VOLTAIRE 



6114 



VOLUNTEERS 



men of the king's bedchamber, he decided to 

 withdraw from the public service and devote all 

 his time to the life at Cirey, but the death of 

 Madame du Chatelet in 1749 changed these 

 plans. 



The following year he went to Berlin, on the 

 invitation of Frederick II of Prussia, to live 

 permanently at the Court. The king was arbi- 

 trary; Voltaire continued his use of free in- 

 vective and satire, so that the stay came to an 

 unhappy end after two years.. He then found 

 himself also in royal disfavor in France, be- 

 cause of his request to leave the Court there to 

 go to Berlin, and so he bought a country house 

 in the republic of Geneva. The great wealth 

 he had acquired enabled him to supply every 

 comfort, one of the most attractive and pleas- 

 urable of which was a private theater where 

 his own plays could be performed. 



In 1758 he settled on the estate of Ferney, 

 on which he had secured feudal rights, and, as 

 a consequence, the greatest possible freedom. 

 There he remained until his death. He wrote 

 freely, chiefly short pamphlets attacking re- 

 ligious fanaticism and intolerance, and in de- 

 fense of the sovereignty of reason. During 

 these years he also contributed to the Encyclo- 

 pedic. The romance Candide and the tragedies 

 Tancrede and Irene belong to this period. He 

 visited Paris again in 1778, took sick before 

 Irene was produced, and died on May 30. 



His Many-Sided Genius. Voltaire's vast work 

 falls naturally into well-defined classes. As a 

 dramatist, the writer of fifty or sixty plays, he 

 revealed marked skill and cleverness. In his 

 poetry there are no touches revealing passion 

 or love of nature; instead, one finds artificial 

 rhythm and conventional grace, combined with 

 an extraordinary felicity in use of words and 

 sharp wit. His literary criticism lacks perma- 

 nent value; the prose romances were used as 

 a tool for political and religious satire. The 

 historical works are clear and acute, lacking, 

 however, in comprehension of philosophy of 

 history; the philosophical writings, the Dic- 

 tionnaire philosophique, containing articles con- 

 tributed by him to the Encyclopedic, belong, 

 strictly speaking, to the department of social 

 philosophy, and in them he attacked freely the 

 political and religious institutions of his day. 



His atheism has been greatly exaggerated 

 by the generations since his death ; he attacked 

 orthodoxy, rather than Christianity, and a care- 

 ful study of his writings does not warrant the 

 broad application of atheist to his name. His 

 fight for liberty led to sharp attacks on abuses, 



many of which were corrected during his life- 

 time. 



Consult Tallentyre's Friends of Voltaire; Mor- 

 ley's Voltaire. 



VOLTMETER, vohlt'me ter, a sort of gal- 

 vanometer (which see) used to measure the 

 pressure of an electric current. It consists of 

 el horseshoe magnet which has a piece of 

 soft iron attached to each pole. A cylinder of 

 soft iron is so suspended between the poles of 

 the magnet that it can rotate. Around this 

 cylinder is a light rectangular frame wound 

 with fine, insulated copper wire. A spiral hori- 

 zontal spring is attached to each end of this 

 frame, and a needle which moves over a gradu- 

 ated dial is attached to the upper end of tin- 

 axis. When a current passes through the coil 

 of wire it causes this frame to turn on its axis. 

 The springs furnish the amount of resistance 

 that must be overcome by the current, and the 

 position of the needle on the dial indicates the 

 pressure. A volt is a pressure that will pro- 

 duce a flow of one ampere per second against 

 a resistance of one ohm. See AMPERE; OHM. 



VOLUNTEERS, volunteerz' , citizens offer- 

 ing their services in a military capacity to 

 country or state. The volunteer movement 

 originated in England, the oldest volunteer 

 organization in existence being the Honorable 

 Artillery Company of London, incorporated 

 during the reign of Henry VIII (1491-1547). In 

 the United States the senior volunteer corps is 

 the Honorable Artillery Company of Boston. 



At the outbreak of the War of the Nations 

 Great Britain and the United States were the 

 only great powers in the world which had not 

 adopted the principle of universal liability to 

 military service. In the United States, the 

 least military of the first-class nations, each 

 national crisis had been met with a loyal re- 

 sponse from the people.. In the War of 1812 

 over 10,000 volunteers, besides militia, were en- 

 gaged. During the War of Secession the regu- 

 lars numbered only 46,679, yet more than 

 2,500,000 men voluntarily enrolled in the Fed- 

 eral armies, and half as many in the Confed- 

 erate ranks. In the Spanish-American War of 

 1898 volunteers and regulars fought side by 

 side, nearly 200,000 men having responded to 

 the calls issued by President McKinley. 



Nineteen years after the close of the struggle 

 with Spain the people of the United States 

 entered into war with the greatest military 

 power on earth. When, in April, 1917, Con- 

 gress formally passed the declaration that a 

 state of war existed with Germany, the regular 



