essed peasantry and townsmen made common cause by
enlisting under the banner of the ultra-Catholic Guises. The mass of
the people saw nothing in Protestantism but an idea favoured by the
aristocracy and which they could not comprehend. Hence the great king
who would have been glad to make France a Protestant country could only
obtain his crown by renouncing his religion, while seeking to protect
it by his memorable Edict of Nantes. But what a generous despot could
grant, a bigoted despot might revoke; and before another century had
elapsed, the good work done by Henry IV. was undone by Louis XIV., the
Edict of Nantes was set aside, the process of casting out the most
valuable political element in the community was carried to completion,
and seven percent of the population of France was driven away and added
to the Protestant populations of northern Germany and England and
America. The gain to these countries and the damage to France was far
greater than the mere figures would imply; for in determining the
character of a community a hundred selected men and women are more
potent than a thousand men and women taken at random. Thus while the
Reformation in France reinforced to some extent the noble army of
freemen, its triumphs were not to be the triumphs of Frenchmen, but of
the race which has known how to enlist under its banner the forces that
fight for free thought, free speech, and self-government, and all that
these phrases imply. [Sidenote: Contrast with France; fate of the
Huguenots]

In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at
stake with the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Everywhere else the
Roman idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they
seemed to be left as the forlorn hope of the human race. But from the
very day when Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the
persecutions in Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the
face of things. The next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick
of Prussia to save the work of the Reformation in central Europe and set
in motion the train of events that were at last to make the people of
the Teutonic fatherland a nation. At that same moment the keenest
minds in France were awaking to the fact that in their immediate
neighbourhood, separated from them only by a few miles of salt water,
was a country where people were equal in the eye of the law. It was the
ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and