ngs went very well in
those days with any man who was not a Whig, and had no views as to
what makes governments legitimate and averts revolution.

In that age of the enlightenment of despotism the most enlightened
despot was Frederic II. Of all rulers and reformers he was the most
laborious and incessant. "A king," said he, "is the first servant of
the State." He did more work and had fewer pleasures than any of them.
The dominant influence was philosophy, not religion, emancipation of
the State from the Church. That corresponded well with Frederic's
temper. He was tolerant, and on the whole consistently tolerant. In
those days the Jesuits were suppressed, first by the secular power in
Bourbon countries, then by the Papacy. The Jesuits peculiarly
represented the old order that was changing, and the authority of the
ecclesiastical law that was being restrained. When they ceased to
exist in Catholic countries, they sought a refuge in England, and at
Petersburg; but their best and most determined protector was Frederic
the Great. The only one of all the princes of that generation who saw
farther, and understood that the time of absolute monarchy,
enlightened or unenlightened, was very near its end, was Leopold of
Tuscany, ancestor of the Austrian dynasty. That was a thing which
Frederic never perceived. The great change that came over Europe in
his time did not make for political freedom. We shall see how that
greater change was to come from beyond the Atlantic.

XIX

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

THE RATIONAL and humanitarian enlightenment of the eighteenth century
did much for the welfare of mankind, but little to promote the
securities of freedom. Power was better employed than formerly, but
it did not abdicate.

In England, politically, the most advanced country, the impetus which
the Revolution gave to progress was exhausted, and people began to
say, now that the Jacobite peril was over, that no issue remained
between parties which made it worth while for men to cut each others'
throats. The development of the Whig philosophy was checked by the
practical tendency to compromise. Compromise distinguished the Whig
from the Roundhead, the man who succeeded from the man who failed, the
man who was the teacher of politics to the civilised world from the
man who left his head on Temple Bar.

The Seven Years' War renewed the interrupted march by involving
America in the concerns of Europe, and causing the