 Chapter 56 The Love of National Independence, however, was too strong to be destroyed in this way. The South Americans were the first to rebel against the reactionary measures of the Congress of Vienna, Greece, and Belgium, and Spain, and a large number of other countries of the European continent followed suit, and the 19th century was filled with the rumor of many wars of independence. It will serve no good purpose to say, if only the Congress of Vienna had done such and such a thing instead of taking such and such a course, the history of Europe in the 19th century would have been different. The Congress of Vienna was a gathering of men who had just passed through a great revolution, and through twenty years of terrible and almost continuous warfare. They came together for the purpose of giving Europe that peace and stability which they thought that the people needed and wanted. They were what we call reactionaries. They sincerely believed in the inability of the mass of the people to rule themselves. They rearranged the map of Europe in such a way as seemed to promise the greatest possibility of a lasting success. They failed, but not through any premeditated wickedness on their part. They were, for the greater part, men of the old school who remembered the happier days of their quiet youth and ardently wished a return of that blessed period. They failed to recognize the strong hold which many of the revolutionary principles had gained upon the people of the European continent. That was a misfortune, but hardly a sin. But one of the things which the French Revolution had taught not only Europe, but America as well, was the right of people to their own nationality. Napoleon, who respected nothing and nobody, was utterly ruthless in his dealing with national and patriotic aspirations. But the early revolutionary generals had proclaimed the new doctrine that nationality was not a matter of political frontiers or round skulls and broad noses, but a matter of the heart and soul. While they were teaching the French children the greatness of the French nation, they encouraged Spaniards and Hollenders and Italians to do the same thing. Soon these people, who all shared Rousseau's belief in the superior virtues of original man, began to dig into their past and found, buried beneath the ruins of the feudal system, the bones of the mighty races of which they supposed themselves the feeble descendants. The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of the great historical discoveries. Everywhere historians were busy publishing medieval charters and early medieval chronicles, and in every country the result was a new pride in the old fatherland. A great deal of this sentiment was based upon the wrong interpretation of historical facts. But in practical politics it does not matter what is true, but everything depends upon what the people believed to be true. And in most countries both the kings and their subjects firmly believed in the glory and fame of their ancestors. The Congress of Vienna was not inclined to be sentimental. Their excellencies divided the map of Europe according to the best interests of half a dozen dynasties and put national aspirations upon the index, or list of forbidden books, together with all other dangerous French doctrines. But history is no respecter of Congress. For some reason or other, it may be an historical law, which thus far has escaped the attention of the scholars. Nations seem to be necessary for the orderly development of human society, and the attempt to stem this tide was quite as unsuccessful as the Metternichian effort to prevent people from thinking. Curiously enough the first trouble began in a very distant part of the world in South America. The Spanish colonies of that continent had been enjoying a period of relative independence during the many years of the Great Napoleonic Wars. They had even remained faithful to their king when he was taken prisoner by the French emperor, and they had refused to recognize Joseph Bonaparte, who had in the year 1808 been made king of Spain by order of his brother. Indeed, the only part of America to get very much upset by the revolution was the island of Haiti, the Espanola of Columbus's first trip. Here in the year 1791, the French convention in a sudden outburst of love and human brotherhood had bestowed upon their black brethren all the privileges hitherto enjoyed by their white masters. Just as suddenly they had repented of this step, but the attempt to undo the original promise led to many years of terrible warfare between General Leclerc, the brother-in-law of Napoleon, and Toussaint Le Venture, the Negro chieftain. In the year 1801, Toussaint was asked to visit Leclerc and discuss terms of peace. He received the solemn promise that he would not be molested. He trusted his white adversaries, was put on board a ship, and shortly afterwards died in a French prison. But the Negroes gained their independence all the same and founded a republic. Incidentally, they were of great help to the first great South American patriot in his efforts to deliver his native country from the Spanish yoke. Simone Bollivar, a native of Caracas in Venezuela, was born in the year 1783, had been educated in Spain, had visited Paris where he had seen the revolutionary government at work, had lived for a while in the United States, and had returned to his native land where the widespread discontent against Spain, the mother country, was beginning to take a definite form. In the year 1811, Venezuela declared its independence and Bollivar became one of the revolutionary generals. Within two months, the rebels were defeated and Bollivar fled. For the next five years, he was the leader of an apparently lost cause. He sacrificed all his wealth, and he would not have been able to begin his final and successful expedition without the support of the President of Haiti. Thereafter, the revolt spread all over South America, and soon it appeared that Spain was not able to suppress the rebellion unaided. She asked for the support of the Holy Alliance. This step greatly worried England. The British shippers had succeeded the Dutch as the common carriers of the world, and they expected to reap heavy profits from a declaration of independence on the part of all South America. They had hopes that the United States of America would interfere, but the Senate had no such plans, and in the House, too, there were many voices which declared that Spain ought to be given a free hand. Just then there was a change of ministers in England. The Whakes went out and the Tories came in. George Canning became Secretary of State. He dropped a hint that England would gladly back up the American government with all the might of her fleet if said government would declare its disapproval of the plans of the Holy Alliance in regard to the rebellious colonies of the Southern continent. President Monroe thereupon, on the 2nd of December of the year 1823, addressed Congress and stated that America would consider any attempt on the part of the Allied Powers to extend their system to any portion of this Western Hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety, and gave warning that the American government would consider such action on the part of the Holy Alliance as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. Four weeks later, the text of the Monroe Doctrine was printed in the English newspapers and the members of the Holy Alliance were forced to make their choice. Here you see a picture of the continents of North America and South America surrounded by a barbed wire fence and posted a sign that says, special notice, all guests are welcome, but they must not bring their guns. It's titled the Monroe Doctrine. Metternich hesitated. Personally, he would have been willing to risk the displeasure of the United States, which had allowed both its army and navy to fall into neglect since the end of the Anglo-American war of the year 1812, but cannings threatening attitude and trouble on the continent forced him to be careful. The expedition never took place and South America and Mexico gained their independence. As for the troubles on the continent of Europe, they were coming fast and furious. The Holy Alliance had sent French troops to Spain to act as guardians of the peace in the year 1820. Austrian troops had been used for a similar purpose in Italy when the Carbonari, the secret society of the charcoal burners, were making propaganda for a united Italy and had caused a rebellion against the unspeakable Ferdinand of Naples. Bad news also came from Russia, where the death of Alexander had been the sign for a revolutionary outbreak in St. Petersburg, a short but bloody upheaval, the so-called Decaborist revolt, because it took place in December, which ended with the hanging of a large number of good patriots who had been disgusted by the reaction of Alexander's last years and had tried to give Russia a constitutional form of government. But worse was to follow. Metternich had tried to assure himself of the continued support of the European courts by a series of conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle, at Chappelle, at Leibach, and finally at Verona. The delegates from the different powers duly traveled to these agreeable watering places where the Austrian Prime Minister used to spend his summers. They always promised to do their best to suppress revolt, but they were none too certain of their success. The spirit of the people was beginning to be ugly, and especially in France the position of the king was by no means satisfactory. The real trouble, however, began in the Balkans, the gateway to Western Europe, through which the invaders of that continent had passed since the beginning of time. The first outbreak was in Moldavia, the ancient Roman province of Dachia, which had been cut off from the empire in the third century. Since then it had been a lost land, a sort of Atlantis, where the people had continued to speak the old Roman tongue and still called themselves Romans and their country Romania. Here in the year 1821, a young Greek, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, began a revolt against the Turks. He told his followers that they could count upon the support of Russia. But Metternich's fast couriers were soon on their way to St. Petersburg and the Tsar, entirely persuaded by the Austrian arguments in favour of peace and stability, refused to help. Ypsilanti was forced to flee to Austria, where he spent the next seven years in prison. In the same year 1821, trouble began in Greece. Since 1815, a secret society of Greek patriots had been preparing the way for a revolt. Suddenly they hoisted the flag of independence in the Moria, the ancient Peloponnesus, and drove the Turkish garrisons away. The Turks answered in the usual fashion. They took the Greek patriarch of Constantinople, who was regarded as their pope both by the Greeks and by many Russians, and they hanged him on Easter Sunday of the year 1821, together with a number of his bishops. The Greeks came back with a massacre of all the Muhammedians in Tripolița, the capital of the Moria, and the Turks retaliated by an attack upon the island of Chios, where they murdered 25,000 Christians and sold 45,000 others as slaves into Asia and Egypt. Then the Greeks appealed to the European courts, but Metternich told them in so many words that they could stew in their own Greece. I am not trying to make a pun, but I am quoting his Serene Highness, who informed the Tsar that this fire of revolt ought to burn itself out beyond the pale of civilization. And the frontiers were closed to those volunteers who wished to go to the rescue of the patriotic Hellenes. Their cause seemed lost. At the request of Turkey, an Egyptian army was landed in the Moria, and soon the Turkish flag was again flying from the Acropolis, the ancient stronghold of Athens. The Egyptian army then pacified the country, ala Turk, and Metternich followed the proceedings with quiet interest, awaiting the day when this attempt against the peace of Europe should be a thing of the past. Once more it was England which upset his plans. The greatest glory of England does not lie in her vast colonial possessions, in her wealth, or her navy, but in the quiet heroism and independence of her average citizen. The Englishman obeys the laws because he knows that respect for the rights of others marks the difference between a dog kennel and a civilized society. But he does not recognize the right of others to interfere with his freedom of thought. If his country does something which he believes to be wrong, he gets up and says so, and the government which he attacks will respect him and will give him full protection against the mob, which today, as in the time of Socrates, often loves to destroy those who surpass it in courage or intelligence. There never has been a good cause, however unpopular or however distant, which has not counted a number of Englishmen among its staunchest adherents. The mass of the English people are not different from those in other lands. They stick to the business at hand and have no time for unpractical sporting ventures, but they rather admire their eccentric neighbor, who drops everything to go and fight for some obscure people in Asia or Africa, and when he has been killed, they give him a fine public funeral and hold him up to their children as an example of valor and chivalry. Even the police spies of the Holy Alliance were powerless against this national characteristic. In the year 1824, Lord Byron, a rich young Englishman who wrote the poetry over which all Europe wept, hoisted the sails of his yacht and started south to help the Greeks. Three months later, the news spread through Europe that their hero lay dead in Missalongi, the last of the Greek strongholds. His lonely death caught the imagination of the people. In all countries, societies were formed to help the Greeks. Lafayette, the grand old man of the American Revolution, pleaded their cause in France. The king of Bavaria sent hundreds of his officers, money and supplies poured in upon the starving men of Missalongi. In England, George Canning, who had defeated the plans of the Holy Alliance in South America, was now prime minister, he saw his chance to checkmate Metronek for a second time. The English and Russian fleets were already in the Mediterranean. They were sent by governments, which dared no longer suppress the popular enthusiasm for the cause of the Greek patriots. The French navy appeared because France, since the end of the Crusades, had assumed the role of the defender of the Christian faith in Muhammadian lands. On October 20th of the year 1827, the ships of the three nations attacked the Turkish fleet in the Bay of Navarino and destroyed it. Rarely has the news of a battle been received with such general rejoicing. The people of Western Europe and Russia, who enjoyed no freedom at home, consoled themselves by fighting an imaginary war of liberty on behalf of the oppressed Greeks. In the year 1829, they had their reward. Greece became an independent nation and the policy of reaction and stability suffered its second great defeat. It would be absurd were I to try in the short volume to give you a detailed account of the struggle for national independence in all other countries. There are a large number of excellent books devoted to such subjects. I have described the struggle for the independence of Greece because it was the first successful attack upon the bulwark of reaction which the Congress of Vienna had erected to maintain the stability of Europe. That mighty fortress of suppression still held out and Metternich continued to be in command, but the end was near. In France, the Bourbons had established an almost unbearable rule of police officials who were trying to undo the work of the French Revolution with an absolute disregard of the regulations and laws of civilized warfare. When Louis the 18th died in the year 1824, the people had enjoyed nine years of peace which had proved even more unhappy than the 10 years of war of the empire. Louis was succeeded by his brother, Charles the Tenth. Louis had belonged to that famous bourbon family which, although it never learned anything, never forgot anything. The recollection of that morning in the town of Ham, when news had reached him of the decapitation of his brother, remained a constant warning of what might happen to those kings who did not read the signs of the times of right. Charles, on the other hand, who had managed to run up private debts of 50 million francs before he was 20 years of age, knew nothing, remembered nothing, and firmly intended to learn nothing. As soon as he had succeeded his brother, he established a government by priests, through priests, and for priests. And while the Duke of Wellington, who made this remark, cannot be called a violent liberal, Charles ruled in such a way that he disgusted even that trusted friend of law and order. When he tried to suppress the newspapers which dared to criticize his government and dismiss the parliament because it supported the press, his days were numbered. On the night of the 27th of July of the year 1830, a revolution took place in Paris. On the 30th of the same month, the king fled to the coast and set sail for England. In this way the famous farce of 15 years came to an end and the Bourbons were at last removed from the throne of France. They were too hopelessly incompetent. France then might have returned to a republican form of government, but such a step would not have been tolerated by Metternich. The situation was dangerous enough. The spark of rebellion had leaped beyond the French frontier and had set fire to another powder house filled with national grievances. The new kingdom of the Netherlands had not been a success. The Belgian and the Dutch people had nothing in common. And their king, William of Orange, the descendant of an uncle of William the Silent, while a hard worker and a good businessman was too much lacking in tact and pliability to keep the peace among his uncongenial subjects. Besides, the horde of priests which had descended upon France had at once found its way into Belgium and whatever Protestant William tried to do was howled down by a large crowd of excited citizens as a fresh attempt upon the freedom of the Catholic Church. On the 25th of August there was a popular outbreak against the Dutch authorities and Brussels. Two months later the Belgians declared themselves independent and elected Leopold of Coburg, the uncle of Queen Victoria of England, to the throne. That was an excellent solution of the difficulty. The two countries, which never ought to have been united, parted their ways and thereafter lived in peace and harmony and behaved like decent neighbors. News in those days, when there were only a few short railroads, traveled slowly. But when the success of the French and the Belgian revolutionists became known in Poland, there was an immediate clash between the Poles and their Russian rulers, which led to a year of terrible warfare and ended with a complete victory for the Russians, who established order along the banks of the Vistula in the well-known Russian fashion. Nicholas I, who had succeeded his brother Alexander in 1825, firmly believed in the divine right of his own family, and the thousands of Polish refugees who had found shelter in Western Europe bore witness to the fact that the principles of the Holy Alliance were still more than a hollow phrase in Holy Russia. In Italy, too, there was a moment of unrest. Marie-Louise, Duchess of Parma, and wife of the former Emperor Napoleon, whom she had deserted after the defeat of Waterloo, was driven away from her country, and in the Papal State, the exasperated people tried to establish an independent republic. But the armies of Austria marched to Rome, and soon everything was as of old. Metternich continued to reside at the Ball Plots, the home of the foreign minister of the Habsburg dynasty. The police spies returned to their job, and peace ranged supreme. Eighteen more years were to pass before a second and more successful attempt could be made to deliver Europe from the terrible inheritance of the Vienna Congress. Again it was France, the revolutionary weathercock of Europe, which gave the signal of revolt. Charles the Tenth had been succeeded by Louis Philippe, the son of that famous Duke of Orleans, who had turned Jacobin, had voted for the death of his cousin the king, and had played a role during the early days of the revolution under the name of Philip Egalité, or Equality Philip. Eventually he had been killed when Robespierre tried to purge the nation of all traitors, by which name he indicated those people who did not share his own views, and his son had been forced to run away from the revolutionary army. Young Louis Philippe thereupon had wandered far and wide. He had taught school in Switzerland, and had spent a couple of years exploring the unknown far west of America. After the fall of Napoleon he had returned to Paris. He was much more intelligent than his bourbon cousins. He was a simple man who went about in the public parks with a red cotton umbrella under his arm, followed by a brood of children like any good housefather. But France had outgrown the king business, and Louis did not know this until the morning of the 24th of February of the year 1848, when a crowd stormed the Tularis and drove his majesty away and proclaimed the Republic. When the news of this event reached Vienna, Metternich expressed the casual opinion that this was only a repetition of the year 1793, and that the Allies would once more be obliged to march upon Paris and make an end to this very unseemly democratic row. But two weeks later his own Austrian capital was an open revolt. Metternich escaped from the mob through the backdoor of his palace, and the Emperor Ferdinand was forced to give his subjects a constitution which embodied most of the revolutionary principles which his prime minister had tried to suppress for the last 33 years. This time all Europe felt the shock. Hungary declared itself independent and commenced a war against the Habsburgs under the leadership of Louis Cossuth. The unequal struggle lasted more than a year. It was finally suppressed by the armies of Tsar Nicholas, who marched across the Carpathian Mountains and made Hungary once more safe for autocracy. The Habsburgs thereupon established extraordinary courts-martial and hanged the greater part of the Hungarian Patriots whom they had not been able to defeat in open battle. As for Italy, the island of Sicily declared itself independent from Naples and drove its bourbon king away. In the Papal States the prime minister Rossi was murdered and the pope was forced to flee. He returned the next year at the head of a French army which remained in Europe to protect his holiness against his subjects until the year 1870. Then it was called back to defend France against the Prussians, and Rome became the capital of Italy. In the north Milan and Venice rose against their Austrian masters. They were supported by King Albert of Sardinia, but a strong Austrian army under Old Brodsky marched into the valley of the Po, defeated the Sardinians near Cestoza and Novara, and forced Albert to abdicate in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel, who a few years later was to be the first king of united Italy. In Germany the unrest of the year 1848 took the form of a great national demonstration in favor of political unity and a representative form of government. In Bavaria the king who had wasted his time and money upon an Irish lady who posed as a Spanish dancer, she was called Lola Montez and lies buried in New York's Pottersfield, was driven away by the enraged students of the university. In Prussia the king was forced to stand with uncovered head before the coffins of those who had been killed during the street fighting and to promise a constitutional form of government. And in March of the year 1849 a German parliament consisting of 550 delegates from all parts of the country came together in Frankfurt and proposed that King Frederick William of Prussia should be the emperor of a united Germany. Then however the tide began to turn. Incompetent Ferdinand had abdicated in favor of his nephew Francis Joseph. The well-drilled Austrian army had remained faithful to their warlord. The hangman was given plenty of work and the Habsburgs after the nature of that strangely cat-like family once more landed upon their feet and rapidly strengthened their position as the masters of Eastern and Western Europe. They played the game of politics very adroitly and used the jealousies of the other German states to prevent the elevation of the Prussian king to the imperial dignity. Their long training in the art of suffering defeat had taught them the value of patience. They knew how to wait. They bided their time and while the Liberals utterly untrained in practical politics talked and talked and talked and got intoxicated by their own fine speeches the Austrians quietly gathered their forces, dismissed the parliament of Frankfurt and re-established the old and impossible German Confederation which the Congress of Vienna had wished upon an unsuspecting world. But among the men who had attended this strange parliament of unpractical enthusiasts there was a Prussian country squire by the name of Bismarck who had made good use of his eyes and ears. He had a deep contempt for oratory. He knew what every man of action has always known that nothing is ever accomplished by talk. In his own way he was a sincere patriot. He had been trained in the old school of diplomacy and he could outlie his opponents just as he could out walk them and out drink them and out ride them. Bismarck felt convinced that the loose confederation of little states must be changed into a strong united country if it would hold its own against the other European powers. Brought up amidst feudal ideas of loyalty he decided that the house of Hohenzollern, of which he was the most faithful servant, should rule the new state rather than the incompetent Habsburgs. For this purpose he must first get rid of the Austrian influence and he began to make the necessary preparations for this painful operation. Italy in the meantime had solved her own problem and had rid herself of her hated Austrian master. The unity of Italy was the work of three men, Kavor, Mazini and Garibaldi. Of these three, Kavor, the civil engineer, with the short-sighted eyes and the steel-rimmed glasses, played the part of the careful political pilot. Mazini, who had spent most of his days in different European carrots hiding from the Austrian police, was the public agitator. While Garibaldi, with his band of red-shirted roughriders, appealed to the popular imagination. Mazini and Garibaldi were both believers in the republican form of government. Kavor, however, was a monarchist and the others who recognized his superior ability in such matters of practical statecraft accepted his decision and sacrificed their own ambitions for the greater good of their beloved fatherland. Here you see a picture of a small jail cell with Giuseppe Mazini sitting inside. Kavor felt towards the house of Sardinia, as Bismarck did towards the Hohenzollan family. With infinite care and great shrewdness, he set to work to jockey the Sardinian king into a position from which his majesty would be able to assume the leadership of the entire Italian people. The unsettled political conditions in the rest of Europe greatly helped him in his plans and no country contributed more to the independence of Italy than her old and trusted and often distrusted neighbor, France. In that turbulent country, in November of the year 1852, the republic had come to a sudden but not unexpected end. Napoleon III, the son of Louis Bonaparte and the former king of Holland, and the small nephew of a great uncle, had re-established an empire and had made himself emperor by the grace of God and the will of the people. This young man, who had been educated in Germany and who mixed his French with harsh Teutonic gutteralls, just as the first Napoleon had always spoken the language of his adopted country with a strong Italian accent, was trying very hard to use the Napoleonic tradition for his own benefit. But he had many enemies and did not feel very certain of his hold upon his ready-made throne. He had gained the friendship of Queen Victoria, but this had not been a difficult task as the good queen was not particularly brilliant and was very susceptible to flattery. As for the other European sovereigns, they treated the French emperor with insulting haughtiness and sat up knights devising new ways in which they could show their upstart good brother how sincerely they despised him. Napoleon was obliged to find a way in which he could break this opposition, either through love or through fear. He well knew the fascination which the word glory still held for his subjects. Since he was forced to gamble for his throne, he decided to play the game of empire for high stakes. He used an attack of Russia upon Turkey as an excuse for bringing about the Crimean War, in which England and France combined against the Tsar on behalf of the Sultan. It was a very costly and exceedingly unprofitable enterprise. Neither France nor England nor Russia reaped much glory. But the Crimean War did one good thing. It gave Sardinia a chance to volunteer on the winning side, and when peace was declared, it gave Kavor the opportunity to lay claim to the gratitude of both England and France. Having made use of the international situation to get Sardinia recognized as one of the more important powers of Europe, the clever Italian then provoked a war between Sardinia and Austria in June of the year 1859. He assured himself of the support of Napoleon in exchange for the provinces of Savoy and the city of Nice, which was really an Italian town. The Franco-Italian armies defeated the Austrians at Magenta and Sulferino, and the former Austrian provinces and Ducches were united into a single Italian kingdom. Florence became the capital of this new Italy until the year 1870, when the French were called their troops from Rome to defend France against the Germans. As soon as they were gone, the Italian troops entered the eternal city, and the house of Sardinia took up its residence in the old palace of the Querenal, which an ancient pope had built on the ruins of the baths of the Emperor Constantine. The pope, however, moved across the river Tiber and hid behind the walls of the Vatican, which had been the home of many of his predecessors since their return from the exile of Avignon in the year 1377. He protested loudly against this high-handed theft of his domains and addressed letters of appeal to those faithful Catholics who were inclined to sympathize with him in his loss. Their number, however, was small, and it had been steadily decreasing. Four, once delivered from the Cares of State, the pope was able to devote all his time to questions of a spiritual nature. Standing high above the petty quarrels of the European politicians, the papacy assumed a new dignity, which proved of great benefit to the church, and made it an international power for social and religious progress, which has shown a much more intelligent appreciation of modern economic problems than most Protestant sects. In this way, the attempt of the Congress of Vienna to settle the Italian question by making the peninsula in Austrian province was, at last, undone. The German problem, however, remained as yet unsolved. It proved the most difficult of all. The failure of the revolution of the year 1848 had led to the wholesale migration of the more energetic and liberal elements among the German people. These young fellows had moved to the United States of America, to Brazil, to the new colonies in Asia and America. Their work was continued in Germany but by a different sort of men. In the new diet, which met at Frankfurt, after the collapse of the German parliament and the failure of the liberals to establish a united country, the kingdom of Prussia was represented by that same Otto von Bismarck, from whom we parted a few pages ago. Bismarck by now had managed to gain the complete confidence of the king of Prussia. That was all he asked for. The opinion of the Prussian parliament, or of the Prussian people, interested him not at all. With his own eyes he had seen the defeat of the liberals. He knew that he would not be able to get rid of Austria without a war, and he began by strengthening the Prussian army. The Lantag, exasperated at his high-handed methods, refused to give him the necessary credits. Bismarck did not even bother to discuss the matter. He went ahead and increased his army with the help of funds, which the Prussian House appears, and the king placed at his disposal. Then he looked for a national cause, which could be used for the purpose of creating a great wave of patriotism among all the German people. In the north of Germany there were the duchies of Schleißfeg and Holstein, whichever since the Middle Ages had been a source of trouble. Both countries were inhabited by a certain number of Danes and a certain number of Germans, but although they were governed by the king of Denmark, they were not an integral part of the Danish state, and this led to endless difficulties. Heaven forbid that I should revive this forgotten question, which now seems settled by the acts of the recent Congress of Versailles. But the Germans and Holstein were very loud in their abuse of the Danes, and the Danes in Schleißfeg make great adieu of their Danishness, and all Europe was discussing the problem, and German manor shores and turnvarians listened to sentimental speeches about the lost brethren, and the different chancellories were trying to discover what it was all about, when Prussia mobilized her armies to save the lost provinces. As Austria, the official head of the German Confederation, could not allow Prussia to act alone in such an important matter, the Habsburg troops were mobilized too, and the combined armies of the two great powers crossed the Danish frontiers, and after a very brave resistance on the part of the Danes occupied the two duchies. The Danes appealed to Europe, but Europe was otherwise engaged, and the poor Danes were left to their fate. Bismarck prepared the scene for the second number upon his imperial program. He used the division of the spoils to pick a quarrel with Austria. The Habsburgs fell into the trap. The new Prussian army, the creation of Bismarck in his faithful generals, invaded Bohemia, and in less than six weeks the last of the Austrian troops had been destroyed at Koniggratz and Sedowa, and the road to Vienna lay open. But Bismarck did not want to go too far. He knew that he would need a few friends in Europe. He offered the defeated Habsburgs very decent terms of peace, provided they would resign their chairmanship of the Confederation. He was less merciful to many of the smaller German states who had taken the side of the Austrians and annexed them to Prussia. The greater part of the northern states then formed a new organization, the so-called Northern German Confederacy, and victorious Prussia assumed the unofficial leadership of the German people. Europe stood aghast at the rapidity with which the work of consolidation had been done. England was quite indifferent, but France showed signs of disapproval. Napoleon's hold upon the French people was steadily diminishing. The Crimean War had been costly and had accomplished nothing. A second adventure in the year 1863, when a French army had tried to force an Austrian Grand Duke by the name of Maximilian upon the Mexican people as their emperor, had come to a disastrous end as soon as the American Civil War had been won by the north. For the government at Washington had forced the French to withdraw their troops, and this had given the Mexicans a chance to clear their country of the enemy and shoot the unwelcome emperor. It was necessary to give the Napoleonic throne a new coat of glory paint. Within a few years, the North German Confederation would be a serious rival of France. Napoleon decided that a war with Germany would be a good thing for his dynasty. He looked for an excuse. In Spain, the poor victim of endless revolutions gave him one. Just then the Spanish throne happened to be vacant. It had been offered to the Catholic branch of the House of Hohenzollern. The French government had objected, and the Hohenzollerns had politely refused to accept the crown. But Napoleon, who was showing signs of illness, was very much under the influence of his beautiful wife Eugenie de Montejo, the daughter of a Spanish gentleman and the granddaughter of William Kirkpatrick, an American consul at Malaga, where the grapes come from. Eugenie, though shrewd enough, was as badly educated as most Spanish women of that day. She was at the mercy of her spiritual advisers, and these worthy gentlemen felt no love for the Protestant king of Prussia. B. Bold was the advice of the Empress to her husband, but she admitted to add the second half of that famous Persian proverb, which admonishes the hero to be bold but not too bold. Napoleon, convinced of the strength of his army, addressed himself to the king of Prussia, and insisted that the king give him assurances that he would never permit another candidature of a Hohenzollern prince to the Spanish crown. As the Hohenzollerns had just declined the honor, the demand was superfluous, and Bismarck so informed the French government. But Napoleon was not satisfied. It was the year 1870, and King William was taking the waters at Ems. There one day he was approached by the French minister, who tried to reopen the discussion. The king answered very pleasantly that it was a fine day, and that the Spanish question was now closed, and that nothing more remained to be set upon the subject. As a matter of routine, a report of this interview was telegraphed to Bismarck, who handled all foreign affairs. Bismarck edited the dispatch for the benefit of the Prussian and French press. Many people have called him names for doing this. Bismarck, however, could plead the excuse that the doctrine of official news, since time immemorial, had been one of the privileges of all civilized governments. When the edited telegram was printed, the good people in Berlin felt that their old and venerable king, with his nice white whiskers, had been insulted by an arrogant little Frenchman, and the equally good people of Paris flew into a rage because their perfectly courteous minister had been shown the door by a royal Prussian flunky. And so they both went to war, and in less than two months, Napoleon and the greater part of his army were prisoners of the Germans. The Second Empire had come to an end, and the Third Republic was making ready to defend Paris against the German invaders. Paris held out for five long months. Ten days before the surrender of the city, in the nearby palace of Versailles, built by that same King Louis XIV, who had been such a dangerous enemy to the Germans, the king of Prussia was publicly proclaimed German Emperor, and a loud booming of guns told the hungry Parisians that a new German empire had taken the place of the old harmless confederation of Teutonic states and statelets. In this rough way, the German question was finally settled. By the end of the year 1871, 56 years after the memorable gathering at Vienna, the work of the Congress had been entirely undone. Metternich and Alexander and Hallerrand had tried to give the people of Europe a lasting peace. The methods they had employed had caused endless wars and revolutions, and the feeling of a common brotherhood of the 18th century was followed by an era of exaggerated nationalism which has not yet come to an end. End of chapter 56, recorded by Michel Crandall, Fremont, California, June 2009. Chapter 57 of The Story of Mankind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon. Chapter 57. The Age of the Engine. But while the people of Europe were fighting for their national independence, the world in which they lived had been entirely changed by a series of inventions which had made the clumsy old steam engine of the 18th century the most faithful and efficient slave of man. The greatest benefactor of the human race died more than half a million years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low brow and sunken eyes, a heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth. He would not have looked well in a gathering of modern scientists, but they would have honoured him as their master. For he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift up a heavy boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our first tools, and he did more than any human being who came after him to give man his enormous advantage over the other animals with whom he shares this planet. Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use of a greater number of tools. The first wheel, a round disk made out of an old tree, created as much stir in the communities of 100,000 BC as the flying machine did only a few years ago. In Washington the story is told of a director of the patent office who in the early 30s of the last century suggested that the patent office be abolished because everything that could possibly be invented had been invented. A similar feeling must have spread through the prehistoric world when the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the people were able to move from place to place without rowing or punting or pulling from the shore. Indeed one of the most interesting chapters of history is the effort of man to let someone else or something else do his work for him, while he enjoyed his leisure sitting in the sun or painting pictures on rocks or training young wolves and little tigers to behave like peaceful domestic animals. Of course in the very olden days it was always possible to enslave a weaker neighbor and force him to do the unpleasant tasks of life. One of the reasons why the Greeks and Romans who were quite as intelligent as we are failed to devise more interesting machinery was to be found in the widespread existence of slavery. Why should a great mathematician waste his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill the air with noise and smoke when he could go to the marketplace and buy all the slaves he needed at a very small expense? And during the Middle Ages, although slavery had been abolished and only a mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds discouraged the idea of using machinery because they thought this would throw a large number of their brethren out of work. Besides, the Middle Ages were not at all interested in producing large quantities of goods. Their tailors and butchers and carpenters worked for the immediate needs of the small community in which they lived and had no desire to compete with their neighbors or to produce more than was strictly necessary. During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church against scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as rigidly as before, a large number of men began to devote their lives to mathematics and astronomy and physics and chemistry. Two years before the beginning of the Thirty Years War, John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his little book, which described the new invention of logarithms. During the war itself, Gottfried Leipniz of Leipzig had perfected the system of infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the Peace of Westphalia, Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was born, and in that same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, died. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years War had destroyed the prosperity of Central Europe, and there was a sudden but very general interest in alchemy, the strange pseudo-science of the Middle Ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into gold. This proved to be impossible, but the alchemists in their laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped the work of the chemists who were their successors. The work of all these men provided the world with a solid scientific foundation upon which it was possible to build even the most complicated of engines, and the number of practical men made good use of it. The Middle Ages had used wood for the few bits of necessary machinery, but wood wore out easily. Iron was a much better material, but iron was scarce except in England. In England, therefore, most of the smelting was done. To smelt iron huge fires were needed. In the beginning these fires had been made of wood, but gradually the forests had been used up. Then stone coal, the petrified trees of prehistoric times, was used. But coal, as you know, has to be dug out of the ground, and it has to be transported to the smelting ovens, and the mines have to be kept dry from the ever-invading waters. These were two problems which had to be solved at once. For the time being, horses could still be used to haul the coal wagons, but the pumping question demanded the application of special machinery. Several inventors were busy trying to solve the difficulty. They all knew that steam would have to be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam engine was very old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century before Christ, had described to us several bits of machinery which were driven by steam. The people of the Renaissance had played with the notion of steam-driven war chariots. The Marquis of Worcester, a contemporary of Newton, in his Book of Inventions tells of a steam engine. A little later, in the year 1698, Thomas Savory of London applied for a patent for a pumping engine. At the same time, a Hollander, Christiane Huygens, was trying to perfect an engine in which gunpowder was used to cause regular explosions in much the same way as we use gasoline in our motors. All over Europe people were busy with the idea. Denis Pappin, a Frenchman, friend, and assistant of Huygens, was making experiments with steam engines in several countries. He invented a little wagon that was driven by steam and a paddle-wheel boat. But when he tried to take a trip in his vessel it was confiscated by the authorities on a complaint of the Boatman's Union, who feared that such a craft would deprive them of their livelihood. Pappin finally died in London in great poverty, having wasted all his money on his inventions. But at the time of his death another mechanical enthusiast, Thomas Newcomen, was working on the problem of a new steam pump. Fifty years later, his engine was improved upon by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year 1777 he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of real practical value. But during the centuries of experiments with a heat engine the political world had greatly changed. The British people had succeeded the Dutch as the common carriers of the world's trade. They had opened up new colonies. They took the raw materials which the colonies produced to England, and there they turned them into finished products, and then they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the world. During the 17th century the people of Georgia and the Carolinas had begun to grow a new shrub which gave a strange sort of woolly substance, the so-called cotton wool. After this had been plucked it was sent to England, and there the people of Lancashire wove it into cloth. This weaving was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen. Very soon a number of improvements were made in the process of weaving. In the year 1730 John Kay invented the fly shuttle. In 1770 James Hargreaves got a patent on his spinning Jenny. Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton gin which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had previously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day. Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cartwright invented large weaving machines which were driven by water power, and then in the 80s of the 18th century just when the estates general of France had begun those famous meetings which were to revolutionize the political system of Europe, the engines of Watt were arranged in such a way that they could drive the weaving machines of Arkwright, and this created an economic and social revolution which has changed human relationship in almost every part of the world. As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success the inventors turned their attention to the problem of propelling boats and carts with the help of a mechanical contrivance. Watt himself designed plans for a steam locomotive, but ere he had perfected his ideas in the year 1804 a locomotive made by Richard Trevithic carried a load of twenty tons at Penidaran in the Wales Mining District. At the same time an American jeweler and portrait painter by the name of Robert Fulton was in Paris trying to convince Napoleon that with the use of his submarine boat, the Nautilus, and his steamboat the French might be able to destroy the naval supremacy of England. Fulton's idea of a steamboat was not original. He had undoubtedly copied it from John Fitch, a mechanical genius of Connecticut whose cleverly constructed steamer had first navigated the Delaware River as early as the year 1787. But Napoleon and his scientific advisers did not believe in the practical possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the Scotch-built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the Seine, the great emperor neglected to avail himself of this formidable weapon, which might have given him his revenge for Trafalgar. As for Fulton he returned to the United States and, being a practical man of business, he organized a successful steamboat company together with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was American minister to France when Fulton was in Paris trying to sell his invention. The first steamer of this new company, the Clermont, which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York State, equipped with an engine built by Bolton and Watt of Birmingham in England, began a regular service between New York and Albany in the year 1807. As for poor John Fitch, the man who longed before anyone else had used the steamboat for commercial purposes, he came to a sad death. Broken in health and empty of purse he had come to the end of his resources when his fifth boat, which was propelled by means of a screw propeller, had been destroyed. His neighbors jeered at him as they were to laugh a hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his funny flying machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country uneasy access to the broad rivers of the West, and his countrymen preferred to travel in flat boats or go on foot. In the year 1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed himself by taking poison. But twenty years later the Savannah, a steamer of one thousand eight hundred fifty tons, and making six knots an hour—the Mauritania goes just four times as fast—crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liverpool in the record time of twenty-five days. Then there was an end to the derision of the multitude, and in their enthusiasm the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man. Six years later George Stevenson, a Scotchman, who had been building locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from the mine pit to smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his famous travelling engine, which reduced the price of coal by almost seventy percent, and which made it possible to establish the first regular passenger service between Manchester and Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at the unheard of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years later this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the present time any well-behaved fliver, the direct descendant of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler and Lavasser of the eighties of the last century, can do better than these early puffing billies. But while these practically-minded engineers were improving upon their rattling heat engines, a group of pure scientists, men who devote fourteen hours of each day to the study of those theoretical scientific phenomena, without which no mechanical progress would be possible, were following a new scent which promised to lead them into the most secret and hidden domains of nature. Two thousand years ago a number of Greek and Roman philosophers, notably Thales of Miletus and Pliny, who was killed while trying to study the eruption of Vesuvius of the year seventy-nine when Pompey and Herculaneum were buried beneath the ashes, had noticed the strange antics of bits of straw and of feather which were held near a piece of amber which was being rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages had not been interested in this mysterious electric power. But immediately after the Renaissance, William Gilbert, the private physician of Queen Elizabeth, wrote his famous treaties on the character and behavior of magnets. During the Thirty Years' War Otto von Gerike, the burgamaster of Magdeburg, and the inventor of the air pump, constructed the first electrical machine. During the next century a large number of scientists devoted themselves to the study of electricity. Not less than three professors invented the famous Leidenjar in the year 1795. At the same time Benjamin Franklin, the most universal genius of America next to Benjamin Thompson, who after his flight from New Hampshire on account of his pro-British sympathies became known as Count Romford, was devoting his attention to the subject. He discovered that lightning and the electric spark were manifestations of the same electric power and continued his electric studies until the end of his busy and useful life. Then came Volta, with his famous electric pile, and Galvani, and De, and the Danish professor Hans Christian Arsted, and Ampere, and Aragó, and Faraday, all of them diligent searchers after the true nature of the electric forces. They freely gave their discoveries to the world, and Samuel Morse, who like Fulton began his career as an artist, thought that he could use this new electric current to transmit messages from one city to another. He intended to use copper wire and the little machine which he had invented. People laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance his own experiments, and soon he had spent all his money, and then he was very poor, and people laughed even louder. He then asked Congress to help him, and a special committee on commerce promised him their support. But the members of Congress were not at all interested, and Morse had to wait twelve years before he was given a small congressional appropriation. He then built a telegraph between Baltimore and Washington. In the year 1837 he had shown his first successful telegraph in one of the lecture halls of New York University. Finally on the 24th of May of the year 1844 the first long-distance message was sent from Washington to Baltimore, and today the whole world is covered with telegraph wires, and we can send news from Europe to Asia in a few seconds. Twenty-three years later Alexander Graham Bell used the electric current for his telephone, and half a century afterwards Marconi improved upon these ideas by inventing a system of sending messages which did away entirely with the old fashioned wires. While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his telegraph, Michael Faraday, the York Sherman, had constructed his first dynamo. This tiny little machine was completed in the year 1881 when Europe was still trembling as a result of the great July revolutions which had so severely upset the plans of the Congress of Vienna. The first dynamo grew and grew and grew, and today it provides us with heat and with light. You know the little incandescent bulbs which Edison, building upon French and English experiments of the forties and fifties, first made in 1878, and with power for all sorts of machines. If I am not mistaken the electric engine will soon entirely drive out the heat engine, just as in the olden days the more highly organized prehistoric animals drove out their less efficient neighbors. Personally, but I know nothing about machinery, this will make me very happy, for the electric engine which can be run by water power is a clean and companionable servant of mankind, but the heat engine, the marvel of the 18th century, is a noisy and dirty creature for ever filling the world with ridiculous smokestacks and with dust and soot and asking that it be fed with coal which has to be dug out of mines at great inconvenience and risk to thousands of people. And if I were a novelist and not a historian who must stick to facts and may not use his imagination, I would describe the happy day when the last steam locomotive shall be taken to the Museum of Natural History to be placed next to the skeleton of the dinosaur and the pterodactyl and the other extinct creatures of a bygone age. The new engines were very expensive and only people of wealth could afford them. The old carpenter or shoemaker who had been his own master in his little workshop was obliged to hire himself out to the owners of the big mechanical tools and while he made more money than before he lost his former independence and he did not like that. In the olden days the work of the world had been done by independent workmen who sat in their own little workshops in the front of their houses who own their own tools who boxed the ears of their own apprentices and who within the limits prescribed by their guilds conducted their business as it pleased them. They lived simple lives and were obliged to work very long hours but they were their own masters. If they got up and saw that it was a fine day to go fishing they went fishing and there was no one to say no. But the introduction of machinery changed this. A machine is really nothing but a greatly enlarged tool. A railroad train which carries you at the speed of a mile a minute is in reality a pair of very fast legs and a steam hammer which flattens heavy plates of iron is just a terrible big fist made of steel but whereas we can all afford a pair of good legs and a good strong fist a railroad train and a steam hammer and a cotton factory are very expensive pieces of machinery and they are not owned by a single man but usually by a company of people who all contribute a certain sum and then divide the profits of their railroad or cotton mill according to the amount of money which they have invested. Here you see a picture with two panels called the man power and machine power at the top it says when the acropolis was built 100 men were needed to move a heavy stone at the bottom it says nowadays little drops of gasoline do the same work in less time and it shows a tractor. Therefore when machines had been improved until they were really practicable and profitable the builders of those large tools the machine manufacturers began to look for customers who could afford to pay for them in cash during the early middle ages when land had been almost the only form of wealth the nobility were the only people who were considered wealthy but as I have told you in a previous chapter the gold and silver which they possessed was quite insignificant and they used the old system of barter exchanging cows for horses and eggs for honey during the crusades the burgers of the cities had been able to gather riches from the reviving trade between the east and the west and they had been serious rivals of the lords and the knights the french revolution had entirely destroyed the wealth of the nobility and had enormously increased that of the middle class or bourgeoisie the years of unrest which followed the great revolution had offered many middle class people a chance to get more than their share of this world's goods the estates of the church had been confiscated by the french convention and had been sold at auction there had been a terrific amount of graft land speculators had stolen thousands of square miles of valuable land and during the napoleonic wars they had used their capital to profiteer and grain and gunpowder and now they possessed more wealth than they needed for the actual expenses of their households and they could afford to build themselves factories and to hire men and women to work the machines this caused a very abrupt change in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people within a few years many cities doubled the number of their inhabitants and the old civic center which had been the real home of the citizens was surrounded with ugly and cheaply built suburbs where the workmen slept after their 11 or 12 or 13 hours spent in the factories and from where they returned to the factory as soon as the whistle blew far and wide throughout the countryside there was talk of the fabulous sums of money that could be made in the towns the peasant boy accustomed to a life in the open went to the city he rapidly lost his old health amidst the smoke and dust and dirt of those early and badly ventilated workshops and the end very often was death in the poor house or in the hospital of course the change from the farm to the factory on the part of so many people was not accomplished without a certain amount of opposition since one engine could do as much work as a hundred men the 99 others who were thrown out of employment did not like it frequently they attacked the factory buildings and set fire to the machines but insurance companies had been organized as early as the 17th century and as a rule the owners were well protected against loss here you see a picture of a very large building with lots of smoke coming out of smokestacks on the top and it's titled the factory soon newer and better machines were installed the factory was surrounded with a high wall and then there was an end to the rioting the ancient guilds could not possibly survive in this new world of steam and iron they went out of existence and then the workmen tried to organize regular labor unions but the factory owners who through their wealth could exercise great influence upon the politicians of the different countries went to the legislature and had laws passed which forbade the forming of such trade unions because they interfered with the liberty of action of the working man please do not think that the good members of parliament who passed these laws were wicked tyrants they were the true sons of the revolutionary period when everybody talked of liberty and when people often killed their neighbors because they were not quite as liberty loving as they ought to have been since liberty was the foremost virtue of man it was not right that labor unions should dictate to their members the hours during which they could work and the wages which they must demand the workmen must at all times be free to sell his services in the open market and the employer must be equally free to conduct his business as he saw fit the days of the mercantile system when the state had regulated the industrial life of the entire community were coming to an end the new idea of freedom insisted that the state stand entirely aside and let commerce take its course the last half of the 18th century had not merely been a time of intellectual and political doubt but the old economic ideas too had been replaced by new ones which better suited the need of the hour several years before the french revolution to joe who had been one of the unsuccessful ministers of finance of louis the 16th had preached the novel doctrine of economic liberty to joe lived in a country which had suffered from too much red tape too many regulations too many officials trying to enforce too many laws remove this official supervision he wrote let the people do as they please and everything will be all right soon his famous advice of lacy fair became the battle cry around which the economists of that period rallied at the same time in england adam smith was working on his mighty volumes on the wealth of nations which made another plea for liberty and the natural rights of trade 30 years later after the fall of napoleon when the reactionary powers of europe had gained their victory at vienna that same freedom which was denied to the people in their political relations was forced upon them in their industrial life the general use of machinery as i have said at the beginning of this chapter proved to be of great advantage to the state wealth increased rapidly the machine made it possible for a single country like england to carry all the burdens of the great napoleonic wars the capitalists the people who provided the money with which machines were bought reaped enormous profits they became ambitious and began to take an interest in politics they tried to compete with the land of aristocracy which still exercised great influence upon the government of most european countries in england where the members of parliament were still elected according to a royal decree of the year 1265 and where a large number of recently created industrial centers were without representation they brought about the passing of the reform bill of the year 1832 which changed the electoral system and gave the class of the factory owners more influence upon the legislative body this however caused great discontent among the millions of factory workers who were left without any voice in the government they too began an agitation for the right to vote they put their demands down in a document which came to be known as the people's charter the debates about this charter grew more and more violent they had not yet come to an end when the revolutions of the year 1848 broke out frightened by the threat of a new outbreak of Jacobinism and violence the english government placed the duke of wellington who is now in his 80th year at the head of the army and called for volunteers london was a place in a state of siege and preparations were made to suppress the coming revolution but the chartis movement killed itself through bad leadership and no acts of violence took place the new class of wealthy factory owners i dislike the word bourgeoisie which had been used to death by the apostles of a new social order slowly increased its hold upon the government and the conditions of industrial life in the large cities continued to transform vast acres of pasture and wheatland into dreary slums which guard the approach of every modern european town end of chapter 58 recorded by michelle krandall freemont california june 2009 chapter 59 of the story of mankind this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox dot org the story of mankind by hendrick funlone chapter 59 emancipation the general introduction of machinery did not bring about the era of happiness and prosperity which had been predicted by the generation which saw the stagecoach replaced by the railroad several remedies were suggested but none of these quite solved the problem in the year 1831 just before the passing of the first reform bill jeremy bentham the great english student of legislative methods and the most practical political reformer of that day wrote to a friend the way to be comfortable is to make others comfortable the way to make others comfortable is to appear to love them the way to appear to love them is to love them in reality jeremy was an honest man he said what he believed to be he said what he believed to be true his opinions were shared by thousands of his countrymen they felt responsible for the happiness of their less fortunate neighbors and they tried their very best to help them and heaven knows it was time that something be done the ideal of economic freedom the laissez-faire of bourgeois had been necessary in the old society where medieval restrictions blamed all industrial effort but this liberty of action which had been the highest law of the land had led to a terrible yay a frightful condition the hours in the factory were limited only by the physical strength of the workers as long as a woman could sit before her loom without fainting from fatigue she was supposed to work children of five and six were taken to the cotton mills to save them from the dangers of the street and a life of idleness a law had been passed which forced the children of paupers to go to work or be punished by being chained to their machines in return for their services they got enough bad food to keep them alive and a sort of pigsty in which they could rest at night often they were so tired that they fell asleep at their job to keep them awake a foreman with a whip made the rounds and beat them on the knuckles when it was necessary to bring them back to their duties of course under these circumstances thousands of little children died this was regrettable and the employers who after all were human beings and not without a heart sincerely wished that they could abolish child labor but since man was free it followed that children were free too besides if mr. jones had tried to work his factory without the use of children of five and six his rival mr. stone would have hired an extra supply of little boys and jones would have been forced into bankruptcy it was therefore impossible for jones to do without child labor until such time as an act of parliament should forbid it for all employers but as parliament was no longer dominated by the old landed aristocracy which had despised the upstart factory owners with their money bags and had treated them with open contempt but was under control of the representatives from the industrial centers and as long as the law did not allow workmen to combine in labor unions very little was accomplished of course the intelligent and decent people of that time were not blind to these terrible conditions they were just helpless machinery had conquered the world by surprise and it took a great many years and the efforts of thousands of noble men and women to make the machine what it ought to be man's servant and not his master curiously enough the first attack upon the outrageous system of employment which was then common in all parts of the world was made on behalf of the black slaves of africa and america slavery had been introduced into the american continent by the spaniards they had tried to use the indians as laborers in the fields and in the mines but the indians when taken away from a life in the open had lain down and died and to save them from extinction a kind-hearted priest had suggested that negroes be brought from africa to do the work the negroes were strong and could stand rough treatment besides association with the white man would give them a chance to learn christianity and in this way they would be able to save their souls and so from every possible point of view it would be an excellent arrangement both for the kindly white man and for his ignorant black brother but with the introduction of machinery there had been a greater demand for cotton and the negroes were forced to work harder than ever before and they too like the indians began to die under the treatment which they received at the hands of the overseers stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to europe and in all countries men and women began to agitate for the abolition of slavery in england william wilberforce and zachery macawley the father of the great historian whose history of england you must read if you want to know how wonderfully interesting a history book can be organized a society for the suppression of slavery first of all they got a law passed which made slave trading illegal and after the year 1840 there was not a single slave in any of the british colonies the revolution of 1848 put an end to slavery in the french possessions the portuguese passed a law in the year 1858 which promised all slaves their liberty in 20 years from that date the dutch abolished slavery in 1863 and in the same year tsar alexander the second returned to his serfs that liberty which had been taken away from them more than two centuries before in the united states of america the question led to grave difficulties and a prolonged war although the declaration of independence had laid down the principle that all men were created free and equal an exception had been made for those men and women whose skins were dark and who worked on the plantations of the southern states as time went on the dislike of the people of the north where the institution of slavery increased and they made no secret of their feelings the southerners however claimed that they could not grow their cotton without slave labor and for almost 50 years a mighty debate raged in both the congress and the senate the north remained obdurate and the south would not give in when it appeared impossible to reach a compromise the southern states threatened to leave the union it was a most dangerous point in the history of the union many things might have happened that they did not happen was the work of a very great and very good man on the sixth of november of the year 1860 abraham lincoln an illinois lawyer and a man who had made his own intellectual fortune had been elected president by the republicans who were very strong in the anti-slavery states he knew the evils of human bondage at first hand and his shrewd common sense told him that there was no room on the northern continent for two rival nations when a number of southern states seceded and formed the confederate states of america lincoln accepted the challenge the northern states were called upon for volunteers hundreds of thousands of young men responded with eager enthusiasm and there followed four years of bitter civil war the south better prepared and following the brilliant leadership of lee and jackson repeatedly defeated the armies of the north then the economic strength of new england and the west began to tell an unknown officer by the name of grant arose from obscurity and became the charles martel of the great slave war without interruption he hammered his mighty blows upon the crumbling defenses of the south early in the year 1863 president lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation which set all slaves free in april of the year 1865 lee surrendered the last of his brave armies at apomattox a few days later president lincoln was murdered by a lunatic but his work was done with the exception of cuba which was still under spanish domination slavery had come to an end in every part of the civilized world but while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount of liberty the free workmen of europe did not fare quite so well indeed it is a matter of surprise to many contemporary writers and observers that the masses of workmen the so-called proletariat did not die out from sheer misery they lived in dirty houses situated in miserable parts of the slums they ate bad food they received just enough schooling to fit them for their tasks in case of death or an accident their families were not provided for but the brewery and distillery interests who could exercise great influence upon the legislature encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them unlimited quantities of whiskey and gin at very cheap rates the enormous improvement which has taken place since the thirties and the forties of the last century is not due to the efforts of a single man the best brains of two generations devoted themselves to the task of saving the world from the disastrous results of the all too sudden introduction of machinery they did not try to destroy the capitalistic system this would have been very foolish for the accumulated wealth of other people when intelligently used may be a very great benefit to all mankind but they tried to combat the notion that true equality can exist between the man who has wealth and owns the factories and can close their doors at will without the risk of going hungry and the laborer who must take whatever job is offered at whatever wage he can get or face the risk of starvation for himself his wife and his children they endeavored to introduce a number of laws which regulated the relations between the factory owners and the factory workers in this the reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries today the majority of the laborers are well protected their hours are being reduced to the excellent average of eight and their children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the carding room of the cotton mills but there were other men who also contemplated the site of all the belching smokestacks who heard the rattle of the railroad trains who saw the storehouses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials and who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity would lead in the years to come they remembered that the human race had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and industrial competition could they change the existing order of things and do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human happiness to profits this idea this vague hope for a better day was not restricted to a single country in england robert owen the owner of many cotton mills established a so-called socialistic community which was a success but when he died the prosperity of new lanark came to an end and an attempt of louis blanc a french journalist to establish social workshops all over france fared no better indeed the increasing number of socialistic writers soon began to see that little individual communities which remained outside of the regular industrial life would never be able to accomplish anything at all it was necessary to study the fundamental principles underlying the whole industrial and capitalistic society before useful remedies could be suggested the practical socialists like robert owen and louis blanc and françois fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like carl marx and frideric angles of these two marx is the best known he was a very brilliant jew whose family had for a long time lived in germany he had heard of the experiments of owen and blanc and he began to interest himself in questions of labor and wages and employment but his liberal views made him very unpopular with the police authorities of germany and he was forced to flee to brussels and then to london where he lived a poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the new york tribune no one thus far had paid much attention to his books on economic subjects but in the year 1864 he organized the first international association of working men and three years later in 1867 he published the first volume of his well-known treatise called capital marx believed that all history was a long struggle between those who have and those who don't have the introduction and general use of machinery had created a new class in society that of the capitalists who used their surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used by the laborers to produce still more wealth which was again used to build more factories and so on until the end of time meanwhile according to marx the third estate the bourgeois was growing richer and richer and the fourth estate the proletariat was growing poorer and poorer and he predicted that in the end one man would possess all the wealth of the world while the others would be his employees and dependent upon his goodwill to prevent such a state of affairs marx advised working men of all countries to unite and to fight for a number of political and economic measures which he had enumerated in a manifesto in the year 1848 the year of the last great european revolution these views of course were very unpopular with the governments of europe many countries especially prussia passed severe laws against the socialists and policemen were ordered to break up the socialist meetings and to arrest the speakers but that sort of persecution never does any good martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an unpopular cause in europe the number of socialists steadily increased and it was soon clear that the socialists did not contemplate a violent revolution but were using their increasing power in the different parliaments to promote the interests of the labouring classes socialists were even called upon to act as cabinet ministers and they cooperated with progressive catholics and protestants to undo the damage that had been caused by the industrial revolution and to bring about a fairer division of the many benefits which had followed the introduction of machinery and the increased production of wealth end of chapter 59 read on june 2nd 2009 in san diego california chapter 60 of the story of mankind this is a lebervox recording all lebervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit lebervox.org recording by michelle krandall the story of mankind by hendrick von lohm chapter 60 the age of science but the world had undergone another change which was of greater importance than either the political or the industrial revolutions after generations of oppression and persecution the scientist had at last gained liberty of action and he was now trying to discover the fundamental laws which govern the universe the egyptians the babelonians the chaldeans the greeks and the romans had all contributed something to the first vague notions of science and scientific investigation but the great migrations of the fourth century had destroyed the classical world of the Mediterranean and the christian church which was more interested in the life of the soul than in the life of the body had regarded science as a manifestation of that human arrogance which wanted to pry into divine affairs which belonged to the realm of almighty god and which therefore was closely related to the seven deadly sins here you see a picture entitled the philosopher of a man walking near windmills through a field the renaissance to a certain but limited extent had broken through this wall of medieval prejudices the reformation however which had overtaken the renaissance in the early 16th century had been hostile to the ideals of the new civilization and once more the men of science were threatened with severe punishment should they try to pass beyond the narrow limits of knowledge which had been laid down in holy writ our world is filled with the statues of great generals atop of prancing horses leading their cheering soldiers to glorious victory here and there a modest slab of marble announces that a man of science has found his final resting place a thousand years from now we shall probably do these things differently and the children of that happy generation shall know of this splendid courage and the almost inconceivable devotion to duty of the men who were the pioneers of that abstract knowledge which alone has made our modern world a practical possibility many of these scientific pioneers suffered poverty and contempt and humiliation they lived in garrets and died in dungeons they dared not print their names on the title pages of their books and they dared not print their conclusions in the land of their birth but smuggled the manuscripts to some secret printing shop in amsterdam or harlem they were exposed to the bitter enmity of the church both protestant and catholic and were the subjects of endless sermons inciting the parishioners to violence against the heretics here and there they found an asylum in holland where the spirit of tolerance was strongest the authorities while regarding these scientific investigations with little favor yet refused to interfere with people's freedom of thought it became a little asylum for intellectual liberty where french and english and german philosophers and mathematicians and physicians could go to enjoy a short spell of rest and get a breath of free air in another chapter i have told you how roger bacon the great genius of the 13th century was prevented for years from writing a single word lest he get into new troubles with the authorities of the church and 500 years later the contributors to the great philosophic encyclopedia were under the constant supervision of the french gendarmerie half a century afterwards darwin who dared to question the story of the creation of man as revealed in the bible was denounced from every pulpit as an enemy of the human race even today the persecution of those who venture into the unknown realm of science has not entirely come to an end and while i am writing this mr brian is addressing a vast multitude on the menace of darwinism warning his hearers against the errors of the great english naturalist all this however is a mere detail the work that has to be done invariably gets done and the ultimate profit of the discoveries and the inventions goes to the mass of those same people who have always decried the man of vision as an unpractical idealist the 17th century had still preferred to investigate the far off heavens and to study the position of our planet in relation to the solar system even so the church had disapproved of this unseemly curiosity and copernicus who first of all had proved that the sun was the center of the universe did not publish his work until the day of his death galileo spent the greater part of his life under the supervision of the clerical authorities but he continued to use his telescope and provided isaac newton with a mass of practical observations which greatly helps the english mathematician when he discovered the existence of that interesting habit of falling objects which came to be known as the law of gravitation here you see a picture of a man standing in the corner of a very large hallway and it's entitled galileo that for the moment at least exhausted the interest in the heavens and man began to study the earth the invention of a workable microscope a strange and clumsy little thing by anthony van lovenhoek during the last half of the 17th century gave man a chance to study the microscopic creatures who are responsible for so many of his ailments it laid the foundations of the science of bacteriology which in the last 40 years has delivered the world from a great number of diseases by discovering the tiny organisms which caused the complaint it also allowed the geologists to make a more careful study of different rocks and of the fossils the petrified prehistoric plants which they found deep below the surface of the earth these investigations convinced them that the earth must be a great deal older than was stated in the book of genesis and in the year 1830 sir charles lyell published his principles of geology which denied the story of creation as related in the bible and gave a far more wonderful description of slow growth and gradual development here you see a picture of a blimp high up in the sky and it's entitled the dirigible which is another name for a blimp at the same time the marquise de laplace was working on a new theory of creation which made the earth a little blotch in the nebulous sea out of which the planetary system had been formed and bunsen and kirchhoff by the use of the spectroscope were investigating the chemical composition of the stars and of our good neighbor the sun his curious spots had first been noticed by galileo meanwhile after a most bitter and relentless warfare with the clerical authorities of catholic and protestant lands the anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the guesswork of the medieval quack within a single generation between 1810 and 1840 more progress was made in every branch of science than in all the hundreds of thousands of years that had passed since man first looked at the stars and wondered why they were there it must have been a very sad age for the people who had been educated under the old system and we can understand their feeling of hatred for such men as the marqu and darwin who did not exactly tell them that they were descended from monkeys an accusation which our grandfathers seem to regard as a personal insult but who suggested that the proud human race had evolved from a long series of ancestors who could trace the family tree back to the little jellyfishes who were the first inhabitants of our planet the dignified world of the well-to-do middle class which dominated the 19th century was willing to make use of the gas or the electric light of all the many practical applications of the great scientific discoveries but the mere investigator the man of the scientific theory without whom no progress would be possible continued to be distrusted until very recently then at last his services were recognized today the rich people who in past ages donated their wealth for the building of a cathedral construct vast laboratories where silent men do battle upon the hidden enemies of mankind and often sacrifice their lives that coming generations may enjoy greater happiness and health indeed it has come to pass that many of the ills of this world which our ancestors regarded as inevitable acts of god have been exposed as manifestations of our own ignorance and neglect every child nowadays knows that he can keep from getting typhoid fever by a little care in the choice of his drinking water but it took years and years of hard work before the doctors could convince people of this fact few of us now fear the dentist chair a study of the microbes that live in our mouth has made it possible to keep our teeth from decay must perchance a tooth be pulled then we take a sniff of gas and go our way rejoicing when the newspapers of the year 1846 brought the story of the painless operation which had been performed in america with the help of ether the good people of europe shook their heads to them it seemed against the will of god that man should escape the pain which was the share of all mortals and it took a long time before the practice of taking ether and chloroform for operations became general but the battle of progress had been one the breach in the old walls of prejudice was growing larger and larger and as time went by the ancient stones of ignorance came crumbling down the eager crusaders of a new and happier social order rushed forward suddenly they found themselves facing a new obstacle out of the ruins of a long gone past another citadel of reaction had been erected and millions of men had to give their lives before this last bulwark was destroyed end of chapter 60 recorded by michelle krandall frima california june 2009