aining it except in England. Absolute despotism was reached first in
Spain, under Philip II.; in France it was reached a century later, under
Louis XIV.; and at about the same time in the hereditary estates of
Austria; while over all the Italian and German soil of the disorganized
empire, except among the glaciers of Switzerland and the dykes of the
Netherlands, the play of political forces had set up a host of petty
tyrannies which aped the morals and manners of the great autocrats at
Paris and Madrid and Vienna. [Sidenote: Increasing power of the crown]

As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but
be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong
nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is
the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward
political death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not
to the Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of
things at the end of the seventeenth century--the dreadful ignorance and
misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe,
and apparently without hope of remedy--so often must we be impressed
anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by
self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the
very existence of modern civilization. It is not too much to say that
in the seventeenth century the entire political future of mankind was
staked upon the questions that were at issue in England. To keep the
sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful
concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in
the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have
been repaired. Some of these conditions we have already considered; let
us now observe one of the most important of all. Let us note the part
played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment,
in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed
in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute
despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find
it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the
Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the
Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of
despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to
observe by contrast how i