The Most Liberal State in Europe
THEY considered the plebeians as a wild beast, whom it behoved them to let loose upon their neighbours, for fear they should devour their masters. Thus the greatest defect in the Government of the Romans raised them to be conquerors. By being unhappy at home, they triumphed over and possessed themselves of the world, till at last their divisions sunk them to slavery.
The Government of England will never rise to so exalted a pitch of glory, nor will its end be so fatal. The English are not fired with the splendid folly of making conquests, but would only prevent their neighbours from conquering.* They are not only jealous of their own liberty, but even of that of other nations. The English were exasperated against Louis XIV for no other reason but because he was ambitious, and declared war against him merely out of levity, not from any interested motives.*
The English have doubtless purchased their liberties at a very high price, and waded through seas of blood to drown the idol of arbitrary power. Other nations have been involved in as great calamities, and have shed as much blood; but then the blood they spilt in defence of their liberties only enslaved them the more.*
* In 1757, some twenty-four years later, The Battle of Plassey proved to be the starting gun for Britain’s rapid colonial expansion; even so, many observers saw it not as ‘the splendid folly of making conquests’ but as an unplanned by-product of a peculiarly English compulsion to trade and to explore: see Sir John Seeley on The Absent Minded Conquerors and George Santayana on The Englishman. When the German Empire offered herself as an imperial conqueror in the Roman mould, Britain’s possessions greatly surprised the Kaiser by fighting lustily at our side: see John Buchan on The Garden and the Machine.
* Voltaire was presumably referring to The War of the Spanish Succession in 1702-1713, in which England (and from 1707 Great Britain) stepped into an essentially Continental dispute over who should inherit the dominions of King Charles II of Spain, following his death in 1700. Not only Spain and the Netherlands but also Austria, Italy and Portugal all saw the war as a fight for their own freedom, and to Voltaire it seemed that in entering the lists as their champion the English had been guilty of sheer quixotry.
* Whether Voltaire would have felt that the French Revolution of 1789 broke the unhappy cycle of European history can only be guessed. Sir Reginald Coupland (1884-1952) was one of those who thought that the cycle had simply repeated itself: see Raw Haste.