The Expansion of Europe 1642-1789 by Wilbur Abbott

Author:Wilbur Abbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

RELIGION, INTELLECT, AND INDUSTRY. 1700-1750

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IF THERE IS ONE CHARACTERISTIC of European peoples more extraordinary than another in the field of intellect it is the amazing discrepancy between their actual and their recorded history. Had their development been confined to those concerns which fill their annals to the exclusion of almost every other topic, — the ambitions and activities of their rulers, war and diplomacy — the story of the three hundred years which culminated in the careers of Louis XIV and Charles XII would resemble nothing so much as the accounts of the rise and fall of Tartar and Zulu tribes, the exploits of Jenghiz Khan and Timur the Lame, of Chaka and Dingaan. Where there are a score of volumes on the elaborate and, for the most part, futile intrigues over the disposition of the inheritance of Charles II of Spain, there is scarcely one on the evolution, in the same period, of the mightiest agent of the modern world, the steam engine. Where there are a hundred narratives of the battles of the wars with which the eighteenth century began, there is hardly to be found a tolerable account of that economic revolution which then commenced to alter the whole basis of civilized society.

Fortunately for Europe and mankind in general, however, the long coil of bloodshed and intrigue from which the system of European states had begun to emerge by the close of the seventeenth century, had been but one manifestation of the energy of its peoples during that period. The growth of commerce and industry, with the attendant leisure and opportunity which wealth engendered; the consequent development of letters and learning; the progress of science and invention; and the gradual transformation of an age of faith and authority into an era of doubt and investigation, had now altered the whole aspect and tendencies of life and thought, and created the beginnings of a truly modern world.

Had a belated traveler, left over from the time when Prince Henry the Navigator and Poggio Bracciolini began to extend European knowledge and power into the realms of the unknown, made his way across the continent in the days of the treaties of Utrecht and Nystad, he would have found himself confronted on every hand with evidences that a revolution had taken place in the world he had known three centuries earlier. He would, indeed, have traveled scarcely more rapidly than in his own day, since, though roads were better, horses’ legs or men’s had improved but little, and canals, though they increased the facilities, contributed nothing to the speed of transportation. But the wagon-trains, the post-riders, the vehicles of all sorts which he met would have seemed a striking contrast to the pack-horses, the peddlers, the pilgrims, and men-at-arms with which his own time had been familiar. These, no less than the châteaus and country houses which he passed, the decaying or decayed castles and monastic establishments, the cities stretching far beyond their mediæval walls, with their great warehouses, dockyards, and

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