Lectures and Essays. Smith Goldwin

on the other side of the globe. It will perhaps be thought hereafter that the quarrel with New England was calamitous in its consequences as well as in itself, since it led to the diversion of British emigration from America, where it supplied, in a democracy of mixed but not uncongenial races, the necessary element of guidance and control, to Australia, where, as there must be a limit to its own multiplication, it may hereafter have to struggle for mastery with swarming multitudes of Chinese, almost as incurable of incorporation with it as the negro. India and the other conquered dependencies are the fruits of strength as a war power at sea combined with weakness on land. Though not so generally noticed, the second of these two factors has not been less operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he could not mate the king do not at first sight necessarily commend themselves as invaluable possessions. Carthage and Venice were merely great commercial cities, which, when they entered on a career of conquest, were compelled at once to form armies of mercenaries, and to incur all the evil consequences by which the employment of those vile and fatal instruments of ambition is attended. England being, not a commercial city, but a nation, and a nation endowed with the highest military qualities, has escaped the fell necessity except in the case of India; and India, under the reign of the Company, and even for some time after its legal annexation to the Crown, was regarded and treated almost as a realm in another planet, with an army, a political system, and a morality of its own. But now it appears that the wrongs of the Hindoo are going to be avenged, as the wrongs of the conquered have often been, by their moral effect upon the conqueror. A body of barbarian mercenaries has appeared upon the European scene as an integral part of the British army, while the reflex influence of Indian Empire upon the political character and tendencies of the imperial nation is too manifest to be any longer overlooked. England now stands where the paths divide, the one leading by industrial and commercial progress to increase of political liberty; the other, by a career of conquest, to the political results in which such a career has never yet failed to end. At present the influences in favour of taking the path of conquest seemed to preponderate, [Footnote: Written in 1878.] and the probability seems to be that the leadership of political progress, which has hitherto belonged to England and has constituted the special interest of her history, will, in the near future, pass into other hands.

THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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      [Footnote: In this lecture free use has been made of recent writers—Mitchell, Chapman, Vehse, Freytag and Ranke, as well as of the older authorities. To Chapman's excellent Life of Gustavus Adolphus we are under special obligations. In some passages it has been closely followed. Colonel Mitchell has also supplied some remarks and touches, such as are to be found only in a military writer.]

      AN EPISODE OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.

      The Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been recently revived. The conflict between Austria and German Independence commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V., and, continued on those battle-fields, was renewed and decided at Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies, sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan. Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot of all who aspire high—no man or nation ever was dandled into greatness.

      The Thirty Years' War was a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long remained the Public Law of Europe.

      Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway between the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the political wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd the scene rise at least two grand forms.

      In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat, there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at Augsburgh, so that the money power became the arbiter even of Imperial elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of anything which Von Moltke would call strategy: and hence again the cruel length of the war, a whole generation of German agony.

      But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side especially, they were types of a class of men, the most terrible perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of those mercenary bands, soldados, in the literal and original sense of the term, free companions, condottieri, lansquenets, who came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times. In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries, under Alva and Parma and Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired butcher and marauder.

      But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European and some non-European tongues. Their only country was the camp; their cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel, but outcasts of all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour, embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of its articles the duel with all the forms—an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: