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Title: A Short History of the World
Author: Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "A Short History of the World" ***
A Short History of the World
Illustrated
BY
H. G. Wells
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York
1922
Copyright, 1922, by H. G. Wells
{v}
PREFACE
This SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD is meant to be read
straightforwardly almost as a novel is read. It gives in the most
general way an account of our present knowledge of history, shorn
of elaborations and complications. It has been amply illustrated
and everything has been done to make it vivid and clear. From it
the reader should be able to get that general view of history
which is so necessary a framework for the study of it particular
period or the history of a particular country. It may be found
useful as a preparatory excursion before the reading of the
author's much fuller and more explicit _Outline of History_ is
undertaken. But its especial end is to meet the needs of the busy
general reader, too driven to study the maps and time charts of
that _Outline_ in detail, who wishes to refresh and repair his
faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of
mankind. It is not an abstract or condensation of that former
work. Within its aim the _Outline_ admits of no further
condensation. This is a much more generalized History, planned
and written afresh.
{vii}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE WORLD IN SPACE 1
II. THE WORLD IN TIME 5
III. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE 11
IV. THE AGE OF FISHES 16
V. THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS 21
VI. THE AGE OF REPTILES 26
VII. THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS 31
VIII. THE AGE OF MAMMALS 37
IX. MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN 43
X. THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN 48
XI. THE FIRST TRUE MEN 53
XII. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT 60
XIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION 65
XIV. PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS 71
XV. SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING 77
XVI. PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES 84
XVII. THE FIRST SEA-GOING PEOPLES 91
XVIII. EGYPT, BABYLON AND ASSYRIA 96
XIX. THE PRIMITIVE ARYANS 104
XX. THE LAST BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF DARIUS I 109
XXI. THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS 115
XXII. PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA 122
XXIII. THE GREEKS 127
XXIV. THE WARS OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS 134
XXV. THE SPLENDOUR OF GREECE 139
XXVI. THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 145
XXVII. THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA 150
{viii}
XXVIII. THE LIFE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA 156
XXIX. KING ASOKA 163
XXX. CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE 167
XXXI. ROME COMES INTO HISTORY 174
XXXII. ROME AND CARTHAGE 180
XXXIII. THE GROWTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 185
XXXIV. BETWEEN ROME AND CHINA 196
XXXV. THE COMMON MAN'S LIFE UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE 201
XXXVI. RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE 208
XXXVII. THE TEACHING OF JESUS 214
XXXVIII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY 222
XXXIX. THE BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO EAST AND WEST 227
XL. THE HUNS AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE 233
XLI. THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES 238
XLII. THE DYNASTIES OF SUY AND TANG IN CHINA 245
XLIII. MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 248
XLIV. THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS 253
XLV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM 258
XLVI. THE CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION 267
XLVII. RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM 277
XLVIII. THE MONGOL CONQUESTS 287
XLIX. THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS 294
L. THE REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH 304
LI. THE EMPEROR CHARLES V 309
LII. THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY
AND PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE 318
LIII. THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS 329
LIV. THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 335
{ix}
LV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF
MONARCHY IN FRANCE 341
LVI. THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED
THE FALL OF NAPOLEON 349
LVII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE 355
LVIII. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 365
LIX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS 370
LX. THE EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES 382
LXI. THE RISE OF GERMANY TO PREDOMINANCE IN EUROPE 390
LXII. THE NEW OVERSEAS EMPIRES OF THE STEAMSHIP AND RAILWAY 393
LXIII. EUROPEAN AGGRESSION IN ASIA, AND THE RISE OF JAPAN 399
LXIV. THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN 1914 405
LXV. THE AGE OF ARMAMENT IN EUROPE, AND
THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-18 409
LXVI. THE REVOLUTION AND FAMINE IN RUSSIA 415
LXVII. THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD 421
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 429
INDEX 439
{xi}
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Luminous Spiral Clouds of Matter 2
Nebula seen Edge-on 3
The Great Spiral Nebula 6
A Dark Nebula 7
Another Spiral Nebula 8
Landscape before Life 9
Marine Life in the Cambrian Period 12
Fossil Trilobite 13
Early Palæozoic Fossils of various Species of Lingula 14
Fossilized Footprints of a Labyrinthodont, Cheirotherium 15
Pterichthys Milleri 17
Fossil of Cladoselache 18
Sharks and Ganoids of the Devonian Period 19
A Carboniferous Swamp 22
Skull of a Labyrinthodont, Capitosaurus 23
Skeleton of a Labyrinthodont: The Eryops 24
A Fossil Ichthyosaurus 27
A Pterodactyl 28
The Diplodocus 29
Fossil of Archeopteryx 32
Hesperornis in its Native Seas 33
The Ki-wi 34
Slab of Marl Rich in Cainozoic Fossils 35
Titanotherium Robustum 38
Skeleton of Giraffe-camel 40
Skeleton of Early Horse 40
Comparative Sizes of Brains of Rhinoceros and Dinoceras 41
A Mammoth 44
Flint Implements from Piltdown Region 45
A Pithecanthropean Man 46
The Heidelberg Man 46
The Piltdown Skull 47
A Neanderthaler 49
{xii}
Europe and Western Asia 50,000 years ago Map 50
Comparison of Modern Skull and Rhodesian Skull 51
Altamira Cave Paintings 54
Later Palæolithic Carvings 55
Bust of Cro-magnon Man 57
Later Palæolithic Art 58
Relics of the Stone Age 62
Gray's Inn Lane Flint Implement 63
Somaliland Flint Implement 63
Neolithic Flint Implement 67
Australian Spearheads 68
Neolithic Pottery 69
Relationship of Human Races Map 72
A Maya Stele 73
European Neolithic Warrior 75
Babylonian Brick 78
Egyptian Cylinder Seals of First Dynasty 79
The Sakhara Pyramids 80
The Pyramid of Cheops: Scene from Summit 81
The Temple of Hathor 82
Pottery and Implements of the Lake Dwellers 85
A Lake Village 86
Flint Knives of 4500 B.C. 87
Egyptian Wall Paintings of Nomads 87
Egyptian Peasants Going to Work 88
Stele of Naram Sin 89
The Treasure House at Mycenæ 93
The Palace at Cnossos 95
Temple at Abu Simbel 97
Avenue of Sphinxes at Karnak 98
The Hypostyle Hall at Karnak 99
Frieze of Slaves 101
The Temple of Horus, Edfu 103
Archaic Amphora 105
The Mound of Nippur 107
Median and Chaldean Empires Map 110
The Empire of Darius Map 111
A Persian Monarch 112
The Ruins of Persepolis 113
The Great Porch of Xerxes 113
{xiii}
The Land of the Hebrews Map 117
Nebuchadnezzar's Mound at Babylon 118
The Ishtar Gateway, Babylon 120
Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II 124
Captive Princes making Obeisance 125
Statue of Meleager 128
Ruins of Temple of Zeus 130
The Temple of Neptune, Pæstum 132
Greek Ships on Ancient Pottery 135
The Temple of Corinth 137
The Temple of Neptune at Cape Sunium 138
Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens 140
The Acropolis, Athens 141
Theatre at Epidauros, Greece 141
The Caryatides of the Erechtheum 142
Athene of the Parthenon 143
Alexander the Great 146
Alexander's Victory at Issus 147
The Apollo Belvedere 148
Aristotle 152
Statuette of Maitreya 153
The Death of Buddha 154
Tibetan Buddha 158
A Burmese Buddha 159
The Dhamêkh Tower, Sarnath 160
A Chinese Buddhist Apostle 164
The Court of Asoka 165
Asoka Panel from Bharhut 165
The Pillar of Lions (Asokan) 166
Confucius 169
The Great Wall of China 171
Early Chinese Bronze Bell 172
The Dying Gaul 175
Ancient Roman Cisterns at Carthage 177
Hannibal 181
Roman Empire and its Alliances, 150 B.C. Map 183
The Forum, Rome 188
Ruined Coliseum in Tunis 189
Roman Arch at Ctesiphon 190
The Column of Trajan, Rome 193
{xiv}
Glazed Jar of Han Dynasty 197
Vase of Han Dynasty 198
Chinese Vessel in Bronze 199
A Gladiator (contemporary representation) 202
A Street in Pompeii 204
The Coliseum, Rome 206
Interior of Coliseum 206
Mithras Sacrificing a Bull 210
Isis and Horus 211
Bust of Emperor Commodus 212
Early Portrait of Jesus Christ 216
Road from Nazareth to Tiberias 217
David's Tower and Wall of Jerusalem 218
A Street in Jerusalem 219
The Peter and Paul Mosaic at Rome 223
Baptism of Christ (Ivory Panel) 225
Roman Empire and the Barbarians Map 228
Constantine's Pillar, Constantinople 229
The Obelisk of Theodosius, Constantinople 231
Head of Barbarian Chief 235
The Church of S. Sophia, Constantinople 239
Roof-work in S. Sophia 240
Justinian and his Court 241
The Rock-hewn Temple at Petra 242
Chinese Earthenware of Tang Dynasty 246
At Prayer in the Desert 250
Looking Across the Sea of Sand 251
Growth of Moslem Power Map 254
The Moslem Empire Map 254
The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem 255
Cairo Mosques 256
Frankish Dominions of Martel Map 260
Statue of Charlemagne 262
Europe at Death of Charlemagne Map 264
Crusader Tombs, Exeter Cathedral 268
View of Cairo 269
The Horses of S. Mark, Venice 271
Courtyard in the Alhambra 273
Milan Cathedral (showing spires) 278
A Typical Crusader 280
{xv}
Burgundian Nobility (Statuettes) 283-4
The Empire of Jengis Khan Map 288
Ottoman Empire before 1453 Map 289
Tartar Horsemen 291
Ottoman Empire, 1566 Map 292
An Early Printing Press 296
Ancient Bronze from Benin 299
Negro Bronze-work 300
Early Sailing Ship (Italian Engraving) 301
Portrait of Martin Luther 305
The Church Triumphant (Italian Majolica work, 1543) 307
Charles V (the Titian Portrait) 311
S. Peter's, Rome: the High Altar 315
Cromwell Dissolves the Long Parliament 321
The Court at Versailles 323
Sack of a Village, French Revolution 325
Central Europe after Peace of Westphalia, 1648 Map 326
European Territory in America, 1750 Map 330
Europeans Tiger Hunting in India 331
Fall of Tippoo Sultan 332
George Washington 337
The Battle of Bunker Hill 338
The U.S.A., 1790 339
The Trial of Louis XVI 344
Execution of Marie Antoinette 346
Portrait of Napoleon 352
Europe after the Congress of Vienna Map 353
Early Rolling Stock, Liverpool and Manchester Railway 356
Passenger Train in 1833 356
The Steamboat Clermont 357
Eighteenth Century Spinning Wheel 361
Arkwright's Spinning Jenny 361
An Early Weaving Machine 363
An Incident of the Slave Trade 367
Early Factory, in Colebrookdale 368
Carl Marx 372
Electric Conveyor, in Coal Mine 376
Constructional Detail, Forth Bridge 378
American River Steamer 385
Abraham Lincoln 387
{xvi}
Europe, 1848-71 Map 391
Victoria Falls, Zambesi 395
The British Empire, 1815 Map 397
Japanese Soldier, Eighteenth Century 401
A Street in Tokio 403
Overseas Empires of Europe, 1914 Map 406
Gibraltar 407
Street in Hong Kong 408
British Tank in Battle 410
The Ruins of Ypres 411
Modern War: War Entanglements 412
A View in Petersburg under Bolshevik Rule 418
Passenger Aeroplane in Flight 423
A Peaceful Garden in England 426
{1}
I
THE WORLD IN SPACE
The story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly
known. A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of
little more than the last three thousand years. What happened
before that time was a matter of legend and speculation. Over a
large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that
the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though
authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring
or autumn of that year. This fantastically precise misconception
was based upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible,
and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected
therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious
teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in
which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous
period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may
be deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem
endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end. But
that the universe in which we live has existed only for six or
seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether exploded
idea.
The earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere
slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly
8,000 miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a
limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years, but
before that time it was supposed to be flat, and various ideas
which now seem fantastic were entertained about its relations to
the sky and the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates
upon its {2} axis (which is about 24 miles shorter than its
equatorial diameter) every twenty-four hours, and that this is the
cause of the alternations of day and night, that it circles about
the sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable oval path in a
year. Its distance from the sun varies between ninety-one and a
half millions at its nearest and ninety-four and a half million
miles.
[Illustration: "LUMINOUS SPIRAL CLOUDS OF MATTER"]
About the earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average
distance of 239,000 miles. Earth and moon are not the only bodies
to travel round the sun. There are also the planets, Mercury and
Venus, at distances of thirty-six and sixty-seven millions of
miles; and beyond the circle of the earth and disregarding a belt
of numerous smaller bodies, the planetoids, there are Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483,
886, 1,782, and 1,793 millions of miles respectively. These
figures in {3} millions of miles are very difficult for the mind
to grasp. It may help the reader's imagination if we reduce the
sun and planets to a smaller, more conceivable scale.
[Illustration: THE NEBULA SEEN EDGE ON]
If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch
diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323
yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes'
walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from
the world. Between earth and sun there would be the two inner
planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and
twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun. All
round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you
came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth;
Jupiter {4} nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a
little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune
six miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for small
particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands
of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale would be 40,000
miles away.
These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of
the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.
For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of
life only upon the surface of our earth. It does not penetrate
much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate
us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reach more than
five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of
space is otherwise empty and dead.
The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest
recorded flight of an aeroplane is little more than four miles.
Men have reached to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of
great suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles, and small
birds and insects which have been carried up by aeroplanes drop
off insensible far below that level.
{5}
II
THE WORLD IN TIME
In the last fifty years there has been much very fine and
interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age
and origin of our earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a
summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle
mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the
physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as
yet to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative
guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the estimated
age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that
the earth has had an independent existence as a spinning planet
flying round and round the sun for a longer period than
2,000,000,000 years. It may have been much longer than that. This
is a length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination.
Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and earth
and the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been a
great swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to
us in various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of
matter, the spiral nebulæ, which appear to be in rotation about a
centre. It is supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its
planets were once such a spiral, and that their matter has
undergone concentration into its present form. Through majestic
æons that concentration went on until in that vast remoteness of
the past for which we have given figures, the world and its moon
were distinguishable. They were spinning then much faster than
they are spinning now; they were at a lesser distance from the
sun; they travelled round it very much faster, and they were
probably incandescent or molten at the surface. The sun itself
was a much greater blaze in the heavens.
{6}
[Illustration: THE GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA]
If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the
earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a
scene more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of
a lava flow before it cools and cakes over than any other
contemporary scene. No water would be visible because all the
water there was would still be superheated steam in a stormy
atmosphere of sulphurous and metallic vapours. Beneath this would
swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock substance. Across a sky of
fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep
swiftly like hot breaths of flame.
====================================================================
{7}
[Illustration: A DARK NEBULA]
====================================================================
Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, this
{8} fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The
vapours in the sky would rain down and become less dense overhead;
great slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would appear upon the
surface of the molten sea, and sink under it, to be replaced by
other floating masses. The sun and moon growing now each more
distant and each smaller, would rush with diminishing swiftness
across the heavens. The moon now, because of its smaller size,
would be already cooled far below incandescence, and would be
alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a series of
eclipses and full moons.
[Illustration: ANOTHER SPIRAL NEBULA]
And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time,
the earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we
live, until at last an age would come when, in the cooling air,
steam would begin to condense into clouds, and the first rain
would fall hissing upon the first rocks below. For endless
millenia the greater part of the earth's water would still be
vaporized in the atmosphere, but there would now be hot streams
running over the crystallizing {9} rocks below and pools and lakes
into which these streams would be carrying detritus and depositing
sediment.
[Illustration: LANDSCAPE BEFORE LIFE]
At last a condition of things must have been attained in which a
man might have stood up on earth and looked about him and lived.
If we could have visited the earth at that time we should have
stood on great lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil or
touch of living vegetation, under a storm-rent sky. Hot and
violent winds, exceeding the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and
downpours of rain such as our milder, slower earth to-day knows
nothing of, might have assailed us. The water of the downpour
would have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks,
coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and canyons as
they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas.
Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving
visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the
moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval.
And {10} the moon, which nowadays keeps one constant face to
earth, would then have been rotating visibly and showing the side
it now hides so inexorably.
The earth aged. One million years followed another, and the day
lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the moon's pace
in the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and storm diminished
and the water in the first seas increased and ran together into
the ocean garment our planet henceforth wore.
But there was no life as yet upon the earth; the seas were
lifeless, and the rocks were barren.
{11}
III
THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
As everybody knows nowadays, the knowledge we possess of life
before the beginnings of human memory and tradition is derived
from the markings and fossils of living things in the stratified
rocks. We find preserved in shale and slate, limestone, and
sandstone, bones, shells, fibres, stems, fruits, footmarks,
scratchings and the like, side by side with the ripple marks of
the earliest tides and the pittings of the earliest rain-falls. It
is by the sedulous examination of this Record of the Rocks that
the past history of the earth's life has been pieced together.
That much nearly everybody knows to-day. The sedimentary rocks do
not lie neatly stratum above stratum; they have been crumpled,
bent, thrust about, distorted and mixed together like the leaves
of a library that has been repeatedly looted and burnt, and it is
only as a result of many devoted lifetimes of work that the record
has been put into order and read. The whole compass of time
represented by the record of the rocks is now estimated as
1,600,000,000 years.
The earliest rocks in the record are called by geologists the
Azoic rocks, because they show no traces of life. Great areas of
these Azoic rocks lie uncovered in North America, and they are of
such a thickness that geologists consider that they represent a
period of at least half of the 1,600,000,000 which they assign to
the whole geological record. Let me repeat this profoundly
significant fact. Half the great interval of time since land and
sea were first distinguishable on earth has left us no traces of
life. There are ripplings and rain marks still to be found in
these rocks, but no marks nor vestiges of any living thing.
====================================================================
{12}
[Illustration: MARINE LIFE IN THE CAMBRIAN PERIOD]
====================================================================
Then, as we come up the record, signs of past life appear and
increase. The age of the world's history in which we find these
past {13} traces is called by geologists the Lower Palæozoic age.
The first indications that life was astir are vestiges of
comparatively simple and lowly things: the shells of small
shellfish, the stems and flowerlike heads of zoophytes, seaweeds
and the tracks and remains of sea worms and crustacea. Very early
appear certain creatures rather like plant-lice, crawling
creatures which could roll themselves up into balls as the
plant-lice do, the trilobites. Later by a few million years or so
come certain sea scorpions, more mobile and powerful creatures
than the world had ever seen before.
[Illustration: FOSSIL TRILOBITE (SLIGHTLY MAGNIFIED)]
None of these creatures were of very great size. Among the
largest were certain of the sea scorpions, which measured nine
feet in length. There are no signs whatever of land life of any
sort, plant or animal; there are no fishes nor any vertebrated
creatures in this part of the record. Essentially all the plants
and creatures which have left us their traces from this period of
the earth's history are shallow-water and intertidal beings. If
we wished to parallel the flora and fauna of the Lower Palæozoic
rocks on the earth to-day, we should do it best, except in the
matter of size, by taking a drop of water from a rock pool or
scummy ditch and examining it under a microscope. The little
crustacea, the small shellfish, the zoophytes and algæ we should
find there would display a quite striking resemblance to these
clumsier, larger prototypes that once were the crown of life upon
our planet.
[Illustration: EARLY PALÆOLITHIC FOSSILS OF VARIOUS SPECIES OF
LINGULA]
It is well, however, to bear in mind that the Lower Palæozoic
rocks probably do not give us anything at all representative of
the first beginnings of life on our planet. Unless a creature has
bones {14} or other hard parts, unless it wears a shell or is big
enough and heavy enough to make characteristic footprints and
trails in mud, it is unlikely to leave any fossilized traces of
its existence behind. To-day there are hundreds of thousands of
species of small soft-bodied creatures in our world which it is
inconceivable can ever leave any mark for future geologists to
discover. In the world's past, millions of millions of species of
such creatures may have lived and multiplied and flourished and
passed away without a trace remaining. The waters of the warm and
shallow lakes and seas of the so-called Azoic period may have
teemed with an infinite variety {15} of lowly, jelly-like,
shell-less and boneless creatures, and a multitude of green scummy
plants may have spread over the sunlit intertidal rocks and
beaches. The Record of the Rocks is no more a complete record of
life in the past than the books of a bank are a record of the
existence of everybody in the neighbourhood. It is only when a
species begins to secrete a shell or a spicule or a carapace or a
lime-supported stem, and so put by something for the future, that
it goes upon the Record. But in rocks of an age prior to those
which bear any fossil traces, graphite, a form of uncombined
carbon, is sometimes found, and some authorities consider that it
may have been separated out from combination through the vital
activities of unknown living things.
[Illustration: FOSSILIZED FOOTPRINTS OF A LABYRINTHODONT
CHEIROTHERIUM]
{16}
IV
THE AGE OF FISHES
In the days when the world was supposed to have endured for only a
few thousand years, it was supposed that the different species of
plants and animals were fixed and final; they had all been created
exactly as they are to-day, each species by itself. But as men
began to discover and study the Record of the Rocks this belief
gave place to the suspicion that many species had changed and
developed slowly through the course of ages, and this again
expanded into a belief in what is called Organic Evolution, a
belief that all species of life upon earth, animal and vegetable
alike, are descended by slow continuous processes of change from
some very simple ancestral form of life, some almost structureless
living substance, far back in the so-called Azoic seas.
This question of Organic Evolution, like the question of the age
of the earth, has in the past been the subject of much bitter
controversy. There was a time when a belief in organic evolution
was for rather obscure reasons supposed to be incompatible with
sound Christian, Jewish and Moslem doctrine. That time has
passed, and the men of the most orthodox Catholic, Protestant,
Jewish and Mohammedan belief are now free to accept this newer and
broader view of a common origin of all living things. No life
seems to have happened suddenly upon earth. Life grew and grows.
Age by age through gulfs of time at which imagination reels, life
has been growing from a mere stirring in the intertidal slime
towards freedom, power and consciousness.
Life consists of individuals. These individuals are definite
things, they are not like the lumps and masses, nor even the
limitless and motionless crystals, of non-living matter, and they
have two characteristics no dead matter possesses. They can
assimilate other matter into themselves and make it part of
themselves, and {17} they can reproduce themselves. They eat and
they breed. They can give rise to other individuals, for the most
part like themselves, but always also a little different from
themselves. There is a specific and family resemblance between an
individual and its offspring, and there is an individual
difference between every parent and every offspring it produces,
and this is true in every species and at every stage of life.
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF THE PTERICHTHYS MILLERI OR SEA SCORPION
SHOWING BODY ARMOUR]
Now scientific men are not able to explain to us either why
offspring should resemble nor why they should differ from their
parents. But seeing that offspring do at once resemble and
differ, it is a matter rather of common sense than of scientific
knowledge that, if the conditions under which a species live are
changed, the species should undergo some correlated changes.
Because in any generation of the species there must be a number of
individuals whose individual differences make them better adapted
to the new conditions under which the species has to live, and a
number whose individuals whose individual differences make it
rather harder for them to live. And on the hole the former sort
will live longer, bear more offspring, and reproduce themselves
more abundantly than the latter, and so generation by generation
the average of the species will change in the favourable
direction. This process, which is called Natural Selection, is
not so much a scientific theory as a necessary deduction {18} from
the facts of reproduction and individual difference. There may be
many forces at work varying, destroying and preserving species,
about which science may still be unaware or undecided, but the man
who can deny the operation of this process of natural selection
upon life since its beginning must be either ignorant of the
elementary facts of life or incapable of ordinary thought.
Many scientific men have speculated about the first beginning of
life and their speculations are often of great interest, but there
is absolutely no definite knowledge and no convincing guess yet of
the way in which life began. But nearly all authorities are
agreed that it probably began upon mud or sand in warm sunlit
shallow brackish water, and that it spread up the beaches to the
intertidal lines and out to the open waters.
[Illustration: FOSSIL OF THE CLADOSELACHE, A DEVONIAN SHARK]
That early world was a world of strong tides and currents. An
incessant destruction of individuals must have been going on
through their being swept up the beaches and dried, or by their
being swept out to sea and sinking down out of reach of air and
sun. Early conditions favoured the development of every tendency
to root and hold on, every tendency to form an outer skin and
casing to protect the stranded individual from immediate
desiccation. From the very earliest any tendency to sensitiveness
to taste would turn the individual in the direction of food, and
any sensitiveness to light would assist it to struggle back out of
the darkness of the sea deeps and caverns or to wriggle back out
of the excessive glare of the dangerous shallows.
Probably the first shells and body armour of living things were
protections against drying rather than against active enemies.
But tooth and claw come early into our earthly history.
We have already noted the size of the earlier water scorpions.
For long ages such creatures were the supreme lords of life. Then
{19} in a division of these Palæozoic rocks called the Silurian
division, which many geologists now suppose to be as old as five
hundred million years, there appears a new type of being, equipped
with eyes and teeth and swimming powers of an altogether more
powerful kind. These were the first known backboned animals, the
earliest fishes, the first known Vertebrata.
[Illustration: SHARKS AND GANOIDS OF THE DEVONIAN PERIOD]
These fishes increase greatly in the next division of rocks, the
rocks known as the Devonian system. They are so prevalent that
this period of the Record of the Rocks has been called the Age of
{20} Fishes. Fishes of a pattern now gone from the earth, and
fishes allied to the sharks and sturgeons of to-day, rushed
through the waters, leapt in the air, browsed among the seaweeds,
pursued and preyed upon one another, and gave a new liveliness to
the waters of the world. None of these were excessively big by
our present standards. Few of them were more than two or three
feet long, but there were exceptional forms which were as long as
twenty feet.
We know nothing from geology of the ancestors of these fishes.
They do not appear to be related to any of the forms that preceded
them. Zoologists have the most interesting views of their
ancestry, but these they derive from the study of the development
of the eggs of their still living relations, and from other
sources. Apparently the ancestors of the vertebrata were
soft-bodied and perhaps quite small swimming creatures who began first
to develop hard parts as teeth round and about their mouths. The
teeth of a skate or dogfish cover the roof and floor of its mouth
and pass at the lip into the flattened toothlike scales that
encase most of its body. As the fishes develop these teeth scales
in the geological record, they swim out of the hidden darkness of
the past into the light, the first vertebrated animals visible in
the record.
{21}
V
THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS
The land during this Age of Fishes was apparently quite lifeless.
Crags and uplands of barren rock lay under the sun and rain.
There was no real soil--for as yet there were no earthworms which
help to make a soil, and no plants to break up the rock particles
into mould; there was no trace of moss or lichen. Life was still
only in the sea.
Over this world of barren rock played great changes of climate.
The causes of these changes of climate were very complex and they
have still to be properly estimated. The changing shape of the
earth's orbit, the gradual shifting of the poles of rotation,
changes in the shapes of the continents, probably even
fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, now conspired to plunge
great areas of the earth's surface into long periods of cold and
ice and now again for millions of years spread a warm or equable
climate over this planet. There seem to have been phases of great
internal activity in the world's history, when in the course of a
few million years accumulated upthrusts would break out in lines
of volcanic eruption and upheaval and rearrange the mountain and
continental outlines of the globe, increasing the depth of the sea
and the height of the mountains and exaggerating the extremes of
climate. And these would be followed by vast ages of comparative
quiescence, when frost, rain and river would wear down the
mountain heights and carry great masses of silt to fill and raise
the sea bottoms and spread the seas, ever shallower and wider,
over more and more of the land. There have been "high and deep"
ages in the world's history and "low and level" ages. The reader
must dismiss from his mind any idea that the surface of the earth
has been growing steadily cooler since its crust grew solid.
After that much cooling had been achieved, the internal
temperature ceased to affect surface {22} conditions. There are
traces of periods of superabundant ice and snow, of "Glacial
Ages," that is, even in the Azoic period.
It was only towards the close of the Age of Fishes, in a period of
extensive shallow seas and lagoons, that life spread itself out in
any effectual way from the waters on to the land. No doubt the
earlier types of the forms that now begin to appear in great
abundance had already been developing in a rare and obscure manner
for many scores of millions of years. But now came their
opportunity.
[Illustration: A CARBONIFEROUS SWAMP]
Plants no doubt preceded animal forms in this invasion of the
land, but the animals probably followed up the plant emigration
{23} very closely. The first problem that the plant had to solve
was the problem of some sustaining stiff support to hold up its
fronds to the sunlight when the buoyant water was withdrawn; the
second was the problem of getting water from the swampy ground
below to the tissues of the plant, now that it was no longer close
at hand. The two problems were solved by the development of woody
tissue which both sustained the plant and acted as water carrier
to the leaves. The Record of the Rocks is suddenly crowded by a
vast variety of woody swamp plants, many of them of great size,
big tree mosses, tree ferns, gigantic horsetails and the like.
And with these, age by age, there crawled out of the water a great
variety of animal forms. There were centipedes and millipedes;
there were the first primitive insects; there were creatures
related to the ancient king crabs and sea scorpions which became
the earliest spiders and land scorpions, and presently there were
vertebrated animals.
[Illustration: SKULL OF A LABYRINTHODONT, CAPITOSAURUS]
Some of the earlier insects were very large. There were dragon
flies in this period with wings that spread out to twenty-nine
inches.
In various ways these new orders and genera had adapted themselves
to breathing air. Hitherto all animals had breathed air dissolved
in water, and that indeed is what all animals still have to do.
But now in divers fashions the animal kingdom was acquiring the
power of supplying its own moisture where it was needed. A man
with a perfectly dry lung would suffocate to-day; {24} his lung
surfaces must be moist in order that air may pass through them
into his blood. The adaptation to air breathing consists in all
cases either in the development of a cover to the old-fashioned
gills to stop evaporation, or in the development of tubes or other
new breathing organs lying deep inside the body and moistened by a
watery secretion. The old gills with which the ancestral fish of
the vertebrated line had breathed were inadaptable to breathing
upon land, and in the case of this division of the animal kingdom
it is the swimming bladder of the fish which becomes a new,
deep-seated breathing organ, the lung. The kind of animals
known as amphibia, the frogs and newts of to-day, begin
their lives in the water and breathe by gills; and subsequently
the lung, developing in the same way as the swimming
bladder of many fishes do, as a baglike outgrowth from the throat,
takes over the business of breathing, the animal comes out on
land, and the gills dwindle and the gill slits disappear. (All
except an outgrowth of one gill slit, which becomes the passage of
the ear and ear-drum.) The animal can now live only in the air,
but it must return at least to the edge of the water to lay its
eggs and reproduce its kind.
[Illustration: SKELETON OF A LABYRINTHODONT; THE ERYOPS]
All the air-breathing vertebrata of this age of swamps and plants
belonged to the class amphibia. They were nearly all of them
forms related to the newts of to-day, and some of them attained a
considerable size. They were land animals, it is true, but they
were land animals needing to live in and near moist and swampy
places, and all the great trees of this period were equally {25}
amphibious in their habits. None of them had yet developed fruits
and seeds of a kind that could fall on land and develop with the
help only of such moisture as dew and rain could bring. They all
had to shed their spores in water, it would seem, if they were to
germinate.
It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful
science, comparative anatomy, to trace the complex and wonderful
adaptations of living things to the necessities of existence in
air. All living things, plants and animals alike, are primarily
water things. For example all the higher vertebrated animals
above the fishes, up to and including man, pass through a stage in
their development in the egg or before birth in which they have
gill slits which are obliterated before the young emerge. The
bare, water-washed eye of the fish is protected in the higher
forms from drying up by eyelids and glands which secrete moisture.
The weaker sound vibrations of air necessitate an ear-drum. In
nearly every organ of the body similar modifications and
adaptations are to be detected, similar patchings-up to meet
aerial conditions.
This Carboniferous age, this age of the amphibia, was an age of
life in the swamps and lagoons and on the low banks among these
waters. Thus far life had now extended. The hills and high lands
were still quite barren and lifeless. Life had learnt to breathe
air indeed, but it still had its roots in its native water; it
still had to return to the water to reproduce its kind.
{26}
VI
THE AGE OF REPTILES
The abundant life of the Carboniferous period was succeeded by a
vast cycle of dry and bitter ages. They are represented in the
Record of the Rocks by thick deposits of sandstones and the like,
in which fossils are comparatively few. The temperature of the
world fluctuated widely, and there were long periods of glacial
cold. Over great areas the former profusion of swamp vegetation
ceased, and, overlaid by these newer deposits, it began that
process of compression and mineralization that gave the world most
of the coal deposits of to-day.
But it is during periods of change that life undergoes its most
rapid modifications, and under hardship that it learns its hardest
lessons. As conditions revert towards warmth and moisture again
we find a new series of animal and plant forms established, We
find in the record the remains of vertebrated animals that laid
eggs which, instead of hatching out tadpoles which needed to live
for a time in water, carried on their development before hatching
to a stage so nearly like the adult form that the young could live
in air from the first moment of independent existence. Gills had
been cut out altogether, and the gill slits only appeared as an
embryonic phase.
These new creatures without a tadpole stage were the Reptiles.
Concurrently there had been a development of seed-bearing trees,
which could spread their seed, independently of swamp or lakes.
There were now palmlike cycads and many tropical conifers, though
as yet there were no flowering plants and no grasses. There was a
great number of ferns. And there was now also an increased
variety of insects. There were beetles, though bees and
butterflies had yet to come. But all the fundamental forms of a
new real land fauna and flora had been laid down during these vast
ages of severity. {27} This new land life needed only the
opportunity of favourable conditions to flourish and prevail.
[Illustration: A FOSSIL ICHTHYOSAURUS, A MESOZOIC FISH-LIZARD]
Age by age and with abundant fluctuations that mitigation came.
The still incalculable movements of the earth's crust, the changes
in its orbit, the increase and diminution of the mutual
inclination of orbit and pole, worked together to produce a great
spell of widely diffused warm conditions. The period lasted
altogether, it is now supposed, upwards of two hundred million
years. It is called the Mesozoic period, to distinguish it from
the altogether vaster Palæozoic and Azoic periods (together
fourteen hundred millions) that preceded it, and from the
Cainozoic or new life period that intervened between its close and
the present time, and it is also called the Age of Reptiles
because of the astonishing predominance and variety of this form
of life. It came to an end some eighty million years ago.
In the world to-day the genera of Reptiles are comparatively few
and their distribution is very limited. They are more various, it
is true, than are the few surviving members of the order of the
amphibia which once in the Carboniferous period ruled the world.
We still have the snakes, the turtles and tortoises (the
Chelonia), {28} the alligators and crocodiles, and the lizards.
Without exception they are creatures requiring warmth all the year
round; they cannot stand exposure to cold, and it is probable that
all the reptilian beings of the Mesozoic suffered under the same
limitation. It was a hothouse fauna, living amidst a hothouse
flora. It endured no frosts. But the world had at least attained
a real dry land fauna and flora as distinguished from the mud and
swamp fauna and flora of the previous heyday of life upon earth.
[Illustration: A PTERODACTYL]
All the sorts of reptile we know now were much more abundantly
represented then, great turtles and tortoises, big crocodiles and
many lizards and snakes, but in addition there was a number of
series of wonderful creatures that have now vanished altogether
from the earth. There was a vast variety of beings called the
Dinosaurs. Vegetation was now spreading over the lower levels of
the world, reeds, brakes of fern and the like; and browsing upon
this abundance came a multitude of herbivorous reptiles, which
increased in size as the Mesozoic period rose to its climax. Some
of these beasts exceeded in size any other land animals that have
ever lived; they were as large as whales. The _Diplodocus
Carnegii_ for example measured eighty-four feet from snout to
tail; the Gigantosaurus was even greater; it measured a hundred
feet. Living upon these monsters was a swarm of carnivorous
Dinosaurs of a corresponding size. One of these, the
Tyrannosaurus, is figured and described in many books as the last
word in reptilian frightfulness.
{29}
[Illustration: A BIG SWAMP-INHABITING DINOSAUR, THE DIPLODOCUS,
OVER EIGHTY FEET FROM SNOUT TO TAIL-TIP]
While these great creatures pastured and pursued amidst the fronds
and evergreens of the Mesozoic jungles, another now vanished tribe
of reptiles, with a bat-like development of the fore limbs,
pursued insects and one another, first leapt and parachuted and
presently flew amidst the fronds and branches of the forest trees.
These were the Pterodactyls. These were the first flying creatures
with backbones; they mark a new achievement in the growing powers
of vertebrated life.
Moreover some of the reptiles were returning to the sea waters.
Three groups of big swimming beings had invaded the sea from which
their ancestors had come: the Mososaurs, the Plesiosaurs, and
Ichthyosaurs. Some of these again approached the proportions of
our present whales. The Ichthyosaurs seem to have been quite
seagoing creatures, but the Plesiosaurs were a type of animal that
has no cognate form to-day. The body was stout and big with
paddles, adapted either for swimming or crawling through marshes,
or along the bottom of shallow waters. The comparatively small
{30} head was poised on a vast snake of neck, altogether outdoing
the neck of the swan. Either the Plesiosaur swam and searched for
food under the water and fed as the swan will do, or it lurked
under water and snatched at passing fish or beast.
Such was the predominant land life throughout the Mesozoic age.
It was by our human standards an advance upon anything that had
preceded it. It had produced land animals greater in size, range,
power and activity, more "vital" as people say, than anything the
world had seen before. In the seas there had been no such advance
but a great proliferation of new forms of life. An enormous
variety of squid-like creatures with chambered shells, for the
most part coiled, had appeared in the shallow seas, the Ammonites.
They had had predecessors in the Palæozoic seas, but now was their
age of glory. To-day they have left no survivors at all; their
nearest relation is the pearly Nautilus, an inhabitant of tropical
waters. And a new and more prolific type of fish with lighter,
finer scales than the plate-like and tooth-like coverings that had
hitherto prevailed, became and has since remained predominant in
the seas and rivers.
{31}
VII
THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS
In a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming
reptiles of that first great summer of life, the Mesozoic period,
has been sketched. But while the Dinosaurs lorded it over the hot
selvas and marshy plains and the Pterodactyls filled the forests
with their flutterings and possibly with shrieks and croakings as
they pursued the humming insect life of the still flowerless
shrubs and trees, some less conspicuous and less abundant forms
upon the margins of this abounding life were acquiring certain
powers and learning certain lessons of endurance, that were to be
of the utmost value to their race when at last the smiling
generosity of sun and earth began to fade.
A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles, small creatures
of the dinosaur type, seem to have been pushed by competition and
the pursuit of their enemies towards the alternatives of
extinction or adaptation to colder conditions in the higher hills
or by the sea. Among these distressed tribes there was developed
a new type of scale--scales that were elongated into quill-like
forms and that presently branched into the crude beginnings of
feathers. These quill-like scales layover one another and formed
a heat-retaining covering more efficient than any reptilian
covering that had hitherto existed. So they permitted an invasion
of colder regions that were otherwise uninhabited. Perhaps
simultaneously with these changes there arose in these creatures a
greater solicitude for their eggs. Most reptiles are apparently
quite careless about their eggs, which are left for sun and season
to hatch. But some of the varieties upon this new branch of the
tree of life were acquiring a habit of guarding their eggs and
keeping them warm with the warmth of their bodies.
With these adaptations to cold other internal modifications {32}
were going on that made these creatures, the primitive birds,
warm-blooded and independent of basking. The very earliest birds
seem to have been seabirds living upon fish, and their fore limbs
were not wings but paddles rather after the penguin type. That
peculiarly primitive bird, the New Zealand Ki-Wi, has feathers of
a very simple sort, and neither flies nor appears to be descended
from flying ancestors. In the development of the birds, feathers
came before wings. But once the feather was developed the
possibility of making a light spread of feathers led inevitably to
the wing. We know of the fossil remains of one bird at least
which had reptilian teeth in its jaw and a long reptilian tail,
but which also had a true bird's wing and which certainly flew and
held its own among the pterodactyls of the Mesozoic time.
Nevertheless birds were neither varied nor abundant in Mesozoic
times. If a man could go back to typical Mesozoic country, he
might walk for days and never see or hear such a thing as a bird,
though he would see a great abundance of pterodactyls and insects
among the fronds and reeds.
[Illustration: FOSSIL OF THE ARCHEOPTERYX; ONE OF THE EARLIEST
BIRDS]
And another thing he would probably never see, and that would be
any sign of a mammal. Probably the first mammals were in {33}
existence millions of years before the first thing one could call
a bird, but they were altogether too small and obscure and remote
for attention.
[Illustration: HESPERORNIS IN ITS NATIVE SEAS]
The earliest mammals, like the earliest birds, were creatures
driven by competition and pursuit into a life of hardship and
adaptation to cold. With them also the scale became quill-like,
and was developed into a heat-retaining covering; and they too
underwent modifications, similar in kind though different in
detail, to become warm-blooded and independent of basking.
Instead of feathers they developed hairs, and instead of guarding
and incubating their eggs they kept them warm and safe by
retaining them inside their bodies until they were almost mature.
Most of them became altogether vivaparous and brought their young
into the world alive. And even after their young were born they
tended to maintain a protective and nutritive association with
them. Most {34} but not all mammals to-day have mammæ and suckle
their young. Two mammals still live which lay eggs and which have
not proper mammæ, though they nourish their young by a nutritive
secretion of the under skin; these are the duck-billed platypus
and the echidna. The echidna lays leathery eggs and then puts
them into a pouch under its belly, and so carries them about warm
and safe until they hatch.
But just as a visitor to the Mesozoic world might have searched
for days and weeks before finding a bird, so, unless he knew
exactly where to go and look, he might have searched in vain for
any traces of a mammal. Both birds and mammals would have seemed
very eccentric and secondary and unimportant creatures in Mesozoic
times.
[Illustration: THE KI-WI, APTERYX, STILL FOUND IN NEW ZEALAND]
====================================================================
{35}
[Illustration: SLAB OF LOWER PLIOCENE MARL]
====================================================================
The Age of Reptiles lasted, it is now guessed, eighty million
years. Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the world
through that inconceivable length of time, how safe and eternal
the sunshine and abundance must have seemed, how assured the
wallowing prosperity of the dinosaurs and the flapping abundance
of the flying lizards! And then the mysterious rhythms and
accumulating forces of the universe began to turn against that
quasi-eternal stability. That run of luck {36} for life was
running out. Age by age, myriad of years after myriad of years,
with halts no doubt and retrogressions, came a change towards
hardship and extreme conditions, came great alterations of level
and great redistributions of mountain and sea. We find one thing
in the Record of the Rocks during the decadence of the long
Mesozoic age of prosperity that is very significant of steadily
sustained changes of condition, and that is a violent fluctuation
of living forms and the appearance of new and strange species.
Under the gathering threat of extinction the older orders and
genera are displaying their utmost capacity for variation and
adaptation. The Ammonites for example in these last pages of the
Mesozoic chapter exhibit a multitude of fantastic forms. Under
settled conditions there is no encouragement for novelties; they
do not develop, they are suppressed; what is best adapted is
already there. Under novel conditions it is the ordinary type
that suffers, and the novelty that may have a better chance to
survive and establish itself....
There comes a break in the Record of the Rocks that may represent
several million years. There is a veil here still, over even the
outline of the history of life. When it lifts again, the Age of
Reptiles is at an end; the Dinosaurs, the Plesiosaurs and
Ichthyosaurs, the Pterodactyls, the innumerable genera and species
of Ammonite have all gone absolutely. In all their stupendous
variety they have died out and left no descendants. The cold has
killed them. All their final variations were insufficient; they
had never hit upon survival conditions. The world had passed
through a phase of extreme conditions beyond their powers of
endurance, a slow and complete massacre of Mesozoic life has
occurred, and we find now a new scene, a new and hardier flora,
and a new and hardier fauna in possession of the world.
It is still a bleak and impoverished scene with which this new
volume of the book of life begins. The cycads and tropical
conifers have given place very largely to trees that shed their
leaves to avoid destruction by the snows of winter and to
flowering plants and shrubs, and where there was formerly a
profusion of reptiles, an increasing variety of birds and mammals
is entering into their inheritance.
{37}
VIII
THE AGE OF MAMMALS
The opening of the next great period in the life of the earth, the
Cainozoic period, was a period of upheaval and extreme volcanic
activity. Now it was that the vast masses of the Alps and
Himalayas and the mountain backbone of the Rockies and Andes were
thrust up, and that the rude outlines of our present oceans and
continents appeared. The map of the world begins to display a
first dim resemblance to the map of to-day. It is estimated now
that between forty and eighty million years have elapsed from the
beginnings of the Cainozoic period to the present time.
At the outset of the Cainozoic period the climate of the world was
austere. It grew generally warmer until a fresh phase of great
abundance was reached, after which conditions grew hard again and
the earth passed into a series of extremely cold cycles, the
Glacial Ages, from which apparently it is now slowly emerging.
But we do not know sufficient of the causes of climatic change at
present to forecast the possible fluctuations of climatic
conditions that lie before us. We may be moving towards
increasing sunshine or lapsing towards another glacial age;
volcanic activity and the upheaval of mountain masses may be
increasing or diminishing; we do not know; we lack sufficient
science.
With the opening of this period the grasses appear; for the first
time there is pasture in the world; and with the full development
of the once obscure mammalian type, appear a number of interesting
grazing animals and of carnivorous types which prey upon these.
At first these early mammals seem to differ only in a few
characters from the great herbivorous and carnivorous reptiles
that ages before had flourished and then vanished from the earth.
A {38} careless observer might suppose that in this second long
age of warmth and plenty that was now beginning, nature was merely
repeating the first, with herbivorous and carnivorous mammals to
parallel the herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs, with birds
replacing pterodactyls and so on. But this would be an altogether
superficial comparison. The variety of the universe is infinite
and incessant; it progresses eternally; history never repeats
itself and no parallels are precisely true. The differences
between the life of the Cainozoic and Mesozoic periods are far
profounder than the resemblances.
[Illustration: A MAMMAL OF THE EARLY CAINOZOIC PERIOD]
The most fundamental of all these differences lies in the mental
life of the two periods. It arises essentially out of the
continuing contact of parent and offspring which distinguishes
mammalian and in a lesser degree bird life, from the life of the
reptile. With very few exceptions the reptile abandons its egg to
hatch alone. The young reptile has no knowledge whatever of its
parent; its mental life, such as it is, begins and ends with its
own experiences. {39} It may tolerate the existence of its
fellows but it has no communication with them; it never imitates,
never learns from them, is incapable of concerted action with
them. Its life is that of an isolated individual. But with the
suckling and cherishing of young which was distinctive of the new
mammalian and avian strains arose the possibility of learning by
imitation, of communication, by warning cries and other concerted
action, of mutual control and instruction. A teachable type of
life had come into the world.
The earliest mammals of the Cainozoic period are but little
superior in brain size to the more active carnivorous dinosaurs,
but as we read on through the record towards modern times we find,
in every tribe and race of the mammalian animals, a steady
universal increase in brain capacity. For instance we find at a
comparatively early stage that rhinoceros-like beasts appear.
There is a creature, the Titanotherium, which lived in the
earliest division of this period. It was probably very like a
modern rhinoceros in its habits and needs. But its brain capacity
was not one tenth that of its living successor.
The earlier mammals probably parted from their offspring as soon
as suckling was over, but, once the capacity for mutual
understanding has arisen, the advantages of continuing the
association are very great; and we presently find a number of
mammalian species displaying the beginnings of a true social life
and keeping together in herds, packs and flocks, watching each
other, imitating each other, taking warning from each other's acts
and cries. This is something that the world had not seen before
among vertebrated animals. Reptiles and fish may no doubt be
found ill swarms and shoals; they have been hatched in quantities
and similar conditions have kept them together, but in the case of
the social and gregarious mammals the association arises not
simply from a community of external forces, it is sustained by an
inner impulse. They are not merely like one another and so found
in the same places at the same times; they like one another and so
they keep together.
====================================================================
{40}
[Illustration: STENOMYLUS HITCHCOCKI--A GIRAFFE-CAMEL]
[Illustration: SKELETON OF PROTOHIPPUS VENTICOLUS--EARLY HORSE]
====================================================================
This difference between the reptile world and the world of our
human minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass. We cannot
conceive in ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a
reptile's instinctive motives, its appetites, fears and hates. We
{41} cannot understand them in their simplicity because all our
motives are complicated; our's are balances and resultants and not
simple urgencies. But the mammals and birds have
self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, a social
appeal, a self-control that is, at its lower level, after our own
fashion. We can in consequence establish relations with almost
all sorts of them. When they suffer they utter cries and make
movements that rouse our feelings. We can make understanding pets
of them with a mutual recognition. They can be tamed to
self-restraint towards us, domesticated and taught.
[Illustration: COMPARATIVE SIZES OF BRAINS OF RHINOCEROS AND
DINOCERAS]
That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of
Cainozoic times marks a new communication and interdependence of
individuals. It foreshadows the development of human societies of
which we shall soon be telling.
As the Cainozoic period unrolled, the resemblance of its flora and
fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the world to-day {42}
increased. The big clumsy Uintatheres and Titanotheres, the
Entelodonts and Hyracodons, big clumsy brutes like nothing living,
disappeared. On the other hand a series of forms led up by steady
degrees from grotesque and clumsy predecessors to the giraffes,
camels, horses, elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the
existing world. The evolution of the horse is particularly
legible upon the geological record. We have a fairly complete
series of forms from a small tapir-like ancestor in the early
Cainozoic. Another line of development that has now been pieced
together with some precision is that of the llamas and camels.
{43}
IX
MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN
Naturalists divide the class _Mammalia_ into a number of orders.
At the head of these is the order _Primates_, which includes the
lemurs, the monkeys, apes and man. Their classification was based
originally upon anatomical resemblances and took no account of any
mental qualities.
Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to
decipher in the geological record. They are for the most part
animals which live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in
bare rocky places like the baboons. They are rarely drowned and
covered up by sediment, nor are most of them very numerous
species, and so they do not figure so largely among the fossils as
the ancestors of the horses, camels and so forth do. But we know
that quite early in the Cainozoic period, that is to say some
forty million years ago or so, primitive monkeys and lemuroid
creatures had appeared, poorer in brain and not so specialized as
their later successors.
The great world summer of the middle Cainozoic period drew at last
to an end. It was to follow those other two great summers in the
history of life, the summer of the Coal Swamps and the vast summer
of the Age of Reptiles. Once more the earth spun towards an ice
age. The world chilled, grew milder for a time and chilled again.
In the warm past hippopotami had wallowed through a lush
sub-tropical vegetation, and a tremendous tiger with fangs like
sabres, the sabre-toothed tiger, had hunted its prey where now the
journalists of Fleet Street go to and fro. Now came a bleaker age
and still bleaker ages. A great weeding and extinction of species
occurred. A woolly rhinoceros, adapted to a cold climate, and the
mammoth, a big woolly cousin of the elephants, the Arctic musk ox
and the reindeer passed across the scene. Then century by century
the Arctic ice cap, the wintry death of the great Ice Age, crept
{44} southward. In England it came almost down to the Thames, in
America it reached Ohio. There would be warmer spells of a few
thousand years and relapses towards a bitterer cold.
[Illustration: A MAMMOTH]
Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the First, Second, Third
and Fourth Glacial Ages, and of the interludes as Interglacial
periods. We live to-day in a world that is still impoverished and
scarred by that terrible winter. The First Glacial Age was coming
on 600,000 years ago; the Fourth Glacial Age reached its bitterest
some fifty thousand years ago. And it was amidst the snows of
this long universal winter that the first man-like beings lived
upon our planet.
By the middle Cainozoic period there have appeared various apes
with many quasi-human attributes of the jaws and leg bones, but it
is only as we approach these Glacial Ages that we find traces of
creatures that we can speak of as "almost human." These traces
are not bones but implements. In Europe, in deposits of this
period, between half a million and a million years old, we find
flints {45} and stones that have evidently been chipped
intentionally by some handy creature desirous of hammering,
scraping or fighting with the sharpened edge. These things have
been called "Eoliths" (dawn stones). In Europe there are no bones
nor other remains of the creature which made these objects, simply
the objects themselves. For all the certainty we have it may have
been some entirely un-human but intelligent monkey. But at Trinil
in Java, in accumulations of this age, a piece of a skull and
various teeth and bones have been found of a sort of ape man, with
a brain case bigger than that of any living apes, which seems to
have walked erect. This creature is now called _Pithecanthropus
erectus_, the walking ape man, and the little trayful of its bones
is the only help our imaginations have as yet in figuring to,
ourselves the makers of the Eoliths.
[Illustration: FLINT IMPLEMENTS FOUND IN PILTDOWN REGION]
It is not until we come to sands that are almost a quarter of a
million years old that we find any other particle of a sub-human
being. But there are plenty of implements, and they are steadily
improving in quality as we read on through the record. They are
no longer clumsy Eoliths; they are now shapely instruments made
with considerable skill. _And they are much bigger than the
similar implements afterwards made by true man._ Then, in a
sandpit at Heidelberg, appears a single quasi-human jaw-bone, a
clumsy jaw-bone, absolutely chinless, far heavier than a true
human jaw-bone and narrower, so that it is improbable the
creature's tongue could have moved about for articulate speech.
On the strength of this jaw-bone, scientific men suppose this
creature to have been a heavy, almost human monster, possibly with
huge limbs and hands, possibly with a thick felt of hair, and they
call it the Heidelberg Man.
{46}
This jaw-bone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects in
the world to our human curiosity. To see it is like looking
through a defective glass into the past and catching just one
blurred and tantalizing glimpse of this Thing, shambling through
the bleak wilderness, clambering to avoid the sabre-toothed tiger,
watching the woolly rhinoceros in the woods. Then before we can
scrutinize the monster, he vanishes. Yet the soil is littered
abundantly with the indestructible implements he chipped out for
his uses.
[Illustration: A THEORETICAL RESTORATION OF THE PITHECANTHROPUS
ERECTUS BY PROF. RUTOT]
[Illustration: THE HEIDELBERG MAN]
Still more fascinatingly enigmatical are the remains of a creature
found at Piltdown in Sussex in a deposit that may indicate an age
between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand years ago,
though some authorities would put these particular remains back in
time to before the Heidelberg jaw-bone. Here there {47} are the
remains of a thick sub-human skull much larger than any existing
ape's, and a chimpanzee-like jaw-bone which may or may not belong
to it, and, in addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant bone
evidently carefully manufactured, through which a hole had
apparently been bored. There is also the thigh-bone of a deer
with cuts upon it like a tally. That is all.
[Illustration: THE PILTDOWN SKULL, AS RECONSTRUCTED FROM ORIGINAL
FRAGMENT]
What sort of beast was this creature which sat and bored holes in
bones?
Scientific men have named him Eoanthropus, the Dawn Man. He
stands apart from his kindred; a very different being either from
the Heidelberg creature or from any living ape. No other vestige
like him is known. But the gravels and deposits of from one
hundred thousand years onward are increasingly rich in implements
of flint and similar stone. And these implements are no longer
rude "Eoliths." The archæologists are presently able to
distinguish scrapers, borers, knives, darts, throwing stones and
hand axes ....
We are drawing very near to man. In our next section we shall
have to describe the strangest of all these precursors of
humanity, the Neanderthalers, the men who were almost, but not
quite, true men.
But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no
scientific man supposes either of these creatures, the Heidelberg
Man or _Eoanthropus_, to be direct ancestors of the men of to-day.
These are, at the closest, related forms.
{48}
X
THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN
About fifty or sixty thousand years ago, before the climax of the
Fourth Glacial Age, there lived a creature on earth so like a man
that until a few years ago its remains were considered to be
altogether human. We have skulls and bones of it and a great
accumulation of the large implements it made and used. It made
fires. It sheltered in caves from the cold. It probably dressed
skins roughly and wore them. It was right-handed as men are.
Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not true
men. They were of a different species of the same genus. They
had heavy protruding jaws and great brow ridges above the eyes and
very low foreheads. Their thumbs were not opposable to the
fingers as men's are; their necks were so poised that they could
not turn back their heads and look up to the sky. They probably
slouched along, head down and forward. Their chinless jaw-bones
resemble the Heidelberg jaw-bone and are markedly unlike human
jaw-bones. And there were great differences from the human
pattern in their teeth. Their cheek teeth were more complicated
in structure than ours, more complicated and not less so; they had
not the long fangs of our cheek teeth; and also these quasi-men
had not the marked canines (dog teeth) of an ordinary human being.
The capacity of their skulls was quite human, but the brain was
bigger behind and lower in front than the human brain. Their
intellectual faculties were differently arranged. They were not
ancestral to the human line. Mentally and physically they were
upon a different line from the human line.
Skulls and bones of this extinct species of man were found at
Neanderthal {49} among other places, and from that place these
strange proto-men have been christened Neanderthal Men, or
Neanderthalers. They must have endured in Europe for many hundreds
or even thousands of years.
[Illustration: THE NEANDERTHALER, ACCORDING TO PROF. RUTOT]
At that time the climate and geography of our world was very
different from what they are at the present time. Europe for
example was covered with ice reaching as far south as the Thames
and into Central Germany and Russia; there was no Channel
separating Britain from France; the Mediterranean and the Red Sea
were great valleys, with perhaps a chain of lakes in their deeper
portions, and a great inland sea spread from the present Black Sea
across South Russia and far into Central Asia. Spain and all of
Europe not actually under ice consisted of bleak uplands under a
harder climate than that of Labrador, and it was only when North
Africa was reached that one would have found a temperate climate.
Across the cold steppes of Southern Europe with its sparse arctic
vegetation, drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly mammoth,
and woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer, no doubt following
the vegetation northward in spring and southward in autumn.
{50}
[Map: Possible Outline of Europe and Western Asia at the Maximum
of the Fourth Ice Age (about 50,000 years ago)]
Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler wandered,
gathering such subsistence as he could from small game or fruits
and berries and roots. Possibly he was mainly a vegetarian,
chewing twigs and roots. His level elaborate teeth suggest a
largely vegetarian dietary. But we also find the long marrow
bones of great animals in his caves, cracked to extract the
marrow. His weapons could not have been of much avail in open
conflict with great beasts, but it is supposed that he attacked
them with spears at difficult river crossings and even constructed
pitfalls for them. Possibly he followed the herds and preyed upon
any dead that were killed in fights, and perhaps he played the
part of jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger which still survived in
his day. Possibly in the bitter hardships of the Glacial Ages
this creature had taken to attacking animals after long ages of
vegetarian adaptation.
We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like. He may have
been very hairy and very unhuman-looking indeed. It is even
doubtful if he went erect. He may have used his knuckles as well
as his feet to hold himself up. Probably he went about {51} alone
or in small family groups. It is inferred from the structure of
his jaw that he was incapable of speech as we understand it.
For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the highest
animals that the European area had ever seen; and then some thirty
or thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer a
race of kindred beings, more intelligent, knowing more, talking
and co-operating together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler's
world from the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their
caves and squatting places; they hunted the same food; they
probably made war upon their grisly predecessors and killed them
off. These newcomers from the south or the east--for at present
we do not know their region of origin--who at last drove the
Neanderthalers out of existence altogether, were beings of our own
blood and kin, the first True Men. Their brain-cases and thumbs
and necks and teeth were anatomically the same as our own. In a
cave at Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a number of
skeletons have been found, the earliest truly human remains that
are so far known.
So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and the
story of mankind begins.
[Illustration: COMPARISON OF (1) MODERN SKULL AND (2) RHODESIAN
SKULL]
The world was growing liker our own in those days though the
climate was still austere. The glaciers of the Ice Age were
receding in Europe; the reindeer of France and Spain presently
gave way to great herds of horses as grass increased upon the
steppes, and the {52} mammoth became more and more rare in
southern Europe and finally receded northward altogether ....
We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in the
summer of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was found together
with pieces of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa, which
seems to be a relic of a third sort of man, intermediate in its
characteristics between the Neanderthaler and the human being.
The brain-case indicates a brain bigger in front and smaller
behind than the Neanderthaler's, and the skull was poised erect
upon the backbone in a quite human way. The teeth also and the
bones are quite human. But the face must have been ape-like with
enormous brow ridges and a ridge along the middle of the skull.
The creature was indeed a true man, so to speak, with an ape-like,
Neanderthaler face. This Rhodesian Man is evidently still closer
to real men than the Neanderthal Man.
This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in the
end may prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human species
which lived on the earth in the vast interval of time between the
beginnings of the Ice Age and the appearance of their common heir,
and perhaps their common exterminator, the True Man. The
Rhodesian skull itself may not be very ancient. Up to the time of
publishing this book there has been no exact determination of its
probable age. It may be that this sub-human creature survived in
South Africa until quite recent times.
{53}
XI
THE FIRST TRUE MEN
The earliest signs and traces at present known to science, of a
humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves, have been
found in western Europe and particularly in France and Spain.
Bones, weapons, scratchings upon bone and rock, carved fragments
of bone, and paintings in caves and upon rock surfaces dating, it
is supposed, from 30,000 years ago or more, have been discovered
in both these countries. Spain is at present the richest country
in the world in these first relics of our real human ancestors.
Of course our present collections of these things are the merest
beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in the future,
when there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination of
all possible sources and when other countries in the world, now
inaccessible to archæologists, have been explored in some detail.
The greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed
yet by a trained observer interested in these matters and free to
explore, and we must be very careful therefore not to conclude
that the early true men were distinctively inhabitants of western
Europe or that they first appeared in that region.
In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day there may
be richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than
anything that has yet come to light. I write in Asia or Africa,
and I do not mention America because so far there have been no
finds at all of any of the higher Primates, either of great apes,
sub-men, Neanderthalers nor early true men. This development of
life seems to have been an exclusively old world development, and
it was only apparently at the end of the Old Stone Age that human
beings first made their way across the land connexion that is now
cut by Behring Straits, into the American continent.
{54}
[Illustration: ONE OF THE MARVELLOUS CAVE PAINTINGS OF ALTAMIRA,
NORTH SPAIN]
These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear already
to have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct
races. One of these races was of a very high type indeed; it was
tall and big brained. One of the women's skulls found exceeds in
capacity that of the average man of to-day. One of the men's
skeletons is over six feet in height. The physical type resembled
that of the North American Indian. From the Cro-Magnon cave in
which the first skeletons were found these people have been called
Cro-Magnards. They were savages, but savages of a high order.
The second race, the race of the Grimaldi cave remains, was
distinctly negroid in its characters. Its nearest living
affinities are the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa. It is
interesting to find at the very outset of the known human story,
that mankind was already racially divided into at least two main
varieties; and one is tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as
that the former race was probably brownish rather than black and
that it came from the East or North, and that the latter was
blackish rather than brown and came from the equatorial south.
{55}
[Illustration: BONE CARVINGS OF THE PALÆOLITHIC PERIOD]
{56}
And these savages of perhaps forty thousand years ago were so
human that they pierced shells to make necklaces, painted
themselves, carved images of bone and stone, scratched figures on
rocks and bones, and painted rude but often very able sketches of
beasts and the like upon the smooth walls of caves and upon
inviting rock surfaces. They made a great variety of implements,
much smaller in scale and finer than those of the Neanderthal men.
We have now in our museums great quantities of their implements,
their statuettes, their rock drawings and the like.
The earliest of them were hunters. Their chief pursuit was the
wild horse, the little bearded pony of that time. They followed
it as it moved after pasture. And also they followed the bison.
They knew the mammoth, because they have left us strikingly
effective pictures of that creature. To judge by one rather
ambiguous drawing they trapped and killed it.
They hunted with spears and throwing stones. They do not seem to
have had the bow, and it is doubtful if they had yet learnt to
tame any animals. They had no dogs. There is one carving of a
horse's head and one or two drawings that suggest a bridled horse,
with a twisted skin or tendon round it. But the little horses of
that age and region could not have carried a man, and if the horse
was domesticated it was used as a led horse. It is doubtful and
improbable that they had yet learnt the rather unnatural use of
animal's milk as food.
They do not seem to have erected any buildings though they may
have had tents of skins, and though they made clay figures they
never rose to the making of pottery. Since they had no cooking
implements their cookery must have been rudimentary or
nonexistent. They knew nothing of cultivation and nothing of any
sort of basket work or woven cloth. Except for their robes of skin
or fur they were naked painted savages.
These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of Europe for a
hundred centuries perhaps, and then slowly drifted and changed
before a change of climate. Europe, century by century, was
growing milder and damper. Reindeer receded northward and
eastward, and bison and horse followed. The steppes gave way to
forests, and red deer took the place of horse and bison. There is
a {57} change in the character of the implements with this change
in their application. River and lake fishing becomes of great
importance to men, and fine implements of bone increased. "The
bone needles of this age," says de Mortillet, "are much superior
to those of later, even historical times, down to the Renaissance.
The Romans, for example, never had needles comparable to those of
this epoch."
[Illustration: THE RUTOT BUST OF A CRO-MAGNON MAN]
Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people drifted
into the south of Spain, and left very remarkable drawings of
themselves upon exposed rock faces there. These were the Azilians
(named from the Mas d'Azil cave). They had the bow; they seem to
have worn feather headdresses; they drew vividly; but also they
had reduced their drawings to a sort of symbolism--a man for
instance would be represented by a vertical dab with two or three
horizontal dabs--that suggest the dawn of the writing idea.
Against hunting sketches there are often marks like tallies. One
drawing shows two men smoking out a bees' nest.
{58}
[Illustration: FIGHT OF BOWMEN]
{59}
These are the latest of the men that we call Palæolithic (Old
Stone Age) because they had only chipped implements. By ten or
twelve thousand years a new sort of life has dawned in Europe, men
have learnt not only to chip but to polish and grind stone
implements, and they have begun cultivation. The Neolithic Age
(New Stone Age) was beginning.
It is interesting to note that less than a century ago there still
survived in a remote part of the world, in Tasmania, a race of
human beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual
development than any of these earliest races of mankind who have
left traces in Europe. These people had long ago been cut off by
geographical changes from the rest of the species, and from
stimulation and improvement. They seem to have degenerated rather
than developed. They lived a base life subsisting upon shellfish
and small game. They had no habitations but only squatting
places. They were real men of our species, but they had neither
the manual dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true
men.
{60}
XII
PRIMITIVE THOUGHT
And now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did
it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure?
How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of
hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time
and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record
of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to
inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.
The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to
reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently
the science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which
the egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained,
suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of
social life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light
upon the history of primitive society; and another fruitful source
of suggestion has been the study of the ideas and customs of such
contemporary savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of
mental fossilization which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying
irrational superstitions and prejudices that still survive among
modern civilized people. And finally we have in the increasingly
numerous pictures, statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we
draw near to our own time, clearer and clearer indications of what
man found interesting and worthy of record and representation.
Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that
is to say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up
images or images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in
accordance with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an
uneducated person does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently
a comparatively late development in human experience; it has not
{61} played any great part in human life until within the last
three thousand years. And even to-day those who really control
and order their thoughts are but a small minority of mankind.
Most of the world still lives by imagination and passion.
Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening stages of
the true human story, were small family groups. Just as the
flocks and herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families
which remained together and multiplied, so probably did the
earliest tribes. But before this could happen a certain restraint
upon the primitive egotisms of the individual had to be
established. The fear of the father and respect for the mother
had to be extended into adult life, and the natural jealousy of
the old man of the group for the younger males as they grew up had
to be mitigated. The mother on the other hand was the natural
adviser and protector of the young. Human social life grew up out
of the reaction between the crude instinct of the young to go off
and pair by themselves as they grew up, on the one hand, and the
dangers and disadvantages of separation on the other. An
anthropological writer of great genius, J. J. Atkinson, in his
_Primal Law_, has shown how much of the customary law of savages,
the _Tabus_, that are so remarkable a fact in tribal life, can be
ascribed to such a mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive
human animal to a developing social life, and the later work of
the psycho-analysts has done much to confirm his interpretation of
these possibilities.
Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and
fear of the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primitive
savage to older protective women, exaggerated in dreams and
enriched by fanciful mental play, played a large part in the
beginnings of primitive religion and in the conception of gods and
goddesses. Associated with this respect for powerful or helpful
personalities was a dread and exaltation of such personages after
their deaths, due to their reappearance in dreams. It was easy to
believe they were not truly dead but only fantastically
transferred to a remoteness of greater power.
The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid
and real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man was
always something of a child. He was nearer to the animals {62}
also, and he could suppose them to have motives and reactions like
his own. He could imagine animal helpers, animal enemies, animal
gods. One needs to have been an imaginative child oneself to
realize again how important, significant, portentous or friendly,
strangely shaped rocks, lumps of wood, exceptional trees or the
like may have appeared to the men of the Old Stone Age, and how
dream and fancy would create stories and legends about such things
that would become credible as they told them. Some of these
stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The
women would tell them to the children and so establish a
tradition. To this day most imaginative children invent long
stories in which some favourite doll or animal or some fantastic
semi-human being figures as the hero, and primitive man probably
did the same--with a much stronger disposition to believe his hero
real.
[Illustration: RELICS OF THE STONE AGE]
For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were
probably quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed
from the Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The
Neanderthaler may have been a dumb animal. Of course the primitive
{63} human speech was probably a very scanty collection of names,
and may have been eked out with gestures and signs.
There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science
of cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in
his associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an
effect with something quite wrong as its cause. "You do so and
so," he said, "and so and so happens." You give a child a
poisonous berry and it dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy
and you become strong. There we have two bits of cause and effect
association, one true one false. We call the system of cause and
effect in the mind of a savage, Fetish; but Fetish is simply
savage science. It differs from modern science in that it is
totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more frequently wrong.
[Illustration: WIDESPREAD SIMILARITY OF MEN OF THE STONE AGE]
In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in
{64} many others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by
experience; but there was a large series of issues of very great
importance to primitive man, where he sought persistently for
causes and found explanations that were wrong but not sufficiently
wrong nor so obviously wrong as to be detected. It was a matter
of great importance to him that game should be abundant or fish
plentiful and easily caught, and no doubt he tried and believed in
a thousand charms, incantations and omens to determine these
desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness and
death. Occasionally infections crept through the land and men
died of them. Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died
or were enfeebled without any manifest cause. This too must have
given the hasty, emotional mind of primitive man much feverish
exercise. Dreams and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or
appeal for help to that man or beast or thing. He had the child's
aptitude for fear and panic.
Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds
sharing the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more
forceful than the others, must have asserted themselves, to
advise, to prescribe, to command. This they declared unpropitious
and that imperative, this an omen of good and that an omen of
evil. The expert in Fetish, the Medicine Man, was the first
priest. He exhorted, he interpreted dreams, he warned, he
performed the complicated hocus pocus that brought luck or averted
calamity. Primitive religion was not so much what we now call
religion as practice and observance, and the early priest dictated
what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical science.
{65}
XIII
THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION
We are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation and
settlement in the world although a vast amount of research and
speculation has been given to these matters in the last fifty
years. All that we can say with any confidence at present is that
somewhen about 15,000 and 12,000 B.C. while the Azilian people
were in the south of Spain and while the remnants of the earlier
hunters were drifting northward and eastward, somewhere in North
Africa or Western Asia or in that great Mediterranean valley that
is now submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean sea, there
were people who, age by age, were working out two vitally
important things; they were beginning cultivation and they were
domesticating animals. They were also beginning to make, in
addition to the chipped implements of their hunter forebears,
implements of polished stone. They had discovered the possibility
of basketwork and roughly woven textiles of plant fibre, and they
were beginning to make a rudely modelled pottery.
They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the
Neolithic phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the
Palæolithic (Old Stone) phase of the Cro-Magnards, the Grimaldi
people, the Azilians and their like. [1] Slowly these Neolithic
people spread over the warmer parts of the world; and the arts
they had mastered, the plants and animals they had learnt to use,
spread by imitation and acquisition even more widely than they
did. By 10,000 B.C., most of mankind was at the Neolithic level.
{66}
Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping of
harvest, threshing and grinding, may seem the most obviously
reasonable steps to a modern mind just as to a modern mind it is a
commonplace that the world is round. What else could you do?
people will ask. What else can it be? But to the primitive man
of twenty thousand years ago neither of the systems of action and
reasoning that seem so sure and manifest to us to-day were at all
obvious. He felt his way to effectual practice through a
multitude of trials and misconceptions, with fantastic and
unnecessary elaborations and false interpretations at every turn.
Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, wheat grew wild; and man
may have learnt to pound and then grind up its seeds for food long
before he learnt to sow. He reaped before he sowed.
And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world
wherever there is sowing and harvesting there is still traceable
the vestiges of a strong primitive association of the idea of
sowing with the idea of a blood sacrifice, and primarily of the
sacrifice of a human being. The study of the original
entanglement of these two things is a profoundly attractive one to
the curious mind; the interested reader will find it very fully
developed in that monumental work, Sir J. G. Frazer's _Golden
Bough_. It was an entanglement, we must remember, in the
childish, dreaming, myth-making primitive mind; no reasoned
process will explain it. But in that world of 12,000 to 20,000
years ago, it would seem that whenever seed time came round to the
Neolithic peoples there was a human sacrifice. And it was not the
sacrifice of any mean or outcast person; it was the sacrifice
usually of a chosen youth or maiden, a youth more often who was
treated with profound deference and even worship up to the moment
of his immolation. He was a sort of sacrificial god-king, and all
the details of his killing had become a ritual directed by the
old, knowing men and sanctioned by the accumulated usage of ages.
====================================================================
{67}
[Illustration: NEOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS]
====================================================================
At first primitive men, with only a very rough idea of the
seasons, must have found great difficulty in determining when was
the propitious moment for the seed-time sacrifice and the sowing.
There is some reason for supposing that there was an early stage
in human experience when men had no idea of a year. The first {68}
chronology was in lunar months; it is supposed that the years of
the Biblical patriarchs are really moons, and the Babylonian
calendar shows distinct traces of an attempt to reckon seed time
by taking thirteen lunar months to see it round. This lunar
influence upon the calendar reaches down to our own days. If usage
did not dull our sense of its strangeness we should think it a
very remarkable thing indeed that the Christian Church does not
commemorate the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ on the
proper anniversaries but on dates that vary year by year with the
phases of the moon.
[Illustration: NEOLITHICISM OF TO-DAY]
It may be doubted whether the first agriculturalists made any
observation of the stars. It is more likely that stars were first
observed by migratory herdsmen, who found them a convenient mark
of direction. But once their use in determining seasons was
realized, their importance to agriculture became very great. The
seed-time sacrifice was linked up with the southing or northing of
some prominent star. A myth and worship of that star was for
primitive man an almost inevitable consequence.
It is easy to see how important the man of knowledge and
experience, the man who knew about the blood sacrifice and the
stars, became in this early Neolithic world.
The fear of uncleanness and pollution, and the methods of
cleansing that were advisable, constituted another source of power
for the knowledgeable men and women. For there have always been
witches as well as wizards, and priestesses as well as priests.
The early priest was really not so much a {69} religious man as a
man of applied science. His science was generally empirical and
often bad; he kept it secret from the generality of men very
jealously; but that does not alter the fact that his primary
function was knowledge and that his primary use was a practical
use.
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF NEOLITHIC POTTERY]
Twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, in all the warm and fairly
well-watered parts of the Old World these Neolithic human
communities, with their class and tradition of priests and
priestesses and their cultivated fields and their development of
villages and little walled cities, were spreading. Age by age a
drift and exchange of ideas went on between these communities.
Eliot Smith and Rivers have used the term "Heliolithic culture"
for the culture of these first agricultural peoples.
"Heliolithic" (Sun and Stone) is not perhaps the best possible
word to use for this, but until scientific men give us a better
one we shall have to use it. Originating somewhere in the
Mediterranean and western Asiatic area, it spread age by age
eastward and from island to island across the Pacific until it may
even have reached America and mingled with the more primitive ways
of living of the Mongoloid immigrants coming down from the North.
Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went
they took with them all or most of a certain group of curious
ideas and practices. Some of them are such queer ideas that they
call for the explanation of the mental expert. They made pyramids
{70} and great mounds, and set up great circles of big stones,
perhaps to facilitate the astronomical observation of the priests;
they made mummies of some or all of their dead; they tattooed and
circumcized; they had the old custom, known as the _couvade_, of
sending the _father_ to bed and rest when a child was born, and
they had as a luck symbol the well-known Swastika.
If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far
these group practices have left their traces, we should make a
belt along the temperate and sub-tropical coasts of the world from
Stonehenge and Spain across the world to Mexico and Peru. But
Africa below the equator, north central Europe, and north Asia
would show none of these dottings; there lived races who were
developing along practically independent lines.
[1] The term Palæolithic we may note is also used to cover the
Neanderthaler and even the Eolithic implements. The pre-human age
is called the "Older Palæolithic;" the age of true men using
unpolished stones in the "Newer Palæolithic."
{71}
XIV
PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS
About 10,000 B.C. the geography of the world was very similar in
its general outline to that of the world to-day. It is probable
that by that time the great barrier across the Straits of
Gibraltar that had hitherto banked back the ocean waters from the
Mediterranean valley had been eaten through, and that the
Mediterranean was a sea following much the same coastlines as it
does now. The Caspian Sea was probably still far more extensive
than it is at present, and it may have been continuous with the
Black Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. About this
great Central Asian sea lands that are now steppes and deserts
were fertile and habitable. Generally it was a moister and more
fertile world. European Russia was much more a land of swamp and
lake than it is now, and there may still have been a land
connexion between Asia and America at Behring Straits.
It would have been already possible at that time to have
distinguished the main racial divisions of mankind as we know them
to-day. Across the warm temperate regions of this rather warmer
and better-wooded world, and along the coasts, stretched the
brownish peoples of the Heliolithic culture, the ancestors of the
bulk of the living inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, of the
Berbers, the Egyptians and of much of the population of South and
Eastern Asia. This great race had of course a number of
varieties. The Iberian or Mediterranean or "dark-white" race of
the Atlantic and Mediterranean coast, the "Hamitic" peoples which
include the Berbers and Egyptians, the Dravidians; the darker
people of India, a multitude of East Indian people, many
Polynesian races and the Maoris are all divisions of various value
of this great main mass of humanity. Its western varieties are
whiter than its eastern. In the forests of central and northern
Europe a more blonde variety {72} of men with blue eyes was
becoming distinguishable, branching off from the main mass of
brownish people, a variety which many people now speak of as the
Nordic race. In the more open regions of northeastern Asia was
another differentiation of this brownish humanity in the direction
of a type with more oblique eyes, high cheek-bones, a yellowish
skin, and very straight black hair, the Mongolian peoples. In
South Africa, Australia, in many tropical islands in the south of
Asia were remains of the early negroid peoples. The central parts
of Africa were already a region of racial intermixture. Nearly
all the coloured races of Africa to-day seem to be blends of the
brownish peoples of the north with a negroid substratum.
[Illustration: A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the
Relationship of Human Races]
We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely and
that they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human races
do not branch out like trees with branches that never come
together again. It is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind,
this remingling of races at any opportunity. It will save us from
many cruel delusions and prejudices if we do so. People will use
such a word as race in the loosest manner, and base the most
preposterous generalizations upon it. They will speak of a
"British" {73} race or of a "European" race. But nearly all the
European nations are confused mixtures of brownish, dark-white,
white and Mongolian elements.
[Illustration: A MAYA STELE]
It was at the Neolithic phase of human development that peoples of
the Mongolian breed first made their way into America. Apparently
they came by way of Behring Straits and spread southward. They
found caribou, the American reindeer, in the north and great {74}
herds of bison in the south. When they reached South America
there were still living the Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and
the Megatherium, a monstrous clumsy sloth as high as an elephant.
They probably exterminated the latter beast, which was as helpless
as it was big.
The greater portion of these American tribes never rose above a
hunting nomadic Neolithic life. They never discovered the use of
iron, and their chief metal possessions were native gold and
copper. But in Mexico, Yucatan and Peru conditions existed
favourable to settled cultivation, and here about 1000 B.C. or so
arose very interesting civilizations of a parallel but different
type from the old-world civilization. Like the much earlier
primitive civilizations of the old world these communities
displayed a great development of human sacrifice about the
processes of seed time and harvest; but while in the old world, as
we shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately mitigated,
complicated and overlaid by others, in America they developed and
were elaborated, to a very high degree of intensity. These
American civilized countries were essentially priest-ruled
countries; their war chiefs and rulers were under a rigorous rule
of law and omen.
These priests carried astronomical science to a high level of
accuracy. They knew their year better than the Babylonians of
whom we shall presently tell. In Yucatan they had a kind of
writing, the Maya writing, of the most curious and elaborate
character. So far as we have been able to decipher it, it was
used mainly for keeping the exact and complicated calendars upon
which the priests expended their intelligence. The art of the
Maya civilization came to a climax about 700 or 800 A.D. The
sculptured work of these people amazes the modern observer by its
great plastic power and its frequent beauty, and perplexes him by
a grotesqueness and by a sort of insane conventionality and
intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. There is nothing quite
like it in the old world. The nearest approach, and that is a
remote one, is found in archaic Indian carvings. Everywhere there
are woven feathers and serpents twine in and out. Many Maya
inscriptions resemble a certain sort of elaborate drawing made by
lunatics in European asylums, more than any other
old-world work. It is as if the Maya mind {75} had developed upon
a different line from the old-world mind, had a different twist to
its ideas, was not, by old-world standards, a rational mind at
all.
This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the idea
of a general mental aberration finds support in their
extraordinary obsession by the shedding of human blood. The
Mexican civilization in particular ran blood; it offered thousands
of human victims yearly. The cutting open of living victims, the
tearing out of the still beating heart, was an act that dominated
the minds and lives of these strange priesthoods. The public
life, the national festivities all turned on this fantastically
horrible act.
[Illustration: NEOLITHIC WARRIOR]
The ordinary existence of the common people in these communities
was very like the ordinary existence of any other barbaric
peasantry. Their pottery, weaving and dyeing was very good. The
Maya writing was not only carven on stone but written and painted
upon skins and the like. The European and American museums
contain many enigmatical Maya manuscripts of which at present
little has been deciphered except the dates. In Peru there were
beginnings of a similar writing but they were superseded by a
method of keeping records by knotting {76} cords. A similar
method of mnemonics was in use in China thousands of years ago.
In the old world before 4000 or 5000 B.C., that is to say three or
four thousand years earlier, there were primitive civilizations
not unlike these American civilizations; civilizations based upon
a temple, having a vast quantity of blood sacrifices and with an
intensely astronomical priesthood. But in the old world the
primitive civilizations reacted upon one another and developed
towards the conditions of our own world. In America these
primitive civilizations never progressed beyond this primitive
stage. Each of them was in a little world of its own. Mexico it
seems knew little or nothing of Peru, until the Europeans came to
America. The potato, which was the principal food stuff in Peru,
was unknown in Mexico.
Age by age these peoples lived and marvelled at their gods and
made their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to high levels of
decorative beauty. Men made love and tribes made war. Drought
and plenty, pestilence and health, followed one another. The
priests elaborated their calendar and their sacrificial ritual
through long centuries, but made little progress in other
directions.
{77}
XV
SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING
The old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000
or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized communities almost
at the Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of
Asia and in the Nile valley. At that time north Persia and
western Turkestan and south Arabia were all more fertile than they
are now, and there are traces of very early communities in these
regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that
there first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation, and
evidences of a social organization rising above the level of a
mere barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and
Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and it was
in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first
cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the
great history of Egypt was beginning.
These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with
prominent noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been
deciphered, and their language is now known. They had discovered
the use of bronze and they built great tower-like temples of
sun-dried brick. The clay of this country is very fine; they used
it to write upon, and so it is that their inscriptions have been
preserved to us. They had cattle, sheep, goats and asses, but no
horses. They fought on foot, in close formation, carrying spears
and shields of skin. Their clothing was of wool and they shaved
their heads.
Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an
independent state with a god of its own and priests of its own.
But sometimes one city would establish an ascendancy over others
and exact tribute from their population. A very ancient
inscription {78}at Nippur records the "empire," the first recorded
empire, of the Sumerian city of Erech. Its god and its
priest-king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf to
the Red Sea.
[Illustration: BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200
B.C.]
At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial
record. Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write.
The Azilian rock pictures to which we have already referred show
the beginning of the process. Many of them record hunts and
expeditions, and in most of these the human figures are plainly
drawn. But in some the painter would not bother with head and
limbs; he just indicated men by a vertical and one or two
transverse strokes. From this to a conventional condensed picture
writing was an easy transition. In Sumeria, where the writing was
done on clay with a stick, the dabs of the characters soon became
unrecognizably unlike the things they stood for, but in Egypt
where men painted on walls and on strips of the papyrus reed (the
first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated remained. From
the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made wedge-shaped
marks, the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform (= wedge-shaped).
{79}
[Illustration: EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY]
An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used
to indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In
the rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done
to-day. We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is
delighted to guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The
Sumerian language was a language made up of accumulated syllables
rather like some contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent
itself very readily to this syllabic method of writing words
expressing ideas that could not be conveyed by pictures directly.
Egyptian writing underwent parallel developments. Later on, when
foreign peoples with less distinctly syllabled methods of speech
were to learn and use these picture scripts they were to make
those further modifications and simplifications that developed at
last into alphabetical writing. All the true alphabets of the
later world derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and
the Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing). Later in China there
was to develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it
never got to the alphabetical stage.
{80}
The invention of writing was of very great importance in the
development of human societies. It put agreements, laws,
commandments on record. It made the growth of states larger than
the old city states possible. It made a continuous historical
consciousness possible. The command of the priest or king and his
seal could go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive his
death. It is interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals
were greatly used. A king or a nobleman or a merchant would have
his seal often very artistically carved, and would impress it on
any clay document he wished to authorize. So close had
civilization got to printing six thousand years ago. Then the
clay was dried hard and became permanent. For the reader must
remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for countless years,
letters, records and accounts were all written on comparatively
indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe a great wealth of
recovered knowledge.
[Illustration: THE SAKHARA PYRAMIDS]
Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity, meteoric
iron were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage.
====================================================================
{81}
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT OF THE GREAT PYRAMID OF
CHEOPS]
====================================================================
{82}
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR AT DENDEREH]
====================================================================
Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have
been {83} very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except for
the asses and cattle in the streets it must have been not unlike
the life in the Maya cities of America three or four thousand
years later. Most of the people in peace time were busy with
irrigation and cultivation--except on days of religious festivity.
They had no money and no need for it. They managed their small
occasional trades by barter. The princes and rulers who alone had
more than a few possessions used gold and silver bars and precious
stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple dominated
life; in Sumeria it was a great towering temple that went up to a
roof from which the stars were observed; in Egypt it was a massive
building with only a ground floor. In Sumeria the priest ruler was
the greatest, most splendid of beings. In Egypt however there was
one who was raised above the priests; he was the living
incarnation of the chief god of the land, the Pharaoh, the god
king.
There were few changes in the world in those days; men's days were
sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into the
land and such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed
life according to immemorial rules and watched the stars for seed
time and marked the omens of the sacrifices and interpreted the
warnings of dreams. Men worked and loved and died, not unhappily,
forgetful of the savage past of their race and heedless of its
future. Sometimes the ruler was benign. Such was Pepi II, who
reigned in Egypt for ninety years. Sometimes he was ambitious and
took men's sons to be soldiers and sent them against neighbouring
city states to war and plunder, or he made them toil to build
great buildings. Such were Cheops and Chephren and Mycerinus, who
built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids at Gizeh. The
largest of these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in it is
4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats and
lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection must have
exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done.
{84}
XVI
PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES
It was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were
settling down to agriculture and the formation of city states in
the centuries between 6000 and 8000 B.C. Wherever there were
possibilities of irrigation and a steady all-the-year-round food
supply men were exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of
hunting and wandering for the routines of settlement. On the
upper Tigris a people called the Assyrians were founding cities;
in the valleys of Asia Minor and on the Mediterranean shores and
islands, there were small communities growing up to civilization.
Possibly parallel developments of human life were already going on
in favourable regions of India, and China. In many parts of
Europe where there were lakes well stocked with fish, little
communities of men had long settled in dwellings built on piles
over the water, and were eking out agriculture by fishing and
hunting. But over much larger areas of the old world no such
settlement was possible. The land was too harsh, too thickly
wooded or too arid, or the seasons too uncertain for mankind, with
only the implements and science of that age to take root.
For settlement under the conditions of the primitive civilizations
men needed a constant water supply and warmth and sunshine. Where
these needs were not satisfied, man could live as a transient, as
a hunter following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal
grass, but he could not settle. The transition from the hunting
to the herding life may have been very gradual. From following
herds of wild cattle or (in Asia) wild horses, men may have come
to an idea of property in them, have learnt to pen them into
valleys, have fought for them against wolves, wild dogs and other
predatory beasts.
{85}
[Illustration: POTTERY AND IMPLEMENTS OF THE LAKE DWELLERS]
{86}
[Illustration: A CONTEMPORARY LAKE VILLAGE]
So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were
growing up chiefly in the great river valleys, a different way of
living, the nomadic life, a life in constant movement to and fro
from winter pasture to summer pasture, was also growing up. The
nomadic peoples were on the whole hardier than the
agriculturalists; they were less prolific and numerous, they had
no permanent temples and no highly organized priesthood; they had
less gear; but the reader must not suppose that theirs was
necessarily a less highly developed way of living on that account.
In many ways this free life was a fuller life than that of the
tillers of the soil. The individual was more
self-reliant; less of a unit in a crowd. The leader was more
important; the medicine man perhaps less so.
[Illustration: NOMADS IN EGYPT]
{87}
Moving over large stretches of country the nomad took a wider view
of life. He touched on the confines of this settled land and
that. He was used to the sight of strange faces. He had to
scheme and treat for pasture with competing tribes. He knew more
of minerals than the folk upon the plough lands because he went
over mountain passes and into rocky places. He may have been a
better metallurgist. Possibly bronze and much more probably iron
smelting were nomadic discoveries. Some of the earliest
implements of iron reduced from its ores have been found in
Central Europe far away from the early civilizations.
[Illustration: FLINT KNIVES OF 4500 B.C.]
[Illustration: NOMADS IN EGYPT]
On the other hand the settled folk had their textiles and their
pottery and made many desirable things. It was inevitable that as
the two sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic
differentiated, a certain amount of looting and trading should
develop between the two. In Sumeria particularly which had
deserts and seasonal {88} country on either hand it must have been
usual to have the nomads camping close to the cultivated fields,
trading and stealing and perhaps tinkering, as gipsies do to this
day. (But hens they would not steal, because the domestic
fowl--an Indian jungle fowl originally was not domesticated by man
until about 1000 B.C.) They would bring precious stones and things
of metal and leather. If they were hunters they would bring skins.
They would get in exchange pottery and beads and glass, garments
and suchlike manufactured things.
[Illustration: EGYPT PEASANTS GOING TO WORK]
Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and
imperfectly settled people there were in those remote days of the
first civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the
forests of Europe were the blonde Nordic peoples, hunters and
herdsmen, a lowly race. The primitive civilizations saw very
little of this race before 1500 B.C. Away on the steppes of
eastern Asia various Mongolian tribes, the Hunnish peoples, were
domesticating the horse and developing a very wide sweeping habit
of seasonal movement between their summer and winter camping
places. Possibly the Nordic and Hunnish peoples were still
separated from one another by the swamps of Russia and the greater
Caspian Sea of that time. For very much of Russia there was swamp
and lake. In the deserts, which were growing more arid now, of
Syria and Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people, the
Semitic tribes, were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses
from pasture to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and
certain more negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites,
who were the first nomads to come into close contact with the
early civilizations. They came {90} as traders and as raiders.
Finally there arose leaders among them with bolder imaginations,
and they became conquerors.
====================================================================
{89}
[Illustration: STELE GLORIFYING KING NARAM SIN, OF AKKAD]
====================================================================
About 2750 B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered the
whole Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the
Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. He was an illiterate
barbarian and his people, the Akkadians, learnt the Sumerian
writing and adopted the Sumerian language as the speech of the
officials and the learned. The empire he founded decayed after
two centuries, and after one inundation of Elamites a fresh
Semitic people, the Amorites, by degrees established their rule
over Sumeria. They made their capital in what had hitherto been a
small up-river town, Babylon, and their empire is called the first
Babylonian Empire. It was consolidated by a great king called
Hammurabi (circa 2100 B.C.) who made the earliest code of laws yet
known to history.
The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion
than Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a
successful Semitic invasion of Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was
set up, the Hyksos or "shepherd kings," which lasted for several
centuries. These Semitic conquerors never assimilated themselves
with the Egyptians; they were always regarded with hostility as
foreigners and barbarians; and they were at last expelled by a
popular uprising about 1600 B.C.
But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good and all, the two
races assimilated and the Babylonian Empire became Semitic in its
language and character.
{91}
XVII
THE FIRST SEAGOING PEOPLES
The earliest boats and ships must have come into use some
twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago. Man was probably
paddling about on the water with a log of wood or an inflated skin
to assist him, at latest in the beginnings of the Neolithic
period. A basketwork boat covered with skin and caulked was used
in Egypt and Sumeria from the beginnings of our knowledge. Such
boats are still used there. They are used to this day in Ireland
and Wales and in Alaska; sealskin boats still make the crossing of
Behring Straits. The hollow log followed as tools improved. The
building of boats and then ships came in a natural succession.
Perhaps the legend of Noah's Ark preserves the memory of some
early exploit in shipbuilding, just as the story of the Flood, so
widely distributed among the peoples of the world, may be the
tradition of the flooding of the Mediterranean basin.
There were ships upon the Red Sea long before the pyramids were
built, and there were ships on the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf
by 7000 B.C. Mostly these were the ships of fishermen, but some
were already trading and pirate ships--for knowing what we do of
mankind we may guess pretty safely that the first sailors
plundered where they could and traded where they had to do so.
The seas on which these first ships adventured were inland seas on
which the wind blew fitfully and which were often at a dead calm
for days together, so that sailing did not develop beyond an
accessory use. It is only in the last four hundred years that the
well-rigged, ocean-going, sailing ship has developed. The ships
of the ancient world were essentially rowing ships which hugged
the shore and went into harbour at the first sign of rough
weather. As ships grew into big galleys they caused a demand for
war captives as galley slaves.
We have already noted the appearance of the Semitic people as
wanderers and nomads in the region of Syria and Arabia, and how
they conquered Sumeria and set up first the Akkadian and then the
first Babylonian Empire. In the west these same Semitic peoples
{92} were taking to the sea. They set up a string of harbour
towns along the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, of which Tyre
and Sidon were the chief; and by the time of Hammurabi in Babylon,
they had spread as traders, wanderers and colonizers over the
whole Mediterranean basin. These sea Semites were called the
Phoenicians, They settled largely in Spain, pushing back the old
Iberian Basque population and sending coasting expeditions through
the straits of Gibraltar; and they set up colonies upon the north
coast of Africa. Of Carthage, one of these Phoenician cities, we
shall have much more to tell later.
But the Phoenicians were not the first people to have galleys in
the Mediterranean waters. There was already a series of towns and
cities among the islands and coasts of that sea belonging to a
race or races apparently connected by blood and language with the
Basques to the west and the Berbers and Egyptians to the south,
the Ægean peoples. These peoples must not be confused with the
Greeks, who come much later into our story; they were pre-Greek,
but they had cities in Greece and Asia Minor; Mycenæ and Troy for
example, and they had a great and prosperous establishment at
Cnossos in Crete.
It is only in the last half century that the industry of
excavating archæologists has brought the extent and civilization
of the Ægean peoples to our knowledge. Cnossos has been most
thoroughly explored; it was happily not succeeded by any city big
enough to destroy its ruins, and so it is our chief source of
information about this once almost forgotten civilization.
The history of Cnossos goes back as far as the history of Egypt;
the two countries were trading actively across the sea by 4000
B.C. By 2500 B.C., that is between the time of Sargon I and
Hammurabi, Cretan civilization was at its zenith.
Cnossos was not so much a town as a great palace for the Cretan
monarch and his people. It was not even fortified. It was only
fortified later as the Phoenicians grew strong, and as a new and
more terrible breed of pirates, the Greeks, came upon the sea from
the north.
The monarch was called Minos, as the Egyptian monarch was called
Pharaoh; and he kept his state in a palace fitted with running
water, with bathrooms and the like conveniences such as we know of
in no other ancient remains. There he held great festivals and
shows. There was bull-fighting, singularly like the
bull-fighting that {93} still survives in Spain; there was
resemblance even in the costumes of the bull-fighters; and there
were gymnastic displays. The women's clothes were remarkably
modern in spirit; they wore corsets and flounced dresses. The
pottery, the textile manufactures, the sculpture, painting,
jewellery, ivory, metal and inlay work of these {94} Cretans was
often astonishingly beautiful. And they had a system of writing,
but that still remains to be deciphered.
[Illustration: THE TREASURE HOUSE AT MYCENÆ]
This happy and sunny and civilized life lasted for some score of
centuries. About 2000 B.C. Cnossos and Babylon abounded in
comfortable and cultivated people who probably led very pleasant
lives. They had shows and they had religious festivals, they had
domestic slaves to look after them and industrial slaves to make a
profit for them. Life must have seemed very secure in Cnossos for
such people, sunlit and girdled by the blue sea. Egypt of course
must have appeared rather a declining country in those days under
the rule of her half-barbaric shepherd kings, and if one took an
interest in politics one must have noticed how the Semitic people
seemed to be getting everywhere, ruling Egypt, ruling distant
Babylon, building Nineveh on the upper Tigris, sailing west to the
Pillars of Hercules (the straits of Gibraltar) and setting up
their colonies on those distant coasts.
There were some active arid curious minds in Cnossos, because
later on the Greeks told legends of a certain skilful Cretan
artificer, Dædalus, who attempted to make some sort of flying
machine, perhaps a glider, which collapsed and fell into the sea.
It is interesting to note some of the differences as well as the
resemblances between the life of Cnossos and our own. To a Cretan
gentleman of 2500 B.C. iron was a rare metal which fell out of the
sky and was curious rather than useful--for as yet only meteoric
iron was known, iron had not been obtained from its ores. Compare
that with our modern state of affairs pervaded by iron everywhere.
The horse again would be a quite legendary creature to our Cretan,
a sort of super-ass which lived in the bleak northern lands far
away beyond the Black Sea. Civilization for him dwelt chiefly in
Ægean Greece and Asia Minor, where Lydians and Carians and Trojans
lived a life and probably spoke languages like his own. There
were Phoenicians and Ægeans settled in Spain and North Africa, but
those were very remote regions to his imagination. Italy was
still a desolate land covered with dense forests; the
brown-skinned Etruscans had not yet gone there from Asia Minor. And
one day perhaps this Cretan gentleman went down to the harbour and saw
a captive who attracted his attention because he was very
fair-complexioned {95} and had blue eyes. Perhaps our Cretan tried to
talk to him and was answered in an unintelligible gibberish. This
creature came from somewhere beyond the Black Sea and seemed to be
an altogether benighted savage. But indeed he was an Aryan
tribesman, of a race and culture of which we shall soon have much
to tell, and the strange gibberish he spoke was to differentiate
some day into Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, German, English and
most of the chief languages of the world.
[Illustration: THE PALACE AT CNOSSOS]
Such was Cnossos at its zenith, intelligent, enterprising, bright
and happy. But about 1400 B.C. disaster came perhaps very
suddenly upon its prosperity. The palace of Minos was destroyed,
and its ruins have never been rebuilt or inhabited from that day
to this. We do not know how this disaster occurred. The
excavators note what appears to be scattered plunder and the marks
of the fire. But the traces of a very destructive earthquake have
also been found. Nature alone may have destroyed Cnossos, or the
Greeks may have finished what the earthquake began.
{96}
XVIII
EGYPT, BABYLON AND ASSYRIA
The Egyptians had never submitted very willingly to the rule of
their Semitic shepherd kings and about 1600 A.D. a vigorous
patriotic movement expelled these foreigners. Followed a new
phase or revival for Egypt, a period known to Egyptologists as the
New Empire. Egypt, which had not been closely consolidated before
the Hyksos invasion, was now a united country; and the phase of
subjugation and insurrection left her full of military spirit.
The Pharaohs became aggressive conquerors. They had now acquired
the war horse and the war chariot, which the Hyksos had brought to
them. Under Thothmes III and Amenophis III Egypt had extended her
rule into Asia as far as the Euphrates.
We are entering now upon a thousand years of warfare between the
once quite separated civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile.
At first Egypt was ascendant. The great dynasties, the
Seventeenth Dynasty, which included Thothmes III and Amenophis III
and IV and a great queen Hatasu, and the Nineteenth, when Rameses
II, supposed by some to have been the Pharaoh of Moses, reigned
for sixty-seven years, raised Egypt to high levels of prosperity.
In between there were phases of depression for Egypt, conquest by
the Syrians and later conquest by the Ethiopians from the South.
In Mesopotamia Babylon ruled, then the Hittites and the Syrians of
Damascus rose to a transitory predominance; at one time the
Syrians conquered Egypt; the fortunes of the Assyrians of Nineveh
ebbed and flowed; sometimes the city was a conquered city;
sometimes the Assyrians ruled in Babylon and assailed Egypt. Our
space is too limited here to tell of the comings and goings of the
armies of the Egyptians and of the various Semitic powers of Asia
Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia. They were armies now provided with
vast droves of war chariots, for the horse--still used only for
{97} war and glory--had spread by this time into the old
civilizations from Central Asia.
[Illustration: TEMPLE AT ABU SIMBEL]
Great conquerors appear in the dim light of that distant time and
pass, Tushratta, King of Mitanni, who captured Nineveh, Tiglath
Pileser I of Assyria who conquered Babylon. At last the Assyrians
became the greatest military power of the time. Tiglath Pileser
III conquered Babylon in 745 B.C. and founded what historians call
the New Assyrian Empire. Iron had also come now into civilization
out of the north; the Hittites, the precursors of the Armenians,
had it first and communicated its use to the Assyrians, and an
Assyrian usurper, Sargon II, armed his troops with it. Assyria
became the first power to expound the doctrine of blood and iron.
Sargon's son Sennacherib led an army to the borders of Egypt, and
was defeated not by military strength but by the plague.
Sennacherib's grandson Assurbanipal (who is also known in history
{98} by his Greek name of Sardanapalus) did actually conquer Egypt
in 670 B.C. But Egypt was already a conquered country then under
an Ethiopian dynasty. Sardanapalus simply replaced one conqueror
by another.
[Illustration: AVENUE OF SPHINXES]
If one had a series of political maps of this long period of
history, this interval of ten centuries, we should have Egypt
expanding and contracting like an amoeba under a microscope, and
we should see these various Semitic states of the Babylonians, the
Assyrians, the Hittites and the Syrians coming and going, eating
each other up and disgorging each other again. To the west of
Asia Minor there would be little Ægean states like Lydia, whose
capital was Sardis, and Caria. But after about 1200 B.C. and
perhaps earlier, a new set of names would come into the map of the
ancient world from {100} the north-east and from the north-west.
These would be the names of certain barbaric tribes, armed with
iron weapons and using horse-chariots, who were becoming a great
affliction to the Ægean and Semitic civilizations on the northern
borders. They all spoke variants of what once must have been the
same language, Aryan.
====================================================================
{99}
[Illustration: THE GREAT HYPOSTYLE HALL AT KARNAK]
====================================================================
Round the north-east of the Black and Caspian Seas were coming the
Medes and Persians. Confused with these in the records of the
time were Scythians and Samatians. From north-east or
north-west came the Armenians, from the north-west of the
sea-barrier through the Balkan peninsula came Cimmerians,
Phrygians and the Hellenic tribes whom now we call the Greeks.
They were raiders and robbers and plunderers of cities, these
Ayrans, east and west alike. They were all kindred and similar
peoples, hardy herdsmen who had taken to plunder. In the east
they were still only borderers and raiders, but in the west they
were taking cities and driving out the civilized Ægean
populations. The Ægean peoples were so pressed that they were
seeking new homes in lands beyond the Aryan range. Some were
seeking a settlement in the delta of the Nile and being repulsed
by the Egyptians; some, the Etruscans, seem to have sailed from
Asia Minor to found a state in the forest wildernesses of middle
Italy; some built themselves cities upon the south-east coasts of
the Mediterranean and became later that people known in history as
the Philistines.
Of these Aryans who came thus rudely upon the scene of the ancient
civilizations we will tell more fully in a later section. Here we
note simply all this stir and emigration amidst the area of the
ancient civilizations, that was set up by the swirl of the gradual
and continuous advance of these Aryan barbarians out of the
northern forests and wildernesses between 1600 and 600 B.C.
And in a section to follow we must tell also of a little Semitic
people, the Hebrews, in the hills behind the Phoenician and
Philistine coasts, who began to be of significance in the world
towards the end of this period. They produced a literature of
very great importance in subsequent history, a collection of
books, histories, poems, books of wisdom and prophetic works, the
Hebrew Bible.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt the coming of the Aryans did not cause
fundamental changes until after 600 B.C. The flight of {101} the
Ægeans before the Greeks and even the destruction of Cnossos must
have seemed a very remote disturbance to both the citizens of
Egypt and of Babylon. Dynasties came and went in these cradle
states of civilization, but the main tenor of human life went on,
with a slow increase in refinement and complexity age by age. In
Egypt the accumulated monuments of more ancient times--the
pyramids were already in their third thousand of years and a show
for visitors just as they are to-day--were supplemented by fresh
and splendid buildings, more particularly in the time of the
seventeenth and nineteenth dynasties. The great temples at Karnak
and Luxor date from this time. All the chief monuments of
Nineveh, the great temples, the winged bulls with human heads, the
reliefs of kings and chariots and lion hunts, were done in these
centuries between 1600 and 600 B.C., and this period also covers
most of the splendours of Babylon.
[Illustration: FRIEZE SHOWING EGYPTIAN FEMALE SLAVES CARRYING
LUXURIOUS FOODS]
Both from Mesopotamia and Egypt we now have abundant public
records, business accounts, stories, poetry and private
correspondence. We know that life, for prosperous and influential
people in such cities as Babylon and the Egyptian Thebes, was
already almost as refined and as luxurious as that of comfortable
and prosperous people to-day. Such people lived an orderly and
ceremonious life in beautiful and beautifully furnished and
decorated houses, wore richly decorated clothing and lovely
jewels; they had feasts and festivals, entertained one another
with music and dancing, were waited upon by highly trained
servants, were cared for by doctors and dentists. They did not
travel very much or very far, but boating {102} excursions were a
common summer pleasure both on the Nile and on the Euphrates. The
beast of burthen was the ass; the horse was still used only in
chariots for war and upon occasions of state. The mule was still
novel and the camel, though it was known in Mesopotamia, had not
been brought into Egypt. And there were few utensils of iron;
copper and bronze remained the prevailing metals. Fine linen and
cotton fabrics were known as well as wool. But there was no silk
yet. Glass was known and beautifully coloured, but glass things
were usually small. There was no clear glass and no optical use
of glass. People had gold stoppings in their teeth but no
spectacles on their noses.
One odd contrast between the life of old Thebes or Babylon and
modern life was the absence of coined money. Most trade was still
done by barter. Babylon was financially far ahead of Egypt. Gold
and silver were used for exchange and kept in ingots; and there
were bankers, before coinage, who stamped their names and the
weight on these lumps of precious metal. A merchant or traveller
would carry precious stones to sell to pay for his necessities.
Most servants and workers were slaves who were paid not money but
in kind. As money came in slavery declined.
A modern visitor to these crowning cities of the ancient world
would have missed two very important articles of diet; there were
no hens and no eggs. A French cook would have found small joy in
Babylon. These things came from the East somewhere about the time
of the last Assyrian empire.
Religion like everything else had undergone great refinement.
Human sacrifice for instance had long since disappeared; animals
or bread dummies had been substituted for the victim. (But the
Phoenicians and especially the citizens of Carthage, their
greatest settlement in Africa, were accused, later of immolating
human beings.) When a great chief had died in the ancient days it
had been customary to sacrifice his wives and slaves and break
spear and bow at his tomb so that he should not go unattended and
unarmed in the spirit world. In Egypt there survived of this dark
tradition the pleasant custom of burying small models of house and
shop and servants and cattle with the dead, models that give us
to-day the liveliest realization of the safe and cultivated life
of these ancient people, three thousand years and more ago.
{103}
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF HORUS AT EDFU]
Such was the ancient world before the coming of the Aryans out of
the northern forests and plains. In India and China there were
parallel developments. In the great valleys of both these regions
agricultural city states of brownish peoples were growing up, but
in India they do not seem to have advanced or coalesced so rapidly
as the city states of Mesopotamia or Egypt. They were nearer the
level of the ancient Sumerians or of the Maya civilization of
America. Chinese history has still to be modernized by Chinese
scholars and cleared of much legendary matter. Probably China at
this time was in advance of India. Contemporary with the
seventeenth dynasty in Egypt, there was a dynasty of emperors in
China, the Shang dynasty, priest emperors over a loose-knit empire
of subordinate kings. The chief duty of these early emperors was
to perform the seasonal sacrifices. Beautiful bronze vessels from
the time of the Shang dynasty still exist, and their beauty and
workmanship compel us to recognize that many centuries of
civilization must have preceded their manufacture.
{104}
XIX
THE PRIMITIVE ARYANS
Four thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C., central
and south-eastern Europe and central Asia were probably warmer,
moister and better wooded than they are now. In these regions of
the earth wandered a group of tribes mainly of the fair and
blue-eyed Nordic race, sufficiently in touch with one another to
speak merely variations of one common language from the Rhine to
the Caspian Sea. At that time they may not have been a very
numerous people, and their existence was unsuspected by the
Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or by the already
ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which was tasting in those
days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest.
These Nordic people were destined to play a very important part
indeed in the world's history. They were a people of the
parklands and the forest clearings; they had no horses at first
but they had cattle; when they wandered they put their tents and
other gear on rough ox waggons; when they settled for a time they
may have made huts of wattle and mud. They burnt their important
dead; they did not bury them ceremoniously as the brunette peoples
did. They put the ashes of their greater leaders in urns and then
made a great circular mound about them. These mounds are the
"round barrows" that occur all over north Europe. The brunette
people, their predecessors, did not burn their dead but buried
them in a sitting position in elongated mounds; the "long
barrows."
The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but they
did not settle down by their crops; they would reap and move on.
They had bronze, and somewhen about 1500 B.C. they acquired iron.
They may have been the discoverers of iron smelting. And somewhen
vaguely about that time they also got the horse--which to begin
with they used only for draught purposes. Their social life did
not centre upon a temple like that of the more settled people
round the Mediterranean, and their chief men were leaders rather
than priests. They had an aristocratic social order rather than a
{106} divine and regal order; from a very early stage they
distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble.
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{105}
[Illustration: A BEAUTIFUL ARCHAIC AMPHORA]
====================================================================
They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their wanderings by
feasts, at which there was much drunkenness and at which a special
sort of man, the bards, would sing and recite. They had no
writing until they had come into contact with civilization, and
the memories of these bards were their living literature. This
use of recited language as an entertainment did much to make it a
fine and beautiful instrument of expression, and to that no doubt
the subsequent predominance of the languages derived from Aryan
is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Aryan people had its legendary
history crystallized in bardic recitations, epics, sagas and
vedas, as they were variously called.
The social life of these people centred about the households of
their leading men. The hall of the chief where they settled for a
time was often a very capacious timber building. There were no
doubt huts for herds and outlying farm buildings; but with most of
the Aryan peoples this hall was the general centre, everyone went
there to feast and hear the bards and take part in games and
discussions. Cowsheds and stabling surrounded it. The chief and
his wife and so forth would sleep on a dais or in an upper
gallery; the commoner sort slept about anywhere, as people still
do in Indian households. Except for weapons, ornaments, tools and
suchlike personal possessions there was a sort of patriarchal
communism in the tribe. The chief owned the cattle and grazing
lands in the common interest; forest and rivers were the wild.
This was the fashion of the people who were increasing and
multiplying over the great spaces of central Europe and west
central Asia during the growth of the great civilization of
Mesopotamia and the Nile, and whom we find pressing upon the
heliolithic peoples everywhere in the second millennium before
Christ. They were coming into France and Britain and into Spain.
They pushed westward in two waves. The first of these people who
reached Britain and Ireland were armed with bronze weapons. They
exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the great stone
monuments of Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge and Avebury in
England. They reached Ireland. They are called the Goidelic
Celts. The {107} second wave of a closely kindred people, perhaps
intermixed with other racial elements, brought iron with it into
Great Britain, and is known as the wave of Brythonic Celts. From
them the Welsh derive their language.
[Illustration: THE MOUND OF NIPPUR]
Kindred Celtic peoples were pressing southward into Spain and
coming into contact not only with the heliolithic Basque people
who still occupied the country but with the Semitic Phoenician
colonies of the sea coast. A closely allied series of tribes, the
Italians, were making their way down the still wild and wooded
Italian peninsula. They did not always conquer. In the eighth
century B.C. Rome appears in history, a trading town on the Tiber,
inhabited by Aryan Latins but under the rule of Etruscan nobles
and kings.
At the other extremity of the Aryan range there was a similar
progress southward of similar tribes. Aryan peoples, speaking
Sanskrit, had come down through the western passes into North
{108} India long before 1000 B.C. There they came into contact
with a primordial brunette civilization, the Dravidian
civilization, and learnt much from it. Other Aryan tribes seem to
have spread over the mountain masses of Central Asia far to the
east of the present range of such peoples. In Eastern Turkestan
there are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but now they speak
Mongolian tongues.
Between the Black and Caspian Seas the ancient Hittites had been
submerged and "Aryanized" by the Armenians before 1000 B.C., and
the Assyrians and Babylonians were already aware of a new and
formidable fighting barbarism on the north-eastern frontiers, a
group of tribes amidst which the Scythians, the Medes and the
Persians remain as outstanding names.
But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes made
their first heavy thrust into the heart of the old-world
civilization. They were already coming southward and crossing
into Asia Minor many centuries before 1000 B.C. First came a
group of tribes of whom the Phrygians were the most conspicuous,
and then in succession the Æolic, the Ionic and the Dorian Greeks.
By 1000 B.C. they had wiped out the ancient Ægean civilization
both in the mainland of Greece and in most of the Greek islands;
the cities of Mycenæ and Tiryns were obliterated and Cnossos was
nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea before 1000
A.D., they had settled in Crete and Rhodes, and they were founding
colonies in Sicily and the south of Italy after the fashion of the
Phoenician trading cities that were dotted along the Mediterranean
coasts.
So it was, while Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II and
Sardanapalus were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia
and Syria and Egypt, the Aryan peoples were learning the methods
of civilization and making it over for their own purposes in Italy
and Greece and north Persia. The theme of history from the ninth
century B.C. onward for six centuries is the story of how these
Aryan peoples grew to power and enterprise and how at last they
subjugated the whole Ancient World, Semitic, Ægean and Egyptian
alike. In form the Aryan peoples were altogether victorious; but
the struggle of Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian ideas and methods was
continued long after the sceptre was in Aryan hands. It is indeed
a struggle that goes on through all the rest of history and still
in a manner continues to this day.
{109}
XX
THE LAST BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF DARIUS I
We have already mentioned how Assyria became a great military
power under Tiglath Pileser III and under the usurper Sargon II.
Sargon was not this man's original name; he adopted it to flatter
the conquered Babylonians by reminding them of that ancient
founder of the Akkadian Empire, Sargon I, two thousand years
before his time. Babylon, for all that it was a conquered city,
was of greater population and importance than Nineveh, and its
great god Bel Marduk and its traders and priests had to be treated
politely. In Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C. we are
already far beyond the barbaric days when the capture of a town
meant loot and massacre. Conquerors sought to propitiate and win
the conquered. For a century and a half after Sargon the new
Assyrian empire endured and, as we have noted, Assurbanipal
(Sardanapalus) held at least lower Egypt.
But the power and solidarity of Assyria waned rapidly. Egypt by
an effort threw off the foreigner under a Pharoah Psammetichus I,
and under Necho II attempted a war of conquest in Syria. By that
time Assyria was grappling with foes nearer at hand, and could
make but a poor resistance. A Semitic people from south-east
Mesopotamia, the Chaldeans, combined with Aryan Medes and Persians
from the north-east against Nineveh, and in
606 B.C.--for now we are coming down to exact chronology--took
that city.
There was a division of the spoils of Assyria. A Median Empire
was set up in the north under Cyaxares. It included Nineveh, and
its capital was Ecbatana. Eastward it reached to the borders of
India. To the south of this in a great crescent was a new
Chaldean Empire, the Second Babylonian Empire, which rose to a
very great degree of wealth and power under the rule of
Nebuchadnezzar the Great (the Nebuchadnezzar of the Bible). The
last great days, the {110} greatest days of all, for Babylon
began. For a time the two Empires remained at peace, and the
daughter of Nebuchadnezzar was married to Cyaxares.
Meanwhile Necho II was pursuing his easy conquests in Syria. He
had defeated and slain King Josiah of Judah, a small country of
which there is more to tell presently, at the battle of Megiddo in
608 B.C., and he pushed on to the Euphrates to encounter not a
decadent Assyria but a renascent Babylonia. The Chaldeans dealt
very vigorously with the Egyptians. Necho was routed and driven
back to Egypt, and the Babylonian frontier pushed down to the
ancient Egyptian boundaries.
From 606 until 589 B.C. the Second Babylonian Empire flourished
insecurely. It flourished so long as it kept the peace with the
stronger, hardier Median Empire to the north. And during these
sixty-seven years not only life but learning flourished in the
ancient city.
[Map: Map showing the relation of the Median and Second Babylonian
(Chaldæan) Empires in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great]
[Map: The Empire of Darius (tribute-paying countries) at its
greatest extent]
Even under the Assyrian monarchs and especially under
Sardanapalus, Babylon had been a scene of great intellectual
activity. {111} Sardanapalus, though an Assyrian, had been quite
Babylon-ized. He made a library, a library not of paper but of
the clay tablets that were used for writing in Mesopotamia since
early Sumerian days. His collection has been unearthed and is
perhaps the most precious store of historical material in the
world. The last of the Chaldean line of Babylonian monarchs,
Nabonidus, had even keener literary tastes. He patronized
antiquarian researches, and when a date was worked out by his
investigators for the accession of Sargon I he commemorated the
fact by inscriptions. But there were many signs of disunion in
his empire, and he sought to centralize it by bringing a number of
the various local gods to Babylon and setting up temples to them
there. This device was to be practised quite successfully by the
Romans in later times, but in Babylon it roused the jealousy of
the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the dominant god of the
Babylonians. They cast about for a possible alternative to
Nabonidus and found it in Cyrus the Persian, the ruler of the
adjacent Median Empire. Cyrus had already distinguished himself
by conquering Croesus, the rich king of Lydia in Eastern Asia
Minor. {112} He came up against Babylon, there was a battle
outside the walls, and the gates of the city were opened to him
(538 B.C.). His soldiers entered the city without fighting. The
crown prince Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus, was feasting, the
Bible relates, when a hand appeared and wrote in letters of fire
upon the wall these mystical words: _"Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin,"_ which was interpreted by the prophet Daniel, whom he
summoned to read the riddle, as "God has numbered thy kingdom and
finished it; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting and
thy kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians." Possibly the
priests of Bel Marduk knew something about that writing on the
wall. Belshazzar was killed that night, says the Bible.
Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and the occupation of the city was
so peaceful that the services of Bel Marduk continued without
intermission.
[Illustration: PERSIAN MONARCH]
Thus it was the Babylonian and Median empires were united.
Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, subjugated Egypt. Cambyses went mad
and was accidentally killed, and was presently succeeded by Darius
the Mede, Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief
councillors of Cyrus.
====================================================================
{113}
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF PERSEPOLIS]
[Illustration: THE GREAT PORCH OF XERXES, AT PERSEPOLIS]
====================================================================
The Persian Empire of Darius I, the first of the new Aryan empires
in the seat of the old civilizations, was the greatest empire the
world had hitherto seen. It included all Asia Minor and Syria,
all the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus
and Caspian regions, Media, Persia, and it extended into India as
far as the Indus. Such an empire was possible because the horse
and rider and the chariot and the made-road had now been brought
into the world. Hitherto the ass and ox and the camel for desert
use had afforded the swiftest method of {114} transport. Great
arterial roads were made by the Persian rulers to hold their new
empire, and post horses were always in waiting for the imperial
messenger or the traveller with an official permit. Moreover the
world was now beginning to use coined money, which greatly
facilitated trade and intercourse. But the capital of this vast
empire was no longer Babylon. In the long run the priesthood of
Bel Marduk gained nothing by their treason. Babylon though still
important was now a declining city, and the great cities of the
new empire were Persepolis and Susa and Ecbatana. The capital was
Susa. Nineveh was already abandoned and sinking into ruins.
{115}
XXI
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS
And now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so
important in their own time as in their influence upon the later
history of the world. They were settled in Judea long before 1000
B.C., and their capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their
story is interwoven with that of the great empires on either side
of them, Egypt to the south and the changing empires of Syria,
Assyria and Babylon to the north. Their country was an inevitable
high road between these latter powers and Egypt.
Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they
produced a written literature, a world history, a collection of
laws, chronicles, psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and
political utterances which became at last what Christians know as
the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in
history in the fourth or fifth century B.C.
Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We
have already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian
Empire while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians
and Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was defeated
and slain at Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to
Egypt, and when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean king in
Babylon, rolled back Necho into Egypt, he attempted to manage
Judah by setting up puppet kings in Jerusalem. The experiment
failed, the people massacred his Babylonian officials, and he then
determined to break up this little state altogether, which had
long been playing off Egypt against the northern empire.
Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant of the people was
carried off captive to Babylon.
{116}
There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.). He then
collected them together and sent them back to resettle their
country and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem.
Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very
civilized or united people. Probably only a very few of them
could read or write. In their own history one never hears of the
early books of the Bible being read; the first mention of a book
is in the time of Josiah. The Babylonian captivity civilized them
and consolidated them. They returned aware of their own
literature, an acutely self-conscious and political people.
Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the
Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old
Testament as we know it. In addition, as separate books they
already had many of the other books that have since been
incorporated with the Pentateuch into the present Hebrew Bible,
Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for example.
The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of
the Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with
similar Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the
common beliefs of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of
Moses and of Samson have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But
with the story of Abraham and onward begins something more special
to the Jewish race.
Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in
Babylon. He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of
Genesis the reader must go for the story of his wanderings and for
the stories of his sons and grandchildren and how they became
captive in the Land of Egypt. He travelled through Canaan, and
the God of Abraham, says the Bible story, promised this smiling
land of prosperous cities to him and to his children.
And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of
wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the
children of Abraham, grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded
the land of Canaan from the Arabian deserts to the East. They may
have done this somewhen between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are
no Egyptian records of Moses nor of Canaan at this time to help
out the story. But at any rate they did not succeed in conquering
any {117} more than the hilly backgrounds of the promised land.
The coast was now in the hands, not of the Canaanites but of
newcomers, those Ægean peoples, the Philistines; and their cities,
Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully withstood the
Hebrew attack. For many generations the children of Abraham
remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in
incessant bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred
tribes about them, the Moabites, the Midianites and so forth. The
reader will find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles
and disasters during this period. For very largely it is a record
of disasters and failures frankly told.
[Map: The Land of the Hebrews]
{118}
For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there
was any rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders
of the people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.C. they chose
themselves a king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul's
leading was no great improvement upon the leading of the Judges;
he perished under the hail of Philistine arrows at the battle of
Mount Gilboa, his armour went into the temple of the Philistine
Venus, and his body was nailed to the walls of
Beth-shan.
[Illustration: MOUND AT BABYLON]
His successor David was more successful and more politic. With
David dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were
ever to know. It was based on a close alliance with the
Phoenician city of Tyre, whose King Hiram seems to have been a man
of very great intelligence and enterprise. He wished to secure a
trade route to the Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country.
Normally Phoenician trade went to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt
was in a state of profound disorder at this {119} time; there may
have been other obstructions to Phoenician trade along this line,
and at any rate Hiram established the very closest relations both
with David and with his son and successor Solomon. Under Hiram's
auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose, and in
return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A very
considerable trade passed northward and southward through
Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence
unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was even given
a daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.
But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the
climax of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king
in a little city. His power was so transitory that within a few
years of his death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second
dynasty, had taken Jerusalem and looted most of its splendours.
The account of Solomon's magnificence given in the books of Kings
and Chronicles is questioned by many critics. They say that it
was added to and exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later
writers. But the Bible account read carefully is not so
overwhelming as it appears at the first reading. Solomon's
temple, if one works out the measurements, would go inside a small
suburban church, and his fourteen hundred chariots cease to
impress us when we learn from an Assyrian monument that his
successor Ahab sent a contingent of two thousand to the Assyrian
army. It is also plainly manifest from the Bible narrative that
Solomon spent himself in display and overtaxed and overworked his
people. At his death the northern part of his kingdom broke off
from Jerusalem and became the independent kingdom of Israel.
Jerusalem remained the capital city of Judah.
The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram died,
and the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew
strong again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of
Judah becomes a history of two little states ground between,
first, Syria, then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt
to the south. It is a tale of disasters and of deliverances that
only delayed disaster. It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a
barbaric people. In 721 B.C. the kingdom of Israel was swept away
into captivity by the Assyrians and its people utterly lost to
history. Judah struggled {121} on until in 604 B.C., as we have
told, it shared the fate of Israel. There may be details open to
criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the days of
the Judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true story
which squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of
Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century.
====================================================================
{120}
[Illustration: THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON]
====================================================================
It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history
together and evolved their tradition. The people who came back to
Jerusalem at the command of Cyrus were a very different people in
spirit and knowledge from those who had gone into captivity. They
had learnt civilization. In the development of their peculiar
character a very great part was played by certain men, a new sort
of men, the Prophets, to whom we must now direct our attention.
These Prophets mark the appearance of new and remarkable forces in
the steady development of human society.
{122}
XXII
PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA
The fall of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series of
disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In the
seventh century B.C. it would have seemed as though the whole
civilized world was to be dominated by Semitic rulers. They ruled
the great Assyrian empire and they had conquered Egypt; Assyria,
Babylon, Syria were all Semitic, speaking languages that were
mutually intelligible. The trade of the world was in Semitic
hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities of the Phoenician
coast, had thrown out colonies that grew at last to even greater
proportion in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded before
800 B.C., had risen to a population of more than a million. It
was for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to
Britain and out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira.
We have already noted how Hiram co-operated with Solomon to build
ships on the Red Sea for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian
trade. In the time of the Pharaoh Necho, a Phoenician expedition
sailed completely round Africa.
At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only the
Greeks were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of the
one they had destroyed, and the Medes were becoming "formidable,"
as an Assyrian inscription calls them, in central Asia. In 800
B.C. no one could have prophesied that before the third century
B.C. every trace of Semitic dominion would be wiped out by
Aryan-speaking conquerors, and that everywhere the Semitic peoples
would be subjects or tributaries or scattered altogether.
Everywhere except in the northern deserts of Arabia, where the
Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life, the ancient
way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and his Akkadians went
down to conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were never
conquered by Aryan masters.
{123}
Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun in
these five eventful centuries one people only held together and
clung to its ancient traditions and that was this little people,
the Jews, who were sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by
Cyrus the Persian. And they were able to do this, because they
had got together this literature of theirs, their Bible, in
Babylon. It is not so much the Jews who made the Bible as the
Bible which made the Jews. Running through this Bible were
certain ideas, different from the ideas of the people about them,
very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they were destined
to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship, adventure
and oppression.
Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was
invisible and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with
hands, a Lord of Righteousness throughout the earth. All other
peoples had national gods embodied in images that lived in
temples. If the image was smashed and the temple razed, presently
that god died out. But this was a new idea, this God of the Jews,
in the heavens, high above priests and sacrifices. And this God
of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen them to be his peculiar
people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of
Righteousness in the World. They were a people exalted by their
sense of a common destiny. This belief saturated them all when
they returned to Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon.
Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation
many Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many
Phoenicians, speaking practically the same language and having
endless customs, habits, tastes and traditions in common, should
be attracted by this inspiring cult and should seek to share in
its fellowship and its promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon,
Carthage and the Spanish Phoenician cities, the Phoenicians
suddenly vanish from history; and as suddenly we find, not simply
in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt, Arabia, the East,
wherever the Phoenicians had set their feet, communities of Jews.
And they were all held together by the Bible and by the reading of
the Bible. Jerusalem was from the first only their nominal
capital; their real city was this book of books. This is a new
sort of thing in history. It is something of which the seeds were
sown long before, when the Sumerians {124} and Egyptians began to
turn their hieroglyphics into writing. The Jews were a new thing,
a people without a king and presently without a temple (for as we
shall tell Jerusalem itself was broken up in 70 A.D.), held
together and consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing
but the power of the written word.
And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor
foreseen nor done by either priests or statesmen. Not only a new
kind of community but a new kind of man comes into history with
the development of the Jews. In the days of Solomon the Hebrews
looked like becoming a little people just like any other little
people of that time clustering around court and temple, ruled by
the wisdom of the priest and led by the ambition of the king. But
already, the reader may learn from the Bible, this new sort of man
of which we speak, the Prophet, was in evidence.
As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the importance of
these Prophets increases.
[Illustration: THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II]
What were these Prophets? They were men of the most diverse
origins. The Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and the
Prophet Amos wore the goatskin mantle of a shepherd, but all had
this in common, that they gave allegiance to no one but to the God
of Righteousness and that they spoke directly to the people. They
{125} came without licence or consecration. "Now the word of the
Lord came unto me;" that was the formula. They were intensely
political. They exhorted the people against Egypt, "that broken
reed," or against Assyria or Babylon; they denounced the indolence
of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of the King. Some of
them turned their attention to what we should now call "social
reform." The rich were "grinding the faces of the poor," the
luxurious were consuming the children's bread; wealthy people made
friends with and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners;
and this was hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would
certainly punish this land.
[Illustration: ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK]
These fulminations were written down and preserved and studied.
They went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they went they
spread a new religious spirit. They carried the common man past
priest and temple, past court and king and brought him face to
face with the Rule of Righteousness. That is their supreme
importance in the history of mankind. In the great utterances of
Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to a pitch of splendid
anticipation and foreshadows the whole earth united and at peace
under one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.
All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the
intelligent reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in
them, much prejudice, and much that will remind him of the
propaganda pamphlets {126}of the present time. Nevertheless it is
the Hebrew Prophets of the period round and about the Babylonian
captivity who mark the appearance of a new power in the world, the
power of individual moral appeal, of an appeal to the free
conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices and slavish
loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.
{127}
XXIII
THE GREEKS
Now while after Solomon (whose reign was probably about 960 B.C.)
the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were suffering
destruction and deportation, and while the Jewish people were
developing their tradition in captivity in Babylon, another great
power over the human mind, the Greek tradition, was also arising.
While the Hebrew prophets were working out a new sense of direct
moral responsibility between the people and an eternal and
universal God of Right, the Greek philosophers were training the
human mind in a new method and spirit of intellectual adventure.
The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the
Aryan-speaking stem. They had come down among the Ægean cities and
islands some centuries before 1000 B.C. They were probably
already in southward movement before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted
his first elephants beyond the conquered Euphrates. For in those
days there were elephants in Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.
It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos, but
there are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are
stories of Minos and his palace (the Labyrinth) and of the skill
of the Cretan artificers.
====================================================================
{128}
[Illustration: STATUE OF MELEAGER]
====================================================================
Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters
whose performances were an important social link, and these handed
down from the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics,
the _Iliad_, telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and
took and sacked the town of Troy in Asia Minor, and the _Odyssey_,
being a long adventure story of the return of the sage captain,
Odysseus, from Troy to his own island. These epics were written
down somewhen in the eighth or seventh century B.C., when the
Greeks had acquired the use of an alphabet from their more
civilized neighbours, but they {129} are supposed to have been in
existence very much earlier. Formerly they were ascribed to a
particular blind bard, Homer, who was supposed to have sat down
and composed them as Milton composed Paradise Lost. Whether there
really was such a poet, whether he composed or only wrote down and
polished these epics and so forth, is a favourite quarrelling
ground for the erudite. We need not concern ourselves with such
bickerings here. The thing that matters from our point of view is
that the Greeks were in possession of their epics in the eighth
century B.C., and that they were a common possession and a link
between their various tribes, giving them a sense of fellowship as
against the outer barbarians. They were a group of kindred
peoples linked by the spoken and afterwards by the written word,
and sharing common ideals of courage and behaviour.
The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without iron,
without writing, and still not living in cities. They seem to
have lived at first in open villages of huts around the halls of
their chiefs outside the ruins of the Ægean cities they had
destroyed. Then they began to wall their cities and to adopt the
idea of temples from the people they had conquered. It has been
said that the cities of the primitive civilizations grew up about
the altar of some tribal god, and that the wall was added; in the
cities of the Greeks the wall preceded the temple. They began to
trade and send out colonies. By the seventh century B.C. a new
series of cities had grown up in the valleys and islands of
Greece, forgetful of the Ægean cities and civilization that had
preceded them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos, Miletus
among the chief. There were already Greek settlements along the
coast of the Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily. The heel and toe
of Italy was called Magna Græcia. Marseilles was a Greek town
established on the site of an earlier Phoenician colony.
Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief
means of transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile
tend to become united under some common rule. The cities of Egypt
and the cities of Sumeria, for example, ran together under one
system of government. But the Greek peoples were cut up among
islands and mountain valleys; both Greece and Magna Græcia are
very mountainous; and the tendency was all the other way. When
the {130} Greeks come into history they are divided up into a
number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence.
They are different even in race. Some consist chiefly of citizens
of this or that Greek tribe, Ionic, Æolian or Doric; some have a
mingled population of Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek
"Mediterranean" folk; some have an unmixed free citizenship of
Greeks lording it over an enslaved conquered population like the
"Helots" in Sparta. In some the old leaderly Aryan families have
become a close aristocracy; in some there is a democracy of all
the Aryan citizens; in some there are elected or even hereditary
kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA]
And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states
divided and various, kept them small. The largest states were
smaller than many English counties, and it is doubtful if the
population of any of their cities ever exceeded a third of a
million. Few came up even to 50,000. There were unions of
interest and sympathy but no coalescences. Cities made leagues
and alliances as {131} trade increased, and small cities put
themselves under the protection of great ones. Yet all Greece was
held together in a certain community of feeling by two things, by
the epics and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in
the athletic contests at Olympia. This did not prevent wars and
feuds, but it mitigated something of the savagery of war between
them, and a truce protected all travellers to and from the games.
As time went on the sentiment of a common heritage grew and the
number of states participating in the Olympic games increased
until at last not only Greeks but competitors from the closely
kindred countries of Epirus and Macedonia to the north were
admitted.
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the quality of
their civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth
centuries B.C. Their social life differed in many interesting
points from the social life of the Ægean and river valley
civilizations. They had splendid temples but the priesthood was
not the great traditional body it was in the cities of the older
world, the-repository of all knowledge, the storehouse of ideas.
They had leaders and noble families, but no quasi-divine monarch
surrounded by an elaborately organized court. Rather their
organization was aristocratic, with leading families which kept
each other in order. Even their so-called "democracies" were
aristocratic; every citizen had a share in public affairs and came
to the assembly in a democracy, but everybody was not a _citizen_.
The Greek democracies were not like our modern "democracies" in
which everyone has a vote. Many of the Greek democracies had a
few hundred or a few thousand citizens and then many thousands of
slaves, freedmen and so forth, with no share in public affairs.
Generally in Greece affairs were in the hands of a community of
substantial men. Their kings and their tyrants alike were just
men set in front of other men or usurping a leadership; they were
not quasi-divine overmen like Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of
Mesopotamia. Both thought and government therefore had a freedom
under Greek conditions such as they had known in none of the older
civilizations. The Greeks had brought down into cities the
individualism, the personal initiative of the wandering life of
the northern parklands. They were the first republicans of
importance in history.
{132}
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY]
And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric
warfare a new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life.
We find men who are not priests seeking and recording knowledge
and enquiring into the mysteries of life and being, in a way that
has hitherto been the sublime privilege of priesthood or the
presumptuous amusement of kings. We find already in the sixth
century B.C.--perhaps while Isaiah was still prophesying in
Babylon--such men as Thales and Anaximander of Miletus and
Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we should now call
independent gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd questionings
of the world in which we live, asking what its real nature was,
whence it came and what its destiny might be, and refusing all
ready-made or evasive answers. Of these questionings of the
universe by the Greek mind, we shall have more to say a little
later in this history. These Greek enquirers {133} who begin to
be remarkable in the sixth century B.C. are the first
philosophers, the first "wisdom-lovers," in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth
century B.C. was in the history of humanity. For not only were
these Greek philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas
about this universe and man's place in it and Isaiah carrying
Jewish prophecy to its sublimest levels, but as we shall tell
later Gautama Buddha was then teaching in India and Confucius and
Lao Tse in China. From Athens to the Pacific the human mind was
astir.
{134}
XXIV
THE WARS OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS
While the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and Asia
Minor were embarking upon free intellectual enquiry and while in
Babylon and Jerusalem the last of the Hebrew prophets were
creating a free conscience for mankind, two adventurous Aryan
peoples, the Medes and the Persians, were in possession of the
civilization of the ancient world and were making a great empire,
the Persian empire, which was far larger in extent than any empire
the world had seen hitherto. Under Cyrus, Babylon and the rich
and ancient civilization of Lydia had been added to the Persian
rule; the Phoenician cities of the Levant and all the Greek cities
in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses had subjected
Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of the Persian rulers
(521 B.C.), found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world.
His couriers rode with his decrees from the Dardanelles to the
Indus and from Upper Egypt to Central Asia.
The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and the
Spanish Phoenician settlements, were not under the Persian Peace;
but they treated it with respect and the only people who gave any
serious trouble were the old parent hordes of Nordic people in
South Russia and Central Asia, the Scythians, who raided the
northern and north-eastern borders.
Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a
population of Persians, The Persians were only the small
conquering minority of this enormous realm. The rest of the
population was what it had been before the Persians came from time
immemorial, only that Persian was the administrative language.
Trade and finance were still largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of
old were the great Mediterranean ports and Semitic shipping plied
upon the seas. But many of these Semitic merchants and business
people as {135} they went from place to place already found a
sympathetic and convenient common history in the Hebrew tradition
and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which was increasing
rapidly in this empire was the Greek element. The Greeks were
becoming serious rivals to the Semites upon the sea, and their
detached and vigorous intelligence made them useful and,
unprejudiced officials.
[Illustration: FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY]
It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded Europe.
He wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of the Scythian
horsemen. He crossed the Bosphorus with a great army and marched
through Bulgaria to the Danube, crossed this by a bridge of boats
and pushed far northward. His army suffered terribly. It was
largely an infantry force and the mounted Scythians rode all round
it, cut off its supplies, destroyed any stragglers and never came
to a pitched battle. Darius was forced into an inglorious
retreat.
He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace and
Macedonia, and Macedonia submitted to Darius. Insurrections of
the Greek cities in Asia followed this failure, and the European
Greeks were drawn into the contest. Darius resolved upon the
subjugation of the Greeks in Europe. With the Phoenician fleet at
his disposal he was able to subdue one island after another, and
finally in 490 B.C. he made his main attack upon Athens. A
considerable Armada sailed from the ports of Asia Minor and the
eastern Mediterranean, and the expedition landed its troops at
Marathon to the north of Athens. There they were met and signally
defeated by the Athenians.
{136}
An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest rival
of Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens appealed to Sparta,
sending a herald, a swift runner, imploring the Spartans not to
let Greeks become slaves to barbarians. This runner (the
prototype of all "Marathon" runners) did over a hundred miles of
broken country in less than two days. The Spartans responded
promptly and generously; but when, in three days, the Spartan
force reached Athens, there was nothing for it to do but to view
the battlefield and the bodies of the defeated Persian soldiers.
The Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So ended the first
Persian attack on Greece.
The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon after the
news of his defeat at Marathon reached him, and for four years his
son and successor, Xerxes, prepared a host to crush the Greeks.
For a time terror united all the Greeks. The army of Xerxes was
certainly the greatest that had hitherto been assembled in the
world. It was a huge assembly of discordant elements. It crossed
the Dardanelles, 480 B.C., by a bridge of boats; and along the
coast as it advanced moved an equally miscellaneous fleet carrying
supplies. At the narrow pass of Thermopylæ a small force of 1400
men under the Spartan Leonidas resisted this multitude, and after
a fight of unsurpassed heroism was completely destroyed. Every
man was killed. But the losses they inflicted upon the Persians
were enormous, and the army of Xerxes pushed on to Thebes and
Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered and made terms.
The Athenians abandoned their city and it was burnt.
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{137}
[Illustration: ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF CORINTH]
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Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came
victory against the odds and all expectations. The Greek fleet,
though not a third the size of the Persian, assailed it in the bay
of Salamis and destroyed it. Xerxes found himself and his immense
army cut off from supplies and his heart failed him. He retreated
to Asia with one half of his army, leaving the rest to be defeated
at Platea (479 B.C.) what time the remnants of the Persian fleet
were hunted down by the Greeks and destroyed at Mycalæ in Asia
Minor.
The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek cities in
Asia became free. All this is told in great detail and with much
picturesqueness in the first of written histories, the _History_
of {138} Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in the
Ionian city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, and he visited Babylon
and Egypt in his search for exact particulars. From Mycalæ onward
Persia sank into a confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was
murdered in 465 B.C. and rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media
broke up the brief order of that mighty realm. The history of
Herodotus lays stress on the weakness of Persia. This history is
indeed what we should now call propaganda--propaganda for Greece
to unite and conquer Persia. Herodotus makes one character,
Aristagoras, go to the Spartans with a map of the known world and
say to them: "These Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You on
the other hand have now attained the utmost skill in war .... No
other nations in the world have what they possess: gold, silver,
bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves. _All this you
might have for yourselves, if you so desired._"
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON) AT CAPE SUNIUM]
{139}
XXV
THE SPLENDOUR OF GREECE
The century and a half that followed the defeat of Persia was one
of very great splendour for the Greek civilization. True that
Greece was torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy between
Athens, Sparta and other states (the Peloponnesian War 431 to 404
B.C.) and that in 338 B.C. the Macedonians became virtually
masters of Greece; nevertheless during this period the thought and
the creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels
that made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the rest of
history.
The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For over
thirty years (466 to 428 B.C.) Athens was dominated by a man of
great vigour and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to
rebuild the city from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced
it. The beautiful ruins that still glorify Athens to-day are
chiefly the remains of this great effort. And he did not simply
rebuild a material Athens. He rebuilt Athens intellectually. He
gathered about him not only architects and sculptors but poets,
dramatists, philosophers and teachers. Herodotus came to Athens
to recite his history (438 B.C.). Anaxagoras came with the
beginnings of a scientific description of the sun and stars.
Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides one after the other carried the
Greek drama to its highest levels or beauty and nobility.
The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens lived
on after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of
Greece was now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long and
wasteful struggle for "ascendancy" was beginning. Indeed the
darkling of the political horizon seems for a time to have
quickened rather than discouraged men's minds.
Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar freedom of
Greek institutions had given great importance to skill in
discussion. {140} Decision rested neither with king nor with
priest but in the assemblies of the people or of leading men.
Eloquence and able argument became very desirable accomplishments
therefore, and a class of teachers arose, the Sophists, who
undertook to strengthen young men in these arts. But one cannot
reason without matter, and knowledge followed in the wake of
speech. The activities and rivalries of these Sophists led very
naturally to an acute examination of style, of methods of thought
and of the validity of arguments. When Pericles died a certain
Socrates was becoming prominent as an able and destructive critic
of bad argument--and much of the teaching of the Sophists was bad
argument. A group of brilliant young men gathered about Socrates.
In the end Socrates was executed for disturbing people's minds
(399 B.C.), he was condemned after the dignified fashion of the
Athens of those days to drink in his own house and among his own
friends a poisonous draught made from hemlock, but the disturbance
of people's minds went on in spite of his condemnation. His young
men carried on his teaching.
[Illustration: PART OF THE FAMOUS FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS]
====================================================================
{141}
[Illustration: THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS]
[Illustration: THE THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS, GREECE]
====================================================================
Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.C.) who
presently began to teach philosophy in the grove of the Academy.
His teaching fell into two main divisions, an examination of the
foundations and methods of human thinking and an examination of
political institutions. He was the first man to write a Utopia,
that is to say the plan of a community different from and better
than any {142} existing community. This shows an altogether
unprecedented boldness in the human mind which had hitherto
accepted social traditions and usages with scarcely a question.
Plato said plainly to mankind: "Most of the social and political
ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the
will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a
wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You
are not awake to your own power." That is a high adventurous
teaching that has still to soak in to the common intelligence of
our race. One of his earliest works was the Republic, a dream of
a communist aristocracy; his last unfinished work was the Laws, a
scheme of regulation for another such Utopian state.
[Illustration: THE CARYATIDES OF THE ERECHTHEUM]
The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of government was
carried on after Plato's death by Aristotle, who had been his
pupil and who taught in the Lyceum. Aristotle came from the city
of Stagira in Macedonia, and his father was court physician to the
Macedonian king. For a time Aristotle was tutor to Alexander,
{144} the king's son, who was destined to achieve very great
things of which we shall soon be telling. Aristotle's work upon
methods of thinking carried the science of Logic to a level at
which it remained for fifteen hundred years or more, until the
mediæval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again. He made
no Utopias. Before man could really control his destiny as Plato
taught, Aristotle perceived that he needed far more knowledge and
far more accurate knowledge than he possessed. And so Aristotle
began that systematic collection of knowledge which nowadays we
call Science. He sent out explorers to collect _facts_. He was
the father of natural history. He was the founder of political
science. His students at the Lyceum examined and compared the
constitutions of 158 different states ....
{143}
[Illustration: ATHENE OF THE PARTHENON]
Here in the fourth century B.C. we find men who are practically
"modern thinkers." The child-like, dream-like methods of
primitive thought had given way to a disciplined and critical
attack upon the problems of life. The weird and monstrous
symbolism and imagery of the gods and god monsters, and all the
taboos and awes and restraints that have hitherto encumbered
thinking are here completely set aside. Free, exact and
systematic thinking has begun. The fresh and unencumbered mind of
these newcomers out of the northern forests has thrust itself into
the mysteries of the temple and let the daylight in.
{145}
XXVI
THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
From 431 to 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece.
Meanwhile to the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia
was rising slowly to power and civilization. The Macedonians
spoke a language closely akin to Greek, and on several occasions
Macedonian competitors had taken part in the Olympic games. In
359 B.C. a man of very great abilities and ambition became king of
this little country--Philip. Philip had previously been a hostage
in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek education and he was
probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus--which had also been
developed by the philosopher Isocrates--of a possible conquest of
Asia by a consolidated Greece.
He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to
remodel his army. For a thousand years now the charging
horse-chariot had been the decisive factor in battles, that and
the close-fighting infantry. Mounted horsemen had also fought,
but as a cloud of skirmishers, individually and without
discipline. Philip made his infantry fight in a closely packed
mass, the Macedonian phalanx, and he trained his mounted
gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in formation and so
invented cavalry. The master move in most of his battles and in
the battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge. The
phalanx _held_ the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept
away the enemy horse on his wings and poured in on the flank and
rear of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by bowmen, who shot
the horses.
With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly
to Greece; and the battle of Chæronia (338 B.C.), fought against
Athens and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the
dream of Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek
states appointed Philip captain-general of the Græco-Macedonian
confederacy {146} against Persia, and in 336 B.C. his advanced
guard crossed into Asia upon this long premeditated adventure.
But he never followed it. He was assassinated; it is believed at
the instigation of his queen Olympias, Alexander's mother. She
was jealous because Philip had married a second wife.
But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son's education. He
had not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the
world, as this boy's tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him
and thrust military experience upon him. At Chæronia Alexander,
who was then only eighteen years old, had been in command of the
cavalry. And so it was possible for this young man, who was still
only twenty years old at the time of his accession, to take up his
father's task at once and to proceed successfully with the Persian
adventure.
[Illustration: BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT]
In 334 B.C.--for two years were needed to establish and confirm
his position in Macedonia and Greece--he crossed into Asia,
defeated a not very much bigger Persian army at the battle of the
Granicus and captured a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept
along the sea-coast. It was necessary for him to reduce and
garrison all the coast towns as he advanced because the Persians
had control of the fleets of Tyre and Sidon and so had command of
the sea. {147} Had he left a hostile port in his rear the
Persians might have landed forces to raid his communications and
cut him off. At Issus (333 B.C.) he met and smashed a vast
conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of Xerxes that
had crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half before, it was an
incoherent accumulation of contingents and it was encumbered with
a multitude of court officials, the harem of Darius and many camp
followers. Sidon surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted
obstinately. Finally that great city was stormed and plundered
and destroyed. Gaza also was stormed, and towards the end of 332
B.C. the conqueror entered Egypt and took over its rule from the
Persians.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER'S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS]
At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great cities,
accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt. To these the
trade of the Phoenician cities was diverted. The Phoenicians of
the western Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history--and as
immediately the Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading
cities created by Alexander appear.
In 331 B.C. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon as
Thothmes and Rameses and Necho had done before him. But he
marched by way of Tyre. At Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh,
{148} which was already a forgotten city, he met Darius and fought
the decisive battle of the war. The Persian chariot charge
failed, a Macedonian cavalry charge broke up the great composite
host and the phalanx completed the victory. Darius led the
retreat. He made no further attempt to resist the invader but
fled northward into the country of the Medes. Alexander marched
on to Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Susa
and Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt down the
palace of Darius, the king of kings.
[Illustration: THE APOLLO BELVEDERE]
Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of central Asia,
going to the utmost bounds of the Persian empire. At first he
turned northward. Darius was pursued; and he was overtaken at
dawn dying in his chariot, having been murdered by his own people.
He was still living when the foremost Greeks reached him.
Alexander came up to find him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian
Sea, he went up into the mountains of western Turkestan, he came
down by Herat (which he founded) and Cabul and the Khyber Pass
into {149} India. He fought a great battle on the Indus with an
Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian troops met elephants
for the first time and defeated them. Finally he built himself
ships, sailed down to the mouth of the Indus, and marched back by
the coast of Beluchistan, reaching Susa again in 324 B.C. after an
absence of six years. He then prepared to consolidate and
organize this vast empire he had won. He sought to win over his
new subjects. He assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian
monarch, and this roused the jealousy of his Macedonian
commanders. He had much trouble with them. He arranged a number
of marriages between these Macedonian officers and Persian and
Babylonian women: the "Marriage of the East and West." He never
lived to effect the consolidation he had planned. A fever seized
him after a drinking bout in Babylon and he died in 323 B.C.
Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his
generals, Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian empire from
the Indus to Ephesus; another, Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and
Antigonus secured Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained
unstable, passing under the control of a succession of local
adventurers. Barbarian raids began from the north and grew in
scope and intensity. Until at last, as we shall tell, a new
power, the power of the Roman republic, came out of the west to
subjugate one fragment after another and weld them together into a
new and more enduring empire.
{150}
XXVII
THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA
Before the time of Alexander Greeks had already been spreading as
merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers, over most of
the Persian dominions. In the dynastic disputes that followed the
death of Xerxes, a band of ten thousand Greek mercenaries played a
part under the leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic
Greece from Babylon is described in his Retreat of the _Ten
Thousand_, one of the first war stories that was ever written by a
general in command. But the conquests of Alexander and the
division of his brief empire among his subordinate generals,
greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient world by the
Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces of
this Greek dissemination are to be found far away in central Asia
and in north-west India. Their influence upon the development of
Indian art was profound.
For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a centre of art
and culture; her schools went on indeed to 529 A.D., that is to
say for nearly a thousand years; but the leadership in the
intellectual activity of the world passed presently across the
Mediterranean to Alexandria, the new trading city that Alexander
had founded. Here the Macedonian general Ptolemy had become
Pharaoh, with a court that spoke Greek. He had become an intimate
of Alexander before he became king, and he was deeply saturated
with the ideas of Aristotle. He set himself, with great energy
and capacity, to organize knowledge and investigation. He also
wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns which, unhappily, is lost
to the world.
Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the
enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make
a permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in
Alexandria which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum
{151} of Alexandria. For two or three generations the scientific
work done at Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid,
Eratosthenes who measured the size of the earth and came within
fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius who wrote on conic
sections, Hipparchus who made the first star map and catalogue,
and Hero who devised the first steam engine are among the greater
stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers.
Archimedes came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a
frequent correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the
greatest of Greek anatomists, and is said to have practised
vivisection.
For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy
II there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alexandria
as the world was not to see again until the sixteenth century A.D.
But it did not continue. There may have been several causes of
this decline. Chief among them, the late Professor Mahaffy
suggested, was the fact that the Museum was a "royal" college and
all its professors and fellows were appointed and paid by Pharaoh.
This was all very well when Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, the pupil and
friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the Ptolemies went on
they became Egyptianized, they fell under the sway of Egyptian
priests and Egyptian religious developments, they ceased to follow
the work that was done, and their control stifled the spirit of
enquiry altogether. The Museum produced little good work after
its first century of activity.
Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize
the finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an
encyclopædic storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria.
It was not simply a storehouse, it was also a book-copying and
book-selling organization. A great army of copyists was set to
work perpetually multiplying copies of books.
Here then we have the definite first opening up of the
intellectual process in which we live to-day; here we have the
systematic gathering and distribution of knowledge. The
foundation of this Museum and Library marks one of the great
epochs in the history of mankind. It is the true beginning of
Modern History.
{152}
[Illustration: ARISTOTLE]
Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on
under serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap
that separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the
trader and the artisan. There were glass workers and metal
workers in abundance in those days, but they were not in mental
contact with the thinkers. The glass worker was making the most
beautifully coloured beads and phials and so forth, but he never
made a Florentine flask or a lens. Clear glass does not seem to
have interested him. The metal worker made weapons and jewellery
but he never made a chemical balance. The philosopher speculated
loftily about atoms and the nature of things, but he had no
practical experience of enamels and pigments and philters and so
forth. He was not interested in substances. So Alexandria in its
brief day of opportunity produced no microscopes and no
chemistry. And though Hero invented a steam engine it was never
set either to pump or drive a boat or do any useful thing. There
were few practical applications of science except in the realm of
medicine, and the progress of science was not stimulated and
sustained by the interest and excitement of practical
applications. There was nothing to keep the work going therefore
when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II {153}
was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum went on record in
obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of scientific
curiosity at the Renascence, reached out to the mass of mankind.
[Illustration: STATUETTE OF MAITREYA: THE BUDDHA TO COME]
Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book making. That
ancient world had no paper made in definite sizes from rag pulp.
Paper was a Chinese invention and it did not reach the western
world until the ninth century A.D. The only book materials were
parchment and strips of the papyrus reed joined edge to edge.
These strips were kept on rolls which were very unwieldy to wind
to and fro and read, and very inconvenient for reference. It was
these things that prevented the development of paged and printed
books. Printing itself was known in the world it would seem as
early as the Old Stone Age; there were seals in ancient Sumeria;
but without abundant paper there was little advantage in printing
books, an improvement that may further have been resisted by
trades unionism on the part of the copyists employed. Alexandria
produced abundant books but not cheap books, and it never spread
knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the level
of a wealthy and influential class.
So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached
beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of
philosophers collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like
the light in a dark lantern which is shut off from the world at
large. Within the blaze may be blindingly bright, but
nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of the world went on its old
ways unaware that the seed of scientific knowledge that was one
day to revolutionize it altogether had been sown. Presently a
darkness of bigotry fell even upon {154} Alexandria. Thereafter
for a thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had sown
lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few
centuries it had become that widespread growth of knowledge and
clear ideas that is now changing the whole of human life.
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF BUDDHA]
Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual activity
in the third century B.C. There were many other cities that
displayed a brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating
fragments of the brief empire of Alexander. There was, for
example, the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and
science flourished for two centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia
Minor, which also had a great library. But this brilliant
Hellenic world was now stricken by invasion from the north. New
Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were striking down along the tracks
that had once been followed by the ancestors of the Greeks and
Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided, shattered and destroyed.
And in the wake of the Gauls came a new conquering people out of
Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated all the western half
of the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They were an able but
unimaginative people, preferring law and profit to either science
or art. {155} New invaders were also coming down out of central
Asia to shatter and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off the
western world again from India. These were the Parthians, hosts
of mounted bowmen, who treated the Græco-Persian empire of
Persepolis and Susa in the third century B.C. in much the same
fashion that the Medes and Persians had treated it in the seventh
and sixth. And there were now other nomadic peoples also coming
out of the northeast, peoples who were not fair and Nordic and
Aryan-speaking but yellow-skinned and black-haired and with a
Mongolian speech. But of these latter people we shall tell more
in a subsequent chapter.
{156}
XXVIII
THE LIFE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA
But now we must go back three centuries in our story to tell of a
great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the religious
thought and feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama Buddha, who
taught his disciples at Benares in India about the same time that
Isaiah was prophesying among the Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus
was carrying on his speculative enquiries into the nature of
things at Ephesus. All these men were in the world at the same
time, in the sixth century B.C.--unaware of one another.
This sixth century B.C. was indeed one of the most remarkable in
all history. Everywhere--for as we shall tell it was also the
case in China--men's minds were displaying a new boldness.
Everywhere they were waking up out of the traditions of kingships
and priests and blood sacrifices and asking the most penetrating
questions. It is as if the race had reached a stage of
adolescence--after a childhood of twenty thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen
perhaps about 2000 B.C., an Aryan-speaking people came down from
the north-west into India either in one invasion or in a series of
invasions; and was able to spread its language and traditions over
most of north India. Its peculiar variety of Aryan speech was the
Sanskrit. They found a brunette people with a more elaborate
civilization and less vigour of will, in possession of the country
of the Indus and Ganges. But they do not seem to have mingled
with their predecessors as freely as did the Greeks and Persians.
They remained aloof. When the past of India becomes dimly visible
to the historian, Indian society is already stratified into
several layers, with a variable number of
sub-divisions, which do not eat together nor intermarry nor
associate freely. And throughout history this {157}
stratification into castes continues. This makes the Indian
population something different from the simple, freely
inter-breeding European or Mongolian communities. It is really a
community of communities.
Siddhattha Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which
ruled a small district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married at
nineteen to a beautiful cousin. He hunted and played and went
about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and irrigated
rice-fields. And it was amidst this life that a great discontent
fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks
employment. He felt that the existence he was leading was not the
reality of life, but a holiday--a holiday that had gone on too
long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
un-satisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of
Gautama. While he was in this mood he met one of those wandering
ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. These men
lived under severe rules, spending much time in meditation and in
religious discussion. They were supposed to be seeking some
deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire to do likewise
took possession of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news
was brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his
first-born son. "This is another tie to break," said Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow
clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to celebrate
the birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a
great agony of spirit, "like a man who is told that his house is
on fire." He resolved to leave his happy aimless life forthwith.
He went softly to the threshold of his wife's chamber, and saw her
by the light of a little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by
flowers, with his infant son in her arms. He felt a great craving
to take up the child in one first and last embrace before he
departed, but the fear of waking his wife prevented him, and at
last he turned away and went out into the bright Indian moonshine
and mounted his horse and rode off into the world.
{158}
[Illustration: TIBETAN BUDDHA]
Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside
{159} the lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river.
There he cut off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his
ornaments and sent them and his horse and sword back to his house.
Going on he presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with
him, and so having divested himself of all worldly entanglements
he was free to pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way
southward to a resort of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur of
the Vindhya Mountains. There lived a number of wise men in a
warren of caves, going into the town for their simple supplies and
imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such as cared to
come to them. Gautama became versed in all the metaphysics of his
age. But his acute intelligence was dissatisfied with the
solutions offered him.
[Illustration: A BURMESE BUDDHA]
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and
knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, by fasting,
sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put
to the test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to
the jungle and there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible
penances. His fame spread, "like the sound of a great {160} bell
hung in the canopy of the skies." But it brought him no sense of
truth achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to
think in spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he fell
unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness of these
semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him.
[Illustration: THE DHAMÊKH TOWER]
He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food and
refusing to continue his mortifications. He had realized that
whatever truth a man may reach is reached best by a nourished
brain in a healthy body. Such a conception was absolutely foreign
to the ideas of the land and age. His disciples deserted him, and
went off in a melancholy state to Benares. Gautama wandered
alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it
makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of
the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt
illumination, it realizes its victory. So it happened to Gautama.
He had seated himself under a great tree by the side of a river to
eat, when this sense of clear vision came to him. It seemed to
him that he saw life plain. He is said to have sat all day and
all night in profound thought, and then he rose up to impart his
vision to the world.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won back his
lost disciples to his new teaching. In the King's Deer Park at
Benares they built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to
which came many who were seeking after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a
fortunate {161} young man, "Why am I not completely happy?" It
was an introspective question. It was a question very different
in quality from the frank and self-forgetful _externalized_
curiosity with which Thales and Heraclitus were attacking the
problems of the universe, or the equally self-forgetful burthen of
moral obligation that the culminating prophets were imposing upon
the Hebrew mind. The Indian teacher did not forget self, he
concentrated upon self and sought to destroy it. All suffering,
he taught, was due to the greedy desires of the individual. Until
man has conquered his personal cravings his life is trouble and
his end sorrow. There were three principal forms that the craving
for life took and they were all evil. The first was the desire of
the appetites, greed and all forms of sensuousness, the second was
the desire for a personal and egotistic immortality, the third was
the craving for personal success, worldliness, avarice and the
like. All these forms of desire had to be overcome to escape from
the distresses and chagrins of life. When they were overcome,
when self had vanished altogether, then serenity of soul, Nirvana,
the highest good was attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and metaphysical
teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek
injunction to see and know fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew
command to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a
teaching much beyond the understanding of even Gautama's immediate
disciples, and it is no wonder that so soon as his personal
influence was withdrawn it became corrupted and coarsened. There
was a widespread belief in India at that time that at long
intervals Wisdom came to earth and was incarnate in some chosen
person who was known as the Buddha. Gautama's disciples declared
that he was a Buddha, the latest of the Buddhas, though there is
no evidence that he himself ever accepted the title. Before he
was well dead, a cycle of fantastic legends began to be woven
about him. The human heart has always preferred a wonder story to
a moral effort, and Gautama Buddha became very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If Nirvana
was too high and subtle for most men's imaginations, if the
myth-making impulse in the race was too strong for the simple
facts of Gautama's life, they could at least grasp something of
the intention {162} of what Gautama called the Eight-fold way, the
Aryan or Noble Path in life. In this there was an insistence upon
mental uprightness, upon right aims and speech, right conduct and
honest livelihood. There was a quickening of the conscience and
an appeal to generous and self-forgetful ends.
{163}
XXIX
KING ASOKA
For some generations after the death of Gautama, these high and
noble Buddhist teachings, this first plain teaching that the
highest good for man is the subjugation of self, made
comparatively little headway in the world. Then they conquered
the imagination of one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever
seen.
We have already mentioned how Alexander the Great came down into
India and fought with Porus upon the Indus. It is related by the
Greek historians that a certain Chandragupta Maurya came into
Alexander's camp and tried to persuade him to go on to the Ganges
and conquer all India. Alexander could not do this because of the
refusal of his Macedonians to go further into what was for them an
unknown world, and later on (303 B.C.) Chandragupta was able to
secure the help or various hill tribes and realize his dream
without Greek help. He built up an empire in North India and was
presently (303 B.C.) able to attack Seleucus I in the Punjab and
drive the last vestige of Greek power out of India. His son
extended this new empire. His grandson, Asoka, the monarch of
whom we now have to tell, found himself in 264 B.C. ruling from
Afghanistan to Madras.
Asoka was at first disposed to follow the example of his father
and grandfather and complete the conquest of the Indian peninsula.
He invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country on the east coast of
Madras, he was successful in his military operations and--alone
among conquerors--he was so disgusted by the cruelty and horror of
war that he renounced it. He would have no more of it. He
adopted the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and declared that
henceforth his conquests should be the conquests of religion.
{164}
[Illustration: A LOHAN OR BUDDHIST APOSTLE (Tang Dynasty)]
His reign for eight-and-twenty years was one of the brightest
interludes in the troubled history of mankind. He organized a
great digging of wells in India and the planting of trees for
shade. He founded hospitals and public gardens and gardens for
the growing of medicinal herbs. He created a ministry for the
care of the aborigines and subject races of India. He made
provision for the education of women. He made vast benefactions
to the Buddhist teaching orders, and tried to stimulate them to a
better and more energetic criticism of their own accumulated
literature. For corruptions and superstitious accretions had
accumulated very {165} speedily upon the pure and simple teaching
of the great Indian master. Missionaries went from Asoka to
Kashmir, to Persia, to Ceylon and Alexandria.
[Illustration: TRANSOME SHOWING THE COURT OF ASOKA]
[Illustration: ASOKA PANEL FROM BHARHUT]
Such was Asoka, greatest of kings. He was far in advance of his
age. He left no prince and no organization of men to carry on his
work, and within a century of his death the great days of his
reign had become a glorious memory in a shattered and decaying
India. The priestly caste of the Brahmins, the highest and most
privileged caste in the Indian social body, has always been
opposed to the frank and open teaching of Buddha. Gradually they
undermined the Buddhist influence in the land. The old monstrous
gods, the innumerable cults of Hinduism, resumed their sway.
Caste became {166} more rigorous and complicated. For long
centuries Buddhism and Brahminism flourished side by side, and
then slowly Buddhism decayed and Brahminism in a multitude of
forms replaced it. But beyond the confines of India and the
realms of caste Buddhism spread--until it had won China and Siam
and Burma and Japan, countries in which it is predominant to this
day.
[Illustration: THE PILLAR OF LIONS]
{167}
XXX
CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE
We have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and Lao
Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which began the
adolescence of mankind, the sixth century B.C. In this history
thus far we have told very little of the early story of China. At
present that early history is still very obscure, and we look to
Chinese explorers and archæolologists in the new China that is now
arising to work out their past as thoroughly as the European past
has been worked out during the last century. Very long ago the
first primitive Chinese civilizations arose in the great river
valleys out of the primordial heliolithic culture. They had, like
Egypt and Sumeria, the general characteristics of that culture,
and they centred upon temples in which priests and priest kings
offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those cities
must have been very like the Egyptian and Sumerian life of six or
seven thousand years ago and very like the Maya life of Central
America a thousand years ago.
If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to animal
sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of picture
writing was growing up long before a thousand years B.C.
And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western Asia
were in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of
the north, so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great
cloud of nomadic peoples on their northern borders. There was a
number of tribes akin in language and ways of living, who are
spoken of in history in succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the
Turks and Tartars. They changed and divided and combined and
re-combined, just as the Nordic peoples in north Europe and central
Asia changed and varied in name rather than in nature. These
Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than the Nordic peoples, and
it may {168} be that in the region of the Altai Mountains they
made an independent discovery of iron somewhen after 1000 B.C.
And just as in the western case so ever and again these eastern
nomads would achieve a sort of political unity, and become the
conquerors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and
civilized region.
It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was
not Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of
Europe and western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite
possible that the earliest civilization of China was a brunette
civilization and of a piece with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian
and Dravidian civilizations, and that when the first recorded
history of China began there had already been conquests and
intermixture. At any rate we find that by 1750 B.C. China was
already a vast system of little kingdoms and city states, all
acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying more or less
regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great priest
emperor, the "Son of Heaven." The "Shang" dynasty came to an end
in 1125 B.C. A "Chow" dynasty succeeded "Shang," and maintained
China in a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka in India and of
the Ptolemies in Egypt. Gradually China went to pieces during
that long "Chow" period. Hunnish peoples came down and set up
principalities; local rulers discontinued their tribute and became
independent. There was in the sixth century B.C., says one
Chinese authority, five or six thousand practically independent
states in China. It was what the Chinese call in their records an
"Age of Confusion."
But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much intellectual
activity and with the existence of many local centres of art and
civilized living. When we know more of Chinese history we shall
find that China also had her Miletus and her Athens, her Pergamum
and her Macedonia. At present we must be vague and brief about
this period of Chinese division simply because our knowledge is
not sufficient for us to frame a coherent and consecutive story.
====================================================================
{169}
[Illustration: CONFUCIUS]
====================================================================
And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and in
shattered and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered China there
were philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these cases
{170} insecurity and uncertainty seemed to have quickened the
better sort of mind. Confucius was a man of aristocratic origin
and some official importance in a small state called Lu. Here in
a very parallel mood to the Greek impulse he set up a sort of
Academy for discovering and teaching Wisdom. The lawlessness and
disorder of China distressed him profoundly. He conceived an
ideal of a better government and a better life, and travelled from
state to state seeking a prince who would carry out his
legislative and educational ideas. He never found his prince; he
found a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence of
the teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is
interesting to note that a century and a half later the Greek
philosopher Plato also sought a prince, and was for a time adviser
to the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily.
Confucius died a disappointed man. "No intelligent ruler arises
to take me as his master," he said, "and my time has come to die."
But his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his
declining and hopeless years, and it became a great formative
influence with the Chinese people. It became one of what the
Chinese call the Three Teachings, the other two being those of
Buddha and of Lao Tse.
The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble or
aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as much
as Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness and
the Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteousness.
He was the most public-minded of all great teachers. He was
supremely concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world,
and he wanted to make men noble in order to bring about a noble
world. He sought to regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent;
to provide sound rules for every occasion in life. A polite,
public-spirited gentleman, rather sternly self-disciplined, was
the ideal he found already developing in the northern Chinese
world and one to which he gave a permanent form.
====================================================================
{171}
[Illustration: THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA]
====================================================================
The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of the
imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more mystical and
vague and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have
preached a stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of
{172} the world and a return to an imaginary simple life of the
past. He left writings very contracted in style and very obscure.
He wrote in riddles. After his death his teachings, like the
teachings of Gautama Buddha, were corrupted and overlaid by
legends and had the most complex and extraordinary observances and
superstitious ideas grafted upon them. In China just as in India
primordial ideas of magic and monstrous legends out of the
childish past of our race struggled against the new thinking in
the world and succeeded in plastering it over with grotesque,
irrational and antiquated observances. Both Buddhism and Taoism
(which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse) as one finds them in
China now, are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering of a
type as ancient in form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial
religions of ancient Sumeria and Egypt. But the teaching {173} of
Confucius was not so overlaid because it was limited and plain and
straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions.
[Illustration: EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL]
North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became Confucian in
thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-Kiang China, became
Taoist. Since those days a conflict has always been traceable in
Chinese affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the north
and the spirit of the south, between (in latter times) Pekin and
Nankin, between the official-minded, upright and conservative
north, and the sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.
The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached their worst
stage in the sixth century B.C. The Chow dynasty was so enfeebled
and so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and retired
into private life.
Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in
those days, Ts'i and Ts'in, both northern powers, and Ch'u, which
was an aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley. At last
Ts'i and Ts'in formed an alliance, subdued Ch'u and imposed a
general treaty of disarmament and peace in China. The power of
Ts'in became predominant. Finally about the time of Asoka in
India the Ts'in monarch seized upon the sacrificial vessels of the
Chow emperor and took over his sacrificial duties. His son,
Shi-Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.C., emperor in 220 B.C.), is called in
the Chinese Chronicles "the First Universal Emperor."
More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for
thirty-six years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks
the beginning of a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese
people. He fought vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from
the northern deserts, and he began that immense work, the Great
Wall of China, to set a limit to their incursions.
{174}
XXXI
ROME COMES INTO HISTORY
The reader will note a general similarity in the history of all
these civilizations in spite of the effectual separation caused by
the great barriers of the Indian north-west frontier and of the
mountain masses of Central Asia and further India. First for
thousands of years the heliolithic culture spread over all the
warm and fertile river valleys of the old world and developed a
temple system and priest rulers about its sacrificial traditions.
Apparently its first makers were always those brunette peoples we
have spoken of as the central race of mankind. Then the nomads
came in from the regions of seasonal grass and seasonal migrations
and superposed their own characteristics and often their own
language on the primitive civilization. They subjugated and
stimulated it, and were stimulated to fresh developments and made
it here one thing and here another. In Mesopotamia it was the
Elamite and then the Semite, and at last the Nordic Medes and
Persians and the Greeks who supplied the ferment; over the region
of the Ægean peoples it was the Greeks; in India it was the
Aryan-speakers; in Egypt there was a thinner infusion of conquerors
into a more intensely saturated priestly civilization; in China,
the Hun conquered and was absorbed and was followed by fresh Huns.
China was Mongolized just as Greece and North India were Aryanized
and Mesopotamia Semitized and Aryanized. Everywhere the nomads
destroyed much, but everywhere they brought in a new spirit of
free enquiry and moral innovation. They questioned the beliefs of
immemorial ages. They let daylight into the temples. They set up
kings who were neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among
their captains and companions.
====================================================================
{175}
[Illustration: THE DYING GAUL]
====================================================================
In the centuries following the sixth century B.C. we find
everywhere a great breaking down of ancient traditions and a new
spirit {176} of moral and intellectual enquiry awake, a spirit
never more to be altogether stilled in the great progressive
movement of mankind. We find reading and writing becoming common
and accessible accomplishments among the ruling and prosperous
minority; they were no longer the jealously guarded secret of the
priests. Travel is increasing and transport growing easier by
reason of horses and roads. A new and easy device to facilitate
trade has been found in coined money.
Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the extreme
east of the old world to the western half of the Mediterranean.
Here we have to note the appearance of a city which was destined
to play at last a very great part indeed in human affairs, Rome.
Hitherto we have told very little about Italy in our story. It
was before 1000 B.C. a land of mountain and forest and thinly
populated. Aryan-speaking tribes had pressed down this peninsula
and formed little towns and cities, and the southern extremity was
studded with Greek settlements. The noble ruins of Pæstum
preserve for us to this day something of the dignity and splendour
of these early Greek establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably
akin to the Ægean peoples, the Etruscans, had established
themselves in the central part of the peninsula. They had
reversed the usual process by subjugating various Aryan tribes.
Rome, when it comes into the light of history, is a little trading
city at a ford on the Tiber, with a Latin-speaking population
ruled over by Etruscan kings. The old chronologies gave 753 B.C.
as the date of the founding of Rome, half a century later than the
founding of the great Phoenician city of Carthage and twenty-three
years after the first Olympiad. Etruscan tombs of a much earlier
date than 753 B.C. have, however, been excavated in the Roman
Forum.
In that red-letter century, the sixth century B.C., the Etruscan
kings were expelled (510 B.C.) and Rome became an aristocratic
republic with a lordly class of "patrician" families dominating a
commonalty of "plebeians." Except that it spoke Latin it was not
unlike many aristocratic Greek republics.
For some centuries the internal history of Rome was the story of a
long and obstinate struggle for freedom and a share in the
government on the part of the plebeians. It would not be
difficult to find {177} Greek parallels to this conflict, which
the Greeks would have called a conflict of aristocracy with
democracy. In the end the plebeians broke down most of the
exclusive barriers of the old families and established a working
equality with them. They destroyed the old exclusiveness, and
made it possible and acceptable for Rome to extend her citizenship
by the inclusion of more and more "outsiders." For while she
still struggled at home, she was extending her power abroad.
[Illustration: REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CISTERNS AT CARTHAGE]
The extension of Roman power began in the fifth century B.C.
Until that time they had waged war, and generally unsuccessful
war, with the Etruscans. There was an Etruscan fort, Veii, only a
few miles from Rome which the Romans had never been able to
capture. In 474 B.C., however, a great misfortune came to the
Etruscans. Their fleet was destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse in
Sicily. {178} At the same time a wave of Nordic invaders came
down upon them from the north, the Gauls. Caught between Roman
and Gaul, the Etruscans fell--and disappear from history. Veii
was captured by the Romans, The Gauls came through to Rome and
sacked the city (390 B.C.) but could not capture the Capitol. An
attempted night surprise was betrayed by the cackling of some
geese, and finally the invaders were bought off and retired to the
north of Italy again.
The Gaulish raid seems to have invigorated rather than weakened
Rome. The Romans conquered and assimilated the Etruscans, and
extended their power over all central Italy from the Arno to
Naples. To this they had reached within a few years of 300 B.C.
Their conquests in Italy were going on simultaneously with the
growth of Philip's power in Macedonia and Greece, and the
tremendous raid of Alexander to Egypt and the Indus. The Romans
had become notable people in the civilized world to the east of
them by the break-up of Alexander's empire.
To the north of the Roman power were the Gauls; to the south of
them were the Greek settlements of Magna Græcia, that is to say of
Sicily and of the toe and heel of Italy. The Gauls were a hardy,
warlike people and the Romans held that boundary by a line of
forts and fortified settlements. The Greek cities in the south
headed by Tarentum (now Taranto) and by Syracuse in Sicily, did
not so much threaten as fear the Romans. They looked about for
some help against these new conquerors.
We have already told how the empire of Alexander fell to pieces
and was divided among his generals and companions. Among these
adventurers was a kinsman of Alexander's named Pyrrhus, who
established himself in Epirus, which is across the Adriatic Sea
over against the heel of Italy. It was his ambition to play the
part of Philip of Macedonia to Magna Græcia, and to become
protector and master-general of Tarentum, Syracuse and the rest of
that part of the world. He had what was then it very efficient
modern army; he had an infantry phalanx, cavalry from
Thessaly--which was now quite as good as the original Macedonian
cavalry--and twenty fighting elephants; he invaded Italy and routed
the Romans in two considerable battles, Heraclea (280 B.C.) and
Ausculum (279 B.C.), and {179} having driven them north, he turned
his attention to the subjugation of Sicily.
But this brought against him a more formidable enemy than were the
Romans at that time, the Phoenician trading city of Carthage,
which was probably then the greatest city in the world. Sicily
was too near Carthage for a new Alexander to be welcome there, and
Carthage was mindful of the fate that had befallen her mother city
Tyre half a century before. So she sent a fleet to encourage or
compel Rome to continue the struggle, and she cut the overseas
communications of Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus found himself freshly assailed
by the Romans, and suffered a disastrous repulse in an attack he
had made upon their camp at Beneventum between Naples and Rome.
And suddenly came news that recalled him to Epirus. The Gauls
were raiding south. But this time they were not raiding down into
Italy; the Roman frontier, fortified and guarded, had become too
formidable for them. They were raiding down through Illyria
(which is now Serbia and Albania) to Macedonia and Epirus.
Repulsed by the Romans, endangered at sea by the Carthaginians,
and threatened at home by the Gauls, Pyrrhus abandoned his dream
of conquest and went home (275 B.C.), and the power of Rome was
extended to the Straits of Messina.
On the Sicilian side of the Straits was the Greek city of Messina,
and this presently fell into the hands of a gang of pirates. The
Carthaginians, who were already practically overlords of Sicily
and allies of Syracuse, suppressed these pirates (270 B.C.) and
put in a Carthaginian garrison there. The pirates appealed to
Rome and Rome listened to their complaint. And so across the
Straits of Messina the great trading power of Carthage and this
new conquering people, the Romans, found themselves in antagonism,
face to face.
{180}
XXXII
ROME AND CARTHAGE
It was in 264 B.C. that the great struggle between Rome and
Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka was beginning
his reign in Behar and Shi-Hwang-ti was a little child, the Museum
in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the
barbaric Gauls were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from
Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated
by insurmountable distances, and probably the rest of mankind
heard only vague and remote rumours of the mortal fight that went
on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa and the
western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic
power and Rome, this newcomer among
Aryan-speaking peoples.
That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the
world. Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and
Semite was to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and
Jew. Our history now is coming to events whose consequences and
distorted traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring
vitality in, and exercise a complicating and confusing influence
upon, the conflicts and controversies of
to-day.
The First Punic War began in 264 B.C. about the pirates of
Messina. It developed into a struggle for the possession of all
Sicily except the dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The
advantage of the sea was at first with the Carthaginians. They
had great fighting ships of what was hitherto an unheard-of size,
quinqueremes, galleys with five banks of oars and a huge ram. At
the battle of Salamis, two centuries before, the leading
battleships had only been triremes with three banks. But the
Romans, with extraordinary energy and in spite of the fact that
they had little naval experience, set themselves to outbuild the
Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created chiefly with
Greek seamen, and they invented {181} grappling and boarding to
make up for the superior seamanship of the enemy. When the
Carthaginian came up to ram or shear the oars of the Roman, huge
grappling irons seized him and the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard
him. At Mylæ (260 B.C.) and at Ecnomus (256 B.C.) the
Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They repulsed a Roman
landing near Carthage but were badly beaten at Palermo, losing one
hundred and four elephants there--to grace such a triumphal
procession through the Forum as Rome had never seen before. But
after that came two Roman defeats and then a Roman recovery. The
last naval forces of Carthage were defeated {182} by it last Roman
effort at the battle of the Ægatian Isles (241 B.C.) and Carthage
sued for peace. All Sicily except the dominions of Hiero, king of
Syracuse, was ceded to the Romans.
[Illustration: HANNIBAL]
For twenty-two years Rome and Carthage kept the peace. Both had
trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came south again,
threatened Rome--which in a state of panic offered human
_sacrifices to the Gods!_--and were routed at Telamon. Rome
pushed forward to the Alps, and even extended her dominions down
the Adriatic coast to Illyria. Carthage suffered from domestic
insurrections and from revolts in Corsica and Sardinia, and
displayed far less recuperative power. Finally, an act of
intolerable aggression, Rome seized and annexed the two revolting
islands.
Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river
Ebro. To that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any crossing
of the Ebro by the Carthaginians was to be considered an act of
war against the Romans. At last in 218 B.C. the Carthaginians,
provoked by new Roman aggressions, did cross this river under a
young general named Hannibal, one of the most brilliant commanders
in the whole of history. He marched his army from Spain over the
Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls against the Romans, and carried
on the Second Punic War in Italy itself for fifteen years. He
inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at Lake Trasimere and
at Cannæ, and throughout all his Italian campaigns no Roman army
stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army had
landed at Marseilles and cut his communications with Spain; he had
no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally the
Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the Numidians at home,
were forced back upon the defence of their own city in Africa, a
Roman army crossed into Africa, and Hannibal experienced his first
defeat under its walls at the battle of Zama (202 B.C.) at the
hands of Scipio Africanus the Elder. The battle of Zama ended
this Second Punic War. Carthage capitulated; she surrendered
Spain and her war fleet; she paid an enormous indemnity and agreed
to give up Hannibal to the vengeance of the Romans. But Hannibal
escaped and fled to Asia where later, being in danger of falling
into the hands of his relentless enemies, he took poison and died.
{183}
For fifty-six years Rome and the shorn city of Carthage were at
peace. And meanwhile Rome spread her empire over confused and
divided Greece, invaded Asia Minor, and defeated Antiochus III,
the Seleucid monarch, at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt, still
under the Ptolemies, and Pergamum and most of the small states of
Asia Minor into "Allies," or, as we should call them now,
"protected states."
Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly
regaining something of her former prosperity. Her recovery
revived the hate and suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked
upon the most shallow and artificial of quarrels (149 B.C.), she
made an obstinate and bitter resistance, stood a long siege and
was stormed (146 B.C.). The street fighting, or massacre, lasted
six days; it was extraordinarily bloody, and when the citadel
capitulated only about fifty thousand of the Carthaginian
population remained alive out of a quarter of a million. They
were sold into slavery, and the city was burnt and elaborately
destroyed. The blackened ruins were ploughed and sown as a sort
of ceremonial effacement.
[Map: The Extent of the Roman Power & its Alliances about 150
B.C.]
So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and
cities that had flourished in the world five centuries before only
one little country remained free under native rulers. This was
Judea, which had liberated itself from the Seleucids and was under
the rule {184} of the native Maccabean princes. By this time it
had its Bible almost complete, and was developing the distinctive
traditions of the Jewish world as we know it now. It was natural
that the Carthaginians, Phoenicians and kindred peoples dispersed
about the world should find a common link in their practically
identical language and in this literature of hope and courage. To
a large extent they were still the traders and bankers of the
world. The Semitic world had been submerged rather than replaced.
Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than the centre
of Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65 B.C.; and after various
vicissitudes of quasi-independence and revolt was besieged by them
in 70 A.D. and captured after a stubborn struggle. The Temple was
destroyed. A later rebellion in 132 A.D. completed its
destruction, and the Jerusalem we know to-day was rebuilt later
under Roman auspices. A temple to the Roman god, Jupiter
Capitolinus, stood in the place of the Temple, and Jews were
forbidden to inhabit the city.
{185}
XXXIII
THE GROWTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the western world
in the second and first centuries B.C. was in several respects a
different thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto
prevailed in the civilized world. It was not at first a monarchy,
and it was not the creation of any one great conqueror. It was
not indeed the first of republican empires; Athens had dominated a
group of Allies and dependents in the time of Pericles, and
Carthage when she entered upon her fatal struggle with Rome was
mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and
most of Spain and Sicily. But it was the first republican empire
that escaped extinction and went on to fresh developments.
The centre of this new system lay far to the west of the more
ancient centres of empire, which had hitherto been the river
valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This westward position enabled
Rome to bring in to civilization quite fresh regions and peoples.
The Roman power extended to Morocco and Spain, and was presently
able to thrust north-westward over what is now France and Belgium
to Britain and north-eastward into Hungary and South Russia. But
on the other hand it was never able to maintain itself in Central
Asia or Persia because they were too far from its administrative
centres. It included therefore great masses of fresh Nordic
Aryan-speaking peoples, it presently incorporated nearly all the
Greek people in the world, and its population was less strongly
Hamitic and Semitic than that of any preceding empire.
For some centuries this Roman Empire did not fall into the grooves
of precedent that had so speedily swallowed up Persian and Greek,
and all that time it developed. The rulers of the Medes and
Persians became entirely Babylonized in a generation or so; they
{186} took over the tiara of the king of kings and the temples and
priesthoods of his gods; Alexander and his successors followed in
the same easy path of assimilation; the Seleucid monarchs had much
the same court and administrative methods as Nebuchadnezzar; the
Ptolemies became Pharaohs and altogether Egyptian. They were
assimilated just as before them the Semitic conquerors of the
Sumerians had been assimilated. But the Romans ruled in their own
city, and for some centuries kept to the laws of their own nature.
The only people who exercised any great mental influence upon them
before the second or third century A.D. were the kindred and
similar Greeks. So that the Roman Empire was essentially a first
attempt to rule a great dominion upon mainly Aryan lines. It was
so far a new pattern in history, it was an expanded Aryan
republic. The old pattern of a personal conqueror ruling over a
capital city that had grown up round the temple of a harvest god
did not apply to it. The Romans had gods and temples, but like
the gods of the Greeks their gods were quasi-human immortals,
divine patricians. The Romans also had blood sacrifices and even
made human ones in times of stress, things they may have learnt to
do from their dusky Etruscan teachers; but until Rome was long
past its zenith neither priest nor temple played a large part in
Roman history.
The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel growth; the
Roman people found themselves engaged almost unawares in a vast
administrative experiment. It cannot be called a successful
experiment. In the end their empire collapsed altogether. And it
changed enormously in form and method from century to century. It
changed more in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or
Egypt changed in a thousand. It was always changing. It never
attained to any fixity.
In a sense the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment
remains unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still
working out the riddles of world-wide statescraft first confronted
by the Roman people.
It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very
great changes not only in political but in social and moral
matters that went on throughout the period of Roman dominion.
There is much too strong a tendency in people's minds to think of
the Roman {187} rule as something finished and stable, firm,
rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay's _Lays of Ancient Rome_,
S.P.Q.R. the elder Cato, the Scipios, Julius Cæsar, Diocletian,
Constantine the Great, triumphs, orations, gladiatorial combats
and Christian martyrs are all mixed up together in a picture of
something high and cruel and dignified. The items of that picture
have to be disentangled. They are collected at different points
from a process of change profounder than that which separates the
London of William the Conqueror from the London of to-day.
We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome into four
stages. The first stage began after the sack of Rome by the Goths
in 390 B.C. and went on until the end of the First Punic War (240
B.C.). We may call this stage the stage of the Assimilative
Republic. It was perhaps the finest, most characteristic stage in
Roman history. The age-long dissensions of patrician and plebeian
were drawing to it close, the Etruscan threat had come to an end,
no one was very rich yet nor very poor, and most men were
public-spirited. It was a republic like the republic of the
South African Boers before 1900 or like the northern states of the
American union between 1800 and 1850; a free-farmers republic. At
the outset of this stage Rome was a little state scarcely twenty
miles square. She fought the sturdy but kindred states about her,
and sought not their destruction but coalescence. Her centuries
of civil dissension had trained her people in compromise and
concessions. Some of the defeated cities became altogether Roman
with a voting share in the government, some became self-governing
with the right to trade and marry in Rome; garrisons full of
citizens were set up at strategic points and colonies of varied
privileges founded among the freshly conquered people. Great
roads were made. The rapid Latinization of all Italy was the
inevitable consequence of such a policy. In 89 B.C. all the free
inhabitants of Italy became citizens of the city of Rome.
Formally the whole Roman Empire became at last an extended city.
In 212 A.D. every free man in the entire extent of the empire was
given citizenship; the right, if he could get there, to vote in
the town meeting in Rome.
This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and to whole
countries was the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It {188}
reversed the old process of conquest and assimilation altogether.
By the Roman method the conquerors assimilated the conquered.
[Illustration: THE FORUM AT ROME AS IT IS TO-DAY]
But after the First Punic War and the annexation of Sicily, though
the old process of assimilation still went on, another process
arose by its side. Sicily for instance was treated as a conquered
prey. It was declared an "estate" of the Roman people. Its rich
soil and industrious population was exploited to make Rome rich.
The patricians and the more influential among the plebeians
secured the major share of that wealth. And the war also brought
in a large supply of slaves. Before the First Punic War the
population of the republic had been largely a population of
citizen farmers. Military service was their privilege and
liability. While they were on active service their farms fell
into debt and a new large-scale slave agriculture grew up; when
they returned they found their produce in competition with
slave-grown produce from Sicily and from the new estates at home.
Times had changed. The republic had {189} altered its character.
Not only was Sicily in the hands of Rome, the common man was in
the hands of the rich creditor and the rich competitor. Rome had
entered upon its second stage, the Republic of Adventurous Rich
Men.
[Illustration: RELICS OF ROMAN RULE]
For two hundred years the Roman soldier farmers had struggled for
freedom and a share in the government of their state; for a
hundred years they had enjoyed their privileges. The First Punic
War wasted them and robbed them of all they had won.
The value of their electoral privileges had also evaporated. The
governing bodies of the Roman republic were two in number. The
first and more important was the Senate. This was a body
originally of patricians and then of prominent men of all sorts,
who were summoned to it first by certain powerful officials, the
consuls and censors. Like the British House of Lords it became a
gathering of great landowners, prominent politicians, big business
men and the {190} like. It was much more like the British House
of Lords than it was like the American Senate. For three
centuries, from the Punic Wars onward, it was the centre of Roman
political thought and purpose. The second body was the Popular
Assembly. This was supposed to be an assembly of _all_ the
citizens of Rome. When Rome was a little state twenty miles
square this was a possible gathering. When the citizenship of
Rome had spread beyond the confines in Italy, it was an altogether
impossible one. Its meetings, proclaimed by
horn-blowing from the Capitol and the city walls, became more and
more a gathering of political hacks and city riff-raff. In the
fourth century B.C. the Popular Assembly was a considerable check
upon the Senate, a competent representation of the claims and
rights of the common man. By the end of the Punic Wars it was an
impotent relic of a vanquished popular control. No effectual
legal check remained upon the big men.
[Illustration: THE GREAT ROMAN ARCH AT CTESIPHON NEAR BAGDAD]
Nothing of the nature of representative government was ever
introduced into the Roman republic. No one thought of electing
delegates to represent the will of the citizens. This is a very
important point for the student to grasp. The Popular Assembly
{191} never became the equivalent of the American House of
Representatives or the British House of Commons. In theory it was
all the citizens; in practice it ceased to be anything at all
worth consideration.
The common citizen of the Roman Empire was therefore in a very
poor case after the Second Punic War; he was impoverished, he had
often lost his farm, he was ousted from profitable production by
slaves, and he had no political power left to him to remedy these
things. The only methods of popular expression left to a people
without any form of political expression are the strike and the
revolt. The story of the second and first centuries B.C., so far
as internal politics go, is a story of futile revolutionary
upheaval. The scale of this history will not permit us to tell of
the intricate struggles of that time, of the attempts to break up
estates and restore the land to the free farmer, of proposals to
abolish debts in whole or in part. There was revolt and civil
war. In 73 B.C., the distresses of Italy were enhanced by a great
insurrection, of the slaves under Spartacus. The slaves of Italy
revolted with some effect, for among them were the trained
fighters of the gladiatorial shows. For two years Spartacus held
out in the crater of Vesuvius, which seemed at that time to be an
extinct volcano. This insurrection was defeated at last and
suppressed with frantic cruelty. Six thousand captured
Spartacists were crucified along the Appian Way, the great highway
that runs southward out of Rome (71 B.C.).
The common man never made head against the forces that were
subjugating and degrading him. But the big rich men who were
overcoming him were even in his defeat preparing a new power in
the Roman world over themselves and him, the power of the army.
Before the Second Punic War the army of Rome was a levy of free
farmers, who, according to their quality, rode or marched afoot to
battle. This was a very good force for wars close at hand, but
not the sort of army that will go abroad and bear long campaigns
with patience. And moreover as the slaves multiplied and the
estates grew, the supply of free-spirited fighting farmers
declined. It was a popular leader named Marius who introduced a
new factor. North Africa after the overthrow of the Carthaginian
civilization had become a semi-barbaric kingdom, the kingdom of
Numidia. {192} The Roman power fell into conflict with Jugurtha,
king of this state, and experienced enormous difficulties in
subduing him. Marius was made consul, in a phase of public
indignation, to end this discreditable war. This he did by
raising _paid troops_ and drilling them hard. Jugurtha was
brought in chains to Rome (106 B.C.) and Marius, when his time of
office had expired, held on to his consulship illegally with his
newly created legions. There was no power in Rome to restrain
him.
With Marius began the third phase in the development of the Roman
power, the Republic of the Military Commanders. For now began a
period in which the leaders of the paid legions fought for the
mastery of the Roman world. Against Marius was pitted the
aristocratic Sulla who had served under him in Africa. Each in
turn made a great massacre of his political opponents. Men were
proscribed and executed by the thousand, and their estates were
sold. After the bloody rivalry of these two and the horror of the
revolt of Spartacus, came a phase in which Lucullus and Pompey the
Great and Crassus and Julius Cæsar were the masters of armies and
dominated affairs. It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus.
Lucullus conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia, and
retired with great wealth into private life. Crassus thrusting
further invaded Persia and was defeated and slain by the
Parthians. After a long rivalry Pompey was defeated by Julius
Cæsar (48 B.C.) and murdered in Egypt, leaving Julius Cæsar sole
master of the Roman world.
The figure of Julius Cæsar is one that has stirred the human
imagination out of all proportion to its merit or true importance.
He has become a legend and a symbol. For us he is chiefly
important as marking the transition from the phase of military
adventurers to the beginning of the fourth stage in Roman
expansion, the Early Empire. For in spite of the profoundest
economic and political convulsions, in spite of civil war and
social degeneration, throughout all this time the boundaries of
the Roman state crept outward and continued to creep outward to
their maximum about 100 A.D. There had been something like an ebb
during the doubtful phases of the Second Punic War, and again a
manifest loss of vigour before the reconstruction of the army by
Marius. The revolt of Spartacus {193} marked a third phase.
Julius Cæsar made his reputation as a military leader in Gaul,
which is now France and Belgium. (The chief tribes inhabiting
this country belonged to the same Celtic people as the Gauls who
had occupied north Italy for a time, and who had afterwards raided
into Asia Minor and settled down as the Galatians.) Cæsar drove
back a German invasion of Gaul and added all that country to the
empire, and he twice crossed the Straits of Dover into Britain (55
and 54 B.C.), where however he made no permanent conquest.
Meanwhile Pompey the Great was consolidating Roman conquests that
reached in the east to the Caspian Sea.
[Illustration: THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN AT ROME]
At this time, the middle of the first century B.C., the Roman
Senate was still the nominal centre of the Roman government,
appointing consuls and other officials, granting powers and the
like; and a number of politicians, among whom Cicero was an
outstanding {194} figure, were struggling to preserve the great
traditions of republican Rome and to maintain respect for its
laws. But the spirit of citizenship had gone from Italy with the
wasting away of the free farmers; it was a land now of slaves and
impoverished men with neither the understanding nor the desire for
freedom. There was nothing whatever behind these republican
leaders in the Senate, while behind the great adventurers they
feared and desired to control were the legions. Over the heads of
the Senate Crassus and Pompey and Cæsar divided the rule of the
Empire between them (The First Triumvirate). When presently
Crassus was killed at distant Carrhæ by the Parthians, Pompey and
Cæsar fell out. Pompey took up the republican side, and laws were
passed to bring Cæsar to trial for his breaches of law and his
disobedience to the decrees of the Senate.
It was illegal for a general to bring his troops out of the
boundary of his command, and the boundary between Cæsar's command
and Italy was the Rubicon. In 49 B.C. he crossed the Rubicon,
saying "The die is cast" and marched upon Pompey and Rome.
It had been the custom in Rome in the past, in periods of military
extremity, to elect a "dictator" with practically unlimited powers
to rule through the crisis. After his overthrow of Pompey, Cæsar
was made dictator first for ten years and then (in 45 B.C.) for
life. In effect he was made monarch of the empire for life.
There was talk of a king, a word abhorrent to Rome since the
expulsion of the Etruscans five centuries before. Cæsar refused
to be king, but adopted throne and sceptre. After his defeat of
Pompey, Cæsar had gone on into Egypt and had made love to
Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, the goddess queen of Egypt.
She seems to have turned his head very completely. He had brought
back to Rome the Egyptian idea of a god-king. His statue was set
up in a temple with an inscription "To the Unconquerable God."
The expiring republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest,
and Cæsar was stabbed to death in the Senate at the foot of the
statue of his murdered rival, Pompey the Great.
Thirteen years more of this conflict of ambitious personalities
followed. There was a second Triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony
and Octavian Cæsar, the latter the nephew of Julius Cæsar.
Octavian like his uncle took the poorer, hardier western provinces
{195} where the best legions were recruited. In 31 B.C., he
defeated Mark Antony, his only serious rival, at the naval battle
of Actium, and made himself sole master of the Roman world. But
Octavian was a man of different quality altogether from Julius
Cæsar. He had no foolish craving to be God or King. He had no
queen-lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored freedom to the
Senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator. The
grateful Senate in return gave him the reality instead of the
forms of power. He was to be called not King indeed, but
"Princeps" and "Augustus." He became Augustus Cæsar, the first of
the Roman emperors (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.).
He was followed by Tiberius Cæsar (14 to 37 A.D.) and he by
others, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and so on up to Trajan (98 A.D.),
Hadrian (117 A.D.), Antonius Pius (138 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius
(161-180 A.D.). All these emperors were emperors of the legions.
The soldiers made them, and some the soldiers destroyed.
Gradually the Senate fades out of Roman-history, and the emperor
and his administrative officials replace it. The boundaries of
the empire crept forward now to their utmost limits. Most of
Britain was added to the empire, Transylvania was brought in as a
new province, Dacia; Trajan crossed the Euphrates. Hadrian had an
idea that reminds us at once of what had happened at the other end
of the old world. Like Shi-Hwang-ti he built walls against the
northern barbarians; one across Britain and a palisade between the
Rhine and the Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of
Trajan.
The expansion of the Roman Empire was at an end.
{196}
XXXIV
BETWEEN ROME AND CHINA
The second and first centuries B.C. mark a new phase in the
history of mankind. Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean are
no longer the centre of interest. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt were
still fertile, populous and fairly prosperous, but they were no
longer the dominant regions of the world. Power had drifted to
the west and to the east. Two great empires now dominated the
world, this new Roman Empire and the renascent Empire of China.
Rome extended its power to the Euphrates, but it was never able to
get beyond that boundary. It was too remote. Beyond the
Euphrates the former Persian and Indian dominions of the Seleucids
fell under a number of new masters. China, now under the Han
dynasty, which had replaced the Ts'in dynasty at the death of
Shi-Hwang-ti, had extended its power across Tibet and over the
high mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But
there, too, it reached its extremes. Beyond was too far.
China at this time was the greatest, best organized and most
civilized political system in the world. It was superior in area
and population to the Roman Empire at its zenith. It was possible
then for these two vast systems to flourish in the same world at
the same time in almost complete ignorance of each other. The
means of communication both by sea and land was not yet
sufficiently developed and organized for them to come to a direct
clash.
Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way, and
their influence upon the fate of the regions that lay between
them, upon central Asia and India, was profound. A certain amount
of trade trickled through, by camel caravans across Persia, for
example, and by coasting ships by way of India and the Red Sea.
In 66 B.C. Roman troops under Pompey followed in the footsteps of
Alexander the Great, and marched up the eastern shores of the
{197} Caspian Sea. In 102 A.D. a Chinese expeditionary force
under Pan Chau reached the Caspian, and sent emissaries to report
upon the power of Rome. But many centuries were still to pass
before definite knowledge and direct intercourse were to link the
great parallel worlds of Europe and Eastern Asia.
To the north of both these great empires were barbaric
wildernesses. What is now Germany was largely forest lands; the
forests extended far into Russia and made a home for the gigantic
aurochs, a bull of almost elephantine size. Then to the north of
the great mountain masses of Asia stretched a band of deserts,
steppes and then forests and frozen lands. In the eastward lap of
the elevated part of Asia was the great triangle of Manchuria.
Large parts of these regions, stretching between South Russia and
Turkestan into Manchuria, were and are regions of exceptional
climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied greatly in the
course of a few centuries They are lands treacherous to man. For
years they will carry pasture and sustain cultivation, and then
will come an age of decline in humidity and a cycle of killing
droughts.
[Illustration: A CHINESE COVERED JAR OF GREEN-GLAZED EARTHENWARE]
The western part of this barbaric north from the German forests to
South Russia and Turkestan and from Gothland to the Alps was the
region of origin of the Nordic peoples and of the Aryan speech.
The eastern steppes and deserts of Mongolia was the region of
origin of the Hunnish or Mongolian or Tartar or Turkish
peoples--for all these several peoples were akin in language, race,
and way of life. And as the Nordic peoples seem to have been
continually overflowing their own borders and pressing south upon
the developing civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean
coast, so the Hunnish {198} tribes sent their surplus as
wanderers, raiders and conquerors into the settled regions of
China. Periods of plenty in the north would mean an increase in
population there; a shortage of grass, a spell of cattle disease,
would drive the hungry warlike tribesmen south.
[Illustration: VASE OF BRONZE FORM, UNGLAZED STONEWARE]
For a time there were simultaneously two fairly effective Empires
in the world capable of holding back the barbarians and even
forcing forward the frontiers of the imperial peace. The thrust
of the Han empire from north China into Mongolia was strong and
continuous. The Chinese population welled up over the barrier of
the Great Wall. Behind the imperial frontier guards came the
Chinese farmer with horse and plough, ploughing up the grass lands
and enclosing the winter pasture. The Hunnish peoples raided and
murdered the settlers, but the Chinese punitive expeditions were
too much for them. The nomads were faced with the choice of
settling down to the plough and becoming Chinese tax-payers or
shifting in search of fresh summer pastures. Some took the former
course and were absorbed. Some drifted
north-eastward and eastward over the mountain passes down into
western Turkestan.
This westward drive of the Mongolian horsemen was going on from
200 B.C. onward. It was producing a westward pressure upon the
Aryan tribes, and these again were pressing upon the Roman
frontiers ready to break through directly there was any weakness
apparent. The Parthians, who were apparently a Scythian people
with some Mongolian admixture, came down to the Euphrates by the
first century B.C. They fought against Pompey the Great in {199}
his eastern raid. They defeated and killed Crassus. They
replaced the Seleucid monarchy in Persia by a dynasty of Parthian
kings, the Arsacid dynasty.
[Illustration: CHINESE VESSEL IN BRONZE, IN FORM OF A GOOSE]
But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads lay
neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia and then
south-eastward through the Khyber Pass into India. It was India
which received the Mongolian drive in these centuries of Roman and
Chinese strength. A series of raiding conquerors poured down
through the Punjab into the great plains to loot and destroy. The
empire of Asoka was broken up, and for a time the history of India
passes into darkness. A certain Kushan dynasty founded by the
"Indo-Scythians"--one of the raiding peoples--ruled for a time
over North India and maintained a certain order. These invasions
went on for several centuries. For a large part of the fifth
century A.D. India was afflicted by the Ephthalites or White Huns,
who levied tribute on the small Indian princes and held India in
terror. Every summer these Ephthalites pastured in western
Turkestan, every autumn they came down through the passes to
terrorize India.
{200}
In the second century A.D. a great misfortune came upon the Roman
and Chinese empires that probably weakened the resistance of both
to barbarian pressure. This was a pestilence of unexampled
virulence. It raged for eleven years in China and disorganized
the social framework profoundly. The Han dynasty fell, and a new
age of division and confusion began from which China did not
fairly recover until the seventh century A.D. with the coming of
the great Tang dynasty.
The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged throughout
the Roman Empire from 164 to 180 A.D. It evidently weakened the
Roman imperial fabric very seriously. We begin to hear of
depopulation in the Roman provinces after this, and there was a
marked deterioration in the vigour and efficiency of government.
At any rate we presently find the frontier no longer invulnerable,
but giving way first in this place and then in that. A new Nordic
people, the Goths, coming originally from Gothland in Sweden, had
migrated across Russia to the Volga region and the shores of the
Black Sea and taken to the sea and piracy. By the end of the
second century they may have begun to feel the westward thrust of
the Huns. In 247 they crossed the Danube in a great land raid,
and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in a battle in what is
now Serbia. In 236 another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken
bounds upon the lower Rhine, and the Alemanni had poured into
Alsace. The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but the
Goths in the Balkan peninsula raided again and again. The
province of Dacia vanished from Roman history.
A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In 270-275
Rome, which had been an open and secure city for three centuries,
was fortified by the Emperor Aurelian.
{201}
XXXV
THE COMMON MAN'S LIFE UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Before we tell of how this Roman empire which was built up in the
two centuries B.C., and which flourished in peace and security
from the days of Augustus Cæsar onward for two centuries, fell
into disorder and was broken up, it may be as well to devote some
attention to the life of the ordinary people throughout this great
realm. Our history has come down now to within 2000 years of our
own time; and the life of the civilized people, both under the
Peace of Rome and the Peace of the Han dynasty, was beginning to
resemble more and more clearly the life of their civilized
successors to-day.
In the western world coined money was now in common use; outside
the priestly world there were many people of independent means who
were neither officials of the government nor priests; people
travelled about more freely than they had ever done before, and
there were high roads and inns for them. Compared with the past,
with the time before 500 B.C., life had become much more loose.
Before that date civilized men had been bound to a district or
country, had been bound to a tradition and lived within a very
limited horizon; only the nomads traded and travelled.
But neither the Roman Peace nor the Peace of the Han dynasty meant
a uniform civilization over the large areas they controlled.
There were very great local differences and great contrasts and
inequalities of culture between one district and another, just as
there are to-day under the British Peace in India. The Roman
garrisons and colonies were dotted here and there over this great
space, worshipping Roman gods and speaking the Latin language; but
where there had been towns and cities before the coming of the
Romans, they went on, subordinated indeed but managing their own
affairs, and, for a time at least, worshipping their own gods in
their own fashion. Over Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt and the
Hellenized East {202} generally, the Latin language never
prevailed. Greek ruled there invincibly. Saul of Tarsus, who
became the apostle Paul, was a Jew and a Roman citizen; but he
spoke and wrote Greek and not Hebrew. Even at the court of the
Parthian dynasty, which had overthrown the Greek Seleucids in
Persia, and was quite outside the Roman imperial boundaries, Greek
was the fashionable language. In some parts of Spain and in North
Africa, the Carthaginian language also held on for a long time in
spite of the destruction of Carthage. Such a town as Seville, which
had been a prosperous city long before the Roman name had been heard
of, kept its Semitic goddess and preserved its Semitic speech for
generations, in spite of a colony of Roman veterans at Italica a few
miles away. Septimius Severus, who was emperor from 193 to 211
A.D., spoke Carthaginian as his mother speech. He learnt Latin
later as a foreign tongue; {203} and it is recorded that his sister
never learnt Latin and conducted her Roman household in the
Punic language.
[Illustration: A GLADIATOR]
In such countries as Gaul and Britain and in provinces like Dacia
(now roughly Roumania) and Pannonia (Hungary south of the Danube),
where there were no pre-existing great cities and temples and
cultures, the Roman empire did however "Latinize." It civilized
these countries for the first time. It created cities and towns
where Latin was from the first the dominant speech, and where
Roman gods were served and Roman customs and fashions followed.
The Roumanian, Italian, French and Spanish languages, all
variations and modifications of Latin, remain to remind us of this
extension of Latin speech and customs.
North-west Africa also became at last largely Latin-speaking.
Egypt, Greece and the rest of the empire to the east were never
Latinized. They remained Egyptian and Greek in culture and
spirit. And even in Rome, among educated men, Greek was learnt as
the language of a gentleman and Greek literature and learning were
very, properly preferred to Latin.
In this miscellaneous empire the ways of doing work and business
were naturally also very miscellaneous. The chief industry of the
settled world was still largely agriculture. We have told how in
Italy the sturdy free farmers who were the backbone of the early
Roman republic were replaced by estates worked by slave labour
after the Punic wars. The Greek world had had very various
methods of cultivation, from the Arcadian plan, wherein every free
citizen toiled with his own hands, to Sparta, wherein it was a
dishonour to work and where agricultural work was done by a
special slave class, the Helots. But that was ancient history
now, and over most of the Hellenized world the estate system and
slave-gangs had spread. The agricultural slaves were captives who
spoke many different languages so that they could not understand
each other, or they were born slaves; they had no solidarity to
resist oppression, no tradition of rights, no knowledge, for they
could not read nor write. Although they came to form a majority
of the country population they never made a successful
insurrection. The insurrection of Spartacus in the first century
B.C. was an insurrection of the special slaves who were trained
for the gladiatorial combats. The agricultural workers in Italy in
the latter days of {204} the Republic and the early Empire
suffered frightful indignities; they would be chained at night to
prevent escape or have half the head shaved to make it difficult.
They had no wives of their own; they could be outraged, mutilated
and killed by their masters. A master could sell his slave to
fight beasts in the arena. If a slave slew his master, all the
slaves in his household and not merely the murderer were
crucified. In some parts of Greece, in Athens notably, the lot of
the slave was never quite so frightful as this, but it was still
detestable. To such a population the barbarian invaders who
presently broke through the defensive line of the legions, came
not as enemies but as liberators.
[Illustration: POMPEII]
The slave system had spread to most industries and to every sort
of work that could be done by gangs. Mines and metallurgical
operations, the rowing of galleys, road-making and big building
operations were all largely slave occupations. And almost all
domestic service was performed by slaves. There were poor
free-men {205} and there were freed-men in the cities and upon the
country side, working for themselves or even working for wages.
They were artizans, supervisors and so forth, workers of a new
money-paid class working in competition with slave workers; but we
do not know what proportion they made of the general population.
It probably varied widely in different places and at different
periods. And there were also many modifications of slavery, from
the slavery that was chained at night and driven with whips to the
farm or quarry, to the slave whose master found it advantageous to
leave him to cultivate his patch or work his craft and own his
wife like a free-man, provided he paid in a satisfactory quittance
to his owner.
There were armed slaves. At the opening of the period of the
Punic wars, in 264 B.C., the Etruscan sport of setting slaves to
fight for their lives was revived in Rome. It grew rapidly
fashionable; and soon every great Roman rich man kept a retinue of
gladiators, who sometimes fought in the arena but whose real
business it was to act as his bodyguard of bullies. And also
there were learned slaves. The conquests of the later Republic
were among the highly civilized cities of Greece, North Africa and
Asia Minor; and they brought in many highly educated captives.
The tutor of a young Roman of good family was usually a slave. A
rich man would have a Greek slave as librarian, and slave
secretaries and learned men. He would keep his poet as he would
keep a performing dog. In this atmosphere of slavery the
traditions of modern literary criticism were evolved. The slaves
still boast and quarrel in our reviews. There were enterprising
people who bought intelligent boy slaves and had them educated for
sale. Slaves were trained as book copyists, as jewellers, and for
endless skilled callings.
But there were very considerable changes in the position of a
slave during the four hundred years between the opening days of
conquest under the republic of rich men and the days of
disintegration that followed the great pestilence. In the second
century B.C. war-captives were abundant, manners gross and brutal;
the slave had no rights and there was scarcely an outrage the
reader can imagine that was not practised upon slaves in those
days. But already in the first century A.D. there was a
perceptible improvement in the attitude of the Roman civilization
towards slavery. Captives were not so abundant for one thing,
{207} thing, and slaves were dearer. And slave-owners began to
realize that the profit and comfort they got from their slaves
increased with the self-respect of these unfortunates. But also
the moral tone of the community was rising, and a sense of justice
was becoming effective. The higher mentality of Greece was
qualifying the old Roman harshness. Restrictions upon cruelty
were made, a master might no longer sell his slave to fight
beasts, a slave was given property rights in what was called his
_peculium_, slaves were paid wages as an encouragement and
stimulus, a form of slave marriage was recognized. Very many
forms of agriculture do not lend themselves to gang working, or
require gang workers only at certain seasons. In regions where
such conditions prevailed the slave presently became a serf,
paying his owner part of his produce or working for him at certain
seasons.
====================================================================
{206}
[Illustration: THE COLISEUM, ROME]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM AT IT APPEARS TO-DAY]
====================================================================
When we begin to realize how essentially this great Latin and
Greek-speaking Roman Empire of the first two centuries A.D. was a
slave state and how small was the minority who had any pride or
freedom in their lives, we lay our hands on the clues to its decay
and collapse. There was little of what we should call family
life, few homes of temperate living and active thought and study;
schools and colleges were few and far between. The free will and
the free mind were nowhere to be found. The great roads, the
ruins of splendid buildings, the tradition of law and power it
left for the astonishment of succeeding generations must not
conceal from us that all its outer splendour was built upon
thwarted wills, stifled intelligence, and crippled and perverted
desires. And even the minority who lorded it over that wide realm
of subjugation and of restraint and forced labour were uneasy and
unhappy in their souls; art and literature, science and
philosophy, which are the fruits of free and happy minds, waned in
that atmosphere. There was much copying and imitation, an
abundance of artistic artificers, much slavish pedantry among the
servile men of learning, but the whole Roman empire in four
centuries produced nothing to set beside the bold and noble
intellectual activities of the comparatively little city of Athens
during its one century of greatness. Athens decayed under the
Roman sceptre. The science of Alexandria decayed. The spirit of
man, it seemed, was decaying in those days.
{208}
XXXVI
RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The soul of man under that Latin and Greek empire of the first two
centuries of the Christian era was a worried and frustrated soul.
Compulsion and cruelty reigned; there were pride and display but
little honour; little serenity or steadfast happiness. The
unfortunate were despised and wretched; the fortunate were
insecure and feverishly eager for gratifications. In a great
number of cities life centred on the red excitement of the arena,
where men and beasts fought and were tormented and slain.
Amphitheatres are the most characteristic of Roman ruins. Life
went on in that key. The uneasiness of men's hearts manifested
itself in profound religious unrest.
From the days when the Aryan hordes first broke in upon the
ancient civilizations, it was inevitable that the old gods of the
temples and priesthoods should suffer great adaptations or
disappear. In the course of hundreds of generations the
agricultural peoples of the brunette civilizations had shaped
their lives and thoughts to the temple-centred life. Observances
and the fear of disturbed routines, sacrifices and mysteries,
dominated their minds. Their gods seem monstrous and illogical to
our modern minds because we belong to an Aryanized world, but to
these older peoples these deities had the immediate conviction and
vividness of things seen in an intense dream. The conquest of one
city state by another in Sumeria or early Egypt meant a change or
a renaming of gods or goddesses, but left the shape and spirit of
the worship intact. There was no change in its general character.
The figures in the dream changed, but the dream went on and it was
the same sort of dream. And the early Semitic conquerors were
sufficiently akin in spirit to the Sumerians to take over the
religion of the Mesopotamian civilization they subjugated without
any profound alteration. Egypt was never {209} indeed subjugated
to the extent of a religious revolution. Under the Ptolemies and
under the Cæsars, her temples and altars and priesthoods remained
essentially Egyptian.
So long as conquests went on between people of similar social and
religious habits it was possible to get over the clash between the
god of this temple and region and the god of that by a process of
grouping or assimilation. If the two gods were alike in character
they were identified. It was really the same god under another
name, said the priests and the people. This fusion of gods is
called theocrasia; and the age of the great conquests of the
thousand years B.C. was an age of theocrasia. Over wide areas the
local gods were displaced by, or rather they were swallowed up in,
a general god. So that when at last Hebrew prophets in Babylon
proclaimed one God of Righteousness in all the earth men's minds
were fully prepared for that idea.
But often the gods were too dissimilar for such an assimilation,
and then they were grouped together in some plausible
relationship. A female god--and the Ægean world before the coming
of the Greek was much addicted to Mother Gods--would be married to
a male god, and an animal god or a star god would be humanized and
the animal or astronomical aspect, the serpent or the sun or the
star, made into an ornament or a symbol. Or the god of a defeated
people would become a malignant antagonist to the brighter gods.
The history of theology is full of such adaptations, compromises
and rationalizations of once local gods.
As Egypt developed from city states into one united kingdom there
was much of this theocrasia. The chief god so to speak was
Osiris, a sacrificial harvest god of whom Pharaoh was supposed to
be the earthly incarnation. Osiris was represented as repeatedly
dying and rising again; he was not only the seed and the harvest
but also by a natural extension of thought the means of human
immortality. Among his symbols was the wide-winged scarabeus
beetle which buries its eggs to rise again, and also the effulgent
sun which sets to rise. Later on he was to be identified with
Apis, the sacred bull. Associated with him was the goddess Isis.
Isis was also Hathor, a cow-goddess, and the crescent moon and the
Star of the sea. Osiris dies and she bears a child, Horus, who is
also a {210} hawk-god and the dawn, and who grows to become Osiris
again. The effigies of Isis represent her as bearing the infant
Horus in her arms and standing on the crescent moon. These are
not logical relationships, but they were devised by the human mind
before the development of hard and systematic thinking and they
have a dream-like coherence. Beneath this triple group there are
other and darker Egyptian gods, bad gods, the dog-headed Anubis,
black night and the like, devourers, tempters, enemies of god and
man.
[Illustration: MITHRAS SACRIFICING A BULL, ROMAN]
Every religious system does in the course of time fit itself to
the shape of the human soul, and there can be no doubt that out of
these illogical and even uncouth symbols, Egyptian people were
able to fashion for themselves ways of genuine devotion and
consolation. The desire for immortality was very strong in the
Egyptian mind, and the religious life of Egypt turned on that
desire. The Egyptian {211} religion was an immortality religion as
no other religion had ever been. As Egypt went down under foreign
conquerors and the Egyptian gods ceased to have any satisfactory
political significance, this craving for a life of compensations
here-after, intensified.
[Illustration: ISIS AND HORUS]
After the Greek conquest, the new city of Alexandria became the
centre of Egyptian religious life, and indeed of the religious
life of the whole Hellenic world. A great temple, the Serapeum,
was set up by Ptolemy I at which a sort of trinity of gods was
worshipped. These were Serapis (who was Osiris-Apis rechristened),
Isis and Horus. These were not regarded as separate gods but as
three aspects of one god, and Serapis was identified with the
Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter and the Persian sun-god. This
worship spread wherever the Hellenic influence extended, even into
North India and Western China. The idea of immortality, an
immortality of compensations and consolation, was eagerly received
by a world in which the common life was hopelessly wretched.
Serapis was called "the saviour of souls." "After death," said
the hymns of that time, "we are still in the care of his
providence." Isis attracted many devotees. Her images stood in
her temples, as Queen of Heaven, bearing the infant Horus in her
arms. Candles were burnt before her, votive offerings were made
to her, shaven priests consecrated to celibacy waited on her
altar.
The rise of the Roman empire opened the western European world to
this growing cult. The temples of Serapis-Isis, the chanting of
the priests and the hope of immortal life, followed the Roman
standards to Scotland and Holland. But there were many rivals to
the Serapis-Isis religion. Prominent among these was Mithraism.
This was a religion of Persian origin, and it {212} centred upon
some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras sacrificing a sacred
and benevolent bull. Here we seem to have something more
primordial than the complicated and sophisticated Serapis-Isis
beliefs. We are carried back directly to the blood sacrifices of
the heliolithic stage in human culture. The bull upon the
Mithraic monuments always bleeds copiously from a wound in its
side, and from this blood springs new life. The votary to
Mithraism actually bathed in the blood of the sacrificial bull.
At his initiation he went beneath a scaffolding upon which a bull
was killed so that the blood could actually run down on him.
Both these religions, and the same is true of many other of the
numerous parallel cults that sought the allegiance of the slaves
and citizens under the earlier Roman emperors, are personal
religions. They aim at personal salvation and personal
immortality. The older religions were not personal like that;
they were social. The older fashion of divinity was god or
goddess of the city first or of the state, and only secondarily of
the individual. The sacrifices were a public and not a private
function. They concerned collective practical needs in this world
in which we live. But the Greeks first and now the Romans had
pushed religion out of politics. Guided by the Egyptian tradition
religion had retreated to the other world.
[Illustration: BUST OF THE EMPEROR COMMODUS, A.D. 180-192]
These new private immortality religions took all the heart and
emotion out of the old state religions, but they did not actually
replace them. A typical city under the earlier Roman emperors
would have a number of temples to all sorts of gods. There might
be a temple to Jupiter of the Capitol, the great god of Rome, and
there would probably be one to the reigning Cæsar. For the Cæsars
had learnt from the Pharaohs the possibility of being gods. In
such temples a cold and stately political worship went on; one
would go and make an offering and burn a pinch of incense to show
one's loyalty. But it would be to the temple of Isis, the dear
Queen of Heaven, one would go with the burthen {213} of one's
private troubles for advice and relief. There might be local and
eccentric gods. Seville, for example, long affected the worship
of the old Carthaginian Venus. In a cave or an underground temple
there would certainly be an altar to Mithras, attended by
legionaries and slaves. And probably also there would be a
synagogue where the Jews gathered to read their Bible and uphold
their faith in the unseen God of all the Earth.
Sometimes there would be trouble with the Jews about the political
side of the state religion. They held that their God was a
jealous God intolerant of idolatry, and they would refuse to take
part in the public sacrifices to Cæsar. They would not even
salute the Roman standards for fear of idolatry.
In the East long before the time of Buddha there had been
ascetics, men and women who gave up most of the delights of life,
who repudiated marriage and property and sought spiritual powers
and an escape from the stresses and mortifications of the world in
abstinence, pain and solitude. Buddha himself set his face
against ascetic extravagances, but many of his disciples followed
a monkish life of great severity. Obscure Greek cults practised
similar disciplines even to the extent of self-mutilation.
Asceticism appeared in the Jewish communities of Judea and
Alexandria also in the first century B.C. Communities of men
abandoned the world and gave themselves to austerities and
mystical contemplation. Such was the sect of the Essenes.
Throughout the first and second centuries A.D. there was an almost
world-wide resort to such repudiations of life, a universal search
for "salvation" from the distresses of the time. The old sense of
an established order, the old confidence in priest and temple and
law and custom, had gone. Amidst the prevailing slavery, cruelty,
fear, anxiety, waste, display and hectic self-indulgence, went
this epidemic of self-disgust and mental insecurity, this agonized
search for peace even at the price of renunciation and voluntary
suffering. This it was that filled the Serapeum with weeping
penitents and brought the converts into the gloom and gore of the
Mithraic cave.
{214}
XXXVII
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
It was while Augustus Cæsar, the first of the Emperors, was
reigning in Rome that Jesus who is the Christ of Christianity was
born in Judea. In his name a religion was to arise which was
destined to become the official religion of the entire Roman
Empire.
Now it is on the whole more convenient to keep history and
theology apart. A large proportion of the Christian world
believes that Jesus was an incarnation of that God of all the
Earth whom the Jews first recognized. The historian, if he is to
remain historian, can neither accept nor deny that interpretation.
Materially Jesus appeared in the likeness of a man, and it is as a
man that the historian must deal with him.
He appeared in Judea in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar. He was a
prophet. He preached after the fashion of the preceding Jewish
prophets. He was a man of about thirty, and we are in the
profoundest ignorance of his manner of life before his preaching
began.
Our only direct sources of information about the life and teaching
of Jesus are the four Gospels. All four agree in giving us a
picture of a very definite personality. One is obliged to say,
"Here was a man. This could not have been invented."
But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been distorted
and obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of
later Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous
personality of Jesus is much wronged by the unreality and
conventionality that a mistaken reverence has imposed upon his
figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was a penniless teacher,
who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon
casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed
and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect and with something
motionless about him as though {215} he was gliding through the
air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people
who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental
and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.
We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult
accessories, with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest
and passionate, capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and
simple and profound doctrine--namely, the universal loving
Fatherhood of God and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was
clearly a person--to use a common phrase--of intense personal
magnetism. He attracted followers and filled them with love and
courage. Weak and ailing people were heartened and healed by his
presence. Yet he was probably of a delicate physique, because of
the swiftness with which he died under the pains of crucifixion.
There is a tradition that he fainted when, according to the
custom, he was made to bear his cross to the place of execution.
He went about the country for three years spreading his doctrine
and then he came to Jerusalem and was accused of trying to set up
a strange kingdom in Judea; he was tried upon this charge, and
crucified together with two thieves. Long before these two were
dead his sufferings were over.
The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching
of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines
that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small wonder
if the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance,
and recoiled in dismay from even a half apprehension of its
tremendous challenges to the established habits and institutions
of mankind. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus
seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and
uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the
life of our struggling race, an utter cleansing, without and
within. To the gospels the reader must go for all that is
preserved of this tremendous teaching; here we are only concerned
with the jar of its impact upon established ideas.
The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole world,
was a righteous god, but they also thought of him as a trading god
who had made a bargain with their Father Abraham {216} about them,
a very good bargain indeed for them, to bring them at last to
predominance in the earth. With dismay and anger they heard Jesus
sweeping away their dear securities. God, he taught, was no
bargainer; there were no chosen people and no favourites in the
Kingdom of Heaven. God was the loving father of all life, as
incapable of showing favour as the universal sun. And all men
were brothers--sinners alike and beloved sons alike--of this
divine father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus cast
scorn upon that natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own
people and to minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other
races. In the parable of the labourers he thrust aside the
obstinate claim of the Jews to have a special claim upon God. All
whom God takes into the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike;
there is no distinction in his treatment, because there is no
measure to his bounty. From all moreover, as the parable of the
buried talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widow's mite
enforces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges, no
rebates and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven.
[Illustration: EARLY IDEAL PORTRAIT, IN GILDED GLASS, OF JESUS
CHRIST IN WHICH THE TRADITIONAL BEARD IS NOT SHOWN]
{217}
But it is not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that
Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and
he would have swept away all the narrow and restrictive family
affections in the great flood of the love of God. The whole
kingdom of Heaven was to be the family of his followers. We are
told that, "While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother
and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Then
one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand
without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said
unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
And he stretched forth his hands towards his disciples, and said,
Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will
of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and
sister, and mother." [2]
[Illustration: THE ROAD FROM NAZARETH TO TIBERIAS]
And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of
family loyalty in the name of God's universal fatherhood and
brotherhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching
condemned all the gradations of the economic system, all private
wealth, and {218} personal advantages. All men belonged to the
kingdom; all their possessions belonged to the kingdom; the
righteous life for all men, the only righteous life, was the
service of God's will with all that we had, with all that we were.
Again and again he denounced private riches and the reservation of
any private life.
[Illustration: DAVID'S TOWER AND WALL OF JERUSALEM]
"And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running,
and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do
that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, Why
callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God.
Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not
kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour
thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him, Master,
all these things have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus
beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou
lackest; go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the
poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, take up
the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went
away grieved; for he had great possessions.
"And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God!
And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus
answered again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for
them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God! It is
{220} easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than
for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God." [3]
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{219}
[Illustration: A STREET IN JERUSALEM]
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Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom which was to
make all men one together in God, Jesus had small patience for the
bargaining righteousness of formal religion. Another large part
of his recorded utterances is aimed against the meticulous
observance of the rules of the pious career. "Then the Pharisees
and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the
tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands? He
answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah prophesied of you
hypocrites, as it is written,
"This people honoureth me with their lips,
"But their heart is far from me.
"Howbeit in vain do they worship me,
"Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
"For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of
men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such things
ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment
of God, that ye may keep your own tradition." [4]
It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus
proclaimed; it is clear from a score of indications that his
teaching had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true
that he said his kingdom was not of this world, that it was in the
hearts of men and not upon a throne; but it is equally clear that
wherever and in what measure his kingdom was set up in the hearts
of men, the outer world would be in that measure revolutionized
and made new.
Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have
missed in his utterances, it is plain they did not miss his
resolve to revolutionize the world. The whole tenor of the
opposition to him and the circumstances of his trial and execution
show clearly that to his contemporaries he seemed to propose
plainly, and did propose plainly, to change and fuse and enlarge
all human life.
In view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who
were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a
swimming of their world at his teaching? He was dragging out all
the little private reservations they had made from social service
into the light {221} of a universal religious life. He was like
some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the snug
burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of
this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no
pride and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love. Is
it any wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out
against him? Even his disciples cried out when he would not spare
them the light. Is it any wonder that the priests realized that
between this man and themselves there was no choice but that he or
priestcraft should perish? Is it any wonder that the Roman
soldiers, confronted and amazed by something soaring over their
comprehension and threatening all their disciplines, should take
refuge in wild laughter, and crown him with thorns and robe him in
purple and make a mock Cæsar of him? For to take him seriously
was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits,
to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible
happiness. . . .
[2] Matt. xii, 46-50.
[3] Mark x. 17-25.
[4] Mark vii, 1-9.
{222}
XXXVIII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINAL CHRISTIANITY
In the four gospels we find the personality and teachings of Jesus
but very little of the dogmas of the Christian church. It is in
the epistles, a series of writings by the immediate followers of
Jesus, that the broad lines of Christian belief are laid down.
Chief among the makers of Christian doctrine was St. Paul. He had
never seen Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul's name was originally
Saul, and he was conspicuous at first as an active persecutor of
the little band of disciples after the crucifixion. Then he was
suddenly converted to Christianity, and he changed his name to
Paul. He was a man of great intellectual vigour and deeply and
passionately interested in the religious movements of the time.
He was well versed in Judaism and in the Mithraism and Alexandrian
religion of the day. He carried over many of their ideas and
terms of expression into Christianity. He did very little to
enlarge or develop the original teaching of Jesus, the teaching of
the Kingdom of Heaven. But he taught that Jesus was not only the
promised Christ, the promised leader of the Jews, but also that
his death was a sacrifice, like the deaths of the ancient
sacrificial victims of the primordial civilizations, for the
redemption of mankind.
When religions flourish side by side they tend to pick up each
other's ceremonial and other outward peculiarities. Buddhism, for
example, in China has now almost the same sort of temples and
priests and uses as Taoism, which follows in the teachings of Lao
Tse. Yet the original teachings of Buddhism and Taoism were
almost flatly opposed. And it reflects no doubt or discredit upon
the essentials of Christian teaching that it took over not merely
such formal things as the shaven priest, the votive offering, the
altars, candles, chanting and images of the Alexandrian and
Mithraic faiths, but adopted even their devotional phrases and
their theological {223} ideas. All these religions were
flourishing side by side with many less prominent cults. Each was
seeking adherents, and there must have been a constant going and
coming of converts between them. Sometimes one or other would be
in favour with the government. But Christianity was regarded with
more suspicion than its rivals because, like the Jews, its
adherents would not perform acts of worship to the God Cæsar.
This made it a seditious religion, quite apart from the
revolutionary spirit of the teachings of Jesus himself.
[Illustration: MOSAIC OF SS. PETER AND PAUL POINTING TO A THRONE,
ON GOLD BACKGROUND]
St. Paul familiarized his disciples with the idea that Jesus, like
{224} Osiris, was a god who died to rise again and give men
immortality. And presently the spreading Christian community was
greatly torn by complicated theological disputes about the
relationship of this God Jesus to God the Father of Mankind. The
Arians taught that Jesus was divine, but distant from and inferior
to the Father. The Sabellians taught that Jesus was merely an
aspect of the Father, and that God was Jesus and Father at the
same time just as a man may be a father and an artificer at the
same time; and the Trinitarians taught a more subtle doctrine that
God was both one and three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For a
time it seemed that Arianism would prevail over its rivals, and
then after disputes, violence and wars, the Trinitarian formula
became the accepted formula of all Christendom. It may be found
in its completest expression in the Athanasian Creed.
We offer no comment on these controversies here. They do not sway
history as the personal teaching of Jesus sways history. The
personal teaching of Jesus does seem to mark a new phase in the
moral and spiritual life of our race. Its insistence upon the
universal Fatherhood of God and the implicit brotherhood of all
men, its insistence upon the sacredness of every human personality
as a living temple of God, was to have the profoundest effect upon
all the subsequent social and political life of mankind. With
Christianity, with the spreading teachings of Jesus, a new respect
appears in the world for man as man. It may be true, as hostile
critics of Christianity have urged, that St.. Paul preached
obedience to slaves, but it is equally true that the whole spirit
of the teachings of Jesus preserved in the gospels was against the
subjugation of man by man. And still more distinctly was
Christianity opposed to such outrages upon human dignity as the
gladiatorial combats in the arena.
Throughout the first two centuries after Christ, the Christian
religion spread throughout the Roman Empire, weaving together an
ever-growing multitude of converts into a new community of ideas
and will. The attitude of the emperors varied between hostility
and toleration. There were attempts to suppress this new faith in
both the second and third centuries; and finally in 303 and the
following years a great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian.
The considerable accumulations of Church property were {225}
seized, all bibles and religious writings were confiscated and
destroyed, Christians were put out of the protection of the law
and many executed. The destruction of the books is particularly
notable. It shows how the power of the written word in holding
together {226} the new faith was appreciated by the authorities.
These "book religions," Christianity and Judaism, were religions
that educated. Their continued existence depended very largely on
people being able to read and understand their doctrinal ideas.
The older religions had made no such appeal to the personal
intelligence. In the ages of barbaric confusion that were now at
hand in western Europe it was the Christian church that was mainly
instrumental in preserving the tradition of learning.
[Illustration: THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST]
The persecution of Diocletian failed completely to suppress the
growing Christian community. In many provinces it was ineffective
because the bulk of the population and many of the officials were
Christian. In 317 an edict of toleration was issued by the
associated Emperor Galerius, and in 324 Constantine the Great, a
friend and on his deathbed a baptized convert to Christianity,
became sole ruler of the Roman world. He abandoned all divine
pretensions and put Christian symbols on the shields and banners
of his troops.
In a few years Christianity was securely established as the
official religion of the empire. The competing religions
disappeared or were absorbed with extraordinary celerity, and in
300 Theodosius the Great caused the great statue of Jupiter
Serapis at Alexandria to be destroyed. From the outset of the
fifth century onward the only priests or temples in the Roman
Empire were Christian priests and temples.
{227}
XXXIX
THE BARBARIANS BREAK THE EMPIRE INTO EAST AND WEST
Throughout the third century the Roman Empire, decaying socially
and disintegrating morally, faced the barbarians. The emperors of
this period were fighting military autocrats, and the capital of
the empire shifted with the necessities of their military policy.
Now the imperial headquarters would be at Milan in north Italy,
now in what is now Serbia at Sirmium or Nish, now in Nicomedia in
Asia Minor. Rome halfway down Italy was too far from the centre
of interest to be a convenient imperial seat. It was a declining
city. Over most of the empire peace still prevailed and men went
about without arms. The armies continued to be the sole
repositories of power; the emperors, dependent on their legions,
became more and more autocratic to the rest of the empire and
their state more and more like that of the Persian and other
oriental monarchs. Diocletian assumed a royal diadem and oriental
robes.
All along the imperial frontier, which ran roughly along the Rhine
and Danube, enemies were now pressing. The Franks and other
German tribes had come up to the Rhine. In north Hungary were the
Vandals; in what was once Dacia and is now Roumania, the Visigoths
or West Goths. Behind these in south Russia were the East Goths
or Ostrogoths, and beyond these again in the Volga region the
Alans. But now Mongolian peoples were forcing their way towards
Europe. The Huns were already exacting tribute from the Alans and
Ostrogoths and pushing them to the west.
In Asia the Roman frontiers were crumpling back under the push of
a renascent Persia. This new Persia, the Persia of the Sassenid
kings, was to be a vigorous and on the whole a successful rival of
the Roman Empire in Asia for the next three centuries.
A glance at the map of Europe will show the reader the peculiar
weakness of the empire. The river Danube comes down to within
{228} a couple of hundred miles of the Adriatic Sea in the region
of what is now Bosnia and Serbia. It makes a square re-entrant
angle there. The Romans never kept their sea communications in
good order, and this two hundred mile strip of land was their line
of communication between the western Latin-speaking part of the
empire and the eastern Greek-speaking portion. Against this
square angle of the Danube the barbarian pressure was greatest.
When they broke through there it was inevitable that the empire
should fall into two parts.
[Map: The Empire and the Barbarians]
A more vigorous empire might have thrust forward and reconquered
Dacia, but the Roman Empire lacked any such vigour. Constantine
the Great was certainly a monarch of great devotion and
intelligence. He beat back a raid of the Goths from just these
vital Balkan regions, but he had no force to carry the frontier
across the Danube. He was too pre-occupied with the internal
weaknesses of the empire. He brought the solidarity and moral
force of Christianity to revive the spirit of the declining
empire, and he decided to create a new permanent capital at
Byzantium upon the Hellespont. This new-made Byzantium, which was
re-christened Constantinople in his honour, was still building
when he died. Towards the end of his reign occurred a remarkable
transaction. The {229} Vandals, being pressed by the Goths, asked
to be received into the Roman Empire. They were assigned lands in
Pannonia, which is now that part of Hungary west of the Danube,
and their fighting men became nominally legionaries. But these
new legionaries remained under their own chiefs. Rome failed to
digest them.
[Illustration: CONSTANTINE'S PILLAR, CONSTANTINOPLE]
Constantine died working to reorganize his great realm, and soon
the frontiers were ruptured again and the Visigoths came almost to
Constantinople. They defeated the Emperor Valens at Adrianople and
made a settlement in what is now Bulgaria, similar to the
settlement of the Vandals in Pannonia. Nominally they were
subjects of the emperor, practically they were conquerors.
From 379 to 395 A.D. reigned the Emperor Theodosius the Great, and
while he reigned the empire was still formally intact. Over the
armies of Italy and Pannonia presided Stilicho, a Vandal, over the
armies in the Balkan peninsula, Alaric, a Goth. When Theodosius
died at the close of the fourth century he left {230} two sons.
Alaric supported one of these, Arcadius, in Constantinople, and
Stilicho the other, Honorius, in Italy. In other words Alaric and
Stilicho fought for the empire with the princes as puppets. In
the course of their struggle Alaric marched into Italy and after a
short siege took Rome (410 A.D.).
The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the Roman
Empire in Europe the prey of robber armies of barbarians. It is
difficult to visualize the state of affairs in the world at that
time. Over France, Spain, Italy and the Balkan peninsula, the
great cities that had flourished under the early empire still
stood, impoverished, partly depopulated and falling into decay.
Life in them must have been shallow, mean and full of uncertainty.
Local officials asserted their authority and went on with their
work with such conscience as they had, no doubt in the name of a
now remote and inaccessible emperor. The churches went on, but
usually with illiterate priests. There was little reading and
much superstition and fear. But everywhere except where looters
had destroyed them, books and pictures and statuary and such-like
works of art were still to be found.
The life of the countryside had also degenerated. Everywhere this
Roman world was much more weedy and untidy than it had been. In
some regions war and pestilence had brought the land down to the
level of a waste. Roads and forests were infested with robbers.
Into such regions the barbarians marched, with little or no
opposition, and set up their chiefs as rulers, often with Roman
official titles. If they were half civilized barbarians they
would give the conquered districts tolerable terms, they would
take possession of the towns, associate and intermarry, and
acquire (with an accent) the Latin speech; but the Jutes, the
Angles and Saxons who submerged the Roman province of Britain were
agriculturalists and had no use for towns, they seem to have swept
south Britain clear of the Romanized population and they replaced
the language by their own Teutonic dialects, which became at last
English.
It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the
movements of all the various German and Slavonic tribes as they
went to and fro in the disorganized empire in search of plunder
and a pleasant home. But let the Vandals serve as an example.
They came into {232} history in east Germany. They settled as we
have told in Pannonia. Thence they moved somewhen about 425 A.D.
through the intervening provinces to Spain. There they found
Visigoths from South Russia and other German tribes setting up
dukes and kings. From Spain the Vandals under Genseric sailed for
North Africa (429), captured Carthage (439), and built a fleet.
They secured the mastery of the sea and captured and pillaged Rome
(455), which had recovered very imperfectly from her capture and
looting by Alaric half a century earlier. Then the Vandals made
themselves masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the
other islands of the western Mediterranean. They made, in fact, a
sea empire very similar in its extent to the sea empire of
Carthage seven hundred odd years before. They were at the climax
of their power about 477. They were a mere handful of conquerors
holding all this country. In the next century almost all their
territory had been reconquered for the empire of Constantinople
during a transitory blaze of energy under Justinian I.
====================================================================
{231}
[Illustration: BASE OF THE "OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS,"
CONSTANTINOPLE]
====================================================================
The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar
adventures. But now there was coming into the European world the
least kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators, the
Mongolian Huns or Tartars, a yellow people active and able, such
as the western world had never before encountered.
{233}
XL
THE HUNS AND THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE
This appearance of a conquering Mongolian people in Europe may be
taken to mark a new stage in human history. Until the last
century or so before the Christian era, the Mongol and the Nordic
peoples had not been in close touch. Far away in the frozen lands
beyond the northern forests the Lapps, a Mongolian people, had
drifted westward as far as Lapland, but they played no part in the
main current of history. For thousands of years the western world
carried on the dramatic interplay of the Aryan, Semitic and
fundamental brunette peoples with very little interference (except
for an Ethiopian invasion of Egypt or so) either from the black
peoples to the south or from the Mongolian world in the far East.
It is probable that there were two chief causes for the new
westward drift of the nomadic Mongolians. One was the
consolidation of the great empire of China, its extension
northward and the increase of its population during the prosperous
period of the Han dynasty. The other was some process of climatic
change; a lesser rainfall that abolished swamps and forests
perhaps, or a greater rainfall that extended grazing over desert
steppes, or even perhaps both these processes going on in
different regions but which anyhow facilitated a westward
migration. A third contributary cause was the economic
wretchedness, internal decay and falling population of the Roman
Empire. The rich men of the later Roman Republic, and then the
tax-gatherers of the military emperors had utterly consumed its
vitality. So we have the factors of thrust, means and
opportunity. There was pressure from the east, rot in the west
and an open road.
The Hun had reached the eastern boundaries of European Russia by
the first century A.D., but it was not until the fourth and {234}
fifth centuries A.D. that these horsemen rose to predominance upon
the steppes. The fifth century was the Hun's century. The first
Huns to come into Italy were mercenary bands in the pay of
Stilicho the Vandal, the master of Honorius. Presently they were
in possession of Pannonia, the empty nest of the Vandals.
By the second quarter of the fifth century a great war chief had
arisen among the Huns, Attila. We have only vague and tantalizing
glimpses of his power. He ruled not only over the Huns but over a
conglomerate of tributary Germanic tribes; his empire extended
from the Rhine cross the plains into Central Asia. He exchanged
ambassadors with China. His head camp was in the plain of Hungary
east of the Danube. There he was visited by an envoy from
Constantinople, Priscus, who has left us an account of his state.
The way of living of these Mongols was very like the way of living
of the primitive Aryans they had replaced. The common folk were
in huts and tents; the chiefs lived in great stockaded timber
halls. There were feasts and drinking and singing by the bards.
The Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian companions of Alexander
would probably have felt more at home in the camp-capital of
Attila than they would have done in the cultivated and decadent
court of Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning
in Constantinople.
For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the leadership
of the Huns and Attila would play the same part towards the
Græco-Roman civilization of the Mediterranean countries that the
barbaric Greeks had played long ago to the Ægean civilization. It
looked like history repeating itself upon a larger stage. But the
Huns were much more wedded to the nomadic life than the early
Greeks, who were rather migratory cattle farmers than true nomads.
The Huns raided and plundered but did not settle.
For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His armies
devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constantinople,
Gibbon says that he totally destroyed no less than seventy cities
in the Balkan peninsula, and Theodosius bought him off by payments
of tribute and tried to get rid of him for good by sending secret
agents to assassinate him. In 451 Attila turned his attention to
the remains of the Latin-speaking half of the empire and invaded
{235} Gaul. Nearly every town in northern Gaul was sacked.
Franks, Visigoths and the imperial forces united against him and
he was defeated at Troyes in a vast dispersed battle in which a
multitude of men, variously estimated as between 150,000 and
300,000, were killed. This checked him in Gaul, but it did not
exhaust his enormous military resources. Next year he came into
Italy by way of Venetia, burnt Aquileia and Padua and looted
Milan.
[Illustration: HEAD OF BARBARIAN CHIEF]
Numbers of fugitives from these north Italian towns and
particularly from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the head
of the Adriatic and laid there the foundations of the city state
of Venice, which was to become one of the greatest or the trading
centres in the middle ages.
In 453 Attila died suddenly after a great feast to celebrate his
marriage to a young woman, and at his death this plunder
confederation of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns disappear
from history, mixed into the surrounding more numerous
Aryan-speaking populations. {236} But these great Hun raids
practically consummated the end of the Latin Roman Empire. After
his death ten different emperors ruled in Rome in twenty years,
set up by Vandal and other mercenary troops. The Vandals from
Carthage took and sacked Rome in 455. Finally in 476 Odoacer, the
chief of the barbarian troops, suppressed a Pannonian who was
figuring as emperor under the impressive name of Romulus
Augustulus, and informed the Court of Constantinople that there
was no longer an emperor in the west. So ingloriously the Latin
Roman Empire came to an end. In 493 Theodoric the Goth became
King of Rome.
All over western and central Europe now barbarian chiefs were
reigning as kings, dukes and the like, practically independent but
for the most part professing some sort of shadowy allegiance to
the emperor. There were hundreds and perhaps thousands of such
practically independent brigand rulers. In Gaul, Spain and Italy
and in Dacia the Latin speech still prevailed in locally distorted
forms, but in Britain and east of the Rhine languages of the
German group (or in Bohemia a Slavonic language, Czech) were the
common speech. The superior clergy and a small remnant of other
educated men read and wrote Latin. Everywhere life was insecure
and property was held by the strong arm. Castles multiplied and
roads fell into decay. The dawn of the sixth century was an age
of division and of intellectual darkness throughout the western
world. Had it not been for the monks and Christian missionaries
Latin learning might have perished altogether.
Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so completely
decayed? It grew because at first the idea of citizenship held it
together. Throughout the days of the expanding republic, and even
into the days of the early empire there remained a great number of
men conscious of Roman citizenship, feeling it a privilege and an
obligation to be a Roman citizen, confident of their rights under
the Roman law and willing to make sacrifices in the name of Rome.
The prestige of Rome as of something just and great and
law-upholding spread far beyond the Roman boundaries. But even as
early as the Punic wars the sense of citizenship was being
undermined by the growth of wealth and slavery. Citizenship
spread indeed but not the idea of citizenship.
{237}
The Roman Empire was after all a very primitive organization; it
did not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing
multitudes of citizens, did not invite their co-operation in its
decisions. There was no network of schools to ensure a common
understanding, no distribution of news to sustain collective
activity. The adventurers who struggled for power from the days
of Marius and Sulla onward had no idea of creating and calling in
public opinion upon the imperial affairs. The spirit of
citizenship died of starvation and no one observed it die. All
empires, all states, all organizations of human society are, in
the ultimate, things of understanding and will. There remained no
will for the Roman Empire in the World and so it came to an end.
But though the Latin-speaking Roman Empire died in the fifth
century, something else had been born within it that was to avail
itself enormously of its prestige and tradition, and that was the
Latin-speaking half of the Catholic Church. This lived while the
empire died because it appealed to the minds and wills of men,
because it had books and a great system of teachers and
missionaries to hold it together, things stronger than any law or
legions. Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. while the
empire was decaying, Christianity was spreading to a universal
dominion in Europe. It conquered its conquerors, the barbarians.
When Attila seemed disposed to march on Rome, the patriarch of
Rome intercepted him and did what no armies could do, turning him
back by sheer moral force.
The Patriarch or Pope of Rome claimed to be the head of the entire
Christian church. Now that there were no more emperors, he began
to annex imperial titles and claims. He took the title of
_pontifex maximus_, head sacrificial priest of the Roman dominion,
the most ancient of all the titles that the emperors had enjoyed.
{238}
XLI
THE BYZANTINE AND SASSANID EMPIRES
The Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire showed much
more political tenacity than the western half. It weathered the
disasters of the fifth century A.D., which saw a complete and
final breaking up of the original Latin Roman power. Attila
bullied the Emperor Theodosius II and sacked and raided almost to
the walls of Constantinople, but that city remained intact. The
Nubians came down the Nile and looted Upper Egypt, but Lower Egypt
and Alexandria were left still fairly prosperous. Most of Asia
Minor was held against the Sassanid Persians.
The sixth century, which was an age of complete darkness for the
West, saw indeed a considerable revival of the Greek power.
Justinian I (527-565) was a ruler of very great ambition and
energy, and he was married to the Empress Theodora, a woman of
quite equal capacity who had begun life as an actress. Justinian
reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and most of Italy from
the Goths. He even regained the south of Spain. He did not limit
his energies to naval and military enterprises. He founded a
university, built the great church of Sta. Sophia in
Constantinople and codified the Roman law. But in order to
destroy a rival to his university foundation he closed the schools
of philosophy in Athens, which had been going on in unbroken
continuity from the days of Plato, that is to say for nearly a
thousand years.
From the third century onwards the Persian Empire had been the
steadfast rival of the Byzantine. The two empires kept Asia
Minor, Syria and Egypt in a state of perpetual unrest and waste.
In the first century A.D., these lands were still at a high level
of civilization, wealthy and with an abundant population, but the
continual coming and going of armies, massacres, looting and war
taxation wore them down steadily until only shattered and ruinous
{239} cities remained upon a countryside of scattered peasants.
In this melancholy process of impoverishment and disorder lower
Egypt fared perhaps less badly than the rest of the world.
Alexandria, like Constantinople, continued a dwindling trade
between the east and the west.
Science and political philosophy seemed dead now in both these
warring and decaying empires. The last philosophers of Athens,
until their suppression, preserved the texts of the great
literature of the past with an infinite reverence and want of
understanding. But there remained no class of men in the world,
no free gentlemen with bold and independent habits of thought, to
carry on the tradition of frank statement and enquiry embodied in
these writings. The social and political chaos accounts largely
for the disappearance of this class, but there was also another
reason why the human intelligence was sterile and feverish during
this age. In both Persia and Byzantium it was all age of
intolerance. Both empires were religious empires in a new way, in
a way that greatly hampered the free activities of the human mind.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH (NOW A MOSQUE) OF S. SOPHIA,
CONSTANTINOPLE]
{240}
[Illustration: THE MAGNIFICENT ROOF-WORK IN S. SOPHIA]
Of course the oldest empires in the world were religious empires,
centring upon the worship of a god or of a god-king. Alexander
was treated as a divinity and the Cæsars were gods in so much as
they had altars and temples devoted to them and the offering of
incense was made a test of loyalty to the Roman state. But these
older religions were essentially religions of act and fact. They
did not invade the mind. If a man offered his sacrifice and bowed
to the god, he was left not only to think but to say practically
whatever he liked about the affair. But the new sort of religions
that had come into the world, and particularly Christianity,
turned inward. These new faiths demanded not simply conformity
but understanding belief. Naturally fierce controversy ensued
upon the exact meaning of the things believed. These new
religions were creed religions. The world was confronted with a
new word, Orthodoxy, and with a stern resolve to keep not only
acts but speech {241} and private thought within the limits of a
set teaching. For to hold a wrong opinion, much more to convey it
to other people, was no longer regarded as an intellectual defect
but a moral fault that might condemn a soul to everlasting
destruction.
[Illustration: THE RAVENNA PANEL, DEPICTING JUSTINIAN AND HIS
COURT]
Both Ardashir I who founded the Sassanid dynasty in the third
century A.D., and Constantine the Great who reconstructed the
Roman Empire in the fourth, turned to religious organizations for
help, because in these organizations they saw a new means of using
and controlling the wills of men. And already before the end of
the fourth century both empires were persecuting free talk and
religious innovation. In Persia Ardashir found the ancient
Persian religion of Zoroaster (or Zarathushtra) with its priests
and temples and a sacred fire that burnt upon its altars, ready
for his purpose as a state religion. Before the end of the third
century Zoroastrianism was persecuting Christianity, and in 277
A.D. Mani, the founder of {243} a new faith, the Manichæans, was
crucified and his body flayed. Constantinople, on its side, was
busy hunting out Christian heresies. Manichæan ideas infected
Christianity and had to be fought with the fiercest methods; in
return ideas from Christianity affected the purity of the
Zoroastrian doctrine. All ideas became suspect. Science, which
demands before all things the free action of an untroubled mind,
suffered a complete eclipse throughout this phase of intolerance.
====================================================================
{242}
[Illustration: THE ROCK HEWN TEMPLE AT PETRA]
====================================================================
War, the bitterest theology, and the usual vices of mankind
constituted Byzantine life of those days. It was picturesque, it
was romantic; it had little sweetness or light. When Byzantium
and Persia were not fighting the barbarians from the north, they
wasted Asia Minor and Syria in dreary and destructive hostilities.
Even in close alliance these two empires would have found it a
hard task to turn back the barbarians and recover their
prosperity. The Turks or Tartars first come into history as the
allies first of one power and then of another. In the sixth
century the two chief antagonists were Justinian and Chosroes I;
in the opening of the seventh the Emperor Heraclius was pitted
against Chosroes II (580).
At first and until after Heraclius had become Emperor (610)
Chosroes II carried all before him. He took Antioch, Damascus and
Jerusalem and his armies reached Chalcedon, which is in Asia Minor
over against Constantinople. In 619 he conquered Egypt. Then
Heraclius pressed a counter attack home and routed a Persian army
at Nineveh (627), although at that time there were still Persian
troops at Chalcedon. In 628 Chosroes II was deposed and murdered
by his son, Kavadh, and an inconclusive peace was made between the
two exhausted empires.
Byzantium and Persia had fought their last war. But few people as
yet dreamt of the storm that was even then gathering in the
deserts to put an end for ever to this aimless, chronic struggle.
While Heraclius was restoring order in Syria a message reached
him. It had been brought in to the imperial outpost at Bostra
south of Damascus; it was in Arabic, an obscure Semitic desert
language, and it was read to the Emperor, if it reached him at
all, by an interpreter. It was from someone who called himself
"Muhammad the Prophet of God." It called upon the Emperor to
{244} acknowledge the One True God and to serve him. What the
Emperor said is not recorded.
A similar message came to Kavadh at Ctesiphon. He was annoyed,
tore up the letter, and bade the messenger begone.
This Muhammad, it appeared, was a Bedouin leader whose
headquarters were in the mean little desert town of Medina. He
was preaching a new religion of faith in the One True God.
"Even so, O Lord!" he said; "rend thou his Kingdom from Kavadh."
{245}
XLII
THE DYNASTIES OF SUY AND TANG IN CHINA
Throughout the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, there
was a steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward. The Huns of
Attila were merely precursors of this advance, which led at last
to the establishment of Mongolian peoples in Finland, Esthonia,
Hungary and Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages
akin to Turkish, survive to this day. The Mongolian nomads were,
in fact, playing a role towards the Aryanized civilizations of
Europe and Persia and India that the Aryans had played to the
Ægean and Semitic civilizations ten or fifteen centuries before.
In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is now
Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turkish
officials and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out of
history, absorbed into the general population of Persia. There
were no more Aryan nomads in the history of Central Asia;
Mongolian people had replaced them. The Turks became masters of
Asia from China to the Caspian.
The same great pestilence at the end of the second century A.D.
that had shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown the Han dynasty
in China. Then came a period of division and of Hunnish conquests
from which China arose refreshed, more rapidly and more completely
than Europe was destined to do. Before the end of the sixth
century China was reunited under the Suy dynasty, and this by the
time of Heraclius gave place to the Tang dynasty, whose reign
marks another great period of prosperity for China.
Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China was the
most secure and civilized country in the world. The Han dynasty
had extended her boundaries in the north; the Suy and Tang
dynasties now spread her civilization to the south, and China
{247} began to assume the proportions she has to-day. In Central
Asia indeed she reached much further, extending at last, through
tributary Turkish tribes, to Persia and the Caspian Sea.
====================================================================
{246}
[Illustration: CHINESE EARTHENWARE ART OF THE TANG
DYNASTY, 616-906]
====================================================================
The new China that had arisen was a very different land from the
old China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary school
appeared, there was a great poetic revival; Buddhism had
revolutionized philosophical and religious thought. There were
great advances in artistic work, in technical skill and in all the
amenities of life. Tea was first used, paper manufactured and
wood-block printing began. Millions of people indeed were leading
orderly, graceful and kindly lives in China during these centuries
when the attenuated populations of Europe and Western Asia were
living either in hovels, small walled cities or grim robber
fortresses. While the mind of the west was black with theological
obsessions, the mind of China was open and tolerant and enquiring.
One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai-tsung,
who began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heraclius at
Nineveh. He received an embassy from Heraclius, who was probably
seeking an ally in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a
party of Christian missionaries (635). They were allowed to
explain their creed to Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese
translation of their Scriptures. He pronounced this strange
religion acceptable, and gave permission for the foundation of a
church and monastery.
To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from Muhammad. They
came to Canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole way
from Arabia along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heraclius and Kavadh,
Tai-Tsung gave these envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his
interest in their theological ideas and assisted them to build a
mosque in Canton, a mosque which survives, it is said, to this
day, the oldest mosque in the world.
{248}
XLIII
MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM
A prophetic amateur of history surveying the world in the opening
of the seventh century might have concluded very reasonably that
it was only a question of a few centuries before the whole of
Europe and Asia fell under Mongolian domination. There were no
signs of order or union in Western Europe, and the Byzantine and
Persian Empires were manifestly bent upon a mutual destruction.
India also was divided and wasted. On the other hand China was a
steadily expanding empire which probably at that time exceeded all
Europe in population, and the Turkish people who were growing to
power in Central Asia were disposed to work in accord with China.
And such a prophecy would not have been an altogether vain one. A
time was to come in the thirteenth century when a Mongolian
overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish
dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and
Persian Empires, over Egypt and most of India.
Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred would
have been in under-estimating the recuperative power of the Latin
end of Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian
desert. Arabia would have seemed what it had been for times
immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. No
Semitic people had founded an empire now for more than a thousand
years.
Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of
splendour. They spread their rule and language from Spain to the
boundaries of China. They gave the world a new culture. They
created a religion that is still to this day one of the most vital
forces in the world.
{249}
The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the
young husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of
Mecca, named Muhammad. Until he was forty he did very little to
distinguish himself in the world. He seems to have taken
considerable interest in religious discussion. Mecca was a pagan
city at that time worshipping in particular a black stone, the
Kaaba, of great repute throughout all Arabia and a centre of
pilgrimages; but there were great numbers of Jews in the
country--indeed all the southern portion of Arabia professed the
Jewish faith--and there were Christian churches in Syria.
About forty Muhammad began to develop prophetic characteristics
like those of the Hebrew prophets twelve hundred years before him.
He talked first to his wife of the One True God, and of the
rewards and punishments of virtue and wickedness. There can be no
doubt that his thoughts were very strongly influenced by Jewish
and Christian ideas. He gathered about him a small circle of
believers and presently began to preach in the town against the
prevalent idolatry. This made him extremely unpopular with his
fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to the Kaaba were the
chief source of such prosperity as Mecca enjoyed. He became
bolder and more definite in his teaching, declaring himself to be
the last chosen prophet of God entrusted with a mission to perfect
religion. Abraham, he declared, and Jesus Christ were his
forerunners. He had been chosen to complete and perfect the
revelation of God's will.
He produced verses which he said had been communicated to him by
an angel, and he had a strange vision in which he was taken up
through the Heavens to God and instructed in his mission.
As his teaching increased in force the hostility of his fellow
townsmen increased also. At last a plot was made to kill him; but
he escaped with his faithful friend and disciple, Abu Bekr, to the
friendly town of Medina which adopted his doctrine. Hostilities
followed between Mecca and Medina which ended at last in a treaty.
Mecca was to adopt the worship of the One True God and accept
Muhammad as his prophet, but the adherents of the new _faith were
still to make the pilgrimage to Mecca_ just as they had done when
they were pagans. So Muhammad established the One True God in
{251} Mecca without injuring its pilgrim traffic. In 629 Muhammad
returned to Mecca as its master, a year after he had sent out
these envoys of his to Heraclius, Tai-tsung, Kavadh and all the
rulers of the earth.
====================================================================
{250}
[Illustration: AT PRAYER IN THE DESERT]
[Illustration: LOOKING ACROSS THE SEA OF SAND]
=====================================================================
Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad spread
his power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of wives
in his declining years, and his life on the whole was by modern
standards unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded of
very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite
sincere religious passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and
expositions, the Koran, which he declared was communicated to him
from God. Regarded as literature or philosophy the Koran is
certainly unworthy of its alleged Divine authorship.
Yet when the manifest defects of Muhammad's life and writings have
been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed
upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration. One is its
uncompromising monotheism; its simple enthusiastic faith in the
rule and fatherhood of God and its freedom from theological
complications. Another is its complete detachment from the
sacrificial priest and the temple. It is an entirely prophetic
religion, proof against any possibility of relapse towards blood
sacrifices. In the Koran the limited {252} and ceremonial nature
of the pilgrimage to Mecca is stated beyond the possibility of
dispute, and every precaution was taken by Muhammad to prevent the
deification of himself after his death. And a third element of
strength lay in the insistence of Islam upon the perfect
brotherhood and equality before God of all believers, whatever
their colour, origin or status.
These are the things that made Islam a power in human affairs. It
has been said that the true founder of the Empire of Islam was not
so much Muhammad as his friend and helper, Abu Bekr. If Muhammad,
with his shifty character, was the mind and imagination of
primitive Islam, Abu Bekr was its conscience and its will.
Whenever Muhammad wavered Abu Bekr sustained him. And when
Muhammad died, Abu Bekr became Caliph (= successor), and with that
faith that moves mountains, he set himself simply and sanely to
organize the subjugation of the whole world to Allah--with little
armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs--according to those letters the
prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the monarchs of the
world.
{253}
XLIV
THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS
There follows the most amazing story of conquest in the whole
history of our race. The Byzantine army was smashed at the battle
of the Yarmuk (a tributary of the Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor
Heraclius, his energy sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted
by the Persian war, saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus,
Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem and the rest fall almost without
resistance to the Moslim. Large elements in the population went
over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned east. The Persians had
found an able general in Rustam; they had a great host with a
force of elephants; and for three days they fought the Arabs at
Kadessia (637) and broke at last in headlong rout.
The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem Empire pushed
far into Western Turkestan and eastward until it met the Chinese.
Egypt fell almost without resistance to the new conquerors, who
full of a fanatical belief in the sufficiency of the Koran, wiped
out the vestiges of the book-copying industry of the Alexandria
Library. The tide of conquest poured along the north coast of
Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded
in 710 and the Pyrenees Mountains were reached in 720. In 732 the
Arab advance had reached the centre of France, but here it was
stopped for good at the battle of Poitiers and thrust back as far
as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of Egypt had given the Moslim
a fleet, and for a time it looked as though they would take
Constantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between 672 and
718 but the great city held out against them.
The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political
experience, and this great empire with its capital now at
Damascus, which stretched from Spain to China, was destined to
break up very speedily. From the very beginning doctrinal
differences undermined {254} its unity. But our interest here
lies not with the story of its political disintegration but with
its effect upon the human mind and upon the general destinies of
our race. The Arab intelligence had been flung across the world
even more swiftly and dramatically than had the Greek a thousand
years before. The intellectual stimulation of the whole world
west of China, the break-up of old ideas and development of new
ones, was enormous.
[Map: The Growth of the Moslem Power in 25 Years]
[Map: the Moslem Empire, 750 A.D.]
{255}
In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not
only with Manichæan, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with
the scientific Greek literature, preserved not only in Greek but
in Syrian translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also.
Every-where, and particularly in Spain, it discovered an active
Jewish tradition of speculation and discussion. In Central Asia
it met Buddhism and the material achievements of Chinese
civilization. It learnt the manufacture of paper--which made
printed books possible--from the Chinese. And finally it came
into touch with Indian mathematics and philosophy.
[Illustration: JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR]
Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of
faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible book, was
dropped. Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the
Arab conquerors. By the eighth century there was an educational
{256} organization throughout the whole "Arabized" world. In the
ninth learned men in the schools of Cordoba in Spain were
corresponding with learned men in Cairo, Bagdad, Bokhara and
Samarkand. The Jewish mind assimilated very readily with the
Arab, and for a time the two Semitic races worked together through
the medium of Arabic. Long after the political break-up and
enfeeblement of the Arabs, this intellectual community of the
Arab-speaking world endured. It was still producing very
considerable results in the thirteenth century.
[Illustration: VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES]
So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts
which was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in this
astonishing renascence of the Semitic world. The seed of
Aristotle and the museum of Alexandria that had lain so long
inactive and neglected now germinated and began to grow towards
fruition. Very great advances were made in mathematical, medical
and physical science. {257} The clumsy Roman numerals were ousted
by the Arabic figures we use to this day and the zero sign was
first employed. The very name _algebra_ is Arabic. So is the
word chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol, Aldebaran and
Boötes preserve the traces of Arab conquests in the sky. Their
philosophy was destined to reanimate the medieval philosophy of
France and Italy and the whole Christian world.
The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists, and they
were still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods
and results secret as far as possible. They realized from the
very beginning what enormous advantages their possible discoveries
might give them, and what far-reaching consequences they might
have on human life. They came upon many metallurgical and
technical devices of the utmost value, alloys and dyes,
distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass; but the two
chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was "the
philosopher's stone"--a means of changing the metallic elements
one into another and so getting a control of artificial gold, and
the other was the _elixir vitoe_, a stimulant that would revivify
age and prolong life indefinitely. The crabbed patient
experimenting of these Arab alchemists spread into the Christian
world. The fascination of their enquiries spread. Very gradually
the activities of these alchemists became more social and
co-operative. They found it profitable to exchange and compare
ideas. By insensible gradations the last of the alchemists became
the first of the experimental philosophers.
The old alchemists sought the philosopher's stone which was to
transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality; they
found the methods of modern experimental science which promise in
the end to give man illimitable power over the world and over his
own destiny.
{258}
XLV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM
It is worth while to note the extremely shrunken dimensions of the
share of the world remaining under Aryan control in the seventh
and eighth centuries. A thousand years before, the Aryan-speaking
races were triumphant over all the civilized world west of China.
Now the Mongol had thrust as far as Hungary, nothing of Asia
remained under Aryan rule except the Byzantine dominions in Asia
Minor, and all Africa was lost and nearly all Spain. The great
Hellenic world had shrunken to a few possessions round the nucleus
of the trading city of Constantinople, and the memory of the Roman
world was kept alive by the Latin of the western Christian
priests. In vivid contrast to this tale of retrogression, the
Semitic tradition had risen again from subjugation and obscurity
after a thousand years of darkness.
Yet the vitality of the Nordic peoples was not exhausted.
Confined now to Central and North-Western Europe and terribly
muddled in their social and political ideas, they were
nevertheless building up gradually and steadily a new social order
and preparing unconsciously for the recovery of a power even more
extensive than that they had previously enjoyed.
We have told how at the beginning of the sixth century there
remained no central government in Western Europe at all. That
world was divided up among numbers of local rulers holding their
own as they could. This was too insecure a state of affairs to
last; a system of co-operation and association grew up in this
disorder, the feudal system, which has left its traces upon
European life up to the present time. This feudal system was a
sort of crystallization of society about power. Everywhere the
lone man felt insecure and was prepared to barter a certain amount
of his liberty for help and protection. He sought a stronger man
as his lord and protector; {259} he gave him military services and
paid him dues, and in return he was confirmed in his possession of
what was his. His lord again found safety in vassalage to a still
greater lord. Cities also found it convenient to have feudal
protectors, and monasteries and church estates bound themselves by
similar ties. No doubt in many cases allegiance was claimed
before it was offered; the system grew downward as well as upward.
So a sort of pyramidal system grew up, varying widely in different
localities, permitting at first a considerable play of violence
and private warfare but making steadily for order and a new reign
of law. The pyramids grew up until some became recognizable as
kingdoms. Already by the early sixth century a Frankish kingdom
existed under its founder Clovis in what is now France and the
Netherlands, and presently Visigothic and Lombard and Gothic
kingdoms were in existence.
The Moslim when they crossed the Pyrenees in 720 found this
Frankish kingdom under the practical rule of Charles Martel, the
Mayor of the Palace of a degenerate descendant of Clovis, and
experienced the decisive defeat of Poitiers (732) at his hands.
This Charles Martel was practically overlord of Europe north of
the Alps from the Pyrenees to Hungary. He ruled over a multitude
of subordinate lords speaking French-Latin, and High and Low
German languages. His son Pepin extinguished the last descendants
of Clovis and took the kingly state and title. His grandson
Charlemagne, who began to reign in 768, found himself lord of a
realm so large that he could think of reviving the title of Latin
Emperor. He conquered North Italy and made himself master of
Rome.
Approaching the story of Europe as we do from the wider horizons
of a world history we can see much more distinctly than the mere
nationalist historian how cramping and disastrous this tradition
of the Latin Roman Empire was. A narrow intense struggle for this
phantom predominance was to consume European energy for more than
a thousand years. Through all that period it is possible to trace
certain unquenchable antagonisms; they run through the wits of
Europe like the obsessions of a demented mind. One driving force
was this ambition of successful rulers, which Charlemagne (Charles
the Great) embodied, to become Cæsar. The realm of Charlemagne
consisted of a complex of feudal German states at {260} various
stages of barbarism. West of the Rhine, most of these German
peoples had learnt to speak various Latinized dialects which fused
at last to form French. East of the Rhine, the racially similar
German peoples did not lose their German speech. On account of
this, communication was difficult between these two groups of
barbarian conquerors and a split easily brought about. The split
was made the more easy by the fact that the Frankish usage made it
seem natural to divide the empire of Charlemagne among his sons at
his death. So one aspect of the history of Europe from the days
of Charlemagne onwards is a history of first this monarch and his
family and then that, struggling to a precarious headship of the
kings, princes, dukes, bishops and cities of Europe, while a
steadily deepening antagonism between the French and German
speaking elements develops in the medley. There was a formality
of election for each emperor; and the climax of his ambition was
to struggle to the possession of that worn-out, misplaced capital
Rome and to a coronation there.
[Map: Area more or less under Frankish dominion in the time of
Charles Martel]
{261}
The next factor in the European political disorder was the resolve
of the Church at Rome to make no temporal prince but the Pope of
Rome himself emperor in effect. He was already pontifex maximus;
for all practical purposes he held the decaying city; if he had no
armies he had at least a vast propaganda organization in his
priests throughout the whole Latin world; if he had little power
over men's bodies he held the keys of heaven and hell in their
imaginations and could exercise much influence upon their souls.
So throughout the middle ages while one prince manoeuvred against
another first for equality, then for ascendancy, and at last for
the supreme prize, the Pope of Rome, sometimes boldly, sometimes
craftily, sometimes feebly--for the Popes were a succession of
oldish men and the average reign of a Pope was not more than two
years--manoeuvred for the submission of all the princes to himself
as the ultimate overlord of Christendom.
But these antagonisms of prince against prince and of Emperor
against Pope do not by any means exhaust the factors of the
European confusion. There was still an Emperor in Constantinople
speaking Greek and claiming the allegiance of all Europe. When
Charlemagne sought to revive the empire, it was merely the Latin
end of the empire he revived. It was natural that a sense of
rivalry between Latin Empire and Greek Empire should develop very
readily. And still more readily did the rivalry of
Greek-speaking Christianity and the newer Latin-speaking version
develop. The Pope of Rome claimed to be the successor of St.
Peter, the chief of the apostles of Christ, and the head of the
Christian community everywhere. Neither the emperor nor the
patriarch in Constantinople were disposed to acknowledge this
claim. A dispute about a fine point in the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity consummated a long series of dissensions in a final
rupture in 1054. The Latin Church and the Greek Church became and
remained thereafter distinct and frankly antagonistic. This
antagonism must be added to the others in our estimate of the
conflicts that wasted Latin Christendom in the middle ages.
Upon this divided world of Christendom rained the blows of three
sets of antagonists. About the Baltic and North Seas remained a
series of Nordic tribes who were only very slowly and reluctantly
{263} Christianized; these were the Northmen. They had taken to
the sea and piracy, and were raiding all the Christian coasts down
to Spain. They had pushed up the Russian rivers to the desolate
central lands and brought their shipping over into the
south-flowing rivers. They had come out upon the Caspian and Black
Seas as pirates also. They set up principalities in Russia; they
were the first people to be called Russians. These Northmen
Russians came near to taking Constantinople. England in the early
ninth century was a Christianized Low German country under a king,
Egbert, a protégé and pupil of Charlemagne. The Northmen wrested
half the kingdom from his successor Alfred the Great (886), and
finally under Canute (1016) made themselves masters of the whole
land. Under Rolph the Ganger (912) another band of Northmen
conquered the north of France, which became Normandy.
====================================================================
{262}
[Illustration: STATUE OF CHARLEMAGNE IN FRONT OF NOTRE DAME,
PARIS]
====================================================================
Canute ruled not only over England but over Norway and Denmark,
but his brief empire fell to pieces at his death through that
political weakness of the barbaric peoples--division among a
ruler's sons. It is interesting to speculate what might have
happened if this temporary union of the Northmen had endured.
They were a race of astonishing boldness and energy. They sailed
in their galleys even to Iceland and Greenland. They were the
first Europeans to land on American soil. Later on Norman
adventurers were to recover Sicily from the Saracens and sack
Rome. It is a fascinating thing to imagine what a great northern
sea-faring power might have grown out of Canute's kingdom,
reaching from America to Russia.
To the east of the Germans and Latinized Europeans was a medley of
Slav tribes and Turkish peoples. Prominent among these were the
Magyars or Hungarians who were coming westward throughout the
eighth and ninth centuries. Charlemagne held them for a time, but
after his death they established themselves in what is now
Hungary; and after the fashion of their kindred predecessors, the
Huns, raided every summer into the settled parts of Europe. In
938 they went through Germany into France, crossed the Alps into
North Italy, and so came home, burning, robbing and destroying.
Finally pounding away from the south at the vestiges of the {264}
Roman Empire were the Saracens. They had made themselves largely
masters of the sea; their only formidable adversaries upon the
water were the Northmen, the Russian Northmen out of the Black Sea
and the Northmen of the west.
[Map: Europe at the death of Charlemagne--814]
Hemmed in by these more vigorous and aggressive peoples, amidst
forces they did not understand and dangers they could not
estimate, Charlemagne and after him a series of other ambitious
spirits took up the futile drama of restoring the Western Empire
under the name of the Holy Roman Empire. From the time of
Charlemagne onward this idea obsessed the political life of
Western Europe, while in the East the Greek half of the Roman
power decayed and dwindled until at last nothing remained of it at
all but the corrupt trading city of Constantinople and a few miles
of territory about it. Politically the continent of Europe
remained traditional and uncreative from the time of Charlemagne
onward for a thousand years.
{265}
The name of Charlemagne looms large in European history but his
personality is but indistinctly seen. He could not read nor
write, but he had a considerable respect for learning; he liked to
be read aloud to at meals and he had a weakness for theological
discussion. At his winter quarters at
Aix-la-Chapelle or Mayence he gathered about him a number of
learned men and picked up much from their conversation. In the
summer he made war, against the Spanish Saracens, against the
Slavs and Magyars, against the Saxons, and other still heathen
German tribes. It is doubtful whether the idea of becoming Cæsar
in succession to Romulus Augustulus occurred to him before his
acquisition of North Italy, or whether it was suggested to him by
Pope Leo III, who was anxious to make the Latin Church independent
of Constantinople.
There were the most extraordinary manoeuvres at Rome between the
Pope and the prospective emperor in order to make it appear or not
appear as if the Pope gave him the imperial crown. The Pope
succeeded in crowning his visitor and conqueror by surprise in St.
Peter's on Christmas Day 800 A.D. He produced a crown, put it on
the head of Charlemagne and hailed him Cæsar and Augustus. There
was great applause among the people. Charlemagne was by no means
pleased at the way in which the thing was done, it rankled in his
mind as a defeat; and he left the most careful instructions to his
son that he was not to let the Pope crown him emperor; he was to
seize the crown into his own hands and put it on his own head
himself. So at the very outset of this imperial revival we see
beginning the age-long dispute of Pope and Emperor for priority.
But Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, disregarded his
father's instructions and was entirely submissive to the Pope.
The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the death of Louis the
Pious and the split between the French-speaking Franks and the
German-speaking Franks widened. The next emperor to arise was
Otto, the son of a certain Henry the Fowler, a Saxon, who had been
elected King of Germany by an assembly of German princes and
prelates in 919. Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned emperor
there in 962. This Saxon line came to an end early in the
eleventh century and gave place to other German rulers. The
feudal princes and nobles to the west who spoke various French
dialects {266} did not fall under the sway of these German
emperors after the Carlovingian line, the line that is descended
from Charlemagne, had come to an end, and no part of Britain ever
came into the Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King
of France and a number of lesser feudal rulers remained outside.
In 987 the Kingdom of France passed out of the possession of the
Carlovingian line into the hands of Hugh Capet, whose descendants
were still reigning in the eighteenth century. At the time of
Hugh Capet the King of France ruled only a comparatively small
territory round Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an invasion
of the Norwegian Northmen under King Harold Hardrada and by the
Latinized Northmen under the Duke of Normandy. Harold King of
England defeated the former at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and
was defeated by the latter at Hastings. England was conquered by
the Normans, and so cut off from Scandinavian, Teutonic and
Russian affairs, and brought into the most intimate relations and
conflicts with the French. For the next four centuries the
English were entangled in the conflicts of the French feudal
princes and wasted upon the fields of France.
{267}
XLVI
THE CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION
It is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the
Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid of the _Arabian
Nights_. It is recorded that Haroun-al-Raschid sent ambassadors
from Bagdad--which had now replaced Damascus as the Moslem
capital--with a splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant and the
keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This latter present was admirably
calculated to set the Byzantine Empire and this new Holy Roman
Empire by the ears as to which was the proper protector of the
Christians in Jerusalem.
These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth century
was still a weltering disorder of war and pillage, there
flourished a great Arab Empire in Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more
civilized than anything Europe could show. Here literature and
science still lived; the arts flourished, and the mind of man
could move without fear or superstition. And even in Spain and
North Africa where the Saracenic dominions were falling into
political confusion there was a vigorous intellectual life.
Aristotle was read and discussed by these Jews and Arabs during
these centuries of European darkness. They guarded the neglected
seeds of science and philosophy.
North-east of the Caliph's dominions was a number of Turkish
tribes. They had been converted to Islam, and they held the faith
much more simply and fiercely than the actively intellectual Arabs
and Persians to the south. In the tenth century the Turks were
growing strong and vigorous while the Arab power was divided and
decaying. The relations of the Turks to the Empire of the
Caliphate became very similar to the relations of the Medes to the
last Babylonian Empire fourteen centuries before. In the eleventh
century a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk Turks, came down
into Mesopotamia and made the Caliph their nominal ruler but
really their {268} captive and tool. They conquered Armenia.
Then they struck at the remnants of the Byzantine power in Asia
Minor. In 1071 the Byzantine army was utterly smashed at the
battle of Melasgird, and the Turks swept forward until not a trace
of Byzantine rule remained in Asia. They took the fortress of
Nicæa over against Constantinople, and prepared to attempt that
city.
The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror. He
was already heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman
adventurers who had seized Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish
people, the Petschenegs, who were raiding over the Danube. In his
extremity he sought help where he could, and it is notable that he
did not appeal to the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as
the head of Latin Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII, and
his successor Alexius Comnenus wrote still more urgently to Urban
II.
[Illustration: CRUSADER TOMBS IN EXETER CATHEDRAL]
This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the Latin
and Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly alive in
men's minds, and this disaster to Byzantium must have presented
itself to the Pope as a supreme opportunity for reasserting the
supremacy of the Latin Church over the dissentient Greeks.
Moreover this occasion gave the Pope a chance to deal with two
other matters that troubled western Christendom very greatly. One
was the custom of "private war" which disordered social life, and
the other was the superabundant fighting energy of the Low Germans
and Christianized Northmen and particularly of the Franks and
Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of the Cross, was
{269} preached against the Turkish captors of Jerusalem, and a
truce to all warfare amongst Christians (1095). The declared
object of this war was the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from the
unbelievers. A man called Peter the Hermit carried on a popular
propaganda throughout France and Germany on broadly democratic
lines. He went clad in a coarse garment, barefooted on an ass, he
carried a huge cross and harangued the crowd in street or
market-place or church. He denounced the cruelties practised upon
the Christian pilgrims by the Turks, and the shame of the Holy
Sepulchre being in any but Christian hands. The fruits of
centuries of Christian teaching became apparent in the response.
A great wave of enthusiasm swept the western world, and popular
Christendom discovered itself.
[Illustration: VIEW OF CAIRO]
Such a widespread uprising of the common people in relation to a
single idea as now occurred was a new thing in the history of our
race. There is nothing to parallel it in the previous history of
the {270} Roman Empire or of India or China. On a smaller scale,
however, there had been similar movements among the Jewish people
after their liberation from the Babylonian captivity, and later on
Islam was to display a parallel susceptibility to collective
feeling. Such movements were certainly connected with the new
spirit that had come into life with the development of the
missionary-teaching religions. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and his
disciples, Mani, Muhammad, were all exhorters of men's individual
souls. They brought the personal conscience face to face with
God. Before that time religion had been much more a business of
fetish, of pseudoscience, than of conscience. The old kind of
religion turned upon temple, initiated priest and mystical
sacrifice, and ruled the common man like a slave by fear. The new
kind of religion made a man of him.
The preaching of the First Crusade was the first stirring of the
common people in European history. It may be too much to call it
the birth of modern democracy, but certainly at that time modern
democracy stirred. Before very long we shall find it stirring
again, and raising the most disturbing social and religious
questions.
Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully
and lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people, crowds
rather than armies, set out eastward from France and the Rhineland
and Central Europe without waiting for leaders or proper equipment
to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. This was the "people's crusade."
Two great mobs blundered into Hungary, mistook the recently
converted Magyars for pagans, committed atrocities and were
massacred. A third multitude with a similarly confused mind,
after a great pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland, marched
eastward, and was also destroyed in Hungary. Two other huge
crowds, under the leadership of Peter the Hermit himself, reached
Constantinople, crossed the Bosphorus, and were massacred rather
than defeated by the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this first
movement of the European people, as people.
Next year (1097) the real fighting forces crossed the Bosphorus.
Essentially they were Norman in leadership and spirit. They
stormed Nicæa, marched by much the same route as Alexander had
followed fourteen centuries before, to Antioch. The siege of
Antioch {271} kept them a year, and in June 1099 they invested
Jerusalem. It was stormed after a month's siege. The slaughter
was terrible. Men riding on horseback were splashed by the blood
in the streets. At nightfall on July 15th the Crusaders had
fought their way into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and
overcome all opposition there: blood-stained, weary and "sobbing
from excess of joy" they knelt down in prayer.
[Illustration: THE HORSES OF S. MARK, VENICE]
Immediately the hostility of Latin and Greek broke out again. The
Crusaders were the servants of the Latin Church, and the Greek
patriarch of Jerusalem found himself in a far worse case under the
triumphant Latins than under the Turks. The Crusaders discovered
themselves between Byzantine and Turk and fighting both. Much of
Asia Minor was recovered by the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin
princes were left, a buffer between Turk and Greek, with Jerusalem
and a few small principalities, of which Edessa was one of the
chief, in Syria. Their grip even on these possessions was
precarious, and in 1144 Edessa fell to the Moslim, leading to an
ineffective Second Crusade, which failed to recover Edessa but
saved Antioch from a similar fate.
{272}
In 1169 the forces of Islam were rallied under a Kurdish
adventurer named Saladin who had made himself master of Egypt. He
preached a Holy War against the Christians, recaptured Jerusalem
in 1187, and so provoked the Third Crusade. This failed to
recover Jerusalem. In the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) the Latin
Church turned frankly upon the Greek Empire, and there was not
even a pretence of fighting the Turks. It started from Venice and
in 1204 it stormed Constantinople. The great rising trading city
of Venice was the leader in this adventure, and most of the coasts
and islands of the Byzantine Empire were annexed by the Venetians.
A "Latin" emperor (Baldwin of Flanders) was set up in
Constantinople and the Latin and Greek Church were declared to be
reunited. The Latin emperors ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to
1261 when the Greek world shook itself free again from Roman
predominance.
The twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth was the
age of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was the age of the
ascendancy of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth the age of the
Northmen. A united Christendom under the rule of the Pope came
nearer to being a working reality than it ever was before or after
that time.
In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and
widespread over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed
through some dark and discreditable phases; few writers can be
found to excuse the lives of Popes John XI and John XII in the
tenth century; they were abominable creatures; but the heart and
body of Latin Christendom had remained earnest and simple; the
generality of the common priests and monks and nuns had lived
exemplary and faithful lives. Upon the wealth of confidence such
lives created rested the power of the church. Among the great
Popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I (590-604)
and Leo III (795-816) who invited Charlemagne to be Cæsar and
crowned him in spite of himself. Towards the close of the
eleventh century there arose a great clerical statesman,
Hildebrand, who ended his life as Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085).
Next but one after him came Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the
First Crusade. These two were the founders of this period of
papal greatness during which the Popes lorded it over the
Emperors. From Bulgaria to Ireland and {274} from Norway to
Sicily and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Gregory VII obliged
the Emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him at Canossa and to
await forgiveness for three days and nights in the courtyard of
the castle, clad in sackcloth and barefooted to the snow. In 1176
at Venice the Emperor Frederick (Frederick Barbarossa), knelt to
Pope Alexander III and swore fealty to him.
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{273}
[Illustration: A COURTYARD IN THE ALHAMBRA]
====================================================================
The great power of the church in the beginning of the eleventh
century lay in the wills and consciences of men. It failed to
retain the moral prestige on which its power was based. In the
opening decades of the fourteenth century it was discovered that
the power of the Pope had evaporated. What was it that destroyed
the naive confidence of the common people of Christendom in the
church so that they would no longer rally to its appeal and serve
its purposes?
The first trouble was certainly the accumulation of wealth by the
church. The church never died, and there was a frequent
disposition on the part of dying childless people to leave lands
to the church. Penitent sinners were exhorted to do so.
Accordingly in many European countries as much as a fourth of the
land became church property. The appetite for property grows with
what it feeds upon. Already in the thirteenth century it was
being said everywhere that the priests were not good men, that
they were always hunting for money and legacies.
The kings and princes disliked this alienation of property very
greatly. In the place of feudal lords capable of military
support, they found their land supporting abbeys and monks and
nuns. And these lands were really under foreign dominion. Even
before the time of Pope Gregory VII there had been a struggle
between the princes and the papacy over the question of
"investitures," the question that is of who should appoint the
bishops. If that power rested with the Pope and not the King,
then the latter lost control not only of the consciences of his
subjects but of a considerable part of his dominions. For also
the clergy claimed exemption from taxation. They paid their taxes
to Rome. And not only that, but the church also claimed the right
to levy a tax of one-tenth upon the property of the layman in
addition to the taxes he paid his prince.
{275}
The history of nearly every country in Latin Christendom tells of
the same phase in the eleventh century, a phase of struggle
between monarch and Pope on the issue of investitures and
generally it tells of a victory for the Pope. He claimed to be
able to excommunicate the prince, to absolve his subjects from
their allegiance to him, to recognize a successor. He claimed to
be able to put a nation under an interdict, and then nearly all
priestly functions ceased except the sacraments of baptism,
confirmation and penance; the priests could neither hold the
ordinary services, marry people, nor bury the dead. With these
two weapons it was possible for the twelfth century Popes to curb
the most recalcitrant princes and overawe the most restive
peoples. These were enormous powers, and enormous powers are only
to be used on extraordinary occasions. The Popes used them at
last with a frequency that staled their effect. Within thirty
years at the end of the twelfth century we find Scotland, France
and England in turn under an interdict. And also the Popes could
not resist the temptation to preach crusades against offending
princes--until the crusading spirit was extinct.
It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled simply
against the princes and had had a care to keep its hold upon the
general mind, it might have achieved a permanent dominion over all
Christendom. But the high claims of the Pope were reflected as
arrogance in the conduct of the clergy. Before the eleventh
century the Roman priests could marry; they had close ties with
the people among whom they lived; they were indeed a part of the
people. Gregory VII made them celibates; he cut the priests off
from too great an intimacy with the laymen in order to bind them
more closely to Rome, but indeed he opened a fissure between the
church and the commonalty. The church had its own law courts.
Cases involving not merely priests but monks, students, crusaders,
widows, orphans and the helpless were reserved for the clerical
courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages and
oaths and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever
the layman found himself in conflict with the priest he had to go
to a clerical court. The obligations of peace and war fell upon
his shoulders alone and left the priest free. It is no great
wonder that jealousy and hatred of the priests grew up in the
Christian world.
{276}
Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the
consciences of common men. It fought against religious
enthusiasm, which should have been its ally, and it forced
doctrinal orthodoxy upon honest doubt and aberrant opinion. When
the church interfered in matters of morality it had the common man
with it, but not when it interfered in matters of doctrine. When
in the south of France Waldo taught a return to the simplicity of
Jesus in faith and life, Innocent III preached a crusade against
the Waldenses, Waldo's followers, and permitted them to be
suppressed with fire, sword, rape and the most abominable
cruelties. When again St. Francis of Assisi
(1181-1226) taught the imitation of Christ and a life of poverty
and service, his followers, the Franciscans, were persecuted,
scourged, imprisoned and dispersed. In 1318 four of them were
burnt alive at Marseilles. On the other hand the fiercely
orthodox order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic
(1170-1221) was strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its
assistance set up an organization, the Inquisition, for the
hunting of heresy and the affliction of free thought.
So it was that the church by excessive claims, by unrighteous
privileges, and by an irrational intolerance destroyed that free
faith of the common man which was the final source of all its
power. The story of its decline tells of no adequate foemen from
without but continually of decay from within.
{277}
XLVII
RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM
One very great weakness of the Roman Church in its struggle to
secure the headship of all Christendom was the manner in which the
Pope was chosen.
If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and
establish one rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it
was vitally necessary that it should have a strong, steady and
continuous direction. In those great days of its opportunity it
needed before all things that the Popes when they took office
should be able men in the prime of life, that each should have his
successor-designate with whom he could discuss the policy of the
church, and that the forms and processes of election should be
clear, definite, unalterable and unassailable. Unhappily none of
these things obtained. It was not even clear who could vote in
the election of a Pope, nor whether the Byzantine or Holy Roman
Emperor had a voice in the matter. That very great papal
statesman Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085) did much to
regularize the election. He confined the votes to the Roman
cardinals and he reduced the Emperor's share to a formula of
assent conceded to him by the church, but he made no provision for
a successor-designate and he left it possible for the disputes of
the cardinals to keep the See vacant, as in some cases it was kept
vacant, for a year or more.
The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in
the whole history of the papacy up to the sixteenth century. From
quite early times onward there were disputed elections and two or
more men each claiming to be Pope. The church would then be
subjected to the indignity of going to the Emperor or some other
outside arbiter to settle the dispute. And the career of everyone
of the great Popes ended in a note of interrogation. At his death
the church might be left headless and as ineffective as a
decapitated {279} body. Or he might be replaced by some old rival
eager only to discredit and undo his work. Or some enfeebled old
man tottering on the brink of the grave might succeed him.
====================================================================
{278}
[Illustration: MILAN CATHEDRAL]
====================================================================
It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal
organization should attract the interference of the various German
princes, the French King, and the Norman and French Kings who
ruled in England; that they should all try to influence the
elections, and have a Pope in their own interest established in
the Lateran Palace at Rome. And the more powerful and important
the Pope became in European affairs, the more urgent did these
interventions become. Under the circumstances it is no great
wonder that many of the Popes were weak and futile. The
astonishing thing is that many of them were able and courageous
men.
One of the most vigorous and interesting of the Popes of this
great period was Innocent III (1198-1216) who was so fortunate as
to become Pope before he was thirty-eight. He and his successors
were pitted against an even more interesting personality, the
Emperor Frederick II; _Stupor mundi_ he was called, the Wonder of
the world. The struggle of this monarch against Rome is a turning
place in history. In the end Rome defeated him and destroyed his
dynasty, but he left the prestige of the church and Pope so badly
wounded that its wounds festered and led to its decay.
Frederick was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and his mother was
the daughter of Roger I, the Norman King of Sicily. He inherited
this kingdom in 1198 when he was a child of four years. Innocent
III had been made his guardian. Sicily in those days had been but
recently conquered by the Normans; the Court was half oriental and
full of highly educated Arabs; and some of these were associated
in the education of the young king. No doubt they were at some
pains to make their point of view clear to him. He got a Moslem
view of Christianity as well as a Christian view of Islam, and the
unhappy result of this double system of instruction was a view,
exceptional in that age of faith, that all religions were
impostures. He talked freely on the subject; his heresies and
blasphemies are on record.
As the young man grew up he found himself in conflict with his
guardian. Innocent III wanted altogether too much from his ward.
{280} When the opportunity came for Frederick to succeed as
Emperor, the Pope intervened with conditions. Frederick must
promise to put down heresy in Germany with a strong hand. Moreover
he must relinquish his crown in Sicily and South Italy, because
otherwise he would be too strong for the Pope. And the German
clergy were to be freed from all taxation. Frederick agreed but
with no intention of keeping his word. The Pope had already
induced the French King to make war upon his own subjects in
France, the cruel and bloody crusade against the Waldenses; he
wanted Frederick to do the same thing in Germany. But Frederick
being far more of a heretic than any of the simple pietists who
had incurred the Pope's animosity, lacked the crusading impulse.
And when Innocent urged him to crusade against the Moslim and
recover Jerusalem he was equally ready to promise and equally
slack in his performance.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL CRUSADER: DON RODRIGO DE CARDENAS]
Having secured the imperial crown Frederick II stayed in Sicily,
which he greatly preferred to Germany as a residence, and did
nothing to redeem any of his promises to Innocent III, who died
baffled in 1216.
{281}
Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent, could do no better with
Frederick, and Gregory IX (1227) came to the papal throne
evidently resolved to settle accounts with this young man at any
cost. He excommunicated him. Frederick II was denied all the
comforts of religion. In the half-Arab Court of Sicily this
produced singularly little discomfort. And also the Pope
addressed a public letter to the Emperor reciting his vices (which
were indisputable), his heresies, and his general misconduct. To
this Frederick replied in a document of diabolical ability. It
was addressed to all the princes of Europe, and it made the first
clear statement of the issue between the Pope and the princes. He
made a shattering attack upon the manifest ambition of the Pope to
become the absolute ruler of all Europe. He suggested a union of
princes against this usurpation. He directed the attention of
the princes specifically to the wealth of the church.
Having fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to perform
his twelve-year-old promise and go upon a crusade. This was the
Sixth Crusade (1228). It was as a crusade, farcical. Frederick
II went to Egypt and met and discussed affairs with the Sultan.
These two gentlemen, both of sceptical opinions, exchanged
congenial views, made a commercial convention to their mutual
advantage, and agreed to transfer Jerusalem to Frederick. This
indeed was a new sort of crusade, a crusade by private treaty.
Here was no blood splashing the conqueror, no "weeping with excess
of joy." As this astonishing crusader was an excommunicated man,
he had to be content with a purely secular coronation as King of
Jerusalem, taking the crown from the altar with his own hand--for
all the clergy were bound to shun him. He then returned to Italy,
chased the papal armies which had invaded his dominions back to
their own territories, and obliged the Pope to grant him
absolution from his excommunication. So a prince might treat the
Pope in the thirteenth century, and there was now no storm of
popular indignation to avenge him. Those days were past.
In 1239 Gregory IX resumed his struggle with Frederick,
excommunicated him for a second time, and renewed that warfare of
public abuse in which the papacy had already suffered severely.
The controversy was revived after Gregory IX was dead, when
Innocent IV {282} was Pope; and again a devastating letter, which
men were bound to remember, was written by Frederick against the
church. He denounced the pride and irreligion of the clergy, and
ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride and
wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general confiscation
of church property--for the good of the church. It was a
suggestion that never afterwards left the imagination of the
European princes.
We will not go on to tell of his last years. The particular
events of his life are far less significant than its general
atmosphere. It is possible to piece together something of his
court life in Sicily. He was luxurious in his way of living, and
fond of beautiful things. He is described as licentious. But it
is clear that he was a man of very effectual curiosity and
inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as well as Christian
philosophers at his court, and he did much to irrigate the Italian
mind with Saracenic influences. Through him the Arabic numerals
and algebra were introduced to Christian students, and among other
philosophers at his court was Michael Scott, who translated
portions of Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great
Arab philosopher Averroes (of Cordoba). In 1224 Frederick founded
the University of Naples, and he enlarged and enriched the great
medical school at Salerno University. He also founded a
zoological garden. He left a book on hawking, which shows him to
have been an acute observer of the habits of birds, and he was one
of the first Italians to write Italian verse. Italian poetry was
indeed born at his court. He has been called by an able writer,
"the first of the moderns," and the phrase expresses aptly the
unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual side.
A still more striking intimation of the decay of the living and
sustaining forces of the papacy appeared when presently the Popes
came into conflict with the growing power of the French King.
During the lifetime of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into
disunion, and the French King began to play the role of guard,
supporter and rival to the Pope that had hitherto fallen to the
Hohenstaufen Emperors. A series of Popes pursued the policy of
supporting the French monarchs. French princes were established
in the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, with the support and approval
of Rome, and the French Kings saw before them the possibility of
{283} restoring and ruling the Empire of Charlemagne. When,
however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II,
the last of the Hohenstaufens, came to all end and Rudolf of
Habsburg was elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of
Rome began to fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about
with the sympathies of each successive Pope. In the East in 1261
the Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and
the founder of the new Greek dynasty, Michael Palæologus, Michael
VIII, after some unreal tentatives of reconciliation with the
Pope, broke away from the Roman communion altogether, and with
that, and the fall of the Latin kingdoms in Asia, the eastward
ascendancy of the Popes came to an end.
[Illustration: COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK
OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile to
the French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and
mission of Rome. For a time he carried things with a high hand.
In 1300 he held a jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims
assembled in Rome. "So great was the influx of money into the
papal treasury, that two assistants were kept busy with the rakes
collecting the {284} offerings that were deposited at the tomb of
St. Peter." [5] But this festival was a delusive triumph.
Boniface came into conflict with the French King in 1302, and in
1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of excommunication
against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in his own
ancestral palace at Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret. This agent
from the French King forced an entrance into the palace, made his
way into the bedroom of the frightened Pope--he was lying in bed
with a cross in his hands--and heaped threats and insults upon
him. The Pope was liberated a day or so later by the townspeople,
and returned to Rome; but there he was seized upon and again made
prisoner by the Orsini family, and in a few weeks' time the
shocked and disillusioned old man died a prisoner in their hands.
[Illustration: COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK
OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose
against Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the
Pope's native town. The important point to note is that the
French King {285} in this rough treatment of the head of
Christendom was acting with the full approval of his people; he
had summoned a council of the Three Estates of France (lords,
church and commons) and gained their consent before proceeding to
extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany nor England was there the
slightest general manifestation of disapproval at this free
handling of the sovereign pontiff. The idea of Christendom had
decayed until its power over the minds of men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to
recover its moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a
Frenchman, the choice of King Philip of France. He never came to
Rome. He set up his court in the town of Avignon, which then
belonged not to France but to the papal See, though embedded in
French territory, and there his successors remained until 1377,
when Pope Gregory XI returned to the Vatican palace in Rome. But
Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of the whole church with
him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin and their habits
and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in 1378
Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these
dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected
another Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This split is called
the Great Schism. The Popes remained in Rome, and all the
anti-French powers, the Emperor, the King of England, Hungary,
Poland and the North of Europe were loyal to them. The
anti-Popes, on the other hand, continued in Avignon, and were
supported by the King of France, his ally the King of Scotland,
Spain, Portugal and various German princes. Each Pope
excommunicated and cursed the adherents of his rival (1378-1417).
Is it any wonder that presently all over Europe people began to
think for themselves in matters of religion?
The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, which we
have noted in the preceding chapters, were but two among many of
the new forces that were arising in Christendom, either to hold or
shatter the church as its own wisdom might decide.
Those two orders the church did assimilate and use, though with a
little violence in the case of the former. But other forces were
more frankly disobedient and critical. A century and a half later
{286} came Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a learned Doctor at
Oxford. Quite late in his life he began a series of outspoken
criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom of the
church. He organized a number of poor priests, the Wycliffites,
to spread his ideas throughout England; and in order that people
should judge between the church and himself, he translated the
Bible into English. He was a more learned and far abler man than
either St. Francis or St. Dominic. He had supporters in high
places and a great following among the people; and though Rome
raged against him, and ordered his imprisonment, he died a free
man. But the black and ancient spirit that was leading the
Catholic Church to its destruction would not let his bones rest in
the grave. By a decree of the Council of Constance in 1415, his
remains were ordered to be dug up and burnt, an order which was
carried out at the command of Pope Martin V by Bishop Fleming in
1428. This desecration was not the act of some isolated fanatic;
it was the official act of the church.
[5] J. H. Robinson.
{287}
XLVIII
THE MONGOL CONQUESTS
But in the thirteenth century, while this strange and finally
ineffectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of the
Pope was going on in Europe, far more momentous events were afoot
upon the larger stage of Asia. A Turkish people from the country
to the north of China rose suddenly to prominence in the world's
affairs, and achieved such a series of conquests as has no
parallel in history. These were the Mongols. At the opening of
the thirteenth century they were a horde of nomadic horsemen,
living very much as their predecessors, the Huns, had done,
subsisting chiefly upon meat and mare's milk and living in tents
of skin. They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion,
and brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military
confederacy. Their central camp was at Karakorum in Mongolia.
At this time China was in a state of division. The great dynasty
of Tang had passed into decay by the tenth century, and after a
phase of division into warring states, three main empires, that of
Kin in the north with Pekin as its capital and that of Sung in the
south with a capital at Nankin, and Hsia in the centre, remain.
In 1214 Jengis Khan, the leader of the Mongol confederates, made
war on the Kin Empire and captured Pekin (1214). He then turned
westward and conquered Western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia, India
down to Lahore, and South Russia as far as Kieff. He died master
of a vast empire that reached from the Pacific to the Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai Khan, continued this astonishing career of
conquest. His armies were organized to a very high level of
efficiency; and they had with them a new Chinese invention,
gunpowder, which they used in small field guns. He completed the
conquest of the Kin Empire and then swept his hosts right across
Asia to Russia (1235), an altogether amazing march. Kieff was
{288} destroyed in 1240, and nearly all Russia became tributary to
the Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a mixed army of Poles and
Germans was annihilated at the battle of Liegnitz in Lower Silesia
in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not seem to have made any
great efforts to stay the advancing tide.
[Map: The Empire of Jengis Khan at his death (1227)]
"It is only recently," says Bury in his notes to Gibbon's _Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_, "that European history has begun to
understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran
Poland and occupied Hungary in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by
consummate strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming
superiority of numbers. But this fact has not yet become a matter
of common knowledge; the vulgar opinion which represents the
Tartars as a wild horde carrying all before them solely by their
multitude, and galloping through Eastern Europe without a
strategic plan, rushing at all obstacles and overcoming them by
mere weight, still prevails. . . .
"It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements
were carried out in operations extending from the Lower Vistula to
Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the {289} power of
any European army of the time, and it was beyond the vision of any
European commander. There was no general in Europe, from
Frederick II downward, who was not a tyro in strategy compared to
Subutai. It should also be noticed that the Mongols embarked upon
the enterprise with full knowledge of the political situation of
Hungary and the condition of Poland--they had taken care to inform
themselves by a well-organized system of spies; on the other hand,
the Hungarians and the Christian powers, like childish barbarians,
knew hardly anything about their enemies."
[Map: The Ottoman Empire before 1453]
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not
continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands
and hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they
turned southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or
assimilating the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously
massacred and assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns
before them. From the Hungarian plain they would probably have
made raids west and south as the Hungarians had done in the ninth
century, the Avars in the seventh and eighth and the Huns in the
fifth. But Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242 there was trouble
{290} about the succession, and recalled by this, the undefeated
hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary and Roumania
towards the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their
Asiatic conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth century they
had conquered the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan succeeded Ogdai Khan as
Great Khan in 1251, and made his brother Kublai Khan governor of
China. In 1280 Kublai Khan had been formally recognized Emperor
of China, and so founded the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368.
While the last ruins of the Sung rule were going down in China,
another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was conquering Persia and Syria.
The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to Islam at this time,
and not only massacred the population of Bagdad when they captured
that city, but set to work to destroy the immemorial irrigation
system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly prosperous and
populous from the early days of Sumeria. From that time until our
own Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins, sustaining only a
scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never penetrated; the
Sultan of Egypt completely defeated an army of Hulagu's in
Palestine in 1260.
After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The
dominions of the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states.
The eastern Mongols became Buddhists, like the Chinese; the
western became Moslim. The Chinese threw off the rule of the Yuan
dynasty in 1368, and set up the native Ming dynasty which
flourished from 1368 to 1644. The Russians remained tributary to
the Tartar hordes upon the south-east steppes until 1480, when the
Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his allegiance and laid the
foundation of modern Russia.
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol
vigour under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He
established himself in Western Turkestan, assumed the title of
Grand Khan in 1369, and conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the
most savage and destructive of all the Mongol conquerors. He
established an empire of desolation that did not survive his
death. In 1505, however, a descendant of this Timur, an
adventurer named Baber, got together an army with guns and swept
down upon the {292} plains of India. His grandson Akbar
(1556-1605) completed his conquests, and this Mongol (or "Mogul"
as the Arabs called it) dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater
part of India until the eighteenth century.
=====================================================================
{291}
[Illustration: TARTAR HORSEMEN]
====================================================================
[Map: The Ottoman Empire at the death of Suleiman the Magnificent,
1566 A.D.]
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol
conquest in the thirteenth century was to drive a certain tribe of
Turks, the Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They
extended and consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the
Dardanelles and conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at
last Constantinople remained like an island amongst the Ottoman
dominions. In 1453 the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, took
Constantinople, attacking it from the European side with a great
number of guns. This event caused intense excitement in Europe
and there was talk of a crusade, but the day of the crusades was
past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans
conquered Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa, and
their fleet made them masters of the Mediterranean. They very
nearly took Vienna, and they exacted it tribute from the Emperor.
There were but two items to offset the general ebb of Christian
{293} dominion in the fifteenth century. One was the restoration
of the independence of Moscow (1480); the other was the gradual
reconquest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492, Granada, the last
Moslem state in the peninsula, fell to King Ferdinand of Aragon
and his Queen Isabella of Castile.
But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of
Lepanto broke the prick of the Ottomans, and restored the
Mediterranean waters to Christian ascendancy.
{294}
XLIX
THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
Throughout the twelfth century there were many signs that the
European intelligence was recovering courage and leisure, and
preparing to take up again the intellectual enterprises of the
first Greek scientific enquiries and such speculations as those of
the Italian Lucretius. The causes of this revival were many and
complex. The suppression of private war, the higher standards of
comfort and security that followed the crusades, and the
stimulation of men's minds by the experiences of these expeditions
were no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was
reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of
education was arising in the church and spreading among laymen.
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing,
independent or quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa,
Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg,
Novgorod, Wisby and Bergen for example. They were all trading
cities with many travellers, and where men trade and travel they
talk and think. The polemics of the Popes and princes, the
conspicuous savagery and wickedness of the persecution of
heretics, were exciting men to doubt the authority of the church
and question and discuss fundamental things.
We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring Aristotle
to Europe, and how such a prince as Frederick II acted as a
channel through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon
the renascent European mind. Still more influential in the
stirring up of men's ideas were the Jews. Their very existence
was a note of interrogation to the claims of the church. And
finally the secret, fascinating enquiries of the alchemists were
spreading far and wide and setting men to the petty, furtive and
yet fruitful resumption of experimental science.
{295}
And the stir in men's minds was by no means confined now to the
independent and well educated. The mind of the common man was
awake in the world as it had never been before in all the
experience of mankind. In spite of priest and persecution,
Christianity does seem to have carried a mental ferment wherever
its teaching reached. It established a direct relation between
the conscience of the individual man and the God of Righteousness,
so that now if need arose he had the courage to form his own
judgment upon prince or prelate or creed.
As early as the eleventh century philosophical discussion had
begun again in Europe, and there were great and growing
universities at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centres. There
medieval "schoolmen" took up again and thrashed out a series of
questions upon the value and meaning of words that were a
necessary preliminary to clear thinking in the scientific age that
was to follow. And standing by himself because of his distinctive
genius was Roger Bacon (circa 1210 to circa 1293), a Franciscan of
Oxford, the father of modern experimental science. His name
deserves a prominence in our history second only to that of
Aristotle.
His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told his
age it was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do. Nowadays a
man may tell the world it is as silly as it is solemn, that all
its methods are still infantile and clumsy and its dogmas childish
assumptions, without much physical danger; but these peoples of
the middle ages when they were not actually being massacred or
starving or dying of pestilence, were passionately convinced of
the wisdom, the completeness and finality of their beliefs, and
disposed to resent any reflections upon them very bitterly. Roger
Bacon's writings were like a flash of light in a profound
darkness. He combined his attack upon the ignorance of his times
with a wealth of suggestion for the increase of knowledge. In his
passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and of
collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him.
"Experiment, experiment," that is the burthen of Roger Bacon.
Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of
him because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and
pored over the bad Latin translations which were then all that was
{296} available of the master. "If I had my way," he wrote, in
his intemperate fashion, "I should burn all the books of
Aristotle, for the study of them can only lead to a loss of time,
produce error, and increase ignorance," a sentiment that Aristotle
would probably have echoed could he have returned to a world in
which his works were not so much read as worshipped--and that, as
Roger Bacon showed, in these most abominable translations.
[Illustration: AN EARLY PRINTING PRESS]
{297}
Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of
seeming to square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and
worse, Roger Bacon shouted to mankind, "Cease to be ruled by
dogmas and authorities; _look at the world!_" Four chief sources
of ignorance he denounced; respect for authority, custom, the
sense of the ignorant crowd, and the vain, proud unteachableness
of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and a world of power
would open to men:--
"Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that
great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be
borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise
cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be
moved _cum impetu inoestimable_, as we deem the scythed chariots
to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are
possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device
by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a
flying bird."
So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse
before men began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden
stores of power and interest he realized so clearly existed
beneath the dull surface of human affairs.
But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus of
its philosophers and alchemists; it also gave it paper. It is
scarcely too much to say that paper made the intellectual revival
of Europe possible. Paper originated in China, where its use
probably goes back to the second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese
made an attack upon the Arab Moslems in Samarkand; they were
repulsed, and among the prisoners taken from them were some
skilled papermakers, from whom the art was learnt. Arabic paper
manuscripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The
manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the
capture of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of
Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated
sadly. Good paper was not made in Christian Europe until the end
of the thirteenth century, and then it was Italy which led the
world. Only by the fourteenth century did the manufacture reach
Germany, and not until the end of that century was it abundant and
{298} cheap enough for the printing of books to be a practicable
business proposition. Thereupon printing followed naturally and
necessarily, for printing is the most obvious of inventions, and
the intellectual life of the world entered upon a new and far more
vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little trickle from mind to
mind; it became a broad flood, in which thousands and presently
scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated.
One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the
appearance of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a
cheapening of school-books. The knowledge of reading spread
swiftly. There was not only a great increase of books in the
world, but the books that were now made were plainer to read and
so easier to understand. Instead of toiling at a crabbed text
arid then thinking over its significance, readers now could think
unimpeded as they read. With this increase in the facility of
reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be a highly
decorated toy or a scholar's mystery. People began to write books
to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. They wrote in
the ordinary language and not in Latin. With the fourteenth
century the real history of the European literature begins.
So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenic share in the
European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of the Mongol
conquests. They stimulated the geographical imagination of Europe
enormously. For a time under the Great Khan, all Asia and Western
Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily
open, and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of
Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the
religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great
hopes were entertained by the papacy for the conversion of the
Mongols to Christianity. Their only religion so far had been
Shumanism, a primitive paganism. Envoys of the Pope, Buddhist
priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese artificers,
Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab officials and
Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol
court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres
of the Mongols, and not enough of their curiosity and desire for
learning. Not perhaps as an originative people, but as
transmitters {299} of knowledge and method their influence upon
the world's history has been very great. And everything one can
learn of the vague and romantic personalities of Jengis or Kublai
tends to confirm the impression that these men were at least as
understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but
egotistical figure Alexander the Great or that raiser of political
ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian Charlemagne.
[Illustration: ANCIENT BRONZE FIGURE FROM BENIN, W. AFRICA]
One of the most interesting of these visitors to the Mongol Court
was a certain Venetian, Marco Polo, who afterwards set down his
story in a book. He went to China about 1272 with his father and
uncle, who had already once made the journey. The Great Khan had
been deeply impressed by the elder Polos; they were the first men
of the "Latin" peoples he had seen; and he sent them back with
enquiries for teachers and learned men who could explain
Christianity to him, and for various other European things that
had aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco was their
second visit.
The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the Crimea,
as in their previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet
and other indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly
facilitated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil
from the lamp that burns in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and
so thither they first went, and then by way of Cilicia into
Armenia. They went thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt was
raiding the Mongol domains at this time. Thence they came by way
of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they
contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants from
India. For some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned
northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over
{300} the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor
into the Hwang-ho valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great
Khan, and they were hospitably entertained.
[Illustration: ANOTHER ANCIENT NEGRO BRONZE OF A EUROPEAN]
Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and clever, and it
is clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly. He
was given an official position and sent on several missions,
chiefly in south-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast
stretches of smiling and prosperous country, "all the way
excellent hostelries for travellers," and "fine vineyards, fields,
and gardens," of "many abbeys" of Buddhist monks, of manufactures
of "cloth of silk and gold and many fine taffetas," a "constant
succession of cities and boroughs," and so on, first roused the
incredulity and then fired the imagination of all Europe. He told
of Burmah, and of its great armies with hundreds of elephants, and
how these animals were defeated by the Mongol bowmen, and also of
the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of Japan, and greatly
exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For three years
Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor, and he probably
impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being little more of a
foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also have been
sent on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a certain
Polo attached to the imperial council in 1277, a very valuable
confirmation of the general truth of the Polo story.
The publication of Marco Polo's travels produced a profound effect
upon the European imagination. The European literature, and
especially the European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes
with the names in Marco Polo's story, with Cathay (North China)
and Cambulac (Pekin) and the like.
[Illustration: EARLY ITALIAN ENGRAVING OF A SAILING SHIP]
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco
Polo was a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who
{301} conceived the brilliant idea of sailing westward round the
world to China. In Seville there is a copy of the Travels with
marginal notes by Columbus. There were many reasons why the
thought of a Genoese should be turned in this direction. Until
its capture by the Turks in 1453 Constantinople had been an
impartial trading mart between the Western world and the East, and
the Genoese had traded there freely. But the "Latin" Venetians,
the bitter rivals of the Genoese, had been the allies and helpers
of the Turks against the Greeks, and with the coming of the Turks
Constantinople turned an {302} unfriendly face upon Genoese trade.
The long forgotten discovery that the world was round had
gradually resumed its sway over men's minds. The idea of going
westward to China was therefore a fairly obvious one. It was
encouraged by two things. The mariner's compass had now been
invented and men were no longer left to the mercy of a fine night
and the stars to determine the direction in which they were
sailing, and the Normans, Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese
had already pushed out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary
Isles, Madeira and the Azores.
Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get ships to
put his idea to the test. He went from one European Court to
another. Finally at Granada, just won from the Moors, he secured
the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was able to set out
across the unknown ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of
two months and nine days he came to a land which he believed to be
India, but which was really a new continent, whose distinct
existence the old world had never hitherto suspected. He returned
to Spain with gold, cotton, strange beasts and birds, and two
wild-eyed painted Indians to be baptized. They were called
Indians because, to the end of his days, he believed that this
land he had found was India. Only in the course of several years
did men begin to realize that the whole new continent of America
was added to the world's resources.
The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise enormously.
In 1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to India, and in 1515
there were Portuguese ships in Java. In 1519 Magellan, a
Portuguese sailor in Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville
westward with five ships, of which one, the _Vittoria_, came back
up the river to Seville in 1522, the first ship that had ever
circumnavigated the world. Thirty-one men were aboard her,
survivors of two-hundred-and-eighty who had started. Magellan
himself had been killed in the Philippine Isles.
Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world as a
thing altogether attainable, a new vision of strange lands,
strange animals and plants, strange manners and customs,
discoveries overseas and in the skies and in the ways and
materials of life burst upon the European mind. The Greek
classics, buried and forgotten for so {303} long, were speedily
being printed and studied, and were colouring men's thoughts with
the dreams of Plato and the traditions of an age of republican
freedom and dignity. The Roman dominion had first brought law and
order to Western Europe, and the Latin Church had restored it; but
under both Pagan and Catholic Rome curiosity and innovation were
subordinate to and restrained by organization. The reign of the
Latin mind was now drawing to an end. Between the thirteenth and
the sixteenth century the European Aryans, thanks to the
stimulating influence of Semite and Mongol and the rediscovery of
the Greek classics, broke away from the Latin tradition and rose
again to the intellectual and material leadership of mankind.
{304}
L
THE REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH
The Latin Church itself was enormously affected by this mental
rebirth. It was dismembered; and even the portion that survived
was extensively renewed.
We have told how nearly the church came to the autocratic
leadership of all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, and how in the fourteenth and fifteenth its power over
men's minds and affairs declined. We have described how popular
religious enthusiasm which had in earlier ages been its support
and power was turned against it by its pride, persecutions and
centralization, and how the insidious scepticism of Frederick II
bore fruit in a growing insubordination of the princes. The Great
Schism had reduced its religious and political prestige to
negligible proportions. The forces of insurrection struck it now
from both sides.
The teachings of the Englishman Wycliffe spread widely throughout
Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of
lectures upon Wycliffe's teachings in the university of Prague.
This teaching spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused
great popular enthusiasm. In 1414-18 a Council of the whole
church was held at Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was
invited to this Council under promise of a safe conduct from the
emperor, seized, put on trial for heresy and burnt alive (1415).
So far from tranquillizing the Bohemian people, this led to an
insurrection of the Hussites in that country, the first of a
series of religious wars that inaugurated the break-up of Latin
Christendom. Against this insurrection Pope Martin V, the Pope
specially elected at Constance as the head of a reunited
Christendom, preached a Crusade.
Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little people
and all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism of Europe
was {305} turned upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century, just as in
the thirteenth it had been turned upon the Waldenses. But the
Bohemian Czechs, unlike the Waldenses, believed in armed
resistance. The Bohemian Crusade dissolved and streamed away from
the battlefield at the sound of the Hussites' waggons and the
distant chanting of their troops; it did not even wait to fight
(battle of Domazlice, 1431). In 1436 an agreement was patched up
with the Hussites by a new Council of the church at Basle in which
many of the special objections to Latin practice were conceded.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF LUTHER]
In the fifteenth century a great pestilence had produced much
social disorganization throughout Europe. There had been extreme
misery and discontent among the common people, and peasant risings
against the landlords and the wealthy in England and France.
After the Hussite Wars these peasant insurrections increased in
gravity in Germany and took on a religious character. Printing
came in as an influence upon this development. By the middle of
the fifteenth century there were printers at work with movable
type {306} in Holland and the Rhineland. The art spread to Italy
and England, where Caxton was printing in Westminster in 1477.
The immediate consequence was a great increase and distribution of
Bibles, and greatly increased facilities for widespread popular
controversies. The European world became a world of readers, to
an extent that had never happened to any community in the past.
And this sudden irrigation of the general mind with clearer ideas
and more accessible information occurred just at a time when the
church was confused and divided and not in a position to defend
itself effectively, and when many princes were looking for means
to weaken its hold upon the vast wealth it claimed in their
dominions.
In Germany the attack upon the church gathered round the
personality of an ex-monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), who appeared
in Wittenberg in 1517 offering disputations against various
orthodox doctrines and practices. At first he disputed in Latin
in the fashion of the Schoolmen. Then he took up the new weapon
of the printed word and scattered his views far and wide in German
addressed to the ordinary people. An attempt was made to suppress
him as Huss had been suppressed, but the printing press had
changed conditions and he had too many open and secret friends
among the German princes for this fate to overtake him.
For now in this age of multiplying ideas and weakened faith there
were many rulers who saw their advantage in breaking the religious
ties between their people and Rome. They sought to make
themselves in person the heads of a more nationalized religion.
England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Germany and
Bohemia, one after another, separated themselves from the Roman
Communion. They have remained separated ever since.
The various princes concerned cared very little for the moral and
intellectual freedom of their subjects. They used the religious
doubts and insurgence of their peoples to strengthen them against
Rome, but they tried to keep a grip upon the popular movement as
soon as that rupture was achieved and a national church set up
under the control of the crown. But there has always been a
curious vitality in the teaching of Jesus, a direct appeal to
righteousness and a man's self-respect over every loyalty and
every subordination, lay or ecclesiastical. None of these
princely churches broke {307} off without also breaking off a
number of fragmentary sects that would admit the intervention of
neither prince nor Pope between a man and his God. In England and
Scotland, for example, there was a number of sects who now held
firmly to the Bible as their one guide in life and belief. They
refused the disciplines of a state church. In England these
dissentients were the Non-conformists, who played a very large
part in the polities of that country in the seventeenth {308} and
eighteenth centuries. In England they carried their objection to
a princely head to the church so far as to decapitate King Charles
I (1649), and for eleven prosperous years England was a republic
under Non-conformist rule.
[Illustration: A MAJOLICA DISH PAINED IN COLOURS]
The breaking away of this large section of Northern Europe from
Latin Christendom is what is generally spoken of as the
Reformation. But the shock and stress of these losses produced
changes perhaps as profound in the Roman Church itself. The
church was reorganized and a new spirit came into its life. One
of the dominant figures in this revival was a young Spanish
soldier, Inigo Lopez de Recalde, better known to the world as St.
Ignatius of Loyola. After some romantic beginnings he became a
priest (1538) and was permitted to found the Society of Jesus, a
direct attempt to bring the generous and chivalrous traditions of
military discipline into the service of religion. This Society of
Jesus, the Jesuits, became one of the greatest teaching and
missionary societies the world has ever seen. It carried
Christianity to India, China and America. It arrested the rapid
disintegration of the Roman Church. It raised the standard of
education throughout the whole Catholic world; it raised the level
of Catholic intelligence and quickened the Catholic conscience
everywhere; it stimulated Protestant Europe to competitive
educational efforts. The vigorous and aggressive Roman Catholic
Church we know to-day is largely the product of this Jesuit
revival.
{309}
LI
THE EMPEROR CHARLES V
The Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign of the
Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs
that Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the air of being the
greatest monarch since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the
creation of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I
(1459-1519). Some families have fought, others have intrigued
their way to world power; the Habsburgs married their way.
Maximilian began his career with Austria, Styria, part of Alsace
and other districts, the original Habsburg patrimony; he
married--the lady's name scarcely matters to us--the Netherlands
and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him after his first
wife's death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he tried
unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in succession
to his father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy of
Milan. Finally he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus,
who not only reigned over a freshly united Spain and over Sardinia
and the kingdom of the two Sicilies, but over all America west of
Brazil. So it was that this Charles V, his grandson, inherited
most of the American continent and between a third and a half of
what the Turks had left of Europe. He succeeded to the
Netherlands in 1506. When his grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516,
he became practically king of the Spanish dominions, his mother
being imbecile; and his grandfather Maximilian dying in 1519, he
was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively tender age
of twenty.
He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick
upper lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of
young and vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant
young {310} monarchs. Francis I had succeeded to the French
throne in 1515 at the age of twenty-one, Henry VIII had become
King of England in 1509 at eighteen. It was the age of Baber in
India (1526-1530) and Suleiman the Magnificent in Turkey (1520),
both exceptionally capable monarchs, and the Pope Leo X (1513) was
also a very distinguished Pope. The Pope and Francis I attempted
to prevent the election of Charles as Emperor because they dreaded
the concentration of so much power in the hands of one man. Both
Francis I and Henry VIII offered themselves to the imperial
electors. But there was now a long established tradition of
Habsburg Emperors (since 1273), and some energetic bribery secured
the election for Charles.
At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in the
hands of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself
and take control. He began to realize something of the
threatening complexities of his exalted position. It was a
position as unsound as it was splendid.
From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation
created by Luther's agitations in Germany. The Emperor had one
reason for siding with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope
to his election. But he had been brought up in Spain, that most
Catholic of countries, and he decided against Luther. So he came
into conflict with the Protestant princes and particularly the
Elector of Saxony. He found himself in the presence of an opening
rift that was to split the outworn fabric of Christendom into two
contending camps. His attempts to close that rift were strenuous
and honest and ineffective. There was an extensive peasant revolt
in Germany which interwove with the general political and
religious disturbance. And these internal troubles were
complicated by attacks upon the Empire from east and west alike.
On the west of Charles was his spirited rival, Francis I; to the
east was the ever advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in
alliance with Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of
tribute from the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and
army of Spain at his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to
get any effective support in money from Germany. His social and
political troubles were complicated by financial distresses. He
was forced to ruinous borrowing.
{311}
[Illustration: THE CHARLES V PORTRAIT BY TITIAN]
{312}
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful
against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was North
Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and
retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The
German army invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back
into Italy, lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made
a long and unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German
forces, defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the
Pope and Henry VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining
excessive power, turned against Charles. The German troops in
Milan, under the Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather
than followed their commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed
the city and pillaged it (1527). The Pope took refuge in the
Castle of St. Angelo while the looting and slaughter went on. He
bought off the German troops at last by the payment of four
hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such confused fighting
impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found himself
triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the Pope--he was
the last German Emperor to be so crowned--at Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They
had defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held
Buda-Pesth, and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took
Vienna. The Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and
did his utmost to drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest
difficulty in getting the German princes to unite even with this
formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I remained
implacable for a time, and there was a new French war; but in 1538
Charles won his rival over to a more friendly attitude after
ravaging the south of France. Francis and Charles then formed an
alliance against the Turk. But the Protestant princes, the German
princes who were resolved to break away from Rome, had formed a
league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and in the
place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom
Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in
Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a
struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for
ascendancy, now {313} flaming into war and destruction, now
sinking back to intrigues and diplomacies; it was a snake's sack
of princely policies that was to go on writhing incurably right
into the nineteenth century and to waste and desolate Central
Europe again and again.
The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in
these gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an
exceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious
dissensions that were tearing Europe into warring fragments as
genuine theological differences. He gathered diets and councils
in futile attempts at reconciliation. Formulæ and confessions
were tried over. The student of German history must struggle with
the details of the Religious Peace of Nuremberg, the settlement at
the Diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of Augsburg, and the like. Here
we do but mention them as details in the worried life of this
culminating Emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly one of the
multifarious princes and rulers in Europe seems to have been
acting in good faith. The widespread religious trouble of the
world, the desire of the common people for truth and social
righteousness, the spreading knowledge of the time, all those
things were merely counters in the imaginations of princely
diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who had begun his career with a
book against heresy, and who had been rewarded by the Pope with
the title of "Defender of the Faith," being anxious to divorce his
first wife in favour of a young lady named Anne Boleyn, and
wishing also to loot the vast wealth of the church in England,
joined the company of Protestant princes in 1530. Sweden, Denmark
and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.
The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the
death of Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents
of the campaign. The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at
Lochau. By something very like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse,
the Emperor's chief remaining antagonist, was caught and
imprisoned, and the Turks were bought off by the promise of an
annual tribute. In 1547, to the great relief of the Emperor,
Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles got to a kind of settlement,
and made his last efforts to effect peace where there was no
peace. In 1552 all Germany was at war again, only a precipitate
flight from Innsbruck {314} saved Charles from capture, and in
1552, with the treaty of Passau, came another unstable
equilibrium....
Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for
thirty-two years. It is interesting to note how entirely the
European mind was concentrated upon the struggle for European
ascendancy. Neither Turks, French, English nor Germans had yet
discovered any political interest in the great continent of
America, nor any significance in the new sea routes to Asia.
Great things were happening in America; Cortez with a mere handful
of men had conquered the great Neolithic empire of Mexico for
Spain, Pizarro had crossed the Isthmus of Panama (1530) and
subjugated another wonder-land, Peru. But as yet these events
meant no more to Europe than a useful and stimulating influx of
silver to the Spanish treasury.
It was after the treaty of Passau that Charles began to display
his distinctive originality of mind. He was now entirely bored
and disillusioned by his imperial greatness. A sense of the
intolerable futility of these European rivalries came upon him.
He had never been of a very sound constitution, he was naturally
indolent and he was suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated.
He made over all his sovereign rights in Germany to his brother
Ferdinand, and Spain and the Netherlands he resigned to his son
Philip. Then in a sort of magnificent dudgeon he retired to a
monastery at Yuste, among the oak and chestnut forests in the
hills to the north of the Tagus valley. There he died in 1558.
Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement,
this renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan,
world-weary, seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God.
But his retreat was neither solitary nor austere; he had with him
nearly a hundred and fifty attendants: his establishment had all
the splendour and indulgences without the fatigues or a court, and
Philip II was a dutiful son to whom his father's advice was a
command.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. PETER'S, ROME, SHOWING THE HIGH
ALTAR]
And if Charles had lost his living interest in the administration
of European affairs, there were other motives of a more immediate
sort to stir him. Says Prescott: "In the almost daily
correspondence between Quixada, or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of
State at Valladolid, there is scarcely a letter that does not turn
more or less on the Emperor's eating or his illness. The one
seems naturally to follow, {315} like a running commentary, on the
other. It is rare that such topics have formed the burden of
communications with the department of state. It must have been no
easy matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity in the
perusal of despatches in which politics and gastronomy were so
strangely mixed together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon
was ordered to make a detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his
route, and bring supplies to the royal table. On {316} Thursdays
he was to bring fish to serve for the _jour maigre_ that was to
follow. The trout in the neighbourhood Charles thought too small,
so others of a larger size were to be sent from Valladolid. Fish
of every kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was anything that in
its nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels, frogs,
oysters, occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare.
Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him;
and he regretted that he had not brought a better supply of these
from the Low Countries. On an eel-pasty he particularly
doted." ... [6]
In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III granting
him a dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his
fast early in the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.
Eating and doctoring! it was a return to elemental things. He had
never acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read aloud to
at meals after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what one
narrator describes as a "sweet and heavenly commentary." He also
amused himself with mechanical toys, by listening to music or
sermons, and by attending to the imperial business that still came
drifting in to him. The death of the Empress, to whom he was
greatly attached, had turned his mind towards religion, which in
his case took a punctilious and ceremonial form; every Friday in
Lent he scourged himself with the rest of the monks with such good
will as to draw blood. These exercises and the gout released a
bigotry in Charles that had hitherto been restrained by
considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant teaching
close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. "Tell the grand
inquisitor and his council from me to be at their posts, and to
lay the axe at the root of the evil before it spreads
further." .... He expressed a doubt whether it would not be well,
in so black an affair, to dispense with the ordinary course of
justice, and to show no mercy; "lest the criminal, if pardoned,
should have the opportunity of repeating his crime." He
recommended, as an example, his own mode or proceeding in the
Netherlands, "where all who remained obstinate in their errors
were burned alive, and those who were admitted to penitence
were beheaded."
And almost symbolical of his place and role in history was his
{317} preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an
intuition that something great was dead in Europe and sorely
needed burial, that there was a need to write Finis, overdue. He
not only attended every actual funeral that was celebrated at
Yuste, but he had services conducted for the absent dead, he held
a funeral service in memory of his wife on the anniversary of her
death, and finally he celebrated his own obsequies.
"The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of
wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The
brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor's
household clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque,
shrouded also in black, which had been raised in the centre of the
chapel. The service for the burial of the dead was then
performed; and, amidst the dismal wail of the monks, the prayers
ascended for the departed spirit, that it might be received into
the mansions of the blessed. The sorrowful attendants were melted
to tears, as the image of their master's death was presented to
their minds--or they were touched, it may be, with compassion by
this pitiable display of weakness. Charles, muffled in a dark
mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his
household, the spectator of his own obsequies; and the doleful
ceremony was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of
the priest, in sign of his surrendering up his soul to the
Almighty."
Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the brief
greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with him. His realm was
already divided between his brother and his son. The Holy Roman
Empire struggled on indeed to the days of Napoleon I but as an
invalid and dying thing. To this day its unburied tradition still
poisons the political air.
[6] Prescott's Appendix to Robertson's _History of Charles V_.
{318}
LII
THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY AND
PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE
The Latin Church was broken, the Holy Roman Empire was in extreme
decay; the history of Europe from the opening of the sixteenth
century onward is a story of peoples feeling their way darkly to
some new method of government, better adapted to the new
conditions that were arising. In the Ancient World, over long
periods of time, there had been changes of dynasty and even
changes of ruling race and language, but the form of government
through monarch and temple remained fairly stable, and still more
stable was the ordinary way of living. In this modern Europe
since the sixteenth century the dynastic changes are unimportant,
and the interest of history lies in the wide and increasing
variety of experiments in political and social organization.
The political history of the world from the sixteenth century
onward was, we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious effort,
of mankind to adapt its political and social methods to certain
new conditions that had now arisen. The effort to adapt was
complicated by the fad that the conditions themselves were
changing with a steadily increasing rapidity. The adaptation,
mainly unconscious and almost always unwilling (for man in general
hates voluntary change), has lagged more and more behind the
alterations in conditions. From the sixteenth century onward the
history of mankind is a story of political and social institutions
becoming more and more plainly misfits, less comfortable and more
vexatious, and of the slow reluctant realization of the need for a
conscious and deliberate reconstruction of the whole scheme of
human societies in the face of needs and possibilities new to all
the former experiences of life.
What are these changes in the conditions of human life that have
disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant and trader,
with {319} periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest, that has
held human affairs in the Old World in a sort of working rhythm
for more than a hundred centuries?
They are manifold and various, for human affairs are
multitudinously complex; but the main changes seem all to turn
upon one cause, namely the growth and extension of a knowledge of
the nature of things, beginning first of all in small groups of
intelligent people and spreading at first slowly, and in the last
five hundred years very rapidly, to larger and larger proportions
of the general population.
But there has also been a great change in human conditions due to
a change in the spirit of human life. This change has gone on
side by side with the increase and extension of knowledge, and is
subtly connected with it. There has been an increasing
disposition to treat a life based on the common and more
elementary desires and gratifications as unsatisfactory, and to
seek relationship with and service and participation in a larger
life. This is the common characteristic of all the great
religions that have spread throughout the world in the last twenty
odd centuries, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam alike. They have
had to do with the spirit of man in a way that the older religions
did not have to do. They are forces quite different in their
nature and effect from the old fetishistic blood-sacrifice
religions of priest and temple that they have in part modified and
in part replaced. They have gradually evolved a self-respect in
the individual and a sense of participation and responsibility in
the common concerns of mankind that did not exist among the
populations of the earlier civilizations.
The first considerable change in the conditions of political and
social life was the simplification and extended use of writing in
the ancient civilizations which made larger empires and wider
political understandings practicable and inevitable. The next
movement forward came with the introduction of the horse, and
later on of the camel as a means of transport, the use of wheeled
vehicles, the extension of roads and the increased military
efficiency due to the discovery of terrestrial iron. Then
followed the profound economic disturbances due to the device of
coined money and the change in the nature of debt, proprietorship
and trade due to this convenient but dangerous convention. The
empires grew in size and range, and {320} men's ideas grew
likewise to correspond with these things. Came the disappearance
of local gods, the age of theocrasia, and the teaching of the
great world religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned and
recorded history and geography, the first realization by man of
his profound ignorance, and the first systematic search for
knowledge.
For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly in
Greece and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the Teutonic
barbarians, the westward drive of the Mongolian peoples,
convulsive religious reconstruction and great pestilences put
enormous strains upon political and social order. When
civilization emerged again from this phase of conflict and
confusion, slavery was no longer the basis of economic life; and
the first paper-mills were preparing a new medium for collective
information and co-operation in printed matter. Gradually at this
point and that, the search for knowledge, the systematic
scientific process, was resumed.
And now from the sixteenth century onward, as an inevitable
by-product of systematic thought, appeared a steadily increasing
series of inventions and devices affecting the intercommunication
and interaction of men with one another. They all tended towards
wider range of action, greater mutual benefits or injuries, and
increased co-operation, and they came faster and faster. Men's
minds had not been prepared for anything of the sort, and until
the great catastrophes at the beginning of the twentieth century
quickened men's minds, the historian has very little to tell of
any intelligently planned attempts to meet the new conditions this
increasing flow of inventions was creating. The history of
mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an
imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the
prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking
but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with
ancient and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man
consciously awake to danger and opportunity.
Since history is the story not of individual lives but of
communities, it is inevitable that the inventions that figure most
in the historical record are inventions affecting communications.
In the sixteenth century the chief new things that we have to note
are the appearance of printed paper and the sea-worthy,
ocean-going sailing ship using the new device of the mariner's
compass. The former {321} cheapened, spread, and revolutionized
teaching, public information and discussion, and the fundamental
operations of political activity. The latter made the round world
one. But almost equally important was the increased utilization
and improvement of guns and gunpowder which the Mongols had first
brought westward in the thirteenth century. This destroyed the
practical immunity of barons in their castles and of walled
cities. Guns swept away feudalism. Constantinople fell to guns.
Mexico and Peru fell before the terror of the Spanish guns.
[Illustration: CROMWELL DISSOLVES THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND SO
BECOMES AUTOCRAT OF THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC]
The seventeenth century saw the development of systematic
scientific publication, a less conspicuous but ultimately far more
pregnant innovation. Conspicuous among the leaders in this great
forward step was Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) afterwards Lord
{322} Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England. He was the pupil and
perhaps the mouthpiece of another Englishman; Dr. Gilbert, the
experimental philosopher of Colchester (1540-1603). This second
Bacon, like the first, preached observation and experiment, and he
used the inspiring and fruitful form of a Utopian story, _The New
Atlantis_, to express his dream of a great service of scientific
research.
Presently arose the Royal Society of London, the Florentine
Society, and later other national bodies for the encouragement of
research and the publication and exchange of knowledge. These
European scientific societies became fountains not only of
countless inventions but also of a destructive criticism of the
grotesque theological history of the world that had dominated and
crippled human thought for many centuries.
Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century witnessed any
innovations so immediately revolutionary in human conditions as
printed paper and the ocean-going ship, but there was a steady
accumulation of knowledge and scientific energy that was to bear
its full fruits in the nineteenth century. The exploration and
mapping of the world went on. Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand
appeared on the map. In Great Britain in the eighteenth century
coal coke began to be used for metallurgical purposes, leading to
a considerable cheapening of iron and to the possibility of
casting and using it in larger pieces than had been possible
before, when it had been smelted with wood charcoal. Modern
machinery dawned.
Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and flower
and fruit at the same time and continuously. With the onset of
the nineteenth century the real fruition of
science--which indeed henceforth may never cease--began. First
came steam and steel, the railway, the great liner, vast bridges
and buildings, machinery of almost limitless power, the
possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material human
need, and then, still more wonderful, the hidden treasures of
electrical science were opened to men ....
We have compared the political and social life of man from the
sixteenth century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner who lies
and dreams while his prison burns about him. In the sixteenth
century the European mind was still going on with its Latin
Imperial dream, {323} its dream of a Holy Roman Empire, united
under a Catholic Church. But just as some uncontrollable element
in our composition will insist at times upon introducing into our
dreams the most absurd and destructive comments, so thrust into
this dream we find the sleeping face and craving stomach of the
Emperor Charles V, while Henry VIII of England and Luther tear the
unity of Catholicism to shreds.
[Illustration: THE COURT AT VERSAILLES]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream turned to
personal monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this
period tells with variations the story of an attempt to
consolidate a monarchy, to make it absolute and to extend its
power over weaker adjacent regions, and of the steady resistance,
first of the landowners and then with the increase of foreign
trade and home industry, of the growing trading and moneyed class,
to the exaction and interference of the crown. There is no
universal victory of either side; here it is the King who gets the
upper hand while there it is the {324} man of private property who
beats the King. In one case we find a King becoming the sun and
centre of his national world, while just over his borders a sturdy
mercantile class maintains a republic. So wide a range of
variation shows how entirely experimental, what local accidents,
were all the various governments of this period.
A very common figure in these national dramas is the King's
minister, often in the still Catholic countries a prelate, who
stands behind the King, serves him and dominates him by his
indispensable services.
Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these
various national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland
went Protestant and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip II
of Spain, the son of the Emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII
and his minister Wolsey, Queen Elizabeth and her minister
Burleigh, prepared the foundations of an absolutism that was
wrecked by the folly of James I and Charles I. Charles I was
beheaded for treason to his people (1649), a new turn in the
political thought of Europe. For a dozen years (until 1660)
Britain was a republic; and the crown was an unstable power, much
overshadowed by Parliament, until George III (1760-1820) made a
strenuous and partly successful effort to restore its
predominance. The King of France, on the other hand, was the most
successful of all the European Kings in perfecting monarchy. Two
great ministers, Richelieu (1585-1642) and Mazarin
(1602-1661), built up the power of the crown in that country, and
the process was aided by the long reign and very considerable
abilities of King Louis XIV, "the Grand Monarque" (1643-1715).
Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was, within
his limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his ambition was
stronger than his baser passions, and he guided his country
towards bankruptcy through the complication of a spirited foreign
policy with an elaborate dignity that still extorts our
admiration. His immediate desire was to consolidate and extend
France to the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb the Spanish
Netherlands; his remoter view saw the French Kings as the possible
successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He made
bribery a state method almost more important than warfare.
Charles II of {325} England was in his pay, and so were most of
the Polish nobility, presently to be described. His money, or
rather the money of the tax-paying classes in France, went
everywhere. But his prevailing occupation was splendour. His
great palace at Versailles with its salons, its corridors, its
mirrors, its terraces and fountains and parks and prospects, was
the envy and admiration of the world.
[Illustration: THE SACK OF A VILLAGE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION]
He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet in
Europe was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means as
his subjects and credits would permit. Everywhere the nobility
rebuilt or extended their chateaux to the new pattern. A great
industry of beautiful and elaborate fabrics and furnishings
developed. The luxurious arts flourished everywhere; sculpture in
alabaster, faience, gilt woodwork, metal work, stamped leather,
much music, magnificent painting, beautiful printing and bindings,
fine crockery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine
furniture went a strange race of "gentlemen" in tall powdered
wigs, silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by
amazing canes; and still more wonderful "ladies," under towers of
powdered hair and wearing vast expansions of silk and satin
sustained on wire. Through it all postured the great Louis, the
sun of his world, unaware of the meagre and sulky and bitter faces
that watched him from those lower darknesses to which his sunshine
did not penetrate.
[Map: Central Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648]
The German people remained politically divided throughout this
period of the monarchies and experimental governments, and a
considerable {326} number of ducal and princely courts aped the
splendours of Versailles on varying scales. The Thirty Years' War
(1618-48), a devastating scramble among the Germans, Swedes and
Bohemians for fluctuating political advantages, sapped the
energies of Germany for a century. A map must show the crazy
patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map of Europe according
to the peace of Westphalia (1648). One sees a tangle of
principalities, dukedoms, free states and the like, some partly in
and partly out of the Empire. Sweden's arm, the reader will note,
reached far into Germany; and except for a few islands of
territory within the imperial boundaries France was still far from
the Rhine. Amidst this patchwork the {327} Kingdom of Prussia--it
became a Kingdom in 1701--rose steadily to prominence and
sustained a series of successful wars. Frederick the Great of
Prussia (1740-86) had his Versailles at Potsdam, where his court
spoke French, read French literature and rivalled the culture of
the French King.
In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England, adding one
more to the list of monarchies half in and half out of the empire.
The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained the
title of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now
there was also an Emperor of the East again. After the fall of
Constantinople (1453), the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great
(1462-1505), claimed to be heir to the Byzantine throne and
adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle upon his arms. His
grandson, Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), assumed the
imperial title of Cæsar (Tsar). But only in the latter half of
the seventeenth century did Russia cease to seem remote and
Asiatic to the European mind. The Tsar Peter the Great
(1682-1725) brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He
built a new capital for his empire, Petersburg upon the Neva, that
played the part of a window between Russia and Europe, and he set
up his Versailles at Peterhof eighteen miles away, employing a
French architect who gave him a terrace, fountains, cascades,
picture gallery, park and all the recognized appointments of Grand
Monarchy. In Russia as in Prussia French became the language of
the court.
Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia was the
Polish kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors
too jealous of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a
nominal kingship to the monarch they elected. Her fate was
division among these three neighbours, in spite of the efforts of
France to retain her as an independent ally. Switzerland at this
time was a group of republican cantons; Venice was a republic;
Italy like so much of Germany was divided among minor dukes and
princes. The Pope ruled like a prince in the papal states, too
fearful now of losing the allegiance of the remaining Catholic
princes to interfere between them and their subjects or to remind
the world of the commonweal of Christendom. There remained indeed
no common {328} political idea in Europe at all; Europe was given
over altogether to division and diversity.
All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of
aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a
"foreign policy" of aggression against its neighbours and of
aggressive alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last
phase of this age of the multifarious sovereign states, and still
suffer from the hatreds, hostilities and suspicions it engendered.
The history of this time becomes more and more manifestly
"gossip," more and more unmeaning and wearisome to a modern
intelligence. You are told of how this war was caused by this
King's mistress, and how the jealousy of one minister for another
caused that. A tittle-tattle of bribes and rivalries disgusts the
intelligent student. The more permanently significant fact is
that in spite of the obstruction of a score of frontiers, reading
and thought still spread and increased and inventions multiplied.
The eighteenth century saw the appearance of a literature
profoundly sceptical and critical of the courts and policies of
the time. In such a book as Voltaire's _Candide_ we have the
expression of an infinite weariness with the planless confusion of
the European world.
{329}
LIII
THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE EUROPEANS IN ASIA AND OVERSEAS
While Central Europe thus remained divided and confused, the
Western Europeans and particularly the Dutch, the Scandinavians,
the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the British were
extending the area of their struggles across the seas of all the
world. The printing press had dissolved the political ideas of
Europe into a vast and at first indeterminate fermentation, but
that other great innovation, the ocean-going sailing ship, was
inexorably extending the range of European experience to the
furthermost limits of salt water.
The first overseas settlements of the Dutch and Northern Atlantic
Europeans were not for colonization but for trade and mining. The
Spaniards were first in the field; they claimed dominion over the
whole of this new world of America. Very soon however the
Portuguese asked for a share. The Pope--it was one of the last
acts of Rome as mistress of the world--divided the new continent
between these two first-comers, giving Portugal Brazil and
everything else east of a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde
islands, and all the rest to Spain (1494). The Portuguese at this
time were also pushing overseas enterprise southward and eastward.
In 1497 Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon round the Cape to
Zanzibar and then to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were
Portuguese ships in Java and the Moluccas, and the Portuguese were
setting up and fortifying trading stations round and about the
coasts of the Indian Ocean. Mozambique, Goa, and two smaller
possessions in India, Macao in China and a part of Timor are to
this day Portuguese possessions.
The nations excluded from America by the papal settlement paid
little heed to the rights of Spain and Portugal. The English, the
Danes and Swedes, and presently the Dutch, were soon staking {330}
out claims in North America and the West Indies, and his Most
Catholic Majesty of France heeded the papal settlement as little
as any Protestant. The wars of Europe extended themselves to
these claims and possessions.
[Map: Britain, France & Spain in America, 1750]
In the long run the English were the most successful in this
scramble for overseas possessions. The Danes and Swedes were too
{331} deeply entangled in the complicated affairs of Germany to
sustain effective expeditions abroad. Sweden was wasted upon the
German battlefields by a picturesque king, Gustavus Adolphus, the
Protestant "Lion of the North." The Dutch were the heirs of such
small settlements as Sweden made in America, and the Dutch were
too near French aggressions to hold their own against the British.
In the far East the chief rivals for empire were the British,
Dutch and French, and in America the British, French and Spanish.
The British had the supreme advantage of a water frontier, the
"silver streak" of the English Channel, against Europe. The
tradition of the Latin Empire entangled them least.
[Illustration: EUROPEANS TIGER HUNTING IN INDIA]
France has always thought too much in terms of Europe. Throughout
the eighteenth century she was wasting her opportunities of
expansion in West and East alike in order to dominate Spain, Italy
and the German confusion. The religious and political dissensions
of Britain in the seventeenth century had driven many {332} of the
English to seek a permanent home in America. They struck root and
increased and multiplied, giving the British a great advantage in
the American struggle. In 1756 and 1760 the French lost Canada to
the British and their American colonists, and a few years later
the British trading company found itself completely dominant over
French, Dutch and Portuguese in the peninsula of India. The great
Mongol Empire of Baber, Akbar and their successors had now far
gone in decay, and the story of its practical capture by a London
trading company, the British East India Company, is one of the
most extraordinary episodes in the whole history of conquest.
[Illustration: THE LAST EFFORT AND FALL OF TIPPOO SULTAN]
This East India Company had been originally at the time of its
incorporation under Queen Elizabeth no more than a company of sea
adventurers. Step by step they had been forced to raise troops
and arm their ships. And now this trading company, with its
tradition of gain, found itself dealing not merely in spices and
dyes and tea and jewels, but in the revenues and territories of
princes {333} and the destinies of India. It had come to buy and
sell, and it found itself achieving a tremendous piracy. There
was no one to challenge its proceedings. Is it any wonder that
its captains and commanders and officials, nay, even its clerks
and common soldiers, came back to England loaded with spoils?
Men under such circumstances, with a great and wealthy land at
their mercy, could not determine what they might or might not do.
It was a strange land to them, with a strange sunlight; its brown
people seemed a different race, outside their range of sympathy;
its mysterious temples sustained fantastic standards of behaviour.
Englishmen at home were perplexed when presently these generals
and officials came back to make dark accusations against each
other of extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parliament passed a
vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774. In 1788 Warren
Hastings, a second great Indian administrator, was impeached and
acquitted (1792). It was a strange and unprecedented situation in
the world's history. The English Parliament found itself ruling
over a London trading company, which in its turn was dominating an
empire far greater and more populous than all the domains of the
British crown. To the bulk of the English people India was a
remote, fantastic, almost inaccessible land, to which adventurous
poor young men went out, to return after many years very rich and
very choleric old gentlemen. It was difficult for the English to
conceive what the life of these countless brown millions in the
eastern sunshine could be. Their imaginations declined the task.
India remained romantically unreal. It was impossible for the
English, therefore, to exert any effective supervision and control
over the company's proceedings.
And while the Western European powers were thus fighting for these
fantastic overseas empires upon every ocean in the world, two
great land conquests were in progress in Asia. China had thrown
off the Mongol yoke in 1360, and flourished under the great native
dynasty of the Mings until 1644. Then the Manchus, another Mongol
people, reconquered China and remained masters of China until
1912. Meanwhile Russia was pushing East and growing to greatness
in the world's affairs. The rise of this great central power of
the old world, which is neither altogether of the East nor {334}
altogether of the West, is one of the utmost importance to our
human destiny. Its expansion is very largely due to the
appearance of a Christian steppe people, the Cossacks, who formed
a barrier between the feudal agriculture of Poland and Hungary to
the west and the Tartar to the east. The Cossacks were the wild
east of Europe, and in many ways not unlike the wild west of the
United States in the middle nineteenth century. All who had made
Russia too hot to hold them, criminals as well as the persecuted
innocent, rebellious serfs, religious secretaries, thieves,
vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum in the southern steppes and
there made a fresh start and fought for life and freedom against
Pole, Russian and Tartar alike. Doubtless fugitives from the
Tartars to the east also contributed to the Cossack mixture.
Slowly these border folk were incorporated in the Russian imperial
service, much as the highland clans of Scotland were converted
into regiments by the British government. New lands were offered
them in Asia. They became a weapon against the dwindling power of
the Mongolian nomads, first in Turkestan and then across Siberia
as far as the Amur.
The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries is very difficult to explain. Within two or three
centuries from the days of Jengis and Timurlane Central Asia had
relapsed from a period of world ascendancy to extreme political
impotence. Changes of climate, unrecorded pestilences, infections
of a malarial type, may have played their part in this
recession--which may be only a temporary recession measured by the
scale of universal history--of the Central Asian peoples. Some
authorities think that the spread of Buddhist teaching from China
also had a pacifying influence upon them. At any rate, by the
sixteenth century the Mongol, Tartar and Turkish peoples were no
longer pressing outward, but were being invaded, subjugated and
pushed back both by Christian Russia in the west and by China in
the east.
All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were spreading
eastward from European Russia, and settling wherever they found
agricultural conditions. Cordons of forts and stations formed a
moving frontier to these settlements to the south, where the
Turkomans were still strong and active; to the north-east,
however, Russia had no frontier until she reached right to the
Pacific ....
{335}
LIV
THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
The third quarter of the eighteenth century thus saw the
remarkable and unstable spectacle of a Europe divided against
itself, and no longer with any unifying political or religious
idea, yet through the immense stimulation of men's imaginations by
the printed book, the printed map, and the opportunity of the new
ocean-going shipping, able in a disorganized and contentious
manner to dominate all the coasts of the world. It was a
planless, incoherent ebullition of enterprise due to temporary and
almost accidental advantages over the rest of mankind. By virtue
of these advantages this new and still largely empty continent of
America was peopled mainly from Western European sources, and
South Africa and Australia and New Zealand marked down as
prospective homes for a European population.
The motive that had sent Columbus to America and Vasco da Gama to
India was the perennial first motive of all sailors since the
beginning of things--trade. But while in the already populous and
productive East the trade motive remained dominant, and the
European settlements remained trading settlements from which the
European inhabitants hoped to return home to spend their money,
the Europeans in America, dealing with communities at a very much
lower level of productive activity, found a new inducement for
persistence in the search for gold and silver. Particularly did
the mines of Spanish America yield silver. The Europeans had to
go to America not simply as armed merchants but as prospectors,
miners, searchers after natural products, and presently as
planters. In the north they sought furs. Mines and plantations
necessitated settlements. They obliged people to set up permanent
overseas homes. Finally in some cases, as when the English
Puritans went to New England in the early seventeenth {336}
century to escape religious persecution, when in the eighteenth
Oglethorpe sent people from the English debtors' prisons to
Georgia, and when in the end of the eighteenth the Dutch sent
orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the Europeans frankly crossed
the seas to find new homes for good. In the nineteenth century,
and especially after the coming of the steamship, the stream of
European emigration to the new empty lands of America and
Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great migration.
So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Europeans, and
the European culture was transplanted to much larger areas than
those in which it had been developed. These new communities
bringing a ready-made civilization with them to these new lands
grew up, as it were, unplanned and unperceived; the statecraft of
Europe did not foresee them, and was unprepared with any ideas
about their treatment. The politicians and ministers of Europe
continued to regard them as essentially expeditionary
establishments, sources of revenue, "possessions" and
"dependencies," long after their peoples had developed a keen
sense of their separate social life. And also they continued to
treat them as helplessly subject to the mother country long after
the population had spread inland out of reach of any effectual
punitive operations from the sea.
Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be
remembered, the link of all these overseas empires was the
oceangoing sailing ship. On land the swiftest thing was still the
horse, and the cohesion and unity of political systems on land was
still limited by the limitations of horse communications.
Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century the
northern two-thirds of North America was under the British crown.
France had abandoned America. Except for Brazil, which was
Portuguese, and one or two small islands and areas in French,
British, Danish and Dutch hands, Florida, Louisiana, California
and all America to the south was Spanish. It was the British
colonies south of Maine and Lake Ontario that first demonstrated
the inadequacy of the sailing ship to hold overseas populations
together in one political system.
These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin and
character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settlements {337}
as well as British; there were British Catholics in Maryland and
British ultra-Protestants in New England, and while the New
Englanders farmed their own land and denounced slavery, the
British in Virginia and the south were planters employing a
swelling multitude of imported negro slaves. There was no natural
common unity in such states. To get from one to the other might
mean a coasting voyage hardly less tedious than the transatlantic
crossing. But the union that diverse origin and natural
conditions denied the British Americans was forced upon them by
the selfishness and stupidity of the British government in London.
They were taxed without any voice in the spending of the taxes;
their trade was sacrificed to British interests; the highly
profitable slave trade was maintained by the British government in
spite of the opposition of the Virginians
who--though quite willing to hold and use slaves--feared to be
swamped by an ever-growing barbaric black population.
[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON]
Britain at that time was lapsing towards an intenser form of
monarchy, and the obstinate personality of George III (1760-1820)
did much to force on a struggle between the home and the colonial
governments.
The conflict was precipitated by legislation which favoured the
London East India Company at the expense of the American shipper.
Three cargoes of tea which were imported under the new conditions
were thrown overboard in Boston harbour by a band of men disguised
as Indians (1773). {338} Fighting only began in 1775 when the
British government attempted to arrest two of the American leaders
at Lexington near Boston. The first shots were fired in Lexington
by the British; the first fighting occurred at Concord.
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL, NEAR BOSTON]
So the American War of Independence began, though for more than a
year the colonists showed themselves extremely unwilling to sever
their links with the mother land. It was not until the middle of
1776 that the Congress of the insurgent states issued "The
Declaration of Independence." George Washington, who like many of
the leading colonists of the time had had a military training in
the wars against the French, was made commander-in-chief. In 1777
a British general, General Burgoyne, in an attempt to reach New
York from Canada, was defeated at Freemans Farm and obliged to
surrender at Saratoga. In the same year the French and Spanish
declared war upon Great Britain, greatly hampering her sea
communications. A second British army under General Cornwallis
was caught in the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia and obliged to
capitulate in 1781. In 1783 peace was made in Paris, and the
Thirteen Colonies from Maine to Georgia became a union of
independent sovereign States. So the United States of America
came into existence. Canada remained loyal to the British flag.
[Map: The United States, showing extent of settlement in 1790]
For four years these States had only a very feeble central
government under certain Articles of Confederation, and they
seemed destined to break up into separate independent communities.
Their immediate separation was delayed by the hostility of the
British and a certain aggressiveness on the part of the French
which brought {340} home to them the immediate dangers of
division. A Constitution was drawn up and ratified in 1788
establishing a more efficient Federal government with a President
holding very considerable powers, and the weak sense of national
unity was invigorated by a second war with Britain in 1812.
Nevertheless the area covered by the States was so wide and their
interests so diverse at that time, that--given only the means of
communication then available--a disintegration of the Union into
separate states on the European scale of size was merely a
question of time. Attendance at Washington meant a long, tedious
and insecure journey for the senators and congressmen of the
remoter districts, and the mechanical impediments to the diffusion
of a common education and a common literature and intelligence
were practically insurmountable. Forces were at work in the world
however that were to arrest the process of differentiation
altogether. Presently came the river steamboat and then the
railway and the telegraph to save the United States from
fragmentation, and weave its dispersed people together again into
the first of great modern nations.
Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America were to
follow the example of the Thirteen and break their connection with
Europe. But being more dispersed over the continent and separated
by great mountainous chains and deserts and forests and by the
Portuguese Empire of Brazil, they did not achieve a union among
themselves. They became a constellation of republican states,
very prone at first to wars among themselves and to revolutions.
Brazil followed a rather different line towards the inevitable
separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occupied
the mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy had fled to
Brazil. From that time on until they separated, Portugal was
rather a dependency of Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822
Brazil declared itself a separate Empire under Pedro I, a son of
the Portuguese King. But the new world has never been very
favourable to monarchy. In 1889 the Emperor of Brazil was shipped
off quietly to Europe, and the United States of Brazil fell into
line with the rest of republican America.
{341}
LV
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE
Britain had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America before a
profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of
Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the
essentially temporary nature of the political arrangements of the
world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of
the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a
multitude of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a
basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. It was
brilliant and aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and
substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were
protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the
whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The
peasants were ground down by taxation; the middle classes were
dominated and humiliated by the nobility.
In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged to
call representatives of the different classes of the realm into
consultation upon the perplexities of defective income and
excessive expenditure. In 1789 the States General, a gathering of
the nobles, clergy and commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier
form of the British Parliament, was called together at Versailles.
It had not assembled since 1610. For all that time France had
been an absolute monarchy. Now the people found a means of
expressing their long fermenting discontent. Disputes immediately
broke out between the three estates, due to the resolve of the
Third Estate, the Commons, to control the Assembly. The Commons
got the better of these disputes and the States General became a
National Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as
the British {342} Parliament kept the British crown in order. The
king (Louis XVI) prepared for a struggle and brought up troops
from the provinces. Whereupon Paris and France revolted.
The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The
grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of
Paris, and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In
the east and north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the
nobility were burnt by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully
destroyed, and the owners murdered or driven away. In a month the
ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had
collapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the
queen's party fled abroad. A provisional city government was set
up in Paris and in most of the other large cities, and a new armed
force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily and plainly
to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into existence by
these municipal bodies. The National Assembly found itself called
upon to create a new political and social system for a new age.
It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the
utmost. It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the
absolutist regime; it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom,
aristocratic titles and privileges and sought to establish a
constitutional monarchy in Paris. The king abandoned Versailles
and its splendours and kept a diminished state in the palace of
the Tuileries in Paris.
For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might struggle
through to an effective modernized government. Much of its work
was sound and still endures, if much was experimental and had to
be undone. Much was ineffective. There was a clearing up of the
penal code; torture, arbitrary imprisonment and persecutions for
heresy were abolished. The ancient provinces of France, Normandy,
Burgundy and the like gave place to eighty departments. Promotion
to the highest ranks in the army was laid open to men of every
class. An excellent and simple system of law courts was set up,
but its value was much vitiated by having the judges appointed by
popular election for short periods of time. This made the crowd a
sort of final court of appeal, and the judges, like the members of
the Assembly, were forced to play to the gallery. And the whole
vast property of the church was seized and administered {343} by
the state; religious establishments not engaged in education or
works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of the clergy
made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing
for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously
underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in
addition the choice of priests and bishops was made elective,
which struck at the very root idea of the Roman Church, which
centred everything upon the Pope, and in which all authority is
from above downward. Practically the National Assembly wanted at
one blow to make the church in France Protestant, in organization
if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts
between the state priests created by the National Assembly and the
recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome.
In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France was
brought to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen,
working in concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends
abroad. Foreign armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and one
night in June the king and queen and their children slipped away
from the Tuileries and fled to join the foreigners and the
aristocratic exiles. They were caught at Varennes and brought
back to Paris, and an France flamed up into a passion of patriotic
republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war with Austria
and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and executed (January,
1793) on the model already set by England, for treason to his
people.
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French
people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and
the Republic. There was to be an end to compromise at home and
abroad; at home royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be
stamped out; abroad France was to be the protector and helper of
all revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world, was to become
Republican. The youth of France poured into the Republican
armies; a new and wonderful song spread through the land, a song
that still warms the blood like wine, the Marseillaise. Before
that chant and the leaping columns of French bayonets and their
enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies rolled back;
before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far beyond the
utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on {344}
foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they
had raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland.
Then the French Government did an unwise thing. It had been
exasperated by the expulsion of its representative from England
upon the execution of Louis, and it declared war against England.
It was an unwise thing to do, because the revolution which had
given France a new enthusiastic infantry and a brilliant artillery
released from its aristocratic officers and many cramping
conditions had destroyed the discipline of the navy, and the
English were supreme upon the sea. And this provocation united
all England against France, whereas there had been at first a very
considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy with
the revolution.
[Illustration: THE TRIAL OF LOUIS XVI]
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a
European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the
Austrians for ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic.
The Dutch fleet, frozen in the Texel, surrendered to a handful of
{345} cavalry without firing its guns. For some time the French
thrust towards Italy was hung up, and it was only in 1796 that a
new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and hungry
republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and Verona.
Says C. F. Atkinson, [7] "What astonished the Allies most of all
was the number and the velocity of the Republicans. These
improvised armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were
unprocurable for want of money, untransportable for want of the
enormous number of wagons that would have been required, and also
unnecessary, for the discomfort that would have caused wholesale
desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne by the men
of 1793-94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could
not be carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar
with 'living on the country.' Thus 1793 saw the birth of the
modern system of war--rapidity of movement, full development of
national strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against
cautious manoeuvring, small professional armies, tents and full
rations, and chicane. The first represented the
decision-compelling spirit, the second the spirit of risking
little to gain a little ... ."
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the
Marseillaise and fighting for _la France_, manifestly never quite
clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the
countries into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in
Paris was spending itself in a far less glorious fashion. The
revolution was now under the sway of a fanatical leader,
Robespierre. This man is difficult to judge; he was a man or poor
physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But he had that most
necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to save the
Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved by
no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the
Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had
sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the
king. There were insurrections; one in the west, in the district
of La Vendée, where the people rose against the conscription and
against the dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by
noblemen and priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles
had risen and the royalists of Toulon {346} had admitted an
English and Spanish garrison. To which there seemed no more
effectual reply than to go on killing royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering
began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this
mood. The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre's
antagonists were guillotined, atheists who argued that there was
no Supreme Being were guillotined; day by day, week by week, this
infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more.
The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed
more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium.
[Illustration: THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE,
OCTOBER 16, 1793]
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown
and guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five men
which carried on the war of defence abroad and held France
together at home for five years. Their reign formed a curious
interlude in this history of violent changes. They took things
{347} as they found them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution
carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland,
south Germany and north Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled and
republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated the
Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of the
liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the
French Government. Their wars became less and less the holy wars
of freedom, and more and more like the aggressive wars of the
ancient regime. The last feature of Grand Monarchy that France
was disposed to discard was her tradition of foreign policy. One
discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate as if there
had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its
intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave that
country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat.
This was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies of
the Directory to victory in Italy.
Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been scheming
and working for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to
supreme power. He was a man of severely limited understanding but
of ruthless directness and great energy. He had begun life as an
extremist of the school of Robespierre; he owed his first
promotion to that side; but he had no real grasp of the new forces
that were working in Europe. His utmost political imagination
carried him to a belated and tawdry attempt to restore the Western
Empire. He tried to destroy the remains of the old Holy Roman
Empire, intending to replace it by a new one centring upon Paris.
The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor and
became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French
wife in order to marry an Austrian princess.
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in 1799,
and he made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation
of Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris, taking the
crown from the Pope and putting it upon his own head himself as
Charlemagne had directed. His son was crowned King of Rome.
For some years Napoleon's reign was a career of victory. He {348}
conquered most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria,
and dominated all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the
command of the sea from the British and his fleets sustained a
conclusive defeat inflicted by the British Admiral Nelson at
Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose against him in 1808 and a British
army under Wellington thrust the French armies slowly northward
out of the peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came into conflict with
the Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a great
conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was defeated and largely
destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose
against him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were
beaten back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He
was exiled to Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815
and was defeated by the allied British, Belgians and Prussians at
Waterloo. He died a British prisoner at St. Helena in 1821.
The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and
finished. A great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna
to restore as far as possible the state of affairs that the great
storm had rent to pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace,
a peace of exhausted effort, was maintained in Europe.
[7] In his article, "French Revolutionary Wars," in the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
{349}
LVI
THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
Two main causes prevented that period from being a complete social
and international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of
wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency
of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair
privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and
teaching. The second was the impossible system of boundaries
drawn by the diplomatists of Vienna.
The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards past
conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain.
Here even the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the
Spanish colonies had followed the example of the United States and
revolted against the European Great Power System, when Napoleon
set his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810. The George
Washington of South America was General Bolivar. Spain was unable
to suppress this revolt, it dragged on much as the United States
War of Independence had dragged on, and at last the suggestion was
made by Austria, in accordance with the spirit of the Holy
Alliance, that the European monarch should assist Spain in this
struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the
prompt action of President Monroe of the United States in 1823
which conclusively warned off this projected monarchist
restoration. He announced that the United States would regard any
extension of the European system in the Western Hemisphere as a
hostile act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine that
there must be no extension of extra-American government in
America, which has kept the Great Power system out of America for
nearly a hundred years and permitted the new states of Spanish
America to work out their destinies along their own lines.
{350}
But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least,
under the protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in
Europe. A popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French
army in 1823, with a mandate from a European congress, and
simultaneously Austria suppressed a revolution in Naples.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles
set himself to destroy the liberty of the press and universities,
and to restore absolute government; the sum of a billion francs
was voted to compensate the nobles for the chateau burnings and
sequestrations of 1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this
embodiment of the ancient regime, and replaced him by Louis
Philippe, the son of that Philip, Duke of Orleans, who was
executed during the Terror. The other continental monarchies, in
face of the open approval of the revolution by Great Britain and a
strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria, did not interfere
in this affair. After all, France was still a monarchy. This man
Louis Philippe (1830-48) remained the constitutional King of
France for eighteen years.
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of
Vienna, which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings of the
monarchists. The stresses that arose from the unscientific
boundaries planned by the diplomatists at Vienna gathered force
more deliberately, but they were even more dangerous to the peace
of mankind. It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer
together the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and
so reading different literatures and having different general
ideas, especially if those differences are exacerbated by
religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interest, such as the
common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a
close linking of peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths; and
even in Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as
in Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and
districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the
reader will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna
drew it, he will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had
planned the maximum of local exasperation.
It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumped {351}
together the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics
of the old Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and set up a kingdom of
the Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old republic of
Venice, but all of North Italy as far as Milan to the
German-speaking Austrians. French-speaking Savoy it combined with
pieces of Italy to restore the kingdom of Sardinia. Austria and
Hungary, already a sufficiently explosive mixture of discordant
nationalities, Germans, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs,
Roumanians, and now Italians, was made still more impossible by
confirming Austria's Polish acquisitions of 1772 and 1795. The
Catholic and republican-spirited Polish people were chiefly given
over to the less civilized rule of the
Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important districts went to Protestant
Prussia. The Tsar was also confirmed in his acquisition of the
entirely alien Finns. The very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish
peoples were bound together under one king. Germany, the reader
will see, was left in a particularly dangerous state of muddle.
Prussia and Austria were both partly in and partly out of a German
confederation, which included a multitude of minor states. The
King of Denmark came into the German confederation by virtue of
certain German-speaking possessions in Holstein. Luxembourg was
included in the German confederation, though its ruler was also
King of the Netherlands, and though many of its peoples talked
French.
Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who talk
German and base their ideas on German literature, the people who
talk Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the
people who talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature,
will all be far better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to
the rest of mankind if they conduct their own affairs in their own
idiom within the ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder
that one of the most popular songs in Germany during this period
declared that wherever the German tongue was spoken, there was the
German Fatherland!
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current
revolution in France, revolted against its Dutch association in
the kingdom of the Netherlands. The powers, terrified at the
possibilities of a republic or of annexation to France, hurried in
to pacify {353} this situation, and gave the Belgians a monarch,
Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There were also ineffectual
revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a much more serious one
in Russian Poland. A republican government held out in Warsaw for
a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in 1825), and
was then stamped out of existence with great violence and cruelty.
The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church was
substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state religion ....
====================================================================
{352}
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF NAPOLEON (CORONATION)]
====================================================================
[Map: Europe after the Congress of Vienna]
In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks.
For six years they fought a desperate war, while the governments
of Europe looked on. Liberal opinion protested against this
inactivity; volunteers from every European country joined the
insurgents, and at last Britain, France and Russia took joint
action. The Turkish fleet was destroyed by the French and English
at the battle of Navarino (1827), and the Tsar invaded Turkey. By
the treaty of Adrianople (1829) Greece was declared free, but
{354} she was not permitted to resume her ancient republican
traditions. A German king was found for Greece, one Prince Otto
of Bavaria, and Christian governors were set up in the Danubian
provinces (which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of the
Jugo-Slav region). Much blood had still to run however before
the Turk
was altogether expelled from these lands.
{355}
LVII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the
opening years of the nineteenth century, while these conflicts of
the powers and princes were going on in Europe, and the patchwork
of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) was changing kaleidoscopically
into the patchwork of the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the
sailing ship was spreading European influence throughout the
world, a steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing up of
men's ideas about the world in which they lived was in progress in
the European and Europeanized world.
It went on disconnected from political life, and producing
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking
immediate results in political life. Nor was it affecting popular
thought very profoundly during this period. These reactions were
to come later, and only in their full force in the latter half of
the nineteenth century. It was a process that went on chiefly in
a small world of prosperous and
independent-spirited people. Without what the English call the
"private gentleman," the scientific process could not have begun
in Greece, and could not have been renewed in Europe. The
universities played a part but not a leading part in the
philosophical and scientific thought of this period. Endowed
learning is apt to be timid and conservative learning, lacking in
initiative and resistent to innovation, unless it has the spur of
contact with independent minds.
We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662
and its work in realizing the dream of Bacon's _New Atlantis_.
Throughout the eighteenth century there was much clearing up of
general ideas about matter and motion, much mathematical advance,
a systematic development of the use of optical glass in microscope
and telescope, a renewed energy in classificatory natural {356}
history, a great revival of anatomical science. The science of
geology--foreshadowed by Aristotle and anticipated by Leonardo da
Vinci (1452-1519)--began its great task of interpreting the Record
of the Rocks.
[Illustration: EARLY ROLLING STOCK ON THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER
RAILWAY IN THE FIRST DAYS OF THE RAILWAY]
The progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy.
Improved metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger and
bolder handling of masses of metal and other materials, reacted
upon practical inventions. Machinery on a new scale and in a new
abundance appeared to revolutionize industry.
[Illustration: EARLY TRAVELLING ON THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER
RAILWAY, 1833]
In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to transport and made
the first locomotive. In 1825 the first railway, between Stockton
and Darlington, was opened, and Stephenson's "Rocket," with a
thirteen-ton train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per
hour. From 1830 onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the
century a network of railways had spread all over Europe.
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition
of human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the
Russian disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in
312 hours. This was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was
travelling with every conceivable advantage, and he averaged {357}
under 5 miles an hour. An ordinary traveller could not have done
this distance in twice the time. These were about the same
maximum rates of travel as held good between Rome and Gaul in the
first century A.D. Then suddenly came this tremendous change.
The railways reduced this journey for any ordinary traveller to
less than forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced the
chief European distances to about a tenth of what they had been.
They made it possible to carry out administrative work in areas
ten times as great as any that had hitherto been workable under
one administration. The full significance of that possibility in
Europe still remains to be realized. Europe is still netted in
boundaries drawn in the horse and road era. In America the
effects were immediate. To the United States of America,
sprawling westward, it meant the possibility of a continuous
access to Washington, however far the frontier travelled across
the continent. It meant unity, sustained on a scale that would
otherwise have been impossible.
[Illustration: THE STEAMBOAT: _CLERMONT_, 1807, U.S.A.]
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam engine
in its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the _Charlotte
Dundas_, on the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an
American {358} named Fulton had a steamer, the Clermont, with
British-built engines, upon the Hudson River above New York. The
first steamship to put to sea was also an American, the Phoenix,
which went from New York (Hoboken) to Philadelphia. So, too, was
the first ship using steam (she also had sails) to cross the
Atlantic, the Savannah (1819). All these were paddle-wheel boats
and paddle-wheel boats are not adapted to work in heavy seas. The
paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then disabled. The
screw steamship followed rather slowly. Many difficulties had to
be surmounted before the screw was a practicable thing. Not until
the middle of the century did the tonnage of steamships upon the
sea begin to overhaul that of sailing ships. After that the
evolution in sea transport was rapid. For the first time men
began to cross the seas and oceans with some certainty as to the
date of their arrival. The transatlantic crossing, which had been
an uncertain adventure of several weeks--which might stretch to
months--was accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down, in the
case of the fastest boats, to under five days, with a practically
notifiable hour of arrival.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and
sea a new and striking addition to the facilities of human
intercourse arose out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani and
Faraday into various electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph
came into existence in 1835. The first underseas cable was laid
in 1851 between France and England. In a few years the telegraph
system had spread over the civilized world, and news which had
hitherto travelled slowly from point to point became practically
simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were
to the popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the
most striking and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only
the most conspicuous and clumsy first fruits of a far more
extensive process. Technical knowledge and skill were developing
with an extraordinary rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent
measured by the progress of any previous age. Far less
conspicuous at first in everyday life, but finally far more
important, was the extension of man's power over various
structural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth century
iron was reduced from its ores by {359} means of wood charcoal,
was handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape.
It was material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were
enormously dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the
individual iron-worker. The largest masses of iron that could be
dealt with under those conditions amounted at most (in the
sixteenth century) to two or three tons. (There was a very
definite upward limit, therefore, to the size of cannon.) The
blast-furnace rose in the eighteenth century and developed with
the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth century do we find
rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783).
Nasmyth's steam hammer came as late as 1838.
The ancient world, because of its metallurgical inferiority, could
not use steam. The steam engine, even the primitive pumping
engine, could not develop before sheet iron was available. The
early engines seem to the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits
of ironmongery, but they were the utmost that the metallurgical
science of the time could do. As late as 1856 came the Bessemer
process, and presently (1864) the open-hearth process, in which
steel and every sort of iron could be melted, purified and cast in
a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard of. To-day in the
electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent steel swirling
about like boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the previous
practical advances of mankind is comparable in its consequences to
the complete mastery over enormous masses of steel and iron and
over their texture and quality which man has now achieved. The
railways and early engines of all sorts were the mere first
triumphs of the new metallurgical methods. Presently came ships
of iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new way of building with
steel upon a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that they had
planned their railways with far too timid a gauge, that they could
have organized their travelling with far more steadiness and
comfort upon a much bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world
much over 2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about
a 50,000-ton liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of
progress as being a progress in "mere size," but that sort of
sneering merely marks the intellectual limitations of those who
indulge in it. {360} The great ship or the steel-frame building
is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of the small ship or
building of the past; it is a thing different in kind, more
lightly and strongly built, of finer and stronger materials;
instead of being a thing of precedent and
rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and intricate calculation.
In the old house or ship, matter was dominant--the material and
its needs had to be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter had been
captured, changed, coerced. Think of the coal and iron and sand
dragged out of the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought, molten and
cast, to be flung at last, a slender glittering pinnacle of steel
and glass, six hundred feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man's knowledge
of the metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration.
A parallel story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and
tin, and of a multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name
but two, unknown before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in
this great and growing mastery over substances, over different
sorts of glass, over rocks and plasters and the like, over colours
and textures, that the main triumphs of the mechanical revolution
have thus far been achieved. Yet we are still in the stage of the
first fruits in the matter. We have the power, but we have still
to learn how to use our power. Many of the first employments of
these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid or
horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still hardly begun to
work with the endless variety of substances now at their disposal.
Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new
science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of
the nineteenth century that this body of enquiry began to yield
results to impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric
light and electric traction, and the transmutation of forces, the
possibility of sending power, that could be changed into
mechanical motion or light or heat as one chose, along a copper
wire, as water is sent along a pipe, began to come through to the
ideas of ordinary people....
The British and French were at first the leading peoples in this
great proliferation of knowledge; but presently the Germans, who
had learnt humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and
pertinacity in scientific enquiry as to overhaul these leaders.
British {361} science was largely the creation of Englishmen and
Scotchmen working outside the ordinary centres of erudition.
[Illustration: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPINNING WHEEL]
[Illustration: MODEL OF ARKWRIGHT'S SPINNING JENNY, 1769]
The universities of Britain were at this time in a state of
educational retrogression, largely given over to a pedantic
conning of the Latin and Greek classics. French education, too,
was dominated by the classical tradition of the Jesuit schools,
and consequently it was not difficult for the Germans to organize
a body of investigators, small indeed in relation to the
possibilities of the case, but large in proportion to the little
band of British and French inventors and experimentalists. And
though this work of research and experiment was making Britain and
France the most rich and {362} powerful countries in the world, it
was not making scientific and inventive men rich and powerful.
There is a necessary unworldliness about a sincere scientific man;
he is too preoccupied with his research to plan and scheme how to
make money out of it. The economic exploitation of his
discoveries falls very easily and naturally, therefore, into the
hands of a more acquisitive type; and so we find that the crops of
rich men which every fresh phase of scientific and technical
progress has produced in Great Britain, though they have not
displayed quite the same passionate desire to insult and kill the
goose that laid the national golden eggs as the scholastic and
clerical professions, have been quite content to let that
profitable creature starve. Inventors and discoverers came by
nature, they thought, for cleverer people to profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German
"learned" did not display the same vehement hatred of the new
learning. They permitted its development. The German business
man and manufacturer again had not quite the same contempt for the
man of science as had his British competitor. Knowledge, these
Germans believed, might be a cultivated crop, responsive to
fertilizers. They did concede, therefore, a certain amount of
opportunity to the scientific mind; their public expenditure on
scientific work was relatively greater, and this expenditure was
abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century
the German scientific worker had made German a necessary language
for every science student who wished to keep abreast with the
latest work in his department, and in certain branches, and
particularly in chemistry, Germany acquired a very great
superiority over her western neighbours. The scientific effort of
the sixties and seventies in Germany began to tell after the
eighties, and the German gained steadily upon Britain and France
in technical and industrial prosperity.
A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the
eighties a new type of engine came into use, an engine in which
the expansive force of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive
force of steam. The light, highly efficient engines that were
thus made possible were applied to the automobile, and developed
at last to reach such a pitch of lightness and efficiency as to
render flight--{363} long known to be possible--a practical
achievement. A successful flying machine--but not a machine large
enough to take up a human body--was made by Professor Langley of
the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897. By 1909
the aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had
seemed to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the
perfection of railways and automobile road traction, but with the
flying machine came fresh reductions in the effective distance
between one point of the earth's surface and another. In the
eighteenth century the distance from London to Edinburgh was an
eight days' journey; in 1918 the British Civil Air Transport
Commission reported that the journey from London to Melbourne,
halfway round the earth, would probably in a few years' time be
accomplished in that same period of eight days.
[Illustration: AN EARLY WEAVING MACHINE]
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in
the time distances of one place from another. They are merely one
aspect of a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of
human possibility. The science of agriculture and agricultural
chemistry, for instance, made quite parallel advances during the
nineteenth century. Men learnt so to fertilize the soil as to
produce quadruple and quintuple the crops got from the same area
in the seventeenth century. There was a still more extraordinary
advance in medical science; the average duration of life rose, the
daily efficiency increased, the waste of life through ill-health
diminished.
{364}
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to
constitute a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a
century this mechanical revolution has been brought about. In
that time man made a stride in the material conditions of his life
vaster than he had done during the whole long interval between the
palæolithic stage and the age of cultivation, or between the days
of Pepi in Egypt and those of George III. A new gigantic material
framework for human affairs has come into existence. Clearly it
demands great readjustments of our social, economical and
political methods. But these readjustments have necessarily
waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution, and they
are still only in their opening stage
to-day.
{365}
LVIII
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we
have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely
new thing in human experience arising out of the development of
organized science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or
the discovery of metals, with something else, quite different in
its origins, something for which there was already an historical
precedent, the social and financial development which is called
the _industrial revolution_. The two processes were going on
together, they were constantly reacting upon each other, but they
were in root and essence different. There would have been an
industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal, no
steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably have
followed far more closely upon the lines of the social and
financial developments of the later years of the Roman Republic.
It would have repeated the story of dispossessed free cultivators,
gang labour, great estates, great financial fortunes, and a
socially destructive financial process. Even the factory method
came before power and machinery. Factories were the product not
of machinery, but of the "division of labour." Drilled and
sweated workers were making such things as millinery cardboard
boxes and furniture, and colouring maps and book illustrations and
so forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial
purposes. There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus.
New books, for instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the
factories of the book-sellers. The attentive student of Defoe and
of the political pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the idea
of herding poor people into establishments to work collectively
for their living was already current in Britain before the close
of the seventeenth century. There are intimations of it even as
early as More's _Utopia_ (1516). It was a social and not a
mechanical development.
{366}
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and
economic history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path
along which the Roman state had gone in the last three centuries
B.C. But the political disunions of Europe, the political
convulsions against monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk
and perhaps also the greater accessibility of the western European
intelligence to mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the
process into quite novel directions. Ideas of human solidarity,
thanks to Christianity, were far more widely diffused in the newer
European world, political power was not so concentrated, and the
man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind, therefore, very
willingly from the ideas of the slave and of gang labour to the
idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and
discovery, was a new thing in human experience and it went on
regardless of the social, political, economic and industrial
consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the
other hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and
more profoundly changed and deflected by the constant variation in
human conditions caused by the mechanical revolution. And the
essential difference between the amassing of riches, the
extinction of small farmers and small business men, and the phase
of big finance in the latter centuries of the Roman Republic on
the one hand, and the very similar concentration of capital in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other, lies in the
profound difference in the character of labour that the mechanical
revolution was bringing about. The power of the old world was
human power; everything depended ultimately upon the driving power
of human muscle, the muscle of ignorant and subjugated men. A
little animal muscle, supplied by draft oxen, horse traction and
the like, contributed. Where a weight had to be lifted, men
lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped it out;
where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the
Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its bank of
sweating rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early
civilizations were employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At its
onset, power-driven machinery did not seem to promise any release
from such unintelligent toil. Great gangs {367} of men were
employed in excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and
embankments, and the like. The number of miners increased
enormously. But the extension of facilities and the output of
commodities increased much more. And as the nineteenth century
went on, the plain logic of the new situation asserted itself more
clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a source of mere
indiscriminated power. What could be done mechanically by a human
being could be done faster and better by a machine. The human
being was needed now only where choice and intelligence had to be
exercised. Human beings were wanted only as human beings. The
_drudge_, on whom all the previous civilizations had rested, the
creature of mere obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous,
had become unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
[Illustration: INCIDENT IN THE DAYS OF THE SLAVE TRADE]
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and
mining as it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For
ploughing, sowing and harvesting, swift machines came forward to
do the work of scores of men. The Roman civilization was built
upon cheap and degraded human beings; modern civilization is being
rebuilt upon {368} cheap mechanical power. For a hundred years
power has been getting cheaper and labour dearer. If for a
generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn in the mine,
it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than machinery.
[Illustration: EARLY FACTORY, IN COLEBROOKDALE]
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human
affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the
old civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the
nineteenth century went on, it became more and more plain to the
intelligent directive people that the common man had now to be
something better than a drudge. He had to be educated--if only to
secure "industrial efficiency." He had to understand what he was
about. From the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular
education had been smouldering in Europe, just as it had
smouldered in Asia wherever Islam has set its foot, because of the
necessity of making the believer understand a little of the belief
by which he is {369} saved, and of enabling him to read a little
in the sacred books by which his belief is conveyed. Christian
controversies, with their competition for adherents, ploughed the
ground for the harvest of popular education. In England, for
instance, by the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century,
the disputes of the sects and the necessity of catching adherents
young had produced a series of competing educational organizations
for children, the church "National" schools, the dissenting
"British" schools, and even Roman Catholic elementary schools.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid
advance in popular education throughout all the Westernized world.
There was no parallel advance in the education of the upper
classes--some advance, no doubt, but nothing to correspond--and so
the great gulf that had divided that world hitherto into the
readers and the non-reading mass became little more than a
slightly perceptible difference in educational level. At the back
of this process was the mechanical revolution, apparently
regardless of social conditions, but really insisting inexorably
upon the complete abolition of a totally illiterate class
throughout the world.
The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never been
clearly apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary
Roman citizen never saw the changes through which he lived,
clearly and comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial
revolution, as it went on towards the end of the nineteenth
century, was more and more distinctly _seen_ as one whole process
by the common people it was affecting, because presently they
could read and discuss and communicate, and because they went
about and saw things as no commonalty had ever done before.
{370}
LIX
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS
The institutions and customs and political ideas of the ancient
civilizations grew up slowly, age by age, no man designing and no
man foreseeing. It was only in that great century of human
adolescence, the sixth century B.C., that men began to think
clearly about their relations to one another, and first to
question and first propose to alter and rearrange the established
beliefs and laws and methods of human government.
We have told of the glorious intellectual dawn of Greece and
Alexandria, and how presently the collapse of the slave-holding
civilizations and the clouds of religious intolerance and
absolutist government darkened the promise of that beginning. The
light of fearless thinking did not break through the European
obscurity again effectually until the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. We have tried to show something of the share of the
great winds of Arab curiosity and Mongol conquest in this gradual
clearing of the mental skies of Europe. And at first it was
chiefly material knowledge that increased. The first fruits of
the recovered manhood of the race were material achievements and
material power. The science of human relationship, of individual
and social psychology, of education and of economics, are not only
more subtle and intricate in themselves but also bound up
inextricably with much emotional matter. The advances made in
them have been slower and made against greater opposition. Men
will listen dispassionately to the most diverse suggestions about
stars or molecules, but ideas about our ways of life touch and
reflect upon everyone about us.
And just as in Greece the bold speculations of Plato came before
Aristotle's hard search for fact, so in Europe the first political
enquiries of the new phase were put in the form of "Utopian"
stories, directly imitated from Plato's _Republic_ and his _Laws_.
Sir Thomas {371} More's _Utopia_ is a curious imitation of Plato
that bore fruit in a new English poor law. The Neapolitan
Campanella's _City of the Sun_ was more fantastic and less
fruitful.
By the end of the seventeenth century we find a considerable and
growing literature of political and social science was being
produced. Among the pioneers in this discussion was John Locke,
the son of an English republican, an Oxford scholar who first
directed his attention to chemistry and medicine. His treatises
on government, toleration and education show a mind fully awake to
the possibilities of social reconstruction. Parallel with and a
little later than John Locke in England, Montesquieu
(1689-1755) in France subjected social, political and religious
institutions to a searching and fundamental analysis. He stripped
the magical prestige from the absolutist monarchy in France. He
shares with Locke the credit for clearing away many of the false
ideas that had hitherto prevented deliberate and conscious
attempts to reconstruct human society.
The generation that followed him in the middle and later decades
of the eighteenth century was boldly speculative upon the moral
and intellectual clearings he had made. A group of brilliant
writers, the "Encyclopædists," mostly rebel spirits from the
excellent schools of the Jesuits, set themselves to scheme out a
new world (1766). Side by side with the Encyclopædists were the
Economists or Physiocrats, who were making bold and crude
enquiries into the production and distribution of food and goods.
Morelly, the author of the _Code de La Nature_, denounced the
institution of private property and proposed a communistic
organization of society. He was the precursor of that large and
various school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth century
who are lumped together as Socialists.
What is Socialism? There are a hundred definitions of Socialism
and a thousand sects of Socialists. Essentially Socialism is no
more and no less than a criticism of the idea of property in the
light of the public good. We may review the history of that idea
through the ages very briefly. That and the idea of
internationalism are the two cardinal ideas upon which most of our
political life is turning.
{372}
[Illustration: CARL MARX]
The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of the
species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape was a
proprietor. Primitive property is what a beast will fight for.
The dog and his bone, the tigress and her lair, the roaring stag
and his herd, these are proprietorship blazing. No more
nonsensical expression is conceivable in sociology than the term
"primitive communism." The Old Man of the family tribe of early
palæolithic times insisted {373} upon his proprietorship in his
wives and daughters, in his tools, in his visible universe. If
any other man wandered into his visible universe he fought him,
and if he could he slew him. The tribe grew in the course of
ages, as Atkinson showed convincingly in his _Primal Law_, by the
gradual toleration by the Old Man of the existence of the younger
men, and of their proprietorship in the wives they captured from
outside the tribe, and in the tools and ornaments they made and
the game they slew. Human society grew by a compromise between
this one's property and that. It was a compromise with instinct
which was forced upon men by the necessity of driving some other
tribe out of its visible universe. If the hills and forests and
streams were not _your_ land or _my_ land, it was because they had
to be our land. Each of us would have preferred to have it _my_
land, but that would not work. In that case the other fellows
would have destroyed us. Society, therefore, is from its
beginning a _mitigation of ownership_. Ownership in the beast and
in the primitive savage was far more intense a thing than it is in
the civilized world to-day. It is rooted more strongly in our
instincts than in our reason.
In the natural savage and in the untutored man to-day there is no
limitation to the sphere of ownership. Whatever you can fight
for, you can own; women-folk, spared captive, captured beast,
forest glade, stone-pit or what not. As the community grew, a
sort of law came to restrain internecine fighting, men developed
rough-and-ready methods of settling proprietorship. Men could own
what they were the first to make or capture or claim. It seemed
natural that a debtor who could not pay should become the property
of his creditor. Equally natural was it that after claiming a
patch of land a man should exact payments from anyone who wanted
to use it. It was only slowly, as the possibilities of organized
life dawned on men, that this unlimited property in anything
whatever began to be recognized as a nuisance. Men found
themselves born into a universe all owned and claimed, nay! they
found themselves born owned and claimed. The social struggles of
the earlier civilization are difficult to trace now, but the
history we have told of the Roman Republic shows a community
waking up to the idea that debts may become a public inconvenience
and should then be repudiated, and that the unlimited ownership of
land is also an inconvenience. We {374} find that later Babylonia
severely limited the rights of property in slaves. Finally, we
find in the teaching of that great revolutionist, Jesus of
Nazareth, such an attack upon property as had never been before.
Easier it was, he said, for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than for the owner of great possessions to enter the
kingdom of heaven. A steady, continuous criticism of the
permissible scope of property seems to have been going on in the
world for the last twenty-five or thirty centuries. Nineteen
hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth we find all the world that
has come under the Christian teaching persuaded that there could
be no property in human beings. And also the idea that a man may
"do what he likes with his own" was very much shaken in relation
to other sorts of property.
But this world of the closing eighteenth century was still only in
the interrogative stage in this matter. It had got nothing clear
enough, much less settled enough, to act upon. One of its primary
impulses was to protect property against the greed and waste of
kings and the exploitation of noble adventurers. It was largely
to protect private property from taxation that the French
Revolution began. But the equalitarian formulæ of the Revolution
carried it into a criticism of the very property it had risen to
protect. How can men be free and equal when numbers of them have
no ground to stand upon and nothing to eat, and the owners will
neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil? Excessively--the
poor complained.
To which riddle the reply of one important political group was to
set about "dividing up." They wanted to intensify and
universalize property. Aiming at the same end by another route,
there were the primitive socialists--or, to be more exact,
communists--who wanted to "abolish" private property altogether.
The state (a democratic state was of course understood) was to own
all property.
It is paradoxical that different men seeking the same ends of
liberty and happiness should propose on the one hand to make
property as absolute as possible, and on the other to put an end
to it altogether. But so it was. And the clue to this paradox is
to be found in the fact that ownership is not one thing but a
multitude of different things.
{375}
It was only as the nineteenth century developed that men began to
realize that property was not one simple thing, but a great
complex of ownerships of different values and consequences, that
many things (such as one's body, the implements of an artist,
clothing, toothbrushes) are very profoundly and incurably one's
personal property, and that there is a very great range of things,
railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens,
pleasure boats, for example, which need each to be considered very
particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it
may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the
public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in
the collective interest. On the practical side these questions
pass into politics, and the problem of making and sustaining
efficient state administration. They open up issues in social
psychology, and interact with the enquiries of educational
science. The criticism of property is still a vast and passionate
ferment rather than a science. On the one hand are the
Individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms
with what we possess, and on the other the Socialists who would in
many directions pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietory
acts. In practice one will find every gradation between the
extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any
sort to support a government, and the communist who would deny any
possessions at all. The ordinary socialist of
to-day is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a
considerable amount of private property but put such affairs as
education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass productions of
staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly
organized state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual
convergence of reasonable men towards a moderate socialism
scientifically studied and planned. It is realized more and more
clearly that the untutored man does not co-operate easily and
successfully in large undertakings, and that every step towards a
more complex state and every function that the state takes over
from private enterprise, necessitates a corresponding educational
advance and the organization of a proper criticism and control.
Both the press and the political methods of the contemporary state
are far too crude for any large extension of collective
activities.
But for a time the stresses between employer and employed and
{376} particularly between selfish employers and reluctant
workers, led to a world-wide dissemination of the very harsh and
elementary form of communism which is associated with the name of
Marx. Marx based his theories on a belief that men's minds are
limited by their economic necessities, and that there is a
necessary conflict of interests in our present civilization
between the prosperous and employing classes of people and the
employed mass. With the advance in education necessitated by the
mechanical revolution, this great employed majority will become
more and more class-conscious and more and more solid in
antagonism to the (class-conscious) ruling minority. In some way
the class-conscious workers would seize power, he prophesied, and
inaugurate a new social state. The antagonism, the insurrection,
the possible revolution are understandable enough, but it does not
follow that a new social state or anything but a socially
destructive process will ensue. Put to the test in Russia,
Marxism, as we shall note later, has proved singularly uncreative.
[Illustration: SCIENCE IN THE COAL MINE]
{377}
Marx sought to replace national antagonism by class antagonisms;
Marxism has produced in succession a First, a Second and a Third
Workers' International. But from the starting point of modern
individualistic thought it is also possible to reach international
ideas. From the days of that great English economist, Adam Smith,
onward there has been an increasing realization that for
world-wide prosperity free and unencumbered trade about the earth
is needed. The individualist with his hostility to the state is
hostile also to tariffs and boundaries and all the restraints upon
free act and movement that national boundaries seem to justify.
It is interesting to see two lines of thought, so diverse in
spirit, so different in substance as this class-war socialism of
the Marxists and the individualistic free-trading philosophy of
the British business men of the Victorian age heading at last, in
spite of these primary differences, towards the same intimations
of a new world-wide treatment of human affairs outside the
boundaries and limitations of any existing state. The logic of
reality triumphs over the logic of theory. We begin to perceive
that from widely divergent starting points individualist theory
and socialist theory are part of a common search, a search for
more spacious social and political ideas and interpretations, upon
which men may contrive to work together, a search that began again
in Europe and has intensified as men's confidence in the ideas of
the Holy Roman Empire and in Christendom decayed, and as the age
of discovery broadened their horizons from the world of the
Mediterranean to the whole wide world.
To bring this description of the elaboration and development of
social, economic and political ideas right down to the discussions
of the present day, would be to introduce issues altogether too
controversial for the scope and intentions of this book. But
regarding these things, as we do here, from the vast perspectives
of the student of world history, we are bound to recognize that
this reconstruction of these directive ideas in the human mind is
still an unfinished task--we cannot even estimate yet how
unfinished the task may be. Certain common beliefs do seem to be
emerging, and their influence is very perceptible upon the
political events and public acts of to-day; but at present they
are not clear enough nor convincing enough to compel men
definitely and systematically towards their realization. {378}
Men's acts waver between tradition and the new, and on the whole
they rather gravitate towards the traditional. Yet, compared with
the thought of even a brief lifetime ago, there does seem to be an
outline shaping itself of a new order in human affairs. It is a
sketchy outline, vanishing into vagueness at this point and that,
{379} and fluctuating in detail and formulæ, yet it grows
steadfastly clearer, and its main lines change less and less.
[Illustration: CONSTRUCTIONAL DETAIL OF THE FORTH BRIDGE]
It is becoming plainer and plainer each year that in many respects
and in an increasing range of affairs, mankind is becoming one
community, and that it is more and more necessary that in such
matters there should be a common world-wide control. For example,
it is steadily truer that the whole planet is now one economic
community, that the proper exploitation of its natural resources
demands one comprehensive direction, and that the greater power
and range that discovery has given human effort makes the present
fragmentary and contentious administration of such affairs more
and more wasteful and dangerous. Financial and monetary
expedients also become world-wide interests to be dealt with
successfully only on world-wide lines. Infectious diseases and
the increase and migrations of population are also now plainly
seen to be world-wide concerns. The greater power and range of
human activities has also made war disproportionately destructive
and disorganizing, and, even as a clumsy way of settling issues
between government and government and people and people,
ineffective. All these things clamour for controls and
authorities of a greater range and greater comprehensiveness than
any government that has hitherto existed.
But it does not follow that the solution of these problems lies in
some super-government of all the world arising by conquest or by
the coalescence of existing governments. By analogy with existing
institutions men have thought of the Parliament of Mankind, of a
World Congress, of a President or Emperor of the Earth. Our first
natural reaction is towards some such conclusion, but the
discussion and experiences of half a century of suggestions and
attempts has on the whole discouraged belief in that first obvious
idea. Along that line to world unity the resistances are too
great. The drift of thought seems now to be in the direction of a
number of special committees or organizations, with world-wide
power delegated to them by existing governments in this group of
matters or that, bodies concerned with the waste or development of
natural wealth, with the equalization of labour conditions, with
world peace, with currency, population and health, and so forth.
{380}
The world may discover that all its common interests are being
managed as one concern, while it still fails to realize that a
world government exists. But before even so much human unity is
attained, before such international arrangements can be put above
patriotic suspicions and jealousies, it is necessary that the
common mind of the race should be possessed of that idea of human
unity, and that the idea of mankind as one family should be a
matter of universal instruction and understanding.
For a score of centuries or more the spirit of the great universal
religions has been struggling to maintain and extend that idea of
a universal human brotherhood, but to this day the spites, angers
and distrusts of tribal, national and racial friction obstruct,
and successfully obstruct, the broader views and more generous
impulses which would make every man the servant of all mankind.
The idea of human brotherhood struggles now to possess the human
soul, just as the idea of Christendom struggled to possess the
soul of Europe in the confusion and disorder of the sixth and
seventh centuries of the Christian era. The dissemination and
triumph of such ideas must be the work of a multitude of devoted
and undistinguished missionaries, and no contemporary writer can
presume to guess how far such work has gone or what harvest it may
be preparing.
Social and economic questions seem to be inseparably mingled with
international ones. The solution in each case lies in an appeal
to that same spirit of service which can enter and inspire the
human heart. The distrust, intractability and egotism of nations
reflects and is reflected by the distrust, intractability and
egotism of the individual owner and worker in the face of the
common good. Exaggerations of possessiveness in the individual
are parallel and of a piece with the clutching greed of nations
and emperors. They are products of the same instinctive
tendencies, and the same ignorances and traditions.
Internationalism is the socialism of nations. No one who has
wrestled with these problems can feel that there yet exists a
sufficient depth and strength of psychological science and a
sufficiently planned-out educational method and organization for
any real and final solution of these riddles of human intercourse
and cooperation. We are as incapable of planning a really
effective peace organization of the world to-day as were men in
1820 to plan an {381} electric railway system, but for all we know
the thing is equally practicable and may be as nearly at hand.
No man can go beyond his own knowledge, no thought can reach
beyond contemporary thought, and it is impossible for us to guess
or foretell how many generations of humanity may have to live in
war and waste and insecurity and misery before the dawn of the
great peace to which all history seems to be pointing, peace in
the heart and peace in the world, ends our night of wasteful and
aimless living. Our proposed solutions are still vague and crude.
Passion and suspicion surround them. A great task of intellectual
reconstruction is going on, it is still incomplete, and our
conceptions grow clearer and more exact--slowly, rapidly, it is
hard to tell which. But as they grow clearer they will gather
power over the minds and imaginations of men. Their present lack
of grip is due to their lack of assurance and exact rightness.
They are misunderstood because they are variously and confusingly
presented. But with precision and certainty the new vision of the
world will gain compelling power. It may presently gain power
very rapidly. And a great work of educational reconstruction will
follow logically and necessarily upon that clearer understanding.
{382}
LX
THE EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES
The region of the world that displayed the most immediate and
striking results from the new inventions in transport was North
America. Politically the United States embodied, and its
constitution crystallized, the liberal ideas of the middle
eighteenth century. It dispensed with state-church or crown, it
would have no titles, it protected property very jealously as a
method of freedom, and--the exact practice varied at first in the
different states--it gave nearly every adult male citizen a vote.
Its method of voting was barbarically crude, and as a consequence
its political life fell very soon under the control of highly
organized party machines, but that did not prevent the newly
emancipated population developing an energy, enterprise and public
spirit far beyond that of any other contemporary population.
Then came that acceleration of locomotion to which we have already
called attention. It is a curious thing that America, which owes
most to this acceleration in locomotion, has felt it least. The
United States have taken the railway, the river steamboat, the
telegraph and so forth as though they were a natural part of their
growth. They were not. These things happened to come along just
in time to save American unity. The United States of to-day were
made first by the river steamboat, and then by the railway.
Without these things, the present United States, this vast
continental nation, would have been altogether impossible. The
westward flow of population would have been far more sluggish. It
might never have crossed the great central plains. It took nearly
two hundred years for effective settlement to reach from the coast
to Missouri, much less than halfway across the continent. The
first state established beyond the river was the steamboat state
of Missouri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the Pacific
was done in a few decades.
{383}
If we had the resources of the cinema it would be interesting to
show a map of North America year by year from 1600 onward, with
little dots to represent hundreds of people, each dot a hundred,
and stars to represent cities of a hundred thousand people.
For two hundred years the reader would see that stippling creeping
slowly along the coastal districts and navigable waters, spreading
still more gradually into Indiana, Kentucky and so forth. Then
somewhere about 1810 would come a change. Things would get more
lively along the river courses. The dots would be multiplying and
spreading. That would be the steamboat. The pioneer dots would
be spreading soon over Kansas and Nebraska from a number of
jumping-off places along the great rivers.
Then from about 1850 onward would come the black lines of the
railways, and after that the little black dots would not simply
creep but run. They would appear now so rapidly, it would be
almost as though they were being put on by some sort of spraying
machine. And suddenly here and then there would appear the first
stars to indicate the first great cities of a hundred thousand
people. First one or two and then a multitude of cities--each
like a knot in the growing net of the railways.
The growth of the United States is a process that has no precedent
in the world's history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a
community could not have come into existence before, and if it
had, without railways it would certainly have dropped to pieces
long before now. Without railways or telegraph it would be far
easier to administer California from Pekin than from Washington.
But this great population of the United States of America has not
only grown outrageously; it has kept uniform. Nay, it has become
more uniform. The man of San Francisco is more like the man of
New York to-day than the man of Virginia was like the man of New
England a century ago. And the process of assimilation goes on
unimpeded. The United States is being woven by railway, by
telegraph, more and more into one vast unity, speaking, thinking
and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation will be
helping in the work.
This great community of the United States is an altogether new
thing in history. There have been great empires before with
populations exceeding 100 millions, out these were associations of
divergent {384} peoples; there has never been one single people on
this scale before. We want a new term for this new thing. We
call the United States a country just as we call France or Holland
a country. But the two things are as different as an automobile
and a one-horse shay. They are the creations of different periods
and different conditions; they are going to work at a different
pace and in an entirely different way. The United States in scale
and possibility is halfway between a European state and a United
States of all the world.
But on the way to this present greatness and security the American
people passed through one phase of dire conflict. The river
steamboats, the railways, the telegraph, and their associate
facilities, did not come soon enough to avert a deepening conflict
of interests and ideas between the southern and northern states of
the Union. The former were slave-holding states; the latter,
states in which all men were free. The railways and steamboats at
first did but bring into sharper conflict an already established
difference between the two sections of the United States. The
increasing unification due to the new means of transport made the
question whether the southern spirit or the northern should
prevail an ever more urgent one. There was little possibility of
compromise. The northern spirit was free and individualistic; the
southern made for great estates and a conscious gentility ruling
over a dusky subject multitude.
Every new territory that was organized into a state as the tide of
population swept westward, every new incorporation into the fast
growing American system, became a field of conflict between the
two ideas, whether it should become a state of free citizens, or
whether the estate and slavery system should prevail. From 1833
an American anti-slavery society was not merely resisting the
extension of the institution but agitating the whole country for
its complete abolition. The issue flamed up into open conflict
over the admission of Texas to the Union. Texas had originally
been a part of the republic of Mexico, but it was largely
colonized by Americans from the slave-holding states, and it
seceded from Mexico, established its independence in 1835, and was
annexed to the United States in 1844. Under the Mexican law
slavery had been forbidden in Texas, but now the South claimed
Texas for slavery and got it.
{385}
Meanwhile the development of ocean navigation was bringing a
growing swarm of immigrants from Europe to swell the spreading
population of the northern states, and the raising of Iowa,
Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon, all northern farm lands, to state
level, gave the anti-slavery North the possibility of predominance
both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The
cotton-growing South, irritated by the growing threat of the
Abolitionist movement, and fearing this predominance in Congress,
began to talk of secession from the Union. Southerners began to
dream of annexations to the south of them in Mexico and the West
Indies, and of great slave state, detached from the North and
reaching to Panama.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE FIRST AMERICAN RIVER STEAMERS]
The return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension President in
1860 decided the South to split the Union. South Carolina passed
an "ordinance of secession" and prepared for war. Mississippi,
Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas joined her, and a
convention met at Montgomery in Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis
president of the "Confederated States" of America, and adopted a
constitution specifically upholding "the institution of negro
slavery."
{386}
Abraham Lincoln was, it chanced, a man entirely typical of the new
people that had grown up after the War of Independence. His early
years had been spent as a drifting particle in the general
westward flow of the population. He was born in Kentucky (1809),
was taken to Indiana as a boy and later on to Illinois. Life was
rough in the backwoods of Indiana in those days; the house was a
mere log cabin in the wilderness, and his schooling was poor and
casual. But his mother taught him to read early, and he became a
voracious reader. At seventeen he was a big athletic youth, a
great wrestler and runner. He worked for a time as clerk in a
store, went into business as a storekeeper with a drunken partner,
and contracted debts that he did not fully pay off for fifteen
years. In 1834, when he was still only five and twenty, he was
elected member of the House of Representatives for the State of
Illinois. In Illinois particularly the question of slavery flamed
because the great leader of the party for the extension of slavery
in the national Congress was Senator Douglas of Illinois. Douglas
was a man of great ability and prestige, and for some years
Lincoln fought against him by speech and pamphlet, rising steadily
to the position of his most formidable and finally victorious
antagonist. Their culminating struggle was the presidential
campaign of 1860, and on the fourth of March, 1861, Lincoln was
inaugurated President, with the southern states already in active
secession from the rule of the federal government at Washington,
and committing acts of war.
This civil war in America was fought by improvised armies that
grew steadily from a few score thousands to hundreds of
thousands--until at last the Federal forces exceeded a million
men; it was fought over a vast area between New Mexico and the
eastern sea, Washington and Richmond were the chief objectives.
It is beyond our scope here to tell of the mounting energy of
that epic struggle that rolled to and fro across the hills and
woods of Tennessee and Virginia and down the Mississippi. There
was a terrible waste and killing of men. Thrust was followed by
counter thrust; hope gave way to despondency, and returned and was
again disappointed. Sometimes Washington seemed within the
Confederate grasp; again the Federal armies were driving towards
Richmond. The Confederates, outnumbered and far poorer in
resources, fought under {387} a general of supreme ability,
General Lee. The generalship of the Union was far inferior.
Generals were dismissed, new generals appointed; until at last,
under Sherman and Grant, came victory over the ragged and
depleted South. In October, 1864, a Federal army under Sherman
broke through the Confederate left and marched down from Tennessee
through Georgia to the coast, right across the Confederate
country, and then turned up through the {388} Carolinas, coming in
upon the rear of the Confederate armies. Meanwhile Grant held Lee
before Richmond until Sherman closed on him. On April 9th, 1865,
Lee and his army surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and within
a month all the remaining secessionist armies had laid down their
arms and the Confederacy was at an end.
[Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN]
This four years' struggle had meant an enormous physical and moral
strain for the people of the United States. The principle of
state autonomy was very dear to many minds, and the North seemed
in effect to be forcing abolition upon the South. In the border
states brothers and cousins, even fathers and sons, would take
opposite sides and find themselves in antagonistic armies. The
North felt its cause a righteous one, but for great numbers of
people it was not a full-bodied and unchallenged righteousness.
But for Lincoln there was no doubt. He was a clear-minded man in
the midst of much confusion. He stood for union; he stood for the
wide peace of America. He was opposed to slavery, but slavery he
held to be a secondary issue; his primary purpose was that the
United States should not be torn into two contrasted and jarring
fragments.
When in the opening stages of the war Congress and the Federal
generals embarked upon a precipitate emancipation, Lincoln opposed
and mitigated their enthusiasm. He was for emancipation by stages
and with compensation. It was only in January, 1865, that the
situation had ripened to a point when Congress could propose to
abolish slavery for ever by a constitutional amendment, and the
war was already over before this amendment was ratified by the
states.
As the war dragged on through 1862 and 1863, the first passions
and enthusiasms waned, and America learnt all the phases of war
weariness and war disgust. The President found himself with
defeatists, traitors, dismissed generals, tortuous party
politicians, and a doubting and fatigued people behind him and
uninspired generals and depressed troops before him; his chief
consolation must have been that Jefferson Davis at Richmond could
be in little better case. The English government misbehaved, and
permitted the Confederate agents in England to launch and man
three swift privateer ships--the _Alabama_ is the best remembered
of them--which {389} chased United States shipping from the seas.
The French army in Mexico was trampling the Monroe Doctrine in the
dirt. Came subtle proposals from Richmond to drop the war, leave
the issues of the war for subsequent discussion, and turn, Federal
and Confederate in alliance, upon the French in Mexico. But
Lincoln would not listen to such proposals unless the supremacy of
the Union was maintained. The Americans might do such things as
one people but not as two.
He held the United States together through long weary months of
reverses and ineffective effort, through black phases of division
and failing courage; and there is no record that he ever faltered
from his purpose. There were times when there was nothing to be
done, when he sat in the White House silent and motionless, a grim
monument of resolve; times when he relaxed his mind by jesting and
broad anecdotes.
He saw the Union triumphant. He entered Richmond the day after
its surrender, and heard of Lee's capitulation. He returned to
Washington, and on April 11th made his last public address. His
theme was reconciliation and the reconstruction of loyal
government in the defeated states. On the evening of April 14th
he went to Ford's theatre in Washington, and as he sat looking at
the stage, he was shot in the back of the head and killed by an
actor named Booth who had some sort of grievance against him, and
who had crept into the box unobserved. But Lincoln's work was
done; the Union was saved.
At the beginning of the war there was no railway to the Pacific
coast; after it the railways spread like a swiftly growing plant
until now they have clutched and held and woven all the vast
territory of the United States into one indissoluble mental and
material unity--the greatest real community--until the common folk
of China have learnt to read--in the world.
{390}
LXI
THE RISE OF GERMANY TO PREDOMINANCE IN EUROPE
We have told how after the convulsion of the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic adventure, Europe settled down again for a time to
an insecure peace and a sort of modernized revival of the
political conditions of fifty years before. Until the middle of
the century the new facilities in the handling of steel and the
railway and steamship produced no marked political consequences.
But the social tension due to the development of urban
industrialism grew. France remained a conspicuously uneasy
country. The revolution of 1830 was followed by another in 1848.
Then Napoleon III, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, became first
President, and then (in 1852) Emperor.
He set about rebuilding Paris, and changed it from a picturesque
seventeenth century insanitary city into the spacious Latinized
city of marble it is to-day. He set about rebuilding France, and
made it into a brilliant-looking modernized imperialism. He
displayed a disposition to revive that competitiveness of the
Great Powers which had kept Europe busy with futile wars during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Tsar Nicholas I of
Russia (1825-1856) was also becoming aggressive and pressing
southward upon the Turkish Empire with his eyes on Constantinople.
After the turn of the century Europe broke out into a fresh cycle
of wars. They were chiefly "balance-of-power" and ascendancy
wars. England, France and Sardinia assailed Russia in the Crimean
war in defence of Turkey; Prussia (with Italy as an ally) and
Austria fought for the leadership of Germany, France liberated
North Italy from Austria at the price of Savoy, and Italy
gradually unified itself into one kingdom. Then Napoleon III was
so ill advised as to attempt adventures in Mexico, during the
American Civil War; he set up an Emperor Maximilian there and
abandoned him hastily to {391} his fate--he was shot by the
Mexicans--when the victorious Federal Government showed its teeth.
[Map: Map of Europe, 1848-1871]
In 1870 came a long-pending struggle for predominance in Europe
between France and Prussia. Prussia had long foreseen and
prepared for this struggle, and France was rotten with financial
corruption. Her defeat was swift and dramatic. The Germans
invaded France in August, one great French army under the Emperor
capitulated at Sedan in September, another surrendered in October
at Metz, and in January 1871, Paris, after a siege and
bombardment, fell into German hands. Peace was signed at
Frankfort surrendering the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the
Germans. {392} Germany, excluding Austria, was unified as an
empire, and the King of Prussia was added to the galaxy of
European Cæsars, as the German Emperor.
For the next forty-three years Germany was the leading power upon
the European continent. There was a Russo-Turkish war in 1877-8,
but thereafter, except for certain readjustments in the Balkans,
European frontiers remained uneasily stable for thirty years.
{393}
LXII
THE NEW OVERSEAS EMPIRES OF STEAMSHIP AND RAILWAY
The end of the eighteenth century was a period of disrupting
empires and disillusioned expansionists. The long and tedious
journey between Britain and Spain and their colonies in America
prevented any really free coming and going between the home land
and the daughter lands, and so the colonies separated into new and
distinct communities, with distinctive ideas and interests and
even modes of speech. As they grew they strained more and more at
the feeble and uncertain link of shipping that had joined them.
Weak trading-posts in the wilderness, like those of France in
Canada, or trading establishments in great alien communities, like
those of Britain in India, might well cling for bare existence to
the nation which gave them support and a reason for their
existence. That much and no more seemed to many thinkers in the
early part of the nineteenth century to be the limit set to
overseas rule. In 1820 the sketchy great European "empires"
outside of Europe that had figured so bravely in the maps of the
middle eighteenth century, had shrunken to very small dimensions.
Only the Russian sprawled as large as ever across Asia.
The British Empire in 1815 consisted of the thinly populated
coastal river and lake regions of Canada, and a great hinterland
of wilderness in which the only settlements as yet were the
fur-trading stations of the Hudson Bay Company, about a third of
the Indian peninsula, under the rule of the East India Company,
the coast districts of the Cape of Good Hope inhabited by blacks
and rebellious-spirited Dutch settlers; a few trading stations on
the coast of West Africa, the rock of Gibraltar, the island of
Malta, Jamaica, a few minor slave-labour possessions in the West
Indies, British Guiana in South America, and, on the other side of
the world, two dumps for convicts at Botany Bay in Australia and
in Tasmania. Spain retained Cuba and a few settlements in the
Philippine Islands. {394} Portugal had in Africa some vestiges of
her ancient claims. Holland had various islands and possessions
in the East Indies and Dutch Guiana, and Denmark an island or so
in the West Indies. France had one or two West Indian islands and
French Guiana. This seemed to be as much as the European powers
needed, or were likely to acquire of the rest of the world. Only
the East India Company showed any spirit of expansion.
While Europe was busy with the Napoleonic wars the East India
Company, under a succession of Governors-General, was playing much
the same role in India that had been played before by Turkoman and
such-like invaders from the north. And after the peace of Vienna
it went on, levying its revenues, making wars, sending ambassadors
to Asiatic powers, a quasi-independent state, however, with a
marked disposition to send wealth westward.
We cannot tell here in any detail how the British Company made its
way to supremacy sometimes as the ally of this power, sometimes as
that, and finally as the conqueror of all. Its power spread to
Assam, Sind, Oudh. The map of India began to take on the outlines
familiar to the English schoolboy of to-day, a patchwork of native
states embraced and held together by the great provinces under
direct British rule. . . .
In 1859, following upon a serious mutiny of the native troops in
India, this empire of the East India Company was annexed to the
British Crown. By an Act entitled _An Act for the Better
Government of India_, the Governor-General became a Viceroy
representing the Sovereign, and the place of the Company was taken
by a Secretary of State for India responsible to the British
Parliament. In 1877, Lord Beaconsfield, to complete the work,
caused Queen Victoria to be proclaimed Empress of India.
Upon these extraordinary lines India and Britain are linked at the
present time. India is still the empire of the Great Mogul, but
the Great Mogul has been replaced by the "crowned republic" of
Great Britain. India is an autocracy without an autocrat. Its
rule combines the disadvantage of absolute monarchy with the
impersonality and irresponsibility of democratic officialdom. The
Indian with a complaint to make has no visible monarch to go to;
his Emperor is a golden symbol; he must circulate pamphlets in
England {395} or inspire a question in the British House of
Commons. The more occupied Parliament is with British affairs,
the less attention India will receive, and the more she will be at
the mercy of her small group of higher officials.
[Illustration: RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE GORGE, VICTORIA FALLS, OF
THE ZAMBESI, SOUTHERN RHODESIA]
Apart from India, there was no great expansion of any European
Empire until the railways and the steamships were in effective
action. A considerable school of political thinkers in Britain
was disposed to regard overseas possessions as a source of
weakness to the kingdom. The Australian settlements developed
slowly until in 1842 the discovery of valuable copper mines, and
in 1851 of gold, gave them a new importance. Improvements in
transport were also making Australian wool an increasingly
marketable commodity in Europe. {396} Canada, too, was not
remarkably progressive until 1849; it was troubled by dissensions
between its French and British inhabitants, there were several
serious revolts, and it was only in 1867 that a new constitution
creating a Federal Dominion of Canada relieved its internal
strains. It was the railway that altered the Canadian outlook.
It enabled Canada, just as it enabled the United States, to expand
westward, to market its corn and other produce in Europe, and in
spite of its swift and extensive growth, to remain in language and
sympathy and interests one community. The railway, the steamship
and the telegraph cable were indeed changing all the conditions of
colonial development.
Before 1840, English settlements had already begun in New Zealand,
and a New Zealand Land Company had been formed to exploit the
possibilities of the island. In 1840 New Zealand also was added
to the colonial possessions of the British Crown.
Canada, as we have noted, was the first of the British possessions
to respond richly to the new economic possibilities that the new
methods of transport were opening. Presently the republics of
South America, and particularly the Argentine Republic, began to
feel in their cattle trade and coffee growing the increased
nearness of the European market. Hitherto the chief commodities
that had attracted the European powers into unsettled and barbaric
regions had been gold or other metals, spices, ivory, or slaves.
But in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century the increase
of the European populations was obliging their governments to look
abroad for staple foods; and the growth of scientific
industrialism was creating a demand for new raw materials, fats
and greases of every kind, rubber, and other hitherto disregarded
substances. It was plain that Great Britain and Holland and
Portugal were reaping a great and growing commercial advantage
from their very considerable control of tropical and sub-tropical
products. After 1871 Germany, and presently France and later
Italy, began to look for unannexed raw-material areas, or for
Oriental countries capable of profitable modernization.
So began a fresh scramble all over the world, except in the
American region where the Monroe Doctrine now barred such
adventures, for politically unprotected lands.
{397}
[Map: The British Empire in 1815]
Close to Europe was the continent of Africa, full of vaguely known
possibilities. In 1850 it was a continent of black mystery; only
Egypt and the coast were known. Here we have no space to tell the
amazing story of the explorers and adventurers who first pierced
the African darkness, and of the political agents, administrators,
traders, settlers and scientific men who followed in their track.
Wonderful races of men like the pygmies, strange beasts like the
okapi, marvellous fruits and flowers and insects, terrible
diseases, astounding scenery of forest and mountain, enormous
inland seas and gigantic rivers and cascades were revealed; a
whole new world. Even remains (at Zimbabwe) of some unrecorded
and vanished civilization, the southward enterprise of an early
people, were discovered. Into this new world came the Europeans,
and found the rifle already there in the hands of the Arab
slave-traders, and negro life in disorder.
By 1900, in half a century, all Africa was mapped, explored,
estimated and divided between the European powers. Little heed
was given to the welfare of the natives in this scramble. The
Arab slaver was indeed curbed rather than expelled, but the greed
for rubber, which was a wild product collected under compulsion by
the natives in the Belgian Congo, a greed exacerbated by the clash
of inexperienced European administrators with the native {398}
population, led to horrible atrocities. No European power has
perfectly clean hands in this matter.
We cannot tell here in any detail how Great Britain got possession
of Egypt in 1883 and remained there in spite of the fact that
Egypt was technically a part of the Turkish Empire, nor how nearly
this scramble led to war between France and Great Britain in 1898,
when a certain Colonel Marchand, crossing Central Africa from the
west coast, tried at Fashoda to seize the Upper Nile.
Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the Boers, or
Dutch settlers, of the Orange River district and the Transvaal set
up independent republics in the inland parts of South Africa, and
then repented and annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877; nor how
the Transvaal Boers fought for freedom and won it after the battle
of Majuba Hill (1881). Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the
memory of the English people by a persistent press campaign. A
war with both republics broke out in 1899, a three years' war
enormously costly to the British people, which ended at last in
the surrender of the two republics.
Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after the
downfall of the imperialist government which had conquered them,
the Liberals took the South African problem in hand, and these
former republics became free and fairly willing associates with
Cape Colony and Natal in a Confederation of all the states of
South Africa as one self-governing republic under the British
Crown.
In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was completed.
There remained unannexed three comparatively small countries:
Liberia, a settlement of liberated negro slaves on the west coast;
Morocco, under a Moslem Sultan; and Abyssinia, a barbaric country,
with an ancient and peculiar form of Christianity, which had
successfully maintained its independence against Italy at the
battle of Adowa in 1896.
{399}
LXIII
EUROPEAN AGGRESSION IN ASIA AND THE RISE OF JAPAN
It is difficult to believe that any large number of people really
accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa in European
colours as a permanent new settlement of the worlds affairs, but
it is the duty of the historian to record that it was so accepted.
There was but a shallow historical background to the European mind
in the nineteenth century, and no habit of penetrating criticism.
The quite temporary advantages that the mechanical revolution in
the west had given the Europeans over the rest of the old world
were regarded by people, blankly ignorant of such events as the
great Mongol conquests, as evidences of a permanent and assured
European leadership of mankind. They had no sense of the
transferability of science and its fruits. They did not realize
that Chinamen and Indians could carry on the work of research as
ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen. They believed that there was
some innate intellectual drive in the west, and some innate
indolence and conservatism in the east, that assured the Europeans
a world predominance for ever.
The consequence of this infatuation was that the various European
foreign offices set themselves not merely to scramble with the
British for the savage and undeveloped regions of the world's
surface, but also to carve up the populous and civilized countries
of Asia as though these people also were no more than raw material
for exploitation. The inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid
imperialism of the British ruling class in India, and the
extensive and profitable possessions of the Dutch in the East
Indies, filled the rival Great Powers with dreams of similar
glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and in
Further India, China and Japan.
{400}
In 1898 Germany seized Kiau Chau in China. Britain responded by
seizing Wei-hai-wei, and the next year the Russians took
possession of Port Arthur. A flame of hatred for the Europeans
swept through China. There were massacres of Europeans and
Christian converts, and in 1900 an attack upon and siege of the
European legations in Pekin. A combined force of Europeans made a
punitive expedition to Pekin, rescued the legations, and stole an
enormous amount of valuable property. The Russians then seized
Manchuria, and in 1904, the British invaded Tibet....
But now a new Power appeared in the struggle of the Great Powers,
Japan. Hitherto Japan has played but a small part in this
history; her secluded civilization has not contributed very
largely to the general shaping of human destinies; she has
received much, but she has given little. The Japanese proper are
of the Mongolian race. Their civilization, their writing and
their literary and artistic traditions are derived from the
Chinese. Their history is an interesting and romantic one; they
developed a feudal system and a system of chivalry in the earlier
centuries of the Christian era; their attacks upon Korea and China
are an Eastern equivalent of the English wars in France. Japan
was first brought into contact with Europe in the sixteenth
century; in 1542 some Portuguese reached it in a Chinese junk, and
in 1549 a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, began his teaching
there. For a time Japan welcomed European intercourse, and the
Christian missionaries made a great number of converts. A certain
William Adams became the most trusted European adviser of the
Japanese, and showed them how to build big ships. There were
voyages in Japanese-built ships to India and Peru. Then arose
complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans, the
Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch Protestants, each
warning the Japanese against the political designs of the others.
The Jesuits, in a phase of ascendancy, persecuted and insulted the
Buddhists with great acrimony. In the end the Japanese came to
the conclusion that the Europeans were an intolerable nuisance,
and that Catholic Christianity in particular was a mere cloak for
the political dreams of the Pope and the Spanish monarchy--already
in possession of the Philippine Islands; there was a great
persecution of the Christians, and in 1638 Japan was absolutely
{401} closed to Europeans, and remained closed for over 200 years.
During those two centuries the Japanese were as completely cut off
from the rest of the world as though they lived upon another
planet. It was forbidden to build any ship larger than a mere
coasting boat. No Japanese could go abroad, and no European enter
the country.
[Illustration: JAPANESE SOLDIER ON THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]
For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current of
history. She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism in
which about five per cent of the population, the _samurai_, or
fighting men, and the nobles and their families, tyrannized
without restraint over the rest of the population. Meanwhile the
great world outside went on to wider visions and new powers.
Strange shipping became more frequent, passing the Japanese
headlands; sometimes ships were wrecked and sailors brought
ashore. Through the Dutch settlement in the island of Deshima,
their one link with the outer universe, came warnings that Japan
was not keeping pace with the power of the Western world. In 1837
a ship sailed into Yedo Bay flying a strange flag of stripes and
stars, and carrying some Japanese sailors she had picked up far
adrift in the Pacific. She was driven off by cannon shot. This
flag presently reappeared on other ships. One in 1849 came to
demand the liberation {402} of eighteen shipwrecked American
sailors. Then in 1853 came four American warships under Commodore
Perry, and refused to be driven away. He lay at anchor in
forbidden waters, and sent messages to the two rulers who at that
time shared the control of Japan. In 1854 he returned with ten
ships, amazing ships propelled by steam, and equipped with big
guns, and he made proposals for trade and intercourse that the
Japanese had no power to resist. He landed with a guard of 500
men to sign the treaty. Incredulous crowds watched this
visitation from the outer world, marching through the streets.
Russia, Holland and Britain followed in the wake of America. A
great nobleman whose estates commanded the Straits of Shimonoseki
saw fit to fire on foreign vessels, and a bombardment by a fleet
of British, French, Dutch and American warships destroyed his
batteries and scattered his swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron
(1865), at anchor off Kioto, imposed a ratification of the
treaties which opened Japan to the world.
The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense. With
astonishing energy and intelligence they set themselves to bring
their culture and organization to the level of the European
Powers. Never in all the history of mankind did a nation make
such a stride as Japan then did. In 1866 she was a medieval
people, a fantastic caricature of the extremest romantic
feudalism; in 1899 hers was a completely Westernized people, on a
level with the most advanced European Powers. She completely
dispelled the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable way
hopelessly behind Europe. She made all European progress seem
sluggish by comparison.
We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan's war with China in
1894-95. It demonstrated the extent of her Westernization. She
had an efficient Westernized army and a small but sound fleet.
But the significance of her renascence, though it was appreciated
by Britain and the United States, who were already treating her as
if she were a European state, was not understood by the other
Great Powers engaged in the pursuit of new Indias in Asia. Russia
was pushing down through Manchuria to Korea. France was already
established far to the south in Tonkin and Annam, Germany was
{403} prowling hungrily on the look-out for some settlement. The
three Powers combined to prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the
Chinese war. She was exhausted by the struggle, and they
threatened her with war.
[Illustration: A STREET IN TOKIO]
Japan submitted for a time and gathered her forces. Within ten
years she was ready for a struggle with Russia, which marks an
epoch in the history of Asia, the close of the period of European
arrogance. The Russian people were, of course, innocent and
ignorant of this trouble that was being made for them halfway
round the world, and the wiser Russian statesmen were against
these foolish thrusts; but a gang of financial adventurers,
including the Grand Dukes, his cousins, surrounded the Tsar. They
had gambled deeply in the prospective looting of Manchuria and
China, and they would suffer no withdrawal. So there began a
transportation of great armies of Japanese soldiers across the sea
to Port Arthur and Korea, and the sending of endless trainloads of
Russian peasants along the Siberian railway to die in those
distant battlefields.
{404}
The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were beaten on
sea and land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed round Africa
to be utterly destroyed in the Straits of Tshushima. A
revolutionary movement among the common people of Russia,
infuriated by this remote and reasonless slaughter, obliged the
Tsar to end the war (1905); he returned the southern half of
Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875, evacuated
Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The European invasion of Asia
was coming to an end and the retraction of Europe's tentacles was
beginning.
{405}
LXIV
THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN 1914
We may note here briefly the varied nature of the constituents of
the British Empire in 1914 which the steamship and railway had
brought together. It was and is a quite unique political
combination; nothing of the sort has ever existed before.
First and central to the whole system was the "crowned republic"
of the United British Kingdom, including (against the will of a
considerable part of the Irish people) Ireland. The majority of
the British Parliament, made up of the three united parliaments of
England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, determines the headship,
the quality and policy of the ministry, and determines it largely
on considerations arising out of British domestic politics. It is
this ministry which is the effective supreme government, with
powers of peace and war, over all the rest of the empire.
Next in order of political importance to the British States were
the "crowned republics" of Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (the
oldest British possession, 1583), New Zealand and South Africa,
all practically independent and self-governing states in alliance
with Great Britain, but each with a representative of the Crown
appointed by the Government in office;
Next the Indian Empire, an extension of the Empire of the Great
Mogul with its dependent and "protected" states reaching now from
Beluchistan to Burma, and including Aden, in all of which empire
the British Crown and the India Office (under Parliamentary
control) played the role of the original Turkoman dynasty;
Then the ambiguous possession of Egypt, still nominally a part of
the Turkish Empire and still retaining its own monarch, the
Khedive, but under almost despotic British official rule;
Then the still more ambiguous "Anglo-Egyptian" Sudan province,
{407} occupied and administered jointly by the British and by the
(British controlled) Egyptian Government;
Then a number of partially self-governing communities, some
British in origin and some not, with elected legislatures and an
appointed executive, such as Malta, Jamaica, the Bahamas and
Bermuda;
Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British Home
Government (through the Colonial Office) verged on autocracy, as
in Ceylon, Trinidad and Fiji (where there was an appointed
council), and Gibraltar and St. Helena (where there was a
governor);
Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product areas,
with politically weak and under-civilized native communities which
were nominally protectorates, and administered either by a High
Commissioner set over native chiefs (as in Basutoland) or over a
chartered company (as in Rhodesia). In some cases the Foreign
Office, in some cases the Colonial Office, and in some cases the
India Office, has been concerned in acquiring the possessions that
fell into this last and least definite class of all, but for the
most part the Colonial Office was now responsible for them.
[Illustration: GIBRALTAR]
====================================================================
{406}
[Map: OVERSEAS EMPIRES of EUROPEAN POWERS, January 1914]
====================================================================
It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no
single brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as a whole.
It was a mixture of growths and accumulations entirely different
from anything that has ever been called an empire before. It
guaranteed a wide peace and security; that is why it was endured
and sustained by many men of the "subject" races--in spite of
official tyrannies {408} and insufficiencies, and of much
negligence on the part of the "home" public. Like the Athenian
Empire, it was an overseas empire; its ways were sea ways, and its
common link was the British Navy. Like all empires, its cohesion
was dependent physically upon a method of communication; the
development of seamanship, ship-building and steamships between
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries had made it a possible and
convenient Pax--the "Pax Britannica," and fresh developments of
air or swift land transport might at any time make it
inconvenient.
[Illustration: STREET IN HONG KONG]
{409}
LXV
THE AGE OF ARMAMENT IN EUROPE, AND THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-18
The progress in material science that created this vast
steamboat-and-railway republic of America and spread this
precarious British steamship empire over the world, produced
quite other effects upon the congested nations upon the continent
of Europe. They found themselves confined within boundaries fixed
during the horse-and-high-road period of human life, and their
expansion overseas had been very largely anticipated by Great
Britain. Only Russia had any freedom to expand eastward; and she
drove a great railway across Siberia until she entangled herself
in a conflict with Japan, and pushed south-eastwardly towards the
borders of Persia and India to the annoyance of Britain. The rest
of the European Powers were in a state of intensifying congestion.
In order to realize the full possibilities of the new apparatus of
human life they had to rearrange their affairs upon a broader
basis, either by some sort of voluntary union or by a union
imposed upon them by some predominant power. The tendency
of modern thought was in the direction of the former alternative,
but all the force of political tradition drove Europe towards the
latter.
The downfall of the "empire" of Napoleon III, the establishment of
the new German Empire, pointed men's hopes and fears towards the
idea of a Europe consolidated under German auspices. For
thirty-six years of uneasy peace the polities of Europe centred
upon that possibility. France, the steadfast rival of Germany for
European ascendancy since the division of the empire of
Charlemagne, sought to correct her own weakness by a close
alliance with Russia, and Germany linked herself closely with the
Austrian Empire (it had ceased to be the Holy Roman Empire in the
days of Napoleon I) and less successfully with the new kingdom of
Italy. {410} At first Great Britain stood as usual half in and
half out of continental affairs. But she was gradually forced
into a close association with the Franco-Russian group by the
aggressive development of a great German navy. The grandiose
imagination of the Emperor William II (1888-1918) thrust Germany
into premature overseas enterprise that ultimately brought not
only Great Britain but Japan and the United States into the
circle of her enemies.
[Illustration: BRITISH TANK IN THE BATTLE OF THE MENIN ROAD]
All these nations armed. Year after year the proportion of
national production devoted to the making of guns, equipment,
battleships and the like, increased. Year after year the balance
{411} of things seemed trembling towards war, and then war would
be averted. At last it came. Germany and Austria struck at
France and Russia and Serbia; the German armies marching through
Belgium, Britain immediately came into the war on the side of
Belgium, bringing in Japan as her ally, and very soon Turkey
followed on the German side. Italy entered the war against
Austria in 1915, and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the
October of that year. In 1916 Rumania, and in 1917 the United
States and China were forced into war against Germany. It is not
within the scope of this history to define the exact share of
blame for this vast catastrophe. The more interesting question is
not why the Great War was begun but why the Great War was not
anticipated and prevented. It is a far graver thing for mankind
that scores of millions of people were too "patriotic," stupid, or
apathetic to prevent this disaster by a movement towards European
unity upon frank and generous lines, than that a small number of
people may have been active in bringing it about.
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF YPRES (ONCE A DELIGHTFUL OLD FLEMISH
TOWN)]
It is impossible within the space at our command here to trace the
intricate details of the war. Within a few months it became
apparent that the progress of modern technical science had changed
{412} the nature of warfare very profoundly. Physical science
gives power, power over steel, over distance, over disease;
whether that power is used well or ill depends upon the moral and
political intelligence of the world. The governments of Europe,
inspired by antiquated policies of hate and suspicion, found
themselves with unexampled powers both of destruction and
resistance in their hands. The war became a consuming fire round
and about the world, causing losses both to victors and vanquished
out of all proportion to the issues involved. The first phase of
the war was a tremendous rush of the Germans upon Paris and an
invasion of East Prussia by the Russians. Both attacks were held
and turned. Then the power of the defensive developed; there was
a rapid elaboration of trench warfare until for a time the
opposing armies lay entrenched in long lines right across Europe,
unable to make any advance without enormous losses. The armies
were millions strong, and behind them entire populations were
organized for the supply of food and munitions to the front. Then
was a cessation of nearly every sort of productive activity except
such as contributed to military operations. All the able-bodied
manhood of Europe was drawn into the armies or navies or into the
improvised factories that served {413} them. There was an
enormous replacement of men by women in industry. Probably more
than half the people in the belligerent countries of Europe
changed their employment altogether during this stupendous
struggle. They were socially uprooted and transplanted.
Education and normal scientific work were restricted or diverted
to immediate military ends, and the distribution of news was
crippled and corrupted by military control and "propaganda"
activities.
[Illustration: THE DEVASTATION OF MODERN WAR]
The phase of military deadlock passed slowly into one of
aggression upon the combatant populations behind the fronts by the
destruction of food supplies and by attacks through the air. And
also there was a steady improvement in the size and range of the
guns employed and of such ingenious devices as poison-gas shells
and the small mobile forts known as tanks, to break down the
resistance of troops in the trenches. The air offensive was the
most revolutionary of all the new methods. It carried warfare
from two dimensions into three. Hitherto in the history of
mankind war had gone on only where the armies marched and met.
Now it went on everywhere. First the Zeppelin and then the
bombing aeroplane carried war over and past the front to an
ever-increasing area of civilian activities beyond. The old
distinction maintained in civilized warfare between the civilian
and combatant population disappeared. Everyone who grew food, or
who sewed a garment, everyone who felled a tree or repaired a
house, every railway station and every warehouse was held to be
fair game for destruction. The air offensive increased in range
and terror with every month in the war. At last great areas of
Europe were in a state of siege and subject to nightly raids.
Such exposed cities as London and Paris passed sleepless night
after sleepless night while the bombs burst, the anti-aircraft
guns maintained an intolerable racket, and the fire engines and
ambulances rattled headlong through the darkened and deserted
streets. The effects upon the minds and health of old people and
of young children were particularly distressing and destructive.
Pestilence, that old follower of warfare, did not arrive until the
very end of the fighting in 1918. For four years medical science
staved off any general epidemic; then carne a great outbreak of
{414} influenza about the world which destroyed many millions of
people. Famine also was staved off for some time. By the
beginning of 1918 however most of Europe was in a state of
mitigated and regulated famine. The production of food throughout
the world had fallen very greatly through the calling off of
peasant mankind to the fronts, and the distribution of such food
as was produced was impeded by the havoc wrought by the submarine,
by the rupture of customary routes through the closing of
frontiers, and by the disorganization of the transport system of
the world. The various governments took possession of the
dwindling food supplies, and, with more or less success, rationed
their populations. By the fourth year the whole world was
suffering from shortages of clothing and housing and of most of
the normal gear of life as well as of food. Business and economic
life were profoundly disorganized. Every-one was worried, and
most people were leading lives of unwonted discomfort.
The actual warfare ceased in November, 1918. After a supreme
effort in the spring of 1918 that almost carried the Germans to
Paris, the Central Powers collapsed. They had come to an end of
their spirit and resources.
{415}
LXVI
THE REVOLUTION AND FAMINE IN RUSSIA
But a good year and more before the collapse of the Central Powers
the half oriental monarchy of Russia, which had professed to be
the continuation of the Byzantine Empire, had collapsed. The
Tsardom had been showing signs of profound rottenness for some
years before the war; the court was under the sway of a fantastic
religious impostor, Rasputin, and the public administration, civil
and military, was in a state of extreme inefficiency and
corruption. At the outset of the war there was a great flare of
patriotic enthusiasm in Russia. A vast conscript army was called
up, for which there was neither adequate military equipment nor a
proper supply of competent officers, and this great host, ill
supplied and badly handled, was hurled against the German and
Austrian frontiers.
There can be no doubt that the early appearance of Russian armies
in East Prussia in September, 1914, diverted the energies and
attention of the Germans from their first victorious drive upon
Paris. The sufferings and deaths of scores of thousands of
ill-led Russian peasants saved France from complete overthrow in
that momentous opening campaign, and made all western Europe the
debtors of that great and tragic people. But the strain of the
war upon this sprawling, ill-organized empire was too heavy for
its strength. The Russian common soldiers were sent into battle
without guns to support them, without even rifle ammunition; they
were wasted by their officers and generals in a delirium of
militarist enthusiasm. For a time they seemed to be suffering
mutely as the beasts suffer; but there is a limit to the endurance
even of the most ignorant. A profound disgust for Tsardom was
creeping through these armies of betrayed and wasted men. From
the close of 1915 onward Russia was a source of deepening anxiety
to her Western Allies. Throughout 1916 she remained largely on
{416} the defensive, and there were rumours of a separate peace
with Germany.
On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered at a dinner
party in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made to put the
Tsardom in order. By March things were moving rapidly; food riots
in Petrograd developed into a revolutionary insurrection; there
was an attempted suppression of the Duma, the representative body,
there were attempted arrests of liberal leaders, the formation of
a provisional government under Prince Lvoff, and an abdication
(March 15th) by the Tsar. For a time it seemed that a moderate
and controlled revolution might be possible--perhaps under a new
Tsar. Then it became evident that the destruction of popular
confidence in Russia had gone too far for any such adjustments.
The Russian people were sick to death of the old order of things
in Europe, of Tsars and wars and of Great Powers; it wanted
relief, and that speedily, from unendurable miseries. The Allies
had no understanding of Russian realities; their diplomatists were
ignorant of Russian, genteel persons with their attention directed
to the Russian Court rather than to Russia, they blundered
steadily with the new situation. There was little goodwill among
these diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest disposition
to embarrass the new government as much as possible. At the head
of the Russian republican government was an eloquent and
picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed by the
forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, the "social
revolution," at home and cold-shouldered by the Allied governments
abroad. His Allies would neither let him give the Russian
peasants the land for which they craved nor peace beyond their
frontiers. The French and the British press pestered their
exhausted ally for a fresh offensive, but when presently the
Germans made a strong attack by sea and land upon Riga, the
British Admiralty quailed before the prospect of a Baltic
expedition in relief. The new Russian Republic had to fight
unsupported. In spite of their naval predominance and the bitter
protests of the great English admiral, Lord Fisher (1841-1920), it
is to be noted that the British and their Allies, except for some
submarine attacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the
Baltic throughout the war.
{417}
The Russian masses, however, were resolute to end the war. At any
cost. There had come into existence in Petrograd a body
representing the workers and common soldiers, the Soviet, and this
body clamoured for an international conference of socialists at
Stockholm. Food riots were occurring in Berlin at this time, war
weariness in Austria and Germany was profound, and there can be
little doubt, in the light of subsequent events, that such a
conference would have precipitated a reasonable peace on
democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution. Kerensky
implored his Western allies to allow this conference to take
place, but, fearful of a worldwide outbreak of socialism and
republicanism, they refused, in spite of the favourable response
of a small majority of the British Labour Party. Without either
moral or physical help from the Allies, the unhappy "moderate"
Russian Republic still fought on and made a last desperate
offensive effort in July. It failed after some preliminary
successes, and there came another great slaughtering of Russians.
The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies broke out in
the Russian armies, and particularly upon the northern front, and
on November 7th, 1917, Kerensky's government was overthrown and
power was seized by the Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik
socialists under Lenin, and pledged to make peace regardless of
the Western powers. On March 2nd, 1918, a separate peace between
Russia and Germany was signed at Brest-Litovsk.
====================================================================
{418}
[Illustration: A VIEW IN PETERSBURG UNDER BOLSHEVIK RULE]
====================================================================
It speedily became evident that these Bolshevik socialists were
men of a very different quality from the rhetorical
constitutionalists and revolutionaries of the Kerensky phase.
They were fanatical Marxist communists. They believed that their
accession to power in Russia was only the opening of a world-wide
social revolution, and they set about changing the social and
economic order with the thoroughness of perfect faith and absolute
inexperience. The western European and the American governments
were themselves much too ill-informed and incapable to guide or
help this extraordinary experiment, and the press set itself to
discredit and the ruling classes to wreck these usurpers upon any
terms and at any cost to themselves or to Russia. A propaganda of
abominable and disgusting inventions went on unchecked in the
press of the {419} world; the Bolshevik leaders were represented
as incredible monsters glutted with blood and plunder and living
lives of sensuality before which the realities of the Tsarist
court during the Rasputin regime paled to a white purity.
Expeditions were launched at the exhausted country, insurgents and
raiders were encouraged, armed and subsidized, and no method of
attack was too mean or too monstrous for the frightened enemies of
the Bolshevik regime. In 1919, the Russian Bolsheviks, ruling a
country already exhausted and disorganized by five years of
intensive warfare, were fighting a British Expedition at
Archangel, Japanese invaders in Eastern Siberia, Roumanians with
French and Greek contingents in the south, the Russian Admiral
Koltchak in Siberia and General Deniken, supported by the French
fleet, in the Crimea. In July of that year an Esthonian army,
under General Yudenitch, almost got to Petersburg. In 1920 the
Poles, incited by the French, made a new attack on Russia; and a
new reactionary raider, General Wrangel, took over the task of
General Deniken in invading and devastating his own country. In
March, 1921, the sailors at Cronstadt revolted. The Russian
Government under its president, Lenin, survived all these various
attacks. It showed an amazing tenacity, and the common people of
Russia sustained it unswervingly under conditions of extreme
hardship. By the end of 1921 both Britain and Italy had made a
sort of recognition of the communist rule.
But if the Bolshevik Government was successful in its struggle
against foreign intervention and internal revolt, it was far less
happy in its attempts to set up a new social order based upon
communist ideas in Russia. The Russian peasant is a small
land-hungry proprietor, as far from communism in his thoughts and
methods as a whale is from flying; the revolution gave him the
land of the great landowners but could not make him grow food for
anything but negotiable money, and the revolution, among other
things, had practically destroyed the value of money.
Agricultural production, already greatly disordered by the
collapse of the railways through war-strain, shrank to a mere
cultivation of food by the peasants for their own consumption.
The towns starved. Hasty and ill-planned attempts to make over
industrial production {420} in accordance with communist ideas
were equally unsuccessful. By 1920 Russia presented the
unprecedented spectacle of a modern civilization in complete
collapse. Railways were rusting and passing out of use, towns
were falling into ruin, everywhere there was an immense mortality.
Yet the country still fought with its enemies at its gates. In
1921 came a drought and a great famine among the peasant
cultivators in the war-devastated south-east provinces. Millions
of people starved.
But the question of the distresses and the possible recuperation
of Russia brings us too close to current controversies to be
discussed here.
{421}
LXVII
THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD
The scheme and scale upon which this History is planned do not
permit us to enter into the complicated and acrimonious disputes
that centre about the treaties, and particularly of the treaty of
Versailles, which concluded the Great War. We are beginning to
realize that that conflict, terrible and enormous as it was, ended
nothing, began nothing and settled nothing. It killed millions of
people; it wasted and impoverished the world. It smashed Russia
altogether. It was at best an acute and frightful reminder that
we were living foolishly and confusedly without much plan or
foresight in a dangerous and unsympathetic universe. The crudely
organized egotisms and passions of national and imperial greed
that carried mankind into that tragedy, emerged from it
sufficiently unimpaired to make some other similar disaster highly
probable so soon as the world has a little recovered from its war
exhaustion and fatigue. Wars and revolutions make nothing; their
utmost service to mankind is that, in a very rough and painful
way, they destroy superannuated and obstructive things. The great
war lifted the threat of German imperialism from Europe, and
shattered the imperialism of Russia. It cleared away a number of
monarchies. But a multitude of flags still waves in Europe, the
frontiers still exasperate, great armies accumulate fresh stores
of equipment.
The Peace Conference at Versailles was a gathering very ill
adapted to do more than carry out the conflicts and defeats of the
war to their logical conclusions. The Germans, Austrians, Turks
and Bulgarians were permitted no share in its deliberations; they
were only to accept the decisions it dictated to them. From the
point of view of human welfare the choice of the place of meeting
was particularly unfortunate. It was at Versailles in 1871 that,
with every circumstance of triumphant vulgarity, the new German
{422} Empire had been proclaimed. The suggestion of a
melodramatic reversal of that scene, in the same Hall of Mirrors,
was overpowering.
Whatever generosities had appeared in the opening phases of the
Great War had long been exhausted. The populations of the
victorious countries were acutely aware of their own losses and
sufferings, and entirely regardless of the fact that the defeated
had paid in the like manner. The war had arisen as a natural and
inevitable consequence of the competitive nationalisms of Europe
and the absence of any Federal adjustment of these competitive
forces; war is the necessary logical consummation of independent
sovereign nationalities living in too small an area with too
powerful an armament; and if the great war had not come in the
form it did it would have come in some similar form--just as it
will certainly return upon a still more disastrous scale in twenty
or thirty years' time if no political unification anticipates and
prevents it. States organized for war will make wars as surely as
hens will lay eggs, but the feeling of these distressed and
war-worn countries disregarded this fact, and the whole of the
defeated peoples were treated as morally and materially
responsible for all the damage, as they would no doubt have
treated the victor peoples had the issue of war been different.
The French and English thought the Germans were to blame, the
Germans thought the Russians, French and English were to blame,
and only an intelligent minority thought that there was anything
to blame in the fragmentary political constitution of Europe. The
treaty of Versailles was intended to be exemplary and vindictive;
it provided tremendous penalties for the vanquished; it sought to
provide compensations for the wounded and suffering victors by
imposing enormous debts upon nations already bankrupt, and its
attempts to reconstitute international relations by the
establishment of a League of Nations against war were manifestly
insincere and inadequate.
[Illustration: PASSENGER AEROPLANE FLYING OVER NORTHOLT]
So far as Europe was concerned it is doubtful if there would have
been any attempt whatever to organize international relations for
a permanent peace. The proposal of the League of Nations was
brought into practical politics by the President of the United
States of America, President Wilson. Its chief support was in
America. So far the United States, this new modern state, had
{423} developed no distinctive ideas of international relationship
beyond the Monroe Doctrine, which protected the new world from
European interference. Now suddenly it was called upon for its
mental contribution to the vast problem of the time. It had none.
The natural disposition of the American people was towards a
permanent world peace. With this however was linked a strong
traditional distrust of old-world polities and a habit of
isolation from old-world entanglements. The Americans had hardly
begun to think out an American solution of world problems when the
submarine campaign of the Germans dragged them into the war on the
side of the anti-German allies. President Wilson's scheme of a
League of Nations was an attempt at short notice to create a
distinctively American world project. It was a sketchy,
inadequate and dangerous scheme. In Europe however it was taken
as a matured American point of view. The generality of mankind in
1918-19 was intensely weary of war and anxious at almost any
sacrifice to erect {424} barriers against its recurrence, but
there was not a single government in the old world willing to
waive one iota of its sovereign independence to attain any such
end. The public utterances of President Wilson leading up to the
project of a World League of Nations seemed for a time to appeal
right over the heads of the governments to the peoples of the
world; they were taken as expressing the ripe intentions of
America, and the response was enormous. Unhappily President
Wilson had to deal with governments and not with peoples; he was a
man capable of tremendous flashes of vision and yet when put to
the test egotistical and limited, and the great wave of enthusiasm
he evoked passed and was wasted.
Says Dr. Dillon in his book, _The Peace Conference_: "Europe, when
the President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the
creative potter. Never before were the nations so eager to follow
a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land where wars
are prohibited and blockades unknown. And to their thinking he
was just that great leader. In France men bowed down before him
with awe and affection. Labour leaders in Paris told me that they
shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades would
go through fire and water to help him to realize his noble
schemes. To the working classes in Italy his name was a heavenly
clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. The
Germans regarded him and his doctrine as their sheet-anchor of
safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said: 'If President Wilson were
to address the Germans and pronounce a severe sentence upon them,
they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur and set
to work at once.' In German-Austria his fame was that of a
saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the
suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted ... ."
Such were the overpowering expectations that President Wilson
raised. How completely he disappointed them and how weak and
futile was the League of Nations he made is too long and too
distressful a story to tell here. He exaggerated in his person
our common human tragedy, he was so very great in his dreams and
so incapable in his performance. America dissented from the acts
of its President and would not join the League Europe accepted
from him. There was a slow realization on the part of the
American {425} people that it had been rushed into something for
which it was totally unprepared. There was a corresponding
realization on the part of Europe that America had nothing ready
to give to the old world in its extremity. Born prematurely and
crippled at its birth, that League has become indeed, with its
elaborate and unpractical constitution and its manifest
limitations of power, a serious obstacle in the way of any
effective reorganization of international relationships. The
problem would be a clearer one if the League did not yet exist.
Yet that world-wide blaze of enthusiasm that first welcomed the
project, that readiness of men everywhere round and about the
earth, of men, that is, as distinguished from governments, for a
world control of war, is a thing to be recorded with emphasis in
any history. Behind the short-sighted governments that divide and
mismanage human affairs, a real force for world unity and world
order exists and grows.
From 1918 onward the world entered upon an age of conferences. Of
these the Conference at Washington called by President Harding
(1921) has been the most successful and suggestive. Notable, too,
is the Genoa Conference (1922) for the appearance of German and
Russian delegates at its deliberations. We will not discuss this
long procession of conferences and tentatives in any detail. It
becomes more and more clearly manifest that a huge work of
reconstruction has to be done by mankind if a crescendo of such
convulsions and world massacres as that of the great war is to be
averted. No such hasty improvisation as the League of Nations, no
patched-up system of Conferences between this group of states and
that, which change nothing with an air of settling everything,
will meet the complex political needs of the new age that lies
before us. A systematic development and a systematic application
of the sciences of human relationship, of personal and group
psychology, of financial and economic science and of education,
sciences still only in their infancy, is required. Narrow and
obsolete, dead and dying moral and political ideas have to be
replaced by a clearer and a simpler conception of the common
origins and destinies of our kind.
[Illustration: A PEACEFUL GARDEN IN ENGLAND]
But if the dangers, confusions and disasters that crowd upon man
in these days are enormous beyond any experience of the past, it
is because science has brought him such powers as he never had
{426} before. And the scientific method of fearless thought,
exhaustively lucid statement, and exhaustively criticized
planning, which has given him these as yet uncontrollable powers,
gives him also the hope of controlling these powers. Man is still
only adolescent. His troubles are not the troubles of senility
and exhaustion but of increasing and still undisciplined strength.
When we look at all {427} history as one process, as we have been
doing in this book, when we see the steadfast upward struggle of
life towards vision and control, then we see in their true
proportions the hopes and dangers of the present time. As yet we
are hardly in the earliest dawn of human greatness. But in the
beauty of flower and sunset, in the happy and perfect movement of
young animals and in the delight of ten thousand various
landscapes, we have some intimations of what life can do for us,
and in some few works of plastic and pictorial art, in some great
music, in a few noble buildings and happy gardens, we have an
intimation of what the human will can do with material
possibilities. We have dreams; we have at present undisciplined
but ever increasing power. Can we doubt that presently our race
will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will
achieve unity and peace, that it will live, the children of our
blood and lives will live, in a world made more splendid and
lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from
strength to strength in an ever widening circle of adventure and
achievement? What man has done, the little triumphs of his
present state, and all this history we have told, form but the
prelude to the things that man has got to do.
{429}
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
About the year 1000 B.C. the Aryan peoples were establishing
themselves in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy and the Balkans, and
they were established in North India; Cnossos was already
destroyed and the spacious times of Egypt, of Thothmes III,
Amenophis III and Rameses II were three or four centuries away.
Weak monarchs of the XXIst Dynasty were ruling in the Nile Valley.
Israel was united under her early kings; Saul or David or possibly
even Solomon may have been reigning. Sargon I (2750 B.C.) of the
Akkadian Sumerian Empire was a remote memory in Babylonian
history, more remote than is Constantine the Great from the world
of the present day. Hammurabi had been dead a thousand years.
The Assyrians were already dominating the less military
Babylonians. In 1100 B.C. Tiglath Pileser I had taken Babylon.
But there was no permanent conquest; Assyria and Babylonia were
still separate empires. In China the new Chow dynasty was
flourishing. Stonehenge in England was already some hundreds of
years old.
The next two centuries saw a renascence of Egypt under the XXIInd
Dynasty, the splitting up of the brief little Hebrew kingdom of
Solomon, the spreading of the Greeks in the Balkans, South Italy
and Asia Minor, and the days of Etruscan predominance in Central
Italy. We begin our list of ascertainable dates with
B.C.
800. The building of Carthage.
790. The Ethiopian conquest of Egypt (founding the XXVth Dynasty).
776. First Olympiad.
753. Rome built.
745. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylonia and founded the New
Assyrian Empire.
722. Sargon II armed the Assyrians with iron weapons.
721. He deported the Israelites.
680. Esarhaddon took Thebes in Egypt (overthrowing the Ethiopian
XXVth Dynasty).
664. Psammetichus I restored the freedom of Egypt and founded the
XXVIth Dynasty (to 610).
608. Necho of Egypt defeated Josiah, king of Judah, at the battle
of Megiddo.
606. Capture of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes.
Foundation of the Chaldean Empire.
604. Necho pushed to the Euphrates and was overthrown by
Nebuchadnezzar II.
(Nebuchadnezzar carried off the Jews to Babylon.)
550. Cyrus the Persian succeeded Cyaxares the Mede.
Cyrus conquered Croesus.
Buddha lived about this time.
So also did Confucius and Lao Tse.
539. Cyrus took Babylon and founded the Persian Empire.
521. Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, ruled from the Hellespont
to the Indus.
His expedition to Scythia.
{430}
490. Battle of Marathon.
480. Battles of Thermopylæ and Salamis.
479. The battles of Platea and Mycale completed the repulse of
Persia.
474. Etruscan fleet destroyed by the Sicilian Greeks.
431. Peloponnesian War began (to 404)
401. Retreat of the Ten Thousand.
359. Philip became king of Macedonia.
338. Battle of Chæronia.
336. Macedonian troops crossed into Asia. Philip murdered.
334. Battle of the Granicus.
333. Battle of Issus.
331. Battle of Arbela.
330. Darius III killed.
323. Death of Alexander the Great.
321. Rise of Chandragupta in the Punjab.
The Romans completely beaten by the Samnites at the battle of
the Caudine Forks.
281. Pyrrhus invaded Italy.
280. Battle of Heraclea.
279. Battle of Ausculum.
278. Gauls raided into Asia Minor and settled in Galatia.
275. Pyrrhus left Italy.
264. First Punic War. (Asoka began to reign in Behar--to 227.)
260. Battle of Mylæ.
256. Battle of Ecnomus.
246. Shi-Hwang-ti became King of Ts'in.
220. Shi-Hwang-ti became Emperor of China.
214. Great Wall of China begun.
210. Death of Shi-Hwang-ti.
202. Battle of Zama.
146. Carthage destroyed.
133. Attalus bequeathed Pergamum to Rome.
102. Marius drove back Germans.
100. Triumph of Marius. (Chinese conquering the Tarim valley.)
89. All Italians became Roman citizens.
73. The revolt of the slaves under Spartacus.
71. Defeat and end of Spartacus.
66. Pompey led Roman troops to the Caspian and Euphrates. He
encountered the Alani.
48. Julius Cæsar defeated Pompey at Pharsalos.
44. Julius Cæsar assassinated.
27. Augustus Cæsar princeps (until 14 A.D.).
4. True date of birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
A.D. Christian Era began.
14. Augustus died. Tiberius emperor.
30. Jesus of Nazareth crucified.
41. Claudius (the first emperor of the legions) made emperor by
pretorian guard after murder of Caligula.
68. Suicide of Nero. (Galba, Otho, Vitellus, emperors in
succession.)
69. Vespasian.
102. Pan Chau on the Caspian Sea.
117. Hadrian succeeded Trajan. Roman Empire at its greatest
extent.
138. (The Indo-Scythians at this time were destroying the last
traces of Hellenic rule in India.)
161. Marcus Aurelius succeeded Antoninus Pius.
164. Great plague began, and lasted to the death of M. Aurelius
(180). This also devastated all Asia.
(Nearly a century of war and disorder began in the Roman
Empire.)
220. End of the Han dynasty. Beginning of four hundred years of
division in China.
227. Ardashir I (first Sassanid shah) put an end to Arsacid line
in Persia.
242. Mani began his teaching.
247. Goths crossed Danube in a great raid.
251. Great victory of Goths. Emperor Decius killed.
260. Sapor I, the second Sassanid shah, took Antioch, captured the
Emperor Valerian, and was cut up on his return from Asia {431}
Minor by Odenathus of Palmyra.
277. Mani crucified in Persia.
284. Diocletian became emperor.
303. Diocletian persecuted the Christians.
311. Galerius abandoned the persecution of the Christians.
312. Constantine the Great became emperor.
323. Constantine presided over the Council of Nicæa.
337. Constantine baptized on his deathbed.
361-3. Julian the Apostate attempted to substitute Mithraism for
Christianity.
392. Theodosius the Great emperor of east and west.
395. Theodosius the Great died. Honorius and Arcadius redivided
the empire with Stilicho and Alaric as their masters and
protectors.
410. The Visigoths under Alaric captured Rome.
425. Vandals settling in south of Spain. Huns in Pannonia, Goths
in Dalmatia. Visigoths and Suevi in Portugal and North Spain.
English invading Britain.
439. Vandals took Carthage.
451. Attila raided Gaul and was defeated by Franks, Alemanni and
Romans at Troyes.
453. Death of Attila.
455. Vandals sacked Rome.
470. Odoacer, king of a medley of Teutonic tribes, informed
Constantinople that there was no emperor in the West. End of
the Western Empire.
493. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, conquered Italy and became King of
Italy, but was nominally subject to Constantinople. (Gothic
kings in Italy. Goths settled on special confiscated lands as a
garrison.)
527. Justinian emperor.
529. Justinian closed the schools at Athens, which had flourished
nearly a thousand years. Belisarius (Justinian's general) took
Naples.
531. Chosroes I began to reign.
543. Great plague in Constantinople.
553. Goths expelled from Italy by Justinian. Justinian died. The
Lombards conquered most of North Italy (leaving Ravenna and Rome
Byzantine).
570. Muhammad born.
579. Chosroes I died.
(The Lombards dominant in Italy.)
590. Plague raged in Rome. Chosroes II began to reign.
610. Heraclius began to reign.
619. Chosroes II held Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, and armies on
Hellespont. Tang dynasty began in China.
622. The Hegira.
627. Great Persian defeat at Nineveh by Heraclius. Tai-tsung
became Emperor of China.
628. Kavadh II murdered and succeeded his father, Chosroes II.
Muhammad wrote letters to all the rulers of the earth.
629. Muhammad returned to Mecca.
632. Muhammad died. Abu Bekr Caliph.
634. Battle of the Yarmuk. Moslems took Syria. Omar second
Caliph.
635. Tai-tsung received Nestorian missionaries.
637. Battle of Kadessia.
638. Jerusalem surrendered to the Caliph Omar.
642. Heraclius died.
643. Othman third Caliph.
655. Defeat of the Byzantine fleet by the Moslems.
668. The Caliph Moawija attacked Constantinople by sea.
687. Pepin of Hersthal, mayor of the palace, reunited Austrasia
and Neustria.
711. Moslem army invaded Spain from Africa.
{432}
715. The domains of the Caliph Walid I extended from the Pyrenees
to China.
717-18. Suleiman, son and successor of Walid, failed to take
Constantinople.
732. Charles Martel defeated the Moslems near Poitiers.
751. Pepin crowned King of the French.
768. Pepin died.
771. Charlemagne sole king.
774. Charlemagne conquered Lombardy.
786. Haroun-al-Raschid Abbasid Caliph in Bagdad (to 809).
795. Leo III became Pope (to 816).
800. Leo crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West.
802. Egbert, formerly an English refugee at the court of
Charlemagne, established himself as King of Wessex.
810. Krum of Bulgaria defeated and killed the Emperor Nicephorus.
814. Charlemagne died.
828. Egbert became first King of England.
843. Louis the Pious died, and the Carlovingian Empire went to
pieces. Until 962 there was no regular succession of Holy Roman
Emperors, though the title appeared intermittently.
850. About this time Rurik (a Northman) became ruler of Novgorod
and Kieff.
852. Boris first Christian King of Bulgaria (to 884).
865. The fleet of the Russians (Northmen) threatened
Constantinople.
904. Russian (Northmen) fleet off Constantinople.
912. Rolf the Ganger established himself in Normandy.
919. Henry the Fowler elected King of Germany.
936. Otto I became King of Germany in succession to his father,
Henry the Fowler.
941. Russian fleet again threatened Constantinople.
962. Otto I, King of Germany, crowned Emperor (first Saxon
Emperor) by John XII.
987. Hugh Capet became King of France. End of the Carlovingian
line of French kings.
1016. Canute became King of England, Denmark and Norway.
1043. Russian fleet threatened Constantinople.
1066. Conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy.
1071. Revival of Islam under the Seljuk Turks. Battle of
Melasgird.
1073. Hildebrand became Pope (Gregory VII) to 1085.
1084. Robert Guiscard, the Norman, sacked Rome.
1087-99. Urban II Pope.
1095. Urban II at Clermont summoned the First Crusade.
1096. Massacre of the People's Crusade.
1099. Godfrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem.
1147. The Second Crusade.
1169. Saladin Sultan of Egypt.
1176. Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged supremacy of the Pope
(Alexander III) at Venice.
1187. Saladin captured Jerusalem.
1189. The Third Crusade.
1198. Innocent III Pope (to 1216). Frederick II (aged four), King
of Sicily, became his ward.
1202. The Fourth Crusade attacked the Eastern Empire.
1204. Capture of Constantinople by the Latins.
1214. Jengis Khan took Pekin.
1226. St. Francis of Assisi died. (The Franciscans.)
1227. Jengis Khan died. Khan from the Caspian to the Pacific, and
was succeeded by Ogdai Khan.
1228. Frederick II embarked upon the Sixth Crusade, and acquired
Jerusalem.
1240. Mongols destroyed Kieff. Russia tributary to the Mongols.
{433}
1241. Mongol victory in Liegnitz in Silesia.
1250. Frederick II, the last Hohenstaufen Emperor, died. German
interregnum until 1273.
1251. Mangu Khan became Great Khan. Kublai Khan governor of
China.
1258. Hulagu Khan took and destroyed Bagdad.
1260. Kublai Khan became Great Khan.
1261. The Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.
1273. Rudolf of Habsburg elected Emperor. The Swiss formed their
Everlasting League.
1280. Kublai Khan founded the Yuan dynasty in China.
1292. Death of Kublai Khan.
1293. Roger Bacon, the prophet of experimental science, died.
1348. The Great Plague, the Black Death.
1360. In China the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty fell, and was succeeded
by the Ming dynasty (to 1644).
1377. Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome.
1378. The Great Schism. Urban VI in Rome, Clement VII at Avignon.
1398. Huss preached Wycliffism at Prague.
1414-18. The Council of Constance.
Huss burnt (1415).
1417. The Great Schism ended.
1453. Ottoman Turks under Muhammad II took Constantinople.
1480. Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow, threw off the Mongol
allegiance.
1481. Death of the Sultan Muhammad II while preparing for the
conquest of Italy.
1486. Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
1492. Columbus crossed the Atlantic to America.
1498. Maximilian I became Emperor.
1498. Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape to India.
1499. Switzerland became an independent republic.
1500. Charles V born.
1509. Henry VIII King of England.
1513. Leo X Pope.
1515. Francis I King of France.
1520. Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan (to 1566), who ruled from
Bagdad to Hungary. Charles V Emperor.
1525. Baber won the battle of Panipat, captured Delhi, and founded
the Mogul Empire.
1527. The German troops in Italy, under the Constable of Bourbon,
took and pillaged Rome.
1529. Suleiman besieged Vienna.
1530. Charles V crowned by the Pope. Henry VIII began his quarrel
with the Papacy.
1539. The Society of Jesus founded.
1546. Martin Luther died.
1547. Ivan IV (the Terrible) took the Title of Tsar of Russia.
1556. Charles V abdicated. Akbar, Great Mogul (to 1605).
Ignatius of Loyola died.
1558. Death of Charles V.
1566. Suleiman the Magnificent died.
1603. James I King of England and Scotland.
1620. _Mayflower_ expedition founded New Plymouth. First negro
slaves landed at Jamestown (Va.).
1625. Charles I of England.
1626. Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) died.
1643. Louis XIV began his reign of seventy-two year's.
1644. The Manchus ended the Ming dynasty.
1648. Treaty of Westphalia. There-by Holland and Switzerland were
recognized as free republics and Prussia became important. The
treaty gave a complete victory neither to the Imperial Crown nor
to the Princes.
{434}
1648. War of the Fronde; it ended in the complete victory of the
French crown.
1649. Execution of Charles I of England.
1658. Aurungzeb Great Mogul. Cromwell died.
1660. Charles II of England.
1674. Nieuw Amsterdam finally became British by treaty and was
renamed New York.
1683. The last Turkish attack on Vienna defeated by John III of
Poland.
1689. Peter the Great of Russia. (To 1725.)
1701. Frederick I first King of Prussia.
1707. Death of Aurungzeb. The empire of the Great Mogul
disintegrated.
1713. Frederick the Great of Prussia born.
1715. Louis XV of France.
1755-63. Britain and France struggled for America and India.
France in alliance with Austria and Russia against Prussia and
Britain (1756-63); the Seven Years' War.
1759. The British general, Wolfe, took Quebec.
1760. George III of Britain.
1763. Peace of Paris; Canada ceded to Britain. British dominant
in India.
1769. Napoleon Bonaparte born.
1774. Louis XVI began his reign.
1776. Declaration of Independence by the United States of America.
1783. Treaty of Peace between Britain and the new United States of
America.
1787. The Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia set up the
Federal Government of the United States. France discovered to
be bankrupt.
1788. First Federal Congress of the United States at New York.
1789. The French States-General assembled. Storming of the
Bastille.
1791. Flight to Varennes.
1792. France declared war on Austria. Prussia declared war on
France. Battle of Valmy. France became a republic.
1793. Louis XVI beheaded.
1794. Execution of Robespierre and end of the Jacobin republic.
1795. The Directory. Bonaparte suppressed a revolt and went to
Italy as commander-in-chief.
1798. Bonaparte went to Egypt. Battle of the Nile.
1799. Bonaparte returned to France. He became First Consul with
enormous powers.
1804. Bonaparte became Emperor. Francis II took the title of
Emperor of Austria in 1805, and in 1806 he dropped the title of
Holy Roman Emperor. So the "Holy Roman Empire" came to an end.
1806. Prussia overthrown at Jena.
1808. Napoleon made his brother Joseph King of Spain.
1810. Spanish America became republican.
1812. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
1814. Abdication of Napoleon. Louis XVIII.
1824. Charles X of France.
1825. Nicholas I of Russia. First railway, Stockton to
Darlington.
1827. Battle of Navarino.
1829. Greece independent.
1830. A year of disturbance. Louis Philippe ousted Charles X.
Belgium broke away from Holland. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
became king of this new country, Belgium. Russian Poland
revolted ineffectually.
1835. The word "socialism" first used.
1837. Queen Victoria.
1840. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
1852. Napoleon III Emperor of the French.
1854-56. Crimean War.
{435}
1856. Alexander II of Russia.
1861. Victor Emmanuel First King of Italy. Abraham Lincoln became
President, U. S. A. The American Civil War began.
1865. Surrender of Appomattox Court House. Japan opened to the
world.
1870. Napoleon III declared war against Prussia.
1871. Paris surrendered (January). The King of Prussia became
"German Emperor." The Peace of Frankfort.
1878. The Treaty of Berlin. The Armed Peace of forty-six years
began in western Europe.
1888. Frederick II (March), William II (June), German Emperors.
1912. China became a republic.
1914. The Great War in Europe began.
1917. The two Russian revolutions. Establishment of the Bolshevik
regime in Russia.
1918. The Armistice.
1920. First meeting of the League of Nations, from which Germany,
Austria, Russia and Turkey were excluded and at which the United
States was not represented.
1921. The Greeks, in complete disregard of the League of Nations,
make war upon the Turks.
1922. Great defeat of the Greeks in Asia Minor by the Turks.
{439}
INDEX
A
ABOLITIONIST movement, 384
Abraham the Patriarch, 116
Abu Bekr, 249, 252, 431
Abyssinia, 398
Actium, battle of, 195
Adam and Eve, 116
Adams, William, 400
Aden, 405
Adowa, battle of, 398
Adrianople, 229
Adrianople, Treaty of, 353
Adriatic Sea, 178, 228
Ægatian Isles, 182
Ægean peoples, 92, 94, 100, 108, 117, 174
Æolic Greeks, 108, 130
Aeroplanes, 4, 363, 413
Æschylus 139
Afghanistan, 163
Africa, 72, 92, 122, 123, 182, 253, 258, 302
Africa, Central, 397
Africa, North, 65, 94, 180, 192, 232, 292, 394, 397, 431
Africa, South, 72, 335, 398, 405
Africa, West, 393
"Age of Confusion," the, 168, 173
Agriculturalists, primitive, 66, 68
Agriculture, 203; slaves in, 203
Ahab, 119
Air-breathing vertebrata, 23, 24
Air-raids, 413
Aix-la-Chapelle, 265
Akbar, 292, 332, 433
Akkadian and Akkadians, 90, 122, 429
Alabama, 385
_Alabama_, the, 388
Alani, 227, 430
Alaric, 230, 232, 431
Albania, 179
Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Prince Consort), 434
Alchemists, 257, 294
Aldebaran, 257
Alemanni, 200, 431
Alexander I, Tsar, 348
Alexander II of Russia, 435
Alexander III, Pope, 274, 432
Alexander the Great, 142, 146 _et seq._, 163, 186, 240, 299, 430
Alexandretta, 147
Alexandria, 147, 151, 209, 222, 239
Alexandria, library at, 151
Alexandria, museum of, 150, 180
Alexius Comnenus, 268
Alfred the Great, 263
Algæ, 13
Algebra, 257, 282
Algiers, 185
Algol, 257
Allah, 252
Alligators, 28
Alphabets, 79, 127
Alps, the, 37, 197
Alsace, 200, 309, 391
Aluminium, 360
Amenophis III, 96, 429
Amenophis IV, 96
America, 263, 302, 309, 314, 324, 335, 336, 422-23, 434
America, North, 12, 330, 336, 382
American Civil War, 386, 435
American civilizations, primitive, 73 _et seq._
American warships in Japanese waters, 402
Ammonites, 30, 36
Amorites, 90
Amos, the prophet, 124
Amphibia, 24
Amphitheatres, 208
Amur, 334
Anagni, 284
Anatomy, 24, 355
Anaxagoras, 138
Anaximander of Miletus, 132
Andes, 37
Angles, 230
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 405
Animals, (_See_ Mammalia)
Annam, 402
Anti-aircraft guns, 413
Antigonus, 149
Antioch, 243, 271, 431
Antiochus III, 183
Anti-Slavery Society, 384
Antoninus Pius, 195, 430
Antony, Mark, 194
Antwerp, 294
Anubis, 210
Apes, 43, 44; anthropoid, 45
Apis 209, 211
Apollonius, 151
Appian Way, 191
Appomattox Court House, 388, 435
Aquileia, 235
Arabia, 77, 88, 91, 122, 123, 248
Arabic figures, 257
Arabic language, 243
Arabs, 253 _et seq._, 294; culture of, 267
Arbela, battle of, 147, 431
Arcadius, 230, 431
Archangel, 419
Archimedes, 151
Ardashir I, 241, 430
Argentine Republic, 396
Arians, 224
Aristocracy, 130
Aristotle, 142, 144, 146, 256, 282, 294, 295, 356, 370
Armadillo, 74
Armenia, 192, 268, 287, 299
Armenians, 100, 108
Armistice, the, 435
Arno, the, 178
Arsacid dynasty, 199, 431
Artizans, 152
Aryan language, 95, 100, 106
Aryans, 95, 104 _et seq._, 122, 128, 151, 174, 176, 185, 197, 198,
233, 303, 429
Ascalon, 117
Asceticism, 158-60, 213
Ashdod, 117
Asia, 72, 197, 227, 287, 298, 329 _et seq._, 333, 399 _et seq._,
403 _et seq._, 430
Asia, Central, 108, 122, 134, 148, 185, 245-247, 255, 334
Asia Minor, 92, 94, 108, 127, 134, 148, 180, 192-93, 238, 243,
258, 271, 292, 429, 430, 431
Asia, Western, 65
Asoka, King, 163 _et seq._, 180, 430
Assam, 394
Asses, 77, 83, 102, 112
Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus), 97, 98, 109, 110
Assyria, 109, 115, 119, 121, 122, 429
Assyrians, 84, 96, 97, 98, 108, 429
Astronomy, early, 70, 74
Athanasian Creed, 224
Athenians, 135
Athens, 129, 135-36, 139, 150, 185, 204, 431
Athens, schools of philosophy in, 238
Atkinson, C. F., 345
Atkinson, J. J., 61, 373
Atlantic, 122, 302
Attalus, 430
Attila, 234, 235, 238, 431
Augsburg, Interim of, 313
Augustus Cæsar, Roman Emperor, 195, 214
Aurelian, Emperor, 200
Aurochs, 197
Aurungzeb, 434
Ausculum, battle of, 178, 430
Australia, 72, 322, 336, 395, 405
Austrasia, 431
Austria, 309, 327, 347-48, 349-52, 390, 411, 434
Austrian Empire, 409
Austrians, 344, 351
Automobiles, 362
Avars, 289
Avebury, 106
Averroes, 282
Avignon, 285, 433
Axis of earth, 1, 2
Azilian age, 57, 65
Azilian rock pictures, 57, 78
Azoic rocks, 11
Azores, 302
B
Baber, 290, 310, 332, 433
Baboons, 43
Babylon, 90, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 111, 112, 114, 115-16, 119,
121, 122, 134, 147, 148, 373, 429
Babylonian calendar, 68
Babylonian Empire, 90, 91, 109, 110
Babylonians, 108
Bacon, Roger, 293-97, 433
Bacon, Sir Francis, 321, 355, 433
Bagdad, 256, 267, 290, 292, 432, 433
Bahamas, 407
Baldwin of Flanders, 272
Balkan peninsula, 108, 200, 230, 392, 429
Balkh, 299
Balloons, altitude attained by, 4
Baltic, 415
Baltic Fleet, Russian, 404
Baluchistan, 405
Barbarians, 227 _et seq._, 230, 320
Barbarossa, Frederick, (_See_ Frederick I)
Bards, 106, 234
Barrows, 104
Barter, 83, 102
Basketwork, 65
Basle, Council of, 305
Basque race, 92, 107
Bastille, 342, 434
Basutoland, 407
Beaconsfield, Lord, 394
Bedouins, 122, 248
Beetles, 26
Behar, 180, 430
Behring Straits, 52, 71, 73
Bel Marduk, 109, 111, 112, 114
Belgium, 185, 344, 347, 352, 411, 434
Belisarius, 431
Belshazzar, 112
Beluchistan, 149
Benares, 156, 160
Beneventum, 179
Berbers, 71, 92
Bergen, 294
Berlin, Treaty of, 435
Bermuda, 407
Bessemer process, 359
Beth-shan, 118
Bible, 1, 68, 100, 112, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122, 184, 286, 298,
306-07, (_Cf._ Hebrew Bible)
Birds, flight of, 4; the earliest, 31; development of, 32
Bison, 56
Black Death, the, 433
Black Sea, 71, 94-95, 108, 129, 200
Blood sacrifice, 167, 186, 212 (_See also_ Sacrifice)
Boats, 91, 136
Boer republic, 187
Boers, 398
Bohemia, 236, 306
Bohemians, 304-05, 326
Bokhara, 256
Boleyn, Anne, 313
Bolivar, General, 349
Bologna, 295, 312
Bolsheviks (and Bolshevism), 417-19, 435
Bone carvings, 53
Bone implements, 45, 46
Boniface VIII, Pope, 283-84
"Book religions," 226
Books, 153, 298, 302
Boötes, 257
Boris, King of Bulgaria, 432
Bosnia, 228
Bosphorus, 135
Boston, 337-38
Bostra, 243
Botany Bay, 393
Bourbon, Constable of, 312, 433
Bowmen, 145, 155, 300
Brahmins and Brahminism, 165, 166
Brain, 42
Brazil, 329, 336, 340
Breathing, 24
Brest-Litovsk, 417
Britain, 106, 122, 174, 185, 203, 236, 349, 353, 402, 431, 434,
(_See also_ England, Great Britain)
British, 329, 331
British Civil Air Transport Commission, 363
British East Indian Company, (_See_ East India Company)
British Empire, 407; (in 1815) 393; (in 1914) 405
British Guiana, 393
British Navy, 408
"British schools," the, 369
Brittany, 309
Broken Hill, South Africa, 52
Bronze, 80, 87, 102, 104
Bruges, 294
Brussels, 344
Brythonic Celts, 107
Buda-Pesth, 312
Buddha, 133, 156, 172, 213, 429; life of, 158; his teaching,
161-62
Buddhism (and Buddhists), 166, 172, 222, 255, 290, 319, 334, 400,
(_See also_ Buddha)
Bulgaria, 135, 229, 245, 292, 411, 432
Bull fights, Cretan, 93
Burgoyne, General, 338
Burgundy, 309, 342
Burial, early, 102, 104
Burleigh, Lord, 324
Burma, 166, 300, 405
Burning the dead, 104
Bury, J, B, 288
Bushmen, 54
Byzantine Army, 253
Byzantine Empire, 238, 271-72
Byzantine fleet, 431
Byzantium, 228, 243, 267, 268, (_See also_ Constantinople)
C
Cabul, 148
Cæsar, Augustus, 430
Cæsar, Julius, 187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 430
Cæsar, title, etc., 212, 223, 240, 327
Cainozoic period, 37 _et seq._
Cairo, 256
Calendar, 68
Calicut, 329
California, 336, 383
Caligula, 195, 430
Caliphs, 252
"Cambulac," 300
Cambyses, 112, 134
Camels, 42, 102, 112, 196, 319
Campanella, 371
Canaan, 116
Canada, 332, 396, 405, 434
Canary Islands, 302
Cannæ, 182
Canossa, 274
Canton, 247
Canute, 263, 432
Cape Colony, 398
Cape of Good Hope, 336, 393, 433
Capet, Hugh, 266, 432
Carboniferous age, (_See_ Coal swamps)
Cardinals, 277 _et seq._
Caria, 98
Carians, 94
Caribou, 73
Carlovingian Empire, 432
Carnac, 106
Carolinas, 388
Carrhæ, 194
Carthage, 92, 122, 123, 134, 176, 179, 182, 183, 185, 232, 429-30,
431
Carthaginians, 179, 182
Caspian Sea, 71, 88, 108, 148, 193, 197, 430
Caste, 157, 165
Catalonians, 302
"Cathay," 300
Catholicism, 237, 337, 351. (_See also_ Papacy, Roman Catholic)
Cato, 187
Cattle, 77, 83
Caudine Forks, 430
Cavalry, 145, 148, 178
Cave drawings, 53, 56, 57
Caxton, William, 306
Celibacy, 275
Celts, 106, 107, 193
Centipedes, 23
Ceylon, 165, 407
Chæronia, battle of, 145, 146, 430
Chalcedon, 243
Chaldean Empire, 109
Chaldeans, 109, 110-11, 115, 429
Chandragupta, 163, 430
Chariots, 96, 100, 101-02, 112, 119, 145, 148
Charlemagne, 259, 261, 264-65, 272, 309, 432
Charles I, King of England, 308, 314, 433
Charles II, King of England, 324, 434
Charles V, Emperor, 309, 310, 314, 316, 433
Charles X, King of France, 350, 434
Charles the Great, (_See_ Charlemagne)
_Charlotte Dundas_, steamboat, 357
Chelonia, 27
Chemists, Arab, 257. (_Cf._ Alchemists)
Cheops, 83
Chephren, 83
China, 76, 84, 103, 166, 167 _et seq._, 173, 174, 233, 245 et
seq., 248, 287, 290, 297, 333, 399-400, 402-03, 411, 429-31,
432, 433, 435. (_See also_ Chow, Han, Kin, Ming, Shang, Sung,
Suy, Ts'in, and Yuan dynasties)
China, culture and civilization in, 247
China, Empire of, 196 _et seq._
China, Great Wall of, 173, 430
China, North, 173
Chinese picture writing, 79, 167
Chosroes I, 243, 431
Chosroes II, 243, 431
Chow dynasty, 168, 173, 429
Christ. (_See_ Jesus)
Christian conception of Jesus, 214
Christianity (and Christians), 224, 255, 272, 295, 319, 400, 431
Christianity, doctrinal, development of, 222 _et seq._
Christianity, spirit of, 224
Chronicles, book of, 116, 119
Chronology, primitive, 68
Ch'u, 173
Church, the, 68
Cicero, 193
Cilicia, 299
Cimmerians, 100
Circumcision, 70
Circumnavigation, 302
Cities, Sumerian, 78
Citizenship, 187 _et seq._, 236, 237
City states, Greek, 129 _et seq._, Chinese, 168
Civilization, 100
Civilization, Hellenic, 139, 150 _et seq._
Civilization, Japanese, 400
Civilization, pre-historic, 71
Civilization, primitive, 76, 167
Civilization, Roman, 185
Claudius, Emperor, 195, 430
Clay documents, 77, 80, 111
Clement V, Pope, 285
Clement VII, Pope, 285, 433
Cleopatra, 194
Clermont, 432
_Clermont_, steamboat, 358
Climate, changes of, 21, 37
Clive, 333
Clothing, 77
Clothing of Cretan women, 93
Clouds, 8
Clovis, 259
Clyde, Firth of, 357
Cnossos (Crete), 92, 94, 95, 101, 108, 127, 429
Coal, 26
Coal swamps, the age of, 21 _et seq._
Coinage, 114, 176, 201, 319
Coke, 322
Collectivists, 375
Colonies, 394 _et seq._, 407
Columbus, Christopher, 300-01, _et seq._, 335, 433
Communism (and Communists), 374-75, 417
Comnenus, Alexius. (_See_ Alexius)
Comparative anatomy, science of, 25, (_Cf._ Anatomy)
Concord, Mass., 338
Confederated States of America, 385
Confucius, 133, 168 _et seq._, 173, 429
Congo, 397
Conifers, 26, 36
Constance, Council of, 286, 304,·433
Constantine the Great, 187, 226, 228, 229, 241, 429, 431
Constantinople, 229, 238, 239, 243, 253, 258, 263-64, 270 _et
seq._, 272, 283, 292, 301, 321, 327, 431, 432, 433. (_See also_
Byzantium)
Consuls, Roman, 193
Copper, 74, 80, 102, 360, 395
Cordoba, 256
Corinth, 129
Cornwallis, General, 338
Corsets, 93
Corsica, 182, 185, 232
Cortez, 314
Cossacks, 334
Cotton fabrics, 102
Couvade, the, 70
Crabs, 23
Crassus, 192, 194, 199
Creation of the world, story of, 1, 116
Creed religions, 240
Cretan script, 94
Crete, 92, 108
Crimea, 419
Crimean War, 390, 434
Crocodiles, 28
Croesus, 111, 429
Cro-Magnon race, 51, 54, 65
Cromwell, Oliver, 434
Cronstadt, 419
Crucifixion, 204
Crusades, 267 _et seq._, 281, 304-05, 432
Crustacea, 13
Ctesiphon, 244
Cuba, 393
Cultivation, the beginnings of, 65 _et seq._
Culture, Heliolithic, 69
Culture, Japanese, 402
Cuneiform, 78
Currents, 18
Cyaxares, 109-10, 429
Cycads, 26, 36
Cyrus the Persian, 111, 116, 121, 123, 134, 429
Czech language, 236
Czecho-Slovaks, 351
Czechs, 304
D
Dacia, 195, 200, 203, 227, 236
Dædalus, 94
Dalmatia, 431
Damascus, 243, 253, 431
Danes, 329, 330
Danube, 135, 200, 227, 430
Dardanelles, 136, 147, 292
Darius I, 112, 134, 135, 136, 429
Darius III, 147, 148,·430
Darlington, 356, 434
David, King, 118-19, 429
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 356
Davis, Jefferson, 385, 388
Dawn Man. (_See_ Eoanthropus)
Dead, burning the, 104; burial of (_See_ Burial)
Debtors' prisons, 336
Deciduous trees, 36
Decius, Emperor, 200, 432
Declaration of Independence, 334, 434
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Gibbon's), 288-89
Deer, 42, 56
Defender of the Faith, title of, 313
Defoe, Daniel, 365
Delhi, 292, 433
Democracy, 131, 132, 270
Deniken, General, 419
Denmark, 306, 313, 394, 432
Deshima, 401
Devonian system, 19
Diaz, 433
Dictator, Roman, 194
Dillon, Dr., 424
Dinosaurs, 28, 31, 36
Diocletian, Emperor, 224, 226, 227
Dionysius, 170
Diplodocus Carnegii, measurement of, 28
Diseases, infectious, 379
Ditchwater, animal and plant life in, 13
Dogs, 42
Domazlice, battle of, 305
Dominic, St., 276
Dominican Order, 276, 285, 400
Dorian Greeks, 108, 130
Douglas, Senator, 386
Dover, Straits of, 193
Dragon flies, 23
Drama, Greek, 139
Dravidian civilization, 108
Dravidians, 71
Duck-billed platypus, 34
Duma, the, 416
Durazzo, 268
Dutch, 329, 331, 332, 399
Dutch Guiana, 394
Dutch Republic, 350
Dyeing, 75
E
Earth, the, shape of, 1; rotation of, 1; distance from the sun, 2;
age and origin of, 5; surface of, 21
Earthquakes, 95
East India Company, 332, 337, 393, 394
East Indies, 394, 399
Ebro, 182
Ecbatana, 109, 114
Echidna, the, 34
Eclipses, 8
Ecnomus, battle of, 181, 430
Economists, French, 371
Edessa, 271
Education, 294, 361, 368, 369
Egbert, King of Wessex, 263, 432
Egg-laying mammals, 34
Eggs, 24, 26, 31, 102
Egypt (and Egyptians), 71, 78, 90, 91, 92, 96, 98, 100-101, 115,
119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 134, 138, 147, 174, 208, 209, 210, 238,
253, 267, 290, 292, 396, 398, 405, 429, 431, 434
Egyptian script, 78, 79
Elamites, 88, 90, 174
Elba, 348
Electric light, 360
Electric traction, 360
Electricity, 322, 358, 360
Elephants, 42, 127, 149, 178, 181, 253, 300
Elixir of life, 257
Elizabeth, Queen, 324, 332
Emigration, 336
Emperor, title of, 327
Employer and employed, 375
"Encyclopædists," the, 371
England (and English), 306, 390, 431
England, Norman Conquest of, 266
England, overseas possessions, 330
English Channel, 331
English language, 95
Entelodonts, 42
Eoanthropus, 47
Eoliths, 45
Ephesus, 149
Ephthalites, 199
Epics, 106, 127, 129, 131
Epirus, 131, 178, 179
Epistles, the, 222
Eratosthenes, 151
Erech, Sumerian city of, 78
Esarhaddon, 429
Essenes, 213
Esthonia, 245
Esthonians, 419
Ethiopian dynasty, 429
Ethiopians, 96, 233
Etruscans, 94, 100, 176, 430
Euclid, 151
Euphrates, 77, 110, 127, 129, 174, 196, 429, 430
Euripides, 139
Europe, 200
Europe, Central, 329
Europe, Concert of, 350
Europe, Western, 53, 298
European overseas populations, 336
Europeans, intellectual revival of, 294 _et seq._
Europeans, North Atlantic, 329
Europeans, Western, 329
Everlasting League, 433
Evolution, 16, 42
Excommunication, 275, 281, 285
Execution, Greek method of, 140
Ezekiel, 124
F
Factory system, 365
Family groups, 61
Famine, 420
Faraday, 358
Fashoda, 398
Fatherhood of God, the, 215, 224, 251
Fear, 61
Feathers, 32
Ferdinand of Aragon, King, 293, 302, 309
Ferns, 23, 26
Fertilizers, 363
Fetishism, 63, 64
Feudal system, 258, 400, 401, 402
Fielding, Henry, 365
Fiji, 407
Finance, 134
Finland, 245
Finns, 351
Fish, the age of, 16 _et seq._; the first known vertebrata, 19;
evolution of, 30
Fisher, Lord, 416
Fishing, 57
Fleming, Bishop, 286
Flint implements, 44, 47
Flood, story of the, 91, 116
Florence, 294
Florentine Society, 322
Florida, 336, 385
Flying machines, 94, 363
Fontainebleau, 348
Food, rationing of, 414
Food riots, 417
Forests, 56, 197
Fossils, 13, 43. (_Cf._ Rocks)
Fowl, the domestic, 88, 102
France, 106, 185, 230, 259, 263, 312, 336, 342, 353, 390, 391,
394, 396, 402, 409, 411, 434
Francis I, King of France, 310, 312, 313, 433
Francis II, Emperor of Austria, 434
Francis of Assisi, St., 276, 432
Franciscan Order, 276, 285, 432
Frankfort, Peace of, 391, 435
Franks, 200, 227, 235, 259, 265, 431
Frazer, Sir J. G., 66
Frederick I (Barbarossa), 274, 432
Frederick I, King of Prussia, 434
Frederick II, German Emperor, 279, 280 _et seq._, 288, 289, 294,
304, 435
Frederick II, King of Sicily, 432
Frederick the Great of Prussia, 327, 434
Freeman's Farm, 338
French, 329, 331, 332, 419
French Guiana, 394
French language, 203, 327, 328, 419
French Revolution, 342 _et seq._, 374
Frogs, 24
Fronde, war of the, 434
Fulton, Robert, 358
Furnace, blast, 359; electric, 359
Furs, 335
G
Galatia, 430
Galatians, 193
Galba, 430
Galerius, Emperor, 226, 431
Galleys, 91, 92, 181, 263
Galvani, 258
Gamma, Vasco da, 329, 335, 433
Ganges, 156
Gath, 117
Gaul, 203, 235, 236, 357, 431
Gauls, 154, 178, 179, 180, 182, 193, 430
Gautama. (_See_ Buddha)
Gaza, 117, 147
Gaztelu, 314
Genoa (and Genoese), 294, 300, 301, 302
Genoa Conference, 425
Genseric, 232
Geology, 11 _et seq._, 356
George III, King of England, 324, 337, 434
Georgia, 336, 339, 385, 387
German Empire, 409
German language, 95, 236, 260
Germans, 268, 288, 310, 351, 360-61, 362
Germany, 197, 326, 347, 348, 362, 390, 396, 402, 409, 410, 411
Germany, North, 306
Gibbon, E., 234, 288
Gibraltar, 71, 92, 94, 253, 393, 407
Gigantosaurus, measurement of, 28
Gilbert, Dr., 322
Gilboa, Mount, 118
Gills, 24
Giraffes, 42
Gizeh, pyramids at, 83
Glacial Ages, 22, 37, 44
Gladiators, 205
Glass, 102
Glyptodon, 74
Goa, 329
Goats, 77
God, idea of one true, 249
God of Judaism, 123, 209, 213, 214, 215
Godfrey of Bouillon, 432
Gods, 111, 123, 129, 165, 184, 186, 201 _et seq._, 208 _et seq._,
240
Goidelic·Celts, 106
Gold, 74, 80, 83, 102, 300, 395
_Golden Bough_, Frazer's, 66
Good Hope, Cape of. (See Cape)
Gospels, the, 214 _et seq._, 222
Gothic kingdom, 259
Gothland, 197, 200
Goths, 181, 200, 227, 228, 430, 431
Granada, 293, 301
Granicus, battle of the, 146, 430
Grant, General, 387, 388
Graphite, 15
Grass, 37, 51
Great Britain, 396, 410
Great Mogul, Empire of, 394, 434
Great Powers, 399 _et seq._
Great Schism. (_See_ Papal schism)
Great War, the, 411 _et seq._, 421, 435
Greece, 92, 94, 108, 127, 139 _et seq._, 145 _et seq._, 434
Greece, war with Persia, 134 _et seq._
Greek language, 95, 202, 203
Greeks, 92, 100, 101, 108, 122 _et seq._, 135, 150, 174, 186, 271,
272, 301, 353, 419, 429, 430, 433
Greenland, 263
Gregory I, Pope, 263
Gregory VII, Pope (Hildebrand), 268, 272, 274, 275, 278, 432
Gregory IX, Pope, 281
Gregory XI, Pope, 285, 433
Gregory the Great, 272
Grimaldi race, 51, 54, 65
Guillotine, the, 346
Guiscard, Robert, 432
Gunpowder, 287, 321
Guns, 321, 413
Gustavus Adolphus, 331
Gymnastic displays, Cretan, 93
H
Habsburgs, 283, 309, 310
Hadrian, 174, 430
Halicarnassus, 138
Hamburg, 294
Hamitic people, 71
Hammurabi, 90, 92, 104, 429
Han dynasty, 196, 200, 245, 430
Hannibal, 182
Hanover, Elector of, 327
Harding, President, 425
Harold Hardrada, 266
Harold, King of England, 266
Haroun-al-Raschid, 267, 432
Hastings, battle of, 266
Hastings, Warren, 333
Hatasu, Queen of Egypt, 96
Hathor, 209
Heaven, Kingdom of, 216, 217
Hebrew Bible, 1, 115, 116. (Cf. Bible)
Hebrew literature, 100
Hebrews, 100, 115. (_See also_ Jews)
Hegira, 431
Heidelberg man, 45
Heliolithic culture, 69, 71, 167, 174
Heliolithic peoples, 107
Hellenic tribes, 100. (_See also_ Greeks)
Hellespont, 430, 431
Helots, 130, 203
Hen. (_See_ Fowl)
Henry IV, King, 274
Henry VI, Emperor, 279
Henry VIII, King of England, 310, 312, 313, 324, 433
Henry the Fowler, 265, 432
Heraclea, battle of, 178, 430
Heraclitus of Ephesus, 132, 156, 161
Heraclius, Emperor, 243, 247, 253, 431
Herat, 148
Herbivorous reptiles, 28
Hercules, Pillars of, (_See_ Gibraltar)
Hero, 151, 152
Herodotus, 138, 139
Herophilus, 151
Hiero, 182
Hieroglyphics, 79, 124
Hildebrand. (_See_ Gregory VII)
Himalayas, the, 37
Hipparchus, 151
Hippopotamus, 43
Hiram, King of Sidon, 118, 119, 122
_History of Charles V_, 316
Hittites, 96, 97, 98, 108
Hohenstaufens, 283
Holland, 306, 344, 347, 394, 396, 402, 433, 434
Holstein, 351
Holy Alliance, 349
Holy Roman Empire, 264, 309, 317, 323, 347, 377, 409, 432, 434
Homer, 129
Honorius, 230, 431
Honorius III, Pope, 281
Horse, 51, 56, 94, 96, 97, 112, 167, 319, 336; evolution of the,
42
Horsetails, 23
Horus, 209, 210, 211
Hottentots, 54
Hsia, 287
Hudson Bay Company, 393
Hudson River, 358
Hulagu Khan, 290, 433
Human sacrifice, 182, 186. (_Cf._ Blood Sacrifice, Sacrifice)
Hungarians, 263, 289, 351
Hungary, 185, 203, 227, 245, 258, 263, 289, 290, 292, 310, 312,
351
Hungary, plain of, 234
Huns, 88, 167, 168, 174, 197, 198, 227, 232, 233, 245, 263, 289,
431
Hunting, 56
Huss, John, 304, 433
Hussites, 305
Hwang-ho river, 173
Hwang-ho valley, 300
Hyksos, 90, 96
Hyracodons, 42
Hystaspes, 430
I
Iberians, 71, 92
Ice age, 43. ·(_Cf._ Glacial ages)
Iceland, 263
Ichthyosaurs, 29, 36
Ignatius of Loyola, St., 308, 434
_Iliad_, 127
Illinois, 386
Illyria, 179, 182
Immolation of human beings, 102
Immortality, idea of, 210, 211, 224
Imperialism, 399
Implements, 46, 48, 56, 57, 65, 87
Implements, use of, by animals, 44, 45
India, 71, 84, 104, 108, 122, 149, 156, 163, 164, 196, 199, 287,
302, 335, 394-95, 399, 409, 433, 434
Indian Empire, 405
Indian Ocean, 329
Indiana, 383, 386
Individualists, 375 _et seq._
Individuality in reproduction, 16 _et seq._
Indo-Scythians, 199, 430
Indus, 149, 429
Industrial revolution, 365 _et seq._
Infantry, 178
Influenza, 414
Innocent III, Pope, 276, 279, 280, 432
Innocent IV, Pope, 281
Innsbruck, 313
Inquisition, the, 276, 349
Insects, 26, 31
Interdicts, papal, 275
Interglacial period, 44
Internationalism, 380
Invertebrata, 13
Investitures, 275
Ionic Greeks, 108, 130
Iowa, 385
Ireland, 106, 405
Iron, 80, 87, 94, 97, 102, 104, 168, 319, 321, 358, 359
Irrigation, 290
Isabella of Castile, Queen, 293, 302, 309
Isaiah, 125, 133, 156
Isis, 209, 210, 211, 212
Islam, 251, 252, 432
Islamism, 267, 319. (_See also_ Moslem, Muhammedanism)
Isocrates, 145
Israel, judges of, 118
Israel, kings of, 118, 119, 121
Issus, battle of, 147, 430
Italian language, 203
Italians, 107, 351
Italica, 202
Italy, 94, 108, 129, 134, 176, 180, 230, 236, 312, 327, 347, 390,
396, 409, 411, 429, 431, 434
Italy, Central, 429
Italy, North, 263, 312, 351, 390, 429, 431
Italy, South, 429
Ivan III (the Great), 327, 433
Ivan IV (the Terrible), 327, 433
J
Jacobin republic, 434
Jamaica, 393, 407
James I, King of England and Scotland, 324, 433
Jamestown (Va.), 433
Japan, 166, 300, 399, 400-01 _et seq._, 409, 410, 435
Japanese, 419
Jarandilla, 315
Java, 302, 329
Jaw-bone, Heidelberg, 45-46; Piltdown, 46
Jehovah, 125
Jena, 434
Jengis Khan, 287, 298, 334, 432
Jerusalem, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 124, 184, 215, 243, 267, 271,
272, 299, 431, 432
Jerusalem, Temple of, 119, 184
Jesuits, 308, 400, 433
Jesus, life and teaching of, 214 _et seq._, 224, 270, 306, 374,
430
Jews, 123, 124, 147, 184, 213, 215, 255, 256, 270, 294
Jews, early history of, 115 _et seq._
Jews, literature of, 115
Jewish religion and sacred books, 116
John III of Poland, 434
John XI, Pope, 272
John XII, Pope, 272, 432
Joppa, 117
Joseph, King of Spain, 349, 434
Josiah, King of Judah, 110, 115, 116, 429
Judah, 115, 119
Judah, kings of, 119
Judea, 115, 183, 214
Judea, priests and prophets in, 122 _et seq._
Judges, book of, 117
Judges of Israel, 118
Jugo-Slavia, 354
Jugo-Slavs, 351
Jugurtha, 192
Julian the Apostate, 431
Julius III, 316
Junks, Chinese, 400
Jupiter (god), 211, 212
Jupiter (planet), 2, 3
Jupiter Capitolinus, 184
Jupiter Serapis, 226
Justinian I, 232, 238, 243, 431
Jutes, 230
K
Kaaba, the, 249
Kadessia, battle of, 253, 431
Kalinga, 163
Kansas, 383
Karakorum, 287, 298
Karnak, 101
Kashgar, 300
Kashmir, Buddhists in, 165
Kavadh, 243, 244, 431
Kentucky, 383, 386
Kerensky, 416, 417
Khans, 287 _et seq._
Khyber Pass, 148, 199
Kiau Chau, 400
Kieff, 287, 432
Kin dynasty, 287
Kings, book of, 119
Kioto, 402
Ki-wi, the, 32
Koltchak, Admiral, 419
Koran, the, 251, 255
Korea, 400, 402
Kotan, 300
Krum of Bulgaria, 432
Kublai Khan, 290, 298, 300, 433
Kushan dynasty, 199
L
Labyrinth, Cretan, 127
Lahore, 287
Lake Ontario, 336
Land scorpions, 23
Langley, Professor, 363
Languages of mankind, 94, 95, 100, 106, 107, 108, 134, 145, 156,
176, 201, 202, 203, 230, 236, 243, 245, 259, 325, 328
Lao Tse, 133, 170 _et seq._, 222, 429
Lapland, 233
Latin Emperor, 259
Latin language, 201, 202, 203, 236, 259. (_Cf. also_ Languages)
Latins, the, 271, 272, 432
Law, 238
_Laws_, Plato's, 142
League of Nations, 422, 423, 424, 425, 435
Learning, 255
Lee, General, 387, 389
Legionaries, 229
Lemurs, 43
Lenin, 417, 419
Leo III, Pope, 265, 272, 432
Leo X, Pope, 310, 312, 433
Leonidas, 136
Leopold I, 353
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 434
Lepanto, battle of, 293
Lepidus, 194
Lexington, 338
Liberia, 398
Libraries, 151, 164, 170
Liegnitz, battle of, 288, 289, 433
Life, beginnings of, the Record of the Rocks, 11 _et seq._;
progressive nature of, 16; of what it consists, 16; theory of
Natural Selection, 18; a teachable type: advent of, 39
Lincoln, Abraham, 385, 386, 388, 389, 435; assassination of, 389
Linen, 102
Lions, 42, 127
Lisbon, 294, 315, 329
Literary criticism, evolution of, 205
Literature, European, 298
Literature, pre-historic, 115
Lizards, 27, 28
Llamas, 42
Lob Nor, 300
Lochau, battle of, 313
Locke, John, 371
Logic, science of, 144
Lombard kingdom, 259
Lombards, 431
Lombardy, 431
London, 294, 413
Lopez de Recalde, Inigo, 308, (_See also_ Ignatius of Loyola)
Lorraine, 391
Louis XIV, 324, 433
Louis XV, 434
Louis XVI, 342, 343, 434
Louis XVIII, 350, 434
Louis Philippe, 350, 434,
Louis the Pious, 265, 432
Louisiana, 336, 385
Lu, state of, 170
Lucretius, 294
Lucullus, 192
Lunar month, 68
Lung, the, 24
Luther, Martin, 306, 310, 433
Luxembourg, 351
Luxor, 101
Lvoff, Prince, 416
Lyceum, Athens, 142, 144
Lydia, 98, 134
Lydians, 94
Lyons, 345
M
Macao, 329
Macaulay, Lord, 187
Maccabeans, 184
Macedonia and Macedonians, 131, 135, 139, 145, 179, 292, 350
Machinery, 322, 356
Madeira, 122, 302
Madras, 163
Magellan, Ferdinand, 302
Magic, 172
Magna Græcia, 129, 178
Magnesia, battle of, 183
Magyars, 263, 264, 270, 289
Mahaffy, Professor, 151
Maine, 336, 339
Majuba Hill, battle of, 398
Malta, 393, 407
Mammals, the earliest, 33; viviparous, 33; egg-laying, 34; the Age
of, 37 _et seq._
Mammoth, 43, 49
Man, brotherhood of, 216, 224, 380
Man, 43; Heidelberg, 45; Eoanthropus, 47; Neanderthal, 47, 48 _et
seq._; earliest known, 53 _et seq._
Manchu, 333, 433
Manchuria, 197, 400,·402, 403, 404
Mangu Khan, 290, 433
Mani, 241, 270, 430, 431
Manichæans, 243, 255
Mankind, racial divisions of, 54, 71
Mantua, 345
Maoris, 71
Marathon, 136
Marathon, battle of, 430
Marchand, Colonel, 398
Marcus Aurelius, 174, 430
Marie Antoinette, 343, 346
Mariner's compass, 302, 320
Marius, 191, 192, 237, 430
"Marriage of East and West," 149
Mars (planet), 2, 3
Marseillaise, the, 343, 345
Marseilles, 129, 182, 312, 345
Martel, Charles, 259, 432
Marlin V, Pope, 286, 304
Marx, 376
Maryland, 337
Mas d'Azil cave, 57
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 390, 391
Maximilian I, Emperor, 309, 433
Maya writing, 74, 75
Mayence, 265, 344
_Mayflower_ expedition, 433
Mazarin, Cardinal, 324
Mecca, 248, 249, 251, 431
Mechanical revolution, 256 _et seq._, 366, 369
Medes, 100, 108, 109, 115, 122, 134, 155, 174, 429
Media, rebellion in, 136
Median Empire, 109, 110, 112
Medicine man, the, 64
Medina, 249
Mediterranean, 71, 91, 176, 292, 293; valley, 71
"Mediterranean" people, pre-Greek, 130
Megatherium, 74
Megiddo, battle of, 110, 115, 429
Melasgird, battle of, 268, 432
Mentality, primitive, 60, _et seq._
Mercury (planet), 2, 3
Mesopotamia, 77, 80, 96, 100, 109, 127, 174, 267, 290, 299
Mesozoic period, 27; land life of, 28; sea life of, 30; scarcity
of bird and mammal life in, 32, 34; its difference from
Cainozoic period, 38
Messina, 179, 180
Messina, Straits of, 179
Metallurgy, 356, 359, 360
Metals, transmutation of, 257
Meteoric iron, 80, 94
Metz, 391
Mexico, 74, 76, 324, 321, 384, 385, 389, 399
Michael VII, Emperor, 268
Michael VIII. (_See_ Palæologus)
Microscope, 355
Midianites, 117
Milan, 227, 235, 309, 312, 351
Miletus, 129
Millipedes, 23
Milton, 129
Ming dynasty, 290, 333, 433
Mining, 335
Minnesota, 385
Minos, 92, 95, 127, 131
Missionaries, 236, 247, 380, 400, 431
Mississippi (state), 385
Mississippi River, 386
Missouri, 382
Mithraism, 211, 212, 213, 222, 431
Mithras, 211, 213
Mnemonics, Chinese and Peruvian method of, 76
Moabites, 117
Moawija, Caliph, 431
Mogul dynasty, 292, 433
Moluccas, 329
Monarchy, 323, 341, 347
Monasticism, 213, 236
Money, 114, 176, 201, 319
Mongol conquests, influence of, 298
Mongol Court, the, 299
Mongol Empire, 332
Mongolia, 197
Mongolian language, 108
Mongolian peoples, 72, 73, 88, 167, 197, 227, 232, 233 _et seq._,
245, 258, 287 _et seq._, 298, 320, 333, 400, 433
Mongoloid tribes, 69
Monkeys, 43, 45
Monotheism, 251. (_See also_ Muhammad)
Monroe doctrine, 349, 389, 396, 423
Monroe, President, 349
Montesquieu, 371
Montgomery, 385
Month, the lunar, 68
Moon, the, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 68
Moorish paper-mills, 297
More, Sir Thomas, 365, 371
Morelly, 371
Morocco, 185, 398
Mortillet, 57
Moscow, 293, 434
Moscow, Grand Duke of, 290
Moses, 116
Moslem Empire, 253
Moslems, 297, 431, 432
Moslim, the, 253, 269, 271, 290
Mososaurs, 29
Moses, 23
Mounds, Neolithic, 70
Mountains, 197
Mozambique, 329
Muehlon, Herr, 424
Muhammad, prophet, 243, 247, 248 _et seq._, 270, 431
Muhammad II, Sultan, 292, 433
Mules, 102
Mummies, 70
Munitions, 412
Musk ox, 43
Mycalæ, battle of, 136, 430
Mycenæ, 92, 108
Mycerinus, 83
Mylæ, battle of, 181, 430
N
Nabonidus, 111, 112
Nankin, 173
Naples, 178, 350, 431
Napoleon Bonaparte, 345, 347, 348, 356, 434
Napoleon III, 390, 434, 435
Nasmyth, 359
Natal, 398
"National schools," 369
Natural history, father of, 144
Natural Selection, theory of, 17
Nautilus, the pearly, 39
Navarino, battle of, 353, 434
Neanderthaler Man, 47, 48 _et seq._
Nebraska, 383
Nebuchadnezzar II (the Great), 102, 110, 115, 429
Nebulæ, 4, 5
Necho II, 109, 110, 115, 122, 147, 429
Needles, bone, 57
Negroid tribes, 72, 88
Nelson, Horatio, 348
Neolithic age, 59, 65
Neolithic civilizations, primitive, 71 _et seq._
Neptune (planet), 2, 3
Nero, 195, 430
Nestorian missionaries, 431. (_Cf._ Missionaries)
Netherlands, 259, 309, 351
Neustria, 431
Neva, 327
New Assyrian Empire, 97
_New Atlantis, The_, 322, 355
New England, 335, 337
New Mexico, 433
New Plymouth, 433
Newts, 24
New York, 358, 434
New Zealand, 322, 396, 405
Newfoundland, 405
Nicæa, 268, 270
Nicæa, Council of, 431
Nicephorus, Emperor, 432
Nicholas I, Tsar, 351, 390, 434
Nicholas II, Tsar, 416
Nickel, 360
Nicomedia, 227
Nieuw Amsterdam, 434. (_Cf._ New York)
Nile, 83, 100, 129, 398; valley 90, 429
Nile, battle of the, 434
Nineveh, 94, 97, 101, 109, 114, 243, 429, 431
Nippur, 78
Nirvana, 161
Nish, 227
Noah's Ark, 91
Nogaret, Guillaume de, 284
Nomadic peoples, primitive, 84 _et seq._, (_Cf._ Nomads)
Nomads, 122, 155, 167, 168, 174, 198-200, 233-34, 245, 287, 334
Nonconformity, 307, 308
Nordic race, 72, 88, 104, 108, 134, 154, 155, 174, 178, 185, 197,
200, 233, 258, 261
Normandy, 263, 342, 432
Normandy, Duke of, 266
Normans, 263, 266, 279, 302
Northmen, 263, 264, 266, 268, 432
Norway, 306, 313, 432
Norwegians, 351
Novgorod, 294, 432
Nubians, 238
Numerals, Arabic, 282
Numidia, 191
Numidians, 182
Nuremberg, 294
Nuremberg, Peace of, 313
O
Ocean dredgings, deepest, 4
Ocean liners, 322, 336
Octavian. (_See_ Augustus)
Odenathus of Palmyra, 431
Odoacer, 236, 431
_Odyssey_, 127
Ogdai Khan, 287, 289, 432
Oglethorpe, 336
Okapi, 397
"Old Man," 372, 373
Old Testament, 115, 116
Olympiad, first, 176, 429
Olympian games, 131
Olympias, Queen, 146
Omar, Caliph, 431
Open-hearth process, 359
Orange River, 398
"Ordinance of secession," 385
Oregon, 385
Organic Evolution, 16
Ormuz, 299
Orsini family, 284
Orthodoxy, 240
Osiris, 200, 210, 211
Ostrogoths, 227, 431
Othman, 432
Otho, 430
Otto I, King of Germany, 265, 432
Otto of Bavaria, Prince, 354
Ottoman Empire, 202. (_See also_ Turkey, Turks)
Oudh, 394
Ownership, 373, 374, 375
Oxen, 49, 104, 112
Oxford, 295
P
Padua, 235
Pæstum, 176
Palæologus, Michael (Michael VIII), 283
Palæolithic age, 13, 59, 66 (note)
Palermo, 181
Palestine, 290, 299
Pamirs, 196, 300
Panama, 385
Panama, Isthmus of, 314
Pan Chau, 197, 430
Panipat, battle of, 433
Pannonia, 203, 229, 232, 234, 431
Papacy (including Popes), 237, 261, 265, 277 _et seq._, 329 _et
seq._, 343
Papal schism (the Great Schism), 285, 394, 433
Paper, 153, 236, 255, 297, 320, 322
Papyrus, 78, 153
Parables, 216
_Paradise Lost_, 129
Parchment, 153
Paris, 294, 295, 342, 350, 356, 390, 391, 412, 413, 415, 435
Paris, Peace of, 338, 434
Parthian dynasty, 202
Parthians, 155, 192, 194, 198, 199, 245
Passau, Treaty of, 314
Patricians, Roman, 176, 188
Paul, St., 202, 223
Pavia, siege of, 312
_Peace Conference_, Dr. Dillon's, 424
Peasant revolts, 305, 310
Peculium, 206
Pedro I, 340
Pegu, 300
Pekin, 173, 287, 300, 383, 400, 432
Peloponnesian War, 139, 145, 430
Pentateuch, the, 116
"People's crusade," the, 270, 432. (_Cf._ Crusades)
Pepi II, 83
Pepin I, 259
Pepin of Hersthal, 431
Pergamum, 154, 180, 183, 430
Pericles, 139, 140
Perry, Commodore, 402
Persepolis, 114, 148, 155
Persia, 77, 134 _et seq._, 165, 185, 192, 227, 243, 253, 255, 287,
399, 409, 430, 431
Persian Empire, 112, 134, 238, 429
Persian Gulf, 77, 78, 91, 299
Persian language, 95
Persians, 100, 108, 109, 115, 155, 174, 431
Peru, 74, 75, 314, 321
Pestilence, 305, 320, 334, 413, 430, 431, 433
Peter the Great, 327, 434
Peter the Hermit, 269, 270
Peterhof, 327
Petersburg, 127, 419. (_See also_ Petrograd)
Petrograd, 416, 417. (_See also_ Petersburg)
Petschenegs, 268
Phalanx, 145, 178
Pharaohs, the, 90, 96, 119, 131, 150, 188
Pharsalos, 430
Philadelphia, 358, 434
Philip, Duke of Orleans, 350
Philip, King of France, 285
Philip II, King of Spain, 314, 324
Philip of Hesse, 313
Philip of Macedon, 145, 146, 430
Philippine Islands, 302, 393, 400
Philistines, 100, 117
Philosopher's stone, 257
Philosophers and Philosophy, 133, 139, 152, 168, 239, 294, 295
Phoenicians, 92, 94, 107, 123, 147
_Phoenix_, steamship, 358
Phrygians, 100, 108
Physiocrats, 371
Picture writing, 56, 57, 78, 79, 167
Piedmont, 345
Pirates and Piracy, 92, 179, 180, 200, 263
Pithecanthropus erectus, 45
Pizarro, 314
Plague, (_See_ Pestilence)
Planetoids, 2
Planets, 2
Plant lice, 13
Plants, 22, 23, 36
Platea, battle of, 136, 430
Plato, 140, 142, 144, 170, 370-71
Platypus, duck-billed, 34
Plebeians, Roman, 176, 177, 187-88
Plesiosaurs, 29, 30, 36
Poison-gas, 413
Poitiers, 432
Poitiers, battle of, 253, 259
Poland, 288, 327, 353, 434
Poles, 288, 419
Political experiment, age of, 318 _et seq._
Political ideas, development of, 370 _et seq._
Political science, founder of, 144
Political worship, 412
Polo, Marco, 299-300
Polynesian races, 71
Pompey the Great, 192, 193, 196, 198, 430
Pontifex maximus, 237, 261
Popes. (_See_ Papacy)
Population, 379, 383
Port Arthur, 400, 403
Portugal, 340, 394, 396, 431
Portuguese, 302, 329, 332, 400
Porus, King, 149
Potato, 76
Potsdam, 327
Pottery, 75, 87
Prague, 433
Prescott, 314
Priestcraft (including Priests), 64, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 83, 111,
114 _et seq._, 122, 131, 132, 167, 174, 275, 277
_Primal Law_, 61
Primates, 43. (_Cf._ Mammalia)
Printing, 80 153, 247, 255, 298, 302, 305, 306, 320, 322, 329
Priscus, 234
Property, 274, 372, 374, 375
Prophet, Muhammad as, 249
Prophets, Jewish, 118, 122 _et seq._
Proprietorship, 373
Protestantism, 316, 324, 327, 351, 400
Proverbs, book of, 116
Prussia, 327, 348, 351, 390, 391, 392, 434, 435
Prussia, East, 412, 415
Psalms, 116
Psammetichus I, 109, 429
Psycho-analysis, 69
Pterodactyls, 28, 29, 31, 36
Ptolemy I, 149, 150, 151, 186, 211
Ptolemy II, 151, 186
Punic language, 203
Punic Wars, 180 _et seq._, 187, 188, 430
Punjab, 163, 199
Puritans, 335
Pygmies, 397
Pyramids, 69, 83, 100
Pyrenees, 253, 432
Pyrrhus, 178, 179, 430
Q
Quebec, 434
Quinqueremes, 180
Quixada, 314
R
Races of mankind, 71 _et seq._
Railways, 322, 350, 357, 382, 383, 384, 389, 395, 396, 409, 434
Rain, 9, 10
Rameses II, 96, 147, 429
Rasputin, 415, 416
Ratisbon, Diet of, 313
Ravenna, 431
Reading, 176
Rebus, 79
Red deer, 56
Red Sea, 91, 118, 122, 196
Reformation, the, 308
Reindeer, 43, 49, 51, 56, 73
Religion, and the creation of the world, 1; and organic evolution,
16; primitive, 61, 64
Religions, 172, 222 _et seq._, 240 _et seq._, 319. (_Cf._
Buddhism, Christianity, etc.)
Religious developments under the Roman Empire, 208 _et seq._
Religious wars, 270, 304, 313. (_Cf._ Crusades)
Reptiles, the age of, 26 _et seq._; mental life of, 38
Reproduction, 17 _et seq._
_Republic_, Plato's, 142
Republic, the Assimilative, 187
Republics, 187 _et seq._, 236, 308, 324, 328, 340, 343, 344, 416,
433, 434, 435
Republicans, the first, 131
_Retreat of the Ten Thousand_, 150
Revolution, 342 _et seq._, 349 _et seq._, 390, 404, 416, 435
Rhine, 200, 227
Rhine languages, 236
Rhineland, 270, 306
Rhinoceros, 43, 49
Rhodes, 108
Rhodesia, 407
Rhodesian man, 52
Richelieu, Cardinal, 324
Richmond, U.S.A., 386, 388, 389
Roads, 114, 187
Robertson, 316
Robespierre, 345, 346, 434
Robinson, J. H., 284
"Rocket," Stephenson's, 356
Rock pictures, 57, 78
Rocks as record of beginnings of life, 11 _et seq._
S
Sabellians, 224
Sabre-toothed tiger, 43
Sacrifice, 102, 103, 167, 174, 182, 186, 211, 212. (_Cf._ also
Blood sacrifice, Human sacrifice)
Sagas, 106
Saghalien, 404
Sailing ships, 91, 336
St. Angelo, castle of, 312
St. Helena, 407
St. Sophia, church of, 238
Saladin, 272, 432
Salamis, battle of, 180, 430
Salamis, bay of, 136
Salerno, 282
Samarkand, 256, 297
Samnites, 430
Samos, 129
Samson, 116
Samurai, 401
San Francisco, 383
Sandstones, 26
Sanskrit, 95, 107, 156
Sapor I, 430
Saracens, 264, 265, 297
Saratoga, 338
Sardanapalus (Assurbanipal), 98, 109, 111
Sardinia, 182, 185, 232, 309, 351, 390
Sardis, 98
Sargon I, 90, 92, 109, 122, 429
Sargon II, 97, 109, 429
Sarmatians, 100
Sassanid dynasty, 227, 241, 430
Saturn (planet), 2, 3
Saul, King of Israel, 118, 429
Saul of Tarsus. (_See_ Paul, St.)
_Savannah_, steamship, 358
Savoy, 334, 351, 390
Saxons, 230, 265
Saxony, Elector of, 310
Scandinavians, 329
Scarabeus beetle, 209
Scheldt, 344
Schmalkaldic League, 312
Science, 144
Science and religion, 243
Science, exploitation of, 362
Science, physical, 412
Scientific societies, 322
Scipio Africanus, 182, 187
Scorpion, sea, 13, 18, 23
Scotland, 306, 307
Scott, Michael, 282
Scythia, 429
Scythians, 100, 108, 134, 135
Sea trade, 91
Sea worms, 13
Seasons, the, 68
Seaweed, 13
Sedan, 391
Seed-bearing trees, 26
Seleucid dynasty, 183, 186, 196, 199
Seleucus I, 149, 163
Seljuks, 267, 268, 272, 432
Semites and Semitic peoples, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 107, 115, 122,
134, 174, 233, 256, 258
Semitic language, 202, 243
Sennacherib, 97
Serapeum, 211, 213
Serapis, 211, 212
Serbia, 179, 200, 227, 228, 292, 354, 411
Serfdom, 207
Seven Years' War, 434
Severus, Septimius, 202
Seville, 202, 213, 302
Shang dynasty, 103, 168
Sheep, 77
Shell necklaces, 56
Shellfish, 13
Shells, as protection against drying, 18
Sherman, General, 387, 388
Shi Hwang-ti, 173, 180, 430
Shimonoseki, Straits of, 402
Shipbuilding, 359, 360, 400
Ships, 91, 119, 122, 149, 180, 196, 320, 322, 336
Shishak, 119
Shrubs, 16
Shumanism, 298
Siam, 166
Siberia, 334
Siberia, Eastern, 419
Siberian railway, 403, 409
Sicilies, Two, 287
Sicily, 108, 122, 129, 134, 178, 179, 182, 185, 188, 232, 263,
279, 280
Sidon, 92, 122, 123, 134, 147
Silurian system, 19
Silver, 80, 102, 335
Sind, 394
Sirmium, 227
Skins, use of; for clothing, 56 for writing, 75; inflated as
boats, 91
Skull, Rhodesian, 52
Slavery (and slaves), 94, 102, 188, 191, 194, 203 _et seq._, 236,
320, 337, 373, 374, 384-86, 388, 430, 433
Slavonic language, 236
Slavs, 263, 265
Smelting, 87, 104, 322
Smith, Adam, 377
Smith, Eliot, 69
Snakes, 27, 28
Social reform, 125
Socialism, 371, 416, 417, 434
Socialists, 375 _et seq._
Socialists, primitive, 374
Society, primitive, 60
Socrates, 140
Solomon, King, 119, 122, 127, 429
Solomon's temple, 119
Sophists, 140
Sophocles, 139
South Carolina, 385
Soviets, 417
Space, the world in, 1 _et seq._
Spain, 93, 106, 122, 123, 180, 185, 230, 232, 236, 253, 255, 256,
309, 348, 349, 350, 393, 429, 431; relics of first true man in,
53
Spain, North, 431
Spanish, 329, 331
Spanish language, 203
Sparta, 129, 130, 136, 203
Spartacus, 191, 192, 203, 430
Spartans, 136
Species, generation of, 17; new, 36
Speech, primitive human, 63
Spiders, 23
Spiral nebulæ, 5
Spores, 24
Stagira, 142
Stamford Bridge, battle of, 286
Stars, 68, 257
State, modern idea of a, 375
State ownership, 374
States General, the, 341, 434
Steamboat, 340, 357 _et seq._, 374, 382, 395, 396
Steam engine, 151, 152, 359
Steam hammer, 359
Steam power, 322
Steel, 322, 359-60
Stephenson, George, 356
Stilicho, 230, 234, 431
Stockholm, 417
Stockton, 356, 434
Stone age, 53, 59
Stone implements, 45, 65
Stonehenge, 106, 429
Story-telling, primitive, 62
Styria, 309
Submarine campaign, 423
Subutai, 289
Sudan, the, 405
Suevi, 431
Suleiman the Magnificent, 310, 312, 432, 433
Sulla, 192, 237
Sumeria and Sumerians, 77, 78 _et seq._, 87, 88, 90, 91, 122
Sumerian Empire, 429
Sumerian language and writing, 77, 78, 79
Sun, the, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10
Sun worship, 211
Sung dynasty, 290
Susa, 114, 135, 148, 149, 155
Suy dynasty, 245
Swastika, 70
Sweden, 306, 313, 348
Swedes, 326, 329, 330, 351
Swimming bladder, 24
Switzerland, 327, 347, 350, 433
Syracuse, 151, 154, 170, 178
Syria, 88, 91, 115, 119, 122, 138, 238, 243, 249, 290, 431
Syrians, 96, 98
T
_Tabus_, the, 61
Tadpoles, 26
Tagus valley, 314
Tai-Tsung, 247, 431
Tang dynasty, 200, 245, 247, 287, 431
"Tanks," 413
Taoism, 174, 222. (_See also_ Lao Tse)
Taranto, 178
Tarentum, 178
Tarim valley, 430
Tartars, 167, 197, 232, 243, 288, 290, 334
Tasmania, 59, 322, 393
Tattooing, 70
Taxation, 271, 337
Tea, 247, 337
Teeth, 19, 20
Telamon, battle of, 182
Telegraph, electric, 340, 358, 382, 384, 396
Telescope, 355
Temples, 77, 83, 101, 129, 131, 167, 174, 184, 186, 211, 212, 213,
240
Tennessee, 386
Testament, Old, 115, 116
Teutons, 431
Texas, 384, 385
Texel, 344
Thales, 131, 161
Thebes, 101, 102, 129, 136
Theocrasia, 209
Theodora, Empress, 238
Theodoric the Goth, 236, 431
Theodosius II, 234, 238
Theodosius the Great, 226, 229, 431
Thermopylæ, battle of, 136, 430
Thessaly, 145, 178
Thirty Years' War, 326
Thothmes III, 96, 127, 147, 429
Thought and research, 140
Thought, primitive, 60 _et seq._
Thrace, 135
Three Estates, council of the, 285
Three Teachings, the, 170
Tiberius Cæsar, 195, 214, 430
Tibet, 196, 400
Tides, 18
Tigers, 42, 43
Tiglath Pileser I, 97, 429
Tiglath Pileser III, 97, 108, 109, 429
Tigris, 77, 84
Time, 5, 6
Timor, 329
Timurlane, 290, 334
Tin, 360
Tiryns, 108
Titanotherium, the, 39, 42
Tonkin, 402
Tortoises, 27, 28
Toulon, 345
Trade, early, 83, 88
Trade, Grecian, 129
Trade routes, 119
Traders, 132, 335
Traders, sea, 92
Trafalgar, battle of, 348
Trajan, 195, 430
Transport, 319, 358, 382
Transvaal, 398
Transylvania, 195
Trasimere, Lake, 182
Trench warfare, 412
Trevithick, 356
Tribal life, 61
Trilobites, 13
Trinidad, 407
Trinil, Java, 45
Trinitarians, 224
Trinity, doctrine of the, 224, 261
Triremes, 180
Triumvirates, 194
Trojans, 94
Troy, 92, 127
Troyes, battle of, 235, 431
Tsar, title of, 327
Tshushima, Straits of, 404
Ts'i, 173
Ts'in, 173, 431
Tuileries, 342, 343
Tunis, 185
Turkestan, 77, 108, 148, 196, 197, 198, 199, 245, 253, 287, 290,
292, 334
Turkey, 390, 411
Turkoman dynasty, 405
Turkomans, 334
Turks, 167, 197, 243, 245, 263, 267, 287, 292, 310, 312, 334, 353,
354, 434
Turtles, 27, 28
Tushratta, king of Mitanni, 97
Twelve tribes, the, 116
Tyrannosaurus, 28
Tyre, 92, 118, 119, 122, 123, 134, 147
U
Uintatheres, 42
Uncleanness, 68
United States, 357, 410, 411, 422, 434; Declaration of
Independence, 338; treaty with Britain, 339; expansion of, 382
_et seq._
Universities, 295, 304, 355, 361
Uranus, 2, 3
Urban II, Pope, 268, 272, 432
Urban VI, Pope, 285, 433
Utopias, 140, 142, 144
V
Valens, Emperor, 229
Valerian, 430
Valladolid, 314, 315, 316
Valmy, battle of, 434
Vandals, 227, 229, 230, 232, 431
Varennes, 343, 434
Vassalage, 259
Vatican, 265, 266, 272, 285
Vedas, 106
Vegetation of Mesozoic period, 28
Veii, 177, 178
Vendée, 345
Venetia, 235
Venetians, 301
Venice, 235, 272, 274, 294, 327, 351, 432
Venus (goddess), 213
Venus (planet), 2, 3
Verona, 345
Versailles, 325, 327, 341, 342
Versailles, Peace Conference of, 421
Versailles, Treaty of, 421, 422
Vertebrata, 19; ancestors of, 20
Verulam, Lord, (_See_ Bacon, Sir Francis)
Vespasian, 430
Vesuvius, 191
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, 435
Victoria, Queen, 394, 434
Vienna, 292, 312, 433, 434
Vienna, Congress of, 348, 349, 350
Vienna, Treaty of, 355
Vilna, 356
Vindhya Mountains, 159
Virginia, 337, 383, 386
Visigoths, 227, 229, 232, 235, 259, 431. (_Cf._ Goths)
Vitellus, 430
_Vittoria_, ship, 302
Viviparous mammals, 33
Vivisection, Herophilus and, 151
Volcanoes, 37
Volga, 200, 227
Volta, 358
Voltaire, 328
Votes, 382
W
Waldenses, 276, 280, 305
Waldo, 276
Walid I, 432
War and Warfare, 96, 344, 390, 422
War of American Independence, 338 _et seq._
Warsaw, 353
Washington, 340, 357, 383, 386, 389
Washington, Conference of, 425
Washington, George, 338
Waterloo, battle of, 348
Watt engine, 356
Weapons, 100, 106
Weaving, 65, 75
Wei-hai-wei, 400
Wellington, Duke of, 348
West Indies, 330, 385, 393, 394
Western Empire, 431
Westminster, 306
Westphalia, Peace of, 326, 355, 433
Wheat, 66, 104
White Huns. (_See_ Ephthalites)
William Duke of Normandy (William I), 432
William II, German Emperor, 410, 435
Wilson, President, 422, 423, 424
Wings, birds', 32
Wisby, 294
Wisconsin, 385
"Wisdom lovers," the first, 133
Witchcraft, 68
Wittenberg, 306
Wolfe, General, 434
Wolsey, Cardinal, 324
Wood blocks for printing, 247
Wool, 102, 395
Workers' Internationals, 377
World, The, creation of, 1; in time, 5 _et seq._
Wrangel, General, 419
Writing, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 94, 124, 176; dawn of, 57
Wycliffe, John, and his followers, 286, 304, 433
X
Xavier, Francis, 400
Xenophon, 150
Xerxes, 136, 138, 147, 150
Y
Yang-Chow, 300
Yang-tse-Kiang, 173
Yangtse valley, 173
Yarmuk, battle of, the, 253, 431
Yedo Bay, 401
Yorktown, 338
Yuan dynasty, 290, 433
Yucatan, 74
Yudenitch, General, 419
Yuste, 314, 317
Z
Zama, battle of, 182, 430
Zanzibar, 329
Zarathustra, 241
Zeppelins, 413
Zero sign, 257
Zeus, 211
Zimbabwe, 397
Zoophytes, fossilized, 13
Zoroaster (and Zoroastrianism), 241, 243, 255
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