fields and tend the 
 cattle, has no value. Therefore the old nomadic peasants 
 were robbed of one privilege after the other, until finally, dur¬ 
 ing the first year of the seventeenth century, they were formally 
 made a part of the soil upon which they lived. The Russian 
 peasants ceased to be free men. They became serfs or slaves 
 and they remained serfs until the year 1861, when their fate 
 had become so terrible that they were beginning to die out 
 
MOSCOW 
 
THE RISE OF RUSSIA 
 
 307 
 
 In the seventeenth century, this new state with its grow¬ 
 ing territory which was spreading quickly into Siberia, had be¬ 
 come a force with which the rest of Europe was obliged to 
 reckon. In 1613, after the death of Boris Godunow, the 
 Russian nobles had elected one of their own number to be 
 Tsar. He was Michael, the son of Feodor, of the Moscow fam¬ 
 ily of Romanow who lived in a little house just outside the 
 Kremlin. 
 
 In the year 1672 his great-grandson, Peter, the son of am 
 other Feodor, was born. When the child was ten years old, 
 his step-sister Sophia took possession of the Russian throne. 
 The little boy was allowed to spend his days in the suburbs of 
 the national capital, where the foreigners lived. Surrounded 
 by Scotch barkeepers, Dutch traders, Swiss apothecaries, Ital¬ 
 ian barbers, French dancing teachers and German school-mas¬ 
 ters, the young prince obtained a first but rather extraordinary 
 impression of that far-away and mysterious Europe where 
 things were done differently. 
 
 When he was seventeen years old, he suddenly pushed 
 Sister Sophia from the throne. Peter himself became the ruler 
 of Russia. He was not contented with being the Tsar of a 
 semi-barbarous and half-Asiatic people. He must be the sov- 
 ereign head of a civilised nation. To change Russia overnight 
 from a Byzantine-Tartar state into a European empire was no 
 small undertaking. It needed strong hands and a capable 
 head. Peter possessed both. In the year 1698, the great op¬ 
 eration of grafting Modern Europe upon Ancient Russia was 
 performed. The patient did not die. But he never got over 
 the shock, as the events of the last five years have shown very 
 plainly. 
 
RUSSIA vs. SWEDEN 
 
 RUSSIA AND SWEDEN FIGHT MANY WARS TO 
 DECIDE WHO SHALL BE THE LEADING 
 POWER OF NORTH-EASTERN EUROPE 
 
 In the year 1698, Tsar 
 Peter set forth upon his first 
 voyage to western Europe. He 
 travelled by way of Berlin and 
 went to Holland and to Eng¬ 
 land. As a child he had almost 
 been drowned sailing a home¬ 
 made boat in the duck pond of 
 his father’s country home. This 
 passion for water remained 
 with him to the end of his life. 
 
 In a practical way it showed 
 itself in his wish to give his 
 land-locked domains access to 
 the open sea. 
 
 While the unpopular and harsh young ruler was away 
 from home, the friends of the old Russian ways in Moscow set 
 to work to undo all his reforms. A sudden rebellion among 
 his life-guards, the Streltsi regiment, forced Peter to hasten 
 home by the fast mail. He appointed himself executioner-in¬ 
 chief and the Streltsi were hanged and quartered and killed to 
 the last man. Sister Sophia, who had been the head of the 
 rebellion, was locked up in a cloister and the rule of Peter be- 
 
 308 
 
 PETER THE GREAT IN 
 THE DUTCH SHIPYARD 
 
RUSSIA vs. SWEDEN 
 
 309 
 
 gan in earnest. This scene was repeated in the year 1716 when 
 Peter had gone on his second western trip. That time the 
 reactionaries followed the leadership of Peter’s half-witted 
 son, Alexis. Again the Tsar returned in great haste. Alexis 
 was beaten to death in his prison cell and the friends of the 
 old fashioned Byzantine ways marched thousands of dreary 
 miles to their final destination in the Siberian lead mines. 
 After that, no further outbreaks of popular discontent took 
 place. Until the time of his death, Peter could reform in peace. 
 
 It is not easy to give you a list of his reforms in chronologi¬ 
 cal order. The Tsar worked with furious haste. He followed 
 no system. He issued his decrees with such rapidity that it is 
 difficult to keep count. Peter seemed to feel that everything 
 that had ever happened before was entirely wrong. The whole 
 of Russia therefore must be changed within the shortest possible 
 time. When he died he left behind a well-trained army of 
 200,000 men and a navy of fifty ships. The old system of gov¬ 
 ernment had been abolished over night. The Duma, or con¬ 
 vention of Nobles, had been dismissed and in its stead, the Tsar 
 had surrounded himself with an advisory board of state offi¬ 
 cials, called the Senate. 
 
 Russia was divided into eight large “governments” or prov¬ 
 inces. Roads were constructed. Towns were built. Industries 
 were created wherever it pleased the Tsar, without any regard 
 for the presence of raw material. Canals were dug and mines 
 were opened in the mountains of the east. In this land of illiter¬ 
 ates, schools were founded and establishments of higher learn¬ 
 ing, together with Universities and hospitals and professional 
 schools. Dutch naval engineers and tradesmen and artisans 
 from all over the world were encouraged to move to Russia. 
 Printing shops were established, but all books must be first read 
 by the imperial censors. The duties of each class of society 
 were carefully written down in a new law and the entire system 
 of civil and criminal laws was gathered into a series of printed 
 volumes. The old Russian costumes were abolished by Im¬ 
 perial decree, and policemen, armed with scissors, watching 
 all the country roads, changed the long-haired Russian mou- 
 
310 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 jiks suddenly into a pleasing imitation of smooth-shaven west' 
 Europeans. 
 
 In religious matters, the Tsar tolerated no division of 
 power. There must be no chance of a rivalry between an Em* 
 peror and a Pope as had happened in Europe. In the year 
 1721, Peter made himself head of the Russian Church. The 
 Patriarchate of Moscow was abolished and the Holy Synod 
 made its appearance as the highest source of authority in all 
 matters of the Established Church. 
 
 Since, however, these many reforms could not be success- 
 
 PETER THE GREAT BUILDS HIS NEW CAPITAL 
 
 ful while the old Russian elements had a rallying point in the 
 town of Moscow, Peter decided to move his government to a 
 new capital. Amidst the unhealthy marshes of the Baltic Sea 
 the Tsar built this new city. He began to reclaim the land in 
 the year 1703. Forty thousand peasants worked for years 
 to lay the foundations for this Imperial city. The Swedes at¬ 
 tacked Peter and tried to destroy his town and illness and 
 misery killed tens of thousands of the peasants. But the work 
 was continued, winter and summer, and the ready-made town 
 soon began to grow. In the year 1712, it was officially de- 
 
RUSSIA vs. SWEDEN 
 
 311 
 
 dared to be the “Imperial Residence.” A dozen years later 
 it had 75,000 inhabitants. Twice a year the whole city was 
 flooded by the Neva. But the terrific will-power of the Tsar 
 created dykes and canals and the floods ceased to do harm. 
 When Peter died in 1725 he was the owner of the largest city 
 in northern Europe. 
 
 Of course, this sudden growth of so dangerous a rival had 
 been a source of great worry to all the neighbours. From his 
 side, Peter had watched with interest the many adventures of 
 his Baltic rival, the kingdom of Sweden. In the year 1654, 
 Christina, the only daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the hero 
 of the Thirty Years War, had renounced the throne and had 
 gone to Rome to end her days as a devout Catholic. A Protes¬ 
 tant nephew of Gustavus Adolphus had succeeded the last 
 Queen of the House of Vasa. Under Charles X and Charles 
 XI, the new dynasty had brought Sweden to its highest point 
 of development. But in 1697, Charles XI died suddenly and 
 was succeeded by a boy of fifteen, Charles XII. 
 
 This was the moment for which many of the northern states 
 had waited. During the great religious wars of the seventeenth 
 century, Sweden had grown at the expense of her neighbours. 
 The time had come, so the owners thought, to balance the ac¬ 
 count. At once war broke out between Russia, Poland, Den¬ 
 mark and Saxony on the one side, and Sweden on the other. 
 The raw and untrained armies of Peter were disastrously beat¬ 
 en by Charles in the famous battle of Narva in November of 
 the year 1700. Then Charles, one of the most interesting mili¬ 
 tary geniuses of that century, turned against his other enemies 
 and for nine years he hacked and burned his way through the 
 villages and cities of Poland, Saxony, Denmark and the Baltic 
 provinces, while Peter drilled and trained his soldiers in distant 
 Russia. 
 
 As a result, in the year 1709, in the battle of Poltawa, the 
 Moscovites destroyed the exhausted armies of Sweden. Charles 
 continued to be a highly picturesque figure, a wonderful hero 
 of romance, but in his vain attempt to have his revenge, he 
 ruined his own country. In the year 1718, he was accidentally 
 
312 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 killed or assassinated (we do not know which) and when peace 
 was made in 1721, in the town of Nystadt, Sweden had lost all 
 of her former Baltic possessions except Finland. The new 
 Russian state, created by Peter, had become the leading power 
 of northern Europe. But already a new rival was on the 
 way. The Prussian state was taking shape. 
 
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 ninth century, Charlemagne had transferred the old 
 centre of civilisation from the Mediterranean to the wild regions 
 of 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 adminis¬ 
 tered 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 
 tenth century and their market-place, by the name of Brenna- 
 bor, became the centre of and gave its name to the new province 
 of Brandenburg. 
 
 During the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth cen¬ 
 turies, a succession of noble families exercised the functions of 
 imperial governor in this frontier state. Finally in the 
 fifteenth century, the House of Hohenzollern made its appear- 
 
 313 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 314 
 
 ance, and as Electors of Brandenburg, commenced to change a 
 sandy and forlorn frontier territory into one of the most ef¬ 
 ficient empires of the modem 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 twelfth century a certain Fred¬ 
 erick 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 Em¬ 
 perors of the old German Empire. During the Reformation, 
 they had taken the side of the Protestants and the early seven¬ 
 teenth 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, parsimonious Prussian sergeant, 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 but one idea. That 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 cor¬ 
 dial, to say the least. The boorish manners of the father of¬ 
 fended the finer spirit of the son. The son’s love for French 
 manners, literature, philosophy and music was rejected by the 
 
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 
 
 315 
 
 father as a manifestation of sissy-ness. There followed a ter¬ 
 rible outbreak between these two strange temperaments. Fred¬ 
 erick 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 some¬ 
 where in the provinces to he 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 detail of a complicated annual Budget. 
 
 As an author, especially in his book called the “Anti- 
 Macchiavelli,” 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 coun¬ 
 sellor. 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 interest 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 Eu¬ 
 rope) Prussia clamored, 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 counter-attacks. 
 
316 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Europe took due notice of this sudden appearance of a 
 very powerful new state. In the eighteenth century, the Ger¬ 
 mans were a people who had been ruined by the great religious 
 wars and who were not held in high esteem by any one. Fred¬ 
 erick, 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 im¬ 
 proved. 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 battle field of 
 the French and the Austrians and the Swedes and the Danes 
 and the Poles, Germany, encouraged by the example of Prus¬ 
 sia, began to regain self-confidence. And this was the work of 
 the little old man, with his hook-nose and his old uniforms cov¬ 
 ered with snuff, who said very funny but very unpleasant things 
 about his neighbours, 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-Macchiavelli.” 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 
 centuries, 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 had been the result of 
 favourable natural 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 in¬ 
 fluence upon foreign affairs. All this of course had cost a great 
 deal of money. The mediaeval state with its lack of centralised 
 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 centralised state was a more complicated 
 affair. The old knights disappeared and hired government 
 officials or bureaucrats took their place. Army, navy, and in¬ 
 ternal 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 
 
 317 
 
318 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 THE VOYAGE OF THE PILGRIMS 
 
THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM 
 
 319 
 
 cities were familiar with silver coin. The discovery of America 
 and the exploitation of the Peruvian mines changed all this. 
 The centre 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 six¬ 
 teenth 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 business men 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 
 favourable balance of export trade. If you can export more to 
 your neighbour 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 seventeenth 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 
 
 t'-ade. 
 
 3. Encourage those industries which change raw ma¬ 
 
 terials into exportable finished products. 
 
S20 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 4. Encourage a large population, for you will need work¬ 
 
 men for your factories and an agricultural com¬ 
 munity does not raise enough workmen. 
 
 5. Let the State watch this process and interfere when¬ 
 
 ever it is necessary to do so. 
 
 Instead of regarding International Trade as something 
 akin to a force of nature which would always obey certain nat¬ 
 ural laws regardless of man’s interference, the people of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to regulate their com¬ 
 merce by the help of official decrees and royal laws and financial 
 help on the part of the government. 
 
 In the sixteenth century Charles Y adopted this Mercan¬ 
 tile System (which was then something entirely new) and in¬ 
 troduced it into his many possessions. Elizabeth of England 
 flattered him by her imitation. The Bourbons, especially King 
 Louis XIV, were fanatical adherents of this doctrine and Col¬ 
 bert, his great minister of finance, became the prophet of Mer¬ 
 cantilism to whom all Europe looked for guidance. 
 
 The entire foreign policy of Cromwell was a practical ap¬ 
 plication of the Mercantile System. It was invariably directed 
 against the rich rival Republic of Holland. For the Dutch 
 shippers, as the common-carriers of the merchandise of Eu¬ 
 rope, 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 precincts and no native 
 was permitted to trade with a merchant whose ship flew a for¬ 
 eign flag. 
 
 Undoubtedly the Mercantile System encouraged the de¬ 
 velopment of young industries in certain countries where there 
 never had been any manufacturing before. It built roads 
 
THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM 
 
 321 
 
 HOW EUROPE CONQUERED THE WORLD 
 
322 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 and dug canals and made for better means of transportation. 
 It demanded greater skill among the workmen 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 ex¬ 
 ploitation. It exposed the citizens of the home country to an 
 even more terrible fate. It helped in a great measure to turn 
 
 SEA POWEE, 
 
 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 neigh¬ 
 bours 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. Eco¬ 
 nomic 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 AMER¬ 
 ICAN CONTINENT. THE DESCENDANTS 
 OF THE MEN WHO HAD PUNISHED KING 
 CHARLES FOR HIS INSISTENCE UPON HIS 
 “DIVINE RIGHTS” ADDED A NEW CHAP¬ 
 TER TO THE OLD STORY OF THE STRUG¬ 
 GLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 For the sake of conveni¬ 
 ence, we ought to go back a 
 few centuries and repeat the 
 early history of the great 
 struggle for colonial posses¬ 
 sions. 
 
 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 im¬ 
 mediately 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 terri¬ 
 tory in Asia, Africa and America. 
 
 323 
 
 THE FIGHT FOR LIBERTY 
 
32-i 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 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 
 
 THE PILGRIMS 
 
 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 na¬ 
 tions have behaved with shocking brutality. The English and 
 the Dutch, however, knew better where to draw the line. Pro¬ 
 vided they got their spices and their gold and silver and their 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 325 
 
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 HOW THE WHITE MAN SETTLED IN NORTH AMERICA 
 
326 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 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 de¬ 
 cided three thousand miles away by the navies of the contending 
 countries. It is one of the most interesting principles of an¬ 
 cient 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 eighteenth century, however, there were no flying ma¬ 
 chines 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 seventeenth 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 Aunerican 
 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 Verrazano had visited these coasts. Cabot 
 had flown the English flag. Verrazano had sailed under the 
 French flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed 
 themselves the owners of the entire continent. 
 
 During the seventeenth 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 dissenters, such as the Puritans, who in the year 
 1620 went to New England, or the Quakers, who settled in 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 327 
 
 Pennsylvania in 1681. They were small frontier communi¬ 
 ties, 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 interfer¬ 
 ence. 
 
 The French colonies, on the other hand, always remained 
 a possession of the crown. No Huguenots or Protestants were 
 
 IN THE CABIN OF THE MAYFLOWER 
 
 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 neighbours 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 
 
328 THE STORY OF MANKIND v 
 
 the king and who expected to return to Paris at the first possi¬ 
 ble chance. 
 
 Politically, however, the position of the English colonies 
 was far from satisfactory. The French had discovered the 
 mouth of the Saint Lawrence in the sixteenth century. From 
 the region of the Great Lakes they had worked their way south¬ 
 ward, had descended the Mississippi and had built several forti¬ 
 fications along the Gulf of Mexico. After a century of explo¬ 
 ration, a line of sixty French forts cut off the English settle¬ 
 ments along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior. 
 
 THE FRENCH EXPLORE THE WEST 
 
 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 men and 
 money and caused a series of horrible border wars in which 
 both sides murdered their white neighbours, 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 Bour¬ 
 bons in their attempt to establish an autocratic form of govern¬ 
 ment and to break the power of Parliament. But in 1689 the 
 last of the Stuarts had disappeared from British soil and Dutch 
 
THE BLOCKHOUSE IN THE WILDERNESS 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 329 
 
 William, the great enemy of Louis XIV succeeded him. From 
 that time on, until the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France and 
 England fought for the possession of India and North Amer¬ 
 ica. 
 
 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, La 
 Salle, Marquette and a score of others was lost to France. 
 
 THE FIRST WINTER IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 Only a very 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 provinces which had been found¬ 
 ed 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 and 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 timourous 
 people did not cross the ocean in those days. The American 
 
330 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 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 an¬ 
 noyed 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 intelli¬ 
 gent than George III or less given to drowsiness and indiffer¬ 
 ence 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 sub¬ 
 jects, they turned rebels, who exposed themselves to the pun¬ 
 ishment of death when they were captured by the German 
 soldiers, whom George hired to do his fighting after the pleas¬ 
 ant 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 suc¬ 
 cess 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 favour of a compromise, and would have 
 been willing to sue for peace. But the great figure of Wash¬ 
 ington stood guard over the cause of the colonists 
 
 Ably assisted by a handful of brave men, he used his stead¬ 
 fast but badly equipped armies to weaken the forces of the king. 
 Time and again when defeat seemed unavoidable, his strategy 
 turned the tide of battle. Often his men were ill-fed. During 
 the winter they lacked shoes and coats and were forced to live 
 in unhealthy dug-outs. 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 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 331 
 
 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 
 ship load. Only men who were deeply convinced of the right¬ 
 eousness of their cause would have found the courage to take 
 the momentous decision of the months of June and July of 
 the year 1776. 
 
 GEORGE WASHINGTON 
 
 In June, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a mo¬ 
 tion 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 Massachu¬ 
 setts. It was carried on July the second and on July fourth, 
 it was followed by an official Declaration of Independence, 
 which was the work of Thomas Jefferson, a serious and ex¬ 
 ceedingly capable student of both politics and government and 
 
88* THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
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 THE GREAT AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
 
 333 
 
 destined to be one of the most famous of our American presi¬ 
 dents. 
 
 When news of this event reached Europe, and was fol¬ 
 lowed by the final victory of the colonists and the adoption of 
 the famous Constitution of the year 1787 (the first of all writ¬ 
 ten constitutions) it caused great interest. The dynastic sys¬ 
 tem of the highly centralised states which had been developed 
 after the great religious wars of the seventeenth century had 
 reached the height of its power. 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. But 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 and the Hawaiians 
 who had just been re-discovered by Captain Cook, whom they 
 had 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 ex¬ 
 plosion 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. 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION PRO¬ 
 CLAIMS THE PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTY, 
 FRATERNITY AND EQUALITY UNTO ALL 
 THE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH 
 
 Before we talk about a revolution it is just as well that 
 we explain just what this word means. In the terms of a 
 great Russian writer (and Russians ought to know what they 
 are talking about in this field) a revolution is “a swift over¬ 
 throw, in a few years, of institutions which have taken cen¬ 
 turies to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that 
 even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in 
 their writings. It is the fall, the crumbling away in a brief 
 period, of all that up to that time has composed the essence 
 of social, religious, political and economic life in a nation.” 
 
 Such a revolution took place in France in the eighteenth 
 century when the old civilisation of the country had grown 
 stale. The king in the days of Louis XIV had become 
 EVERYTHING and was the state. The Nobility, formerly 
 the civil servant of the federal state, found itself without any 
 duties and became a social ornament of the royal court. 
 
 This French state of the eighteenth century, however, cost 
 incredible sums of money. This money had to be produced 
 in the form of taxes. Unfortunately the kings of France had 
 not been strong enough to force the nobility and the clergy 
 to pay their share of these taxes. Hence the taxes were paid 
 
 334 
 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 835 
 
 entirely by the agricultural population. But the peasants 
 living in dreary hovels, no longer in intimate contact with their 
 former landlords, but victims of cruel and incompetent land 
 agents, were going from bad to worse. Why should they 
 work and exert themselves? Increased returns upon their 
 land merely meant more taxes and nothing for themselves 
 and therefore they neglected their fields as much as they dared. 
 
 Hence we have a king who wanders in empty splendour 
 through the vast halls of his palaces, habitually followed by 
 hungry office seekers, all of whom live upon the revenue ob¬ 
 tained from peasants who are no better than the beasts of the 
 fields. It is not a pleasant picture, but it is not exaggerated. 
 There was, however, another side to the so-called “Ancien 
 Regime” which we must keep in mind. 
 
 A wealthy middle class, closely connected with the nobility 
 (by the usual process of the rich banker’s daughter marrying 
 the poor baron’s son) and a court composed of all the most 
 entertaining people of France, had brought the polite art of 
 graceful living to its highest development. As the best brains 
 of the country were not allowed to occupy themselves with 
 questions of political economics, they spent their idle hours 
 upon the discussion of abstract ideas. 
 
 As fashions in modes of thought and personal behaviour 
 are quite as likely to run to extremes as fashion in dress, it 
 was natural that the most artificial society of that day should 
 take a tremendous interest in what they considered “the simple 
 life.” The king and the queen, the absolute and unquestioned 
 proprietors of France, and all its colonies and dependencies, to¬ 
 gether with their courtiers, went to live in funny little country 
 houses all dressed up as milk-maids and stable-boys and played 
 at being shepherds in a happy vale of ancient Hellas. Around 
 them, their courtiers danced attendance, their court-musicians 
 composed lovely minuets, their court barbers devised more 
 and more elaborate and costly headgear, until from sheer bore¬ 
 dom and lack of real jobs, this whole artificial world of Ver¬ 
 sailles (the great show place which Louis XIV had built far 
 away from his noisy and restless city) talked of nothing but 
 
336 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 those subjects which were furthest removed from their own 
 lives, just as a man who is starving will talk of nothing except 
 food. 
 
 When Voltaire, the courageous old philosopher, play¬ 
 wright, historian and novelist, and the great enemy of all 
 religious and political tyranny, began to throw his bombs of 
 criticism at everything connected with the Established Order 
 of Things, the whole French world applauded him and his 
 theatrical pieces played to standing room only. When Jean 
 Jacques Rousseau waxed sentimental about primitive man 
 and gave his contemporaries delightful descriptions of the 
 happiness of the original inhabitants of this planet, (about 
 whom he knew as little as he did about the children, upon whose 
 education he was the recognised authority,) all France read 
 his “Social Contract” and this society in which the king and 
 the state were one, wept bitter tears when they heard Rous¬ 
 seau’s appeal for a return to the blessed days when the real 
 sovereignty had lain in the hands of the people and when the 
 king had been merely the servant of his people. 
 
 When Montesquieu published his “Persian Letters” in 
 which two distinguished Persian travellers turn the whole ex¬ 
 isting society of France topsy-turvy and poke fun at every¬ 
 thing from the king down to the lowest of his six hundred 
 pastry cooks, the book immediately went through four 
 editions and assured the writer thousands of readers for his 
 famous discussion of the “Spirit of the Laws” in which the 
 noble Baron compared the excellent English system with the 
 backward system of France and advocated instead of an abso¬ 
 lute monarchy the establishment of a state in which the Execu¬ 
 tive, the Legislative and the Judicial powers should be in 
 separate hands and should work independently of each other. 
 When Lebreton, the Parisian book-seller, announced that 
 Messieurs Diderot, d’Alembert, Turgot and a score of other 
 distinguished writers were going to publish an Encyclopaedia 
 which was to contain “all the new ideas and the new science 
 and the new knowledge,” the response from the side of the 
 public was most satisfactory, and when after twenty-two years 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 337 
 
 the last of the twenty-eight volumes had been finished, the 
 somewhat belated interference of the police could not repress 
 the enthusiasm with which French society received this most 
 important but very dangerous contribution to the discussions 
 of the day. 
 
 Here, let me give you a little warning. When you read a 
 novel about the French revolution or see a play or a movie, 
 you will easily get the impression that the Revolution was the 
 
 work of the rabble from the 
 Paris slums. It was nothing 
 of the kind. The mob appears 
 often upon the revolutionary 
 stage, but invariably at the in¬ 
 stigation and under the lead¬ 
 ership of those middle-class 
 professional men who used the 
 hungry multitude as an effi¬ 
 cient ally in their warfare upon 
 the king and his court. But 
 the fundamental ideas which 
 caused the revolution were in¬ 
 vented by a few brilliant minds, 
 and they were at first intro¬ 
 duced into the charming draw¬ 
 ing-rooms of the “Ancien 
 Regime” to provide amiable 
 diversion for the much-bored ladies and gentlemen of his 
 Majesty’s court. These pleasant but careless people played 
 with the dangerous fireworks of social criticism until the sparks 
 fell through the cracks of the floor, which was old and rotten 
 just like the rest of the building. Those sparks unfortunately 
 landed in the basement where age-old rubbish lay in great 
 confusion. Then there was a cry of fire. But the owner of 
 the house who was interested in everything except the manage¬ 
 ment of his property, did not know how to put the small blaza 
 out. The flame spread rapidly and the entire edifice was 
 consumed by the conflagration, which we call the Great French 
 Revolution. 
 
 THE GUILLOTINE 
 
338 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 For the sake of convenience, we can divide the French 
 Revolution into two parts. From 1789 to 1791 there was a 
 more or less orderly attempt to introduce a constitutional 
 monarchy. This failed, partly through lack of good faith and 
 stupidity on the part of the monarch himself, partly through 
 circumstances over which nobody had any control. 
 
 From 1792 to 1799 there was a Republic and a first effort 
 to establish a democratic form of government. But the actual 
 outbreak of violence had been preceded by many years of 
 unrest and many sincere but ineffectual attempts at reform. 
 
 When France had a debt of 4000 million francs and the 
 treasury was always empty and there was not a single thing 
 upon which new taxes could be levied, even good King Louis 
 (who was an expert locksmith and a great hunter but a very 
 poor statesman) felt vaguely that something ought to be done. 
 Therefore he called for Turgot, to be his Minister of Finance. 
 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne, a man in the 
 early sixties, a splendid representative of the fast disappearing 
 class of landed gentry, had been a successful governor of a 
 province and was an amateur political economist of great abil¬ 
 ity. He did his best. Unfortunately, he could not perform 
 miracles. As it was impossible to squeeze more taxes out of 
 the ragged peasants, it was necessary to get the necessary funds 
 from the nobility and clergy who had never paid a centime. 
 This made Turgot the best hated man at the court of Versailles. 
 Furthermore he was obliged to face the enmity of Marie 
 Antoinette, the queen, who was against everybody who dared 
 to mention the word “economy” within her hearing. Soon 
 Turgot was called an “unpractical visionary” and a “theoreti¬ 
 cal professor” and then of course his position became unten¬ 
 able. In the year 1776 he was forced to resign. 
 
 After the “professor” there came a man of Practical Busi¬ 
 ness Sense. He was an industrious Swiss by the name of 
 Necker who had made himself rich as a grain speculator and 
 the partner in an international banking house. His ambitious 
 wife had pushed him into the government service that she 
 might establish a position for her daughter who afterwards as 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 339' 
 
 the wife of the Swedish minister in Paris, Baron de Stael, 
 became a famous literary figure of the early nineteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Necker set to work with a fine display of zeal just as Turgot 
 had done. In 1781 he published a careful review of the French 
 finances. The king understood nothing of this “Compte 
 Rendu.” He had just sent troops to America to help the colo¬ 
 nists against their common enemies, the English. This expe¬ 
 dition proved to be unexpect¬ 
 edly expensive and Necker was 
 asked to find the necessary 
 funds. When instead of pro¬ 
 ducing revenue, he published 
 more figures and made statistics 
 and began to use the dreary 
 warning about “necessary econ¬ 
 omies” his days were numbered. 
 
 In the year 1781 he was dis¬ 
 missed as an incompetent 
 servant. 
 
 After the Professor and the 
 Practical Business Man came 
 the delightful type of financier 
 who will guarantee everybody 
 100 per cent, per month on 
 their money if only they will 
 trust his own infallible system. 
 
 He was Charles Alexandre de Calonne, a pushing official, 
 who had made his career both by his industry and his com¬ 
 plete lack of honesty and scruples. He found the country 
 heavily indebted, but he was a clever man, willing to oblige 
 everybody, and he invented a quick remedy. He paid the 
 old debts by contracting new ones. This method is not new. 
 The result since time immemorial has been disastrous. In 
 less than three years more than 800,000,000 francs had been 
 added to the French debt by this charming Minister of Finance 
 who never worried and smilingly signed his name to every 
 demand that was made by His Majesty and by his lovely 
 
340 
 
 the story of mankind 
 
 Queen, who had learned the habit of spending during the days 
 of her youth in Vienna. 
 
 At last even the Parliament of Paris (a high court of jus¬ 
 tice and not a legislative body) although by no means lacking 
 in loyalty to their sovereign, decided that something must be 
 done. Calonne wanted to borrow another 80,000,000 francs. 
 It had been a bad year for the crops and the misery and hunger 
 in the country districts were terrible. Unless something sensi¬ 
 ble were done, France would go bankrupt. The King as always 
 was unaware of the seriousness of the situation. Would it not 
 be a good idea to consult the representatives of the people? 
 Since 1614 no Estates General had been called together. In 
 view of the threatening panic there was a demand that the 
 Estates be convened. Louis XVI however, who never could 
 take a decision, refused to go as far as that. 
 
 To pacify the popular clamour he called together a meeting 
 of the Notables in the year 1787. This merely meant a gath¬ 
 ering of the best families who discussed what could and should 
 be done, without touching their feudal and clerical privilege 
 of tax-exemption. It is unreasonable to expect that a certain 
 class of society shall commit political and economic suicide for 
 the benefit of another group of fellow-citizens. The 127 
 Notables obstinately refused to surrender a single one of their 
 ancient rights. The crowd in the street, being now exceed¬ 
 ingly hungry, demanded that Necker, in whom they had confi¬ 
 dence, be reappointed. The Notables said “No.” The crowd 
 in the street began to smash windows and do other unseemly 
 things. The Notables fled. Calonne was dismissed. 
 
 A new colourless Minister of Finance, the Cardinal 
 Lomenie de Brienne, was appointed and Louis, driven by the 
 violent threats of his starving subjects, agreed to call together 
 the old Estates General as “soon as practicable.” This vague 
 promise of course satisfied no one. 
 
 No such severe winter had been experienced for almost a 
 century. The crops had been either destroyed by floods or had 
 been frozen to death in the fields. All the olive trees of 
 Provence had been killed. Private charity tried to do some- 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 341 
 
 thing but could accomplish little for eighteen million starving 
 people. Everywhere bread riots occurred. A generation be¬ 
 fore these would have been put down by the army. But the 
 work of the new philosophical school had begun to bear fruit. 
 People began to understand that a shotgun is no effective 
 remedy for a hungry stomach and even the soldiers (who came 
 from among the people) were no longer to be depended upon. 
 It was absolutely necessary that the king should do something 
 definite to regain the popular goodwill, but again he hesitated. 
 
 Here and there in the provinces, little independent Repub¬ 
 lics were established by followers of the new school. The cry 
 of “no taxation without representation” (the slogan of the 
 American rebels a quarter of a century before) was heard 
 among the faithful middle classes. France was threatened with 
 general anarchy. To appease the people and to increase the 
 royal popularity, the government unexpectedly suspended the 
 former very strict form of censorship of books. At once a 
 flood of ink descended upon France. Everybody, high or 
 low, criticised and was criticised. More than 2000 pam¬ 
 phlets were published. Lomenie de Brienne was swept away 
 by a storm of abuse. Necker was hastily called back to placate, 
 as best he could, the nation-wide unrest. Immediately the stock 
 market went up thirty per cent. And by common consent, peo¬ 
 ple suspended judgment for a little while longer. In May of 
 1789 the Estates General were to assemble and then the wisdom 
 of the entire nation would speedily solve the difficult problem 
 of recreating the kingdom of Franee into a healthy and happy 
 state. 
 
 This prevailing idea, that the combined wisdom of the 
 people would be able to solve all difficulties, proved disastrous. 
 It lamed all personal effort during many important months. 
 Instead of keeping the government in his own hands at this 
 critical moment, Necker allowed everything to drift. Hence 
 there was a new outbreak of the acrimonious debate upon the 
 best ways to reform the old kingdom. Everywhere the power 
 of the police weakened. The people of the Paris suburbs, 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 842 
 
 under the leadership of professional agitators, gradually be¬ 
 gan to discover their strength, and commenced to play the role 
 which was to be theirs all through the years of the great unrest, 
 when they acted as the brute force which was used by the actual 
 leaders of the Revolution to secure those things which could 
 not be obtained in a legitimate fashion. 
 
 As a sop to the peasants and the middle class, Necker de- 
 
 THE BASTILLE 
 
 cided that they should be allowed a double representation in 
 the Estates General. Upon this subject, the Abbe Sieyes then 
 wrote a famous pamphlet, “To what does the Third Estate 
 Amount?” in which he came to the conclusion that the Third 
 Estate (a name given to the middle class) ought to amount to 
 everything, that it had not amounted to anything in the past, 
 and that it now desired to amount to something. He expressed 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 the sentiment of the great majority of the people who had the 
 best interests of the country at heart. 
 
 Finally the elections took place under the worst conditions 
 imaginable. When they were over, 308 clergymen, 285 noble¬ 
 men and 621 representatives of the Third Estate packed their 
 trunks to go to Versailles. The Third Estate was obliged to 
 carry additional luggage. This consisted of voluminous re¬ 
 ports called “cahiers” in which the many complaints and griev¬ 
 ances of their constituents had been written down. The stage 
 was set for the great final act that was to save France. 
 
 The Estates General came together on May 5th, 1789. 
 The king was in a bad humour. The Clergy and the Nobility 
 let it be known that they were unwilling to give up a single one 
 of their privileges. The king ordered the three groups of rep¬ 
 resentatives to meet in different rooms and discuss their griev¬ 
 ances separately. The Third Estate refused to obey the royal 
 command. They took a solemn oath to that eff ect in a squash 
 court . (hastily put in order for the purpose of this illegal meet¬ 
 ing) on the 20th of June, 1789. They insisted that all three 
 Estates, Nobility, Clergy and Third Estate, should meet to¬ 
 gether and so informed His Majesty. The king gave in. 
 
 As the “National Assembly,” the Estates General began 
 to discuss the state of the French kingdom. The King got 
 angry. Then again he hesitated. He said that he would never 
 surrender his absolute power. Then he went hunting, forgot 
 all about the cares of the state and when he returned from the 
 chase he gave in. For it was the royal habit to do the right 
 thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. When the people 
 clamoured for A, the king scolded them and gave them nothing. 
 Then, when the Palace was surrounded by a howling multitude 
 of poor people, the king surrendered and gave his subjects 
 what they had asked for. By this time, however, the people 
 wanted A plus B. The comedy was repeated. When the king 
 signed his name to the Royal Decree which granted his beloved 
 subjects A and B they were threatening to kill the entire royal 
 family unless they received A plus B plus C. And so on, 
 through the whole alphabet and up to the scaffold. 
 
344 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Unfortunately the king was always just one letter behind. 
 He never understood this. Even when he laid his head under 
 the guillotine, he felt that he was a much-abused man who had 
 received a most unwarrantable treatment at the hands of peo¬ 
 ple whom he had loved to the best of his limited ability. 
 
 Historical “ifs,” as I have often warned you, are never of 
 any value. It is very easy for us to say that the monarchy 
 might have been saved “if” Louis had been a man of greater 
 energy and less kindness of heart. But the king was not alone. 
 Even “if” he had possessed the ruthless strength of Napoleon, 
 his career during these difficult days might have been easily 
 ruined by his wife who was the daughter of Maria Theresa of 
 Austria and who possessed all the characteristic virtues and 
 vices of a young girl who had been brought up at the most 
 autocratic and mediaeval court of that age. 
 
 She decided that some action must be taken and planned a 
 counter-revolution. Necker was suddenly dismissed and loyal 
 troops were called to Paris. The people, when they heard of 
 this, stormed the fortress of the Bastille prison, and on the 
 fourteenth of July of the year 1789, they destroyed this 
 familiar but much-hated symbol of Autocratic Power 
 which had long since ceased to be a political prison and 
 was now used as the city lock-up for pickpockets and second- 
 story men. Many of the nobles took the hint and left the 
 country. But the king as usual did nothing. He had been 
 hunting on the day of the fall of the Bastille and he had shot 
 several deer and felt very much pleased. 
 
 The National Assembly now set to work and on the 4th of 
 August, with the noise of the Parisian multitude in their ears, 
 they abolished all privileges. This was followed on the 27th 
 of August by the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the 
 famous preamble to the first French constitution. So far so 
 good, but the court had apparently not yet learned its lesson. 
 There was a wide-spread suspicion that the king was again 
 trying to interfere with these reforms and as a result, on the 
 5th of October, there was a second riot in Paris. It spread to 
 Versailles and the people were not pacified until they had 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 345 
 
 brought the king back to his palace in Paris. They did not 
 trust him in Versailles. They liked to have him where they 
 could watch him and control his correspondence with his rela¬ 
 tives in Vienna and Madrid and the other courts of Europe. 
 
 In the Assembly meanwhile, Mirabeau, a nobleman who 
 had become leader of the Third Estate, was beginning to put 
 order into chaos. But before he could save the position of the 
 king he died, on the 2nd of April of the year 1791. The king, 
 who now began to fear for his own life, tried to escape on the 
 21st of June. He was recognised from his picture on a coin, 
 was stopped near the village of Varennes by members of the 
 National Guard, and was brought back to Paris, 
 
 In September of 1791, the first constitution of France was 
 accepted, and the members of the National Assembly went 
 home. On the first of October of 1791, the legislative assem¬ 
 bly came together to continue the work of the National 
 Assembly. In this new gathering of popular representatives 
 there were many extremely revolutionary elements. The 
 boldest among these were known as the Jacobins, after the old 
 Jacobin cloister in which they held their political meetings. 
 These young men (most of them belonging to the professional 
 classes) made very violent speeches and when the newspapers 
 carried these orations to Berlin and Vienna, the King of 
 Prussia and the Emperor decided that they must do something 
 to save their good brother and sister. They were very busy 
 just then dividing the kingdom of Poland, where rival politi¬ 
 cal factions had caused such a state of disorder that the country 
 was at the mercy of anybody who wanted to take a couple of 
 provinces. But they managed to send an army to invade 
 France and deliver the king. 
 
 Then a terrible panic of fear swept throughout the land 
 of France. All the pent-up hatred of years of hunger and 
 suffering came to a horrible climax. The mob of Paris stormed 
 the palace of the Tuileries. The faithful Swiss bodyguards 
 tried to defend their master, but Louis, unable to make up his 
 mind, gave order to “cease firing” just when the crowd was 
 retiring. The people, drunk with blood and noise and cheap 
 
346 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 wine, murdered the Swiss to the last man, then invaded the 
 palace, and went after Louis who had escaped into the meeting 
 hall of the Assembly, where he was immediately suspended of 
 his office, and from where he was taken as a prisoner to the 
 old castle of the Temple. 
 
 But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their ad¬ 
 vance and the panic changed into hysteria and turned men and 
 women into wild beasts. In the first week of September of 
 the year 1792, the crowd broke into the jails and murdered all 
 the prisoners. The government did not interfere. The Jaco¬ 
 bins, headed by Danton, knew that this crisis meant either the 
 success or the failure of the revolution, and that only the most 
 brutal audacity could save them. The Legislative Assembly 
 was closed and on the 21st of September of the year 1792, a 
 new National Convention came together. It was a body com¬ 
 posed almost entirely of extreme revolutionists. The king was 
 formally accused of high treason and was brought before the 
 Convention. He was found guilty and by a vote of 361 to 360 
 (the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of Orleans) 
 he was condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the 
 year 1793, he quietly and with much dignity suffered himself 
 to be taken to the scaffold. He had never understood what all 
 the shooting and the fuss had been about. And he had been too 
 proud to ask questions. 
 
 Then the Jacobins turned against the more moderate ele¬ 
 ment in the convention, the Girondists, called after their south¬ 
 ern district, the Gironde. A special revolutionary tribunal was 
 instituted and twenty-one of the leading Girondists were con¬ 
 demned to death. The others committed suicide. They were 
 capable and honest men but too philosophical and too moderate 
 to survive during these frightful years. 
 
 In October of the year 1793 the Constitution was 
 suspended by the Jacobins “until peace should have been 
 declared.” All power was placed in the hands of a small com¬ 
 mittee of Public Safety, with Danton and Robespierre as its 
 leaders. The Christian religion and the old chronology were 
 abolished. The “Age of Reason” (of which Thomas Paine had 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 347 
 
 written so eloquently during the American Revolution) had 
 come and with it the “Terror” which for more than a year killed 
 good and bad and indifferent people at the rate of seventy or 
 eighty a day. 
 
 The autocratic rule of the King had been destroyed. It 
 was succeeded by the tyranny of a few people who had such a 
 passionate love for democratic virtue that they felt compelled 
 to kill all those who disagreed with them. France was turned 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 INVADES HOLLAND 
 
 into a slaughter house. Everybody suspected everybody else. 
 No one felt safe. Out of sheer fear, a few members of the old 
 Convention, who knew that they were the next candidates for 
 the scaffold, finally turned against Robespierre, who had 
 already decapitated most of his former colleagues. Robes¬ 
 pierre, “the only true and pure Democrat,” tried to kill him¬ 
 self but failed. His shattered jaw was hastily bandaged and 
 he was dragged to the guillotine. On the 27th of July, of the 
 year 1794 (the 9th Thermidor of the year II, according to the 
 strange chronology of the revolution), the reign of Terror came 
 to an end, and all Paris danced with joy. 
 
348 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 The dangerous position of France, however, made it neces* 
 sary that the government remain in the hands of a few strong 
 men, until the many enemies of the revolution should have been 
 driven from the soil of the French fatherland. While the 
 half-clad and half-starved revolutionary armies fought their 
 desperate battles of the Rhine and Italy and Belgium and 
 Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Great 
 Revolution, five Directors were appointed, and they ruled 
 France for four years. Then the power was vested in the hands 
 of a successful general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, 
 who became “First Consul” of France in the year 1799. And 
 during the next fifteen years, the old European continent be¬ 
 came the laboratory of a number of political experiments, the 
 like of which the world had never seen before. 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon was born in the year 1769, the third son 
 of Carlo Maria Buonaparte, an honest notary public of 
 the city of Ajaccio in the island of Corsica, and his good 
 wife, Letizia Ramolino. He therefore was not a Frenchman, 
 but an Italian whose native island (an old Greek, Cartha¬ 
 ginian and Roman colony in the Mediterranean Sea) had 
 for years been struggling to regain its independence, 
 first of all from the Genoese, and after the middle of the 
 eighteenth century from the French, who had kindly offered 
 to help the Corsicans in their struggle for freedom and had 
 then occupied the island for their own benefit. 
 
 During the first twenty years of his life, young Napoleon 
 was a professional Corsican patriot—a Corsican Sinn Feiner, 
 who hoped to deliver his beloved country from the yoke of the 
 bitterly hated French enemy. But the French revolution had 
 unexpectedly recognised the claims of the Corsicans and gradu¬ 
 ally Napoleon, who had received a good training at the military 
 school of Brienne, drifted into the service of his adopted coun¬ 
 try. Although he never learned to spell French correctly or 
 to speak it without a broad Italian accent, he became a French¬ 
 man. In due time he came to stand as the highest expression 
 of all French virtues. At present he is regarded as the symbol 
 of the Gallic genius. 
 
 Napoleon was what is called a fast worker. His career 
 
 349 
 
350 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 does not cover more than twenty years. In that short span 
 of time he fought more wars and gained more victories and 
 marched more miles and conquered more square kilometers and 
 killed more people and brought about more reforms and gen¬ 
 erally upset Europe to a greater extent than anybody (includ¬ 
 ing Alexander the Great and Jenghis Khan) had ever man¬ 
 aged to do. 
 
 He was a little fellow and during the first years of his life 
 his health was not very good. He never impressed anybody 
 by his good looks and he remained to the end of his days very 
 clumsy whenever he was obliged to appear at a social function. 
 He did not enjoy a single advantage of breeding or birth or 
 riches. For the greater part of his youth he was desperately 
 poor and often he had to go without a meal or was obliged 
 to make a few extra pennies in curious ways. 
 
 He gave little promise as a literary genius. When he com¬ 
 peted for a prize offered by the Academy of Lyons, his essay 
 was found to be next to the last and he was number 15 out of 
 16 candidates. But he overcame all these difficulties through 
 his absolute and unshakable belief in his own destiny, and in 
 his own glorious future. Ambition was the main-spring of his 
 life. The thought of self, the worship of that capital letter 
 “N” with which he signed all his letters, and which recurred 
 forever in the ornaments of his hastily constructed palaces, the 
 absolute will to make the name Napoleon the most important 
 thing in the world next to the name of God, these desires car¬ 
 ried Napoleon to a pinnacle of fame which no other man has 
 ever reached. 
 
 When he was a half-pay lieutenant, young Bonaparte was 
 very fond of the “Lives of Famous Men” which Plutarch, the 
 Greek historian, had written. But he never tried to live up 
 to the high standard of character set by these heroes of the 
 older days. Napoleon seems to have been devoid of all those 
 considerate and thoughtful sentiments which make men 
 different from the animals. It will be very difficult to decide 
 with any degree of accuracy whether he ever loved anyone 
 besides himself. He kept a civil tongue to his mother, but 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 351 
 
 Letizia had the air and manners of a great lady and after the 
 fashion of Italian mothers, she knew how to rule her brood of 
 children and command their respect. For a few years he was 
 fond of Josephine, his pretty Creole wife, who was the daugh¬ 
 ter of a French officer of Martinique and the widow of the 
 Vicomte de Beauharnais, who had been executed by Robes¬ 
 pierre when he lost a battle against the Prussians. But 
 the Emperor divorced her when she failed to give him a son 
 and heir and married the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, 
 because it seemed good policy. 
 
 During the siege of Toulon, where he gained great fame 
 as commander of a battery, Napoleon studied Macchiavelli 
 with industrious care. He followed the advice of the Floren¬ 
 tine statesman and never kept his word when it was to his 
 advantage to break it. The word “gratitude” did not occur in 
 his personal dictionary. Neither, to be quite fair, did he expect 
 it from others. He was totally indifferent to human suffering. 
 He executed prisoners of war (in Egypt in 1798) who had 
 been promised their lives, and he quietly allowed his wounded 
 in Syria to be chloroformed when he found it impossible to 
 transport them to his ships. He ordered the Duke of Enghien 
 to be condemned to death by a prejudiced court-martial and to 
 be shot contrary to all law on the sole ground that the 
 “Bourbons needed a warning.” He decreed that those Ger¬ 
 man officers who were made prisoner while fighting for their 
 country’s independence should be shot against the nearest wall, 
 and when Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero, fell into his hands 
 after a most heroic resistance, he was executed like a common 
 traitor. 
 
 In short, when we study the character of the Emperor, we 
 begin to understand those anxious British mothers who used 
 to drive their children to bed with the threat that “Bonaparte, 
 who ate little boys and girls for breakfast, would come and get 
 them if they were not very good.” And yet, having said these 
 many unpleasant things about this strange tyrant, who looked 
 after every other department of his army with the utmost care, 
 but neglected the medical service, and who ruined his uniforms 
 
352 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 with Eau de Cologne because he could not stand the smell of 
 his poor sweating soldiers; having said all these unpleasant 
 things and being fully prepared to add many more, I must 
 confess to a certain lurking feeling of doubt. 
 
 Here I am sitting at a comfortable table loaded heavily 
 with books, with one eye on my typewriter and the other on 
 Licorice the cat, who has a great fondness for carbon paper, 
 and I am telling you that the Emperor Napoleon was a most 
 contemptible person. But should I happen to look out of 
 the window, down upon Seventh Avenue, and should the end¬ 
 less procession of trucks and carts come to a sudden halt, and 
 should I hear the sound of the heavy drums and see the little 
 man on his white horse in his old and much-worn green uni¬ 
 form, then I don’t know, but I am afraid that I would leave 
 my books and the kitten and my home and everything else to 
 follow him wherever he cared to lead. My own grandfather 
 did this and Heaven knows he was not born to be a hero. 
 Millions of other people’s grandfathers did it. They re¬ 
 ceived no reward, but they expected none. They cheerfully 
 gave legs and arms and lives to serve this foreigner, who took 
 them a thousand miles away from their homes and marched 
 them into a barrage of Russian or English or Spanish or 
 Italian or Austrian cannon and stared quietly into space while 
 they were rolling in the agony of death. 
 
 If you ask me for an explanation, I must answer that I 
 have none. I can only guess at one of the reasons. Napoleon 
 was the greatest of actors and the whole European conti¬ 
 nent was his stage. At all times and under all circumstances 
 he knew the precise attitude that would impress the spectators 
 most and he understood what words would make the deepest 
 impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before 
 the backdrop of the Sphinx and the pyramids, or addressed 
 his shivering men on the dew-soaked plains of Italy, made no 
 difference. At all times he was master of the situation. Even 
 at the end, an exile on a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic, 
 a sick man at the mercy of a dull and intolerable British gov¬ 
 ernor, he held the centre of the stage. 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 353 
 
 After the defeat of Waterloo, no one outside of a few 
 trusted friends ever saw the great Emperor. The people of 
 Europe knew that he was living on the island of St. Helena— 
 they knew that a British garrison guarded him day and night 
 —they knew that the British fleet guarded the garrison which 
 guarded the Emperor on his farm at Longwood. But he was 
 never out of the mind of either friend or enemy. When illness 
 and despair had at last taken him away, his silent eyes contin¬ 
 ued to haunt the world. Even to-day he is as much of a force 
 in the life of France as a hundred years ago when people 
 fainted at the mere sight of this sallow-faced man who stabled 
 his horses in the holiest temples of the Russian Kremlin, and 
 who treated the Pope and the mighty ones of this earth as if 
 they were his lackeys. 
 
 To give you a mere outline of his life would demand a 
 couple of volumes. To tell you of his great political reform 
 of the French state, of his new codes of laws which were 
 adopted in most European countries, of his activities in every 
 field of public activity, would take thousands of pages. But 
 I can explain in a few words why he was so successful during 
 the first part of his career and why he failed during the last 
 ten years. From the year 1789 until the year 1804, Napoleon 
 was the great leader of the French revolution. He was not 
 merely fighting for the glory of his own name. He defeated 
 Austria and Italy and England and Russia because he, him¬ 
 self, and his soldiers were the apostles of the new creed of 
 “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality” and were the enemies of 
 the courts while they were the friends of the people. 
 
 But in the year 1804, Napoleon made himself Hereditary 
 Emperor of the French and sent for Pope Pius VII to come 
 and crown him, even as Leo III, in the year 800 had crowned 
 that other great King of the Franks, Charlemagne, whose ex¬ 
 ample was constantly before Napoleon’s eyes. 
 
 Once upon the throne, the old revolutionary chieftain be¬ 
 came an unsuccessful imitation of a Habsburg monarch. He 
 forgot his spiritual Mother, the Political Club of the Jacobins. 
 He ceased to be the defender of the oppressed. He became the 
 
354 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 chief of all the oppressors and kept his shooting squads ready 
 to execute those who dared to oppose his imperial will. No 
 one had shed a tear when in the year 1806 the sad remains of 
 the Holy Roman Empire were carted to the historical dustbin 
 and when the last relic of ancient Roman glory was destroyed 
 by the grandson of an Italian peasant. But when the Napo¬ 
 leonic armies had invaded Spain, had forced the Spaniards to 
 recognise a king whom they detested, had massacred the poor 
 Madrilenes who remained faithful to their old rulers, then 
 public opinion turned against the former hero of Marengo and 
 Austerlitz and a hundred other revolutionary battles. Then 
 and only then, when Napoleon was no longer the hero of the 
 revolution but the personification of all the bad traits of the 
 Old Regime, was it possible for England to give direction to 
 the fast-spreading sentiment of hatred' which was turning all 
 honest men into enemies of the French Emperor. 
 
 The English people from the very beginning had felt 
 deeply disgusted when their newspapers told them the grue¬ 
 some details of the Terror. They had staged their own great 
 revolution (during the reign of Charles I) a century before. 
 It had been a very simple affair compared to the upheaval of 
 Paris. In the eyes of the average Englishman a Jacobin was 
 a monster to be shot at sight and Napoleon was the Chief Devil. 
 The British fleet had blockaded France ever since the year 
 1798. It had spoiled Napoleon’s plan to invade India by way 
 of Egypt and had forced him to beat an ignominious retreat, 
 after his victories along the banks of the Nile. And finally, 
 in the year 1805, England got the chance it had waited for so 
 long. 
 
 Near Cape Trafalgar on the southwestern coast of Spain, 
 Nelson annihilated the Napoleonic fleet, beyond a possible 
 chance of recovery. From that moment on, the Emperor was 
 landlocked. Even so, he would have been able to maintain 
 himself as the recognised ruler of the continent had he under¬ 
 stood the signs of the times and accepted the honourable peace 
 which the powers off ered him. But Napoleon had been blinded 
 by the blaze of his own glory. He would recognise no equals. 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 355 
 
 He could tolerate no rivals. And his hatred turned against 
 Russia, the mysterious land of the endless plains with its inex- 
 haustible supply of cannon-fodder. 
 
 As long as Russia was ruled by Paul I, the half-witted son 
 of Catherine the Great, Napoleon had known how to deal with 
 the situation. But Paul grew more and more irresponsible 
 until his exasperated subjects were obliged to murder him, 
 (lest they all be sent to the Siberian lead-mines) and the son of 
 
 THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW 
 
 Paul, the Emperor Alexander, did not share his father’s affec¬ 
 tion for the usurper whom he regarded as the enemy of man¬ 
 kind, the eternal disturber of the peace. He was a pious man 
 who believed that he had been chosen by God to deliver the 
 world from the Corsican curse. He joined Prussia and Eng¬ 
 land and Austria and he was defeated. He tried five times 
 and five times he failed. In the year 1812 he once more taunted 
 Napoleon until the French Emperor, in a blind rage, vowed 
 that he would dictate peace in Moscow. Then, from far and 
 wide, from Spain and Germany and Holland and Italy and 
 Portugal, unwilling regiments were driven northward, that the 
 
35 6 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 wounded pride of the great Emperor might be duly avenged. 
 
 The rest of the story is common knowledge. After a march 
 of two months, Napoleon reached the Russian capital and es¬ 
 tablished his headquarters in the holy Kremlin. On the night 
 of September 15 of the year 1812, Moscow caught fire. The 
 town burned four days. When the evening of the fifth day 
 came, Napoleon gave the order for the retreat. Two weeks 
 later it began to snow. The army trudged through mud and 
 sleet until November the 26th when the river Berezina was 
 reached. Then the Russian attacks began in all seriousness. 
 The Cossacks swarmed around the “Grande Armee” which 
 was no longer an army but a mob. In the middle of December 
 the first of the survivors began to be seen in the German cities 
 of the East. 
 
 Then there were many rumours of an impending revolt. 
 “The time has come,” the people of Europe said, “to free our¬ 
 selves from this insufferable yoke.” And they began to look 
 for old shotguns which had escaped the eye of the ever-present 
 French spies. But ere they knew what had happened, Napo¬ 
 leon was back with a new army. He had left his defeated sol¬ 
 diers and in his little sleigh had rushed ahead to Paris, making 
 a final appeal for more troops that he might defend the sacred 
 soil of France against foreign invasion. 
 
 Children of sixteen and seventeen followed him when he 
 moved eastward to meet the allied powers. On October 16, 
 18, and 19 of the year 1813, the terrible battle of Leipzig took 
 place where for three days boys in green and boys in blue 
 fought each other until the Elster ran red with blood. On the 
 afternoon of the 17th of October, the massed reserves of Rus¬ 
 sian infantry broke through the French lines and Napoleon 
 fled. 
 
 Back to Paris he went. He abdicated in favour of his small 
 son, but the allied powers insisted that Louis XVIII, the 
 brother of the late king Louis XVI, should occupy the French 
 throne, and surrounded by Cossacks and Uhlans, the dull-eyed 
 Bourbon prince made his triumphal entry into Paris. 
 
 As for Napoleon, he was made the sovereign ruler of the 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 357 
 
 little island of Elba in the Mediterranean where he organised 
 his stable boys into a miniature army and fought battles on a 
 chess board. 
 
 But no sooner had he left France than the people began 
 to realise what they had lost. The last twenty years, however 
 costly, had been a period of great glory. Paris had been the 
 capital of the world. The fat Bourbon king who had learned 
 nothing and had forgotten nothing during the days of his 
 exile disgusted everybody by his indolence. 
 
 On the first of March of the year 1815, when the repre¬ 
 sentatives of the allies were ready to begin the work of unscram¬ 
 bling the map of Europe, Napoleon suddenly landed near 
 Cannes. In less than a week the French army had deserted 
 the Bourbons and had rushed southward to offer their swords 
 and bayonets to the “little Corporal.” Napoleon marched 
 straight to Paris where he arrived on the twentieth of March. 
 This time he was more cautious. He offered peace, but the 
 allies insisted upon war. The whole of Europe arose against 
 the “perfidious Corsican.” Rapidly the Emperor marched 
 northward that he might crush his enemies before they should 
 be able to unite their forces. But Napoleon was no longer his 
 old self. He felt sick. He got tired easily. He slept when he 
 ought to have been up directing the attack of his advance- 
 guard. Besides, he missed many of his faithful old generals. 
 They were dead. 
 
 Early in June his armies entered Belgium. On the 16th 
 of that month he defeated the Prussians under Bliicher. But 
 a subordinate commander failed to destroy the retreating army 
 as he had been ordered to do. 
 
 Two days later, Napoleon met Wellington near Waterloo. 
 It was the 18th of June, a Sunday. At two o’clock of the 
 afternoon, the battle seemed won for the French. At three a 
 speck of dust appeared upon the eastern horizon. Napoleon 
 believed that this meant the approach of his own cavalry who 
 would now turn the English defeat into a rout. At four o’clock 
 he knew better. Cursing and swearing, old Bliicher drove 
 his deathly tired troops into the heart of the fray. The shock 
 
358 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 broke the ranks of the guards. Napoleon had no further re¬ 
 serves. He told his men to save themselves as best they could, 
 and he fled. 
 
 For a second time, he abdicated in favor of his son. Just 
 one hundred days after his escape from Elba, he was making 
 for the coast. He intended to go to America. In the year 
 1803, for a mere song, he had sold the French colony of 
 
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 THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO 
 
 Louisiana (which was in great danger of being captured by 
 the English .) to the young American Republic. “The Ameri¬ 
 cans,” so he said, “w T ill be grateful and will give me a little bit 
 of land and a house where I may spend the last days of my life 
 in peace and quiet.” But the English fleet was watching all 
 French harbours. Caught between the armies of the Allies 
 and the ships of the British, Napoleon had no choice. The 
 Prussians intended to shoot him. The English might be more 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 359 
 
 generous. At Rochefort he waited in the hope that something 
 might turn up. One month after Waterloo, he received orders 
 from the new French government to leave French soil inside 
 of twenty-four hours. Always the tragedian, he wrote a letter 
 to the Prince Regent of England (George III, the king, was 
 in an insane asylum) informing His Royal Highness of his 
 intention to “throw himself upon the mercy of his enemies and 
 like Themistocles, to look for a welcome at the fireside of his 
 foes . . 
 
 NAPOLEON GOES INTO EXILE 
 
 On the 15th of July he went on board the “Bellerophon” 
 and surrendered his sword to Admiral Hotham. At Plymouth 
 he was transferred to the “Northumberland” which carried him 
 to St. Helena. There he spent the last seven years of his 
 life. He tried to write his memoirs, he quarrelled with his 
 keepers and he dreamed of past times. Curiously enough he 
 returned (at least in his imagination) to his original point of 
 departure. He remembered the days when he had fought the 
 battles of the Revolution. He tried to convince himself that 
 he had always been the true friend of those great principles of 
 “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality” which the ragged soldiers 
 of the convention had carried to the ends of the earth. He 
 liked to dwell upon his career as Commander-in-Chief and 
 Consul. He rarely spoke of the Empire. Sometimes he 
 
360 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 thought of his son, the Duke of Reichstadt, the little eagle, 
 who lived in Vienna, where he was treated as a “poor relation” 
 by his young Habsburg cousins, whose fathers had trembled at 
 the very mention of the name of Him. When the end came, 
 he was leading his troops to victory. He ordered Ney to attack 
 with the guards. Then he died. 
 
 But if you want an explanation of this strange career, if 
 you really wish to know how one man could possibly rule so 
 many people for so many years by the sheer force of his will, 
 do not read the books that have been written about him. Their 
 authors either hated the Emperor or loved him. You will 
 learn many facts, but it is more important to “feel history” 
 than to know it. Don’t read, but wait until you have a chance 
 to hear a good artist sing the song called “The Two Grena¬ 
 diers.” The words were written by Heine, the great German 
 poet who lived through the Napoleonic era. The music was 
 composed by Schumann, a German who saw the Emperor, 
 the enemy of his country, whenever he came to visit his im¬ 
 perial father-in-law. The song therefore is the work of two 
 men who had every reason to hate the tyrant. 
 
 Go and hear it. Then you will understand what a thousand 
 volumes could not possibly tell you. 
 
THE HOLY ALLIANCE 
 
 AS SOON AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN SENT TO 
 ST. HELENA THE RULERS WHO SO OFTEN 
 HAD BEEN DEFEATED BY THE HATED 
 “CORSICAN” MET AT VIENNA AND TRIED 
 TO UNDO THE MANY CHANGES THAT HAD 
 BEEN BROUGHT ABOUT BY THE FRENCH 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 The Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their 
 Graces the Dukes, the Ministers Extraordinary and Plenipo¬ 
 tentiary, together with the plain Excellencies and their army 
 of secretaries, servants and hangers-on, whose labours had 
 been so rudely interrupted by the sudden return of the terrible 
 Corsican (now sweltering under the hot sun of St. Helena) 
 went back to their jobs. The victory was duly celebrated with 
 dinners, garden parties and balls at which the new and very 
 shocking “waltz” was danced to the great scandal of the ladies 
 and gentlemen who remembered the minuet of the old Regime. 
 
 For almost a generation they had lived in retirement. At 
 last the danger was over. They were very eloquent upon the 
 subject of the terrible hardships which they had suffered. 
 And they expected to be recompensed for every penny they 
 had lost at the hands of the unspeakable Jacobins who had 
 dared to kill their anointed king, who had abolished wigs and 
 who had discarded the short trousers of the court of Versailles 
 for the ragged pantaloons of the Parisian slums. 
 
 361 
 
362 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 You may think it absurd that I should mention such a 
 detail. But, if you please, the Congress of Vienna was one 
 long succession of such absurdities and for many months the 
 question of “short trousers vs. long trousers” interested the 
 delegates more than the future settlement of the Saxon or 
 Spanish problems. His Majesty the King of Prussia went so 
 far as to order a pair of short ones, that he might give public 
 evidence of his contempt for everything revolutionary. 
 
 Another German potentate, not to be outdone in this noble 
 hatred for the revolution, decreed that all taxes which his sub¬ 
 jects had paid to the French usurper should be paid a second 
 time to the legitimate ruler who had loved his people from afar 
 while they were at the mercy of the Corsican ogre. And so on. 
 From one blunder to another, until one gasps and exclaims 
 “but why in the name of High Heaven did not the people 
 object?” Why not indeed? Because the people were utterly 
 exhausted, were desperate, did not care what happened or how 
 or where or by whom they were ruled, provided there was 
 peace. They were sick and tired of war and revolution and 
 reform. 
 
 In the eighties of the previous century they had all danced 
 around the tree of liberty. Princes had embraced their cooks 
 and Duchesses had danced the Carmagnole with their lackeys 
 in the honest belief that the Millennium of Equality and Fra¬ 
 ternity had at last dawned upon this wicked world. Instead of 
 the Millennium they had been visited by the Revolutionary com¬ 
 missary who had lodged a dozen dirty soldiers in their parlor 
 and had stolen the family plate when he returned to Paris to 
 report to his government upon the enthusiasm with which the 
 “liberated country” had received the Constitution, which the 
 French people had presented to their good neighbours. 
 
 When they had heard how the last outbreak of revolutionary 
 disorder in Paris had been suppressed by a young officer, called 
 Bonaparte, or Buonaparte, who had turned his guns upon the 
 mob, they gave a sigh of relief. A little less liberty, fraternity 
 and equality seemed a very desirable thing. But ere long, the 
 young officer called Buonaparte or Bonaparte became one of 
 
OFF FOR TRAFALGAR 
 
 r _ 
 
THE HOLY ALLIANCE 
 
 363 
 
 the three consuls of the French Republic, then sole consul and 
 finally Emperor. As he was much more efficient than any 
 ruler that had ever been seen before, his hand pressed heavily 
 upon his poor subjects. He showed them no mercy. He im¬ 
 pressed their sons into his armies, he married their daughters 
 to his generals and he took their pictures and their statues to 
 enrich his own museums. He turned the whole of Europe 
 into an armed camp and killed almost an entire generation of 
 men. 
 
 Now he was gone, and the people (except a few professional 
 military men) had but one wish. They wanted to be let alone. 
 For awhile they had been allowed to rule themselves, to vote 
 for mayors and aldermen and judges. The system had been a 
 terrible failure. The new rulers had been inexperienced and 
 extravagant. From sheer despair the people turned to the 
 representative men of the old Regime. “You rule us,” they 
 said, “as you used to do. Tell us what we owe you for taxes 
 and leave us alone. We are busy repairing the damage of the 
 age of liberty.” 
 
 The men who stage-managed the famous congress cer¬ 
 tainly did their best to satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. 
 The Holy Alliance, the main result of the Congress, made the 
 policeman the most important dignitary of the State and held 
 out the most terrible punishment to those who dared criticise a 
 single official act. 
 
 Europe had peace, but it was the peace of the cemetery. 
 
 The three most important men at Vienna were the Em¬ 
 peror Alexander of Russia, Mettemich, who represented the 
 interests of the Austrian house of Habsburg, and Talleyrand, 
 the erstwhile bishop of Autun, who had managed to live 
 through the different changes in the French government by 
 the sheer force of his cunning and his intelligence and who 
 now travelled to the Austrian capital to save for his country 
 whatever could be saved from the Napoleonic ruin. Like the 
 gay young man of the limerick, who never knew when he was 
 slighted, this unbidden guest came to the party and ate just as 
 heartily as if he had been really invited. Indeed, before long, 
 
364 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 THE SPECTRE WHICH FRIGHTENED THE HOLY ALLIANCE 
 
THE HOLY ALLIANCE 
 
 365 
 
 he was sitting at the head of the table entertaining everybody 
 with his amusing stories and gaining the company’s good will 
 by the charm of his manner. 
 
 Before he had been in Vienna twenty-four hours he knew 
 that the allies were divided into two hostile camps. On the 
 one side were Russia, who wanted to take Poland, and Prussia, 
 who wanted to annex Saxony; and on the other side were 
 Austria and England, who were trying to prevent this grab 
 because it was against their own interest that either Prussia or 
 Russia should be able to dominate Europe. Talleyrand played 
 the two sides against each other with great skill and it was due 
 to his efforts that the French people were not made to suffer 
 for the ten years of oppression which Europe had endured at 
 the hands of the Imperial officials. He argued that the French 
 people had been given no choice in the matter. Napoleon had 
 forced them to act at his bidding. But Napoleon was gone and 
 Louis XVIII was on the throne. “Give him a chance,” Talley¬ 
 rand pleaded. And the Allies, glad to see a legitimate king 
 upon the throne of a revolutionary country, obligingly yielded 
 and the Bourbons were given their chance, of which they 
 made such use that they were driven out after fifteen years. 
 
 The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metter- 
 nich, the Austrian prime minister, the leader of the foreign 
 policy of the house of Habsburg. Wenzel Lothar, Prince of 
 Metternich-Winneburg, was exactly what the name suggests. 
 He was a Grand Seigneur, a very handsome gentleman with 
 very fine manners, immensely rich, and very able, but the 
 product of a society which lived a thousand miles away from 
 the sweating multitudes who worked and slaved in the cities 
 and on the farms. As a young man, Metternich had been 
 studying at the University of Strassburg when the French 
 Revolution broke out. Strassburg, the city which gave birth 
 to the Marseillaise, had been a centre of Jacobin activities. 
 Metternich remembered that his pleasant social life had been 
 sadly interrupted, that a lot of incompetent citizens had sud¬ 
 denly been called forth to perform tasks for which they were 
 not fit, that the mob had celebrated the dawn of the new liberty 
 
366 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 by the murder of perfectly innocent persons. He had failed to 
 see the honest enthusiasm of the masses, the ray of hope in the 
 eyes of women and children who carried bread and water to 
 the ragged troops of the Convention, marching through the 
 city on their way to the front and a glorious death for the 
 French Fatherland. 
 
 The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with disgust. 
 It was uncivilised. If there were any fighting to be done it 
 must be done by dashing young men in lovely uniforms, charg¬ 
 ing across the green fields on well-groomed horses. But to 
 turn an entire country into an evil-smelling armed camp where 
 tramps were overnight promoted to be generals, that was both 
 wicked and senseless. “See what came of all your fine ideas,” 
 he would say to the French diplomats whom he met at a quiet 
 little dinner given by one of the innumerable Austrian grand- 
 dukes. “You wanted liberty, equality and fraternity and you 
 got Napoleon. How much better it would have been if you 
 had been contented with the existing order of things.” And 
 he would explain his system of “stability.” He would advo¬ 
 cate a return to the normalcy of the good old days before the 
 war, when everybody was happy and nobody talked nonsense 
 about “everybody being as good as everybody else.” In this 
 attitude he was entirely sincere and as he was an able man of 
 great strength of will and a tremendous power of persuasion, 
 he was one of the most dangerous enemies of the Revolutionary 
 ideas. He did not die until the year 1859, and he therefore 
 lived long enough to see the complete failure of all his policies 
 when they were swept aside by the revolution of the year 1848. 
 He then found himself the most hated man of Europe and 
 more than once ran the risk of being lynched by angry crowds 
 of outraged citizens. But until the very last, he remained stead¬ 
 fast in his belief that he had done the right thing. 
 
 He had always been convinced that people preferred peace 
 to liberty and he had tried to give them what was best for them. 
 And in ail fairness, it ought to be said that his efforts to estab¬ 
 lish universal peace were fairly successful. The great powers 
 did not fly at each other’s throat for almost forty years, indeed 
 
THE HOLY ALLIANCE 
 
 867 
 
 not until the Crimean war between Russia and England, 
 France and Italy and Turkey, in the year 1854. That means 
 a record for the European continent. 
 
 The third hero of this waltzing congress was the Emperor 
 Alexander. He had been brought up at the court of his grand- 
 
 THE REAL CONGRESS OF VIENNA 
 
 mother, the famous Catherine the Great. Between the lessons 
 of this shrewd old woman, who taught him to regard the glory 
 of Russia as the most important thing in life, and those of his 
 private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau, who 
 filled his mind with a general love of humanity, the boy grew 
 up to be a strange mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental 
 revolutionist. He had suffered great indignities during the 
 life of his crazy father, Paul I. He had been obliged to wit- 
 
S68 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ness the wholesale slaughter of the Napoleonic battle-fields. 
 Then the tide had turned. His armies had won the day for the 
 Allies. Russia had become the saviour of Europe and the Tsar 
 of this mighty people was acclaimed as a half-god who would 
 cure the world of its many ills. 
 
 But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know 
 men and women as Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. 
 He did not understand the strange game of diplomacy. He 
 was vain (who would not be under the circumstances?) and 
 loved to hear the applause of the multitude and soon he had 
 become the main “attraction” of the Congress while Metter¬ 
 nich and Talleyrand and Castlereagh (the very able British 
 representative) sat around a table and drank a bottle of Tokay 
 and decided what was actually going to be done. They needed 
 Russia and therefore they were very polite to Alexander, but 
 the less he had personally to do with the actual work of the 
 Congress, the better they were pleased. They even encouraged 
 his plans for a Holy Alliance that he might be fully occupied 
 while they were engaged upon the work at hand. 
 
 Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties 
 and meet people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay 
 but there was a very different element in his character. He 
 tried to forget something which he could not forget. On the 
 night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801 he had been sitting 
 in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg, waiting for 
 the news of his father’s abdication. But Paul had refused to 
 sign the document which the drunken officers had placed be¬ 
 fore him on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf 
 around his neck and had strangled him to death. Then they 
 had gone downstairs to tell Alexander that he was Emperor of 
 all the Russian lands. 
 
 The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar 
 who was a very sensitive person. He had been educated in 
 the school of the great French philosophers who did not be¬ 
 lieve in God but in Human Reason. But Reason alone could 
 not satisfy the Emperor in his predicament. He began to 
 hear voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which 
 
THE HOLY ALLIANCE 
 
 369 
 
 he could square himself with his conscience. He became very 
 pious and began to take an interest in mysticism, that strange 
 love of the mysterious and the unknown which is as old as the 
 temples of Thebes and Babylon. 
 
 The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era 
 had influenced the character of the people of that day in a 
 strange way. Men and women who had lived through twenty 
 years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite normal. They 
 jumped whenever the door-bell rang. It might mean the news 
 of the “death on the field of honour” of an only son. The 
 phrases about “brotherly love” and “liberty” of the Revolu¬ 
 tion were hollow words in the ears of sorely stricken peasants. 
 They clung to anything that might give them a new hold on 
 the terrible problems of life. In their grief and misery they 
 were easily imposed upon by a large number of impostors 
 who posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine 
 which they dug out of the more obscure passages of the Book 
 of Revelations. 
 
 In the year 1814, Alexander, who had already consulted a 
 large number of w T onder-doctors, heard of a new seeress who 
 was foretelling the coming doom of the world and was exhort¬ 
 ing people to repent ere it be too late. The Baroness von 
 Kriidener, the lady in question, was a Russian woman of uncer¬ 
 tain age and similar reputation who had been the wife of a 
 Russian diplomat in the days of the Emperor Paul. She had 
 squandered her husband’s money and had disgraced him by 
 her strange love affairs. She had lived a very dissolute life 
 until her nerves had given way and for a while she was not in 
 her right mind. Then she had been converted by the sight of 
 the sudden death of a friend. Thereafter she despised all 
 gaiety. She confessed her former sins to her shoemaker, a 
 pious Moravian brother, a follower of the old reformer John 
 Huss, who had been burned for his heresies by the Council of 
 Constance in the year 1415. 
 
 The next ten years the Baroness spent in Germany making 
 a specialty of the “conversion” of kings and princes. To con¬ 
 vince Alexander, the Saviour of Europe, of the error of his 
 
370 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ways was the greatest ambition of her life. And as Alexander, 
 in his misery, was willing to listen to anybody who brought him 
 a ray of hope, the interview was easily arranged. On the eve¬ 
 ning of the fourth of June of the year 1815, she was admitted 
 to the tent of the Emperor. She found him reading his Bible. 
 We do not know what she said to Alexander, but when she 
 left him three hours later, he was bathed in tears, and vowed 
 that “at last his soul had found peace.” From that day on the 
 Baroness was his faithful companion and his spiritual adviser. 
 She followed him to Paris and then to Vienna and the time 
 which Alexander did not spend dancing he spent at the 
 Kriidener prayer-meetings. 
 
 You may ask why I tell you this story in such great detail? 
 Are not the social changes of the nineteenth century of greater 
 importance than the career of an ill-balanced woman who had 
 better be forgotten? Of course they are, but there exist any 
 number of books which will tell you of these other things with 
 great accuracy and in great detail. I want you to learn some¬ 
 thing more from this history than a mere succession of facts. 
 I want you to approach all historical events in a frame of mind 
 that will take nothing for granted. Don’t be satisfied with 
 the mere statement that “such and such a thing happened then 
 and there.” Try to discover the hidden motives behind every 
 action and then you will understand the world around you 
 much better and you will have a greater chance to help others, 
 which (when all is said and done) is the only truly satisfac¬ 
 tory way of living. 
 
 I do not want you to think of the Holy Alliance as a piece 
 of paper which was signed in the year 1815 and lies dead and 
 forgotten somewhere in the archives of state. It may be for¬ 
 gotten but it is by no means dead. The Holy Alliance was 
 directly responsible for the promulgation of the Monroe 
 Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine of America for the Ameri¬ 
 cans has a very distinct bearing upon your own life. That is 
 the reason why I want you to know exactly how this document 
 happened to come into existence and what the real motives were 
 
THE HOLY ALLIANCE 371 
 
 underlying this outward manifestation of piety and Christian 
 devotion to duty. 
 
 The Holy Alliance was the joint labour of an unfortunate 
 man who had suffered a terrible mental shock and who was 
 trying to pacify his much-disturbed soul, and of an ambitious 
 w T oman who after a wasted life had lost her beauty and her 
 attraction and who satisfied her vanity and her desire for noto¬ 
 riety by assuming the role of self-appointed Messiah of a 
 new and strange creed. I am not giving away any secrets 
 when I tell you these details. Such sober minded people as 
 Castlereagh, Metternich and Talleyrand fully understood 
 the limited abilities of the sentimental Baroness. It would have 
 been easy for Metternich to send her back to her German 
 estates. A few lines to the almighty commander of the imperial 
 police and the thing was done. 
 
 But France and England and Austria depended upon the 
 good-will of Russia. They could not afford to offend Alex¬ 
 ander. And they tolerated the silly old Baroness because they 
 had to. And while they regarded the Holy Alliance as utter 
 rubbish and not worth the paper upon which it was written, 
 they listened patiently to the Tsar when he read them the first 
 rough draft of this attempt to create the Brotherhood of Men 
 upon a basis of the Holy Scriptures. For this is what the 
 Holy Alliance tried to do, and the signers of the document 
 solemnly declared that they would “in the administration of 
 their respective states and in their political relations with every 
 other government take for their sole guide the precepts of that 
 Holy Religion, namely the precepts of Justice, Christian 
 Charity and Peace, which far from being applicable only to 
 private concerns must have an immediate influence on the 
 councils of princes, and must guide all their steps as being the 
 only means of consolidating human institutions and remedying 
 their imperfections.” They then proceeded to promise each 
 other that they would remain united “by the bonds of a true 
 and indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as 
 fellow-countrymen, they would on all occasions and in all places 
 
372 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 lend each other aid and assistance.” And more words to the 
 same effect. 
 
 Eventually the Holy Alliance was signed by the Emperor 
 of Austria, who did not understand a word of it. It was signed 
 by the Bourbons who needed the friendship of Napoleon’s old 
 enemies. It was signed by the King of Prussia, who hoped to 
 gain Alexander for his plans for a “greater Prussia,” and by 
 all the little nations of Europe who were at the mercy of Rus¬ 
 sia. England never signed, because Castlereagh thought the 
 whole thing buncombe. The Pope did not sign because he 
 resented this interference in his business by a Greek-Orthodox 
 and a Protestant. And the Sultan did not sign because he 
 never heard of it. 
 
 The general mass of the European people, however, soon 
 were forced to take notice. Behind the hollow phrases of the 
 Holy Alliance stood the armies of the Quintuple Alliance 
 which Metternich had created among the great powers. These 
 armies meant business. They let it be known that the peace 
 of Europe must not be disturbed by the so-called liberals who 
 were in reality nothing but disguised Jacobins, and hoped for 
 a return of the revolutionary days. The enthusiasm for the 
 great wars of liberation of the years 1812, 1813, 1814 and 
 1815 had begun to wear off. It had been followed by a sincere 
 belief in the coming of a happier day. The soldiers who had 
 borne the brunt of the battle wanted peace and they said so. 
 
 But they did not want the sort of peace which the Holy 
 Alliance and the Council of the European powers had now 
 bestowed upon them. They cried that they had been betrayed. 
 But they were careful lest they be heard by a secret-police spy. 
 The reaction was victorious. It was a reaction caused by men 
 who sincerely believed that their methods were necessary for 
 the good of humanity. But it was just as hard to bear as if 
 their intentions had been less kind. And it caused a great deal 
 of unnecessary suffering and greatly retarded the orderly 
 progress of political development. 
 
THE GREAT REACTION 
 
 THEY TRIED TO ASSURE THE WORLD AN ERA 
 OF UNDISTURBED PEACE BY SUPPRESS¬ 
 ING ALL NEW IDEAS. THEY MADE THE 
 POLICE-SPY THE HIGHEST FUNCTIONARY 
 IN THE STATE AND SOON THE PRISONS 
 OF ALL COUNTRIES WERE FILLED WITH 
 THOSE WHO CLAIMED THAT PEOPLE 
 HAVE THE RIGHT TO GOVERN THEM¬ 
 SELVES AS THEY SEE FIT 
 
 To undo the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood 
 was almost impossible. Age-old fences had been washed away. 
 The palaces of two score dynasties had been damaged to such 
 an extent that they had to be condemned as uninhabitable. 
 Other royal residences had been greatly enlarged at the ex¬ 
 pense of less fortunate neighbours. Strange odds and ends 
 of revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the receding 
 waters and could not be dislodged without danger to the entire 
 community. But the political engineers of the Congress did 
 the best they could and this is what they accomplished. 
 
 France had disturbed the peace of the world for so many 
 years that people had come to fear that country almost in¬ 
 stinctively. The Bourbons, through the mouth of Talleyrand, 
 had promised to be good, but the Hundred Days had taught 
 Europe what to expect should Napoleon manage to escape for 
 a second time. The Dutch Republic, therefore, was changed 
 
 373 
 
374 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 into a Kingdom, and Belgium (which had not joined the Dutch 
 struggle for independence in the sixteenth century and since 
 then had been part of the Habsburg domains, first under Span¬ 
 ish rule and thereafter under Austrian rule) was made part 
 of this new kingdom of the Netherlands. Nobody wanted this 
 union either in the Protestant North or in the Catholic South, 
 but no questions were asked. It seemed good for the peace 
 of Europe and that was the main consideration. 
 
 Poland had hoped for great things because a Pole, Prince 
 Adam Czartoryski, was one of the most intimate friends of 
 Tsar Alexander and had been his constant advisor during the 
 war and at the Congress of Vienna. But Poland was made a 
 semi-independent part of Russia with Alexander as her king. 
 This solution pleased no one and caused much bitter feeling 
 and three revolutions. 
 
 Denmark, which had remained a faithful ally of Napoleon 
 until the end, was severely punished. Seven years before, an 
 English fleet had sailed down the Kattegat and without a 
 declaration of war or any warning had bombarded Copenhagen 
 and had taken away the Danish fleet, lest it be of value to 
 Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna went one step further. 
 It took Norway (which since the union of Calmar of the year 
 1397 had been united with Denmark) away from Denmark 
 and gave it to Charles XIV of Sweden as a reward for his be¬ 
 trayal of Napoleon, who had set him up in the king business. 
 This Swedish king, curiously enough, was a former French gen¬ 
 eral by the name of Bernadotte,who had come to S weden as one 
 of Napolean’s adjutants, and had been invited to the throne of 
 that good country when the last of the rulers of the house of 
 Hollstein-Gottorp had died without leaving either son or 
 daughter. From 1815 until 1844 he ruled his adopted country 
 (the language of which he never learned) with great ability. He 
 was a clever man and enjoyed the respect of both his Swedish 
 and his Norwegian subjects, but he did not succeed in joining 
 two countries which nature and history had put asunder. The 
 dual Scandinavian state was never a success and in 1905, 
 Norway, in a most peaceful and orderly manner, set up as an 
 
THE GREAT REACTION 
 
 375 
 
 independent kingdom and the Swedes bade her “good speed” 
 and very wisely let her go her own way. 
 
 The Italians, who since the days of the Renaissance had 
 been at the mercy of a long series of invaders, also had put 
 great hopes in General Bonaparte. The Emperor Napoleon, 
 however, had grievously disappointed them. Instead of the 
 United Italy which the people wanted, they had been divided 
 into a number of little principalities, duchies, republics and 
 the Papal State, which (next to Naples) was the worst gov¬ 
 erned and most miserable region of the entire peninsula. The 
 Congress of Vienna abolished a few of the Napoleonic repub¬ 
 lics and in their place resurrected several old principalities 
 which were given to deserving members, both male and female, 
 of the Habsburg family. 
 
 The poor Spaniards, who had started the great nationalistic 
 revolt against Napoleon, and who had sacrificed the best blood 
 of the country for their king, were punished severely when the 
 Congress allowed His Majesty to return to his domains. This 
 vicious creature, known as Ferdinand VII, had spent the last 
 four years of his life as a prisoner of Napoleon. He had im¬ 
 proved his days by knitting garments for the statues of his 
 favourite patron saints. He celebrated h:s return by re-intro¬ 
 ducing the Inquisition and the torture-chamber, both of which 
 had been abolished by the Revolution. He was a disgusting 
 person, despised as much by his subjects as by his four wives, 
 but the Holy Alliance maintained him upon his legitimate 
 throne and all efforts of the decent Spaniards to get rid of this 
 curse and make Spain a constitutional kingdom ended in 
 bloodshed and executions. 
 
 Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when 
 the royal family had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The coun¬ 
 try had been used as a base of supply for the armies of 
 Wellington during the Peninsula war, which lasted from 1808 
 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued to be a sort of 
 British province until the house of Braganza returned to the 
 throne, leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro 
 as Emperor of Brazil, the only American Empire which lasted 
 
376 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 for more than a few years, and which came to an end in 1889 
 when the country became a republic. 
 
 In the east, nothing was done to improve the terrible con¬ 
 ditions of both the Slavs and the Greeks who were still subjects 
 of the Sultan. In the year 1804 Black George, a Servian 
 swineherd, (the founder of the Karageorgevich dynasty) had 
 started a revolt against the Turks, but he had been defeated 
 by his enemies and had been murdered by one of his supposed 
 friends, the rival Servian leader, called Milosh Obrenovich, 
 (who became the founder of the Obrenovich dynasty ) and the 
 Turks had continued to be the undisputed masters of the 
 Balkans. 
 
 The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence, two 
 thousand years before, had been subjects of the Macedonians, 
 the Romans, the Venetians and the Turks, had hoped that their 
 countryman, Capo d’lstria, a native of Corfu, and together 
 with Czartoryski, the most intimate personal friend of 
 Alexander, would do something for them. But the Congress 
 of Vienna was not interested in Greeks, but was very much 
 interested in keeping all “legitimate” monarchs, Christian, 
 Moslem and otherwise, upon their respective thrones. There¬ 
 fore nothing was done. 
 
 The last, but perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress 
 was the treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the 
 Thirty Years War had not only destroyed the prosperity of the 
 country, but had turned it into a hopeless political rubbish 
 heap, consisting of a couple of kingdoms, a few grand-duchies, 
 a large number of duchies and hundreds of margravates, prin¬ 
 cipalities, baronies, electorates, free cities and free villages, 
 ruled by the strangest assortment of potentates that was ever 
 seen off the comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had 
 changed this when he created a strong Prussia, but this state 
 had not survived him by many years.. 
 
 Napoleon had blue-penciled the demand for independence 
 of most of these little countries, and only fifty-two out of a 
 total of more than three hundred had survived the year 1806. 
 During the years of the great struggle for independence, many 
 
THE GREAT REACTION 
 
 377 
 
 a young soldier had dreamed of a new Fatherland that should 
 be strong and united. But there can be no union without a 
 strong leadership, and who was to be this leader? 
 
 There were five kingdoms in the German speaking lands. 
 The rulers of two of these, Austria and Prussia, were kings by 
 the Grace of God. The rulers of three others, Bavaria, Saxony 
 and Wurtemberg, were kings by the Grace of Napoleon, and 
 as they had been the faithful henchmen of the Emperor, their 
 patriotic credit with the other Germans was therefore not very 
 good. 
 
 The Congress had established a new German Confedera¬ 
 tion, a league of thirty-eight sovereign states, under the chair¬ 
 manship of the King of Austria, who was now known as the 
 Emperor of Austria. It was the sort of make-shift arrange¬ 
 ment which satisfied no one. It is true that a German Diet, 
 which met in the old coronation city of Frankfort, had been 
 created to discuss matters of “common policy and importance.” 
 But in this Diet, thirty-eight delegates represented thirty-eight 
 different interests and as no decision could be taken without a 
 unanimous vote (a parliamentary rule which had in previous 
 centuries ruined the mighty kingdom of Poland), the famous 
 German Confederation became very soon the laughing stock 
 of Europe and the politics of the old Empire began to resemble 
 those of our Central American neighbours in the forties and 
 the fifties of the last century. 
 
 It was terribly humiliating to the people who had sacrificed 
 everything for a national ideal. But the Congress was not 
 interested in the private feelings of “subjects,” and the debate 
 was closed. 
 
 Did anybody object? Most assuredly. As soon as the first 
 feeling of hatred against Napoleon had quieted down—as soon 
 as the enthusiasm of the great war had subsided—as soon as 
 the people came to a full realisation of the crime that had been 
 committed in the name of “peace and stability” they began to 
 murmur. They even made threats of open revolt. But what 
 could they do? They were powerless. They were at the mercy 
 
S78 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of the most pitiless and efficient police system the world had 
 ever seen. 
 
 The members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sin¬ 
 cerely believed that “the Revolutionary Principle had led to 
 the criminal usurpation of the throne by the former emperor 
 Napoleon.” They felt that they were called upon to eradicate 
 the adherents of the so-called “French ideas” just as Philip II 
 had only followed the voice of his conscience when he burned 
 Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the six¬ 
 teenth century a man who did not believe in the divine right 
 of the Pope to rule his subjects as he saw fit was a “heretic” 
 and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century, on the continent of Eu¬ 
 rope, a man who did not believe in the divine right of his king to 
 rule him as he or his Prime Minister saw fit, was a “heretic,” and 
 it was the duty of all loyal citizens to denounce him to the near¬ 
 est policeman and see that he got punished. 
 
 But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in 
 the school of Napoleon and they performed their task much 
 better than it had been done in the year 1517. The period 
 between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was the great era of 
 the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in pal¬ 
 aces and they were to be found in the lowest gin-shops. They 
 peeped through the key-holes of the ministerial cabinet and 
 they listened to the conversations of the people who were taking 
 the air on the benches of the Municipal Park. They guarded 
 the frontier so that no one might leave without a duly vis£d 
 passport and they inspected all packages, that no books with 
 dangerous “French ideas” should enter the realm of their 
 Royal masters. They sat among the students in the lecture 
 hall and woe to the Professor who uttered a word against the 
 existing order of things. They followed the little boys and 
 girls on their way to church lest they play hookey. 
 
 In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. 
 The church had suffered greatly during the days of the revolu¬ 
 tion. The church property had been confiscated. Several 
 priests had been killed and the generation that had learned its 
 
THE GREAT REACTION 
 
 379 
 
 cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the other French 
 philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason when 
 the Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of 
 God in October of the year 1793. The priests had followed the 
 “4migr£s” into their long exile. Now they returned in the 
 wake of the allied armies and they set to work with a ven¬ 
 geance. 
 
 Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their 
 former labours of educating the young. Their order had been 
 a little too successful in its fight against the enemies of the 
 church. It had established “provinces” in every part of the 
 world, to teach the natives the blessings of Christianity, but 
 soon it had developed into a regular trading company which 
 was for ever interfering with the civil authorities. During the 
 reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great reforming minister 
 of Portugal, they had been driven out of the Portuguese lands 
 and in the year 1773 at the request of most of the Catholic 
 powers of Europe, the order had been suppressed by Pope 
 Clement XIV. Now they were back on the job, and preached 
 the principles of “obedience” and “love for the legitimate dyn¬ 
 asty” to children whose parents had hired shopwindows that 
 they might laugh at Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold 
 which was to end her misery. 
 
 But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were 
 not a whit better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, 
 the poets and the writers who had preached a holy war upon the 
 usurper, were now branded as dangerous “demagogues.” Their 
 houses were searched. Their letters were read. They were 
 obliged to report to the police at regular intervals and give an 
 account of themselves. The Prussian drill master was let loose 
 in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a party of 
 students celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with 
 noisy but harmless festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prus¬ 
 sian bureaucrats had visions of an imminent revolution. When 
 a theological student, more honest than intelligent, killed a 
 Russian government spy who was operating in Germany, the 
 
380 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 universities were placed under police-supervision and profes¬ 
 sors were jailed or dismissed without any form of trial. 
 
 Russia, of course, was even more absurd in these anti-revo¬ 
 lutionary activities. Alexander had recovered from his attack 
 of piety. He was gradually drifting toward melancholia. He 
 well knew his own limited abilities and understood how at 
 Vienna he had been the victim both of Metternich and the 
 Krudener woman. More and more he turned his back upon the 
 west and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in 
 Constantinople, the old holy city that had been the first teacher 
 of the Slavs. The older he grew, the harder he worked and the 
 less he was able to accomplish. And while he sat in his study, 
 his ministers turned the whole of Russia into a land of mili¬ 
 tary barracks. 
 
 It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened 
 this description of the Great Reaction. But it is just as well 
 that you should have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was 
 not the first time that an attempt had been made to set the 
 clock of history back. The result was the usual one. 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 THE LOVE OF NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, 
 HOWEVER WAS TOO STRONG TO BE DE¬ 
 STROYED IN THIS WAY. THE SOUTH 
 AMERICANS WERE THE FIRST TO REBEL 
 AGAINST THE REACTIONARY MEASURES 
 OF THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA, GREECE 
 AND BELGIUM AND SPAIN AND A LARGE 
 NUMBER OF OTHER COUNTRIES OF THE 
 EUROPEAN CONTINENT FOLLOWED SUIT 
 AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS 
 FILLED WITH THE RUMOUR OF MANY 
 WARS OF INDEPENDENCE 
 
 It will serve no good purpose to say “if only the Congress 
 of Vienna had done such and such a thing instead of taking 
 such and such a course, the history of Europe in the nineteenth 
 century would have been different.” The Congress of Vienna 
 was a gathering of men who had just passed through a great 
 revolution and through twenty years of terrible and almost 
 continuous warfare. They came together for the purpose of 
 giving Europe that “peace and stability” which they thought 
 that the people needed and wanted. They were what we call 
 reactionaries. They sincerely believed in the inability of the 
 mass of the people to rule themselves. They re-arranged the 
 map of Europe in such a way as seemed to promise the greatest 
 possibility of a lasting success. They failed, but not through 
 
 m 
 
382 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 any premeditated wickedness on their part. They were, for the 
 greater part, men of the old school who remembered the happier 
 days of their quiet youth and ardently wished a return of that 
 blessed period. They failed to recognise the strong hold which 
 many of the revolutionary principles had gained upon the peo¬ 
 ple of the European continent. That was a misfortune but 
 hardly a sin. But one of the things which the French Revolu¬ 
 tion had taught not only Europe but America as well, was the 
 right of people to their own “nationality.” 
 
 Napoleon, who respected nothing and nobody, was utterly 
 ruthless in his dealing with national and patriotic aspirations. 
 But the early revolutionary generals had proclaimed the new 
 doctrine that “nationality was not a matter of political fron¬ 
 tiers or round skulls and broad noses, but a matter of the 
 heart and soul.” While they were teaching the French children 
 the greatness of the French nation, they encouraged Spaniards 
 and Hollanders and Italians to do the same thing. Soon 
 these people, who all shared Rousseau’s belief in the superior 
 virtues of Original Man, began to dig into their past and found, 
 buried beneath the ruins of the feudal system, the bones of the 
 mighty races of which they supposed themselves the feeble 
 descendants. 
 
 The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of the 
 great historical discoveries. Everywhere historians were busy 
 publishing mediaeval charters and early mediaeval chronicles 
 and in every country the result was a new pride in the old 
 fatherland. A great deal of this sentiment was based upon the 
 wrong interpretation of historical facts. But in practical poli¬ 
 tics, it does not matter what is true, but everything depends 
 upon what the people believe to be true. And in most countries 
 both the kings and their subjects firmly believed in the glory 
 and fame of their ancestors. 
 
 The Congress of Vienna was not inclined to be sentimental. 
 Their Excellencies divided the map of Europe according to the 
 best interests of half a dozen dynasties and put “national aspi¬ 
 rations” upon the Index, or list of forbidden books, together 
 with all other dangerous “French doctrines.” 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 383 
 
 But history is no respecter of Congresses. For some rea¬ 
 son or other (it may be an historical law, which thus far has 
 escaped the attention of the scholars) “nations” seemed to be 
 necessary for the orderly development of human society and 
 the attempt to stem this tide was quite as unsuccessful as the 
 Metternichian effort to prevent people from thinking. 
 
 Curiously enough the first trouble began in a very distant 
 part of the world, in South America. The Spanish colonies 
 of that continent had been enjoying a period of relative inde¬ 
 pendence during the many years of the great Napoleonic wars. 
 They had even remained faithful to their king when he was 
 taken prisoner by the French Emperor and they had refused 
 to recognise Joseph Bonaparte, who had in the year 1808 been 
 made King of Spain by order of his brother. 
 
 Indeed, the only part of America to get very much upset 
 by the Revolution was the island of Haiti, the Espagnola of 
 Columbus’ first trip. Here in the year 1791 the French Con¬ 
 vention, in a sudden outburst of love and human brotherhood, 
 had bestowed upon their black brethren all the privileges hither¬ 
 to enjoyed by their white masters. Just as suddenly they had 
 repented of this step, but the attempt to undo the original 
 promise led to many years of terrible warfare between General 
 Leclerc, the brother-in-law of Napoleon, and Toussaint l’Ou- 
 verture, the negro chieftain. In the year 1801, Toussaint was 
 asked to visit Leclerc and discuss terms of peace. He received 
 the solemn promise that he would not be molested. He trusted 
 his white adversaries, was put on board a ship and shortly 
 afterwards died in a French prison. But the negroes gained 
 their independence all the same and founded a Republic. Inci¬ 
 dentally they were of great help to the first great South 
 American patriot in his efforts to deliver his native country 
 from the Spanish yoke. 
 
 Simon Bolivar, a native of Caracas in Venezuela, born in 
 the year 1783, had been educated in Spain, had visited Paris 
 where he had seen the Revolutionary government at work, had 
 lived for a while in the United States and had returned to his 
 native land where the widespread discontent against Spain, 
 
984 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the mother country, was beginning to take a definite form. 
 In the year 1811, Venezuela declared its independence and 
 Bolivar became one of the revolutionary generals. Within 
 two months, the rebels were defeated and Bolivar fled. 
 
 For the next five years he was the leader of an apparently 
 lost cause. He sacrificed all his wealth and he would not have 
 been able to begin his final and successful expedition without 
 the support of the President of Haiti. Thereafter the revolt 
 spread all over South America and soon it appeared that Spain 
 was not able to suppress the rebellion unaided. She asked for 
 the support of the Holy Alliance. 
 
 This step greatly worried England. The British shippers 
 had succeeded the Dutch as the Common Carriers of the world 
 and they expected to reap heavy profits from a declaration of 
 independence on the part of all South America. They had 
 hopes that the United States of America would interfere but 
 the Senate had no such plans and in the House, too, there were 
 many voices which declared that Spain ought to be given a 
 free hand. 
 
 Just then, there was a change of ministers in England. 
 The Whigs went out and the Tories came in. George Canning 
 became secretary of State. He dropped a hint that England 
 would gladly back up the American government with all the 
 might of her fleet, if said government would declare its disap¬ 
 proval of the plans of the Holy Alliance in regard to the 
 rebellious colonies of the southern continent. President Mon¬ 
 roe thereupon, on the 2nd of December of the year 1828, ad¬ 
 dressed Congress and stated that: “America would consider 
 any attempt on the part of the allied powers to extend their 
 system to any portion of this western hemisphere as dangerous 
 to our peace and safety,” and gave warning that “the American 
 government would consider such action on the part of the 
 Holy Alliance as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition 
 toward the United States.” Four weeks later, the text of the 
 “Monroe Doctrine” was printed in the English newspapers and 
 the members of the Holy Alliance were forced to make their 
 choice. 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 385 
 
 Metternich hesitated. Personally he would have been will¬ 
 ing to risk the displeasure of the United States (which had al¬ 
 lowed both its army and navy to fall into neglect since the end 
 
 THE MONROE DOCTRINE 
 
386 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of the Anglo-American war of the year 1812.) But Canning’s 
 threatening attitude and trouble on the continent forced him 
 to be careful. The expedition never took place and South 
 Aonerica and Mexico gained their independence. 
 
 As for the troubles on the continent of Europe, they were 
 coming fast and furious. The Holy Alliance had sent French 
 troops to Spain to act as guardians of the peace in the year 
 1820. Austrian troops had been used for a similar purpose in 
 Italy when the “Carbonari” (the secret society of the Charcoal 
 Burners) were making propaganda for a united Italy and had 
 caused a rebellion against the unspeakable Ferdinand of 
 Naples. 
 
 Bad news also came from Russia where the death of Alex¬ 
 ander had been the sign for a revolutionary outbreak in St. 
 Petersburg, a short but bloody upheaval, the so-called Deka- 
 berist revolt (because it took place m December,) which ended 
 with the hanging of a large number of good patriots who had 
 been disgusted by the reaction of Alexander’s last years and 
 had tried to give Russia a constitutional form of government. 
 
 But worse was to follow. Metternich had tried to assure 
 himself of the continued support of the European courts by a 
 series of conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle, at Troppau, at 
 Laibach, and finally at Verona. The delegates from the 
 different powers duly travelled to these agreeable watering 
 places where the Austrian prime minister used to spend 
 his summers. They always promised to do their best 
 to suppress revolt but they were none too certain of their 
 success. The spirit of the people was beginning to be ugly and 
 especially in France the position of the king was by no means 
 satisfactory. 
 
 The real trouble however began in the Balkans, the gate¬ 
 way to western Europe through which the invaders of that 
 continent had passed since the beginning of time. The first 
 outbreak was in Moldavia, the ancient Roman province of 
 Dacia which had been cut off from the Empire in the third 
 century. Since then, it had been a lost land, a sort of Atlantis, 
 where the people had continued to speak the old Roman tongue 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 387 
 
 and still called themselves Romans and their country Roumania. 
 Here in the year 1821, a young Greek, Prince Alexander 
 Ypsilanti, began a revolt against the Turks. He told his fob 
 lowers that they could count upon the support of Russia. But 
 Metternich’s fast couriers were soon on their way to St. Peters¬ 
 burg and the Tsar, entirely persuaded by the Austrian argu¬ 
 ments in favor of “peace and stability,” refused to help. Ypsil¬ 
 anti was forced to flee to Austria where he spent the next seven 
 years in prison. 
 
 In the same year, 1821, trouble began in Greece. Since 
 1815 a secret society of Greek patriots had been preparing 
 the way for a revolt. Suddenly they hoisted the flag of inde¬ 
 pendence in the Morea (the ancient Peloponnesus) and drove 
 the Turkish garrisons away. The Turks answered in the usual 
 fashion. They took the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, 
 who was regarded as their Pope both by the Greeks and by 
 many Russians, and they hanged him on Easter Sunday of the 
 year 1821, together with a number of his bishops. The Greeks 
 came back with a massacre of all the Mohammedans in 
 Tripolitsa, the capital of the Morea and the Turks retaliated 
 by an attack upon the island of Chios, where they murdered 
 25,000 Christians and sold 45,000 others as slaves into Asia and 
 Egypt. 
 
 Then the Greeks appealed to the European courts, but 
 Metternich told them in so many words that they could “stew 
 in their own grease,” (I am not trying to make a pun, but I 
 am quoting His Serene Highness who informed the Tsar that 
 this “fire of revolt ought to burn itself out beyond the pale 
 of civilisation”) and the frontiers were closed to those volun¬ 
 teers who wished to go to the rescue of the patriotic Hellenes. 
 Their cause seemed lost. At the request of Turkey, an Egyp¬ 
 tian army was landed in the Morea and soon the Turkish flag 
 was again flying from the Acropolis, the ancient stronghold of 
 Athens. The Egyptian army then pacified the country “a la 
 Turque,” and Metternich followed the proceedings with quiet 
 interest, awaiting the day when this “attempt against the peace 
 of Europe” should be a thing of the past. 
 
388 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Once more it was England which upset his plans. The 
 greatest glory of England does not lie in her vast colonial 
 possessions, in her wealth or her navy, but in the quiet hero¬ 
 ism and independence of her average citizen. The Englishman 
 obeys the law because he knows that respect for the rights of 
 others marks the difference between a dog-kennel and civilised 
 society. But he does not recognize the right of others to inter¬ 
 fere with his freedom of thought. If his country does some¬ 
 thing which he believes to be wrong, he gets up and says so 
 and the government which he attacks will respect him and will 
 give him full protection against the mob which to-day, as in 
 the time of Socrates, often loves to destroy those who surpass 
 it in courage or intelligence. There never has been a good 
 cause, however unpopular or however distant, which has not 
 counted a number of Englishmen among its staunchest adher¬ 
 ents. The mass of the English people are not different from 
 those in other lands. They stick to the business at hand and 
 have no time for unpractical “sporting ventures.” But they 
 rather admire their eccentric neighbour who drops everything 
 to go and fight for some obscure people in Asia or Africa and 
 when he has been killed they give him a fine public funeral and 
 hold him up to their children as an example of valor and chiv¬ 
 alry. 
 
 Even the police spies of the Holy Alliance were power¬ 
 less against this national characteristic. In the year 1824, Lord 
 Byron, a rich young Englishman who wrote the poetry over 
 which all Europe wept, hoisted the sails of his yacht and started 
 south to help the Greeks. Three months later the news spread 
 through Europe that their hero lay dead in Missolonghi, 
 the last of the Greek strongholds. His lonely death 
 caught the imagination of the people. In all countries, societies 
 were formed to help the Greeks. Lafayette, the grand old 
 man of the American revolution, pleaded their cause in France. 
 The king of Bavaria sent hundreds of his officers. Money and 
 supplies poured in upon the starving men of Missolonghi. 
 
 In England, George Canning, who had defeated the plans 
 of the Holy Alliance in South America, was now prime minis- 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 389 
 
 ter. He saw his chance to checkmate Metternich for a second 
 time. The English and Russian fleets were already in the 
 Mediterranean. They were sent by governments which dared 
 no longer suppress the popular enthusiasm for the cause of the 
 Greek patriots. The French navy appeared because France, 
 since the end of the Crusades, had assumed the role of the de¬ 
 fender of the Christian faith in Mohammedan lands. On Octo¬ 
 ber 20 of the year 1827, the ships of the three nations attacked 
 the Turkish fleet in the bay of Navarino and destroyed it. 
 Rarely has the news of a battle been received with such general 
 rejoicing. The people of western Europe and Russia who 
 enjoyed no freedom at home consoled themselves by fighting 
 an imaginary war of liberty on behalf of the oppressed Greeks. 
 In the year 1829 they had their reward. Greece became an 
 independent nation and the policy of reaction and stability 
 suffered its second great defeat. 
 
 It would be absurd were I to try, in this short volume, to 
 give you a detailed account of the struggle for national inde¬ 
 pendence in all other countries. There are a large number of 
 excellent books devoted to such subjects. I have described the 
 struggle for the independence of Greece because it was the first 
 successful attack upon the bulwark of reaction which the Con¬ 
 gress of Vienna had erected to “maintain the stability of Eu¬ 
 rope.” That mighty fortress of suppression still held out and 
 Metternich continued to be in command. But the end was 
 near. 
 
 In France the Bourbons had established an almost unbear¬ 
 able rule of police officials who were trying to undo the work 
 of the French revolution, with an absolute disregard of the 
 regulations and laws of civilised warfare. When Louis 
 XVIII died in the year 1824, the people had enjoyed nine 
 years of “peace” which had proved even more unhappy than 
 the ten years of war of the Empire. Louis was succeeded by 
 his brother, Charles X. 
 
 Louis had belonged to that famous Bourbon family which, 
 although it never learned anything, never forgot anything. 
 The recollection of that morning in the town of Hamm, when 
 
390 
 
 THE STGRY OF MANKIND 
 
 news had reached him of the decapitation of his brother, re¬ 
 mained a constant warning of what might happen to those 
 kings who did not read the signs of the times aright. Charles, 
 on the other hand, who had managed to run up private debts of 
 fifty million francs before he was twenty years of age, knew 
 nothing, remembered nothing and firmly intended to learn 
 nothing. As soon as he had succeeded his brother, he estab¬ 
 lished a government “by priests, through priests and for 
 priests,” and while the Duke of Wellington, who made this re¬ 
 mark, cannot be called a violent liberal, Charles ruled in such 
 a way that he disgusted even that trusted friend of law and 
 order. When he tried to suppress the newspapers which dared 
 to criticise his government, and dismissed the Parliament be¬ 
 cause it supported the Press, his days were numbered. 
 
 On the night of the 27th of July of the year 1830, a revo¬ 
 lution took place in Paris. On the 30th of the same month, the 
 king fled to the coast and set sail for England. In this way 
 the “famous farce of fifteen years” came to an end and the 
 Bourbons were at last removed from the throne of France. 
 They were too hopelessly incompetent. France then might 
 have returned to a Republican form of government, but such 
 a step would not have been tolerated by Metternich. 
 
 The situation was dangerous enough. The spark of rebel¬ 
 lion had leaped beyond the French frontier and had set fire to 
 another powder house filled with national grievances. The new 
 kingdom of the Netherlands had not been a success. The Bel¬ 
 gian and the Dutch people had nothing in common and their 
 king, William of Orange (the descendant of an uncle of Wil¬ 
 liam the Silent), while a hard worker and a good business man, 
 was too much lacking in tact and pliability to keep the peace 
 among his uncongenial subjects. Besides, the horde of priests 
 which had descended upon France, had at once found its way 
 into Belgium and whatever Protestant William tried to do was 
 howled down by large crowds of excited citizens as a fresh at¬ 
 tempt upon the “freedom of the Catholic church.” On the 25th 
 of August there was a popular outbreak against the Dutch 
 authorities in Brussels. Two months later, the Belgian? 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 393 
 
 declared themselves independent and elected Leopold of Co¬ 
 burg, the uncle of Queen Victoria of England, to the throne. 
 That was an excellent solution of the difficulty. The two coun¬ 
 tries, which never ought to have been united, parted their 
 ways and thereafter lived in peace and harmony and behaved 
 like decent neighbours. 
 
 News in those days when there were only a few short rail¬ 
 roads, travelled slowly, but when the success of the French 
 and the Belgian revolutionists became known in Poland there 
 was an immediate clash between the Poles and their Russian 
 rulers which led to a year of terrible warfare and ended with a 
 complete victory for the Russians who “established order along 
 the banks of the Vistula” in the well-known Russian fashion. 
 Nicholas the First, who had succeeded his brother Alexander in 
 1825, firmly believed in the Divine Right of his own family, 
 and the thousands of Polish refugees who had found shelter 
 in western Europe bore witness to the fact that the principles 
 of the Holy Alliance were still more than a hollow phrase in 
 Holy Russia. 
 
 In Italy too there was a moment of unrest. Marie Louise, 
 Duchess of Parma and wife of the former Emperor Napo¬ 
 leon, whom she had deserted after the defeat of Waterloo, was 
 driven away from her country, and in the Papal state the exas¬ 
 perated people tried to establish an independent Republic. 
 But the armies of Austria marched to Rome and soon every¬ 
 thing was as of old. Metternich continued to reside at the Ball 
 Platz, the home of the foreign minister of the Habsburg 
 dynasty, the police spies returned to their job, and peace 
 reigned supreme. Eighteen more years were to pass before a 
 second and more successful attempt could be made to deliver 
 Europe from the terrible inheritance of the Vienna Con¬ 
 gress. 
 
 Again it was France, the revolutionary weather-cock of 
 Europe, which gave the signal of revolt. Charles X had been 
 succeeded by Louis Philippe, the son of that famous Duke of 
 Orleans who had turned Jacobin, had voted for the death of hi? 
 cousin the king, and had played a role during the early day*) 
 
392 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 of the revolution under the name of “Philippe Egalite” or 
 “Equality Philip.” Eventually he had been killed when 
 Robespierre tried to purge the nation of all “traitors,” (by 
 which name he indicated those people who did not share his own 
 views ) and his son had been forced to run away from the 
 revolutionary army. Young Louis Philippe thereupon had 
 wandered far and wide. He had taught school in Switzerland 
 and had spent a couple of years exploring the unknown “far 
 west” of America. After the fall of Napoleon he had returned 
 to Paris. He was much more intelligent than his Bourbon 
 cousins. He was a simple man who went about in the public 
 parks with a red cotton umbrella under his arm, followed by a 
 brood of children like any good housefather. But France had 
 outgrown the king business and Louis did not know this until 
 the morning of the 24th of February, of the year 1848, when 
 a crowd stormed the Tuileries. and drove his Majesty away and 
 proclaimed the Republic. 
 
 When the news of this event reached Vienna, Metternich 
 expressed the casual opinion that this was only a repetition 
 of the year 1793 and that the Allies would once more be obliged 
 to march upon Paris and make an end to this very unseemly 
 democratic row. But two weeks later his own Austrian capital 
 was in open revolt. Metternich escaped from the mob through 
 the back door of his palace, and the Emperor Ferdinand was 
 forced to give his subjects a constitution which embodied most 
 of the revolutionary principles which his Prime Minister had 
 tried to suppress for the last thirty-three years. 
 
 This time all Europe felt the shock. Hungary declared it¬ 
 self independent, and commenced a war against the Habs- 
 burgs under the leadership of Louis Kossuth. The unequal 
 struggle lasted more than a year. It was finally suppressed by 
 the armies of Tsar Nicholas who marched across the Carpa¬ 
 thian mountains and made Hungary once more safe for autoc¬ 
 racy. The Habsburgs thereupon established extraordinary 
 court-martials and hanged the greater part of the Hungarian 
 patriots whom they had not been able to defeat in open battle. 
 
 As for Italy, the island of Sicily declared itself independent 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 393 
 
 from Naples and drove its Bourbon king away. In the Papal 
 states the prime minister, Rossi, was murdered and the Pope 
 was forced to flee. He returned the next year at the head of a 
 French army which remained in Rome to protect His Holi¬ 
 ness against his subjects until the year 1870. Then it was 
 called back to defend France against the Prussians, and 
 Rome became the capital of Italy. In the north, Milan and 
 Venice rose against their Austrian masters. They were sup¬ 
 ported by king Albert of Sardinia, but a strong Austrian army 
 under old Radetzky marched into the valley of the Po, de¬ 
 feated the Sardinians near Custozza and Novara and forced 
 Albert to abdicate in favour of his son, Victor Emanuel, who 
 a few years later was to be the first king of a united Italy. 
 
 In Germany the unrest of the year 1848 took the form of a 
 great national demonstration in favour of political unity and a 
 representative form of government. In Bavaria, the king who 
 had wasted his time and money upon an Irish lady who posed as 
 a Spanish dancer—(she was called Lola Montez and lies buried 
 in New York’s Potter’s Field)—was driven away by the en¬ 
 raged students of the university. In Prussia, the king was 
 forced to stand with uncovered head before the coffins of those 
 who had been killed during the street fighting and to promise a 
 constitutional form of government. And in March of the year 
 1849, a German parliament, consisting of 550 delegates from 
 all parts of the country came together in Frankfort and pro¬ 
 posed that king Frederick William of Prussia should be the 
 Emperor of a United Germany. 
 
 Then, however, the tide began to turn. Incompetent Ferdi¬ 
 nand had abdicated in favour of his nephew Francis Joseph. 
 The well-drilled Austrian army had remained faithful to their 
 war-lord. The hangman was given plenty of work and the 
 Habsburgs, after the nature of that strangely cat-like fam¬ 
 ily, once more landed upon their feet and rapidly strengthened 
 their position as the masters of eastern and western Europe. 
 They played the game of politics very adroitly and used the 
 jealousies of the other German states to prevent the elevation 
 of the Prussian king to the Imperial dignity. Their long train- 
 
394 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ing in the art of stiffering defeat had taught them the value of 
 patience. They knew how to wait. They bided their time 
 and while the liberals, utterly untrained in practical politics, 
 talked and talked and talked and got intoxicated by their own 
 fine speeches, the Austrians quietly gathered their forces, dis¬ 
 missed the Parliament of Frankfort and re-established the old 
 and impossible German confederation which the Congress of 
 Vienna had wished upon an unsuspecting world. 
 
 But among the men who had attended this strange Parlia¬ 
 ment of unpractical enthusiasts, there was a Prussian country 
 squire by the name of Bismarck, who had made good use of his 
 eyes and ears. He had a deep contempt for oratory. He knew 
 (what every man of action has always known) that nothing 
 is ever accomplished by talk. In his own way he was a sincere 
 patriot. He had been trained in the old school of diplomacy 
 and he could outlie his opponents just as he could outwalk 
 them and outdrink them and outride them. 
 
 Bismarck felt convinced that the loose confederation 
 of little states must be changed into a strong united country 
 if it would hold its own against the other European powers. 
 Brought up amidst feudal ideas of loyalty, he decided that 
 the house of Hohenzollern, of which he was the most faithful 
 servant, should rule the new state, rather than the incompetent 
 Habsburgs. For this purpose he must first get rid of the 
 Austrian influence, and he began to make the necessary prepa¬ 
 rations for this painful operation. 
 
 Italy in the meantime had solved her own problem, and had 
 rid herself of her hated Austrian master. The unity of Italy 
 was the work of three men, Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi. 
 Of these three, Cavour, the civil-engineer with the short-sighted 
 eyes and the steel-rimmed glasses, played the part of the care¬ 
 ful political pilot. Mazzini, who had spent most of his days 
 in different European garrets, hiding from the Austrian police, 
 was the public agitator, while Garibaldi, with his band of red- 
 shirted rough-riders, appealed to the popular imagination. 
 
 Mazzini and Garibaldi were both believers in the Repub¬ 
 lican form of government. Cavour, however, was a monarch- 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 395 
 
 ist, and the others who recognised his superior ability in such 
 matters of practical statecraft, accepted his decision and sacri¬ 
 ficed their own ambitions for the greater good of their beloved 
 Fatherland. 
 
 Favour felt towards the House of Sardinia as Bismarck 
 did towards the Hohenzollern family. With infinite care and 
 great shrewdness he set to work to jockey the Sardinian King 
 into a position from which His Majesty would be able to as¬ 
 sume the leadership of the entire Italian people. The unsettled 
 political conditions in the rest of Europe greatly helped him in 
 his plans and no country con¬ 
 tributed more to the inde¬ 
 pendence of Italy than her old 
 and trusted (and often dis¬ 
 trusted) neighbour, France. 
 
 In that turbulent country, 
 in November of the year 1852, 
 the Republic had come to a 
 sudden but not unexpected end. 
 
 Napoleon III the son of Louis 
 Bonaparte the former King of 
 Holland, and the small nephew 
 of a great uncle, had re-estab¬ 
 lished an Empire and had 
 made himself Emperor “by the 
 Grace of God and the Will of 
 the People.” 
 
 This young man, who had been educated in Germany and 
 who mixed his French with harsh Teutonic gutturals (just 
 as the first Napoleon had always spoken the language of his 
 adopted country with a strong Italian accent) was trying very 
 hard to use the Napoleonic tradition for his own benefit. But 
 he had many enemies and did not feel very certain of his hold 
 upon his ready-made throne. He had gained the friendship 
 of Queen Victoria but this had not been a difficult task, as the 
 good Queen was not particularly brilliant and was very sus¬ 
 ceptible to flattery. As for the other European sovereigns, 
 
396 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 they treated the French Emperor with insulting haughtiness 
 and sat up nights devising new ways in which they could show 
 their upstart “Good Brother” how sincerely they despised him. 
 
 Napoleon was obliged to find a way in which he could break 
 this opposition, either through love or through fear. He well 
 knew the fascination which the word “glory” still held for his 
 subjects. Since he was forced to gamble for his throne he 
 decided to play the game of Empire for high stakes. He used 
 an attack of Russia upon Turkey as an excuse for bringing 
 about the Crimean war in which England and France com¬ 
 bined against the Tsar on behalf of the Sultan. It was a very 
 costly and exceedingly unprofitable enterprise. Neither 
 France nor England nor Russia reaped much glory. 
 
 But the Crimean war did one good thing. It gave Sardinia 
 a chance to volunteer on the winning side and when peace was 
 declared it gave Cavour the opportunity to lay claim to the 
 gratitude of both England and France. 
 
 Having made use of the international situation to get Sar¬ 
 dinia recognised as one of the more important powers of Eu¬ 
 rope, the clever Italian then provoked a war between Sardinia 
 and Austria in June of the year 1859. He assured himself of 
 the support of Napoleon in exchange for the provinces of 
 Savoy and the city of Nice, which was really an Italian town. 
 The Franco-Italian armies defeated the Austrians at Magenta 
 and Solferino, and the former Austrian provinces and duchies 
 were united into a single Italian kingdom. Florence became 
 the capital of this new Italy until the year 1870 when the 
 French recalled their troops from Rome to defend France 
 against the Germans. As soon as they were gone, the Italian 
 troops entered the eternal city and the House of Sardinia took 
 up its residence in the old Palace of the Quirinal which an 
 ancient Pope had built on the ruins of the baths of the Emperor 
 Constantine. 
 
 The Pope, however, moved across the river Tiber and hid 
 behind the walls of the Vatican, which had been the home of 
 many of his predecessors since their return from the exile of 
 Avignon in the year 1377. He protested loudly against this 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 397 
 
 high-handed theft of his domains and addressed lettess of ap¬ 
 peal to those faithful Catholics who were inclined to sympa¬ 
 thise with him in his loss. Their number, however, was small, 
 and it has been steadily decreasing. For, once delivered from 
 the cares of state, the Pope was able to devote all his time to 
 questions of a spiritual nature. Standing high above the petty 
 quarrels of the European politicians, the Papacy assumed a new 
 dignity which proved of great benefit to the church and made 
 it an international power for social and religious progress 
 which has shown a much more intelligent appreciation of mod¬ 
 ern economic problems than most Protestant sects. 
 
 In this way, the attempt of the Congress of Vienna to 
 settle the Italian question by making the peninsula an Aus¬ 
 trian province was at last undone. 
 
 The German problem however remained as yet unsolved. 
 It proved the most difficult of all. The failure of the revolution 
 of the year 1848 had led to the wholesale migration of the more 
 energetic and liberal elements among the German people. 
 These young fellows had moved to the United States of Amer¬ 
 ica, to Brazil, to the new colonies in Asia and America. Their 
 work was continued in Germany but by a different sort of men. 
 
 In the new Diet which met at Frankfort, after the collapse 
 of the German Parliament and the failure of the Liberals to 
 establish a united country, the Kingdom of Prussia was rep¬ 
 resented by that same Otto von Bismarck from whom we parted 
 a few pages ago. Bismarck by now had managed to gain the 
 complete confidence of the king of Prussia. That was all he 
 asked for. The opinion of the Prussian parliament or of the 
 Prussian people interested him not at all. With his own eyes 
 he had seen the defeat of the Liberals. He knew that he 
 would not be able to get rid of Austria without a war and he 
 began by strengthening the Prussian army. The Landtag, ex¬ 
 asperated at his high-handed methods, refused to give him the 
 necessary credits. Bismarck did not even bother to discuss 
 the matter. He went ahead and increased his army with the 
 help of funds which the Prussian house of Peers and the king 
 placed at his disposal. Then he looked for a national cause 
 
398 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 which could be used for the purpose of creating a great wave 
 of patriotism among all the German people. 
 
 In the north of Germany there were the Duchies of Schles¬ 
 wig and Holstein which ever since the middle ages had been a 
 source of trouble. Both countries were inhabited by a certain 
 number of Danes and a certain number of Germans, but al¬ 
 though they were governed by the King of Denmark, they 
 were not an integral part of the Danish State and this led to 
 endless difficulties. Heaven forbid that I should revive this 
 forgotten question which now seems settled by the acts of the 
 recent Congress of Versailles. But the Germans in Holstein 
 were very loud in their abuse of the Danes and the Danes in 
 Schleswig made a great ado of their Danishness, and all Eu¬ 
 rope was discussing the problem and German Mannerchors 
 and Turnvereins listened to sentimental speeches about the 
 “lost brethren” and the different chancelleries were trying to 
 discover what it was all about, when Prussia mobilised her 
 armies to “save the lost provinces.” As Austria, the official 
 head of the German Confederation, could not allow Prussia 
 to act alone in such an important matter, the Habsburg troops 
 were mobilised too and the combined armies of the two great 
 powers crossed the Danish frontiers and after a very brave re¬ 
 sistance on the part of the Danes, occupied the two duchies. 
 The Danes appealed to Europe, but Europe was otherwise 
 engaged and the poor Danes were left to their fate. 
 
 Bismarck then prepared the scene for the second number 
 upon his Imperial programme. He used the division of the 
 spoils to pick a quarrel with Austria. The Habsburgs fell into 
 the trap. The new Prussian army, the creation of Bismarck and 
 his faithful generals, invaded Bohemia and in less than six 
 weeks, the last of the Austrian troops had been destroyed at 
 Koniggratz and Sadowa and the road to Vienna lay open. But 
 Bismarck did not want to go too far. He knew that he would 
 need a few friends in Europe. He offered the defeated 
 Habsburgs very decent terms of peace, provided they would 
 resign their chairmanship of the Confederation. He was less 
 merciful to many of the smaller German states who had taken 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 399 
 
 the side of the Austrians, and annexed them to Prussia. The 
 greater part of the northern states then formed a new organ¬ 
 isation, the so-called North German Confederacy, and victor¬ 
 ious Prussia assumed the unofficial leadership of the German 
 people. 
 
 Europe stood aghast at the rapidity with which the work of 
 consolidation had been done. England was quite indifferent 
 but France showed signs of disapproval. Napoleon’s hold 
 upon the French people was steadily diminishing. The Cri¬ 
 mean war had been costly and had accomplished nothing. 
 
 A second adventure in the year 1863, when a French army 
 had tried to force an Austrian Grand-Duke by the name of 
 Maximilian upon the Mexican people as their Emperor, had 
 come to a disastrous end as soon as the American Civil War had 
 been won by the North. For the Government at Washington 
 had forced the French to withdraw their troops and this had 
 given the Mexicans a chance to clear their country of the enemy 
 and shoot the unwelcome Emperor. 
 
 It was necessary to give the Napoleonic throne a new 
 coat of glory-paint. Within a few years the North German 
 Confederation would be a serious rival of France. Napoleon 
 decided that a war with Germany would be a good thing for his 
 dynasty. He looked for an excuse and Spain, the poor victim 
 of endless revolutions, gave him one. 
 
 Just then the Spanish throne happened to be vacant. It 
 had been offered to the Catholic branch of the house of Hohen- 
 zollern. The French government had objected and the Hoh- 
 enzollerns had politely refused to accept the crown. But 
 Napoleon, who was showing signs of illness, was very much 
 under the influence of his beautiful wife, Eugenie de Monti jo, 
 the daughter of a Spanish gentleman and the grand-daughter 
 of William Kirkpatrick, an American consul at Malaga, where 
 the grapes come from. Eugenie, although shrewd enough was 
 as badly educated as most Spanish women of that day. She 
 was at the mercy of her spiritual advisers and these worthy gen¬ 
 tlemen felt no love for the Protestant King of Prussia. “Be 
 bold,” was the advice of the Empress to her husband, but she 
 
400 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 omitted to add the second half of that famous Persian proverb 
 which admonishes the hero to “be bold but not too bold.” 
 Napoleon, convinced of the strength of his army, addressed 
 himself to the king of Prussia and insisted that the king give 
 him assurances that “he would never permit another candi¬ 
 dature of a Hohenzollern prince to the Spanish crown.” As 
 the Hohenzollerns had just declined the honour, the demand 
 was superfluous, and Bismarck so informed the French govern¬ 
 ment. But Napoleon was not satisfied. 
 
 It was the year 1870 and King William was taking the 
 waters at Ems. There one day he was approached by the 
 French minister who tried to re-open the discussion. The king 
 answered very pleasantly that it was a fine day and that the 
 Spanish question was now closed and that nothing more 
 remained to be said upon the subject. As a matter of 
 routine, a report of this interview was telegraphed to 
 Bismarck, who handled all foreign affairs. Bismarck edited 
 the dispatch for the benefit of the Prussian and French 
 press. Many people have called him names for doing 
 this. Bismarck however could plead the excuse that the doc¬ 
 toring of official news, since time immemorial, had been one 
 of the privileges of all civilised governments. When the “edit¬ 
 ed” telegram was printed, the good people in Berlin felt that 
 their old and venerable king with his nice white whiskers had 
 been insulted by an arrogant little Frenchman and the equally 
 good people of Paris flew into a rage because their perfectly 
 courteous minister had been shown the door by a Royal Prus¬ 
 sian flunkey. 
 
 And so they both went to war and in less than two months, 
 Napoleon and the greater part of his army were prisoners of 
 the Germans. The Second Empire had come to an end and the 
 Third Republic was making ready to defend Paris against the 
 German invaders. Paris held out for five long months. Ten 
 days before the surrender of the city, in the nearby palace of 
 Versailles, built by that same King Louis XIV who had been 
 such a dangerous enemy to the Germans, the King of Prussia 
 was publicly proclaimed German Emperor and a loud booming 
 
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE 
 
 401 
 
 of guns told the hungry Parisians that a new German Empire 
 had taken the place of the old harmless Confederation of Teu¬ 
 tonic states and statelets. 
 
 In this rough way, the German question was finally settled. 
 By the end of the year 1871, fifty-six years after the memorable 
 gathering at Vienna, the work of the Congress had been entirely 
 undone. Metternich and Alexander and Talleyrand had tried 
 to give the people of Europe a lasting peace. The methods 
 they had employed had caused endless wars and revolutions and 
 the feeling of a common brotherhood of the eighteenth century 
 was followed by an era of exaggerated nationalism which has 
 not yet come to an end. 
 
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 
 
 BUT WHILE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE 
 FIGHTING FOR THEIR NATIONAL INDE¬ 
 PENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY 
 LIVED HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED 
 BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS, WHICH HAD 
 MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM ENGINE 
 OF THE 18 TH CENTURY THE MOST FAITH¬ 
 FUL AND EFFICIENT SLAVE OF MAN 
 
 The greatest benefactor of the human race died more than 
 half a million years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low 
 brow and sunken eyes, a heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth. 
 He would not have looked well in a gathering of modern sci¬ 
 entists, but they would have honoured him as their master. For 
 he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift up a heavy 
 boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our 
 first tools, and he did more than any human being who came 
 after him to give man his enormous advantage over the other 
 animals with whom he shares this planet. 
 
 Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use 
 of a greater number of tools. The first wheel (a round disc 
 made out of an old tree) created as much stir in the communi¬ 
 ties of 100,000 b.c, as the flying machine did only a few years 
 ago. 
 
 In Washington, the story is told of a director of the Patent 
 Office who in the early thirties of the last century suggested 
 
 402 
 
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 
 
 403 
 
 that the Patent Office be abolished, because “everything that 
 possibly could be invented had been invented.” A similar 
 feeling must have spread through the prehistoric world when 
 the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the people were able 
 to move from place to place without rowing or punting or 
 pulling from the shore. 
 
 Indeed one of the most interesting chapters of history is 
 the effort of man to let some one else or something else do his 
 work for him, while he enjoyed his leisure, sitting in the sun 
 or painting pictures on rocks, or training young wolves and 
 little tigers to behave like peaceful domestic animals. 
 
 Of course in the very olden days, it was always possible 
 to enslave a weaker neighbour and force him to do the unpleas¬ 
 ant tasks of life. One of the reasons why the Greeks and 
 Romans, who were quite as intelligent as we are, failed to 
 devise more interesting machinery, was to be found in the wide¬ 
 spread existence of slavery. Why should a great mathema¬ 
 tician waste his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill 
 the air with noise and smoke when he could go to the market¬ 
 place and buy all the slaves he needed at a very small expense ? 
 
 And during the middle-ages, although slavery had been 
 abolished and only a mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds 
 discouraged the idea of using machinery because they thought 
 this would throw a large number of their brethren out of 
 work. Besides, the Middle-Ages were not at all interested 
 in producing large quantities of goods. Their tailors and butch¬ 
 ers and carpenters worked for the immediate needs of the small 
 community in which they lived and had no desire to compete 
 with their neighbours, or to produce more than was strictly 
 necessary. 
 
 During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church 
 against scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as 
 rigidly as before, a large number of men began to devote their 
 lives to mathematics and astronomy and physics and chemistry. 
 Two years before the beginning of the Thirty Years War, 
 John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his little book which 
 described the new invention of logarithms. During the war it- 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 104 
 
 self, Gottfried Leibnitz of Leipzig had perfected the system of 
 infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the peace of West¬ 
 phalia, Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was 
 born, and in that same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, 
 died. Meanwhile the Thirty Years War had destroyed the pros¬ 
 perity of central Europe and there was a sudden but very gen¬ 
 eral interest in “alchemy,” the strange pseudo-science of the 
 middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into 
 gold. This proved to be impossible but the alchemists in their 
 laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped 
 the work of the chemists who were their successors. 
 
 The work of all these men provided the world with a solid 
 scientific foundation upon which it was possible to build even 
 the most complicated of engines, and a number of practical 
 men made good use of it. The Middle-Ages had used wood for 
 the few bits of necessary machinery. But wood wore out 
 easily. Iron was a much better material, but iron was scarce 
 except in England. In England therefore most of the smelt¬ 
 ing was done. To smelt iron, huge fires were needed. In the 
 beginning, these fires had been made of wood, but gradually 
 the forests had been used up. Then “stone coal” (the petri¬ 
 fied trees of prehistoric times) was used. But coal as you 
 know has to be dug out of the ground and it has to be trans¬ 
 ported to the smelting ovens and the mines have to be kept 
 dry from the ever invading waters. 
 
 These were two problems which had to be solved at once. 
 For the time being, horses could still be used to haul the coal- 
 wagons, but the pumping question demanded the application 
 of special machinery. Several inventors were busy trying to 
 solve the difficulty. They all knew that steam would have to 
 be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam engine was 
 very old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century 
 before Christ, has described to us several bits of machinery 
 which were driven by steam. The people of the Renaissance 
 had played with the notion of steam-driven war chariots. The 
 Marquis of Worcester, a contemporary of Newton, in his book 
 of inventions, tells of a steam engine. A little later, in the year 
 
THE MODERN CITY 
 
■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 , > i 
 
 
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 
 
 405 
 
 1698, Thomas Savery of London applied for a patent for a 
 pumping engine. At the same time, a Hollander, Christian 
 Huygens, was trying to perfect an engine in which gun-powder 
 was used to cause regular explosions in much the same way as 
 we use gasoline in our motors. 
 
 All over Europe, people were busy with the idea. Denis 
 Papin, a Frenchman, friend and assistant of Huygens, was 
 making experiments with steam engines in several countries. 
 He invented a little wagon that was driven by steam, and a 
 paddle-wheel boat. But when he tried to take a trip in his 
 vessel, it was confiscated by the authorities on a complaint of 
 the boatmen’s union, who feared that such a craft would de¬ 
 prive them of their livelihood. Papin finally died in London in 
 great poverty, having wasted all his money on his inventions. 
 But at the time of his death, another mechanical enthusiast, 
 Thomas Newcomen, was working on the problem of a new 
 steam-pump. Fifty years later his engine was improved upon 
 by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year 
 1777, he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of 
 real practical value. 
 
 But during the centuries of experiments with a “heat-en¬ 
 gine,” the political world had greatly changed. The British 
 people had succeeded the Dutch as the common-carriers of the 
 world’s trade. They had opened up new colonies. They took 
 the raw materials which the colonies produced to England, 
 and there they turned them into finished products, and then 
 they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the 
 world. During the seventeenth century, the people of Georgia 
 and the Carolinas had begun to grow a new shrub which gave 
 a strange sort of woolly substance, the so-called “cotton wool.” 
 After this had been plucked, it was sent to England and there 
 the people of Lancashire wove it into cloth. This weaving 
 was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen. Very soon 
 a number of improvements were made in the process of weav¬ 
 ing. In the year 1730, John Kay invented the “fly shuttle.” 
 In 1770, James Hargreaves got a patent on his “spinning 
 jenny.” Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton-gin, 
 
406 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had pre¬ 
 viously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day. 
 Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cart¬ 
 wright invented large weaving machines, which were driven by 
 water power. And then, in the eighties of the eighteenth 
 century, just when the Estates General of France had begun 
 those famous meetings which were to revolutionise the political 
 system of Europe, the engines of Watt were arranged in such 
 a way that they could drive the weaving machines of Ark¬ 
 wright, and this created an economic and social revolution 
 which has changed human relationship in almost every part 
 of the world. 
 
 As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the 
 inventors turned their attention to the problem of propelling 
 boats and carts with the help of a mechanical contrivance. 
 Watt himself designed plans for a “steam locomotive,” but 
 ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year 1804, a locomotive 
 made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty tons at 
 Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district. 
 
 At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter 
 by the name of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to con¬ 
 vince Napoleon that with the use of his submarine boat, the 
 “Nautilus,” and his “steam-boat,” the French might be able to 
 destroy the naval supremacy of England. 
 
 Fulton’s idea of a steamboat was not original. He had un¬ 
 doubtedly copied it from John Fitch, a mechanical genius of 
 Connecticut whose cleverly constructed steamer had first navi¬ 
 gated the Delaware river as early as the year 1787. But Napo¬ 
 leon and his scientific advisers did not believe in the practical 
 possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the Scotch- 
 built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the Seine, the 
 great Emperor neglected to avail himself of this formidable 
 weapon which might have given him his revenge for Trafalgar. 
 
 As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being 
 a practical man of business, he organised a successful steam¬ 
 boat company together with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of 
 the Declaration of Independence, who was American Minister 
 
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 
 
 407 
 
 to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying to sell his inven¬ 
 tion. The first steamer of this new company, the “Clermont,” 
 which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York 
 State, equipped with an engine built by Boulton and Watt of 
 Birmingham in England, began a regular service between New 
 York and Albany in the year 1807. 
 
 As for poor John Fitch, the man who long before any one 
 else had used the “steam-boat” for commercial purposes, he 
 came to a sad death. Broken in health and empty of purse, he 
 had come to the end of his resources when his fifth boat, which 
 
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 fjt S* /*/ fjy O fT to/ij US£J> OAJ ThB /?/</£# 
 
 J BB ?h/L4>>££fi/t,A />/9 p£Ri O F VtfB y£s<i/? /ffo 
 
 THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 
 
 was propelled by means of a screw-propeller, had been de¬ 
 stroyed. His neighbours jeered at him as they were to laugh a 
 hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his 
 funny flying machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country 
 an easy access to the broad rivers of the west and his country¬ 
 men preferred to travel in flat-boats or go on foot. In the year 
 1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed himself by tak¬ 
 ing poison. 
 
 But twenty years later, the “Savannah,” a steamer of 1850 
 
408 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 tons and making six knots an hour, (the Mauretania goes just 
 four times as fast,) crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liver¬ 
 pool in the record time of twenty-five days. Then there was 
 an end to the derision of the multitude and in their enthusiasm 
 the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man. 
 
 Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had 
 
 Ftfij'r oe nj ussts 
 
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 ft f & TtroKu s>'is o F 
 
 fyou To isSB SA/L. 5 
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 Ro kjsas^ 
 
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 '/ st e c- 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF THE STEAMBOAT 
 
 been building locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from 
 the mine-pit to smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his 
 famous “travelling engine” which reduced the price of coal by 
 almost seventy per cent and which made it possible to estab¬ 
 lish the first regular passenger service between Manchester and 
 Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at the 
 unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years 
 later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. 
 
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 
 
 409 
 
 At the present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct de¬ 
 scendant of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler 
 and Levassor of the eighties of the last century) can do better 
 than these early “Puffing Billies.” 
 
 But while these practically-minded engineers were improv¬ 
 ing upon their rattling “heat engines,” a group of “pure” 
 
 Thc oRiCiaj oc THe Ao*i 0 MoS>> u £ 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF THE AUTOMOBILE 
 
 scientists (men who devote fourteen hours of each day to the 
 study of those “theoretical” scientific phenomena without which 
 no mechanical progress would be possible) were following a 
 new scent which promised to lead them into the most secret and 
 hidden domains of Nature. 
 
 Two thousand years ago, a number of Greek and Roman 
 philosophers (notably Thales of Miletus and Pliny who was 
 killed while trying to study the eruption of Vesuvius of the 
 
410 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 year 79 when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried beneath 
 the ashes) had noticed the strange antics of bits of straw and of 
 feather which were held near a piece of amber which was being 
 rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages 
 had not been interested in this mysterious “electric” power. 
 But immediately after the Renaissance, William Gilbert, the 
 private physician of Queen Elizabeth, wrote his famous treatise 
 on the character and behaviour of Magnets. During the 
 Thirty Years War Otto von Guericke, the burgomaster of 
 Magdeburg and the inventor of the air-pump, constructed the 
 first electrical machine. During the next century a large num¬ 
 ber of scientists devoted themselves to the study of electricity. 
 Not less than three professors invented the famous Leyden 
 Jar in the year 1795. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin, 
 the most universal genius of America next to Benjamin Thom¬ 
 son (who after his flight from New Hampshire on account of 
 his pro-British sympathies became known as Count Rumford) 
 was devoting his attention to this subject. He discovered that 
 lightning and the electric spark were manifestations of the same 
 electric power and continued his electric studies until the end of 
 his busy and useful life. Then came Volta with his famous 
 “electric pile” and Galvani and Day and the Danish professor 
 Hans Christian Oersted and Ampere and Arago and Faraday, 
 all of them diligent searchers after the true nature of the elec¬ 
 tric forces. 
 
 They freely gave their discoveries to the world and Samuel 
 Morse (who like Fulton began his career as an artist) thought 
 that he could use this new electric current to transmit mes¬ 
 sages from one city to another. He intended to use copper 
 wire and a little machine which he had invented. People 
 laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance his 
 own experiments and soon he had spent all his money and 
 then he was very poor and people laughed even louder. He 
 then asked Congress to help him and a special Committee on 
 Commerce promised him their support. But the members of 
 Congress were not at all interested and Morse had to wait 
 
THE AGE OF THE ENGINE 
 
 411 
 
 twelve years before he was given a small congressional appro¬ 
 priation. He then built a “telegraph” between Baltimore and 
 Washington. In the year 1837 he had shown his first success¬ 
 ful “telegraph” in one of the lecture halls of New York Uni¬ 
 versity. Finally, on the 24th of May of the year 1844 the 
 first long-distance message was sent from Washington to Bal¬ 
 timore and to-day the whole world is covered with telegraph 
 wires and we can send news from Europe to Asia in a few sec¬ 
 onds. Twenty-three years later Alexander Graham Bell used 
 the electric current for his telephone. And half a century after¬ 
 wards Marconi improved upon these ideas by inventing a sys¬ 
 tem of sending messages which did away entirely with the old- 
 fashioned wires. 
 
 While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his 
 “telegraph,” Michael Faraday, the Yorkshire-man, had con¬ 
 structed the first “dynamo.” This tiny little machine was com¬ 
 pleted in the year 1831 when Europe was still trembling as a 
 result of the great July revolutions which had so severely upset 
 the plans of the Congress of Vienna. The first dynamo grew 
 and grew and grew and to-day it provides us with heat and 
 with light (you knoAv the little incandescent bulbs which Edi¬ 
 son, building upon French and English experiments of the for¬ 
 ties and fifties, first made in 1878) and with power for all sorts 
 of machines. If I am not mistaken the electric-engine will 
 soon entirely drive out the “heat engine” just as in the olden 
 days the more highly-organised prehistoric animals drove out 
 their less efficient neighbours. 
 
 Personally (but I know nothing about machinery) this will 
 make me very happy. For the electric engine which can be run 
 by waterpower is a clean and companionable servant of man¬ 
 kind but the “heat-engine,” the marvel of the eighteenth cen¬ 
 tury, is a noisy and dirty creature for ever filling the world with 
 ridiculous smoke-stacks and with dust and soot and asking 
 that it be fed with coal which has to be dug out of mines at 
 great inconvenience and risk to thousands of people. 
 
 And if I were a novelist and not a historian, who must stick 
 
412 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 to facts and may not use his imagination, I would describe the 
 happy day when the last steam locomotive shall be taken to the 
 Museum of Natural History to be placed next to the skeleton 
 of the Dinosaur and the Pterodactyl and the other extinct 
 creatures of a by-gone age. 
 
mf 
 
 THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 BUT THE NEW ENGINES WERE VERY EXPEN¬ 
 SIVE AND ONLY PEOPLE OF WEALTH 
 COULD AFFORD THEM. THE OLD CARPEN¬ 
 TER OR SHOEMAKER WHO HAD BEEN HIS 
 OWN MASTER IN HIS LITTLE WORKSHOP 
 WAS OBLIGED TO HIRE HIMSELF OUT TO 
 THE OWNERS OF THE BIG MECHANICAL 
 TOOLS, AND WHILE HE MADE MORE 
 MONEY THAN BEFORE, HE LOST HIS FOR¬ 
 MER INDEPENDENCE AND HE DID NOT 
 LIKE THAT 
 
 In the olden days the work of the world had been done by 
 independent workmen who sat in their own little workshops in 
 the front of their houses, who owned their tools, who boxed the 
 ears of their own apprentices and who, within the limits pre¬ 
 scribed by their guilds, conducted their business as it pleased 
 them. They lived simple lives, and were obliged to work very 
 long hours, but they were their own masters. If they got up 
 and saw that it was a fine day to go fishing, they went fishing 
 and there was no one to say “no.” 
 
 But the introduction of machinery changed this. A ma¬ 
 chine is really nothing but a greatly enlarged tool. A rail¬ 
 road train which carries you at the speed of a mile a minute is 
 in reality a pair of very fast legs, and a steam hammer which 
 flattens heavy plates of iron is just a terrible big fist, made of 
 steeL 
 
 413 
 
414 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 But whereas we can all afford a pair of good legs and a 
 good strong fist, a railroad train and a steam hammer and a 
 cotton factory are very expensive pieces of machinery and they 
 are not owned by a single man, but usually by a company of 
 people who all contribute a certain sum and then divide the 
 
 MAN POWER AND MACHINE POWER 
 
 profits of their railroad or cotton mill according to the amount 
 of money which they have invested. 
 
 Therefore, when machines had been improved until they 
 were really practicable and profitable, the builders of those 
 
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 415 
 
 large tools, the machine manufacturers, began to look for cus¬ 
 tomers who could afford to pay for them in cash. 
 
 During the early middle ages, when land had been almost 
 the only form of wealth, the nobility were the only people 
 who were considered wealthy. But as I have told you in a 
 previous chapter, the gold and silver which they possessed 
 was quite insignificant and they used the old system of bar¬ 
 ter, exchanging cows for horses and eggs for honey. During 
 the crusades, the burghers of the cities had been able to gather 
 riches from the reviving trade between the east and the west, 
 and they had been serious rivals of the lords and the knights. 
 
 The French revolution had entirely destroyed the wealth 
 of the nobility and had enormously increased that of the middle 
 class or “bourgeoisie.” The years of unrest which followed the 
 Great Revolution had offered many middle-class people a 
 chance to get more than their share of this world’s goods. The 
 estates of the church had been confiscated by the French Con¬ 
 vention and had been sold at auction. There had been a terrific 
 amount of graft. Land speculators had stolen thousands 
 of square miles of valuable land, and during the Napoleonic 
 wars, they had used their capital to “profiteer” in grain and 
 gun-powder, and now they possessed more wealth than they 
 needed for the actual expenses of their households and they 
 could afford to build themselves factories and to hire men and 
 women to work the machines. 
 
 This caused a very abrupt change in the lives of hundreds 
 of thousands of people. Within a few years, many cities 
 doubled the number of their inhabitants and the old civic centre 
 which had been the real “home” of the citizens was surrounded 
 with ugly and cheaply built suburbs where the workmen slept 
 after their eleven or twelve hours, or thirteen hours, spent in the 
 factories and from where they returned to the factory as soon 
 as the whistle blew. 
 
 Far and wide through the countryside there was talk of the 
 fabulous sums of money that could be made in the towns. The 
 peasant boy, accustomed to a life in the open, went to the city. 
 He rapidly lost his old health amidst the smoke and dust and 
 
416 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 dirt of those early and badly ventilated workshops, and the 
 end, very often, was death in the poor-house or in the hospital. 
 
 Of course the change from the farm to the factory on the 
 part of so many people was not accomplished without a certain 
 amount of opposition. Since one engine could do as much 
 work as a hundred men, the ninety-nine others who were 
 thrown out of employment did not like it. Frequently they at¬ 
 tacked the factory-buildings and set fire to the machines, but 
 
 Insurance Companies had been organised as early as the 17 th 
 century and as a rule the owners were well protected against 
 loss. 
 
 Soon, newer and better machines were installed, the fac¬ 
 tory was surrounded with a high wall and then there was an 
 end to the rioting. The ancient guilds could not possibly sur¬ 
 vive in this new world of steam and iron. They went out of 
 existence and then the workmen tried to organise regular labour 
 unions. But the factory-owners, who through their wealth 
 could exercise great influence upon the politicians of the dif¬ 
 ferent countries, went to the Legislature and had laws passed 
 
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 417 
 
 which forbade the forming of such trade unions because they 
 interfered with the “liberty of action” of the working man. 
 
 Please do not think that the good members of Parlia¬ 
 ment who passed these laws were wicked tyrants. They were; 
 the true sons of the revolutionary period when everybody 
 talked of “liberty” and when people often killed their neigh¬ 
 bours because they were not quite as liberty-loving as they 
 ought to have been. Since “liberty” was the foremost virtue 
 of man, it was not right that labour-unions should dictate to 
 their members the hours during which they could work and 
 the wages which they must demand. The workman must at 
 all times, be “free to sell his services in the open market,” and 
 the employer must be equally “free” to conduct his business 
 as he saw fit. The days of the Mercantile System, when 
 the state had regulated the industrial life of the entire com¬ 
 munity, were coming to an end. The new idea of “freedom” 
 insisted that the state stand entirely aside and let commerce 
 take its course. 
 
 The last half of the 18 th century had not merely been a 
 time of intellectual and political doubt, but the old economic 
 ideas, too, had been replaced by new ones which better suited the 
 need of the hour. Several years before the French revolution. 
 Turgot, who had been one of the unsuccessful ministers of 
 finance of Louis XVI, had preached the novel doctrine of 
 “economic liberty.” Turgot lived in a country which had 
 suffered from too much red-tape, too many regulations, too 
 many officials trying to enforce too many laws. “Remove this 
 official supervision,” he wrote, “let the people do as they please, 
 and everything will be all right.” Soon his famous advice of 
 “laissez faire” became the battle-cry around which the econom¬ 
 ists of that period rallied. 
 
 At the same time in England, Adam Smith was working 
 on his mighty volumes on the “Wealth of Nations,” which made 
 another plea for “liberty” and the “natural rights of trade.” 
 Thirty years later, after the fall of Napoleon, when the reac¬ 
 tionary powers of Europe had gained their victory at Vienna, 
 
418 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 that same freedom which was denied to the people in their 
 political relations was forced upon them in their industrial 
 life. 
 
 The general use of machinery, as I have said at the begin¬ 
 ning of this chapter, proved to be of great advantage to the 
 state. Wealth increased rapidly. The machine made it pos¬ 
 sible for a single country, like England, to carry all the bur¬ 
 dens of the great Napoleonic wars. The capitalists (the peo¬ 
 ple who provided the money with which machines were bought) 
 reaped enormous profits. They became ambitious and began 
 to take an interest in politics. They tried to compete with the 
 landed aristocracy which still exercised great influence upon 
 the government of most European countries. 
 
 In England, where the members of Parliament were still 
 elected according to a Royal Decree of the year 1265, and 
 where a large number of recently created industrial centres were 
 without representation, they brought about the passing of the 
 Reform Bill of the year 1832, which changed the electoral 
 system and gave the class of the factory-owners more influ¬ 
 ence upon the legislative body. This however caused great 
 discontent among the millions of factory workers, who were 
 left without any voice in the government. They too began 
 an agitation for the right to vote. They put their demands 
 down in a document which came to be known as the “People’s 
 Charter.” The debates about this charter grew more and 
 more violent. They had not yet come to an end when the revo¬ 
 lutions of the year 1848 broke out. Frightened by the threat 
 of a new outbreak of Jacobinism and violence, the English 
 government placed the Duke of Wellington, who was now in 
 his eightieth year, at the head of the army, and called for Vol¬ 
 unteers. London was placed in a state of siege and prepara¬ 
 tions were made to suppress the coming revolution. 
 
 But the Chartist movement killed itself through bad lead¬ 
 ership and no acts of violence took place. The new class of 
 wealthy factory owners, (I dislike the word “bourgeoisie’' 
 which has been used to death by the apostles of a new social 
 
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 419 
 
 order,) slowly increased its hold upon the government, and 
 the conditions of industrial life in the large cities continued to 
 transform vast acres of pasture and wheat-land into dreary 
 slums, which guard the approach of every modern European 
 town. 
 
EMANCIPATION 
 
 THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION OF MACHIN¬ 
 ERY DID NOT BRING ABOUT THE ERA OF 
 HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY WHICH 
 HAD BEEN PREDICTED BY THE GENERA¬ 
 TION WHICH SAW THE STAGE COACH RE¬ 
 PLACED BY THE RAILROAD. SEVERAL 
 REMEDIES WERE SUGGESTED BUT NONE 
 OF THESE QUITE SOLVED THE PROBLEM 
 
 In the year 1831, just before the passing of the first Re¬ 
 form Bill Jeremy Bentham, the great English student of legis¬ 
 lative methods and the most practical political reformer of that 
 day, wrote to a friend: “The way to be comfortable is to 
 make others comfortable. The way to make others comfort¬ 
 able is to appear to love them. The way to appear to love them 
 is to love them in reality.” Jeremy was an honest man. He 
 said what he believed to be true. His opinions were shared by 
 thousands of his countrymen. They felt responsible for the 
 happiness of their less fortunate neighbours and they tried 
 their very best to help them. And Heaven knows it was time 
 that something be done! 
 
 The ideal of “economic freedom” (the “laissez faire” of 
 Turgot) had been necessary in the old society where mediaeval 
 restrictions lamed all industrial effort. But this “liberty of 
 action” which had been the highest law of the land had led to 
 a terrible, yea, a frightful condition. The hours in the fac- 
 
 420 
 
EMANCIPATION 
 
 421 
 
 tory were limited only by the physical strength of the work¬ 
 ers. As long as a woman could sit before her loom, without 
 fainting from fatigue, she was supposed to work. Children of 
 five and six were taken to the cotton mills, to save them from 
 the dangers of the street and a life of idleness. A law had 
 been passed which forced the children of paupers to go to work 
 or be punished by being chained to their machines. In return 
 for their services they got enough bad food to keep them alive 
 and a sort of pigsty in which they could rest at night. Often 
 they were so tired that they fell asleep at their job. To keep 
 them awake a foreman with a whip made the rounds and beat 
 them on the knuckles when it was necessary to bring them back 
 to their duties. Of course, under these circumstances thousands 
 of little children died. This was regrettable and the employers, 
 who after all were human beings and not without a heart, sin¬ 
 cerely wished that they could abolish “child labour.” But since 
 man was “free” it followed that children were “free” too. Be¬ 
 sides, if Mr. Jones had tried to work his factory without the 
 use of children of five and six, his rival, Mr. Stone, would have 
 hired an extra supply of little boys and Jones would have been 
 forced into bankruptcy. It was therefore impossible for Jones 
 to do without child labour until such time as an act of Parlia¬ 
 ment should forbid it for all employers. 
 
 But as Parliament was no longer dominated by the old 
 landed aristocracy (which had despised the upstart factory- 
 owners with their money bags and had treated them with open 
 contempt), but was under control of the representatives from 
 the industrial centres, and as long as the law did not allow 
 workmen to combine in labour-unions, very little was accom¬ 
 plished. Of course the intelligent and decent people of that 
 time were not blind to these terrible conditions. They were 
 just helpless. Machinery had conquered the world by sur¬ 
 prise and it took a great many years and the efforts of thou¬ 
 sands of noble men and women to make the machine what it 
 ought to be, man’s servant, and not his master. 
 
 Curiously enough, the first attack upon the outrageous 
 system of employment which was then common in all parts of 
 
422 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the world, was made on behalf of the black slaves of Africa 
 and America. Slavery had been introduced into the Ameri¬ 
 can continent by the Spaniards. They had tried to use the 
 Indians as labourers in the fields and in the mines, but the In¬ 
 dians, when taken away from a life in the open, had lain down 
 and died and to save them from extinction a kind-hearted priest 
 had suggested that negroes be brought from Africa to do the 
 work. The negroes were strong and could stand rough treat¬ 
 ment. Besides, association with the white man would give 
 them a chance to learn Christianity and in this way, they would 
 be able to save their souls, and so from every possible point of 
 view, it would be an excellent arrangement both for the kindly 
 white man and for his ignorant black brother. But with the 
 introduction of machinery there had been a greater demand for 
 cotton and the negroes were forced to work harder than ever 
 before, and they too, like the Indians, began to die under the 
 treatment which they received at the hands of the overseers. 
 
 Stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to 
 Europe and in all countries men and women began to agitate 
 for the abolition of slavery. In England, William Wilberforce 
 and Zachary Macaulay, (the father of the great historian whose 
 history of England you must read if you want to know how 
 wonderfully interesting a history-book can be,) organised a 
 society for the suppression of slavery. First of all they got a 
 law passed which made “slave trading” illegal. And after the 
 year 1840 there was not a single slave in any of the British colo¬ 
 nies. The revolution of 1848 put an end to slavery in the 
 French possessions. The Portuguese passed a law in the year 
 1858 which promised all slaves their liberty in twenty years 
 from date. The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863 and in the 
 same year Tsar Alexander II returned to his serfs that liberty 
 which had been taken away from them more than two centuries 
 before. 
 
 In the United States of America the question led to 
 grave difficulties and a prolonged war. Although the Decla¬ 
 ration of Independence had laid down the principle that 
 “all men were created equal,” an exception had been made for 
 
EMANCIPATION 
 
 423 
 
 those men and women whose skins were dark and who worked 
 on the plantations of the southern states. As time went on, the 
 dislike of the people of the North for the institution of slavery- 
 increased and they made no secret of their feelings. The south¬ 
 erners however claimed that they could not grow their cotton 
 without slave-labour, and for almost fifty years a mighty de¬ 
 bate raged in both the Congress and the Senate. 
 
 The North remained obdurate and the South would not give 
 in. When it appeared impossible to reach a compromise, the 
 southern states threatened to leave the Union. It was a most 
 dangerous point in the history of the Union. Many things 
 “might” have happened. That they did not happen was the 
 work of a very great and very good man. 
 
 On the sixth of November of the year 1860, Abraham Lin¬ 
 coln, an Illinois lawyer, and a man who had made his own in¬ 
 tellectual fortune, had been elected president by the Repub¬ 
 licans who were very strong in the anti-slavery states. He 
 knew the evils of human bondage at first hand and his shrewd 
 common-sense told him that there was no room on the northern 
 continent for two rival nations. When a number of southern 
 states seceded and formed the “Confederate States of Amer¬ 
 ica,” Lincoln accepted the challenge. The Northern states 
 were called upon for volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of 
 young men responded with eager enthusiasm and there fol¬ 
 lowed four years of bitter civil war. The South, better pre¬ 
 pared and following the brilliant leadership of Lee and Jack- 
 son, repeatedly defeated the armies of the North. Then the 
 economic strength of New England and the West began to 
 tell. An unknown officer by the name of Grant arose from ob¬ 
 scurity and became the Charles Martel of the great slave war. 
 Without interruption he hammered his mighty blows upon the 
 crumbling defences of the South. Early in the year 1863, 
 President Lincoln issued his “Emancipation Proclamation” 
 which set all slaves free. In April of the year 1865 Lee sur¬ 
 rendered the last of his brave armies at Appomattox. A few 
 days later, President Lincoln was murdered by a lunatic. But 
 his work was done. With the exception of Cuba which was 
 
THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 424 
 
 still under Spanish domination, slavery had come to an end in 
 every part of the civilised world. 
 
 But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount 
 of liberty, the “free” workmen of Europe did not fare quite so 
 well. Indeed, it is a matter of surprise to many contemporary 
 writers and observers that the masses of workmen (the so- 
 called proletariat) did not die out from sheer misery. They 
 lived in dirty houses situated in miserable parts of the slums. 
 They ate bad food. They received just enough schooling to 
 fit them for their tasks. In case of death or an accident, their 
 families were not provided for. But the brewery and distillery 
 interests, (who could exercise great influence upon the Legis¬ 
 lature, ) encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them 
 unlimited quantities of whisky and gin at very cheap rates. 
 
 The enormous improvement which has taken place since the 
 thirties and the forties of the last century is not due to the ef¬ 
 forts of a single man. The best brains of two generations de¬ 
 voted themselves to the task of saving the world from the dis¬ 
 astrous results of the all-too-sudden introduction of machinery. 
 They did not try to destroy the capitalistic system. This would 
 have been very foolish, for the accumulated wealth of other 
 people, when intelligently used, may be of very great benefit 
 to all mankind. But they tried to combat the notion that true 
 equality can exist between the man who has wealth and owns 
 the factories and can close their doors at will without the risk 
 of going hungry, and the labourer who must take whatever job 
 is offered, at whatever wage he can get, or face the risk of star¬ 
 vation for himself, his wife and his children. 
 
 They endeavoured to introduce a number of laws which reg¬ 
 ulated the relations between the factory owners and the fac¬ 
 tory workers. In this, the reformers have been increasingly 
 successful in all countries. To-day, the majority of the labour¬ 
 ers are well protected; their hours are being reduced to the 
 excellent average of eight, and their children are sent to the 
 schools instead of to the mine pit and to the carding-room of 
 the cotton mills. 
 
 But there were other men who also contemplated the sight 
 
EMANCIPATION 
 
 425 
 
 of all the belching smoke-stacks, who heard the rattle of the 
 railroad trains, who saw the store-houses filled with a surplus 
 of all sorts of materials, and who wondered to what ultimate 
 goal this tremendous activity would lead in the years to come. 
 They remembered that the human race had lived for hundreds 
 of thousands of years without commercial and industrial com¬ 
 petition. Could they change the existing order of things and 
 do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human 
 happiness to profits? 
 
 This idea—this vague hope for a better day—was not re¬ 
 stricted to a single country. In England, Robert Owen, the 
 owner of many cotton mills, established a so-called “socialistic 
 community” which was a success. But when he died, the pros¬ 
 perity of New Lanark came to an end and an attempt of Louis 
 Blanc, a French journalist, to establish “social workshops” 
 all over France fared no better. Indeed, the increasing num¬ 
 ber of socialistic writers soon began to see that little individual 
 communities which remained outside of the regular industrial 
 life, would never be able to accomplish anything at all. It 
 was necessary to study the fundamental principles underlying 
 the whole industrial and capitalistic society before useful reme¬ 
 dies could be suggested. 
 
 The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis 
 Blanc and Francois Fournier were succeeded by theoretical 
 students of socialism like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of 
 these two, Marx is the best known. He was a very brilliant 
 Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany. He 
 had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he be¬ 
 gan to interest himself in questions of labour and wages and 
 unemployment. But his liberal views made him very unpopu¬ 
 lar with the police authorities of Germany, and he was forced to 
 flee to Brussels and then to London, where he lived a poor and 
 shabby life as the correspondent of the New York Tribune. 
 
 No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on 
 economic subjects. But in the year 1864 he organised the first 
 international association of working men and three years later* 
 in 1867, he published the first volume of his well-known trea- 
 
426 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 tise called “Capital.” Marx believed that all history was a 
 long struggle between those who “have” and those who “don’t 
 have.” The introduction and general use of machinery had 
 created a new class in society, that of the capitalists who used 
 their surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used by 
 the labourers to produce still more wealth, which was again used 
 to build more factories and so on, until the end of time. Mean¬ 
 while, according to Marx, the third estate (the bourgeoisie) 
 was growing richer and richer and the fourth estate (the prole¬ 
 tariat) was growing poorer and poorer, and he predicted that 
 in the end, one man would possess all the wealth of the world 
 while the others would be his employees and dependent upon 
 his good will. 
 
 To prevent such a state of affairs, Marx advised working 
 men of all countries to unite and to fight for a number of politi¬ 
 cal and economic measures which he had enumerated in a Man¬ 
 ifesto in the year 1848, the year of the last great European 
 ^revolution. 
 
 These views of course were very unpopular with the gov¬ 
 ernments of Europe, many countries, especially Prussia, passed 
 severe laws against the Socialists and policemen were ordered 
 to break up the Socialist meetings and to arrest the speakers. 
 But that sort of persecution never does any good. Martyrs 
 are the best possible advertisements for an unpopular cause. 
 In Europe the number of socialists steadily increased and it 
 was soon clear that the Socialists did not contemplate a violent 
 revolution but were using their increasing power in the differ- 
 ent Parliaments to promote the interests of the labouring 
 classes. Socialists were even called upon to act as Cabinet 
 Ministers, and they co-operated with progressive Catholics and 
 Protestants to undo the damage that had been caused by the 
 Industrial Revolution and to bring about a fairer division of 
 the many benefits which had followed the introduction of ma¬ 
 chinery and the increased production of wealth. 
 
THE AGE OF SCIENCE 
 
 BUT THE WORLD HAD UNDERGONE ANOTHER 
 CHANGE WHICH WAS OF GREATER IM¬ 
 PORTANCE THAN EITHER THE POLITICAL 
 OR THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS. 
 AFTER GENERATIONS OF OPPRESSION 
 AND PERSECUTION, THE SCIENTIST HAD 
 AT LAST GAINED LIBERTY OF ACTION 
 AND HE WAS NOW TRYING TO DISCOVER 
 THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS WHICH GOV¬ 
 ERN THE UNIVERSE 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
 The Egyptians, the Baby¬ 
 lonians, the Chaldeans, the 
 Greeks and the Romans, had all 
 contributed something to the first 
 vague notions of science and sci¬ 
 entific investigation. But the 
 great migrations of the fourth 
 century had destroyed the classi¬ 
 cal world of the Mediterranean, 
 and the Christian Church, which 
 was more interested in the life of 
 the soul than in the life of the 
 body, had regarded science as a 
 manifestation of that human ar- 
 
 rogance which wanted to pry into divine affairs which belonged 
 to the realm of Almighty God, and which therefore was closely 
 related to the seven deadly sins. 
 
 427 
 
428 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 The Renaissance to a certain but limited extent had broken 
 through this wall of Mediaeval prejudices. The Reformation, 
 however, which had overtaken the Renaissance in the early 16 th 
 century, had been hostile to the ideals of the “new civilisation,” 
 and once more the men of science were threatened with severe 
 punishment, should they try to pass beyond the narrow limits 
 of knowledge which had been laid down in Holy Writ. 
 
 Our world is filled with the statues of great generals, atop 
 of prancing horses, leading their cheering soldiers to glorious 
 victory. Here and there, a modest slab of marble announces 
 that a man of science has found his final resting place. A thou¬ 
 sand years from now we shall probably do these things differ¬ 
 ently, and the children of that happy generation shall know 
 of the splendid courage and the almost inconceivable devotion 
 to duty of the men who were the pioneers of that abstract 
 knowledge, which alone has made our modern world a practical 
 possibility. 
 
 Many of these scientific pioneers suffered poverty and con¬ 
 tempt and humiliation. They lived in garrets and died in dun¬ 
 geons. They dared not print their names on the title-pages of 
 their books and they dared not print their conclusions in the 
 land of their birth, but smuggled the manuscripts to some secret 
 printing shop in Amsterdam or Haarlem. They were exposed 
 to the bitter enmity of the Church, both Protestant and Catho¬ 
 lic, and were the subjects of endless sermons, inciting the par¬ 
 ishioners to violence against the “heretics.” 
 
 Here and there they found an asylum. In Holland, where 
 the spirit of tolerance was strongest, the authorities, while re¬ 
 garding these scientific investigations with little favour, yet 
 refused to interfere with people’s freedom of thought. It be¬ 
 came a little asylum for intellectual liberty where French and 
 English and German philosophers and mathematicians and 
 physicians could go to enjoy a short spell of rest and get a 
 breath of free air. 
 
 In another chapter I have told you how Roger Bacon, the 
 great genius of the thirteenth century, was prevented for years 
 
THE AGE OF SCIENCE 
 
 429 
 
 from writing a single word, lest he get into new troubles with 
 the authorities of the church. And five hundred years later, the 
 contributors to the great philosophic “Encyclopaedia” were un¬ 
 der the constant supervision of the French gendarmerie. Half 
 a century afterwards, Darwin, who dared to question the story 
 of the creation of man, as re¬ 
 vealed in the Bible, was de¬ 
 nounced from every pulpit as 
 an enemy of the human race. 
 
 Even to-day, the persecution of 
 those who venture into the un¬ 
 known realm of science has 
 not entirely come to an end. 
 
 And while I am writing this 
 Mr. Bryan is addressing a vast 
 multitude on the “Menace of 
 Darwinism,” warning his hear¬ 
 ers against the errors of the 
 great English naturalist. 
 
 All this, however, is a mere 
 detail. The work that has to 
 be done invariably gets done, 
 and the ultimate profit of the 
 discoveries and the inventions 
 goes to the mass of those same 
 people who have always decried 
 the man of vision as an unpractical idealist. 
 
 The seventeenth century had still preferred to investi¬ 
 gate the far off heavens and to study the position of our 
 planet in relation to the solar system. Even so, the Church had 
 disapproved of this unseemly curiosity, and Copernicus who 
 first of all had proved that the sun was the centre of the uni¬ 
 verse, did not publish his work until the day of his death. Gali¬ 
 leo spent the greater part of his life under the supervision of the 
 clerical authorities, but he continued to use his telescope and 
 provided Isaac Newton with a mass of practical observations, 
 which greatly helped the English mathematician when he dis- 
 
430 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 covered the existence of that interesting habit of falling ob¬ 
 jects which came to be known as the Law of Gravitation. 
 
 That, for the moment at least, exhausted the interest in the 
 Heavens, and man began to study the earth. The invention 
 of a workable microscope, (a strange and clumsy little thing,) 
 by Anthony van Leeuwenhoek during the last half of the 17th 
 century, gave man a chance to study the “microscopic” crea¬ 
 tures who are responsible for so many of his ailments. It laid 
 the foundations of the science of “bacteriology” which in the 
 last forty years has delivered the world from a great number of 
 diseases by discovering the tiny organisms which cause the 
 complaint. It also allowed the geologists to make a more 
 careful study of different rocks and of the fossils (the petrified 
 prehistoric plants) which they found deep below the surface of 
 the earth. These investigations convinced them that the earth 
 must be a great deal older than was stated in the book of 
 Genesis and in the year 1830, Sir Charles Lyell published his 
 “Principles of Geology” which denied the story of creation as 
 related in the Bible and gave a far more wonderful description 
 of slow growth and gradual development. 
 
 At the same time, the Marquis de Laplace was working on 
 a new theory of creation, which made the earth a little blotch 
 in the nebulous sea out of which the planetary system had 
 been formed and Bunsen and Kirchhoff, by the use of the spec¬ 
 troscope, were investigating the chemical composition of the 
 stars and of our good neighbour, the sun, whose curious spots 
 had first been noticed by Galileo. 
 
 Meanwhile after a most bitter and relentless warfare with 
 the clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the 
 anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission 
 to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our 
 organs and their habits for the guesswork of the mediasval 
 quack. 
 
 Within a single generation (between 1810 and 1840) more 
 progress was made in every branch of science than in all the 
 hundreds of thousands of years that had passed since man first 
 looked at the stars and wondered why they were there. It 
 
THE DIRIGIBLE 
 

THE AGE OF SCIENCE 
 
 431 
 
 must have been a very sad age for the people who had been 
 educated under the old system. And we can understand their 
 feeling of hatred for such men as Lamarck and Darwin, who 
 did not exactly tell them that they were “descended from 
 monkeys,” (an accusation which our grandfathers seemed to 
 regard as a personal insult,) but who suggested that the proud 
 human race had evolved from a long series of ancestors who 
 could trace the family-tree back to the little jelly-fishes who 
 were the first inhabitants of our planet. 
 
 The dignified world of the well-to-do middle class, which 
 dominated the nineteenth century, was willing to make use 
 of the gas or the electric light, of all the many practical appli¬ 
 cations of the great scientific discoveries, but the mere inves¬ 
 tigator, the man of the “scientific theory” without whom no 
 progress would be possible, continued to be distrusted until 
 very recently. Then, at last, his services were recognised. To¬ 
 day the rich people who in past ages donated their wealth for 
 the building of a cathedral, construct vast laboratories where 
 silent men do battle upon the hidden enemies of mankind and 
 often sacrifice their lives that coming generations may enjoy 
 greater happiness and health. 
 
 Indeed it has come to pass that many of the ills of this 
 world, which our ancestors regarded as inevitable “acts of 
 God,” have been exposed as manifestations of our own ignor¬ 
 ance and neglect. Every child nowadays knows that he can 
 keep from getting typhoid fever by a little care in the choice of 
 his drinking water. But it took years and years of hard 
 work before the doctors could convince the people of this fact. 
 Few of us now fear the dentist chair. A study of the mi¬ 
 crobes that live in our mouth has made it possible to keep our 
 teeth from decay. Must perchance a tooth be pulled, then we 
 take a sniff of gas, and go our way rejoicing. When the news¬ 
 papers of the year 1846 brought the story of the “painless 
 operation” which had been performed in America with the help 
 of ether, the good people of Europe shook their heads. To 
 them it seemed against the will of God that man should escape 
 the pain which was the share of all mortals, and it took a long 
 
432 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 time before the practice of taking ether and chloroform for 
 operations became general. 
 
 But the battle of progress had been won. The breach in the 
 old walls of prejudice was growing larger and larger, and as 
 time went by, the ancient stones of ignorance came crumbling 
 down. The eager crusaders of a new and happier social order 
 rushed forward. Suddenly they found themselves facing a new 
 obstacle. Out of the ruins of a long-gone past, another citadel 
 of reaction had been erected, and millions of men had to give 
 their lives before this last bulwark was destroyed. 
 
ART 
 
 A CHAPTER OF ART 
 
 When a baby is perfectly healthy and has had enough to eat 
 and has slept all it wants, then it hums a little tune to show how 
 happy it is. To grown-ups this humming means nothing. It 
 sounds like “goo-zum, goo-zum, goo-o-o-o-o,” but to the baby 
 it is perfect music. It is his first contribution to art. 
 
 As soon as he (or she) gets a little older and is able to sit 
 up, the period of mud-pie making begins. These mud-pies do 
 not interest the outside world. There are too many million 
 babies, making too many million mud-pies at the same time. 
 But to the small infant they represent another expedition into 
 the pleasant realm of art. The baby is now a sculptor. 
 
 At the age of three or four, when the hands begin to obey 
 the brain, the child becomes a painter. His fond mother gives 
 him a box of coloured chalks and every loose bit of paper is 
 rapidly covered with strange pothooks and scrawls which rep¬ 
 resent houses and horses and terrible naval battles. 
 
 Soon however this happiness of just “making things” 
 comes to an end. School begins and the greater part of the 
 day is filled up with work. The business of living, or rather 
 the business of “making a living,” becomes the most important 
 event in the life of every boy and girl. There is little time left 
 for “art” between learning the tables of multiplication and the 
 past participles of the irregular French verbs. And unless 
 the desire for making certain things for the mere pleasure of 
 
 433 
 
434 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 creating them without any hope of a practical return be very 
 strong, the child grows into manhood and forgets that the 
 first five years of his life were mainly devoted to art. 
 
 Nations are not different from children. As soon as the 
 cave-man had escaped the threatening dangers of the long and 
 shivering ice-period, and had put his house in order, he began 
 to make certain things which he thought beautiful, although 
 they were of no earthly use to him in his fight with the wild 
 animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his grotto with 
 pictures of the elephants and the deer which he hunted, and 
 out of a piece of stone, he hacked the rough figures of those 
 women he thought most attractive. 
 
 As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the 
 Persians and all the other people of the east had founded 
 their little countries along the Nile and the Euphrates, they 
 began to build magnificent palaces for their kings, invented 
 bright pieces of jewellery for their women and planted gardens 
 which sang happy songs of colour with their many bright flow¬ 
 ers. 
 
 Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the dis¬ 
 tant Asiatic prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as 
 fighters and hunters, composed songs which celebrated the 
 mighty deeds of their great leaders and invented a form of 
 poetry which has survived until our own day. A thousand years 
 later, when they had established themselves on the Greek main¬ 
 land, and had built their “city-states,” they expressed their 
 joy (and their sorrows) in magnificent temples, in statues, in 
 comedies and in tragedies, and in every conceivable form of 
 art. 
 
 The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy 
 administering other people and making money to have much 
 love for “useless and unprofitable” adventures of the spirit. 
 They conquered the world and built roads and bridges but they 
 borrowed their art wholesale from the Greeks. They invented 
 certain practical forms of architecture which answered the 
 demands of their day and age. But their statues and their his¬ 
 tories and their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imi- 
 
ART 
 
 435 
 
 tations of Greek originals. Without that vague and hard-to- 
 define something which the world calls “personality,” there can 
 be no art and the Roman world distrusted that particular sort 
 of personality. The Empire needed efficient soldiers and 
 tradesmen. The business of writing poetry or making pic¬ 
 tures was left to foreigners. 
 
 Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the prover¬ 
 bial bull in the china-shop of western Europe. He had no use 
 for what he did not understand. Speaking in terms of the year 
 1921, he liked the magazine covers of pretty ladies, but threw 
 the Rembrandt etchings which he had inherited into the ash- 
 can. Soon he came to learn better. Then he tried to undo the 
 damage which he had created a few years before. But the ash- 
 cans were gone and so were the pictures. 
 
 But by this time, his own art, which he had brought with 
 him from the east, had developed into something very beautiful 
 and he made up for his past neglect and indifference by the so- 
 called “art of the Middle Ages” which as far as northern Eu¬ 
 rope is concerned was a product of the Germanic mind and had 
 borrowed but little from the Greeks and the Latins and nothing 
 at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and Assyria, not 
 to speak of India and China, which simply did not exist, as far 
 as the people of that time were concerned. Indeed, so little 
 had the northern races been influenced by their southern neigh¬ 
 bours that their own architectural products were completely 
 misunderstood by the people of Italy and were treated by 
 them with downright and unmitigated contempt. 
 
 You have all heard the word Gothic. You probably asso¬ 
 ciate it with the picture of a lovely old cathedral, lifting its slen¬ 
 der spires towards high heaven. But what does the word really 
 mean? 
 
 It means something “uncouth” and “barbaric”—something 
 which one might expect from an “uncivilised Goth,” a rough 
 backwoods-man who had no respect for the established rules of 
 classical art and who built his “modern horrors” to please his 
 own low tastes without a decent regard for the examples of 
 the Forum and the Acropolis. 
 
436 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 And yet for several centuries this form of Gothic architec¬ 
 ture was the highest expression of the sincere feeling for art 
 which inspired the whole northern continent. From a previous 
 chapter, you will remember how the people of the late Middle 
 Ages lived. Unless they were peasants and dwelt in villages, 
 they were citizens of a “city” or “civitas,” the old Latin name 
 for a tribe. And indeed, behind their high walls and their deep 
 moats, these good burghers were true tribesmen who shared 
 the common dangers and enjoyed the common safety and pros¬ 
 perity which they derived from their system of mutual protec¬ 
 tion. 
 
 In the old Greek and Roman cities the market-place, where 
 the temple stood, had been the centre of civic life. During 
 the Middle Ages, the Church, the House of God, became such a 
 centre. We modern Protestant people, who go to our church 
 only once a week, and then for a few hours only, hardly know 
 what a medieval church meant to the community. Then, be¬ 
 fore you were a week old, you were taken to the Church to be 
 baptised. As a child, you visited the Church to learn the holy 
 stories of the Scriptures. Later on you became a member 
 of the congregation, and if you were rich enough you built 
 yourself a separate little chapel sacred to the memory of the 
 Patron Saint of your own family. As for the sacred edifice, 
 it was open at all hours of the day and many of the night. In 
 a certain sense it resembled a modern club, dedicated to all the 
 inhabitants of the town. In the church you very likely caught 
 a first glimpse of the girl who was to become your bride at a 
 great ceremony before the High Altar. And finally, when the 
 end of the journey had come, you were buried beneath the 
 stones of this familiar building, that all your children and their 
 grandchildren might pass over your grave until the Day of 
 Judgement. 
 
 Because the Church was not only the House of God but 
 also the true centre of all common life, the building had to be 
 different from anything that had ever been constructed by 
 the hands of man. The temples of the Egyptians and the 
 Greeks and the Romans had been merely the shrine of a local 
 
ART 
 
 437 
 
 divinity. As no sermons were preached before the images of 
 Osiris or Zeus or Jupiter, it was not necessary that the interior 
 offer space for a great multitude. All the religious processions 
 of the old Mediterranean peoples took place in the open. But 
 in the north, where the 
 weather was usually bad, 
 most functions were held 
 under the roof of the church. 
 
 During many centuries 
 the architects struggled with 
 this problem of constructing 
 a building that was large 
 enough. The Roman tradi¬ 
 tion taught them how to 
 build heavy stone walls with 
 very small windows lest 
 the walls lose their 
 strength. On the top of 
 this they then placed a heavy 
 stone roof. But in the 
 twelfth century, after the 
 beginning of the Crusades, 
 when the architects had seen 
 the pointed arches of the 
 Mohammedan builders, the 
 western builders discovered 
 a new style which gave them 
 their first chance to make the 
 sort of building which those 
 days of an intense religious 
 life demanded. And then 
 they developed this strange style upon which the Italians 
 bestowed the contemptuous name of “Gothic” or barbaric. 
 They achieved their purpose by inventing a vaulted roof which 
 was supported by “ribs.” But such a roof, if it became 
 too heavy, was apt to break the walls, just as a man 
 of three hundred pounds sitting down upon a child’s chair 
 
 GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
438 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 will force it to collapse. To overcome this difficulty, certain 
 French architects then began to re-enforce the walls with 
 “buttresses” which were merely heavy masses of stone against 
 which the walls could lean while they supported the roof. And 
 to assure the further safety of the roof they supported the ribs 
 of the roof by so-called “flying buttresses,” a very simple 
 method of construction which you will understand at once when 
 you look at our picture. 
 
 This new method of construction allowed the introduction 
 of enormous windows. In the twelfth century, glass was still 
 an expensive curiosity, and very few private buildings pos¬ 
 sessed glass windows. Even the castles of the nobles were 
 without protection and this accounts for the eternal drafts 
 and explains why people of that day wore furs in-doors as 
 well as out. 
 
 Fortunately, the art of making coloured glass, with which 
 the ancient people of the Mediterranean had been familiar, 
 had not been entirely lost. There was a revival of stained 
 glass-making and soon the windows of the Gothic churches 
 told the stories of the Holy Book in little bits of brilliantly 
 coloured window-pane, which were caught in a long frame¬ 
 work of lead. 
 
 Behold, therefore, the new and glorious house of God, 
 filled with an eager multitude, “living” its religion as no people 
 have ever done either before or since! Nothing is considered 
 too good or too costly or too wondrous for this House of God 
 and Home of Man. The sculptors, who since the destruction 
 of the Homan Empire have been out of employment, haltingly 
 return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and buttresses 
 and cornices are all covered with carven images of Our Lord 
 and the blessed Saints. The embroiderers too are set to work 
 to make tapestries for the walls. The jewellers offer their 
 highest art that the shrine of the altar may be worthy of com¬ 
 plete adoration. Even the painter does his best. Poor man, 
 he is greatly handicapped by lack of a suitable medium. 
 
 And thereby hangs a story. 
 
 The Romans of the early Christian period had covered the 
 
ART 
 
 439 
 
 floors and the walls of their temples and houses with mosaics; 
 pictures made of coloured bits of glass. But this art had been 
 exceedingly difficult. It gave the painter no chance to express 
 all he wanted to say, as all children know who have ever tried to 
 make figures out of coloured blocks of wood. The art of 
 mosaic painting therefore died out during the late Middle 
 Ages except in Russia, where the Byzantine mosaic painters 
 had found a refuge after the fall of Constantinople and con¬ 
 tinued to ornament the walls of the orthodox churches until 
 the day of the Bolsheviki, when there was an end to the build¬ 
 ing of churches. 
 
 Of course, the medieval painter could mix his colours with 
 the water of the wet plaster which was put upon the walls of 
 the churches. This method of painting upon “fresh plaster” 
 (which was generally called “fresco” or “fresh” painting) 
 was very popular for many centuries. To-day, it is as rare 
 as the art of painting miniatures in manuscripts and among 
 the hundreds of artists of our modern cities there is perhaps 
 one who can handle this medium successfully. But during the 
 Middle Ages there was no other way and the artists were 
 “fresco” workers for lack of something better. The method 
 however had certain great disadvantages. Very often the 
 plaster came off the walls after only a few years, or dampness 
 spoiled the pictures, just as dampness will spoil the pattern 
 of our wall paper. People tried every imaginable expedient 
 to get away from this plaster background. They tried to mix 
 their colours with wine and vinegar and with honey and with 
 the sticky white of egg, but none of these methods were satis¬ 
 factory. For more than a thousand years these experiments 
 continued. In painting pictures upon the parchment leaves 
 of manuscripts the medkeval artists were very successful. But 
 when it came to covering large spaces of wood or stone with 
 paint which would stick, they did not succeed very well. 
 
 At last, during the first half of the fifteenth century, the 
 problem was solved in the southern Netherlands by Jan and 
 Hubert van Eyck. The famous Flemish brothers mixed their 
 paint with specially prepared oils and this allowed them to use 
 
440 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 wood and canvas or stone or anything else as a background foi 
 their pictures. 
 
 But by this time the religious ardour of the early Middle 
 Ages was a thing of the past. The rich burghers of the cities 
 were succeeding the bishops as patrons of the arts. And as 
 art invariably follows the full dinner-pail, the artists now began 
 to work for these worldly employers and painted pictures for 
 kings, for grand-dukes and for rich bankers. Within a very 
 short time, the new method of painting with oil spread through 
 Europe and in every country there developed a school of 
 special painting which showed the characteristic tastes of the 
 people for whom these portraits and landscapes were made. 
 
 In Spain, for example, Velasquez painted court-dwarfs 
 and the weavers of the royal tapestry-factories, and all sorts 
 of persons and subjects connected with the king and his court. 
 But in Holland, Rembrandt and Frans Hals and Vermeer 
 painted the barnyard of the merchant’s house, and they painted 
 his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumptious children 
 and the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy on 
 the other hand, where the Pope remained the largest patron 
 of the arts, Michelangelo and Correggio continued to paint 
 Madonnas and Saints, while in England, where the aristocracy 
 was very rich and powerful and in France where the 
 kings had become uppermost in the state, the artists painted 
 distinguished gentlemen who were members of the government, 
 and very lovely ladies who were friends of His Majesty. 
 
 The great change in painting, which came about with the 
 neglect of the old church and the rise of a new class in society, 
 was reflected in all other forms of art. The invention of print¬ 
 ing had made it possible for authors to win fame and reputa¬ 
 tion by writing books for the multitudes. In this way arose 
 the profession of the novelist and the illustrator. But the 
 people who had money enough to buy the new books were not 
 the sort who liked to sit at home of nights, looking at the ceiling 
 or just sitting. They wanted to be amused. The few minstrels 
 of the Middle Ages were not sufficient to cover the demand for 
 entertainment. For the first time since the early Greek city- 
 
ART 
 
 441 
 
 states of two thousand years before, the professional play¬ 
 wright had a chance to ply his trade. The Middle Ages had 
 known the theatre merely as part of certain church celebra¬ 
 tions. The tragedies of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen¬ 
 turies had told the story of the suffering of our Lord. But 
 during the sixteenth century the worldly theatre made its re¬ 
 appearance. It is true that, at first, the position of the pro¬ 
 fessional playwright and actor was not a very high one. 
 William Shakespeare was regarded as a sort of circus-fellow 
 who amused his neighbours with his tragedies and comedies. 
 But when he died in the year 1616 he had begun to enjoy the 
 respect of his neighbours and actors were no longer subjects 
 of police supervision. 
 
 William’s contemporary, Lope de Vega, the incredible 
 Spaniard who wrote no less than 1800 worldly and 400 reli¬ 
 gious plays, was a person of rank who received the papal ap¬ 
 proval upon his work. A century later, Moliere, the French¬ 
 man, was deemed worthy of the companionship of none less 
 than King Louis XIV. 
 
 Since then, the theatre has enjoyed an ever increasing 
 affection on the part of the people. To-day a “theatre” is part 
 of every well-regulated city, and the “silent drama” of the 
 movies has penetrated to the tiniest of our prairie hamlets. 
 
 Another art, however, was to become the most popular of 
 all. That was music. Most of the old art-forms demanded a 
 great deal of technical skill. It takes years and years of prac¬ 
 tice before our clumsy hand is able to follow the commands of 
 the brain and reproduce our vision upon canvas or in marble. 
 It takes a lifetime to learn how to act or how to write a good 
 novel. And it takes a great deal of training on the part of the 
 public to appreciate the best in painting and writing and 
 sculpture. But almost any one, not entirely tone-deaf, can 
 follow a tune and almost everybody can get enjoyment out of 
 some sort of music. The Middle Ages had heard a little music 
 but it had been entirely the music of the church. The holy 
 chants were subject to very severe laws of rhythm and harmony 
 
442 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 and soon these became monotonous. Besides, they could not 
 well be sung in the street or in the market-place. 
 
 The Renaissance changed this. Music once more came 
 into its own as the best friend of man, both in his happiness and 
 in his sorrows. 
 
 The Egyptians and the Babylonians and the ancient Jews 
 had all been great lovers of music. They had even combined 
 different instruments into regular orchestras. But the Greeks 
 had frowned upon this barbaric foreign noise. They liked to 
 hear a man recite the stately poetry of Homer and Pindar. 
 They allowed him to accompany himself upon the lyre (the 
 poorest of all stringed instru¬ 
 ments) . That was as far as any 
 one could go without incurring 
 the risk of popular disapproval. 
 
 The Romans on the other hand 
 had loved orchestral music at 
 their dinners and parties and 
 they had invented most of the 
 instruments which (in very 
 modified form) we use to-day. 
 
 The early church had despised 
 this music which smacked too 
 much of the wicked pagan 
 world which had just been de¬ 
 stroyed. A few songs rendered 
 by the entire congregation were 
 all the bishops of the third and 
 fourth centuries would tolerate. As the congregation was apt 
 to sing dreadfully out of key without the guidance of an in¬ 
 strument, the church had afterwards allowed the use of an 
 organ, an invention of the second century of our era which con¬ 
 sisted of a combination of the old pipes of Pan and a pair of 
 bellows. 
 
 Then came the great migrations. The last of the Roman 
 musicians were either killed or became tramp-fiddlers going 
 from city to city and playing in the street, and begging for 
 pennies like the harpist on a modern ferry-boat. 
 
ART 
 
 448 
 
 But the revival of a more worldly civilisation in the cities 
 of the late Middle Ages had created a new demand for musi¬ 
 cians. Instruments like the horn, which had been used only 
 as signal-instruments for hunting and fighting, were remodelled 
 until they could reproduce sounds which were agreeable in the 
 dance-hall and in the banqueting room. A bow strung with 
 horse-hair was used to play the old-fashioned guitar and be¬ 
 fore the end of the Middle Ages this six-stringed instrument 
 (the most ancient of all string-instruments which dates back 
 to Egypt and Assyria) had grown into our modern four- 
 stringed fiddle which Stradivarius and the other Italian violin- 
 makers of the eighteenth century brought to the height of per¬ 
 fection. 
 
 And finally the modern piano was invented, the most wide¬ 
 spread of all musical instruments, which has followed man into 
 the wilderness of the jungle and the ice-fields of Greenland. 
 The organ had been the first of all keyed instruments but the 
 performer always depended upon the co-operation of some one 
 who worked the bellows, a job which nowadays is done by elec¬ 
 tricity. The musicians therefore looked for a handier and less 
 circumstantial instrument to assist them in training the pupils 
 of the many church choirs. During the great eleventh century, 
 Guido, a Benedictine monk of the town of Arezzo (the 
 birthplace of the poet Petrarch) gave us our modern system 
 of musical annotation. Some time during that century, when 
 there was a great deal of popular interest in music, the first 
 instrument with both keys and strings was built. It must 
 have sounded as tinkly as one of those tiny children’s pianos 
 which you can buy at every toy-shop. In the city of Vienna, 
 the town where the strolling musicians of the Middle Ages 
 (who had been classed with jugglers and card sharps) had 
 formed the first separate Guild of Musicians in the year 1288, 
 the little monochord was developed into something which we 
 can recognise as the direct ancestor of our modern Steinway. 
 From Austria the “clavichord” as it was usually called in those 
 days (because it had “claves” or keys) went to Italy. There 
 it was perfected into the “spinet” which was so called after 
 
444 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 the inventor, Giovanni Spinetti of Venice. At last during 
 the eighteenth century, some time between 1709 and 1720, 
 Bartolomeo Cristofori made a “clavier” which allowed the 
 performer to play both loudly and softly or as it was said in 
 Italian, “piano” and “forte.” This instrument with certain 
 changes became our “pianoforte” or piano. 
 
 Then for the first time the world possessed an easy and con¬ 
 venient instrument which could be mastered in a couple of years 
 and did not need the eternal tuning of harps and fiddles and 
 was much pleasanter to the ears than the mediaeval tubas, clari¬ 
 nets, trombones and oboes. Just as the phonograph has given 
 millions of modern people their first love of music so did the 
 early “pianoforte” carry the knowledge of music into much 
 wider circles. Music became part of the education of every well- 
 bred man and woman. Princes and rich merchants maintained 
 private orchestras. The musician ceased to be a wandering 
 “jongleur” and became a highly valued member of the com¬ 
 munity. Music was added to the dramatic performances of 
 the theatre and out of this practice, grew our modern Opera. 
 Originally only a few very rich princes could afford the ex¬ 
 penses of an “opera troupe.” But as the taste for this sort of 
 entertainment grew, many cities built their own theatres where 
 Italian and afterwards German operas were given to the un¬ 
 limited joy of the whole community with the exception of a few 
 sects of very strict Christians who still regarded music with 
 deep suspicion as something which was too lovely to be entirely 
 good for the soul. 
 
 By the middle of the eighteenth century the musical life 
 of Europe was in full swing. Then there came forward a 
 man who was greater than all others, a simple organist of the 
 Thomas Church of Leipzig, by the name of Johann Sebastian 
 Bach. In his compositions for every known instrument, from 
 comic songs and popular dances to the most stately of sacred 
 hymns and oratorios, he laid the foundation for all our modern 
 music. When he died in the year 1750 he was succeeded by 
 Mozart, who created musical fabrics of sheer loveliness which 
 remind us of lace that has been woven out of harmony and 
 
ART 
 
 445 
 
 rhythm. Then came Ludwig von Beethoven, the most tragic 
 of men, who gave us our modern orchestra, yet heard none of 
 his greatest compositions because he was deaf, as the result of a 
 cold contracted during his years of poverty. 
 
 Beethoven lived through the period of the great French 
 Bevolution. Full of hope for a new and glorious day, he had 
 dedicated one of his symphonies to Napoleon. But he lived 
 to regret the hour. When he died in the year 1827, Napoleon 
 was gone and the French Revolution was gone, but the steam 
 engine had come and was filling the world with a sound that 
 had nothing in common with the dreams of the Third Sym¬ 
 phony. 
 
 Indeed, the new order of steam and iron and coal and large 
 factories had little use for art, for painting and sculpture and 
 poetry and music. The old protectors of the arts, the Church 
 and the princes and the merchants of the Middle Ages and the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no longer existed. The 
 leaders of the new industrial world were too busy and had too 
 little education to bother about etchings and sonatas and bits 
 of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those 
 things, and who were of no practical use to the community in 
 which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened 
 to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste 
 for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. 
 The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. 
 Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings 
 had been left, were dying a slow death in the museums. And 
 music became a monopoly of a few “virtuosi” who took the 
 music away from the home and carried it to the concert-hall. 
 
 But steadily, although slowly, the arts are coming back into 
 their own. People begin to understand that Rembrandt and 
 Beethoven and Rodin are the true prophets and leaders of 
 their race and that a world without art and happiness resem¬ 
 bles a nursery without laughter. 
 
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 
 
 A CHAPTER WHICH OUGHT TO GIVE YOU A 
 GREAT DEAL OF POLITICAL INFORMA¬ 
 TION ABOUT THE LAST FIFTY YEARS, BUT 
 WHICH REALLY CONTAINS SEVERAL EX¬ 
 PLANATIONS AND A FEW APOLOGIES 
 
 If I had known how difficult it was to write a History of 
 the World, I should never have undertaken the task. Of course, 
 any one possessed of enough industry to lose himself for half 
 a dozen years in the musty stacks of a library, can compile a 
 ponderous tome which gives an account of the events in every 
 land during every century. But that was not the purpose of 
 the present book. The publishers wanted to print a history 
 that should have rhythm—a story which galloped rather than 
 walked. And now that I have almost finished I discover that 
 certain chapters gallop, that others wade slowly through the 
 dreary sands of long forgotten ages—that a few parts do not 
 make any progress at all, while still others indulge in a veri¬ 
 table jazz of action and romance. I did not like this and I sug¬ 
 gested that we destroy the whole manuscript and begin once 
 more from the beginning. This, however, the publishers would 
 not allow. 
 
 As the next best solution of my difficulties, I took the type¬ 
 written pages to a number of charitable friends and asked them 
 to read what I had said, and give me the benefit of their advice. 
 The experience was rather disheartening. Each and every 
 
 446 
 
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 
 
 447 
 
 man had his own prejudices and his own hobbies and prefer¬ 
 ences. They all wanted to know why, where and how I dared 
 to omit their pet nation, their pet statesman, or even their most 
 beloved criminal. With some of them, Napoleon and Jenghiz 
 Khan were candidates for high honours. I explained that I 
 had tried very hard to be fair to Napoleon, but that in my 
 estimation he was greatly inferior to such men as George 
 Washington, Gustavus Wasa, Augustus, Hammurabi or 
 Lincoln, and a score of others all of whom were obliged to 
 
 THE PIONEER 
 
 content themselves with a few paragraphs, from sheer lack of 
 space. As for Jenghiz Khan, I only recognise his superior 
 ability in the field of wholesale murder and 1 did not intend to 
 give him any more publicity than I could help. 
 
 “This is very well as far as it goes,” said the next critic, 
 “but how about the Puritans? We are celebrating the ter¬ 
 centenary of their arrival at Plymouth. They ought to have 
 more space.” My answer was that if I were writing a history 
 of America, the Puritans would get fully one half of the first 
 twelve chapters; that however this was a history of mankind 
 and that the event on Plymouth rock was not a matter of far- 
 
448 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 reaching international importance until many centuries later; 
 that the United States had been founded by thirteen colonies 
 and not by a single one; that the most prominent leaders of the 
 first twenty years of our history had been from Virginia, from 
 Pennsylvania, and from the island of Nevis, rather than from 
 Massachusetts; and that therefore the Puritans ought to con¬ 
 tent themselves with a page of print and a special map. 
 
 Next came the prehistoric specialist. Why in the name of 
 the great Tyrannosaur had I not devoted more space to the 
 wonderful race of Cro-Magnon men, who had developed such 
 a high stage of civilisation 10,000 years ago? 
 
 Indeed, and why not ? The reason is simple. I do not take 
 as much stock in the perfection of these early races as some of 
 our most noted anthropologists seem to do. Rousseau and 
 the philosophers of the eighteenth century created the “noble 
 savage” who was supposed to have dwelt in a state of perfect 
 happiness during the beginning of time. Our modern scien¬ 
 tists have discarded the “noble savage,” so dearly beloved by 
 our grandfathers, and they have replaced him by the “splendid 
 savage” of the French Valleys who 35,000 years ago made an 
 end to the universal rule of the low-browed and low-living 
 brutes of the Neanderthal and other Germanic neighbourhoods. 
 They have shown us the elephants the Cro-Magnon painted 
 and the statues he carved and they have surrounded him with 
 much glory. 
 
 I do not mean to say that they are wrong. But I hold that 
 we know by far too little of this entire period to re-construct 
 that early west-European society with any degree (however 
 humble) of accuracy. And I would rather not state certain 
 things than run the risk of stating certain things that were not 
 so. 
 
 Then there were other critics, who accused me of direct 
 unfairness. Why did I leave out such countries as Ireland 
 and Bulgaria and Siam while I dragged in such other coun¬ 
 tries as Holland and Iceland and Switzerland? My answer 
 was that I did not drag in any countries. They pushed them¬ 
 selves in by main force of circumstances, and I simply could 
 
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 
 
 449 
 
 not keep them out. And in order that my point may be under¬ 
 stood, let me state the basis upon which active membership to 
 this book of history was considered. 
 
 There was but one rule. “Did the country or the person 
 in question produce a new idea or perform an original act 
 without which the history of the entire human race would have 
 been different?” It was not a question of personal taste. It 
 was a matter of cool, almost mathematical judgment. No race 
 ever played a more picturesque role in history than the Mon¬ 
 golians, and no race, from the point of view of achievement or 
 intelligent progress, was of less value to the rest of mankind. 
 
 The career of Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian, is full of dra¬ 
 matic episodes. But as far as we are concerned, he might just 
 as well never have existed at all. In the same way, the history 
 of the Dutch Republic is not interesting because once upon a 
 time the sailors of de Ruyter went fishing in the river Thames, 
 but rather because of the fact that this small mud-bank along 
 the shores of the North Sea offered a hospitable asylum to all 
 sorts of strange people who had all sorts of queer ideas upon 
 all sorts of very unpopular subjects. 
 
 It is quite true that Athens or Florence, during the hey-day 
 of their glory, had only one tenth of the population of Kansas 
 City. But our present civilisation would be very different 
 had neither of these two little cities of the Mediterranean basin 
 existed. And the same (with due apologies to the good people 
 of Wyandotte County) can hardly be said of this busy me¬ 
 tropolis on the Missouri River. 
 
 And since I am being very personal, allow me to state one 
 other fact. 
 
 When we visit a doctor, we find out before hand whether 
 he is a surgeon or a diagnostician or a homeopath or a faith 
 healer, for we want to know from what angle he will look at 
 our complaint. We ought to be as careful in the choice of our 
 historians as we are in the selection of our physicians. We 
 think, “Oh well, history is history,” and let it go at that. But 
 the writer who was educated in a strictly Presbyterian house¬ 
 hold somewhere in the backwoods of Scotland will look differ- 
 
450 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 ently upon every question of human relationships from his 
 neighbour who as a child, was dragged to listen to the brilliant 
 exhortations of Robert Ingersoll, the enemy of all revealed 
 Devils. In due course of time, both men may forget their 
 early training and never again visit either church or lecture 
 hall. But the influence of these impressionable years stays 
 with them and they cannot escape showing it in whatever they 
 write or say or do. 
 
 In the preface to this book, I told you that I should not be 
 an infallible guide and now that we have almost reached the 
 end, I repeat the warning. I was born and educated in an 
 atmosphere of the old-fashioned liberalism which had followed 
 the discoveries of Darwin and the other pioneers of the nine¬ 
 teenth century. As a child, I happened to spend most of my 
 waking hours with an uncle who was a great collector of the 
 books written by Montaigne, the great French essayist of the 
 sixteenth century. Because I was born in Rotterdam and 
 educated in the city of Gouda, I ran continually across 
 Erasmus and for some unknown reason this great exponent 
 of tolerance took hold of my intolerant self. Later I discov¬ 
 ered Anatole France and my first experience with the English 
 language came about through an accidental encounter with 
 Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond,” a story which made more im¬ 
 pression upon me than any other book in the English language. 
 
 If I had been born in a pleasant middle western city I prob¬ 
 ably should have a certain affection for the hymns which I had 
 heard in my childhood. But my earliest recollection of music 
 goes back to the afternoon when my Mother took me to hear 
 nothing less than a Bach fugue. And the mathematical per¬ 
 fection of the great Protestant master influenced me to such 
 an extent that I cannot hear the usual hymns of our prayer- 
 meetings without a feeling of intense agony and direct pain. 
 
 Again, if I had been born in Italy and had been warmed 
 by the sunshine of the happy valley of the Arno, I might love 
 many colourful and sunny pictures which now leave me indif¬ 
 ferent because I got my first artistic impressions in a country 
 where the rare sun beats down upon the rain-soaked land with 
 
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 
 
 451 
 
 almost cruel brutality and throws everything into violent con¬ 
 trasts of dark and light. 
 
 I state these few facts deliberately that you may know 
 the personal bias of the man who wrote this history and may 
 understand his point-of-view. The bibliography at the end of 
 this book, which represents all sorts of opinions and views, will 
 allow you to compare my ideas with those of other people. 
 And in this way, you will be able to reach your own final con¬ 
 clusions with a greater degree of fairness than would 
 otherwise be possible. 
 
 After this short but necessary excursion, we return to the 
 history of the last fifty years. Many things happened during 
 this period but very little occurred which at the time seemed 
 to be of paramount importance. The majority of the greater 
 powers ceased to be mere political agencies and became large 
 business enterprises. They built railroads. They founded and 
 subsidized steam-ship lines to all parts of the world. They 
 connected their different possessions with telegraph wires. 
 Aiid they steadily increased their holdings in other continents. 
 Every available bit of African or Asiatic territory was claimed 
 
452 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 by one of the rival powers. France became a colonial nation 
 with interests in Algiers and Madagascar and Annam and 
 Tonkin (in eastern Asia). Germany claimed parts of south¬ 
 west and east Africa, built settlements in Kameroon on the 
 west coast of Africa and in New Guinea and many of the 
 islands of the Pacific, and used the murder of a few missionaries 
 as a welcome excuse to take the harbour of Kiaochau on the 
 Yellow Sea in China. Italy tried her luck in Abyssinia, was 
 disastrously defeated by the soldiers of the Negus, and con¬ 
 soled herself by occupying the Turkish possessions in Tripoli 
 in northern Africa. Russia, having occupied all of Siberia, 
 took Port Arthur away from China. Japan, having defeated 
 China in the war of 1895, occupied the island of Formosa and 
 in the year 1905 began to lay claim to the entire empire of 
 Corea. In the year 1883 England, the largest colonial empire 
 the world has ever seen, undertook to “protect” Egypt. She 
 performed this task most efficiently and to the great material 
 benefit of that much neglected country, which ever since the 
 opening of the Suez canal in 1868 had been threatened with a 
 foreign invasion. During the next thirty years she fought a 
 number of colonial wars in different parts of the world and in 
 1902 (after three years of bitter fighting) she conquered the 
 independent Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange 
 Free State. Meanwhile she had encouraged Cecil Rhodes to 
 lay the foundations for a great African state, which reached 
 from the Cape almost to the mouth of the Nile, and had faith¬ 
 fully picked up such islands or provinces as had been left with¬ 
 out a European owner. 
 
 The shrewd king of Belgium, by name Leopold, used 
 the discoveries of Henry Stanley to found the Congo Free 
 State in the year 1885. Originally this gigantic tropical em¬ 
 pire was an “absolute monarchy.” But after many years of 
 scandalous mismanagement, it was annexed by the Belgian 
 people who made it a colony (in the year 1908) and abolished 
 the terrible abuses which had been tolerated by this very un¬ 
 scrupulous Majesty, who cared nothing for the fate of the 
 natives as long as he got his ivory and rubber. 
 
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 
 
 453 
 
 As for the United States, they had so much land that they 
 desired no further territory. But the terrible misrule of 
 Cuba, one of the last of the Spanish possessions in the western 
 hemisphere, practically forced the Washington government to 
 take action. After a short and rather uneventful war, the 
 Spaniards were driven out of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the 
 Philippines, and the two latter became colonies of the United 
 States. 
 
 This economic development of the world was perfectly 
 natural. The increasing number of factories in England and 
 France and Germany needed an ever increasing amount of raw 
 materials and the equally increasing number of European 
 workers needed an ever increasing amount of food. Every¬ 
 where the cry was for more and for richer markets, for more 
 easily accessible coal mines and iron mihes and rubber planta¬ 
 tions and oil-wells, for greater supplies of wheat and grain. 
 
 The purely political events of the European continent 
 dwindled to mere insignificance in the eyes of men who were 
 making plans for steamboat lines on Victoria Nyanza or 
 for railroads through the interior of Shantung. They knew 
 that many European questions still remained to be settled, but 
 they did not bother, and through sheer indifference and care¬ 
 lessness they bestowed upon their descendants a terrible inher¬ 
 itance of hate and misery. For untold centuries the south-east¬ 
 ern corner of Europe had been the scene of rebellion and blood¬ 
 shed. During the seventies of the last century the people of 
 Serbia and Bulgaria and Montenegro and Roumania were once 
 more trying to gain their freedom and the Turks (with the 
 support of many of the western powers), were trying to pre¬ 
 vent this. 
 
 After a period of particularly atrocious massacres in Bui- 
 garia in the year 1876, the Russian people lost all patience. 
 The Government was forced to intervene just as President Mc¬ 
 Kinley was obliged to go to Cuba and stop the shooting-squads 
 of General Weyler in Havana. In April of the year 1877 the 
 Russian armies crossed the Danube, stormed the Shipka pass, 
 and after the capture of Plevna, marched southward until they 
 
454 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 reached the gates of Constantinople. Turkey appealed for 
 help to England. There were many English people who de¬ 
 nounced their government when it took the side of the Sultan. 
 But Disraeli (who had just made Queen Victoria Empress of 
 India and who loved the picturesque Turks while he hated the 
 Russians who were brutally cruel to the Jewish people within 
 their frontiers) decided to interfere. Russia was forced to 
 conclude the peace of San Stefano ( 1878 ) and the question of 
 the Balkans was left to a Congress which convened at Berlin 
 in June and July of the same year. 
 
 This famous conference was entirely dominated by the per¬ 
 sonality of Disraeli. Even Bismarck feared the clever old 
 man with his well-oiled curly hair and his supreme arrogance, 
 tempered by a cynical sense of humor and a marvellous gift 
 for flattery. At Berlin the British prime-minister carefully 
 watched over the fate of his friends the Turks. Montenegro, 
 Serbia and Roumania were recognised as independent king¬ 
 doms. The principality of Bulgaria was given a semi-inde¬ 
 pendent status under Prince Alexander of Battenberg, a 
 nephew of Tsar Alexander II. But none of those countries 
 were given the chance to develop their powers and their re¬ 
 sources as they would have been able to do, had England been 
 less anxious about the fate of the Sultan, whose domains were 
 necessary to the safety of the British Empire as a bulwark 
 against further Russian aggression. 
 
 To make matters worse, the congress allowed Austria to 
 take Bosnia and Herzegovina away from the Turks to be 
 “administered” as part of the Habsburg domains. It is true 
 that Austria made an excellent job of it. The neglected prov¬ 
 inces were as well managed as the best of the British colonies, 
 and that is saying a great deal. But they were inhabited by 
 many Serbians. In older days they had been part of the great 
 Serbian empire of Stephan Dushan, who early in the four¬ 
 teenth century had defended western Europe against the inva¬ 
 sions of the Turks and whose capital of Uskub had been a 
 centre of civilisation one hundred and fifty years before Colum¬ 
 bus discovered the new lands of the west. The Serbians remem- 
 
COLONIAL EXPANSION AND WAR 
 
 455 
 
 bered their ancient glory as who would not? They resented 
 the presence of the Austrians in two provinces, which, so they 
 felt, were theirs by every right of tradition. 
 
 And it was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, that the 
 archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was mur¬ 
 dered on June 28 of the year 1914. The assassin was a Serb¬ 
 ian student who had acted from purely patriotic motives. 
 
 But the blame for this terrible catastrophe which was the 
 immediate, though not the only cause of the Great World War 
 did not lie with the half-crazy Serbian boy or his Austrian 
 victim. It must be traced back to the days of the famous 
 Berlin Conference when Europe was too busy building a ma¬ 
 terial civilisation to care about the aspirations and the dreams 
 of a forgotten race in a dreary corner of the old Balkan 
 peninsula. 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
 THE GREAT WAR WHICH WAS REALLY THE 
 STRUGGLE FOR A NEW AND 
 BETTER WORLD 
 
 The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the noblest charac¬ 
 ters among the small group of honest enthusiasts who were 
 responsible for the outbreak of the great French Revolution. 
 He had devoted his life to the cause of the poor and the unfor¬ 
 tunate. He had been one of the assistants of d’Alembert and 
 Diderot when they wrote their famous Encyclopedic. During 
 the first years of the Revolution he had been the leader of the 
 Moderate wing of the Convention. 
 
 His tolerance, his kindliness, his stout common sense, had 
 made him an object of suspicion when the treason of the king 
 and the court clique had given the extreme radicals their chance 
 to get hold of the government and kill their opponents. 
 Condorcet was declared “hors de loi,” or outlawed, an outcast 
 who was henceforth at the mercy of every true patriot. His 
 friends offered to hide him at their own peril. Condorcet 
 refused to accept their sacrifice. He escaped and tried to reach 
 his home, where he might be safe. After three nights in the 
 open, torn and bleeding, he entered an inn and asked for some 
 food. The suspicious yokels searched him and in his pockets 
 they found a copy of Horace, the Latin poet. This showed 
 that their prisoner was a man of gentle breeding and had no 
 business upon the highroads at a time when every educated 
 
 456 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
 457 
 
 person was regarded as an enemy of the Revolutionary state. 
 They took Condorcet and they bound him and they gagged 
 him and they threw him into the village lock-up, but in the 
 morning when the soldiers came to drag him back to Paris and 
 cut his head off, behold! he was dead. 
 
 This man who had given all and had received nothing had 
 good reason to despair of the human race. But he has written 
 a few sentences which ring as true to-day as they did one 
 hundred and thirty years ago. I repeat them here for your 
 benefit. 
 
 “Nature has set no limits to our hopes,” he wrote, “and 
 the picture of the human race, now freed from its chains and 
 
 WAR 
 
 marching with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue 
 and happiness, offers to the philosopher a spectacle which 
 consoles him for the errors, for the crimes and the injustices 
 which still pollute and afflict this earth.” 
 
 The world has just passed through an agony of pain com¬ 
 pared to which the French Revolution was a mere incident. 
 The shock has been so great that it has killed the last spark of 
 hope in the breasts of millions of men. They were chanting a 
 hymn of progress, and four years of slaughter followed their 
 prayers for peace. “Is it worth while,” so they ask, “to work 
 and slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed 
 beyond the stage of the earliest cave men?” 
 
 There is but one answer. 
 
 That answer is “Yesl” 
 
458 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 The World War was a terrible calamity. But it did not 
 mean the end of things. On the contrary it brought about the 
 coming of a new day. 
 
 It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the 
 Middle Ages. The actors who played their parts upon that 
 long-forgotten stage are all dead. We can criticize them with 
 a cool head. The audience that applauded their efforts has dis¬ 
 persed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt their feelings. 
 
 But it is very difficult to give a true account of contempo¬ 
 rary events. The problems that fill the minds of the people 
 with whom we pass through life, are our own problems, and 
 they hurt us too much or they please us too well to be de¬ 
 scribed with that fairness which is necessary when we are wilt¬ 
 ing history and not blowing the trumpet of propaganda. All 
 the same I shall endeavour to tell you why I agree with poor 
 Condorcet when he expressed his firm faith in a better future. 
 
 Often before have I warned you against the false impres¬ 
 sion which is created by the use of our so-called historical 
 epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the an¬ 
 cient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Refor¬ 
 mation, and Modern Time. The last of these terms is the most 
 dangerous. The word “modern” implies that we, the people 
 of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement. 
 Fifty years ago the liberals of England who followed the lead¬ 
 ership of Gladstone felt that the problem of a truly representa¬ 
 tive and democratic form of government had been solved for¬ 
 ever by the second great Reform Bill, which gave workmen 
 an equal share in the government with their employers. When 
 Disraeli and his conservative friends talked of a dangerous 
 “leap in the dark” they answered “No.” They felt certain of 
 their cause and trusted that henceforth all classes of society 
 would co-operate to make the government of their common 
 country a success. Since then many things have happened, 
 and the few liberals who are still alive begin to understand 
 that they were mistaken. 
 
 There is no definite answer to any historical problem. 
 
 Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
 459 
 
 as those sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have 
 perished. 
 
 If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new 
 and much broader view of life. Then, go one step further 
 and try to imagine yourself in the position of your own great- 
 great-grandchildren who will take your place in the year 
 10,000. They too will learn history. But what will they 
 think of those short four thousand years during which we have 
 kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? 
 They will think of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglath 
 Pileser, the Assyrian conqueror. Perhaps they will confuse 
 him with Jenghiz Khan or Alexander the Macedonian. The 
 great war which has just come to an end will appear in the light 
 of that long commercial conflict which settled the supremacy 
 of the Mediterranean when Rome and Carthage fought during 
 one hundred and twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. 
 The Balkan troubles of the 19th century (the struggle for 
 freedom of Serbia and Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro) 
 to them will seem a continuation of the disordered conditions 
 caused by the Great Migrations. They will look at pictures 
 of the Rheims cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed 
 by German guns as we look upon a photograph of the Acro¬ 
 polis ruined two hundred and fifty years ago during a war 
 between the Turks and the Venetians. They will regard the 
 fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a 
 childish superstition which was perhaps natural in a race of 
 men who had burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even 
 our hospitals and our laboratories and our operating rooms 
 of which we are so proud will look like slightly improved 
 workshops of alchemists and medkeval surgeons. 
 
 And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and 
 women are not “modern” at all. On the contrary we still 
 belong to the last generations of the cave-dwellers. The foun¬ 
 dation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human race 
 was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took 
 courage to question all things and made “knowledge and un¬ 
 derstanding” the foundation upon which to create a more 
 
460 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The Great 
 War was the “growing-pain” of this new world. 
 
 For a long time to come people will write mighty books to 
 prove that this or that or the other person brought about the 
 war. The Socialists will publish volumes in which they will ac-> 
 
 THE SPREAD OF THE IMPERIAL IDEA 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
 461 
 
 cuse the “capitalists” of having brought about the war for “com¬ 
 mercial gain.” The capitalists will answer that they lost infi¬ 
 nitely more through the war than they made—that their chil¬ 
 dren were among the first to go and fight and be killed—and 
 they will show how in every country the bankers tried their 
 very best to avert the outbreak of hostilities. French his¬ 
 torians will go through the register of German sins from the 
 days of Charlemagne until the days of William of Hohen- 
 zollern and German historians will return the compliment and 
 will go through the list of French horrors from the days of 
 Charlemagne until the days of President Poincare. And 
 then they will establish to their own satisfaction that the other 
 fellow was guilty of “causing the war.” Statesmen, dead and 
 not yet dead, in all countries will take to their typewriters and 
 they will explain how they tried to avert hostilities and how 
 their wicked opponents forced them into it. 
 
 The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about 
 these apologies and vindications. Pie will understand the real 
 nature of the underlying causes and he will know that personal 
 ambitions and personal wickedness and personal greed had very 
 little to do with the final outburst. The original mistake, which 
 was responsible for all this misery, was committed when our 
 scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and 
 chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is 
 slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known 
 sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years 
 behind the small group of courageous leaders. 
 
 A Zulu in a frock coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride 
 a bicycle and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being 
 with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 
 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth 
 century tradesman. 
 
 If you do not understand this at first, read it again. It 
 will become clearer to you in a moment and it will explain 
 many things that have happened these last six years. 
 
 Perhaps I may give you another, more familiar, example, 
 to show you what I mean. In the movie theatres, jokes aad 
 
462 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 funny remarks are often thrown upon the screen. Watch the 
 audience the next time you have a chance. A few people seem 
 almost to inhale the words. It takes them but a second to read 
 the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from 
 twenty to thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who 
 do not read any more than they can help, get the point when 
 the brighter ones among the audience have already begun to 
 decipher the next cut-in. It is not different in human life, 
 as I shall now show you. 
 
 In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the 
 Roman Empire continued to live for a thousand years after 
 the death of the last Roman Emperor. It caused the establish¬ 
 ment of a large number of “imitation empires.” It gave the 
 Bishops of Rome a chance to make themselves the head of the 
 entire church, because they represented the idea of Roman 
 world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless 
 barbarian chieftains into a career of crime and endless war¬ 
 fare because they were for ever under the spell of this magic 
 word “Rome.” All these people, Popes, Emperors and plain 
 fighting men were not very different from you or me. But 
 they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital 
 issue—something living—something which was remembered 
 clearly both by the father and the son and the grandson. And 
 so they struggled and sacrificed themselves for a cause which 
 to-day would not find a dozen recruits. 
 
 In still another chapter I have told you how the great reli¬ 
 gious wars took place more than a century after the first open 
 act of the Reformation and if you will compare the chapter 
 on the Thirty Years War with that on Inventions, you will see 
 that this ghastly butchery took place at a time when the first 
 clumsy steam engines were already puffing in the laboratories 
 of a number of French and German and English scientists. 
 But the world at large took no interest in these strange con¬ 
 traptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion 
 which to-day causes yawns, but no anger. 
 
 And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian 
 will use the same words about Europe of the out-going nine- 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
 463 
 
 teenth century, and he will see how men were engaged upon 
 terrific nationalistic struggles while the laboratories all around 
 them were filled with serious folk who cared not one whit for 
 politics as long as they could force nature to surrender a few 
 more of her million secrets. 
 
 You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving 
 at. The engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a 
 single generation, filled Europe and America and Asia with 
 their vast machines, with their telegraphs, their flying machines, 
 their coal-tar products. They created a new world in which 
 time and space were reduced to complete insignificance. They 
 invented new products and they made these so cheap that al¬ 
 most every one could buy them. I have told you all this before 
 but it certainly will bear repeating. 
 
 To keep the ever increasing number of factories going, the 
 owners, who had also become the rulers of the land, needed raw 
 materials and coal. Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of 
 the people were still thinking in terms of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries and clinging to the old notions of the 
 state as a dynastic or political organisation. This clumsy me¬ 
 diaeval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the 
 highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. 
 It did its best, according to the rules of the game which had 
 been laid down centuries before. The different states created 
 enormous armies and gigantic navies which were used for the 
 purpose of acquiring new possessions in distant lands. Where- 
 ever there was a tiny bit of land left, there arose an English or 
 a French or a German or a Russian colony. If the natives 
 objected, they were killed. In most cases they did not object, 
 and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did not 
 interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil 
 mines or the gold mines or the rubber plantations, and they 
 derived many benefits from the foreign occupation. 
 
 Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw 
 materials wanted the same piece of land at the same time, 
 Then there was a war. This occurred fifteen years ago when 
 Russia and Japan fought for the possession of certain terri- 
 
464 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 tories which belonged to the Chinese people. Such conflicts, 
 however, were the exception. No one really desired to fight. 
 Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and 
 submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early 20th 
 century. They associated the idea of violence with the long- 
 ago age of unlimited monarchies and intriguing dynasties. 
 Every day they read in their papers of still further inventions, 
 of groups of English and American and German scientists who 
 were working together in perfect friendship for the purpose 
 of an advance in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in a 
 busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But only 
 a few noticed that the development of the state, (of the gigantic 
 community of people who recognise certain common ideals,) 
 was lagging several hundred years behind. They tried to warn 
 the others. But the others were occupied with their own 
 affairs. 
 
 I have used so many similes that I must apologise for bring¬ 
 ing in one more. The Ship of State (that old and trusted 
 expression which is ever new and always picturesque,) of the 
 Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Venetians 
 and the merchant adventurers of the seventeenth century had 
 been a sturdy craft, constructed of well-seasoned wood, and 
 commanded by officers who knew both their crew and their 
 vessel and who understood the limitations of the art of navi¬ 
 gating which had been handed down to them by their ancestors. 
 
 Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. 
 First one part, then another of the old ship of state was 
 changed. Her dimensions were increased. The sails were dis¬ 
 carded for steam. Better living quarters were established, but 
 more people were forced to go down into the stoke-hole, and 
 while the work was safe and fairly remunerative, they did not 
 like it as well as their old and more dangerous job in the rig¬ 
 ging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden 
 square-rigger had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. 
 But the captain and the mates remained the same. They were 
 appointed or elected in the same way as a hundred years be¬ 
 fore. They were taught the same system of navigation which 
 
A NEW WORLD 
 
 465 
 
 had served the mariners of the fifteenth century. In their 
 cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which had done 
 service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. 
 In short, they were (through no fault of their own) completely 
 incompetent. 
 
 The sea of international politics is not very broad. When 
 those Imperial and Colonial liners began to try and outrun 
 each other, accidents were bound to happen. They did hap¬ 
 pen. You can still see the wreckage if you venture to pass 
 through that part of the ocean. 
 
 And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is 
 in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership— 
 who will have the courage of their own visions and who will 
 recognise clearly that we are only at the beginning of the 
 voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seaman¬ 
 ship. 
 
 They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. 
 They will have to fight their way to the top against every pos¬ 
 sible form of opposition. When they reach the bridge, mutiny 
 of an envious crew may cause their death. But some day, a 
 man will arise who will bring the vessel safely to port, and he 
 shall be the hero of the ages. 
 
AS IT EVER SHALL BE 
 
 “The more I think of the problems of our lives, the more I am 
 “persuaded that we ought to choose Irony and Pity for our 
 “assessors and judges as the ancient Egyptians called upon 
 “the Goddess Isis and the Goddess Nephtys on behalf of their 
 “dead. 
 
 “Irony and Pity are both of good counsel; the first with her 
 “smiles makes life agreeable; the other sanctifies it with her 
 “tears. 
 
 “The Irony which I invoke is no cruel Deity. She mocks 
 “neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. 
 “Her mirth disarms and it is she who teaches us to laugh at 
 “rogues and fools, whom but for her we might be so weak as 
 “to despise and hate.” 
 
 And with these wise words of a very great Frenchman I 
 bid you farewell. 
 
 8 Barrow Street, New York, 
 
 Saturday, June 26, xxi. 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 The treaty of Versailles was writ with the point of a bayo¬ 
 net. And however useful the invention of Colonel Fuysegur 
 may have been in a close scrimmage, as an instrument of peace 
 it has never been considered a success. 
 
 To make matters worse, the people who handled this deadly 
 weapon were all of them old men. It is one thing when a band 
 of young fellows get into a scrap. They will fight each other 
 with a deadly hatred. But once they have got rid of their 
 pent-up anger, they can return to the affairs of the day without 
 any great personal resentment toward those who only a short 
 while before were their enemies. But it is something very dif¬ 
 ferent when half a dozen smooth-shaven graybeards, filled with 
 the futile rage of a lifetime of frustrated ambitions, sit down 
 around a green table and make ready to judge half a dozen 
 defenseless opponents who in the heyday of their victory dis¬ 
 regarded every principle of law and international decency. 
 
 On such an occasion may Heaven have mercy upon us! 
 
 Adas! the Good Lord, whose name had been so terribly 
 abused during the previous four years, was in no mood to 
 extend his merciful hand to his undeserving children. 
 
 The carnage was of their own making. Now let them settle 
 their difficulties as best they could! 
 
 What that “best” was, we have since then had occasion to 
 learn. And the story of the last seven years is an almost un¬ 
 interrupted recital of ignominious blunders, of greed, of cruelty 
 and short-sighted meanness—an epoch of such hair-raising im¬ 
 becility that it stands unique among the dreary annals of human 
 
 467 
 
468 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 A WORLD IN FLAMES 
 
 stupidity, which (if I may be permitted this aside) is saying a 
 great deal. 
 
 It is of course quite impossible to predict what the people 
 of the year 2500 will have to say about the underlying causes 
 of the great upheaval that destroyed the civilization of Europe 
 and bestowed upon the unsuspecting American people the 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 469 
 
 leadership of the human race. But in the light of what had 
 gone before, ever since nations had become highly organized 
 business organizations, they will probably come to the conclu¬ 
 sion that an outbreak of some sort between the two great con¬ 
 tending commercial factions was absolutely unavoidable, and 
 was bound to occur sooner or later. In plain English, they will 
 recognize that Germany had become too much of a menace to 
 the prosperity of the British Empire to be allowed any further 
 development as the general purveyor of the world’s manifold 
 wants and needs. 
 
 We who lived through the struggle find it much more difficult 
 to estimate the events of the last decade at their true light, but 
 now after seven years it is possible to draw a few fairly definite 
 conclusions without causing too much commotion among our 
 peaceful neighbors and friends. 
 
 The history of the last five hundred years is really the record 
 of a gigantic struggle between the so-called “leading powers” 
 and those who hoped to deprive them of their fortunate position 
 and become their successors as the recognized masters of the 
 seas. Spain came to glory across the dead bodies of the great 
 Italian commercial republics and of Portugal. As soon as 
 Spain had established that far-famed empire upon which the 
 sun (for reasons of geography or honesty) was never known 
 to set, Holland tried to rob her of her riches and in view of 
 the difference in size of the two countries, the Dutch Republic 
 achieved a very remarkable success. But no sooner had Hol¬ 
 land acquired those parts of the world which then seemed to 
 offer the biggest chance of immediate profit than France and 
 England appeared upon the scene to despoil the Dutch people 
 of their newly acquired possessions. When this had been ac¬ 
 complished, France and England fought for the spoils and 
 after a long and costly struggle, England came out on top. 
 Thereafter England dominated the world for more than a 
 century. She brooked no rivalry. Small nations that came 
 in her path were run under foot. Large ones which could not 
 be tackled single handedly suddenly found themselves con- 
 
470 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 fronted by one of those mysterious political alliances of which 
 the rulers of England (past masters in the craft of foreign 
 politics) seemed to possess the secret. 
 
 In view of these well-known economic developments (faith¬ 
 fully described in every primary textbook of history) the poli¬ 
 cies which the rulers of Germany followed during the first two 
 decades of the twentieth century seem little short of naive. 
 
 SEA POWER 
 
 Some people claim that the former Kaiser was to blame and 
 their argument deserves our close attention. William II was 
 an honest man, of very restricted ability and a victim of that 
 strange form of self-delusion which is so common among those 
 who are by birth lifted into the seats of the mighty and who 
 contemplate the rest of the world from such a high pinnacle of 
 anointed superiority that they soon lose all touch with the 
 ordinary run of humanity. This much is certain; that no man 
 ever tried so hard to gain the good will of the British people 
 and that no foreigner ever failed quite so ignominiously to 
 understand the true nature of the English character. 
 
 That curious island on the other side of the North Sea lives 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 471 
 
 by and of and for just one thing—trade. Those who do not 
 interfere with British commerce are, if not exactly “friends,” 
 at least “tolerated strangers.” Those on the other hand who, 
 however remotely, might become a menace to the imperial 
 hegemony are “enemies” and they must be destroyed at the 
 first possible opportunity. And all the lovely speeches and all 
 the obvious manifestations of good-will and friendship on the 
 part of the anglophile Teuton emperor never even for a single 
 moment made the average Englishman forget that the Ger¬ 
 mans were his most dangerous competitors and would sooner 
 or later try to dump their own cheaper wares upon every part 
 of the civilized and uncivilized world. 
 
 But that was only one side of the question. A most im¬ 
 portant one but not sufficient to account for the wholesale 
 slaughter that was so characteristic of the late war. 
 
 In the happy days before the railroad and the telegraph, 
 wben each country was more or less of a definite entity which 
 proceeded upon its own career with the plodding determina¬ 
 tion of an elephant pushing a circus truck, the quarrel between 
 the two contending candidates for commercial supremacy 
 would have proceeded slowly and the wily diplomats of the 
 old school would probably have succeeded in localizing the 
 quarrel. Unfortunately in the year 1914 the whole world was 
 one large international workshop. A strike in the Argentine 
 was apt to cause suffering in Berlin. A raise in the price of 
 certain raw materials in London might spell disaster to tens 
 of thousands of long-suffering Chinese coolies who never even 
 had heard of the existence of the big city on the Thames. The 
 invention of some obscure Privat-Dozent in a third-rate Ger¬ 
 man university would often force dozens of Chilean banks to 
 close their doors, while bad management on the part of an old 
 commercial house in Gothenburg might deprive hundreds of 
 little boys and girls in Australia of a chance to go to college. 
 
 Of course, not all nations had reached the same stage of 
 industrial development. A few of them were still wholly agri¬ 
 cultural and others were only just emerging from a state of 
 
472 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 almost medieval feudalism. This, however, did not make them 
 undesirable allies in the eyes of their industrialized neighbors. 
 On the contrary. Such states, as a rule, are possessed of almost 
 unlimited reservoirs of man-power and as sheer cannon fodder 
 the Russian peasant had never had a rival. 
 
 How and in what way all these different and conflicting 
 interests were marshaled into one gigantic group of associated 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 MAN POWER 
 
 nations and why for more than four years they consented to 
 fight for a common purpose—these are questions the solution 
 of which we had better leave to our grandchildren. The world 
 will have to know a great deal more about the preliminaries of 
 the war than it does to-day before it can pass judgment upon 
 those misguided patriots who turned the continent of Europe 
 into one vast shambles. 
 
 All we can hope to do this hot day of August in the year of 
 Grace 1926 is to draw attention to one salient fact which is 
 almost invariably overlooked by those who call themselves his¬ 
 torians, to wit: that the great European conflict which began 
 as a world-wide war ended as a world-wide revolution and that 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 473 
 
 it did not mean a short interruption of the normal development 
 of affairs (as all the wars of the last three hundred years had 
 done) but marked the beginning of an entirely new social and 
 economic epoch. The old men who were responsible for the 
 peace treaty of Versailles were too much a product of their 
 own original surroundings to be able to recognize this. 
 
 They thought and talked and acted in terms of a bygone age. 
 
 That probably is the reason why their labors proved such a 
 curse to the rest of humanity. But still one other element 
 which contributed greatly to the disastrous outcome of the 
 war for democracy and the rights of small nations was the be¬ 
 lated participation in the struggle on the part of the United 
 States of America. 
 
 As a nation the American people, feeling themselves safely 
 entrenched behind three thousand miles of ocean, had never 
 taken any deep interest in foreign politics. Accustomed to 
 think in terms of slogans and captions and headlines and 
 cheerfully ignorant of the historical development of Europe 
 (or for that matter of any other part of the world) during the 
 last two thousand years, the majority of President Wilson’s 
 fellow-citizens were obliged to get their historical information 
 second-hand. Aided and abetted by certain colossal crimes on 
 the part of the German military and naval leaders, it was an 
 easy task for the manufacturers of allied propaganda to make 
 their American friends see the war as a definite struggle be¬ 
 tween right and wrong, a clash between white and black, a due] 
 to the death between the angels of Anglo-Saxon self-determina¬ 
 tion and the devils of Teutonic autocracy, until the American 
 people, kind-hearted and sentimental (and therefore apt to 
 run to certain curious extremes of emotionalism and cruelty) 
 felt that they could not possibly keep out of the struggle with¬ 
 out becoming unfaithful to all that was good and decent in their 
 own manhood. A hot wave of a crusadelike zeal and eagerness 
 swept across the country. Slowly but steadily the gigantic, 
 mills of American industry began to grind and ere long two 
 
174 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 million men were hastening to the battlefields of Europe to put 
 a stop to the intolerable depravities of the Hun. 
 
 PROPAGANDA 
 
 Now it was only natural that these millions of serious-minded 
 and earnest young men should try and revaluate their fighting 
 ideals into terms that should be comprehensible to all of their 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 475 
 
 fellow countrymen. Hence the slogan of “a war to end war.” 
 Hence the famous fourteen points of President Wilson—the 
 new decalogue of international righteousness. Hence the en¬ 
 thusiasm for the self-determination of small nations, the hilari¬ 
 ously expressed desire to “make the world safe for democracy.” 
 
 To the Balfours and the Poincares and the Churchills (not 
 to mention the exiled leaders of the old Russian regime) such 
 words must have sounded like rank heresy. If any of their 
 own people had undertaken to parade such battle-cries they 
 would have been sent before a firing-squad at very short notice. 
 But the commander-in-chief of two million men, the trusted 
 gatekeeper of all the treasures of the world, must be listened 
 to with an outward semblance of respect. Hence the leaders of 
 the different European nations, during the last year and a 
 half of the war, fought for certain ideals for which they had 
 no more use than for those fantastic economic innovations which 
 were now being shouted in a hundred different tongues from 
 the battlements of the old Kremlin. And as soon as the Ger¬ 
 mans, agreeably surprised by the reasonable terms of their 
 much feared American antagonists, had thrown their emperor 
 overboard, had changed the name of their country from an 
 “Empire” to that of a “Republic,” and adorned with red cock¬ 
 ades and singing the popular song of international brother¬ 
 hood had started upon their famous backward march to the 
 Rhine, the allied chieftains hastened to rid themselves of those 
 foolish and embarrassing American ideals and made ready to 
 conclude a peace upon that well-known principle of “woe to 
 the loser” which ever since the days of the caveman had been 
 accepted as the logical conclusion to a well-regulated physical 
 encounter. 
 
 Their task would have been a great deal less complicated if 
 President Wilson had not hit upon the unfortunate plan of 
 taking a direct and personal part in the diplomatic negotiations 
 of the year 1919. Had he remained at home, the European 
 powers would have concluded peace according to their own 
 terms of right and wrong. From an American point of view 
 
476 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 they would have been wrong, but right or wrong, their decisions 
 would have been an honest expression of a definite school of 
 thought. How, however, American and European ideals 
 (which never have mixed) got so horribly interwoven that 
 nothing was definitely settled, that every one of the allies was 
 left with a grievance, and that the peace proved infinitely 
 more costly than the war. 
 
 But there-was still another element which contributed greatly 
 to the chaos caused by the Treaty of Versailles. President 
 Wilson, himself the head of a federation of semi-independent 
 nations, had visions of a federated world-state. The thing had 
 proved possible on the American continent. For more than a 
 century it had given an ever-increasing number of sovereign 
 states a degree of political liberty and economic well-being 
 which had made the nation as a whole the most prosperous and 
 the richest country on the entire planet. Why should not the 
 people of Europe learn the lesson which Virginia and Penn¬ 
 sylvania and Massachusetts had taken to heart in the year 
 1776? 
 
 Why not, indeed? 
 
 And so the allied leaders bowed low and listened respectfully 
 when Mr. Wilson explained his scheme for a League of Na¬ 
 tions. Under the press of circumstances they even agreed to 
 incorporate the principles of a United States of the World 
 into their treaty of peace. But just as soon as the Presidential 
 ship had hoisted anchor and had set course for the western 
 hemisphere, they began to undo the work that had been closest 
 to the heart of the great president and returned to the old 
 diplomatic ideals of secret treaties and surreptitious alliances. 
 
 Meanwhile a very definite revulsion of feeling had taken 
 place in America itself. It is, of course, very easy to blame 
 certain personal characteristics of Mr. Wilson for this changed 
 attitude towards the League of Nations on the part of so 
 many of his contemporaries. But other forces, infinitely more 
 subtle, were at work. 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 477 
 
 In the first place, the soldiers who had taken part in the fight 
 were returning to their homes. Their first-hand acquaintance 
 with European conditions had not made them over-anxious to 
 continue the close intimacy of the last two years. 
 
 In the second place, the peo¬ 
 ple at large were beginning to 
 recover from the mad fury of 
 the war. They were no longer 
 in fear for the lives of their be¬ 
 loved sons and daughters and 
 once more were able to think 
 soberly. The traditional dis¬ 
 trust of Europe began to re¬ 
 assert itself. Soon it became 
 clear that George Washing¬ 
 ton’s ominous warning against 
 “entangliing alliances” had as 
 much of a hold upon the mass 
 of the people of the year 1918 as it had had a century before. 
 
 In the third place, after two years of parades and four- 
 minute speeches and liberty loans, it was very pleasant to go 
 back to the quiet routine of a profitable business career. 
 
 In short, the infant League of Nations which President 
 Wilson had dumped so unceremoniously upon the threshold of 
 Europe was now repudiated by its own spiritual parents. The 
 child did not die. But it lived a precarious existence and grew 
 up to be a weak and emaciated creature, too feeble to make its 
 influence felt in any decisive way and merely irritating those 
 who were its friends by an occasional futile scolding and the 
 waving of a naughty, naughty finger. 
 
 Once more we are confronted by an ominous historical “if.” 
 
 “If the League of Nations had really turned the whole of 
 the civilized world into a successful United States of the 
 World. . . .” 
 
 I don’t know, but even under the most favorable circum- 
 
478 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 stances, the plan of President Wilson had only a slender chance 
 of success. 
 
 For the war, as we are now beginning to understand, was 
 not so much a war as a revolution and it was a revolution in 
 which the victory was carried away by an unsuspected third 
 party, who since then has been identified as the grandson of one, 
 James Watt, and who is coming to be known in wider and 
 wider circles as “the Iron Man.” 
 
 THE IRON MAN 
 
 Originally the steam engine (like his younger brother, the 
 electric engine) had been a welcome addition to the family of 
 civilized human beings because he was a willing slave and 
 ever ready to lighten the tasks of man and beast. 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 479 
 
 But soon it became clear that this inanimate factotum was 
 full of cunning and devilment and the war with its temporary 
 suspension of all the decencies of life gave the iron contraption 
 a chance to enslave those who in reality were meant to be his 
 masters. 
 
 Here and there some wise men of science may have foreseen 
 the danger that threatened the race from the side of this unruly 
 servant but as soon as such an unfortunate prophet opened 
 his mouth and issued a word of warning, he was denounced 
 as an enemy of society, as a rank Bolshevik and a seditious 
 radical and he was bade to hold his tongue or take the conse¬ 
 quences. For the politicians and the diplomats who had been 
 responsible for the war were now engaged upon the serious 
 task of fabricating a suitable peace and they must not be inter¬ 
 rupted in these holy endeavors. Unfortunately, as a class such 
 worthies are almost always completely ignorant of those ele¬ 
 mentary principles of natural science and political economy 
 which happen to dominate our present industrialized and 
 mechanical form of society and they are less fit to handle 
 complicated modern problems than any other group of men 
 of whom I can think at the present moment. The plenipoten¬ 
 tiaries of Paris were no exception. They met in the shadow 
 of the Iron Man, they talked of a world that was dominated 
 by the Iron Man, yet never became aware of his presence and 
 until the very end talked in words and symbols that represented 
 the mentality of the eighteenth century but not that of the 
 twentieth. 
 
 The result was inevitable. It is impossible to think in terms 
 of the year 1719 and prosper in terms of the year 1919. But 
 that, it is becoming increasingly evident, is exactly what the old 
 men of Versailles did. 
 
 Now behold the world as it has been left in the wake of this 
 orgy of hatred and unreason—a crazy quilt of phantastic new 
 nationalities that may possess some value as historical curiosi¬ 
 ties but that will never be able to hold their own in a world 
 
480 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 dominated by coal and oil and water-power and wholesale 
 credits—a continent divided by artificial frontiers which look 
 pretty enough upon a children’s atlas but bear no relation what¬ 
 soever to the urgent necessities of modern civilization—a vast 
 armed camp of people in yellow and green and purple uniforms 
 masquerading as feeble imitations of their mythical ancestors 
 but of less practical use to our contemporary society than any 
 little cash-girl that works in the basement of a ten-cent store. 
 
 This may sound like a brutal condemnation of a state of 
 affairs that still fills the souls of millions of honest European 
 patriots with gratitude and pride. 
 
 I am sorry but not until the statesmen of Europe shall be 
 willing to leave the solution of modern problems to people 
 with modern minds can there be any lasting improvement. 
 Meanwhile in their agony and distress the people will turn to 
 the cure-alls offered by Bolshevism and Fascism. 
 
 Incidentally this outburst of rhetoric will explain the most 
 dangerous and regrettable of all recent political developments 
 —the rapidly increasing dislike between the people of Europe 
 and those of America. Since I am trying to write for the 
 children of all races and not merely for those who live on the 
 fortunate patch of land that stretches from the Atlantic to the 
 Pacific, this apparent waving of the stars and stripes may be 
 considered as an exhibition of very doubtful taste. But this is 
 a time for plain speech and even at the risk of being mistaken 
 for a hundred per cent patriot (the very last honor to which I 
 aspire) I shall try to make my point clear. 
 
 I do not for a moment claim that man for man and woman 
 for woman the Americans as a nation are superior to any of 
 their cousins of the old world. But fortunately for themselves 
 they have little consciousness of the past and therefore they 
 are more able to approach the problems of the present with an 
 open eye towards the future than the members of almost any 
 other race. As a result they have accepted the modern world 
 without any reservations and having accepted it with all its 
 
AFTER SEVEN YEARS 
 
 481 
 
 good and all its evil, they are rapidly reaching a “modus 
 vivendi” whereby animate man and his inanimate servant shall 
 be able to exist on terms of peace and mutual respect. It 
 sounds absurd yet it is true that the country which has achieved 
 the greatest mechanical perfection is also the first to bring the 
 Iron Man to terms. In order to do this the American people 
 have been forced to throw overboard a great deal of ancestral 
 ballast. They have sacrificed hundreds of ideas and prejudices 
 and ideals that served a highly useful purpose two hundred or 
 two thousand years ago but which to-day are of no more value 
 than a stagecoach or a miracle-working image. As far as I 
 can see there will be no hope for Europe until the mass of 
 Germans and Englishmen and Spaniards and Heaven-only- 
 knows-what-they-are-called do likewise. 
 
 In a chapter like this it would be so easy to deliver noble 
 harangues upon the accomplishments of Locarno; the unfeasi¬ 
 bility of a Marxian program of applied economics; to discuss 
 the follies of those small-town French politicians who have not 
 yet learned that the days of Louis XIV and Napoleon have 
 long since been relegated to the era of the Stone Age. But 
 it would be a waste of energy and printer’s ink. 
 
 The misery that has come over the world during the last ten 
 years (hastened along by the Great War but by no means 
 caused by that sanguinary conflict) is in reality due to a pro¬ 
 found change in the economic and social structure of the entire 
 world. But Europe, steeped in the lore of the past, has thus 
 far been unwilling or unable to realize this fact. 
 
 The peace of Versailles, the last great gesture of the old 
 regime, was meant as a final stronghold against the inevitable 
 approach of the modern era. In less than eight years it has 
 become an obsolete ruin. It would have been considered a 
 sublime piece of statecraft in the year of Grace 1700. To-day 
 not one out of ten thousand people has ever bothered to read it. 
 For the twentieth century is dominated by certain economic 
 and industrial principles which recognize no political boundaries 
 and tend with absolute inevitableness to turn the entire world 
 
482 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 into a single large and prosperous workshop regardless of 
 language, race or previous condition of ancestral glory. 
 
 * 
 
 What eventually will come out of this workshop, what form 
 of civilization will be developed by an intelligent and willing co¬ 
 operation between man and his machines—that I do not know 
 and it really does not matter so very much. Life means change 
 and this is not the first time that the human race has been faced 
 by a similar emergency. 
 
 Our remote and our less-distant ancestors have lived through 
 such crises. 
 
 No doubt our children and grandchildren will do the same. 
 
 But for us, who are alive to-day, the one and only serious 
 problem is a world-wide reorganization along economic rather 
 than worn-out political lines. 
 
 Seven years ago, our ears deafened by the noise of the big 
 guns, our eyes blinded by the flash of the searchlights, we were 
 still too dazed to understand whither the great upheaval had 
 carried us. At that moment any fairly honorable and sincere 
 man who pretended that he could guide us back to the happy 
 days of 1914 was welcomed as a leader and was assured of our 
 willing loyalty. 
 
 To-day we know better. 
 
 We have begun to understand that the comfortable old world 
 in which we dwelled so unsuspectingly until the outbreak of the 
 war had in reality outlived its usefulness by several decades. 
 
 This does not mean that we are absolutely certain about the 
 road that now lies before us. Most likely we will follow a 
 dozen wrong tracks before we find the right direction. And 
 in the meantime we are fast learning one very important lesson 
 —that the future belongs to the living and that the dead ought 
 to mind their own business. 
 
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CONCERNING THE PICTURES 
 
 CONCERNING THE PICTURES OF THIS ROOK AND A FEW 
 WORDS ABOUT THE BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 The day of the historical textbook without illustrations has gone. 
 Pictures and photographs of famous personages and equally famous oc¬ 
 currences cover the pages of Breasted and Robinson and Beard. In 
 this volume the photographs have been omitted to make room for a 
 series of home-made drawings which represent ideas rather than events. 
 
 While the author lays no claim to great artistic excellence (being 
 possessed of a decided leaning towards drawing as a child, he was 
 taught to play the violin as a matter of discipline,) he prefers to 
 make his own maps and sketches because he knows exactly what he 
 wants to say and cannot possibly explain this meaning to his more 
 proficient brethren in the field of art. Besides, the pictures were all 
 drawn for children and their ideas of art are very different from those 
 of their parents. 
 
 To all teachers the author would give this advice—let your boys and 
 girls draw their history after their own desire just as often as you have 
 a chance. You can show a class a photograph of a Greek temple or a 
 mediaeval castle and the class will dutifully say, “Yes, Ma’am,” and 
 proceed to forget all about it. But make the Greek temple or the 
 Roman castle the centre of an event, tell the boys to make their own 
 picture of “the building of a temple,” or “the storming of the castle,” 
 and they will stay after school-hours to finish the job. Most children, 
 before they are taught how to draw from plaster casts, can draw after 
 a fashion, and often they can draw remarkably well. The product of 
 their pencil may look a bit prehistoric. It may even resemble the 
 work of certain native tribes from the upper Congo. But the child is 
 
 489 
 
490 
 
 THE BTORH DF MANKmp 
 
 quite frequently prehistoric or upper-Congoish in his or her own tastes, 
 and expresses these primitive instincts with a most astonishing accu¬ 
 racy. 
 
 The main thing in teaching history, is that the pupil shall remem¬ 
 ber certain events “in their proper sequence.” The experiments of 
 many years in the Children’s School of New York has convinced the 
 author that few children will ever forget what they have drawn, while 
 very few will ever remember what they have merely read. 
 
 It is the same with the maps. Give the child an ordinary conven¬ 
 tional map with dots and lines and green seas and tell him to revaluate 
 that geographic scene in his or her own terms. The mountains will be 
 a bit out of gear and the cities will look astonishingly medieval. The 
 outlines will be often very imperfect, but the general effect will be 
 quite as truthful as that of our conventional maps, which ever since 
 the days of good Gerardus Mercator have told a strangely erroneous 
 story. Most important of all, it will give the child a feeling of intimacy 
 with historical and geographic facts which cannot be obtained in any 
 other way. 
 
 Neither the publishers nor the author claim that "The Story of Man¬ 
 kind” is the last word to be said upon the subject of history for chil¬ 
 dren. It is an appetizer. The book tries to present the subject in such 
 a fashion that the average child shall get a taste for History and shall 
 ask for more. 
 
 To facilitate the work of both parents and teachers, the publishers 
 have asked Miss Leonore St. John Power (who knows more upon this 
 particular subject than any one else they could discover) to compile a 
 list of readable and instructive books. 
 
 The list was made and was duly printed. 
 
 The parents who live near our big cities will experience no diffi¬ 
 culty in ordering these volumes from their booksellers. Those who 
 for the sake of fresh air and quiet, dwell in more remote spots, may 
 not find it convenient to go to a book-store. In that case, Boni and 
 Liveright will be happy to act as middle-man and obtain the books 
 that are desired. They want it to be distinctly understood that 
 they have not gone into the retail book business, but they are quite 
 willing to do their share towards a better and more general historical 
 education, and all orders will receive their immediate attention. 
 
AN HISTORICAL READING LIST FOR CHILDREN 
 
 “Don’t stop (I say) to explain that Hebe was (for once) the 
 “legitimate daughter of Zeus and, as such, had the privilege to draw 
 “wine for the. Gods. Don’t even stop, just yet, to explain who the 
 “Gods were. Don’t discourse on amber, otherwise ambergris; don’t 
 “explain that ‘gris’ in this connection doesn’t mean ‘gi*ease’; don’t 
 “trace it through the Arabic into Noah’s Ark; don’t prove its electri¬ 
 cal properties by tearing up paper into little bits and attracting them 
 “with the mouth-piece of your pipe rubbed on your sleeve. Don’t 
 “insist philologically that when every shepherd ‘tells his tale’ he is not 
 “relating an anecdote but simply keeping ‘tally’ of his flock. Just go 
 “on reading, as well as you can, and be sure that when the children 
 “get the thrill of the story, for which you wait, they will be asking 
 “more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer.— 
 (“On the Art of Reading for Children,” by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.) 
 
 The Days Before History 
 
 “How the Present Came From the Past,” by Margaret E. Wells, 
 Volume I. 
 
 How earliest man learned to make tools and build homes, and the 
 stories he told about the fire-makers, the sun and the frost. A simple, 
 illustrated account of these things for children. 
 
 “Tb« Story of Ab/' by Stanley Waterloo. 
 
 A romantic tale of the time of the cave-man. (A much simplified 
 edition of this for little children is “Ab, the Cave Man” adapted by 
 William Lewis Nida.) 
 
 491 
 
492 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 “Industrial and Social History Series,” by Katharine E. Dopp. 
 
 “The Tree Dwellers—The Age of Fear” 
 
 “The Early Cave-Men—The Age of Combat” 
 
 “The Later Cave-Men—The Age of the Chase” 
 
 “The Early Sea People—First Steps in the Conquest of the Waters” 
 “The Tent-Dwellers—The Early Fishing Men” 
 
 Very simple stories of the way in which man learned how to make 
 pottery, how to weave and spin, and how to conquer land and sea. 
 “Ancient Man,” written and drawn and done into colour by Hendrik 
 Willem van Loon. 
 
 The beginning of civilisations pictured and written in a new and 
 fascinating fashion, with story maps showing exactly what happened in 
 all parts of the world. A book for children of all ages. 
 
 The Dawn of History 
 
 “The Civilisation of the Ancient Egyptians,” by A. Bothwell Gosse. 
 
 “No country possesses so many wonders, and has such a number 
 of works which defy description.” An excellent, profusely illustrated 
 account of the domestic life, amusements, art, religion and occupations 
 of these wonderful people. 
 
 “How the Present Came From the Past,” by Margaret E. Wells, 
 Volume II. 
 
 What the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the 
 Persians contributed to civilisation. This is brief and simple and may 
 be used as a first book on the subject. 
 
 “Stories of Egyptian Gods and Heroes,” by F. H. Brooksbank. 
 
 The beliefs of the Egyptians, the legend of Isis and Osiris, the 
 builders of the Pyramids and the Temples, the Riddle of the Sphinx, all 
 add to the fascination of this romantic picture of Egypt. 
 
 “Wonder Tales of the Ancient World,” by Rev. James Baikie. 
 
 Tales of the Wizards, Tales of Travel and Adventure, and Legends 
 of the Gods all gathered from ancient Egyptian literature. 
 
 “Ancient Assyria,” by Rev. James Baikie. 
 
 Which tells of a city 2800 years ago with a street lined with beau¬ 
 tiful enamelled reliefs, and with libraries of clay. 
 
 “The Bible for Young People,” arranged from the King James version, 
 with twenty-four full page illustrations from old masters. 
 
 “Old, Old Tales From the Old, Old Book,” by Nora Archibald Smith. 
 “Written in the East these characters live forever in the West— 
 
READING LIST FOR CHILDREN 
 
 493 
 
 they pervade the world.” A good rendering of the Old Testament. 
 “The Jewish Fairy Book,” translated and adapted by Gerald Fried- 
 lander. 
 
 Stories of great nobility and beauty from the Talmud and the old 
 Jewish chap-books. 
 
 “Eastern Stories and Legends,” by Marie L. Shedlock. 
 
 “The soldiers of Alexander who had settled in the East, wandering 
 merchants of many nations and climes, crusading knights and hermits 
 brought these Buddha Stories from the East to the West.” 
 
 Stories of Greece and Rome 
 
 “The Story of the Golden Age,” by James Baldwin. 
 
 Some of the most beautiful of the old Greek myths woven into the 
 story of the Odyssey make this book a good introduction to the glories 
 of the Golden Age. 
 
 “A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
 with pictures by Maxfield Parrish. 
 
 “The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy,” by Padraic 
 Colum, presented by Willy Pogany. 
 
 An attractive, poetically rendered account of “the world’s greatest 
 story.” 
 
 “The Story of Rome,” by Mary Macgregor, with twenty plates in 
 colour. 
 
 Attractively illustrated and simply presented story of Rome from 
 the earliest times to the death of Augustus. 
 
 “Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls,” retold by W. H. Weston. 
 
 “The Lays of Ancient Rome,” by Lord Macaulay. 
 
 “The early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than any¬ 
 thing else in Latin Literature.” 
 
 “Children of the Dawn,” by Elsie Finnemore Buckley. 
 
 Old Greek tales of love, adventure, heroism, skill, achievement, or 
 defeat exceptionally well told. Especially recommended for girls. 
 “The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,” by Charles 
 Kingsley. 
 
 “The Story of Greece,” by Mary Macgregor, with nineteen plates in 
 colour by Walter Crane. 
 
 Attractively illustrated and simply presented—a good book to 
 begin on. 
 
494 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 Christianity 
 
 “The Story of Jesus,” pictures from paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico, 
 Duccio, Ghirlandais, and Barnja-da-Siena. Descriptive text 
 from the New Testament, selected and arranged by Ethel Na¬ 
 talie Dana. 
 
 A beautiful book and a beautiful way to present the Christ Story. 
 “A Child’s Book of Saints,” by William Canton. 
 
 Sympathetically told and charmingly written stories of men and 
 women whose faith brought about strange miracles, and whose goodness 
 to man and beast set the world wondering. 
 
 “The Seven Champions of Christendom,” edited by F. J. H. Darton. 
 
 How the knights of old—St. George of England, St. Denis of 
 France, St. James of Spain, and others—fought with enchanters and 
 evil spirits to preserve the Kingdom of God. Fine old romances in¬ 
 terestingly told for children. 
 
 “Stories From the Christian East,” by Stephen Gaselee. 
 
 Unusual stories which have been translated from the Coptic, the 
 Greek, the Latin and the Ethiopic. 
 
 “Jerusalem and the Crusades,” by Estelle Blyth, with eight plates in 
 colour. 
 
 Historical stories telling how children and priests, hermits and 
 knights all strove to keep the Cross in the East. 
 
 Stories of Legend and Chivalry 
 
 “Stories of Norse Heroes From the Eddas and Sagas,” retold by E. M. 
 Wilmot-Buxton. 
 
 These are tales which the Northmen tell concerning the wisdom of 
 All-Father Odin, and how all things began and how they ended. A 
 good book for all children, and for story-tellers. 
 
 “The Story of Siegfried,” by James Baldwin. 
 
 A good introduction to this Northern hero whose strange and 
 daring deeds fill the pages of the old sagas. 
 
 “The Story of King Arthur and His Knights,” written and illustrated 
 by Howard Pyle. 
 
 This, and the companion volumes, “The Story of the Champions of 
 the Round Table,” “The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions,” 
 “The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur,” form an incom¬ 
 parable collection for children. 
 
READING LIST FOR CHILDREN 495 
 
 “The Boy’s King Arthur,” edited by Sidney Lanie? ; illustrated by N. 
 C. Wyeth. 
 
 A very good rendering of Malory’s King Arthur, made especially 
 attractive by the coloured illustrations. 
 
 “Irish Fairy Tales,” by James Stephens, illustrated by Arthur Rack- 
 ham. 
 
 Beautifully pictured and poetically told legends of Ireland’s epic 
 hero Fk>nn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, 
 and a book for story-telling or reading aloud. 
 
 “Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France,” by A. J. 
 Church. 
 
 Stories from the old French and English chronicles showing the 
 romantic glamour surrounding the great Charlemagne and his crusad¬ 
 ing knights. 
 
 “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,” written and illustrated by 
 Howard Pyle. 
 
 Both in picture and in story this book holds first place in the hearts 
 of children. 
 
 “A Book of Ballad Stories,” by Mary Macleod. 
 
 Good prose versions of some of the famous old ballads sung by the 
 minstrels of England and Scotland. 
 
 ‘The Story of Roland,” by James Baldwin. 
 
 “There is, in short, no country in Europe, and no language, in 
 which the exploits of Charlemagne and Roland have not at some time 
 been recounted and sung.” This book will serve as a good introduction 
 to a fine heroic character. 
 
 “The Boy’s Froissart,” being Sir John Froissart’s Chronicles of Ad¬ 
 venture, Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain. 
 “Froissart sets the boy’s mind upon manhood and the man’s mind 
 upon boyhood.” An invaluable background for the future study of 
 history. 
 
 “The Boy’s Percy,” being old ballads of War, Adventure and Love 
 from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, edited by 
 Sidney Lanier. 
 
 “He who walks in the way these following ballads point, will be 
 manful in necessary fight, loj r al in love, generous to the poor, tender in 
 the household, prudent in living, merry upon occasion, and honest in 
 all things.” 
 
 “Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims,” retold from Chaucer and others 
 by E. J. H. Darton. 
 
496 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 “Sometimes a pilgrimage seemed nothing but an excuse for a 
 lively and pleasant holiday, and the travellers often made themselves 
 very merry on the road, with their jests and songs, and their flutes 
 and fiddles and bagpipes.” A good prose version much enjoyed by boys 
 and girls. 
 
 “Joan of Arc,” written and illustrated by M. Boutet de Monvel. 
 
 A very fine interpretation of the life of this great heroine. A book 
 to be owned by every boy and girl. 
 
 “When Knights Were Bold,” by Eva March Tappan. 
 
 Telling of the training of a knight, of the daily life in a castle, of 
 pilgrimages and crusades, of merchant guilds, of schools and litera¬ 
 ture, in short, a full picture of life in the days of chivalry. A good 
 book to supplement the romantic stories of the time. 
 
 Adventurers vn New Worlds 
 
 “A Book of Discovery,” by M. B. Synge, fully illustrated from authen¬ 
 tic sources and with maps. 
 
 A thoroughly fascinating book about the world’s exploration from 
 the earliest times to the discovery of the South Pole., A book to be 
 owned by older boys and girls who like true tales of adventure. 
 
 “A Short History of Discovery From the Earliest Times to the Found¬ 
 ing of the Colonies on the American Continent,” written and 
 done into colour by Hendrik Willem van Loon. 
 
 “Dear Children: History is the most fascinating and entertaining 
 and instructive of arts.” A book to delight children of all ages. 
 
 “The Story of Marco Polo,” by Noah Brooks. 
 
 “Olaf the Glorious,” by Robert Leighton. 
 
 An historical story of the Viking age. 
 
 “The Conquerors of Mexico,” retold from Prescott’s “Conquest of 
 Mexico,” by Henry Gilbert. 
 
 “The Conquerors of Peru,” retold from Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” 
 by Henry Gilbert. 
 
 “Vikings of the Pacific,” by A. C. Laut. 
 
 Adventures of Bering the Dane; the outlaw hunters of Russia; 
 Benyowsky, the Polish pirate: Cook and Vancouver; Drake, and other 
 soldiers of fortune on the West Coast of America. 
 w The Argonauts of Faith,” by Basil Mathews. 
 
 The Adventures of the “Mayflower” Pilgrims. 
 
 “Pathfinders of the West,” by A. C. Laut. 
 
READING LIST FOR CHILDREN 497 
 
 The thrilling story of the adventures of the men who discovered the 
 great Northwest. 
 
 “Beyond the Old Frontier,” by George Bird Grinnell. 
 
 Adventures of Indian Fighters, Hunters, and Fur-Traders on the 
 Pacific Coast. 
 
 “A History of Travel in America,” by Seymour Dunbar, illustrated 
 from old woodcuts and engravings. 4 volumes. 
 
 An interesting book for children who wish to understand the prob¬ 
 lems and difficulties their grandfathers had in the conquest of the West. 
 This is a standard book upon the subject of early travel, but is so 
 readable as to be of interest to older children. 
 
 “The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators,” by Hendrik Willem van 
 Locn. Fully illustrated from old prints. 
 
 The World’s Progress in InvenUon — Art — Music. 
 
 “Gabriel and the Hour Book,” by Evaleen Stein. 
 
 How a boy learned from the monks how to grind and mix the colours 
 for illuminating the beautiful hand-printed books of the time and how 
 he himself made books that are now treasured in the museums of France 
 and England. 
 
 “Historic Inventions,” by Rupert S. Holland. 
 
 Stories of the invention of printing, the steam-engine, the spinning- 
 jenny, the safety-lamp, the sewing machine, electric light, and other 
 wonders of mechanism. 
 
 “A History of Everyday Things in England,” written and illustrated 
 by Marjorie and C. V. B. Quennell. 2 Volumes. 
 
 A most fascinating book, profusely illustrated in black and white 
 and in colour, giving a vivid picture of life in England from 1066-1799. 
 It tells of wars and of home-life, of amusements and occupations, of 
 art and literature, of science and invention. A book to be owned by 
 every boy and girl. 
 
 “First Steps in the Enjoyment of Pictures,” by Maude I. G. Oliver. 
 
 A book designed to help children in their appreciation of art by giv¬ 
 ing them technical knowledge of the media, the draughtsmanship, the 
 composition and the technique of well-known American pictures. 
 “Knights of Art,” by Amy Steedman. 
 
 Stories of Italian Painters. Attractively illustrated iD colour from 
 old masters. 
 
498 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 “Masters of Music,” by Anna Alice Chapin. 
 
 “Story Lives of Men of Science,” by F. J. Rowbotham. 
 
 “All About Treasures of the Earth,” by Frederick A. Talbot. 
 
 A book that tells many interesting things about coal, salt, iron, 
 rare metals and precious stones. 
 
 “The Boys’ Book of New Inventions,” by Harry E. Maule. 
 
 An account of the machines and mechancial processes that are 
 making the history of our time more dramatic than that of any other 
 age since the world began. 
 
 “Masters of Space,” by Walter Kellogg Towers. 
 
 Stories of the wonders of telegraphing through the air and be¬ 
 neath the sea with signals, and of speaking across continents. 
 
 “All About Railways,” by F. S. Hartnell. 
 
 “The Man-of-War, What She Has Done and What She Is Doing,” 
 by Commander E. Hamilton Currey. 
 
 True stories about galleys and pirate ships, about the Spanish 
 Main and famous frigates, and about slave-hunting expeditions in the 
 days of old. 
 
 The Democracy of To-Day. 
 
 “The Land of Fair Play,” by Geoffrey Parsons. 
 
 “This book aims to make clear the great, unseen services that 
 America renders each of us, and the active devotion each of us must 
 yield in return for America to endure.” An excellent book on our 
 government for boys and girls. 
 
 “The American Idea as Expounded by American Statesmen,” compiled 
 by Joseph B. Gilder. 
 
 A good collection, including The Declaration of Independence, The 
 Constitution of the United States, the Monroe Doctrine, and the 
 famous speeches of Washington, Lincoln, Webster and Roosevelt. 
 “The Making of an American,” by Jacob A. Riis. 
 
 The true story of a Danish boy who became one of America’s finest 
 citizens. 
 
 “The Promised Land,” by Mary Antin. 
 
 A true story about a little immigrant. “Before we came, the New 
 World knew not the Old; but since we have begun to come, the 
 Young World has taken the Old by the hand, and the two are learning 
 to march side by side, seeking a common destiny.” 
 
READING LIST FOR CHILDREN 
 
 Illustrated Histories m French. 
 
 499 
 
 (The colourful and graphic pictures make these histories beloved by 
 all children whether they read the text or not.) 
 
 “Voyages et Glorieuses Decouvertes des Grands Navigateurs et Explo- 
 rateurs Franfais, illustre par Edy Segrand.” 
 
 “Collection d’Albums Historiques.” 
 
 Louis XI, texte de Georges Montorgueil, aquarelles de Job. 
 Francis I, texte de G. Gustave Toudouze, aquarelles de Job. 
 Henri IV, texte de Georges Montorgueil, aquarelles de H. Vogel. 
 Richelieu, texte de Th. Cahu, aquarelles de Maurice Leloir. 
 
 Le Roy Soleil, texte de Gustave Toudouze, aquarelles de Maurice 
 Leloir. 
 
 Bonaparte, texte de Georges Montorgueil, aquarelles de Job. 
 ■‘Fabliaux et Contes du Moyen-Age”; illustrations de A. Robida. 
 
500 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 INDEX 
 
 A 
 
 Abelard .210 
 
 Abu-Bekr . 142 
 
 Achaeans. 55 
 
 Acropolis . 78,81 
 
 Aegean Sea . 48-53 
 
 Africa .452,453 
 
 Age of Discovery.224-240 
 
 Age of Expression.219-223 
 
 Age of Reason. 346 
 
 Akkadians . 35 
 
 Alaric . 127 
 
 Alba, Duke of. 269 
 
 Albert of Sardinia. 393 
 
 alchemy ... 404 
 
 Alcibiades . 82 
 
 Alemanni . 127 
 
 Alexander VI (Pope). 238 
 
 Alexander the Great-...-28, 37, 83, 84 
 
 Ali . 142 
 
 American Revolution.323-333 
 
 Amerigo Vespucci. 236 
 
 Amorites . 35 
 
 Anne . 294 
 
 Antiochus III.107-108 
 
 Antony. 117 
 
 Aquinas, Thomas . 194 
 
 architecture .. -437,438 
 
 Aristides . 77 
 
 Aristotle .83, 193-195, 216 
 
 Arkwright, Richard . 406 
 
 art .. 433-445 
 
 Assyrians .28,36 
 
 Athens .81,82 
 
 Augustus... 118 
 
 B 
 
 Bach . 
 
 Bacon, Roger .... 
 
 Bagdad . 
 
 Balance of Power 
 
 Balboa . 
 
 Balkan States .... 
 
 Barbarossa . 
 
 Barrack Emperors 
 
 .444 
 
 ....194, 226, 429 
 
 . 142 
 
 .....296-300 
 
 . 236 
 
 376, 386, 453, 454 
 
 . 166 
 
 . 125 
 
 Beethoven .445 
 
 Belgium. 374 
 
 Bell, Alexander Graham.411 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy . 420 
 
 Bismarck .394-400 
 
 Blanc, Louis. 425 
 
 Bliicher . 35? 
 
 Boccaccio . 214 
 
 Boer War.452 
 
 Bolivar, Simon . 383 
 
 Bologna, University of.210 
 
 Bonapartel, Joseph .. 383 
 
 Bonaparte (See Napoleon)... 
 
 Boris Godunow . 306 
 
 Brandenburg . 312 
 
 Brazil . 375 
 
 de Brienne .340-341 
 
 Buddha ....241-246 
 
 Bulgaria.453,544 
 
 Bunsen .430 
 
 Burgundians . 127 
 
 Byron . 388 
 
 Byzantine Empire .216 
 
 conquered by Turks...137 
 
 Byzantium . 126 
 
 C 
 
 Cabot, John .236, 284, 326 
 
 Caesar, Julius .112-115 
 
 de Calonne .339-340 
 
 Calvin . 262,264 
 
 Canning, George .384,388 
 
 Capo d’Istria . 376 
 
 Carbonari . 386 
 
 Carthage ......88-104 
 
 government of. 88-90 
 
 Cartwright, Edmund . 406 
 
 Castlereagh .368-372 
 
 Catiline .. 113 
 
 Cavour . 394 
 
 Chaldeans . 37 
 
 Champollion .. • 19 
 
 Chancellor, Richard .285,301 
 
 Charlemagne .144-149, 193 
 
 crowned — • •.. 146 
 
 his Empire divided.146-148 
 
 Charles I (England).287-290 
 
INDEX 
 
 501 
 
 Charles II (England)-.......290-292 
 
 Charles V - •. • .252, 253, 259, 267, 269, 320 
 
 Charles X (France). 389 
 
 Charles XII (Sweden).. 311 
 
 Charles XXII (Sweden)....374 
 
 Charles the Bold.. 148 
 
 Charles Martel . 143 
 
 Chartist Movement. 418 
 
 Cheops . 26 
 
 chivalry ...159-161 
 
 Christian IV (Denmark).274-276 
 
 Chrysoloras . 216 
 
 Cicero.. 113 
 
 Civil War (U. S. A.) . 423 
 
 Cleopatra .28, 115 
 
 Clovis . 145 
 
 Cnossos .51-53 
 
 Colbert .. 320 
 
 College of Cardinals . 164 
 
 Colonial Expansion .....451-453 
 
 Columbus...226, 232-235 
 
 Committee of Public Safety.346 
 
 Confucius .247-250 
 
 Congo . 452 
 
 Congress of Vienna .361-382 
 
 Conrad V. 167 
 
 Constantine ..126, 127, 135 
 
 Constantinople.127, 129, 137, 216 
 
 Copernicus . 231 
 
 Correggio . 440 
 
 cotton . .....405,406 
 
 Council of Ten (Venice). 200 
 
 de Covilham, Pedro ..231 
 
 Crete .51-52 
 
 Crimean War . 396 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver.. .289-290, 320 
 
 Crusades . 166-173 
 
 First . 169 
 
 Second . 170 
 
 Cuba . 453 
 
 cuneiform inscriptions . 32 
 
 Cyrus. 45 
 
 Czartoryski, Adam . 374 
 
 D 
 
 da Gama, Vasco.226,236 
 
 Danish Parliament. 189 
 
 Dante .211-213 
 
 Danton . 346 
 
 Declaration of Independence. 331 
 
 Declaration of Rights of Man... 334 
 
 Denmark . 374 
 
 Deutschland .. 148 
 
 Diaz, Bartholomew . 230 
 
 discovery of America.235-238 
 
 Disraeli . 454 
 
 Divine Right of Kings.287-289 
 
 Draco . 64 
 
 Dutch East India Company... .238-272 
 
 Dutch Republic becomes Kingdom 373 
 
 Dutch Republic formed. 190 
 
 Dutch West India Company. 273 
 
 Dynamoes . 411 
 
 E 
 
 Edict of Nantes . 277 
 
 Egypt ..17-28 
 
 Captured by Alexander the Great 27 
 
 Captured by Assyrians . 27 
 
 Captured by Hyksos .. 27 
 
 Captured by Rome. 28 
 
 Electricity .410-411 
 
 Elizabeth (England).. .271,283,285,320 
 
 Emancipation Proclamation.423 
 
 England, conquests of. 154 
 
 English Cabinet.. 293 
 
 English Colonies...326-329 
 
 English Revolution .279-295 
 
 Encyclopaedia (French).336, 429 
 
 Engels, Friedrich . 425 
 
 Enghien, Due d’ ... 351 
 
 Erasmus ....208, 256, 257 
 
 Eriksen, Leif . 232 
 
 Estates General (Holland) 189,190,270 
 
 Etruscans .. 93 
 
 Eugenie, Empress.399 
 
 van Eyck, Jan. 4391 
 
 . F 
 
 factories .413-419 
 
 Faraday, Michael . 411 
 
 Ferdinand and Isabella . 235 
 
 Ferdinand II (Austria).274 
 
 Ferdinand VII (Spain).. 375 
 
 Feudalism .155-158 
 
 fire, first use of.14-15 
 
 Fitch, John .406, 407 
 
 Florence .20L. 396 
 
 Fra Angelico . 222 
 
 French Colonies .327-329 
 
 French Parliament . 188 
 
 French Revolution .334-348, 415 
 
 Francis Joseph . 393 
 
 Franco-Prussian War .......-400-401 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin .330, 410 
 
 Franks .127, 144 
 
 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.... 166 
 
 Frederick II of Prussia .314-316 
 
 Frederick William I . 314 
 
 Frederick William IV.393 
 
 freedom of the sea..272 
 
 Fulton, Robert . 406 
 
502 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 G 
 
 Galileo . 404 
 
 Garibaldi . 394 
 
 Genoa . 201 
 
 George I .294 
 
 George II . 294 
 
 George III .294, 330 
 
 German Empire .400-401 
 
 Germany after Congress of 
 
 Vienna .376-379 
 
 Ghent . 203 
 
 Gibel-al-tarik . 142 
 
 Giotto . 222 
 
 Girondists. 346 
 
 Glacial Age .13, 14 
 
 Godfrey of Bouillon . 170 
 
 Goths . 127 
 
 Grachi . Ill 
 
 Grand Remonstrance .289 
 
 Grant. 423 
 
 Gratian . 210 
 
 Greece .54-84,376, 387, 388 
 
 Greek art rediscovered-•_-.214,215 
 
 “ cities as states .58-61 
 
 “ government .62-65 
 
 “ home-life .66-70 
 
 “ language in Middle-Ages. 216 
 
 Greeks conquer Aegeans .56, 57 
 
 Greek slaves .67-68 
 
 “ theatre .71-73 
 
 Gregory (Pope) . 136 
 
 Gregory VII .164-166 
 
 Grotius . 272 
 
 Guelphs and Ghibellines .211 
 
 von Guericke, Otto .410 
 
 Gustavus Adolphus . 276 
 
 Gutenberg . 223 
 
 H 
 
 Haiti . 383 
 
 Hals, Franz . 440 
 
 Hammurabi . 35 
 
 Hannibal .100-107 
 
 Hanseatic League . 203 
 
 Hargreaves James . 405 
 
 Hasdrubal .102j, 103 
 
 Hastings, Battle of . 154 
 
 van Heemskerk . 272 
 
 Hegira . 140 
 
 Hellenes . 55 
 
 Henry IV (Germany) .164-166 
 
 Henry VII (England) . 282 
 
 Henry VIII (England) .262, 282 
 
 Henry the Navigator .228-230 
 
 heresy . 265 
 
 herring fisheries . 203 
 
 hieroglyphics ..19-21 
 
 Hittites . 36 
 
 Hohenstaufen family . 166 
 
 Hohenzollern, rise of .313-314 
 
 Holy Alliance .. -360-372,384-386 
 
 Holy Roman Empire founded... - 148 
 
 Henry Hudson . 273 
 
 Hundred Years’ War...281,282 
 
 Huns . 127 
 
 Huss, John... .220,369 
 
 Huygens . 405 
 
 Hyksos . 27 
 
 I 
 
 Icelandic Parliament . 189 
 
 Indo-Europeans .44-47 
 
 Indulgences . 258 
 
 Inquisition .263, 264 
 
 Isis . 24 
 
 Italy united . 394 
 
 Ivan the Terrible .202-203, 306 
 
 J 
 
 Jacobins.345, 346, 353 
 
 James I . 286 
 
 James II . 292 
 
 Japan . 452 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas . 331 
 
 Jenghiz Khan . 304 
 
 Jerusalem . 41 
 
 captured by Crusaders. 170 
 
 captured by Turks-.... 173 
 
 Jesuits .266-267, 379 
 
 Jesus Christ .118-123 
 
 Jews .38-41 
 
 Joan of Arc .220, 281 
 
 John (England) .186, 187 
 
 Josephine, Empress . 351 
 
 Justinian . 136 
 
 K 
 
 Karageorgevich dynasty .376 
 
 Kay, John . 405 
 
 a Kempis, Thomas .219, 221 
 
 Kirchhoff . 430 
 
 Knighthood .159-161 
 
 Koniggratz, battle of . 398 
 
 Kossuth . 392 
 
 von Kriidener, Baroness .369-371 
 
INDEX 
 
 503 
 
 L 
 
 labor reforms .420-426 
 
 Lafayette . 388 
 
 Lao-Tse . 247,248 
 
 de Laplace, Marquis . 430 
 
 Lee; Richard Henry . 331 
 
 Lee, Robert, General.423 
 
 van Leeuwenhoek. 430 
 
 Leibnitz . 404 
 
 Leipzig, battle of . 356 
 
 Leonidas . 78 
 
 Leopold I (Belgium) . 391 
 
 Leopold II (Belgium) . 452 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham . 423 
 
 Locomotives .408, 409 
 
 Louis XIII . 276 
 
 Louis XIV.296-299, 320, 334-335 
 
 Louis XVI .338-346 
 
 Louis XVIII.356,365,389 
 
 Louis Philippe .391-392 
 
 Louisiana Purchase . 358 
 
 Loyola .266 
 
 Luther, Martin .251, 257-260 
 
 Lyell, Sir Charles . 430 
 
 M 
 
 Macchiavelli . 222 
 
 Magellan .225, 226, 236, 237 
 
 Magenta, battle of . 396 
 
 Magna Carta .186-187 
 
 Mammals . • 
 
 Man, first appearance. .. 10 
 
 Marathon .76-77 
 
 Marco Polo .224 
 
 Maria Theresa . 315 
 
 Marie Louise . 391 
 
 Marius .111-112 
 
 Mary, Queen . 283 
 
 Mary, Queen of Scots...283 
 
 Marx, Karl..; -425-426 
 
 Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico.. 399 
 
 Mazzini . 394 
 
 Medes . 45 
 
 Mediaeval cities ..174-183 
 
 “ “ obtain charters, 180-183 
 
 “ self-government ...184-190 
 
 “ trade .198-205 
 
 “ world..191-197 
 
 Medici . : . 201 
 
 de Medici, Catherine . 
 
 Mercantile System . 
 
 Merovingian kings .144-145 
 
 Mesopotamia . 29-37 
 
 Metternich.. .363-372, 386, 389, 390-392 
 Mexico .. 399 
 
 Michelangelo . 440 
 
 Microscope. 430 
 
 Middle Ages .191-197 
 
 Miltiades . 76 
 
 Mirabeau . 345 
 
 Mohammed .138-143 
 
 Mohammedans conquer Mesopo¬ 
 tamia and Spain. 142 
 
 Monroe Doctrine . 384 
 
 Montesquieu . 336 
 
 Montez, Lola . 393 
 
 Morse, Samuel . 410 
 
 Moscow .305-306 
 
 “ burned by Napoleon.356 
 
 Moses .38-41 
 
 Mozart .444 
 
 Mummy. 24 
 
 Music .441-445 
 
 Mycenae . 50 
 
 N 
 
 Napier, John . 403 
 
 Napoleon..149, 348-363, 374-375, 395-396 
 
 Napoleon III .400 
 
 National Assembly .343-345 
 
 Necker .338, 341-344 
 
 Nelson . 354 
 
 Netherlands,, war with Spain. .268-271 
 
 Newcomen, Thomas . 405 
 
 Newton, Isaac .404, 429 
 
 Nicholas I (Russia) . 391 
 
 Nieuw Amsterdam . 273 
 
 Nile Valley .17, 22, 26, 27 
 
 Ninwegen, peace of . 299 
 
 Norman conquest of England.... 280 
 
 Normandy . 151 
 
 Norse discoverers .232-233 
 
 Norsemen .150-154 
 
 North German Confederacy . 399 
 
 Norway . 374 
 
 'Novgorod .202-203 
 
 O 
 
 Obrenovitch dynasty . 376 
 
 Octavian . 117 
 
 Odoacer. 127 
 
 Oldenbarneveldt, John of . 278 
 
 Osiris . 24 
 
 Otto the Great .148, 163, 193 
 
 Owen, Robert . 425 
 
 Oxford University . 210 
 
 P 
 
 Pacific Ocean, discovery of.236 
 
 Paine. Thomas . 346 
 
504 
 
 THE STORY OF MANKIND 
 
 painting.439-440 
 
 Palestine . 41 
 
 Papin .405 
 
 Paris, University of . 210 
 
 Paul .119-123 
 
 Paul I (Russia) .355,367,368 
 
 Peloponnesian war .81-82 
 
 Pepin . 145 
 
 Pericles .81-82 
 
 Persia .45, 47 
 
 Persian wars with Greece .74-80 
 
 Peter the Great .307-311 
 
 Reter the Hermit . 169 
 
 Petrarca .213-214 
 
 Piano . 443-444 
 
 Pilgrims . 329 
 
 Pius VII . 353 
 
 Platea, battle of . 80 
 
 Pharnaces . 115 
 
 Pharoah . 27 
 
 Philip II (Spain).283, 288, 267-270 
 
 Philip of Macedon . 83 
 
 Philippe Egalite . 392 
 
 Philippine Islands . 237 
 
 Phoenicians ....42-43 
 
 Phoenician alphabet .. 43 
 
 Poitiers, battle of .142, 144 
 
 Poland . 374 
 
 Pompey .113, 114 
 
 Pontius Pilate .121-123 
 
 Pope .123-137 
 
 Pope vs. Emperor ............162-167 
 
 Portugal . 375 
 
 Prester, John .229-231 
 
 Priests, first mention of . 24 
 
 Printing . 223 
 
 Protestants and Catholics _262-278 
 
 Prussia .313-316 
 
 Ptolomean system of the universe 231 
 
 Ptolomy. 28 
 
 Punic Wars—1st war .97- 98 
 
 2nd war .98-103 
 
 3d war .103-104 
 
 Puritans .289, 326-327 
 
 Pyramids .25-26 
 
 Q 
 
 Quintus Fabius Maximus.100-102 
 
 R 
 
 Rafael . 222 
 
 Ravenna .127, 211 
 
 Reformation .251-278 
 
 Reform Bill . 418 
 
 Reichstadt, Duke of .360 
 
 Religion, origin of .23-24 
 
 Rembrandt . 440 
 
 Renaissance .206-223 
 
 Richard the Lion Hearted-... .186,187 
 
 Richelieu . 276 
 
 Robespierre .346( 347 
 
 Roland . 146 
 
 Rollo . 151 
 
 Roman Church.131-137,253-255 
 
 “ “ in England........ 279 
 
 “ conquest of England_ 279 
 
 “ Empire .117-130 
 
 “ Slaves .109-110 
 
 Rome .88-130 
 
 conquers Greece.106-107 
 
 conquers Syria .107-108 
 
 earliest history .91- 96 
 
 fall of . 124-130 
 
 Romulus Augustulus . 127 
 
 Rosetta Stone .18-19 
 
 Roumania . 387 
 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques . 336 
 
 Rudolph of Hapsburg .. 167 
 
 Rumford, Count . 410 
 
 Rump Parliament . 289 
 
 Runnymede . 186 
 
 Rurik . 302 
 
 Russia .301-312, 380 
 
 Russo-Japanese War.464 
 
 Ryswick, Peace of. 299 
 
 S 
 
 Sabines . 93 
 
 St. Helena . 359 
 
 Salamis . 79 
 
 Salerno, University of . 210 
 
 Sarajevo .455 
 
 Savonarola . 217 
 
 Schliemann, Heinrich .48-50 
 
 Scientific Progress .427-432 
 
 Scipio, Lucius . 108 
 
 Scipio, Publius .103, 106 
 
 Serbia . 454 
 
 Serfs . 306 
 
 Shakespeare .286, 441 
 
 Sicily . 393 
 
 Slavery abolished. 422 
 
 Socialism .425-426 
 
 Solferino, battle of . 396 
 
 Solon. 64 
 
 Spain . 375 
 
 Spanish Armada . 271, 284 
 
 Spanish Succession, war of•••-299-300 
 
 Sparta .77- 82 
 
 Star Chamber . 282 
 
 Steamboat .406-408 
 
INDEX 
 
 Steam Engine .404-405 
 
 Stephenson, George . 408 
 
 Stuarts .286-292 
 
 Sulla .111-113 
 
 Sumerians .32- 37 
 
 Sweden .311, 374 
 
 Swedish Parliament . 188 
 
 Swiss Assemblies . 189 
 
 T 
 
 Talleyrand .363-365, 368, 371, 373 
 
 Taoism .247 
 
 Ta’ Rifa . 228 
 
 Tartar Invasion .304-306 
 
 Telegraph .410-411 
 
 Telephone . 411 
 
 Ten Commandments . 40 
 
 Teutoburg Woods . 118 
 
 Theatre ..71-73,441 
 
 Thebes . 28 
 
 Themistocles . 77 
 
 Theodoric . 127 
 
 Thermopylae . 78 
 
 Third Estate .342-345 
 
 Thirty Years’ War.......273-278 
 
 Tilly .274-276 
 
 Tory .292-293 
 
 Toussaint l'Ouverture . 383 
 
 Trafalgar . 354 
 
 Triple Alliance of 1664 . 298 
 
 Troy .48-49 
 
 Turgot.388, 417 
 
 U 
 
 Universities, origin of .208-211 
 
 V 
 
 Vandals . 127 
 
 Varro . 102 
 
 Varrus . 118 
 
 Vatican . 396 
 
 505 
 
 de Vega, Lope . 441 
 
 Velasquez . 440 
 
 Venizuela .383-384 
 
 Venice .172, 198-202 
 
 Vermeer.440 
 
 Verrazano . 326 
 
 Victor Emanuel . 393 
 
 Vikings . 151 
 
 da Vinci, Leonardo . 222 
 
 Voltaire . 336 
 
 W 
 
 Wallenstein .274-276 
 
 Washington, George . 330 
 
 Waterloo, battle of .357-358 
 
 Watt, James . 405 
 
 Wellington, Duke of . 357 
 
 Westphalia, treaty of.273,277 
 
 Whigs .291-293 
 
 Whitney. Eli . 405 
 
 William I (Germany) . 400 
 
 William III (England)... .292-295, 299 
 
 William the Conqueror . 154 
 
 William of Orange (the Silent) 269-270 
 
 William of Orange . 390 
 
 Wilberforce, William . 422 
 
 de Witt, Jan .298-299 
 
 Worms, Diet of.259 
 
 writing, invention of.18-21 
 
 Wycliffe, John . 220 
 
 X 
 
 Xerxes . 79 
 
 Y 
 
 Ypsilanti, Prince Alexander . 387 
 
 Z 
 
 Zarathustra 
 
 45 
 

 
 
 
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