A POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE
VOLUME I
1500-1815

BY CARLTON J. H. HAYES




PREFACE


This book represents an attempt on the part of the author to satisfy a
very real need of a textbook which will reach far enough back to afford
secure foundations for a college course in modern European history.

The book is a long one, and purposely so. Not only does it undertake to
deal with a period at once the most complicated and the most inherently
interesting of any in the whole recorded history of mankind, but it
aims to impart sufficiently detailed information about the various
topics discussed to make the college student feel that he is advanced a
grade beyond the student in secondary school. There is too often a
tendency to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of the
collegian and to feed him so simple and scanty a mental pabulum that he
becomes as a child and thinks as a child. Of course the author
appreciates the fact that most college instructors of history piece out
the elementary textbooks by means of assignments of collateral reading
in large standard treatises. All too frequently, however, such
assignments, excellent in themselves, leave woeful gaps which a slender
elementary manual is inadequate to fill. And the student becomes too