The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama, is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her sky. But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.
Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large, that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart. But disaster taught Spain nothing--
Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson; And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.
The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining comment than the decline of Spain.[4]
The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo, Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries before by Leo III and Charlemagne.
And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la Révolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain, first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire moulded by a new ideal.
Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and what each brings to the vanquished.