mimMtmtmmmimisummmm^^ THE EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE A, BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH OP FRANCE MARY PARMELE Author of "Evolution of Empire Series, Germany;" " Who f When 9 What ? Literature Chart. " ntx^ NEW YORK WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON, 59 Fifth Avenue 1894 Published and Copyrighted, 1894, BY WILLIAM BEVERLEY HAEISON, 59 Fifth Ave., New York City. ELECTROTVPED AND PRINTED BY jtf ft THE PUBLISHERS' PRINTING COMPANY D ^ 132-136 WEST 14TH STREET y.. *-* *. b " NEW YORK PREFACE. In an attempt to tell the story of a great nation in about 100 pages, it is needless to say there must be a rigid exclusion of all save essential facts. To those already famil- iar with the subject, this sketch is offered merely as a reminder of the sequence of conditions and events in xhe evolution of France ; while to the student it is presented as a framework upon which may be placed, in orderly and comprehensible fashion, the results of future reading and research. To the latter class I would suggest that a series of papers, written upon the most prominent themes found in the Table of Contents, will bear fruit in knowledge more real and vital than may be obtained from the writings of others, howe\er eloquent and vivid the presentation. M. P. New York, July 23d, 1894. GONTEIsTTS. Chapter I. PAGE The Aryan Family of Nations — Keltic Race — An- cient Gaul — Gauls in Rome— Gauls in Greece and in Asia Minor 9 Chapter II. Roman Conquest of Gaul — Julius Csesar 18 Chapter III. Birth of C'hristianity — Its Dissemination — Persecu- tion at Lyons by order of Marcus Aurelius — The RomaA Empire Espouses Christianity under Constantine 22 Chapter IV. Gaul Overrun and Subjugated by Franks — Clovis King — Decay of the Merovingian Line — Maire du PaZm'sKing de facto — Charles Martel — Birth of Mohammedanism — Its Triumphs — Christen- dom Threatened — Pepin King — Charlemagne — Alliance with Pope— France, Italy, and Ger- many Emerge as Separate Nationalities 30 6 CONTENTS. Chapter V. PAQE The Northmen — Beginnings of Feudalism in France — Normandy Bestowed upon the Northmen — Conquest of England by William, Duke of Nor- mandy — Albigenses — Inquisition at Toulouse — The Crusades 39 Chapter VI. Decline of Feudalism — Creation of the Commune — Charles VII. — Henry V. in France — Joan of Arc 47 Chapter VII. Francis I. — Huguenots — Catharine de Medici — Francis II 54 Chapter VIII. Massacre of St. Bartholomew— Henry III.— Henry IV 62 Chapter IX. Edict of Nantes— Louis XIII.— Richelieu 71 , Chapter X. Louis XIV.— Revocation of the Edict of Nantes — Louis XV. — Age of Voltaire and Rousseau — The Gathering Storm 77 CONTENTS. Chapter XI. PAGE Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette — American Col- onies Arrayed Against England — French Aid to America — Smouldering Fires of Discontent — Louis Convokes States- General — National As- sembly Created by Commons — Bastille Attacked — Eevolution — Execution of King. 87 Chapter XII, Napoleon Bonaparte — Toulon — Campaign in Italy — Empire Established — Europe Under the Feet of the Great Corsican — Marie Louise — Waterloo — Louis XVIII. — Charles X.— Louis Philippe- Second Republic — Louis Napoleon President — • Second Empire — Napoleon III. — Franco-Prus- sian War — Sedan — Third Eepublic — Review of Present Conditions 97 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. CHAPTER I. One of the greatest achievements of mod- ern research is the discovery of a Jsey by which we may determine the kinship of na- tions. What we used to conjecture, we now know. An identity in the structural form of language establishes with scientific certi- tude that however diverse their character and civilizations, Russian, German, English, French, Spaniard, are all but branches from the same parent stem, are all alike children of the Asiatic Aryan. So skilful are modern methods of ques- tioning the past, and so determined the effort to find out its secrets, we may yet know the origin and history of this wonderful Asiatic people, and when and why they left their native continent and colonized upon the 10 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. northern shores of the Mediterranean. Cer- tain it is, however, that, more centuries be- fore the Christian era than there have been since, they had peopled Western Europe. This branch of the Aryan family is known as the Keltic, and was older brother to the Teuton and Slav, which at a much later period followed them from the ancestral home, and appropriated the middle and east- ern portions of the European Continent. The name of Gaul was given to the ter- ritory lying between the Ocean and the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenees and the Alps. And at a later period a portion of Northern Gaul, and the islands lying north of it, received from an invading chieftain and his tribe the name Brit or Britain (or Pryd or Prydain). if the mind could be carried back on the track of time, and we could see what we now call France as it existed twenty cen- turies before the Christian era, we should behold the same natural features: the same mountains rearing their heads; the same rivers flowing to the sea; the same plains stretching out in the sunlight. But instead EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 11 of vines and flowers and cultivated fields we should behold great herds of wild ox and elk, and of swine as fierce as wolves, rang- ing in a climate as cold as Norway; and vast inaccessible forests, the home of beasts of prey, which contended with man for food and shelter. Let us read Guizot's description of life in Gaul five centuries before Christ : , " Here lived six or seven millions of men a bestial life, in dwellings dark and low, built of wood and clay and covered with branches or straw, open to daylight by the door alone and confusedly heaped together behind a rampart of timber, earth, and stone, which enclosed and protected what they were pleased to call — a town.'''' Such was the Paris, and such the French- men of the age of Pericles ! And the same tides that washed the sands of Southern Gaul, a few hours later ebbed and flowed upon the shores of Greece — rich in culture, with refinements and subtleties in art which are the despair of the world to-day — with an intellectual endowment never since at- tained by any people. 12 EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. The same sun which rose upon temples and palaces and life serene and beautiful in Greece, an hour later lighted sacrificial altars and hideous orgies in the forests of Gaul. While the Gaul was nailing the heads of human victims to his door, or hanging them from the bridle of his horse, or burn- ing or flogging his prisoners to death, the Greek, with a literature, an art, and a civil- ization in ripest perfection, discussed with his friends the deepest problems of life and destiny, which were then baffling human intelligence, even as they are with us to- day. Truly we of Keltic and Teuton de- scent are late -comers upon the stage of national life. There was no promise of greatness in an- cient GauL It was a great unregulated force, rushing hither and thither. Impelled by insatiate greed for the possessions of their neighbors, there was no permanence in their loves or their hatreds. The enemies of to- day were the allies of to-morrow. Guided entirely by the fleeting desires and passions of the moment, with no far-reaching plans to restrain, the sixty or more tribes compos- EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 13 ing the Gallic people were in perpetual state of feud and anarchy, apparently insensible to the ties of brotherhood, which give con- cert of action, and stability in form of na- tional life. If they overran a neighboring country, it seemed not so much for perma- nent acquisition, as to make it a camping- ground until its resources were exhausted. We read of one Massillia who came with a colony of Greeks long ages ago, and after founding the city of Marseilles, created a narrow bright border of Greek civilization along the Southern edge of the benighted land. It was a brief illumination, lasting only a century or more, and leaving few traces ; but it may account for the superior intellectual quality of the southern pro- vinces in future France. It requires a vast extent of territory to sustain a people living by the chase, and upon herds and flocks ; hence the area which now amply maintainc thirty-five millions of Frenchmen was all too small for six or seven million Gauls; and they were in perpetual struggle with their neighbors for land — more land. 14 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. "Give us land," they said to the Eo- mans, and when land was denied them and the gates of cities disdainfully closed upon their messengers, not land, but vengeance, was their cry; and hordes of half -naked barbarians trampled down the vineyards, and rushed, a tumultuous torrent, upon Kome. The Romans could not stand before this new and strange kind of warfare. The Gauls streamed over the vanquished legions into the Eternal City, silent and deserted save only by the Senate and a few who re- mained intrenched in the Citadel ; and there the barbarians kept them besieged for seven months, while they made themselves at home amid uncomprehended luxuries. Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them back. But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there, — master of Rome ; that the ironclad legions had been no match for his naked force, and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul. It was the first throb of national life. The sixty or more frag- ments drew closer together into something EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 16 like Gallic unity — with a common danger to meet, a common foe to drive back. Hereafter there was another hunger to be appeased besides that for food and land ; a hunger for conquest, for vengeance, and for glory for the Gallic name. National pride was born. For years they hovered like wolves about Eome. But skill and superior intelligence tell in the centuries. It took long — and cost no end of blood and treasure; but two hun- dred years from the capture of Eome, the Gauls were driven out of Italy, and the Alps pronounced a barrier set by Nature herself against barbarian encroachments. Italy was not the only country suffering from the destroying footsteps of the West- ern Kelts. There had been long ago an over- flow of a tribe in Northern Gaul (the Kym- rians), which had hewed and plundered its way south and eastward ; until at the time of Alexander (340 B.C.) it was knocking at the gates of Macedonia. Stimulated by the success at Rome fifty years earlier, they were, with fresh inso- lence, demanding "land," and during the 16 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. centuries which followed, the G-allic name acquired no fresh lustre in Greece. Half- naked, gross, ferocious and ignorant, some- times allies, but always a scourge, they finally crossed the Hellespont (2Y8 B.C.), and turned their attention to Asia Minor. And there, at last, we find them settled in a prov- ince called Gallicia, where they lived with- out amalgamating with the people about them; it is said, even as late as 400 years after Christ, speaking the language of their tribal home (what is now Belgium). And these were the Galatians — the " foolish Gala- tians," to whom Paul addressed his epistle; and we have followed up this Gallic thread simply because it mingles with the larger strand of ancient and sacred history with which we are all so familiar. It is not strange that Eoraan courage and endurance became a by-word. Her fibre was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict. Even while she was struggling with Gaul and while the echoes of the Hunnish invasion were still resounding through the Continent, Hannibal, with his hosts, was pouring EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 17 through Gaul and gathering accessions from that people as he swept down into Italy. Then, with the memories of the Carthagenian wars still fresh at Eome, the Goths were at her gates, — their blows directed with a solid- ity superior to that of the barbarians who had preceded them. Where the Gauls had knocked, the Goths thundered. Again the city was invaded by barbarian feet, and again did superior training and in- telligence drive back the invading torrent and triumph over native brute force. Such, in brief outline, was the condition of the centuries just before the Christian era. CHAPTER II. The making of a nation is not unlike bread or cake making. One element is used as the basis, to which are added other com- ponent parts, of varying qualities, and the result we call England, or Germany, or France. The steps by which it is accom- plished, the blending and fusing of the ele- ments, require centuries, and the process makes what we call — history. It was written in the book of fate that Gaul should become a great nation; but not until fused and interpenetrated with two other nationalities. She must first be hu- manized and civilized by the Roman, and then energized and made free from the Ro- man by the Teuton. The instrument chosen for the former was Julius CsBsar, and for the latter — five centuries later — Clovis, the Frankish leader. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 19 It is safe to affirm that no man has ever so changed the course of human events as did JuHus Caesar. Napoleon, who strove to imitate him 1800 years later, was a charla- tan in comparison ; a mere scene-shifter on a great theatrical stage. Not a trace of his work remains upon humanity to-day. Caesar opened up a pathway for the old civilizations of the world to flow into West- ern Europe, and the sodden mass of barbar- ism was infused with a life-compelhng cur- rent. This was not accomplished by placing before the inferior race a higher ideal of life for imitation, but by a mingling of the blood of the nations — a transfusion into Gallic veins of the germs of a higher living and thinking^ — ^thus making them heirs to the great civilizations of antiquity. No human event was ever fraught with such consequences to the human race as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar. The Gallic wars had for centuries drained the treasure and taxed the resources of Eome. Caesar conceived the audacious idea of stopping them at their source — in fact, of making Gaul a Roman province. 20 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. It was a marvellous exhibition, not sim- ply of force, but of force wielded by supreme intelligence and craft. He had lived four years among this people and knew their sources of weakness, their internal jealousies and rivalries, their incohesiveness. When they hurled themselves against Rome, it was as a mass of sharp fragments. When the Goths did the same, it was as one solid, indivisible body. Caesar saw that by adroit management he could disintegrate this people, even while conquering them. By forcibly maintaining in power those who submitted to him, being by turns gen- tle and severe, ingratiating here, terrifying there, he established a tremendous personal force; and during nine years carried on eight campaigns, marvels in the art of war, as well as in the subtler methods of negoti- ation and intrigue. He had successively dealt with all the Gallic tribes, even includ- ing Great Britain, subjugating either through their own rivalries, or by his invin- cible arm. Equally able to charm and to terrify, he had all the gifts, all the means to success EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 21 and empire, that can be possessed by man. Great in politics as in war, as full of re- source in the forum as on the battle-field, he was by nature called to dominion. It was not as a patriot, simply intent upon freeing Rome of an harassing enemy, that he endured those nine years in Gaul — not as a great leader burning with military ar- dor that he conducted those eight campaigns. The conquest of Gaul meant the greater conquest of Eome. The one was accom- plished ; he now turned his back upon the devastated country, and prepared to com- plete his great project of human ascendency. Rome was mistress of the world; he — would be master of Rome. CHAPTEE III. While the Star of Empire was thus mov- ing toward the West, another and brighter star was about to arise in the East. So ac- customed are we to the story, that we lose all sense of wonder at its recital. Julius Caesar's brief triumph was over. Marc Antony had recited his virtues over his bier, Eome had wept, and then forgotten him in the absorbing splendors of his nephew Augustus. In an obscure village of an ob- scure country in Asia Minor, the young wife of a peasant finds shelter in a stable, and gives birth to a son, who is cradled in the straw of a manger, from which the cattle are feeding. Can the mind conceive of human circum- stances more lowly? The child grew to man- hood, and in his thirty-three years of life was never lifted above the obscure sphere into EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 23 which he was born; never spoke from the vantage-ground of worldly elevation, — sim- ply moving among people of his own station in life, mechanics, fishermen, and peasants, he told of a religion of love, a gospel of peace, for which he was willing to die. Who would have dreamed that this was the germ of the most potent, the most re- generative force the world had ever known ? That thrones, empires, principalities, and powers would melt and crumble before his name? Of all miracles, is not this the great- est? The passionate ardor with which this re- ligion was propagated in the first two cen- turies had no motive but the yearning to make others share in its benefits and hopes ; and to this end to accept the belief that Jesus Christ had come in fulfilment of a long- promised Saviour, — who should be sent to this world clothed with divine authority to establish a spiritual kingdom, in which he was King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Mediator between us and the Father, of whom he was the "only begotten Son." The religion in its essence was absolutely 24: EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. simple. Its founder summed it up in two sentences, — expressing the duty of man to man, and of man to God. That was all the Theology he formulated. For two centuries the religion of Christ was an elementary spiritual force. It ap pealed only to the highest attributes and longings of the human soul, and under its sustaining influence frail women, men, and even children were able to endure tortures, of which we cannot read even now without shuddering horror. Nature's method of gardening is very beau- tiful. She carefully guards the seed until it is ripe, then she bursts the imprisoning walls and gives it to the winds to distribute. Precisely such method was used in dissemi- nating Christianity. It was not for one people — it was for the healing of the nations, and its home was wherever man abides. - Nearly five decades after Christ's death upon the cross, Jerusalem was destroyed b}^ Titus, The home of Christianity was effaced. At just the right moment the en- closing walls had broken, and freed to the EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 25 winds the germs in all their primitive purity. Imperial favor had not tarnished it, hu- man ambitions had not employed and de- graded it, nor had it been made into com- plex system by ingenious casuists. The pure spiritual truth, unsullied as it came from the hand of its founder, was scattered broad- cast, as the band of Christians dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, naturally forming into communities here and there, which became the centres of Christian prop- agandism. Lyons in Gaul was such a cen- tre. The fires of persecution had been lighted here and there throughout the Empire, and the Emperor Nero, under whom the Apos- tles Peter and Paul are said to have suffered martyrdom, had amused himself by making torches of the Christians at Rome. But un- til 117 A.D. Gaul was exempt froni such hor- rors. Marcus Aurelius — that peerless pagan, — large in intelligence, exalted in character, and guided by a conscientious rectitude 26 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. which has made his name shine like a star in the lurid light of Eoman history, still failed utterly to comprehend the significance of this spiritual kingdom established by Christ on earth. He it was who ordered the first persecution in Gaul. In pursuance of his command, horrible tortures were in- flicted at Lyons upon those who would not abjure the new faith. A letter, written by an eye-witness, pic- tures with terrible vividness the scenes which followed . Many cases are described with harrowing detail, and of one Blandina it is said : " From morn till eve they put her to all manner of torture, marvelling that she still lived with her body pierced through and through and torn piecemeal by so many tortures of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her, to which she only replied, ' I am a Christian.' " The recital goes on to tell how she was then cast into a dungeon, — her feet com- pressed and dragged out to the utmost ten- sion of the muscles, — then left alone in dark- ness, until new methods of torture could be devised. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 27 Finally she was brought,, with other Chris- tians, into the amphitheatre, hanging from a cross to which she was tied, and there thrown to the beasts. As the beasts refused to touch her she was taken back to the dun- geon to be reserved for another occasion, being brought out daily to witness the fate and suffering of her friends and fellow- martyrs; still answering the oft-repeated question — "I am a Christian." The writer goes on to say, "After she had undergone fire, the talons of beasts, and every agony which could be thought of, she was wrapped in a network and thrown to a bull, who tossed her in the air" — and her sufferings were ended. Truly it cost something to say "I am a Christian" in those days. Marcus Aurelius probably gave orders for the persecution at Lyons, with little knowl- edge of what would be the nature of those persecutions, or of the religion he was trying to exterminate. Some of the hours spent in writing introspective essays would have been well employed in studying the period in which he lived, and the Empire he ruled. 28 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Paganism and Druidism, those twin mon- sters, receded before the advancing light of Christianity. Neither contained anything which could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of national- ity. Druidism was the last stronghold of in- dependent Gallic life. It was a mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of me- tempsychosis, coarse, mystical, and cruel. The Roman paganism which was superim- posed by the conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital religion. Educated men had long ceased to believe in the gods and divinities of Greece, and it is said that the Eoman augurs, while giving their solemn prophetic utterances, could not look at each other without laughing. In the year 312, alas for Christianity, it was espoused by imperial power. When the Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian, there was no doubt rejoicing among the saints ; but it was the beginning of the degeneracy of the religion of Christ. The faith of the humble was to be raised to EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. 29 a throne; its lowly garb to be exchanged for purple and scarlet, the gospel of peace to be enforced by the sword. The Empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and social con- ditions of modern times were forming. Paganism and Druidism would have been an impossibility. Christianity even with its lustre dimmed, its purity tarnished, its sim plicity overlaid with scholasticism, was bet- ter than these. The miracle had been ac- complished. The great Eoman Empire had said: "I am Christian." CHAPTEE IV. Gaul had been Latinized and Christian- ized. Now one more thing was needed to prepare her for a great future. Her fibre was to be toughened by the infusion of a stronger race. JuHus Csesar had shaken her into submission, and Eome had chastised her into decency of behavior and speech, but as her manners improved her native vigor declined. She took kindly to Eoman luxury and effeminacy, and could no longer have thundered at the gates of her neighbors de- manding " land. " But at last the great Eoman Empire was dying, and even degenerate Gaul was strug- gling out of her relaxing grasp. In her ex- tremity she called upon the Franks, a pow- erful Germanic race, to aid her. This people had long looked with covetous eyes at the fair fields stretching beyond the Ehine, and lost no time in accepting the invitation. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 31 They overspread the land, and Gaul and Roman alike were submerged beneath the Teuton flood, while the Frankish Con- queror, Clovis (son of the great Merovseus), was at Paris (or "Lutetia") wearing the kingly crown. Such was the beginning of independent and of dynastic life in France. Eome had found a more powerful ally than she hoped ; and the desire of Gaul was accomplished in that she was free from Rome. But the king of whom she had dreamed was of her own race ; not this terrible Frank. Had she exchanged one servitude for an- other? Had she been, not set free, but sim- ply annexed to the realm of the Barbarian across the Rhine? Let us say rather that it was an espousal. She had brought her dowry of beauty and "land, "that most cov- eted of possessions, and had pledged obedi- ence, for which she was to be cherished, honored, and protected, and to bear the name of her lord. * * * * * * Ancient heroes are said to be seen through a shadowy lens, which magnifies their stat- 32 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. ure. Let us hope that the crimes of the three or four generations immediately suc- ceeding Clovis have been in Hke manner expanded ; for it is sickening to read of such monstrous prodigahty of wickedness. Whole families butchered, husbands, wives, chil- dren — anything obstructing the path to the throne — with an atrocity which makes Eich- ard III. seem a mere pigmy in the art of in- trigue and killing. The chapter closes with the daughter and mother of kings (Brune- hilde or Brunhaut) naked and tied by one arm, one leg and her hair to the tail of an unbroken horse, and amid jeers and shouts dashed over the stones of Paris (600 a.d.). But even the Frank succumbed to the ener- vating Gallic influence. The Merovingian line commenced by Clovis faded from ferocity into imbecility. Its Kings in less than two centuries had become mere lay-figures, wear- ing the symbols of an authority which ex- isted nowhere, unless in the Maire du Palais. This office from being a sort of royal stew- ardship had grown to be the governing power de facto. While Theodoric, the Phantom King, was having his Ion g locks dressed and EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 33 perfumed, his Maire du Palais, Charles, was moulding and welding his kingdom, and at the same time staying the Mohammedan flood which was pouring over the Pyrenees; and, by his final and decisive blow in defence of the Christianity espoused by Clovis, earn- ing the name Charles Martel (the hammer). 7v "TV" W W W Vv Less than one hundred years after the death of Clovis, there had come out of Asia, that birthplace of religions, a new faith, which was destined to be for centuries the scourge of Christendom, and which to-day rules one-third of the human family. Zoroas- ter, Buddha, Christ, had successively come with saving message to humanity, and now (600 A.D.) Mohammed believed himself divinely appointed to drive out of Arabia the idolatry of ancient Magianism (the religion of Zoroaster). Christianity had passed through strange vicissitudes. Kings, Emperors, Popes, and Bishops had been terrible custodians of its truths, and while many still held it in its primitive purity, ecclesiastics were fiercely fighting over the nature of the Trinity, the 34 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. divinity of the Virgin Mother, and the Church was shaken to its foundation by fu- rious factions. In this hour of weakness, the Persians (590 A.D.) had conquered Asia Minor. Beth- lehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were pro- faned ; the Holy Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of laughter. Magianism had insulted Christi- anity, and no miracle had interposed ! The heavens did not roll asunder, nor did the earth open her abysses to swallow them up. There was consternation and doubt in Chris- tendom. Such was the state of the Church when Mohammedanism came into existence. "There is but one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet." Such was its battle-cry and its creed, and the moral precepts of the Koran its gosjDel. There seems nothing in this to account for the mad enthusiasm and the passion for worship in its followers. But in less than a hundred years this lion out of Arabia had subjected Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Northern Africa, and the Spanish Peninsula. Now, sword in one hand, and EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 35 the Koran in the other, the Mohai^imedan had crossed the Pyrenees and was in South- ern Gaul. Under the strange magic of this faith, the largest religious empire the world had known had sprung into existence, stretch- ing from the Chinese Wall to the Atlantic ; from the Caspian to the Indian Ocean ; and Jerusalem, the metropolis of Christianity- Jerusalem, the Mecca of the Christian, was lost! The crescent floated over the birth- place of our Lord, and notwithstanding the temporary successes of the Crusades, it does to this day. If the Pyrenees were passed, the very existence of Christendom was threatened. Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charle- magne, averted this danger when he stayed the infidel flood at the battle of Tours, ^32 A.D. ; Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, who suc- ceeded him as Maire du Palais, does not seem to have had the temper or spirit of an usurper, but simply to have been an ener- getic, resolute man who was bored by the circumlocution of governing through a King 36 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. - who did not exist. He determined to put an end to the fiction, and to cut the Gordian knot by first cutting the long curls of the last Merovingian, Childeric; and then put- ting the crown upon his own head, he sent the unfortunate phantom of royalty to a mon- astery, to reflect upon the uncertainty of human pleasures and events. ■ By right of manhood and superiority, the Carlovingian line had succeeded to the Merovingian, •if * -x- * * * Against the dark background of European history, and with the broad level of obscur- ity stretching over the ages at its feet, there rises one shining pinnacle. Considered as man or sovereign, Charlemagne is one of the most impressive figures in history. His seven feet of stature clad in shining steel, his masterful grasp of the forces of his time, his splendid intelligence, instinct even then with the modern spirit, all combine to ele- vate him in solitary grandeur. Charlemagne found France in disorder measureless, and apparently insurmounta- ble. Barbarian invasion without, and an- archy within ; Saxon paganism pressing in EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 37 upon the North, and Asiatic Islamism upon the South and West ; a host of forces strug- ghng for dominion in a nation brutish, ig- norant, and without cohesion. It is the attribute of genius to discern op- portunity where others see nothing. Charle- magne saw rising out of this chaos a great resuscitated Eoman empire, which should be at the same time a spiritual and Christian empire as well. Saxons, Slavs, Huns, Lombards, Arabs, came under his compell- ing grasp; these antagonistic races all held together by the force of one terrible will, in unnatural combination with France. No political liberties, no popular assemblies dis- cussing public measures ; it is Charlemagne alone who fills the picture ; it is absolutism, — marked by prudence, ability, and gran- deur, but still, absolutism. The Pope looked approvingly upon this son of the Church by whose order 4,500 pa- gan heads could be cut off in one day, and a whole army compelled to baptism in an afternoon. Here was a champion to be pro- pitiated ! Charlemagne, on the other hand, saw in the Church the most compliant and 38 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. effective means to empire. In the loving alliance formed, he was to be the protector, the Pope the protected. He wore the Church as a precious jewel in his crown. It was a splendid dream, splendidly real- ized ; the most imposing of human successes, and the most impressive of human failures. It seems designed as a lesson for the human race in the transitory nature of power ap- plied from without. The vast fabric passed with himself; was gone like a shadow when he was gone. The unity of the Empire was buried in the grave of its founder. In twenty-nine years (by the treaty of Verdun) three kingdoms emerged from the crumbling mass. France, Italy, Germany, already separated by race repulsions, had taken up each a distinct na- tional existence, the Imperial crown re- maining with Germany. And France — France, the centre of this dream of unity, with her native incohesive- ness, and in the irony of fate, had broken into no less than 59 fragments, loosely held to- gether by one Carlovingian King. CHAPTER V. I THINK that it was Lincoln who said that " the Lord must like common people, because he had made so many of them." The path for the common people in France at this time led through heavy shadows. But a darker time was approaching. A system of oppres- sion was maturing, which was soon to en- velop them in the obscurity of darkest night. Those Scandinavian freebooters called Northmen, and later Normans, were the scourge of the kingdom. Nothing was safe from their insolent courage and rapacity. The rich could intrench themselves in stone fortresses, with moats and drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly defenceless against this peren- nial destroyer. The result was a compact between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the Feudal System. 40 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. It was in effect an exchange of protection for service and fealty. You give us absolute control of your persons — your military ser- vice when required, and a portion of your substance and the fruit of your toil — and we will in exchange give you our fortified cas- tles as a refuge from the Northmen. Such was the offer. It was a choice between vas- salage, serfdom, or destruction outright. Simple enough in its beginnings, this be- came a ramified system of oppression, a cu- rious network of authority, ingeniously con- trolling an entire people. The conditions upon which was engrafted this compact were of great antiquity, had indeed been brought across the Rhine by their German conquer- ors; but the Northmen were the impelling cause of the swift development of feudalism in France. Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would at the same time sap the foundations of royalty it- self. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 41 The theory was that the King was absolute owner of all the territory ; the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the pledge ; and so on in de- scending chain, until at last the serf, that wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder beneath the su- perimposed mass. No appeal from the au- thority, no escape from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord. Could any scales weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been endured? Is it strange, with every aspiration thwarted, hope stifled, that Europe sank into the long sleep of the Mid- dle Ages? It is easy to conceive that under such a system, where all the affairs of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with un- limited power, and where the great barons could make war upon each other without authorization from the King, that by the time this nominal head of the entire system 42 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. was reached, there was nothing for him to do. In fact, there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and Carlovingian rulers were almost as insignificant as their Mero- vingian predecessors. France had, instead of one great sovereign, 150 petty ones! * * * * * * In 911 A.D. the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as Nor- mandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and submission to the laws of the realm. Eollo, the disreputable rob- ber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France his Suzerain, and Christian bap- tism transformed him into respectable, law- abiding Eobert, Duke of Normandy. With marvellous facility this people took on the language and manners of their neigh- bors, and in a century and a half were pre- pared to instruct the Britons in a higher civilization . I think it is one hundred years of respect- ability that is required by a certain aristo- cratic club for admission to its membership. The blood does not acquire the proper shade of azure until it has flowed in the full light EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 43 of day for at least three generations. De- cidedly, William the Conqueror, first Nor- man King of England, could not have been admitted to this club. A century before his birth, his ancestors had lived by looting their neighbors. They were highwaymen, robbers, by profession. And, to increase his ineligibility, his mother, a pretty Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, had ensnared the affections of that pleasant Duke of Normandy, known as "Eobert the Devil." William, the fruit of this unconsecrated union, became in time Duke of Normandy. With that reversion to ancestral types to which scientists tell us we are all liable, he seems to have looked across the Channel toward England, with an awakening of his robber-instincts. In a few weeks, Harold, the last King of the Saxons, lay dead at his feet, and William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England. Then was presented the curious anomaly of an English sovereign who was also ruler of a French province ; an English king who was vassal to the King of France. A door 44 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, was thus opened (1066 A. D.) through which entered entangling complications and count- less woes in the future. * * * * * * If Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in the ninth cen- tury, the Church now in the eleventh century wore all the European states, a tiara of jewels in her mitre. The centre of dominion had passed from the Empire of Germany to Rome, when Henry IV. prostrated himself barefoot- ed before Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1072. The Church was at its zenith. As a politi- cal system it was unrivalled; but its tri- umphs brought little joy to the earnest souls still clinging to the ideals of primitive Christianity. But what availed it for Abe- lard to lead an intellectual revolt against corrupted beliefs in the North, or the Albi- genses a spiritual one in the South? He was silenced and immured for life, while the unhappy inhabitants of Languedoc were massacred and almost exterminated, and an inquisition, established at Toulouse, made sure that heretical germs should not again spread from that infected centre. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 45 But however imperfect the religious senti- ment of the time, however it may have departed from the simple precepts of its founder, its power to sway the hearts and lives of the people may be judged from the extraordinary movement started in France in the twelfth century. How inconceivable, in this practical age, that Europe should three times have emptied her choicest and best into Asia for a senti- ment ! Business suspended, private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life, treasure, all eagerly given — for what? That a small bit of territory, a thousand miles away, be torn from profaning infidels, because of its sacred associations, because it was the birthplace of a religion whose meaning seems to have escaped them — a religion which they wore on their battle-flags, but not in their hearts. How would a barefooted, rope-girdled monk, however inspired and eloquent, fare to-day in New York, or London, or Paris? History has no stranger chapter than that of the Crusades. When Peter the HQrmit pictured the desecration of the Holy Land by Mohammedans, all classes in France, 46 EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. from King to serf, were for the first time moved by a common sentiment, and poured life and treasure with passionate zeal into those streams which three times inundated Palestine. The order of Knights Templar had been created, and a splendid ideal of manhood held up before the French nation, and now the knightly ideal, side by side with the Christian and the romantic ideal, entered into the life of the people. Romance, song, poetry, eloquence came into being from a sort of spiritual baptism, and France began to wear the mantle of beauty which was to be her chief glory in the future. But future France was not clad in coat of mail in the twelfth century. She was lying helpless, beneath the mass of feudal trappings. Her time was not yet. CHAPTER VI. Like all oppressive systems, feudalism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. When the King, shorn of prerogative and of dignity, made alliance with the people lying in helpless misery beneath the mailed sur- face, the system was rudely shaken. When artisans flocked to the free cities enjoying especial immunities and privileges from the King, and by skill and industry amassed fortunes, the commune and the bourgeoisie were created, and feudalism was stricken to its centre. When spendthrift nobles and needy barons mortgaged their estates, the end was not far off. And when in 1302 the ^' tiers etaf entered the States-General as a legitimate order of the Government, the very foundations were crumbling, and it needed but the final coup de grace given by Charles VII. in the fifteenth century, when 48 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. he established a standing army under the control of the King. When this was done, the feudal system was relegated to the region of the. obsolete. It was well for that sovereign that he could do something to save his name from the obloquy attached to it on account of his base desertion of Joan of Arc, to whom he owed his throne and his kingdom. From the moment when a French province was attached to the crown of England, the dream of that nation was the conquest of France. Generations came and went, one dynasty replaced another, and still the struggle continued ; France sometimes seem- ing near to dominion over England, and England always believing it was her destiny to bring France under the rule of an Eng- lish sovereign. A glamour of romance is thrown over history by the royal marriages which occur in dazzling profusion. It seems to have been the custom, whenever a peace was con- cluded in Europe, to cement it with a royal marriage, and to throw in a princess as a sacrifice, — one of the conditions of almost EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 49 every treaty being that a royal daughter, or sister, or niece, should be tossed across the Channel, or into Germany, or Italy, or Spain, an unwilling bride thrown into the arms of a reluctant bridegroom; with the result that in the succeeding generation there was a plentiful sprinkling of heirs with claims, more or less shadowy, to the neigh- boring thrones. This was the source, or rather pretext, for most of the wars be- tween France and England for four hundred years. In the early part of the fifteenth century the great crisis arrived. With that lack of unity which seemed a fatal Gallic inheri- tance, France broke into civil war, while an invading English army was in the heart of her kingdom. England's dream was near realization. An insane King, a vicious intriguing Queen-Eegent, the Duke of Burgundy madly jealous of the Duke of Orleans, and both ready to sacrifice France in the rage of dis- appointed ambition, — such were the ele- ments. England's opportunity had come. The depraved Queen Isabella, acting for 50 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. her insane husband, held conference with Henry V., and actually concluded a treaty bestowing the regency upon the English King. There was the usual douceur of a princess thrown in, and Katharine, the daughter of Isabella, and sister to the Dau- phin (the future King Charles VII.), was espoused by King Henry V. of England, who set up a royal court at Vincennes. The fortunes of the kingdom had never been so desperate. The people saw in these insolent traitorous dukes their natural enemy; in the King, their friend and pro- tector. Had not monarchy given them life and hope? It was to them sacred next to Heaven. They rose in an outburst of patri- otism. The young Dauphin was hastily and informally crowned, and thousands flocked to his standard. It was the King and the peo- ple against the great vassals, the last strug- gle of an expiring feudalism. Desperation lent fury to the conflict which was, upon both sides, a fight for existence; the Queen - mother in unnatural alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, who was resolved to rule or ruin. EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. 51 He soon saw that defeat was inevitable, and, preferring infamy, threw himself into the hands of the English, offering to turn the kingdom over to the infant King Henry VI. (Henry V. having died) . Charles abandoned hope; how could he struggle against such a combination? He was considering whether he should find refuge in Spain or in Scotland, when the tide of events was turned by the strangest romance in history. It must ever remain a mystery that a peasant girl, a child in years and in experi- ence, should have believed herself called to such a mission; conferring only with her heavenly guides or "voices," that she should have sought the King, inspired him with f^ith in her, and in himself and his cause, reanimated the courage of the army, and led it herself to victory absolute and complete; and then, compelling the half-reluctant, half- doubting Charles to go with her to Rheims, where she had him anointed and consecrated, this simple child in that day bestowed upon him a kingdom, and upon France a King ! 52 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Was there ever a stranger chapter in history ! Alas, if it could have ended here, and she could have gone back to her mother and her spinning and her simple pleasures, as she was always longing to do when her work should he done. But no! we see her falling into the hands of the de- feated and revengeful English — this child, who had wrested from them a kingdom al- ready in their grasp. She was turned over to the French ecclesiastical court to be tried. A sorceress and a blasphemer they pro- nounce her, and pass her on to the secular authorities, and her sentence is — death. We see the poor defenceless girl, bewil- dered, terrified, wringing her hands and de- claring her innocence as she rides to execu- tion. God and man had abandoned her. No heavenly voice spoke, no miracle intervened as her young limbs were tied to the stake and the fagots and straw piled up about her. The torch was applied, and her pure soul mounted heavenward in a column of flames. Eugged men wept. A Burgundian gen- eral said, as he turned gloomily away, " We have murdered a saint." EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 53 And Charles, sitting upon the throne she had rescued for him, what was he doing to save her? Nothing — to his everlasting shame be it said, nothing. He might not have succeeded ; the effort at rescue, or to stay the event, might have been unavailing. But where was his knighthood, where his manhood, that he did not try, or utter pas- sionate protest against her fate? Twenty-five years later we see him erect- ing statues to her memory, and "rehabilitat- ing" her desecrated name. And to-day, the Church which condemned her for blasphemy is placing her upon the calendar of saints, while all political parties alike are using her name as a thing to conjure with. CHAPTER VII. The early part of the sixteenth century- must ever be memorable in the history of Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella had given to the human race a new world. Luther had hurled his defiance at Eome — had arraigned Leo X. for blasphemy and corrupt practices. Henry V,, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella (and nephew of Katharine, wife of Henry VIII.) was Emperor of Germany. Astute and powerful though he was, he had been unable to stay the Protestant flood. His empire, apparently hungering for the new heresy, was divided already into States Protestant and States Catholic. England was Protestant. The conversion of her King, because the Pope refused to annul his marriage with Katharine, was not one of the proudest triumphs of the new faith, but one of the most important. Had Katha- EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. 55 rine's charms been fresher, or Anne Boleyn's less alluring, the course of history might have been strangely changed. Henry VIII. as persecutor of heretics would have found congenial occupation for his ferocious in- stincts, and Protestantism would have been long delayed. Spain was unchangeably Cath- olic, while France offered congenial soil for the new faith. The germs of heresy, long slumbering, were everywhere stirred into life. Francis I. was King ; sumptuous in tastes, suave and elegant in manners, as handsome as an Apollo, gay, pleasure-loving, as vicious as he was false, and if need be with a cruelty which matched his ambition, such was the man who held the destinies of France at this time. A rival claimant for the throne of Ger- many, he was destined to spend his life in fruitless contest with the more able, wily, and astute Henry V., the possession of that Empire the ignis-fatuus ever luring him on ; an end to which all other ends were simply the means. The religious question upon which Europe was divided meant nothing to him, except as he could use it in his duel 56 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. with the Emperor. He was in turn the ally of Henry VIII. or the willing tool of Henry V. If he needed the English King's friend- ship, the Protestants had protection. If he desired to placate Henry V., the roastings and torturings commenced again. In 154Y Francis and Henry VIII. each went to his reward, and a few years later Henry V. had laid down his crown and car- ried his weary, unsatisfied heart to St. Yuste. The brilliant pageant was over; but Protestantism was expanding. The question at issue was deeper than any one knew. Neither Luther nor Leo X. understood the revolution they had precipi- tated. Protestants and Papists alike failed to comprehend the true nature of the strug- gle, which was not for supremacy of Eoman- ist or Protestant; not whether this dogma or that was true, and should prevail; but an assertion of the right of every human soul to choose its own faith and form of worship. The great battle for human lib- erty had commenced; the struggle for religious liberty was but the prelude to what was to follow. There was abundant proof EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 57 later that Protestants no less than Papists needed only opportunity and power to be as cruel and intolerant as their persecutors had been. Before the Reformation was fifty years old, Servetus, one of the greatest men of his age, a scholar, philosopher, and man of irreproachable character, was burned at Geneva for heretical views concerning the nature of the Trinity, Calvin, the great organizer of Protestant theology, giving, if not the order for this crime, at least the nod of approval. * * -X- ■55- * -Sf Huguenot, that name of tragic associa- tion, was a corruption of the German Eid- genossen — meaning associates. By the way of Switzerland it came into France as Egue- nots, and the transition to its present form was simple. The Huguenots were no longer a timorous band hiding in darkness as in the time of Francis I. A party with such lead- ers as Anthony de Bourbon, Prince of Conde (his brother), and Admiral Coligny, was not to be put down by a few roastings and stranglings here and there. Anthony de Bourbon (King of Navarre) was next in 58 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. succession should the House of Valois be- come extinct, with a young son valiant as himself (the future Henry IV.) pressing on toward manhood. Catholic France needed plenty of comfort from Rome and Madrid in dealing with this formidable body of heretics which had fast- ened upon her vitals, and which was in turn receiving aid and comfort from the young Protestant Queen across the Channel. When that fair princess Catharine de Medici became the wife of Henry, second son of Francis I., no one suspected the tre- mendous import of the event. Powerless to win the affection or even confidence of her husband, she remained during his reign almost unobserved, but, as the event proved, not unobservant. Her alert faculties were not idle, and when upon the death of Henry II. she found herself Queen-Regent, with only a frail boy of sixteen to obstruct her will, she quickly gathered the threads she already knew so well, and her supple hand closed upon them with a grasp not to be relinquished while she lived. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 59 Another young Princess had been tossed across the Channel. This time it was her most serene Httle highness, Marie Stuart, Queen of Scotland, intended for the dauphin, who was to be Francis II. In order to be prepared for this high des- tiny, the little maid was brought when only six years old to the Court of France to be trained under the direct supervision of her future mother-in-law, Catharine de Medici. Poor little Marie Stuart — predestined to sin and to tragedy ! Who could be good, with the blood of the Guises in her veins, and with Catharine de Medici as preceptress? This marriage was planned before Catha- rine's advent to power, or it would never have been. Marie was the niece of the Duke of Guise, and the central thought of Catha- rine's policy was the exclusion of this am- bitious, intriguing family from every avenue to power in the state. Now, Marie would be Queen, and who so natural advisers as her uncles of the house of " Lorraine "? The marriage of the two children had taken place — the sickly boy with only a mod- est portion of intelligence was Francis II. 60 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Marie, his Queen, whom he adored, controlled him utterly, and was in turn controlled by her uncles, the Guises. The wily Catharine saw herself defeated by a beautiful girl of sixteen. The family of Guise was the self-appointed head of the Catholic party in France and represented the most extreme views regard- ing the treatment of heretics. So the strange result was, that Catharine, if she looked for any allies in her fight with the house of Lorraine, of which the Duke of Guise was the head, must make common cause with the Protestants, whom she hated a little less than she did the uncles of Marie Stuart. But events were soon to change the situation. Did she hasten them? Such a suspicion may never have existed. But may one not suspect anything of a woman capa- ble of a St. Bartholomew? Francis II. was dead. Marie Stuart had passed out of French history. The fates were fighting on the side of Catharine, who wasted no regrets upon the death of a son, which made her Queen -Eegent during the minority of her second son Charles. She EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 61 entered upon her fight with the Guises with renewed energy, and became to some extent protector of the Protestants. Realizing that her time was brief, she prepared Charles for the position he would soon hold. What can be said of a mother who seeks to exterminate every germ of truth or virtue in her son — who immerses him in degrading vices in order to deaden his too sensitive conscience and make him a willing tool for her purposes? Inheriting the splendid in- telligence as well as genius for statecraft of the de Medici, nourished from her infancy upon Machiavellian principles, cold and cruel by nature, this Florentine woman has writ- ten her name in blood across the pages of French history. CHAPTER VIII. There is not time to tell the story of the events leading up to that fateful night, August 24, 1572. Impelled always by her fear and dread of the Guises, Catharine had been vacillating in her policy with the Hu- guenots. Charles IX. was now King: im- pressible, easily influenced, yet stubborn, intractable, incoherent, passionate, and un- reliable ; sometimes inclining to the Guises, sometimes to Coligny and the Huguenots, and always submitting at last after vain struggle to his imperious mother's will, in her efforts to free him from both. We see in him a weak character, not naturally bad, torn to distraction by the cruel forces about him, who when compelled to yield, as he always did in the end, to that terrible wo- man, would give way to fits of impotent EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 63 rage against the fate which allowed him no peace. A time arrived when Catharine feared the influence of the Protestant Coligny more than the Guises. Brave, patriotic, magnetic, he had succeeded in winning Charles' con- sent to declare war against Spain. Philip U. of Spain was Catharine's son-in-law and closest ally. Her entire policy would be undermined. At all hazards Coligny must be gotten rid of. The young King of Na- varre, adored leader of the Protestants, was a constant menace ; he too must in some way be disposed of. There were sinister conferences with Philip of Spain and with his Minister, that incar- nation of cruelty and of the Inquisition, the Duke of Alva. God knows France was not guiltless in what followed; but the initiative, the in- ception of the horrid deed, was not French. It was conceived in the brain of either this Italian woman or her Spanish adviser and co-conspirator, the Duke of Alva. We will never know the inside history of the massa- cre of St. Bartholomew. It must ever re- 64 EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. main a matter of conjecture just how and when it was planned, but the probabilities point strongly one way. Charles was to be gradually prepared for it by his mother, the plot revealed to him as he was in condition to bear it; by working upon his fears, his suspicions, by stories of plottings against his life and his kingdom, to infuriate him, and then — before his rage was exhausted — to act. The marriage of Charles' sister Margaret with the young Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, with its promise of future protection to the Hu- guenots, was part of the plot. It would lure all the leaders of the cause to Paris. Co- ligny, Conde, all the heads of the party were urgently invited to attend the marriage- feast which was to inaugurate an era of peace. Admiral Coligny was requested by Catha- rine, simply as a measure of protection to the Protestants, to have an additional regi- ment of guards in Paris, to act in case of any unforeseen violence. Two days after the marriage and while the festivities were at their height, an at- EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 65 tempt upon the life of the old Admiral awoke suspicion and alarm. But Catharine and her son went immediately in person to see the wounded old man, and to express their grief and horror at the event. They commanded that a careful list of the names and abode of every Protestant in Paris be made, in order, as they said, "to take them under their own immediate protection." "My dear father," said the King, "the hurt is yours, the grief is mine." At that moment, the knives were already sharpened, every man instructed in his part in the hideous drama, and the signal for its commencement determined upon. Charles did not know it, but his mother did. She went to her son's room that night, artfully and eloquently pictured the danger he was in, confessed to him that she had authorized the attempt upon Coligny, but that it was done because of the Admiral's plottings against him, which she had discovered. But the Guises — her enemies and his — they knew it, and would denounce her and the King! The only thing now is to finish the work. He must die. 66 EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. Charles was in frightful agitation and stubbornly refused. Finally with an air of offended dignity she bowed coldly and said to her son, " Sir, will you permit me to with- draw with my daughter from your king- dom?" The wretched Charles was con- quered. In a sort of insane fury he exclaimed, " Well, let them kill him, and all the rest of the Huguenots too. See that not one remains to reproach me." This was more than she had hoped. All was easy now. So eager was she to give the order before a change of mood, that she flew herself to give the signal, fully two hours earlier than was expected. At midnight the tocsin rang out upon the night, and the horror began. Lulled to a feeling of security by artfully contrived circumstances, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, peacefully sleeping, were awakened to see each other hideously slaugh- tered. The stars have looked down upon some terrible scenes in Paris, her stones are not unacquainted with the taste of human blood, but never had there been anything like this. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 67 The carnage of battle is merciful compared with it. Shrieking women and children, half-clothed, fleeing from knives already dripping with human blood ; frantic mothers shielding the bodies of their children, and wives pleading for the lives of husbands; the living hiding beneath the bodies of the dead. The cry that ascended to Heaven from Paris that night was the most awful and despairing in the world's history. It was centuries of cruelty crowded into a few hours. The number slain can never be accurately stated ; but it was thousands. Human blood is intoxicating. An orgie set in which laughed at orders to cease. Seven days it continued and then died out for lack of material. The provinces had caught the contagion, and orders to slay were received and obeyed in all except two, the Gov- ernor of Bayonne, to his honor be it told, writing to the King in reply: "Your Maj- esty has many faithful subjects in Bayonne, but not one executioner." And where was " His Majesty" while this 68 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. work was being done? How was it with Catharine? She was possibly seeing to the embalming of Coligny's head, which we learn she sent as a present to the Pope. We hear of no regrets, no misgivings, that she was calm, collected, suave and un- fathomable as ever, but that Charles in a strange, half-frenzied state was amusing himself by firing from the windows of the palace at the fleeing Huguenots. Had he killed himself in remorse, would it not have been better, instead of lingering two wretched years, a prey to mental tortures and an inscrutable malady, before he died? Europe was shocked. Christendom averted her face in horror. But at Madrid and Eome there was satisfaction. Catharine and the Duke of Alva had done their work skilfully, but the result surprised and disappointed them. Tens of thousands of Huguenots were slain, which was well; but many times that number remained, with spirit unbroken, which was 7iot well. They had been too merciful ! Why had Henry of Navarre been spared? Had not Alva said, "Take the big fish and let the EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 69 small fry go. One salmon is worth more than a thousand frogs." But Charles considered the matter settled when he uttered those swelling words to Henry of Navarre the day after the massa- cre : "I mean in future to have one religion in my kingdom. It is mass or death." Catharine's third son now wore the crown of France. In Henry III. she had as pliant an instrument for her will as in the two brothers preceding him ; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating conflict with the Protestants and the Duke de Guise. At last, wearied and exasperated, this half-Ital- ian and altogether conscienceless King quite naturally thought of the stiletto. The old Duke, as he entered the King's apart- ment by invitation, was stricken down by assassins hidden for that purpose. Henry had not counted on the rebound from that blow. Catholic France was excited to such popular fury against him that he threw himself into the arms of the Protes- tants, imploring their aid in keeping his crown and his kingdom ; and when himself 70 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. assassinated, a year later, in the absence of a son he named Henry, King of Navarre, his successor. A Protestant and a Huguenot was King of France. CHAPTER IX. After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar lights and headlands. With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time. The accession of a Protestant King was hailed with delirious joy by the Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France. The one looked forward to redress- ing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his heresy, and be- come a convert to the true faith. The new King saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him. After four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon his course. He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant France, 72 EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots. He saw that the highest good of the kingdom required, not that he should impose upon it either form of behef or worship, but give equal opportunity and privilege to both. To the consternation of the Huguenots he announced himself ready to listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Eome ; and it took just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth. He announced himself ready to abjure his old faith. Bit- ter reproaches on the one side and rejoic- ings on the other greeted this decision. It was not heroic. But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be an act of supreme political wisdom. Peace was restored, and the "Edict of Nantes," which quickly followed, proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten. The Protestants, with every disability removed, shared equal priv- ileges with the Catholics throughout the kingdom ; and the first victory for religious liberty was splendidly won. An era of unexampled prosperity dawned. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Y3 Never had the kingdom been so wisely and beneficently governed. Sincerity, simplic- ity, and sympathy had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty. Uplifting agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that forgotten ele- ment in the nation. The reign of the Bourbon dynasty had opened auspiciously. Henry IV, was the idol of the people. His loveless marriage with Margaret de Valois had been annulled, and he had espoused Marie de Medici. The blood from that poisoned stream was again to be intermingled with the blood of the future Kings of France. After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler who had done more than any other to make her great and happy was stricken down by the hand of an assas- sin, and a cry of grief arose alike from Cath- olic and Protestant throughout the kingdom. Poor France was again at the mercy of a woman with the corrupt instincts of the de Medici. The widow of Henry IV. , who was Regent during the infancy of her son Louis, 74 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. was intriguing, vulgar, and without the abihty of the great Catharine. The king- dom was rent by cabals of aspiring favorites and ambitious nobles, until the reign of Louis XIII. , or rather of Cardinal Eichelieu, began. The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save his own far- reaching intelligence. Pitiless as an ice- berg, he crushed every obstacle to his pur- pose. Impartial as fate, with no loves, no hatreds. Catholics, Protestants, nobles, Par- liaments, one after another were borne down before his determination to make the King, what he had not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France. The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe. The power of the gran- dees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to monarchy, was swept away. One great noble after another was humiliated and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head. The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen, and even EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 75 while the Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture, the minister was planning to send Henrietta, sister of the King, across the Channel to become Queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act of supreme audacity was to come. This high prelate of the church, this cardinal minister, formed alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great leader of the Protes- tants in the war upon the Emperor and the Pope! He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him. He was for France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless dominion. By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a commonplace King one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own colossal ambition he so strengthened the foundations of the mon- archy that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it. It was great — it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one thing which revo- lutions and time have not swept away. The " French Academy" alone survives as his monument. Out of a gathering of literary 76 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. friends he created a national institution, its object the establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in speaking or writing the French language. In a country where nothing endures, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years. But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for liter- ary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Cor- neille as much as he did the enemies of France. CHAPTER X. Again do we recognize the fine Italian hand in French poHtics. Cardinal Mazarin was Minister during the regency of Anne of Austria, directing and controlling the affairs of the Kingdom, less intent upon the great- ness of France than the greatness and mag- nificence of her Prime Minister. At last the wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV. settled himself upon the throne which Rich- elieu had rendered so exalted and immovable. Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in him to make four Kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage, dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a magnificent scale, and so were 78 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. his vanity, his loves, his cruelties, his pleas- ures, his triumphs, and his disappointments. No King more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, hut he desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every manifestation of genius, hut he signed the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his subjects. If the names of Marlborough and Main- tenon could havfe been stricken out of his life, the story might have had a different ending. From the moment the great Duke checked his victorious army, his sun began to go down; but it was Maintenon who most obscured its setting. His unloved Queen, the Spanish Marie Therese, had borne his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de Monte - span had invited her own destruction by bringing into her household the pious widow EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Y9 of the poet Scarron, Madame de Maintenon, (grand-daughter of d'Aubigne, the historian of th'e Reformation). Grave, austere, am- bitious, talented, she was not too much engrossed in her duties as governess of de Montespan's children to find ways of estab- lishing an influence over the King. This man who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the Government, who was Ministers, Magistrates, Parliaments, all in one, this central sun of whom Corneille, Moliere, Racine were but single rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having passed, he was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She arifully pricked his conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained. She next convinced him that the only fit- ting atonement for his sins was to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith. At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and brutally stamped out Protestantism. 80 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. A part of the scheme of penitence seems to have been that on the death of poor Marie Therese, he should make her (de Maintenon) his lawful wife, which he did privately ; and his sun went down obscured by crushing griefs and disappointments. His children swept away, the prestige of success tar- nished, this demigod was taken to pieces by time's destroying fingers, quite as uncere- moniously as are the rest of us, hiding finally behind the bed-curtains while a kneeling courtier passed to him his wig on the end of a stick, and at last lying down like any other old dying sinner, overwhelmed with the vanity of earthly things and with the vastness of eternity. Still more would the dying moments of the Grand Monarque have been embittered could he have foreseen into what hands his great inheritance was passing. Upon Louis XV. more than any other rests the responsibility of the crisis which was approaching. A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of responsibility or compre- EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 81 hension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary governed by a succession of designing wo- men, regardless of national poverty, indulg- ing in wildest extravagance, — such was the man in whom was vested the authority ren- dered so absolute by Eichelieu, — such the man who opened up a pathway for the storm. As for the nobility, their degradation may be imagined when it is said there was as bitter rivalry between titled and illustrious fathers to secure for their daughters the coveted position held by Madame de Pompa- dour, as for the highest offices of State. Could the upper ranks fall lower than this? Had not the kingdom reached its lowest depths, where its foreign policy was determined by the amount of consideration shown to Madame de Pompadour? But this woman, whose friendship was artfully sought by the great Empress Maria Theresa, was superseded, and the fresher charms of Ma- dame du Barri enslaved the King. The deposed favorite could not survi^'/e her fall, and died of a broken heart. It is said that as Louis, looking from an upper window of 82 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. his palace, saw the coffin borne out in a drenching rain, he smiled and said : " Ah, the Marquise has a bad day for her journey." It may be imagined that the man who could be so pitiless to the woman he had loved would feel little pity for the people whom he had not loved, but whom he knew only as a remote, obscure something, which held up the weight of his glory. But this "obscure something" was under- going strange transformation. The greater light at the surface had sent some glimmer- ing rays down into the mass below, which began to awaken and to think. Misery, hopeless and abject, was changing into rage and thirst for vengeance. A new class had come into existence which was not noble, but with highly trained intelligence it looked with contempt and loathing upon the frivolous, half-educated nobles. Scorn v-as added to the ferment of human passions beneath the surface, and when Voltaire had spoken, and the re- straints of religion were loosened, no living hand, not that of a Eichelieu nor a Louis XIV., could have averted the coming doom. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 83 But — no one seems to have suspected what was approaching. A wonderful literature had come into ex- istence — not stately and classic as in the age j)receding, — but instinct with a new sort of life. The highest speculations which can occupy the soul of man were handled with marvellous lightness of touch and pris- matic brilliancy of expression ; but all was negation. None tried to build ; all to de- molish. The black-winged angel of Destruc- tion was hovering over the land. Then Eousseau tossed his dreamy ab- stractions into the quivering air, and the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equal- ity," was caught up by the titled aristocracy as a charming idyllic toy, while Princes, Dukes, and Marquises amused themselves with a dream of Arcadian simplicity, to be attained in some indefinite way in some remote and equally indefinite future. It was all a masquerade. No reality, no sin- cerity, no convictions, good or evil. The only thing that was real was that an over- taxed, impoverished people was exasperated and — hungry. 84: EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Did the King need new supplies for his unimaginable luxuries, they were taxed. Was it necessary to have new accessions to French " glory, " in order to allay popular clamor or discontent, they must supply the men to fight the glorious battles, and the means with which to pay them. Every burden fell at last upon this lowest stratum of the State, the nobility and clergy, while owning two-thirds of the land, being nearly exempt from taxation. And yet the King and nobility of France, in love with Eousseau's theories, were airily discussing the "rights of man." Wolves and foxes coming together to talk over the sacredness of the rights of property — or the occupants of murderers' row growing elo- quent over the sanctity of human life ! How incomprehensible that among those quick- witted Frenchmen there seems not one to have realized that the logical sequence of the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," must be, "Down with the Aris- tocrats!" And so the surface which Eichelieu had converted into adamant grew thinner and EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 86 thinner each day, until King and Court danced upon a mere gilded crust, uncon- scious of the abysmal fires beneath. Some of those powdered heads fell into the execu- tioner's basket twenty-five years later. Did they recall this time? Did Madame du Barri think of it, did she exult at her tri- umph over de Pompadour, when she was dragged shrieking and struggling to the guillotine? And w-hile France was thus weaving her future, what were the other nations doing? England, sane, practical, with little time for abstractions, and little said about "glory," was importing turnips, converting agriculture into a science, and under the instruction of exiled Huguenots, establish- ing marvellous industries. In the new kingdom of Prussia, a half -savage, half inspired King had been importing artisans and skill of all sorts, reclaiming waste lands. Living like a miser, he had indulged in but one luxury : an army, which should be the best in the world. There was no powder, no patches at his Court ; where he thrashed 86 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. with his own royal hands male and female courtiers, starved, imprisoned, and cudgelled his son and heir to his throne for playing on the violin; and, it is said, so terrified and scarified his grenadiers with canes and cats that not one of them would not have pre- ferred facing the enemy to meeting his en- raged sovereign, had he done wrong. Frederick was not a pleasant barbarian. But there is at least a ring of sincerity about all this, which it is refreshing to recall after the tinsel and depraved refinements of France under Louis XV. , and something too which gives promise, in spite of its brutality, of a stalwart future. Five years before the close of this miser- able reign, an event occurred seemingly of small importance to Europe. A child was born in an obscure Italian household. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte. CHAPTER XI. Louis XV, was dead, and two children, with the light-heartedness of youth and in- experience, stepped upon the throne which was to be a scaffold — Louis XVI., only twenty, and Marie Antoinette, his wife, nineteen. He, amiable, kind, full of gener- ous intentions; she, beautiful, simple, child- like and lovely. Instead of a debauched old King with depraved surroundings, here were a Prince and Princess out of a fairy-tale. The air was filled with indefinite promise of a new era for mankind to be inaugurated by this amiable young king, whose kindness of heart shone forth in his first speech, " We will have no more loans, no credit, no fresh burdens on the people ;" then, leaving his ministers to devise ways of paying the enormous salaries of officials out of an empty treasury, and to arrange the financial 88 EVOLUTION OP AN EMPIRE. details of his benevolent scheme of govern- ment, he proceeded with his gay and bril- liant young wife to Rheims, there to be crowned with a magnificence undreamed of by Louis XIV. In the midst of these rejoicings over the new reign, and of speculative dreams of universal freedom, there was wafted across the Atlantic news of a handful of patriots arrayed against the tyranny of the British Crown. Here were the theories of the new philosophy translated into the reality of actual experience. "No taxation without representation," "No privileged class," "No government without the consent of the gov- erned." Was this not an embodiment of their dreams? Nor did it detract from the interest in the conflict that England — Eng- land, the hated rival of France, was defied by an indignant people of her own race. There was not a young noble in the land who would not have rushed if he could to the defence of the outraged colonies. The King, half doubting, and vaguely fearing, was swept into the current, and the armies and the courage of the Americans EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 89 were splendidly reinforced by generous, en- thusiastic France. Why should the simple-hearted Louis see what no one else seemed to see : that victory or failure were alike full of peril for France? If the colonies were conquered, France would feel the vengeance of England ; if they were freed and self-governing, the principle of Monarchy had a staggering blow. In the mean time, as the American Eevo- lution moved on toward success, there was talk in the cabin as well as the chateau of the "rights of man." In shops and barns, as well as in clubs and drawing-rooms, there was a glimmering of the coming day. "What is true upon one continent is true upon another," say they. "If it is cowardly to submit to tyranny in America, what is it in France ?" " If Englishmen may revolt against oppression, why may not Frenchmen?" "No government without the consent of the governed, eh? When has our consent been asked, the consent of twenty-five million people? Are we sheep, that we have let a few thousands govern us for a thousand years, without our consent?" 90 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Poverty and hunger gave force and ur- gency to these questions. The people began to clamor more boldly for the good time which had been promised by the kind-hearted King. The murmur swelled to an ominous roar. Thousands were at his very palace gates, telling him in no unmistakable terms that they were tired of smooth words and fair promises. What they wanted was a new constitution and — bread. Poor Louis ! the one could be made with pen and paper ; but by what miracle could he produce the other? How gladly would he have given them anything. But what could he do? There was not enough money to pay the salaries of his officials, nor for his gay young Queen's fetes and balls ! The old way would have been to impose new taxes. But how could he tax a people cry- ing at his gates for bread? He made more promises which he could not" keep; yielded, one after another, concessions of authority and dignity; then vacillated, and tried to return over the slippery path, only to be dragged on again by an irresistible fate. When Louis XVI. convoked the States- EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 91 General, he made his last concession to the demands of his subjects. That almost -forgotten body had not been seen since Richelieu effaced all the auxiliary functions of government. Nobles, ecclesi- astics, and tiers etat (or commons) found themselves face to face once more. The handsome contemptuous nobles, the princely ecclesiastics were unchanged^but there was a new expression in the pale faces of the commons. There was a look of calm defi- ance as they met the disdainful gaze of the aristocrats across the gulf of two centuries. The two superior bodies absolutely refused to sit in the same room with the commons. They might under the same roof, but in the same room — never. No outburst met this insult. With mar- vellous self-control and dignity, and with an ominous calm, the commons constituted themselves into the "National Assembly." Aristocratic France had committed its concluding act of arrogance and folly. And when poor distracted Louis gave impotent order for the Assembly to disperse, he com- mitted suicide. Louis the man lived on to 92 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. be slain by the people three years later, but Louis the King died at that moment. When the Assembly defied his authority and continued to solemnly act as if he had not spoken, the power had passed to the people. They were sovereign. Paris was in wild excitement; and a rumor that troops were marching upon the Assembly to disperse it converted excitement into madness. The populace marched to- ward the Bastille, and in another hour the heads of the Governor and his officials were being carried on pikes through the streets of Paris. The horrible drama had opened, and events developed with the swiftness of a falling avalanche. Louis might have followed his fleeing nobles. But always vacillating, and "letting I dare not wait upon I would," the opportunity was lost. He and his family were prisoners in the "Temple," while an awful travesty upon a court of justice was sending out death-warrants for his friends and adherents faster than the guillotine could devour them. More and more furious swept the torrent, EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 93 gathering to itself all that was vile and outcast. Where were the pale-faced, deter- mined patriots who sat in the " National As- sembly"? Some of them riding with Dukes and Marquises to the guillotine. Was this the equality they expected when they cried " Down with the Aristocrats " ? Did they think they could guide the whirl- wind after raising it? As well whisper to the cyclone to level only the tall trees, or to the conflagration to burn only the temples and palaces. With restraining agencies removed, relig- ion, government, King, all swept away, that hideous brood born of vice, poverty, hatred, and despair came out from dark hiding- places ; and what had commenced as a patri- otic revolt had become a wild orgie of bloodthirsty demons, led by three master- demons, Eobespierre, Marat, and Danton, vying with each other in ferocity. Then we see that simple girl thinking by one supreme act of heroism and sacrifice, like Joan of Arc, to save her country. Fool- ish child ! Did she think to slay the monster devouring Paris by cutting off one of his 94 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. heads? The death of Marat only added to the fury of the tempest ; and the f alHng of Charlotte Corday's head was not more noticed than the falling of a leaf in the forest. On the 21st of January, 1Y93, Louis XVI. embraced for the last time his adored wife and children; then, with every possible indignity, was strapped to a plank and shoved under the guillotine. The kindest-hearted, most inoffensive gen- tleman in Europe had expiated the crimes of his ancestors. A few months later, Marie Antoinette, daughter of the proud Empress Maria The- resa, and child of the Caesars, was borne along the same road. And how bravely she met her awful fate ! We forget her follies, her reckless grasping after pleasures, in view of her horrible sufferings and in admiration of her courage as she rides to her death ; sitting in that hideous tumbril, head erect, pale, proud, defiant, as if upon a throne. With the death of the King and Queen the madness had reached its height, and a revulsion of feeling set in. There was a EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 95 surfeit of blood, and an awakening sense of horror, which turned upon the instigators. Danton fell, and finally, when amid cries of "Death to the tyrant!" Robespierre was dragged wounded and shivering to the fate he had brought upon so many thousands, the drama which had opened at the Bastille was fittingly closed. The great battle for human liberty had been fought and won. Religious freedom and political freedom were identical in prin- ciple. The right of the human conscience proclaimed by Luther in 1517 had in 1793 only expanded into the large conception of all the inherent rights of the individual. It had taken centuries for English persist- ence to accomplish what France, with such appalling violence, had done in as many years. It had been a furious outburst of pent- up force ; but the work had been thorough. Not a germ of tyranny remained. The in- crustations of a thousand years were not alone broken, but pulverized ; the privileged classes were swept away, and their vast estates, two-thirds of the territory of France, ready to be distributed among the rightful 96 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. owners of the soil, those who by toil and industry could win them, France was as new as if she had no history. There was ample opportunity for her people now. What would they do with it? CHAPTEE XII. It is strange to read that the armies went on fighting battles automatically, even while there was no central head to direct them. While the ghastly scenes were enacting in Paris, and while Josephine de Beauharnais was at the Conciergerie listening with blanched face to the call of her husband's name on the death-roll for the day, a young lieutenant of artillery, only twenty-four years old, was at Toulon, winning his first mihtary honors. He would have been thought a strange prophet who had said that in less than ten years the young Cor- sican lieutenant would be Emperor, and the prisoner at the Conciergerie Empress of the French! Nor did M. de Beauharnais, as he rode to execution, dream that forty- five years later his grandson would over the same stones be borne to his coronation. 98 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. In the anarchy which prevailed after the Eevolution, the young hero of Toulon was called upon to quell a riot in Paris. The people realized they had met a master. For twenty-five years from that day, the history of France, and indeed of Europe, was that of one man, Napoleon Bonaparte. Com- mander-in-chief of the Army, then First Consul of the Republic, then Emperor — the steps in his ascent were as rapid and as be- wildering as the movements in one of his own campaigns. France, groping about helplessly among the wreckage of the past, believed what she most desired was liberty and self-government. This Italian, who was a French citizen even only by merest accident, knew her better than she did herself, and that what she really wanted was a fresh mantle of glory to cover her humiliation, and — a master. Leading a broken, unpaid, half-clothed army into Italy, he electrified France and all Europe. Before the world had really found out who he was, and whence he had come, he had conquered all of Northern EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 99 Italy, part of Austria and Belgium, had created a Cisalpine Republic out of the frag- ments, and was making treaties and dictat- ing terms to kings and princes. France, discredited and almost disgraced among the monarchies of Europe, found herself suddenly feared and glorious. Napo- leon had captured the most imaginative and military people in Europe. The rest of the way was easy. Prudent, discreet, knowing when to wait, and when to come down like an avalanche, this marvellous man held France in his hands, and placed Europe under his feet. The people which had exerted such super- human effort for freedom were held by a hand more despotic than Richelieu's, more destructive to popular freedom than that of Louis XIV. ; and the more absolute his rule, the more overpowering his authority, the better pleased they seemed to be. But, was there not equal opportunity for every man in the Empire? Every soldier's knapsack, might it not hold a Marshal's baton? Was not the Emperor himself a living illustration of what a man from the 100 E^'OLUTION OF AN EMPIEE. people might become? And then what did it mean to Frenchmen to be suddenly lifted to dazzling ascendancy in Europe? Who would not willingly serve a master who could bring Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Ro- manoff, Bourbon, crouching at his feet — who could tear down states, and set them up, and if an extra throne were needed for a retainer, could carve a new state from ter- ritory of friend and foe alike, and place a diadem upon every head in his domestic or military household? It was the most stu- pendous display of personal power ever be- held, England alone standing upright in his presence, and in the end accomplishing his ruin. When Austria with a reluctant shudder bestowed her princess upon the invincible parvenu, and when France with regretful pity saw the adored Josephine set aside for that disdainful royal maiden, Marie Louise, at that moment Napoleon passed the merid- ian of his greatness. It had taken just fifteen years to make the most astonishing and dazzling chapter in French history; and then came " Moscow" EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 101 and "Elba," to be quickly followed by "Waterloo" and "St. Helena." And then for France — most incomprehensible of all — a return to the Bourbons ! It had required the greatest tragedy of modern times to get rid of them, and here they were again, Louis XVIII. and Charles X., as overbearing and as arrogant as if their brother's head had not dropped into a basket in 1Y93. When somebody said of the Bourbons "they learn nothing and forget nothing," he was inaccu- rate. They had certainly forgotten the French Revolution. But death removed the first, and popular sentiment the second, of these relics of an obsolete past. And a new experiment was tried. This time it was the son of Philippe Egalite, that wickedest of all the regicides, who came smiling and bowing before the people as a popular sovereign, who would beneficently rule under a liberal constitu- tion. Whatever his father had been, Louis Philippe was far from being a wicked man. Whether teachiiig school in Switzerland, or giving French lessons in America, or wearing the kingly crown in France, he was 102 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. the kindest hearted, most inoffensive of gentlemen. When in the pre-revolutionary days we read of France making war, it means that the King, or his minister, with more or less deference to the will of a few thousand nobles, did so. They are the France referred to. The real France was not consulted and had nothing to do with it, unless it were to fill the ranks with fathers, sons, and hus- bands, and then pay the taxes imposed to support them. But times were changed. Under a constitutional monarchy, the King does not govern ; he reigns. Louis Philippe was King of the French, — not of France. He was chosen by the people as their orna- mental figurehead. But what if he ceased to be ornamental? What was the use of a King who in eighteen years had added not a single ray of glory to the national name, but who was using his high position to in- crease his enormous private fortune, and incessantly begging an impoverished coun- try for benefits and emoluments for five sons? EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 103 An excellent father, truly, though a short- sighted one. His power had no roots. The cutting from the Orleans tree had never taken hold upon the soil, and toppled over at the sound of Lamartine's voice proclaim- ing a Republic from the balcony of the "Hotel deVille." When invited to step down from his royal throne, he did so on the instant. Never did King succumb with such alacrity, and never did retiring royalty look less imposing, than when Louis Philippe was in hiding at Havre under the name of " William Smith," wait- ing for safe convoy to England, without having struck one blow in defence of his throne. But three terrible words had floated into the open windows of the Tuileries. With the echoes of 1792 still sounding in his ears, "Liberty," "Fraternity," and "Equality," shouted in the streets of Paris, had not a pleasant sound ! Republicanism was an abiding sentiment in France, even while two dull Bourbon Kings were stupidly trying to turn back 104 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. the hands od the dial of time, and while an Orleans, with more supple neck, was posing as a popular sovereign. During all this tire- some interlude, the real fact was developing. A Republican sentiment which had existed vaguely in the air was materializing, con- solidating, into a more and more tangible reality in the minds of thinking men and patriots. The ablest men in the country stood with plans matured, ready to meet this crisis. A Republic was proclaimed ; M. de Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, General Cavaignac, M. Ras- pail, and Louis Napoleon were rival candi- dates for the office of President. The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and son of Hortense, was only known as the perpetrator of two very absurd attempts to overthrow the monarchy under Louis Philippe. But since the remains of the great Emperor had been returned to France by England, and the splendors of the past placed in striking contrast with a dull, lustre- less present, there had been a revival of Na- poleonic memories and enthusiasm. Here was an opportunity to unite two powerful EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 105 sentiments in one man — a Napoleon at the head of Republican France would express the glory of the past and the hope of the future. The magic of the name was irresistible. Louis Napoleon was elected President of the second Republic, and history prepared to re- peat itself. What sort of a ruler would he be— this dark, mysterious, unmagnetic man? Even should he not turn out well, no great harm could be done. It was only for four years. His hand had not the steely fineness of touch of his great uncle's, but it was strong, and guided, they soon found, by a subtle intelligence. The overthrow of Monarchy in France had set fire to Republicanism in Europe, Kossuth with transcendent eloquence lead- ing a revolution in Hungary, and Garibaldi and Mazzini with pen and sword in Italy. Europe was in a blaze of revolt. The first great military exploit of Napoleon Bona- parte had been in Italy, and so was his nephew's, but with this difference— the ob- ject of the one was to build up Repubhcs on the other side of the Alps, and o£ the other to 106 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. pull them down. Garibaldi and Mazzini were driven out of Italy by French bayonets, which also propped up the pontifical throne for the fugitive Pope. The Assembly soon realized that in this Prince-President it had no automaton to deal with. A deep antagonism grew, and the cunningly devised issue could not fail to secure popular support to Louis Napoleon. When an Assembly is at war with the Pres- ident because it desires to restrict the suf- frage, and he, to make it universal, can any one doubt the result? He was safe in appealing to the people on such an issue, and sure of being sustained in his Proclamation dissolving the Assembly. He was gathering the reins into his hands with the astute cour- age of his uncle. Moving on almost identi- cal lines with his great original, the nephew set his face toward the same goal. The French people must have realized they were being betrayed. They must have seen that this ambitious plotter was slipping the old fetters of arbitrary power into position. But, under the powerful spell of the Napole- onic name, lulled to tranquillity by the gift EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 107 of suffrage, and fascinated by the growing splendors of an ingenious reproduction of the most brilliant chapter in French history, they were unresistingly drawn into the Im- perial net. France was for the second time an Em- pire, and Napoleon III. was Emperor of the French. His Mephistophelian face did not look as classic under the laurel wreath as had his uncle's, nor had his work the blinding splen- dor nor the fineness of texture of his great model. But then, an imitation never has. It was a marble masterpiece, done in plas- ter ! But what a clever reproduction it was ! And how, by sheer audacity, it compelled recognition and homage, and at last even adulation in Europe!— and what a clever stroke it was, for this heavy, unsympathetic man to bring up to his throne from the peo- ple a radiant Empress, who would capture romantic and sesthetic France ! The distance was great from cheap lodg- ings in New York to a seat upon the Im- perial throne of France ; but human ambition , is not easily satisfied. A Pelion always 108 EVOLUTION OF A'N EMPIRE. rises beyond an Ossa. It was not enough to feel that he had re-estabhshed the prosperity and prestige of France, that fresh glory had been added to the Napoleonic name. Was there not after all a certain irritating reserve in the homage paid him, was there not a touch of condescension in the friendship of his royal neighbors? And had he not always a Mordecai at his gate — while the " Faubourg St. Oermain'''' stood aloof and disdainful, smiling at his brand-new aristocracy? War is the thing to give solidity to em- pire and to reputation ! Neither France nor Europe can withstand the magic of military renown. And so, upon a quickly improvised pretext, the French Emperor started, amid the booming of cannon and the wild ac- clamations of a delighted people, upon his errand of conquest. The insolent Germans were to be chastised; and, incidentally, Europe was to be made to tremble ! In a few months the bubble was pricked. The glittering French army proved to be a thing of tinsel and fustian. No reality, no power to stand before the solid German battalions, it melted like hoar-frost. Napo- EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 109 leon III. was prisoner of war at Sedan, and King William, Unser Fritz, and Von Moltke were at Versailles. Moved by his colossal misfortunes, and perhaps partly in displeasure at having a French Republic once more at her door, Eng- land offered asylum to the deposed Emperor. There, from the seclusion of " Chiselhurst, " he and his still beautiful Eugenie watched the Republic weathering the first days of storm an 3. stress, and coming out at last stable and triumphant. The weary exile felt that not in his day would the reaction come. But his son would yet wear the Imperial crown which was his birthright. Futile dream! The boy was destined to cruel fate — to be slain by Zulu assegai, while fighting the battles of England, — England, the author of Wate?^- loo. Strange ending for the heir to the name and glory of Napoleon Bonaparte. But the reaction Louis Napoleon so confi- dently hoped for did not come. With mili- tary pride humbled in the dust, national pride wounded by the loss of two provinces, loaded down with an immense war indem- 110 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. nity, the people set about the task of rehabil- itation ; in an incredibly short time, the gall- ing debt was paid, financial prosperity and political strength restored, and with mili- tary organization second to none in Europe, France, with revengeful eyes fastened on Germany, waits for the day of reckoning. For twenty-four years the Eepublic has existed. Communistic fires always smoulder- ing have again and again burst forth — demagogues, fanatics, and those creatures for whom there is no place in organized society, whose element is chaos, standing ready to fan the fires of revolt ; while Orlean- ist, Bonapartist, Bourbon, are ever on the alert, watching for opportunity to slip in through the open door of Eevolution. England in conscious superiority smiles at a nation which has had seven political revo- lutions in a hundred years. Republic, then Empire, then a return to the Bourbons, then Constitutional Monarchy under Louis Phi- lippe, then Republic, followed by Empire again, and now for the third time a Republic ! But Francs, complex, mobile, changeful as the sea, in riotous enjoyment of her new- EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. Ill found liberties, casts off a form of govern- -ment as she would an ill-fitting garment. She knows'^ the value of tranquillity — she had it for /»ne thousand years ! The people, which have only breathed the upper air for a a century — the people, who were stifled under feudalism, stamped upon by Valois Kings, riveted down by Richelieu, then prodded, outraged, and starved by Bourbons, have be- come a great nation. Many-sided, resource- ful, gifted, it matters not whether they have called the head of their government Con- sul, Emperor, King, or President. They are a race of freemen, who can never again be enslaved by tyrannous system. It was a bright day for France when that ambitious young Emperor of Germany sent his great Chancellor into retirement; and another bright day when, taking offence at scant courtesy at the hands of the Czar, he left ajar the back door to his dominions. An alliance between despotic Russia thirsting for the waters of the Mediterranean, and Re- publican France thirsting for revenge, is the darkest cloud on the German horizon to-day. It is only a matter of months or of years 112 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, when France will be at the throat of Ger- many demanding Alsace and Lorraine. The French army is not the one which faced Von Moltke in 1871; and when France knocks at her front door, Germany will have all she can attend to, without hearing Rus- sian batteries thundering at her rear. A dramatic reconciliation with the old Chan- cellor is interesting, but it will not undo the work of the last four years. There is no longer thought of conflict be- tween any two nations of Europe. The next war is to be one of tremendous combinations. National alliances are shifting and uncer- tain. But at the time this is written (1894) Germany, Austria, and Italy are drawn to- gether in one hostile camp, while France and Russia, in loving embrace, stand in the '^ther ; and England, aloof and suspicious, holds herself ready to hurl her weight against whichever one obstructs her path to India. There is something in the air which makes one think the name Napoleon is still a thing to conjure with. But whatever the future may hold for France, no American can be indifferent to the fate of a nation to whom EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 113 we owe so much. Nor can we ever forget that in the hour of our direst extremity, and regardless of cost to herself, she helped us to establish our liberties, and to take our place among the great nations of the earth. THE EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE A Brief Historical Sketch of Germany, By MARY PARMELE, Author of "Who? When? and What?." William Beverley Harison, 59 Fifth Avenue. Price, cloth, gilt, $1.00. Mrs. Parmele, whose previous work " Who ? When ? and What ? " has proved such a useful reference chart to Students of History, Literature and Art, has begun a series of outline histories of which this is the first. A few vivid strokes portray Germany from the Aryan migrations, to William II. There is not a superfluous line in the picture, yet the salient points are not alone there, but developed to a brilliant intensity. The book may be read in two hours — but we venture to say that the reader or student will have learned from its brief pages more than from many imposing volumes, wherein a superfluity of details hopelessly obscures the grand lines in the march of events. If the student can first grasp these lines in their simplicity, can first see the tree in outline as it were^ it will be an easy task later to clothe it with leaves and fruitage. The author has, we think, done wisely in offering a single continuous thread of events which intelligibly connects the present with the past, and this is done in such a charming way that the book reads like a romance. WHO? WHEN? AND WHAT? BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF CIVILIZATION, 1250 TO 1850. Authors, Inventors, Discoverers, Artists and Musicians. SHORTEST ROAD YET OPENED TO KNOWLEDGE. What People Say About It. " It must prove very valuable to students of history as well as to others." Jos. MiLNER CoiT, President St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H. "The new Historical Chart, 'Who? When? and What?' fills an empty place on our reading tables. Teachers who have made use of it like it much." Susan Fenimore Cooper, Cooperstown, N. Y. " Most interesting and ingenious work." Phillips Brooks, Boston, Mass. "The work is herculean, and must be very valuable, I am certain." Judge Charles A. Peabody, New York. "lam greatly impressed with the amount of labor and learning repre- sented by it, and with its utility." James C. Carter, New York. " I am amazed at the amount of valuable information condensed into so compact and accessible a form. ... It should be in the hands of every scholar as well as others who have neither time nor inclination to search out for themselves." Rev. George U. 3 ows&ov, Archdeacon of Richmond. " The idea is capital; is faithfully carried out with care, industry and fine discrimination. It cannot fail to flood this long stretch of years with light and intelligence, especially if accompanied by wise collateral reading." Rev. George D. Rider, New York. "One of the most skilfully devised aids for the contemporary study of notable characters and events of the last six centuries is the little pamphlet, and What? ' The chart which accompanies the index represents in vertical columns the centuries and decades from 1350 to 1850; each horizontal line represents the life of the person whose name it bears and a reference to the index tells who he was, when he lived, and what he did. Along the mai-gin at the top of the chart are found conspicuous discoveries and events. The special excellence of the design lies in the fact that it places a great writer, artist or other famous personage in his proper time, groups his contempo- raries about him, brings out the state of arts, philosophy, literature at the moment, and, in a word, recalls his environment in all its'essential features. The char trepresents an immense amount of work, and cannot fail to be of the utmost use to readers and students in all departments." Christian Union, New York. "We consider it a most valuable informant for literary people, and, in fact, would wilUngly pay $5.00 for it had that been the price." Weekly Journalist, Boston, Mass. " It brings before the eye at a single glance more of this last phase of the world's history than can be found elsewhere, and demonstrates the grandeur of the problem, while giving vividness to the incidents of which it is com- posed." A. J. WiLiARD, Lxite Chief Justice of South Carolina. " A valuable addition to our Books of Reference, and one which must be appreciated by teachers and scholars. Sincerely thy friend, John G. Whit- tier," Newburyport, Mass. " Remarkable for care, compactness and breadth. It should have a per- manent place in our literature.'' Bishop J. H. Hurst, American University, Washington, D. C. " A very valuable adjunct in schools and colleges and to those engaged in literary and historical studies. I cordially commend the work as most help- ful in purpose, unique in plan, and invaluable to both teacher and student." Prof. Mary L. Dickinson, New York. " A mine of information and marvel of ingenuity, learning and clear pi-es- entation." Prof. W. McD. Halsey, Collegiate School, West 40th Street, New York. " The groupings and selections are excellent, and as a guide or mnemotech- nic in the hands of the student or busy reader, must serve a most useful ofifice. A little ' primer ' accompanying, supplies the necessary explanatory mem- oranda. Both are kept in a durable envelope, convenient, small and easily consulted. It may be carried in the pocket, and should be found on the desk or table of all interested." Living Church, Chicago. "Every now and then in a man's reading, he comes upon names, the sig- nificance of which he feels he ought to know, but into whose histoiy, as given in an encyclopaedia, he has not the time to look. It is the needs of just such a man that this chart and its p.cconipanying index, under the attractive title of 'Who? When? and What?' were" designed to meet. By referring to the index, you And the date of any famous man and what he did to astonish the world. Then, by turning to the chart and finding the man's name, you learn who were his contemporaries, who were his predecessors and who his followers, what ideas were then in the air in religion, in liter- ature, and in philosophy, and what development had been attained by the different arts and sciences. The importance of such a synchronism or tab- ular arrangement of all the prominent men and events of these six centuries can hardly be overestimated. The fundamental thing to fix in your mind about any famous man is his place in history. You can only understand him by grasping his relation to his predecessors and successors, and to the age in which he lived. In this way you learn the part he played in helping on the progress of the world, and also you can recall him by remembering his position among noted men in his particular branch of knowledge. The three divisions of the chart into literature, philosophy, and science in the first place, secondly, painting and sculpture, etc. , and finally music, enables the student to see the order of the great men in their social spheres, Mozart among the musicians and Wordsworth among the poets, but at the same time does not prevent him from learning what musicians and what poets were contemporaneous. Every man of education or who desires to be informed about the leaders in the world's progress, will welcome a chart so complete, and one whose method is so clear and so easy of comprehension. ' Who? When? and What? ' will be a boon to many a man who is hurried and o'erworked by his daily cares." The Churchman, New York. |atiVe Tree^ A Study for School and Home- By L. W. RUSSELL, Providence, R.I. There is a growing demand for easily under- stood and practical mat- ter about our native trees. This little work is designed to supply this demand. Works upon general botany do not suppi}' the needs of those who wish, without difficult study, to come to a friendly acquaintance with the forest and wayside trees which they daily meet. The author has written about trees as he has seen them, in walks and rambles, in town and country. It is wholly unlike anything that has ever before been published on this subject. WILLIAIVI BEVERLEY HARISON, 3 East 14th Street, New York City. BOOKS FOR TEACHERS. THE ESSENTIALS OP GEOGRAPHY.— i^z^Z/^f- . Cloth, $ .50 GEOGRAPHICAL NEWS OP THE YEAH.-risktr. Paper, .20 SCHOOL KEEPING: How To Dolt.— Orca« . Cloth, .75 QUIZZISM and ITS KM.—Souihwick . . . i ^loth. 100 ( Paper, .50 QUEER QUESTIONS and READY REPLIES— 0/i>/Sa«^ Cloth, .76 RECREATION QUERIES IN U. S. HISTORY.- Grubtr. Cloth, .75 ACTS AND ANECDOTES OP AUTHORS.— -5arro7y5. Cloth, 1.50 SONGS OP HISTORY.— ^K«frwori/i. . . . Cloth, 1.00 LIPE OP JOHN D. PHIIBROOK.— -0?^«/o«. . Cloth, 1.00 MANUAL IN ARITHMETIC FOR PRIMARY CRADES.- Fisher. Boards, .40 MANUAL OF GYMNASTICS.— ir^/c// . . . Paper, .25 EXERCISES FOR WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY.- Jf7»Mro/. Paper, .25 EXERCISES ON THE AMERICAN FLAG.- Winthrop. Paper, .20 EXERCISES FOR ARBOR DAY.— W^V///s. . . Paper, .25 NATIVE TREES —i?2«i^// Paper, .30 GYMNASTIC CARDS OP THE LING M%im..- Morse. Per package .15 PREPARING TO READ — S fear and Augsburg. Boards, ,50 Teachers Help Manual Series. PAPER 25 cts. each, or 5 for $100. 1. Practical Grammar, 500 Exercises.— -Ea/o^. 2. Manual of Correspondence.- JEa^fow. 3. Mechanics' Arithmetic— Wright. 4. Easy Problems for Young Thinkers.— .Ea/ow. 5. Catch Questions In Arithmetic— C«/^/. 6. 100 Lessons In Composition.— ///^^iow. 1. Manual of Rhymes, Selections and Phrases.- ^c/«»««. 9. Common Sense Exercises In Geography —£a/o?/. BOOKS SENT TO ANT ADDRESS BY MAIL, BOS TBAID. William B e verley Haris on. ANNOUNCEMENT OE New Helps for Teachers. TO l^EAD, OR ThQ Beginning of School Life. By MARY A. SPEAR, Pri7ictpal of the Model School, State JVormal School, West Chester, Pa. With over Three Hundred Drawings. By D. R. Augsburg. Boards, Price, 50 cents.m^ : Miss Spear has no superior in this country as a teacher of the art of teaching children how to begin school life, and D. R. Augsburg is a genius in the art of helping teachers to draw easily everyday objects on the blacliboard. A good foundation is nowhere more needed than in the teaching of reading and in learning to read. Many a primary teacher who means well utterly fails because she does not understand the nature or amount of preparatory work necessary before a cliild is able to read from a book with ease and with a natural expression. With this book in hand no teacher need fail in teaching reading with eminent success, whatever book she uses with the pupils. The author begins at the foundation and tells just what preparation should be made at home; following this with the preparation at school. WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON 3 East 14 Street, NEW YORK HOME STUDY IN NSTURE. Child's Hand=Book For Collecting Pictures and Stories of Animals. Part I.— MAMMALS. Fop collecting and preserving, in a classified form. Pictures and Stories of all the Mammals. This book is about 8xio inches in size, with a strong cloth binding, with numerous illustrations and the entire classification of the Mammals, so arranged that it can be easily understood, and used as a guide in placing pictures and stories on the blank pages. This gives the children something to do, and the universal propensity to make collections of things, is here utilized in a pleasant and profitable way. Filling up the blank pages of this attractive volume, with choice pictures and stories, will be a source of great delight, and will foster a desire to read about all animals. This volume will be followed by others covering the entire Animal Kingdom. PRICE, POSTPAID, Sl.OO NET. A sample filled ivith pictures and stories can be seen at the office of American Kindergarten, 70 Fifth Avenue, Leaf=Collectors' . . 4to, cloth. $2.00. Arranged as an aid in collecting and pre- serving specimens of leaves of trees, of the United States. Fully illustrated with outline drawings of ii6 different specimens. A splendid aid to Nature Study. Whitall's, black and white, - $3.00 net. " colored, - - - 3.00 " Per set, $5.00. Whittaker's, - - - - .75 net. Pocket size, - - - - - .25 " POSTPAID UPON KECEIPX OF PKICE. Clock Dials. With the works of a clock arranged to move the hands by use of thumb- screws — for purpose of drilling in the study of time. 10 Inch, $1.25. 12 Inch, $1.50. OpPffiGEflDJUSTJlBIiE Book: Covkr. (Patented U. S., Canada and England.) Is made of an extra heavy strong manila paper, ^elf-sealing and easily adjustable to all sizes of school or library books. Being in otte piece, it has no joints on back or sides to come apart. It will remain in place even when unsealed, and can therefore be used without danger of its coming off if by chance it is improperly sealed. The sides form pockets inside the cover suitable for the library card, or with school or college books, for memoranda or notes. All exposed edges are of double thickness and almost impossible to be torn. The edges of the book covered cannot touch the shelf. For absolute protection-~-iiniplicity of design — durability and all necessary qualijications for a per- fect cover, the " One Piece " cover is unequaled. Mr. Boyd, Secretary of the Board of Home Mis- sion of the Presbyterian Church, says of these cov- ers that they are ' ' the only practical covers he has ever seen" No. 1. Fits all ordinary sizes. Price, per 100 $1 50 No. % Extra large size for bound magazines, etc. Price, per 100 ,, . . . 2 5G No. 3. Extra large size for large geographies, Price, per 100. , 3 5G Sent postpaid upon receipt of price to all parts United States or Canada. Sample sent upon receipt of 2c. stamp. For sale by all booksellers. Dictionary Holders. By special arrangement I am able to offer these all metal holders (the Harvard) to schools, at club rates, i. e. 33^5^% discovmt. Chart Alphabet of . . . . Common Objects. Mounted on Rollers, Size 29x39 Inches. price, s1.60 net. A chart printed in bright colors, with the alphabet illustrated with numerous objects, attractive to children. French Songs and Games ^VS^ITH ivrxjsic. A series of interesting and entertain- ing songs and games, in French, for children. PRICE, PER SET, 50 CENTS. ISAAC PITMAN'S SHORTHAND THE ORIGINAL STANDARD SYSTEM. PHONOGRAPHIC INSTRUCTION BOOKS. The Phonographic Teacher; or, First Book in Shorthand $ 15 1,500,000 copies sold. Key to Phonographic Teacher 15 A Manual of Phonography 40 650th thousand. 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Contains a full description and direc- tions to enable any one to teach or acquire this style of writing. Jackson's Vertical Writing Copy Books^ - - 10c. each (10 Numbers.) Harison's Vertical Writing Pads Uck^son) - 10c. " (8 Numbers.) Vertical ¥s. Sloping Writing by Jackson, - 10c. " ANY OF ABOVE SENT UPON RECEIPT OF PRICE.