How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.
The reasons of state which governed all Louis XI.'s external policy also inspired his internal administration. If they justified him in employing lies and deception in international affairs, in his relations with his subjects they led him to regard as lawful everything which favoured his authority; no question of right could weigh against it. The army and taxation, as the two chief means of domination within and without the kingdom, constituted the main bulwarks of his policy. As for the nobility, his only thought was to diminish their power by multiplying their number, as his predecessors had done; while he reduced the rebels to submission by his iron cages or the axe of his gossip Tristan Lermite. The Church was treated with the same unconcerned cynicism; he held her in strict tutelage, accentuating her moral decadence still further by the manner in which he set aside or re-established the Pragmatic Sanction, according to the fluctuations of his financial necessities or his Italian ambitions. It has been said that on the other hand he was a king of the common people, and certainly he was one of them in his simple habits, in his taste for rough pleasantries, and above all in his religion, which was limited to superstitious practices and small devoutnesses. But in the states of Tours in 1468 he evinced the same mistrust for fiscal control by the people as for the privileges of the nobility. He inaugurated that autocratic rule which was to continue gaining strength until Louis XV.'s time. Louis XI. was the king of the bourgeoisie; he exacted much from them, but paid them back with interest by allowing them to reduce the power of all who were above them and to lord it over all who were below. As a matter of fact Louis XI.'s most faithful ally was death. Saint-Pol, Nemours, Charles the Bold, his brother the duke of Berry, old René of Anjou and his nephew the count of Maine, heir to the riches of Provence and to rights over Naples--the skeleton hand mowed down all his adversaries as though it too were in his pay; until the day when at Plessis-les-Tours it struck a final blow, claimed its just dues from Louis XI., and carried him off despite all his relics on the 30th of August 1483. Entry: A
The fundamental and essential significance of the European events of the beginning of the nineteenth century lies in the movement of the mass of the European peoples from west to east and afterwards from east to west. The commencement of that movement was the movement from west to east. For the peoples of the west to be able to make their warlike movement to Moscow it was necessary: (1) that they should form themselves into a military group of a size able to endure a collision with the warlike military group of the east, (2) that they should abandon all established traditions and customs, and (3) that during their military movement they should have at their head a man who could justify to himself and to them the deceptions, robberies, and murders which would have to be committed during that movement.
It lies in the fact that an historic character like Alexander I, standing on the highest possible pinnacle of human power with the blinding light of history focused upon him; a character exposed to those strongest of all influences: the intrigues, flattery, and self-deception inseparable from power; a character who at every moment of his life felt a responsibility for all that was happening in Europe; and not a fictitious but a live character who like every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth--that this character--though not lacking in virtue (the historians do not accuse him of that)--had not the same conception of the welfare of humanity fifty years ago as a present-day professor who from his youth upwards has been occupied with learning: that is, with books and lectures and with taking notes from them.
FORT DODGE, a city and the county-seat of Webster county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Des Moines river, 85 m. (by rail) N. by W. from Des Moines. Pop. (1890) 4871; (1900) 12,162; (1905, state census) 14,369, (2269 being foreign-born); (1910) 15,543. It is served by the Illinois Central, the Chicago Great Western, the Minneapolis & Saint Louis, and the Fort Dodge, Des Moines & Southern railways, the last an electric interurban line. Eureka Springs and Wild Cat Cave are of interest to visitors, and attractive scenery is furnished by the river and its bordering bluffs. The river is here spanned by the Chicago Great Western railway steel bridge, or viaduct, one of the longest in the country. Fort Dodge is the seat of Tobin College (420 students in 1907-1908), a commercial and business school, with preparatory, normal and classical departments, and courses in oratory and music; among its other institutions are St Paul's school (Evangelical Lutheran), two Roman Catholic schools, Corpus Christi Academy and the Sacred Heart school, Our Lady of Lourdes convent and a Carnegie library. Oleson Park and Reynold's Park are the city's principal parks. Immediately surrounding Fort Dodge is a rich farming country. To the E. of the city lies a gypsum bed, extending over an area of about 50 sq. m., and considered to be the most valuable in the United States; to the S. coal abounds; there are also limestone quarries and deposits of clay in the vicinity--the clay being, for the most part, obtained by mining. Fort Dodge is a market for the products of the surrounding country, and is a shipping centre of considerable importance. It has various manufactures, including gypsum, plaster, oatmeal, brick and tile, sewer pipe, pottery, foundry and machine-shop products, and shoes. In 1905 the value of all the factory products was $3,025,659, an increase of 200.8% over that for 1900. Fort Clark was erected on the site in 1850 to protect settlers against the Indians; in 1851 the name was changed by order of the secretary of war to Fort Dodge in honour of Colonel Henry Dodge (1782-1867), who was a lieutenant-colonel of Missouri Volunteers in the War of 1812, served with distinction as a colonel of Michigan Mounted Volunteers in the Black Hawk War, resigned from the military service in March 1833, was governor of Wisconsin Territory from 1836 to 1841 and from 1846 to 1848, and was a delegate from Wisconsin Territory to Congress from 1841 to 1845, and a United States senator from Wisconsin in 1848-1857. The fort was abandoned in 1853, and in 1854 a town was laid out. It was chartered as a city in 1869. From the gypsum beds near Fort Dodge was taken in 1868 the block of gypsum from which was modelled the "Cardiff Giant," a rudely-fashioned human figure, which was buried near Cardiff, Onondaga county, New York, where it was "discovered" late in 1869. It was then exhibited in various parts of the country as a "petrified man." The hoax was finally exposed by Professor Othniel C. Marsh of Yale; and George Hall of Binghamton, N.Y., confessed to the fraud, his object having been to discredit belief in the "giants" of Genesis vi. 4. (See "The Cardiff Giant: the True Story of a Remarkable Deception," by Andrew D. White, in the _Century Magazine_, vol. xlii., 1902.) Entry: FORT