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CHAP. project, taking no notice of the demand, and the cabinet was alarmed to learn that the Duke of Bedford had proposed signing it without referring home. Hereupon his powers were limited, to his great disgust. Fresh instances were made, and at length Choiseul agreed to cede Flanders for the Havannah, and Minorca for Belleisle. France retained Louisiana, guaranteeing the free passage of the Mississippi to the colonists higher up; also Martinique and Guadeloupe, England restoring the two islands. All its territories in the north of that continent, including the islands of the St. Lawrence, were ceded definitively to England. Senegal and Goree remained French settlements. In Hindostan the French recovered merely the few commercial settlements which they had possession of at the commencement of 1749. In the autumn they evacuated Nieuport and Ostend, and stipulated that the only fortifications of Dunkirk should be landward. All that England stipulated with regard to Germany was that the French should evacuate Wesel, Gueldres, and the Prussian fortresses left of the Rhine. Such was Bute's hatred of Frederick that his intention was that the Austrians should immediately occupy them.* It was however stated that they should be given up to the first comer, and the King of Prussia took care to be that-raising an irregular corps, menacing the country with a renewal of the war.†

and

Peace upon these conditions was signed between England, France, and Spain on the 10th of February, 1763, at Paris. On the 15th was signed the peace Hubertsburg, between Austria and Prussia. These seven

* See Duke of Bedford's minute of his conversation with Bute. Bedford Papers, vol. iii. p. 90.

Earl Russell seems to argue in his Introduction to the above volume, that the English government was merely unfair to Frederick in the form. The withdrawal of the subsidy, the secret negotiation with

of

years, war between them, for Silesia, cost the lives of a million of soldiers, augmented the debts of France and England prodigiously, yet left the frontiers of the two great German powers just where it found them!

What may be called the great public of England and of France never felt or displayed such interest in a war as they did in this. Instead of the scanty bulletins which told of the exploits of Marlborough and Eugene, journalism had now sprung up, annuals and diurnals recording events with a minuteness and a degree of ability previously unknown. There was not unanimity, indeed. Courts, and their hangers on, had a great dislike to Frederick, who was a talking as well as a living satire upon their absurdities. And though the elder Pitt gloried in the exploits of the Prussian hero, these excited in George the Second little more than a painful grimace. Pompadour was the decided antagonist of Frederick. King and court obeyed her. But not only in London, but even in Paris, there were numbers who sympathised with him; some Frenchmen not being displeased with the defeat inflicted at Rosbach on a court general and his undisciplined army of marauders.

Frederick upheld and represented what were considered the advanced principles of the day—a contempt of religious bigotry, and with it unfortunately a denial of religious sentiment. Frederick had not only adopted Voltaire, made a guest and a chamberlain of him, but established at his court those French writers who carried farthest their aversion to priestcraft. Their philosophy was indeed simply negation. Those who had feelings, like Voltaire, paused necessarily at deism; those who had none, who had geometrical minds, saw no reason for stopping short of atheism. After all there was not much difference, so loosely put together were all the creeds produced in sarcasm and in obedience to fashion. The prevailing opinions of the educated classes were those of reaction against a religion as tyrannical as it

CHAP. XXXVI.

CHAP. was dissolute. Any gibe, any contradiction, was good enough to fling at the clergy.

XXXVI.

It was manifestly not intended by Providence that religion should be taught, or should impose itself, demonstratively. Were it so, responsibility as well as merit and demerit must disappear. Proofs of revelation were thus left to be vague, and their appreciation by reason difficult. Its facts, manifested to one generation, or to a small fraction of that generation, were recorded and communicated with a certain admixture of human bias and current prejudices. Each age, too, requires a different mode of proof and of persuasion. To the unlettered and superstitious Jews, a miracle was necessary for conviction. At a later period, authority sufficed to draw the multitude. Unfortunately, even holy authorities quarrelled and misbehaved. Their moral turpitude, worldly and sensual nature, were so gross and so apparent, as to disgust mankind, and drive it to found for itself, out of the materials furnished it, a religion consonant to its nature. This was the effort of the eighteenth, as it is of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to deny the strong temptation to the intellect of the former epoch to set aside the religion that was imposed upon it by the priesthood and the government. These, in the name of religion, prohibited all freedom, all fervour, even of devotion. They treated the mind of man as they would treat that of a child, whilst at the same time they offered undoubted proofs that they were themselves the most ignorant and foolish of the species. No man could stand such tyranny. The most devout religionist of 1850 must have sympathised with the great party of negation a hundred years before. Any milder mode of protest was idle. To admit the great truths of religion, and denounce its abuses-this was either Huguenotism, which had failed in France and could not be re-attempted, or Jansenism, which was equally scouted. There was nothing left than to follow

XXXVI.

the example of Bayle, and denounce religion altogether. CHAP. Be it remembered, too, that deism or atheism was yet untried, as the profession of a people. There was no experience of what they might produce. As to the philosophes, they had the greatest possible hopes of the experiment. And after all, the best thing that could be done for the cause of religion was, perhaps, that the negation of it should be fully and frankly tried. It

was so.

perse

The crime or the glory of the incredulity which beset. the age, must not be attributed merely to Voltaire, to Montesquieu, Rousseau, or the philosophes. The condition to which men, their minds, fortunes, hopes, their pride and prospects were reduced, was quite sufficient to create disgust with the whole order of things. Religion had become a tyranny, an absurdity, and a pest. It warred with letters, prohibiting the most innocent works, such as Hamlet and Belisaire for example. It refused Christian burial to the actor or the Jansenist. Then came the disgusting facts of cution, which displayed the clergy, even in the last half of the eighteenth century, to be men of blood. At a period when personages of rank and office professed downright infidelity, a Protestant pastor, if caught, was hanged. At Toulouse in 1762, on the anniversary of St. Bartholomew's massacre, observed in that demoniac city as a fête, four persons were executed for the crime of being Protestant. These were Rochette, a pastor, and three brothers, gentlemen of the name of Grenier. Some days after, Jean Calas, an old man of sixty-eight, was brought to the same place of execution. He had had a son of wayward temper, who had expressed an intention to turn Catholic, and who was found dead, having indubitably committed suicide. The father was accused of having murdered him to prevent his conversion. Proof there was none, save the bigotry of the magistrate. And

U 2

XXXVI.

CHAP. old Jean Calas, protesting his innocence, was broken on the wheel in the Place of Toulouse, and made to endure two hours of torture until he expired. The case became universally known from the circumstance of Voltaire having taken it up, and demanded a new trial for the sake of reparation to the family of the victim. In this the poet, seconded by public opinion, amply succeeded so far as to reverse the judgment, and disgrace, if they were capable of feeling it, the judges and magistrates who had ordered and permitted the bigot murder. Similar events, such as the execution of a young officer, La Barre, for having in a nocturnal freak overthrown a cross at Abbeville, spread the belief that the chief characteristic of the French clergy and their religion was cruelty added to injustice. Indeed, till nearly the end of Louis the Fifteenth's reign, the bagnes of Toulon were crowded with convicts, guilty of the sole crime of Protestantism. Such were the deeds, and such the spirit, with which the French clergy faced an age full of hatred to them and contempt of all they professed.

If the state religion had thus failed of every object which Christianity proposed, monarchy was an equal failure. It had degraded the upper class immediately around it into the lowest depths of dissoluteness, servility and corruption. The middle class it spurned, mulcted and treated with every contumely and neglect. It had reduced the peasant to beggary. The army was without order, without glory, without self-respect. The treasury was empty, and the finance minister-as we shall see in the Abbé Terrai—was nothing less than an insolent public robber. Justice, or the awards in its name, was bought and sold, as shown by Beaumarchais, who was to the judges what Pascal had been to the Jesuits, the exposer of their vileness and corruption.

It was the clergy and Louis the Fifteenth himself, with his Parc aux Cerfs, Pompadour and her extravagance, Soubise and his defeats, Terrai and his extortion