thirties and
forties in England, a little later, with the civil wars, in France. It
submerged all classes but the bourgeoisie; or, rather, it subjugated
them all and forced them to follow, as in a Roman triumph, the
conquering car of Wealth.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie uses monarchy]

The one other power in the state that was visibly aggrandized at the
expense of other classes, besides the plutocracy, was that of the
prince. This is sometimes spoken of as the result of a new political
theory, an iniquitous, albeit unconscious, conspiracy of Luther and
Machiavelli, to exalt the divine right of kings. But in truth their
theories were but an expression of the accomplished, or easily
foreseen, fact; and this fact was due in largest measure to the need of
the commercial class for stable and for strong government. Riches,
which at the dawn of the twentieth century seemed, momentarily, to have
assumed a cosmopolitan character, were then bound up closely with the
power of the state. To keep order, to bridle the lawless, to secure
concessions and markets, a mercantile society needed a strong
executive, and this they could find only in the person of the prince.
Luther says that kings are only God's gaolers and hangmen, high-born
and splendid because the meanest of God's servants must be thus
accoutred. It would be a little truer to say that they were the
gaolers and hangmen hired by the bourgeoisie to over-awe the masses and
that their quaint trappings and titles were kept as an ornament to the
gay world of snobbery.

[Sidenote: And other agencies]

Together with the monarchy, the new masters of men developed other
instruments, parliamentary government in some countries, a bureaucracy
in others, and a mercenary army in nearly all. At that time was either
invented or much quoted the saying that {550} gold was one of the
nerves of war. The expensive firearms that blew up the feudal castle
were equally deadly when turned against the rioting peasants.

[Sidenote: To break the nobility]

Just as the burgher was ready to shoulder his way into the front rank,
he was greatly aided by the frantic civil strife that broke out in both
the older privileged orders. Never was better use made of the maxim,
"divide and conquer," than when the Reformation divided the church, and
the civil wars, dynastic in England, feudal in Germany and nominally
religious in France, broke the sword of the noble. When the earls and
knights had finish