THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 75 
out; or, rather, such uniformity of belief and behaviour 
is attained only after all dissent and innovation have 
been crushed out; and of course in such a community 
no further progress is possible. 
If our principal subject were the philosophy of 
European history, it would be interesting and profit- 
able to inquire into the circumstances which have 
enabled the nations of Europe to get over the initial 
difficulty of civilization and secure the benefits of con- 
certed action without going so far as to crush out 
variation in belief and conduct. As it is, we must 
content ourselves with observing that in this sort of 
compromise has consisted the peculiar progressiveness 
of European civilization. The different nations of 
Europe have solved the problem with very different 
degrees of success, — England and Spain affording the 
two extreme instances, — but none have quite failed in 
it like the nations of Asia. There have been despot- 
isms in Europe, but nothing like the despotism of 
Assyria or Persia. The papacy never quite became a 
caliphate, though some of the popes may have done 
their best to make it so. Neither Philip II. nor 
Louis XIV. was quite a sultan, however it might 
have tickled their fancy to be thought so. 
Nevertheless, the tendency toward Asiatic despotism 
has asserted itself very strongly at various epochs of 
European history, usually, perhaps, as the result of 
prolonged military pressure from without. The ten- 
dency increased quite steadily in the Roman Empire 
from the time of the earliest Germanic invasions until 
the culmination of the Byzantine era; and the tradi- 
tions of this despotism were inherited by the Roman 
Church. In Germany, the operation of the tendency 
