However rapidly we have sketched, in the preceding pages, the history of the Pilgrims from their settlement in Holland to their removal to America, no one can fail to have been deeply impressed with the inspiring lessons which that history teaches. As has been well said: "Their banishment to Holland was fortunate; the decline of their little company in the strange land was fortunate; the difficulties which they experienced in getting the royal consent to banish themselves to this wilderness was fortunate; all the tears and heartbreakings of that ever-memorable parting at Delfthaven had the happiest influence on the rising destinies of New England. All this purified the rank of the settlers. These rough touches of fortune brushed off the light, uncertain, selfish spirits. They made it a grave, solemn, self-denying expedition, and required of those who were engaged in it to be so too."

Touching also is the story of the "long, cold, dreary autumnal passage" in that "one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower, of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state and bound across the unknown sea." We behold it "pursuing with a thousand misgivings the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against the staggering vessel."

Escaped from these perils, after a passage of sixty-six days, and subsequent journeyings until the middle of December, they land on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, worn out with suffering, weak and weary from the fatigues of the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, surrounded by barbarians, without prospect of human succor, without the help or favor of their king, with a useless patent, without assurance of liberty in religion, without shelter, and without means!

Yet resolute men are there: Carver, Bradford, Brewster, Standish, Winslow, Alden, Warren, Hopkins, and others. Female fortitude and resignation are there. Wives and mothers, with dauntless courage and unexampled heroism, have braved all these dangers, shared all these trials, borne all these sorrows, submitted to all these privations. And there, too, is "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless but for a mother's arms, couchless but for a mother's breast."

But these sepulchres of the dead!—where lie Turner, Chilton, Crackston, Fletcher, Goodman, Mullins, White, Rogers, Priest, Williams, and their companions—these touch the tenderest and holiest chords. Husbands and wives, parents and children, have finished their pilgrimage, and mingled their dust with the dust of New England. Hushed as the unbreathing air, when not a leaf stirs in the mighty forest, was the scene at those graves where the noble and true were buried in peace. "Deeply as they sorrowed at parting with those, doubly endeared to them by the remembrance of what they had suffered together, and by the fellowship of kindred griefs, they committed them to the earth calmly, but with hope." No sculptured marble, no enduring monument, no honorable inscription, marks the spot where they were laid. Is it surprising that local attachments soon sprung up in the breasts of the survivors, endearing them to the place of refuge and their sorrows? They had come "hither from a land to which they were never to return. Hither they had brought, and here they were to fix, their hopes and their affections." Consecrated by persecutions in their native land, by an exile in Holland of hardship and toil, by the perils of the ocean voyage and its terrible storms, by their sufferings and wanderings in quest of a home, and by the heartrending trials of the first lonely winter—by all these was their new home consecrated and hallowed in their inmost thoughts; and forward to the future they looked with confidence in God and a cheerful reliance upon that beneficent Providence which had enabled them with patience to submit to his chastenings, and, Phoenix-like, to rise from the ashes of the dead and from the depths of the bitterest affliction and distress, with invincible courage, determined to subdue the wilderness before them, and to "fill this region of the great continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole," with freedom and intelligence, the arts and the sciences, flourishing villages, temples of worship, and the numerous blessings of civilized life, baptized in the fountain of the Gospel of Christ.



BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHODS

BACON AND DESCARTES

A.D. 1620

GEORGE HENRY LEWES

Three centuries of modern thought have not sufficed to settle the dispute as to its own origin. Many Englishmen still claim insistently that Lord Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning, and still more positively in his later and greater work, the Novum Organum (1620) started modern scientific method. Present scientists themselves seem inclined to smile somewhat scornfully at the laurels thus placed on Bacon's brow. And as for Frenchmen, they simply refuse to hear the pompous Lord Chancellor mentioned at all. To them Rene Descartes is the only genuine originator of all modern philosophy. The publication of his Discourse on Method (1637) marks for them the epoch which separates two worlds of thought.

Fortunately, George Henry Lewes, himself a celebrated English critic and the author of a system of philosophy, presents us the two rivals side by side, seeking to explain and balance the honors due to each.

It is very certain that somewhere about this period did originate that mathematical exactitude of method in both thought and experiment which has produced modern science. And modern science has, in its brief but marvellous career of three centuries, altered the face of the globe. It has taught man more than ancient science did in all the preceding centuries; it has touched even our deepest faiths.

Whether its success has been due mainly to the abstract reasoners like Copernicus and the philosophers, or to the practical experimenters like Galileo and Harvey, is perhaps scarcely a practical question.

In the evolution of philosophy, as in the evolution of an organism, it is impossible to fix with any precision a period of origin, because every beginning is also a termination, and presumes the results of a whole series of preceding evolutions. As Mr. Spedding felicitously says, our philosophy "was born about Bacon's time, and Bacon's name, as the brightest which presided at the time of its birth, has been inscribed upon it:

"Hesperus that led The starry host rode brightest."

"Not that Hesperus did actually lead the other stars; he and they were moving under a common force, and they would have moved just as fast if he had been away; but because he shone brightest, he looked as if he led them." Bacon and Descartes are generally recognized as the "Fathers of Modern Philosophy," though they themselves were carried along by the rapidly swelling current of their age, then decisively setting in the direction of science. It is their glory to have seen visions of the coming greatness, to have expressed in terms of splendid power the thoughts which were dimly stirring the age, and to have sanctioned the new movement by their authoritative genius. The destruction of scholasticism was complete. They came to direct the construction of a grander temple.

There are in these two thinkers certain marked features of resemblance, and others equally marked of difference. We see their differences most strikingly in their descendants. From Bacon lineally descended Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Cabanis, and our Scotch school. From Descartes descended Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The inductive method predominated in one school, the deductive in the other. These differences we shall recognize more fully later on; at present we may fix our minds on the two great points of resemblance: 1st, the decisive separation of philosophy from theology; 2d, the promulgation of a new method.

The separation of philosophy from theology is made emphatic in the rejection of final causes by both Bacon and Descartes. Perhaps the most effective of their novelties was the effort of Descartes to explain the system of the world by matter and motion only, thus quietly setting aside all causes and metaphysical entities which had hitherto been invoked. The hypothesis of vortices was indeed soon disclosed to be untenable; but the scientific attitude from which that hypothesis proceeded was never afterward relinquished. It was a bold attempt at the application of the objective method, and was only defective in its restriction to cosmology, and its exclusion of biology, which was still left to the subjective method, as I shall presently notice.

The second point on which Bacon and Descartes resemble each other is in their conception of the results to be achieved by a totally new method. Coming as they did on the top of the revolutionary wave which had washed away the old methods, seeing as they saw the striking results of physical research, and foreseeing yet more glorious conquests from the spirit which achieved those results, they yielded themselves to the pleasant illusion that a new method would rapidly solve all problems. Bacon, as the more magnificent and imaginative mind, had grander visions and more enthusiastic faith; but Descartes also firmly believed that the new method was to do wonders. Indeed, it is interesting to note how these great intellects seem quite unconscious of their individual superiority, and are ready to suppose that their method will equalize all intellects. It reminds us of Sydney Smith maintaining that any man might be witty if he tried. Descartes affirms that "it is not so essential to have a fine understanding as to apply it rightly. Those who walk slowly make greater progress if they follow the right road than those who run swiftly on a wrong one." To the same effect Bacon: "A cripple on the right path will beat a racer on the wrong one." This is true enough, but is beside the question. Equipped with good or bad instruments, the superiority of one worker over another is always made manifest; and it is precisely in the right use of a good method that the scientific genius is called upon for its delicate and patient skill.

Into the vexed questions of Bacon's conduct, both with regard to Essex and with regard to bribery, I cannot enter here; but referring the curious to his biographers and critics, I will simply note that he was born in 1561; was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he learned to distrust the Aristotelianism of his masters, and planned his own vast scheme of reform; went to Paris; sat in Parliament as member for Middlesex; was successively appointed of the Privy Council, and lord chancellor; was created Viscount Verulam; was impeached and condemned for corruption as a judge; and died in the spring of 1626. "For my name and memory," said the dying man, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age."

Posterity has been generous; the fame of Bacon is immense. Admirers have not always been unanimous as to his special claims; but there has been no lack of enthusiasm, no questioning of his genius. He has been lauded for achievements in which he had no part, and has been adorned with titles to which he had doubtful pretensions; while his most important services have been overlooked. But the general recognition of his greatness, and our national pride in it, have not prevented certain attacks on his reputation, which have been answered in a rather angry spirit; and thus from one cause and another there is great difficulty in arriving at any candid and thorough appreciation of the work he did. It seems to some persons that Bacon did very little in rising against the philosophy of his day, and pointing out a new path; and to others it seems that he did nothing of the kind. But whoever looks closely into the writings of Bacon's predecessors will see that what now seems obvious and trivial was then startling and important. As M. Remusat felicitously says, "Il fallait du genie pour avoir ce bon sens." And to those who deny that Bacon did head the revolution, I would oppose not simply the testimony of nearly three centuries, but the testimony of Gassendi, who, both as contemporary and as foreigner, was capable of judging the effect then produced. It is indeed apparent to anyone familiar with the writings of some of Bacon's immediate predecessors, especially Galileo, that there was little novelty in his denunciations of the erroneous method then popular, or in his exhortations to pursue observation, experiment, and induction. But it is not less apparent that he had wider and profounder views of the philosophy of method than any of them, and that the popular opinion does not err in attributing to him the glory of heading the new era.

In England he is commonly regarded as the "Father of Experimental Philosophy" and the originator of the inductive method. Men profess themselves followers of the "Baconian philosophy," sometimes confounding that with a servile attention to facts and a most unscientific scorn of theories; at other times implying that by the Baconian method is to be understood the one on which science has successfully been pursued. A rigorous investigation of Bacon's claims will disclose the truth of his own statement, that he was rather one who sounded the trumpet-call than one who marshalled the troops. He insisted on the importance of experiment, but he could not teach what he did not himself understand—the experimental method. He exhorted men to study nature; but he could not give available directions for that study. He had fervent faith in the possible conquests of science; but never having thoroughly mastered any one science, he was incapable of appreciating the real conditions of research. He saw clearly enough the great truth that the progress of research must be gradual, but he did not see what were the necessary grades, he did not see the kind of inquiries, and the order they must follow before discoveries could be made.

That he had really but vague and imperfect conceptions of scientific method is decisively shown by his contemptuous rejection of Copernicus, Galileo, and Gilbert, and by his own plan of investigation into heat. One sentence alone would suffice to show this, namely, his sneer at Copernicus as "a man who thinks nothing of introducing fictions of any kind into nature, provided his calculations turn out well." Bacon did not understand, what Copernicus profoundly saw, that the only value of an hypothesis was its reconciliation of calculations with observations. In his plan for an inquisition into the nature of heat, we see a total misconception of the scientific process; not only does he set about in a laboriously erroneous way, but he seeks that which science proclaims inaccessible, the nature of heat. It is true that he arrives at a hypothesis which bears some resemblance to the hypothesis now accepted, namely, that heat is a mode of motion—"an expansive and restrained motion, modified in certain ways, and exerted in the smaller particles of the body." But those who have been eager to credit him with an anticipation of modern views on the strength of this definition, have overlooked the fact that it is incapable of explaining a single process, includes none of the ascertained laws of phenomena, and is itself an example of the illicit generalization which Bacon elsewhere condemns. It was with some justification, therefore, that Harvey, who knew what science was, and knew better than most men how discoveries were made, said of him that he wrote of science like a lord chancellor.

Indeed, it is to mistake his position and his greatness altogether to attribute his influence on philosophy, which is undeniable, to an influence on science which is more than questionable. Bacon was a philosopher; but because with him philosophy, separating itself from the bondage of theology, claimed to ally itself with science, and sought its materials in the generalities of science, those writers who have never made a very accurate distinction between the two, but have confounded philosophy with metaphysics, and science with physics, have naturally regarded Bacon as the precursor of Newton, Laplace, Faraday, and Liebig. It is in vain that critics oppose such a claim by asserting what is undeniable, that the great discoveries in modern science were neither made on Bacon's method nor under any direct guidance from him—that Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler preceded him, that Harvey and Newton ignored him—stanch admirers have their answer ready; they know that Bacon was the herald of the new era, and they believe that it was his trumpet-call which animated the troops and led them to victory.

Having thus indicated his position, it will be necessary to give a brief outline of the method which he confidently believed was to be infallible and applicable in all inquiries. This was imperatively needed: "for let a man look carefully into all that variety of books with which the arts and sciences abound, he will find everywhere endless repetitions of the same thing, varying in the method of treatment, but not new in substance, insomuch that the whole stock, numerous as it appears at first view, proves on examination to be but scanty. What was asserted once is asserted still, and what was a question once is a question still, and, instead of being resolved by discussion, is only fixed and fed."

He proposes his new method, that thereby "the intellect may be raised and exalted and made capable of overcoming the difficulties and obscurities of nature. The art which I introduce with this view (which I call the 'Interpretation of Nature') is a kind of logic, though the difference between it and the ordinary logic is great, indeed immense. For the ordinary logic professes to contrive and prepare helps and guards for the understanding, as mine does; and in this one point they agree. But mine differs from it in three points: viz., in the end aimed at, in the order of demonstration, and in the starting-point of inquiry.

"But the greatest change I introduce is in the form itself of induction and the judgments made thereby. For the induction of which the logicians speak, which proceeds by simple enumeration, is a puerile thing; concluded at hazard, is always liable to be upset by a contradictory instance, takes into account only what is known and ordinary, and leads to no result. Now, what the sciences stand in need of is a form of induction which shall analyze experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion."

"Now, my method, though hard to practise, is easy to explain; and it is this: I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain; but the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception."

The same dissatisfaction with mediaeval philosophy expressed itself in Descartes. The incompetence of philosophers to solve the problems they occupied themselves with—the anarchy which reigned in the scientific world, where no two thinkers could agree upon fundamental points—the extravagance of the conclusions to which some accepted premises led, determined him to seek no more to slake his thirst at their fountains.

"And that is why, as soon as my age permitted me to quit my preceptors," he says, "I entirely gave up the study of letters; and resolving to seek no other science than that which I could find in myself, or else in the great book of the world, I employed the remainder of my youth in travel, in seeing courts and camps, in frequenting people of diverse humors and conditions, in collecting various experiences, and above all in endeavoring to draw some profitable reflection from what I saw. For it seemed to me that I should meet with more truth in the reasonings which each man makes in his own affairs, and which, if wrong, would be speedily punished by failure, than in those reasonings which the philosopher makes in his study, upon speculations which produce no effect, and which are of no consequence to him, except perhaps that he will be more vain of them the more remote they are from common-sense, because he would then have been forced to employ more ingenuity and subtlety to render them plausible."

For many years he led a roving, unsettled life; now serving in the army, now making a tour, now studying mathematics in solitude, now conversing with scientific men. One constant purpose gave unity to those various pursuits. He was elaborating his answers to the questions which perplexed him; he was preparing his method.

When only twenty-three he conceived the design of a reformation in philosophy. He was at that time residing in his winter quarters at Neuburg, on the Danube. His travels soon afterward commenced, and at the age of thirty-three he retired into Holland, there in silence and solitude to arrange his thoughts into a consistent whole. He remained there eight years; and so completely did he shut himself from the world that he concealed from his friends the very place of his residence.

When the results of this meditative solitude were given to the world in the shape of his celebrated Discourse on Method, and his Meditations—to which he invented replies—the sensation produced was immense. It was evident to all men that an original thinker had arisen; and although this originality could not but rouse much opposition, from the very fact of being original, yet Descartes gained the day. His name became European. His controversies were European quarrels. Charles I of England invited him over, with the promise of a liberal appointment; and the invitation would probably have been accepted had not the civil war broken out. He afterward received a flattering invitation from Christina of Sweden, who had read some of his works with great satisfaction, and wished to learn from himself the principles of his philosophy.

He accepted it, and arrived in Stockholm in 1649. His reception was most gratifying, and the Queen was so pleased with him as earnestly to beg him to remain with her, and give his assistance toward the establishment of an academy of sciences. But the delicate frame of Descartes was ill fitted for the severity of the climate, and a cold, caught in one of his morning visits to Christina, produced inflammation of the lungs, which carried him off.

Christina wept for him, had him interred in the cemetery for foreigners, and placed a long eulogium upon his tomb. His remains were subsequently (1666) carried from Sweden into France, and buried with great ceremony in Ste. Genevieve du Mont.

Descartes was a great thinker; but having said this, we have almost exhausted the praise we could bestow upon him as a man. In disposition he was timid to servility. When promulgating his proofs of the existence of the Deity, he was in evident alarm lest the Church should see something objectionable in them. He had also written an astronomical treatise; but hearing of the fate of Galileo, he refrained from publishing, and always used some chicane in speaking of the world's movement. He was not a brave man, nor was he an affectionate man. But he was even-tempered, placid, and studious not to give offence.

It has already been indicated that the great work performed by Descartes was, like that of Bacon, the promulgation of a new method. This was rendered necessary by their separation from the ancient philosophy and their exclusion of authority. If inquiry is to be independent, if reason is to walk alone, in what direction must she walk? Having relinquished the aid of the Church, there were but two courses open: the one to tread once more in the path of the ancients, and to endeavor by the ancient methods to attain the truth; or else to open a new path, to invent a new method. The former was barely possible. The spirit of the age was deeply imbued with a feeling of opposition against the ancient methods; and Descartes himself had been painfully perplexed by the universal anarchy and uncertainty which prevailed. The second course was therefore chosen.

Uncertainty was the disease of the epoch. Scepticism was widespread, and even the most confident dogmatism could offer no criterion of certitude. This want of criterion we saw leading, in Greece, to scepticism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, the New Academy, and finally leading the Alexandrians into the province of faith, to escape from the dilemma. The question of a criterion had long been the vital question of philosophy. Descartes could get no answer to it from the doctors of his day. Unable to find firm ground on any of the prevalent systems, distracted by doubts, mistrusting the conclusions of his own understanding, mistrusting the evidences of his senses, he determined to make a tabula rasa, and reconstruct his knowledge. He resolved to examine the premises of every conclusion, and to believe nothing but upon the clearest evidence of reason; evidence so convincing that he could not by any effort refuse to assent to it.

He has given us the detailed history of his doubts. He has told us how he found that he could plausibly enough doubt of everything except of his own existence. He pushed his scepticism to the verge of self-annihilation. There he stopped; there in self, in his consciousness, he found at last an irresistible fact, an irreversible certainty.

Firm ground was discovered. He could doubt the existence of the external world, and treat it as a phantasm; he could doubt the existence of a God, and treat the belief as a superstition; but of the existing of his thinking, doubting mind no sort of doubt was possible. He, the doubter, existed if nothing else existed. The existence that was revealed in his own consciousness was the primary fact, the first indubitable certainty. Hence his famous "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").

It is somewhat curious, and, as an illustration of the frivolous verbal disputes of philosophers, not a little instructive, that this celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum," should have been frequently attacked for its logical imperfection. It has been objected, from Gassendi downward, that to say, "I think, therefore I am," is a begging of the question; since existence has to be proved identical with thought. Certainly, if Descartes had intended to prove his own existence by reasoning, he would have been guilty of the petitio principii Gassendi attributes to him, viz., that the major premise, "that which thinks exists," is assumed, not proved. But he did not intend this. What was his object? He has told us that it was to find a starting-point from which to reason—to find an irreversible certainty. And where did he find this? In his own consciousness. Doubt as I may, I cannot doubt of my own existence, because my very doubt reveals to me a something which doubts. You may call this an assumption, if you will: I will point out the fact as one above and beyond all logic; which logic can neither prove nor disprove; but which must always remain an irreversible certainty, and as such a fitting basis of philosophy.

I exist. No doubt can darken such a truth; no sophism can confute this clear principle. This is a certainty, if there be none other. This is the basis of all science. It is in vain to ask for a proof of that which is self-evident and irresistible. I exist. The consciousness of my existence is to me the assurance of my existence.

Had Descartes done no more than point out this fact he would have no claim to notice here; and we are surprised to find many writers looking upon this "Cogito, ergo sum" as constituting the great idea in his system. Surely it is only a statement of universal experience—an epigrammatic form given to the common-sense view of the matter. Any clown would have told him that the assurance of his existence was his consciousness of it; but the clown would not have stated it so well. He would have said, "I know I exist, because I feel that I exist."

Descartes therefore made no discovery in pointing out this fact as an irreversible certainty. The part it plays in his system is only that of a starting-point. It makes consciousness the basis of all truth. There is none other possible. Interrogate consciousness, and its clear replies will be science. Here we have a new basis and a new philosophy introduced. It was indeed but another shape of the old formula, "Know thyself," so differently interpreted by Thales, Socrates, and the Alexandrians; but it gave that formula a precise signification, a thing it had before always wanted. Of little use could it be to tell man to know himself. How is he to know himself? By looking inward? We all do that. By examining the nature of his thoughts? That had been done without success. By examining the process of his thoughts? That, too, had been accomplished, and the logic of Aristotle was the result.

The formula needed a precise interpretation; and that interpretation Descartes gave. Consciousness, said he, is the basis of all knowledge; it is the only ground of absolute certainty. Whatever it distinctly proclaims must be true. The process, then, is simple: examine your consciousness, and its clear replies. Hence the vital portion of his system lies in this axiom: All clear ideas are true: whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true. This axiom he calls the foundation of all science, the rule and measure of truth.

The next step to be taken was to determine the rules for the proper detection of these ideas; and these rules he has laid down as follows:

1. Never accept anything as true but what is evidently so; to admit nothing but what so clearly and distinctly presents itself as true that there can be no reason to doubt it.

2. To divide every question into as many separate questions as possible; that each part being more easily conceived, the whole may be more intelligible—(Analysis).

3. To conduct the examination with order, beginning by that of objects the most simple, and therefore the easiest to be known, and ascending little by little up to knowledge of the most complex—(Synthesis).

4. To make such exact calculations and such circumspections as to be confident that nothing essential has been omitted.

Consciousness, being the ground of all certainty, everything of which you are clearly and distinctly conscious must be true; everything which you clearly and distinctively conceive exists, if the idea of it involves existence.

In the four rules, and in this view of consciousness, we have only half of Descartes' system; the psychological half. It was owing to the exclusive consideration of this half that Dugald Stewart was led—in controverting Condorcet's assertion that Descartes had done more than either Galileo or Bacon toward experimental philosophy—to say that Condorcet would have been nearer the truth if he had pointed him out as the "Father of the Experimental Philosophy of the Mind." Perhaps the title is just; but Condorcet's praise, though exaggerated, was not without good foundation.

There is, in truth, another half of Descartes' system, equally important, or nearly so: we mean the deductive method. His eminence as a mathematician is universally recognized. He was the first to make the grand discovery of the application of algebra to geometry; and he made this at the age of twenty-three. The discovery that geometrical curves might be expressed by algebraical numbers, though highly important in the history of mathematics, only interests us here by leading us to trace his philosophical development. He was deeply engrossed in mathematics; he saw that mathematics were capable of a still further simplification and a far more extended application. Struck as he was with the certitude of mathematical reasoning, he began applying the principles of mathematical reasoning to the subject of metaphysics. His great object was, amid the scepticism and anarchy of his contemporaries, to found a system which should be solid and convincing. He first wished to find a basis of certitude—a starting-point: this he found in consciousness. He next wished to find a method of certitude: this he found in mathematics.

"Those long chains of reasoning," he tells us, "all simple and easy, which geometers use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, suggested to me that all things which came within human knowledge must follow each other in a similar chain; and that provided we abstain from admitting anything as true which is not so, and that we always preserve in them the order necessary to deduce one from the other, there can be none so remote to which we cannot finally attain, nor so obscure but that we may discover them." From these glimpses of the twofold nature of Descartes' method, it will be easy to see into his whole system: consciousness being the only ground of certitude, mathematics the only method of certitude.

We may say therefore that the deductive method was now completely constituted. The whole operation of philosophy henceforth consisted in deducing consequences. The premises had been found; the conclusions alone were wanting. This was held to be true of physics no less than of psychology. Thus, in his Principia, he announces his intention of giving a short account of the principal phenomena of the world, not that we may use them as reasons to prove anything; for he adds: "we desire to deduce effects from causes, not from effects; but only in order that out of the innumerable effects which we learn to be capable of resulting from the same causes, we may determine our minds to consider these rather than others."



SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE

RICHELIEU RULES FRANCE

A.D. 1627

ANDREW D. WHITE

Through the work which Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, performed for that monarch and for France, the country was lifted from a state of comparative disorganization and weakness, and started on a fresh career, which led her to the foremost position among European nations.

At the death of Henry IV, in 1610, his son Louis XIII was but nine years old, and from 1624 to the end of the reign, in 1643, Richelieu directed the policy of France. By crushing the Huguenots as a political party he prepared the way for building up the power of the King. The Huguenots were aiming at an independent Protestant commonwealth within the kingdom. When Richelieu had defeated this project by his victory at La Rochelle he was free to undertake a readjustment of the relations between the throne and the grasping nobles. After accomplishing this he could turn his attention to foreign affairs.

In the last stage of the Thirty Years' War France under Richelieu played her part so well that the house of Austria was humbled, and, although the great Cardinal died before the end of the war, in the final settlement France received territorial and political benefits which greatly added to her prestige.

White, our eminent historian, educator, and diplomatist, has given to the world, in the following narrative and analysis, the best account of Richelieu's administration to be found in English.

Thus far the struggles of the world have developed its statesmanship after three leading types.

First of these is that based on faith in some great militant principle. Strong among statesmen of this type, in this time, stand Cavour, with his faith in constitutional liberty; Cobden, with his faith in freedom of trade; the third Napoleon, with his faith that the world moves, and that a successful policy must keep the world's pace.

The second style of statesmanship is seen in the reorganization of old states to fit new times. In this the chiefs are such men as Cranmer and Turgot.

But there is a third class of statesmen sometimes doing more brilliant work than either of the others. These are they who serve a state in times of chaos—in times when a nation is by no means ripe for revolution, but only stung by desperate revolt. These are they who are quick enough and firm enough to bind all the good forces of the state into one cosmic force, therewith to compress or crush all chaotic forces; these are they who throttle treason and stab rebellion; who fear not, when defeat must send down misery through ages, to insure victory by using weapons of the hottest and sharpest. Theirs, then, is a statesmanship which it may be well for the leading men of this land and time to be looking at and thinking of, and its representative man shall be Richelieu.

Never perhaps did a nation plunge more suddenly from the height of prosperity into the depth of misery than did France on May 14, 1610, when Henry IV fell dead by the dagger of Ravaillac. All earnest men, in a moment, saw the abyss yawning—felt the state sinking—felt themselves sinking with it. And they did what in such a time men always do: first all shrieked, then every man clutched at the means of safety nearest him. Sully, Henry's great minister, rode through the streets of Paris with big tears streaming down his face; strong men whose hearts had been toughened and crusted in the dreadful religious wars sobbed like children; all the populace swarmed abroad bewildered—many swooned—some went mad. This was the first phase of feeling.

Then came a second phase yet more terrible. For now burst forth that old whirlwind of anarchy and bigotry and selfishness and terror which Henry had curbed during twenty years. All earnest men felt bound to protect themselves, and seized the nearest means of defence. Sully shut himself up in the Bastille, and sent orders to his son-in-law, the Duke of Rohan, to bring in six thousand soldiers to protect the Protestants. All unearnest men, especially the great nobles, rushed to the court, determined now, that the only guardians of the state were a weak-minded woman and a weak-bodied child, to dip deep into the treasury which Henry had filled to develop the nation, and to wrench away the power which he had built to guard the nation.

In order to make ready for this grasp at the state treasure and power by the nobles, the Duke of Epernon—from the corpse of the King by whose side he was sitting when Ravaillac struck him—strides into the Parliament of Paris and orders it to declare the late Queen, Marie de' Medici, regent; and when this Parisian court, knowing full well that it had no right to confer the regency, hesitated, he laid his hand on his sword, and declared that, unless they did his bidding at once, his sword should be drawn from its scabbard. This threat did its work. Within three hours after the King's death the Paris Parliament, which had no right to give it, bestowed the regency on a woman who had no capacity to take it.

At first things seemed to brighten a little. The Queen Regent sent such urgent messages to Sully that he left his stronghold of the Bastille and went to the palace. She declared to him before the assembled court that he must govern France still. With tears she gave the young King into his arms, telling Louis that Sully was his father's best friend, and bidding him pray the old statesman to serve the state yet longer.

But soon this good scene changed. Mary had a foster-sister, Leonora Galligai, and Leonora was married to an Italian adventurer, Concini. These seemed a poor couple, worthless and shiftless, their only stock in trade Leonora's Italian cunning; but this stock soon came to be of vast account, for thereby she soon managed to bind and rule the Queen Regent—managed to drive Sully into retirement in less than a year—managed to make herself and her husband the great dispensers at court of place and pelf. Penniless though Concini had been, he was in a few months able to buy the Marquisate of Ancre, which cost him nearly a half a million livres; and, soon after, the post of first gentleman of the bedchamber, and that cost him nearly a quarter of a million; and, soon after that, a multitude of broad estates and high offices at immense prices. Leonora also was not idle; among her many gains was the bribe of three hundred thousand livres to screen certain financiers under trial for fraud.

Next came the turn of the great nobles. For ages the nobility of France had been the worst among her many afflictions. From age to age attempts had been made to curb them. In the fifteenth century Charles VII had done much to undermine their power, and Louis XI had done much to crush it. But strong as was the policy of Charles, and cunning as was the policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left France, though advanced, miserable. For these monarchs had not cut the root of the evil. The French nobility continued practically a serf-holding nobility.

Despite, then, the curb put upon many old pretensions of the nobles, the serf-owning spirit continued to spread a network of curses over every arm of the French government, over every acre of the French soil, and, worst of all, over the hearts and minds of the French people. Enterprise was deadened, invention crippled. Honesty was nothing, honor everything. Life was of little value. Labor was the badge of servility; laziness the very badge and passport of gentility. The serf-owning spirit was an iron wall between noble and not noble—the only unyielding wall between France and prosperous peace.

But the serf-owning spirit begat another evil far more terrible: it begat a substitute for patriotism—a substitute which crushed out patriotism just at the very emergencies when patriotism was most needed. For the first question which in any state emergency sprang into the mind of a French noble was not, How does this affect the welfare of the nation? but, How does this affect the position of my order? The serf-owning spirit developed in the French aristocracy an instinct which led them in national troubles to guard the serf-owning class first and the nation afterward, and to acknowledge fealty to the serf-owning interest first and to the national interest afterward.

So it proved in that emergency at the death of Henry. Instead of planting themselves as a firm bulwark between the state and harm, the Duke of Epernon, the Prince of Conde, the Count of Soissons, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Bouillon, and many others, wheedled or threatened the Queen into granting pensions of such immense amounts that the great treasury filled by Henry and Sully with such noble sacrifices, and to such noble ends, was soon nearly empty.

But as soon as the treasury began to run low the nobles began a worse work. Mary had thought to buy their loyalty, but when they had gained such treasures their ideas mounted higher. A saying of one among them became their formula, and became noted: "The day of kings is past; now is come the day of the grandees."

Every great noble now tried to grasp some strong fortress or rich city. One fact will show the spirit of many. The Duke of Epernon had served Henry as governor of Metz, and Metz was the most important fortified town in France; therefore Henry, while allowing D'Epernon the honor of governorship, had always kept a royal lieutenant in the citadel, who corresponded directly with the ministry. But on the very day of the King's death D'Epernon despatched commands to his own creatures at Metz to seize the citadel, and to hold it for him against all other orders.

But at last even Mary had to refuse to lavish more of the national treasure and to shred more of the national territory among these magnates. Then came their rebellion.

Immediately Conde and several great nobles issued a proclamation denouncing the tyranny and extravagance of the court—calling on the Catholics to rise against the Regent in behalf of their religion—calling on the Protestants to rise in behalf of theirs—summoning the whole people to rise against the waste of their state treasure.

It was all a glorious joke. To call on the Protestants was wondrous impudence, for Conde had left their faith and had persecuted them. To call on the Catholics was not less impudent, for he had betrayed their cause scores of times; but to call on the whole people to rise in defence of their treasury was impudence sublime, for no man had besieged the treasury more persistently, no man had dipped into it more deeply, than Conde himself.

The people saw this and would not stir. Conde could rally only a few great nobles and their retainers, and therefore, as a last tremendous blow to the court, he and his followers raised the cry that the Regent must convoke the States-General.

Any who have read much in the history of France, and especially in the history of the French Revolution, know in part how terrible this cry was. By the court, and by the great privileged classes of France, this great assembly of the three estates of the realm was looked upon as the last resort amid direst calamities. For at its summons came stalking forth from the foul past the long train of Titanic abuses and satanic wrongs; and came surging up from the seething present the great hoarse cry of the people; then loomed up, dim in the distance, vast shadowy ideas of new truth and new right; and at the bare hint of these, all that was proud in France trembled.

This cry for the States-General, then, brought the Regent to terms at once, and, instead of acting vigorously, she betook herself to her old vicious fashion of compromising—buying off the rebels at prices more enormous than ever. By her treaty of Ste. Menehould, Conde received a half a million of livres, and his followers received payments proportionate to the evil they had done.

But this compromise succeeded no better than the previous compromises. Even if the nobles had wished to remain quiet, they could not. Their lordship over a servile class made them independent of all ordinary labor and all care arising from labor; some exercise of mind and body they must have; Conde took this needed exercise by attempting to seize the city of Poitiers, and, when the burgesses were too strong for him, by ravaging the neighboring country. The other nobles broke the compromise in ways wonderfully numerous and ingenious. France was again filled with misery.

Dull as Regent Mary was, she now saw that she must call that dreaded States-General, or lose not only the nobles, but the people. Undecided as she was, she soon saw that she must do it at once; that if she delayed it, her great nobles would raise the cry for it again and again just as often as they wished to extort office or money. Accordingly, on October 14, 1614, she summoned the deputies of the three estates to Paris, and then the storm set in.

Each of the three orders presented its "portfolio of grievances" and its programme of reforms. It might seem, to one who has not noted closely the spirit which serf-mastering thrusts into a man, that the nobles would appear in the States-General, not to make complaints, but to answer complaints. It was not so. The noble order, with due form, entered complaint that theirs was the injured order. They asked relief from familiarities and assumptions of equality on the part of the people. Said the Baron de Senecce, "It is a great piece of insolence to pretend to establish any sort of equality between the people and the nobility": other nobles declared, "There is between them and us as much difference as between master and lackey."

To match these complaints and theories, the nobles made demands; demands that commoners should not be allowed to keep firearms, nor to possess dogs unless the dogs were ham-strung; nor to clothe themselves like nobles, nor to clothe their wives like the wives of nobles; nor to wear velvet or satin under a penalty of five thousand livres. And preposterous as such claims may seem to us, they carried them into practice. A deputy of the Third Estate having been severely beaten by a noble, his demands for redress were treated as absurd. One of the orators of the lower order having spoken of the French as forming one great family in which the nobles were the elder brothers and the commoners the younger, the nobles made a formal complaint to the King, charging the Third Estate with insolence insufferable. Next came the complaints and demands of the clergy. They insisted on the adoption in France of the decrees of the Council of Trent, and the destruction of the liberties of the Gallican Church.

But far stronger than these came the voice of the people: first spoke Montaigne, denouncing the grasping spirit of the nobles. Then spoke Savaron, stinging them with sarcasm, torturing them with rhetoric, crushing them with statements of facts.

But chief among the speakers was the president of the Third Estate, Robert Miron, provost of the merchants of Paris. His speech, though spoken across the great abyss of time and space and thought and custom which separates him from us, warms a true man's heart even now. With touching fidelity he pictured the sad life of the lower orders—their thankless toil, their constant misery; then with a sturdiness which awes us, he arraigned, first, royalty for its crushing taxation; next, the whole upper class for its oppressions, and then, daring death, he thus launched into popular thought an idea:

"It is nothing less than a miracle that the people are able to answer so many demands. On the labor of their hands depends the maintenance of your majesty, of the clergy, of the nobility, of the commons. What without their exertions would be the value of the tithes and great possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates of the nobility, or of our own house-rents and inheritances? With their bones scarcely skinned over, your wretched people present themselves before you, beaten down and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of living men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has appointed you to reign over them—who made you a man, that you might be merciful to other men—and who made you the father of your subjects, that you might be compassionate to these your helpless children. If your majesty shall not take means for that end, I fear lest despair should teach the sufferers that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant bearing arms; and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken up his arquebuse, he should cease to become an anvil only that he may become a hammer."

After this the Third Estate demanded the convocation of a general assembly every ten years, a more just distribution of taxes, equality of all before the law, the suppression of interior custom-houses, the abolition of sundry sinecures held by nobles, the forbidding to leading nobles of unauthorized levies of soldiery, some stipulations regarding the working clergy and the non-residence of bishops; and in the midst of all these demands, as a gold grain amid husks, they placed a demand for the emancipation of the serfs.

But these demands were sneered at. The idea of the natural equality in rights of all men—the idea of the personal worth of every man—the idea that rough-clad workers have prerogatives which can be whipped out by no smooth-clad idlers—these ideas were as far beyond serf-owners of those days as they were beyond slave-owners of our own days. Nothing was done. Augustin Thierry is authority for the statement that the clergy were willing to yield something. The nobles would yield nothing. The different orders quarrelled until one March morning in 1615, when, on going to their hall, they were barred out and told that the workmen were fitting the place for a court ball. And so the deputies separated—to all appearance no new work was done, no new ideas enforced, no strong men set loose.

So it was in seeming; so it was not in reality. Something had been done. That assembly planted ideas in the French mind which struck more and more deeply, and spread more and more widely, until, after a century and a half, the Third Estate met again and refused to present petitions kneeling; and when King and nobles put on their hats, the commons put on theirs, and when that old brilliant stroke was again made, and the hall was closed and filled with busy carpenters and upholsterers, the deputies of the people swore that great tennis-court oath which blasted French tyranny.

But something great was done immediately. To that suffering nation a great man was revealed; for when the clergy pressed their requests they chose as their orator a young man only twenty-nine years of age, the Bishop of Lucon, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu.

He spoke well. His thoughts were clear, his words well pointed, his bearing firm. He had been bred a soldier, and so had strengthened his will; afterward he had been made a scholar and so had strengthened his mind. He grappled with the problems given him in that stormy assembly with such force that he seemed about to do something; but just then came that day of the court ball, and Richelieu turned away like the rest.

But men had seen him and heard him. Forget him they could not. From that tremendous farce, then, France had gained directly one thing at least, and that was a sight of Richelieu.

The year, after the States-General, wore away in the old vile fashion. Conde revolted again, and this time he managed to scare the Protestants into revolt with him. The daring of the nobles was greater than ever. They even attacked the young King's train as he journeyed to Bordeaux, and another compromise had to be wearily built in the Treaty of Loudun. By this Conde was again bought off—but this time only by a bribe of a million and a half of livres. The other nobles were also paid enormously, and on making a reckoning it was found that this compromise had cost the King four millions and the country twenty millions. The nation had also to give into the hands of the nobles some of its richest cities and strongest fortresses.

Immediately after this compromise Conde returned to Paris, loud, strong, jubilant, defiant, bearing himself like a king. Soon he and his revolted again; but just at that moment Concini happened to remember Richelieu. The young bishop was called and set at work.

Richelieu grasped the rebellion at once. In broad daylight he seized Conde and shut him up in the Bastille; other noble leaders he declared guilty of treason and degraded them; he set forth the crimes and follies of the nobles in a manifesto which stung their cause to death in a moment; he published his policy in a proclamation which ran through France like fire, warming all hearts of patriots, withering all hearts of rebels; he sent out three great armies: one northward to grasp Picardy, one eastward to grasp Champagne, one southward to grasp Berri. There is a man who can do something! The nobles yield in a moment; they must yield.

But just at this moment, when a better day seemed to dawn, came an event which threw France back into anarchy and Richelieu into the world again.

The young King, Louis XIII, was now sixteen years old. His mother the Regent and her favorite Concini had carefully kept him down. Under their treatment he had grown morose and seemingly stupid; but he had wit enough to understand the policy of his mother and Concini, and strength enough to hate them for it.

The only human being to whom Louis showed any love was a young falconer, Albert de Luynes, and with De Luynes he conspired against his mother's power and her favorite's life. On an April morning, 1617, the King and De Luynes sent a party of chosen men to seize Concini. They met him at the gate of the Louvre. As usual he is bird-like in his utterance, snake-like in his bearing. They order him to surrender; he chirps forth his surprise, and they blow out his brains. Louis, understanding the noise, puts on his sword, appears on the balcony of the palace, is saluted with hurrahs, and becomes master of his kingdom.

Straightway measures are taken against all supposed to be attached to the regency. Concini's wife, the favorite Leonora, is burned as a witch; Regent Mary is sent to Blois, and Richelieu is banished to his bishopric.

And now matters went from bad to worse. King Louis was no stronger than Regent Mary had been; King's favorite, De Luynes, was no better than Regent's favorite, Concini, had been. The nobles rebelled against the new rule as they had rebelled against the old. The King went through the same old extortions and humiliations.

Then came also to full development yet another vast evil. As far back as the year after Henry's assassination, the Protestants, in terror of their enemies, now that Henry was gone and the Spaniards seemed to grow in favor, formed themselves into a great republican league—a state within the state—regularly organized; in peace, for political effort, and in war, for military effort, with a Protestant clerical caste which ruled always with pride, and often with menace.

Against such a theocratic republic war must come sooner or later, and in 1617 the struggle began. Army was pitted against army; Protestant Duke of Rohan against Catholic Duke of Luynes. Meanwhile Austria and the foreign enemies of France, Conde and the domestic enemies of France fished in the troubled waters, and made rich gains every day. So France plunged into sorrows ever deeper and blacker. But in 1624 Marie de' Medici, having been reconciled to her son, urged him to recall Richelieu.

The dislike which Louis bore Richelieu was strong, but the dislike he bore toward compromises had become stronger. Into his poor brain at last began to gleam the truth that a serf-mastering caste, after a compromise, only whines more steadily and snarls more loudly; that at last, compromising becomes worse than fighting, Richelieu was called and set at work.

Fortunately for our studies of the great statesman's policy, he left at his death a Political Testament, which floods with light his steadiest aims and boldest acts. In that Testament he wrote this message:

"When your majesty resolved to give me entrance into your councils and a great share of your confidence, I can declare with truth that the Huguenots divided the authority with your majesty, that the great nobles acted not at all as subjects, that the governors of the provinces took on themselves the airs of sovereigns, and that the foreign alliances of France were despised. I promised your majesty to use all my industry, all the authority you gave me, to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the high nobles, and to raise your name among foreign nations to the place where it ought to be."

Such were the plans of Richelieu at the outset. Let us see how he wrought out their fulfilment.

First of all, he performed daring surgery and cautery about the very heart of the court. In a short time he had cut out from that living centre of French power a number of unworthy ministers and favorites, and replaced them by men on whom he could rely. Then he began his vast work. His policy embraced three great objects: First, the overthrow of the Huguenot power; secondly, the subjugation of the great nobles; thirdly, the destruction of the undue might of Austria.

First, then, after some preliminary negotiations with foreign powers, he attacked the great politico-religious party of the Huguenots. These held, as their great centre and stronghold, the famous seaport of La Rochelle. He who but glances at the map shall see how strong was this position; he shall see two islands lying just off the west coast at that point, controlled by La Rochelle, yet affording to any foreign allies, whom the Huguenots might admit there, facilities for stinging France during centuries. The position of the Huguenots seemed impregnable. The city was well fortressed, garrisoned by the bravest of men, mistress of a noble harbor open at all times to supplies from foreign ports, and in that harbor rode a fleet, belonging to the city, greater than the navy of France. Richelieu saw well that here was the head of the rebellion. Here, then, he must strike it.

Strange as it may seem, his diplomacy was so skilful that he obtained ships to attack the Protestants in La Rochelle from the two great Protestant powers—England and Holland. With these he was successful. He attacked the city fleet, ruined it, and cleared the harbor.

But now came a terrible check. Richelieu had aroused the hate of that incarnation of all that was and is offensive in English politics—the Duke of Buckingham. Scandal-mongers were wont to say that both were in love with the Queen, and that the Cardinal, though unsuccessful in his suit, outwitted the Duke and sent him out of the kingdom; and that the Duke swore a great oath that if he could not enter France in one way, he would enter in another; and that he brought about a war and came himself as a commander. Of this scandal believe what you will, but—be the causes what they may—the English policy changed, and Charles I sent Buckingham with ninety ships to aid La Rochelle.

But Buckingham was flippant and careless; Richelieu careful when there was need, and daring when there was need. Buckingham's heavy blows were foiled by Richelieu's keen thrusts, and then, in his confusion, Buckingham blundered so foolishly and Richelieu profited by his blunders so shrewdly that the fleet returned to England without any accomplishment of its purpose. The English were also driven from that vexing position in the Isle of Re.

Having thus sent the English home, for a time at least, he led King and nobles and armies to La Rochelle, and commenced the siege in full force. Difficulties met him at every turn; but the difficulty of all was that arising from the spirit of the nobility.

No one could charge the nobles of France with lack of bravery. The only charge was that their bravery was almost sure to shun every useful form, and to take every noxious form. The bravery which finds outlet in duels they showed constantly; the bravery which finds outlets in street fights they had shown from the day when the Duke of Orleans perished in a brawl, to the days when the "Mignons" of Henry III fought at sight every noble whose beard was not cut to suit them. The pride fostered by lording it over serfs, in the country, and by lording it over men who did not own serfs, in the capital, aroused bravery of this sort and plenty of it. But that bravery which serves a great good cause, which must be backed by steadiness and watchfulness, was not so plentiful. So Richelieu found that the nobles who had conducted the siege before he took command had, through their brawling propensities and lazy propensities, allowed the besieged to garner in the crops from the surrounding country, and master all the best points of attack.

But Richelieu pressed on. First he built an immense wall and earthwork, nine miles long, surrounding the city, and to protect this he raised eleven great forts and eighteen redoubts. Still the harbor was open, and into this the English fleet might return and succor the city at any time. His plan was soon made. In the midst of that great harbor of La Rochelle he sank sixty hulks of vessels filled with stone; then, across the harbor—nearly a mile wide and, in places, more than eight hundred feet deep—he began building over these sunken ships a great dike and wall; thoroughly fortified, carefully engineered, faced with sloping layers of hewn stone.

His own men scolded at the magnitude of the work; the men in La Rochelle laughed at it. Worse than that, the ocean sometimes laughed and scolded at it. Sometimes the waves, sweeping in from that fierce Bay of Biscay, destroyed in an hour the work of a week. The carelessness of a subordinate once destroyed in a moment the work of three months.

Yet it is but fair to admit that there was one storm which did not beat against Richelieu's dike. There set in against it no storm of hypocrisy from neighboring nations. Keen works for and against Richelieu were put forth in his day: works calm and strong for and against him have been issuing from the presses of France and England and Germany ever since; but not one of the old school of keen writers, or of the new school of calm writers, is known to have ever hinted that this complete sealing of the only entrance to a leading European harbor was unjust to the world at large or unfair to the besieged themselves.

But all other obstacles Richelieu had to break through or cut through constantly. He was his own engineer, general, admiral, prime minister. While he urged on the army to work upon the dike, he organized a French navy, and in due time brought it around to that coast and anchored it so as to guard the dike and to be guarded by it. Yet daring as all this work was, it was but the smallest part of his work. Richelieu found that his officers were cheating his soldiers in their pay and disheartening them; in the face of the enemy he had to reorganize the army and to create a new military system. He made the army twice as effective and supported it at two-thirds less cost than before. It was his boast in his Testament that, from a mob, the army became "like a well-ordered convent."

He found also that his subordinates were plundering the surrounding country, and thus rendering it disaffected; he at once ordered that what had been taken should be paid for, and that persons trespassing thereafter should be severely punished. He found also the great nobles who commanded in the army half-hearted and almost traitorous from sympathy with those of their own caste on the other side of the walls of La Rochelle, and from their fear of his increased power should he gain a victory. It was their common saying that they were fools to help him do it. But he saw the true point at once. He placed in the most responsible positions of his army men who felt for their cause, whose hearts and souls were in it—men not of the Dalgetty stamp, but of the Cromwell stamp. He found also—as he afterward said—that he had to conquer not only the kings of England and Spain, but also the King of France. At the most critical moment of the siege Louis defeated him, went back to Paris, allowed courtiers to fill him with suspicions. Not only Richelieu's place, but his life, was in danger, and he well knew it; yet he never left his dike and siege-works, but wrought on steadily until they were done; and then the King, of his own will, in very shame broke away from his courtiers and went back to his master.

And now a royal herald summoned the people of La Rochelle to surrender. But they were not yet half conquered. Even when they had seen two English fleets, sent to aid them, driven back from Richelieu's dike, they still held out manfully. The Duchess of Rohan, the Mayor Guiton, and the minister Salbert, by noble sacrifices and burning words, kept the will of the besieged firm as steel. They were reduced to feed on their horses; then on bits of filthy shellfish; then on stewed leather. They died in multitudes.

Guiton, the mayor, kept a dagger on the city council-table to stab any man who should speak of surrender; some, who spoke of yielding, he ordered to execution as seditious. When a friend showed him a person dying of hunger, he said: "Does that astonish you? Both you and I must come to that!" When another told him that multitudes were perishing he said, "Provided one remains to hold the city gate, I ask nothing more."

But at last even Guiton had to yield. After the siege had lasted more than a year, after five thousand were found remaining out of fifteen thousand, after a mother had been seen to feed her child with her own blood, the Cardinal's policy became too strong for him. The people yielded and Richelieu entered the city as master.

And now the victorious statesman showed a greatness of soul to which all the rest of his life was as nothing. He was a Catholic cardinal; the Rochellois were Protestants; he was a stern ruler; they were rebellious subjects who had long worried and almost impoverished him; all Europe, therefore, looked for a retribution more terrible than any in history.

Richelieu allowed nothing of the sort. He destroyed the old franchises of the city, for they were incompatible with that royal authority which he so earnestly strove to build. But this was all. He took no vengeance; he allowed the Protestants to worship as before; he took many of them into the public service, and to Guiton he showed marks of respect. He stretched forth that strong arm of his over the city and warded off all harm. He kept back greedy soldiers from pillage; he kept back bigot priests from persecution.

Years before this he had said, "The diversity of religions may indeed create a division in the other world, but not in this." At another time he wrote, "Violent remedies only aggravate spiritual diseases." And he was now so tested that these expressions were found to embody not merely an idea, but a belief. For when the Protestants in La Rochelle, though thus owing tolerance—and even existence—to a Catholic, vexed Catholics in a spirit most intolerant, even that could not force him to abridge the religious liberties he had given.

He saw beyond his time, not only beyond Catholics, but beyond Protestants. Two years after that great example of toleration in La Rochelle, Nicholas Antoine was executed for apostasy from Calvinism at Geneva. And for his leniency Richelieu received the titles of "Pope of the Protestants" and "Patriarch of the Atheists." But he had gained the first great object of his policy, and he would not abuse it: he had crushed the political power of the Huguenots forever.

Let us turn now to the second great object of his policy. He must break the power of the nobility: on that condition alone could France have strength and order, and here he showed his daring at the outset. "It is iniquitous," he was wont to tell the King, "to try to make an example by punishing the lesser offenders; they are but trees which cast no shade: it is the great nobles who must be disciplined."

It was not long before he had to begin this work—and with the highest—with no less a personage than Gaston, Duke of Orleans, favorite son of Mary, brother of the King. He who thinks shall come to a higher idea of Richelieu's boldness when he remembers that for many years after this Louis was childless and sickly, and that during all those years Richelieu might awake any morning to find Gaston—king.

In 1626 Gaston, with the Duke of Vendome, half-brother of the King, the Duchess of Chevreuse, confidential friend of the Queen, the Count of Chalais, and the Marshal Ornano, formed a conspiracy after the old fashion. Richelieu had his hand at their lofty throats in a moment. Gaston, who was used only as a makeweight, he forced into the most humble apology and the most binding pledges; Ornano he sent to die in the Bastille; the Duke of Vendome and the Duchess of Chevreuse he banished; Chalais he sent to the scaffold.

The next year he gave the grandees another lesson. The serf-owning spirit had fostered in France, through many years, a rage for duelling. Richelieu determined that this should stop. He gave notice that the law against duelling was revived, and that he would enforce it. It was soon broken by two of the loftiest nobles in France—by the Count of Bouteville Montmorency and the Count des Chapelles. They laughed at the law: they fought defiantly in broad daylight. Nobody dreamed that the law would be carried out against them. The Cardinal would, they thought, deal with them as rulers have dealt with serf-mastering lawbreakers from those days to these—invent some quibble and screen them with it. But his method was sharper and shorter. He seized both, and executed both on the Place de la Greve—the place of execution for the vilest malefactors.

No doubt that under the present domineering of the pettifogger caste there are hosts of men whose minds run in such small old grooves that they hold legal forms not a means, but an end; these will cry out against this proceeding as tyrannical. No doubt, too, that under the present palaver of the "sensationist" caste, the old ladies of both sexes have come to regard crime as mere misfortune: these will lament this proceeding as cruel. But for this act, if for no other, an earnest man's heart ought in these times to warm toward the great statesman. The man had a spine. To his mind crime was not mere misfortune: crime was crime.

Crime was strong; it would pay him well to screen it: it might cost him dear to fight it. But he was not a modern "smart" lawyer to seek popularity by screening criminals; nor a modern soft juryman, to suffer his eyes to be blinded by quirks and quibbles to the great purposes of law; nor a modern bland governor, who lets a murderer loose out of politeness to the murderer's mistress. He hated crime; he whipped the criminal; no petty forms and no petty men of forms could stand between him and a rascal. He had the sense to see that this course was not cruel, but merciful. In the eighteen years before Richelieu's administration, four thousand men perished in duels; in the ten years after Richelieu's death nearly a thousand thus perished; but during his whole administration, duelling was checked completely. Which policy was tyrannical? Which policy was cruel?

The hatred of the serf-mastering caste toward their new ruler grew blacker and blacker, but he never flinched. The two brothers Marillac, proud of birth, high in office, endeavored to stir revolt as in their good days of old. The first, who was keeper of the seals, Richelieu threw into prison; with the second, who was a marshal of France, Richelieu took another course. For this marshal had added to revolt things more vile and more insidiously hurtful: he had defrauded the government in army contracts. Richelieu tore him from his army and put him on trial. The Queen-Mother, whose pet he was, insisted on his liberation. Marillac himself blubbered that it "was all about a little straw and hay, a matter for which a master would not whip a lackey." Marshal Marillac was executed. So, when statesmen rule, fare all who take advantage of the agonies of a nation to pilfer a nation's treasure.

To crown all, the Queen-Mother began now to plot against Richelieu because he would not be her puppet, and he banished her from France forever.

The high nobles were now exasperated. Gaston fled the country, first issuing against Richelieu a threatening manifesto. Now awoke the Duke of Montmorency. By birth he stood next the King's family: by office, as constable of France, he stood next the King himself. Montmorency was defeated and taken. The nobles supplicated for him lustily: they looked on crimes of nobles resulting in deaths of plebeians as lightly as the English House of Lords afterward looked on Lord Mohun's murder of Will Mountfort, or as another body of lords looked on Matt Ward's murder of Professor Butler: but Montmorency was executed. Says Richelieu in his Memoirs, "Many murmured at this act, and called it severe; but others, more wise, praised the justice of the King, who preferred the good of the state to the vain reputation of a hurtful clemency."

Nor did the great minister grow indolent as he grew old. The Duke of Epernon, who seems to have had more direct power of the old feudal sort than any other man in France, and who had been so turbulent under the regency, him Richelieu humbled completely. The Duke of Valette disobeyed orders in the army, and was executed as a common soldier would have been for the same offence. The Count of Soissons tried to see if he could not revive the good old turbulent times, and raised a rebel army; but Richelieu hunted him down like a wild beast. Then certain court nobles—pets of the King—Cinq-Mars and De Thou, wove a new plot, and, to strengthen it, made a secret treaty with Spain; but the Cardinal, though dying, obtained a copy of the treaty, through his agent, and the traitors expiated their treason with their blood.

But this was not all. The Parliament of Paris—a court of justice—filled with the idea that law is not a means, but an end, tried to interpose forms between the master of France and the vermin he was exterminating. That Parisian court might, years before, have done something. They might have insisted that the petty quibbles set forth by the lawyers of Paris should not defeat the eternal laws of retribution set forth by the Lawgiver of the Universe. That they had not done, and the time for legal forms had gone by. The Paris Parliament would not see this, and Richelieu crushed the Parliament. Then the court of aids refused to grant supplies, and he crushed that court. In all this the nation upheld him. Woe to the courts of a nation when they have forced the great body of plain men to regard legality as injustice! Woe to the councils of a nation when they have forced the great body of plain men to regard legislation as traffic! Woe thrice repeated to gentlemen of small pettifogging sort when they have brought such times, and God has brought a man to fit them!

There was now in France no man who could stand against the statesman's purpose. And so, having hewn through all that anarchy and bigotry and selfishness a way for the people, he called them to the work. In 1626 he summoned an assembly to carry out reforms. It was essentially a people's assembly. That anarchical States-General, domineered by great nobles, he would not call; but he called an "Assembly of Notables." In this was not one prince or duke, and two-thirds of the members came directly from the people. Into this body he thrust some of his own energy. Measures were taken for the creation of a navy. An idea was now carried into effect which many suppose to have sprung from the French Revolution; for the army was made more effective by opening its high grades to the commons.

A reform was also made in taxation, and shrewd measures were taken to spread commerce and industry by calling the nobility into them.

Thus did France, under his guidance, secure order and progress. Calmly he destroyed all the useless feudal castles which had so long overawed the people and defied the monarchy. He abolished also the military titles of grand admiral and high constable, which had hitherto given the army and navy into the hands of leading noble families. He destroyed some troublesome remnants of feudal courts, and created royal courts; in one year, that of Poitiers alone, punished for exactions and violence against the people, more than two hundred nobles. Greatest step of all, he deposed the hereditary noble governors, and placed in their stead governors taken from the people—"Intendants"—responsible to the central authority alone.

We are brought now to the third great object of Richelieu's policy. He saw from the beginning that Austria and her satellite Spain must be humbled if France was to take her rightful place in Europe.

Hardly, then, had he entered the council, when he negotiated a marriage of the King's sister with the son of James I of England; next he signed an alliance with Holland; next he sent ten thousand soldiers to drive the troops of the Pope and Spain out of the Valtelline district of the Alps, and thus secured an alliance with the Swiss. We are to note here that fact, which Buckle wields so well, that, though Richelieu was a cardinal of the Roman Church, all these alliances were with Protestant powers against Catholics. Austria and Spain intrigued against him, sowing money in the mountain districts of South France which brought forth those crops of armed men who defended La Rochelle. But he beat them at their own game. He set loose Count Mansfeld, who revived the Thirty Years' War by raising a rebellion in Bohemia; and when one great man, Wallenstein, stood between Austria and ruin, Richelieu sent his monkish diplomatist, Father Joseph, to the German Assembly of Electors, and persuaded them to dismiss Wallenstein and to disgrace him.

But the great Frenchman's masterstroke was his treaty with Gustavus Adolphus. With that keen glance of his he saw and knew Gustavus while yet the world knew him not—while he was battling afar off in the wilds of Poland. Richelieu's plan was formed at once. He brought about a treaty between Gustavus and Poland; then he filled Gustavus' mind with pictures of the wrongs inflicted by Austria on German Protestants, hinted to him probably of a new realm, filled his treasury, and finally hurled against Austria the man who destroyed Tilly, who conquered Wallenstein, who annihilated Austrian supremacy at the battle of Lutzen, who, though in his grave, wrenched Protestant rights from Austria at the treaty of Westphalia, who pierced the Austrian monarchy with the most terrible sorrows it ever saw before the time of Napoleon.

To the main objects of Richelieu's policy already given, might be added two subordinate subjects. The first of these was a healthful extension of French territory. In this Richelieu planned better than the first Napoleon; for while he did much to carry France out to her natural boundaries, he kept her always within them. On the south he added Roussillon, on the east Alsace, on the northeast Artois.

The second subordinate object of his policy sometimes flashed forth brilliantly. He was determined that England should never again interfere on French soil. We have seen him driving the English from La Rochelle and from the Isle of Re; but he went further. In 1628, on making some proposals to England, he was repulsed with English haughtiness. "They shall know," said the Cardinal, "that they cannot despise me." Straightway one sees protests and revolts of the Presbyterians of Scotland and Richelieu's agents in the thickest of them. And now what was Richelieu's statesmanship in its sum?

1. In the political progress of France his work has already been sketched as building monarchy and breaking anarchy. Therefore have men said that he swept away old French liberties. What old liberties? Richelieu but tore away the decaying, poisonous husks and rinds which hindered French liberties from their chance of life and growth. Therefore also have men said that Richelieu built up absolutism. The charge is true and welcome. For evidently absolutism was the only force in that age which could destroy the serf-mastering caste. Many a Polish patriot, as he to-day wanders through the Polish villages, groans that absolutism was not built to crush that serf-owning aristocracy which has been the real architect of Poland's ruin. Anyone who reads to much purpose in De Mably, or Guizot, or Henri Martin knows that this part of Richelieu's statesmanship was but a masterful continuation of all great French statesmanship since the twelfth century league of the king and commons, against nobles, and that Richelieu stood in the heirship of all great French statesmen since Suger. That part of Richelieu's work, then, was evidently bedded in the great line of divine purpose running through that age and through all ages.