tury
repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius,
that there are certain political truths by which every State and every
interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a
series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the
lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an
irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies
and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron
and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side. Year after year, the
assemblies that represented the self-government of provinces and of
privileged classes, all over the Continent, met for the last time and
passed away, to the satisfaction of the people, who had learned to
venerate the throne as the constructor of their unity, the promoter of
prosperity and power, the defender of orthodoxy, and the employer of
talent.

The Bourbons, who had snatched the crown from a rebellious democracy,
the Stuarts, who had come in as usurpers, set up the doctrine that
States are formed by the valour, the policy, and the appropriate
marriages of the royal family; that the king is consequently anterior to
the people, that he is its maker rather than its handiwork, and reigns
independently of consent. Theology followed up divine right with passive
obedience. In the golden age of religious science, Archbishop Ussher,
the most learned of Anglican prelates, and Bossuet, the ablest of the
French, declared that resistance to kings is a crime, and that they may
lawfully employ compulsion against the faith of their subjects. The
philosophers heartily supported the divines. Bacon fixed his hope of all
human progress on the strong hand of kings. Descartes advised them to
crush all those who might be able to resist their power. Hobbes taught
that authority is always in the right. Pascal considered it absurd to
reform laws, or to set up an ideal justice against actual force. Even
Spinoza, who was a Republican and a Jew, assigned to the State the
absolute control of religion.

Monarchy exerted a charm over the imagination, so unlike the
unceremonious spirit of the Middle Ages, that, on learning the execution
of Charles I., men died of the shock; and the same thing occurred at the
death of Louis XVI. and of the Duke of Enghien. The classic land of
absolute monarchy was France. Richelieu held that it would be impossible
to keep the people down if they