of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700-10 round the Spanish, and in 1740-60 round the Austrian succession.[1] It is the climax also of the genealogical principle. Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube! was indeed "an extension of war by other means." The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects. Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict conventions.[2] What was contended for was the heritage of half the world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together in Habsburg hands. The State is still "well up to form"; the nobility has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille) Prussia's road is the same as France's, and the outcome in each case is a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.
For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely, but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely dispense with governmental watchfulness, and that her peers in the Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the self-evidentness of England's greatness;[3] whereas in the Empire the upper stratum of the land-princes — with the Diet at Regensburg as their Upper House — were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct "peoples" the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of fatherland as strictly as possible from other "peoples'" bits. In place of the world-horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation itself was aban-
- ↑ The fifty-year interval of these critical points, which is seen with special distinctness in the clear historical structure of the Baroque, but is recognizable also in the sequence of the three Punic Wars, is yet another hint that the Cosmic flowings in the form of human lives upon the surface of a minor star are not self-contained and independent, but stand in deep harmony with the unending movedness of the universe. In a small but noteworthy book, R. Mewes, Die Kriegs- und Geistesperioden im Völkerleben unde Verkündigung des nächsten Weltkrieges (1896), the relation of those war-periods with weather-periods, sun-spot cycles, and certain conjunctures of the planets is established, and a great war foretold accordingly for the period 1910-20. But these and numerous similar connexions that come within the reach of our senses (cf. pp. 5, et seq.) veil a secret that we have to respect and not to infringe with causal expositions or mystical brain-spectres.
- ↑ See C. von B(inder)-K(rieglstein), Geist und Stoff im Kriege (1896); F. N. Maude, War and the World's Life (1907), and other works by the same author; also, in more summary terms, the articles "Army" and "French Revolutionary Wars" by the present translator in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.
- ↑ "Rule, Britannia" is an eighteenth-century product. — Tr.
