BOOKS The New Age

By D. W. BROGAN

ovus Orel° Seclorunt—the. infant United States chose this Virgilian tag as the motto no its great seal (although it was only in the twentieth century that it was stamped on the equally sacred dollar bill), and the question when the new order of the ages' began is one of the most debated questions in modern historio- graphy. We must assume that the founders of the United States had some idea of .what they were doing when they chose this motto, and it is at any rate permissible to suggest that Acton W,,as right and that it was the foundation of the United States, not the French Revolution, that 'harked the formal separation of the umbilical cord of history. States chose this Virgilian tag as the motto no its great seal (although it was only in the twentieth century that it was stamped on the equally sacred dollar bill), and the question when the new order of the ages' began is one of the most debated questions in modern historio- graphy. We must assume that the founders of the United States had some idea of .what they were doing when they chose this motto, and it is at any rate permissible to suggest that Acton W,,as right and that it was the foundation of the United States, not the French Revolution, that 'harked the formal separation of the umbilical cord of history.

Here a new body politic was created • by an . act of . law and of , political faith (It is 4, (HY asserted here that .the basic doctrine of le, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' was stated by M. Lavoisier, the eminent Farmer- Oeneral and chemist. The credit for this is usually given to Mr. Jefferson in 1776, and he did not pretend that his doctrines were new. He had at any rate the advantage over M. Lavoisier of writing English much better than M. Lavoisier did French.) , In some sense or other,• the new age began on lulY- 4, 1776. But there. can be no doubt that the doctrines of the Enlightenment, the doctrines ?_f the Revolution, were spread most effectively nY the arms of the French Republic and later Of the French Empire. And whether. this .is , a good or a bad thing is still bitterly debated, nowhere more than in France. The debate is avoided; in the United States, by giving a con- servative polish to the American Revolution; so that it can be accepted by Senator Goldwater and Mr. William Buckley as well as by President Johnson and ,Mr. Adlai Stevenson. And we are ,taken on a pleasure tour of this revolutionary transformation in the volumes edited by Professor

Goodwin and Mr. Crawley.* •

Lord Acton and his successor, Sir George Clark, chose to break up history into manageable sec- `Inns, each dealt with by a specialist scholar apprised of all the .bibliographicar and scholarly, controversies of that particular corner Of the hld. The advantages of the system are, of course, very great. It produced, in the first version, lOasterly chapters like that of -F. W. Maitland- on tile Elizabethan Reformation, It means that the common reader- can usually---in fact, nearly '1‘vaYs--- be confident that he is apprised of 'the ,!ate of the question' at the moment of publica- tion.

And if some of the bibliographical annota- "'Ins in the new series are already a little out of date or omit important and challenging

NEW CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISIOAY: .'41-1-IME' VII I : Tint: AMERICAN Ni)A FRIINt.11 REVD- ;.c IONS 1763-93. Edited by A. Goodwin. voLumr WAR ANO 1(T IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL 1793- ".'0. Edited by C. W. Crawley. 50s. each.)

contlibutions (like Mr. Mackesy's revision of the military history of the American Revolution), that cannot be helped. I (although I have con- tributed to another volume of this series) am inclined to think that the bolder course of Ernest Lavisse and his later French imitators is perhaps the wiser. For if this means that the authors of the very wide surveys of the French system are sometimes not masters of every square metre of the field, there is, at any rate, a field. This is not always so in the old or the new Cambridge Modern History, which sometimes suggests the results of the strip system rather than of the enclosure movement.

Necessarily, there is a very considerable un-

• ,evenness in the levels of the contributions and an arbitrary character about the areas allotted to them. Some of the chapters in these two volumes seem to me strikingly below the general level. Others are contradictory. For example, there are two different rulers described in these volumes both called Frederick II of Prussia. One is a really enlightened' despot, hard-working, thrifty, a real father of the poor, really a first servant of the state, an example to his contem- poraries and to his successors. The other is an unscrupulous tyrant, a ruthless exactor of taxation, a pillar of the `rdaction nobiliaire'— exemplified in his continuous reduction of the rile of the middle class in the Prussian army and in the Prussian civil service. I incline to the second view of the great king; but to show im- partiality I might note that in the admirable contribution on music, Frederick the Great is• given no credit for the part he played in calling to the serious attention of the young W: A. Mozart, the then not very fashionable works, of J. S. BaCh. There is a Germanic predominance in the volumes which I regret. Almost as much space is devoted to the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia as to the Napoleonic order in France. This might have been reasonable a generation ago, but is hardly reasonable today when Prussia has disappeared and France is still with us!

Then it is very hard to .write what is called 'intellectual history' and I do not think this is uniformly well done here, although there. is a brilliant article on the sciences and their rela- tions with technology from an. American scholar. But it is not merely pedantic to point out that France, in the person Of Victor Cousin, was the, great mediator of German philosophy, not only to France, but to New England. And, on the other hand, it was 'an English translation that allowed the young Edgar Quinet to impress on his country the novelty of the Meet, (it would be unjust to reproach the editors-with not having foreseen Sir Isaiah Berlin's very recent re- assessment of the importance of Herder).

It was a reproach to the old Cambridge Modiyit History that it neglected economic history, notably in its neglect of the price revo- lution 'Of the sixteenth century. No such Mistake has been made in the new series: But the chief novelty of these volumes is not a re-telling for the common reader, or for the undergraduate, of the theories of M. Labrousse, but the importance given to demography.

This is illustrated not only in Britain, but' in Italy, and I, at any rate, learn for the first time that the population of Iceland suffered from a great volcanic outburst in 1780. This is an interesting if not overwhelmingly im- portant piece of information; but there are, I am glad to say, more pieces of information which please me, such as learning of an Italian prince called Hercules III, a name straight out of the La Chartreuse. However, I did know some- thing of Tupac Amaru,' because, like a great many people of my age, I had read in my child- hood Manco the Peruvian Chief, and since I have learned (from another source) of the degree to which this revolution in eighteenth- century Peru frightened the Spaniards so that they banned the use of the word `Inca,' I think' I can understand why Cardinal Consalvi feared a possible revival of sun worship, which may not have been altogether a foolish fear.

But the most interesting and important and exciting themes dealt with in these volumes arise out of the clash between 'the 'Enlightenment,' with its economic as well as ideological contents, and the old order..On the whole, the contributors' think that the French Revolution was a good thing and, on the whole, that Napoleon was a bad one. The..case for Napoleon . is admirably put by Mr. Felix Markham, of Oxford, .but I share the general dislike of that disastrous genius. Everybody would probably have been. better off if he had died of his wound outside Ratisbon in 1809. For one thing, Karl Marx might have grown up as a Frenchman and. not as a Prussian! But the settlement of Vienna is less of a triumph for sound politics than is often asserted.

We are reminded of the way in which the Prussians brought into the Rhineland an attitude to the Catholic population recalling, only too completely, the attitude of the Irish ascendancy which was doing so much harm at the same time. As we are told, the only Protestant in many communes was the burgomaster, and the Hohenzollerns seem to have had no more talent for winning over Catholic subjects than had the House of Hanover. Something in the attitude of Dr. Adenauer today can be attributed to his anti-Prussian education, and we can understand how it was that, as Treitschke writes, Kaiser Franz got such a warm welcome when he visited the newly annexed territories of the Hohen- zollerns in the Rhineland.

One or two minor criticisms might be made— in a suitably timid tone of voice. Thus, the im- plication •that rifles were of little use until smokeless powder was invented is confuted by the experience of Sadowa, Gravelotte and Plevna long before there was smokeless powder. As Colonel Stoffel, Napoleon ill's intelligent attaché in Berlin, pointed out, breech-loading rifles changed the whole character Of infantry tactics. And, a more serious complaint; the account of the background of the American War of 1812 is written from a Peculiarly complacent British point of view. The Royal Navy, it must be remembered, was almost as unpopular an insti-. tution by 1807 as was the Grande Armde-----as Professor Bradford Parkins has shown. But no one who wants to know how we got, histori- cally speaking, into 'the present situation, can neglect this very valuable contribution to an understanding of the beginning of the modern age.