Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/242

 forces, two rights, two ideas: Austria against the princes, Catholic against Protestant, ancient territorial right as against new territorial force. Here too the religious influence produces cross division; the Lutheran and the Calvinist will not fight side by side; the Bavarian sets Catholicism before imperialism; Austria sets the family interest before either; yet Austria is as Catholic as the Jesuits and as imperial as the jurists can make her. But notwithstanding this cross influence of rights and ideas, the Thirty Years War is mainly a war of force, a war for determining the balance, not between ideas or rights, not between competing religions or competing liberties, but between armed sovereignties and territorial aggregations. Make the utmost of the idealism of Gustavus Adolphus, the legal pretexts of his interference are even worse founded than those under which Denmark in the earlier stage of the war had thrown in her lot as against the empire; and the idealism of Gustavus, his high and noble purpose of coming down as the saviour of religion, ends in the artificial aggrandisement of Sweden, as the luckless intriguing policy of Christian ends in the complete humiliation of Denmark. The interference of France, without sympathy of idea, without pretext of legality, is a simple intrusion of force. But I pass on.

The Thirty Years War exhausted Germany, even the victorious powers were worn out, much more the defeated ones: the stage is left clear for the glories of Lewis XIV. 'The state is myself.' 'The right is the glory of France.' Perhaps the lurid glare of the glories of this act, the act of the Great Monarch, throws a shade on minor actors and less prominent motives, but it can scarcely be misread; it is the triumph of force over both old rights and new ideas; a regime in which might is construed as right. The dominance of the idea of force in the aggression produces a corresponding influence in the resisting powers. They are bound not by sympathy but by necessity; the alliances that resist the great monarch are alliances of expediency, not of principle, and when the resistance is past they are ever ready for new combinations.

The struggle of the Spanish succession followed, a struggle in