BOTH in England and France, during the Eighteenth Century, the Monarchy transgressed against these principles of Louis XIV. though in England the fault was not the King’s . The House of Hanover, from its origin, was dependent on the Whig party ; the House of Bourbon from its corruption under the Regent Philippe d’Orleans and again under Louis XV, became enervated by pleasure and more and more dependent on the good graces of moneylenders . The Whigs drew a great part of their support from the merchant bankers of the City of London, whose financial operations extended over the whole world; the French nobility and higher clergy, as a consequence of their extravagance, fell into the hands of the Swiss and Dutch bankers . Thus, in these two countries, the internationalism of Money challenged the power of the Throne and began to exert influence on national policy .
So far as Money was concerned there was neither England nor France . Close relations existed already between the banking houses in all European centers . Thus the firm of Thelusson and Necker financed the grain trade in France and England and was connected both in France and England with the trade with the East Indies . This Swiss firm of Geneva had offices both in Paris and London . It made numerous loans to Louis XV and was interested at the same time in loans made to the British Government .
This house, along with many others, discovered in the markets of America, India, and the East a rich field of enterprise . It was contended by these bankers that money, like water, must be free to find its level -- that is to say, that they themselves must be free to obtain the largest possible profit irrespective of any national need . It was a claim which Louis XIV would have heard with lively indignation and would have answered by demanding how the advantage of a section or a party should be placed above the advantage of France . Louis XV, on the contrary, sold titles and conferred privileges without regard to service . In consequence he lost the support of his people . France returned to a condition in which parties and factions divided the realm to the advantage of international finance . The Seven Years’ War against Frederick the Great and his ally England revealed the ruin which had been wrought . The French arms were everywhere defeated and humiliated, and England seized the opportunity to possess herself of India and Canada . The bankers in their counting-houses, meanwhile, were haunted by the fear that a King of the type of Louis XIV would arise with enough popular backing to sweep away their privileges, and put a stop to their operations in so far as these operations bore heavily upon his people .
The history of the banker Jacques Necker deserves close study as illustrating the precautions of Money . This man, from his counting-house in Paris, in the latter years of the Eighteenth Century took steps to widen as much as possible the breach between Throne and People . With that end in view he made himself the patron of those liberal writers who were finding audiences among the hard-pressed farmers and industrialists . It was an easy matter to persuade these people that Louis XV’s faults--which were real enough--were the sole cause of their distresses, and that sovereignty belonged not to the King but to the People . Necker entered into association with the philosophers Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the others, and kept open house in Paris for the entertainment of would be popular leaders of every kind . He was a learned man, big and smug, with a troublesome sense of his own moral worth . The humanistic doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a fellow Swiss, met with his approval up to a point, and he spent money, of which he possessed enormous quantities, in helping to make them better known .
While Necker was pursuing these ends in France, William Pitt the elder, the son of a wealthy East India merchant, was at work in England defeating the attempts of the young King, George III, to escape from the control of the Whigs and become the leader of the nation . The dice, here, as in France, were loaded against the King . It was Pitt and the Whigs who had wrested India and Canada from France . Pitt was the City of London’s man, and employed against his Sovereign the same weapons of newspaper and philosophic propaganda of which Necker was making such deadly use in Paris . The English people were roused against the young King who wished to make peace with France . When the King succeeded in making peace, he was attacked with extreme violence, notably by John Wilkes, and the peace became little more than an armed neutrality .
Far from feeling any patriotic resentment against Pitt, Necker tried to arrange a marriage between his own daughter Germaine and the English minister’s son . The truth was that England seemed to be a safer place for plutocracy than France . England was mistress of the seas and therefore able to protect overseas trade; England possessed a Royal House which, in spite of the young King’s exuberance, was still insecurely seated; the governing power in England was largely in the hands of the Whigs, who were largely in the hands of the bankers; above all, England possessed the immense overseas Empire which had formerly belonged to France . So excellent a combination of advantages the field of overseas operations, the means of communication, a large home population containing a minimum of peasant proprietors and therefore easy to mobilize for industrial work, a huge public debt, and a weak Monarchy was to be found nowhere else in the world . The English, in addition, being patriotic and good fighters, could be counted on to protect their country, and, being honest, to pay their debts . Their island position made it exceedingly improbable that they would be successfully invaded . London, therefore, suffered the calamity of becoming the financial center and the financial magnet of the world . Money came home, not indeed to roost, but to pause in its flight . The English people were flattered by the opportunities afforded them of getting rich of which a very few availed themselves and by the spectacle of a great Empire and the sovereignty of the seas . They were yoked, at the same time, to the car of Mammon and brought to understand that there is an inexorable economic law which decrees that the wages of an unskilled labourer must remain at the subsistence level and that all other wages must be determined in relation to that level .
Agriculture in England shared with industry the distresses arising out of the growth of the bankers’ power . At the beginning of the Eighteenth Century the greater part of England had been covered with open fields in which numbers of small farmers held isolated strips of land . They lived on these strips of land and enjoyed a high degree of independence . But they produced no profits . On the plea that efficient methods of farming could not be introduced while these common holders continued to cumber the ground, Parliament passed a number of Enclosure Acts which had the effect of compelling the cultivator of the strip to merge his rights in those of his richer neighbours . The rich man now planted hedges and dug ditches, and the poor man found himself faced with charges, as a shareholder in the land, which he was quite unable to pay . He had to sell his rights to pay his debts; from independence he sank at once to the position of a hired labourer on the land that had formerly maintained him and his family . The yeomen, worthy backbone of England, were broken and destroyed and their places taken by merchant farmers -- wholly dependent on the banks . Agricultural wages were now brought down at once to the barest level of subsistence .
Such were the conditions in England during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century . The conditions in France were worse because, as has been said, money was much more reluctant to remain in that country . French agriculture visibly declined; French industry languished; the condition of the peasants and workpeople became so distressing that men of goodwill were everywhere shocked by it . The King tried to raise further loans in order to help his people -- for Louis XV, though a debauched liver, was a man of kindly nature subject to severe pangs of conscience -- only to find that, as he was told, his credit was exhausted . Even the imposing spectacle of Versailles, once so powerful a magnet of money, had lost its attraction .
In these circumstances French hatred of England was roused to boiling point . Was it not England who had filched away India and Canada ? England who had driven French ships from the sea ? England who was sucking the wealth out of Europe as a vampire sucks blood ? The King ascribed his poverty to this cause ; so did the peasant . Neither King nor peasant was aware that Englishmen as a whole, had derived no advantage and were suffering the same distresses as their neighbours .
Money, in fact, concealed its operations so successfully that the hatred engendered by its operations was felt not against itself but against Englishmen and Frenchmen . Necker took occasion to deplore this exhibition of nationalist feeling . He was accustomed to call himself a good European and to suggest that it was the mission of bankers to bring nations closer together . This was the cue for the philosophers, economists, journalists, and wits who thronged his wife’s salon and enjoyed his own lavish hospitality . They deplored the senseless luxury of Versailles, which, as they urged, had to be paid for by the tears and sweat of the people, and shook their heads over the King’s rising indignation against the excellent people of England . In London the same sentiments were being expressed, in the same language, by Necker’s partner the Swiss, Thelusson, and his fellow bankers . What a pity French nationalism was so troublesome and so blind !