-4- counselled by the canny John Locke, moved into the slums of London, organized groups of shouting, hurrahing fol- lowers, gained control of a parliament which could not longer be postponed and brought the cheap autocrat's life to a miserable end in 1684; and the long subdued lower middle classes of the country united with the new aristocracy and made the unloved William III of Holland King of Engalnd. All the larger cities and more develop ed shires, supported by the angry colonies from Massachu- setts to South Carolina, shouted loud harrahs. It was the "glorious revolution," hardly a score of lives lost in the process. All the strenuous decrees of Charles II became dead letters which no one seriously heeded. Seventy years later when George III tried to revamp the system, the colonies revolted and started a world commotion which lasted thirty years. Stuart economic nationalism had failed. IV. The English had hardly launched their scheme before John Baptiste Colbert, master statesman about Louis XIV, contrived a better system for the perfect government of France. Son of a more trader of Rheime, he invented a pedigree which proved himself to be of noble birth, and he managed to get it to the snobbish young monarch. That was enough. He was granted despotic powers. He dispossessed hundreds of great families of newly rich folk, handed their properties over to the Crown, condemned thousands to death because they resisted him. |