Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/404

388 591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political principles, even summoning the "Ruler of the Middle" himself (now become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their name Ming-dshu became later, like the word "tyrant," a term of obloquy, because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything but a power unauthorized by law — but it is beyond all question that these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosphers to be their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander — in any case it is with them that the "people" first emerges as a political quantity. It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine Baroque — the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany, at the same time, the Thirty Years' War broke out. The magnitude of its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde of the great electors, and that between the individual princes and the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre of world-politics then lay in Spain. There, in conjunction with the high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle — which embodied the absolute State vis-à-vis the Cortes — had attained to its highest development in the course of the Jong struggle with the House of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived — no longer the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the "Holy Roman Empire, German by nation," but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in Habsburg hands, which