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Title: The Evolution of States
Author: Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon), 1856-1933
Language: English
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THE EVOLUTION OF STATES
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.
NEW ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.
WINNOWINGS FROM WORDSWORTH.
WALT WHITMAN: An Appreciation.
MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE. (Second Edition, with additional Essays on
cognate subjects.)
BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: a Sociological Study.
THE SAXON AND THE CELT: a Sociological Study.
MODERN HUMANISTS: Essays on Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin, and
Spencer. (Fourth Edition.)
THE FALLACY OF SAVING: a Study in Economics.
THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: a Study in Economics. (Second Edition.)
THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION: an Essay in English Culture-History.
By "M.W. Wiseman."
A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, Ancient and Modern. (Second Edition:
2 vols.)
PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE. (Third Edition.)
STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY.
WRECKING THE EMPIRE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. (Second Edition.)
CRITICISMS. 2 vols.
TENNYSON AND BROWNING AS TEACHERS.
ESSAYS IN ETHICS.
ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY. 2 vols.
LETTERS ON REASONING. (Second Edition.)
DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE "TITUS ANDRONICUS"?
PIONEER HUMANISTS: Essays on Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza,
Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
TRADE AND TARIFFS.
COURSES OF STUDY.
CHAMBERLAIN: A STUDY.
PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE.
CHARLES BRADLAUGH. By Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner. Part II. by J.M.R.
PAGAN CHRISTS: Studies in Comparative Hierology. (Second Edition,
Revised and Expanded.)
THE MEANING OF LIBERALISM.
THE
EVOLUTION OF STATES
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS
BY
J.M. ROBERTSON
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1912
"The sociologist has three main quests--first, he must try to discover
the conditions that determine mere aggregation and concourse. Secondly,
he must try to discover the law that governs social choices--the law,
that is, of the subjective process. Thirdly, he must try to discover
also the law that governs the natural selection and the survival of
choices--the law, that is, of the objective process."
--_Professor Giddings._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
PART I.
POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAP. I.--THE SUBJECT-MATTER 1
II.--ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION 8
III.--GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION 36
IV.--THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 54
PART II.
ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAP. I.--ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 75
II.--GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 98
PART III.
CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY
CHAP. I.--GREECE 121
II.--THE SARACENS 146
III.--ROME 158
EPILOGUE--A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE 170
PART IV.
THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS
NOTE ON LITERATURE 181
CHAP. I.--THE BEGINNINGS 183
II.--THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION 209
III.--THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE 233
PART V.
THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES
CHAP. I.--IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS 257
II.--THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES 264
III.--THE HANSA 286
IV.--HOLLAND 291
§ 1. The Rise of the Netherlands 293
§ 2. The Revolt against Spain 301
§ 3. The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce 310
§ 4. Home and Foreign Policy 318
§ 5. The Decline of Commercial Supremacy 321
§ 6. The Culture Evolution 325
§ 7. The Modern Situation 328
V.--SWITZERLAND 331
§ 1. The Beginnings of Union 332
§ 2. The Socio-Political Evolution 338
§ 3. The Modern Renaissance 347
VI.--PORTUGAL 355
§ 1. The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire 355
§ 2. The Colonisation of Brazil 361
PART VI.
ENGLISH HISTORY TILL THE CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD
CHAP. I.--BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION 369
II.--THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH 414
III.--FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE 436
IV.--INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 458
CONCLUSION 468
INDEX 473
PREFACE
The following treatise is an expansion, under a new title, of one
originally published (1900) under the name of _An Introduction to
English Politics_. Several friendly reviewers of that work objected, not
unjustly, that its title was something of a misnomer, or at least an
imperfect indication of its contents. It had, as a matter of fact,
originated remotely in a lecture delivered as preliminary to a course on
"Modern English Politicians" (from Bolingbroke to Gladstone), the aim of
the prefatory address being to trace in older politics, home and
foreign, general laws which should partly serve as guides to modern
cases, or at least as preparation for their scientific study; while the
main course dealt with modern political problems as they have arisen in
the careers and been handled by the measures of modern English
statesmen. It was that opening exposition, developed into an essay, and
published as a series of magazine articles, that had been further
expanded into this treatise, by way of covering the ground more
usefully; and the original name is therefore retained as a sub-title.
It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that the book makes no pretension
to being a complete or systematic treatment of political history, or of
political forms and theories. The object in view from the first has
been, not the technical anatomy or documentary history of institutions,
but the bringing into light of the ruling forces in all political life,
ancient and modern alike. It seeks to help the reader to fulfil the
precept of Montaigne: "_Qu'il ne luy apprenne pas tant les histoires
qu'à en juger._"
Since it was first written, there has been so much fresh sociological
study of history that I need not repeat the justification originally
offered for my undertaking. Alike as to ancient and modern history, the
effort of scholars is now more and more towards comprehension of
historic causation in terms of determining conditions, the economic
above all; so much so that I have profited somewhat in my revision from
various recent works, and might with more leisure have done so more
fully. Revised as it is, however, the book may serve to expound views of
history which are still not generally accepted, and to call in question
fallacious formulas which seem to me still unduly common.
On any view, much remains to be done before the statement of historic
causation can reach scientific thoroughness; and it may well be that
some of my theories will incur modification. All I claim for them is
that they are made in the light of a study of the concrete process; and
I am satisfied that fuller light is to be obtained only in that
direction. In the end, doubtless, conflicts of historical interpretation
will turn upon problems of psychology. A contemporary German expert of
distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able lectures on the problem _What
is History?_ (Eng. trans. 1905), lays it down that the main problem of
every scientific history of mankind is the "deducing from the history of
the most important communities of men the evolution of the breadth of
consciousness"; and again that "the full historical comprehension of a
single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical
significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles;
that is to say, from the application of the highest universal-historical
categories." If I understand Prof. Lamprecht aright, he here means
simply that we properly understand the motivation of men in the past in
terms of our own psychosis, conceived as in touch only with their data.
This seems to me substantially sound. But on the other hand I doubt the
utility of his apparent purpose of explaining modern historic
developments in terms of special psychic changes or movements in
communities, considered as forces. That way seems to lie reversion to
the old and vain device of explaining the course of nations in terms of
their "characters."
In any case, however, we have Prof. Lamprecht's avowal that "It would be
a study of great value to establish, by comparative work in universal
history, what are the constantly recurring economic factors of each
period which are so uniformly followed by the development of other
higher intellectual values." That is as full a recognition of the
"economic factor" as I am concerned to contend for, if it be understood
that economic motives are on the one hand recognised as affecting social
action in general, and on the other that varying forms of social
machinery react variously on intellectual life. Upon such hypotheses the
following inquiry proceeds; to such conclusions it leads.
Obviously all critical exposition, historical or other, is an attempt to
influence the psychic processes of the reader, to make him "feel" this
and "think" that; and in this sense any resulting change of conduct
means the play of "the psychic factor." But that is only another way of
saying that the psychic factor is conditioned by material circumstances,
by knowledge, and by ignorance. To insist on the perpetual social
significance of all three is the general aim of this book.
_September, 1912._
PART I
POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT MATTER
§ 1
Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife
of wills on the ground of social action. As international politics is
the sum of the strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is
the sum of the strifes and compromises of classes, interests, factions,
sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages. In studying it,
then, we study the evolution of an aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms
of the clashing forces of its units and of their spontaneous
combinations.
This may seem too obvious and simple a truth to need formal telling; and
yet no truth is more often missed or set aside by writers who deal with
political history. The past course of nations, when it is sought to be
explained at all, is by two writers out of three accounted for by
certain supposed qualities of character in the given nation as a whole,
instead of by the specially conditioned play of forces common to all
peoples.[1] For instance, M. Taine, in the preface to the first volume
of his fascinating work, _Les origines de la France contemporaine_, goes
about to justify his own political indifferentism by stating that in
eighty years his country had thirteen times changed its constitution.
"_We_," he says, have done this; and "_we_ have not yet found that which
suits _us_."[2] It is here implied that a body of men collectively and
concurrently seeking for a fixed constitution have failed, and that the
failure is discreditable--that those who thus seek and fail have been
badly employed. It is by implication denied that successive changes of a
constitution may fitly be regarded as a process of growth and healthy
adjustment of parts: the ideal of political health is assumed to be a
state of fixity. Thus does indifferentism, naturally if not necessarily,
miss the point of view from which itself is to be studied as one of the
forces whose conflict the true historian ought to analyse.
There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final
constitution; nor are the successive constitutions of France as such
more significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive
changes in the professedly unchanged constitution of Great Britain,
though the violent kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had
but applied with rigour the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if
wittily, for all problems alike, he could not have begun his history
with that delusive abstraction of a one-minded community, failing to
achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "_Je n'en sais rien_," he remarks with
a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard that certain scientific
reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "_est-ce qu'il y a des
Français?_"[3] In dead earnest he now assumes that France consists just
of the single species "Frenchmen," whose constitution-building is a
corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is
truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French
constitutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and
conflicting passions and interests of sets of people in France who are
"Frenchmen" merely when they happen to act in concert against other
geographical groups. At no moment were all of the French people
consenting parties to any one of the thirteen constitutions. Then there
was no collective failure.
Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator;
but as teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by
his fatalism. He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we,"
which excludes the political analysis essential to any practical
explanation; and it inevitably followed that his generalisations were
merely pseudo-biological, and not what is most wanted in
history--sociological truth rooted in psychology and biology. In
denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really gave the
great illustration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on
Mérimée,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe
of his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not
care enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he
comes to be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all
sociology to the plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic
amateur can show it, can convict the critic of hearing only the devil's
advocate in every moral process,[5] and of becoming at length the
historic oracle of those, of all readers, who are most alien to his
philosophy.
Such an outcome, in the work of such a critic, is vividly instructive.
At worst, indeed, he has a positive value as the extremest reactionist
against the merely partisan method of history, which is almost all we
have had in England since the French Revolution, down to the other day.
After M. Taine has passed, fools' paradises must needs fall in market
value. But when the devil's advocate has made his round, we must still
plough and eat, and the paradises must just be laid out for new sowing.
The evil of theoretical extremes is not so much their falsehood as their
irrelevance. If we are to instruct each other in conduct, it must be in
terms of sympathies and antipathies; and if we are to profit by a study
of politicians, who are among the most generally typical of men, and of
politics, which is the expression of so much of life, we must go about
it as humanists and not as fatalists.
§ 2
Humanity, however, will not suffice to save us from false philosophy if,
as humanists, we seek to gain our polemical ends by M. Taine's didactic
methods. He, naturally so much of an analyst, took to pseudo-synthesis
when he wished with little labour to discredit certain popular
aspirations. But pseudo-synthesis is the favourite expository process of
many men with ardent aspirations, and of many writers who are friendly
enough to the aspirations of their fellows. By pseudo-synthesis I mean
that process, above exemplified, of "cooking" an intricate moral problem
by setting up one or more imaginary entities, to whose volition or
potency the result is attributed. It was the method of medieval science;
and it is still popular among the experts as well as the amateurs of
historical science. It was the ordinary expedient of Comte, in whose
pages history becomes a Jonsonian masque of personified abstractions;
and Buckle too often resorts to it. But hear a learned and judicious
English Liberal, not to be suspected of doctrinary extravagance:--
"As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she
might be the mistress of others, so now" [in the later Empire] "to
be universal she, the conqueror, had descended to the level of the
conquered" [in respect of Caracalla's edict giving to all subjects
of the Empire the rights of Roman citizenship]. "But the sacrifice
had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language
that had overspread the world; at her feet the nations laid the
offerings of their labour; she was the head of the Empire and of
civilisation."[6]
The "she" of this passage I take to be as purely imaginary an entity as
Phlogiston; and it is not easy to see how a method of explanation which
in physical science is found worse than barren can give any edification
in the study of history. To say nothing of the familiar explanation that
Caracalla's sole motive in conferring the citizenship on the provincials
was the desire to lay on them corresponding taxes,[7] the proposition
has no footing in political actualities. "Rome's self-abnegation that
she might Romanise the world"[8] expresses no fact in Roman volition,
thought, or deed; it is not the mention of a sentiment which swayed
men's action, but the attempt to reduce a medley of actions to the
semblance of a joint volition. There was no "Rome" capable of
"self-abnegation" and susceptible of "reward." Why, then, should it be
said? It is said either because the writer permits himself to fill in a
perspective with a kind of pigment which he would not employ in his
foreground, or because he is still too much under the sway of old
methods when he is generalising conventional knowledge instead of
analytically reaching new.[9] Either way the lapse is only too
intelligible. And if an innovating expert, dealing with old facts, runs
such risks, great must be those run by plain people when they seek to
attain a generalised knowledge of facts which are the battle-ground of
current ideals. Only by perpetual analysis can we hope partly to escape
the snare of the pseudo-synthetic, the traps of rhetoric and exegetic
fiction.
§ 3
The term "pseudo-synthesis" implies, of course, that there may be a true
synthesis. What is necessary to such synthesis is that there shall have
been a preliminary analysis; but a synthesis once justly made is the
greatest of helps to new analyses. Now there is one such which may
safely be brought to bear on the study of practical politics, because it
is an axiom alike of inorganic physics and of biology, and a commonplace
of human science, though seldom used as a means of historic
generalisation. This is the simple principle that all energy divides
ostensibly into forces of attraction and of repulsion.
[The principle thus stated should be compared with the theorem of
Kant as to the correlative forces of sociability and unsociability
(_Idee zu einer allgemein Geschichte_), and the important and
luminous formula of Professor Giddings, that all sociological
processes, properly so called, turn upon "consciousness of kind"
(_Principles of Sociology_, 1896, 3rd ed. pp. 17-19, and Preface;
and in earlier writings by Professor Giddings, there mentioned).
The scientific value of that formula is obvious; but other ways of
stating the case may still serve a purpose. The view in the text I
find to have been partly anticipated by Shaftesbury, _Essay on the
Freedom of Wit and Humour_, 1709, pt. iii, § 2 (_Characteristics_,
ed. 1733, i, pp. 111-12), who is followed by Eusèbe Salverte, _De
la Civilisation depuis les premiers Temps historiques_, 1813, p.
53. Shaftesbury even anticipates in part the formula of Professor
Giddings in the passage: "If anything be natural, in any Creature
or any Kind, 'tis that which is preservative of the Kind itself,"
and in the sequel. As Professor Giddings traces (pref. to 3rd ed.
p. x) the first suggestion of his "consciousness of kind" to Adam
Smith's _Theory of the Moral Sentiments_, which is certainly in
the line of descent from Shaftesbury, there may really be a causal
connection.]
That principle obviously holds of the relations of men in society as it
does of their muscular action and of their moral and intellectual life;
and so fundamental is the fact that when we study human history in view
of it, we find it more and more difficult to suppose that it will ever
cease to hold. That is to say, it is almost impossible to conceive state
of life in which the forces of attraction and repulsion shall not
operate energetically in the moral and intellectual relations of human
beings. From the primitive and the barbaric stages in which the sight of
an alien moves the savage to such destructive rage as is seen in some
dogs at the sight of others, or in which a difference of personal odour
rouses a no less spontaneous repulsion--as in Chinese against Europeans,
or in Europeans against Chinese[10]--down to the fierce battle in
self-governing countries over every innovating law, or that strife of
opinion in which these lines play their part, the clash of opposing
tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable. And so difficult is it
to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the
general principle to the particular conclusion that all the _modes_ in
which the action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of
individuals and groups, have operated in the past must needs operate in
the future. They conclude, that is, that the particular phenomenon of
WAR, above all, is chronic, and can never definitely disappear. Thus M.
Zola, looking around him and finding strife everywhere, decides that all
the past _forms_ of strife are inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well
at the outset to insist that the general principle involves no such
particular necessity.
War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion
have operated in human societies during ages in which certain
psychological and physiological types have been normal. It may very well
recur, with growing infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not
rationally to be regarded as a necessary function of the grand
biological forces. What does seem certain is a different thing--that the
forces of attraction and repulsion will always operate in _some_ form;
and that the very fact of their finding less expression in the mode of
physical strife will imply their coming into play in other modes, such
as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and class interests as they are
expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the
forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or
feeling, run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may
be broadly regarded as animal; and that when altered political and
social conditions partly or wholly close these channels, the biological
forces open for themselves new ones.
War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of
all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective
clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many
real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each
other, as wholes--if by anything higher than animal pugnacity--either by
the mere ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less
imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the
most primitive of social instincts--the _sensus gregis_. As evolution
proceeds, the blind form may be expected to disappear, and the more
reasoned forms--that is, the inter-social and intellectual--to develop.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: It is one of the shortcomings of Buckle that, though he at
least once (_Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng._, Routledge's ed. p. 352)
recognises the futility of explaining history in terms of national
character, he repeatedly lapses to that method, and speaks of peoples as
if they were of one will, bent, and mind. (Ed. cited, edit. notes pp.
354, 385, 540, 553, 558, 719, etc.). See below, pt. iii, ch. iii, second
note, as to Eduard Meyer.]
[Footnote 2: Similarly De Tocqueville begins _L'ancien régime et la
révolution_ with "_Les Français ont fait...._" (Avant-Propos, 2e éd. p.
5), and makes the successors of the Revolutionists "_les mêmes
Français_" (p. 12). Soon he makes the Revolution an entity (p. 35).
Compare with Taine's passage the programme of the first number of Le
Play's _La Réforme Sociale_, 1881 (cited by H. Higgs, _Quarterly Journal
of Economics_, Boston, July, 1890, p. 418), which might almost have been
written by Taine. In the case of Le Play the ideal of a
quasi-patriarchal order, very stable and very fixed, led to an attitude
resembling at points that of Taine. It is easy to see how the natural
recoil from political turmoil has, since the French Revolution,
developed successive schools such as those of Saint Simon, Comte, and Le
Play, all aiming at stability and order, all seeking to elbow out the
cosmic force of Change. In Taine's case the result was an acceptance of
Spencer's "administrative nihilism."]
[Footnote 3: _Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siècle en France_,
3ième éd. p. 37.]
[Footnote 4: _Lettres de Prosper Mérimée à une Inconnue_, préf. _end_.
When, however, M. Taine wrote on Sainte-Beuve's death (1869), he laid
down, as one of the necessities of the search for "the true truth," this
very determination "to be the dupe of nothing and nobody, above all of
oneself" (_Derniers Essais_, p. 52). Years before an acute critic had
said of his literary criticism: "M. Taine, at bottom, let us say it with
bated breath, is the dupe of himself when he supposes himself to have
given a rigorous formula, an exact definition, a chemical analysis of
his author" (Frédéric Morin, _Les hommes et livres contemporains_, 1862,
p. 33). Compare the brochure of Professor Edouard Droz, _La critique
littéraire et la science_, 1893, discussed in the present writer's _New
Essays towards a Critical Method_, 1897, p. 13 _sq._]
[Footnote 5: See _Napoléon et ses détracteurs_, par le Prince Napoléon,
p. 13, and _passim_.]
[Footnote 6: Professor Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. p. 7.]
[Footnote 7: Gibbon, ch. vi (Bohn ed. i, pp. 201, 212-13). In the same
way, Julius Cæsar, and the triumvirs after him, were in their day moved
to extend citizenship in Italy because of the falling-off in the free
Roman population. Widened citizenship meant a wider field for Italian
recruiting. At that time the extension involved not taxation, but
immunities; but, according to Cicero, Antony received great sums from
the Sicilians in payment for the privilege he conferred upon them. _Ad
Atticum_, xiv, 12; _Philipp._ ii, 36.]
[Footnote 8: Bryce, p. 9.]
[Footnote 9: A different explanation holds in the case of Hegel,
who--after very pointedly affirming that "nothing great in the world has
been accomplished without passion" (_Leidenschaft_), in the sense of
individual interest and self-seeking aim, and that "an individual is
such and such a one, not a man in general, for that is not an existence,
but one in particular" (_Philos. der Geschichte_, 2te Aufl. p.
30)--proceeds to express historical processes in terms of universal
spirit, abstract universality, and so forth. Here the trouble is the
cherished tendency to verbal abstraction.]
[Footnote 10: Cp. Professor H.A. Giles, _The Civilisation of China_,
1911, pp. 214-15. Smell appears to be an insuperable bar to any general
association of "whites" with "blacks," and it probably enters into many
racial repugnances. Compare the curious device of Lombard women to set
up by an artificial bad smell a repugnance on the part of their alien
suitors such as they themselves may have felt. Gummere, _Germanic
Origins_, 1892, p. 138.]
[Footnote 11: Cited by Tolstoy, _The Kingdom of God is Within You_, ch.
vi, end.]
CHAPTER II
ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION
§ 1
A survey of the ancient history best known to us may help to make
clearer the fatality of strife and the impossibility of solving it save
by transcending the physical plane. The habit of summing up all Roman
history as so many planned actions of "the Romans," or of "Rome," is in
singular contrast with the imbroglio of the records. In the social stage
discovered to us by the analysis of the oldest known institutions,
"early" Rome is already an artificial political organism, far removed
from the simple life of tribal barbarism.[12] There are three tribes;
the very name of tribe, it may be, comes from the number three[13] in
the flection _tribus_; and the subdivisions are fixed by the numbers
three and ten.[14] Behind the artificial "tribe" is a past in which, it
may be, a group of villages forms the _pagus_ or settlement.[15]
Already privilege and caste are fully established, even between classes
of freemen; and only by inference can we reach the probable first bases
of civic union among the ruling caste. They were clearly a caste of
conquerors. Their _curiæ_, apparently the oldest form of group after the
family or the clan,[16] are artificially arranged, numbering thirty,
each _curia_ containing nominally a hundred _gentes_, each _gens_
nominally ten families.
Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 511) decides for the
view of L. Lange, that the historic appellation of Roman citizens,
_Quirites_, derives from _curia_. The ancients had several theories
as to the name. One (Festus) was that the Sabine goddess Curis gave
her name to the Sabine town Cures (cp. Athenê, Athenai), whence,
according to the legend, had come a band under Titus Tatius, who
conquered the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, and had for tribe-god
Quirinus. Cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82. Mommsen (Eng. tr. 1862, i,
57, 78, _notes_) has secured currency for the other tradition,
argued for by F.W. Newman (_Regal Rome_, 1852, pp. 55-56), that the
root is the Sabine word _curis, quiris_, a spear. For this somewhat
unplausible theory there is support in the fact that in the cognate
Gaelic _coir_, pronounced quîr, means a spear, and that there is
derived thence _curiadh_, a warrior. Mommsen is followed by
Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th ed. p. 13; and Greenidge,
_Roman Public Life_, p. 33. Pott and Becker, who derived _Quirites_
from _curia_, explain the latter word as _co-viria_, the band of
warriors. And as the view that "Athenê" comes from "Athenai," not
_vice versâ_, has the stronger claims to acceptance, the more
acceptable presumption is that "Curis" and Quirinus evolved from
the _curia_. If _Quirites_ meant spearmen, how could Cæsar be
understood to cow mutineers by simply addressing them as Quirites
[= citizens]? The curia theory is supported by the facts that "the
Roman constitutional tradition ... makes the division into curies
alone originate with the origin of the city"; that it "appears as
an essential part of the Latin municipal system;" and that of all
the old divisions it seems to be the only one that "really
fulfilled important functions in the primitive constitutional
organisation" (Mommsen, B. i, ch. v, pp. 73-75).
These _curiæ_ may be conceived as derived from inner tribal or clan
groups formed in the conquering stage, since they are ostensibly united
by their collective or curial _sacra_, the rites for which the grouped
_gentes_--who each have their private _sacra_--assemble in a special
place, under a special priest. They still retain the usage of a common
banquet,[17] the earliest form of collective religion known to us.[18]
Apart from the members of the _curiæ_ are the conquered _plebs_,[19]
"the many" not enslaved, but payers of tribute; without share in the
_curiæ_ or vote in the _comitia_, or assembly, and without part in the
curial or other _sacra_.
On this head there has been some gratuitous confusion. Schwegler
(i, 621 _sq._) gives convincing reasons for the view that in early
times the plebs were not members of the _curiæ_. Cp. Ihne, as
cited, pp. 110, 127; and Fustel de Coulanges, p. 278 _sq._ Meyer
(ii, 513, 521) asserts, on the contrary, without any specification
of periods, that the _curiæ_ included plebeians as well as
patricians. The contradiction seems to arise out of inattention to
chronology, or a misreading of Mommsen. That historian rightly sets
forth in his history (B. ii, ch. i; Eng. trans. ed. 1862, i,
264-65) that the plebs were not admitted into the _comitia curiata_
before the "Servian" period; adding that these bodies were "at the
same time" almost totally deprived of their prerogatives. In his
_Römisches Forschungen_, 1864, i, 144 _sq._, he shows that they
were admitted in the "_historic_ period"--when the _comitia_ in
question had ceased to have any legal power, and when, as he
elsewhere states, the admission "practically gave little more than
the capacity for adrogation" (_Römisches Staatsrecht_, Bd. iii,
Abth. i, p. 93). Here again he states that "to equal rights in the
curies, especially to the right of vote in the comitia, the
plebeians attained only in the later times" (_Id._ p. 72). Yet
Professor Pelham, in asserting (p. 21; cp. p. 46) that "the
_primitive_ Roman people of the thirty _curiæ_ included all the
freemen of the community, _simple as well as gentle_," gives the
note: "The view here taken on the vexed question of the purely
patrician character of the _curiæ_ is that of Mommsen (_Röm.
Forschungen_, vol. i)."
When this error is corrected, the question ceases to be vexed.
Schwegler has disposed of the blunder of Dionysius, who ascribes to
the plebeians a share in the _curiæ_ from the beginning; and it is
not disputed that they were allowed to enter when the _comitia
curiata_ had been practically superseded by the _comitia
centuriata_. It is to be noted that the denial of the inclusion of
the plebeians in the original _curiæ_ does not apply to the
_clientes_, whose status, though non-patrician, had been different
from that of the true plebs. M. Delaunay, who argues that the
plebeians were all along admitted to the _curiæ_, adds the
qualification: "Doubtless not the entire mass of the plebeians, but
only those who were ... attached to the gentes" (Robiou et
Delaunay, _Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, i, 21). But
who were these _gentilitia_ if not the _clientes_? (cp. _loc. cit._
p. 26).
The _populus_ at this stage, then, is not "the people" in the
modern sense; it is the aggregate of the privileged _curiæ_, and
does not include the plebs,[20] which at this stage is not even
part of the army. But a separate quasi-plebeian class, the
_clientes_ of the patricians, are in a state of special dependence
upon the latter, and in a subordinate fashion share their
privileges.
The _clientes_ have very much the air of being primarily the
servile or inferior part of the early clan or _gens_, as distinct
from its "gentlemen." Cp. Burton, _Hist. of Scotland_, viii,
524-25, as to the lower and the higher (duniewassal) orders in the
Scottish Highland clans. "In the old life of the _pagus_ and the
_gens_ the weaker sought the protection of the stronger by a
willing vassalage" (Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 6). The
_clientes_ are the nominal as distinct from the real "family" of
the chief or _patronus_. M. Delaunay (_Les Institutions de
l'ancienne Rome_, as cited, i, 27) thinks with Mommsen (so also
Dupond, pp. 20-21) that they were mainly freedmen, but gives no
evidence. As to the meaning and etymology of the word (_clientes_
from _cluere_ or _cliere_, "to listen" or "obey"), cp. Newman,
_Regal Rome_, p. 49; Ortolan, p. 29; Mommsen, _Römisches
Staatsrecht_, III, i, 1887, p. 63. The theory that the plebeians
were all _clientes_ (Ortolan, pp. 25, 27) seems untenable, though
Mommsen (_Staatsrecht_, III, i, 63) pronounces that "all
non-patricians were clients"; and Meyer (ii, 521) appears to
acquiesce. Only in theory can the mass of the plebs have been
clients at any time. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 277-78. The
_clientes_, it seems clear, were as such admitted to the _comitia_,
whereas the plebs were not. See the citations of Fustel de
Coulanges from Livy, ii, 56-64; also iii, 14 (Dupond, p. 22, doubts
the fact). On any view, the _clientela_ rapidly dwindled, passing
into the plebs (cp. Dupond, p. 23; Livy, vi, 18). As to its early
status see Fustel de Coulanges, p. 273 _sq._ Ortolan, after
representing all plebeians as clients, speaks (p. 31) of plebeians
belonging to no gens (so Aulus Gellius, x, 20).
Wealth is not yet a matter of land-owning--the main element of
property is cattle;[21] and the bulk of the land is _ager
occupatorius_, a great "common" on which all men's cattle feed.
The voteless free plebeian has simply his home and homestead, "toft
and croft," the latter being two yokes (= five roods) of land, on
which he raises the grain and olives and vegetables that feed his
household.[22] This goes to his heir. Here arises another problem.
E.W. Robertson (as last cited) decides that the "two yokes" can
have been only "the homestead, and could not have included the farm
or property attached to it." The _heredium_, he holds, following
Pliny (_Hist. Nat._, xix, 19), and citing Livy (vi, 36), was only
in the _hortus_, the house and garden, "and not in the arable or
pasture land." But surely the arable was on a different footing
from the pasture land (_ager compascus_). Corn was not grown in
common, unless it were by the _gentes_ (Mommsen, vol. i, pp. 38,
72, 193). The solution seems to be that given by Greenidge, that as
"the _heredium_ consisted only of two _jugera_ (Festus, p. 53), an
amount obviously insufficient for the maintenance of a family,"
"there must have been _ager privatus_ as well, owned by some larger
unit, and this unit would naturally have been the gens" (_Roman
Public Life_, p. 15).
Among general historians of Rome Mommsen seems to be the first to
note this circumstance, and he gives neither details nor evidence.
Schwegler, discussing (i, 619) the theory of Puchta that there was
no private property in Rome before the "arrival" of the plebs,
admits that among the ancient Germans the land was yearly
apportioned among the groups as such, but finds that "Roman
tradition tells of nothing of the kind." (So Greenidge, p. 15.) In
any case, Mommsen, while insisting that "the fields (_sic_) of the
gentes (_Geschlechts-Genossen_) in the earliest period lay
together" (_Staatsrecht_, III, i, 24; cp. p. 94), admits that such
gentile ownership had at an early stage disappeared (_früh
verschwundenen_). There was then no communal tillage in the
historic period. Cincinnatus, in the legend, returns to the plough
on his own croft. Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to
the "two yokes" being "hardly enough to raise a roof on or to make
a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on behalf of plebeians
to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-client
plebeians then had no share in the land of the _gentes_ or clans,
being themselves in large part dispossessed by conquest.
Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of
course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the
personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after
the lands of the large landholders, not the original private
holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the _gens_
(_Geschlecht_) or commune (_Gauverband_)." But on the previous page
Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the _gentes_, but
communally (_genossenschaftlich_) by unions of equal freemen." If
these, then, were the _curiæ_ (the Mark, says Meyer in this
connection, did _not_ belong to the _gentes_), they did not include
the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had
no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on
the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen
(ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the
arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the _gentes_ or
clans--a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the
quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides
(i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of
the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the
circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common
land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could
yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, _Lebensnachrichten_, ii, 245,
cited by Schwegler.)
On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally
tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old
generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what
impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did
rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?"
"I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must
needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from
that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue."
[Epistle Dedicatory to _Philosophical Rudiments concerning
Government and Civil Society_ (translation of _De Cive_), 1651. Cp.
Goldwin Smith, _The United States_, 1893, p. 23.]
The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes"
in the earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the
patricians were "a class of occupying landholders rather than
proprietary landowners."[24] The "public land" was literally so, save in
so far as the patricians would have the ampler (and often untaxed or
low-rented) use of it for their much larger herds;[25] or, it may be,
for cultivation by their clients or slaves. _Heredia_, however, were
saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the dispossession and
enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on that pressure
of population on means of subsistence which underlies all economic
history.
Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave
the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors,
probably highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves,
but leave the mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for
which they pay tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26]
And thus far they live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]
Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were
mainly in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and
artisans and aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling
caste occupied, potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the
two or three fortified hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They
were certainly not the founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had
been occupied by Latins and Sabines respectively long before the time
traditionally assigned to the "founding" of Rome; and there were
communities there before them. Modern excavators trace many successive
strata of civilisation before that which we call the Roman; and the
probability is that the Romans of history, like the kindred Sabines,
conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred race, whose place and
possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had presumably grown
weak for self-defence by reason of some such disintegrating economic
evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors themselves. Such a
disintegration may well have taken place in the case of Alba Longa, of
which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But before Alba
Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which perhaps
outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman period
until the last century of the Republic.
This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson
(_History of the Roman Republic_, 1783, ch. i, _note_; perhaps
following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the
nature of the remains of the great _cloacæ_, which he held could
not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is
since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's _Remains of
Ancient Rome_, 1892, i, 104-107; and Robiou et Delaunay, _Les
Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, § 1. Cp.
Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 9-11; Burton, _Etruscan
Bologna_, 1876, pp. 170-74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great _cloacæ_ to
the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the
other hand, confidently decides that the _cloaca maxima_ belongs to
the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we
know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and
may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind
was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined,
so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the
habitation of countless generations" (_Survey of Greek Civ._ 1897,
p. 28).
§ 2
There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we
know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans
were even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic
Rome--vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity
in conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders
seems to have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a
real federation,[33] securing local peace as between the hill-holders.
It has been said that Rome grew up without any known aid from men of
political genius such as Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for
something in all stages of upward human evolution. The guiders of early
Rome are lost in a cloud of myth and fable; but some man or men of civic
faculty there must have been to shape tendency, though doubtless a main
factor in the early union was the simple _collocation_ of the hills
first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is a mythical king, the
elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for _some_ planning by able
men, and has several main points in common with that given to Athens by
Solon.
Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan,
there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important
factor of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with;
and the conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and
share in all the civic offices, represented some such source of
recuperation to the Roman aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of
England after the Norman Conquest. If we add the probable factor of an
Etruscan element, Rome is to be conceived as standing for a ruling class
of more various faculty than was to be found in any of the rival
communities singly. The progressive absorption of the most enterprising
of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception to the rule of Italic
life as to that of other races, so that in following the class struggles
of Rome we are to note not so much the violence of the process as the
fact that, so far as it went, it was relatively fortunate. And its
success, again, is conceivably due to the fact, among others, that from
an early period the region of the seven defensible hills was a refuge or
centre for men breaking away from the other Italian communities, where
conservatism held firm.
Behind the legend of the flocking of all manner of "broken men" to the
standard of Romulus lies the probability that the ancient "asylum"
behind the Capitol brought a variety of types to the place; and as in
Athens so in Rome, such variety of stock might well raise the level of
faculty. But it was a faculty for aggression. Given the initial
federation of Romans and Sabines, the one general force of comity or
cohesion, apart from the more public cults, is the bond of mere
collective antagonism to other communities. The total polity is one of
war; and never in the history of civilisation has that ground of comity
long averted the economic process by which social inequality deepens and
widens. It is thus entirely credible that, through this economic
process, which we shall trace later, the early Roman polity came to a
pass at which its conquest by Etruscan "kings" was welcomed by the
plebs, sinking into poverty or held in outlawry under primitive
"capitalistic" exploitation. There is no clear historic record of the
process; but all the better evidence goes to prove its occurrence.[35]
The most plausible theory of the constitution ascribed to Servius
Tullius is that it was imposed by Etruscan conquerors. The earlier
Romans had been quasi-sacerdotally ruled by priest-kings of the
primitive type, "kings of the sacrifice," whose religious powers were
balanced by the secular interest of the patrician heads of
families--themselves priests of their family cults. The "Servian"
constitution put down the _rex sacrificulus_, divided the city into four
tribes, and its territory into twenty-six districts, each under a
headman or headmen. The city at the same time was in part new walled,
and the seven hills united; while the mass of the free population were
divided into five classes according to their property, and enrolled for
military purposes in 193 "centuries." In the first and richest class
were forty centuries of men above forty-six for the defence of the city,
and forty of younger men for service in the field; while the second,
third, and fourth classes were divided into twenty centuries each, and
the fifth class into thirty. The poorest of all were grouped in a
separate century, the "Proletarians," or "breeders," without military
duties; and the trumpeters, armourers, and carpenters in four more. New
assemblies, the _comitia centuriata_, were formed, in which all members
of the centuries shared, the old _comitia curiata_ being thus virtually
superseded. The military organisation was made the basis of a fiscal
one, in which the classes were taxed on the capital value of their
property. As freedom from direct taxation was the mark of the ancient
"free" communities in general, the whole arrangement seems to be one
that only a conqueror could have imposed; and the tradition ran that
Servius was regarded as the friend of the poor, who made his birthday an
annual festival.
But plebeian distress was probably not the sole, perhaps not the
primary, factor in the convulsion. All along, the process of inequality
had gone on among plebeians and patricians alike, some of the former
rising to wealth and some of the latter sinking to relative poverty.
Thus arises in effect the struggle of a "middle class" to share the
political and social privileges of the "upper"; and there is reason to
think that the Etruscan conquest was furthered by rich plebeians as
against the patricians. The new constitution was what the Greeks called
a "timocracy," or "rule of property"; and though in respect of the
_comitia centuriata_ plebeians were admitted to the franchise, it was
under such provisions as to voting that the richer classes easily held
the balance of power.[36] At the same time the patricians retained the
religious power of the old kings, as custodians of the ritual
mysteries--a great source of dominion. Thus the crisis was only
temporarily relieved, and the struggle was renewed again and again, both
under and after the kings. We can broadly divine that the anti-patrician
rule of the king, who would rely on the plebs, unified against him the
patricians or "free" citizens, who sought to keep down the masses;
while, on the other hand, the increasing outlaw plebs was unified by its
sheer need.[37]
As to the rule of the kings, whether native or Etruscan, no exact
knowledge is now possible. We can but trace some of their functions in
certain constitutional forms. Thus the Senate, or Council of the Elders,
appears to have been the council of the king, selected by him, but
capable of nominating his successor.[38] Whatever were its original
function, it became in time the supreme power in the State, growing
alike in numbers and in power, overruling or eclipsing the _comitia
curiata_, _comitia centuriata_, and other bodies in which the general
mass, first of patrician citizens and later of enfranchised plebeians,
were enrolled.[39] But it is not through the complicated archæology of
the Roman constitution, latterly compiled with such an infinity of
scholarly labour, that the nature of Roman evolution is really to be
known. The technique of the system resulted from an endless process of
compromise among social forces; and it is in the actual clash and play
of those forces, as revealed in the simple records, that the human
significance of it all is to be felt. In this way we substitute for a
vague and false conception of unitary growth one of perpetual strife of
classes, interests, and individualities.
In the doubtful transition period, as the tradition goes, it is in the
time of discontented plebeian subjection, after the expulsion of the
king (510 B.C.), that the Etruscan enemy captures the city (497); and
the surmise that the battle of Lake Regillus was not really a Roman
victory[40] is partly strengthened by the fact that soon after it there
occur the division into twenty-five tribes, the tumults of the nexi, and
the successful Secession of the Plebs, ending in their incorporation,
with two tribunes to represent their interests (494). There is a clear
presumption that only from a weakened patriciate, forced to seek union,
could the plebs have won their tribunate and enfranchisement. On the
other hand, it is after victories over the Volscians that the consul
Spurius Cassius, who had proposed to divide among landless men the land
conquered from the Hernicans, is said to have been executed (485) by the
triumphant aristocracy; and it is in another period of security, when
the Veientines and Sabines are depressed (473), that the tribune Cneius
Genucius is murdered for having ventured to bring a consular to trial.
Always we are in presence of a brutal caste, in the main utterly
selfish, some of whose members are at all times as prone to the use of
the dagger as an Italian _camorra_ of our own day. Yet it is by the
forcing of concessions on this caste that the Roman polity is kept
vigorous and adaptable in comparison with those of the surrounding
States which Rome subordinated or overran.
While Rome thrives, a new project for popular law reform is defeated
(462); and it is after Cincinnatus, according to the legend, barely
saves the State (458) that the tribunes are raised from five to ten, and
the land is divided among the poor (456); though at the same time
decemvirs are appointed and the conservative Twelve (at first Ten)
Tables are drawn up (451-450). Thus partially strengthened, the plebs
are able soon to force the abdication of the decemvirate (449) by the
old menace of their withdrawal; and for a time the commonalty
sufficiently holds its own, getting (445) the right of marriage with
patricians, and (444) the institution of military tribunes with consular
power;[41] though fresh distribution of land is prevented, and the
patricians learn to divide the tribunes against each other. Thus class
dissension goes on till the Gauls capture the city (390), multitudes of
the Romans flying to Veii. Then it is that the plebeian party, after the
Gauls have gone, are willing to transfer the seat of government to Veii;
and the threat would doubtless win them some concessions in the
rebuilding of Rome. But population always blindly increases; and the
cancer of poverty spreads, despite the chronic planting of colonies in
subject territory. Manlius is executed for trying to relieve debtors;
but some land is reluctantly distributed. New wars create new popular
distress, and new colonies fail to relieve it. At length the Licinian
laws, relieving debtors and limiting estates, are proposed (376), and
after nine years of agitation are passed at the crisis (367) at which
the Gauls (who themselves had in the meantime undergone dissensions)
again attack Rome; while the powers of the consuls (limited in 443 by
the appointment of two Censors) are now further limited by the creation
of a Prætor (patrician) and of Curule _ædiles_, alternately taken from
the two strata.
This makes a temporary palliation, and in time the now privileged
plebeians[42] lean to the patrician side and status; while fresh wars
with Hernicans, Gauls, Etruscans, and Samnites check class strife, and
the patricians recover preponderance, passing a law (358) to check "new
men." This is immediately followed by counter measures, limiting
interest to ten per cent. and putting a five per cent. tax on
manumissions; but the eternal distress of debtors is renewed, and a vain
attempt is made to meet it (352) by State loans, and again by reducing
interest to five per cent. (347). Increase of plebeian poverty again
causes reactions, and after a mutiny futile laws are passed prohibiting
interest altogether (342); the dictator Publilius carries popular
political laws (339) checking the power of the Senate, and debtors are
once more protected (326). After many wars, checking all domestic
progress, popular distress causes a last Secession of the Plebs (287)
and new political concessions to them; but still wars multiply, till all
Italy is Romanised (266). The now mixed warlike aristocracy of birth,
wealth, and office monopolises power in the Senate; and the residual
plebs gradually ceases to be a distinct moral force, its last great
struggle being made under the Gracchi, to whom it gives no valid
support.
If we consider this evolution purely as a play of domestic political
forces, we recognise it from first to last as a simple conflict of class
needs and interests, partially modified at times by movements of true
public spirit on the part of such men as the patricians who supported
the Licinian laws, and such men as the Gracchi. The State-organism is
the result of the struggles and pressures of its elements. What happened
in the chronic readjustments was never a democratisation of the State,
but at most an institutional protection of the poorer plebeians, and an
admission of the richer to something like equal status with the
optimates. Never was the "people" really united by any common home
interest beyond the need of extorting some privileges. Only to that
extent were the richer plebeians at one with the poorer; and there can
be little doubt that as soon as the former secured the privileges they
craved they tended to abuse them as the patricians had done. There was
no _personnel_ adequate to the effective working of the Licinian laws in
face of a perpetual process of conquest which infallibly evoked always
the instinct of acquisition, and never the science which might have
controlled it. The early division of the State-territory into
twenty-five tribes (495), of whom twenty-one were rural, determined the
limitation of the political problem to the simple sharing of land; and
every effort of public-spirited men to arrest the aggregation of lands
in the hands of a few meant a convulsive explosion of resistance by the
wealthy.
From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all
schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in
retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio
Nasica is a standing theme of praise;[43] the lesson of the course of
things social towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is
angrily evaded. Cicero knew as well as any the need for social
reconstruction in Rome;[44] and he repeatedly records the sagacity of
Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had been tribune and consul in Cicero's
boyhood. As consul, Philippus had resisted the attempts of M. Livius
Drusus to reform the Senate and provide for the poorer citizens and the
Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his tribuneship avowed the fact
that there were not left two thousand men in the State who owned
property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious.[45] The ideal
aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those
who attempted it--Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a
consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or
Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and
tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period;
whereafter Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron
dictatorship, restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end
of self-governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy,
which was not to come without another agony of long-protracted civil
war. It is the supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest
that for most Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.
§ 3
The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here
plain. On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and
slavery by their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the
patrician's lands are worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their
distress is met by a share in the lands conquered; and after the
soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they are more and more ready to join
in conquest. Not only is popular discontent put off by the prospect of
foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of aggressive war, while
tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators who make the
army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister fraternity
of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when the
primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and
worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total
strength. There is no lesson that men are slower to learn--and this
naturally, because they see the success of unjust conquest--yet there
is no truth easier to prove from history. Early Rome was strong as
against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred,
but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws:
the reciprocal sense of recognised _rights_ sustained public spirit at
the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and
it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous
conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving
it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of
cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military
autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of
cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and
the "have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained
for a time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature
of society that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting.
Men whose main discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become
simply incapable of strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue
either internecine strife or the degradation of the weaker elements, or
a sequence of these results.
This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the
contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of
public bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being
the chief of these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in
the modern manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canvassing
by candidates[47] (_lex de ambitu_) suggests the recognition of
electoral corruption; and later there followed a whole series of futile
vetoes--futile because the social conditions grew always morally worse.
The _lex Æmilia Bæbia_ (182 B.C.) forbade all money gifts by candidates;
and twenty-three years later another law decreed that offenders should
be exiled. This also failing, there followed the _leges tabellariæ_,
establishing the ballot (139-137). Still the disease persisted, because
there was no stop now possible to the career of conquest, which had
undermined the very instincts whereon law depends; and on the
treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there
supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman
ruling class had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters,
as did the Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels
of despotism and civil war were substantially the same.
The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude
us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic
and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the
community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive
or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the
State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the
long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the
control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well
exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion
again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and
men and classes become the fools of their animosities. The wars of
faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of
Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and
Democrats, Cæsar and Pompey, the pandemonium on Cæsar's death, all in
turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude
energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in
foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the
materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more
arrogant and hardened, the free farmer class has in large part
disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]
The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and
desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal
lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling--or, let us say, of social
science--that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from,
or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly
evolved of the Greeks.[49] As wealth and luxury, pride and power
accumulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever
deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.
It was doubtless a partial recognition of this that motived, in
Cicero's day, the large number of affranchisements of slaves
(Wallon, _Hist. de l'Esclavage_, ii, 409). But fresh enslavements
went on; the amelioration consisted in the brevity of the period of
enslavement in cases of good conduct. And the evil was in the main
a product of conquest. It is fairly established by Dureau de la
Malle (_Écon. polit. des Romains_, 1840, vol. i, liv. ii, ch. 2)
that down to the second Punic War Roman slaves were few. They would
be for the most part _nexi_, victims of debt. As conquests
multiplied prisoners, the class increased rapidly. Broadly
speaking, the house servants were all slaves, as were the bulk of
the shepherds in the great _latifundia_, the crews of the galleys,
and many of the artisans. The total number has doubtless been
greatly exaggerated, both in ancient and modern times, as has been
the population of the imperial city. Athenæus is responsible for
many wild estimates. (Cp. Letronne, as cited by Dureau, liv. ii,
ch. 4.) Dureau arrives by careful calculation at an estimate of an
Italian population of some five millions about the year 529 A.U.C.,
of whom some two and three quarter millions were free and some two
and a quarter millions were slaves or _metæci_, aliens without
political rights (i, 296). The population of Rome as late as
Aurelian he puts at between 500,000 and 600,000 (i, 368). (See
Prof. Bury's note in his ed. of Gibbon, iii, 308, for different
views. Gibbon, Bunsen, and Hodgkin put the figure at about a
million.) The exact proportion of slaves to free is not of the
essence of the problem. A society with nine slaves for every eleven
free was sufficiently committed to degeneration.
But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian
degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the
political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs
in Spain and Southern Gaul (121--the first great successes since the
fall of Carthage), illustrate the general principle that a ruling class
or house may always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular
self-assertion by turning the animal energies of the people to animal
strife with another nation, in which case union correlates with strife.
Wars imply comradeship and the putting aside of domestic strife for the
time being; and a war with Illyria was made the pretext for suspending
the operation of the new land law passed by the elder Gracchus when the
younger later sought to carry it out. The triumphs of Marius, again,
over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed nothing to unify the parties in the
State, or to secure his own. In democratising the army by drawing on a
demoralised _demos_, he did but make it a more facile tool for the
general, a thing more detached from the body politic.[50] The tendency
of all classes in Rome to unite against the claims of the outside
Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the democrats within
Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest, in the
period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the Marians,
gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the position
of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu very
justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give
it a formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51]
But this again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where
there is no general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and
systematic militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.
One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of
the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism.
Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards
Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans--so often their
accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The
provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the
other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself.
Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen
Italian towns to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the
emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by
confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.
§ 4
The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic
conditions; and when Cæsar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the
way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older
civilisations[53]--a state of things commonly but rather loosely called
degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the
life therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been
run in Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where,
after a conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders,[54] who were
in touch with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that
archaic stage while Greek civilisation continues to progress.[55] There,
with a small aristocracy lording it over a people of serfs,[56] progress
of all kinds was arrested, and even the religion of the conquerors
assimilated to that of the aborigines.[57] In the Rome of Cæsar we see,
after much fluctuation, with a more complex and less enfeebled structure
of population, the beginnings of the same fixation of classes; while, at
the same time, there has been such psychological variation as can begin
to give new and ostensibly higher channels to the immanent forces of
union and strife. This is the social condition that, given the required
military evolution, above all lends itself to imperialism or absolute
monarchy; which system in turn best maintains itself by a policy of
conquest, so employing the animal energies and keeping up the cohesive
force of militarist pride throughout all classes. Even now, of course,
in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population pure and
simple,[58] there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at
length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its
daily bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the
spectacle of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once
condemn itself by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it
was only in the upper classes that men commonly refused to marry and
have legitimate children, population was now restrained by the
preventive checks of vice, city life, and wholesale abortion,[59] which
are so much more effective--alike against child and mother[60]--than the
random resort to infanticide, though that too had greatly increased.[61]
On the other hand, as the field of practicable conquest again approaches
exhaustion and no sufficiently strong rival arises to conquer the
conquerors, nothing can hinder that people of all classes, having no
ideals tending to social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient
channel for the instinct of union in the politics of the autocracy,
shall find some channels of a new kind.[62] These are opened in due
course, and take the shape especially of religious combinations or
churches. Such modes had appeared even in the earlier stages of civic
disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian cults had begun to
compete successfully with the public or civic. They did so by appealing
more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional feeling (the
outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no longer found
outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry. After
having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of
several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling classes,
instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at
the startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide
to stamp out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal
conditions remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the
worships of Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less
bound up with divination and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating
body politic.[65] The wheel of social evolution had, so to speak, "gone
full circle" since the first Roman _curia_, the basis of the State,
subsisted as groups with their special _sacra_, finding in these their
reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other principles of subordinate
cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself once more into groups
similarly motived. But the principle is newly conditioned, and the
_sacra_ now begin the struggle for existence among themselves. The rise
of Christianity is simply the success of a system which, on a good
economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish synagogues,
assimilates the main attractions of similar worships, while availing
itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It thus
necessarily gains ground among the multitude, rich as well as poor;[66]
and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very
exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely
enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it
became the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and
as such it was accepted and employed.[67]
And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates
with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union,
being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the
reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in
the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new
forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours,
excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms
of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity
leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen
since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to
raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct;
half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is
overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the
new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation
of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.
§ 5
Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate
of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of
total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that
conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin
with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit
conditions and institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial
situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and
agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier
way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of
seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated
group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly
equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant
struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision
against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual
consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a
continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need,
imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation
between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the
interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position
of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7)
the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy,
habitually trained to administration[73]--all these genetic conditions
combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has
ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the
fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised
Greek cities of Italy did not.
Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of
"the habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous
separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal
feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no
_vera causa_, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome
itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special
conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the
separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in
Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy
remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their
basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted
each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually
nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder
was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they
continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the
Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.
Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external
conditions came in time to be initial causes--the teeth and claws, so to
speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class
Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and
empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by
habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval
superstition of citizenship,[76] a degree of sagacity in the
conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their
being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly
with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage,
Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering
herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted
against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a
still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming
provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant
plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like
Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were
still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders
employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing
generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as
Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive
material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for
organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]
Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of
class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social
problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off
domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was
already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the
Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the
imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially
exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on
hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men
still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had
Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been
just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as
it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population
of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a
specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For
the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act
of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had
they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the
nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always
learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as
the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.
The author of a recent and meritorious _History of Rome_, Mr.
Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as
explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians
as a nation are by nature superior to Phoenicians and Libyans,
both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is
the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth."
This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the
alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons.
If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied
degeneration of the Romans in body or soul, or both? We are driven
to the explanation lying in polity and institutions, which it
should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking
as he does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by
the Romans." And such explanations are actually offered by Polybius
(vi, 53).
§ 6
And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a
sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed
could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves.
The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion
from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a
course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it
devastated the subject States.
Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fashion
of self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at
first (210) taxed by Marcellus in a fashion of which Livy makes
boast;[80] and after the suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C.,
the system was further reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands,
paid a fixed tax to the Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual
contribution of 800,000 _modius_ of wheat for free doles in Rome; and
the rest of the island paid a tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81]
Later, the realms of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and
the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus, were made the public patrimony of the
conquering State. Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, and Asia were in
general taxed a tenth of their produce of all kinds. As the exploitation
went on, individual governors added to all this regular taxation a vast
irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly every attempt to
impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the Senate.[82] Verres
in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia, Appius in
Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot
immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious
brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised
the ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of
citizens to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]
It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To
moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it
be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters
of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself
is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal
conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms
of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such
figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an
ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers,
according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves,
yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician
State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the
Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always
ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or
liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced
in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself
being one. Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of
Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that
"the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman
Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable
conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage--the frivolous
wars, tending to nothing but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by
Rome continuously after the second Punic War--destroyed the old Roman
character[85] far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could
ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal
corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches,
disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders
of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised,
celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces,
robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.
We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do?
in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on
seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class
problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men
must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must
be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And
as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a
matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home,
men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and
frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the
distant leader, passing years of camp life at the head of professional
troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic.
When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the
head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic
passed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of
mercenaries, the senatorial class having outlived the main conditions of
its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to
delete the remaining brains by banishing or slaying all who openly
criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by
the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after
stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply
because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its
physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the
strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the
apparition of a Cæsar in a State that must needs worsen under Cæsars
even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Cæsar his
opportunity.
Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are
no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies
to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The
ancient generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and
death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative
military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.
The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of
individuals was long ago rightly rejected as vicious by Volney
(_Leçons d'Histoire_, 1794, 6ième Séance), who insisted that
political destruction occurred only through vices of polity,
inasmuch as all polities have been framed with one of the three
intentions of _increasing_, _maintaining_, or _overthrowing_. The
explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old formula is
just. The issue was taken up and pronounced upon to the same effect
in the closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's _Essai sur l'histoire
de l'espèce humaine_, 1798. (Professor Flint, in his _History of
the Philosophy of History_, cites Walckenaer, but does not mention
Volney's _Leçons_.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth
clearly and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people
fatally doomed either to progress or decline. It does not
necessarily pass, like an individual, from youth to old age" (cited
by H. Higgs in _American Quarterly Journal of Economics_, July,
1890, p. 428). It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have
adhered to the fallacy of the necessary decay and death of nations
in his suggestive work on the _Intellectual Development of Europe_
(ed. 1875, i, 13-20; ii, 393-98). He was doubtless influenced by
the American tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old
countries." The word "decay" may of course be used with the
implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in the opening
sentence of his _Life of Belisarius_; but even in that use it gives
a lead to fallacy.
Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later
Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral
equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as
against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would
have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so
long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors
of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be
unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but
rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No
Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of
moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of
the decay and fall of the Empire.[91] The forces of intellectual
progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages
were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian,
anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted,
Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than
it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came
from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen
contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery,
making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation;
printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and
the fresh competition and disruption of States, setting up fruitful
differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these
causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of
European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work;
though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to
illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other
bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of
modern times.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: Cp. A. Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, 1853, i, 610-615;
Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero
(_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) pronounces
that "The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to
a primitive people," he sets up a needless mystification. They had the
defects of their own culture stage, which was far beyond that of
"primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were "semi-civilised
barbarians," with a long past of institutional life.]
[Footnote 13: It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by
threes could have arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.]
[Footnote 14: Schwegler, i, 616. The origin of _tribus_ from _three_ is
not an accident special to the Romans. Among the Spartans and Dorians
likewise there were three stocks (cp. K.O. Müller, _The Dorians_, Eng.
tr. 1830, i, 35-37; Fustel de Coulanges, _La Cité antique_, 8e édit. p.
135, note 2); and the great number of Greek epithets in which "three" or
"thrice" enters is a proof of the special importance anciently attached
to the number. Cp. K.D. Hüllmann, _Ursprung der römischen Verfassung
durch Vergleichungen erläutert_, 1835, p. 24.]
[Footnote 15: Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, 1901, p. 1.]
[Footnote 16: Pelham, p. 20; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 132, _sq._;
Schwegler, i, 610, 615; Ihne, _Early Rome_, 1897, p. 108; Ortolan,
_Hist. de la Législation romaine_, ed. Labbé, 1880, pp. 35, 36.]
[Footnote 17: Schwegler, i, 611, following Dionysius. Cp. Meyer, ii,
514.]
[Footnote 18: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 13, 24, 132, 179; Robertson
Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 1889, pp. 245, 247, 251, etc.; Jevons,
_Introd. to the History of Religion_, ch. xii.]
[Footnote 19: Cp. Schwegler, i, 628; Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 107; Dupond,
_Magistratures romaines sous la République_, 1877, p. 19. The source of
the plebs is one of the vexed points of Roman origins; and the view that
they were primarily a conquered population is not yet generally
accepted. See Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 44. The true
solution seems to be that the plebs were always being added to in
various ways--by aliens, by "broken men," by discarded clients, and by
fugitives. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, p. 279.]
[Footnote 20: Schwegler, i, 621-28, 636-38; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 277.
Note the expression _populo plebique_ in Livy, xxix, 27; Cicero, _Pro
Murena_, i; Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, i, 17. Ortolan (endorsed by Labbé)
argues (work cited, p. 31) that _populus plebsque_ no more implies
separation than _senatus populusque_. But this argument destroys itself.
The Senate as such _was_ distinct from the populus, as having
_auctoritas_, while the populus had only _potestas_. The phrase then was
not a pleonasm. By this very analogy _populus plebsque_ implies a vital
legal distinction. Niebuhr, who first made the facts clear (cp. his
_Lectures_, Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 107), followed Vico, who was led to
the true view by knowledge of the separateness of the _popolo_ from the
_commune_ in the Italian republics.]
[Footnote 21: Schwegler, i, 619; E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxvii. Yet
the constant tradition is that not only did the mass of the people live
mainly on farinaceous food and vegetables, but the upper classes also in
the early period ate meat only on festival days. Cp. Guhl and Koner,
_The Life of the Greeks and Romans_, Eng. trans., pp. 501-2; Pliny,
_H.N._, xviii, 3, 19; Ramsay, _Roman Antiquities_, 1851, p. 437. The
cattle then were presumably sold to the people of the Etruscan and
Campanian cities. Professor Ferrero leaves this problem in a state of
mystery. The early Romans, he writes, had "few head of cattle" (i, 2);
but land capture, he admits, meant increase (p. 5); and at the time of
the Roman Protectorate over all Italy (266 B.C.) he recognises "vast
wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without stable or pen" (p. 9),
conducted by slave shepherds. On such lands there must have been a
considerable amount of cattle-breeding at a much earlier period. On the
other hand, noting that the Romans early imported terracottas and metals
from Etruria, Phoenicia, and Carthage, "besides ivory-work and
ornaments, perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the
magistrates, and a few slaves" (p. 3), Professor Ferrero lightly affirms
that "it was not difficult to pay for these in exports: timber for
shipbuilding, and salt, practically made up the list."]
[Footnote 22: Cp. Schwegler, i, 451, 617-19; ii, 108; E.W. Robertson,
_Historical Essays in connection with the Land, the Church, etc._, 1872,
pp. xxvi-vii, 244.]
[Footnote 23: E.W. Robertson, as cited, pp. 243-44; Schwegler, i,
617-19.]
[Footnote 24: E.W. Robertson, p. xxv.]
[Footnote 25: Schwegler, i, 619, and refs.; Robertson, pp. 244-45;
Ferrero, i, 9; Greenidge, _Rom. Pub. Life_, p. 35.]
[Footnote 26: Cp. E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxv.]
[Footnote 27: Schwegler, i, 629; Robertson, p. xxvii.]
[Footnote 28: Schwegler, i, 620 and refs.]
[Footnote 29: Mommsen (ch. xiii. i, 200) puts this point in some
confusion, making the patricians live mostly in the country. Meyer (ii,
521) seems to put a quite contrary view. Greenidge (_History of Rome_,
1904, p. 11) agrees with Mommsen, putting town houses as a development
of the second century B.C.]
[Footnote 30: According to Niebuhr (_Lectures_, xv; Eng. trans. ed.
1870, p. 81) and Mommsen (ch. iv), the Palatine and the Quirinal. (But
cp. Greenidge, p. 2.) The Palatine was probably the first occupied by
Romans. Schwegler, i, 442. Cp. Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th
ed. p. 3, as to its special advantages. The Quirinal was held by the
Sabines. Cp. Koch, _Roman History_, Eng. trans. p. 2.]
[Footnote 31: Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82.]
[Footnote 32: Presumably "Pelasgian." Cp. K.O. Müller, _The Dorians_,
Eng. trans. i, 15; Schwegler, i, 155 _sq._]
[Footnote 33: Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen,
vol. i, ch. 6, _ad init._, as to the precedence of the Palatine priests
over those of the Quirinal.]
[Footnote 34: So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 5.]
[Footnote 35: Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives
concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to
their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating
conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have
been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had
not been incontestable" (_Early Rome_, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).]
[Footnote 36: Cp. Mérimée, _Études sur l'histoire romaine_, t. i,
_Guerre sociale_, 1844, p. 352 _sq._; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).]
[Footnote 37: Cicero (_De Officiis_, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by
Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by
Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained
under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (_Problems in Greek History_, pp. 81-83;
Social _Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (_Hist. Antiq. of
the Greeks_, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler,
_Römische Geschichte_, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through
class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.]
[Footnote 38: Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.]
[Footnote 39: Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.]
[Footnote 40: Niebuhr, _Lect._ xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, _Early
Rome_, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional
view. Cp. Shuckburgh (_History of Rome_, p. 71), who remarks that the
battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (_Geschichte des
Alterthums_, ii, 812) gives no verdict.]
[Footnote 41: The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate
was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367
was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.]
[Footnote 42: Plebeians first admitted to the Quæstorship, 421 B.C.; to
the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the
Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Prætorship, 337. This
left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of
membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to
plebeians in 300 or 296.]
[Footnote 43: _De Officiis_, i, 22, 30.]
[Footnote 44: _Ad Atticum_, i, 19.]
[Footnote 45: _De Officiis_, ii, 21.]
[Footnote 46: See Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 272-76, for
some interesting details; and refs. in Mérimée, _Guerre Sociale_, p.
22.]
[Footnote 47: Livy, iv, 25.]
[Footnote 48: A writer in many respects instructive (W. Warde Fowler,
_The City State of the Greeks and Romans_, 1893, p. 194), in pursuance
of the thesis that "the Romans" had an "innate political wisdom" and an
"inborn genius" for accommodation, speaks of the process of democratic
self-assertion and aristocratic concession as "leaving no bad blood
behind," this when social disease was spreading all round. The theorem
of "national genius" will suffice to impair any exposition, however
judicious otherwise. And this is the fundamental flaw in the argument of
Bagehot in _Physics and Politics_. Though he notes the possibility of
the objection that he is positing "occult qualities" (p. 24), he never
eliminates that objection, falling back as he does on an assumed "gift"
in "the Romans" (p. 81), instead of asking how an activity was evoked
and fostered.]
[Footnote 49: Cp. the _Politics_, i, 6.]
[Footnote 50: Cp. Professor Pelham's _Outline of Roman History_, 1893,
p. 197; Mérimée, _Guerre Sociale_, pp. 217, 220.]
[Footnote 51: _Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains,
et de leur décadence_, ch. xi. He refers to the many cases in point in
modern European history.]
[Footnote 52: Dio Cassius, xlvii, 14; xlviii, 6; Appian, _Bell. Civ._
iv, 3; v, 5, 22.]
[Footnote 53: See below, p. 30, as to Carthage.]
[Footnote 54: Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i, 269.]
[Footnote 55: _Idem_, i, 272-73.]
[Footnote 56: See Livy, xxxiii, 36, as to the _conjuratio servorum_
throughout Etruria in 557 A.U.C.]
[Footnote 57: Schwegler, i, 270, 275.]
[Footnote 58: Compare the slave wars of Rome in Sicily with the modern
disorders (1892) in the same region, and with Aristotle's testimony as
to the constant tendency of the slave populations in Greece to conspire
against their owners (_Politics_, ii, 9).]
[Footnote 59: Juvenal, _Sat._ vi, 368, 593-96; Ovid, _Amor_. 1. ii,
elegg. 13, 14. It is uncertain whether among the ancients any prudential
preventive check was thought of. On the whole question see Malthus'
fourteenth chapter. Malthus, however, omits to notice that the Romans
probably learned the arts of abortion from the Greeks, Egyptians, and
Syrians.]
[Footnote 60: Ovid speaks of the many women killed, _Amor._ ii. xiv,
38.]
[Footnote 61: Malthus cites Tacitus, _De Mor. Germanorum_, c. 19;
Minucius Felix, c. 30; Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xxix, 4.]
[Footnote 62: Cp. Shaftesbury, _Characteristics_, Treatise ii, pt. iii,
§ 2 (i, 114). Guizot seems to find the process surprising: "Singulier
phénomène! C'est au moment où l'Empire se brise et disparaît, que
l'Eglise chrétienne se rallie et se forme définitivement. L'unité
politique périt, l'unité religieuse s'élève" (_Histoire de la
civilisation en France_, éd. 1874, i, 339). He does not recognise the
case as one of cause and effect. Of course, the fall of the State is not
necessary to set up new combinations. It suffices that men should be
without political influence or national consciousness--_e.g._, the
secret societies of China in recent times.]
[Footnote 63: An inquiry, or series of inquiries, into the physiological
side of social and political development is obviously necessary, and
must be made before sociology can on this side attain much scientific
precision. I know, however, no general treatise on the subject except an
old essay on _Changes Produced in the Nervous System by Civilisation_,
by Dr. Robert Verity (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1839). This is suggestive,
but, of course, tentative. Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_,
Eng. trans, i, 298-99.]
[Footnote 64: Livy, xxxix, 8-18. See below, pt. iii. ch. iii.]
[Footnote 65: Cp. Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, p. 52.]
[Footnote 66: The subject is discussed in the author's essay on
Mithraism in _Pagan Christs_.]
[Footnote 67: M. Hochart (_Études d'histoire religieuse_, 1890, ch. ix)
argues that Constantine was never really converted to Christianity; and
this is perhaps the best explanation of his long postponement of his
baptism.]
[Footnote 68: Compare episodes in the history of the Salvation Army in
England (1890), where that body was seen prepared to practise continuous
fighting. It had no thought of "Christian" conciliation.]
[Footnote 69: Various causes, the chief being probably Greek piracy, had
caused in pre-Roman Etruria a decay of the original seaports. See
Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i, 273.]
[Footnote 70: On this cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 6; and Mommsen, ch.
iv.]
[Footnote 71: This may have been set up in imitation of the Carthaginian
institution of _Suffetae_, which would be well known to the Etruscans of
the monarchic period, who had much traffic with Carthage. E. Meyer,
_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 701. But it may also be explained by
the simple fact that the original army was divided into two legions
(_id._ ii, 812).]
[Footnote 72: On this see Montesquieu, _Grandeur des Romains_, c. 1. No
one has elucidated so much of Roman history in so little space as
Montesquieu has done in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above
the _Esprit des Lois_. (Cp. the eulogy of Taine, in his _Tite-Live._)
Its real insight may perhaps best be appreciated by comparing it with
the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud, _Histoire des Causes de la
Grandeur de l'Angleterre_ (1856), in which it will be hard to find any
specification of real causes.]
[Footnote 73: The specification of this detail is one of the items of
real explanation in Mr. Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account
of the development of the Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He
credits the Romans with an "innate genius" for combination and
constitutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not noticing the fact
that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-Romans by
Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman institutions; that
the institutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour
of systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war
and conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to
wealth; and that the accommodations of later times were forced on the
upper classes by the career of warfare, to which domestic peace was
indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to the element of coercion and patrician
policy in the Roman social system. _Philos. der Gesch._, Theil iii,
Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, § 6, as to the very different
conditions of the Greek City-States.]
[Footnote 74: E.S. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 16.]
[Footnote 75: See below, ch. iii, _end_; ch. iv, § 2 (_c_).]
[Footnote 76: Cp. Livy, viii, 3-5.]
[Footnote 77: Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans,
i, 240.]
[Footnote 78: Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 11; vi, 5.]
[Footnote 79: Already in Montesquieu's _Grandeur des Romains_ it is
pointed out that for Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere
was Capua. Montesquieu rightly observes that the stock phrase on that
head is one of the things everybody says because it has once been said.
And it is repeated still.]
[Footnote 80: Livy, xxv, 40.]
[Footnote 81: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.]
[Footnote 82: Sallust, _Bell. Jugurth._, c. 36.]
[Footnote 83: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; _In
Pisonem_,34-36; _Pro Flacco_, 12; _Pro Fonteio_, 5; _Pro lege Manilia_,
13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_,
1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113-14, 183.]
[Footnote 84: Cp. Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, ii. 78-81, and
Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 299-300, as to the plunder and
annexation of Cyprus. "Whether the annals of British India contain so
foul a crime," writes Long, "I leave those to determine who know more of
Indian affairs than I do."]
[Footnote 85: An admission that national "character" is not a connatural
or fixed bias, but a simple function of variables.]
[Footnote 86: Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, ed. Schwabe, Eng.
trans. i, 122 (§ 91).]
[Footnote 87: See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's _Geschichte der
Denk und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und
des Christenthums_, 1847.]
[Footnote 88: Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, § 1 (11).]
[Footnote 89: I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division;
but his own difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the
"later Roman Empire," while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as
_another_ "later Roman Empire," is the best proof that the established
nomenclature is the most convenient. Nobody is misled by it. A
compromise might perhaps be made on the form "Greek Empire," contended
for by M. Sathes (_Monumenta Historiæ Hellenicæ_, i, pref. p. 5),
following on M. Rambaud.]
[Footnote 90: As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.]
[Footnote 91: Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a
punishment of Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the
Christian and pre-Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough
imperialist. See the critique and citations of M. Boissier, _La Fin du
Paganisme_, ii, 136-141,407. Origen had set the note a century before
Constantine (_Contra Celsum_, viii, 68-72).]
CHAPTER III
GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION
The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than
that of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the
problem, but of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek
studies.
The modern Greek historian, Paparrigopoulo, has published in French
an _Histoire de la Civilisation hellénique_ (Paris, 1878), which
condenses his learned Greek work in five volumes; but the general
view, though sometimes suggestive, is both scanty and superficial
as regards ancient Greek history, and runs to an unprofitable
effort at showing the "unity" of all Hellenic history, Pagan and
Christian, in terms of an assumed conception of Hellenic character.
The posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Jakob Burckhardt
(1898) throws little light on social evolution. Trustworthy,
weighty, and lucid, like all Burckhardt's work, it is rather a
survey of Greek moral conditions than a study of social
development, thus adding something of synthesis to the previous
scholarly literature on the subject without reducing the phenomena
to any theory of causation. It includes, however, good studies of
vital social developments, such as slavery, to which Grote and
Thirlwall paid surprisingly little attention, and which Mahaffy
handles inadequately. This is also to be studied in W.R.
Patterson's _Nemesis of Nations_ (1907)--with some caution as
regards the political generalisations.
Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in
Dr. G.B. Grundy's _Thucydides and the History of his Age_ (1911) a
new recognition of the fundamental character of economic conditions
in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no academic
precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths
propositions which for economic historians are or should have been
axioms. The result, however, is a really stimulating and valuable
presentment of Greek history in terms of causal forces.
The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_
(1898), though they contain not a few explanations of Greek
culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms of themselves, are
helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really
study causation, as do Meyer's _Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des
Alterthums_ and some other recent German treatises, of which Dr.
Cunningham makes use.
Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert
studies. Boeckh's great work on the _Public Economy of the
Athenians_, which, though containing economic absurdities, hardly
deserves even in that regard the strictures passed on it by the
first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842;
superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857),
has not very fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The
third German edition by Fränkel, 1886, typifies the course of
scholarship. It corrects details and adds a mass of _apparatus
criticus_ equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no
new ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his _Ideen_, etc.,
translated as a _Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece_
(1829), and also as part of Heeren's _Thoughts on the Politics_,
etc., of _the Ancient World_, is too full of early misconceptions
to be well worth returning to, save for its general view. On the
other hand, Grote's great _History of Greece_, though unmatched in
its own species, and though a far more philosophical performance
than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of
Greece agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a
narrative and critical history on the established lines, and does
not aim at being more than incidentally sociological; and that of
Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is
substantially in similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote
truly illuminates the sociological problem--notably in his view of
the reactions between the Greek drama and the Greek life. Of the
German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894-98)
is a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research,
but has no special intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly
prolix. The history of Dr. Evelyn Abbott, so far as it has gone,
has fully equal value in most respects; but both leave the need for
a sociological history unsatisfied. Mr. Warde Fowler's _City State
of the Greeks and Romans_ (1893) points in the right direction, but
needs following up.
Apart from Burckhardt and Cunningham, the nearest approach yet made
to a sociological study of Greek civilisation is the series of
works on Greek social history by Professor Mahaffy (_Social Life in
Greece_; _Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the
Roman Conquest_; _The Greek World under Roman Sway_; _Problems of
Greek History_; and _Survey of Greek Civilisation_). These learned
and brilliant volumes have great value as giving more vivid ideas
of Greek life than are conveyed by any of the regular histories,
and as constantly stimulating reflection; but they lack method,
omit much, and abound regrettably in capricious and inconsistent
dicta. The _Survey_ is disappointing as emphasising rather than
making good the defects of the previous treatises. G.F.
Hertzberg's _Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der
Römer_ (1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are
always worth consulting.
Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the _Industrial
History of the Free Nations_ by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that
fails to throw any light on what should have been its primary
problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather sentimental than
scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (_History of Greece
from its Conquest by the Romans_, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes
illuminating by his interest in economic law, though he holds
uncritically enough by some now exploded principles, and exhibits
some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening sections
express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological
history--difficulties only too abundantly apparent in the following
pages. Professor J.B. Bury's _History of the Later Roman Empire_ (2
vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt, save
incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.
§ 1
The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will
serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution.
That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern
polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies
and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive
argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask
whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies.
And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad
fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more
firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not
suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all
the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the
aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely,
though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade
populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the artisan and
serving class.[92] Where population increases at anything like the
natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must
either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the
"haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to
thin numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During
some centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had
already happened among the Phoenicians;[93] the colonies themselves in
turn, with their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife
of rich and poor more quickly and more violently than the mother
cities.[94] Among these, it was when that relief seemed to be exhausted
that strife became most dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a
means to advancement and prosperity for individuals, as well as for the
State which could extort tribute or plunder from the others. War,
however, limits agriculture, so that food supply is kept proportionately
small; and with peace the principle of population soon overtakes lost
ground; so that, though the Greek States like others tended to gain in
solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the pressure of poverty
was always breeding fresh division.
If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric
invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and
fission, that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many
different States, that there can be no question as to the presence of a
general sociological law, not to be counteracted in any community save
by a radical change of conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly
the same. The upper class ("upper" in virtue either of primary
advantages or of special faculty for acquiring wealth) attains to
providing for its future by holding multitudes of poorer citizens in
debt--the ancient adumbration of the modern developments of landlordism,
national debts, and large joint-stock enterprises, which yield
inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt led as often to
adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome;[95] but in a world of small and
warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly making
slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of their
insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted
in,[96] and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other
ways. The son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to
serve in perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was
ever at the lowest point. The pressure increases till the mass of
debtors are harassed into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to
establish himself as despot.[97] Sometimes, in later days, the documents
of debt are publicly destroyed;[98] sometimes the land is divided
afresh.[99] Landholders burdened with debt would vote for the former
course and resist the latter;[100] and as that was clamoured for at
Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in some places it was
resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest would be insisted
on.[101] Naturally such means of rectification availed only for a
moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being assassinated; the
triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled nobles, with the
cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state
of the people would be worse than the first; till again slackened
vigilance on one side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed
the cycle of violent change.
In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to
equipoise;[102] but it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite
abasement of the populace;[103] and it was by a famous stroke of
statecraft that Athens was able so to solve her first great crisis as to
make possible some centuries of expanding democratic life. The name of
Solon is associated with an early crisis (594 B.C.) in which debt and
destitution among the Athenian demos (then still for the most part small
cultivators, for whom the city was a refuge fortress, but as a rule no
longer owning the land they tilled) brought matters to the same point as
was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs. The Athenian oligarchy
was very much like the Roman; and when the two sides agreed to call in
Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general expectation that he
would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people knew him to be
opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the nobles and traders, anxious for
security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had small
objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a noble of moderate
means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her
neighbour, Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader,
brought to his problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician,
and doubtless had a less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages,
loosely manipulating tradition, ascribed to him a variety of laws that
he cannot have made;[104] but all the records concur in crediting him
with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-burdens," and a healing of the
worst of the open wounds of the body politic. All existing mortgages
were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was abolished; Athenians who
had been sold into alien slavery were bought back (probably by a
contribution from relieved debtors[105]); and the coinage was
recast--whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.
Grote (ii, 471), while eulogising Solon's plan as a whole, accepts
the view that he debased the money-standard; while Boeckh
(_Metrologie_, ch. 15) holds him to have further altered the
weights and measures. For the former view there is clear support in
Plutarch (_Solon_, c. 15), and for the latter in the lately
recovered Aristotelian _Polity of Athens_ (c. 10). But when Messrs.
Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (p. 45), declare
that the latter document makes clear that the coinage measure was
solely for the promotion of trade, and entirely independent of the
Seisachtheia (so also Bury, p. 183), they unduly stress the
evidence. The document, which is hardly Aristotelian in structure,
proceeds doubtfully on tradition and not upon record; and there may
be some truth in the old view of Androtion (Plut. c. 15), that
Solon only reduced the rate of interest while altering the
money-standard. The point is really obscure. Cp. Abbott, _Hist. of
Greece_, i, 407-8; Grote, ii, 472-76; Meyer, ii, 651-52; Cox, _Gen.
Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. pp. 76-79. So far are we from exact
knowledge that it is still a moot point whether the tenant
_Hektemorioi_ or "Sixth-men" _paid_ or _received_ a sixth part of
their total product. Cp. Mitchell and Caspari, abr. of Grote, p.
14, _note_; Cox, _Gen. Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. p. 77; Bury,
_Hist. of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 181; Meyer, ii, 642; Abbott, _Hist.
of Greece_, i, 289.
While the burdened peasants and labourers were thus ostensibly given a
new economic outlook on life, they were further humanised by being given
a share in the common polity. To the Ecclesia or "Congregation" of the
people Solon gave the power of electing the public magistrates; and by
way of controlling somewhat the power of the Areopagus or Senate, he
established a "pre-considering" Council or "Lower House" of Four
Hundred, chosen from all save the poor class, thus giving the State
"two anchors." And though the executive was in the hands of the
aristocracy, subject only to popular election, the burdens of the
community were soundly adjusted by a new or improved classification of
citizens according to their incomes ("timocracy"), which worked out
somewhat as a graduated income-tax, whether by way of a money-rate or in
respect of their share in military duties and public "liturgies," which
had to be maintained by the richer citizens.
As to this vexed question, see Boeckh, _Staatsaushaltung der
Athener_, B. iv, c. 5 (Grote's ref. wrong), as expounded and
checked by Grote (ii, 485-88). Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in
their abridgment of Grote (pp. 22, 49, _notes_), reject the whole
interpretation (which is reached by a combination of ancient data,
Plutarch [c. 18] telling nothing as to taxation). But they adduce
only the negative argument that "as we know that Peisistratos, the
champion of the poorer classes, subsequently levied a uniform tax
of five or ten per cent., it is absurd to suppose that the highly
democratic principle of a sliding-scale had been previously adopted
by Solon. Peisistratos would not have dared to attempt a reaction
from a sliding-scale income-tax to a sort of poll-tax." To this it
might be replied that the "flat rate" of Peisistratos--which ought
to modify the conception of him as the "friend of the poor"--may
have been an addition to previous taxes; and that the division of
citizens into income-classes must have stood for _something_ in the
way of burdens. The solution would seem to be that these were not
regular money taxes. "Regular direct taxes were as little known in
free Athens as in any other ancient State; they are the marks of
absolute monarchy, of unfreedom" (Meyer, ii, 644). "Seemingly, it
was not until later times that this distribution of classes served
the purposes of taxation" (Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_,
Eng. tr. p. 40). But already the cost of certain public services,
classed under the head of "liturgies," was laid upon the rich; and
there may well have been a process of collective contribution
towards these at a time when very rich citizens cannot have been
numerous.
Doubtless the graduated income-tax would have been unworkable in a
systematic way, though in the "Servian" timocracy of early Rome a
_tributum_ seems to have been imposed on the classes (Livy, ii, 9).
At yet other points Solon prepared the ground for the democratic
structure of the later Athenian polity. By overthrowing the sacrosanct
power of the aristocratic priestly houses, who had aggrandised
themselves by it like the nobles of early Rome, he prevented the growth
of a hierocracy. By constituting out of all the citizens, including the
Thetes or peasant cultivators, a kind of universal jury-court, out of
which the panels of judges were to be taken by lot, he put the people on
the way of becoming a court of appeal against the upper-class archons,
who recruited the Areopagus. "The constitution of the judicial courts
(_Heliaia_) out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which
Solon discovered. It is his title to fame in the history of the growth
of popular government in Europe."[106]
The whole reform was indeed a great achievement; and so far definitive
that from that time forward Athens needed no further resort to
"Seisachtheia" or to alteration of the money-standard. Solon had in fact
eliminated the worst disruptive force at work in the community--the
enslavement of the debtor; a reform so radical,[107] when considered as
one man's work, that to note its moral limits may seem to imply
blindness to its value. Henceforth, on the lines of the democracy which
he made possible, Athenians were so far homogeneous that their slaves
were aliens. Beyond that point they could not rise; after Solon, as
before, they were at daggers drawn with neighbouring Statelets, and to
the end it remained tolerable to them to enslave the men of other
Greek-speaking communities. Floated over the first reef by Solon, they
never found a pilot to clear the second--the principle of group-enmity.
Upon that the Hellenic civilisation finally foundered.
Even in respect of what he achieved, Solon received but a chequered
recognition in his own time. The peasantry had expected him to divide
the land among them;[108] and when they found that the abolition of
enslavement for debt did not mean much less stress of life, they were
ready to forfeit all the political rights he had given them for some
more tangible betterment.
The simple fact that a generation later Peisistratos was able to become
tyrant in the teeth of the aged Solon's vehement opposition is
intelligible only as standing for the feeling of many of the common
people that through a _tyrannos_ alone could their interests be
maintained against the perpetual conspiracy of the upper class to
overreach them.[109] It may be that Solon had alienated the rural folk
by his concern for commerce, which would be likely to mean the
encouragement of imports of food.[110] Peisistratos, we know, was the
leader of the _Diakrioi_, the herdsmen and crofters of the uplands, and
was "accounted the most thorough democrat" as against the landlords of
the plains (_Pediaioi_), led by Lycurgos, and the traders of the coast
(_Paraloi_), led by Megacles.[111] The presumption is that by this time
the fertile plain-lands were largely owned by rich men, who worked them
by hired labour; but the nature of the conflicting forces is not now to
be clearly ascertained. The credit given afterwards to Peisistratos for
maintaining the Solonian laws points to an understanding between him and
the people;[112] and their acceptance of him in Solon's despite suggests
that they even identified the latter with the failure of his laws to
secure them against further aristocratic oppression.
Nonetheless, Solon's recasting of the political structure of the State
determined the future evolution. As Athens grew more and more of an
industrial and trading city, her people reverted more and more surely to
the self-governing ideal; albeit the Solonian constitution preserved the
unity of the State, keeping all the people of Attica "Athenians." The
rule of Peisistratos was twice upset, and that of his house in all did
not last much above fifty years. When the last member was driven out by
Kleisthenes (510 B.C.), the constitution was re-established in a more
democratic form than the Solonian; all freemen of Attica became burghers
of Athens; and thousands of unenfranchised citizens and emancipated
slaves obtained full rights of citizenship. For better and for worse,
republican Athens was made--a new thing in the ancient world, for
hitherto "democratical government was a thing unknown in Greece--all
Grecian governments were either oligarchical or despotic, the mass of
the freemen having not yet tasted of constitutional privilege."[113]
What followed was an evolution of the old conflicting forces on a new
constitutional basis, the balance of power and prestige being on the
side of the demos and its institutions, no longer on that of a
land-owning and dominant aristocracy. But the strife never ceased.
Kleisthenes himself found "the Athenian people excluded from everything"
once more, and, "being vanquished in the party contest with his rival,
took the people into partnership."[114] The economic tendencies of all
civic life reproduced the hostility again and again. One of the most
remarkable of the laws of Solon was that which disfranchised any citizen
who in a "stasis" or seditious feud stood aloof and took no side.[115]
He had seen the risks of such apathy in the attempt of Kylon, in his
youth, to become despot of Athens; and his fears were realised when
Peisistratos seized power. The law may have helped to promote
public-spirited action; but in the nature of things it was hardly
necessary when once democracy was established. Again and again the demos
had to fight for its own hand against the cliques who sought to restore
oligarchy; and apathy was not likely to be common. The perpetual
generation of fresh poverty through rapid increase of population, and
the inevitable resort to innovating fiscal and other measures to relieve
it, sufficed to provide grounds of class strife while free Athens
endured.
It lies on the face of Aristotle's _Politics_, however, that even if the
population difficulty had been solved otherwise than by exodus, and even
if the Athenians could have guarded against class strife among
themselves, the fatality of war in the then civilised world would have
sufficed to bring about political dissolution. As he profoundly
observes, the training of a people to war ends in their ruin, even when
they acquire supremacy, because their legislators have not "taught them
how to rest."[116] Add the memorable testimony of Thucydides concerning
the deep demoralisation wrought by the Peloponnesian War--a testimony
supported by every page of the history of the time. Even the sinister
virtue of uniting a people within itself was lacking to the perpetual
warfare of the Greeks: the internal hatreds seemed positively to worsen
in the atmosphere of the hatreds of the communities. But while the
spirit of strife is universal, peoples are inevitably trained to war;
and even if the Greek States could have so far risen above their
fratricidal jealousies as to form a stable union, it must needs have
turned to external conquest, and so run the downward course of the
post-Alexandrian Hellenistic Empires, and of the Roman Empire, which in
turn sank to dissolution before the assaults of newer militarisms.
§ 2
Nothing can save any democratic polity from the alternatives of insane
strife and imperial subjection but a vital prosperous culture, going
hand in hand with a sound economy of industry. The Greek democracies in
their different way split on the rock that wrecked the Roman Republic:
there was (1) no general mental development commensurate with the
political problems which arose for solution, and (2) there was no
approach to a sound economics. The first proposition will doubtless be
denied by those who, nourished on the literature of Greece, have come to
see in its relative excellence, the more confidently because of the
abiding difficulty of mastering it, the highest reach of the faculties
of thought and expression. But this judgment is fundamentally astray,
because of the still subsisting separation, in the literary mind, of the
idea of literary merit from the idea of scientific sanity. Men
themselves too often vowed to the defence and service of a mythology are
slow to see that it was not for nothing that the Athenian people
bottomed its culture to the last on myth and superstition. Yet a little
reflection might make it clear that the community which forced Socrates
to drink the hemlock for an alleged and unproved scepticism, and
Anaxagoras to fly for a materialistic hypothesis concerning the sun,
could have no political enlightenment adequate to the Athenian needs. We
see the superstitious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant
multitude of all ages, eager for a master, incapable of steadfast
self-rule, begging that the magnificent Alcibiades, who led the sacred
procession to Eleusis in despite of the Spartans near at hand, shall put
down his opponents and reign at Athens as king[117]--this after he had
been exiled by the same demos on a charge of profane parody of the
Eleusinian mysteries, and sacerdotally declared accursed for the
offence.[118] A primitive people may stumble along in primitive
conditions by dint of elementary political methods; but a civilised
people with a complex political problem can solve it only by means of a
correspondingly evolved science. And the Athenian people, with their
purely literary and æsthetic culture, never as a body reached even a
moderate height of ethical and scientific thought,[119] or even any such
general æsthetic well-being as we are apt to credit them with. Moderns
think of them, as the great song of Euripides has it, "lightly lifting
their feet in the lucid air,"[120] and are indulgently ready to take by
the letter the fine panegyric of the Athenian polity by Pericles,[121]
forgetting that statesmen in all ages have glorified their State, always
making out the best case, always shunning discouragement for their
hearers, and making little account of evil. But Burckhardt, after his
long survey, decides with Boeckh that "the Hellenes were more unhappy
than most men think;"[122] and the saying holds good of their political
and intellectual life above all things.
Our more idealising scholars forget that the philosophy of the
philosophers was a specialism, and that the chance of hearing a tragedy
of Sophocles or a comedy of Aristophanes was no training in political
conduct for a people whose greatest philosopher never learned to see the
fatality of slavery. On the economic side, Periclean Athens was nearly
as ill founded as aristocratic Rome. Citizens often with neither
professions nor studies, with no ballasting occupation for head or hand;
average men paid from the unearned tribute of allied States to attend to
affairs without any fundamental study of political conditions; citizens
whose work was paid for in the same fashion; citizens of merely
empirical education, for whom politics was but an endless web of
international intrigue, and who had no higher ideal than that of the
supremacy of their own State in Hellenedom or their own faction in the
State--such men, it is now easy to see, were incapable of saving Athens,
much less of unifying Greece. They were politically raised to a
situation which only wise and deeply instructed men could fill, and they
were neither wise nor deeply instructed, however superior their
experience might make them relatively to still worse trained
contemporaries, or to populations living under a systematic despotism.
On some of the main problems of life the majority had thought no further
than their ancestors of the days of the kings. The spell of religion had
kept them ignorant and superstitious.[123] In applied ethics they had as
a body made no progress: the extension of sympathy, which is moral
advance, had gone no further than the extortion of civic status and
power by some new classes, leaving a majority still enslaved. Above all,
they could not learn the lesson of collective reciprocity; could not see
the expediency of respecting in other communities the liberty they
prized as their own chief good. Athens in her turn "became an imperial
or despot city, governing an aggregate of dependent subjects all without
their own active concurrence, and in many cases doubtless contrary to
their own sense of political right.... But the Athenians committed the
capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their own hands, and
treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to attach them
by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and
discussion--without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling or
idea of a joint interest--without admitting any control, real or even
pretended, over themselves as managers. Had they attempted to do this,
it might have proved difficult to accomplish--so powerful was the force
of geographical dissemination, the tendency to isolated civic life, and
the repugnance to any permanent extramural obligations, in every Grecian
community. But they do not appear to have ever made the attempt. Finding
Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into
subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter
of pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and
far-sighted of them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without
the cement of some all-pervading interest or attachment, although not
practically oppressive, must nevertheless have a natural tendency to
become more and more unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in
pieces."[124]
In fine, a democracy, the breath of whose nostrils is justice,
systematically refused to do as it would be done by; and as was Athens,
so were the rest of the Greek States. When the Athenians told the
protesting Melians, in effect, that might is right,[125] they did even
as Sparta and Thebes had done before them.[126] Hence the instinct of
justice was feeble for all purposes, and the domestic strife of factions
was nearly as malignant and animalised as in Borgian Italy. Mother
cities and their colonies fought more destructively with each other than
with aliens; Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and Corcyra, strove more
malignantly than did Greek with barbarian. It was their rule after a
victory to slay their prisoners.[127] Such men had not learned the
secret of stable civic evolution; animal instinct was still enthroned
against law and prudence. Unearned income, private and public; blindly
tyrannous political aggression; ferocious domestic calumny; civic and
racial disruption--these were the due phases and fruits of the handling
of a great political problem by men who in the mass had no ideals of
increasing knowledge, of growing tolerance, of widening justice, of
fraternity.[128] Stoic and Epicurean wisdom and righteousness came too
late to save free Hellas: they were the fruits of retrospect in
decadence. The very art and literature which glorified Athens were in
large part the economic products of impolicy and injustice, being
fostered by the ill-gotten wealth accruing to the city from her
tributary allies and subject States, somewhat as the art of the great
period in Italy was fed by the wealth of the Church and of the merchant
princes who grew by the great river of trade. In the one case as in the
other, there was no polity, no science, equal to the maintenance of the
result when the originating conditions disappeared. Greek art and
letters passed away because they were ill rooted. Nobly incorrupt for
himself, Pericles thus fatally fostered a civic corruption that no
leader's virtues could countervail, and his policy in this regard was
probably the great force of frustration to his scheme for a pan-Hellenic
congress at Athens, to promote free trade and intercourse.[129]
For various views on this matter cp. Heeren, Eng. tr. of Researches
on the _Political History of Ancient Greece_, pp. 129-34;
Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, ch. xviii (1st ed. iii, 62-70);
Grote, iv, 490-504; Abbott, _History of Greece_, i, 405-9; Holm,
_History of Greece_, Eng. tr. ii, 268, note 8 to ch. xvii (a
vindication). Grote, who vindicates the policy of Pericles with
much care, endorses the statesman's own plea that his use of the
confederate treasure in ennobling the city gave her a valuable
prestige. But even to the Athenian opposition this answer was
indecisive, for, as Grote records, the argument of Thucydides was
that Athens was "disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks" by her use of
the treasure. This meant that her prestige was fully balanced by
hatred, so that the civic gain was a new danger.
Not that matters would have gone a whit better if, as our Tory
historians used retrospectively to prescribe, democracy had been
permanently subverted by aristocracy. No other ideal then in vogue would
have produced even so much "good life" as was actually attained. We know
that the rich and the great in the Greek cities were the worst citizens,
in the sense of being the least law-abiding; and that the lower-class
Athenians who served in the fleet were the best disciplined; the
middle-class hoplites less so; and the rich men who formed the cavalry
the least orderly of all.[130] Above all, the aristocrats were cruel and
rapacious when in power as the demos never were, even when they had
overthrown the guiltiest of their tyrants.[131] The leading aristocrats
were simply weaker versions of the demagogues, making up for their
weakness by their cruelty; and nothing can be more misleading than to
take the account given of Kleon by Aristophanes for even a semblance of
the truth. The great humorist saw nothing as it really was: his very
genius was as it were a many-faceted mirror that could reflect no whole,
and left his practical judgment worth less than that of any of the men
he ridiculed. Kleon is to be conceived as a powerful figure of the type
of a New York Tammany "Boss," without culture or philosophy, but shrewd,
executive, and abounding in energy. The aristocrats were but slighter
egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy
philosophy. And the philosophers _par excellence_, Plato and Aristotle,
were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of
the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never
transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism
in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for
another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding
hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for
her life. The treasons of Alcibiades are evoked and amply balanced by
the murderous plots of his fellows against him: every figure in the line
of leaders, from Solon's self, is hated by some hetairia; the honest
Anytus, the perfect type of brainless conservatism sitting in the chair
of sociological judgment, can be appeased only by the slaying of
Socrates; and to the end the egoisms of Demosthenes, Æschines, and
Isocrates are at grapple, with the national assassin in sight.
And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal lust to
tyrannise, that really consummates the political dissolution. It was not
the battle of Chæronea that made an end of Greek independence. That
disaster would have been retrieved like others if only the Greeks had
persistently cared to retrieve it. They fell because they took the bribe
of empire. Philip held it out at once by his offer of facile terms to
Athens: he was planning in his own way what the pragmatic Isocrates took
for the ideal Hellenic course, a Hellenic war of conquest against
Persia; and it was that very war, made by Alexander, that transformed
the Greeks into a mere diluvium of fortune-hunters, turning away from
every ideal of civic stability and dignity to the overrunning of alien
populations and the getting of alien gold. Given the process of historic
determination, moral bias becomes a fatality; and when it is fixed,
"'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus." Republican Greece passed
away because there were no more republican Greeks, but only a rabble of
imperialists. Here again appears the fatality of their past: it was the
sombre memory of unappeasable civil strife, of eternal inequality and
envy and class attrition, that made the new promise so dazzling; any
future seemed fairer than the recent past. But it was through the
immediate bait to their cupidity that the Greeks were led out of their
old man-making life of turbulent counterpoise, the sphere of free
equals, into the new unmanning life of empire, the sphere of slaves.
They were easy victims. The men of Aristotle's day had once more before
their eyes, in the squalid drama of Philip's house--in the spectacle of
alienated wife and son deriding and hating the laurelled conqueror and
exulting in his murder--the old lesson of autocracy, its infallible
dishonour, its depravation, its dissolution of the inmost ties of
cordial life. But any countervailing ideal that still lived among them
was overborne by the tide of triumphant conquest; and, with Aristotle
and Plato in her hand, Greece turned back to the social ethic of the
Heraclidæ.
And when once the Circean cup of empire had been drained by the race,
there was no more returning to the status of republican manhood. The new
self-governing combination of cities which arose in Achaia after the
disintegration of Alexander's empire might indeed conceivably have
reached a high civilisation in time; but the external conditions, as
summed up in the existence of Rome, were now overwhelmingly
unfavourable. The opportunity for successful federalism was past. As it
was, the Achaian and Ætolian Leagues were but politic unions as much for
aggression as for defence, even as the Spartan reformers, Agis and
Cleomenes, could never rise above the ideal of Spartan self-assertion
and domination. Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned
for the well-being of the mass of the people (always excepting the
helots) as a means to restore Spartan pre-eminence; and on the other
hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies, hating the doctrine of
sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta--the forces of union
and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to say nothing of
fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopoemen at deadly odds
is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the later
Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity.
The statement of Freeman (_History of Federal Government in Greece
and Italy_, ed. 1893, p. 184) that a federal system in Greece was
"utterly impossible," is true in the bare philosophic sense that
that was impossible which did not happen; but such a proposition
would hold equally true of anything else that did not happen at a
given time; and it merely creates confusion to affirm it of one
item in particular. Pericles schemed something like a federal
union;[132] and had his practice been in accord with his ideal, it
might conceivably have been at least tried. M. Fustel de Coulanges
well points out how the primary religious conception of the ancient
City-State expelled and negatived that of a composite State (_La
Cité antique_, l. iii, ch. xiv, p. 239); that is a process of
rational explanation. But unless we conceive the "failures" of the
past as lessons to be profited by, there can be neither a social
nor a moral science. Freeman, however, actually proceeds to say
that Greek federation was utterly undesirable--an extraordinary
doctrine in a treatise devoted to studying and advocating
federalism. On the principles thus laid down, Dr. Freeman's
denunciation of Austria and France in modern times is irrational,
since that which has happened in these countries is that which
alone was possible; and the problem as to the desirable is
hopelessly obscured.
To say that "Greece united in a federal bond could never have
become the Greece" we admire (_id._ p. 184), is only to vary the
verbalism. Granted that Hellenic greatness _as we know it_ was
"inseparably limited to the system of independent city
commonwealths," it remains a rational proposition that had the
Greek cities federated they could have developed their general
culture further than they actually did, though the special
splendour of Periclean Athens could not in that case have been so
quickly attained. And as the _fall_ of Greece is no less
"inseparably linked" with the separateness of the States, Dr.
Freeman's proposition suggests or implies an assertion of the
desirableness of that fall. Mr. T. Whittaker, in his notable essay
on _The Liberal State_ (1907, pp. 70-72), rightly puts it as a
fatality of the Greek State that it could neither enter into nor
absorb a larger community, but recognises this as a failure to
solve the great problem. When, however, he writes that "the free
development of Athens as an autonomous State would have been
restricted by a real federation in which other States had a voice
of their own," he partly sets up the difficulty created by Freeman.
Wherein would Athens have suffered as to freedom?
The lesson for modern democracies from the story of the ancient is thus
clear enough. To flourish, they must have peace; they must sooner or
later practise a scientific and humane restraint of population--the
sooner the better, as destruction of surplus population is always going
on, even with emigration; they must check inequality, which is the
fountain of domestic dispeace; and they must maintain a progressive and
scientific culture. And the lesson is one that may now be acted on as it
never could have been before. There is no longer a reserve of fecund
barbarism ready to overwhelm a civilisation that ceases to be
pugnacious; and the civilised States have it in their own power to
submit their quarrels to bloodless arbitrament. The inveterate strifes
of the Greeks belong to a past stage of civilisation, and were in any
case the product of peculiar geographical conditions, Greece being
physically divided, externally among islands, and internally into a
multitude of glens, which in the days of City-State life and primitive
means of communication preserved a state of cantonal separateness and
feud, just as did the physical conditions of the Scottish Highlands in
the days before effective monarchic rule.
This permanent dissociation of the City-States was only a more
intractable form of the primary divisions of the districts. Thus in
Attica itself the divisions of party largely followed the
localities: "There were as many parties among them as there were
different tracts of land in their country"--the mountain-dwellers
being democratic, while the plain-dwellers were for an oligarchy,
and the coast-dwellers sought a mixed government. (Plutarch,
_Solon_, cc. 13, 29; Aristotle, _Polity of Athens_, c. 13.) See the
question further discussed below, ch. iv, § 2 (_c_).
Indeed, the fulness of the autonomous life attained by the separate
cities was a psychological hindrance to their political union, given the
primary geographical sunderance. Thus we have in the old Amphictyonic
councils the evidence of a measure of peaceful political attraction
among the tribes before the cities were developed;[133] yet on those
ancient beginnings there was no political advance till the rise of
formal federalism in the Ætolian and Achaian Leagues after the death of
Alexander. And that federalism was not ethically higher than the spirit
of the ancient Amphictyonic oath, preserved by Æschines. The balance of
the forces of separateness and political wisdom is to be conceived in
terms of a given degree of culture relatively to a given set of physical
conditions. Happily the deadlock in question no longer subsists for
civilised States.
Again, there is now possible a scientific control of population, without
infanticide, without vice, without abortion. There has been attained a
degree of democratic stability and enlightenment which given peace,
permits of a secure gradual extension of the principle of equality by
sound machinery. And there is now accumulated a treasury of seminal
knowledge which makes possible an endless intellectual progress, the
great antiseptic of political decay, provided only that the foregoing
conditions are secured. This is, in brief, the programme of progressive
democracy.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 92: Cp. Mr. Godkin, _Problems of Modern Democracy_, 1896, pp.
327-28, as to the recent rise of class hatred in the United States.]
[Footnote 93: Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 142.]
[Footnote 94: "Freedom flourishes in colonies. Ancient usages cannot be
preserved ... as at home.... Where every man lives by the labour of his
hands, equality arises, even where it did not originally exist" (Heeren,
_Pol. Hist. of Greece_, Eng. tr. p. 88. Cp. Bagehot, _Physics and
Politics_, p. 99). Note, in this connection, the whole development of
Magna Græcia. Sybaris was "perhaps in 510 B.C. the greatest of all
Grecian cities" (Grote, part ii, ch. 37). As to the early strifes in the
colonies, cp. Meyer, ii, 681.]
[Footnote 95: Such was the legal course of things before Solon (Grote,
ii, 465-66; Ingram, _History of Slavery_, p. 16; cp. Schömann,
_Griechische Alterthümer_, 2te Aufl. i, 341; Aristotle, _Polity of
Athens_, cc. 2, 4, 6; Wachsmuth, _Histor. Antiq. of the Greeks_, § 33,
Eng. tr. 1837, i, 244).]
[Footnote 96: Cp. Schömann, i, 114; Burckhardt, _Griechische
Culturgeschichte_, i, 159; Meyer, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, ii, 642. In
the historic period the majority of slaves are said to have been of
non-Greek race (Schömann, i, 112; Burckhardt, i, 158). But this is said
without much evidence. The custom was to kill adult male captives and
enslave the women and children. Men captives who were spared by the
Athenians were put to slavery in the mines (Burckhardt, citing
Polyaenus, II, i, 26).]
[Footnote 97: _E.g._ Telys at Sybaris, Theagenes at Megara, and Kypselus
at Corinth, in the sixth century B.C.; and Klearchus at Herakleia in the
fourth (Grote. ii, 414, 418; iv, 95; x, 394). Compare the appeals made
to Solon by both parties to make himself despot (Plutarch, _Solon_, c.
14).]
[Footnote 98: As at Sparta under Agis IV (Plutarch, _Agis_, c. 13;
Thirlwall, c. lxii, 1st ed. viii, 142). The claims were restored at
Agis's death (_id._ p. 163).]
[Footnote 99: As by Cleomenes, soon after (_id._ p. 164).]
[Footnote 100: _E.g._ Agesilaus in the same crisis.]
[Footnote 101: As at Megara (Grote, ii, 418).]
[Footnote 102: See Grote, ii, 381, as to the general development.]
[Footnote 103: But cp. Grote, ii, 420, as to the case of Megara.]
[Footnote 104: Grote, ii, 490-94.]
[Footnote 105: Cp. Meyer, ii, 651.]
[Footnote 106: Bury, pp. 183-84.]
[Footnote 107: Eduard Meyer writes of Solon (ii, 649) that "aller
Radicalismus liegt ihm fern"; and, two pages later, as to the freeing of
the peasantry, that "Hier konnte nur ein radicales Mittel, ein Bruch des
formellen Rechts, Hülfe bringen."]
[Footnote 108: Grote (ii, 471) finds this incredible; it is hard to see
why. Plutarch (14, 16) is explicit on the point; so also the _Athenian
Polity_, c. 11.]
[Footnote 109: Friends of Solon's in the upper classes took advantage of
a disclosure of his plans to buy up land in advance, escaping full
payment under his law cancelling debts (Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 15;
Aristotle, _Athenian Polity_, c. 6). See Plutarch, c. 16, as to the
moderation and popularity of Peisistratos.]
[Footnote 110: See below, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 1.]
[Footnote 111: Plutarch, _Solon_, 13, 29.]
[Footnote 112: As to his tactic in building up a party see Busolt,
_Griech. Gesch._ 1885, i, 550-53. But the panegyric of Peisistratos as a
ruler by Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari (abr. of Grote, p. 58) is
extravagant. The tyrant is there extolled for the most primitive device
of the ruler seeking popularity, the remission of taxes to individuals.]
[Footnote 113: Grote, ii, 468, 496.]
[Footnote 114: Herodotus, v, 66-69.]
[Footnote 115: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 24.]
[Footnote 116: Bk. vii, c. 15.]
[Footnote 117: Plutarch, _Alcibiades_, c. 34.]
[Footnote 118: Grote, ch. 46.]
[Footnote 119: Cp. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, iv, § 446.]
[Footnote 120: Rev. A.S. Way's translation of Euripides, _Medea_,
829-30.]
[Footnote 121: Thucydides, ii, 40.]
[Footnote 122: _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 11; cp. ii, 386-88,
394, etc. And see Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 727-29, 734,
etc. For an able counter-pleading, see the essay of Mr. Benn, "The
Ethical Value of Hellenism," in _Intern. Jour. of Ethics_, April, 1902,
rep. in his _Revaluations, Historical and Ideal_, 1909.]
[Footnote 123: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, _La cité antique_, ed. 1880, pp.
260-64; E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 728.]
[Footnote 124: Grote, iv, 489-90.]
[Footnote 125: Thucydides, v, 85 _sq_.]
[Footnote 126: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. §
66.]
[Footnote 127: Grote, iv, 539. Cp. Thirlwall, i, 181-83.]
[Footnote 128: The view here set forth is fully borne out by the
posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Burckhardt. Cp. i, 249-57.]
[Footnote 129: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17.]
[Footnote 130: Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, iii, 5, 18. Cp. Grote, iv, 465.
As Grote goes on to show, the same general statement holds good of Rome
after her victory over Carthage, of the Italian Republics, and of the
feudal baronage in England and elsewhere.]
[Footnote 131: Grote, vi, 315-17, 518, rightly insists on the moderation
of the people after the expulsions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty
Tyrants.]
[Footnote 132: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17; Grote, iv, 510; T. Davidson,
_The Parthenon Frieze_, 1882, pp. 82-128.]
[Footnote 133: Grote, pt. ii, ch. ii (ed. 1888, ii, 173-78); Freeman,
_History of Federal Government_, ed. 1893, p. 103.]
CHAPTER IV
THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
§ 1
The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues
in sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to
anticipate objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a
complete theory of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as
sufficing to dismiss the dispute[134] as to what progress is, or what
basis there is for the modern conceptions bound up with the word. Our
generalisations proceed on the assumption--not of course that human
affairs must constantly improve in virtue of some cosmic law, but--that
by most men of any education a certain advance in range of knowledge, of
reflection, of skill, of civic amenity, of general comfort, is held to
be attainable and desirable; that such advances have clearly taken place
in former periods; and that the due study of these periods and of
present conditions may lead to a further and indefinitely prolonged
advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring by way of rise in the
quantity and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent life, we beg the
question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those who may
regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny that such
increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of mankind
from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as
immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture,
which may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation"
begins. Only with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the
horde or tribe. Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than
in political co-ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is,
how to diagnose advance.
All of us, roughly speaking, understand by progress the moving of things
in the way we want them to go; and the ideals underlying the present
treatise are easily seen, though it does not aim at an exhaustive survey
of the conditions and causes of what it assumes to be progressive forms
or phases of civilisation. To reach even a working theory, however, we
have to make, as it were, cross-sections in our anatomy, and to view the
movement of civilisation in terms of the conditions which increase men's
stock of knowledge and extend their imaginative art. To lay a
foundation, we have to subsume Buckle's all-important generalisation as
to the effect of food and life conditions in differentiating what we may
broadly term the primary from the secondary civilisation. Thus we think
from "civilisation" to _a_ civilisation.
Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his
critics, between "European" and "non-European" civilisations. This
broadly holds good, but is a historical rather than a sociological
proposition. The process of causation is one of life conditions;
and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were
made in Asia Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the
earlier civilisations, such as the "Minoan" of Crete, now being
traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact with both
Egypt and the East. (Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_,
1907, chs. v, ix.) The distinction here made between "primary" and
"secondary" civilisations is of course merely relative, applying as
it does only to the historic period. We can but mark off the known
civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus
the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest
of Greece, inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan
influences representing a then ancient culture. But the Roman
militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself
unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by
the Greek.
Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say
that:--
(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the
regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to
offer constant temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is
defensible only by a strong community.)
(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population,
readily lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving
despotism and subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level
territories, which facilitate conquest and administration, and thus also
involve military autocracy.
The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large
populations in a primary civilisation, generate despotisms, was
explicitly put in the eighteenth century by Walckenaer (_Essai sur
l'histoire de l'espèce humaine_, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198).
Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be
fanciful and non-economic (cp. Volney, _Leçons d'Histoire_, 6ième
séance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed. pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact
that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile
Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides
that mountaineers tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to
rulers, and coast-dwellers something midway between (_Esprit des
Lois_, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the
economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not
easy to conquer, doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched
on in Gray's unfinished poem on the _Alliance between Government
and Education_, written before the appearance of the _Esprit des
Lois_, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had
forestalled some of his best thoughts" (Gray's _Works_, ed. 1821,
p. 274). The point is discussed more fully in Dr. Dunbar's _Essays
on the History of Mankind_, 1780, Essay vi.
(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations,
in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of
being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the
cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be
extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves
lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly.
Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese,
and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.
As Dr. Draper has well pointed out (_Intellect. Develop. of
Europe_, ed. 1875, i, 84-88), the peculiar regularity of Egyptian
agriculture, depending as it did on the Nile overflow, which made
known in advance the quantity of the crops, lent itself especially
to a stable system of life and administration. The long-lasting
exclusion of foreigners there, as in China and in Sparta, would
further secure sameness of culture; and only by such causes can
special unprogressiveness anywhere arise. Sir Henry Maine's
formula, marking off progressive and unprogressive civilisations as
different species, is merely verbal, and is not adhered to by
himself. (The point is discussed at some length by the present
writer in _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 402-8.) Maine's distinction
was drawn long ago by Eusèbe Salverte (_De la Civilisation depuis
les premiers temps_, 1813, p. 22, _seq._), who philosophically goes
on to indicate the conditions which set up the differentiation;
though in later references (_Essai sur les noms d'hommes_, 1824,
préf. p. ii; _Des Sciences occultes_, 1829, préf. p. vi) he recurs
to the empirical form of his proposition, which is that adhered to
by Maine.
(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race
of not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated
as to be much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or
otherwise easily defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the
fresher civilisation that the latter, if not vitiated by a bad political
system, will soon surpass it,[135] provided that the latter community in
turn is duly crossed as regards its stock, and that the former has due
resources.
(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a
region not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is
the less likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population
is not so easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when
physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally
fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we
term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which
have stimulated it.[137]
(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races,
however, is as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from
their union as to a useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares
ill with the contact of higher and lower races even in a climate equally
favourable to both; and where it is favourable to the latter only, there
is likely to be no immediate progress in the lower race, while in the
terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or disappear.[139]
(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more
civilised, there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to
progress, though after a period of independent growth the newer
civilisation may be greatly fecundated by intelligent resort to the
remains of the older.
The cases of China and the Roman Empire may serve as illustrations.
They were, however, different in that the northern invasion of Rome
was by relatively considerable masses, while the Tartar conquerors
of China were easily absorbed in the vast native population.
(8) Where, again, independent States at nearly the same stage of
civilisation, whether speaking the same or different languages, stand in
a position of commerce and rivalry, but without desperate warfare, the
friction and cross-fertilisation of ideas, together with the mixture of
stocks, will develop a greater and higher intellectual and artistic life
than can conceivably arise in one great State without great or close
rivals, since there one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear
all others, with the result of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.
This point is well put by Hume as to Greece, in his essay _Of the
Rise of the Arts and Sciences_ (1752); and after him by Gibbon, ch.
53, Bohn ed. vi, 233; Cp. Heeren, _Pol. Hist. of Ancient Greece_,
Eng. tr. p. 42; Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, p. 338; Ferguson, _Essay
on the History of Civil Society_, 1767, pp. 182, 183; Dunbar,
_Essays on the History of Mankind_, 1780, pp. 257, 271; Goguet, _De
l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences_, 1758, iii Epoque,
L. ii, ch. 2; Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, 1813, pp. 83-88;
Grote, _History of Greece_, pt. ii, ch. i, ed. 1888, ii, 156;
Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i, 75. Grote brings out very
clearly the "mutuality of action and reaction" in the case of the
maritime Greeks as compared with the others and with other nations.
See also Hegel, _Philos. der Geschichte_, Th. ii, Absch. i (ed.
1840, p. 275). Hegel, besides noting the abstract element of
geographical variety, points to the highly mixed character of the
Greek stocks, especially in Attica. So Salverte, as cited. The same
principle is rightly put by Guizot (_Hist. de la civilisation en
France_, i, leçon 2), and accepted by J.S. Mill (_On Liberty_, ch.
iii, end), as a main explanation of the intellectual progress of
modern Europe. It is therefore worth weighing as regards given
peoples, by those who, like Mr. Bryce, see nothing but harm in the
subdivision of Germany after the Thirty Years' War (_Holy Roman
Empire_, 8th ed. p. 346). Against the undoubted evils connected
with the partition system ought to be set the intellectual gains
which latterly arose from it when the intellectual life of Germany
had, as it were, recovered breath.
(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate
it to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own
anthropological level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in
its nature less "viable," less capable of independent evolution, than
one set up by the free commerce of trading peoples. The most rapid
growths of civilisation appear always to have occurred by way of the
multiplying of free contacts among trading communities, and among the
free colonies of such.[140] The "money economy" they introduced was a
great instrument of social and industrial evolution;[141] and on such
city civilisations the ancient empires themselves seem always to have
proceeded.[142]
(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that
great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when
adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious
culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an
exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply,
the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the
Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade
monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.
(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a
relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion.
Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such
processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead"
civilisations of the past were _overthrown or absorbed by military
violence_; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed
dying out.
Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to,
fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and
the Chinese" (_Oriental and Linguistic Studies_, 2nd series). He
declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human
history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and
its culture either have become extinct or have passed into the
keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had
already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88).
Similarly Ratzel pronounces (_History of Mankind_, Eng. tr. 1896,
i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given
the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is _useful_ to them,
but not for going _any further_." Voltaire never penned such a
"bull." He wrote (_Essai sur les moeurs_, Avant-Propos, ch. i),
"Il _semble_ que la Nature ait donné," and "_nécessaire_," not
"useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great
essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese
conservatism--their ancestral piety and the nature of their method
of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a
_vera causa_, though only one of those involved. The German
specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of
view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century,
going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments"
causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause
of the rigidity in their social system."
This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as
Professor Whitney does, what has become of Egypt, of the
Phoenicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece and Rome, and
of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race
still reproduces itself, in vassalage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation
of ancient Greece was absorbed by the Greek invaders. The
"Mycenæan" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen in ancient Troy and
"Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The
Phoenicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians
are at present retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece
were successively overrun by barbarism. Spain, like Italy,
retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration. In
all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies
or disappears save by violence; and, given the proper conditions,
all races are capable of progress indefinitely. China, though
unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has changed in
many respects within two thousand years--nay, within twenty.[144]
Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly
misses any real elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology,
which he assumes to solve (p. 87) by saying we must look for our
explanations "deep in the foundations of the national character
itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by
the national character.
It is surely time that this palæo-theological fashion of explaining
human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of
positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst
explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been
intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century
before the conservative reaction (see the _Esprit des Lois_, vii,
6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13-20; Dunbar's
_Essays_, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer,
_Essai_ cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been
thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and
his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be
applied to many questions of moral science after they have been
wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of
empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when
they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them
accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (_Evolution
and Ethics_, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting
"that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states
which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as
scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and
death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows
the analogy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless
influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding
European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because
"slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393-98.
In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is
seen to have been _intellectual_ decay, in the sense of, first, a
cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to
appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the
higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in
the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism,
and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by
religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like
Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon
England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these cases is itself of
course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to
be explained by (_a_) the substitution of systematic militarism, always
fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare,
favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (_b_) there is
reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of
intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a
people for the most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured
that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a
young civilisation, where the sexes are physiologically not far removed
from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the
psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the
males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding
of mentally energetic types.
(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the
co-efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given
the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication
of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the
contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people.
Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head
of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant
process of being added to among the studious or leisured class, but
disseminated among the other classes, stagnation will take place among
these, and will inevitably infect the educated class.
De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always
_in vacuo_, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and
democratic societies, says decisively enough (_Démocratie en
Amérique_, ed. 1850, ii, 62-63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met
entièrement à part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai
dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly
enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. Godkin's
criticism (_Problems of Modern Democracy_, p. 56) that "M. de
Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the
great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence
is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is
hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so
far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in
his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical
work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century,
except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the
criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the
'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial."
Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough
worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name
scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call
careless or slipshod; and if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and
Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a
similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day.
As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr.
Godkin alike omit the necessary economic analysis.
(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation,
properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the
primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that
slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it
wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the
censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of
civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery:
then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she
gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed
by _specialisation_ of pursuits; and such specialisation was not
necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was
in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large _free_
population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147]
In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of
superstition and anti-culture.
Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with
toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the
toiling class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say,
continual progress implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and
cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be
maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]
(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4-10) that the highest
civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying
culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under
climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation
sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such
various culture-influences through all classes of the nation in which
they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political
regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss
fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich class, and elevation
of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on
an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after
Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had constituted the navy,
flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery,
and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration
played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those
of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its
fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may
sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or
public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a
great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the
forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.
§ 2
It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have
direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (_a_) ancient
Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some
fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of
stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek
civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much
race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the
commercial position and coast-conformation of Hellas.
This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs.
xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the
"inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit
of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused
and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its
poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated,
accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force--_aided
indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked_ from
without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of
"impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is
decisive, the historian himself has in other passages acknowledged
that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such
"provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the
culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of
the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the
range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of
the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to
his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and
more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking
stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury,
_History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 39-42, and Professor Burrows,
_The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent
complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation. The case is
suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii,
155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as
many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in
civilisation when the other had progressed far. "_Here there lacked
the foreign stimulus_: the west of Greece is away from the source
of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to
rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself.... Corinth
in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in
remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A.
Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are
"incomparably more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica
(_Études de mythologie et d'archéologie grecques_, 1858, pp.
40-41); and again by Winwood Reade in _The Martyrdom of Man_ (1872,
p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was
that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is
nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose ...
compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light."
But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause
(above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible
only by a strongly organised community. Thus an early exploitation
of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy.
The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is
interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii,
ch. i.
(_b_) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only
moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly
populated as Egypt.
The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised
by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides,
i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, _Political History of Ancient
Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 24-33; Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, small
ed. i, 12; Duncker, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, ch. i, § 1;
Wachsmuth, _Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, § 8; Duruy, _Hist.
Grecque_, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160);
Boeckh, _Public Economy of Athens_, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr,
_Lectures_, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, _Rambles and
Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164-67. Dr. Grundy
(_Thucydides and the History of his Age_, 1911, p. 58 _sq._) lays
stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the
smallness of the fertile areas.
(_c_) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by
its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the
islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each
other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and
interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political
separateness--that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the
advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.
The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed
at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, _Ueber den Einfluss des
griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner_, which I
have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his
_Geographie von Griechenlands_ that he takes the view here set
forth. Cp. Senior's _Journal kept in Turkey and Greece_, 1859, p.
255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation,
"divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each
other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction
from the same perception made by the young Arthur Stanley
(Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_, 1-vol. ed. p. 143); and the
impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, _Études de
mythologie et d'archéologie grecques_, 1858, p. 199.
The profound importance of the geographical fact has been
recognised more or less clearly and fully by many writers--_e.g._,
Hume, essay Of the _Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences_
(ed. 1825 of _Essays_, i, 115-16); Gillies, _History of Greece_,
1-vol. ed. p. 5; Heeren, as cited, pp. 35, 75; Duncker, as last
cited, also ch. iii, § 12 (2te Aufl. 1860, p. 601); Duruy, ch. i;
Cox, _General History of Greece_, bk. i, ch. i; Thirlwall, ch. x;
Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 87; Comte, _Cours de Philosophie Positive_,
Leçon 53ième; Grote, pt. ii, ch. i (ii, 155); Finlay, _History of
Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 28; K.O. Müller, _Introd. to Scientific
Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 179; Hegel, as last cited; Hertzberg,
_Geschichte von Hellas und Rom_, 1879 (in Oncken's series), i, 9;
Winwood Reade, _The Martyrdom of Man_, 1872, p. 65 sq.; Bury,
_History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 2-4; Fyffe (very explicitly),
_Primer of Greek History_, p. 8--but it is strangely overlooked by
writers to whom one turns for a careful study of causes. Even
Grote, after having clearly set forth (ii, 150) the predetermining
influence of land-form, attributes Greek divisions to the
"character of the race," which even in this connection, however, he
describes as "splitting _by natural fracture_ into a multitude of
self-administering, indivisible cities" (pt. ii, ch. 28,
beginning); and Sir George Cox, after specifying the geographical
factor, speaks of it as merely "fostering" a love of isolation
_resulting_ from "political creed." Freeman (_History of Federal
Government_) does not seem to apply the geographical fact to the
explanation of any phase of Greek history, though he sees in Greece
(ed. 1893, pp. 92, 554) "each valley and peninsula and island
marked out by the hand of nature for an independent being," and
quotes (p. 559) Cantù as to the effect of land-form on history in
Italy. In so many words he pronounces (p. 101) that the love of
town-autonomy was "inherent in the Greek mind." Mr. Warde Fowler
(_City-State of the Greeks and Romans_) does not once give heed to
the geographical conditions of causation, always speaking of the
Greeks as lacking the "faculty" of union as compared with the
Latins, though the Eastern Empire finally showed greater cohesive
power than the Western. Even Mr. Fyffe (_Primer_ cited, p. 127),
despite his preliminary recognition of the facts, finally speaks of
the Greeks as relatively lacking in the "gift for government."
The same assumption is made in Lord Morley's _Compromise_ (ed.
1888, p. 108) in the allusion to "peoples so devoid of the
sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and
the Jews." Lord Morley's proposition is that such peoples may
still evolve great civilising ideas; but though that is true, the
implied thesis as to "faculty" weakens even the truth. The case of
the Jews is to be explained in exactly the same way as that of the
Greeks, the face of Palestine being disjunct and segregate in a
peculiar degree. Other "Semites," living in great plains, were
united in great monarchies. The sound view of the case as to Rome
is put by Hertzberg: "Soll man im Gegensatze zu der hellenischen
Geschichte es in kürzester Fassung bezeichnen, so kann man etwa
sagen, die italische Landesnatur stellte der Ausbildung eines
grossen _einheitlich_ geordneten Staates durchaus nicht die
gewaltigen Hindernisse entgegen, wie das in Griechenland der Fall
war" (_Gesch. von Hellas und Rom_, ii, 7). Cp. Shuckburgh, _History
of Rome_, 1894, p. 9, as to "the vast heights which effectually
separate tribes." Dr. Cunningham puts it (_Western Civilisation_,
i, 152, 160) that Roman expansion in Italy came of the need to
reach a true frontier of defence, in the lack of physical barriers
to the early States. (So Lord Cromer, _Anc. and Mod. Imperialism_,
1910, p. 19.) It seems more plausible to say that all of the States
concerned were positively disposed to conquest, and that the
physical conditions of Italy made possible an overrunning which in
early Greece was impossible.
The theory of "faculty," consistently applied on Mr. Fowler's and
Lord Morley's lines, would credit the French with an innate gift of
union much superior to that of the Germans--at least in the modern
period--and the Chinese with the greatest "faculty" of all. But the
long maintenance of one rule over all China is clearly due in large
part to the "great facility of internal intercourse" (Davis, _The
Chinese_, Introd.) so long established. The Roman roads were half
the secret of the cohesion of the Empire. Dr. Draper suggests,
ingeniously but inaccurately, that Rome had strength and permanence
because of lying east and west, and thus possessing greater racial
homogeneity than it would have had if it lay north and south
(_Intel. Devel. of Europe_, _i_, 11). On the other hand,
mountainous Switzerland remains still cantonally separate, though
the pressure of surrounding States, beginning with that of Austria,
forced a political union. Compare the case of the clans of the
Scottish Highlands down to the road-making period after the last
Jacobite rising. See the principle discussed in Mr. Spencer's
_Principles of Sociology_, i, § 17.
It may be well, before leaving the subject, to meet the important
criticism of the geographical principle by Fustel de Coulanges (_La
Cité antique_, liv. iii, ch. xiv, p. 238, édit. 1880). Noting that
the incurable division of the Greeks has been attributed to the
nature of their land, and that it has been said that the
intersecting mountains established lines of natural demarcation
among men, he goes on to argue: "But there are no mountains
between Thebes and Platæa, between Argos and Sparta, between
Sybaris and Crotona. There were none between the towns of Latium,
or between the twelve cities of Etruria. Physical nature has
doubtless some influence on the history of peoples, but the beliefs
of men have a much greater. Between two neighbouring cities there
was something more impassable than a mountain--to wit, the series
of sacred limits, the difference of cults, the barrier which each
city set up between the stranger and its Gods."
All this, so far as it goes, is substantially true, but it does not
at all conflict with the principle as above set forth. Certainly
all cities, like all tribes, were primarily separatist; though even
in religious matters there was some measure of early peaceful
inter-influence, and a certain tendency to syncresis as well as to
separateness. (Cp. K.O. Müller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. i, 228.) But
the principle is not special to the cities of Greece. Cities and
tribes were primarily separatist in Babylonia and in Egypt. How,
then, were these regions nevertheless monarchised at an early
period? Clearly by reason of the greater invitingness and
feasibility of conquest in such territories--for their unification
was forcible. The conditions had thus both an objective and a
subjective, a suggestive and a permissive force, both lacking in
Greece. Again, the twelve cities of Etruria _formed a league_. If
they did so more readily and effectually than the Greeks, is not
the level character of their territory, which made them
collectively open to attack, and facilitated intercourse, one of
the obviously probable causes? No doubt the close presence of
hostile and alien races was a further unifying force which did not
arise in Greece. Etruria, finally, like Latium, was unified by
conquest; the question is, Why was not Greece? There is no answer
save one--that in the pre-Alexandrian period no Greek State had
acquired the military and administrative skill and resources needed
to conquer and hold such a divided territory. Certainly the
conditions conserved the ideal of separateness and non-aggression
or non-assimilation, so that cities which had easy access to each
other respected each other's ideal. But here again it was known
that an attempt at conquest would probably lead to alliances
between the attacked State and others; and the physical conditions
prevented any State save Macedonia from becoming overwhelmingly
strong. To these conditions, then, we always return, not as to sole
causes, but as to determinants.
(_d_) In Egypt, again, culture was never deeply disseminated, and before
Alexander was hardly at all fecundated by outside contact. In Greece
there was always the great uncultured slave substratum; and the arrest
of freedom, to say nothing of social ignorance, female subjection, and
sexual perversion, ultimately kept vital culture stationary. In Rome,
militarism and the multiplication of the slave class, along with the
deletion of the independent and industrious middle class, made
progressive culture impossible, as surely as it broke down
self-government. In all cases alike, over-population, not being met by
science, either bred poverty or was obviated by crime and vice.
The so-called regeneration of Europe by the barbarian conquest, finally,
was simply the beginning of a long period of corrupted and internecine
barbarism, the old culture remaining latent; and not till after many
centuries did the maturing barbaric civilisation in times of compulsory
peace reach the capacity of being fecundated by the intelligent
assimilation of the old. But after the Renaissance, as before, the
diseases of militarism and class privilege and the political subjection
caused a backthrow and intellectual stagnation, which was assisted by
the commercial decline brought upon Italy; so that in the feudal period,
in one State after another, we have the symptoms of, as it were, senile
"decay" and retrogression.[153] In all cases this is to be set down
proximately to the deficit of new ideas, and in some to excess of
strife, which exhausted spare energy among the leisured class, deepened
the misery of the toilers, and normally prevented the intelligent
intercourse of peoples. It is become a commonplace of historical
philosophy that the Crusades wrought for good inasmuch as they meant
fresh communication between East and West. Yet it may be doubted whether
much more was not done through the quiet contacts of peace between
Saracen and Christian in Western Europe, and by the commerce with the
East which preceded the Crusades,[154] than by the forced intercourse
following on religious war. In any case, the transition from quasi-decay
to progress in Christendom is clearly due to the entrance of new ideas
of many species from many directions into the common stock; Greek
letters, Saracen physics, and new geographical discovery all combining
to generate thought.
The case of Japan, again, compares with both that of ancient Greece and
that of modern Europe. Its separate civilisation, advantageously placed
in an archipelago, drew stimulus early in the historic period from that
of China; and, while long showing the Chinese unprogressiveness in other
respects, partly in virtue of the peculiar burdensomeness of the
Chino-Japanese system of ideograms, it made remarkable progress on the
side of art. The recent rapid industrial development (injurious to the
artistic life) is plainly a result of the European and American
contact; and if only the mechanism of reading and writing be made
manageable on the European lines, and the snare of militarism be
escaped, the Japanese civilisation may develop mentally as much as it is
doing industrially and in military organisation.
It suffices the practical political student, then, to note that progress
is thus always a matter of intelligible causation; and, without
concerning himself about predicting the future or estimating the sum of
possibilities, to take up the tasks of contemporary politics as all
other tasks are taken up by practical men, as a matter of adaptation of
means to ends. The architect and engineer have nothing to do with
calculating as to when the energy of the solar system will be wholly
transmuted. As little has the politician to do with absolute estimates
of the nature of progress. All alike have to do with the study of laws,
forces, and economics.
§ 3
We may now, then, set forth the all-pervading biological forces or
tendencies of attraction and repulsion in human affairs as the main
primary factors in politics or corporate life, which it is the problem
of human science to control by counteracting or guiding; and we may
without further illustration set down the principal modes in which these
instincts appear. They are, broadly speaking:--
(_a_) Animal pugnacities and antipathies of States or peoples,
involving combinations, sanctified from the first by religion, and
surviving as racial aspirations in subject peoples.
(_b_) Class divisions, economically produced, resulting in class
combinations and hostilities within a State, and, in particular,
popular desire for betterment.
(_c_) The tendency to despotism as a cure for class oppression or
anarchy; and the spirit of conquest.
(_d_) The beneficent lure of commerce, promoting intercourse,
countered by the commercial jealousies of States.
(_e_) Designs of rulers, giving rise to popular or aristocratic
factions--complicated by questions of succession and loyalism.
(_f_) Religious combinations, antipathies, and ambitions,
international or sectarian. In more educated communities, ideals of
government and conduct.
In every one of these modes, be it observed, the instinct of repulsion
correlates with the instinct of attraction. The strifes are the strifes
of combinations, of groups or masses united in themselves by sympathy,
in antipathy to other groups or masses. The _esprit de corps_ arises
alike in the species, the horde, the tribe, the community, the class,
the faction, the nation, the trade or profession, the Church, the sect,
the party. Always men unite to oppose; always they must love to hate,
fraternise to struggle.
The analogies in physics are obvious, but need not here be dwelt
upon. There is a risk of losing concrete impressions, which are
here in view, in a highly generalised statement of cosmic
analogies. But it may be well to point out that a general view will
perfectly reconcile the superficially conflicting doctrines of
recent biologists, as to "progress by struggle" and "progress by
co-operation." Both statements hold good, the two phases being
correlatives.
I have said that it is extremely difficult to imagine a state of society
in which there shall be no public operation of any one of these forces.
I am disposed to say it is impossible, but for scientific purposes
prefer to put simply the difficulties of the conception. A cessation of
war is not only easily conceivable, but likely; but a cessation of
strife of aspiration would mean a state of biological equilibrium
throughout the civilised world. Now, pure equilibrium is by general
consent a state only momentarily possible; and the state of dissolution
of unions, were that to follow, would involve strife of opinion at least
up to a certain point. But just as evolution is now visibly towards an
abandonment of brute strife among societies, so may it be reasonably
expected that the strife of ideals and doctrines within societies,
though now perhaps emotionally intense in proportion to the limitation
of brute warfare, will gradually be freed of malevolent passion as
organisms refine further. Passion, in any case, has hitherto been at
once motive-power and hindrance--the omnipresent force, since all ideas
have their correlative emotion. A perception of this has led to some
needless dispute over what is called the "economic theory" of history;
critics insisting that men are ruled by non-economic as well as economic
motives.[155] The solution is perfectly simple. Men are proximately
ruled by their passions or emotions; and the supremacy of the economic
factor consists in its being, for the majority, the most permanent
director or stimulant of feeling. Therefore, the great social
rectification, if it ever come, must needs be economic.
Certainly, on the principle laid down, there is a likelihood that strife
of ideals and doctrines may be for a time intensified by the very
process of social reform, should that go to lessen the stress of the
industrial struggle for existence. It is easy to see that England has in
the past hundred and twenty years escaped the stress of domestic strife
which in France wrought successive revolutions, not so much by any
virtue in its partially democratic constitution as by the fact that on
the one hand a war was begun with France by the English ruling classes
at an early stage of the first revolution, and that on the other hand
the animal energies of the middle and lower classes were on the whole
freer than those of the French to run in the channels of industrial
competition. People peacefully fighting each other daily in trade, not
to speak of sports, were thereby partly safeguarded from carrying the
instincts of attraction and repulsion in politics to the length of
insurrection and civil war. When the strife of trade became congested,
the spirit of political strife, fed by hunger, broke out afresh, to be
again eased off when the country had an exciting foreign war on hand. So
obvious is this that it may be the last card of Conservatism to play off
the war spirit against the reform spirit, as was done with some
temporary success in England by Beaconsfield, and as is latterly being
done by his successors.[156] The climaxing movement of political
rationalism is evidently dependent on the limitation of the field of
industrial growth and the absence of brute warfare. And if, as seems
conceivable, political rationalism attains to a scientific provision for
the well-being of the mass of the people, we shall have attained a
condition in which the forces of attraction and repulsion, no longer
flowing freely in the old social channels, may be expected to dig new
ones or deepen those lately formed. The future channels, generally
speaking, would tend to lie in the regions of political, ethical, and
religious opinion; and the partial disuse of any one of these will tend
to bring about the deepening of the others.
But this is going far ahead; and it is our business rather to make
clear, with the help of an analysis of analogous types of civilisation,
what has happened in the modern past of our country. The simple general
laws under notice are universal, and will be found to apply in all
stages of history, though the interpretation of many phases of life by
their means may be a somewhat complex matter.
For instance, the life of China[157] (above discussed) and that of India
may at first sight seem to give little colour to the assumption of a
constant play of social attraction and repulsion. The "unprogressiveness
of Asia" is dwelt on alike by many who know Asia and many who do not.
But this relative unprogressiveness is to be explained, like European
progress, in terms of the conditions. China is simply a case of
comparative culture-stability and culture-isolation. The capital
condition of progress in civilisation has always been, as aforesaid, the
contact of divergent races whose independent culture-elements, though
different, are not greatly different in grade and prestige. Now, the
outside contacts of China, down till the eighteenth century, had been
either with races which had few elements of civilisation to give her,
like the Mongols, or with a civilisation little different from or less
vigorous than her own, like that of India. Even these contacts counted
for much, and Chinese history has been full of political convulsions,
despite--or in keeping with--the comparative stagnation of Chinese
culture. (On this see Peschel, _Races of Men_, Eng. tr. pp. 361-74. Cp.
Huc, _Chinese Empire_, Eng. tr. ed. 1859, p. xvii; Walckenaer, _Essai
sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine_, 1798, pp. 175, 176; and Maine,
_Early History of Institutions_, pp. 226, 227). The very pigtail which
for Europe is the symbol of Chinese civilisation is only two hundred
years old, having come in with the Mantchoo dynasty; and the policy of
systematically excluding foreigners dates from the same period (Huc, p.
236). "No one," writes Professor Flint, "who has felt interest enough in
that singular nation to study the researches and translations of
Remusat, Pauthier, Julien, Legge, Plath, Faber, Eitel, and others, will
hesitate to dismiss as erroneous the commonplace that it has been an
unprogressive nation" (_History of the Philosophy of History_, vol. i,
1893, p. 88).
China was in fact progressive while the variety of stocks scattered over
her vast area reacted on each other in virtue of variety of government
and way of life:[158] it was when they were reduced under one imperial
government that unity of state-system, coupled with the exclusion of
foreign contacts, imposed stagnation. But the stagnation was real, and
other factors contributed to its continuance. The fecundity of the soil
has always maintained a redundant and therefore a poor and ignorant
population--a condition which we have described as fatal to progress in
culture if not counteracted, and which further favours the utter
subjection of women and the consequent arrest of half the sources of
variation. Mencius, speaking to the rulers of his day (3rd c. B.C.),
declared with simple profundity that "They are only men of education
who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart.
As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood it follows that
they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart
there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of
moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license" (Legge, _Life and
Works of Mencius_, 1875, p. 49). That lesson the rulers of China could
not learn, any more than their European congeners.
We cannot, therefore, accede to Professor Flint's further remark that
"The development and filiation of thought is scarcely less traceable in
the history and literature of China than of Greece"--that is, if it be
meant that Chinese history down till our own day may be so compared with
the history of pagan Greece. The forces of fixation in China have been
too strong to admit of this. The same factors have been at work in
India, where, further, successive conquests, down till our own, had
results very similar to those of the barbarian conquest of the Roman
Empire. Yet at length, next door to China, in Japan, there has rapidly
taken place a national transformation that is not to be paralleled in
the world's history; and in India the Congress movement has developed in
a way that twenty years ago was thought impossible.[159] And while these
things are actually happening before the world's eyes, certain
Englishmen vociferate more loudly than ever the formula of the
"unchangeableness of Asia." A saner, though still a speculative view, is
put forth by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his work on _National Character_. It
was anticipated by--among others--M. Philarète Chasles. See his
_L'Angleterre politique_, édit. 1878, pp. 250, 251. And Walckenaer, over
a hundred years ago (_Essai_ cited, p. 368), predicted the future
civilisation of the vast plains of Tartary.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 134: On this may be consulted a suggestive paper by Mr. Lowes
Dickinson in the _Free Review_, April, 1894, and an instructive study by
Mr. T. Whittaker, "A Critical Essay on the Philosophy of History," in
his _Essays and Notices_, 1895. Cp. Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and
Cause," in _Essays_, vol. i.]
[Footnote 135: This also is posited by Dunbar, _Essays_ cited, pp. 230,
233.]
[Footnote 136: This again, as well as the general importance of
culture-contacts, is noted by Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, pp. 202-3.]
[Footnote 137: This was seen in antiquity. Julian, at least, pointed to
the fashion in which the Greeks had perfected studies the rudiments of
which they had received from other peoples (_apud_ Cyrill, v. 8); and
Celsus had said it before him (Origen, _Contra Celsum_, i. 2).]
[Footnote 138: See some just remarks by Bagehot in _Physics and
Politics_, pp. 67-69, proceeding on Quatrefages, as to the varying
success of given race-mixtures in different regions, in terms of the
difference of the physical environment. Compare Schäffle, _Bau und
Körper de Socialen Lebens_, 1875-8, ii, 468.]
[Footnote 139: Cp. Dunbar, as cited, p. 211, and Bagehot, as cited, p.
71. In such cases as those of British India and French Algiers the
exception is only apparent, the European control being kept up by annual
drafts of new men.]
[Footnote 140: _E.g._ the ancient Ægean civilisation, as seen in
"Minoan" Crete; the colonies of the Phoenicians; those of the Greeks
in Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily; the medieval Italian Republics; the
Hansa towns; those of the Netherlands; and the United States.]
[Footnote 141: See Dr. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, pp. 73, 74,
83-86, 94-97, etc., for an interesting development of this principle.
Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to Economic History_, 1888-93, i, 43,
and Hildebrand, as there cited. The originality of Hildebrand's ideas on
this point has perhaps been overrated by Ochenkowski and others. Smith
recognised the main facts (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. i, c. iv). See also
the passage from Torrens cited by M'Culloch in his essay on "Money,"
_Treatises_, ed. 1859, pp. 9, 10.]
[Footnote 142: _E.g._ Babylonia, Egypt, Alexander's empire, and Rome.]
[Footnote 143: This was written before the recent revolution.]
[Footnote 144: Since this was written China has undergone her new
birth.]
[Footnote 145: Cp. Pearson's _History of England during the Early and
Middle Ages_, i, 312, and H.W. C. Davis, _England under the Normans and
Angevins_, 1905, pp. 1, 2, 47.]
[Footnote 146: Japan now runs a grave risk of such retrogression.]
[Footnote 147: Cp. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_, i, 109.]
[Footnote 148: The point is argued at greater length by the author in an
article on "The Economics of Genius" in the _Forum_, April, 1898 (rep.
in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii).]
[Footnote 149: Cp. Tiele, _Outlines of the History of Religion_, Eng.
tr. pp. 205, 207, and the present writer's _Short History of
Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 122-24.]
[Footnote 150: The civilisations of North America and the English
"dominions," while showing much diffusion of average culture, produce
thus far relatively few of the highest fruits because of social
immaturity and the smallness of their culture class.]
[Footnote 151: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 12; v, 4.]
[Footnote 152: Grote (ii, 150) argues that the need to move the cattle
between high and low grounds promoted communication between "otherwise
disunited villages." But that would be a small matter. The essential
point is that, whatever the contacts, the communities remained alien to
each other.]
[Footnote 153: See Stubbs, _Const. Hist. of England_, 4th ed. iii,
632-33, as to England in the fifteenth century; and Michelet, Introd. to
_Renaissance_ (vol. vii of _Hist. de France_).]
[Footnote 154: See below, pt. vi, ch. i, § 2.]
[Footnote 155: This discussion also goes back for at least two
centuries. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii, ch. i (vol.
iii, pp. 137, 152).]
[Footnote 156: Note, in this connection, the tactic of Mr. Balfour in
the election struggle of 1909-10.]
[Footnote 157: This was written, of course, before the recent uprising.]
[Footnote 158: Cp. Professor Giles, _The Civilisation of China_, pp.
1-19, as to the little-recognised diversity of Chinese speech, stock,
and climate.]
[Footnote 159: Since these words were written China in turn has had her
new birth, vindicating the doctrine above set forth.]
PART II
ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAPTER I
ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION
By singling out one set of the forces of aggregation and disintegration
touched on in the foregoing general view, it is possible to get a more
concrete idea of what actually went on in the Roman body politic. It is
always useful in economic science, despite protests to the contrary, to
consider bare processes irrespectively of ethical feeling; and the
advantage accrues similarly in the "economic interpretation of
history."[160] We have sufficiently for our purpose considered Roman
history under the aspects of militarism and class egoism: it remains to
consider it as a series of economic phenomena.
This has been facilitated by many special studies. Gibbon covers
much of the ground in chapters 6, 14, 17, 18, 29, 35, 36 and 41;
and Professor Guglielmo Ferrero sheds new light at some points in
his great work, _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_ (Eng. trans. 5
vols. 1907-1911), though his economics at times calls for revision.
Cp. Alison on "The Fall of Rome," in _Essays_, 1850, vol. iii (a
useful conspectus, though flawed by some economic errors);
Spalding's _Italy and the Italian Islands_, 3rd ed. 1845, i,
371-400; Dureau de la Malle, _Économie politique des Romains_,
1840, t. ii; Robiou et Delaunay, _Les Institutions de l'ancienne
Rome_, 1888, vol. iii, ch. 1; Fustel de Coulanges, _Le Colonat
romain_, etc.; Finlay, _History of Greece from its Conquest by the
Romans_, ed. 1877, ch. i, §§ 5-8; Long, _Decline of the Roman
Republic_, vol. i, 1864, chs. xi, xii, xx (a work full of sound
criticism of testimonies); W.T. Arnold, _Roman Provincial
Administration_, 1879; Brooks Adams, _The Law of Civilisation and
Decay_, 1897, ch. i; and Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_,
vol. i, 1899. Among many learned and instructive German treatises
may be noted the Preisschrift of R. Pöhlmann, _Die Uebervölkerung
der antiken Grossstädte_, Leipzig, 1884. Special notice is due to
the recent work of W.R. Patterson, _The Nemesis of Nations_,
1907--a valuable study of slavery.
As we have first traced them, the Romans are a cluster of agricultural
and pastoral tribes, chronically at war with their neighbours, and
centring round certain refuge-fortresses on one or two of the "Seven
Hills." Whether before or after conquest by monarchic Etruscans, these
tribes tended normally to fall into social grades in which relative
wealth and power tended to go together. The first source of subsistence
for all was cattle-breeding and agriculture, and that of the richer was
primarily slave labour, a secondary source being usury. Slaves there
were in the earliest historic times. But from the earliest stages wealth
was in some degree procured through war, which yielded plunder in the
form of cattle,[161] the principal species of riches in the ages before
the precious metals stood for the command of all forms of wealth. Thus
the rich tended to grow richer even in that primitive community, their
riches enabling them specially to qualify themselves for war, so getting
more slaves and cattle, and to acquire fresh slave labour in time of
peace, while in time of war the poor cultivator ran a special risk of
being himself reduced to slavery at home, in that his farm was untilled,
while that of the slave-owner went on as usual.[162] Long before the
ages described as decadent, the lapse of the poor into slavery was a
frequent event. "The law of debt, framed by creditors, and for the
protection of creditors, was the most horrible that has ever been known
among men."[163] When the poorer cultivator borrowed stock or seed from
the richer, he had first to pay a heavy interest; and when in bad years
he failed to meet that liability he could be at once sold up and finally
enslaved with his family, so making competition all the harder for the
other small cultivators. As against the plainly disintegrating action of
such a system, however, wars of conquest and plunder became to some
extent a means of popular salvation, the poorer having ultimately their
necessary share in the booty, and, as the State grew, in the conquered
lands. Military expansion was thus an economic need.
In such an inland community, commerce could grow but slowly, the
products being little adapted for distant exchange. The primitive
prejudice of landholders against trade, common to Greece and Rome, left
both handicraft and commerce largely to aliens and pariahs.[164] The
traders, as apart from the agriculturists and vine-and olive-growers,
would as a rule be foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political
rights; and their calling was from the first held in low esteem by the
richer natives, were it only because in comparison it was always apt to
involve some overreaching of the agriculturist,[165] which as between
man and man could be seen to be a bad thing by moralists who had no
scruples about usury and enslavement for debt. And as the scope of the
State increased from age to age, the patrician class found ready to its
hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less
trouble than was involved in commerce. The prejudice against trade was
no bar to brigandage.
On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities,
taxation, was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the
outset. The payment of the _tributum_ or occasional special tax for
military purposes was a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far
the patricians were all burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were
not. But this contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was
repaid when the times improved."[166] And there were other
compensations. The use of the public pastures (which seem at one time to
have been the sole source of the State's revenue[167]), and the
cultivation of public land, were operations which could be so conducted
as to pay the individual without paying the State. It is clear that
frauds in this connection were at all times common: the tithes and rents
due on the _ager publicus_ were evaded, and the land itself appropriated
wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called public
property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have
conquered lands divided, and not kept as _ager publicus_; while the
landless men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard
their migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they
argued, had not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and
treated the lands which they leased at a nominal rental as their own,
there would have been enough land at home to divide among those who had
been ruined while serving their country in arms."[169]
But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase
supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any
save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it
could still be made _ager publicus_ and rented to its own inhabitants;
and the collection of this and other exactions from subject provinces
gradually grew to be a main source of Roman wealth. For the mere
cattle-looting of the early days there was substituted the systematic
extortion of tribute. "In antiquity conquest meant essentially the power
to impose a tribute upon the conquered";[170] and "until the time of
Augustus the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and
squandering the accumulated [bullion] capital hoarded by all the nations
of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper classes were directly or
indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the time of the
conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus Emilius
brought from the sack of Hellas so enormous a treasure in bullion, as
well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the _tributum_ from
Roman citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and
henceforth, until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy
sponged undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] Cæsar's
expeditions were simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason
for his speedy retreat from Britain, for which there have been framed so
many superfluous explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero
in which he tells of the news sent him from Britain by his brother--"no
hope of plunder."[173] But the supreme need was a regular annual
tribute, preferably in bullion, but welcome as corn. On the one hand the
exacted revenue supported the military and the bureaucracy; on the other
hand, the business of collecting taxes and tribute was farmed out in the
hands of companies of _publicani_, mainly formed of the so-called
knights, the _equites_ of the early days; in whose hands rich senators,
in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital sums for
investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were free
to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia
Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman
administration was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in
the interest of the Roman moneyed classes;[176] and the ruthless skill
with which the possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps
even now not fully realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute
upon tribute by lending to a subject city or State the money demanded of
it by the government, and charge as much interest on the loan as the
borrowers could well pay. We know that the notoriously conscientious
Brutus, of sacred memory, thus lent, or backed a friend who lent, money
to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or at least demanded 48 per cent. on
his loans, and sought to use the power of the executive to extort the
usury.[177]
All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total
domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably
depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary
provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious,
of agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale
turning of arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives
followed, though the rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece.
But Italy had ceased to be self-supporting. The produce she imported was
far in excess of her power of export;[178] so that in sheer
factitiousness the revenue of Rome is without parallel in history.
Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its coal in
manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a
share in the national and municipal debts of all other countries--England
is stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures,
which also earn imports and constitute loans. So with the recent
exploitation of German iron; though in that case there has been much
of sheer national waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping"
prices in times of trade depression. But the history of Rome
was a progressive paralysis of Italian production; and the one way in
which the administration can be said to have counteracted the
process--as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and olive-culture
and to slave manufactures--was by forcing more-or-less unprofitable
mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus giving what
stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh bullion on
the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to an
illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to
standfor public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for
tribute, Spain in particular being prized for her mining resources. As a
necessary sequence, therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C.
269), and silver finally, after a long transition period, by gold, about
the time of Severus.[179] The silver had been repeatedly debased when
the treasury was in difficulties;[180] and in the later days of the
Empire it seems to have been base beyond all historic parallel,[181]
though a large revenue was extorted till the end. Between revenue and
tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the Roman moneyed class
must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the tributaries were not
exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for--(_a_) foods,
spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by the more
prosperous provinces; (_b_) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl,
raised chiefly on the estates run by their own class; (_c_) some wares
of home production; and (_d_) _services_[182] from artists, architects,
master craftsmen, slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose
economic demand in turn would as far as possible go in the same
directions.
As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on
common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on
the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of
the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the
part of the rich class, made age by age more unproductive industrially
and more worthless politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian
law of 367 B.C.,[183] which for a time seems to have restored a yeoman
class to the State and greatly developed its fighting power, the forces
of outside competition and of capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen
cultivators all over Italy, leaving the land mainly in the hands of the
patricians and financiers of the city, who exploited it either by slave
labour or by grinding down the former cultivators as tenants. Even on
this footing, a certain amount of industry would be forced on the towns.
But not only was that also largely in the hands of slave-masters, with
the result that demotic life everywhere was kept on the lowest possible
plane: the emperors gradually adopted on humane grounds a policy which
demoralised nearly all that was left of sound citizenship.
As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious
men tended to seek for the mass of the people some protection as against
the upper class; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the
disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was
rather negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went
further. In the last rally of what may be termed conscientious
aristocratic republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as
tribune, helping the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a
fourth of its market value--an expedient pathetically expressive of the
hopeless distance that then lay between public spirit and social
science. Both of the Gracchi sought by violent legal measures to wring
the appropriated public lands from the hands of the rich, with the
inevitable result of raising against themselves a host of powerful
enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But even if it had
been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of Tiberius
Gracchus, Blossius of Cumæ and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184] looked solely
to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of slavery, the
deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in which
the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and
that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of
extorted tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their
predecessors and imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and
no one contemplated the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman
ruling class likely to think of either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did
avowedly seek to substitute free for slave labour,[185] and wrought to
that end; and though Caius Gracchus did in his time of power employ a
large amount of free labour on public works, one such effort counted for
nothing against the normal attitude of the patriciate. In order to fight
the Senate he had to conciliate the _publicani_ and money-lenders as
well as the populace, and the reforms of the two brothers came to
nothing.[186]
There is no record that in the contracts between the treasury and the
companies of _publicani_ any stipulation was ever made as to their
employing free labour, or in any way considering the special needs of
the populations among whom they acted.[187] Thus a mere cheapening of
bread could do nothing to aid free labour as against capitalism using
slaves. On the contrary, such aids would tend irresistibly to multiply
the host of idlers and broken men who flocked to Rome from all its
provinces, on the trail of the plunder. Industrial life in Rome was for
most of them impossible, even were they that way inclined;[188] and the
unceasing inward flow would have been a constant source of public danger
had the multitude not been somehow pacified. The method of free or
subsidised distribution of grain,[189] however, was so easy a way of
keeping Rome quiet, in the period of rapidly spreading conquest and
mounting tribute, that in spite of the resistance of the moneyed
classes[190] it was adhered to. Sulla naturally checked the practice,
but still it was revived; and Cæsar, after his triumph in Africa, found
the incredible number of 320,000 citizens in receipt of regular doles of
cheapened or gratis corn. He in turn, though he had been concerned in
extending it,[191] took strong measures to check the corrosion, reducing
the roll to 150,000;[192] but even that was in effect a confession that
the problem was past solution by the policy, so energetically followed
by him, of re-colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul.
And if Cæsar sought to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have
outgone his predecessors in his provision of the other element in the
popular ideal--the circus; his shows being bloodier as well as vaster
than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus treated to sport must
needs have cheap food as well.
Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the
depression of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or
given away by the administration was of course bought or taken in the
cheapest markets--those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and
Gaul--and importation once begun would be carried to the utmost lengths
of commercialism. Italian farms, especially those at a distance from
the capital,[194] could not compete with the provinces save by still
further substituting large slave-tilled farms for small holdings, and
grinding still harder the face of the slave. When finally Augustus,[195]
definitely establishing the system of lowered prices and doles,
subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed his
populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the
cheapest foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and
even of parts of some provinces, was practically destroyed.
It has been argued by M'Culloch (_Treatises and Essays: History of
Commerce_, 2nd ed. p. 287, _note_) that it is impossible that the
mere importation of the corn required to feed the populace--say a
million quarters or more--could have ruined the agriculture of
Italy. This expresses a misconception of what took place. The doles
were not universal, and the emperors naturally preferred to limit
themselves as far as possible to paying premiums for the
importation and cheap sale of corn. (Cp. Suetonius, _Claudius_, c.
19, and the Digest, iii, 4, 1; xiv, i, 1, 20; xlvii, ix, 3, 8; l,
v, 3, etc.) All of the conquered provinces, practically, had to pay
a tithe of their produce; and where corn was specially cheap it
would be likely to come to Rome in that form. (Cp. Dureau de la
Malle, _Écon. polit. des Romains_, ii, 424 _sq._) Many of the
patrician families, besides, owned great estates in Africa, and
they would receive their revenues in produce. Egyptian, Sardinian,
Sicilian, and African corn could thus easily undersell Italian for
ordinary consumption. For the rest, the produce of Egypt would be a
means of special revenue to the emperor. Cp. M'Culloch's own
statement, p. 291.
Prof. Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. ii,
App. A) has independently (but in agreement with Weber and
Salvioli) carried M'Culloch's thesis further, and has opposed the
view that the "competition" of Sicilian and African wheat "was the
cause of the agricultural depression from which Italy began to
suffer in 150 B.C." His own theory is the singular one that the
"depression" was caused by "the increased cost of living" arising
out of luxurious habits! This untenable and indeed unintelligible
conclusion he ostensibly reaches by a series of arguments that are
alternately incoherent and rotatory, of propositions some of which
are rebutted by himself, and of assumptions that are plainly
astray. The dispute may be condensed thus:--
(1) "In antiquity," the Professor begins, "each district consumed
its own wheat"; yet he goes on to mention that in the fifth and
fourth centuries B.C. Attica was "obliged to import, even in good
seasons, between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 bushels." This
contradiction he appears to think is saved by the addendum that
"the amount in question is a very small one, compared with the
figures of modern commerce." Naturally it is, Athens being a small
State compared with those of to-day. But the contradiction stands
unresolved. And it follows that larger towns, not placed in
fruitful "districts," would have proportionally larger imports.
(2) "Moreover," writes the Professor, "while the industrial
countries of to-day seek so far as possible to check the import of
cereals by protective duties, Athens used every expedient of war
and diplomacy to render the supply of imported corn both regular
and abundant." It is startling to find a professor of history, a
sociological historian, unaware that Britain, Belgium, and Holland
have no import duties on corn. (The most exclusive State in that
matter is Portugal, which, with no pretensions to be an industrial
State, prohibits corn imports altogether.)
(3) More plausibly, Prof. Ferrero argues that the policy of Athens
proves that "corn was not easily transported for sale beyond the
local market." But the efforts of the Athenians "to obtain the
mastery of the Black Sea, and especially of the Bosphorus, _in
order to capture the corn trade for themselves_, or to entrust it,
on their own conditions, to whom they pleased," proves that the
difficulties of transport were mainly those set up by hostile
States or pirates, and that--as the Professor admits--the fertile
Crimea, with its sparse population, yielded an easy surplus for
export.
(4) All this, however, is only partially relevant to the question
of the supplies of Rome from Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, and Spain in
the second century B.C. Did such supplies come, or did they not? As
the Professor admits, they were "vital" to the Roman military
policy; and "she had immense granaries at her disposal whenever she
required them." But such sources of supply meant a certain large
normal production; and this would enter Italy in time of peace. If
it was purposely maintained in view of the needs of war-time, so
much the more surely would it undersell Italian wheat, raised on a
less fruitful soil. In no other way could Sicily and Africa yield
either annual tribute to Rome or rents to Roman owners of land in
those countries. The first effect of the importation would be to
add the pressure of lowered prices to the discouragement already
offered to private cultivators by the inducements of loot in war,
fleecings in administration of newly conquered countries, commerce,
and usury. Of this discouragement the sequel would be the attempt
to run by slave labour the large estates in which the old farms
were merged. But slave labour is apt to be bad labour, and
agriculture could not thereby be restored.
(5) The thesis that agriculture was _depressed_ by high cost of
living (= high prices for agricultural products) it is not easy to
treat with seriousness. The simple fact is that sea-carriage to
Rome from Sicily, Spain, and Africa must have been cheaper than
land carriage from most parts of Italy to the capital. As Prof.
Ferrero notes, food prices in the valley of the Po were very
low--obviously because cost of carriage either to Rome or to the
southern seaports deterred export.
(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the
economic crisis from which Italy has been suffering during the last
twenty years is due to the increased cost of living occasioned by
the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial civilisation
of England and France into an old agricultural society." The
confusion here defies analysis. Suffice it to say that the high
cost of living in modern Italy is due to tariffs and high taxation.
Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it
luxuriously--they do not and cannot--but because a particularly
unintelligent policy of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot
sugar produced in a country ill-suited to the growth of beetroot.
Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States than in
Britain, not because those countries have only recently become
"luxurious," but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living
in Rome certainly rose as Romans raised their standards of
consumption; but their importation of corn from conquered provinces
kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and
Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways
of making money.
Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory
by his own account (i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once
more the precious metals were _cheap and abundant_" after a time of
scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture was
superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, _note_.)
But abundant bullion means high prices for produce, which the
Professor has declared to be a cause of depression! As to the new
production, the process certainly cannot have taken place with the
rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous
slave-shelters or compounds [_ergastula_], with their gangs of
forced labourers, vanished from the scene, together with the huge
desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?], to
be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted
in all parts of the peninsula, ... estates on which the new slave
immigrants contentedly cultivated the vine or the olive, or bred
animals for the stable or transport, under the direction of a Greek
or Oriental bailiff; ... pleasant cottages of landlords, who farmed
their own holdings with the help of a few slaves." All this cannot
have happened in the time of Pompey. But in any case, inasmuch as
bullion was rife, prices in general must have been high, yet
without "depression"; and the new demand for wine and olives, in
the terms of the case, made their cultivation remunerative. But
"huge pastures" cannot have been "replaced" by vineyards and
olive-groves; and Italian agriculture did not in imperial times
become again the thing it had been.
It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196]
the _latifundia_, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin
the provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces,
notably Sicily, undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged
competition of Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African
provinces, undersold the produce of most of the other regions, and would
have done so equally had their agriculture remained in the hands of
small farmers. The _latifundia_ were themselves effects of the policy of
conquest and annexation. The theory that "those large pastoral estates,
and that slave-cultivation, which had so powerful and so deleterious an
influence over Italian husbandry and population, may be principally
ascribed to the confiscations and the military colonies of Sulla and his
successors," is clearly wide of the mark.
So M'Culloch, _Treatises and Essays: Colonial System of the
Ancients_, p. 426. No doubt agriculture went rapidly from bad to
worse in the convulsions of Sulla's rule, when whole territories
passed into the hands of his partisans. These would be bent on the
use of slave labour, and would take to the forms of production
which gave them the best money return. On the other hand, in an age
of chronic confiscation of whole areas, steady men were not likely
to be attracted to the land. See Prof. Pelham's _Outlines_, p. 213;
Dureau de la Malle, _Écon. polit. des Romains_, vol. ii, liv. iii,
ch. 22.
Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time
of Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage,
where they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to
have hurt agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the
other hand, the Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to
restore a free farming population. In Italy the disease was older than
Sulla. When Tiberius Gracchus was passing through Etruria on his way
from Spain, fifty years before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free
labourers, but only slaves in chains.[199] The true account of the
matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered Sicily, North Africa,
Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their competition could not have
come to pass as it did; for any imports in that case would have had to
be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing adequate to export. It was
the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the appropriation of conquered
territory as estates by the nobles,[200] that upset the economic
balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or free
food--which was extended to other large Italian cities--but because corn
was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the tribute
came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came in
bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food
and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the
Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on
farming at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond
olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home
consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula
was thus finally a mere shell, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of
the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more
and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more
and more strictly factitious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire,
as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast
economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and
bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the
upper classes had done; and though their popular measures must have
exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their
well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]
We may perhaps better understand the case by supposing a certain
economic development to take place in England in the distant future. At
present we remain, as we are likely long to remain, economically
advantaged or beneficed for manufacture by our coalfields, which are
unequalled in Europe, though Germany, through the invention which made
her phosphoric iron workable, has a larger store of the chief industrial
metal. In return for our coal and manufactures and our shipping
services, we import foods and goods that otherwise we could not pay for;
and the additional revenue from British investments in foreign debts and
enterprises further swells the food and raw material import, thus
depressing to a considerable extent _our_ agriculture under a system of
large farms. When in the course of centuries the coalfields are
exhausted, unless it should be found that the winds and tides can be
made to yield electric power cheaply enough, our manufacturing
population will probably dwindle. Either the United States will
supersede us with their stores of coal, or--if, as may well be, their
stores are already exhausted by a vaster exploitation--China may take
the lead. The chief advantage left us would be the skill and efficiency
of our industrial population--an important but incalculable factor.[205]
A "return to the land," if not achieved beforehand, might in that case
be assumed to be inevitable; but should Australian, Indian, and North
and South American wheat-production continue (as it may or may not) to
have the same relative advantages of soil, our remaining city
populations would continue to buy foreign corn; and the land might still
be largely turned to pasture. That remaining city population, roughly
speaking, would in the terms of the case consist of (_a_) those persons
drawing incomes from foreign investments; (_b_) those workmen,
tradesmen, and professional people who could still be successfully
employed in manufactures, or whom the interest-drawing classes employed
to do their necessary home-work, as the Romans perforce employed to the
last many workmen and doctors and scribes, slave or free; (_c_) those
who might earn incomes by seafaring; and (_d_) the official
class--necessarily reduced, like every other. Until the incomes from
foreign investments had in some measure disappeared, the country could
not gravitate down to an economically stable recommencement in
agriculture.
We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in
exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is
exhausted the whole social structure will be modified; and it is
conceivable that the idle class may have been eliminated. But we are
supposing a less progressive evolution for illustration's sake. Suffice
it that such a development would be in a measure economically analogous
to what took place in ancient Rome. If the upper-class population of
such a hypothetical future in England, instead of receiving only
dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from the revenue of India,
were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and other dominions,
the parallel would be so much the closer. What held together the Roman
Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed military and
juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the other
hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or an
Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he
might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage.
As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political
anæmia; and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all
its burden of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though
precarious ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare,
at least for men who had lost the spirit of reasoned political
self-assertion.
Under good emperors, the system worked imposingly enough; and Mommsen,
echoing Gibbon, not unwarrantably bids us ask ourselves whether the
south of Europe has ever since been better governed than it was under
the Antonines.[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by governors
under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure restricted. But,
to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the economic
evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors and bad,
and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten society.
So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute
thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian
life; but when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all
its classes, taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were
in the terms of the case as Roman as the capital; and there was no
special reason, save the principle of concentration, why the later
emperors should reside there. Where of old the provincial governors had
extorted from their subjects fortunes for themselves, to be spent in
Rome like the public tribute, they would now tend to act as permanent
dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the palace was set up elsewhere,
the accessories of administration inevitably followed; and the
transference of official and other population would partly balance the
restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian
corn-tribute to Constantinople--a loss that had to be made good by a
drain on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens
the Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose
main source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into
financial straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his
reign three costly wars--one to recover Britain, one to repel the
Alemanni from Gaul, one to recover Africa from Firmus; and it was
apparently the drain on revenue thus set up, aggravated by an African
famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his accession to the step of
confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So great was the
State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore the pagan
revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military; and we
shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval Italy,
the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the
Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and
Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its
unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to
agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each
successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to
many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some
districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while
Italy thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be
less impoverished.
Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the
curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian
soil, always considerable. The three temples to the Goddess Fever in
Rome were the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every
overflow of the Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the
land. But when the great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous
area was in constant process of reduction by agriculture and drainage;
and the inhabitants had become in large part immune to infection.[212]
In the early, the "Social" and the later civil wars it was devastated
and depopulated to such an extent that Pliny[213] could enumerate
fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples," and could cite the
record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now were the Pontine
marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted
unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but
population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the
malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216]
but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to
more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered
it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down
to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest
was a twofold process, direct and indirect.
In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring
back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a
leprosy. Thus Cæsar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle
populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy
regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only
by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of
hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported
stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the
"principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount
the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for
the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant
districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated
the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.
[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics
in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing
may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the
early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed
neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest
nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that
at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of
the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His
investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades
of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached
the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was
doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]
There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of
the final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of _(a)_
increasing barbarian enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience
of the many barbarians who served the Empire, and of _(b)_ increasing
moral weakness on the part of the whole administrative system. And
doubtless this change in the balance of military energy was decisive.
When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the imperial chair, at best
contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the end was
necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just empire;
ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling class incapable of
energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the
use of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as
contrasted with the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an
easier task against Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the
defence was there relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This
lack has been wholly or partly explained by quite a number of
writers[218] as a result of a failure in the whole supply of the
precious metals--a proposition which may be understood of either a
falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general withdrawal of bullion
from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either explanation can
stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in the Empire, and
a general withdrawal could take place only by way of export to the
barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern provinces
of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and after
the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No doubt
the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409-10) greatly crippled the west, and
the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained
Africa it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or
rather the virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province
by the Vandals (430-40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals,
whereafter there remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till
Odoaker, dismissing Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.
As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some
writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that
the Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before
and has been as true since, that _all_ gold-mining, save in the case of
the richest and easiest mines, separately considered, or of groups of
mines which have been acquired at less cost than went to find and open
them, is carried on at a loss as against the standing competition of the
great mass of precious metal above-ground at any moment, the output of
unknown barbarian toil and infinite slave labour, begun long before the
age of written history.[220] When it was reluctantly realised that the
cost of working either the gold or the silver mines was greater to the
State than their product,[221] they would be abandoned; though under a
free government private speculators would have been found ready to risk
more money in reopening them immediately. As a matter of fact, the
Spanish mines were actually worked by the Saracens in the Middle Ages,
and have been since. The Romans had made the natural blunder of greed in
taking all gold and silver mines into the hands of the State,[222] where
speculative private enterprise would have gone on working them at a
loss, and so adding--vainly enough--to the total bullion in circulation,
on which the State could levy its taxes. Even as it was, when they were
losing nothing, but rather checking loss, by abandoning the mines, a
falling-off in revenue from one source could have been made good by
taxation if the fiscal system had remained unimpaired, and if the former
income of Italy had not been affected by other causes than a stoppage of
mining output.
If the mere cessation of public gold-mining were the cause of a general
weakening of the imperial power, and by consequence the cause of the
collapse in Italy, it ought equally to have affected the Eastern Empire,
which we know to have possessed a normal sufficiency of bullion all
through the Dark and Middle Ages, though it had no mines left.[223] The
fact is that, when Valentinian and Valens divided the Empire between
them, the former chose the western half because he shared the delusion
that the Spanish mines were a greater source of real wealth than the
fruitful provinces of the east. Those could always procure the bullion
they required, because they had produce to exchange for it. Gold mines
even of average fertility could have availed no more; and if Italy had
remained agriculturally productive she could have sustained herself
without any mines.
Dr. Cunningham, in his study of the economic conditions of the
declining Empire, appears to lay undue stress on the factor of
scarcity of bullion, and does not duly recognise the difference of
progression between the case of Italy and that of the east. "The
Roman Empire," he writes (p. 187, _note_), lacked both treasure and
capital, "and _it perished_." When? The eastern seat of the Empire
survived the western by a thousand years. "It seems highly
improbable," he argues again (p. 185), "that the drain of silver to
the east, which continued during the Middle Ages, was suspended at
any period of the history of the Empire." But such a drain (which
means a depletion) cannot go on for twelve hundred years; and it
was certainly not a drain of silver to the east that ruined the
Byzantine Empire. Finlay's dictum (i, 52) that the debasement of
the currency between Caracalla and Gallienus "annihilated a great
part of the trading capital in the Roman Empire and rendered it
impossible to carry on commercial transactions, not only with
foreign countries but even with distant provinces," is another
erroneous theorem.
It seems clear that the Italian collapse occurred as it did because,
after the fall of the three great possessions, Gaul, Spain, and Africa,
there was left only the central State, made impotent by long parasitism
to meet the growing barbarian pressure. Italy in the transition period
can have yielded very little revenue, though Rome had for the barbarians
plenty of hoarded plunder; and the country had long ceased to yield good
troops. Gaul itself had been monstrously taxed; and it must have been no
less a prudent than a benevolent motive that led Julian to reduce to
£2,000,000 the revenue of £7,000,000 extorted by Constantine and
Constantius.[224] The greater the depression in the sources of income,
and the greater the costs of the frontier wars, the harder became the
pressure of the fiscal system, till the burdens laid on the upper
citizens who formed the curia[225] put them out of all heart for
patriotic action, and drove many to flight, to slavery, or the cloister.
Towards the end, indeed, there was set up a rapid process of economic
change which substituted for slaves a class of serfs, _coloni_,
_adscriptitii_, and so on, who though tied to the land paid a rent for
it and could keep any surplus; but under this system agriculture was
thus far no more a source of revenue than before. Latterly the very wine
of Italy grew worthless, and its olives decayed;[226] so that in once
fruitful Campania, "the orchard of the south," Honorius in the year 395
had to strike from the fiscal registers, as worthless, more than three
hundred thousand acres of land[227]--an eighth of the whole province.
After the ruinous invasions of Rhadagast and Alaric, fresh remissions of
taxation had to be given, so that as the danger neared the defence
weakened.[228] In the east, again, there was no impulse to succour the
falling west; and indeed there was not the ability. The fiscal power of
the Emperor was inelastic; his revenues, extorted by cruel pressure,
needed careful husbanding; his own world needed all his attention; and
the eastern upper class of clerics and officials were not the people to
strain themselves for the mere military retention of Britain or Gaul or
Italy, as Rome would have done in the republican period, or as the
emperors would have done before the period of decentralisation. For the
rich agricultural provinces of Africa they did strive with success when
Belisarius overthrew the Vandals; and in that age, when Italy had once
more become revenue-yielding through the revival of her agriculture, it
was worth the while of the east to reconquer Italy also; but the old
spirit of resolute dominion and aggression was gone. Armies could still
be enrolled and generalled if there was pay for them; but the pay
failed, not because bullion was lacking, but because the will and power
to supply and apply it in the old fashion was lacking. The new age,
after Theodosius, looked at these matters in a different light--the
light of commercial self-interest and Christian or eastern disregard for
Roman tradition and prestige. The new religion, Christianity, was a
direct solvent of imperial patriotism in the old sense, transferring as
it did the concern of serious men from this world to the next, and from
political theory to theological. In Italy, besides, the priesthood could
count on making rather more docile Christians of the invaders than it
had done of the previous inhabitants; so that Christian Rome, once
overrun, must needs remain so.
[Finlay (ed. cited i, 294) suggests that "probably the knowledge
which the Emperor Justin and his cabinet must have possessed of the
impossibility of deriving any revenue from the agricultural
districts of Italy offers the simplest explanation of the
indifference manifested at Constantinople to the Lombard invasion."
But he had already noted (p. 236, _note_) that a great revival of
agriculture took place in the reign of Theodoric. Then it could
only be through the exhaustion of the subsequent wars that Italy
was incapable of yielding a revenue. The true explanation of
Justin's inaction is probably not indifference but impotence, the
Empire's resources being then drained.
After the invasion of the Lombards the clergy and Senate of Rome
had to send a large sum in bullion to induce the Emperor Maurice to
listen to their prayers for help. Still the help could not be
given, though, save in the case of the coast towns (see below, p.
188), tribute was paid to Byzantium till the final breach between
Rome and Leo the Iconoclast. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 114.)
Guizot (_Histoire de la Civilisation en France_, 13e éd. i, 75, 76)
notes the fundamental difference in the attitude of the Church
under the old and eastern emperors and under the Teutonic rule.
Symonds (_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a
result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and
his having treated it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul
at once gained an ascendency over the Frankish kings, and the popes
would probably have done as well with resident emperors as with
absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian
monarch against another--a plan not open to the patriarch of
Constantinople.]
That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them
generals who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in
the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme
parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is
some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of
prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of
what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system,
inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force
of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been
preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal
of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the
ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now
inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter
of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should
thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out
before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise
the economic and other sociological causation of the process.
It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be
explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified
by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the
obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of
this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element
... by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy
which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the
"great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely
the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were
the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of
Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the
mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had
abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the
Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as
regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by
the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was,
had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit
of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the
East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the
resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established
religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that
finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against
the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin
Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the
minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the
patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 160: The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application
of the principle, however, does not carry us far.]
[Footnote 161: Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by
war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it
(_Western Civilisation_, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof.
Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber
for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable
products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?]
[Footnote 162: Cp. Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, i, 26,
following Von Ihering.]
[Footnote 163: Macaulay, _Lays of Ancient Rome_, pref. to _Virginia_.
Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 80-81.]
[Footnote 164: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Écon. polit. des Romains_, vol.
ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.]
[Footnote 165: Cp. Cicero, _De Officiis_, i, 42.]
[Footnote 166: Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.]
[Footnote 167: Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xviii, 3]
[Footnote 168: E. Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 518), alleges
a common misconception as to the _ager publicus_ being made a subject of
class strife; but does not make the matter at all clearer. Cp. Niebuhr,
_Lectures on the History of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 153-54, 407,
503.]
[Footnote 169: Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, pp. 93, 94. Cp. Long,
_Decline of the Roman Republic_, ch. xii, and Pelham, pp. 187-89, as to
the frauds of the rich in the matter of the public lands.]
[Footnote 170: W.T. Arnold, _Roman Provincial Administration_, 1879, p.
26.]
[Footnote 171: Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 39.]
[Footnote 172: When Julius Cæsar abolished the public revenue from the
lands of Campania by dividing them among 20,000 colonists, the only
Italian revenue left was the small duty on the sale of slaves (Cicero,
_Ep. ad Atticum_, ii, 16).]
[Footnote 173: _Ep. ad Atticum_, iv, 15 (16).]
[Footnote 174: Cp. Niebuhr, _Lectures on Roman History_, Eng. tr. 1-vol.
ed. pp. 227, 449; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 404; v, 74-75.]
[Footnote 175: _Orat. pro M. Fonteio_, v. Cp. Long, _in loc._
(_Orationes_, 1855, ii, 167).]
[Footnote 176: Dr. Cunningham, preserving the conception of Rome as an
entity with choice and volition, inclines to see a necessary
self-protection in most Roman wars; yet his pages show clearly enough
that the moneyed classes were the active power. He distinguishes (p.
161) "public neglect" (of conquered peoples) from "public oppression."
But the public neglect was simply a matter of the control of the
exploiting class, who were the effective "public" for foreign affairs.
Compare his admissions as to their forcing of wars and their control of
justice, pp. 163, 164.]
[Footnote 177: The fullest English account of the matter is given by
Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 423-27, following Savigny.
Cp. Plutarch's account of the doings of the _publicani_ in Asia
(_Lucullus_, cc. 7, 20). Lucullus gave deadly offence at Rome by his
check on their extortions, as P. Rutilius Rufus had done before him
(Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, pp. 198, 283; Ferrero, i,
183). The lowest rate of interest charged by the _publicani_ seems to
have been 12 per cent. (Niebuhr, _Lectures_, 1-vol. ed. p. 449). We
shall find the same rates current in Renaissance Italy.]
[Footnote 178: Cp. R. Pöhlmann, _Die Uebervölkerung der antiken
Grossstädte_, 1884, pp. 14-15, 29-30. Prof. Ferrero (_Greatness and
Decline of Rome_, Eng. tr. i, 123-27; ii, 131-36) affirms a restoration
of Italian "prosperity" from 80 B.C. onwards, by way first of a general
cultivation of the vine and the olive by means of Oriental slaves used
to such culture, and later of slave manufactures in the towns. But the
evidence falls far short of the proposition. The main items are that
about 52 B.C. Italy began to export olive oil, and that certain towns
later won repute for pottery, textiles, arms, and so on. On the new
agriculture cp. Dureau de la Malle, i, 426-27.]
[Footnote 179: W.W. Carlile, _The Evolution of Modern Money_, 1901, pp.
46, 48.]
[Footnote 180: Cp. M'Culloch, _Essays and Treatises_, 2nd ed. pp. 58-64,
and refs.]
[Footnote 181: Cp. Hodgkin, _The Dynasty of Theodosius_, 1889, pp.
19-20. From Severus onwards the silver coinage had in fact become "mere
_billon_ money," mostly copper. Carlile, as cited.]
[Footnote 182: On this cp. Pöhlmann, _Die Uebervölkerung der antiken
Grossstädte_, p.37, and Engel, as there cited.]
[Footnote 183: As to the probable nature of this much-discussed law see
Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, i, chs. xi and xii. Cp. Niebuhr,
_Lect._ 89.]
[Footnote 184: Plutarch, _Tiberius Gracchus_, c. 8.]
[Footnote 185: As Long remarks (i, 171), it does not appear what
Tiberius Gracchus proposed to do with the slaves when he had put freemen
in their place. Cp. Cunningham, p. 150.]
[Footnote 186: Cp. Pelham, _Outlines_, pp. 191-92; Ferrero, ch. iii.]
[Footnote 187: Robiou et Delaunay, _Les institutions de l'ancienne
Rome_, 1888, iii, 18.]
[Footnote 188: Cp. Juvenal, iii, 21 _sq._; 162 _sq._]
[Footnote 189: For the history of the practice, see the article
"Frumentariae Leges," in Smith's _Dictionary of Antiquities_.]
[Footnote 190: The first step by Gracchus does not seem to have been
much resisted (Merivale, _Fall of the Roman Republic_, p. 22; but cp.
Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, i, 262), such measures having
been for various reasons resorted to at times in the past (Pliny, _Hist.
Nat._ xviii, 1; Livy, ii, 34); but in the reaction which followed, the
process was for a time restricted (Merivale, p. 34).]
[Footnote 191: It seems to have been he who, as consul, first caused the
distribution to be made gratuitous. See Cicero, _ad Attic._ ii, 19, and
_De Domo Sua_, cc. 10, 15. The Clodian law, making the distribution
gratuitous, was passed next year.]
[Footnote 192: Suetonius, _Julius_, c. 41.]
[Footnote 193: Dio Cassius, xliii, 24.]
[Footnote 194: It must have been the relative dearness of land transport
that kept the price of corn so low in Cisalpine Gaul in the time of
Polybius, who describes a remarkable abundance (ii, 15).]
[Footnote 195: Suetonius, _Aug._ cc. 40, 41.]
[Footnote 196: _Hist. Nat._ xviii, 7 (6).]
[Footnote 197: Cp. his _Economicus_, chs. 5, 9, 11, 20, etc.]
[Footnote 198: Meyer, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, 682 (§ 379).]
[Footnote 199: Plutarch, _Tiberius Gracchus_, c. 8.]
[Footnote 200: _E.g._, in the provinces of Africa (Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii,
445) and Sicily (Pelham, _Outlines_, p. 121).]
[Footnote 201: Cp. Pliny, as last cited.]
[Footnote 202: The Italians consumed large quantities of pork, mainly
raised in the north (Polybius ii, 15; xii. fr. 1). Aurelian began a pork
as well as a wine and oil ration for the Romans (Vopiscus, _Aurelianus_,
35, 47); and under Valentinian III the annual consumption in the city of
Rome was 3,628,000 lbs., there being then a free distribution to the
poor during five months of the year. Gibbon calculates that it sold at
less than 2d. per lb. (Bohn ed. iii, 417-18.)]
[Footnote 203: Cp. Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i, 372-75,
392, 398; Merivale, _History_, c. 32; ed. 1873, iv, 42; M'Culloch, as
cited, pp. 286-92; Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 43; Gibbon, Bohn ed.
iii, 418; Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Years of the Roman Empire_,
2nd ed. p. 122 and refs.; and Blanqui, _Histoire de l'économie
politique_, 2e éd. i, 123, as to the progression of the policy of
feeding the populace. Cp. also Suetonius, _in Aug._ c. 42.]
[Footnote 204: There is, however, reason to surmise that the murder of
Pertinax was planned, not by the prætorians who did the deed, but by the
official and moneyed class who detested his reforms. See them specified
by Gibbon, ch. iv, _end_.]
[Footnote 205: It is noteworthy that in the United States the New
England region, producing neither coal nor iron, neither cotton nor
(latterly) wheat, continues to retain a manufacturing primacy as against
the South, in virtue of the (in part climatic) industry and skill of its
population.]
[Footnote 206: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. large ed. v, 5
(_Provinces_, vol. i); Gibbon, ch. iii, near end (Bohn ed. i, 104); cp.
Mahaffy, _The Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 397; Milman, _History of
Christianity_, Bk. I, ch. vi; Renan, _Les Apôtres_, ed. 1866, p. 312;
and Hegewisch, as cited by Finlay (i, 80, _note_), who protests that the
favourable view cannot be taken of the state of Greece and Egypt. Mr.
Balfour (_Decadence_, 1908, p. 18) chimes in with Mommsen and the rest.]
[Footnote 207: Cp. Pelham, _Outlines_, p. 473.]
[Footnote 208: Gibbon, ch. xvii; Bohn ed. ii, 194, and _notes_.]
[Footnote 209: Symmachus speaks of a famine about the time of the
confiscation of the temple revenues. Ep. x, 54.]
[Footnote 210: Valentinian had resumed those temple revenues which had
been restored by Julian, but went no further, though he vetoed the
acquisition of legacies by his own church. That Gratian's step was
rather financial than fanatical is proved by his having at the same time
endowed the pagan rhetors and grammarians as a small religious _quid pro
quo_. Beugnot, _Hist. de la destr. du paganisme en occident_, 1835, i,
478.]
[Footnote 211: There was a fresh relapse after Theodoric, in the ruinous
wars between Justinian and the Goths and Franks. Revival began in the
north under the Lombards, and was stimulated in the south after the
revolt of Gregory II against Leo the Iconoclast, which made an end of
the payment of Italian tribute to Byzantium. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 127,
372, 377.)]
[Footnote 212: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Écon. polit. des Romains_, ii,
24 _sq._]
[Footnote 213: _Hist. Nat._ iii, ix, 16.]
[Footnote 214: _Id. ib._ 6.]
[Footnote 215: Livy, vii, 38.]
[Footnote 216: Mommsen, i, 36. Mommsen does not deny the deterioration.]
[Footnote 217: Sueton. _Julius_, c. 20.]
[Footnote 218: _E.g._ Jacob, _Hist. Inq. into the Prod. and Consump. of
the Precious Metals_, 1831, i, 221 _sq._]
[Footnote 219: Cp. Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xii, 18 (41).]
[Footnote 220: Cp. Del Mar, _History of the Precious Metals_, 1880,
pref. p. vi; _Money and Civilisation_, 1886, introd. p. ix.]
[Footnote 221: Cp. Polybius, cited by Strabo, iii, ii, § 10; Jacob,
_Hist. of the Precious Metals_, i, 176.]
[Footnote 222: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. pol. des Romains_, ii,
441; Merivale, _History_, iv, 44.]
[Footnote 223: Jacob, as cited, i, 179.]
[Footnote 224: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237. Cp. Prof. Bury's note
in his ed., and Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, i, 301
_sq._]
[Footnote 225: On this form of oppression cp. Guizot, _Essais sur
l'histoire de France_, i; his note on Gibbon, Bohn ed. ii, 234; Dill,
_Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_, B. iii, ch.
2; and Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, pp. 188, 189.]
[Footnote 226: Spalding, _Italy_, i, 398, following Symmachus.]
[Footnote 227: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237, citing _Cod.
Theodos._ xi, 28, 2. Cp. Dill, pp. 259-60.]
[Footnote 228: Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 260.]
[Footnote 229: Anastasius in his reign of twenty-seven years had saved
an enormous treasure, whence it is arguable that Justinian's straits
were due to bad management. But while he enlarged the expenditure,
chiefly for military purposes, he also enlarged the revenue by very
oppressive means, and practised some new economies. The fact remains
that where Anastasius could hoard with a non-imperialist policy,
Justinian, re-expanding the Empire, could not. See Gibbon, ch. 40,
_passim_. Non-military expenditure could not account for the final
deficit in Justinian's treasury. Even the great church of San Sofia does
not seem to have cost above £1,000,000. _Id._ Bohn ed. iv, 335.]
[Footnote 230: "Here [in Egypt], as in Palestine, as in Syria, as in the
country about the Euphrates, the efforts of the Persians could never
have been attended with such immediate and easy success but for the
disaffection of large masses of the population. This disaffection rested
chiefly on the religious differences" (Bury, _History of the Later Roman
Empire_, ii, 214). Compare Gibbon, ch. 47, Bohn ed. v, 275; and Mosheim,
_Eccles. Hist._, 5 Cent, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 2, 4, 5 (Reid's ed. pp.
179-81). As to the welcoming of the Saracens in Egypt by the
Monophysites, see Gibbon, ch. 51, Bohn ed. vi, 59-60. Cp. Sharpe, _Hist.
of Egypt_, 6th ed. ii, 371; Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii,
213; Finlay, i, 370-71.]
[Footnote 231: _E.g._ the _tome_ of St. Leo, the Laws of Marcian, the
_Henoticon of Zeno_, and the laws of Justinian; and the _ecthesis_ and
_typus_ of Heraclius and Constans II--all retailed by Gibbon, ch. 47.]
[Footnote 232: Finlay immediately afterwards (p. 139) declares of the
choice of Byzantium by Constantine as his capital that "its first effect
was to preserve the unity of the Eastern Empire." The admission is
repeated on p. 140, where the whole credit of the stand made by the East
is given to the administration. Cp. also the explanations as to Italy on
p. 235, and as to Byzantium on p. 184. The theory of p. 138 is utterly
unsupported, and on p. 289 it is practically repudiated once for all.
Cp. finally, pp. 217, 276, 298, 309, 328, 329, 347, 348, and pp. 361 and
371. On p. 276 we have the explicit admission that the hostility to the
Roman Government throughout the East [in the sixth century] was
everywhere connected with an opposition to the Greek "clergy."]
Chapter II
GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION
§ 1
In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the
tendency to the accumulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the
strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which
aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the
demos[233] was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory
in literature and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the
ancient world see in slavery anything but an institution to be defended
against ethical attack as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of
all this, we may reasonably hold that even if there had been no
Macedonian dominance and no Roman conquest, Greek civilisation would not
have gone on progressing indefinitely after the period which we now mark
as its zenith--that the evil lot of the lower strata must in time have
infected the upper. What we have here briefly to consider, however, is
the actual economic course of affairs.
For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek
communities under two classes: (1) those whose incomes, down through the
historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave
or free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished
chiefly by commerce, whether with or without military domination, as
Athens and Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in
different degrees as regards both time and place, there were steep
divisions of lot between rich and poor, even among the free. Nowhere,
not even in early "Lycurgean" Sparta, was there any system aiming at the
methodical prevention of large estates, or the prevention of poverty,
though the primitive basis was one of military communism, and though
certain sumptuary laws and a common discipline were long maintained.
Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of
Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch. viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an
equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove that, as
regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains
either to restrain the enrichment of the former or to prevent the
impoverishment of the latter"--this even as regards born Spartans.
As to the early military communism of Sparta and Crete, see Meyer,
_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, § 210; and as to the economic
process see Fustel de Coulanges, _Nouvelles recherches sur quelques
problèmes d'histoire_, 1891, pp. 99-118.
Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of
industry and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis,
solved by Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her
economic development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that
the mass of the people, blind to the importance of the political rights
conferred upon them, were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's
"shaking-off-of-burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a
"tyrant" who even laid upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie
in points of fiscal policy to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon
it is recorded[235] that he made a law against the export of any food
produce of Attica save oil--the yield of the olive. This implied that of
that product only was there in his opinion a redundancy; and we have it
from the same source that he "saw that the soil was so poor that it
could only suffice for the farmers," and so "gave great honour to
trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father
if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a travelled
merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to
despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are
led to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of
manufactures, _plus_ oil, and on the other the importation of corn and
other food. In point of fact, grain was already being imported in
increasing quantity from the recently colonised lands of Sicily and the
Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or lightly taxed the inland
cultivators would have a local grievance in the depression of the prices
of their produce.
The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in
the carriage and development of manufactures--vases, weapons, objects of
art--which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them
their food from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion
impossible to an agricultural community on the same soil; and could so
escape that fate of shrinkage in the free class which ultimately fell
upon purely agricultural Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before
Solon, Athens had commercial interests among her pretexts for war, and
so widened the sphere of her hostilities, escaping the worst forms of
"stasis" in virtue of the expansibility of commerce and the openings for
new colonisation which commerce provided and widened. But colonisation
there had to be. Precisely by reason of her progressiveness, her
openness to the alien, her trade and her enterprise, Attica increased in
population at a rate which enforced emigration, while the lot of the
rural population did not economically improve, and the probable change
from corn-growing to olive-culture[238] would lessen the number of
people employed on the land. Even apart from the fact of the popular
discontent which welcomed the _tyrannis_ of Peisistratos, we cannot
doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude the old phenomena of
poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans to immigrate,[239]
while it made for the democratic development and naval strength of
Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new economic crisis.
And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of population. The
traditional permission given by the sage to parents to expose infants,
implicitly avows the insoluble problem--the "cursed fraction" in the
equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the approach of
Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about 570) its
first _kleruchie_, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory--this
by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the
easiest compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.
[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants
is made by Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by
Lecky. The law in question is not mentioned by Plutarch, and I do
not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is stated,
however, by Sextus Empiricus (_Hypotyp_. iii, 24) that Solon made a
law by which a parent could put his child to death; and this
passage, which is cited by Hume in his _Essay on the Populousness
of Ancient Nations_, is doubtless Malthus's authority. Nothing
nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on
Solon; but this could very well stand as a permission of
infanticide, especially seeing that the practice is presumptively
prehistoric. Petit writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in patris
erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo
judicio, non tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (_Leges
Atticæ_, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling, 1742). Grote (ii, 470, _note_)
pronounces that the statement of Sextus "cannot be true, and must
be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius
the Halicarnassian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the
_patria potestas_ among the Romans with the restrictions which all
the Greek legislators, Solon included, either found or introduced.
Dr. Mahaffy (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the
notion of exposing infants from _economical_ motives not to have
prevailed till later times" than the seventh century B.C., but he
gives no reason for fixing any date. We may take it as certain that
while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables, enjoined
or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the
general Greek usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it
at Thebes (Ælian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7) implies its previous
normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, _Pol._ vii,
16); and the _sale_ of children by their (free) parents was further
permitted, except in Attica (Ingram, _History of Slavery_, p. 16);
while even there a freeman's children by a slave concubine were
slaves.]
On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the
military strength of the State considered as the small free population,
were ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the
number of "pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of
primogeniture, with a rigid severance between the upper class and the
lower, there could in fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the
revolts of the helots and the chronic massacres of these by their lords,
which put such a stamp of atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress
of class strife seems to have been limited among the aristocracy, not
only by systematic infanticide, but by the survival of polyandry,
several brothers often having one wife in common.[243] Whether owing to
infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives, families of three and
four were uncommon and considered large, and special privileges offered
to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed against the
pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course, the
_perioikoi_ and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy
of specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as
massacre. In other States, where the polity was more civilised, many
observers perceived that the two essential conditions of stability were
(_a_) absolute or approximate equality of property, and (_b_) restraint
of population, the latter principle being a notable reaction of reason
against the normal practice of encouraging or compelling marriage.[246]
Aristotle said in so many words that to let procreation go unchecked "is
to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of
sedition and evil";[247] and he cites previous publicists who had sought
to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato had partly contemplated it; and
the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more brutal methods;[248] but
Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population difficulty, perhaps on
that account is the less disposed towards communism.
As medical knowledge advanced, it seems certain, the practice of
abortion must have been generally added to that of infanticide in
Greece, as later in Rome. See Aristotle, _Politics_, vii, 16;
Plutarch, _Lycurgus_, c. 3; and Plato, _Theætetus_, p. 149
(Jowett's trans. iv, 202), as to the normal resort to abortion. The
Greeks must have communicated to the Romans the knowledge of the
arts of abortion, as they did those of medicine generally. But it
does not appear that with all these checks population really fell
off in Greece until after the time of Alexander. Before that time
it may very well have fallen off in Athens when she lost her
position as sovereign and tribute-drawing State. The tribute would
tend to maintain a population in excess of the natural amount. Dr.
Mahaffy (_Rambles and Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. p. 11--a passage
not squared with the data in _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 328,
558) accepts the old view of a general and inexplicable
depopulation. One of the _loci classici_ on that head, in the
treatise _On the Cessation of Oracles_ (viii) attributed to
Plutarch but probably not by him, is searchingly examined by Hume
at the close of his essay _Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations_,
and the critic comes to the conclusion that the extreme decay there
asserted cannot have taken place. He was in all probability right
in arguing that the number of slaves in Attica had been enormously
exaggerated in the figures of Athenæus (cp. Cunningham, _Western
Civilisation_, i, 109, note). There is reason to conclude, however,
that Hume was unduly incredulous on some points. Strabo (refs. in
Thirlwall, viii, 460) had found an immense decay of population in
Greece more than a century before Plutarch; and his details prove a
process of shrinkage which must have lasted long. In any case, a
relative depopulation took place after the conquests of Alexander,
from the operation of socio-economic causes, which are indicated by
Finlay (_History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15; cp. Mahaffy, _Greek
Life and Thought_, p. 328, and _The Greek World under Roman Sway_,
1890, p. 218). Broadly speaking, the Greeks went to lands where
wealth was more easily acquired than in their own. Further
depopulation took place under the Romans, partly from direct
violence and deportation, partly from fiscal pressure, partly from
the economic causes already noted.
Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249]
confidently decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and
moral. Such a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no
clear idea of the facts, since he asserts that "in our time" and
"rapidly" there took place in Greece a "failure of offspring" (or
"dearth of children"), which left cities desolate and land waste; and
goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which either kept men from
marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few of their children.
The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could not have been so
depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to slaughter, a
drain of population to lands where the conditions were more
advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that
child-exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that
marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius.
It is true that pæderasty would count for much in lowering character;
but it had been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius,
and had not affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in
Sparta for other reasons.
As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life
was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even
in the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded
quantity and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the
normal play of self-interest in the governing class brought about a
continuous shrinkage in the number of enfranchised citizens and of
those holding land, till there were only 700 of the former and 100 of
the latter--this when there were still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure"
descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable of military service. Even of the
hundred landowners many were women, the estates having thus evidently
aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It mattered little that
this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over Athens and in the
post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of Greece:[253] the
evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode of their
revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the
community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division
of the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained
himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time.
Accumulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific
and permanent system.
Schemes for promoting equality had been mooted in Greece from an
early period (see Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 6, 7, 8). Thus,
"Pheidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest of legislators, thought
that the families and number of citizens ought to continue the
same." Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed to keep fortunes and culture
equal; and Hippodamus the Milesian had a system of equality for a
State of 10,000 persons. Some States, too, put restraints on the
accumulation of land. But, save for transient successes, such as
that of Solon at Athens, and of the compromise at Tarentum (see
Aristotle, v, 5; and Müller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 184-86), there
was no adequate adjustment of means to ends, as indeed there could
not be. Aristotle's own practical suggestions show the hopelessness
of the problem.
In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth
tended to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get
into so few hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were
more and more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich class
which could be best got at by way of taxation. In such communities,
though the division and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable
as in Sparta, there was more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see
maritime and trading communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining
their oligarchic government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman
period,[254] somewhat as Venice in a later age outlasted the other
chief republics of Italy. The ruin of Corinth, though indirectly
promoted by class strifes,[255] need not have occurred but for the Roman
overthrow.[256]
As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions
concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public
buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the
contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its
houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their
better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by
them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first
need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even
sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield
materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piræus and Munychia
were walled on a still greater scale--the whole constituting a public
work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation
of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the
city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to
the now safe Piræus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to
set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the
Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the
generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of
ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had
houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the
natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from
the Athenian supremacy. But Dicæarchus belongs to the same period, and
his account represents the mass of the city as poor in appearance, the
houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets
crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty
spaces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the
houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a
rather straitened equality among the mass of the town-dwelling free
citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the
form of the public baths and gymnasia.
Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver
mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised
citizens--an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each,
but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with
the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this
fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian
maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort
tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the
greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever
attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for
and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the
artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so
creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of
Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far
beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale;
it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to
multitudes of poorer free citizens--an experiment unique in history. The
main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the
members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an
order numbering some six thousand; (3) the _theorikon_ or allowance of
theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the
soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices;
(6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the
sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were
billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six
thousand in ten years. Without taking the _a priori_ hostile view of the
aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this--a view endorsed
later by Plato and Socrates--the common-sense politician must note the
utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did
absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the
expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian
war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and parties, already
bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]
In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the
Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens
begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we
find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience,
proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up
the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to
pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient
revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the
encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by
exempting them from military service and from all forms of public
stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they
would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the
citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement
of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest,
paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns,
shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners,
and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the
merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all,
it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the
yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there
employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should
further set about finding new mines.
We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic
problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish,
alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true
economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could
not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The
income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid
by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army
of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers
of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues
paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing
all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that
the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that
the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The
old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the
taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments
for the religious festival drama and other public services from the
rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to
decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners
for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally,
the middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures
and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were
mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the
State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free
citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400
B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of
Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which
was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be
affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest.
The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary
view as to the poverty of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See
above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (_Lectures on Roman History_, Eng. tr. 3rd
ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling the
Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of Cox, _General
History_, 2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil
could not compete with the output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the
Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to a low level (Curtius'
_History_, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii).
As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x,
410, 412, 413. When it became possible thus to draw a revenue from
investment, the Athenian publicists rapidly developed the
capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support of
trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix.
§ 2
In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and
subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a
secondary place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of
its newly acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and
population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece
proper would tend to pass into fewer hands,[271] thus _pro tanto_
narrowing more than ever the free and cultured class, and relatively
enlarging that of the slaves.
[Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) dwells on the variety of manufactures,
and here gives a juster view than does Dr. Mahaffy, who (_Social
Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 406) oddly speaks of the lack of
machinery as making "any large employment of hands in manufacture
impossible." But the main manufacture, that of arms, was peculiarly
dependent on the Athenian command of the confederate treasure; and
it does not appear that the other manufactures were a source of
much revenue till just before the period of political decline, when
other causes combined to check Athenian trade. By that time the
aristocratic class had weakened in their old prejudice against all
forms of commerce (Mahaffy, as cited; Boeckh, as cited), which had
hitherto kept it largely in the hands of aliens, this long after
the time when, at Corinth and other ports, the ruling class had
been constituted of the rich traders; and after the special efforts
of Solon to encourage and enforce industry. Apart from this
prejudice, which in many States put a political disability on
traders, commerce had always been hampered by war and bad policy.
Dr. Mahaffy (_Social Life_, p. 405) somewhat over-confidently
follows Heeren and Boeckh in deciding that none of the Greek trade
laws were in the interests of particular trades or traders; but
even if they were not, they none the less hampered all commerce.
Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. As Hume observed, the high rates of
profit and interest prevailing in Greece show an early stage of
commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, chs. ix, xxii.]
Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would
find themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would
raise all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy,
formerly the study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and
thence always associated more or less with the spirit of
aristocracy,[272] was now often cultivated by men of humble status.[273]
The new rich then appear to have already fallen away somewhat from the
old Athenian standards; while the attraction of poorer men was
presumably caused in part by the process of endowment of the philosophic
schools begun by Plato in his will--an example soon followed by
others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is due to this economic
cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation of the
prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was
relatively decaying.
The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute
violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and
later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and
small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia
Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn
would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial
pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133
B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily--a proof of
fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek
systems of municipal government, and had begun by putting on light
taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in
which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse.
Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, massacred most of the
citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piræus; whereafter Athens
practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth,
which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately
reconstructed by Cæsar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what
commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the
Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had
arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and
other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further
swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted,
it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by
simple kidnapping.
[The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a
Roman emporium (Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, § 1). Mahaffy (_Greek World
under Roman Sway_, p. 154) regards the pirates as largely
anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But
previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7)
recognises the connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman
when the Romans, who had so long tolerated them as slave-traders
(as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done before), were driven to
keep them in check as pirates.]
Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of
the pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of
greedy proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful
memories. In the civil wars before and after Cæsar's fall, Greece was
harried by both sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus
depopulation and impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under
Roman rule.[279] Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the
rulers was made an engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their
taxes were sold as slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at
usurious rates in the old Roman fashion; and the parasitic class of
so-called Roman citizens, as such free of taxation, tended to absorb the
remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in turn tended to take the shape of
luxuries bought from the really productive provinces; and the fatality
of the unproductive communities, lack of the bullion which they in a
double degree required, for the time overtook Greece very much as it
overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle of exterior
splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings, and as
regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer
hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers;
but the lot of the mass of the people must have been depressed to the
verge of endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief.
As it was, the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of
the capitalistic, official, and parasitic classes on the one hand, and
of slaves and poor on the other.[281]
The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly
intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its
newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more
active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days.
In the ages of expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its
cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic
population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a
sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a
wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial
hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive
equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their
frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of
Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at
one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once
forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt
and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic
level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They
flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at
the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now
restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on
the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the
life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population,
grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions.
In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity,
passing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time
to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane
that typified it.
§ 3
It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman
Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it
were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for
the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the
Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and
administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial
succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as
a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system
which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held
it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the Roman
plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking
world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.
The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty
and uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication
of slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian
empires, the Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would
necessarily be checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by
the continued shrinkage of the rich class. Agriculture in Greece, as in
Italy, could not compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in
special cultures, would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again,
the manufactures carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled
greatly; and the small wealthy class could not and would not maintain
more than a certain number of slaves for household purposes. The records
of the religious associations, too, as we shall see, seem to prove that
men who were slaves in status had practical freedom of life, and the
power of disposing of part of their earnings; whence it may be inferred
that many owners virtually liberated their slaves, though retaining a
legal claim over them. In this state of things population would
gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type of poor
semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of comfort than
had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated, who would
largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living mainly on
olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and country. On
that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive, especially
when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We are
prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like
Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284]
The expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of
the philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such
a revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy
lost it, with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While
domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the
imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.
A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire
of the Arsacidæ by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The Arsacidæ, though often at
war with the Romans, still represented the Hellenistic civilisation,
whereas the Sassanidæ zealously returned to the ancient Persian
religion, the exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western
commerce,[285] even while the cult of Mithra, Hellenised to the extent
of being specially associated with image-worship, was spreading widely
in the West. Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece,
the Indian and Chinese trade passing north and south of Persia.[286] The
removal of the seat of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly
lessening the Italian drain on the provinces, would still further assist
the Greek revival after the Gothic invasion had come and gone. Thus we
find the larger Greek world in the time of Constantine grown once more
so important that in the struggle between him and Licinius his great
naval armament, composed chiefly of European Greeks, was massed in the
restored Piræus. The fleet of Licinius, made up chiefly by Asiatic and
Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative decline on that side of the
Empire's resources.[287] When, finally, Constantine established the new
seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to draw thither all the streams
of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as the centre of the revenues
of the Eastern Empire, some such population as had once flourished in
Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to commerce and industry in the
lower class population as well as in the middle class. To the government
of this population was brought the highly developed organisation of the
later Pagan Empire, joined with an ecclesiastical system from which
heresy was periodically eliminated by the imperial policy, aided by the
positive intellectual inferiority of the new Greek-speaking species.
There was prosperity enough for material life; and the political and
religious system was such as to prevent the normal result of prosperity,
culture, from developing independently. The much-divided Greek world had
at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a possibility of
quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to sustain and
repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,[288]
and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its
neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.
§ 4
We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised
empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit
much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been
extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new
creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for
itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superstitious rich women, an
amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days
of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in
pagan practice; for in the days of substitution of emotional Eastern
cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there had grown up a
multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious,
semi-festival purposes--_thiasoi_, _eranoi_, and _orgeones_, all
cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of
Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called
"Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations
of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely
open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were
absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their
means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the
Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though
still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the
democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower
strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some
such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions
and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and
establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process
analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of
Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but
governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of
sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power
of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective
means of keeping it practically subordinate.
The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was
the cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western
fell,[293] has made the countervailing admission that between Justinian
and Heraclius there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the
Byzantine State, which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable
principle of Roman centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly
destroyed by its enemies and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province
after province had been taken by the Persians in the East; Slavs and
Avars were driving back the population from the northern frontiers, even
harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent enabled Phocas to dethrone and
execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in turn was utterly defeated by
the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to check the continuity of
disaster, and to place the now circumscribed Empire on a footing of
possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far the economic
and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it was.
Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that of
imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder,
provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian
conquest of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the
emperor's inability to feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause
of regeneration, inasmuch as the State was forcibly relieved of the
burden, and many of the idlers became available for the army about to be
led by the emperor against the menacing Persians. He was reduced,
however, to the expedient of offering to continue the supply on a
payment of three pieces of gold from each claimant, and finally to
breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing to transfer his
capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and the
clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large
loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the nobility who had hitherto
hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians,
however, only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the
Arabs; the first financial result of his successes having been to tax to
exasperation the recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical
loan with usury; and the circumscribed Empire under his successors could
not, even if the emperors wished, resume the feeding of the mass of the
citizens. Constantinople, though still drawing some tribute from the
remaining provinces in Italy, was thus perforce reduced to a safe
economic basis, even as the people in general had been coerced into
united effort by the imminent danger from Persia.
From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the
contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and
commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength,
managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The
new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles
in warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was
the possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures
of mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the
far East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval
European world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple,
and the virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and
western Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power
in Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the
Saracen conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this
source of strength; for the Saracen administration, though often wise
and energetic, was in Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit
of trade flourishing there in any superlative degree. The Byzantines
continued to trade with India by the Black Sea and Central Asian route;
and their monopolies and imposts, however grievous, were relatively
bearable compared with the afflictions of commerce under other powers.
As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking folk were the traders of the
Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching sufficient power to check
them; and when finally its remnants took to piracy, they served rather
to cut off all weaker competition than to affect the preponderating
naval power of the Empire.
In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the
eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic,
the rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely
feeble,[297] though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the
Peloponnesus[298] must have lived by that means. Under such
circumstances the towns would be fed by imported grain, presumably that
of the Crimea; but as they did not grow in size, at least in the case of
the capital, their industrial prosperity must have largely depended on
the restriction of population, whether by vice, preventive checks,
misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life, which at the present
day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining themselves save by
influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to the legal
veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these
things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice,
child-exposure, and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor
population within the limits of subsistence.
Mr. Oman (_Byzantine Empire_, p. 145) takes the popular view as to
the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe
Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to
prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing
had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted
the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all
exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of
the pagan practice at Thebes (Ælian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7). But in
spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule,
exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian
sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of
Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, _Hist. of European
Morals_, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.
Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is
pictured for us by Chrysostom--a multitude profoundly ignorant,
superstitious, excitable, sensuous--all the vices of the
Græco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must
have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread.
On the general moral environment, cp. the author's _Short History
of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.
It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a
conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian
Empire. We are still told[300] that the Christian doctrine or
implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly
modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research
proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic
causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and
in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301] the efficient causes
remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other causes can be shown
to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303] and
treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to
Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early
Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held
slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word
is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter
of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate
it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which
we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and
to have become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic
auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a
definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand
set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308] Among the Christian
Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were
forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was
burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest
slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold
without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It
cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants
of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more
humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find
Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and
brutally flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the
atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The
admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their
slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging
force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's
secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population
outside its own lands.[313] The spirit of the Justinian code, despite
its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of
the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of
spiritual equality between bond and free.
On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the
possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the
last,[314] but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural
districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal
freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely analysed the
conditions:--
"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher
classes and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small
proprietors and cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of
the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of
great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as
important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed
proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on
the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent
the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in
the cultivation of lands assessed for the land-tax, to other
employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the
slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the
imperial treasury.[315] The avarice of the imperial treasury, by
reducing the mass of the free population to the same degree of
poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of
the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of its
moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political
position in society as the poor labourer from the moment that the
Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands
for the space of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his
descendants, to the same estate.[316] The lower orders were from
that period blended into one class; the slave rose to be a member
of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary
for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for
the extinction of slavery. _Such was the progress of civilisation
in the Eastern Empire._ The measures of Justinian which, by their
fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same
state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the
rise of the slaves _as soon as any general improvement took place
in the condition of the human race_."[317]
For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus constituted
had much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to
follow their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the
East,[318] and none of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in
Byzantine life. Still, the fact remains that the commercial and
industrial life sustained the political, and that the political began
definitely to fail when the commercial did. Constantinople could hardly
have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if its commerce had not
already begun to dwindle through interception by Venice and the Italian
trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade directly with the
East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the stream of
commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the secret of
her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn undermined. On
the economic weakening, the political followed; and the Eastern Empire
finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had fallen
before the Goths.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 233: Aristotle, _Politics_, v, 9.]
[Footnote 234: _Id._ i, 2.]
[Footnote 235: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 24.]
[Footnote 236: _Id._ c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy, _Thucydides and the History
of his Age_, 1911, p. 66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting
manufactures.]
[Footnote 237: Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 38.
Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.]
[Footnote 238: Cp. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i (1898), 100-2.]
[Footnote 239: Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other
cities, as Corinth, in trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in
Solon's time (Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 22; Busolt, _Griechische
Geschichte_, i, 501).]
[Footnote 240: Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them
from lately recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii,
462.]
[Footnote 241: Plutarch, _Agis._ c. 5; Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9;
Thirlwall, viii, 133.]
[Footnote 242: The arguments of K.O. Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii,
c. 3, §§ 3-5) in discredit of the received view, though not without
weight, have never carried general conviction. Cp. Maisch, _Manual of
Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 17.]
[Footnote 243: See the recovered passage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed.
Hultsch) cited (from Mai, _Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor._ ii, 384) by
Müller (_Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp. M'Lennan, _Kinship in Ancient
Greece_, § 2.]
[Footnote 244: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's
unhesitating assumption (ii, 10) as to the normality and the effects of
pæderasty, cp. the refutation of Müller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. b. iv, c.
4, §§ 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of population, see b.
iii, c. 10, § 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the propertied
class, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through accumulations,
which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is
narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the
pure Spartan population was not a result of vice, any more than the
normal dwindling of the numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be
remembered that younger sons would be likely to have illegitimate
offspring among the helots, if not among the _perioikoi_. The selfish
aristocracy thus wrought for its own class extinction.]
[Footnote 245: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 22.]
[Footnote 246: See refs. in Fustel de Coulanges, _La cité antique_, 1.
iii, ch. xviii, p. 265.]
[Footnote 247: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 6.]
[Footnote 248: Cp. the _Republic_, v, and the _Laws_ (bks. v, xi;
Jowett's tr. 3rd ed. v, pp. 122, 313) with the _Politics_, vii, 16.]
[Footnote 249: _Fr. Vat._ xxxvii, 9.]
[Footnote 250: Cp. Hume, essay cited, as to the slight effect of the
exposure check in China.]
[Footnote 251: Above, p. 101.]
[Footnote 252: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9; Plutarch, _Agis_, c. 7.]
[Footnote 253: Athenæus, citing Phylarchus, iv, 20.]
[Footnote 254: Grote, x, 402; Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 457;
_Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 237; M'Culloch, _Treatises and
Essays_, ed. 1859, pp. 276-78.]
[Footnote 255: Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 452.]
[Footnote 256: M'Culloch, as cited, p. 275.]
[Footnote 257: Thucydides, i, 93.]
[Footnote 258: Grote, iv, 341, 342.]
[Footnote 259: Citations in Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12.]
[Footnote 260: Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12. Cp. De Pauw, _Recherches
philosophiques sur les Grecs_, 1787, i, 55-60.]
[Footnote 261: See E. Ardaillon, _Les mines du Laurion dans
l'antiquité_, 1897, ch. v.]
[Footnote 262: The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the
"Pelasgi," do not figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the
fifth century B.C. Ardaillon, pp. 126-27.]
[Footnote 263: As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such
buildings as the Propylæa and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy, _Survey of
Greek Civilisation_, p. 143, and M'Cullagh, _Industrial History of the
Free Nations_, 1846, i, 166, 167.]
[Footnote 264: "Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than
many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political
importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no
artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina,
Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies.
She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and
Æolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the
Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend
towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch.
xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly"
(Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.]
[Footnote 265: This view appears to be substantially at one with the
reasoning of Dr. Cunningham (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 112-23). I must
dissent, however, from his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was
the _mode_ of the expenditure that was wrong, and that Athens might have
employed her ill-gotten capital "productively" in the modern economic
sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre, cited by him, seem to be beside
the argument.]
[Footnote 266: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 11.]
[Footnote 267: Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.]
[Footnote 268: _On the Revenues._]
[Footnote 269: As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.]
[Footnote 270: Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be
adhered to; but the whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general
vindication of it is puzzling (Trans. pref. xv, _note_).]
[Footnote 271: See Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands unter der
Herrschaft der Römer_, Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates
now acquired by a few.]
[Footnote 272: In Magna Graecia, in particular, the whole Pythagorean
movement had such associations in a high degree. Note the frequency of
names beginning anax (= king or chief) in the history of early
Greek philosophy.]
[Footnote 273: Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 136.]
[Footnote 274: _Idem_, pp. 145-49; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iv, 352.]
[Footnote 275: _E.g._, the whole population of Corinth; and 150,000
inhabitants of Epirus.]
[Footnote 276: Cp. Finlay, i, 23.]
[Footnote 277: They exacted from Macedonia only half the tribute it had
paid to its kings; but there is a strong presumption that it was too
impoverished after the war to pay more.]
[Footnote 278: "The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon
equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the regular taxes" (Finlay, i, 39).
Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek World under Roman Sway_, pp. 145, 156, 159, 161,
162.]
[Footnote 279: Cp. Hertzberg, _Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrsch.
der Römer_, Th. i, Kap. 5, pp. 486-91.]
[Footnote 280: Finlay, i, 45, 46, 74.]
[Footnote 281: "We stand [1st c. A.C.] before a decayed society of very
rich men and slaves" (Mahaffy, _Greek World_, p. 268).]
[Footnote 282: Finlay, i, 73. But cp. Frazer, _Pausanias_, 1900, p. 4,
as to the decay in the second century.]
[Footnote 283: This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with
circumspection. In the first century A.C. the administration seems to
have been unoppressive (Mahaffy, _Greek World_, pp. 233, 237).]
[Footnote 284: Hertzberg (_Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der
Römer_, Th. ii, Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that
Greece reached the lowest degree of misery and depopulation under the
Flavian emperors ("about the time of Vespasian" is the first expression
in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay contradicts himself: cp. p. 66.
Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar zunehmende sociale
Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making the fact clear.
See below.]
[Footnote 285: This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later
surrender of a large Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when
the whole Greek population of the ceded districts was forced to
emigrate.]
[Footnote 286: Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.]
[Footnote 287: Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the
military importance of Greece by Julian.]
[Footnote 288: Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of
the fourth century by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that
wrought in the sixth century by Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.]
[Footnote 289: Sôtêriaotai is one of the group-names preserved.]
[Footnote 290: They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.]
[Footnote 291: Foucart, _Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs_,
1873, pp. 5-10.]
[Footnote 292: They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war
(Foucart, p. 66).]
[Footnote 293: Finlay, i, 85-86, _notes_.]
[Footnote 294: _Id._ i, 289.]
[Footnote 295: _Id._ p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.]
[Footnote 296: A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the
narratives of Gibbon, Finlay, and Mr. Oman (_The Byzantine Empire_, ch.
x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital;
Gibbon ignores the point as to the stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay
ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133) represents it as voluntary,
whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory (ch. 46. Bohn ed. v,
179, _note_). Mr. Bury alone (_History of the Later Roman Empire_, 1889,
ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He specifies
a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain
supply.]
[Footnote 297: Finlay, i, 425.]
[Footnote 298: _Id._ ii, 37.]
[Footnote 299: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 12.]
[Footnote 300: Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as
made by Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by
Milman, and countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon
(ii, 50-54). But such conventional formulas are always subject to
resuscitation.]
[Footnote 301: Finlay (i, 81) writes that "at this favourable
conjuncture Christianity stepped in to prevent avarice from ever
recovering the ground which humanity had gained." This clearly did not
happen, and his later chapters supply the true explanation.]
[Footnote 302: Finlay later says so in so many words (ii, 23, 220),
explicitly rejecting the Christian theory (see also p. 321). This
historian's views seem to have modified as his studies proceeded, but
without leading him to recast his earlier text.]
[Footnote 303: Luke xvii, 7-10, Gr. The translation "servant" is, of
course, an entire perversion.]
[Footnote 304: 1 Cor. vii, 21-24. The phrase unintelligibly garbled as
"use it rather" clearly means "rather remain a slave." "even" being
understood in the previous clause. This was the interpretation of
Chrysostom and most of the Fathers. See the Variorum Teacher's Bible,
_ad loc_. Cp. the whole first chapter of Larroque, _De l'esclavage chez
les nations chrétiennes_, 2nd édit. 1864; and the forcible passage of
Frédéric Morin, _Origines de la Démocratie_, 3e édit. 1865, pp. 384-86.
As Morin points out, the Church has never passed a theological
condemnation of slavery. On the other hand, it was expressly justified
by Augustine (_De Civ. Dei_, 1. xix, c. 15) as a divinely ordained
punishment for sin; and by Thomas Aquinas (_De regimine principum_, ii,
10) as being further a stimulus to bravery in soldiers. He cannot have
seen the Histories of Tacitus, where (ii, 4) civil wars are declared to
have been the most bloody, _because_ prisoners were not to be enslaved.]
[Footnote 305: Athenagoras, _Apology for Christianity_, c. 35;
Chrysostom, _passim_.]
[Footnote 306: _Instit. Justin._ I, iii, § 2, 4; v.]
[Footnote 307: _Politics_, i, 3.]
[Footnote 308: Cp. Michelet, _Hist. de France_, vol. vii, _Renaissance_,
note du § v. Introd. (ed. 1857, pp. 155-57). Michelet argues that the
Christian influence was substantially anti-liberationist.]
[Footnote 309: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.]
[Footnote 310: Chrysostom. 15th Hom. in Eph. (iv, 31); cp. 11th Hom. in
1 Thess. (v. 28).]
[Footnote 311: "Cum occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen.
Non solum hoc, sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiæ cæno
abutuntur" (_De gubernatione Dei_, iv).]
[Footnote 312: See below, pt. iv, ch. ii.]
[Footnote 313: Cp. the whole of Larroque's second chapter.]
[Footnote 314: So Mr. Oman admits, p. 148.]
[Footnote 315: _Cod. Theod._ xi, 3. 1, 2; _Cod. Justin._ xi, 47.]
[Footnote 316: _Cod. Justin._ xi, 47, 13 and 23. [A clear retrogression
to quasi-slavery for the freemen.]]
[Footnote 317: Finlay, i, 200, 201. Cp. p. 153.]
[Footnote 318: _Id._ ii, 27, and _note_. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.]
PART III
CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY
CHAPTER I
GREECE
§ 1
It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of
evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of
sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and
theocratic religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be
well, then, to consider some of these developments as processes of
social causation, in terms of the general principles above outlined.
[A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth
century, by whom the question of culture beginnings was much
discussed--_e.g._, Goguet's _De l'origine des lois, des arts, et
des sciences_, 1758; Ferguson's _Essay on the History of Civil
Society_, 1767; and Hume's essay on the _Rise and Progress of the
Arts and Sciences_. At the end of the century we find the solution
scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le germe de génie et des
talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas
propres à le faire éclore" (_Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce
humaine_, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx, _Des siècles les plus favorables aux
productions de génie_, pp. 348, 349). In England forty years later
we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There
is only one cause for the want of great men in any period--nature
does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of
education and circumstances" (_Literature of Europe_, pt. i, ch.
iii, § 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir
Francis Galton's argument in _Hereditary Genius_. Cp. the present
writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," in _The Forum_, April,
1898 (rep. in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii), and the able essay
of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester Ward
(_Dynamic Sociology_, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill
(_System of Logic_, bk. vi, ch. iv, § 4; cp. Bain, _J.S. Mill_, p.
146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to that of Hallam and
Galton, in assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only
opportunity.]
And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic
people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an
artist who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his
opinion, has on the whole a better right to it in this case than has the
average man to his. It is a man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite
faith, dear to those who teach, is that certain periods were especially
artistic, and that nations, readily named, were notably lovers of art.
So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people, worshippers of the
beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the
multitude....Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was
an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a paradox, is when
interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.
Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the
slow contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the
artistic species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were
uncritically used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown--and
the Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of
explanation. The probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic
Greece were moved to imitative construction by samples of the work of
foreigners. If, on the other hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved
relatively high artistic capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian
home,[320] it will still hold good that the early Ægean evolution owed
much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know
them visibly passed from primitive to high art in all things. Having
first had fetish Gods of unshapen stone, they made Gods in crudely human
shape, at first probably of wood, later of stone. So with vases,
goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts, all gradually
developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter art
worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes.
_Pace_ the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied
mainly because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse
is doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must
also have been special conditions to develop it in one country in the
special degree. That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was
oftener appealed to in Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more
freedom in the response, thus reaching new excellence. The early Greeks
can have had no very delicate taste, satisfied as they were with statues
as primitive as the conventional Assyrian types they copied.
Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on _The Discoveries in Crete_
(1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on
a given chronological view, the creators of the early Ægean
civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the
race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology.
Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total
potentialities. The determinants are the special _evocative_
conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic
fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr.
Mahaffy, despite his endorsement of Mr. Freeman's extravagant
estimate of Athenian intelligence:--"However national and diffused
it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and training, and
legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural
beauty was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent
was also rare and special" (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p.
430). All the remains, as well as every principle of sociological
science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber asserts
(_Hist. of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very
first carvings of Greece had a power of development which was
wanting in all the other nations of that period," he is setting up
an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other nations of
_that period_ were not in progressive stages; but some of them had
progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek
works--that is, of the "historic" period, as distinguished from the
"Minoan"--are enormously inferior to some very ancient Egyptian
work.
The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of
comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow
in reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special
conditions of historic Greece were roughly these:--
(1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought,
through the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains
of the older Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from
Egypt.
(2) Multitude of autonomous communities, of which the members had
intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other,
but mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the
species.
(3) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its
local statues, and its local ritual practices.
(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable
men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other
speech who came thither to learn.
(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the
free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens.
Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek
cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace.
(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these
conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (_a_)
systematic militarism, or (_b_) industrialism, or (_c_) by great
accumulation of wealth.
(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age
of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the
poorer of the free citizens.
Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally
from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of
the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the Ægean Isles; the
spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate
City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest.
These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially
those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a
multitudinous mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being
worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had
their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples,
altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the
public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the
countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of
anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to
the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium
for sculpture and for the finest architecture--pure marble. And as the
political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach to
organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the
priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations
on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to
all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was
constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and
athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs
flourish wherever it could ornament life.
We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and
early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In
Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine
images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to
idolatry.[325] (This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the
outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part
traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic
period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact
sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation
of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and
institutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their
specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal
acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent
the partial uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to
learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where
sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached
an astonishing excellence,[327] the easily maintained political
centralisation[328] and the commercial isolation made fatally for
uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised
priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one
stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329] which
was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as
possible resemble Gods. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the
skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to
all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia
were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.
Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian
Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of
labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace,
at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, kalokagathos,
supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as
he was stimulated by it. Assuredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if
not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.
It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of
Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, _Hist. Nat._
xxxv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art
was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the
schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the
practice spread all over Hellas. Aristotle, too (_Politics_, v
[viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting
that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in
picture-buying--though he puts this as an inferior and incidental
gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all
dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman,
_Schools of Hellas_, 1908, pp. 114-17.
§ 2
In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The
Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a class of
bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic
households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and
it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of
Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the
perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the
centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an
ancient culture--"the earliest of all the Æolic settlements, anterior
even to Kymê"[330]--and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists
Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation
in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The
drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the
public worship of the Gods, first provided for by the community, later
often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama
is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of
Dionysos, Beer-God or Wine-God; individual genius and communal fostering
combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331]
For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course
required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms
at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the
special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and
maintained. Æschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died
with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously
shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of
special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the
spirit of drama. The constant clashing and contrast of ethical points of
view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama
which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably
affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be
said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated "Laconism"; and
both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it. Myths thus came
to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection which was
nowhere else possible.
Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered
by other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for
Greece in the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men,
themselves often travelled, living in inquisitive communities often
visited by strangers. What Egypt and Syria and Phoenicia had to give
in medical lore, in geometry, and in astronomy, was assimilated and
built upon, in an atmosphere of free thought and free discussion, whence
came all manner of abstract philosophy, analytical and ethical. Plato
and Aristotle are the peaks of immense accumulations of more primitive
thought beginning on the soil laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor;
Socrates was stimulated and drawn out by the Athenian life on which he
didactically reacted; Hippocrates garnered the experience of many
medical priests. History was cultivated under similar conditions of
manifold intercourse and intelligent inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down
the outcome of much questioning during many travels, and he had an
appreciative public with similar tastes.[333] The manifold life of
Hellas and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria, was an endless ground
for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing, acquired long before from
Phoenicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and at length the theme
of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political passions of Hellas
were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a historian
produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the
critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library
of lesser writers.
Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of
Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical
conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the
verbalist explanation of "race qualities" or "national genius." If
Hellas developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards,
the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given
to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were
determined by environment. To suppose that "the Greeks" started
primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively "ideal"
method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to
entail the further assumption of a separate biological evolution from
the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we
suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to
have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals
which have played so decisive a part in the development of human
societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have
risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian
aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most
remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately
high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that
their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of
gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to
credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back
upon all the accumulating evidence which goes to show that from the
first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and
assimilated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The
futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment
we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in Hellas, how
special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had
reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all Hellenic
life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were
many sections of the pagan Hellenic stock to the last; and how backward
they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.
The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but
definitely, in Dr. Cunningham's contrast of Phoenicians and
Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and culture-seekers, ingrained
barbarians and ingrained humanists (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 72,
73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent
"principles which the Greek and the Phoenician respectively
represented." The antithesis, it is here maintained, is spurious.
Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many
Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek
norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the
Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the
Phoenicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an
equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures,
they could have become all that the Greeks ever were. The assertion
that when we see "the destruction and degradation of human life in
the march of material progress, we see what is alien to the Greek
spirit" (_id._ p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery,
like every other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to
speak of a "consciousness of her mission" on the part of "Athens"
(_id._ pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-entity and a moral
illusion.
It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of
evolutionary thought there is still a strong tendency to think of
Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of "Hellenic
spirit," something unique in social phenomena, something not to be
accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so
accomplished and critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems
to account for every Greek advance beyond savagery as a result of
"Hellenism." _E.g._, "Human sacrifice, then, is one of the
barbarities which Hellenism successfully overcame" (_The Rise of
the Greek Epic_, 1907, p. 16); "Solved by the progressive, or, I
may say, by the Hellenic spirit" (_Id._ p. 25). In this way the
discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the
"Homeric" period (_Id._ pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to
the Homeric or to the Hellenic "spirit."
Now, Mr. Murray himself incidentally notes (p. 121) that poisoned
weapons are forbidden in the Laws of Manu; and it might be pointed
out that even among the barbaric and ill-advantaged Somali, when
visited by Burton fifty years ago, the use of poisoned arrows was
already restricted to "the servile class" (_First Footsteps in East
Africa_, ed. 1910, p. 45; cp. p. 74). The use of poisoned arrows,
in short, is common in savagery, and is transcended by all races
alike when they rise some way above that level. The "Hellenes," to
start with, were savages like the rest, and rose like others in
virtue of propitious conditions. So with human sacrifice. According
to Herodotus, the Egyptians had abandoned it before the Greeks.
Shall we describe the Egyptian progress as a matter of "Egypticism"
or "the Egyptian spirit"?
Defences of the Greeks, such as that made so ably by Mr. Murray
against the aspersions cast upon "Paganism" by uncritical
Christians, are to be sympathetically received in the light of
their purport; but the true historical method is surely not to
exhibit the historic Greeks as "antitheses" to "the pagan man" of
modern anthropology, but to show Christians how they and their
creed have evolved from savagery even as did the Greeks. (Cp. the
author's _Christianity and Mythology_, 2nd ed. p. 77 _sq._, as to
the pro-Hellenic handling of Greek phenomena by other scholars.)
Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it
will suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If
it were "Greek character" that brought forth Greek art, letters, and
science, they ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It
is, however, the notorious historic fact that during all the centuries
of her existence, after the pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to
the general deed of man virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in
science or philosophy.
The grounds for holding that choral poetry flourished pre-eminently
at Sparta (see K.O. Müller, _History of the Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii,
383) are not very strong. See Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_,
1885, i, 158, 159, for what can be finally said on this head. Ernst
Curtius (_Griechische Geschichte_, 1858, i, 240) writes on this
subject as a romantic enthusiast. Burckhardt (_Griechische
Culturgeschichte_, i, 116-19) examines the subject with his usual
care, but decides only that the Spartans employed music with a
special eye to military education. And Müller acknowledges that
though many Spartan lyrists are named, "there has not been
preserved a single fragment of Spartan lyric poetry, with the
exception of Alkman's," the probable reason being "a certain
uniformity and monotony in their productions, such as is perceived
in the early works of art." On the whole question cp. K.J.
Freeman's _Schools of Hellas_, chs. i and xi.
In the story of Hellas, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as
yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory
of beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally
sterile as steel. Yet "the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only
people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the
purity of their Greek blood."[336] Before such a phenomenon the dogma of
race-character instantly collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of
conditions the explanation is entirely adequate. As thus:--
1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States.
In the words of Euripides, it was "hollow, surrounded by mountains,
rugged, and difficult of access to an enemy."[337] Compared in
particular with Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled,
but out of the way of all traffic.[338]
2. From the first the Spartans were balanced in a peculiar degree by the
strength of the Achaians, who were in the Peloponnesus before them, the
hostilities between the invaders and the older inhabitants lasting
longer in the valley of the Eurotas than anywhere else.[339] The Spartan
militarism was thus a special product of circumstances, not a result of
Doric "character," since other Dorian communities did not develop it.
3. Being thus so little open to commercial influence, and so committed
to a life of militarism, Sparta was susceptible of a rigidity of
military constitution that was impossible elsewhere in the Hellenic
world, save to some extent in the similarly aristocratic and undeveloped
communities of Thessaly and Crete, each similarly noted for
unintellectuality. Whatever be the political origins of these societies,
it is clear that that of Sparta could not have been built up or
maintained save under conditions of comparative isolation.
Grote, always somewhat inclined to racial explanations, argues (ed.
1888, ii, 262), as against K.O. Müller, who had still stronger
leanings of the kind, that the Spartans were not the "true Doric
type," in that their institutions were peculiar to themselves,
distinguishing them "not less from Argos, Corinth, Megara,
Epidaurus, Sikyôn, Korkyra, or Knidus, than from Athens or Thebes."
This is doubtless true as against Müller (cp. Kopstadt, cited by
Grote; Cox, _General History of Greece_, 1877, p. 28; and Ménard,
_Histoire des Grecs_, 1884, pp. 218, 221), but the suggestion that
the Spartans varied in respect of being _less_ "Doric" is equally
astray. Grote goes on to note that "Krête was the only other
portion of Greece in which there prevailed institutions in many
respects analogous, yet still dissimilar in those two attributes
which form the real mark and pinch of Spartan legislation--viz.,
the military discipline and rigorous private training. There were
doubtless Dorians in Krête, but we have no proof that these
peculiar institutions belonged to them more than to the other
inhabitants of the island." The argument cuts both ways. If it was
not definitely "Dorian" to have such institutions, neither was it
un-Dorian. As Cox observes (p. 30), the Spartan constitution in its
earlier stages "much resembled the constitution of the Achaians as
described in the _Iliad_." Equally arbitrary seems Grote's argument
(i, 451) that "the low level of taste and intelligence among the
Thessalians, as well as certain points of their costume,
assimilates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to Hellenes."
He notes the equally low level of taste and intelligence among the
Spartans, who as a rule could not read or write (ii, 307), and to
whom he might as well have assimilated the Thessalians as to the
Macedonians. In all cases alike culture conditions supply the true
explanation. All through Greece, barring Sparta, stocks were
endlessly mixed. M. Ménard well points out in reply to Müller that
it is impossible to associate types of government with any of the
special "races"--that as against Sparta there were "Ionian
aristocracies at Marseilles and at Chalkis, and Dorian democracies
at Tarentum and Syracuse," while most of the Greek cities had by
turns aristocratic and democratic constitutions.
4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military
side developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340]
which clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States
were admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own
people.[341] This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence
her art.
Among the names of Greek sculptors only three belong to Sparta, and
these are all of the sixth century B.C., the beginning of the
historic period. After that, nothing. See Radford's _Ancient
Sculpture_, Chron. List at end. Thus Sparta positively retrogressed
into militarism. "There is evidence in the character of Alkman's
poetry that he did not sing to a Sparta at all resembling the
so-called Sparta of Lycurgus" (Mahaffy, _Problems in Greek
History_, p. 77; cp. Burckhardt, _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i,
117).
5. Not only does military specialism preclude, so far as it goes, more
intellectual forms of activity: it develops in the highest degree the
conservative spirit[342] when thoroughly rooted in law and custom. Nor
is it any more favourable to moral feeling in general.[343]
As offset to all this it may be urged that the middle unenfranchised
class (the _Perioikoi_) in Sparta, the _Penestai_ in Thessaly, and the
ordinary citizens in Crete, were in some ways superior types to part of
the similar classes of Attica; while the slaves, as having some military
life, were, despite the flavour of the name "Helot," above the
average.[344] But even if that were so, it would not affect the problem
as to culture development, and its solution in terms of the primary and
secondary conditions of life for the given communities.
It is to be noted that in Crete, less isolated by nature and way of
life than either Sparta or Thessaly, less rigidly militarised than
they and more democratic in constitution, there were more stirrings
of mind. Epimenides, the author of the famous saying that the
Cretans were always "liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons," was
himself a distinguished Cretan. But Crete on the whole counts for
very little in Greek culture-history. Cp. K.J. Freeman, _Schools of
Hellas_, p. 38.
§ 3
Such being, in brief, the process of the building up of culture for
Greece, it remains to note the causes of the process of retrogression,
which also connects broadly with the course of politics. Indeed, the
mere expansion of Hellenistic life set up by the empire-making of
Alexander might alone account for a complete change in the conditions
and phases of Greek civilisation. In the new Hellenistic world wealth
and power were to be won with ease and with amenity[345] where of old
there was only an alien barbarism, or at least a society which to the
cultured Greek was barbaric. When such cities as Alexandria and Antioch
beckoned the Greek scholar of small means, impoverished Athens could
hardly retain him. Her extorted revenue in her most powerful
period,[346] as we saw, was the source of her highest flight of artistic
splendour; and even after the Peloponnesian War, with greatly lessened
power, Athens was the most desirable dwelling-place in Hellas. After
Alexander, all this was insensibly changed: Athens, though for a time
filled with Greeks enriched by the plunder of Persia, must needs
gradually dwindle to the point at which the slight natural advantages of
her soil, industry, and situation would maintain her; and the life of
ideas, such as it finally was, passed inevitably to Alexandria, where it
was systematically encouraged and protected, in the fashion in which
well-meaning autocrats do such things. But while these new developments
were not inconsiderable, and included some rare felicities, they were on
the whole fatally inferior to the old, and this for reasons which would
equally affect what intellectual life was left in Greece proper.
The forces of hindrance were political and psychological;[347] and they
operated still more powerfully under the Romans than under the
successors of Alexander. The dominance of the Greeks over the other
races in the eastern provinces did not make them more than a class of
privileged tools of Rome; and they deteriorated none the less.[348] When
for the stimulating though stormy life of factious self-government there
was substituted the iron hand of a conqueror, governing by military
force, there was need of a new and intelligent discipline if the mental
atmosphere were not to worsen. All civilisation, in so far as it
proceeds from and involves a "leisured class," sets up a perpetual risk
of new morbid phases. Men must have some normal occupation if their life
is to be sound; and where that occupation is not handicraft it can be
kept sound and educative only by the perpetual free effort of the
intelligence towards new truth, new conception, and new
presentment.[349] Nor can this effort conceivably take place on any wide
scale, and with any continuity, save in a community kept more or less
generally alert by the agitation of vital issues. For a generation or
two after Alexander, it is true, there is no arrest in the production
of good philosophic minds among the Greeks; indeed, the sudden forcing
back of all the best remaining minds on philosophy, as the one mental
employment left to self-respecting men of leisure,[350] raised the
standards of the study, and led to the ethical systems of Epicurus and
Zeno, certainly fit in their way to stand beside those of Plato and
Aristotle. So, too, the thrusting back of the drama (which in the hands
of Aristophanes had meddled audaciously with every public question) on
the study of private life, developed in the highest degree the domestic
and psychological bent of the later comedy,[351] very much as the
autocracy has developed the novel in contemporary Russia. But the
schools of Epicurus and Zeno, both of which outlasted in moral credit
and in moral efficacy that of Plato,[352] and the new comedy of
Menander, alike represent the as yet unexhausted storage of the mental
energy generated by the old political life; and the development is not
prolonged in either case. Evidently something vital was lost: only a
renewal of the freer life could make possible a continuous advance in
intellectual power.
On this it is important to insist, as there are plausible grounds for
contrary inferences, which are often drawn. All supposed exceptions to
the law, however, will be found on analysis to be apparent only. A
tyranny may indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a
republic may fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably
undone or kept within a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the
free community be but fairly well guided, its potentialities are
unlimited. This is the solution of much modern dispute between the
schools of _laissez-faire_ and protection. A Velasquez, who might
otherwise have been condemned to seek his market with coarser wares, may
develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of fine taste; but
even he partly depends for his progress on intelligent communion, which
the autocrat in this case chances to yield him. And from Velasquez
onward there is no progress. So, in autocratic Assyria, sculpture
reaches a certain point and becomes for ever conventionalised. In Egypt
it conforms more or less exactly to the general stereotyping of life. We
may grant, with some emphatic qualifications, that in some cases "with
the tyrant _began_ the building of large temples, ... the patronage of
clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts,"[353] and that he may
have patronised men of letters; but as regards the temples it is certain
that in Hellas he was not the chief temple-builder; and it is also quite
certain that the tyrant never evolved a single generation of important
writers, thinkers, and artists, any more than of intelligent,
self-respecting, and self-governing citizens. The latter constituted, in
fact, the necessary nutritive soil for the former in the communities of
antiquity.[354] It has been said[355] that "at the end of the third
century of Rome, when its inhabitants had hardly escaped from the hands
of Porsena, Syracuse contained more men of high genius than any other
city in the world. These were collected at the court of the first Hiero,
during his short reign of ten years, and among them were the greatest
poets of the age: Pindar ... Simonides ... Æschylus." This is true; but
Hiero had not been the means of evolving the powers of any one of the
three. Pindar is manifestly the product of the diversified life of the
free States; Simonides, though much patronised by aristocrats, began to
"find himself" as a chorus teacher at Carthea in Ceos, won countless
prizes at the Greek festivals,[356] and spent only the latter part of
his life with Hiero; Æschylus is the product of the Attic theatre. Not
the tyranny, but democracy, had been the _alma mater_. It is true that
Athens after Æschylus played the "despot city" in finance, but she so
far preserved at home the democratic atmosphere, in which, according to
Demosthenes, slaves had more freedom of speech than citizens in many
other places.[357] Lesbos had her oscillations between oligarchy and
despotism; but the group in which Sappho stood was that of Pittakos and
Alkaios--the elected ten-years dictator who finally laid down his
dictatorship, and the fierce singer who assailed him. Not in the "Roman
peace" of a fixed despotism did Lesbian song reach its apex.
The old problem of the culture-value of the tyrant has been raised
afresh by Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of
Grote's _History of Greece_. Grote's enthusiasm for democracy, they
contend, "undoubtedly prevented him from doing full justice to much
that was good in the non-democratic governments of Greece,"
notably "in his estimate of the so-called 'tyrants' of the Greek
world and in his attitude towards the Macedonian Empire" (pref. to
work cited, p. xv). Part of their discussion is beside the case,
and proves only their general hostility to Grote as "a
rationalist," to whom "every problem was a matter for rational
discussion" (p. xiii). They first assert that Grote's chapter
heading, "Age of the Despots," is "subtly misleading," inasmuch as
there were despots at various periods in Greek history--as has been
insisted by Professor Mahaffy. Then they avow that "this fact is
mentioned by Grote himself," and that he "quite properly
distinguishes" between the early and the late tyrannies.
The counter-claim is first put in the propositions (1) that an
early Greek "tyranny" was in effect "a union of one powerful
personality with the poorer and hitherto unrepresented classes,"
favourable to individual life among the latter; and (2) that the
tyrants by preserving peace and giving the people individual
freedom of life promoted "the accumulation of wealth and the
extension of trade at home and abroad, and enriched the Greek mind
by familiarising it with the natural and artistic products of other
lands" (p. xvii). There is really nothing here that Grote denied;
nor do the critics attempt to show that he denies it. Grote
actually said, before them, that "the demagogue despots are
interesting as the first evidence of the growing importance of the
people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as
representing the feelings and interests of the people against the
governing few.... Even the worst of the despots was more formidable
to the rich than to the poor; and the latter may perhaps have
gained by the change...." (_History_, pt. ii, ch. ix, ed. 1888, ii,
397). As regards the case of Peisistratos, on which Messrs.
Mitchell and Caspari chiefly found their plea, Grote notes that his
"was doubtless practically milder" than the average despotism, but
that "cases of this character were rare." And to _this_ thesis,
which is backed by an overwhelming mass of Greek testimony, from
Herodotus to Aristotle and Plato, the critics offer no kind of
answer.
They do, however, claim for "the tyrants" in general that "in the
first place their orderly government provided _for the first time_
the conditions which are essential to artistic and literary
production. Secondly, it was their policy to foster in all possible
ways everything that contributed to the magnificence of the
States." If it be meant to include under the head of _tyrannoi_ the
early feudal chieftains before whom the bards chanted, the issue is
merely confused. If not, the proposition is untenable. If again it
be argued that the Mausoleum was a finer thing than the Parthenon,
or quite as well worth having, the real issue is missed.
It is significant that Grote's anti-rationalistic critics make no
attempt to gauge the respective effects of "tyrannic" and
democratic or oligarchic rule on the _inner_ life of men, which is
what Grote chiefly considered. Neither is this, the vital issue,
once faced in the essay of Hegewisch "On the Epoch of Roman History
most Fortunate for the Human Race" (French trans. by Solvet, 1834),
or in the encomiums of Gibbon, Mommsen, and Renan, before cited (p.
89, _note_). As has been shown above, there is no instance of a new
and great intellectual development taking its rise or visibly going
forward (save as at Alexandria under the Ptolemies) under the
auspices of even a good despot in antiquity; though such a despot
might at times usefully preserve the peace and cherish writers and
artists. Here, then, is a sociological clue that should be
followed. The reasonable inference seems to be that democratic
conditions, other things being equal, tend most to elicit human
faculty.
And where in modern times certain of the less democratic nations may be
said to have developed certain forms of culture more widely and
energetically than do certain of the more democratic States--as Germany
her learned class, in comparison with France and England and the United
States; or modern Russia in comparison with the States in the matter of
the higher fiction--it can easily be shown (1) that these developments
arise not in virtue of but in reaction against autocracy, and (2) that
they were possible only in virtue of the evocative influence of
communities living more freely. Modern communities differ vitally from
the ancient in that printing has created a species of intercourse which
overleaps all political and geographical restrictions, so that a
politically tyrannised community can yet receive and respond to the
stimulus of another. But the stimulus is still indispensable. Thus the
intellectual expansion of France after the death of Louis XIV[358] drew
germinally from the culture of the England of the day; and that of
Germany later in the century was equally a sequence from that and from
the ferment in France. Given the cluster of independent States, each
with its court and its university, which made up the Germany of the
period, the revived spirit of free thought bore the more and the better
fruit because of the multitude of the reactions involved in the
circumstances. For the time, the slackened and lightened petty
autocracies counted for intellectual democracy, though even Kant was
made to feel the pressure of censorship. It was not regal or ducal rule
that made Lessing or Herder or Schiller or Goethe; and it was not mere
kingly encouragement that bred scholars like Hermann and Wachsmuth and
Buttmann and Bekker and Boeckh and Heeren and Ottfried Müller. The
school of Tübingen was the outcome of a movement that proximately began
in English Deism; and even the personal bias of Frederick counted for
much less in the evolution than the general contagion of European
debate. In the University of Berlin, organised after Jena, the inspiring
principle was that of intellectual freedom; and the moving spirits took
express pains to guard against the tyranny of convention which they saw
ruling in the universities of England. For the rest, the production of a
very large class of scholarly specialists in Germany was made possible
primarily by the number of universities set up in the days of
separatism, and secondarily by the absence of such economic conditions
(all resting on possession of coal and maritime situation) as drew
English energy predominantly to industry and commerce. It is true that
if a democratic society to-day does not make express economic provision
for a scholarly and cultured class, it is likely to lack such, because
the leisured or idle class in all countries grows less capable of, and
less inclined to, such intellectual production as it contributed to the
serious literature of England during the nineteenth century. But such
economic provision has been still more necessary in monarchic
communities. Finally, at every stage Germany has been reacted upon by
France and England; and it is notable that while, in the last
generation, under a strengthening militarism and imperialism, the number
of trained German specialists was maintained, the number of Germans able
to stir and lead European thought fell off.[359]
In the same way the phenomenon of a group of great novelists in the
autocratic Russia of our own age is no fruit of autocracy, save in the
sense that autocratic government checks all other forms of criticism of
life, all liberal discussion, and so drives men back on artistic forms
of writing which offer no disturbing social doctrine. And the artistic
development itself is made possible only by the culture previously or
contemporaneously accumulated in other and freer communities, from whose
mental life the cultivated Russian draws his. It was to some extent a
similar restrictive pressure that specially developed the drama in
France under the Third Empire. Apart from the peculiar case of the
Italian cities of the Renaissance, discussed hereinafter, the most that
can be said for the "tyrant" in modern Europe is that Richelieu and
Colbert promoted science in France; that the German principalities of
the eighteenth century fostered music at their courts; that George III
did much for Handel in England; and that the King of Bavaria did still
more for Wagner. On the other hand, the system of national and municipal
theatres on the Continent was an essential adjunct even in this regard;
and the mere comparative freedom accorded to the drama in Elizabethan
England, at a time when surplus intellectual energy lacked other
stimuli, sufficed to develop that art in one generation to a degree
never so speedily reached elsewhere, save in republican Athens. Where
the "tyrant" is most useful is in such a civilisation as that of the
Saracens, for which autocracy is the only alternative to anarchy, and
where, on a basis of derived culture, he can protect and rapidly further
the useful arts and all manner of special studies. But even he cannot
command a great intellectual art, or an inwardly great literature.[360]
It will hardly be pretended that the freethinking which went on in
Moslem Persia and Spain in the eighth and later centuries was evoked by
the Caliphs, though some of them for a time protected it. The Ptolemies
for a while fostered science at Alexandria; but under Roman rule--surely
as tyrannous--it died out. And even under the Ptolemies science was a
hothouse plant which never throve in the open.
It is clear, then, that first the rule of Alexander and his successors,
and later the rule of Rome, over Greece and the Græcised East, put a
check on the intellectual forces there, against which there was no
counteractive in existence. There remained no other free communities
whose culture could fecundate that of the Greek and other cities held in
tutelage.
The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death
of Alexander, and maintained its self-government down till the
Roman period, was, in point of fact, latterly distinguished for its
art (Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 334-38), thus
illustrating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but
its pre-eminently commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth,
and as later in the case of Venice, kept it relatively
undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures
and statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv,
492) calls Rhodes a _seat_ of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus
and Eudemus. But they both studied and settled at Athens.
From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might
reasonably be put _a priori_--that for a whole community, once
self-governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant
the settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the
thinkers left in Greece _could_ do was to lend philosophic ideas and
method to the jurists at work on the problem of adapting Roman law to
the needs of a world-empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it
was the last genuine task that the circumstances permitted of. To
discuss vitally the problems of politics would have meant challenging
the despotism. There remained, it is true, philosophy and the arts; and
these were still cultivated; but they finally subsisted at the level of
the spirit of a community which felt itself degenerate from its past,
and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No important work, broadly
speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like the most gifted Greeks
of the palmy days (innovating in drama and improving on the science of
the foreigner), feel themselves capable of equalling or transcending the
past;[362] and that feeling seems to have become impossible alike for
the students and the sculptors of Greece soon after the Macedonian
conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and Pheidias, Aristotle and
Praxiteles, Æschylus and Epicurus, figured as heights of irrecoverable
achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded dreamily over Plato
or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and produced statues
of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where their
ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and Gods for the shrines
of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not
physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely assumed, but a certain
arrest of psychological development--an arrest which, as above
suggested, may be held to have set in when the life and culture of the
"family women" in the Greek cities began decisively to conform to the
Asiatic standard, the men cultivating the mind, while the women were
concerned only with the passive life of the body. In this one matter of
the equal treatment of the sexes Sparta transcended the practice of
Athens, her narrow intellectual life being at least the same for both;
and to this element of equilibrium was probably due her long maintenance
of vigour at the level of her ideal.
[As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not
finally live the martial life of the men, the results of their
chiefly animal training were not exemplary. See the question
vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, _Recherches philosophiques sur
les Grecs_, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, § 1--a work which contains
many acute observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The
Spartan women, it appears, were in a special degree carried away by
the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, _Var. Hist._ iii, 42. Cp. Aristotle,
_Politics_, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, _Manual
of the Political Antiquities of Greece_, § 27, 12), as to their
general licence.]
The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would
tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think,
but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly
for thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece
drew perforce from a relatively small class--chiefly the leisured middle
class and the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic
community, could win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the
Roman rule the endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend
to minister to Roman taste, and as _that_ deteriorated its ministers
would. Rome, it is easy to see, went the downward intellectual way in
the imperial age with fatal certainty; and her subject States
necessarily did likewise at their relative distance. Finally, when
Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all the sciences and all
the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were rapidly stupefied,
the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century, and the Church
laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it tolerated, even
as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is positively
startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second
century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is
an appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first
Christian emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing
his monument in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty
seem to have declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official
hostility to all forms of free thought strengthened.
[See Finlay, _History of Greece_, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the
veto on discussion by Theodosius. In the next century Justinian
suppressed the philosophic schools at Athens. Finlay, in one
passage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before
suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely
contrary account. There are too many such contradictions in his
pages. Cp. Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben
des antiken Lebens_, 1876, i, 78-84.]
By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that
of a semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated
when Christianity conquered the "educated" classes. But these classes
themselves were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the
bureaucracy, save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure.
Barbarian invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to
exterminate the former leisured and property-owning class. It is indeed
an exaggeration to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could
find bread ... and, with the extinction of the wealthy and educated
classes, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of
society."[363] But the last clause is broadly true. In this society the
priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and knowledge, became the type
and source of culture.
A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has
anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a
civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation
was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that
every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully
attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after
all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh,
George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and
so on--one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without
being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that
Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman
precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women
of the imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a
fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of
bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself
against the assaults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and
Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made
the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine
authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers
whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the
essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the
intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the
post-Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as
to an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to assume
comparative equality of culture between the sexes, there is no escape
from the conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation
or paralysis, the subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a
result of many causes--of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The
creed, in fact, was a specific cause of isolation, and so of
intellectual impoverishment. As was well said by Gibbon, the mental
paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of their solitary
and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which Byzantium
might latterly have profited--the Saracen--was made tabu by creed, which
was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine and
Italian life.
Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the
earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social
diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in
Egypt and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by
arousing in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all
the wrangling sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of
the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on
in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is
hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any
form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so
in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after
exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner
minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed--this if only
external peace could have been secured. But the attacks, first of Persia
and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with whom, on
Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, shore away
all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium
finally only its central and most homogeneous section, where the power
of the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on
political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of
intellectual variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the
Empire, connected as they were with so many destructive earthquakes and
pestilences,[370] would, on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the
hold of superstition on the general mind. On the other hand, the final
Christianising of the Bulgarian and Slav populations on the north, while
safeguarding the Empire there, yielded it only the inferior and
retarding culture-contact of a new pietistic barbarism, more childish in
thought than itself. We can see the fatality of the case when we
contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the eighth century
to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No such effort
could avail against the mindless superstition of the ignorant mass,
rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their
existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon,
might have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he
sat.[372] It seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically
as well as intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox
party. The worshipped images which they sought to suppress were
artistically worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people.
"If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of
the agricultural classes would have been widely different. The abolition
of the principle which the first Christian emperors had adopted, of
nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out
by the Iconoclastic emperors and reversed by their successors."[373]
Thus did it come about that Christian Byzantium found the rigid
intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a lower level of
mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but only to
fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 319: Whistler, _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, 1890, pp.
138, 139.]
[Footnote 320: Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, ch.
xi; Bury, _History of Greece_, 1906, p. 65. "The supreme inspiration,"
says Bury, "came to their minstrels on Asiatic soil."]
[Footnote 321: E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii. 533-36; A.R.
Hall, _The Oldest Civilisation of Greece_, 1901, pp. 31, 32. Cp. the
author's _Short History of Freethought_, i, 122-27; and Von Ihering's
_Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer_, Eng. trans. ("The Evolution of the
Aryan"), p. 73. Von Ihering's dictum is the more noteworthy because it
counters his primary assumption of race-characters.]
[Footnote 322: Cp. Galton. _Hereditary Genius_, ed. 1892, p. 329. The
contrast between the policy of Athens, before and after Solon, and that
of Megara, which boasted of never having given the citizenship to any
stranger save Hercules (Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 248), goes far to explain
the inferiority of Megarean culture.]
[Footnote 323: "No other Greek city possessed so large an immediate
territory" [as distinct from subject territory, like Laconia] "or so
great a number of free and equal citizens" (Freeman, _History of Federal
Government_, ed. 1893, p. 22, _note_). And the number was greatly
swelled "after Athens had in 477 taken the lead in the Delian Maritime
League" (Maisch, _Greek Antiquities_, § 28), so that in 451 it was felt
necessary again to limit citizenship to men born of Athenian parents.]
[Footnote 324: Cicero (_in Verrem_ ii, 59) testifies to the zeal of
Greek cities in buying paintings and statues in his day, and their
unwillingness to sell.]
[Footnote 325: The result is a marked poverty of power in such sculpture
as the Persians had. It is in every respect inferior to the Assyrian
which it copies. See Reber, _History of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, pp.
121-28.]
[Footnote 326: See above, p. 28.]
[Footnote 327: See Maspero, _Manual of Egyptian Archæology_, Eng. tr.
1895, pp. 215, 226, 235, 236, 240, etc.]
[Footnote 328: See above, p. 56.]
[Footnote 329: See Maspero, as cited, pp. 212, 214, 231, etc., as to the
religious influence. M. Maspero recognises several movements of
renaissance and reaction through the ages.]
[Footnote 330: Grote, iii, 21-22.]
[Footnote 331: Cp. Haigh, _The Tragic Drama of the Greeks_, 1896, ch. i;
Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, 2nd ed.
1908, ch. viii.]
[Footnote 332: Pt. ii, ch. 67.]
[Footnote 333: See Holm's suggestion, cited by Mahaffy, _Problems of
Greek History_, p. 92, _note_, as to the value of Herodotus to the
_traders_ of his day. Holm also suggests, however, that the political
service rendered by Herodotus to the Athenians was felt by them to be
important, as giving them new light on Egypt and the East (Eng. tr. ii,
290, 291). The reward paid to Herodotus would greatly stimulate further
historical research.]
[Footnote 334: Cp. Bury, _History of Greece_, pp. 7, 33-34.]
[Footnote 335: The Spartan women were indeed reputed the most beautiful,
doubtless a result of their healthier life. As for the works of "art"
claimed by Müller (_The Dorians_, ii, 25-26) for Sparta, they are simply
objects of utility, and were by his own avowal (p. 24) the work of
non-Spartan Laconians, aliens, or slaves, "since no Spartan, before the
introduction of the Achæan constitution, was allowed to follow any
trade." No one disputes that other Dorian cities, notably Sikyon, did
much for art--another proof that "race" has nothing to do with the
matter.]
[Footnote 336: Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 59.]
[Footnote 337: Cited in Strabo, bk. viii, ch. v, § 6.]
[Footnote 338: Cp. Müller, i, 80. Müller notes that the Corinthians were
"nearly singular among the Doric States" in esteeming trade, their
experience of its productiveness "having taught them to set a higher
value upon it" (work cited, ii, 24).]
[Footnote 339: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. § 11;
K.O. Müller, _The Dorians_, i, 105, 203.]
[Footnote 340: The native Spartans were positively forbidden to go
abroad without special leave, nor were strangers permitted to settle
there (Grote, ii, 306; Wachsmuth, i, 248).]
[Footnote 341: Grote, iii, 294, and _note_.]
[Footnote 342: Cp. Dr. Mahaffy's remark on post-Alexandrian Sparta,
"where five ignorant old men were appointed to watch the close adherence
of the State to the system of a fabulous legislator" (_Greek Life and
Thought from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest_, 1887, p. 3).]
[Footnote 343: Macaulay, in his youthful review of Mitford
(_Miscellaneous Writings_, ed. 1868, p. 74), draws up a long indictment
against the Spartans in the matter of bad faith and meanness. It is only
fair to remember that some similar charges can be laid against others of
the Greek States.]
[Footnote 344: Grote, ii, 204. But cp. Aristotle (_Politics_, ii, 9) and
Plutarch (_Lycurgus_, c. 27), who agrees with the saying of Plato and
others (cp. Müller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 43, _note_) that in Sparta a
free man was most a freeman, and a slave most a slave. And see Schömann,
_Alterthümer_, i, 362. Hume (_On Populousness_) cites Xenophon,
Demosthenes, and Plautus as proving that slaves were exceptionally well
treated at Athens, and this is borne out by the Athenian comedy in
general (cp. Maisch, _Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. § 32). But the fact
remains that at Athens slaves, male and female, were frequently tortured
to make them give evidence against their masters, who in turn were free
to kill them for doing so (Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_, pp.
240-41). And Aristotle takes for granted that they were substantially
inferior in character to freemen.]
[Footnote 345: Cp. Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15;
Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 105.]
[Footnote 346: Fifth century B.C.]
[Footnote 347: Holm (Eng. tr. iv, 595-98) misses half the problem when
he argues that the Greek cities under the Romans were nearly as free and
self-governing as are to-day those of Switzerland, the United States, or
the German Empire. The last-named may perhaps approximate at some
points; but in the other cases the moral difference is inexpressible.
The Greek cities under the Romans were _provincialised_, and their
inhabitants deprived of the powers of _State_ government which they
formerly possessed. Their whole outlook on life was changed.]
[Footnote 348: Cp. Finlay, i, 76.]
[Footnote 349: In artistic handicraft, of course, such daily renewal of
creative intelligent effort is of great importance to mental health; and
the complete lack of it, as in the conventional sculpture of Egypt,
tells of utter intellectual stagnation. In the least artistic crafts,
however, it is not so essential a condition of sound work.]
[Footnote 350: Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 10, 15,
131-38, 144.]
[Footnote 351: The change was not so immediately dependent on the
Alexandrian régime as Droysen implies (_Geschichte Alexanders des
Grossen_, 3te Aufl. p. 367): the New Comedy had been led up to by the
Middle Comedy, which already tended to withdraw from burning questions
(cp. K.O. Müller, _Lit. of Ancient Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 436-41); but
the movement was clearly hastened.]
[Footnote 352: Cp. Mackintosh, _On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy_,
4th ed. p. 29; Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 6th ed. i, 128.]
[Footnote 353: Mahaffy, _Problems of Greek History_, p. 85; _Survey of
Greek Civilisation_, pp. 87, 99, 117; _Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed.
pp. 83, 137, 440. Cp. the remark of Thirlwall, ch. xii (1st ed. ii,
125), that the tyrants "were the natural patrons of the lyrical poets,
who cheered their banquets, extolled their success," etc.]
[Footnote 354: Holm on this head makes an admission (iii, 168) which
countervails the remark last above cited from him. Noting the prosperity
of art in Asiatic Greece, he writes: "Art as a rule flourishes--we do
not say, reaches its highest point, _for that is impossible without
freedom_--where wealth is to be found combined with good taste. And good
taste is a gift which even tyrants may possess, and semi-barbarians
acquire."]
[Footnote 355: Professor Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i,
117, 118.]
[Footnote 356: K.O. Müller, _History of Greek Literature_, 1847, pp.
208, 210.]
[Footnote 357: Schömann, _Griechische Alterthümer_, ii, 362.]
[Footnote 358: The questions of the previous expansion under Richelieu
and Mazarin, and of the decay in the latter part of Louis's reign, are
discussed, _àpropos_ of the _laissez-faire_ argument of Buckle, in the
author's _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 324-39.]
[Footnote 359: An interesting corroboration of the above general view
was presented in an article on the state of German art in the _Century
Magazine_ for July, 1898. The writer thus described the position of
German art under the Kaiser's patronage: "Moved by the best of
intentions, the Emperor is not very successful in his efforts to
encourage art. They smack too much of personal tastes and one-man power.
Menzel is perhaps a favourite, not because of his great Meissonnier-like
skill in illustrations, but because he is the draftsman and painter of
the period of Frederick the Great. The Emperor is really honouring his
own line rather than the artist when he covers him with rewards.... It
is not by making sketches for the Knackfusses to carry out that the
Emperor will raise art in Prussia from its present stagnation, but by
allowing the dangerous breath of liberty to blow through the art world.
The fine arts are under the drill-sergeant, and produce recruits who
have everything except art in them. It is too much to say that this is
the Emperor's fault; but it is true that so long as he insists upon
running things artistic, no one else can, or will--and the artists
themselves least of all."]
[Footnote 360: Cp. Mill, _Liberty_, ch. iii, People's ed. p. 38.]
[Footnote 361: Cp. J.S. Mill's analysis of "benevolent despotism" in ch.
iii of his _Representative Government_.]
[Footnote 362: Prof. Mahaffy (_Greek Life and Thought_, p. 112)
attributes the same sense of superiority to the men of the period of the
earlier successors of Alexander. This could well be, and such a feeling
would serve to inspire the great art works of the period in question.
Cp. Thirlwall (vii, 120) as to the sense of new growth set up by the
commercial developments of the Alexandrian world.]
[Footnote 363: Finlay. _History of Greece_, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.]
[Footnote 364: D. Bikélas. _Seven Essays on Christian Greece_,
translated by the Marquess of Bute, 1890.]
[Footnote 365: Work cited, p. 103.]
[Footnote 366: Work cited, pp. 97-98; Finlay, _History of Greece_, iv,
351-52. That this was no Christian innovation becomes clear when we
compare the status of women in Egypt and imperial Rome. Cp. Mahaffy,
_Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 173-74. And see his _Greek World under
Roman Sway_, p. 328, as to pre-Christian developments.]
[Footnote 367: Bikélas, p. 104.]
[Footnote 368: Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to
the internal forces of routine.]
[Footnote 369: _De bello Gothico_, i, 3. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 47, note, Bohn
ed. v, 243; and Prof. Bury's App. to his ed. of Gibbon, iv, 516.]
[Footnote 370: Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43,
end.]
[Footnote 371: "The degrading feature of the end of the seventh century
... was the ignorant credulity of the richer classes" (Bury, _History of
the Later Empire_, ii, 387). Cp. Gibbon, ch. 54, Bohn ed. vi, 235.]
[Footnote 372: Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.]
[Footnote 373: Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.]
Chapter II
THE SARACENS
While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation
for a time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium
possessed, if it could not employ, the treasures of old Hellenic science
and philosophy. The fact that such a fructification of an alien
civilisation could take place while the transmitting community showed no
similar gain, is tolerably decisive as to _(a)_ the constrictive force
of religious systems under certain conditions, and _(b)_ the nullity of
the theory of race genius. Yet these very circumstances have been made
the ground of a preposterous impeachment of the "Semitic" character in
general, and of the Arab in particular.
Concerning no "race" save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable
theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after
another[374] has explained Semitic "faculty" in terms of Semitic
experience, always to the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming
what it becomes, but only when it has become so, since what it does not
do it has, by implication, no faculty for doing.[375] The learned
Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the antiquities of Iran,
inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to sculpture as a
matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to which
the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or why
the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with
architecture, he pronounces the Semites averse to that also; and as
regards the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues
that we know not "how far entirely alien models were imitated by the
Semites."[377] Only for music does he admit them to have any independent
inclination; and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not
by the virtual inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in
their Sacred Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by
primordial lack of faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of
imaginative fiction in the _Arabian Nights_ is credited bodily to the
"Indo-Germanic" account, because it has Hindu affinities, and took place
in Persia; and, of course, the Semites are denied a mythology, as by M.
Renan, no question being raised as to what is redacted myth in the
Sacred Books. For the rest, "the Semite" is not fitted to shine in
science, being in all his branches "almost totally devoid of
intellectual curiosity," so that what philosophy and science he has are
not "his own"; and he is equally ill-fitted for politics, wherein,
having no political idea save that of the family, he oscillates between
"unlimited despotism and complete anarchy."[378] Apart from music, his
one special faculty is for religion.
Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part
such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set
up a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists
contrive to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history
of civilisation without learning wherein the process of civilisation
consists. On Spiegel's method--which is that of Mommsen in dealing with
the early culture-history of Rome--the Germanic nations must be adjudged
to be naturally devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama,
philosophy, science, law, and order, since they had none of those things
till they got them in the Middle Ages through the reviving civilisation
of the Mediterranean and France. And as the Greeks certainly received
their first impulse to philosophy and science through contact with the
survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in Ionia, they in turn must
be pronounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a science of their own";
while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all faculty for the
epic and the drama. It is the method of Molière's doctors, with their
_virtus dormitivus_ of opium, applied to sociology.
The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely
applied to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of
imperfect development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some
edifying results as regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:--
"There is no such thing as an original Arab medical science. Arab
medical science was a slavish imitation from the Greek. And the
same remark is true of all the sciences. The Arabs have never been
inventors. They are enthusiasts, possessed with a passion for
anything new, which renders their enthusiasm itself evanescent. And
in consequence of this incapacity for perseverance, they soon
forgot the lessons in medical science which they had once acquired
from the Greeks, and have fallen back into a state of the most
absolute ignorance."[379]
The method by which Arab defects are here demonstrated from the arrest
of Arab civilisation is a simple extension of that by which Spiegel
demonstrates the original deficiencies of the ancient Semites, and
Mommsen the incapacity of the Latins to do what they did not do. A
certain race or nation, having at one time attained a considerable
degree of civilisation, and afterwards lost it, is held to have thus
shown a collective incapacity for remembering what "it" or "they" had
learned. The "they" here is the correlative of M. Taine's "we"--a
pseud-entity, entirely self-determining and strictly homogeneous. The
racial misfortune is set down to a fault pervading the whole national
character or intellect, and peculiar to it in comparison with other
national characters. Conditions count for nothing; totality of inherited
character, acting _in vacuo_, is at once the summary and the judgment.
Anyone who has followed the present argument with any assent thus far
will at once grant the futility of such doctrine. "The Arabs" had
neither more nor less collective faculty of appreciation and oblivion
than any other equally homogeneous people at the same culture-stage. It
is quite true that they had not an "original medical science." But
neither have any other historical "they" ever had such. The Greeks
certainly had not. The beginnings of medical knowledge for all mankind
lay of necessity in the primeval lore of the savage; and the nations
which carried it furthest in antiquity were just those who learned what
others had to give, and improved upon it. The Greeks must have learned
from Asia, from Egypt,[380] from Phoenicia; and the Romans learned
from the Greeks. The Arabs, coming late into the sphere of the higher
civilisation, and crossing their stock in the East with those of Persia,
in the West with the already much-mixed stocks of Spain, passed quite as
rapidly as the Greeks had done from the stage of primitive thought in
all things to one of comparative rationality as regards medicine and
the exact sciences; and this not in virtue of any special "enthusiasm"
for new ideas, but by the normal way of gradual collection of
observations and reflection upon them, in communities kept alert by
variety of intercourse, and sufficiently free on the side of the
intellectual life. Such was the state of the Saracens in Persia and
Spain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and their social
evolution before and after is all a matter of natural sequence, not
proceeding upon any peculiarity of collective character, but
representing the normal reactions of character at a given culture-stage
in special political circumstances.
What is peculiar to the Saracen civilisation is its sudden origin
(taking Islam as a history by itself)[381] under conditions reached
elsewhere only as climax in a long evolution. The rise of Islam has the
twofold aspect of a barbarian campaign of plunder and a crusade of
fanaticism; and though the prospect and the getting of plunder were
needed to ripen the fanaticism to full bloom,[382] the latter was
ultimately a part of the cementing force that turned a horde into a
community. The great facilitating conditions for both were the feeble
centralised system maintained by the Christianised Empire, and the
disintegrating force of Christianity as a sectarian ferment. In Egypt,
for instance, the hatred between rival schools of Christian metaphysic
secured for the Arabs an unresisted entrance into Alexandria.[383] It
needed only a few generations of contact with higher culture in a richer
environment to put the Saracens, as regards art and science, very much
on a level with the stagnating Byzantines; and where the latter,
possessed of their scientific and philosophical classics, but imprisoned
by their religion, made no intellectual progress whatever, the former,
on the same stimulus, progressed to a remarkable degree. There has been
much dispute as to the exact measure of their achievements; but three
things are clear: (1) that they carried the mathematics of astronomy
beyond the point at which it had been left by the Greeks; (2) that they
laid the foundations of chemistry; and(3) that they intelligently
carried on surgery and medicine when the Byzantines, having early in the
Christian period destroyed the Asklepions, which were in some degree
the schools of the medicine of antiquity, had sunk to the level of using
prayers and incantations and relics as their regular means of cure.
Curiously enough, too, the Saracens had the merit, claimed for the
Byzantines, of letting their women share rather freely in their culture
of all kinds.[384] What is more, the later Saracens of Spain, whatever
the measure of their own scientific progress, were without question a
great seminal force in the civilisation of Western Christendom, which
drew from them its beginnings in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry,
astronomy, and medicine, and to some extent even in literature[385] and
architecture,[386] to say nothing of the effect on the useful arts of
the contact of the Crusaders with the Saracens of the East.
As to Arab medicine, see Withington, as cited, pp. 139, 170; and
Sprengel, _History of Medicine_, French tr. vol. ii (1815), pp.
262-64--a passage which contradicts Sprengel's previous
disparagements. Compare p. 343. The _histoire particulière_ in this
chapter (v of Sect. 6) generally countervails the hostile
summaries. Sprengel proceeded on the prejudice (i, 215) that there
was no "rational science" anywhere before the Greeks; as if there
were not many irrational elements in the science not only of the
Greeks but of the moderns. A much better qualified historian of
Arab medicine, Dr. Lucien Leclerc, writes (_Histoire de la médecine
arabe_, 1876, i, 462) that in the eleventh century "the medical
productions [of the Arabs] continue to develop an independent
aspect, and have already a certain stamp of originality. Already
the Arabs feel themselves rich on their own footing. We see
appearing certain writings not less remarkable for the novelty of
the form than for the value of the substance." Again, Dr. Ernst von
Meyer, the historian of chemistry, sums up (_Hist. of Chemistry_,
M'Gowan's tr. 2nd ed. p. 28), that "the germs of chemical knowledge
attained to a marvellous growth among the Arabians." It may be
noted that there is record of a hospital in Bagdad at the beginning
of the ninth century, and that there were many there in the tenth
(Leclerc, i, 559).
A rational argument is brought against Semitic "faculty" by Dr.
Cunningham, it should be admitted, in the contention that the
Phoenicians figured poorly as copyists of Greek art (_Western
Civilisation_, p. 69, following Renan). But this argument entirely
ignores the element of time that is needed to develop any art in
any civilisation. The Phoenician civilisation was overthrown
before it had time to assimilate Greek art developments, which
themselves were the work of centuries even in a highly favourable
set of conditions. Nöldeke, though less unscientific than Spiegel,
partly follows him in insisting that Phoenician architecture
copied Egyptian, and that the later Semites copied the Greek, as if
the Greeks in turn had not had predecessors and guides. Starting
with the fixed fallacy that the Semites were "one-sided," he
reasons in a circle to the effect that their one-sidedness was
"highly prejudicial to the development of science," while compelled
to admit the importance of the work of the Babylonians in
astronomy. (_Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr. pp. 15-18.)
It is now current doctrine that "for nearly eight centuries, under her
Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a
civilised and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly
prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore
fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys
of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana.... Art, literature, and science
prospered as they prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked
from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of
learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and
doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science; women were encouraged
to devote themselves to serious study; and the lady doctor was not
unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany,
history[?], philosophy and jurisprudence[?] were to be mastered in
Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific
methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the
highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the
hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to
perfection by the Spanish Moors."
See Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Moors in Spain_, pref. It could be
wished that Mr. Lane-Poole had given English readers, as he so well
could, a study of Saracen civilisation, instead of a "Story of the
Nation" on the old lines. For corroboration of the passage see
Dozy, _Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109, 110;
Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, pp.
186-88, 192, 195-99; Draper, _Intellectual Development of Europe_,
ed. 1875, ii, 30-53; Sismondi, _Historical View of the Literature
of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 50-54, 64-68, 76-84, 89. Cp.
Seignobos, _Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age_, 3e éd. pp.
48-62; Gebhart, _Origines de la Renaissance en Italie_, 1879, pp.
185-89; Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, 2nd ed. pp.
217, 286; Nöldeke, as cited, p. 105; Bouterwek, as cited, i, 3;
Baden-Powell, _History of Natural Philosophy_, 1834, pp. 94-104;
U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. 1900, vol. i, ch. 16.
All this being so, the course of deciding that the Arabs retrogressed
because "they" were impatient and discontinuous is on a level with the
thesis that nature has a horror of a vacuum. The Arab civilisation was
arrested and anchylosed by forces which in other civilisations operated
in exactly the same modes. The first great trouble was the element of
perpetual domestic strife, which was uncured by the monarchic system,
since every succession was liable to dispute. Under such conditions just
government could not flourish; and Moslem taxation always tended to be
suicidally unscrupulous.[387] Disputes of succession, indeed, wrought
hardly more strife among the Saracens than has taken place among Greeks
and Romans, and Christians of all nations, down to modern times; even
the ecclesiastical and feudal doctrine of legitimacy, developed by the
Latin and Greek Churches, having failed to prevent dynastic wars in
Christendom. But the Saracens, neighboured everywhere by Christians who
bore them a twofold hostility, had peculiar need of union, and ran
special risks from dissension; and in Spain their disunion was their
ruin. At the same time their civilisation was strangled intellectually
by a force which, though actually in operation in Christendom also, was
there sufficiently countered by a saving condition which the Saracens
finally lacked. The force of constriction was the cult of the Sacred
Book; the counteracting force in Christendom was diversity and friction
of governments and cultures--a condition which passed out of the Saracen
equation.
How fatally restrictive the cult of the completed Sacred Book can be is
obvious in the history of Byzantium. It was in terms of the claims of
the Christian creed that the Eastern Emperors proscribed pagan
philosophy and science, reducing the life of the whole Eastern world as
far as possible to one rigid and unreasoned code. That the mental life
of Italy and France was relatively progressive even in the Middle Ages
was substantially due--(1) to Saracen stimulus, and (2) to the friction
and ferment set up by the diversity of life in the Italian republics,
and the Italian and French and German universities. Byzantium was in
comparison a China or an Egypt. The saving elements of political
diversity, culture competition, and culture contact have in later Europe
completed the frustration of the tendency of church, creed, and Bible
to destroy alike science and philosophy. In Islam, on the other hand,
the arresting force finally triumphed over the progressive because of
the social and political conditions. (1) The political field, though
stormy, finally lacked diversity in terms of the universality of the
monarchic principle, which was imposed by the military basis and bound
up with the creed: uniformity of ideal was thus furthered. (2) There was
practically no fresh culture contact possible after the assimilation of
the remains of Greek science and the stimulus of Jewish philosophy; for
medieval Christendom had no culture to give; and the more thoroughly the
Papacy and the Christian monarchy in Spain were organised, the more
hostile they grew to the Moors. (3) The economic stimulus among the
latter tended to be restricted more and more to the religious class,
till that class was able to suppress all independent mental activity.
The last is the salient circumstance. In any society, the special
cultivation of serious literature and the arts and sciences depends on
one or more of three conditions--(_a_) the existence of a cultured class
living on unearned incomes, as in ancient Athens, middle Rome, and
modern England and France; (_b_) public expenditure on art and culture,
as in ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy and modern France, and in the
German university system _par excellence_; or (_c_) the personal concern
of princes and other patrons to encourage ability. In the nature of the
case it was mainly on this last and most precarious stimulus that
Saracen culture depended. Taking it at its zenith, under such rulers as
Haroun Alraschid and El-Mamoun at Bagdad, and Abderrahman III and
Hakam II of Cordova, we find its advance always more or less dependent
on the bounty of the caliph; and even if, like Abderrahman and his
son Hakam, he founded all manner of public and free schools, it depended
on the bias of his successors rather than on public opinion or municipal
custom whether the movement should continue. Abderrahman's
achievement, seen even through Christian eyes, was so manifold as to
constitute him one of the great rulers of all history; but the task of
making Moorish civilisation permanent was one which no series of such
statesmen could have compassed. The natural course of progress would
have been through stable monarchy to constitutionalism. But Christian
barbarism, with its perpetual assault, kept the Saracens forever at the
stage of active militarism, which is the negation of constitutionalism;
and their very refinement was a political danger, no less than their
dynastic strifes.
On the other hand, the continuous stress of militarism was in ordinary
course much more favourable to fanaticism than to free thought; and to
fanaticism the Koran, like the Bible, was and is a perpetual stimulant.
It was as a militant faith that Islam maintained itself; and in such a
civilisation the Sacred Book, which claimed to be the highest of all
lore, and was all the while so easy a one, giving to ignorance and
conceit the consciousness of supreme knowledge without any mental
discipline whatever, was sure of abundant devotees.[388] In an
uninstructed community--and of course the mass of the Saracen population
was uninstructed[389]--the cult of the Sacred Book needs no special
endowment; it can always be depended on to secure revenues for itself,
even as may the medicine-man in an African tribe. To this day the
propagation of the Koran is subscribed for in Turkey as the Bible
Society is subscribed to among ourselves, ignorance earning thus the
felicity of prescribing for human welfare in the mass, and at the same
time propitiating Omnipotence, at the lowest possible outlay of study
and reflection. Enthusiasms which can thus flourish in the twentieth
century were of course abundant in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh;[390]
and thus we find that when a caliph was suspected by the pietists of
caring too little for their lore, he ran the risk of being rebelled
against with a speed and zeal in the ratio of their conviction of divine
knowledge. Islam, unlike the State churches of Greece, Rome, and
England, has democratic rootage in the practice of setting ordinary
laymen to recite the prayers and preach the sermons in the mosques: it,
in fact, resembles Methodism more than any of the established Christian
churches in respect of its blending of clerisy and laity. Such a system,
when thoroughly fanaticised, has enormous powers of turbulence; and in
Moorish Spain we find them early exercised. Abderrahman I, whose
policy of tolerance towards Jews and Christians transcended all previous
Christian practice, and thus won for his realm a great stimulus in the
way of variety of culture-elements and of industry, had kept the
religious class in due control; but his well-meaning son Hisham was
priest-ridden to the last degree; and when his successor Hakam showed an
indisposition to patronise pietists to the same extent they raised
revolt after revolt (806-815), all put down by massacre.
Mr. Lane-Poole notes (p. 73) the interesting fact that the
theologers were largely of Spanish stock, the natives having in
general embraced Islam. Thus the fanaticism of the Berbers was
reinforced by that of the older population, which, as Buckle
showed, was made abnormally devout, not by inheritance of
character, but by the constant effect of terrorising environment,
in the form of earthquakes.
The elements of the situation remained fundamentally unchanged; and when
the Moorish military power began to feel more and more the pressure of
the strengthening Christian foe, it lay in the nature of the case that
the fanatical species should predominate. The rationalistic and
indifferent types would figure as the enemies of their race, very much
as such types would have done in Covenanting Scotland. At length, in the
eleventh century, the weakened Moorish princes had to call in the aid of
the fanatical Almoravides from Barbary; and these, with the full support
of the priesthood and the pious, established themselves at the head of
affairs, reducing everything as far as possible to the standards of the
eighth century.[391] And when the new barbarism in time grew corrupt, as
that of the Goths and Vandals had done in earlier ages, the "Unitarian"
Almohades in turn (twelfth century) overthrew the Almoravides in Spain
as they had already done in Africa, only to be themselves overthrown a
hundred years later by the Christians. Thereafter the curtailed Moorish
power, pent up in Southern Spain, reverted to the spirit of fanaticism
which national failure generates in religious minds; and from the
thirteenth century to the final overthrow at the end of the fifteenth
the intellectual life of Saracen Spain was but a long stagnation.
A civilisation driven back on superstition and fanaticism[392] thus gave
way to a revived barbarism, which itself, after a few centuries of
power, was arrested in its progress by the same order of forces, and has
ever since remained in the rear of European development. A remarkable
exception, indeed, is to be noted in the case of Ibn Khaldun
(1332-1406), who in the narrow world of Tunis attained to a grasp of the
science of history such as no Christian historian up to his time had
remotely approached.[393] Such an intellectual phenomenon sufficiently
disposes of the current formulas about the innate incapacities of "the
Semitic mind." But whether it were that he dared not say what he
thought of the fatal influence of the Sacred Book, or that on that side
he was really, as he is ostensibly, quite uncritical, Khaldun fails, in
his telling survey of Arab decadence, to set forth the decisive
condition of intellectual arrest; and his luminous impeachment of the
civilisation of his race failed to enlighten it.
In Persia the same forces wrought closely similar results. The Greek
stimulus, after working wonders in science and rational thought, failed
to sustain a society that could not politically evolve beyond despotism;
and economic evil and intellectual decay together undermined the empire
of the Caliphs,[394] till the Turks could overrun it as the Christians
did Moorish Spain; they themselves, however, adding no new culture
developments, because under them no new culture contacts were possible.
Of the Moslem civilisation as a whole, it must be said that on the
material side, in Spain and the East, it was such a success as had not
been attained under the Romans previously (though it was exceeded in
Egypt by the Lagids), and has not been reached in Christian Spain since
the fall of Boabdil. Economically, the Moorish regimen was sound and
stable in comparison with that of imperial Spain, which, like Rome,
merely set up a factitious civilisation on the basis of imported bullion
and provincial tribute, and decayed industrially while nominally growing
in empire and power. When the history of Spain from the seventeenth
century onward is compared with that of the Saracens up to their
overthrow, the nullity of explanations in terms of race qualities
becomes sufficiently plain--unless, indeed, it is argued that Moorish
blood is the secret of Spanish decadence. But that surmise too is folly.
Spanish decadence is a perfectly simple sociological sequence;[395] and
a Spanish renascence is not only conceivable, but likely, under
conditions of free science and free thought. Nor is it on the whole less
likely that the Arab stock will in time to come contribute afresh and
largely to civilisation. The one element which can finally distinguish
one race from another--acquired physiological adaptation to a given
climate--marks the Arab races as best fitted for the recovery of great
southern and eastern regions which, once enormously productive, have
since the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires been reduced to
sterility and poverty. The Greeks in their recovered fatherland, and the
French in Algeria, have not thus far been much more successful than the
Turks in developing material prosperity. If North Africa, Syria, and
Mesopotamia are again to be rich and fruitful lands, it must be in the
hands of an acclimatised race; and the Arab stocks are in this regard
among the most eligible.
But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a
renascence.[396] Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race
character than the decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the
Spaniards: it is the enforced result of the attitude of special enmity
taken up towards the Turkish intruders from the first by all their
Christian neighbours. By sheer force of outside pressure, co-operating
with the sinister sway of the Sacred Book, Turkey has been kept
fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly militarist, and therefore
financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of the long-oppressed
Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was till lately
proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of
superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military
force as against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all
endowment of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or
prudence should so modify the system of government as to give freer
course to industry and ideas; that the military system should be
restricted; and that European knowledge should be brought to bear on
education, till the fettering force of religion is frustrated, as in the
progressive countries of Christendom. For Turkey and Spain, for Moslems
and for Christians, the laws of progress and decadence are the same; and
if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to help instead of
hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is
industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course
of things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the
closest students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict
such a transformation.[397]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 374: Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in _Buckle and
his Critics_, p. 509.]
[Footnote 375: Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is
"the highest, it should seem, _attainable_ by the Asiatic _type of
mind_" (_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 222). This in the century
which was to witness the renascence of Japan.]
[Footnote 376: _Erânische Alterthumskunde_, 1871, i, 387.]
[Footnote 377: _Id._ p. 388.]
[Footnote 378: _Erânische Alterthumskunde_, p. 389.]
[Footnote 379: Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, "Impressions médicales,"
in the _Journal des Débats_, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K.
Bikélas, as cited, tr. p. 100. Cp. Renan's language as to "l'_esprit_
sémitique, sans étendue, sans diversité, sans arts plastiques, sans
philosophie, sans mythologie, sans _vie politique_, sans progrès"
(_Études d'histoire religieuse_, 1862, p. 67).]
[Footnote 380: This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, _Origin of the
Healing Art_, 1893, p.72; Withington, _Medical History from the Earliest
Times_, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the Greeks could hardly have resorted to
the Egyptians so much as they admittedly did for mathematical and
astronomical teaching in the early period without learning something of
their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick, _Ancient Egypt_,
1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The passage in the _Odyssey_,
iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it
was stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and
Egyptian medicine found "neue Bedeutung" in Greek hands, after the fresh
contacts made under Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (_Geschichte
Alexanders des Grossen_, 3te Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.]
[Footnote 381: As to the inferred development of pre-Islamic
civilisation in Arabia, see Deutsch, _Literary Remains_, pp. 91, 123,
124, 313, 314; and Nöldeke, _Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr.
pp. 18, 19.]
[Footnote 382: The first Islamites, apart from the inner circle, were
the least religious. See Renan, _Études d'histoire religieuse_, pp.
257-65; and Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_, Amsterdam,
1894, pp. 1, 2, 4, 7. Nöldeke (p. 15) speaks in the conventional way of
the "wonderful intellectual outburst" which made possible the early
triumphs of Islam. The case is really on all fours with that of the
French Revolution--"_la carrière ouverte aux talens_." Cp. Milman,
_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 204, as to the readiness with which
the followers of Moseilama turned to Mahommedanism.]
[Footnote 383: See above, p. 97, _note_ 1.]
[Footnote 384: Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed.
1889, pp. 187, 188.]
[Footnote 385: Cp. Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese
Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 4, and Sismondi, _Literature of the South
of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 61, 64, 68, 80-90. As to Arabic study of
linguistics, cp. Nöldeke, p. 17.]
[Footnote 386: Cp. Testa, _History of the War of Frederick I. upon the
Communes of Lombardy_, Eng. tr. p. 100.]
[Footnote 387: Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_,
Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 7-12.]
[Footnote 388: As to the religious zeal of the Berbers in the way of
Moslem dissent, on all fours with the phenomena of Protestantism, see
Lane-Poole, as cited, p. 53.]
[Footnote 389: Dozy (_Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109)
decides that "in Andalusia nearly everyone could read and write"; but
even if this were true, which is very doubtful (seeing that on the same
page the historian tells how Hakam founded twenty-three free schools for
the children of the poor in Cordova), the reading would be almost solely
confined to the Koran.]
[Footnote 390: The mere preaching and miracle-working of the Marabouts
among the Berbers set up successively the movements of the Fatimites,
the Almoravides, and the Almohades (Lane-Poole, p. 54).]
[Footnote 391: Concerning the intolerance of this reaction, see Dozy,
iii, 248-54. Cp. iii, 16-21, as to the normal fanaticism of the Moorish
populace.]
[Footnote 392: See Dozy, iii, 286, as to the general lapse from
rationalism to faith.]
[Footnote 393: See the whole estimate of Prof. Flint, _History of the
Philosophy of History_, 1893, pp. 157-71.]
[Footnote 394: Cp. Dugat, _Histoire des philosophes et des théologiens
mussulmans_, 1878, pp. 337-48; Freeman, _History and Conquests of the
Saracens_, p. 124; and the author's _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd.
ed. i, 267-68, 277-79.]
[Footnote 395: See it discussed in _A Short History of Freethought_,
2nd. ed. i, ch. x, § 3; ii, 56 _sq._ And see below, pt. v, ch. iv. § 2.]
[Footnote 396: This was written before 1900.]
[Footnote 397: Deutsch, however (_Literary Remains_, p. 172), predicted
it with confidence.]
CHAPTER III
ROME
The culture conditions of Rome seem to cause no perplexity even to those
who find Greek civilisation a mystery. They are certainly obvious
enough. By reason of the primary natural direction of Roman life to
plunder and conquest, with a minimum of commerce and peaceful contacts,
Roman culture was as backward as that of Greece was forward. The early
Etruscan culture having been relegated to the status of archæology,
however respectfully treated,[398] and the popular language having
become that of all classes, the republican period had to begin again at
the beginning. Latin literature practically commenced in the third
century B.C., when that of Greece was past its meridian; and the fact
that Lucius Andronicus and Nævius, the early playwrights, were men of
Greek culture, and that Ennius translated the Greek rationalist Evêmeros
(Euhêmeros), point to the Hellenic origins of Rome's intellectual life.
Her first art, on the other hand, was substantially derived from the
Etruscans, who also laid the simple beginnings of the Roman drama, later
built upon under Greek influence. But even with the Etruscan
stimulus--itself a case of arrested development--the art went no great
way before the conquest of Greece; and even under Greek stimulus the
literature was progressive for only two centuries, beginning to decline
as soon as the Empire was firmly established.
Of the relative poverty of early Roman art, the cause is seen even by
Mommsen to lie partly in the religious environment, religion being the
only incentive which at that culture stage could have operated (and this
only with economic fostering); but the nature of the religious
environment he implicitly sets down as usual to the character of the
race,[399] as contrasted with the character of the Greeks. Obviously it
is necessary to seek a reason for the religious conditions to begin
with; and this is to be found in the absence from early Rome of exactly
those natural and political conditions which made Greece so manifold in
its culture. We have seen how, where Greece was divided into a score of
physically "self-contained" states, no one of which could readily
overrun the others, Rome was placed on a natural career of conquest; and
this at a culture stage much lower than that of Ionic Greece of the same
period. Manifold and important culture contacts there must have been for
Hellenes before the Homeric poems were possible; but Rome at the
beginning of the republican period was in contact only with the other
Italic tribes, the Phoenicians, the Grecian cities, and the Etruscans;
and with these her relations were hostile. In early Ionia, again, Greek
poetry flourished as a species of luxury under a feudal system
constituted by a caste of rich nobles who had acquired wealth by
conquest of an old and rich civilisation. Roman militarism began in
agricultural poverty; and the absorption of the whole energies of the
group in warfare involved the relegation of the arts of song and poetry
to the care of the women and boys, as something beneath adult male
notice.[400] Roman religion in the same way was left as a species of
archæology to a small group of priests and priestly aristocrats, charged
to observe the ancient usages. It would thus inevitably remain
primitive--that is, it would remain at a stage which the Greeks had
mostly passed at the Homeric period; and when wealth and leisure came,
Greek culture was there to over-shadow it. To say that the Latins
racially lacked the mythopoeic faculty is to fall back on the old plan
of explaining phenomena in terms of themselves. As a matter of fact, the
mere number of deities, of personified forces, in the Roman mythology is
very large,[401] only there is lacking the embroidery of concrete
fiction which gives vividness to the mythology of the Greeks. The Romans
relatively failed to develop the mythopoeic faculty because their
conditions caused them to energise more in other ways.[402]
There is, however, obvious reason to believe that among the Italian
peoples there was at one time a great deal more of myth than has
survived.[403] What is preserved is mainly fragments of the mythology of
one set of tribes, and that in only a slightly developed form. All the
other Italic peoples had been subdued by the Romans before any of them
had come into the general use of letters;[404] and instead of being put
in a position to develop their own myths and cults, or to co-ordinate
the former in the Greek fashion, they were absorbed in the Roman system,
which took their Gods to its pantheon, and at the same time imposed on
them those of Rome. Much of their mythic lore would thus perish, for the
literate Romans had not been concerned to cultivate even their own.
Early Roman life being divided between war and agriculture, and there
being no free literary class to concern itself with the embellishment of
the myths, there subsisted only the simple myths and rituals of
agriculture and folklore, the numerous list of personified functions
connected with all the phases of life, and the customary ceremonial of
augury and invocation in war. The augurs and pontifices were the public
men and statesmen, and they made religion a State function. What occult
lore there was they made a class monopoly--an effectual preventive in
itself of a Hellenic development of myth. Apart from the special sets or
colleges of priests there were specially appointed colleges of
religio-archæological specialists--first, the six augurs and the five
_pontifices_, then the _duoviri sacris faciundis_, afterwards increased
to ten and to fifteen, who collected Greek oracles and saw to the
Sibylline books; later the twenty _fetiales_ or heralds, and so on.
"These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the
priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific
divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the
preservation of traditional rules regarding the more general religious
observances.... These close corporations supplying their own vacancies,
of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the
depositaries of skilled arts and sciences."[405]
Religion being thus for centuries so peculiarly an official matter of
settled tradition, no unauthorised myth-maker could get a hearing. Even
what was known would be kept as far as possible a corporation
secret,[406] as indeed were some of the mystery practices in Egypt and
Greece. But whereas in Greece the art of sculpture, once introduced, was
stimulated by and reacted on mythology in every temple in every town,
the rigid limitation of early Roman public life to the business of war
would on that side have closed the door on sculpture,[407] even if it
could otherwise have found entrance. The check laid on the efflorescence
of the religious instinct was a double check on the efflorescence of
art. The net result is described with some exaggeration by an eminent
mythologist, in a passage which reduces to something like unity of idea
the tissues of contradiction spun by Mommsen:--
For the Latins their Gods, although their name was legion, remained
mysterious beings without forms, feelings, or passions; and they
influenced human affairs without sharing or having any sympathy
with human hopes, fears, or joys. Neither had they, like the Greek
deities, any society among themselves. There was for them no
Olympos where they might gather and take counsel with the father of
Gods and men. They had no parentage, no marriage, no offspring.
They thus became a mere multitude of oppressive beings, living
beyond the circle of human interests, yet constantly interfering
with it; and their worship was thus as terrible a bondage as any
under which the world has yet suffered. Not being associated with
any definite bodily shapes, they could not, like the beautiful
creations of the Greek mind, promote the growth of the highest art
of the sculptor, the painter, and the poet.[408]
It is necessary here to make some corrections and one expansion. The
statement as to parentage, marriage, and offspring is clearly wrong. Cox
here follows Keightley, whose pre-scientific view is still common.
Keightley admits that the early Latin Gods and Goddesses occur in pairs,
as Saturn and Ops, Janus and Jana; and that they were called _Patres_
and _Matres_.[409] To assert after this that they were never thought of
as generating offspring, merely because the bulk of the old
folk-mythology is lost, is to ascribe uncritically to the Latins an
abstention from the most universal forms of primitive myth-making. The
proposition as to "terrible bondage," again, cannot stand historically;
for, to say nothing of the religions of Mexico and Palestine, and some
of those of India, the Roman life was certainly much less darkened by
creed than has been that of many Christian countries, for instance
Protestant Scotland and Catholic Spain.
[M. Boissier (_La religion romaine_, i, 2) decided that the Romans
were religiously ruled more by fear than hope, and that their
worship consisted chiefly of "timid supplications and rigorous
expiations." Mommsen, on the other hand (ch. xii, p. 191),
pronounces that "the Latin religion was grounded mainly on man's
enjoyment of earthly pleasures." Both statements would be equally
true of all ancient religions. Compare M. Boissier's later remarks,
pp. 21-25, 26, 28, wherein he contradicts himself as does Mommsen.]
As regards, again, the failure of the early Latin pantheon to stimulate
sculpture and poetry, it has to be noticed that sculpture and poetry
tended to make as well as to be made by mythology in Greece. The
argument against the Latin pantheon is in fact an argument in a circle.
If the Latin Gods were not "associated with any definite bodily shapes"
(parentage, marriage, and offspring they certainly _had_), it could only
be when and _because_ they were not yet sculptured. Greek Gods before
they were sculptured would be conceived just as variably. Were _they_
then thought of as formless? The proposition is strictly inconceivable.
Latin Gods must have been imagined very much as were and are those of
other barbarous races, who are notoriously thought of as having sex,
form, and passions. Greek mythology simply reached the art stage sooner.
The cults of Hellas did not start with a mythology full-blown, thereby
creating the arts; the mythology grew step by step with and in the arts,
in a continuous mutual reaction; many Greek myths being really tales
framed to explain the art-figures of other mythologies, Egyptian and
Asiatic. Thus the primitive bareness of the Latin mythology signifies
not a natural saplessness which could give no increase to art, but (1)
loss of lore and (2) a lack of the artistic and literary factors which
record and stimulate higher mythologic growth.
Thus limited in their native culture, the Roman upper class were
inevitably much affected by higher foreign cultures when they met these
under conditions of wealth and leisure. Long before that stage, indeed,
they consulted Greek oracles and collected responses; and they had
informally assimilated before the conquest a whole series of Greek Gods
without giving them public worship.[410] The very Goddess of the early
Latin League, the Aventine Diana, was imaged by a copy of Artemis of
Ephesus, the Goddess of the Ionian League.[411] As time went on the more
psychologically developed cults of the East were bound to attract the
Romans of all classes. What of religious emotion there was in the early
days must have played in large part around the worship which the State
left free to the citizens as individuals--the worship of the _Lares_ and
_Penates_, the cults of the hearth and the family; and in this
connection the primitive mythopoeic instinct must have evolved a great
deal of private mythology which never found its way into literature. But
as the very possession of _Lares_ and _Penates_, ancestral and domestic
spirits, was originally a class privilege, not shared by the landless
and the homeless, these had step by step to be made free of public
institutions of a similar species--the _Lares Praestites_ of the whole
city, festally worshipped on the first day of May, and other _Lares
Publici_, _Rurales_, _Compitales_, _Viales_, and so on--just as they
were helped to bread. Even these concessions, however, failed to make
the old system suffice for the transforming State; and individual
foreign worships with a specific attraction were one by one inevitably
introduced--that of Æsculapius in the year 291 B.C., in a panic about
pestilence; that of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, in 205: both by
formal decision of the Senate. The manner of the latter importation is
instructive. Beginning the Hannibalic war in a spirit of religious
patriotism, the Senate decreed the destruction of the temples of the
alien Isis and Serapis.[412] But as the war went on, and the devotion
shown to the native Gods was seen to be unrewarded, the Senate
themselves, yielding to the general perturbation which showed itself in
constant resort to foreign rites by the women,[413] prescribed resort to
the Greek sacrificial rites of Apollo.[414] Later they called in the
cult of Cybele from Phrygia;[415] and other cults informally, but none
the less irresistibly, followed.
In all such steps two forces were at work--the readiness of the
plebeians to welcome a foreign religion in which the patricians had, as
it were, no vested rights; and the tendency of the more plastic
patricians themselves, especially the women, to turn to a worship with
emotional attractions. When the plebeians sought admission for their
class to the higher offices of State, they were told with unaffected
seriousness that their men had not the religious qualifications--they
lacked the hereditary gift of reading auspices, the lore of things
sacred.[416] So, when they did force entrance, their alleged blunders in
these matters were exclaimed against as going far to ruin the republic.
This was not a way to make the populace revere the national religion;
and as the population of foreign race steadily increased by conquest and
enslavement, alien cults found more and more hold. "It was always in the
popular quarters of the city that these movements began."[417]
The first great unofficial importation seems to have been the orgiastic
worship of Dionysos, who specially bore for the Romans his epithet of
Bacchus, and was identified with their probably aboriginal _Liber_. This
worship, carried on in secret assemblies, was held by the conservatives
to be a hotbed of vice and crime, and was, according to Livy, bloodily
punished (B.C. 186). So essentially absurd, however, is Livy's childish
narrative that it is impossible to take anything in it for certain save
the bare fact that the worship was put under restrictions, as tending to
promote secret conspiracies.[418] But from this time forward, roughly
speaking, Rome may be said to have entered into the mythological
heritage of Greece, even as she did into her positive treasure of art
work and of oriental gold. Every cult of the conquered Mediterranean
world found a footing in the capital, the mere craving for new
sensations among the upper class being sufficient to overcome their
political bias to the old system. It is clear that when Augustus found
scores of Roman temples in disrepair after the long storms of the civil
wars, it was not that "religion" was out of vogue, but that it was
superseded by what the Romans called "superstition"--something
extraneous, something over and above the public system of rites and
ceremonies. In point of fact, the people of Rome were in the mass no
longer of Roman stock, but a collection of many alien races, indifferent
to the indigenous cults. The emperor's restorations could but give a
subsidised continuity to the official services: what vitally flourished
were the cults which ministered to the new psychological needs of a
population more and more divorced from great public interests, and
increasingly alien in its heredity--the stimulant and hysterical
worships of Adonis, of Attis, of the Lover Goddess coupled with the
first, or the Mourning Mother Goddess with the second, of Isis and
Osiris and their child--rituals of alternate lamentation and rejoicing,
of initiations, austerities, confessions, penances, self-abasement, and
the promise of immortality. On the general soil of devotion thus formed,
there finally grew up side by side Mithraism and Christianity, the rival
religions of the decadence, of which the second triumphed in virtue of
having by far the larger number of adaptations to its environment.
But while Rome was thus at length fully possessed by the spirit of
religious imagination which had so fruitfully stirred the art of Greece,
there ensued no new birth of faculty. It was with the arts as with
literature: the stimulus from Greece was received by a society rapidly
on the way to that social state which in Greece had choked the springs
of progress. In the last generations of the Republic the literary
development was markedly rapid. In the century which saw Rome, after a
terrific struggle, victorious over Carthage and prepared for the grapple
with Macedon, the first practitioners of literature were playwrights, or
slaves, or clients of great men, or teachers like Ennius, who could find
in the now leisured and in part intelligent or at least inquisitive
upper class a sufficient encouragement to a literary career. That class
did not want recitals of the crude folklore of their fathers, so
completely eclipsed by that of Greece, which was further associated with
the literary form of drama, virtually new to the Romans.[419] Drama,
always the form of literature which can best support itself, is the form
most cultivated down till the period of popular abasement and civil
convulsion, though of a dozen dramatists we have only Plautus and
Terence left in anything like completeness; and while the tragedy of
Pacuvius and Attius was unquestionably an imitation of the Greek, it may
have had in its kind as much merit as the comedies that have been
preserved. Even more rapid than the development, however, is the social
gangrene that kills the popular taste; for when we reach the time of
Augustus there is no longer a literary drama, save perhaps for the small
audiences of the wooden theatres, and the private performances of
amateurs;[420] parades and pantomimes alone can attract the mindless
multitude; and the era of autocrats begins on well-laid foundations of
ignorance and artificial incivilisation.
As with the literature of the people, so with that of the lettered
class. In the last generation of freedom, we have in Lucretius and
Catullus two of the great poets of all antiquity, compared with whose
forceful inspiration Virgil and Horace already begin to seem sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of decline. Thenceforth the glory begins to die
away; and though the red blade of Juvenal is brandished with a hand of
power, and Lucan clangs forth a stern memorial note, and Petronius
sparkles with a sinister brilliancy, there is no mistaking the downward
course of things under Cæsarism. It is true we find Juvenal complaining
that only the emperor does anything for literature:--
Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum.
Solus enim tristes hac tempestate Camoenas
Respexit.[421]
It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it
Domitian or another; and the commentators decide that only at the
beginning of Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a
description of the Roman upper class as grown indifferent to poetry, or
to any but their own. But it is not on the economic side that the
autocracy and the aristocracy of the Empire are to be specially
indicted. The economic difficulty was very much the same under the
Republic, when only by play-writing could literary men as such make a
living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when he cried Evohe was well
fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the serpents would have
been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless trumpet have sounded
nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all inheritors of a
patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later a patron's
munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their
books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were
prices kept by the small demand.[422] What was true of the poets was
still truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire,
the men of letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn
solely from the small class with inherited incomes. The curse of the
Empire was that even when the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought
to endow studies,[423] they could not buy moral or intellectual energy.
The senate of poltroons who crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were
the upper-class version of the population which lived by bread and the
circus; and in that air neither great art nor great thought could
breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek sculpture taken into pay;
Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus. The noble apparition
of Marcus Aurelius shines out of the darkening ages like some unearthly
incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all the light and
healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of Fronto
his speech is as that of one of the wise Gods of the ancient fantasy.
Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative
literature, be it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another
age. _Roma fuit._
The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can
best be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul.
Subjected to regular imperial administration within a generation of its
conquest by Cæsar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in
civilisation, the imperial regimen being relatively more favourable to
nearly every species of material progress than that of the old
chiefs.[424] The emperors even in the fourth century are found
maintaining there the professorships of rhetoric, language, law,
philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus Antoninus;[425] and
until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade, the material
conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life was
merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper classes,
for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as
elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital
political discussion--if indeed any appetite for such discussion
survived--drove literature either into mere erudition or into
triviality. On the other hand, the growing Church offered a field of
ostensibly free intellectual activity, and so was for a time highly
productive, in point of sheer quantity of writing; a circumstance
naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed. The
phenomenon was of course simply one of the passage of energy by the line
of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did
thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire,
men of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and
support; and the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and
the East, were, as M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather
than for solitary life.[426] There, for men who believed the creed,
which was as credible as the older doctrines, there was a constant
exercise for the mind on interests that were relatively real, albeit
profoundly divided from the interests of the community. Thus, at a time
when the community needed all its mental energy to meet its political
need, that mental energy was spent in the discussion of insoluble and
insane problems, of predestination and freewill, of faith and works, of
fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the worship of saints.
Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus, Cassian, Hilary, and
Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and Augustine in the South,
represent as it were the last vibrations of the civilised intelligence;
their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great issues, hints
of the amount of force that was still running to waste throughout the
Empire.
Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the
intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed
began to paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of
political tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole
of supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could
wield the weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the
Eastern and the Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and
the multitude of sects which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so
many more forces of social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that
difference of dogma was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in
the Church, must needs take the course that had before been taken in
politics.
After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory
of Nazianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at
Tours,[427] fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled
in turn; and as soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing
system of thought, theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent
as government. As we read Augustine's _City of God_, with its strenuous
demonstration that the calamities which men ascribe to the new religion
are the fruit of their own misdeeds, we realise to the full the
dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid in his polemic is the
exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before detected by the
reason of the few, but maintained by believers and unbelievers alike for
reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of a faith which
first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State concerns,
then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most
needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy
itself had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a
State could live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by
the men who framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy,
but could not build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the
commonweal. "Of all the various systems of government that have been
attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is
undoubtedly one of the very worst."[428]
But one thing the Church could construct and conserve--the fabric of her
own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a
State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals
of antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the
Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so,
inasmuch as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the
sundering of communities than for advance and unification. The truly
civilising forces were the other three: the first being the body of
Roman law, the product of Roman experience and Greek thought in
combination; and the second, the literature of antiquity, in large part
lost till the time we call the New Birth, when its recovery impregnated
and inspired, though it perhaps also overburdened and lamed, the
unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The third was the heritage of
the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by the populations of
the western towns which survived and propagated their species through
the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering society of
Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is modern
civilisation derived.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 398: See E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 703; cp.
A. Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i, 274-79, as to the survivals. The
reversion of the remaining Etruscan aristocracy in Rome to the language
of the common people, under stress of strife with Etruria, is a
phenomenon on all fours with the abandonment of French by the
upper-class English in the fourteenth century, as a result of hostility
with France.]
[Footnote 399: Even Eduard Meyer decides in this fashion (_Geschichte
des Alterthums_, ii, 530) that to Italy "was denied the capacity to
shape a culture for itself, to energise independently and creatively in
the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and science"--this after expressly
noting (ii, 155) how Greece itself developed only under the stimulus of
alien culture. Compare §§ 339, 340 (ii, 533-36).]
[Footnote 400: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 285-300
(bk. i, ch. xv).]
[Footnote 401: "No people has ever possessed a vaster pantheon,"
observes M. Boissier, while noting the slightness of the
characterisation (_La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, 4e
édition, i, 8). The lack of characterisation would seem to have
encouraged multiplication.]
[Footnote 402: The fact that the Etruscans, like the other Italian
peoples, remained at the stage of unintellectual formalism (Meyer,
_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 528-29; Schwegler, _Römische
Geschichte_, i, 273), suffices to show that not in race genius but in
stage and conditions of culture lies the explanation. All early religion
in official hands is formalist--witness the Pentateuch. The preoccupied
Italians left their cults, as did the Phoenicians, to archæological
officials, while the leisured Greeks carried them into poetry and art
under conditions which fostered these activities.]
[Footnote 403: The point is discussed in the author's _Christianity and
Mythology_, 2nd ed. pp. 74-90; _Pagan Christs_, 2nd ed. pp. 45-46.]
[Footnote 404: Whether or not we accept Mommsen's view (bk. i, c. xiv)
that the use of the alphabet in Italy dates from about 1000 B.C. On this
cp. Schwegler, i, 36.]
[Footnote 405: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, bk. i, ch. xii, Eng. tr. ed.
1868, i. 189. Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 354, as to the respective
functions of priests and pontiffs.]
[Footnote 406: It is only through fragmentary vestiges (Servius on
Virgil, _Georg._ i, 21; cp. Varro in Augustine, _De civitate Dei_, vi,
7-10) that we know the contents of the book of _Indigitamenta_ kept by
the pontifices. It seems to have been a list, not of the _Dii Indigetes_
commonly so-called, but of all the multitudinous powers presiding over
the various operations of life. See Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i,
32; Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Lit._ ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. 1900, i,
104; Boissier, _La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, i, 4, and
_note_. "I have no doubt," writes Mr. Ward Fowler (_The Religious
Experience of the Roman People_, 1911, p. 168), "that Wissowa is right
in explaining _Indigitamenta_ as _Gebetsformeln_, formulæ of invocation;
in which the most important matter, we may add, would be the name of the
deity. See his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 177 foll." Corssen put this
view before Wissowa.]
[Footnote 407: According to Varro (cited by Augustine, _De civ. Dei_,
iv, 31), the early Romans for 170 years worshipped the Gods without
images.]
[Footnote 408: Rev. Sir G.W. Cox, _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_, ed.
1882, p. 169.]
[Footnote 409: Keightley, _Mythol. of Anc. Greece and Italy_, 1838, pp.
506-7.]
[Footnote 410: Meyer, ii, 531.]
[Footnote 411: Mommsen, ch. 12.]
[Footnote 412: Valerius Maximus, i, 3.]
[Footnote 413: Livy, xxv, 1.]
[Footnote 414: _Id._ xxv, 12.]
[Footnote 415: _Id._ xxix, 10, 14.]
[Footnote 416: Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 39.]
[Footnote 417: Boissier, i, 346. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 2, Bohn ed. i, 40-41,
and Wenck's note.]
[Footnote 418: Livy, xxxix, 18. The farrago of charges of crime we have
no more reason to credit than we have in regard to the similar charges
made later against the Christians.]
[Footnote 419: Cp. Carl Peter, _Geschichte Roms_, 1881, i, 550.]
[Footnote 420: Cp. Merivale, _History_, small ed. iv, 67-70, and Gibbon,
ch. 31 (Bohn ed. iii, 420).]
[Footnote 421: Sat, vii, 1.]
[Footnote 422: Martial, i, 67, 118; xiii, 3. But cp. Becker, _Gallus_.
Sc. iii, Excur. 3.]
[Footnote 423: Vespasian began the endowment of professorships of
rhetoric (Suetonius, _Vespasian_, 18). As to the Antonines, see Gibbon,
ch. ii, _note_, near end; and cp. Hatch, _Influence of Greek Ideas upon
the Christian Church_, 1900, pp. 38-39; and Boissier, _La Fin du
Paganisme_, i, 166. Vespasian's endowments, it should be noted, were
given only to the professors of rhetoric. The philosophers (presumably
the Stoics, but also the astrologers) he banished, as did Domitian. On
this cp. Merivale, _History_, vol. vii, ch. 60.]
[Footnote 424: Cp. Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e
éd. i, 48, 49.]
[Footnote 425: _Id._, pp. 113-15.]
[Footnote 426: _Id._, i, 121, 122.]
[Footnote 427: Guizot (as cited, i, 135) makes much of the fact that
Hilary, Ambrose, and Martin opposed the _capital_ punishment of
heretics. He ignores the circumstance that Martin led an attack on all
the pagan idols and temples of his neighbourhood, in which the peasants
who resisted were slain.]
[Footnote 428: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, M. Hume's ed. 1900, i,
115.]
EPILOGUE
A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE
We are now, perhaps, in a position to contemplate the wood without being
distracted by the trees, and without forgetting, on the other hand, that
it is an aggregate of trees individually conditioned by aggregation.
The record of Græco-Roman, as of all other ancient civilisation, with
the partial exception of that of China, is one of a complete
decadence--in this case a twofold decadence: a passing from collective
energy and achievement to collective decrepitude and mental impotence,
from intellectual freedom and force to the dogmatic arrest of thought,
from artistic splendour to the very negation of the finest forms of art.
However we may dispute about the nature of progress, we all agree that
this was decadence. Not even the Christian Greek, the least freethinking
of educated moderns, supposes that the life of his race went upwards
from the time of Constantine. The Italian to this day aspires--by way of
Tripoli, among other things--to bear some comparison with the Roman,
whose "greatness" he envies. Decadence, then, is confessed. It concerns
us, if we would have a historical philosophy at all, to think it all in
terms of general causation.
At the outset, we shall do well to realise that in the long
transmutation there was no day, save those of sudden and dire disaster,
on which the human elements of the State organisms concerned were
collectively conscious of any great change in their way of life. And
days of dire disaster had occurred in the times to which we look back as
those of energetic expansion. Early Rome had been actually captured by
Etruscans, by Gauls; "she" had ostensibly come to the verge of overthrow
by Hannibal a whole era before she was sacked by the Goths; Athens had
been sacked by the Persians long before the Roman invasion. What was the
determining difference in the consciousness of the citizens at the two
epochs? Clearly that between the minds of men wont to "fend for
themselves" collectively and of men wont to be ruled and prescribed for
by a master--a difference, therefore, in power of resistance and of
recovery. And this difference had itself been wrought by long
mutations--from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome, from
the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had
been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to
an autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been
habituated to slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The
substantial and fatal change was in the degree of simple average manhood
among the free. National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood--a
thing not easily lost.
A Conservative statesman of our day, wont to apply analytic criticism
chiefly for partisan purposes, has attempted a comparatively
disinterested analysis of the problem before us, in a short but not
inconsiderate survey of the decadence of the old world. At the outset he
rightly notes the inconsistency with which men still tend to hold by the
old idea of an inevitable ageing and ultimate decrepitude of States and
civilisations, while holding no less confidently to the modern notion,
practically unattained by the ancients, of an inevitable progress.
"Why," he asks, "_should_ civilisations thus wear out and great
communities decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they
do?"[429] It may or may not be by reason of political bias that the
questioner--who indeed avows that he is pursuing one of "those wandering
trains of thought where we allow ourselves the luxury of putting
wide-ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any confident
reply"--propounds no clear answer to either query, contenting himself
with suggesting that modern civilisation, in virtue of its strengthening
hold on physical science, stands a chance of escaping the doom that fell
on the old. But such a curtailed answer moves us afresh to seek a more
complete one.
Our questioner, contemplating the "fall" of Rome, argues that the cause
cannot have been even so serious an evil as slavery, which had been in
operation from the beginning. He overlooks the fact that it had greatly
increased in the period of far-reaching conquest,[430] and so misses an
element in the solution. Passing over this, he recognises one proximate
"cause," diminution of population; and he in effect seems to trace to
this source the secondary factor of fiscal collapse--the breaking down
of the tax-paying classes everywhere under the ever-increasing burden of
State exaction. The final fiscal process he oddly describes as "a crude
experiment in socialism." Putting the decay of population and the
increase of burdens together, he pronounces that "they absolutely
require themselves to be explained by causes more general and more
remote"; and his answer--confessedly a mere restatement of the
problem--is just the word "Decadence." The process is simply formulated,
once more, in terms of its name. The questioner does not even take the
further analytical step of asking how the Eastern Empire came to endure
a thousand years longer than the Western; and why the decadence did not
similarly operate there.
If anything has been made out in the foregoing survey, we have got
further than this; and indeed from any point of view the arrest of the
analysis is surprising. Supposing failure of population to be the
central phenomenon, we have obviously to ask: What were the political
differentia of the progressive and the ostensibly declining states of
population? How were the peoples ruled when they were strong, expansive,
and collectively equal to their burdens? Surely the answer is obvious.
Republican Greece and Republican Rome were self-governing communities,
or aggregates of such, supporting themselves by individualist production
of all kinds, breeding beyond and not under the apparent limit of
food-production. When Romanised Italy ceased to produce a sufficiency of
men, she had ceased to produce a sufficiency of things; and this latter
failure, entailing the other, can be shown to have been a direct result
of the exaction of all manner of subsistence from conquered territories.
So far, there is no mystery.
Our querist, however, affirms a diminution of population not only in
Italy but throughout the Empire. Here we must first question the
assertion. Pestilences, such as that of 166 A.C., doubtless visited most
parts of the Empire; but pestilences belong also to the pre-imperial
period, and need not here be specially considered. As to Greece, the
facts have been already given. The depopulation of that, after
Alexander, was primarily a matter of exodus to the richer conquered
lands, where a new Hellenistic civilisation arose under purely monarchic
rule, and therefore unaccompanied by the all-round, self-developing
mental energy which had marked the life of "free" Greece. In Byzantium,
of course, the mental stagnation, under Christian autocracy, was no less
complete. But there is no evidence whatever that after Constantine the
principle of population failed in the Eastern Empire, especially when
that was restricted by the amputation of the tributary territories.[431]
Did population then fail in Gaul and Spain and Africa? If so, when? As
to Gaul, there is evidence that after the conquest population and
productivity increased, though the latter had not previously been
low--witness the loot taken by Cæsar at Toulouse. Gaul was certainly
taxed exorbitantly; but Julian, as we saw, prudently lessened the drain;
and Mommsen describes both Gaul and Spain as flourishing in their
Romanised period.[432] They continued, in fact, to be, with North
Africa, the main sources of the revenue of the Western Empire down to
its collapse. Materially, they in some respects went forward, notably in
the case of the region of old Carthage. The element wherein they were
decadent was precisely that of free manhood, everywhere eviscerated by
autocratic and bureaucratic rule. Therefore it was that, like
Britain--similarly productive of revenue in the imperial period--they
were unable to defend themselves against the final barbarian inroads.
Had Honorius carried out his scheme for a measure of Home Rule in
Gaul,[433] and followed it up by a similar scheme for Spain, Italy
indeed might all the sooner have lost her hold on them as milch kine,
but both provinces might conceivably have developed a new life centuries
before they historically did.
The Conservative statesman has in fact, and very naturally, excluded
from consideration the central political factor. Echoing the
Gibbon-Mommsen-Renan thesis as to the excellence of the Antonine
government of the Mediterranean world, he ignores as those writers did
the vital problem: Wherein lies the felicity of a world wholly at the
mercy of the chance of the election of a good emperor by a mercenary
soldiery? To fall back on phrases about the Empire "respecting local
feelings, encouraging local government," and being "accepted by the
conquered as the natural organisation of the world," is merely to burke
the real issue as to the political viability of communities satisfied
with such a system, content to rest the social pyramid forever on its
apex. To say that the conditions of the Empire under the Antonines were
"getting better" is merely to close the eyes to the frightful hazard of
imperial succession. A world absolutely dependent for its
betterment--nay, even for its safe continuance--on the chance of a good
succession of despots is a world doomed by the mere law of variation.
If we will but gauge moral and economic forces in human affairs as we
gauge physical forces in that toil of science of which the Conservative
statesman has learned to recognise the efficacy, we shall deliver
ourselves from the mystery-mongering which he is fain to substitute for
the old shibboleth of "the divine will." To trace causation in a known
civilisation is not to pretend either to understand all social sequences
in all ages or to predict the destinate future: it is but to recognise
the real reactions of human proclivities and procedures which habit and
prejudice have been wont to contemplate uncritically. The late Sir John
Seeley, who at times hardly advances on Kingsley as an interpreter of
history, grappled in his day with our problem; and he too specified the
Antonine age as a notably hopeful period, from which he dates the
decadence:--
"A century of unparalleled tranquillity and virtuous government is
followed immediately by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution.
A century of rest is followed not by renewed vigour, but by
incurable exhaustion. Some principle of decay must have been at
work; but what principle? We answer: it was a period of sterility
or barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was bad. And among
the causes of this barrenness we find, in the more barbarous
nations, the enfeeblement produced by the too abrupt introduction
of civilisation and universally the absence of industrial habits,
and the disposition to listlessness which belongs to the military
character."[434]
One is tempted to apply the theory of human crops to the case of the
chair of history at Cambridge. Prof. Seeley's theory is an edifying
variant on that of Mr. Balfour. Where one thesis finds the key to all in
the emperor, the other sees failure of the human harvest the moment the
imperial succession goes wrong. And while the Professor offers the
semblance of a reason for the alleged failure in the human breed, it is
really too nugatory for discussion. If the "barbarous nations" alluded
to were Gaul and Spain, they had suffered the "abrupt introduction of
civilisation" more than two hundred years before. Egypt and Syria and
Greece and North Africa had older civilisations than the Roman. Germany
was not decadent. The decay of industrial life in Italy had begun long
before the Empire. As well might we say that a bad human crop there had
preceded the Etruscan conquest, the invasion by Hannibal, and the civil
wars. To cite, as does Prof. Seeley, the pestilence of the year 166 as a
beginning of depopulation, is to ignore the problem of three hundred
years of previous depopulation in Italy, and to set up a misconception
as to the rest of the Empire. According to Gibbon, the long pestilence
of the years 250-265 was the worst of all.[435]
More plausibly, Prof. Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had
been to the population, that the _fiscus_ was to industry. It broke the
bruised reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility.
Roman finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as
to depress enterprise and trade. The _fiscus_ destroyed capital in the
Roman Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government
lay in wait for all savings--_locupletissimus quisque in prædam
correptus_. All the intricate combinations by which man is connected to
man in a progressive society disappeared."[436] But this is a finally
excessive description of a process which had been in full swing in the
time of Cicero, and which subsisted for three hundred years after Marcus
Aurelius in the West. A generation after Marcus came the powerful
Severus, whose son Caracalla could find millions of money to build his
immense baths at Rome, still monstrous in their ruins; and seventy years
after Caracalla, Diocletian, wielding the Empire at its utmost
extension, could build still vaster baths for the imperial city at which
he had ceased to dwell. With a debased silver coinage,[437] the emperors
of that day seemed to feel no fatal lack of real revenue, and
maintained, at great cost, huge armies for the control and defence of
their enormous realm.
It is impossible to see why the age of the Antonines should be taken as
a turning point in the Empire's history rather than the age of
Diocletian. That great organiser seems to have partly provoked the
insurrection of the Bagaudae in Gaul by taxation; but the Bagaudae were
a _jacquerie_ oppressed by the nobles, as their fathers had been before
Cæsar, and as their posterity was long afterwards; and their wrongs may
as well have been at the hands of their lords as at those of the
autocrat.[438] However that might be, Roman rule in Gaul survived the
revolt of the Bagaudae, yielding a great revenue to Constantine; and at
the time of the fall of Rome Gaul was much more productive than Italy.
All this is beside the case. To say that "the downfall of the Empire is
accounted for" by the _fiscus_[439] is to raise the question whether the
Empire, as such, could have been run by any other method. The Professor
himself pronounces that "Government in its helplessness was driven" to
fiscal oppression. Then fiscal oppression belonged to the nature of the
Empire. Once more we return to the true line of sequence and
explanation. Every step and stage in decadence belonged to the process
of conquest, of confiscation, of subjection of foreign races, who were
made to pay for the vast machinery that kept them subject till they were
unfit for self-defence.
[What is true of the Roman fisc was true till the other day of the
Turkish, another product of militarist imperialism, similarly
collateral with mental stagnation. Depopulation and arrest of
production in the East under Turkish rule are to be explained in
substantially the way in which we have explained them for ancient
Rome. And it is significant that the prospect of regeneration for
Turkey has begun after the amputation of many of the provinces over
which she maintained an alien rule. Her future visibly depends on
the continuance of the processes of self-maintenance and
development of the principle of self-government throughout the
subsisting State.]
There is a danger that, in insisting on the primarily moral causation of
the process of social disease and decay, we may on the one hand relapse
into a delusive sense of moral superiority, and on the other hand fail
to realise how the subjective moral divagation becomes politically
effectual in structural and economic change. It is the understood
process of causation that is alone truly instructive. But the
instruction is deepened in the ratio of our realisation of the decay.
Though it is clear that before Rome many a civilisation had gone to
violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more overwhelming memory
of long triumph and long downfall than that "from the far-distant
morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests
on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the
tragic hour in which the sun of Græco-Latin civilisation set over the
deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and
brutalised peoples of Latin Europe."[440] And this whole tremendous arc
of triumph and decline is to be understood as the historic expression of
the specially conditioned bias of conquest in one people.
The decline is the due sequence of the "rise": everything roots in the
wrong relation of communities throughout the Empire. The extension of
such a social disease as slavery is one of the symptoms, one of the
sequelæ, of the central malady.[441] A totally progressive State
eliminates or minimises slavery; a declining one fails to do so. The
economic malady involved affects primarily the dominant or parasitic
State or central part, its condition of parasitism being more deadly
than its draining effect on the others. _Their_ malady lay in their
state of subjugation, which was an impoverishment of character and
political faculty; and thus it came about that the collapse of the
centre of organisation meant the fall of the entire civilisation of
Western Europe before the new barbarism.
Rome had so visibly ruined all that we are apt to forget how the process
of moral and political retrogression had begun in the Greek world long
before. There, however, the Roman conquest was but a consummation; and
the economic and political continuance of the Eastern Empire was
concurrent with a moral and intellectual contraction which was never
recovered from. In a word, varying conditions determined the differences
of continuance and evolution in the two spheres. But the causation is
none the less clear throughout.
It might be supposed that this reverberating lesson could have been read
in only one way--as a warning to the nations against taking the Roman
road of conquest and dominion. And yet it is doubtful whether modern
States have been at all guided by that lesson, as compared with the
extent to which they have been overruled by the sheer difficulty of
repeating the evolution. The problem has been faced by Lord Cromer, a
ripe ruler, in his very scholarly essay on _Ancient and Modern
Imperialism_. The experienced administrator is quite alive to the
analogy between the part played of old by Rome around the Mediterranean
and in Europe, and that played to-day by England in India and, in some
measure, in Egypt. Raised in some degree above the ordinary
hallucination of mere dominion, the confused pride of the average man in
his country's rule over large portions of the earth, the veteran
governor notes that, whereas there was a general acquiescence of the
subject peoples in the imperial rule of Rome, no _imperium_ to-day has
won any such cordial acceptance.[442] Neither France in Algeria and
Tunis nor Britain in India and Egypt is an assimilating and unifying
power. We may note the proximate explanation, which he does not at first
give--to wit, the sundering force of crystallised religious systems. As
he later puts it, following Sir Alfred Lyall, religions make nations,
where the Romans had to deal with tribes.[443] But that need not greatly
affect our view of the political problem, which would remain if the
religious factor were eliminated; and it is over the political problem
that Lord Cromer most significantly balances.
Falling back on the method of fatalism, he pronounces, like others
before him, "that Rome, equally with the modern expansive Powers, more
especially Great Britain and Russia, was impelled onwards by the
imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers;
that the public opinion of the world scoffed 2,000 years ago, as it does
now, at the alleged necessity; and that each onward move was attributed
to an insatiable lust for extended dominion."[444] As in all fatalistic
reasoning, we are here faced by radical self-contradiction. The "public
opinion of the world," which Lord Cromer allows to include a large part
of Roman opinion,[445] could not scoff at an "irresistible necessity":
it knew that it was no more irresistibly necessary for A to conquer B
than for B to conquer A; and in ascribing to Rome an "insatiable lust
for extended dominion" it merely credited Rome with an appetite known to
inhere in all States. Rome succeeded in her aim; others failed. Pisa,
overborne by Florence, had in her day overborne other communities. Lord
Cromer has begged the vital question, which is: Can States, or can they
not, live neighbourly? To say that Rome could not because of the
ambitions or menaces of others is idle: the menace was reciprocal.
For practical purposes, of course, the thesis is sometimes adequate all
round, as when France and Britain, face to face in North America and in
India, strove each to oust the other. But at times the plea becomes
visibly farcical, as in the recent case of Russia in the Far East, and
the earlier case of Britain with regard to Afghanistan. We can all
remember the temporary growth of the doctrine of "a scientific
frontier." First you want a river; then you need the territory beyond
the river; then you need the line of hills commanding that territory;
then the territory behind the hills becomes a _sine qua non_.[446] In
this case the doctrine has disappeared with the policy, and _that_
disappeared simply because it failed. The event has proved that the
doctrine was a chimera. And nobody to-day probably will maintain that
Russia lay under an imperious and irresistible necessity to go and be
defeated by the Japanese in Manchuria; or that she could not conceivably
have stopped short of that extremity.
The use sometimes made of the word "cupidity" is apt to obscure the
problem. There is cupidity of power and conquest as well as of
territory, revenue, plunder. Roman cupidity was of all kinds. But so was
that of "the" Greeks. Lord Cromer employs the old false
dichotomy--above discussed--that marks the Greeks as "individualistic"
and the Romans as somehow unitary.[447] As we have seen, the original
Roman City-State was just the same kind of thing as the Greek: it was
opportunity that made "the Romans" expand, whereas "the Greeks," down to
Alexander, remained segregated in their States. What was common and
fatal to both, what led Greece to dissolution and Rome to downfall, was
the primary impulse to combat, the inability to refrain from jealousy,
hate, and war. And for the moderns, seeing this, the problem is, Can
they refrain?
Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel
without a purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect
take this attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the
lesson. On the one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between
ancient and modern Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits,
originally aimed at home revenue, and did for a time practise sheer
plunder;[448] the British rule no longer does either: which is in effect
an admission that one "imperious and irresistible necessity" of the
Roman rule has been successfully resisted--shall we say, by modern
enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the further step and say
that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we should substitute
the ideal of their education and purposive evolution. Rather he makes
the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar fashion on the
dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the relative
stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the first
is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of
progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that
Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian
Abyssinia is so still.
As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the
whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it
what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not
even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take
place[449] by way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow,
even as he argues that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where
they (on the urging, as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to
evade further conquest by recognising "buffer States"[450]--as who
should say that whatever course a majority or a Government do take "had
to" be taken. The answer to such reasoning is the mention of the fact,
which he admits, that it was "a supreme principle of the Roman
Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with equal rights."[451] Can
it be still a question whether that principle is to be transcended?
On the final issue as to what the ruling nations "have to" do to-day as
regards the subject peoples, the disinterested student can hardly
hesitate, however the ex-administrator may feel bound to balance. "The
Englishman," Lord Cromer tells us, truly enough as regards the average
citizen, "would be puzzled to give any definite answer" to the question
_Quo vadis?_ in matters imperial.[452] He may well be, when Lord Cromer
visibly is, despite the ostensible emphasis with which he exhorts his
countrymen to keep "the _animus manendi_ strong within them."[453] The
danger is that, noting the formal conclusion rather than the implicit
lesson of Lord Cromer's very able survey, "the Englishman" may turn from
his puzzle to some new insanity of imperialism. Not many years have
passed since English wiseacres were speculating on a "break-up" of
China, and a dominion of some other State over her huge area and
multitudinous millions. He would be a bad sample of modernity who should
now regret that China is apparently on the way, like Japan, to build up
a new progressive civilisation in the "unchanging East."[454] But it is
perhaps as much to the sheer impracticability of further great conquests
as to any alert and conscious reading of the lesson of history that we
owe the growing disposition of modern States to seek their good in their
own development. If so, provided that the ideal be changed, "it is well,
if not _so_ well."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 429: _Decadence._ (Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture.) By the
Right Hon. A.J. Balfour, 1908, p. 8.]
[Footnote 430: See above, pp. 23-24. On the whole question see the very
full survey of W.R. Patterson, _The Nemesis of Nations_, 1907, p. 265
_sq._]
[Footnote 431: Gibbon's generalisation (end of ch. 10) as to a
"diminution of the human species" throughout the Empire is confessedly
founded on very imperfect evidence, applying only to Alexandria, and
very doubtful even at that point.]
[Footnote 432: History, vol. v (_The Provinces_). Cp. Merivale, _General
History_, p. 682.]
[Footnote 433: See Gibbon, ch. 31, end. On Gibbon's and Guizot's
interpretation of the scheme, see Prof. Bury's note on Gibbon, _in
loc_.]
[Footnote 434: _Lectures and Essays_, 1870: Lecture on "Roman
Imperialism," p. 54.]
[Footnote 435: Ch. 10, _end_.]
[Footnote 436: Essay cited, p. 56.]
[Footnote 437: Prof. Bury (note to Gibbon in his ed. i, 281) cites the
debased silver coinage as a proof of the "distress of the Empire" and
the "bankruptcy of the Government." This is an unwarranted inference.
See above, p. 80.]
[Footnote 438: Cp. Gibbon, ch. 13, Bohn ed. i, 427-28; Merivale,
_General History_, pp. 572-74. Bagaudae seem to have recruited the army
of Julian. (Ed. note on Gibbon, as cited, ii, 474.)]
[Footnote 439: Seeley, as cited, p. 57.]
[Footnote 440: Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1907,
vol. i, pref.]
[Footnote 441: Cp. Patterson, _Nemesis of Nations_, as cited.]
[Footnote 442: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, 1910, pp. 37-38,
73-91.]
[Footnote 443: _Id._ p. 91.]
[Footnote 444: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, pp. 19-20.]
[Footnote 445: _Id._ p. 22.]
[Footnote 446: Compare Lord Cromer's mention (p. 32) of the doubt as to
whether the Himalayas made a secure frontier.]
[Footnote 447: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, p. 14.]
[Footnote 448: _Id._ pp. 43, 65-68.]
[Footnote 449: _Id._ p. 62.]
[Footnote 450: _Id._ p. 22.]
[Footnote 451: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, p. 26, citing Mommsen.]
[Footnote 452: _Id._ p. 118.]
[Footnote 453: _Id._ p. 126.]
[Footnote 454: Mr. Balfour, using this egregious expression in his
lecture on Decadence (p. 35), explains that "the 'East' is a term most
loosely used. It does not here include China and Japan, and _does_
include parts of Africa." At the same time it does not refer to the
ancient Jews and Phoenicians. One is moved to ask, Does it include the
Turks and the Persians? If not, in view of all the other exceptions,
might it not be well to drop the "unchanging" altogether?]
PART IV
THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS
NOTE ON LITERATURE
No quite satisfactory history of Italy has appeared in English. The
standard modern Italian history, that of Cesare Cantù, has been
translated into French; but in English there has been no general
history of any length since Procter and Spalding. Col. Procter's
_History of Italy_ (published as by G. Perceval, 1825; 2nd ed.
1844) has merit, but is not abreast of modern studies. Spalding's
_Italy and the Italian Islands_ (3 vols. 3rd ed. 1845) is an
excellent work of its kind, covering Italian history from the
earliest times, but is also in need of revision. The comprehensive
work of Dr. T. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_ (2nd ed. 1892-99,
8 vols.) comes down to the death of Charlemagne.
Of special histories there are several. One of the best and latest
is that of _The Lombard Communes_, by Prof. W.F. Butler (1906).
Captain H.E. Napier, in the preface to his _Florentine History_
(1846, 6 vols.) rightly contended that "no people can be known by
riding post through their country against time"; but his six
learned volumes are ill-written and ill-assimilated. The best
complete history of Florence, the typical Italian Republic, is the
long _Histoire de Florence_ by F.T. Perrens (9 tom. 1877-84; Eng.
tr. of one vol. by Hannah Lynch, 1892). T.A. Trollope's _History of
the Commonwealth of Florence_ (1865, 4 vols.) is less indigestible
than Napier's, but is gratuitously diffuse, and is written in large
part in unfortunate imitation of the pseudo-dramatic manner of
Carlyle. It is further blemished by an absurd index. Neither this
nor Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt's _History of the Venetian Republic_
(1860, 4 vols.; new ed. in two large vols. 1900) has much
sociological value, though the latter is copious and painstaking,
albeit also diffuse. The _Genoa_ of J. Theodore Bent (1881) is an
interesting sketch; but the well-read author fails in orderly
construction.
A good short manual is the _Italy_ of Mr. Hunt (Macmillan's
Historical Course); and an excellent compendium is supplied by the
two treatises of Oscar Browning (1894-95), _Guelphs and
Ghibellines_ (covering the period 1250-1409) and _The Age of the
Condottieri_, covering the Renaissance, to 1530. Bryce and Hallam
are alike helpful to general views; and it is still profitable to
return to the condensed _History of the Italian Republics_ by
Sismondi (written for the English "Cabinet Cyclopædia" in 1832),
though it needs revision in detail. In his two volumes entitled
_The Fall of the Roman Empire_ (1834) that author has given a
useful conspectus of the period covered by Gibbon's great work.
Sismondi's larger and earlier _Histoire des républiques italiennes_
has never ceased to be well worth study, though the _Geschichte von
Italien_ of H. Leo (1829) improves upon it in several respects. It
has been revised and condensed (Routledge, 1 large vol. 1906) by
Mr. William Boulting. For the early period the most comprehensive
survey is the _Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter_ of Ludo Moritz
Hartmann (3 Bde. in 5, 1897-1911) which comes down to the tenth
century.
Among modern monographs that of Alfred von Reumont on _Lorenzo de'
Medici_ (Eng. tr. 1876, 2 vols.) in nearly every way supersedes the
old work of Roscoe, whose _Leo X_, again, is practically superseded
by later works on the Renaissance, in particular those of
Burckhardt (Eng. tr. of Geiger's ed. in 1 vol. 1892) and the late
J.A. Symonds. Miss Duffy has a good chapter on Florentine trade and
finance in her _Story of the Tuscan Republics_, 1892; and the short
work of F.T. Perrens, _La civilisation florentine du 13e au 16e
siècle_ (1892--in the _Bibliothèque d'histoire illustrée_) is
luminous throughout; but Ranke's _History of the Latin and Teutonic
Nations_ (Eng. tr. 1887), which deals with the Italy of 1494-1514,
is little more than a sand-heap of incident. On the economic side
there is a good research in Pignotti's essay on Tuscan Commerce in
his _History of Tuscany_ (Eng. tr. 1823, vol. iii). Much
interesting detail is given, with much needless rhetoric, in _The
Guilds of Florence_, by Edgcumbe Staley, 1906.
Of great general value is the elaborate work of Gregorovius,
_Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter_ (4te Aufl. 8 Bde.
1886-96; Eng. tr. by Mrs. Hamilton, 8 vols. 1895-1902), which,
however, suffers from the disparity of its purposes, combining as
it does, a topographical history of the city of Rome with a full
history of its politics. It remains a valuable mass of materials
rather than a history proper. The same criticism applies to the
very meritorious _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_ of A. von Reumont (3
Bde. 1867-70), which begins with the very origin of the city, and
comes down to our own time.
But there has risen in contemporary Italy a school of historical
students who are rewriting the history of the great period in the
light of the voluminous archives which have been preserved by
municipalities. One outcome of this line of investigation is Prof.
Villari's _The Two First Centuries of Florentine History_ (Eng. tr.
of first 2 vols. 1894). New light, further, has been thrown on the
commercial history of Italy in the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages
by the admirable research of Prof. W. von Heyd, of which the
French translation by Furcy Raynaud, _Histoire du commerce du
Levant an moyen age_ (1886, 2 tom.) is recast and considerably
enlarged by the author, while the Renascence period is illuminated
by R. Pöhlmann's treatise, _Die Wirthschafts Politik der
Florentiner Renaissance und das Princip der Verkehrsfreiheit_
(Leipzig, 1878).
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS
§ 1
To understand aright the phenomenon of medieval Italian civilisation we
need first to realise that it was at bottom a fresh growth on the
culture roots of the cities of Romanised Italy. When the imperial centre
was shifted to the East, as already remarked, the people of Italy began
a fresh adaptation to their conditions; those of Rome, instead of
leading, standing most zealously to the old way of things. All the
barbarian irruptions did but harass and hinder the new development; they
finally counted for little in its upward course. There is a prevalent
hallucination, akin to others concerning the "Teutonic race," in the
shape of a belief that Italy was somehow "regenerated" by the "free
nations of the North." No accepted formula could well be further away
from the facts. If the political qualities of the "Teutonic race,"
whatever that may mean, are to be generalised on the facts of the
invasions of Italy by the Germanic tribes, from Theodoric to Frederick
Barbarossa, they must be summed up as consisting in a general incapacity
for progressive civilisation. The invaders were, in fact, too disparate
in their stage of evolution from that of the southern civilisation to be
capable of assimilating it and carrying it on. Living a life of strife
and plunder like the early Romans, they found in the disarmed Italians,
and in their rapidly degenerate predecessors of their own stock, an
easier prey than the Romans had ever known till they went to the East;
but in the qualities either of military or of civil organisation they
were conspicuously inferior to the Romans of the early Republic. Men of
the highest executive ability appeared from time to time among their
leaders; a circumstance of great interest and importance, as suggesting
that a percentage of genius occurs in all stages of human culture; but
the mass of the invaders was always signally devoid of the very
characteristics so romantically attributed to them by German, English,
and even French Teutophiles--to wit, the gifts of union, discipline,
order, and self-government. These elements of civilisation depend on the
functioning of the nerve centres, and are not to be evolved by mere
multiplication of animated flesh, which was the main constructive
process carried on in ancient Germania. Precisely because they were, as
Tacitus noted, the most homogeneous of the European races of that
era,[455] they were incapable of any rapid and durable social
development. It is only mixed races that can evolve or sustain a complex
civilisation.
"The Germans," as we historically trace them at the beginning of our
era, were barbarians (_i.e._, men between savagery and civilisation) in
the most rudimentary stage, making scanty beginnings in agriculture;
devoid of the useful arts, save those normally practised by savages;
given to drunkenness; chronically at war; and alternating at other times
between utter sloth and energetic hunting--the pursuit which best fitted
them for war. Because the peoples thus situated were in comparison with
the Romans "chaste" and monogamous--a common enough virtue in savage
life[456]--they are supposed by their admirers to have been excellent
material for a work of racial regeneration. Only in an indirect sense
does this hold good. As a new "cross" to the Italian stocks they may
indeed have made for beneficial variation; but by themselves they were
mere raw material, morally and psychologically. Their reputed virtue of
chastity disappeared as soon as the barbarians passed from a northern to
a southern climate,[457] their vices so speedily exceeding the measure
of paganism that even a degree of physiological degeneration soon set
in. Even in their own land, met by a fiercer barbarism than their own,
they collapsed miserably before the Huns. As regards the arts and
sciences, moral and physical, it is impossible to trace to the invaders
any share in the progress of Italy,[458] save in so far as they were
doubtless a serviceable cross with the older native stocks. To their own
stock, which had been relatively too homogeneous, the gain of crossing
was mixed. Aurelian had put the case with rude truth when he told a
bragging embassy of Goths that they knew neither the arts of war nor
those of peace;[459] and so long as the Empire in any section had
resources enough to levy and maintain trained armies, it was able to
destroy any combination of the Teutons. There was always generalship
enough for that, down till the days of Teutonic civilisation. Claudius
the Second routed their swarms as utterly as ever did Marius or Cæsar;
Stilicho annihilated Rodogast, and always out-generalled Alaric; Aetius,
after routing Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths, overwhelmed the vast
host of Attila's Huns; and in a later age the single unsleeping brain of
Belisarius, scantily weaponed with men and money by a jealous sovereign,
could drive back from Rome in shame and ruin all the barbarian levy of
Wittich.[460]
As against the "Teutonic" theory of Italian regeneration, a hearing
may reasonably be claimed for the "Etruscan," thus set forth:--"The
Etruscans were undoubtedly one of the most remarkable nations of
antiquity--the great civilisers of Italy--and their influence not
only extended over the whole of the ancient world but has affected
every subsequent age.... That portion of the Peninsula where
civilisation earliest flourished, whence infant Rome drew her first
lessons, has in subsequent ages maintained its pre-eminence.... It
was Etruria which produced Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Luca
Signorelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, Hildebrand, 'the starry
Galileo,' and such a noble band of painters, sculptors and
architects as no other country of modern Europe can boast.
Certainly no other region of Italy has produced such a galaxy of
brilliant intellects.... Much may be owing to the natural
superiority of the race, which, in spite of the revolutions of
ages, remains essentially the same, and preserves a distinctive
character." (G. Dennis, _The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, 3rd
ed. 1883, Introd. vol. i, pp. cii-iv.) Assumption for assumption,
this is as defensible as the others.
What happened in Italy after Odoaker was that, for sheer lack of unitary
government on the part of the invaders, the cities, which preserved the
seeds and norms of the old civilisation, gradually grew into new organic
life. Under the early Empire they had been disarmed and unwalled, to
make them incapable of revolt. Aurelian, stemming the barbarian tide,
began to wall them afresh; but, as we have seen, the withdrawal of the
seat of empire left Italy economically incapable of action on an
imperial scale; and the personal imbecility of such emperors as Honorius
filled up the cup of the humiliation of what once was Rome. But the
invaders on the whole did little better; and the material they brought
was more hopeless than what they found. The passage from full barbarism
to order and civilisation cannot conceivably be made in one generation
or one age. Athaulf, the able successor of Alaric, passed his competent
judgment on the matter in words which outweigh all the rhetoric of
modern romanticism: "He was wont to say that his warmest wish had at
first been to obliterate the Roman name, and to make one sole Gothic
empire, so that all that which had been Romania should be called Gothia,
and that he, Athaulf, should play the same part as did Cæsar Augustus.
But when by much experience he was convinced that the Goths were
incapable of obedience to laws, because of their unbridled barbarism,
and that the State without laws would cease to be a State, he had chosen
to seek glory in rebuilding its integrity and increasing the Roman power
by Gothic forces, so that posterity should at least regard him as the
restorer of the empire which he was unable to replace. Therefore he
strove to avoid war and to establish peace."[461]
It needed only command of the machinery of systematic government--if
indeed the same qualities had not been in full play long before--to
develop in the Teutons every species of evil that could be charged
against the Southerns. The fallacy of attributing the crimes of
Byzantium to the physiological degeneration of an "old" race is exposed
the moment we compare the record with the history of the Franks, as told
by Gregory of Tours. Christian writers continue to hold up Nero as a
typical product of decadent paganism, saying nothing of the Christian
Chilperic, "the Nero of France," or of his father, less ill-famed,
Clothaire, the slayer of children, the polygamist, the strictly orthodox
Churchman, "certain that Jesus Christ will remunerate us for all the
good we do" to his priests.[462] Odious women were as powerful in
Frankish courts as in Byzantine; and the tale of the end of Brunehild is
not to be matched in pagan annals. Savage treachery, perjury, parricide,
fratricide, filicide, assassination, massacre, debauchery, are if
possible more constant notes in the tale of the young barbarism, as told
by the admiring saint, than in that of the long-descended civilisation
of Constantinople; and the rank and file seem to have been worthy of the
heads.
One note of Gibbon's, on "barbaric virtue," _àpropos_ of the
character of Totila, has given one of his editors (Bohn ed. iv,
505) the opportunity to assert that the "natural superiority" of
the invaders was manifest wherever they came in contact with their
civilised antagonists. As if Aurelian and Belisarius were not the
moral equals of Totila. Yet in a previous note (ch. 38, ed. cited,
iv, 181) on the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours, Gibbon had
truly remarked that "it would not be easy, within the same
historical space, to find more vice and less virtue." On that head
Sismondi declares (_Histoire des Français_, ed. 1821, i, 403-4;
_Fall of the Roman Empire_, i, 263) that "there was not a
Merovingian king that was not a father before the age of fifteen
and decrepit at thirty." Dunham (_History of the Germanic Empire_,
1834, i, 10) improves on this to the extent of asserting that
"those abominable princes generally--such were their premature
vices--died of old age before thirty." It is a fair surmise that,
Clovis being a barbarian of great executive genius (cp. Guizot,
_Essais sur l'histoire de France_, p. 43), his stock was specially
liable to degeneration through indulgence. But Motley, whose
Teutophile and Celtophobe declamation at times reaches nearly the
lowest depth touched by his school, will have it (_Rise of the
Dutch Republic_, ed. 1863, p. 12) that later "the Carlovingian
_race_ had been exhausted by _producing a race_ of heroes." Any
formula avails to support the dogma that "the German was loyal as
the Celt was dissolute" (_id._ p. 6).
It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code
peculiar to himself. Sismondi (_Fall_, i, 246) remarks, concerning
Clothaire's son Gontran, called by Gregory "the good king Gontran,"
as compared with his brothers: "His morality indeed passed for
good; he is only known to have had two wives and one mistress, and
he repudiated the first before he married the second; his temper
was, moreover, reputed to be a kindly one, for, with the exception
of his wife's physician, who was hewn in pieces because he was
unable to cure her; of his two brothers-in-law, whom he caused to
be assassinated; and of his bastard brother, Gondebald, who was
slain by treachery, no other act of cruelty is recorded of him than
that he razed the town of Cominges to the ground and massacred all
the inhabitants, men, women, and children." Sismondi has also
appreciated (p. 205) what Gibbon has missed, the point of the
letter of St. Avitus to Gondebald of Burgundy, who had killed his
three brothers, exhorting him "to weep no longer with such
ineffable piety the death of his brothers, since it was the good
fortune of the kingdom which diminished the number of persons
invested with royal authority, and preserved to the world such only
as were necessary to rule it." Cp. Sismondi's _Hist. des Français_,
i, 173.
A great name, such as Theodoric's, tends to dazzle the eye that looks
on the history of the time; but the great name, on scrutiny, is seen to
stand for all the progress made in a generation. Theodoric, though he
would never learn to read,[463] had a civilised education as regards the
arts of government, and what was masterly in his rule may at least as
well be attributed to that as to his barbaric stock.[464] It is
important to note that in his reign, by reason of being forced to live
on her own products, Italy actually attains the capacity to export grain
after feeding herself[465]--a result to which the king's rule may
conceivably have contributed.[466] In any case, the able ruler
represents but a moment of order in an epic of anarchy.[467] After
Theodoric, four kings in turn are assassinated, each by his successor;
and the new monarchy begins to go the way of the old. What Belisarius
began Narses finished, turning to his ends the hatreds between the
Teutonic tribes. Narses gone, a fresh wave of barbarism flowed in under
Alboin the Longobard, who in due course was assassinated by his outraged
wife; and his successor was assassinated in turn. Yet again, the new
barbarism began to wear all the features of disorderly decay; and the
Longobard kingdom subsisted for over two hundred years, under twenty-one
kings, without decisively conquering Venetia, or the Romagna, or Rome,
or the Greek municipalities of the south.[468] Then came the Frankish
conquest, completed under Charlemagne, on the invitation of the Pope,
given because the Franks were good Athanasians and the Longobards
Arians. The great emperor did what a great man could to civilise his
barbarian empire; but instead of fitting it to subsist without him he
destroyed what self-governing power it had.[469] Soon after his death,
accordingly, the stone rolled downhill once more; and when Otto of
Saxony entered Rome in 951, Italy had undergone five hundred years of
Teutonic domination without owing to Teuton activity, save indirectly,
one step in civil progress.
It thus appears that, while barbaric imperialism has different aspects
from that of "civilisation," having a possible alterative virtue where
the conditions are in themselves stagnant, even then its work is at best
negative, and never truly constructive. Charlemagne's work, being one of
personal ambition, was in large part destructive even where it
ostensibly made for civilisation; and at his death the Germanic world
was as literally degenerate, in the sense of being enfeebled for
self-defence, as was the Roman world in the period of its imperial
decay.[470] It is true that, despite the political chaos which followed
on the disintegration of his system, there is henceforth no such
apparent continuity of decadence as had followed on the Merovingian
conquest,[471] and his period shows a new intellectual activity.[472]
But it is a fallacy to suppose that he created this activity, which is
traceable to many sources. At most, Charlemagne furthered general
civilisation by forcing new culture contacts in Central Europe[473], and
bringing capable men from other countries, notably Alcuin, but also many
from Ireland.[474] But these favourable conditions were not permanent;
there was no steady evolution; and we are left asking whether progress
might not have occurred in a higher degree had the emperor's work been
left unattempted.[475] In any case, it is long after his time that
civilisation is seen to make a steady recovery; and there is probably
justice in the verdict of Sismondi, that Otto, an administrator of no
less capacity than Charlemagne, did more for it than he.[476] Guizot,
while refusing to admit that the work of Charlemagne passed away, admits
Sismondi's proposition that in the tenth century civilised society in
Europe was dissolving in all directions.[477] The subsequent new life
came not of imperialism but of the loosening of empire, and not from the
Teuton world but from the Latin. It is from the new municipal
developments inferribly set up before and under Otto[478] that the fresh
growth derives.
Mommsen, in one of those primitively biassed anti-Celtic passages which
bar his pretensions to rank as a philosophic historian, declares of the
elusive Celtæ of antiquity, in dogged disregard of the question (so
often put by German scholars and so often answered against him[479])
whether they were not Germans, that, "always occupied with combats and
heroic actions, they were scattered far and wide, from Ireland to Spain
and Asia Minor; but all their enterprises melted like snow in spring;
they created nowhere a great State, and developed no specific
civilisation."[480] The passage would be exactly as true if written of
the Teutons. Every tendency and quality which Mommsen in this
context[481] specifies as Celtic is strictly applicable to the race
supposed to be so different from the Celts. "Attachment to the natal
soil, so characteristic of the Italians and _Germans_, was foreign to
them.... Their political constitution was imperfect; not only was their
national unity feebly recognised,[482] as happens with all nations at
their outset, but the separate communities were lacking in unity of aim,
in solid control, in serious political sentiment, and in persistence.
The sole organisation of which they were capable was the military,[483]
in which the ties of discipline dispensed the individual from personal
efforts." "They preferred the pastoral life to agriculture." "Always we
find them ready to roam, or, in other words, to begin the march ...
following the profession of arms as a system of organised pillage"; and
so on. Such were in strict truth the peculiarities of the Germani, from
Tacitus to the Middle Ages; while, on the contrary, there is plenty of
evidence that not merely the Gauls but the Britons of Cæsar's day were
much better agriculturists than the Germani.[484]
In the early stage the Germani actually shifted their ground every
year;[485] and for every migration or crusade recorded of Celtæ, three
are recorded of Teutons. The successive swarms who conquered Italy
showed an almost invincible repugnance to the practice of agriculture;
in the mass they knew no law and no ideal save the military; they were
constantly at tribal war with each other, Frank with Longobard and Goth
with Burgundian; Ostrogoths and Gepidæ fought on the side of Attila at
Chalons against Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saxons; they had no
idea of racial unity; and not one of their kingdoms ever went well for
two successive generations. The story of the Merovingians is one
nightmare of ferocious discord; that of the Suevi in Spain, and of the
Visigoths in Aquitaine, is mainly a memory of fratricide. As regards
organisation, the only Teutonic kings who ever made any headway were
those who, like Theodoric, had a civilised education, or, like the great
Charles and Louis the Second, eagerly learned all that Roman tradition
could teach them. The main stock were so incapable of political
combination that, after the deposition of the last incapable
Carlovingian (888), they could not arrest their anarchy even to resist
the Huns and Saracens. Their later conquests of Italy came to nothing;
and in the end, by the admission of Teutonic men of science,[486] there
is nothing to show, in all the southern lands they once conquered, that
they had ever been there. The supposed type has disappeared; the
language never imposed itself; the Vandal kingdom in Africa went down
like a house of cards before Belisarius;[487] the Teutondom of Spain was
swept away by the Moors, and it was finally the mixed population that
there effected the reconquest. No race had ever a fairer opportunity
than the Visigoths in Spain, with a rich land and an undivided monarchy.
"Yet after three centuries of undisputed enjoyment, their rule was
overthrown at once and for ever by a handful of marauders from Africa.
The Goth ... had been weighed in the balance and found wanting."[488] In
Spain, France, and Italy alike, the language remained Romance; "not a
word is to be found in the local nomenclature of Castile, nor yet of the
Asturias, to tell the tale of the Visigoth";[489] even in England, where
also the Teutonic peoples for six hundred years failed to attain either
progressive civilisation or political order, the Norman conquerors,
speaking a Romance language, vitally modified by it the vocabulary of
the conquered. So flagrant are the facts that Savigny and Eichhorn in
their day both gave the opinion that "the German nations have had to run
through their history with an ingrained tendency in their character
towards political dismemberment and social inequality." The contrary
theory was a later development.[490]
If, instead of seeking simply for the scientific truth, we sought to
meet Teutomania with Celtomania, we might argue that it was only where
there was a Celtic basis that civilisation prospered in the tracks of
the Roman Empire.[491] Mommsen, in the passage first above cited,
declares that the Celts, meaning the Cisalpine Galli, "loved to assemble
in towns and villages, which consequently grew and gained in importance
among the Celts sooner than in the rest of Italy"--this just after
alleging that they preferred pastoral life to agriculture, and just
before saying that they were always on the march. If the first statement
be true, it would seem to follow that the Celts laid the groundwork of
medieval Italian civilisation; for it was in the towns of what had been
Cisalpine Gaul that that civilisation flourished. Parts of Northern
Italy had in fact been comparatively unaffected by the process which
rooted out the peasantry in the South; and there was agriculture and
population in the valley of the Po when they had vanished from large
areas around and south of Rome.[492] It is certain that "Celtic"
Gaul--whence Charlemagne (semi-civilised by the old environment) wrought
hard, but almost in vain, to impose civilisation on Germany--reached
unity and civilisation in the Middle Ages, while Germany remained
divided and semi-barbaric; that Ireland preserved classical learning and
gave it back to the rest of Europe when it had well-nigh disappeared
thence;[493] that England was civilised only after the Norman Conquest;
and that Germany, utterly disrupted by the Reformation where France
regained unity, was so thrown back in development by her desperate
intestine strifes that only in the eighteenth century did she begin to
produce a modern literature. One of the most flagrant of modern fables
is that which credits to "Teutonic genius" the great order of church
architecture which arose in medieval and later France.[494] "That
sublime manifestation of 'poetry in stone' so strangely called Gothic
architecture is not only not Visigothic, but it was unknown in Spain for
four hundred years after the destruction of the Goths."[495] The Goth
was not a builder but a wrecker.
But if anything has been proved by the foregoing analyses, it is that
race theories are, for the most part, survivals of barbaric
pseudo-science; that culture stage and not race (save as regards the
need for mixture), conditions and not hereditary character, are the
clues to the development of all nations, "race" being a calculable
factor only where many thousands of years of given environments have
made a conspicuous similarity of type, setting up a disadvantageous
homogeneity. It was simply their prior and fuller contact with Greece
and Rome, and further their greater mixture of stocks, that civilised
the Galli so much earlier than the Germani. On the other hand, the
national failure in Spain and Italy of the Teutonic stocks, as such,
proves only that idle northern barbarians, imposing themselves as a
warrior caste on an industrious southern population, were (1) not good
material for industrial development, and (2) were probably at a
physiological disadvantage in the new climate. Southerners would
doubtless have failed similarly in Scandinavia.
I know of no thorough investigation of the amalgamation of the
stocks, or the absorption or disappearance of the northern. There
is some reason to suppose that early in Rome's career of conquest
there began in the capital a substitution of more southerly
physiological types--eastern and Spanish--for those of the early
Latins. But the Italians at all times seem to have undergone a
climatic selection which adapted them to Italy, where the
northerners, whether Celt or Teuton, were not so adapted. The
supposed divergence of character between northern and southern
Italians, insisted on by the former in our own time, certainly
cannot be explained by any Teutonic intermixture; for the Teutons
were settled in all parts of Italy, and nowhere does the
traditional blond type remain. Exactly such differences, it should
be remembered, are locally alleged as between Norwegians and Danes,
northern and southern Germans, and northern and southern English.
If there be any real generic and persistent difference of
temperament (there is none in variety of moral bias and mental
capacity) or of nervous energy, it is presumably to be traced to
climate. Some aspects of the problem are discussed at length in
_The Saxon and the Celt_, pt. i, §§ 4, 5.
§ 2
The new life of Italy, so to speak, came of the ultimate impotence of
the northern invaders for imperialism. Again and again, from the time of
Odoaker, we find signs of a growth of new life in the cities, now partly
thrown on their own resources; and it is only the too great stress of
the subsequent invasions that postpones their fuller growth for so many
centuries. It is to be remembered that these invasions wrought absolute
devastation where, even under Roman rule, there had been comparative
well-being. Thus the province of Illyria, between the Alps and the
Danube, whose outlying and exposed character made it unattractive to the
senatorial monopolists, was under the Empire well populated by a free
peasantry, who abundantly recruited the army.[496] In the successive
invasions this population was almost obliterated; and when Odoaker
conquered the Rugians, who then held the territory, he brought
multitudes of them into stricken Italy, to people and cultivate its
waste lands.[497] Theodoric, in turn, is held to have revived prosperity
after overthrowing Odoaker; and we have seen reason to believe that
after the loss of Africa even southern Italy perforce revived her
agriculture;[498] but early in Theodoric's reign (496) we find Pope
Gelasius declaring, doubtless with exaggeration, that in the provinces
of Aemilia and Tuscany human life was almost extinct; while Ambrose
writes that Bologna, Modena, Reggio, Piacenza, and the adjacent country
remained ruined and desolate.[499] After Theodoric, Belisarius, in a
struggle that exhausted central Italy, almost annihilated the Goths; and
under Narses, who finished the conquest, there was again some recovery,
the scattered remnants of the population congregating in the towns, so
that Milan and others made fresh headway,[500] though the country
remained in large part deserted.
This would seem to have been the turning-point in the long welter of
Italian history. The Longobard conquest under Alboin forced on the
process of driving the older inhabitants into the cities. The
Ostrogothic kings, while they unwalled the towns they captured, had
fortified Pavia, which was able to resist Alboin for four years, thus
giving the other towns their lesson; and as he advanced the natives fled
before him to Venice, to Genoa, to the cities of the Pentapolis, to
Pisa, to Rome, to Gaeta, to Naples, and to Amalfi.[501] Above all, the
cities of the coast, still adhering to the Greek Empire, and impregnable
from land, were now allowed to retain for their own defence the revenue
they had formerly paid to Constantinople; Naples won the right to elect
her own dukes; and Venice won the status of an equal ally of
Byzantium.[502] Thus once more there began to grow up, in tendency if
not in form and name, republics of civilised and industrious men, in the
teeth of barbarism and under the shadow of the name of empire.[503] Even
in the eighth and ninth centuries the free populations of Rome and
Ravenna were enrolled under the four heads of _clerici_, _optimates
militiæ_, the _milites_ or _exercitus_, and the _cives onesti_ or free
_populus_.[504] Beneath all were the great mass of unfree; but here at
least was a beginning of new municipal life. The Longobards had not, as
has been so often written, revived the spirit of liberty; conquest is
the negation of the reciprocity in which alone liberty subsists; but
they had driven other men into the conditions where the idea of liberty
could revive; and in so far as "Lombard" civilisation in the next two
hundred years distanced that of the Franks,[505] it was owing to the
revival of old industries in the towns and the reactions of the other
Italian cities, no less than to the renewed growth of rural population
and agriculture.
Sismondi (_Républiques_, i, 55, 402-5; _Fall_, i, 242) uses the
conventional phrase as to the Longobards reviving the spirit of
freedom, while actually showing its fallacy. In his _Short History
of the Italian Republics_ (p. 13), he tells in the same breath that
the invaders "introduced" several of their sentiments,
"particularly the habit of independence and resistance to
authority," and that in their conquests they considered the
inhabitants "their property equally with the land." Dunham (_Europe
in the Middle Ages_, 1835, i, 8) similarly speaks of the Longobards
as "infusing a new spirit" into the "slavish minds of the
Italians," and then proceeds (p. 9) to show that what happened was
a flight of Italians from Longobard tyranny. He admits further (p.
17) that the Longobard code of laws was "less favourable to social
happiness than almost any other, the Visigothic, perhaps, alone
excepted"; and (p. 19) that the Longobards, wherever they could,
"destroyed the [free] municipal institutions by subjecting the
cities to the jurisdiction of the great military feudatories, the
true and only tyrants of the country." Gibbon decides that the
Longobards possessed freedom to elect their sovereign, and sense to
decline the frequent use of that dangerous privilege (ch. 45, Bohn
ed. v, 125); but pronounces their government milder and better than
that of the other new barbarian kingdoms (p. 127). Sismondi again
(_Fall_, i, 259; so also Boulting in his recast of the
_Républiques_, p. 8) declares that their laws, for a barbarian
people, were "wise and equal." The midway truth seems to be that
the dukes or provincial rulers came to feel some identity of
interest with their subjects. Later jurists called their laws
_asininum jus, quoddam jus quod faciebant reges per se_ (Symonds,
_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 45).
Prof. Butler, in his generally excellent history of _The Lombard
Communes_, is unduly receptive of the old formula that "the
_infusion of Teutonic blood_ had given new life to the Peninsula"
(p. 37; also p. 38). His own narrative conflicts with the
assertion; for he writes that the long isolation of such cities as
Cremona in the midst of Teuton enemies "must have led to a
rekindling of military and municipal spirit and the power of
initiative" (p. 35). He notes, too, that the building up of a new
and active "aristocracy" in the cities from plebeian elements was
hateful to the Teuton, as represented by Otto of Freisingen in the
time of Barbarossa (p. 48). And what had the Teutons to do with the
making of Venice? And what of the similar movement in Spain,
Africa, Illyria, and Gaul?
If the foregoing criticism be valid, it must be further turned
against the expressions of Bishop Stubbs concerning the effect of
the Teutonic conquest in setting up the Romance literatures. "The
breath of life of the new literatures," he writes (_Const. Hist._
4th ed. i, 7), "was Germanic.... The poetry of the new nations is
that of the leading race ... even in Italy it owes all its
sweetness and light to the _freedom_ which has breathed from beyond
the Alps." Here the thesis shifts unavowedly from "race" to
"freedom," and all the while no data whatever are offered for
generalisations which decide in a line some of the root problems of
sociology. A laborious scholar can thus write as if in matters of
total historic generalisation there were needed neither proof nor
argument, while the most patient research is needed to settle a
single detail of particular history.
On the whole, it may be psychologically accurate to say that the
invaders, by setting up a new caste of freemen where before all
classes were alike subordinate to the imperial tyranny, created a
variation in the direction of a new self-government, the spectacle
of privilege stimulating the unprivileged to desire it. But any
conquest whatever might do this; and it is a plain paralogism to
conclude that where the subjugated people does _not_ react the
fault is its own, while where it does the credit is to go to the
conquerors. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to reason
that the Norman Conquest of England was as such the bringer of the
liberty later achieved there. Yet, as regards the Teutonic
invasions of Italy, the principle passes current on all sides; and
Guizot endorses it in one lecture (_Hist. de la civ. en France_, i,
7ième leçon, _end_), though in the next he gives an objective
account which practically discredits it.
As regards the ideals of justice and freedom in general, the
Teutonic laws, being framed not for a normal barbarian state but
for a society of conquerors and conquered, were in some respects
rather more iniquitous than the Roman. In particular the
Ostrogothic laws of Theodoric and his son punish the crimes of the
rich by fines, and put to death the poor for the same offences;
while the degradation of the slave is in all the early Teutonic
codes constantly insisted on. (Cp. Milman, _Hist. Lat. Chr._ 4th
ed. ii, 36, and refs. Roman law also, however, differed in practice
for rich and poor. Cp. Cassiodorus, l. ii, pp. 24, 25; iii, 20, 36;
iv, 39; v, 14, and Finlay, ed. cited. i, 236.) Whether or not
Gregory the Great, as has been asserted (Milman, as cited, p. 52),
was the first to free slaves on the principle of human equality, he
did not get the idea from the Teutons.
It took centuries, in any case, to develop the new upward tendency to a
decisive degree. The Frankish conquest, like others, disarmed and
unwalled the population as far as possible; and it seems to have been
only in the tenth century, when the Hungarians repeatedly raided
northern Italy (900-24), and the Saracens the southern coasts and the
isles, that a general permission was given to the towns to defend
themselves.[506] This time the balance of power lay with the defence;
and to the mere disorderliness of the barbarian rule on one hand may in
part be attributed the relative success of the cities of the later
Empire as compared with those of the earlier. Latin Rome had not only
disarmed its cities but accustomed them for centuries to ease and
idleness; and before a numerous foe, bent on conquest, they made no
resistance. Goths, Longobards, and Franks in turn sought to keep all but
their own strong places disarmed; but their system could not wholly
prevent the growth of a militant spirit in the industrial towns. On the
other hand, the Hungarians and Saracens were bent not on conquest but on
mere plunder, and were thus manageable foes. Had the Normans, say, come
at this time into Italy, they could have overrun the quasi-Teutonic
communities as easily as the Teutons had done the Romans or each other.
But the conditions being as they were, the swing was towards the
independence of the cities; at first under the headship of the bishops,
who in the period of collapse of the Carlovingian empire obtained part
of the authority previously wielded by counts.[507] At this stage the
bishop was by his position partly identified with the people, whom he
would on occasion champion against the counts. Thus a new conception of
social organisation was shaped by the pressures of the times; and when
Otto came in 951 the foundations of the republics were laid. The next
stage was the effacement of the authority of the counts within the
cities; the next an extension of the bishops' authority over the whole
diocese, which was as a rule the old Roman _civitas_ or county. Thus the
new municipalities came into being partly under the ægis of the Church.
Hallam (_Middle Ages_, ch. iii, pt. i) describes Sismondi as
stating that Otto "erected" the Lombard cities into municipal
communities, and dissents from that view. But Sismondi
(_Républiques_, i, 95) expressly says that there are no charters,
and that the municipal independence of the cities is to be inferred
from their subsequent claims of prescription. As there is nothing
to show for any regular government from the outside in the
preceding period of turmoil, the inference that _some_
self-government existed before and under Otto is really forced upon
us. Ranke (_Latin and Teutonic Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 11) pronounces
that the first _consuls_ of the Italian cities, chosen by
themselves, appear at the date of the first Crusade, 1100. "Beyond
all question, we meet with them first in Genoa on the occasion of
an expedition to the Holy Land." (They appear again in 1117 at a
meeting of reconciliation for all Lombardy at Milan. Prof. W.F.
Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, 1906, pp. 76-77.) But this
clearly does not exclude prior forms of self-government for
domestic needs. Consuls of some kind are noted "in Fano and other
places in 883; in Rome in 901; Orvieto, 975; Ravenna, 990; Ferrara,
1015; Pisa and Genoa, 1100; Florence, 1101." Boulting-Sismondi, p.
63. (This last date appears to be an error. The document hitherto
dated 1102 belongs to 1182. Villari, _Two First Centuries of
Florentine History_, Eng. tr. pp. 55, 84. But there is documentary
evidence for Florentine consuls in 1136. _Id._ p. 115.) Hallam
himself points out that in the years 1002-6 the annalists, in
recording the wars of the cities, speak "of the people and not of
their leaders, which is the true republican tone of history"; and
notes that a contemporary chronicle shows the people of Pavia and
Milan acting as independent states in 1047.
This state of things would naturally arise when the emperor and the
nobles lived in a state of mutual jealousy. Cp. Bryce, _Holy Roman
Empire_, pp. 127-29, 139-40, 150, 176. Mr. Bryce does not attempt
to clear up the dispute, but he recognises that the liberties of
the cities would naturally "shoot up in the absence of the emperors
and the feuds of the princes." And this is the view finally of
Heinrich Leo: "Seit Otto bemerken wir eine auffallende Aenderung in
der Politik der ganzen nördlichen Italiens" (_Geschichte von
Italien_, 1829, i, 325; Bk. iv, Kap. i, § 1). Leo points out that
the granting of exemptions to the north Italian cities came from
the Ottos. "It was not, however," he goes on, "as it has been
supposed we must assume, the blending of Roman _citizenship_ (which
in the Lombard cities had never existed[508] in the form of commune
or municipality [_Gemeinde_]) with the Lombard and German, but the
blending of the survivors and the labourers, mostly of Roman
descent, with the almost entirely German-derived free _Gemeinde_,
through which the exemptions were obtained, and which gave a new
aspect to the Italian cities" (pp. 326-27).
Similarly Karl Hegel, after noting the analogies between Roman
_collegia_ and German gilds, decides that "the German gilds were of
native (_einheimischen_) origin, the same needs setting up the same
order of institutions." He adds that the Christian Church first
evoked in the gilds a real brotherly feeling. (_Städte und Gilden
der germanischen Völker in Mittelalter_, 1891, Einleit. p. 10.) He
admits, however, that the gilds, when first traced under
Charlemagne, are forbidden under the name _Gildonia_, as
oath-societies; and that they seem to have been unknown among the
Franks (pp. 4, 6).
§ 3
Almost concurrently with the new growth of political life in the cities,
rural life readjusted itself under a system concerning the merits of
which there has been as much dispute as concerning its origins--the
system of feudalism. Broadly speaking, that began in the relation
between the leaders of the Germanic invasion and their chief followers,
who, receiving lands as their share, or at another time as a reward,
were expected as a matter of course to back the king in time of war, and
in their turn ruled their lands and retainers on that principle. When
the principle of heredity was established as regarded the crown, it was
necessarily affirmed as regards land tenures; and soon it was applied
as a matter of course to nearly all the higher royal offices and
"benefices" in the Frankish empire,[509] which after Charlemagne became
the model for the Germanic and the French and English kingdoms. Thus
"the aristocratic system was in possession of society"; and the conflict
which inevitably arose between the feudal baronage and the monarchic
power served in time to aggrandise the cities, whose support was so
important to both sides.
[See Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, 4th ed. i,
273-74, _note_, for a sketch of the discussion as to the rise of
feudalism. It has been obscured, especially among the later
writers, by lack of regard for exact and consistent statement. Thus
Bishop Stubbs endorses Waitz's dictum that "the gift of an estate
by the king involved no _defined_ obligation of service"; going on
to say (p. 275) that a king's _beneficium_ was received "with a
_special undertaking_ to be faithful"; and again adding the
footnote: "Not a _promise_ of _definite_ service, but a _pledge_ to
_continue faithful in the conduct in consideration of which the
reward is given_." Again, the bishop admits that by this condition
the giver had a hold on the land, "through which he was able to
enforce fidelity" (p. 275, _note_); yet goes on to say (p. 277)
that homage and fealty "depended on conscience only for their
fulfilment." Bishop Stubbs further remarks (i, 278) that there was
a "_great difference in social results_ between French (= Frankish)
and German feudalism," by reason of the prostrate state of the old
Gallic population; going on however to add: "But the _result was
the same_, feudal government, a graduated system of jurisdiction
based on land tenure, in which every lord judged, taxed, and
commanded the class next below him; in which abject slavery formed
the lowest, and irresponsible tyranny the highest grade; in which
private war, private coinage, private prisons, took the place of
the imperial institutions of government." Of course the bishop has
previously (p. 274, _note_) endorsed Waitz's view, that "_all_ the
people were bound to be faithful to the king"; but the passage
above cited seems to be his final generalisation.]
Whatever its social value, the feudal system is essentially a blend of
Roman and barbarian points of polity; and in France, the place of its
development, Gallic usage played a modifying part. It is dubiously
described as growing up "from two great sources--the _beneficium_ and
the practice of commendation"--the first consisting (_a_) in gifts of
land by the kings out of their own estates, and (_b_) in surrenders of
land to churches or powerful men, on condition that the surrenderer
holds it as tenant for rent or service; while commendation consisted in
becoming a vassal without any surrender of title. "The union of the
beneficiary tie with that of commendation completed the idea of feudal
obligation." The _beneficium_ again, "is partly of Roman, partly of
German origin," and "the reduction of a large Roman population,"
nominally freemen under the Roman system, "to dependence," placed it on
a common footing with the German semi-free cultivator, "and conduced to
the wide extension of the institution. Commendation, on the other hand,
may have had a Gallic or Celtic origin...." In one or other of these
developments, the German _comitatus_ or chief's war-band, originally so
different, "ultimately merged its existence." On the whole, then, the
Teutons followed Gallo-Roman leads.
[See Stubbs, i, 275, 276; cp. p. 4; and Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_,
pp. 123-24. Under Otto, observes Mr. Bryce (p. 125), "the
institutions of primitive Germany were almost all gone." Elsewhere
Bishop Stubbs decides (p. 10) that "the essence of feudal law is
custom," and again (p. 71), that "no creative genius can be
expected among the rude leaders of the tribes of North Germany. The
new life started at the point at which the old had been broken
off." Then in the matter of the feudal system, "the old" must have
been mainly the Gallo-Roman, for feudalism arose in Frankish Gaul,
not in Germany. In an early passage (p. 3) Dr. Stubbs confuses
matters by describing the government of France as "originally
little more than a simple adaptation of the old German polity to
the government of a conquered race," but proceeds to admit that
"the Franks, gradually uniting in religion, blood, and language
with the [Romanised] Gauls, retained and developed the idea of
feudal subordination...." The rest of the sentence again introduces
error. For a good general view of the evolution of feudalism see
Prof. Abdy's _Lectures on Feudalism_, 1890, lect. v-vii.]
To pass a moral judgment on this system, either for or against, is to
invert the problem. It was simply the most stable, or rather the most
elastic arrangement possible in the species of society in which it
arose; and we are now concerned with it merely as a conditioning
influence in European civilisation. Hallam, severe towards all other
men's generalisations, lightly pronounces that "in the reciprocal
services of lord and vassal, there was ample scope for every magnanimous
and disinterested energy," and that "the heart of man, when placed in
circumstances which have a tendency to excite them, will seldom be
deficient in such sentiments." On the other hand he concedes that "the
bulk of the people, it is true, were degraded by servitude," though he
affirms that "this had no connection with the feudal tenures"; and he is
forced to decide that "the peace and good order of society were not
promoted by this system. Though private wars did not originate in the
feudal customs, it is impossible to doubt that they were perpetuated by
so convenient an institution, which indeed owed its universal
establishment to no other cause."[510] The latter judgment sufficiently
countervails the others; and the claim that feudalism was a school of
moral discipline, which gradually substituted good faith for bad, will
be endorsed by few students of the history of feudal times. A more
plausible plea is that of Sismondi, that the feudal nobles of Italy,
finding themselves resisted in the cities, which they had been wont to
regard as their property, and finding the need of retainers for the
defence of their castles, affranchised and protected their peasants as
they had never done before. There resulted, he believes, an extension of
agriculture which greatly increased the population in the tenth and
eleventh centuries.[511] This is partially provable, and it gives us the
standpoint most favourable to feudalism; which on the other hand is seen
in the main to have soon reached its constructive limits, and to have
promoted division no less than union.[512]
It is important here to realise how in the new civilisation, with its
new language, there subsisted simultaneously all of the forms of
spontaneous aggregation which had been evolved in the older Roman life.
The aristocratic families in their very nomenclature exhibited anew the
old evolution of the system of _gentes_, men being named "of the
Uberti," "of the Buondelmonti," and so on. At the same time the
industrial groups formed _their_ communities, as the _scholæ_ of workers
had done of old; and in the political history of Florence we see
constitution after constitution built out of political units so formed.
First came the primary patriotism of the family stock; then that of the
trade or industrial group; and only as a balance of these separate and
largely hostile interests did the City-State subsist. Thus the new
Italian civilisation was on its political side fundamentally and
organically atomistic, civic union being never a primary but always a
secondary adjustment among groups whose first loyalty was to the primary
fraternity. It was hard enough to evolve out of all this a common civic
interest: to rise yet higher was impossible to the men of that era. And
all the while the separate corporation of the Church, despite its inner
feuds, tended to seek its separate interest as against all others.
As regards Italy, then, the value of the imperial feudal system,
operating through the machinery of the bishoprics, was that it freed the
energies of the cities, where alone the higher civilisation could
germinate; but on the other hand it fostered in them a spirit of
localism and separatism[513] that was ultimately fatal. The old Roman
unity had been completely broken up by the invasions, by the strifes of
Goths and Byzantines, by the sheer need for individual defence; and the
empire, warring with the Papacy, fixed the tendency. Genoa, Pisa,
Florence, Milan, and the smaller cities alike felt and acted as
independent States, each against the other, forming occasional alliances
only as separate nations or kings might do. In the ever-changing
conflict of nobles, emperor, pope, cities, and bishops, all parties
alike developed the spirit of self-assertion,[514] and wrought for their
own special incorporation. At times prelates and cities combined against
nobles, as under Conrad the Salic (1035-39), who was forced to revise
the feudal law and free the remaining serfs; later, members of each
species sided with pope or emperor in the strifes of Hildebrandt and
Henry IV and their successors over the question of investitures, till
the general interest compelled a peace. During these ages of
inconclusive conflict the cities, thus far acting mainly in conjunction
with their bishops or archbishops, developed their militia; their
_caroccio_ or banner-bearing fighting-car; and their institution of
public election of consuls. Here the very name tells of the power of the
Roman tradition, as against the supposed capacity of the Teutonic races
for spontaneous free organisation and self-government--tells too of the
survival of a majority of Roman-speaking people even in the upper and
middle classes of the cities. We may readily grant, as against Savigny
and his disciples, that the Roman institution of the _curia_ had not
been preserved in the cities of Lombardy. There was no reason why it
should have been, even if the Longobard kings had been inclined to use
it as a means of extorting taxation; for in the last ages of the Empire
it had become detestable to the upper citizens themselves.
[Savigny's proposition seems to be sufficiently confuted in a page
or two by Leo, _Geschichte von Italien_, 1829, i, 82, 83. Karl
Hegel later wrote a whole treatise to the same effect, _Geschichte
der Stadtverfassung von Italien_, Leipzig, 1847. See also F. Morin,
_Origines de la démocratie_, 3e ed. 1865, pp. 34-35, 59, 94, 122,
etc. Guizot uncritically followed Raynouard, who held with or
anticipated Savigny. As to the general revolt against the _curia_,
cp. Leo, i, 47, and Guizot, _Civilisation en France_, i, 52-63. As
to the theory of a Roman basis for the early civic organisation of
Saxon Britain, cp. Pearson, _History of England during the Early
and Middle Ages_, 1867, i, 264; Scarth, _Roman Britain_, App. i;
Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, 4th ed. i, 99; and
Karl Hegel, _Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker im
Mittelalter_, 1891, Einleit. pp. 10, 33, 34.]
But other Roman institutions remained even in the Lombard cities, in
respect of the organisation of trades and commerce;[515] and apart from
the Roman survivals at Ravenna,[516] the free cities of the coast, which
had remained nominally attached to Byzantium, had _their_ elective
institutions, not specially democratic, but sufficiently "free" to
incite the Lombard towns to similar procedure.[517] Venice in particular
was moulded from the first by Byzantine influences. "Industry, commerce,
economic methods, and financial institutions were affected as much as
manners, the arts, and even religious life. Greek was the language of
eastern trade, and served many Venetians as a second tongue."[518]
Venice and Genoa alike developed a national police on Byzantine lines,
prescribing the shape, construction, and manning of vessels[519] in the
very spirit of late imperial Rome. And the cities of the peninsula could
not but be similarly influenced. At all events it was in the train of
these earlier developments, and perhaps in some degree on stimulus from
papal Rome, that the new organic life of the Lombard and Tuscan cities
began to develop itself in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The first
seats of new commerce were in those cities to which, as we have seen,
numbers of the old Italian population had fled before the Gothic
invaders. Amalfi was such a seat even in the ninth century; and to its
merchants is credited the first traffic with the East in the Saracen
period, as well as the first employment of the mariner's compass in
navigation.[520] Next flourished Pisa, where also, perhaps, the ancient
commerce had never wholly died out;[521] then her successful rivals,
Genoa and Venice. And always commerce formed the basis of the revival.
Once begun, the new life was extraordinarily energetic on the industrial
and constructive side, the independence and rivalry of so many
communities securing for the time the maximum of effort. Already in the
seventh century, indeed, their industry stood for a new era in
history.[522] Where before even the men of the cities had gone clad in
skins after the manner of the barbarian conquerors, they now began to
weave for themselves woollen cloths like the civilised ancients.[523]
Soon the art of weaving the finer cloths, which had hitherto been
imported from Greece in so far as they were used at all, followed the
simpler craft of wool-weaving.[524] It was in these cities that
architecture may be said to have had its first general revival in
western Europe since the beginning of the decay of Rome. Walls, towers,
ports, quays, canals, municipal palaces, prisons, churches,
cathedrals--such were the first outward and visible signs of the new era
in Italian civilisation.[525] On these foundations were to follow the
literature and the art and science which began the civilisation of
modern Europe, the whole presided over and in part ordered and inspired
by the recovered use of the great system of ancient Roman law, which too
began to be redelivered to Europe early in the twelfth century from
Italian Bologna.
[The public buildings of the eleventh century are to this day among
the greatest in Italy. Cp. Sismondi with Testa, _History of the War
of Frederick I against the Communes of Lombardy_, Eng. trans, p.
101. Before the tenth century the houses were mostly of wood, and
thatched with straw or shingles (Testa, p. 11). It seems highly
probable that the great development of building in the eleventh
century was due to the sense of a new lease of life which came upon
Christendom when it was found that the world did not come to an
end, as had been expected, with the year 1000. That expectation
must have gone far to paralyse all activity towards the end of the
tenth century.]
And whereas the common political path to independence had been
originally by way of the headship of the bishop as against the count,
that headship in turn disappears during the eleventh century without any
visible or general cataclysm. It would seem as if, when the obsessing
fear of the end of the world with which men entered the year 1000 had
passed away, the secular spirit recovered new life; and the intimate
tyranny of the feudal representative of the military monarch being no
longer a danger, the hand of the bishop was in turn thrown off. For a
time the combination of city and prelate was politically valid, as in
the case of Archbishop Aribert of Milan, under whose nominal rule the
civic _caroccio_ seems to have made its appearance; but even Aribert was
shelved before his death, in the course of a civil strife between the
people and the nobles. Thenceforward, for an age, the great Lombard city
practically ruled itself, the nobles being included in a compromise
brought about by Lanzone, who, himself a noble, had led the faction of
the burghers. Fresh strifes followed, in which the succeeding
archbishops bore part; but the virtual autonomy of the city
remained.[526]
A similar evolution took place throughout northern Italy, in a
sufficiently simple fashion. The bishops were still in large measure
elected by the people, and rival candidates for vacant sees were always
ready to outbid each other in surrendering political functions which
were becoming ever harder to fulfil.[527] Beyond this, the course of the
final stage of the emancipation of the cities is not traceable. "All
that we can say is that at the opening of the eleventh century the
bishops exercised in the cities the authority which had formerly been
vested in the counts: at the close the cities have reduced the prelates
to insignificance, and stand before us as so many free republics."[528]
"The power of the bishops was the calyx which for a certain time had
kept the flower of Italian life close-packed within the bud. Then the
calyx weakened and opened, and Italian civic life unfolded itself to the
eye to form and bear fruit."[529]
To this, however, we should add that in Florence the process was
somewhat different. Under the Franks, Florence was ruled, like other
cities, by a count, who replaced the Longobard duke; and under the later
Germanic empire all Tuscany, and some further territory, is found ruled
by a Marquis, or Markgraf, Ugo, in the tenth century. In the latter part
of the tenth century his descendant Matilda sided with Hildebrandt
against the Emperor. At this period Florence was a centre of the papal
movement of monastic reform; and the people actually rose against a
simoniacal bishop, whom they fought for five years[530] (1063-68). Here,
under the rule of Countess Matilda, the republic or "commune" is seen
growing up rather of its own faculty than by help of the bishop; it
already calls itself _Populus Florentinus_;[531] and after Matilda's
death in 1115, it speedily develops the self-governing functions which
it had partially exercised in her lifetime.[532] And Florence, be it
noted, was the most democratic in population of the northern cities from
the beginning.[533]
In no case, however, should we be right in supposing that "republic" or
"commune" or "free city" meant a population united in devotion to a
civic ideal. The eternal impulses of strife and repulsion had in no
degree been eliminated by the formation of new State units. In Florence
we find all the elements of Greek _stasis_ at work in the first century
of the commune.[534] Among the _grandi_ were men who had risen from the
people, and men descended from old feudal houses; and these
spontaneously ranged themselves in factions. Such a division furthered
imperialism by inclining groups to take the side of the emperor, who,
wherever he could, set up his _Podestà_ (_potestas_ or "authority") in
the cities.[535] Imperialistic nobles further formed groups called
"Societies of the Towers," each of which had its common defensive tower
or fort, communicating with the houses of neighbouring members; the
officials of these societies were at times called consuls; and from
these were usually chosen, in the early days, the consuls of the
commune.[536] At times they were also consuls of trade guilds, a state
of things proving a certain amount of assimilation between the trading
and the noble class, who together formed the enfranchised "people," the
town artisans and the rural cultivators of the surrounding _contado_ or
"county" being excluded.
The close community thus formed exhibited very much the same political
tendencies as had marked that of early republican Rome. The cities,
constantly flouted and menaced by the castled nobility of the
surrounding territory, who blackmailed passing traders, soon learned to
use the iron hand as against these, who in turn sought the emperor's
protection; and cities wont to put down nobles were prompt to seek to
coerce each other. On the death of the Emperor Frederick I (1197),
Florence set on foot a League of the Tuscan cities, which, while
primarily hostile to the Empire, repelled the claim of the Papacy to
over-lordship as heir of the Countess Matilda. On such a basis there
might conceivably have arisen a new and strong national life; but soon
Florence, like old Athens, was oppressing her allies, who gave their
sympathy to a town like Semifonte, the refuge of all who fled from
places conquered and taxed by her. To individual allies like Sienna,
Florence was substantially faithless, and so strengthened from the first
the fatal tendency to separatism--this while the inner social sunderance
was steadily deepening.[537]
None of the forces at work was remedial on this side; the regimen of the
_Podestà_, even when he was actually a foreigner, furthered instead of
checking strife between communities;[538] and the more "aristocratic"
cities were at least as quarrelsome as the less. Bologna played the
tyrant city as vigorously as Florence.[539] Rome was among the worst
governed of all. In the thirteenth century, under Innocent IV, we find
the fighting factions of the nobles using the Coliseum and other ancient
monuments as fortresses, garrisoned by bandits in their pay, who
pillaged traders and passengers; and not the Papacy, but the "senator"
chosen by the people--a Bolognese noble--put them down, hanging nobles
and bandits alike.[540]
Such was civilisation at the centre of Christendom after a thousand
years of Christianity. The notable fact is that through all this wild
play of primitive passion there _was_ yet growing up a new Italian
civilisation; and it is part of our task to trace its causation.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 455: _Germania_, c. 2.]
[Footnote 456: For a good view of the many points in common between
Teutonic barbarism and normal savagery, see the synopsis of Guizot,
_Histoire de la civilisation en France_, i, 7ième leçon. Lamprecht
acquiesces (_What is History?_ 1905, p. 213).]
[Footnote 457: "Everything about them [the Longobards], even for many
years after they have entered upon the sacred soil of Italy, speaks of
mere savage delight in bloodshed and the rudest forms of sensual
indulgence" (Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, 2nd ed. v, 156. Cp.
Lamprecht, _What is History?_ pp. 48-49.)]
[Footnote 458: Ranke's statement (_Latin and Teutonic Nations._ Eng. tr.
p. 1) that the "collective German nations at last brought about" a
Latino-Teutonic unity is a merely empirical proposition, true in no
organic sense.]
[Footnote 459: Gibbon, ch. 11, Bohn ed. i, 365.]
[Footnote 460: It is true that none of the generals mentioned was an
Italian. Stilicho was indeed a Vandal; Aetius was a Scythian; Belisarius
was a Thracian; and Narses probably a Persian. But they handled armies
made up of all races; and their common qualification was a military
science to be learned only from Roman tradition. Cp. Finlay, _History of
Greece from its Conquest by the Romans_, ed. 1877, i, 211.]
[Footnote 461: Paulus Orosius, vii, 43. The record has every appearance
of trustworthiness, the historian premising that at Bethlehem he heard
the blessed Jerome tell how he had known a wise old inhabitant of
Narbonne, who was highly placed under Theodosius, and had known Athaulf
intimately; and who often told Jerome how that great and wise king thus
delivered himself.]
[Footnote 462: Sismondi, citing the _Diplomata_, tom. iv, p. 616.]
[Footnote 463: Because of his contempt for the religious controversies
to which the literature of his time mainly ran.]
[Footnote 464: See Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, B. ii, Kap.
2, as to his constant concern for culture and established usage.]
[Footnote 465: Cassiodorus, 1. i, c. 34; iii, 44; iv, 5, 7. Cp. Finlay,
ed. cited, i, 236, _note_. At the same time it is to be remembered that
the population was in some districts greatly reduced. See below, p. 194.
And there were, of course, Italian scarcities from time to time.
Cassiodorus, v, 35; x, 27; xi, 5.]
[Footnote 466: Cp. Gibbon, ch. 39 (Bohn ed. iv, 270-71), as to the
general care of the administration and the prosperity of agriculture.]
[Footnote 467: "Gross war Ruhm und Glanz seines [Theodoric's] Reiches;
die inneren Schäden und Gefahren desselben blieben damals noch verhüllt,
kaum etwa dem Kaiser und den Merovingen erkennbar" (F. Dahn,
_Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker_, in Oncken's
_Allg. Gesch._ 1881, i, 246).]
[Footnote 468: Machiavelli points out (_Istorie Fiorentine_, 1. i) that
this was the result of their having, at the death of their tyrant Clef,
suspended the election of kings and set up the system of thirty dukes or
marquises--an arrangement unfavourable to further conquest.]
[Footnote 469: See Guizot, _Essais sur l'histoire de France_, 7e édit.
pp. 185, 189, 195. But cp. pp. 198-201 as to the rise of hereditary
feudality. Cp. also the _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e
édit. iii, 103; iv, 77-79.]
[Footnote 470: Cp. Sismondi, _Républiques italiennes_, ed. cited, i,
85.]
[Footnote 471: Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, ii, 134,
162; Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. pp. 71-74.]
[Footnote 472: See Guizot's table, pp. 130-32.]
[Footnote 473: For a favourable view of the case see Schröder's
_Geschichte Karl's des Grossen_, 1869, Kapp. 15, 16; Bryce, as cited,
pp. 71-74; and Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, B. v, Kap. i, §
2. Gregorovius (p. 20) calls Charlemagne "the Moses of the Middle Ages,
who had happily led mankind through the wilderness of barbarism"--a
proposition grounded on race-pride rather than on evidence.]
[Footnote 474: Cp. Poole, _Illustrations of the History of Medieval
Thought_, 1884, pp. 15-16, 22.]
[Footnote 475: There is reason to infer that the very movement of
theological thought which marks the ninth century was due to Moslem
contacts. These might have been more fruitful under peace conditions
than under those of Charlemagne's campaigns.]
[Footnote 476: _Républiques_, i, 91. "The Holy Roman Empire, taking the
name ... as denoting the sovereignty of Germany and Italy vested in a
Germanic prince, is the creation of Otto the Great" (Bryce, _Holy Roman
Empire_, p. 80). Gregorovius, instead of giving Otto some such praise as
he bestows on Karl, pronounces this time that "the Roman Empire was now
regenerated by the German _nation_" (B. vi, Kap. iii, § 1).]
[Footnote 477: Guizot, _Civilisation_, iii, 103; Sismondi,
_Républiques_, i, 87. In his _Essais_, however (p. 238, etc.), Guizot
speaks of the "belle mais stérile tentative de Charlemagne." See the
problem discussed in the author's essay on Gibbon, in _Pioneer
Humanists_, p. 335 sq.]
[Footnote 478: Sismondi, _Républiques_, i, 95. See below, pp. 198-99.]
[Footnote 479: _E.g._ Wieseler, _Die deutsche Nationalität der
kleinasiatischen Galater_, 1877; Holtzmann, _Kelten und Germanen_,
1855.]
[Footnote 480: _History of Rome_, bk. ii, ch. iv.]
[Footnote 481: The author has examined a later deliverance of Mommsen's
on the subject in _The Saxon and the Celt_, pt. iii, § 1.]
[Footnote 482: In a later passage (bk. v, ch. 7) Mommsen credits the
Celts with "unsurpassed fervour of national feeling." His History
abounds in such contradictions.]
[Footnote 483: In the passage cited in the last note, the historian
asserts that the Celts were unable "to attain, or barely to tolerate ...
any sort of fixed military discipline." Such is the consistency of
malice.]
[Footnote 484: Cp. Elton, _Origins of English History_, 2nd ed. 1890, p.
115.]
[Footnote 485: Tacitus, _Germania_, c. 26; Cæsar, _Bell. Gall._ vi, 21.]
[Footnote 486: See Virchow, as cited in Penka's _Die Herkunft der
Arier_, 1886, p. 98.]
[Footnote 487: "Never was there a more rapid conquest than that of the
vast kingdom of the Vandals" (Sismondi, _Fall of the Roman Empire_, Eng.
tr. i. 221).]
[Footnote 488: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. i. 115. The
special explanation of the Visgothic decadence is held by this historian
to lie (1) in the elective character of the monarchy, which left the
king powerless to check the extortions of the nobles who degraded and
enfeebled the common people, and (2) in the ascendency of the Church.]
[Footnote 489: Burke, as cited, i. 119.]
[Footnote 490: Cp. Prof. Paul Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_,
1892, pp. 10-11, 17.]
[Footnote 491: Guizot (_Hist. de la Civ. en France_, i, 2e leçon) has an
extraordinary passage to the effect that while German and English
civilisation was German _in origin_, that of France is _romaine dès ses
premiers pas_. As if there had not been a primary Gallic society as well
as a Germanic. If Mommsen be right, the Galli before their conquest were
much more advanced in civilisation than the Germani. In point of fact,
the Celtæ of Southern France had commercial contact with the Greeks
before they had any with the Romans. And in the very passage under
notice, Guizot goes on to say that the life and institutions of
_northern_ France had been essentially _Germanic_. The theorem is
hopelessly confused. The plain facts are that German "civilisation" came
from Italy and Romanised Gaul, albeit later, as fully as did that of
Gaul from Italy.]
[Footnote 492: Cp. Prof. Butler, _The Lombard Communes_, 1906, pp. 23,
28-30.]
[Footnote 493: Poole, _Illustrations_, as cited, p. 11.]
[Footnote 494: For a pleasing attempt to retain the credit for
Teutonism, on the score that German invaders had "determined the
character of the population" in the region of Paris, where the new
architecture arose, see Dr. E. Richard's _History of German
Civilisation_, New York, 1911, pp. 203-4. It is not explained at what
stage the German responsibility for French evolution ceased.]
[Footnote 495: Burke, as cited, i, 118. On the "Gothic mania," cp.
Michelet, _Hist. de France_, vii--_Renaissance_: Introd. § 10 and note
in App.]
[Footnote 496: Sismondi, _Fall of the Roman Empire_, as cited, i, 35,
172, 238.]
[Footnote 497: Gibbon, ch. 36, _end_.]
[Footnote 498: Above, pp. 188.]
[Footnote 499: Citations in Gibbon, ch. 36; Bohn ed. iv, 105. For a
somewhat fuller sketch than Gibbon's see Manso, _Geschichte des
ost-gothischen Reiches in Italien_, 1824, §§ 73-79. Cp. Spalding,
_Italy_, i, 398-400. It is possible that Gelasius and Ambrose were
thinking mainly of the disappearance of the landowners, and were
overlooking the serfs. Deserted villas would give the effect of
desolation while the mass of the common people remained.]
[Footnote 500: Sismondi, _Fall_, i, 236. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 43; Bohn ed.
iv, 536.]
[Footnote 501: Sismondi, _Fall_, i, 240; Gibbon, ch. 45, ed. cited, v.
116-18.]
[Footnote 502: Gibbon, as cited, v, 118.]
[Footnote 503: Sismondi, _Fall_, i, 241. The movement, as Sismondi
notes, extended to Spain, to Africa, to Illyria, and to Gaul.]
[Footnote 504: Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, p. 45.]
[Footnote 505: Sismondi, _Fall_, i, 259. The historian decides that "the
race of the conquerors took root and throve in the soil, without
_entirely_ superseding that of the conquered natives, _whose language
still prevailed_," but gives no proofs for the first proposition. The
uncritical handling of these questions in the histories leaves essential
problems still unsolved. Cp. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, 2nd ed.
vi (bk. vii), 579-93; vii (bk. viii), 384, 385. Mr. Boulting does not
try to solve the problem.]
[Footnote 506: This is again Sismondi's generalisation (_Histoire des
républiques italiennes_, ed. 1826, i, 21; _Short History_, p. 14;
Boulting-Sismondi, p. 60). He has been followed by Procter (Perceval's
_History of Italy_, 1825, 2nd ed. 1844, p. 9); by Dunham (_Europe in the
Middle Ages_, i, 23); by Symonds (_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i,
48); and by Prof. W.F. Butler (_The Communes of Lombardy_, p. 46). It is
noteworthy that at the same period Henry the Fowler encouraged free
cities in Germany for the same reason.]
[Footnote 507: Butler, pp. 40-43; Boulting-Sismondi, pp. 23-27.]
[Footnote 508: _Note by Leo._--"Except in the cities acquired latest,
and by capitulation from the Romans"--_i.e._ the Greek Empire.]
[Footnote 509: Guizot, _Essais_, pp. 199-201; Stubbs, i, 277. Cp. refs.
in Buckle, author's ed. p. 348-49.]
[Footnote 510: _Europe during the Middle Ages_, ch. ii, pt. ii, _end_.
Compare Hodgkin on "the Feudal Anarchy which history has called, with
unintended irony, the Feudal System," and on the fashion in which, in
the capitularies of Charlemagne, "we have imperial sanction given to
that most anti-social of all feudal practices, the levying of private
war" (_Italy and her Invaders_, viii, 301-2).]
[Footnote 511: _Short History_, p. 15. "The liberated agricultural
classes multiplied rapidly, and brought vast tracts of abandoned soil
under cultivation" (Boulting, p. 27). It probably needed such an
expansion, we may note, to make possible the Crusades.]
[Footnote 512: Sismondi finally decides that in the tenth century
feudalism had induced in the main rather a dissolution than an
organisation of society (_Républiques_, i, 85-91). Cp. Guizot, _History
de la civ. en France_, as cited, iii, 103, 272-75, iv, 77-79; _Essais_,
v; and Boulting, p. 17.]
[Footnote 513: Cp. Sismondi, _Républiques_, i, 105-14.]
[Footnote 514: See Neander, _Church History_, Eng. tr., vii, 128 _sq._
and Milman, _Hist. Latin Christ._, lv, 61 _sq._, as to Hildebrandt's
efforts to win public opinion to his side against clerical marriage, and
the resulting growth of private judgment.]
[Footnote 515: "Die Abtheilung in Zünfte und die daran sich anknüpfende
Markt-polizei mögen die einzigen Institute aus römischer Zeit sein, die
sich auch unter den Longobarden erhielten" (Leo, i, 85; cp. p. 335). Cp.
Villari, _Two First Centuries_, Eng. trans, pp. 95-99.]
[Footnote 516: Leo decides (i, 335) that in Ravenna between 1031 and
1115 there appear "gar keine Stadtconsuln in Urkunden, aber wohl Leute,
die sich _ex genere consulum_ nennen." Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 58.]
[Footnote 517: As the general governor elected by the Venetians to stay
their dissensions (697) bore the title of doge or duke, which was that
borne by the Greek governors of Italian provinces, the influence of
imperial example must be admitted, especially as Venice continued to
profess allegiance to the Greek empire. The cities of Naples, Gaeta, and
Amalfi, again, while connected only nominally and commercially with
Byzantium, gave the title of doge to their first magistrate likewise
(Sismondi, _Short History_, pp. 25, 26).]
[Footnote 518: Nys. _Researches in the History of Economics_, Eng.
trans. 1899, p. 61.]
[Footnote 519: _Id._ p. 59.]
[Footnote 520: Cp. Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. trans. 1823, iii,
256; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 328, 332. It is clear that the
polarity of the magnet was known long before the practical use of it in
the compass.]
[Footnote 521: Hallam, iii, 441; Pignotti, iii, 256-58.]
[Footnote 522: Sismondi, _Républiques_, i, 384, 385.]
[Footnote 523: Pignotti, iii, 262-64; Dante, _Paradiso_, xv, 116.]
[Footnote 524: Pignotti, iii, 265.]
[Footnote 525: "The citizens (900-1200) allowed themselves no other use
of their riches than that of defending or embellishing their country"
(Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 23).]
[Footnote 526: Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, pp. 58-70.]
[Footnote 527: _Id._ p. 71.]
[Footnote 528: _Id._ P.55.]
[Footnote 529: Leo, as cited, i, 417.]
[Footnote 530: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 74 _sq._]
[Footnote 531: _Id._ p. 79.]
[Footnote 532: _Id._ pp. 84-92.]
[Footnote 533: _Id._ p. 91.]
[Footnote 534: _Id._ p. 142.]
[Footnote 535: _Id._ pp. 143, 148, 151, 153.]
[Footnote 536: _Id._ pp. 119, 121.]
[Footnote 537: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, pp. 158-72.]
[Footnote 538: _Id._ p. 173.]
[Footnote 539: Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 77.]
[Footnote 540: _Id._ p. 82.]
Chapter II
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION
§ 1
In the twelfth century, then, we find in the full flush of life a number
of prosperous Italian republics or "communes," closely resembling in
many respects the City-States of ancient Greece. The salient differences
were (1) the Christian Church, with its wealth[541] and its elaborate
organisation; (2) the pretensions of the Empire; and (3) the presence of
feudal nobles, some of whom were first imposed by the German emperors on
the cities, and who, after their exodus and their life as
castle-holders, had in nearly every case compromised with the citizens,
spending some months of every year in their town palaces by stipulation
of the citizens themselves. All of these differentia counted for the
worse to Italy, in comparison with Hellas, as aggravations of the uncured
evil of internal strife. The source of their strength--separateness and
the need to struggle--was at the same time the source of their bane; for
at no time do we find the Italian republics contemplating durable peace
even as an ideal, or regarding political union as aught save a temporary
expedient of the state of war.
On the familiar assumption of "race character" we should accordingly
proceed to decide that the Italians, by getting mixed with the Teutons,
had lost the "instinct of union" which built up Rome. Those who credit
"Teutonic blood" with the revival never think of saddling it with the
later ruinous strifes of cities and parties, or with the vices of the
"Italian character." The rational explanation is, of course, that there
was now neither a sufficient preponderance of strength in any one State
to admit of its unifying Italy by conquest, nor such a concurrence of
conditions as could enable any State to become thus preponderant; while
on the other hand the Empire and the Church, each fighting for its own
hand, were perpetual fountains of discord. The factions of Guelph
(papal) and Ghibelline[542] (imperial) stereotyped and intensified for
centuries every proclivity to strife inherent in the Italian
populations.
All the cities alike were at once industrial and military, with the
exception of Rome; and for all alike a career of mere plunder was out of
the question, though every city sought to enlarge its territory.
Forcible unification could conceivably be wrought only by the emperor or
the Papacy; and in the nature of things these powers became enemies,
carrying feud into the heart of every city in Italy, as well as setting
each on one or the other side according as the majority swayed for the
moment. At times, as after the destruction of Milan by Frederick
Barbarossa, hatred of the foreigner and despot could unite a number of
cities in a powerful league; but though the emperor was worsted there
was no excising the trouble of the separate interests of the bishops and
the nobles, or that of the old jealousies and hatreds of many of the
cities for each other. Pope Innocent IV, after the death of Frederick II
in 1250, turned against the Papacy many of the Milanese by his
arrogance. They had made immense sacrifices for the Guelph cause; and
their reward was to be threatened with excommunication for an
ecclesiastical dispute.[543] The Christian religion not only did not
avail to make Italians less madly quarrelsome than pagan Greeks: it
embittered and complicated every difference; and if the cities could
have agreed to keep out the Germans, the Papacy would not have let them.
Commonly it played them one against the other, preaching union only when
there was a question of a crusade.
Some writers, even non-Catholics, have spoken of the Papacy as a
unifying factor in Italian life. Machiavelli, who was pretty well
placed for knowing where the shoe pinched, repeatedly (_Istorie
fiorentine_, l. i; _Discorsi sopra Tito Livio_, i, 12) speaks of it
bitterly as being at all times the source of invasion and of
disunion in Italy. This is substantially the view of Gregorovius
(_Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, B. iv, cap. iii, § 3) as to the
process in the city of Rome to begin with. So also Symonds: "The
whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right when he
asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation in
disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends" (_Renaissance
in Italy: The Age of the Despots_, ed. 1907, p. 75).
As a civilising lore or social science the religion of professed love
and fraternity, itself a theatre of divisions and discords,[544] counted
literally for less than nothing against the passions of ignorance,
egoism, and patriotism; for ignorant all orders of the people still
were--more ignorant than the Greeks of Athens--in the main matters of
political knowledge and self-knowledge.[545] Yet such is the creative
power of free intelligence even in a state of strife--given but the
conditions of economic furtherance and variety of life and of
culture-contact--that in this warring Italy of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries there grew up a civilisation almost as manifold as
that of Hellas itself. The elements of variety, of culture, and of
competition were present in nearly as potent a degree. In the north, in
particular, the Lombard, and Tuscan, and other cities differed widely in
their industries. Florence, besides being one of the great centres of
European banking, was eminently the city of various occupations,
manufacturing and trading in woollens and silks and gold brocades,
working in gold and jewelry, the metals, and leather, and excelling in
dyes. In 1266 the reformed constitution specified twelve _arti_ or
crafts, seven major and five minor, the latter list being later
increased to fourteen.[546] Pisa, beginning as a commercial seaport,
trading with the East, whither she exported the iron of Elba, became the
first great seat of the woollen manufacture.[547] Milan, besides silks
and woollens, manufactured in particular weapons and armour. Genoa had
factories of wool, cotton, silk, maroquin, leather, embroidery, and
silver and gold thread.[548] Bologna was in a special degree a culture
city, with its school of law, and as such would have its special minor
industries. But indeed every one of the countless Italian republics,
with its specialty of dialect, of life, and of outward aspect, must have
had something of its own to contribute to the complex whole.[549]
In the south the Norman kingdom set up in the eleventh century meant yet
another norm of life, for there Frederick II established the University
of Naples; and Saracen contact told alike on thought and imagination.
All through these regions there now reigned something like a common
speech, the skeleton of old Latin newly suppled and newly clothed upon;
and for all educated men the Latin itself was the instrument of thought
and intercourse. For them, too, the Church and the twofold law
constituted a common ground of culture and discipline. On this composite
soil, under heats of passion and stresses of warring energies, there
gradually grew the many-seeded flower of a new literature.
Gradual indeed was the process. Italy, under stress of struggle, was
still relatively backward at a time when Germany and France, and even
England, under progressive conditions quickened with studious life;[550]
and there was a great intellectual movement in France, in particular, in
the twelfth century, when Italy had nothing of the kind to show, save as
regarded the important part played by the law school of Bologna in
educating jurists for the whole of western Europe. For other
developments there still lacked the needed conditions, both political
and social. The first economic furtherance given to mental life by the
cities seems to have been the endowment of law schools and
chronicle-writers; the schools of Ravenna and Bologna, and the first
chronicles, dating from the eleventh century. Salerno had even earlier
had a medical school, long famous, which may or may not have been
municipally endowed.[551] To the Church, as against her constant
influence for discord and her early encouragement of illiteracy,[552]
must be credited a share in these beginnings. After the law school of
Bologna (whence in 1222 was founded that of Padua, by a secession of
teachers and students at strife with the citizens) had added medicine
and philology to its chairs, the Papacy gave it a faculty of theology;
and in Rome itself the Church had established a school of law. The first
great literary fruit of this intellectual ferment is the _Summa
Theologiae_ of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), a performance in which the
revived study of Aristotle, set up by the stimulus of Saracen culture,
is brought by a capacious and powerful mind to the insuperable task of
philosophising at once the Christian creed and the problems of
Christendom. Close upon this, the Latin expression of accepted medieval
thought, comes the great achievement of Dante, wherein a new genius for
the supreme art of rhythmic speech has preserved for ever the profound
vibration of all the fierce and passionate Italian life of the Middle
Ages. In his own spirit he carries it all, save its vice and levity. Its
pitiless cruelty, its intellectuality, its curious observation, its
ingrained intolerance, its piercing flashes of tenderness, its capacity
for intense and mystic devotion, its absolute dogmatism in every field
of thought, the whole pell-mell of its vehement experience, throbs
through every canto of his welded strain. And no less does he incarnate
for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante,
politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction:
his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares
the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his
imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to
subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other
faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence.
§ 2
With Dante we are already in the fourteenth century, close upon Petrarch
and Boccaccio; and already the whole course of political things is
curving back to tyranny, for lack of faculty in the cities, placed as
they were, to learn the lesson of politics. Their inhabitants could
neither combine as federations to secure well-being for all of their own
members, nor cease to combine as groups against each other. Always their
one principle of union remained negative--animal hatred of city to city,
of faction to faction. It is important then to seek for a clear notion
of the forces which fostered mental life and popular prosperity
alongside of influences which wrought for demoralisation and
dissolution. Taking progress to consist on one hand in increase and
diffusion of knowledge and art, and on the other in better distribution
of wealth, we find that slavery, to begin with, was substantially
extinguished in the time of conflict between cities, barons, and
emperor.
Already in the fifth century the process had begun in Gaul. Guizot
treats the change from slave to free labour as a mystery. "Quand et
comment il s'opéra au sein du monde romain, je ne le sais pas; et
personne, je crois, ne l'a découvert; mais ... au commencement du
Ve siècle, ce pas était fait; il y avait, dans toutes les grandes
villes de la Gaule, une classe assez nombreuse d'artisans libres;
déjà même ils étaient constitués en corporations.... La plupart des
corporations, dont on a continué d'attribuer l'origine au moyen
âge, remontent, dans le midi de la Gaule surtout et en Italie, au
monde romain" (_Civilisation en France_, i, 57). But a few pages
before (p. 51) we are told that at the _end_ of the _fourth_
century free men commenced in crowds to seek the protection of
powerful persons. On this we have the testimony of Salvian (_De
gubernatione Dei_, lib. v). The solution seems to be that the
"freed" class in the rural districts were the serfs of the glebe,
who, as we have seen, were rapidly substituted for slaves in Italy
in the last age of the Empire; and that in the towns in the same
way the crumbling upper class slackened its hold on its slaves.
Both in town and country such detached poor folk would in time of
trouble naturally seek the protection of powerful persons, thus
preparing the way for feudalism.
At the same time the barbarian conquerors maintained slavery as a
matter of course, so that in the transition period slaves were
perhaps more numerous than ever before (cp. Milman, _Hist. Lat.
Christ._ 4th ed. ii, 45-46; Lecky, _European Morals_, ed. 1884, ii,
70). Whatever were the case in the earlier ages of barbarian
irruption, it seems clear that during the Dark Ages the general
tendency was to reduce "small men" in general to a servile status,
whether they were of the conquering or the conquered stock. Cp.
Guizot, _Essais_, as cited, pp. 161-72; _Civilisation_, iii, 172,
190-203 (leçons 7, 8). The different grades of _coloni_ and _servi_
tended to approximate to the same subjection in Europe as in the
England of the twelfth century. But in France and Italy betterment
seems to have set in about the eleventh century; and the famous
ordinance of Louis the Fat in 1118 (given by Guizot, iii, 204)
tells of a general movement, largely traceable to the Crusades,
which in this connection wrought good for the tillers of the soil
in the process of squandering the wealth of their masters. Cp.
Duruy, _Hist. de France_, ed. 1880, i, 291.
The process of causation is still somewhat obscure, and is further
beclouded by _a priori_ views and prepossessions as to the part played
by religion in the change. The fact that the Catholic Church everywhere,
though the last to free her own slaves,[553] encouraged penitents to
free theirs, is taken as a phenomenon of religion, though we have seen
slavery of the worst description[554] flourishing within the past
century in a devoutly Protestant community. Pope Urban II actually
reduced to slavery the wives of priests who refused to submit to the law
of celibacy, handing them over to the nobles or bishops.[555] The
rational inference is that the motives in the medieval abandonment of
slavery, as in its disuse towards the end of the Roman Empire, and as in
its later re-establishments in Christian States, were economic--that (1)
nobles on the one hand and burghers on the other found it to their
advantage to free their slaves for military purposes,[556] by way of
getting money; (2) that the Church in the Dark Ages actually had to
enrol many serfs as priests, the desire of freemen to escape military
service by taking orders having made necessary a prohibitory law;[557]
and (3) that the Church further promoted the process,[558] especially
during the crusading period, because a free laity was to her more
profitable than one of slaves--as apart from her own serfs. Freemen
could be made to pay clerical dues: slaves could not, save on a very
small scale.
See Larroque, as cited, ch. ii. The claim of Guizot (_Essais_, p.
167; _Civ. en Europe_, leç. 6) that the religious character of most
of the formulas of enfranchisement proves them to have had a
specially Christian motive, is pure fallacy. Before Christianity
the process of manumission was a religious solemnity, being
commonly carried out in the pagan temples (cp. A. Calderini, _La
manomissione e la condizione dei liberti in Grecia_, 1908, p. 96
_sq._), and there were myriads of freedmen. It appears from Cicero
(_Philipp._ viii, 11, cited by Wallon, _Hist. de l'esclavage dans
l'antiquité_, ii, 419) that a well-behaved slave might expect his
liberty in six years. Among the acts of Constantine to establish
Christianity was the transference of this function of manumission
from the pagan temples to the churches. Thus Christianity took over
the process, like the idea of "natural equality" itself, from the
pagans.
And the principle goes farther. In Adam Smith's not altogether coherent
discussion of the general question,[559] the unprofitableness of slave
labour in comparison with free is urged, probably rightly, as counting
for much more than the alleged bull of Alexander III (12th century);
while the interest of the sovereign as against the noble is noted as a
further factor. As regards the "love of domination" to which Smith
attributes the slowness of slave-owners to see the inferiority of slave
labour, it is to be remembered that the Roman slave-owner was fixed in
his bias by the perpetual influx of captives and cheap slaves from the
East; that this resource was lacking to the medieval Italians, who had
to take the costly course of breeding most of their slaves; and that in
such circumstances the concurrent pressure of all the other causes
mentioned could very well suffice to make emancipation general.
While the lowest stratum of the people was thus being raised, the state
of war was for a time comparatively harmless by reason of the
primitiveness of the fighting. The cities were all alike walled, and
incapable of capture in the then state of military technique;[560] so
they had periodical conflicts[561] which often came to nothing, and
involved no heavy outlay; even the long struggle with Barbarossa was
much less vitally costly to the cities than to Germany. Frederick's
eight variously devastating campaigns, ending in frustration, were the
beginning of the medieval demoralisation of Germany,[562] to which such
a policy meant retrogression in industry and agriculture; while the
Lombards, traders and cultivators first, and soldiers only secondarily,
rapidly made good all their heavy losses.
It was when the practice of war grew more and more systematic under
Frederick II, and the policy of cities became more and more capricious
for or against the Emperor, that their mutual animosities became more
commonly savage. Thus we read that in 1250 "the Parmesans were
overthrown by the Cremonese, losing 3,000 men. The captives were bound
in the gravel-pit near the Taro ... the whole population seemed to have
been captured. The Cremonese tortured them shamefully, drawing their
teeth and ramming toads into their mouths. The exiles from Parma were
more cruel to their countrymen than the Cremonese were."[563] And,
indeed, the Parmesans a century before had burned Borgo San Donnino and
led away all its inhabitants as prisoners.[564] Now the Cremonese threw
into prison 1,575 of their Parmesan enemies; and when after a year the
dungeons were thrown open, only 318 remained alive.[565] Thus
civilisation in effect went backwards on several lines at once, the
spirit of internecine strife growing step by step with the economic
process under which the community divided into rich and poor, as
formerly into noble and plebeian.
Up till the end of the thirteenth century, however, the growth of
capital went on slowly,[566] and the division between rich and poor was
not deep, the less so because thus far the middle and upper classes held
by the sentiment of civic patriotism to the extent of being ready to
spend freely for civic purposes, while they spent little on themselves
as compared with the rich of a later period. So that, although the
republics were from the first, in differing degrees, aristocratic rather
than democratic--the _popolo_ being the body of upper-class and
middle-class citizens with the franchise, not the mass of the
population--and though the workers had later to struggle for their
political privileges very much as did the plebs of ancient Rome, the
economic conditions were for a considerable period healthy enough. A
rapid expansion of upper-class wealth seems to have begun in the
thirteenth century, in connection, apparently, with the new usury[567]
and the new monopolist commerce connected with the Crusades; and it is
from this time that the economic conditions so markedly alter as to
infect the political unity and independence of the republics without
substituting any ideal of a wider union.
Much of the wealth of Florence must in early republican times have
been drawn from the agriculture of the surrounding plains, which
had a large population. Machiavelli (_Istorie fiorentine_, 1. ii)
states that when at the death of Frederick II the city reorganised
its military, there were formed twenty companies in the town and
sixty-six in the country. Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 365.
Dante (_Paradiso_, xv, 97-129) pictures the Florentine upper class
as living frugally in the reign of Conrad III (d. 1152). Borghini
and Giovanni Villani decide that the same standards still prevailed
till the middle of the thirteenth century. (Cited by Villari, p.
200, and Testa, pp. 89-91: cp. Riccobaldi of Ferrara, there cited
from Muratori; Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 293;
Trollope, _History of Florence_, i, 34; and Hallam, _Middle Ages_,
11th ed. iii, 342-44.) If these testimonies can be in any degree
trusted, the growth of wealth and luxury may be inferred to have
taken place in part through the money-lending system developed by
the Florentines in the period of the later Crusades, in part
through the great commercial developments.
The wool-trade, in which Florentines soon surpassed Pisa by reason
of their skill in dyeing, was a basis for capitalistic commerce,
inasmuch as the wool they dyed and manufactured was mostly foreign,
the Tuscan region being better suited for the growing of corn,
wine, and olives than for pasture. Already in 1202 the Florentine
wool trade had its consuls. (Villari puts these much earlier. He
traces them in 1182, and thinks they were then long established.
_Two First Centuries_, pp. 124, 313.) Woollen-weaving was first
noticeably improved by the lay order of the Umiliati at Milan about
1020; and this order was introduced about 1210 into Florence, where
it received special privileges. Thenceforward the city became the
great emporium for the finer cloths till the Flemings and English
learned to compete. (Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, as cited, iii,
265-70.)
The silk manufacture, brought into Sicily from the islands of the
Archipelago by Roger II in 1147, and carried north from Sicily in
the reign of Frederick III, seems to have existed in Florence at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, but to have flourished at
first on a larger scale at Lucca, whence, on the sack of the town
by Uguccioni della Faggiola in 1315, most of the Lucchese
manufacturers fled to Florence, taking their trade with them.
(Pignotti, iii, 273-74; Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 323.)
Many had fled to Venice from the power of Castruccio Castracani,
five years earlier. (Below, p. 243.) Being much more profitable
than any other, by reason of the high prices, it seems to have
speedily ranked as more aristocratic than the wool trade; and when
that declined, the silk trade restored Florentine prosperity.
(Villari, as cited.)
The business of banking, again, must have been much developed
before the Bardi and the Peruzzi could lend 1,500,000 florins to
Edward III of England (G. Villani, xi, 88; xii, 54, 56; Gibbins,
_History of Commerce_, 1891, pp. 47, 48; Hallam, _Middle Ages_,
iii, 340. Pignotti, iii, 279, Eng. tr., estimates the sum lent as =
£3,000,000 of modern money). This function, in turn, arose on the
basis of commerce, and the _cambisti_ are subjects of legal
regulation in Florence as early as 1299. (Pignotti, iii, 276.) On
this line capitalism must have been developed greatly, till it
became the preponderant power in the State. Even as the kings and
tyrants were enabled, by borrowing from the bankers, to wage wars
which otherwise might have been impossible to them, the republican
statesman who could command the moneyed interest was destined to
supersede the merely military tyrant. In Genoa the bankers
coalesced in a corporation called the Bank of St. George, which
controlled politics, traded, and even made conquests, thus giving a
historic lead to the Bank of Amsterdam. (Cp. Hallam, _Middle
Ages_, iii, 341; J.T. Bent, _Genoa_, 1881, ch. ii.)
Summing up the industrial evolution, we note that about 1340 there
were 200 cloth factories in Florence; and a century later 272, of
which 83 made silk and cloth-of-gold. At the latter period there
were 72 bankers or money-changers, 66 apothecary shops, 30
goldbeaters, and 44 of goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewellers. The
artisan population was estimated at 30,000; and gold currency at
two millions of florins (Pignotti, iii, 290-91). Concerning Milan,
it is recorded that in 1288, a generation after it had lost its
liberties, it had a population of 200,000 (certainly an
exaggeration), 13,000 houses, 600 notaries, 200 physicians, 80
schoolmasters, and 50 copyists of MSS. (Hallam, _Middle Ages_, i,
393, citing Galvaneus Flamma; cp. Ranke, _Latin and Teutonic
Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 111.)
§ 3
We can now generalise, then, the conditions of the rise of the arts and
sciences in medieval Italy. First we have seen commerce, handicraft, and
architecture flourish in the new free cities, as they did at the same
time in Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. In the south, again, in the Two
Sicilies, under the reign of Frederick II, prosperous industry and
commerce, in contact and rivalry with those of the Saracens, supplied a
similar basis, though without yielding such remarkable fruits. There,
however, on the stimulus of Saracen literature, occur the decided
beginnings of a new literature, in a speech at once vernacular and
courtly, as being accepted by the emperor and the aristocracy. The same
conditions, indeed, had existed before Frederick, under the later Norman
kings; and it is in Sicily about 1190 that we must date the oldest known
verses in an Italian dialect.[568] Some of them refer to Saladin; and
the connection between Italian and Arab literature goes deeper than that
detail; for there is reason to suppose that in Europe the very use of
rhyme, arising as it thus did in the sphere of Saracen culture-contact,
derives from Saracen models.[569] In any case, the Moorish poetry
certainly influenced the beginnings of the Italian and Spanish. About
the same time, however, there occurs the important literary influence of
the troubadours, radiating from Provence, where, again, the special
source of fertilisation was the culture of the Moors.[570] The Provençal
speech, developed in a more stable life,[571] took literary form before
the Italian, and yielded a literature which was the most effective
stimulus to that of Italy. And, broadly speaking, the troubadours stood
socially for either the leisured upper class or a class which
entertained and was supported by it.
Here, then, as regards imaginative and artistic literature, we find the
beginnings made in the sphere of the beneficent prince or "tyrant." But,
exactly as in Greece, it is only in the struggling and stimulating life
of the free cities that there arises, after the period of primary song,
the great reflective literature, the great art: and, furthermore, the
pursuit of letters at the courts of the princes is itself a result of
outside stimulus. It needed the ferment of Moorish culture--itself
promoted by the special tolerance of the earlier Ommiades towards Jews
and Christians--to produce the literary stir in Sicily and Provence.
Again, while the Provençal life, like the Moorish, included a remarkable
development of free thought, the first great propagation of
quasi-rational heresy in the south occurring in Provence, it was in the
free Italian cities, where also many _Cathari_ and _Paterini_ were found
for burning, that there arose the more general development of
intelligence. That is to say, the intellectual climate, the mental
atmosphere, in which great literature grows, is here as elsewhere found
to be supplied by the "free" State, in which men's wills and ideas clash
and compromise.[572] In turbulent Florence of the thirteenth century was
nourished the spirit of Dante. And it is with art as with literature.
Modern painting begins in the thirteenth century in Florence with
Cimabue, and at Siena with Duccio, who, trained like previous Italian
painters of other towns in the Byzantine manner, transcended it and led
the Renaissance.
The great step once taken, the new speech once broadly fixed, and the
new art-ideal once adumbrated by masters, both literature and art could
in differing sort flourish under the regimen of more or less propitious
princes; but not so as to alter the truth just stated. What could best
of all thrive was art. Architecture, indeed, save for one or two great
undertakings, can hardly be said to have ever outgone the achievement of
the republican period; and painting was first broadly developed by
public patronage; but it lay in the nature of the case that painting
could find ample economic furtherance under the princes and under the
Church. For the rule of the princes was not, save in one or two places
at a time, a tyranny of the kind that destroys all individuality; the
invention of printing, and the general use of Latin, now maintained a
constant interaction of thought throughout all Europe, checked only by
the throttling hand of the Church; and the arts of form and colour, once
well grown, are those which least closely depend on, though they also
thrive by, a free all-round intellectual life. The efficient cause of
the great florescence of Italian art from the thirteenth to the
sixteenth century was economic--the unparalleled _demand_ for art on the
part alike of the cities, the Church, the princes, and the rich. From
the tenth to the thirteenth century the outstanding economic phenomenon
in Italy is the growth of wealth by industry and commerce. In the same
period, Italian agriculture so flourished that by the fifteenth century
Italy would on this ground alone have ranked as the richest of European
countries.[573] From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century the
outstanding economic fact is the addition to this still increasing
wealth of the foreign revenues of the Church.[574]
In the sixteenth century all three sources of wealth are almost
simultaneously checked--that from agriculture through the miserable
devastation wrought by the wars[575] and by the Spanish and papal rule;
and then it is that the great art period begins to draw to its close.
While the revenue of the Church from the northern countries was sharply
curtailed by the Reformation, which in rapid succession affected
Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and the
Scandinavian States, the trade of Italy began to be affected through the
development of the new sea route round the Cape of Good Hope by the
Portuguese; and though that gradual change need not have brought
depression speedily, the misrule of Leo X, raised to an unprecedented
secular power, and the crowning blow of the Spanish Conquest, following
upon the other and involving government by Spanish methods, were the
beginning of the end of Italian greatness.
Prof. Thorold Rogers repeatedly generalises (_Six Centuries of
Work and Wages_, p. 157; _Holland_, p. 49; _Economic Interpretation
of History_, p. 11) that the Turkish conquest of Egypt (1517)
blocked the only remaining road to the East known to the Old World;
and that thenceforth the trade of the Rhine and Danube was so
impoverished as to ruin the German nobles, who speedily took to
oppressing their tenants, and so brought about the Peasants' War,
while "the Italian cities fell into rapid decay." Whatever be the
truth as to Germany, the statement as to Italy is very doubtful.
The Professor confessedly came to these conclusions from having
observed a "sudden and enormous rise in the prices of all Eastern
products" at the close of the first quarter of the sixteenth
century, not from having ascertained first the decay of the Italian
cities. Now, H. Scherer expressly notes (_Allgemeine Geschichte des
Welthandels_, 1852, i, 336), that Selim I, after conquering Egypt,
made terms with his old enemies the Venetians (who were then the
main Eastern traders in Italy) and "bestowed on them all the
privileges they had under the Mamelukes." Prof. Rogers states that
"the thriving manufactures of Alexandria were at once destroyed."
Scherer states that Selim freed from imposts all the Indian wares
brought into his States through Alexandria, while he burdened
heavily all that came by way of Lisbon. Heyd sums up (_Histoire du
commerce du Levant_, éd. fran. 1886, ii, 546), that "under the new
régime as under the old, Egypt and Syria remained open to the
Venetian merchants." It is hard to reconcile these data with the
assertions of Prof. Rogers; and his statement as to prices is
further indecisive because the Portuguese trade by sea should have
availed to counteract the effect of the closing of the Egyptian
route, if that _were_ closed. But the subject remains obscure:
Prof. Gibbins (_History of Commerce in Europe_, 1891, pp. 56, 57)
follows Rogers without criticism. The difficulty is that, as
Scherer complains (i, 272), we have very few records as to Italian
trade. "They have illustrated nearly everything, but least of all
their commerce and their commercial politics." The lack of
information Scherer sets down to the internecine jealousy of the
cities. But see the list of works of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries given by Heyd, i, p. xvii _sq._, and his narrative,
_passim_.
So superficially has history been written that it is difficult to gather
the effect thus far of the change in the channels of trade; but there
seems to be no obscurity as to the effect of papal and Spanish rule.
What the arrest of trade began, and the rule of Leo X promoted, the
desperate wars of France and Spain for the possession of Italy
completed, and the misgovernment of the Spanish crown from 1530 onwards
perpetuated. Under sane rule peace might have brought recuperation; but
Spanish rule was ruin prolonged. Destructive taxation, and still more
destructive monopolies, paralysed commerce in the cities under Spanish
sway; while the executive was so weak for good that brigandage abounded
in the interior, and the coasts were raided periodically by the fleets
of the Turks or the Algerine pirates. The decline of the art of painting
in Italy (apart from Venice and Rome) being broadly coincident with this
collapse, the induction is pretty clear that the economic demand had
been the fundamental force in the artistic development. The Church and
the despot remained, but the artistic growth ceased.
Always in need of money for his vast outlays, Leo administered his
secular power solely with a view to his own immediate revenue, and
set up trade monopolies in Florence and the papal estates wherever
he could. As to the usual effects of the papal power on commerce,
see Napier, _Florentine History_, 1845, ii, 413. "The Court of
Rome, since it had ceased to respect the ancient municipal
liberties, never extended its authority over a new province without
ruining its population and resources" (Sismondi, _Short History_,
p. 319). Roscoe (_Life of Leo X_, ed. 1846, ii, 207) speaks of a
revival of Florentine commerce under Leo's kinsman, the Cardinal,
about 1520; but this is almost the only glance at the subject of
trade and administration in Roscoe's work.
Under Pope Gregory XIII (1572-84) there was for a time fair
prosperity in States that had formerly suffered from more
precarious tyrannies; but ere long "the taxes laid upon persons,
property, and commerce, to replace the lost revenues of
Christendom, dried up these resources"; and many cities fell into
poverty. Ancona in particular was so crushed by a tax on imports
that her Mediterranean trade was lost once for all. (Zeller,
_Histoire d'Italie_, 1853, p. 406.) Sismondi's charge is
substantially borne out also by Ranke's account (_History of the
Popes_, Eng. trans. 1-vol. ed. 1859, pp. 118-19) of the ruinous
impositions of Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who taxed the poorest
trades and the necessaries of life, besides debasing the coinage
and raising further revenue from the sale of places at exorbitant
prices, leaving the holders to recoup themselves by extortion and
corruption. Cp., however, Zeller, pp. 409-10, as to his municipal
improvements.
As to Spanish misrule, see Cantù, _Storia degli Italiani_, cap.
139, ed. pop. ix, 512; Sismondi, _Républiques_, xvi, 71-76, 158-59,
170, 217; Symonds, _Renaissance_, vol. vi, pt. i (Catholic
Reaction), pp. 52, 65; Procter, _History of Italy_, 1844, pp. 218,
219, following Muratori and Giannone; Spalding, _Italy_, ii,
264-72, citing many other sources. "The Spaniards, as a Milanese
writer indignantly remarks, possessed Central Lombardy for 172
years. They found in its chief city 300,000 souls; they left in it
scarcely a third of that number. They found in it seventy-five
woollen manufactories; they left in it no more than five"
(Spalding, ii, 272). Agriculture suffered equally. The decay of
manufactures might be set down to outside causes, not so the rise
in taxation.
Yet the decadence does not seem to have been universal, or at least
was not continuous. In Sicily, it is alleged, though the statement
is hardly credible, the revenue, which in 1558 was 1,770,000
ducats, was in 1620 5,000,000 (Leo, _Geschichte von Italien_, v,
506, 507); and at the latter date, according to Howell, Naples
abounded "in rich staple commodities, as silks, cottons, and
wines," from which there accrued to the King of Spain "a mighty
revenue," which, however, was mostly spent in the province, being
"eaten up 'twixt governors, garrisons, and officers" (Letter of
October, 1621, in _Epistolæ Ho-elianæ_, Bennett's ed. 1891, i,
130). Thus there would seem to have been marked fluctuations, for
in the time of Pope Gregory Naples is described as sinking under
oppression and Milan as prosperous (Zeller, p. 407). The inference
seems to be that some governors learned from the failures of their
predecessors to handle trade aright.
The case of Florence after 1587, finally, shows how a wise ruler
could so profit by experience as to restore prosperity where
misrule had driven it out. Duke Ferdinand (1587-1609) was
technically as much a "tyrant" as his brother and predecessor
Francis, but by wise public works he restored prosperity to Leghorn
and to Pisa, whose population had latterly fallen from 22,000 to
8,000 (Zeller, pp. 406, 411), and so increased both population and
revenue that he even set up a considerable naval power. The net
result was that at 1620, even under less sagacious successors,
Florence "marvellously flourished with buildings, with wealth, and
with artisans"; and the people of all degrees were declared to live
"not only well but splendidly well, notwithstanding the manifold
exactions of the Duke upon all things" (Howell's Letter of
November, 1621, ed. cited, i, 136).
We are in sight, then, of the solution of the dispute as to whether it
was the republics or the "tyrants" that evoked the arts and literature
in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The true generalisation embraces both
sides. It may be well, however, to meet in full the "protectionist" or
"monarchist" view, as it has been very judiciously put by an
accomplished specialist in Italian culture history, in criticism of the
other theory:--
"The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed,
under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry
which raised Italy to a first place among civilised nations. We are
not justified by the facts in assuming that, had the free burghs
continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a
greater height. Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican
career, produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her
splendour in the art of painting to aliens from Cadore,
Castle-franco, and Verona. Genoa remained silent and irresponsive
to the artistic movement of Italy to the last days of the Republic,
when her independence was but a shadow. Pisa, though a burgh of
Tuscany, displayed no literary talent, while her architecture dates
from the first period of the Commune. Siena, whose republican
existence lasted longer even than that of Florence, contributed
nothing of importance to Italian literature. The art of Perugia was
developed during the ascendency of despotic families. The painting
of the Milanese school owes its origin to Lodovico Sforza, and
survived the tragic catastrophes of his capital, which suffered
more than any other from the brutalities of Spaniards and
Frenchmen. Next to Florence, the most brilliant centres of literary
activity during the bright days of the Renaissance were princely
Ferrara and royal Naples. Lastly, we might insist upon the fact
that the Italian language took its first flight in the court of
imperial Palermo, while republican Rome remained dumb throughout
the earlier stage of Italian literary evolution. Thus the facts of
the case seem to show that culture and republican independence were
not so closely united in Italy as some historians would seek to
make us believe.
"On the other hand, it is impossible to prove that the despotisms
of the fifteenth century were necessary to the perfecting of art
and literature. All that can be safely advanced upon this subject
is that the pacification of Italy was demanded as a preliminary
condition, and that this pacification came to pass through the
action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the oligarchies
of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the despots
were in close sympathy with the masses of the people, shared their
enthusiasms, and promoted their industry.... To be a prince and not
to be the patron of scholarship, the pupil of the humanists, and
the founder of libraries, was an impossibility. In like manner they
employed their wealth upon the development of arts and industries.
The great age of Florentine painting is indissolubly connected with
the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes her magnificence to the
despotic popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was the creation of the
ducal house of Urbino."[576]
The criticism of this well-marshalled passage may best be put in a
summary form, as thus:--
I. (_a_) The despot promoter of arts and letters is here admittedly the
pupil and product of a previous culture. That being so, he could avail
for fresh culture in so far as he gave it economic furtherance. He might
even give such furtherance on some sides in a fuller degree than ever
did the Republics. But he could _not_ give (though after the invention
of printing he could not wholly destroy) the mental atmosphere needed to
produce great literature. None of the above-cited illustrations goes any
way to prove that he could; and it is easy to show that his influence
was commonly belittling to those who depended on him.
(_b_) The point as to pacification is unduly pressed, or is perhaps
accidentally misstated. It is not to be denied that the despot in the
Italian cities, as in old Greece and Rome, did in a measure earn popular
support by giving the common people relief from the strifes of Guelphs
and Ghibellines. But the despots did not pacify Italy, though they to
some extent set up local stability by checking faction feuds.
(_c_) The popes were in the earlier Middle Ages a main cause of the
ill-development of Rome. Their splendid works were much later than many
of those of the Republics. St. Mark's at Venice, a result of Byzantine
contact, was built in the eleventh century, as was the duomo of Pisa,
whose baptistery and tower belong to the twelfth. The Campo Santa of
Pisa, again, belongs to the thirteenth and fourteenth, and the Palazzo
Vecchio of Florence to the end of the thirteenth. And the great
architects and sculptors of the thirteenth century were mostly
Pisans.[577]
II. The point as to the lack of the right intellectual atmosphere under
the princes can be proved by a comparison of products. The literature
that is intellectually great, in the days before printing equalised and
distributed cultures, belongs from first to last to Florence. Dante and
Machiavelli are its terms; both standing for the experience of affairs
in a disturbed but self-governing community; and it was in Florence that
Boccaccio formed his powers. "Florentine art and letters, constituting
the most fertile seeds of art and letters in Italy, were essentially
republican; many writers, and most of the artists, of Florence were the
offspring of traders or labouring men."[578] What the popes and the
princes protected and developed was the literature of scholarship, their
donations constituting an endowment of research. If the revival of
classic learning and the rapid growth of art after the middle of the
fifteenth century be held, as by some historians, to be the essence of
the Renaissance,[579] then the Renaissance is largely the work of the
despots. But even the artists and scholars patronised by Cosimo de'
Medici were formed before his time,[580] and there is no proportional
increase in number or achievement afterwards. On the other hand, it was
_mere_ scholarship that the potentates fostered: Lorenzo Valla, welcomed
for his _Elegantiae latinae linguae_, had barely escaped exile for his
_De falsa donatione Constantini Magni_;[581] and it is impossible to
show that they promoted thought save in such a case as the encouragement
of the Platonic philosophy by Cosimo and Lorenzo. For the rest, the
character of the humanists whom the potentates fostered is admittedly
illaudable in nearly every case. Pomponius Lætus, who almost alone of
his class bears scrutiny as a personality, expressly set his face
against patronage, and sought to live as a free professor in the
University of Rome.[582] And it is open to argument, finally, whether
the princely patronage of the merely retrospective humanists did not
check vital culture in Italy.[583] It is true that when "despotism" has
been so long acquiesced in as to mean a stable social state, there may
take place under it new forms of intellectual life. The later cases of
Galileo and Vico would suffice to prove as much. But it will hardly be
suggested that monarchic rule _evoked_ such forms of genius, any more
than that the papacy was propitious to Galileo. In both cases the
effective stimulant was foreign thought.
III. (_a_) The case of Venice has to be explained in respect of its
special conditions. Venice was from the first partly aloof from ordinary
Italian life by reason of its situation and its long Byzantine
connections. It was further an aristocratic republic of the old Roman
type, its patrician class developing as a caste of commanders and
administrators; and its foreign possessions, added to in every century,
reinforced this tendency.[584] The early usage of civic trading, carried
on by means of fleets owned by the State, was habitually turned to the
gain of the ruling minority. The use of the fleets was generally granted
to monopoly companies, who paid no duties, while private persons did;
the middle classes in general being allowed to trade only under
burdensome restrictions.[585] Here were conditions contrary in effect to
those of the progressive days of Greece. Contrasted with Florence, the
Italian Athens, Venice has even been likened to Sparta by a modern
Italian.[586] It has been more justly compared, however,[587] with
Rhodes, which, unlike Sparta, was primarily a commercial and a maritime
power; and where, as in Venice, the rich merchants patronised the arts
rather than letters. From the first Venice achieved its wealth by an
energetically prosecuted trade, with no basis of landed property to set
up a leisured class. In such a city the necessarily high standards of
living,[588] as well as the prevailing habit and tradition, would keep
men of the middle class away from literature;[589] and only men of the
middle class like Dante, or leisured officials like Poggio and Boccaccio
and Machiavelli, are found to do important literary work even in
Florence. Hence the small share of Venice in the structure of Italian
literature.
The same explanation partly holds good of art. Venice, however, at
length gave the needed economic furtherance; and men of other
communities could there find a market, as did Greek sculptors in
imperial Rome. Obviously a despot could not have evoked artists of
Venetian birth any more than did the Republic, save by driving men out
of commerce. But it is in Venice, where wealth and the republican form
lasted longest, that we find almost the last of the great
artists--Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. After these the Caracci, Guido,
and many others gravitate to Rome, where the reorganised Church regains
some riches with power. We are to remember, too, that the aristocratic
rulers saw to the food supply of the whole Republic by a special
promotion of agriculture in its possessions, particularly in Candia;
besides carefully making treaties which secured its access to the grain
markets of Sicily, Egypt, and North Africa.[590] Here again we have to
recognise a form of civic self-preserving resource special in origin to
republics, though afterwards exploited by autocracies, as earlier in the
case of imperial Rome.
The fact that Venice _did_ maintain great artists after the
artistic arrest of Tuscany and Lombardy, is part of the proof that,
as above contended (p. 221), it was papal and Spanish misrule
rather than the change in the channels of trade that impoverished
Italy in the sixteenth century. Venice could still prosper by her
manufactures when her commerce was partly checked, because the
volume of European trade went on increasing. As Hallam notes: "We
are apt to fall into a vulgar error in supposing that Venice was
crushed, or even materially affected [phrase slightly modified in
footnote], as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the
Portuguese. She was in fact _more opulent_, as her buildings
themselves may prove, in the sixteenth century than in any
preceding age. The French trade from Marseilles to the Levant,
which began later to flourish, was what impoverished Venice rather
than that of Portugal with the East Indies." As the treatise of
Antonio Serra shows (1613), Venice was rich when Spanish Naples was
poor (_Introduction to the Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii,
165, 166).
(_b_) As regards Genoa, the explanation is similar. That republic
resembled Venice in that it was from the beginning a city apart from the
rest of Italy, devoted to foreign commerce, and absorbed in the
management of distant possessions or trade colonies. When we compare the
intellectual history of two such States with that of Florence, which was
not less but more republican in its government, it becomes clear that it
was not republicanism that limited culture in the maritime cities.
Rather we must recognise that their development is analogous with that
of England in the eighteenth century, when the growth of commerce, of
foreign possessions, and of naval power seems to have turned the general
energies, hitherto in large proportion intellectually employed,
predominantly towards practical and administrative employment.[591] The
case of Florence is the test for the whole problem. Its pre-eminence in
art and letters alike is to be explained through (1) its being in
constant touch with all the elements of Italian and other European
culture; and (2) its having no direct maritime interests and no foreign
possessions.[592]
IV. With the patronage of the princes of Ferrara, history associates
the poetry of Ariosto and Tasso, though as a matter of fact the _Orlando
Furioso_ seems to have been written before Ariosto entered the ducal
service. But even if that and the _Gerusalemme_ be wholly credited to
the principle of monarchism, it only needs to weigh the two works
against those which were brought forth in the atmosphere of the free
cities in order to see how little mere princely pay can avail for power
and originality in literature where the princely rule thwarts the great
instincts of personality. Ariosto and Tasso are charming melodists; and
as such they have had an influence on European literature; but they have
waned in distinction age by age, while earlier and later names have
waxed. And all the while, what is delightful in them is clearly enough
the outcome of the still manifold Italian culture in which they grew,
though it may be that the influence of a court would do more to foster
sheer melody than would the storm and stress of the life of a Republic.
Sismondi (_Républiques italiennes_, iv, 416-18), admits the
encouragement given to men of letters by despots like Can' Grande,
and the frequent presence of poets at the courts. But he rightly
insists that the faculty of imagination itself visibly dwindled
when intellectual freedom was gone. It is interesting to note how
Montaigne, writing within a century of the production of the
_Orlando Furioso_, is struck by its want of sustained imaginative
flight in comparison with Virgil (_Essais_, B. ii, 10; éd.
Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 432). Compare the estimate of Cantù,
_Storia degli Italiani_, cap. 142, ed. pop. x, 180-86.
In fine, we can rightly say with Mr. Symonds himself that the history of
the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or even of
nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom
by the human spirit manifested in the European races.[593] And _this_
process, surely, was not accomplished at the courts of the despots. Nor
can it well be disputed, finally, that the Spanish domination was the
visible and final check to intellectual progress on the side of
imaginative literature, at a time when there was every prospect of a
great development of Italian drama. "It was the Inquisitors and
Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit."[594]
Equally clear is it that the republican life evolved an amount of
expansive commercial energy which at that period could not possibly have
taken place under a tyrant. The efforts by which Florence developed her
trade and power--efforts made possible by the mere union of
self-interest among the commercial class--will compare with any process
of monarchic imperialism in respect of mere persistency and success.
Faced by the jealous enmity of Pisa, their natural port, and suffering
from the trade burdens laid on them by the maritime States while they
lacked a marine, the Florentines actually opened up trade communication
with China when shut out from Egypt by the Venetians; traded through the
port of Talamone when the Pisans barred their traffic; took Provençal
and Neapolitan galleys in their pay when the Pisans and Genoese tried to
close Talamone; and, after becoming masters of Pisa in 1406, not only
established a well-ordered marine, but induced Genoa to sell to them the
port of Leghorn. They could not, indeed, successfully compete with the
Genoese and Venetians till the fall of the Greek Empire; but thereafter
they contrived to obtain abundant concessions from the Turks, while the
Genoese were driven out of the Levant. Commercial egoism, in fact,
enabled them to tread the path of "empire" even as emperors had done
long before them; and they hastened to the stage of political collapse
on the old military road, spending on one war of two years, against
Visconti, a sum equal to £15,000,000 at the present time; and in the
twenty-nine years of struggle against Pisa (1377-1406) a sum equal to
£58,000,000.[595] Thus they developed a capitalistic class, undermined
in the old way the spirit of equity which is the cement of societies,
and prepared their own subjection to a capitalist over-lord. But that is
only another way of saying that the period of expansive energy preceded
the age of the tyrant, wise or unwise.
When all is said, however, there can be no gainsaying of the judgment
that the strifes of the republics were the frustration of their culture;
and it matters little whether or not we set down the inveteracy of the
strifes to the final scantiness and ill-distribution of the culture.
Neither republics nor princes seem ever to have aimed at its diffusion.
The latter, in common with the richer ecclesiastics, did undoubtedly
promote the recovery of the literature of antiquity; but where the
republics had failed to see any need for systematic popular tuition[596]
the princes naturally did not dream of it. It would be a fallacy,
however, to suppose that, given the then state of knowledge and of
political forces, any system of public schooling could have saved
Italian liberty. No class had the science that could solve the problem
which pressed on all. The increase and culmination of social and
political evil in Renaissance Italy was an outcome of more forces than
could be checked by any expedient known to the thought of the time. It
must never be forgotten that the very dividedness of the cities, by
maximising energy, had been visibly a cause of their growth in
riches;[597] and that, though peace could have fostered that when once
it had been attained, anything like a federation which should secure to
the satisfaction of each their conflicting commercial interests was an
enormously difficult conception. It would be a bad fallacy, again, to
suppose that there was lacking to the Italians of the Renaissance a kind
of insight or judgment found in other peoples of the same period. There
is no trace of any such estimate in that age; and we who look back upon
it are rather set marvelling at the intense and luminous play of Italian
intelligence, keen as that of Redskins on the trail, so far as the
realisation of the self-expressive and self-assertive appetites could
go. The tragedy of the decadence, here as in the case of Rome, is
measured by the play of power from which men and States fall away; for
the forces which next came to the top stand for no mental superiority.
The problem, in fact, was definitely beyond the grasp of the age. It
remains to realise this by a survey of the process of decline from
self-government to despotism.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 541: Leo estimates that as early as the reign of Louis the
Pious the Church owned about one-third of the land of Italy. Cp. B. iii,
cc. 1, 3, as to the process.]
[Footnote 542: Names derived from the German Welf (or Wölf) and
Waiblingen; Italianised as Guelfo and Ghibellino. Waiblingen was the
name of a castle in the diocese of Augsburg belonging to the Salian or
Franconian emperors, the descendants of Conrad the Salic, Welf was a
family name of the Dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, who constantly resisted
the predominance of the emperors, both of the Franconian and the
Hohenstaufen lines. The names seem to have become war-cries in Italy
about the end of the twelfth century. In Florence they appear first in
1239. Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 181, _note_.]
[Footnote 543: Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 81.]
[Footnote 544: As to the relations of successive popes in the Dark
Ages--each cancelling the acts of his predecessor--see Sismondi,
_Républiques_, i, 142; Gregorovius, as last cited, and _passim_.]
[Footnote 545: Prof. Butler (_Communes of Lombardy_, p. 231), credits
the Italians with having acquired, as a result of the perpetual wars of
the cities, "a breadth of view and a vigour of mind unknown among the
urban populations of other lands." How can "breadth of view" in politics
be ascribed to communities whose unending strifes finally brought them
all under despotism?]
[Footnote 546: Machiavelli, _Istorie fiorentine_, l. ii. The seven major
_arti_ were (1) the judges and notaries; (2) the dealers in French
cloths; (3) the money-changers; (4) the wool traders; (5) the physicians
and apothecaries; (6) the silk dealers and mercers; and (7) the
furriers.]
[Footnote 547: Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. trans. iii, 260.]
[Footnote 548: H. Scherer, _Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels_,
1852, i, 337, 338.]
[Footnote 549: Cp. Symonds, _Age of the Despots_, ed. 1897, pp. 26-27.]
[Footnote 550: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 310; Hallam, _Introd.
to Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, i, 8, 16, 19, 71, 77, 78. But see p.
74 as to the stimulus from Italy in the eleventh century. Cp.
Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, B. viii, Kap. vii, § i (Bd. iv,
604-605), as to the primitive state of mental life in Rome in the
twelfth century, and the resort of young nobles to Paris for education.]
[Footnote 551: In the previous edition I accepted the still current
statement that Salerno drew its first medical lore from the Saracens.
But Dr. Rashdall has, I think, sufficiently shown that there is no basis
for the theory (_The Universities in the Middle Ages_, 1895, i, 77-86).
Salerno seems rather to have preserved some of the classic lore on which
the Saracens also founded. Arabic influence in the Italian schools began
in the twelfth century, and was in full force early in the fourteenth,
when Salerno was in complete decline (_Id_. p. 85).]
[Footnote 552: As to the attitude and influence of Gregory the Great see
Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, as cited, i, 4, 21, 22; and Gregorovius,
B. iii, cap. iii, § 2 (ii, 88). As to the reforms of Gregory VII in the
tenth century, see also Gregorovius, B. vii, cap. vii, § 5 (iv, 288).
See the latter writer again, B. vii, cap. vi (iv, 242-46), and Guizot,
_Civilisation en Europe_, leçon vi, ed. 1844, pp. 159-60, as to the
effect of Hildebrandt's policy in dividing the Church.]
[Footnote 553: Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 9; Muratori, _Dissert._ xv,
cited by Lecky, _Hist. of European Morals_, ii, 71; Milman, as last
cited, ii, 51.]
[Footnote 554: We know further from Salvian, as noted above, p. 119,
that the Christians of Gaul treated their slaves as badly as the pagans
had ever done (_De gubernatione Dei_, l. iv). As to the whole subject,
see the valuable researches of Larroque, _De l'esclavage chez les
nations chrétiennes_, 2e éd. 1864, and Biot, _De l'abolition de
l'esclavage ancien en Occident_, 1840.]
[Footnote 555: Lea, _Hist. Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, 2nd ed. pp.
242-43.]
[Footnote 556: Cp. Sismondi, as before cited, and Testa, as cited, p.
92. Testa's book, like so many other modern Italian treatises, is
written with the garrulity of the Middle Ages, but embodies a good deal
of research. The pietistic passage on p. 93 is contradicted by that on
p. 92.]
[Footnote 557: Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 58 and
refs. Manumission was the legal preliminary to ordination; but it was
often set aside, with the object of having the serf-priest more subject
to discipline. Cp. Tytler, _Hist. of Scotland_, ed. 1869, ii, 255, as to
bondmen-clerks in Scotland in the thirteenth century.]
[Footnote 558: As in the war of cities against nobles under Conrad the
Salic. See above, p. 203.]
[Footnote 559: _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. 2.]
[Footnote 560: Cp. Butler, pp. 224, 229.]
[Footnote 561: As to these see Testa, p. 56. Compare the accounts of the
later bloodless battles of the _condottieri_, which were thus not
without Italian precedent. Between 1013 and 1105 Pavia and Milan had six
wars. Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, p. 58.]
[Footnote 562: Cp. Heeren, _Essai sur l'influence des Croisades_,
Villers' tr. 1808, p. 101; Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. pp. 199,
211, 213, 223; Stubbs, _Germany in the Middle Ages_, 1908, pp. 105,
197.]
[Footnote 563: _Memoirs of Fra Salimbene_, tr. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in
same vol. with _The Duke and the Scholar_, 1875, p. 120.]
[Footnote 564: Butler, p. 98.]
[Footnote 565: _Id._ p. 314.]
[Footnote 566: Wealth-accumulation first took the form of land-owning.
At the beginning of the twelfth century the Florentine territory was
merely civic; at the end it was about forty miles in diameter.
(Trollope, _History of the Commonwealth of Florence_, 1865, i, 85.) The
figure given for the beginning, six miles, is legendary and incredible.
See Villari, _Two First Centuries_, pp. 71-72.]
[Footnote 567: As everywhere else in the Middle Ages, interest at
Florence was high, varying from ten to thirty per cent. Pignotti, _Hist.
of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. 1823, iii, 280. Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th
ed. iii, 337.]
[Footnote 568: Bartoli, _Storia della letteratura italiana_, 1878, tom.
ii, cap. vii.]
[Footnote 569: Sismondi, _Literature of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr.
i, 61, 85, 86, 87, 89; Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese
Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 22, 23; Bartoli, i, 94.]
[Footnote 570: Sismondi, as last cited, i, 74, 76, 80, 242; Bartoli,
tom. ii, cap. i, and p. 165.]
[Footnote 571: "The union of Provence, during two hundred and thirteen
years, under a line of princes who ... never experienced any foreign
invasion, but, by a fraternal government, augmented the population and
riches of the State, and favoured commercial pursuits ... consolidated
the laws, the language, and the manners of Provence" (Sismondi, as last
cited, i, 75).]
[Footnote 572: See above, p. 135 _sq._, as to the theory of the
culture-value of the despot.]
[Footnote 573: Sismondi, _Républiques_, xii, 38-41. The land was already
cultivated on the _métayer_ system, half the crop going to the tenant--a
state of things advantageous all round. Villari (_Two First Centuries_,
p. 315) pronounces that the Florentines looked sagaciously to trade, but
harassed agriculture. This does not seem to be true of Italian polity in
general.]
[Footnote 574: As to these, consult M'Crie, _History of the Reformation
in Italy_, ed. 1856, pp. 23-25.]
[Footnote 575: See Sismondi, _Républiques_, xii, 39, as to the utter
ruin of the Pisan territory by Florence.]
[Footnote 576: J.A. Symonds, _The Age of the Despots_, ed. 1897, pp.
61-62.]
[Footnote 577: Sismondi, _Républiques italiennes_, iv, 174-77.]
[Footnote 578: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 239. So Perrens: "Its
glory belonged to the democratic period" (_Histoire de Florence_, Eng.
trans. of vol. vii, p. 171).]
[Footnote 579: Cp. Zeller, _Histoire d'Italie_, 1853, p. 309.]
[Footnote 580: Roscoe (_Life of Leo X_, ii, 318) attributes to the
rivalry of Leonardo and Michel Angelo at Florence (in 1500, while the
Medici were in exile, and the city was self-governed) the kindling of
the art life of the greatest period. And see Perrens (_Histoire de
Florence_, Eng. trans. of vol. cited, p. 457, also as cited below, p.
249) on the decay of architecture and the check to art through the
policy of Lorenzo. "Art under the grandfather," he declares (p. 434),
"_completed_ a remarkable evolution which has no equivalent under the
grandson." Previously (p. 200) he had noted that "many works of which
the fifteenth century gets the glory because it finished them, were
ordered and begun amid the confusion and terrible agitation of the
demagogy." As to Cosimo's expenditure on building see p. 166, and on
letters p. 168.]
[Footnote 581: Zeller, p. 310. The _De falsa donatione_ was certainly an
abusive document. See Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, pt. i, ch. iii,
sect. i, par. 7, _note_.]
[Footnote 582: Burckhardt, as cited, p. 279. Another estimable type was
Fra Urbano. See Roscoe, Leo X, i, 351, 352. On the character of
Poliziano see Perrens, trans. cited, p. 441.]
[Footnote 583: Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203, 204, 291; Zeller, p. 330; and
von Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, Eng. trans. ii, 18. Lorenzo expressly
cut down the scope and the resources of the Florentine _Studio_ for
selfish personal reasons. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 436-37. It was
Bernardo Nerli, not Lorenzo, who bore the cost of printing Homer. _Id._
p. 443.]
[Footnote 584: See the estimate of Venetian ideals in Burckhardt,
_Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy_, pt. i, ch. vii.]
[Footnote 585: Nys, _Researches in the History of Economics_, 1899, pp.
66-67; Frignet, _Histoire de l'association commerciale_, 1868, p. 78.]
[Footnote 586: Prof. Giacomo Gay, _Dei Carattere degli Italiani nel
medio evo e nell' età moderna_, Asti, 1876, p. 8.]
[Footnote 587: By Prof. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 97.]
[Footnote 588: Compare these as described by Ranke (_Latin and Teutonic
Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 248) with those of old Athens.]
[Footnote 589: Burckhardt (Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 71, 72) gives some
illustrative details. See also H. Brown in _Cambridge Modern History_,
1902, i, 284. But cp. Geiger, _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und
Deutschland_, Berlin, 1882, pp. 265-66, as to the _per contra_.]
[Footnote 590: Nys, _Researches in the History of Economics_, 1899, pp.
64-65, and ref.]
[Footnote 591: Cp. _The Dynamics of Religion_, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M.
R.), 1897, pp. 175, 176, 181.]
[Footnote 592: "Non partecipavi Firenze nelle faccende d'Europa così
largamente, come Venezia e Genova, sì per essere continuamente straziata
dalle fazioni e sì per non avere dominio di mare. Dal che nasceva, che
niun cittadino potesse sorgere in lei di nome e di appichi esterni tanto
possente che potesse stabilirvi da per se o la libertà o la tyrannide"
(C. Botta, _Storia d' Italia_, 1837, i, 124). But Genoa also had
countless strifes of faction, so that the vera causa of the greater
inner development of Florence must be held to be her lack of external
dominion and occupation.]
[Footnote 593: Vol. cited, p. 3. Cp. Burckhardt, _Civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy_, pt. iv, ch. iv, p. 309. Both writers adopt the
language of Michelet.]
[Footnote 594: Burckhardt, p. 317. The Counter-Reformation, of course,
must always be taken into account in estimates of the latter period of
Italian history. The regeneration of the Papacy after the Reformation is
to be credited jointly to Spain and the Reformation itself.]
[Footnote 595: Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 282-92.]
[Footnote 596: Study suffered in Florence particularly from the faction
troubles. The _Studio_ or college, founded in 1348, was closed between
1378 and 1386; reopened then, shut in 1404, again opened in 1412, and so
on. Cp. Napier, _Florentine History_, 1846, iv, 75; Perrens, _Histoire
de Florence_, Eng. tr. of vol. vii, pp. 172-77; and von Reumont,
_Lorenzo de' Medici_, Eng. tr. i, 428-30.]
[Footnote 597: Mr. Symonds notes (_Age of the Despots_, p. 34) how
Guicciardini argued this (_Op. Ined._ i, 28), as against Machiavelli's
lament over the lack of Italian unity.]
Chapter III
THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE
§ 1
Given the monarchic and feudal environment, the chronic strife within
and between the Italian cities can be seen to be sufficient in time to
undo them;[598] and some wonder naturally arises at their failure to
frame some system of federal government that should restrain their
feuds. It was their supreme necessity; but though the idea was now and
then broached,[599] there is no sign that the average man ever came
nearer planning for it than did the Ghibelline Dante, with his simple
theory that Cæsar should ride the horse,[600] or than did the clear
brain of Machiavelli, with its longing for a native ruler[601] like
Cesare Borgia, capable of beating down the rival princes and the
adventurers, and of holding his own against the Papacy. One of the
statesmen who harboured the ideal was Rienzi; but he never wrought for
its realisation, and his devotion to the Papacy as well as to the
headship of Rome would have made it miscarry had he set it on foot.[602]
The failure of Cesare Borgia, who of all Italians of his day came
nearest to combining the needed faculties for Italian unification, is
the proof of the practical impossibility of that solution. But a
federation of States, it has been reasoned, was relatively feasible; why
then was it never attempted? As usual, the question has been answered in
the simple verbalist way, by the decision that the Italians did not
strike out a political philosophy or science because they were not that
way given. They lacked the "faculty" for whatever they did not happen to
do; whereas the ancient Greeks, on the contrary, did theorise because
that faculty was theirs, though they had not the faculty to work out the
theories.
_E.g._ the reasoning of so intelligent a thinker as Heeren: "Among
those countries in which [political speculation] might have been
expected to give the earliest sign of life, Italy was undoubtedly
the first: all the ordinary causes appear to have united here; a
number of small states arose near each other; republican
constitutions were established; political parties were everywhere
at work and at variance; and with all this, the arts and sciences
were in the full splendour of their revival. The appearance of
Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of
ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as
in Greece they had been many!--a result both unexpected and
difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon
may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there
_never was_ a philosophical system of character or influence which
prospered _under the sky of Italy_. No nation of civilised Europe
has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had
less genius for such pursuits. The history of the Roman philosophy,
a mere echo of the Grecian, proves this of its earlier ages, nor
was it otherwise in its later." (Essay "On the Rise and Progress of
Political Theories," in _Historical Treatises_, Eng. tr. 1836, p.
118.)
To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which
ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo,
Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more
that on this principle the Germans must be pronounced to have been
devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does
not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.
Seeking a less vacuous species of explanation, we are soon led to
recognise (1) that the case of medieval Italy was to the extent of at
least two factors more complicated than that of ancient Greece; and that
these factors alone might suffice to explain their non-production of a
"theory" which should avail for the need; (2) that the theories of the
Greeks did not avail to solve their problem; and (3) that the Italians
all the while had really two theories too many. At the very emergence of
their republics they were already possessed or wrought upon by the
embodied theories of the Empire and the Papacy, two elements never
represented in the Greek problem, where empire was an alien and
barbarian thing suddenly entering into the affairs of civilised Hellas,
and where there was nothing in the nature of the Papacy. These two
forces in Italian life were all along represented by specific theories;
and their clash was a large part of the trouble. Their pressure set up a
chronic clash of parties; and the theorist of to-day may be challenged
to frame a theory which could have worked well for Italy otherwise than
by setting those forces aside--a thing quite impossible in the Middle
Ages. If mere system-making on either side could have availed, Thomas
Aquinas might have rendered the service.[603]
The economic and political destiny of the Church may be said to have
been determined in the eleventh century, when, after a desperate
struggle, begun by Pope Hildebrandt, celibacy was forced on the secular
clergy. The real motive to this policy was of course not ascetic but
economic, the object being to prevent at once the appropriation of
church property by married priests for family purposes, and the creation
of hereditary titles to church benefices. An evolution of that kind had
actually begun; and there can be no question that had it not been
checked it would have been fatal to the Papacy. Naturally the married
clergy on their part resisted to the uttermost. Only the desperate
policy of Hildebrandt, withdrawing popular obedience and ecclesiastical
protection from those who would not give up their wives, broke down the
resistance; and even thereafter Urban II, as we saw, had to resort to
the odious measure of making priests' wives slaves.[604] From that
period we may date the creation of the Church as a unitary political
power. Sacerdotal celibacy took many generations to establish; but when
once the point was carried it involved a force of incorporation which
only the strongest political forces--as at the Reformation--could outdo,
and which since the Reformation has kept the Church intact.
It is true that the monk Arnold of Brescia, burned alive by the
Papacy in 1155, fought a long battle (1139-55) against the papal
power, creating an immense ferment in Lombardy, and rousing a
strong anti-papal movement in Rome itself (Sismondi, _Républiques
italiennes_, i, chs. 7, 8; Gibbon, ch. 69); and that, as noted by
M'Crie (_Reformation in Italy_, p. 1), "the supremacy claimed by
the bishops of Rome was resisted in Italy after it had been
submitted to by the most remote churches of the west"; but once
papalised, Italy necessarily remained so in her own pecuniary
interest. Cp. Rogers, _Economic Interpretation of History_, p. 79.
Arnold's movement led even to a revolution in Rome; but after he
had ruled there for ten years, overbearing two successive popes,
one of greater energy, Adrian IV, excommunicated the city, so
expelling Arnold. Adrian then, making a bargain with the emperor
Frederick Barbarossa at his coronation, got the republican leader
in his power; and the movement ended with Arnold's life. The Papacy
was now an irremovable element of division in Italy; and disunion
was thenceforth the lot of the land.
If we seek to localise the disease, however, we find that no one factor
is specially responsible. The alien emperor, coming in from outside, and
setting city against city, Pavia against Milan, and nobles against
burghers, is clearly a force of strife. Again, whereas the cities might
on the whole have combined successfully against the emperor, to the
point of abolishing his rule, the Papacy, calling him in to suit its own
purposes, and calling in yet other aliens at a pinch, is still more a
force of discord. At times the emperors, in the worst days of Roman
corruption, had to choose among the competitors nominated to the Papacy
by the intrigues of courtesans and nobles and the venal votes of the
people, thus identifying the man they chose with their cause.
Hildebrandt, again, after securing that the popes should be elected by
the cardinals, became the fiercest of autocrats. By his strife with
Henry IV he set up civil war through all Italy and Germany; and when in
his despair he called in the Normans against Rome, they sold most of the
people into slavery.[605] Later, in the minority of Frederick II,
Innocent III so strengthened the Church that it was able by sheer
slaughter to crush for a generation all Provençal heresy, and was able
to prevail against Frederick in its long struggle with him; in so doing,
however, deepening to the uttermost the passion of faction in all the
cities, and so preparing the worst and bloodiest wars of the future.
Yet, on the other hand, if we make abstraction of pope and emperor, and
consider only the nobles and the citizens, it is clear that they had
among them the seeds of strife immeasurable. The nobles were by training
and habit centres of violence.[606] Their mutual feuds, always tending
to involve the citizens, were a perpetual peril to order; and their
disregard of law kept them as ready to make war on citizens or cities as
on each other. Again and again they were violently expelled from every
Lombard city, on the score of their gross and perpetual disorders; but
they being the chief experts in military matters, they were always
welcomed back again, because the burghers had need of them as leaders in
the feuds of city with city, and of Guelphs with Ghibellines. So that
yet again, if we put the nobles out of sight, the spirit of strife as
between city and city was sufficient, as in ancient Greece, to make them
all the prey of any invader with a free hand. They could not master the
science of their problem, could not rise above the plane of primary
tribal or local passion and jealousy; though within each city were
faction hatreds as bitter as those between the cities as wholes. Already
in the twelfth century we find Milan destroying Lodi and unwalling Como.
Later, in the thirteenth century, Genoa ruins the naval power of
Pisa,[607] then under the tyranny of Ugolino, in a war of commercial
hatred, such as Pisa had before waged with Amalfi and with Lucca; in the
fourteenth, Genoa and Venice again and again fight till both are
exhausted, and Genoa accepts a lord to aid her in the struggle, Pisa
doing likewise, and so recovering strength on land;[608] in the
fifteenth and sixteenth, Florence spares no cost or effort to keep Pisa
in subjection. This fatal policy, in turn, was the result of the
frequent attempts of the Pisans to destroy Florentine trade by closing
their port to it.[609] All along, inter-civic hates are in full flow
through all the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines; and the menace of
neither French nor Spanish tyranny can finally unify the mutually
repellent communities.
We may, indeed, make out a special case against the Papacy, to the
effect that, but for that, Italian intelligence would have had a freer
life; and that even if Italy, like Spain and France and England,
underwent despotism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, her
intellectual activity would have sufficed to work her recovery at least
as rapidly as the process took place elsewhere. It has been argued[610]
that the liberating force elsewhere in the sixteenth century was the
Reformation--a theory which leaves us asking what originated the
Reformation in its turn. Taking that to be the spirit of (_a_) inchoate
free thought, of developing reason, or (_b_) of economic revolt against
the fiscal exactions of an alien power, or both, we are entitled to say
broadly that the crushing of such revolt in Italy, as in Provence and in
Spain, clearly came of the special development of the papal power thus
near its centre--the explanation of "national character" being as
nugatory in this as in any other sociological issue.
Heeren naturally rests on this solution. The "new religion," he
says, "was suited to the north, but not to the south. The calm and
investigating spirit of the German nations found in it the
nourishment which it required and sought for.... The more vivid
imagination and sensitive feelings of the people of the south ...
found little to please them in its tenets.... It was not,
therefore, owing to the prohibitions of the government, but to the
character of the nations themselves, that the Reformation found no
support among them" (vol. cited, pp. 58, 59). The two explanations
of climate and race can thus be employed alternatively at need.
Ireland, though "northern," is to be got rid of as not being
"German." For the rest, the Albigenses, the _paterini_, the
reforming Franciscans, and the myriad victims of the Inquisition in
Spain, are conveniently ignored. Heeren's phrase about the "almost
total exclusion" of the southern countries from the "great ferment
of ideas which in other countries of civilised Europe gave activity
and life to the human intellect" can be described only as a piece
of concentrated misinformation. And a similar judgment must be
passed on the summing-up of Mr. Symonds that "Germany achieved the
labour of the Reformation almost single-handed" (_Renaissance in
Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 28). There is far more truth in the verdict of
Guizot, that "la principale lutte d'érudition et de doctrine contre
l'Eglise catholique a été soutenue par la réforme française; c'est
en France et en Hollande, et toujours en français, qu'ont été
écrits tants d'ouvrages philosophiques, historiques, polémiques, à
l'appui de cette cause" (_Civilisation en France_, i, 18). Motley,
though an uncritical Teutophile and Gallophobe, admits as to
Holland that "the Reformation first entered the Provinces, not
through the Augsburg but the Huguenot gate" (_Rise of the Dutch
Republic_, ed. 1863, p. 162). As to the spirit of reformation in
Italy and Spain, the student may consult the two careful and
learned _Histories_ of M'Crie, works which might have saved many
vain generalisations by later writers, had they heeded them. The
question of the supposed racial determination of the Reformation is
discussed at some length in _The Saxon and the Celt_, pp. 92-97,
143-47, 203, 204. Cp. _The Dynamics of Religion_, 1897, pt. i;
_Letters on Reasoning_, 2nd ed. 1905, pp. 20-24; and _A Short
History of Freethought_, vol. i, chs. ix, x, xi.
The history of Italian religious life shows that the spirit of sheer
reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stronger there
than even in France in the sixteenth, where again it was perhaps
positively stronger than in Germany, though not stronger relatively to
the resistance. And in Italy the resistance was personified in the
Papacy, which there had its seat and strength. When all is said,
however, the facts remain that in England the Reformation meant sordid
spoliation, retrogression in culture, and finally civil war; that in
France it meant long periods of furious strife; that in Germany, where
it "prospered," it meant finally a whole generation of the most ruinous
warfare the modern world had seen, throwing back German civilisation a
full hundred years. Save for the original agony of conquest and the
special sting of subjection to alien rule, Italy suffered in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less evils than these.
The lesson of our retrospect, then, is: (1) generally, that as between
medieval Italian development and that of other countries--say our
own--there has been difference, not of "race character" and "faculty,"
but of favouring and adverse conditions; and (2) particularly, that
certain social evils which went on worsening in Florence and are in some
degree present in all societies to-day, call for scientific treatment
lest they go on worsening with us. The modern problem is in many
respects different from that of pre-Reformation Italy; but the forces
concerned are kindred, and it may be worth while to note the broad facts
of the past process with some particularity.
§ 2
The central fact of disunion in Italian life, complicated as we have
seen it to be by extraneous factors, analyses down to the eternal
conflict of interests of the rich and the poor, the very rich and the
less rich, or, as Italian humour figured it, the "fat" and the "lean."
For Machiavelli this is the salient trouble in the Florentine
retrospect, since it survived the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline; though
he sets down to the Papacy the foreign invasions and the disunion of the
cities. The faction-feuds, of course, tell of the psychological
conditions of the feud of rich and poor, and were to some extent an
early form of the feud,[611] the imperialist Ghibellines being
originally the more aristocratic faction; while the papalist Guelphs, by
the admission of Machiavelli, were the more friendly to the popular
liberties, that being the natural course for the Papacy to take. The
imperial cause, on the other hand, was badly compromised by the tyranny
of the terrible Ezzelino III, the representative of Frederick II in the
Trevisan March, who ruled half-a-dozen cities in a fashion never
exceeded for cruelty in the later ages of Italian tyranny.[612] Whatever
democratic feeling there was must needs be on the other side.
After Florence had recast its constitution at the death of Frederick
II, establishing twelve _anziani_ or magistrates, replaced every two
months, and two foreign judges--one the upper-class _podestà_ and the
other the captain of the people[613]--to prevent grounds of quarrel,
matters were in fair train, and the city approved its unity by the
sinister steps of forcing Pistoia, Arezzo, and Siena to join its
confederation, capturing Volterra, and destroying several villages,
whose inhabitants were deported to Florence. But new plots on behalf of
Manfred led to the expulsion of the Ghibellines, who in turn, getting
the upper hand with no sense of permanence, reasoned that to make their
party safe they must destroy the city; a purpose changed, as the
familiar story goes, only by the protest of the Florentine Ghibelline
chief, Farinata degli Uberti. They then tried, in obvious bad faith, the
expedient of conciliating the people, whom they had always hitherto
oppressed, by giving them a quasi-democratic constitution, in which the
skilled workers were recognised as bodies, to which all citizens had to
belong.[614] But this scheme being accompanied by fresh taxation, the
Ghibellines were driven out by force; and once more the Guelphs, now
backed by Charles of Anjou (1266), organised a government of twelve
magistrates, adding a council of twenty-four upper-class citizens,
called the _credenza_, and yet another body of 180 popular deputies,
thirty for each of the six quarters of the city, making up with the
others a Council General. To this, however, was strangely added yet
another council of 120, charged with executive functions. The purpose
was to identify the Guelph cause with that of the people--that is, the
lower _bourgeoisie_ and skilled artisans; and the property of the exiled
Ghibellines was confiscated and divided among the public treasury, the
heads of the ruling party, and the Guelphs in general. At this stage the
effort of Gregory X, at his election, to effect a restoration of the
Ghibellines and a general reconciliation, naturally failed. Yet when his
successor, Nicolas III, persisted in the anti-French policy, he was able
through his northern legate to persuade the city, suffering from the
lawlessness of the Guelph as of old from that of the Ghibelline nobles,
to recall the latter and set up a new constitution of fourteen
governors, seven of each party, all nominated by the Pope--a system
which lasted ten years. Then came another French interregnum;
whereafter, on the fall of the French rule in Sicily in 1282, there was
set up yet another constitution of compromise. For the council of
fourteen was set up one of three _priori delle arti_, heads of the
crafts--a number immediately raised to six, so as to give one prior to
each ward of the city, with a change in the title to _signoria_. These
were to be elected every two months. The system, aristocratic in respect
of its small governing body, yet by its elective method lent itself
peculiarly to the new _bourgeois_ tendencies; and thenceforward, says
Machiavelli, we find the parties of Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence
supplanted by the simpler enmity of rich and poor. Soon many of the
nobles, albeit Guelph, were driven out of the city, or declared
disqualified for priorship on the score of their past disorders; and
outside they set up new feuds.
While Florence thus held out, other cities sought safety in
one-man-power, choosing some noble as "captain of the people" and
setting him above the magistrates. Thus Pagano della Torre, a Guelph,
became war-lord of Milan, and his brothers succeeded him, till the
office came to be looked on as hereditary, and other cities inclined to
choose the same head. And so astutely egotistic was the action of all
the forces concerned, that when the Guelph house of Della Torre thus
became unmanageably powerful, the Papacy did not scruple to appoint to
the archbishopric of Milan an exiled Ghibelline, Visconti.
"Henceforward," says Sismondi, "the rivalry between the families of
Della Torre and Visconti made that between the people and the nobles
almost forgotten." The Visconti finally defeated the other faction, made
Milan Ghibelline, and became its virtual rulers.
On the other hand, the entrance of a French army under Charles of Anjou,
called in by a French pope to conquer the Ghibelline realm of the Two
Sicilies (1266), put a due share of wrong to the account of the Guelphs,
the French power standing for something very like barbarism. Its first
achievement was to exterminate the Saracen name and religion in Sicily.
On its heels came a new irruption from Germany, in the person of
Conradin, the claimant of the imperial succession, to whom joined
themselves Pisa and Siena, in opposition to their big neighbour and
enemy Florence, and the people of Rome itself, at quarrel with their
Pope, who had left the city for Viterbo. By Conradin's defeat the French
power became paramount; and then it was that the next pope, Gregory X,
sought to restore the Ghibellines as counterpoise: a policy pursued by
his successor, to the end, however, of substituting (1278) papal for
imperial claims over Italy. Even Florence at his wish recalled her
Ghibellines. But then came the forced election of another French pope,
who acted wholly in the French interest, and re-exiled everywhere the
Ghibellines: a process speedily followed in turn by the "Sicilian
Vespers," involving the massacre and expulsion of the French, and
introducing a Spanish king as representative of the imperial line. Again
the Papacy encouraged the other power, relieving Charles II, as King of
Naples, from his treaty oath, and set him upon making a war with Sicily,
which dragged for twenty-four years. Such were the main political
features of the Italy of Dante. The Papacy, becoming a prize of the
leading Roman families, played a varying game as between the two
monarchies of the south and their partisans in the north; and the minor
cities, like the greater, underwent chronic revolutions. Still, so
abundant was the Italian outflow of intellectual and inventive energy,
so substantial was the general freedom of the cities, and so soundly was
the average regimen founded on energetic agriculture and commerce, that
wealth abounded on all hands.
With the new French invasion (1302) under Charles of Valois, called in
by Boniface VIII to aid him against Sicily, a partially new stage
begins. Charles was received at Florence as the typical Guelph; but,
being counselled by the pope to pacify Tuscany to his own advantage,
allied himself with the ultra-Guelphs, the _Neri_, gave up to plunder,
the proceeds of which he pocketed, the houses of the other or
pro-Ghibelline faction, the _Bianchi_, and enforced the execution or
exile of its leading men, including Dante. Then came the election of a
strictly French pope and his establishment at Avignon. A new lease being
now given to faction, the cities rapidly lapsed into the over-lord
system as the only means of preserving order; and when in 1316 a new
emperor, Henry VII, presented himself for homage and claimed to place an
imperial vicar in each city, most were well disposed to agree. When
however Henry, like Charles, showed himself mainly bent on plunder,
demanding 100,000 florins from Milan and 60,000 from Genoa, he destroyed
his prestige. He had insisted on the recall of all exiles of either
party; but all united against his demands, save the Pisans, who had sent
him 60,000 florins in advance. His sudden death, on his way to fight the
forces of Naples, left everything in a new suspense, save that Pisa,
already shorn of maritime power, was soon eclipsed, after setting up a
military tyranny as a last resort.
The _régime_ of the local tyrant now rapidly developed. On the fall of
the Pisan tyrant rose that of Lucca, Castruccio Castracani, the great
type, after Ezzelino, of the Italian despot-adventurer of the
Renaissance. Such a leader was too dangerous an antagonist to such a
corporation as that of Florence--once more (1323) reconstructed on an
upper-class basis, with a scrutinised franchise, election by ballot, and
a more complicated system of offices than ever.[615] To command them
against Castruccio, they called in the Catalonian general Cardona, who
utterly failed them. He took the course of so handling and placing his
troops as to force those citizens in the army who could afford it to buy
leave of absence, and was finally defeated with his wilfully weakened
army. Florence was driven to call in the King of Naples, at the price of
conferring the _signoria_ on his son. Meanwhile the new emperor Ludwig,
called in by Castruccio, plundered the Milanese and imprisoned their
lords, the Visconti, who had been of his own party; extorted 150,000
florins from the Pisans; tortured, to extort treasure, a Ghibelline who
had given up to him a fortress in the papal State; and generally showed
the Italians, before he withdrew, that a German tyrant could beat even a
native at once in treachery, cruelty, and avarice. Castruccio and the
son of the King of Naples, who had proved a bad bargain, died about the
same time as did the reigning Visconti at Milan, the reigning tyrant at
Mantua, and Can' Grande of Verona, the successor of Ezzelino, who had
conquered Padua. Again the encouraged middle class of Florence recast
their constitution (1328), annulling the old councils and electing two
new: a Council of the "People," composed of 300 middle-class citizens,
and a Council of the Commune, composed of 250 of both orders. Elsewhere
the balance inclined to anarchy and despotism, as of old. A new emperor,
John of Bohemia, offered (1330) a new chance of pacification, eagerly
welcomed, to a harassed people, in large part shaken by military dangers
in its devotion to republicanism, and weary of local tyrannies. But
against the new imperialism Florence stoutly held out, with the aid of
Lombard Ghibellines; the new emperor, leaving Italy, sold his influence
everywhere to local tyrants, and once more everything was in suspense.
At length, in 1336, there occurred the new phenomenon of a combination
between Florence and Venice against a new tyrant of Padua and Lucca, who
had betrayed Florence; but the Venetians in turn did the same thing,
leaving the Florentines half a million of florins in debt; whereupon
they were attacked by their old enemies the Pisans, who heavily defeated
them and captured Lucca, for which Florence had been fighting. It was in
this stage of demoralisation that the Florentines (1342) suddenly forced
their _signoria_ to give the war-lordship to the French Gaultier de
Brienne, "Duke of Athens," formerly the right-hand man of the son of the
King of Naples, who had now been sent to them as a new commander by that
king, on the request of the Commission of Twenty charged with the war.
The commission elected him to the sole command in order to save
themselves[616] and pacify the people; and his natural associates, the
old nobility, counselled him to seize the government, which he gradually
did, beheading and exiling the discredited middle-class leaders, and so
winning the support of the populace, who, on his putting himself for
open election to the _signoria_ for one year, acclaimed him to the
function for life. To this pass had come the see-saw of middle class
(_popolo_) and upper class, with a populace held in pupilage.
Sismondi, in his _Short History_, pp. 147, 148, seems to represent
the episode as wholly one of wanton popular caprice and venality,
even representing that Duke Gaultier was only by chance in the
city. The narrative of Machiavelli explicitly sets forth how he
came through the appeal of the Commission of Twenty; how the
nobility and some of the _bourgeoisie_ conspired with him; and how
the populace were worked upon by the conspirators. The public
acclamation, bad as it was, had been carefully subsidised. The
middle class, whose war policy, however, had brought the city into
such danger, were far more guilty than the mostly unenfranchised
populace. Sismondi had latterly an undue faith in the principle of
middle-class rule. (Cp. Mr. Boulting's Memoir in his recast of the
_Républiques_, p. xxiv.) In his _Histoire des républiques
italiennes_ (v, 329-53) he sets forth the financial corruption of
the middle-class rulers (p. 330), and recognises that they and the
aristocrats were alike dangerous to liberty. Cp. as to his change
of front, F. Morin, _Origines de la démocratie_, 3e édit. 1865,
introd. pp. 17-18.
Within a year, partly on the sudden pressure of a scarcity, the tyrant
was overthrown, after having wrung from Florence 400,000 florins and
infuriated all classes against him and his race. Not the least of his
offences was his conclusion of a peace with Pisa, by which she for a
given period was to rule over Lucca. The rising against him was
universal. Three of his henchmen were literally torn to pieces with
hands and teeth: a madness of fury which was only too profoundly in
keeping with the self-abandonment that had placed the tyrant in power.
The political organism was beginning to disintegrate. A new constitution
was set up, with a leaning to aristocracy, which was soon upset by the
middle class, who in turn established yet another. The nobles, believing
the populace to be hostile to the _bourgeoisie_, attempted anew a
revolution, and were utterly crushed. And now began, according to the
greatest of the publicists of the Renaissance, the final enfeeblement of
Florence, in that the ruin of the nobility, whose one merit had been
their fighting power, led to the abandonment of all military
exercise.[617] Yet Florence a generation later made vigorous war under a
"committee," and in the meantime at least the city tasted domestic peace
and grew in civilisation. And though we doubtless exaggerate when we
conceive of a transition from what we are apt to figure as the fierce
and laughterless Florence of Dante to the gay Florence of the Medici, it
is hard to hold that life was worsened when men changed the ways which
made them collectively capable of rending with their teeth the carcases
of those they hated, and which left the Viscontis of Milan capable of
torturing their political prisoners to death through forty days.
Still the process of disintegration and reintegration proceeded. The
tyrants of the smaller cities usually established themselves by the aid
of professional mercenaries, German and other, whom, when their funds
failed, they turned loose to shift for themselves, having in the
meantime disarmed the citizens. These companies, swelled by others
disbanded after the English wars in France, ravaged and plundered Italy
from Montferrat to Naples, and were everywhere bought off save by
Florence. Only the Pope and the greater tyrants could keep them
regularly in pay; and by their means the Viscontis became lords of
sixteen cities of Lombardy, while the Papacy began to build up a
military power. Naples, on the other hand, continuously degenerated;
while Genoa and Venice exhausted each other in deadly strife for the
commercial monopoly of the East; and Pisa leaned to the Viscontis, who
ultimately obtained its headship.
Rome, popeless, and domineered over by warring nobles, had its brief
vision of a republic under the dreamer Cola di Rienzi, who at last fell
by the hand of the masses whom he had for a brief space hypnotised.
Neither he nor they were meet for the destiny they fain would have
fulfilled; and had people and leader alike been worthier, they would
ultimately have failed to master the forces joined against them.
Rienzi's brief, and on some sides remarkably vigorous, administration in
1346-47 was not wholly unworthy of his ideal of "the good estate"; he
seems, indeed, to have ruled the Roman territory with an efficiency that
recalled the ancient State; and his early successes against the nobles
tell of unexpected weakness on their side and energy on that of the
people. His dream of an Italian federation, too, remains to prove that
he was no mere mob-leader. But had he been as stable in purpose and
policy as he was heady and capricious, and had the Roman populace been
as steadfast as it was turbulent, the forces of division represented by
the nobles and the Papacy would ultimately have overthrown any
republican polity. What Florence could not compass, Rome could not
maintain. Two centuries before, Arnold of Brescia had fallen, after
fifteen years of popularity, as soon as pope and emperor joined hands
against him; and the papalism of Rienzi was as fatal to him as
anti-papalism had been to Arnold. Had Rienzi had his way, the Pope would
have at once returned to Rome; and where the Papacy was, no republic
could endure, however strong and sober were its head. And Rienzi was not
sober. After his overthrow in 1347 and his seven years of wandering
exile, he was restored solely by the choice and as the agent of the Pope
at Avignon; and his death in a tumult after four months of renewed
office was the end of his cause.
In Florence the disintegration went on apace. A new emperor, Charles IV,
charged the city 100,000 florins (1355) for her immunities, leaving all
men hopeless as ever of the Empire as a political solution; and when the
crimes of the Viscontis drove cities and Papacy to call Charles in
against them (1368), he did but use the opportunity to levy blackmail
wherever he went. Later (1375), the Papacy combined with Florence
against the reigning Visconti, but only to betray its ally. And now
occurred what for a time must have seemed a vital revolution in Italian
affairs; the infuriated Florentines suddenly allying themselves with
Visconti, the enemy of the day before, against the treacherous Pope, and
framing a league with Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Church that
Florence had so long sustained. Eighty towns in ten days drove out their
legates; and furious reprisals broke out on all hands, till the very
Pope at Avignon was fain to come to stay the universal warfare. Now,
however, an aristocratic and papalist party in Florence bitterly opposed
"The Eight" who managed the war, the aristocracy having gravitated to
the papal side; and at length exhaustion and the absolute instability
of all alliances brought about a peace in which most of the cities,
freed from the Papacy--now become an affair of two mutually
anathematising heads--fell once more under local tyrants. In the hour of
extreme need the Papacy was, if possible, a worse influence than the
emperor; nowhere was to be found a force of stability save in the
tyrannies, which were merely unstable with a difference.
Florence, still republican and still obstinately prosperous, stood as a
strange anomaly in the general transformation. But she had now reached
the stage when the long-ignored populace--the multitude beneath the
_popolo_--made up of handworkers with no nominal incorporation or
franchise, was able to press its claims as against the other orders,
which in turn were divided, as of old, by the jealousies between the
major and minor middle-class guilds and between the new nobility of
capital and their former equals. Refused the status of incorporation,
the _ciompi_ ("chums" or "mates," from the French _compère_) made
_their_ insurrection in turn, finding for the nonce in a wool-carder a
leader of the best quality the time could show, who carried his point,
was chosen head magistrate, enforced order among his own partisans, and
established a new magistracy, with three representatives of the major
arts, three of the minor (1378).
Among other things, the _ciompi_ demanded that interest should no
longer be paid on the public debt; that the principal be paid off
in twelve years, and that no "small people" should be sued for
debts under fifty florins for the next two years (see Trollope, ii,
216). The trouble was that the brains in the movement, good as they
were, could not permanently control the spirit of riot. Sismondi,
after arguing (_Short History_, p. 182) in the Whig manner that
"those who have not learnt to think, those to whom manual labour
leaves no time for meditation, ought not to undertake the guidance
of their fellow-citizens," amusingly proceeds (p. 185) to point to
the capacity of Lando as showing "how much a free government
spreads sound sense and elevated sentiments among even the lowest
classes of society." Immediately afterwards he has to record how
the upper classes fell into fresh disorders.
But where the educated burgesses and nobles had failed in the science of
self-government, the mass of untrained toilers[618] could not succeed.
Suborned doubtless by the other classes, they rebelled against the man
whom they had made leader, and were by him promptly and capably
suppressed, many being exiled; whereupon in due course he was himself
deprived of his post by the old parties, and the new order was annulled
(1382). After fresh strifes and proscriptions among the aristocracy
themselves, all traces of the popular rising were effaced, and the
aristocracy of wealth was definitely re-established.
What had happened was the attainment of the capitalistic stage and the
enthronement of capital in the republican State. In place of strifes
between wealth and nobility there had arisen the strife of capital and
labour, the new aristocracy of wealth having in large part taken the
place of that of descent. The latter transition had occurred nearly
simultaneously in the other remaining Republics. Genoa had substituted
factions with the names of new wealthy families for the old. In Siena,
where the _bourgeoisie_ dispossessed the nobles, they were in turn
assailed by "reformers" of the lower class, who were finally defeated in
battle and exiled wholesale (1385). Meantime the hereditary tyrants of
Milan, the Visconti, with their singular continuity of capacity, had
grown stronger than ever, had built up a native and scientific military
system, and more than ever menaced all their neighbours. Florence called
in aid successively from Germany and France (1390-91); but the Milanese
army triumphed over all; and the skilled adventurer Sir John Hawkwood,
the hired general of the Florentine troops, could not hold his ground.
The Emperor, as usual, was satisfied to take payment for
non-intervention; and the reigning Visconti, Gian Galeazza, invested by
the Emperor with the titles of Duke of Mantua and Count of Pavia, and
the lordship of twenty-six cities, had by the year 1402 further
compassed, by all manner of fraud and force, the mastery of Pisa,
Perugia, Genoa, Siena, Lucca, and Bologna, dying of the plague at the
height of his power. His sons being boys, his power broke up among his
generals, to be in large part recovered later, however, by his second
son, who first assassinated the elder.
At this stage Venice once more intervenes, taking up the cause of Verona
against the tyrant of Padua, whom, having defeated him by her
carefully-chosen and supervised mercenaries, she put to death (1406). He
had been the ally of Florence; but Florence let him fall, being now
wholly bent on reconquering Pisa, her natural seaport. Pisa, in turn,
always invincibly opposed to Florentine rule, was on commercial grounds
backed by Genoa, now under the nominal rule of a representative of the
King of France, who, however, sought to sell Pisa to the Florentines,
and did receive from them 200,000 florins. Still resisting, the Pisans
recalled an exile to lead them; and he in turn sold them for 50,000
florins, this time to their complete undoing. Refusing all Florentine
favours, the bulk of the ruling middle-class abandoned the city for
ever, taking much of its special commerce with them. Meantime, the
kingdom of Naples, under an energetic king, Ladislaus, had acquired most
of the States of the distracted Church, menaced Florence, and was
pressing her hard, despite French support, when Ladislaus died (1414).
By this time the new Visconti was establishing himself at Milan by means
of mercenaries, commanded for him by well-chosen captains. Six times
were the Florentines defeated by his forces; till his capable general,
Carmagnola, whom he had disgraced, revealed to the Council of Venice his
master's intention to attack them; and Venice joined Florence to crush
the tyrant. Carmagnola, acting slackly, met ill success, and was
therefore executed by his Venetian masters. But the Visconti too finally
died defeated, leaving his power to a new adventurer, Francesco Sforza,
who had married his daughter, and had fought both for and against him in
the endless imbroglio of Italian conspiracy.
Florentine republicanism was now near its euthanasia. By the fatal law
of empire, the perpetual enterprise of destroying other men's freedom
left Florence unfit to use or to defend her own; and the tyrants of Pisa
became meet for the yoke of tyranny. The family of Medici, growing
rapidly rich, began to use the power of capital as elsewhere less astute
adventurers used the power of the sword. From the overthrow of the
_ciompi_ party in 1382 to 1434, the Republic had been ruled by a faction
of the new commercial aristocracy with substantial unity; and the period
is claimed as the most prosperous, intellectually and materially, though
not the most progressive, in Florentine history.
See above, p. 226-27. Perrens (_Histoire de Florence_, trans.
cited, pp. 171-72, 202) thinks otherwise, but does not blame the
oligarchy. Sismondi, in his larger and earlier work (_Républiques_,
ed. 1826, xi, 2), represents that Florence _ceased_ to be great
under the Medici; cp. however, xii, 52, and the different note in
the reactionary _Short History_ (p. 224), where he deems that in
this period were born and formed "all those great men" whose glory
is credited to the Medici. This holds good of Brunelleschi the
architect, Masallio the artist, and Ghiberti the sculptor, as well
as of Poggio and other scholars. Cp. Zeller, _Histoire d'Italie_,
1853, p. 309, and the list given by Perrens, _Histoire de
Florence_, trans. cited, p. 456. M. Perrens pronounces that under
Lorenzo "the decadence of sculpture is visible, and still more that
of architecture," both being too rapidly produced from motives of
gain (_La civilisation florentine du 13e siècle au 16e_, 1893, p.
190). Here he follows Romohr (see _Histoire de Florence_, last
cited). Lorenzo, he notes, had the reactionary belief, odd on the
part of a merchant, that only nobles could produce perfect work,
they only having the necessary leisure. He accordingly ignored all
plebeian genius, such as that of Leonardo da Vinci.
Cosimo de' Medici, descendant of a democrat, was grown too rich to be
one in his turn; and between him and the Albizzi, who led the ruling
faction, there grew up one of the old and typical jealousies of
power-seekers. Exiled by a packed _balia_, Cosimo's wealth enabled him
to turn the tables in a year and exile his exilers, taking their place
and silently absorbing their power. "The moment was come when the credit
of the Medici was to prevail over the legal power of the Florentine
_signoria_." Thus when the Visconti died, Cosimo and the doge of Venice
combined their forces to prevent the recovery of the republican
independence of Milan, whose middle class, divided by their own
jealousies, speedily succumbed to the fraud and force of Sforza, the
Visconti's heir.
For thirty years Cosimo maintained at Florence, by the power of capital,
prosperity and peace under the semblance of the old constitution, the
richer of the ever-renewed capitalist class accepting his primacy, while
the populace, being more equitably governed than of yore under the old
nobility, and being steadily prosperous, saw no ground for revolt.
Capital as "tyrant" had in fact done what the tyrants of early Greece
and Rome are presumed to have often done--favoured the people as against
the aristocracy; Cosimo's liberality giving employment and pay at the
same time to the artisans and to the scholars. Under Cosimo and his
political colleagues, doubtless, the subject cities were corruptly
governed; but Florence seems to have been discreetly handled. Attempts
to break the capitalistic domination came to nothing, save the exile or
at a pinch the death of the malcontents.
[Under all of the Medici, it appears, "the fiscal legislation
adhered to the principle of burdening the old nobility of the city"
(Von Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, Eng. tr. i, 33). They however
built up a fresh public debt, and their finance had very crooked
aspects, especially under Lorenzo, who lacked the mercantile
faculty of his grandfather (_id._ pp. 31-33. Cp. Perrens, _Histoire
de Florence_, trans. cited, pp. 55-60, 288, 408-13, 416-17).
Lorenzo was even accused of appropriating the dowries of orphan
girls; and it seems clear that he defrauded the _monte delle doti_,
or dowry bank.
As regards fiscal policy, it may be interesting to note that in
Florence taxes had been imposed alternately on capital or income
from the thirteenth century onwards, both being taken at the lowest
values, and rated at from one-half to three per cent. according to
the _estimo_ (Esquiron de Parieu, _Traité des impôts_, 2e édit.
1866, i, 417). These taxes in turn were probably suggested by the
practice of ancient Athens, where extraordinary revenue for war
purposes was obtained "partly from voluntary contributions, partly
from a graduated income or property tax." In 1266 a fresh
income-tax of ten per cent. on an already heavily taxed city
incited the decisive rising against the rule of the Ghibelline
Count Guido. The earlier historians of Florence, like most others,
pay little attention to the history of taxation; but details emerge
for the later period.
In 1427 Giovanni de' Medici imposed on Florence a tax called the
_catasto_--apparently not, like earlier taxes of the same name,
based on a survey of land, but on disposable or movable
capital--and also one of 1/2 per cent. on income over what was
necessary to support life. Further, he levied a super-tax, which
was paid by 1,400 citizens out of the 10,000 who came under the
_catasto_. At a pinch, the _catasto_ was levied several times in
the year. Yet further, a regularly graduated income-tax was imposed
by Cosimo de' Medici, in 1441, and raised in 1443; but, in this
case, the salutary principle of sparing the amount of income
necessary to sustain life seems to have been departed from, since
incomes of from one to fifty florins paid 4 per cent., the rate
gradually rising thereafter to 33-1/3 per cent. for incomes over
1,500 florins. By reason of bad finance, further, taxes had now to
be levied even ten and fifteen times a year. Cp. Perrens, as last
cited. It is yet further noteworthy that, from 1431 to 1458,
traders were required to show their books to the revenue officers
for the purpose of fair assessment. The abandonment of this
provision seems to have been partly due to the evasions practised
by the traders, partly to the irritation and the abuses set up by
it.]
At Cosimo's death there was dynastic strife of capital, as elsewhere of
blood; but the blundering financier Pitti went to the wall, and the
invalid Piero de' Medici kept his father's power. At his death the group
of his henchmen kept their hold on it; and in time his son Lorenzo
ousted them and engrossed all, escaping the plot which was fatal to his
brother. The failure of that and other plots, in Florence and elsewhere,
sufficed to prove that the artisans, well employed and protected by the
laws, had no concern to upset the orderly and business-like "tyranny"
either of one great capitalist or of a prince, in the interest of an
oligarchy which would rule no better, which gave them no more of
political privilege than did he, and which was less ready than he with
public gifts. Thus he had little difficulty in cutting down every
institution that restricted his power, whether popular or
oligarchic.[619] Italian republicanism had always been a matter of
either upper-class or middle-class rule; and when the old upper class of
feudal descent was superseded by one of commercial descent, the populace
had nothing to gain by supporting the bourgeoisie. A capitalistic
"lord," most of whose wealth was in its nature unseizable, was thus a
more stable power than any mere swordsman among swordsmen; and Lorenzo
de' Medici not only crushed all the conspiracies against him, but held
his own against the dangerous alliance of the republican Pope Sixtus IV
and the King of Naples--the menace of Turkish invasion helping him.
When, early in his reign, he joined in and carried through the plot for
the confiscation of Volterra, chiefly in order to secure a hold on its
rich alum mines, his popularity at Florence was in the ratio of the
baseness of his triumph. As always, imperialism and corruption went hand
in hand, and the Florentines ensured their own servitude by their
eagerness to compass the fall of others.[620]
After Lorenzo's death (1492) only the incompetence of his son Piero at
the hazardous juncture of the new French invasion under Charles VIII
could upset the now hereditary power of the house; but such incompetence
at such a crisis was sufficient, Savonarola having now set up a new
democratic force, partly analogous to that of Puritanism in the England
of a later age. The new party, however, brought no new political
science.[621] Republican Florence in its interim of self-government
proceeded as of old to make war on indomitable Pisa, with which it could
never consent to live on terms of equality. Time after time, vanquished
by force and treachery, the Pisans had again cast loose, fighting for
independence as fiercely as did their fathers of a previous generation.
Savonarola, who had no better light for this problem than was given to
the other Florentines of his age, "staked the truth of his inspiration
on the recovery of Pisa"; he had not a grain of sympathy for the Pisans,
and punished those who had;[622] and though his party had the wisdom to
proclaim a general amnesty for Florence (1495), the war against Pisa
went on, with the French king insensately admitted as a Florentine ally.
Savonarola in his turn fell, on his plain failure to evoke the
miraculous aid on the wild promise of which he had so desperately
traded; his party of pietists went to pieces; and the upper-class party
which succeeded carried on the war, destroying the Pisan harvests every
year, till, under the one-man command of Loderini, Florence triumphed
(1507), and the staunch sea-city fell once more. Even now the conquering
city consented to pay great bribes to the kings of France and Aragon for
leave to take her prey. And once more multitudes of Pisans emigrated,
refusing to live in subjection, despite all attempts at
conciliation.[623]
Slowly the monarchic powers closed in; France, after several campaigns,
decisively defeated and captured Lodovico Sforza, lord of Milan, and
proceeded by a secret treaty with Spain to partition the kingdom of
Naples--a rascals' bargain, which ended in a quarrel and in the
destruction of two French armies; Spain remaining master of Naples and
the Sicilies, while France held the Milanese and Liguria, including
Genoa. For a few years Cesare Borgia flared across the Italian sky, only
to fall with his great purposes unfulfilled; and still the foreign
powers encroached. France, with Swiss support, proceeded in turn to make
war on Venice; and the emperor, the pope, Spain, and the smaller
neighbouring despots, joined in the attack. Against these dastardly odds
the invincible oligarchy of Venice held out, till Pope Julius, finding
his barbarian friends worse than his Italian enemies, changed sides,
joined the republic, and after many reverses got together an anti-French
league of English, Swiss, and Spanish. Finally the emperor betrayed his
French allies, who were once more driven out of Italy, leaving their
ally, Florence, to fall into the hands of the Spaniards (1512).
Now came the restoration of the family of Medici, soon followed by the
elevation of Giovanni de' Medici to the Papacy as Leo X; whence came yet
more wars, enough to paralyse Italy financially had there been no other
impoverishing cause. But Leo X, now the chief Italian power, misgoverned
in secular affairs as badly as in ecclesiastical; and the wars, so
barbarous in themselves, were waged upon dwindling resources. Venice,
pressed afresh by Maximilian, made alliance with Louis, who was defeated
by the Swiss, as defenders and "lords" of Milan; whereupon the Spanish,
papal, and German forces successively ravaged the Venetian territories.
Francis I zealously renewed the war, grappled with the Swiss in the
desperate battle of Marignano in such sort as to get them to come to
terms, and compassed the sovereignty of Milan. On the succession of
Charles V to the throne of Spain and the Empire (1519), war between him
and Francis set in systematically, and continued under Adrian and
Clement VII as under Leo, both combatants feeding on and plundering
Italy. The defeat of Francis at Pavia (1525) brought no cessation to the
drain; a new league was formed between France, the Papacy, Venice, and
Sforza; and soon, besides the regular armies, a guerilla horde of
Germans on the imperial side, receiving no pay, was living by the
plunder of Lombardy. At length, in 1527, came the sack of Rome by the
imperial forces, Germans and Spanish combining for nine miserable months
to outdo the brutalities and the horrors of all previous conquests,
Christian or heathen. Two years' more fighting "only added to the
desolation of Italy, and destroyed alike in all the Italian provinces
the last remains of prosperity."[624] When a fresh German army entered
Lombardy, in 1529, there was "nothing more to pillage."[625]
The curtain now falls rapidly on every form of "independence" in Italy.
Pope Clement VII, freed of his barbarian conquerors, sent them against
Florence, which fell in a fashion not unworthy of its great republican
tradition, after tasting three final years of its ancient and
thrice-forfeited "freedom." With the dying Machiavelli to frame the
ordinances of her revived military system, and Michel Angelo to
construct her last fortifications, she had in her final effort bound up
with her name as a republic two of the greatest Italian names of the age
of the Renaissance. Then came the vengeance of the Medicean Pope,
Clement VII, the ducal tyranny, and the end of a great period.
The prolonged life of the maritime and commercial-aristocratic republics
of Genoa and Venice, interesting as a proof of the defensive powers of
communities so placed and so ordered, was no prolongation of Italian
civilisation, save in so far as a brilliant art survived at Venice till
the close of the sixteenth century. It is sufficient to note that what
of artistic and intellectual life Venice and Genoa had was dependent
first on Venetian contact with Byzantium, and later on the fecundity of
freer Italy. The mere longer duration of Venice was due as much to her
unique situation as to her system. On the other hand, it seems
substantially true that the Venetian oligarchy did rule its subjects,
both at home and on the mainland, with greater wisdom and fairness than
was shown by any other Italian power. When Castruccio Castracani drove
nine hundred families out of Lucca in 1310, thus destroying some of its
chief manufactures, Venice gave the silk-weavers among them a politic
encouragement, and so widened her commercial basis.[626] Her rulers, in
short, had the common sense of men of business, who knew the value of
goodwill. There is thus an unwarrantable extravagance in the verdict of
the young Macaulay, that in Venice "aristocracy had destroyed every seed
of genius and virtue";[627] and in his outburst: "God forbid that there
should ever again exist a powerful and civilised State which, after
existing through thirteen hundred eventful years, shall not bequeath to
mankind the memory of one great name or one generous action." Such
actions are not rife in any history, and in mere civic selfishness of
purpose the rulers of Venice were on a par with most others.[628] As
citizens, or as a caste, they seem to have been not more but less
self-seeking as against the rest of the community, despite their
determined exclusiveness, than the same class in other States.[629]
Their history does but prove that an astute oligarchy, protectively
governing a commercial and industrial State, is not helpful to
civilisation in the ratio of its power and stability, and that the
higher political wisdom is not the appanage of any class.
When all is said, the whole Italian civilisation of the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance represents a clear political gain over that of ancient
Hellas in that it had transcended slavery, while failing to attain or to
aim at the equality and fraternity which alone realise liberty. Despite,
too, all the scandals of the Renaissance in general, and of papal Rome
in particular, the life of such a city as Florence was morally quite on
a par with that of any northern city.[630] But the later States and
civilisations which, while so much more fortunate in their political
conditions, are still so far from the moral liberation of their
labouring masses--these are not entitled to plume themselves on their
comparative success. "The petty done" is still dwarfed by "the undone
vast."
What they and we may truly claim is that in the modern State, freed from
the primal curse of fratricidal strife between cities and provinces, the
totality of "good life," no less than of industrial and commercial life,
is far greater than of old, even if signal genius be less common. To
contrast the Genoa of to-day with the old City-State is to realise how
peace can liberate human effort. The city of Petrarch, Columbus, and
Mazzini has no recent citizen of European fame; but since a wealthy son
bequeathed to her his huge fortune (1875), she has become the chief port
of Italy, passing some forty per cent. of the total trade of the
country. The fact that half her imports, in weight, consist of coal,
tells of the main economic disadvantage of modern Italy as compared with
the chief northern countries; but the modern development of industry is
all the more notable. Under a system of general free trade, it might go
much further.
The fact remains that modern Italy is no such intellectual beacon-light
among the nations as she was in the "old, unhappy, far-off times"; and
upon this the historical sentimentalist is prone to moralise. But there
is no perceptible reason why the new life, well managed, should not
yield new intellectual glories; and the latterday intellectual
Renaissance of Italy may one day take its place in the historic
retrospect as no less notable than that of the days of strife.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 598: Burckhardt (as cited, p. 94) agrees with Ranke that, if
Italy had escaped subjugation by the Spaniards, she would have fallen
into the hands of the Turks.]
[Footnote 599: Burckhardt, p. 82. Freeman, from whom one looks for
details (_History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy_, ed. 1893,
pp. 558, 615), gives none.]
[Footnote 600: _Purgatorio_, canto vi, 91-93.]
[Footnote 601: Machiavelli, however, had special schemes of
constitutional compromise (see Burckhardt, p. 85, and Roscoe, _Life of
Leo X_, ed. 1846, ii, 204, 205); and there were many framers of paper
constitutions for Florence (Burckhardt, p. 83).]
[Footnote 602: See Gibbon, ch. 70. Bohn ed. vii, 398, 404.]
[Footnote 603: Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 6, 7.]
[Footnote 604: Lea, _Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, 2nd ed.
pp. 145-47, 212-20, 224-36, 242-43.]
[Footnote 605: Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 20.]
[Footnote 606: Trollope notes (_History of the Commonwealth of
Florence_, i, 31) how Dante and Villani caught at the theory of an
intermixture of alien blood as an explanation of the strifes which in
Florence, as elsewhere, grew out of the primordial and universal
passions of men in an expanding society. Villari (_Two First Centuries_,
p. 73) endorses the old theory without asking how civil strifes came
about in the cities of early Greece and in those of the Netherlands.]
[Footnote 607: Which, however, was probably already being weakened by
the silting up of the Pisan harbour. This seems to have begun through
the action of the Genoese in blocking it with huge masses of stone in
1290. Bent, _Genoa_, pp. 86-87. Sismondi notes that, after the great
defeat of 1284, "all the fishermen of the coast quitted the Pisan
galleys for those of Genoa." _Short History_, p. 111. As to the Pisan
harbour, whose very site is now uncertain, see Pignotti, _Hist. of
Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 258, _note_.]
[Footnote 608: After destroying Ugolino, the Pisans chose as leader
Guido de Montefeltro, who made their militia a formidable power.]
[Footnote 609: Pignotti, as cited, iii, 283-84.]
[Footnote 610: Heeren, as cited, pp. 69, 120, etc.]
[Footnote 611: Cp. Trollope, _History of Florence_, i, 105; Villari,
_Two First Centuries_, pp. 95, 100.]
[Footnote 612: Cp. Sismondi, _Short History_, pp. 88-90.]
[Footnote 613: _Podestà_, as we have seen, was an old imperialist title.
In Florence it became communal, and in 1200 it was first held by a
foreigner, chosen, it would seem, as likely to be more impartial than a
native. Cp., however, the comments of Villari, _First Two Centuries_, p.
157, and Trollope, i, 84, 94; and the mention by Plutarch, _De amore
prolis_, § 1, as to the same development among the Greeks. In the
memoirs of Fra Salimbene (1221-90) there is mention that in 1233 the
Parmesans "made a friar their _podestà_, who put an end to all feuds"
(trans. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in _The Duke and the Scholar_, 1875, p.
90). The Florentine institution of the _priori delle arti_, mentioned
below, is traced back as far as 1204 (Cantù, as cited, viii, 465,
_note_). The _anziani_, during their term of office, slept at the public
palace, and could not go out save together.]
[Footnote 614: Thus Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici belonged to the craft
of apothecaries.]
[Footnote 615: See Trollope, ii, 179, as to the endless Florentine
devices to check special power and to vary the balance of the
constitution.]
[Footnote 616: Two years before a feebler attempt had been made to set
up a military tool, named Gabrielli.]
[Footnote 617: Machiavelli, _Istorie_, end of 1. ii and beginning of 1.
iii.]
[Footnote 618: According to Giovanni Villani, in the fourteenth century
there were schools only for 8,000 children, and only 1,200 were taught
arithmetic.]
[Footnote 619: Details in Perrens' _Histoire de Florence_, Eng. trans.
of vol. viii, pp. 268, 284-88, 291, 307, 310.]
[Footnote 620: Cp. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 276-80.]
[Footnote 621: M. Perrens indeed pronounces the two Councils set up by
Savonarola's party to be much superior to the former bodies (_La
civilisation florentine_, p. 61); but he admits that "at bottom and from
the start the system was vitiated by the theocracy which presided over
it."]
[Footnote 622: Cp. Armstrong, in _Cambridge Modern History_, 1902, i,
171.]
[Footnote 623: The constancy of Pisa in resisting the yoke of Florence,
and the repeated self-expatriation of masses of the inhabitants, is
hardly intelligible in view of the submission of so many other cities to
worse tyrannies. It would seem that the sting lay in the idea that the
rule of the rival city was more galling to pride than any one-man
tyranny, foreign or other.]
[Footnote 624: Sismondi, _Républiques_, xvi, 71-76, 158, 159, 170, 217;
_Short History_, p. 336.]
[Footnote 625: As to the misery of Florence after the siege, see Napier,
_Florentine History_, iv, 533, 534.]
[Footnote 626: Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iii. citing
Sandi.]
[Footnote 627: Review of Mitford, _Miscellaneous Writings_, ed. 1868, p.
74.]
[Footnote 628: Macaulay doubtless proceeded on the history of Daru, now
known to be seriously erroneous. Compare that of W.C. Hazlitt, above
cited, pref.]
[Footnote 629: Cp. Brown, in _Cambridge Modern History_, 1902, vol. i,
_The Renaissance_, p. 285.]
[Footnote 630: Cp. Armstrong, in _Cambridge History_, i, 150-51.]
PART V
THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES
CHAPTER I
THE IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS
It lies on the face of the foregoing surveys that the principle which
gives mass-form to all politics--to wit, the principle of
nationality--makes at once for peace and war, co-operation and enmity.
As against the tendency to atomism, the tribal principle supplies
cohesion; as against tribalism, the principle of the State plays the
same part; and as against oppression the instinct of race or nationality
inspires and sustains resistance. But in every aggregate, the force of
attraction tends to generate a correlative repulsion to other
aggregates, and--save for the counterplay of class repulsions--the
fundamental instinct of egoism takes new extensions in pride of family,
pride of clan, pride of nation, pride of race. Until the successive
extensions have all been rectified by the spirit of reciprocity,
politics remains so far unmoralised and unrationalised.
The nullity of the conception of "race genius" has been forced on us at
every meeting with it. No less clear, on a critical analysis, is the
irrationality of the instinct of racial pride which underlies that
conception, and which is involved in perhaps half of the strifes of
tribes, States, and nations. Yet perhaps most of the reflections made by
historical writers in the way of generalisations of the history of
States and peoples are in terms of the fallacy and the irrationality in
question. And the instinctive persistence of both reveals itself when we
come to reflect on the fortunes of what we usually call the little
nations--employing a term which at once sets up a whole series of
partial hallucinations.
The main distinction between civilised nations being difference of
language, there has spontaneously arisen the habit of identifying
language with "race," and regarding a dwindling tongue as implying a
dwindling people. In the British Islands, for instance, the decline in
the numbers of the people speaking Celtic dialects--the Erse, the Welsh,
and the Gaelic--leads many persons, including some of the speakers of
those tongues, to regard the "Celtic stock" as in course of diminution;
and statesmen speak quasi-scientifically of "the Celtic fringe" as
representing certain political tendencies in particular. Yet as soon as
we substitute the comparatively real test of name-forms for the non-test
of language, we find that the Welsh and Gaelic-speaking stocks have
enormously extended within the English-speaking population, so that
"Welsh blood" is very much commoner in Britain than "Saxon," relatively
to the proportions between the areas and populations of Wales and
England, while "Highland blood" is relatively predominant in
"Saxon"-speaking Scotland; and "Irish blood" is almost similarly
abundant even in England, to say nothing of its immense multiplication
in the United States.
Enthusiasm for one's nation as such thus begins on scrutiny to resolve
itself into enthusiasm for one's speech; and as our English speech is a
near variant of certain others held alien, as Dutch and Scandinavian and
German, with a decisive control from French, enthusiasm for the
speech-tie begins, on reflection, to assimilate to the enthusiasm of the
district, the glen, the parish. Millions of us are at a given moment
rapturous about the deeds of our non-ancestors, on the supposition that
they were our ancestors, and in terms of a correlative aversion to the
deeds of certain other ancients loosely supposed to have been the
ancestors of certain of our contemporaries. Thus the ostensible entity
which plays so large a part in the common run of thought about
history--the nation, considered as a continuous and personalised
organism--is in large measure a metaphysical dream, and the emotion
spent on it partakes much of the nature of superstition.
How hard it is for anyone trained in such emotion to transcend it is
seen from the form taken by the sympathy which is bestowed by
considerate members of a large community on members of a small one.
"Gallant little Wales" is a phrase in English currency; and a
contemporary poet, who had actually written pertinently and well in
prose on the spurious conception of greatness attached to membership in
a large population, has also written in verse a plea for "little
peoples" in terms of the assumption of an entity conscious of relative
smallness. Some of these more sympathetic pictures of the lesser States
obscurely recall the anecdote of the little girl who, contemplating a
picture of martyrs thrown to the lions, sorrowed for the "poor lion who
hadn't any Christian." The late Sir John Seeley, on the other hand,
wrote in the more normal Anglo-Saxon manner that "some countries, such
as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably (_sic_) regard their history as
in a manner wound up; ... the only practical lesson of their history is
a lesson of resignation."[631] The unit in a population of three
millions is implicitly credited with the consciousness of a dwarf or a
cripple facing a gigantic rival when he thinks of the existence of a
community of thirty or sixty millions. Happily, the unit of the smaller
community has no such consciousness;[632] and, inasmuch as his state is
thus intellectually the more gracious, there appears to be some solid
psychological basis for the paradox, lately broached by such a one, that
"the future lies with the small nations." That is to say, it seems
likely that a higher level of general rationality will be attained in
the small than in the large populations, in virtue of their escaping one
of the most childish and most fostered hallucinations current in the
latter.
Certain patriots of the wilful sort are wont to flout reason in these
matters, blustering of "false cosmopolitanism" and "salutary prejudice."
To all such rhetoric the fitting answer is the characterisation of it as
false passion. Those who indulge in it elect wilfully to enfranchise
from the mass of detected and convicted animal passions one which
specially chimes with their sentiment, as if every other might not be
allowed loose with as good reason. Matters are truly bad enough without
such perverse endorsement of vulgar ideals by those who can see their
vulgarity. Ordinary observation makes us aware that the most commonplace
and contracted minds are most prone to the passion of national and
racial pride; whereas the men of antiquity who first seem to have
transcended it are thereby marked out once for all as a higher breed. It
is in fact the proof of incapacity for any large or deep view of human
life to be habitually and zealously "patriotic" in the popular sense of
the term. Yet, in the civilisations which to-day pass for being most
advanced, the majority of the units habitually batten on that quality of
feeling, millions of adults for ever living the political life of the
schoolboy; and, as no polity can long transcend the ideals of the great
mass, national fortunes and institutions thus far tend to be determined
by the habit of the lower minds.
It is pure paralogism to point to the case of a large backward
population without a national-flag idea--for instance, the
Chinese[633]--as showing that want of patriotic passion goes with
backwardness in culture. There is an infinity of the raw material of
patriotism among precisely the most primitive of the Chinese population,
whose hatred of "foreign devils" is the very warp of "imperialism." The
ideal of cosmopolitanism is at the other end of the psychological scale
from that of the ignorance which has gone through no political evolution
whatever; its very appearance implies past patriotism as a
stepping-stone; and its ethic is to that of patriotism what civil law is
to club law. If "salutary prejudice" is to be the shibboleth of future
civilisation, the due upshot will be the attainment of it one day by the
now semi-civilised races, and the drowning out of European patriotisms
by Mongolian.
If a saner lesson is to be widely learned, one way to it, if not the
best way, may be an effort on the part of the units of the "great
nations" to realise the significance of the fortunes of the "little
nations," in terms, not of the imagined consciousness of metaphysical
entities, but of actual human conditions--material, passional, and
intellectual. We have seen how erudite specialists can express
themselves in terms of the fallacy of racial genius. Specialists perhaps
as erudite, and certainly multitudes of educated people, seem capable of
thinking as positively in terms of the hallucinations of racial entity,
national consciousness, political greatness, national revenue, and
imperial success. Thus we have publicists speaking of Holland as an
"effete nation," of Belgium as "doomed to absorption," of the
Scandinavian peoples as "having failed in the race," and of Switzerland
as "impotent"; even as they call Spain "dying" and Turkey "decomposing."
Nearly every one of those nations, strictly speaking, has a fairer
chance of ultimate continuance without decline of wealth and power than
England, whose units in general show as little eye for the laws of
decline as Romans did in the days of Augustus. Spain has large
potentialities of rich agricultural life; Turkey needs only new habits
to develop her natural resources; the life of Belgium, indeed, is, like
that of England, in part founded on exhaustible minerals; but
Switzerland and Scandinavia, with their restrained populations, may
continue to maintain, as they do, a rather higher _average_ of decent
life and popular culture than that of the British Islands,[634] though
they, too, have at all times a social problem to deal with. British
greatness, on dissection, consists in the aggregation of much greater
masses of wealth and much greater masses of poverty, larger groups of
idlers and larger swarms of degenerates, with much greater maritime
power, than are to be seen in the little nations; certainly not in a
higher average of manhood and intelligence and well-being. Sir John
Seeley, in a moment of misgiving, avowed that "bigness is not
necessarily greatness"; adding, "if by remaining in the second rank of
magnitude we can hold the front rank morally and intellectually, let us
sacrifice mere material magnitude."[635] But he had before used the term
"greatness" without reserve as equivalent to "mere material magnitude";
and even in revising his doctrine, it seems, he must needs crave some
sort of supremacy, some sense of the inferiority of the mass of mankind.
Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let
us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on
mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth
and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more
civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was
better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of
1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations--though it had to be a
poet--who saw not hardship but happiness in the thought of "leaving
great verse unto a little clan." And it was a Christian bishop, looking
on the break-up of a great empire, who asked, _An congruat bonis latius
velle regnare?_--Doth it beseem the good to seek to widen their
rule?--and gave the judgment that if human things had gone in the
happier way of righteousness, all States had remained small, happy in
peaceful neighbourhood.[636]
As for the sentiment of a national greatness that is measured by acreage
and census and quantity of war material, it is hard to distinguish
ethically between it and that individual pride in lands and wealth which
all men save those who cherish it are agreed to pronounce odious. Even
the snobs of nationality have, as a rule, a saving sense which withholds
them from flaunting their pride in the eyes of their "poorer"
neighbours, the members of the less numerous communities. Yet the note
which is thus tacitly admitted to be vulgarly jarring for alien ears is
habitually struck for domestic satisfaction; few newspapers let many
days pass without sounding it; and certain poets and writers of verse
appear to find their chief joy in its vibrations. The men of some of the
lesser States, then, stand a fair chance of becoming ethically and
æsthetically, as well as intellectually, superior in the average to
those of the larger aggregates, in that their moral codes are not
vitiated nor their literary taste vulgarised by national purse-pride and
the vertigo of the higher dunghill; though they, too, have their snares
of "patriotism," with its false ideals and its vitiation of true
fraternity.
To some degree, no doubt, the habit of mind of our megalophiles connects
with the vague but common surmise that a small aggregate is more liable
to unscrupulous aggression than a large one. If, however, there be any
justice in that surmise, there is obviously implied a known disposition
in the larger aggregates to commit such aggression; so that to act or
rest upon it is simply to prefer being the wronger to being the wronged.
Thus to glory in being rather on the side of the bully than on the side
of the bullied is only to give one more proof of the unworthiness of the
instinct at work. All the while, there is no real ground for the hope;
and as regards the small nations themselves, the apprehension does not
appear to prevail. There has indeed been a recrudescence of the barbaric
ethic of the Napoleonic period in the Bismarckian period; but there is
no present sign of a serious fear of national suppression on the part of
Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Scandinavian States;
while, apart from Bismarck's early aggression upon Denmark, and the
ill-fortune of Greece in attacking Turkey, it is not small but large
aggregates--to wit, Austria, France, Russia, Turkey, Spain--that have
suffered any degree of military humiliation during the past half
century; and it is precisely the large aggregates that avowedly live in
the most constant apprehension either of being outnumbered in their
armies and navies by single rivals or coalitions, or of losing their
"prestige" by some failure to punish a supposed slight. It is a matter
of historic fact that the "patriotic" consciousness in England had its
withers wrung during a long series of years by the remembrance of such
military disasters as the fall of Gordon at Khartoum, and the defeat of
an incompetent general at Majuba Hill.[637] No "little nation" could
exhibit a more wincing sense of humiliation and disgrace than is thus
visibly felt by multitudes of a great aggregate over military repulses
at the hands of extremely small and primitive groups. Politically
speaking, then, the future of the small nations seems rather brighter
than that of the large; and thus in the last analysis the pride of the
unit of the latter is found to be still a folly.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 631: _The Expansion of England_, 1883, p. 1.]
[Footnote 632: This though it be true, as remarked by Sismondi
(_Histoire des républiques italiennes_, ed. 1826, i, 100, 101), that all
nations spontaneously desire to be large and powerful, in disregard of
all experience.]
[Footnote 633: This, it need hardly be repeated, was written before
1900.]
[Footnote 634: Compare the remarks of Freeman, _History of Federal
Government_, 2nd ed. p. 41.]
[Footnote 635: _Expansion of England_, p. 16. Compare the further
vacillations in pp. 132-37, 301, 304, 306. In the concluding chapter (p.
294) comes the avowal that "we know no reason in the nature of things
why a State should be any the better for being large."]
[Footnote 636: Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, iv, 15.]
[Footnote 637: This was written before 1900. The disasters of the South
African War confirmed the proposition.]
CHAPTER II
THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES
§ 1
When the early history of Scandinavia is studied as a process of social
evolution rather than as a chronicle of feuds and of the exploits of
heroes of various grades,[638] it is found to constitute a miniature
norm of a simple and instructive sort. Taken as it emerges from the
stage of myth, about the time of Charlemagne, it presents a vivid phase
of barbarism, acted on by powerful conditions of change. The three
sections of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden stand in a certain natural
gradation as regards their possibilities of political development. All
alike were capable only of a secondary or tertiary civilisation, being
at once geographically disrupted and incapable, on primitive methods, of
feeding an abundant population. In their early piratical stage, the
Scandinavians are not greatly different from the pre-Homeric Greeks as
these were conceived by Thucydides; but whereas the Greeks came in
contact with the relatively high civilisations which had preceded them,
the Scandinavians of the Dark Ages had no contacts save with the
primitive life of the pre-Christian Slavs, the premature and arrested
cross-civilisations of Carlovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England, and,
in a fuller and more fruitful degree, with the similarly arrested
semi-Christian civilisation of Celtic Ireland, which latter counted for
so much in their literature.
But in barbarian conditions certain main laws of social evolution
operate no less clearly than in later stages; and we see sections of the
Norsemen passing from tribal anarchy to primitive monarchy, and thence
to military "empire," afterwards returning to their stable economic
basis, as every military empire sooner or later must. Of the
Scandinavian sections, Denmark and the southern parts of Sweden (round
the Maelar) are the least disrupted and most fertile; and these were
respectively the most readily reducible to a single rule. In all, given
to begin with the primordial bias to royalism in any of its forms,[639]
the establishment of a supreme and hereditary military rule was only a
question of time; every successive attempt, however undone by the forces
of barbaric independence, being a lead and stimulus to others. It is
important to note how the process was promoted by, and in its turn
promoted, the establishment of Christianity. The incomplex phenomena in
Scandinavia throw a new light on the more complex evolution of other
parts of Christendom. Primitive polytheism is obviously unpropitious to
monarchic rule; and in every ancient religion it can be seen to have
undergone adaptations where such rule arose. In the widely varying
systems of Homeric Greece, Babylonia, Egypt, and Rome, the same tendency
is visibly at work in different degrees, the ascendent principle of
earthly government being more or less directly duplicated in theological
theory. Under the Roman Empire, all cults were in a measure bent to the
imperial service, and it was only the primary exclusiveness of
Christianity that put it in conflict with the State. Once the emperor
accepted it, recognising its political use, and conceded its exclusive
claims, it became a trebly effective political instrument,[640]
centralising as it did the whole machinery of religion throughout the
Empire, and co-ordinating all to the political system. To use a modern
illustration, it "syndicated" the multifold irregular activities of
worship, and was thus the ideal system for a centralised and imperial
State.[641] This was as readily seen by Theodoric and Charlemagne as by
the rulers at Constantinople; and to such a perception, broadly
speaking, is to be attributed the forcing of Christianity on the
northern races by their kings.
Compare the explicit admissions of Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ 8
cent., pt. ii, ch. ii, § 5 and note, following on the testimony of
William of Malmesbury as to Charlemagne. Other ecclesiastical
historians coincide. "Numbers of the earliest and most active
converts, both in Germany and England, were connected with the
royal households; and in this way it would naturally occur that
measures which related to the organising of the Church would
emanate directly from the King.... It is indeed remarkable that so
long as kings were esteemed the real patrons of the Church, she
felt no wish to define exactly her relations to the civil power;
the two authorities ... _laboured to enforce obedience to each
other_" (Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, pp. 56-57).
The same historian (p. 127) describes the Wends of the eleventh
century as seeing in the missionary a means for their subjection to
Germany, and as "constantly attempting to regain their independence
and extinguish the few glimmerings of truth that had been forced
into their minds."
Northern paganism, more than the semi-cosmopolitan polytheism of the
south in the period of Augustus, was a local and domestic faith, lending
itself to separateness and independence, as did the civic and family
religions of early Greece and Rome. While there were communal assemblies
with specially solemn sacrifices, the popular beliefs were such that
every district could have its holy places, and every family or group its
special rites;[642] and in primitive Scandinavia a priesthood could
still less develop than even in primitive Germany, whose lack of any
system corresponding to the Druidism of Gaul is still empirically
ascribed to some anti-sacerdotal element in the "national character,"
whereas it is plainly a result of the nomadic life-conditions of the
scattered people. In germ the Teutonic priesthood was extremely
powerful, being the judiciary power from which there was no appeal.[643]
But an organised priestly system can arise only on the basis of some
measure of political levelling or centralisation, involving some
peaceful inter-communication. Romanised Christianity, coming ready-made
from its centre, permitted of no worship save that of the consecrated
church, and no ministry save that of the ordained priest.[644] Only the
most obstinately conservative kings or chieftains, therefore, could fail
to see their immediate advantage in adopting it.[645]
Naturally the early Christian records gloss the facts. Thus it is
told in the life of Anskar (Ancharius) that "the Swedes" sent
messengers to the Emperor Ludovic the Pious (_circa_ 825) telling
that "many" of them "longed to embrace the Christian faith"--a
story for which the only possible basis would be the longings and
perhaps the propaganda of Christian captives of some western
European nationality. (Cp. Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_,
1853, p. 110, _notes_, and p. 111.) Still it is admitted that the
king was avowedly willing to listen; and the tale of the first
acceptance of Christianity in Sweden, even if true in detail, would
plainly point to a carefully rehearsed plan under the king's
supervision. The admission that afterwards there was a return to
heathenism for nearly a century consists entirely with the view
that the first tentative was one of kingly policy. See Geijer, c.
iii, pp. 34, 35. It was the people who drove out the missionaries;
and Hardwick's statement that after seven years Anskar "was able to
regain his hold on the affections of the Swedes" is confuted by his
own narrative. All that Anskar obtained was a toleration of his
mission; and this was given after a trial by lots, on heathen
principles (Hardwick, pp. 112, 113; cp. p. 115). The account in
Crichton and Wheaton's _Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 122, brings the
king's initiative into prominence. (Cp. Otté, _Scandinavian
History_, 1874, p. 34.) They also note that Charlemagne, in
treating with the Danes, "did not attempt to impose his religion"
upon them; but they do not glimpse the true explanation, which is
that he could gain nothing by helping to organise a hostile
kingdom. In point of fact he refused to let Lindger pursue his
purpose of converting the Northmen. (Hardwick, p. 108, _note 2_,
citing _Vit. S. Lindger_.) He had not developed the devotion or the
subservience to the Church which in later ages led emperors to
force the acceptance of Christianity on a defeated State that
remained otherwise independent.
When in a later age Christianity was definitely established in
Sweden under Olaf the Lap (or Tribute) King (_circa_ 1000), whose
father Erik is said to have been murdered in a tumult for his
destruction of a pagan temple, the process was again strictly
monarchic, the Diet resisting; but Olaf's substantial success was
such as to permit of his annexing Gothland, temporarily conquering
Norway, and styling himself king of all Sweden; and his son, Anund
Jakob, continuing the profitable policy, earned the title of Most
Christian Majesty (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 111; Geijer, p. 39).
Even after this the attempt of a bishop (1067) to destroy the old
temple at Upsala, resisted by the Christian King Stenkil, but
supported by his rasher son Inge, caused the expulsion of the
latter by the pagan party under Svend. Only after Inge's
restoration by Danish help (1075) was the heathen worship
suppressed (Hardwick, p. 116).
As regards Denmark, the historians incidentally make it clear that
Harald Klak, usurping king of Jutland (_circa_ 820), wanted to
Christianise his turbulent subjects in order to subordinate them,
having learned the wisdom of the policy from Louis the Pious; and
it is no less clear that the same motive swayed Erik I, who, after
having in his days of piratical adventure, as usurper of the Jute
crown, destroyed the Christian settlement of Charlemagne at
Hamburg, entirely changed his attitude and favoured Christianity
when, on the death of King Horda-Knut, he became king of all
Denmark (Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 120-23).
So plain was the political tendency of the new creed that after the
Christianisation of Denmark by Erik I the nobility forced Erik II to
restore the pagan system; but the triumph of the Church, like that of
monarchy, was only a question of time. Even kings who, being caught late
in life, did not renounce their paganism, are found ready to favour the
missionaries; and in Denmark such tolerance on the part of Gorm the Old
(d. 941), successor of Erik II, is followed by the official Christianity
of his son Harald Bluetooth. Danish "empire" duly follows; and in the
next century we find Knut the Great (1014-1035) utterly reversing[646]
the pagan policy of his father, Svend[647] (who had been enabled to
dethrone _his_ Christian father, Harald, by the pagan malcontents), and
dying in the odour of sanctity, "lord" of six kingdoms--Denmark, Sweden,
Norway, England, Scotland, and Wales.
The principle is established from another side in the case of Norway.
There the first notable monarchic unification had been wrought by the
pagan Harold Fairhair (875), without the aid of Christianity; and the
pagan resistance was so irreducible that revolters sailed off in all
directions, finding footing in Scotland and Ireland, and in particular
in Northern France and Iceland.[648] In the next generation the monarchy
relapsed to the old position; and Harold's Christian son Hakon (educated
in England) had to cede to the determined demands of the pagan majority,
who forced him to join in the old heathen rites, and murdered the
leading Christians;[649] a course followed by the further weakening of
the power of the crown. The Danish Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm, who
then conquered Norway, sought to re-establish the Church by the sword;
but Hakon Jarl, who followed, gave up Christianity in order to reign
and again put it down by violence.[650] The next king to restore it,
Olaf Tryggvason, who had met with Christianity in his wanderings in
Greece, Russia, England, and Germany,[651] established that creed by
brute force when he attained the throne (977), and again the spirit of
local independence, abnormally conserved in Norway by the special
separateness set up by the geographical conditions, fiercely resisted
the new system as it had done the rule of Harold Fairhair, many defeated
pagans withdrawing to remote glens and fastnesses, where to this day
their mythology thrives.[652] On Olaf's final defeat and death (1000),
his immediate successors, jarls supported by Denmark and Sweden, were
content to leave paganism alone, as representing a too dangerous spirit
of independence; and when St. Olaf, in turn, again undertook to crush
it, he found he had but beaten down and alienated the forces that would
have enabled him to resist Knut.[653] Danish "imperialism" had been
evolved while the Norwegian kings were striving towards it; and St. Olaf
was exiled, defeated, and slain (1030). His subsequent popularity is a
mere posthumous Church-made cult of the Christian period.
The spread of Christianity among the Franks; in England; in Saxony
by Charlemagne; in North Germany later; and among the Wends, Poles,
Hungarians, and Bohemians, constantly exhibits the same phenomena.
Always it is the duke or king who is "converted"; whereupon the
people are either baptised in mass or dragooned for generations. A
powerful king like Clovis could secure obedience; others, as in
Scandinavia, Bohemia, and Wendland, lost life and kingdom in the
attempt to crush at once paganism and local independence. Prussia
was almost depopulated by sixty years of war before the Order of
Teutonic Knights, who undertook to convert it on being awarded the
territory, could extinguish by savagery its staunch paganism. The
Christianisation of almost the whole of Northern Europe was thus a
purely political process, accomplished in great part by the sword.
See Hardwick, _passim_, and cp. the author's _Short History of
Christianity_, pp. 211-16.
§ 2
The ultimate arrest of all aggression by the Scandinavian peoples is to
be explained as a simple redressing of the balance between them and the
States they had formerly plundered. To begin with, all the Scandinavian
groups alike practised piracy[654] as against the more civilised States
of Northern Europe; and piracy showed them the way to conquest and
colonisation. At home their means of subsistence were pasturage,
fishing, the chase, and an agriculture which cannot have been easily
extensible beyond the most fertile soils; hence a constant pressure of
population, promoting piracy and aggressive emigration. How the pressure
was purposively met is not clear; but as the Scandinavian father, like
the Greek and Roman, was free either to expose or bring up a new-born
child,[655] there is a presumption that at some periods exposure was not
uncommon.[656] There is even testimony, going back to the eighth century
and recurring frequently as late as the twelfth, to the effect that a
certain number of men were periodically sent away by lot when the mouths
had visibly multiplied beyond the meat.
See, for instance, the _Roman de Rou_ (1160), ed. Andresen,
1877-79, i, 18, 19, verses 208-25 of prologue. Pluquet, in a note
on the passage in his edition (1827, i, 10), remarking that the
usage is often mentioned, not only by Norman but by English and
French annalists of the Middle Ages, adds that the oldest mention
of all, in the _Tractatus_ of Abbot Odo (d. 942), must be rejected,
the document being apocryphal. That, however, is not the oldest
mention by a long way. Paulus Diaconus (740-99) gives the statement
in a very circumstantial form (cited by Rydberg, _Teutonic
Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 68) in his history of the Longobardians,
his own stock, who he says came from Scandinavia. He testifies that
he had actually talked with persons who had been in
Scandinavia--his descriptions pointing to Scania. M. Pluquet notes
(so also Crichton and Wheaton, i, 166-67) that no northern saga
mentions the usage in question. But it was likely to be
commemorated only by the stocks forced in that fashion to emigrate.
The saga-making Icelanders were not among these. The old statement,
finally, is in some measure corroborated by the testimony of
Geijer, p. 84, as to the long subsistence of the Swedish practice
of sending forth sons to seek their fortune by sea.
But without any such organised exodus there were adventurers
enough.[657] Hence colonisations and conquests in Scotland, the
Hebrides, Ireland, Iceland, Russia, England, and remote plundering
expeditions by land and river, some getting as far south as Italy; one
conquering expedition passing from Gaul through Arab Spain (827) and
along the Mediterranean coasts, north and south; another passing through
Russia to Constantinople. Thus the Norwegian and Danish stocks must have
rooted in nearly every part of the British Islands; and the settlement
in Gaul of a colony of revolters from Norway, in the reign of Harold
Fairhair, built up one of the great provinces of France. Only in Iceland
did the colonists preserve their language; hence, in terms of the
hallucination of race, the assumption that the others "failed," when in
reality they helped to constitute new races; no more "failing" in these
cases than did the British stock in its North American colonies. It may
be said, indeed, that the Teutonic stocks which overran Italy, Spain,
and North Africa did in large part physically disappear thence, their
physiological type having failed to survive as against the southern
types. Even on that view, however, the impermanent type must in some
degree have affected that which survived. In any case, the amalgamated
Norse stock in Normandy, grown French-speaking, in turn overran England
and part of Italy and Sicily, and, in the Crusades, formed new kingdoms
in the East; while in the case of England, turning English-speaking,
they again modified the stock of the nation. As against the notion that
in this case there was "failure" either for French or for Normans, we
might almost adopt the _mot_ of M. Clémenceau and call England "a French
colony gone wrong."[658] In terms of realities there has been no racial
decease; it is but names and languages that have changed with the
generations.
But there was an arrest of military exodus from Scandinavia; and
thenceforward the Norse-speaking stocks figure as more or less small and
retiring communities. They gave up piracy and conquest only because they
had to, Danish imperialism causing the arrest on a wide scale, as every
monarchic unification had done on a small.[659] When Knut reigned over
six kingdoms, piracy was necessarily checked as among these; and when
Knut's empire broke up after his death through the repulsive powers of
its component parts and the relative lack of resources in Denmark, the
various States of north-western Europe, in the terms of the case, were
more able than before to resist Norse attacks in general. In England,
William the Conqueror was fain to keep them off by bribery and intrigue;
but the States with the greater natural resources grew in strength,
while those of Scandinavia could not. When the pirates began to get the
worst of it, and when the Scandinavian kings had cause to dread
reprisals from those of the west, piracy began to dwindle. The last
regular practitioners were the pagan Wends, and the republican pagans of
the city of Jomsborg, who plundered the Scandinavians as they had of
yore plundered others; and after the Christianised Danish people had for
a time defended themselves by voluntary associations, both sets of
pirates were overthrown by an energetic Danish king. The suppression was
under Christian auspices; but it is a conventional fallacy to attribute
it to the influence of Christianity. It was simply an act of necessary
progressive polity, like the suppression of the Cilician pirates by
Pompeius.
Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton make the regulation statement that
when Christianity was introduced into Scandinavia, "it corrected
the abuses of an ill-regulated freedom; it banished vindictive
quarrels and bloody dissensions; it put a restraint upon robberies
and piracies; it humanised the public laws and softened the
ferocity of public manners; it emancipated the peasantry from a
miserable servitude, restored to them their natural rights, and
created a relish for the blessings of peace and the comforts of
life" (_Scandinavia_, i, 196). For the general and decisive
disproof of these assertions it is necessary only to follow Messrs.
Crichton and Wheaton's own narrative, pp. 201, 213, 216, 219, 230,
240, 244, 247, 275, 278, 280, 308, 312, 322, etc., and note their
contrary generalisation at pp. 324, 325. It was his "Most Christian
Majesty" Anund Jakob who got the nickname of Coal-burner for his
law that the houses and effects of malefactors should be burned to
the value of the harm they had done. The Swedes, polygamous before
Christianity, continued to be so for generations as Christians
(Crichton and Wheaton, i, 197, 198, citing Adam of Bremen. Cp.
Grimm, _Geschichte der deutschen Sprache_, i, 18, 188.) Civil wars
and ferocious feuds greatly multiplied in the early Christian
period, apart altogether from pagan insurrections. Geijer, while
erroneously attributing to Christianity the lessening of war
between Scandinavia and the rest of the world, admits that the
passions of strife, "hitherto turned in an external direction, now
spent themselves in a domestic field of action, generating civil
discord and war. Christianity, besides, dissolved the effective
bond of the old social institutions" (p. 40). In that case it
clearly cannot have been religious feeling that checked external
war. As to piracy, that was later practised by Elizabethan
Protestants and by the Huguenots of La Rochelle, when the
opportunities were tempting. As to popular misery, it is told in
the life of Anskar that the poor in ancient Sweden wore so few that
the first Christians could find a use for their alms only in
foreign countries (Geijer, p. 33). That difficulty has not
prevailed since. Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton later admit that the
Danish peasantry, free as pagans, "gradually sunk under the
increasing power and influence of the feudal chiefs and the Romish
hierarchy" (p. 227), and that the Crusades did not forward the
emancipation of the serfs in Denmark as elsewhere, the peasantry on
the contrary sinking into "a state of hopeless bondage" (pp. 251,
252).
§ 3
From the period of arrest of aggression, the economic and political
history of the Scandinavian States is that of slightly expansible
communities with comparatively small resources; and their high status
to-day is the illustration of what civilisation may come to under such
conditions. In the feudal period they made small material or
intellectual progress. It is not probable that the Norse population was
ever greater than in the eighteenth century, though Malthus had a
surmise that it might anciently have been so:[660] the old belief that
Scandinavia was the great _officina gentium_, the nursery of the races
which overran the Roman Empire, is a delusion; but it is certain that
the increase since the twelfth century has been even slower than the
European average. In the absence of emigration, this meant for past
centuries constant restraint of marriage through lack of houses and
livelihoods--the preventive check in its most stringent form. Emigration
there must have been; but the check must also have been strong. Thus,
while the lot of the common people, in so far as it remained free, was
likely to be comparatively comfortable, the land-owning classes, in the
absence of industry and commerce, tended to become nearly all-powerful;
and the Church, which inherits and does not squander, would engross most
of the power if not specially checked. The conditions were thus as
unfavourable to intellectual as to material progress.
Denmark was the first of the Scandinavian States to develop a
considerable commerce, beginning as did Holland on the footing of the
fishery;[661] and on that basis there was a certain renewal of Danish
empire. But this again could not hold out against the neighbouring
forces; and in the thirteenth century, the herring fishery in the
Baltic failing, it had to yield its hold on the mainland cities of
Hamburg and Lübeck, which began a new career of commercial power as the
nucleus of the great trading federation of the Hansa cities, while
Denmark itself was riven by the struggles of six claimants of the
throne. The result was a "feudal and sacerdotal oligarchy,"[662] leading
to an era of "the complete triumph of the Romish clergy over the
temporal power in Denmark," in which the peasantry were reduced to
absolute predial slavery.[663] Similar evolution took place in
Norway,[664] though with less depression of the peasantry,[665] by
reason of the small scope there for capitalistic agriculture; and there
too the now nascent commerce was appropriated by the Hansa.[666] In
Sweden, where industry remained so primitive that down till the
sixteenth century there was hardly any attempt to work up the native
iron,[667] Germans greatly predominated in the cities and controlled
trade,[668] even before the accession of Albert of Mecklenburg (1363),
who further depressed the native nobility in the German interest.[669]
On the other hand, the clergy were less plenipotent than in the sister
kingdoms, the people having retained more of their old power.
Cp. Schweitzer, _Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_, i, 129.
The Swedish peasantry, like the Norwegian, were less easy to
enslave than the Danish by reason of the natural conditions; those
of the remote mountain and mining districts in particular retaining
their independence (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 375, 376; Geijer, pp.
50, 81, 89, 97, 103), so that they ultimately enabled Gustavus Vasa
to throw off the Danish yoke. Yet they had at first refused to
recognise him, being satisfied with their own liberties; and
afterwards they gave him much serious trouble (Otté, _Scandinavian
History_, 1874, pp. 228, 235; Geijer, pp. 109, 112, 115, 116, 118,
120-24). Slavery, too, was definitely abolished in Sweden as early
as 1335 (Geijer, pp. 57, 86; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 316, 333). As
regards the regal power, the once dominant theory that the Swedish
kings in the thirteenth century obtained a grant of all the mines,
and of the province of the four great lakes (Crichton and Wheaton,
i, 332), appears to be an entire delusion (Geijer, pp. 51, 52).
Such claims were first enforced by Gustavus Vasa (_id._ p. 129). As
regards the clergy, they appear from the first, _quâ_ churchmen, to
have been kept in check by the nobles, who kept the great Church
offices largely in the hands of their own order (Geijer, p. 109),
though Magnus Ladulas strove to strengthen the Church in his own
interest (_id._ pp. 52-53). Thus the nobles became specially
powerful (_id._ pp. 50, 56, 108); and when in the fifteenth century
Sweden was subject to Denmark, they specially resented the
sacerdotal tyranny (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 356).
In Sweden, as in the other Scandinavian States, however, physical strife
and mental stagnation were the ruling conditions. Down till the
sixteenth century her history is pronounced "a wretched detail of civil
wars, insurrections, and revolutions, arising principally from the
jealousies subsisting between the kings and the people, the one striving
to augment their power, the other to maintain their independence."[670]
The same may be said of the sister kingdoms, all alike being torn and
drained by innumerable strifes of faction and wars with each other. The
occasional forcible and dynastic unions of crowns came to nothing; and
the Union of Calmar (1397), an attempt to confederate the three kingdoms
under one crown, repeatedly collapsed. The marvel is that in such an age
even the attempt was made. The remarkable woman who planned and first
effected it, Queen Margaret of Norway, appealed in the first instance
with heavy bribes for the co-operation of the clergy,[671] who,
especially in Sweden, where they preferred the Danish rule to the
domination of the nobles,[672] were always in favour of it for
ecclesiastical reasons.
Had such a union permanently succeeded, it would have eliminated a
serious source of positive political evil; but to carry forward
Scandinavian civilisation under the drawbacks of the medieval difficulty
of inter-communication (involving lack of necessary culture-contacts),
the natural poverty of the soil, and the restrictive pressure of the
Catholic Church, would have been a task beyond the power of a monarchy
comprising three mutually jealous sections. As it was, the old strifes
recurred almost as frequently as before, and moral union was never
developed. If historical evidence is to count for anything, the
experience of the Scandinavian stocks should suffice to discredit once
for all the persistent pretence that the "Teutonic races" have a faculty
for union denied to the Celtic, inasmuch as they, apparently the most
purely Teutonic of all, were even more irreconcilable, less fusible,
than the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and the Germans down
till our own day, and much more mutually jealous than the quasi-Teutonic
provinces of the Netherlands, which, after the severance of Belgium,
have latterly lost their extreme repulsions, while those of Scandinavia
are not yet dead.[673] The explanation, of course, is not racial in any
case; but it is for those who affirm that capacity for union is a
Teutonic gift to find a racial excuse.
With the Reformation, though that was nowhere more clearly than in
Scandinavia a revolution of plunder, there began a new progress, in
respect not of any friendliness of the Lutheran system to thought and
culture, but of the sheer break-up of the intellectual ice of the old
regimen. In Denmark the process is curiously instructive. Christian II,
personally a capable and reformative but cruel tyrant, aimed throughout
his life at reducing the power alike of the clergy and the nobles, and
to that end sought on the one hand to abolish serfdom and educate the
poor and the burghers,[674] and on the other to introduce Lutheranism
(1520). From the latter attempt he was induced to desist, doubtless
surmising that the remedy might for him be a new disease: but on his
enforcing the reform of slavery he was rebelled against and forced to
fly by the nobility, who thereupon oppressed the people more than
ever.[675] His uncle and successor, Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein,
accepted the mandate of the nobles to the extent of causing to be
publicly burned in his presence all the laws of the last reign in favour
of the peasants, closing the poor schools throughout the kingdom,
burning the new books,[676] and pledging himself to expel Lutheranism.
He seems, however, to have been secretly a Protestant, and to have
evaded his pledge; and the rapid spread of the new heresy, especially in
the cities, brought about a new birth of popular literature in the
vernacular, despite the suppression of the schools.[677] In a few years'
time, Frederick, recognising the obvious interest of the crown, and
finding the greater nobles in alliance with the clergy, made common
cause with the smaller nobility, and so was able (1527) to force on the
prelates, who could hope for no better terms from the exiled king, the
toleration of Protestantism, the permission of marriage to the clergy,
and a surrender of a moiety of the tithes.[678] A few years later (1530)
the monasteries were either stormed by the populace or abandoned by the
monks, their houses and lands being divided among the municipalities,
the king and his courtiers, and the secular clergy.[679] After a stormy
interregnum, in which the Catholic party made a strenuous reaction, the
next king, Christian III, taking the nobles and commons-deputies into
partnership, made with their help an end of the Catholic system; the
remaining lands, castles, and manors of the prelates going to the crown,
and the tithes being parcelled among the landowners, the king, and the
clergy. Naturally a large part of the lands, as before, was divided
among the nobles,[680] who were in this way converted to Protestantism.
Thus whereas heathen kings had originally embraced Christianity to
enable them to consolidate their power, Christian kings embraced
Protestantism to enable them to recover wealth and power from the
Catholic Church. Creed all along followed interest;[681] and the people
had small concern in the change.[682]
Norway, being under the same crown, followed the course of Denmark. In
Sweden the powerful Gustavus Vasa saw himself forced at the outset of
his reign to take power and wealth from the Church if he would have any
of his own; and after the dramatic scene in the Diet of Westeras (1527),
in which he broke out with a passionate vow to renounce the crown if he
were not better supported,[683] he carried his point. The nobles, being
"squared"[684] by permission to resume such of their ancestral lands as
had been given to churches and convents since 1454, and by promise of
further grants, forced the bishops to consent to surrender to the king
their castles and strongholds, and to let him fix their revenues; all
which was duly done. The monasteries were soon despoiled of nearly all
their lands, many of which were seized by or granted in fief to the
barons;[685] and the king became head of the Church in as full a degree
as Henry VIII in England;[686] sagaciously, and in part unscrupulously,
creating for the first time in Scandinavia a strong yet not wholly
despotic monarchy, with such revenues from many sources[687] as made
possible the military power and activity of Gustavus Adolphus, and
later the effort of Charles XII to create an "empire"--an effort which,
necessarily failing, reduced Sweden permanently to her true economic
basis.
Apart from those remarkable episodes, the development of the
Scandinavian States since the sixteenth century has been, on their
relatively small scale, that of the normal monarchic community with a
variously vigorous democratic element; shaken frequently by civil
strife; wasting much strength in insensate wars; losing much through bad
kings and gaining somewhat from the good; passing painfully from bigotry
to tolerance; getting rid of their old aristocracies and developing new;
exhibiting in the mass the northern vice of alcoholism, yet maintaining
racial vigour; disproportionately taxing their producers as compared
with their non-producers; aiming, nevertheless, at industry and
commerce, and suffering from the divisive social influences they entail;
meddling in international strifes, till latterly the surrounding powers
preponderated too heavily; disunited and normally jealous of each other,
even when dynastically united, through stress of crude patriotic
prejudice and lack of political science; frequently retrograding, yet in
the end steadily progressing in such science as well as in general
culture and well-being. Losses of territory--as Finland and
Schleswig-Holstein--at the hands of stronger rivals, and the violent
experiences and transitions of the Napoleonic period, have left them on
a relatively stable and safe basis, albeit still mutually jealous and
unable to pass beyond the normal monarchic stage. To-day their culture
is that of all the higher civilisations, as are their social problems.
§ 4
In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special
illustrations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first
great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and
remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the
retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every
memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the
grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland; and the natural conditions,
enforcing long spells of winter leisure, greatly furthered the movement.
But the finest growth of the new literature, it turns out, is due to
culture-contacts--an unexpected confirmation, in a most unlikely
quarter, of a general principle arrived at on other data. The vigilant
study of our own day has detected, standing out from the early
Icelandic literature, "a group of poems which possess the very qualities
of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate
dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language, which [other] Icelandic
poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at
all. They are the poetry of the 'Western Islands'"[688]--that is, the
poetry of the meeting and mixing of the "Celtic" and Scandinavian stocks
in Ireland and the Hebrides--the former already much mixed, and
proportionally rich in intellectual variations. It was in this area that
"a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for
power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries
after their date.... This school, which is totally distinct from the
Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the thirteenth
century."[689]
Compare Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_,
1883, vol. i, Introd. pp. lxii, lxiii; and, as regards the old
Irish civilisation, the author's _Saxon and Celt_, pp. 127, 128,
131-33.
The theory of Celtic influence, though established in its
essentials, is not perfectly consistent as set forth in the
_Britannica_ article. Thus, while the Celticised literature is
remarked for "noble simplicity of language," the true Icelandic,
primarily like the Old English, is said to develop a "complexity of
structure and ornament, an elaborate mythological and enigmatical
phraseology, and a regularity of rhyme, assonance, luxuriance,
quantity, and syllabification which it caught up from the Latin and
_Celtic_ poets." Further, while the Celticised school is described
as "totally distinct from the Icelandic," Celtic influence is also
specified as affecting Norse literature in general. The first
generations of Icelandic poets were men of good birth, "nearly
always, too, of Celtic blood on one side at least"; and they went
to Norway or Denmark, where they lived as kings' or chiefs'
henchmen. The immigration of Norse settlers from Ireland, too,
affected the Iceland stock very early. "It is to the west that the
best sagas belong: it is to the west that nearly every classic
writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west
that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest" (_ib._). The facts
seem decisive, and the statements above cited appear the more
clearly to need modification. It is to be noted that Schweitzer's
_Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_ gives no hint of the
Celtic influence.
But the Icelandic civilisation as a whole could not indefinitely
progress on its own basis any more than the Irish. Beyond a certain
point both needed new light and leading; for the primeval spirit of
strife never spontaneously weakened; the original Icelandic stock being,
to begin with, a selection of revolters from over-rule. So continual
domestic feuds checked mental evolution in Iceland as in old
Scandinavia; and the reduction of the island to Norwegian rule in the
thirteenth century could not do more for it than monarchy was doing for
Norway. Mere Christianity without progressive conditions of culture
availed less for imaginative art than free paganism had done; and when
higher culture-contacts became possible, the extreme poverty of Iceland
tended more than ever to send the enterprising people where the culture
and comfort were. It is in fact not a possible seat for a relatively
flourishing civilisation in the period of peaceful development. The
Reformation seems there to have availed for very little indeed. It was
vehemently resisted,[690] but carried by the preponderant acquisitive
forces: "nearly all who took part in it were men of low type, moved by
personal motives rather than religious zeal."[691] "The glebes and
hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the
subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful class in the
island; while the bad system of underleasing at rack-rent and short
lease with unsecured tenant-right extended in this way over at least a
quarter of the better land, stopping any possible progress." For the
rest, "the Reformation had produced a real poet [Hallgrim Petersen], but
the material rise of Iceland"--that is, the recent improvements in the
condition of the people--"has not yet done so,"[692] though poetry is
still cultivated in Iceland very much as music is elsewhere.
Thus this one little community may be said to have reached the limits of
its evolution, as compared with others, simply because of the strait
natural conditions in which its lot was cast. But to think of it as a
tragically moribund organism is merely to proceed upon the old
hallucinations of race-consciousness. Men reared in Iceland have done
their part in making European civilisation, entering the more southerly
Scandinavian stocks as these entered the stocks of western Europe; and
the present population, who are a remnant, have no more cause to hang
their heads than any family that happens to have few members or to have
missed wealth. Failure is relative only to pretension or purpose.
The modern revival of Scandinavian culture, as must needs be, is the
outcome of all the European influences. At the close of the sixteenth
century, in more or less friendly intercourse with the other Protestant
countries of north Europe, Denmark began effectively to develop a
literature such as theirs, imaginative and scientific, in the vernacular
as well as in Latin; and so the development went on while Sweden was
gaining military glory with little enlightenment. Then a rash attack
upon Sweden ended in a loss of some of the richest Danish provinces
(1658); whereafter a sudden parliamentary revolution, wrought by a
league of king and people against the aristocracy, created not a
constitutional but an absolute and hereditary monarchy (1660),
enthroning divine right at the same instant in Denmark and Norway as in
England. Thereafter, deprived of their old posts and subjected to
ruinous taxes, the nobility fell rapidly into poverty;[693] and the
merchant class, equally overtaxed, withdrew their capital; the peasantry
all the while remaining in a state of serfdom.[694] Then came a new
series of wars with Sweden, recurring through generations, arresting, it
is said, literature, law, philosophy, and medicine,[695] but not the
natural sciences, then so much in evidence elsewhere: Tycho Brahe being
followed in astronomy by Horrebow, while chemistry, mathematics, and
even anatomy made progress. But to this period belongs the brilliant
dramatist and historian Holberg, the first great man of letters in
modern Scandinavia (d. 1754); and in the latter half of the eighteenth
century the two years of ascendency of the freethinking physician
Struensee as queen's favourite (1770-72) served partially to emancipate
the peasants, establish religious toleration, abolish torture, and
reform the administration. Nor did his speedy overthrow and execution
wholly undo his main work,[696] which outdid that of many generations of
the old régime. Still, the history of his rise and fall, his vehement
speed of reconstruction and the ruinous resistance it set up, is one of
the most dramatic of the many warnings of history against thinking
suddenly to elevate a nation by reforms imposed wholly from
without.[697]
Thenceforward, with such fluctuations as mark all culture-history, the
Scandinavian world has progressed mentally nearly step for step with
the rest of Europe, producing scholars, historians, men of science,
artists, and imaginative writers in more than due proportion. Many names
which stand for solid achievement in the little-read Scandinavian
tongues are unknown save to specialists elsewhere; but those of Holberg,
Linnæus, Malte-Brun, Rask, Niebuhr, Madvig, Oehlenschläger,
Thorwaldsen, and Swedenborg tell of a comprehensive influence on the
thought and culture of Europe during a hundred years in which Europe was
being reborn; and in our own day some of the greatest imaginative
literature of the modern world comes from Norway, long the most backward
of the group. Ibsen, one of a notable company of masters, stood at the
head of the drama of the nineteenth century; and the society which
sustained him, however he may have satirised it, is certificated abreast
of its age.
§ 5
In one aspect the Scandinavian polities have a special lesson for the
larger nations. They have perforce been specially exercised latterly, as
of old, by the problem of population; and in Norway there was formerly
made one of the notable, if not one of the best, approaches to a
practical solution of it. Malthus long ago[698] noted the Norwegian
marriage-rate as the lowest in Europe save that of Switzerland; and he
expressed the belief that in his day Norway was "almost the only country
in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehension expressed of a
redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower
classes of people is in some degree seen and understood."[699] This
state of things having long subsisted, there is a presumption that it
persists uninterruptedly from pagan times, when, as we have seen, there
existed a deliberate population-policy; for Christian habits of mind can
nowhere be seen to have set up such a tendency, and it would be hard to
show in the history of Norway any great political change which might
effect a rapid revolution in the domestic habits of the peasantry, such
as occurred in France after the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the mass
of the Norwegian people had till the last century continued to live
under those external or domiciliary restraints on multiplication which
were normal in rural Europe in the Middle Ages, and which elsewhere have
been removed by industrialism; yet without suffering latterly from a
continuance of the severer medieval destructive checks. They must,
therefore, have put a high degree of restraint on marriage, and probably
observed parental prudence in addition.
When it is found that in Sweden, where the conditions and usages were
once similar, there was latterly at once less prudential restraint on
marriage and population, and a lower standard of material well-being,
the two cases are seen to furnish a kind of _experimentum crucis_. The
comparatively late maintenance of a powerful military system in Sweden
having there prolonged the methods of aristocratic and bureaucratic
control while they were being modified in Denmark-Norway, Swedish
population in the eighteenth century was subject to artificial stimulus.
From about the year 1748, the Government set itself, on the ordinary
empirical principle of militarism, to encourage population.[700] Among
its measures were the variously wise ones of establishing medical
colleges and lying-in and foundling hospitals, the absolute freeing of
the internal trade in grain, and the withdrawal in 1748 of an old law
limiting the number of persons allowed to each farm. The purpose of that
law had been to stimulate population by spreading tillage; but the spare
soil being too unattractive, the young people emigrated. On the law
being abolished, population did increase considerably, rising between
1751 and 1800 from 1,785,727 to 2,347,308,[701] though some severe
famines had occurred within the period. But in the year 1799, when
Malthus visited the country, the increased population suffered from
famine very severely indeed, living mainly and miserably on bark
bread.[702] It was one of Malthus's great object-lessons in his science.
On one side a poor country was artificially over-populated; on the
other, the people of Norway, an even poorer country, directly and
indirectly[703] restrained their rate of increase, while the Government
during a long period wrought to the same end by the adjustment of its
military system and by making a certificate of earning power or income
necessary for all marriages.[704] The result was that, save in the
fishing districts, where speculative conditions encouraged early
marriages and large families, the Norwegian population were better off
than the Swedish.[705]
Already in Malthus' youth the Norwegian-Danish policy had been altered,
all legal and military restrictions on marriage having been withdrawn;
and he notes that fears were expressed as to the probable results. It is
one of his shortcomings to have entirely abstained from subsequent
investigation of the subject; and in his late addendum as to the state
of Sweden in 1826 he further fails to note that as a result of a
creation there after 1803 of 6,000 new farms from land formerly waste,
the country ceased to need to import corn and was able to export a
surplus.[706] It still held good, however, that the Norwegian
population, being from persistence of prudential habit[707] much the
slower in its rate of increase, had the higher standard of comfort,
despite much spread of education in Sweden.
Within the past half-century the general development of commerce and of
industry has tended broadly to equalise the condition of the
Scandinavian peoples. As late as 1835 a scarcity would suffice to drive
the Norwegian peasantry to the old subsistence of bark bread, a ruinous
resort, seeing that it destroyed multitudes of trees of which the value,
could the timber have found a market, would have far exceeded that of a
quantity of flour yielding much more and better food. At that period the
British market was closed by duties imposed in the interest of the
Canadian timber trade.[708] Since the establishment of British free
trade, Norwegian timber has become a new source of wealth; and through
this and other and earlier commercial developments prudential family
habits were affected. Thus, whereas the population of Sweden had all but
doubled between 1800 and 1880, the population of Norway had grown even
faster.[709] And whereas in 1834 the proportion of illegitimate to
legitimate births in Stockholm was 1 to 2.26[710] (one of the results of
foundling hospitals, apparently), in 1890 the total Swedish rate was
slightly below 1 to 10, while in Norway it was 1 to 14. The modern
facilities for emigration have further affected conjugal habits.
Latterly, however, there are evidences of a new growth of intelligent
control.
In recent years the statistics of emigration and population tell a
fairly plain story. In Norway and Sweden alike the excess of births over
deaths reached nearly its highest in 1887, the figures being 63,942 for
Sweden and 29,233 for Norway. In 1887, however, emigration was about its
maximum in both countries, 50,786 leaving Sweden and 20,706 leaving
Norway. Thereafter the birth-rate rapidly fell, and the emigration,
though fluctuating, has never again risen in Sweden to the volume of
1887-88, though it has in Norway. But when, after falling to 43,728 in
1892, the excess of Swedish births over deaths rises to 60,231 in 1895,
while the emigration falls from 45,000 in 1892 to 13,000 in 1894, it is
clear that the lesson of regulation is still very imperfectly learned.
Norway shows the same fluctuations, the excess of births rising from
23,600 in 1892 to nearly 32,000 in 1896, and again from 27,685 in 1908
to 29,804 in 1909, doubtless because of ups and downs in the harvests,
as shown in the increase of marriages from 12,742 in 1892 to 13,962 in
1896.
In Denmark the progression has been similar. There the excess of births
over deaths was so far at its maximum in 1886, the figures being 29,986
in a population of a little over 2,000,000; whereafter they slowly
decreased, till in 1893 the excess was only 26,235. All the while
emigration was active, gradually rising from 4,346 in 1885 to 10,382 in
1891; then again falling to 2,876 in 1896, when the surplus of births
over deaths was 34,181--a development sure to force more emigration. In
1911 the population was 2,775,076--a rapid rise; and in 1910 the surplus
of births over deaths was 40,110. The Scandinavians are thus still in
the unstable progressive stage of popular well-being, though probably
suffering less from it than either Germany or England.
Here, then, is a group of kindred peoples apparently at least as capable
of reaching a solution of the social problem as any other, and visibly
prospering materially and morally in proportion as they bring reason to
bear on the vital lines of conduct, though still in the stage of curing
over-population by emigration. Given continued peaceful political
evolution in the direction first of democratic federation, and further
of socialisation of wealth, they may reach and keep the front rank in
civilisation, while the more unmanageably large communities face risks
of dire vicissitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 638: As in Carlyle's _Early Kings of Norway_, the _caput
mortuum_ of his historical method. Much more instructive works on
Scandinavian history are available to the English reader. The two
volumes on _Scandinavia_ by Crichton and Wheaton (1837) are not yet
superseded, though savouring strongly of the conservatism of their
period. Dunham, who rapidly produced, for Gardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia
series, histories of _Spain and Portugal_ (5 vols.), _Europe during the
Middle Ages_ (4 vols.), and the _Germanic Empire_ (3 vols.), compiled
also one of _Denmark, Sweden, and Norway_ (3 vols. 1839-40), of inferior
quality. But Geijer's _History of Sweden_, one of the standard modern
national histories of Europe, is translated into English as far as the
period of Gustavus Vasa (3 vols. of orig. in one of trans. 1845); and
the competent _History of Denmark_ by C.-F. Allen is available in a
French translation (Copenhagen, 2 tom. 1878). Otté's _Scandinavian
History_, 1874, is an unpretending and unliterary but well-informed
work, which may be used to check Crichton and Wheaton. The more recent
work of Mr. R. Nisbet Bain, _Scandinavia: a Political History of
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1513 to 1900_ (Camb. Univ. Press,
1905), is useful for the period covered, but has little sociological
value. For the history of ancient Scandinavian literature, the
introduction to Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (1883),
and Prof. Powell's article on Icelandic Literature in the 10th ed. of
the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, are preferable to Schweitzer's
_Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_ (1886, 2 Bde.), which,
however, is useful for the modern period.]
[Footnote 639: See Geijer's _History of the Swedes_, Eng. tr. of pt. i,
1-vol. ed. p. 30, as to the special persistence in Scandinavia of the
early religious conception of kingship. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton's
_Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 157.]
[Footnote 640: Such New Testament passages as _Rom._ xiii, 1-7, and
_Titus_ iii, 1, seem to have been penned or interpolated expressly to
propitiate the Roman government.]
[Footnote 641: It was by entirely overlooking this historic fact that M.
Fustel de Coulanges, in the last chapter of his _Cité antique_, was able
to propound a theory of historic Christianity as something
extra-political. He there renounced the inductive method for a pure
ecclesiastical apriorism, and the result is a very comprehensive
sociological misconception.]
[Footnote 642: Geijer, pp. 31, 33; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 102, 104,
183, 184.]
[Footnote 643: Tacitus, _Germania_, cc. 7, 11.]
[Footnote 644: Cp. Zschokke, _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_, c. 7, as
to the psychological effect of an organised worship in a great building
on heathens without any such centre. And see the frank admission of J.R.
Green, _Short History_, p. 54, that among the Anglo-Saxons "religion had
told against political independence."]
[Footnote 645: Cp. C.F. Allen, _History of Denmark_, French tr.,
Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55, 56.]
[Footnote 646: Crichton and Wheaton, _Scandinavia_, i, 129-32; Hardwick,
_Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 115. Knut was a great supporter
of missionaries. Hardwick attributes to Gorm a "bitter hatred" of the
Church, and also "violence," but gives no details.]
[Footnote 647: Even Svend is said to have laboured for Christianity in
his latter years--another suggestion that it was found to answer
monarchic purposes. See Hardwick, p. 115, _note 9_.]
[Footnote 648: Cp. Dasent, Introd. to _The Burnt Njal_, p. ix.]
[Footnote 649: Hardwick, as cited, p. 117.]
[Footnote 650: Hardwick, as cited.]
[Footnote 651: A warlike priest of Bremen is said to have converted him
in Germany; and he was baptised in the Scilly Islands, which he had
visited on a piratical expedition. Finally he was confirmed in England,
which he promised to treat in future as a friendly State. (_Id._ _ib._)]
[Footnote 652: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 151.]
[Footnote 653: Cp. Hardwick. p. 118, _note 3_.]
[Footnote 654: Though this was often of the most brutal description,
there were some comparatively "mild-mannered" pirates, who rarely "cut a
throat or scuttled ship." See C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, i,
21.]
[Footnote 655: Geijer, _History of Sweden_, Eng. tr. p. 31.]
[Footnote 656: It is actually on record that the practice long subsisted
in Iceland, despite the efforts of St. Olaf to suppress it. Hardwick,
_Church History: Middle Age_, p. 119, _note_, citing Torfaens, _Hist.
Norveg._ ii, 2, and Neander. Among the Slavonic Pomeranians in the
twelfth century it was still common to destroy female children at birth.
_Id._ p. 224, _note_.]
[Footnote 657: Cp. C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, Fr. tr. 1878, i,
20.]
[Footnote 658: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que l'Angleterre? Une colonie
français mal tournée."]
[Footnote 659: Thus Rolf the Ganger fared forth to France because Harold
Fairhair would not suffer piracy on any territory acquired by him.]
[Footnote 660: _Essay on the Principle of Population_, 7th ed. p. 139.]
[Footnote 661: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 254. Dr. Ph. Schweitzer
(_Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_, § 19), makes the surprising
statement that the quantity of old coins found in Scandinavia (over
100,000 within the last century) proves that the ancient Scandinavian
commerce was very great (_ein ganz grossartiger_). His own account of
the occasional barter of the Vikings shows that there was nothing
"grossartig" about it, and the coins prove nothing beyond piracy.]
[Footnote 662: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 263, 287.]
[Footnote 663: _Id._ pp. 251, 252, 277, 377.]
[Footnote 664: _Id._ pp. 304, 305, 311.]
[Footnote 665: _Id._ ii, 350. Cp. Laing, _Journal of a Residence in
Norway_ (1834-36), ed. 1851, p. 135. Bain, however, pronounces that in
Norway in the latter part of the fifteenth century "the peasantry were
mostly thralls" (_Scandinavia_, 1905, p. 10).]
[Footnote 666: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 305, 310.]
[Footnote 667: _Id._ p. 332; Geijer, p. 135.]
[Footnote 668: Geijer, pp. 88, 91; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 331.]
[Footnote 669: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 324.]
[Footnote 670: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 331.]
[Footnote 671: _Id._ p. 336.]
[Footnote 672: Geijer, pp. 100, 109; Otté, _Scandinavian History_, 1874,
p. 252.]
[Footnote 673: Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 225, on
Anglo-Saxon separatism. Since this was written there has taken place the
decisive separation between Norway and Sweden.]
[Footnote 674: Otté, _Scandinavian History_, 1874, pp. 214-18. Himself
an excellent Latinist, he sought to raise the learned professions, and
compelled the burghers to give their children schooling under penalty of
heavy fines. He further caused new and better books to be prepared for
the public schools, and stopped witch-burning. Cp. Allen, _Histoire de
Danemark_, i, 281.]
[Footnote 675: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 377-79, 383; Allen, as cited, i,
286, 310.]
[Footnote 676: Otté, p. 222; Allen, i, 287, 290.]
[Footnote 677: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 384-86; Allen, pp. 287-90.]
[Footnote 678: Allen, i, 299, 300.]
[Footnote 679: Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 386, 387. These writers
suppress the details as to Frederick's anti-popular action; and Otté's
history, giving these, omits all mention of his act of toleration.
Allen's is the best account, i, 293, 299, 301, 305.]
[Footnote 680: Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 394-96; Otté, pp. 222-24.
According to some accounts, the great bulk of the spoils went to the
nobility. Villers, _Essay on the Reformation_, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 105.]
[Footnote 681: It is notable that even in the thirteenth century there
was a Norwegian king (Erik) called the Priest-hater, because of his
efforts to make the clergy pay taxes.]
[Footnote 682: "The bulk of the people, at least in the first instance,
and especially in Sweden and Norway, were by no means disposed to look
to Wittenberg rather than to Rome for spiritual guidance" (Bain,
_Scandinavia_, p. 86; cp. pp. 60, 64).]
[Footnote 683: Geijer, p. 177; Otté, p. 234.]
[Footnote 684: As the king wrote later to an acquisitive noble: "To
strip churches, convents, and prebends of estates, manors, and chattels,
thereto are all full willing and ready; and after such a fashion is
every man a Christian and evangelical"--_i.e._ Lutheran. Geijer, p. 126.
Cp. p. 129 as to the practice of spoliation.]
[Footnote 685: Geijer, pp. 119, 129.]
[Footnote 686: _Id._ p. 125; Otté, p. 236. The prelates were no longer
admitted to any political offices, though the bishops and pastors sat
together in the Diet.]
[Footnote 687: See Geijer, pp. 129-36.]
[Footnote 688: Prof. York Powell, article on Icelandic Literature, in
_Encyclopædia Britannica_, 10th ed. xii, 621; 11th ed. xiv, 233.]
[Footnote 689: _Id._ (11th ed. xiv, 234).]
[Footnote 690: Bain, _Scandinavia_, pp. 100-1.]
[Footnote 691: Powell, article on Icelandic Literature, _Ency. Brit._
10th ed. xii, 621.]
[Footnote 692: _Id._ p. 623.]
[Footnote 693: Shaftesbury (_Characteristics_, ed. 1900, ii, 262) writes
in 1713 of "that forlorn troop of begging gentry extant in Denmark or
Sweden, since the time that those nations lost their liberties."]
[Footnote 694: Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 104.]
[Footnote 695: _Id._ ii, 321-22.]
[Footnote 696: Laing in 1839 (_Tour in Sweden_, p. 13) thought the Danes
as backward as they had been in 1660, quoting the ambassador Molesworth
as to the effect of Lutheran Protestantism in destroying Danish
liberties (pp. 10, 11). But it is hard to see that there were any
popular liberties to destroy, save in so far as the party which set up
the Reformation undid the popular laws of Christian II. The greatest
social reforms in Denmark are certainly the work of the last
half-century.]
[Footnote 697: It will be remembered that the Marquis of Pombal, in
Portugal, at the same period, was similarly overthrown after a much
longer and non-scandalous reformatory rule, the queen being his enemy.]
[Footnote 698: His particulars were gathered during a tour he made in
1799. Thus the Norse practice he notes had been independent of any
effect produced by his own essay.]
[Footnote 699: _Essay on the Principle of Population_, 7th ed. pp. 126,
133.]
[Footnote 700: This was doubtless owing to the loss of Finland (1742), a
circumstance not considered by Malthus.]
[Footnote 701: Malthus (p. 141) gives higher and clearly erroneous
figures for both periods, and contradicts them later (p. 143) with
figures which he erroneously applies to Sweden _and Finland_. He seems
to have introduced the latter words in the wrong passage.]
[Footnote 702: _Id._ p. 141.]
[Footnote 703: See p. 131 as to the restrictions on subdivision of farms
by way of safeguarding the forests.]
[Footnote 704: _Id._ p. 126. A priest would often refuse to marry a
couple who had no good prospect of a livelihood: so far could rational
custom affect even ecclesiastical practice.]
[Footnote 705: Cp. Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 339-50; Laing, _Journal of
a Residence in Norway_ (1834-36), ed. 1851, pp. 22, 23, 34, 35, 191,
214.]
[Footnote 706: Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 345. Laing (_Tour in Sweden_,
pp. 277-82) thought the Swedish peasants better off than the Scotch,
though morally inferior to the Norwegian.]
[Footnote 707: Laing, _Norway_, p. 213.]
[Footnote 708: Laing, as cited, p. 220; Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 368.]
[Footnote 709: Sweden in 1800 stood at 2,347,303; in 1880, at 4,565,668;
in 1900, at 5,136,441. Estimate for 1910, 5,521,943. Norway in 1815
stood at 886,656; in 1910 at 2,391,782.]
[Footnote 710: Laing, as cited, p. 103, _note_.]
CHAPTER III
THE HANSA
Systematic commerce in the north of Europe, broadly speaking, begins
with the traffic of the Hansa towns, whose rise may be traced to the
sudden development of civic life forced on Germany in the tenth century
by the emperor Henry I, as a means of withstanding the otherwise
irresistible raids of the Hungarians.[711] Once founded, such cities for
their own existence' sake gave freedom to all fugitive serfs who joined
them, defending such against former masters, and giving them the chance
of earning a living.[712] That is by common consent the outstanding
origin of German civic industry, and the original conditions were such
that the cities, once formed, were gradually forced[713] to special
self-reliance. _Faustrecht_, or private war, was universal, even under
emperors who suppressed feudal brigandage; and the cities had to fight
their own battle, like those of Italy, from the beginning. As compared
with the robber baronage and separate princes, they stood for
intelligence and co-operation, and supplied a basis for organisation
without which the long German chaos of the Middle Ages would have been
immeasurably worse. Taking their commercial cue from the cities of
Italy, they reached, as against feudal enemies, a measure of peaceful
union which the less differentiated Italian cities could not attain save
momentarily. The decisive conditions were that whereas in Italy the
enemies were manifold--sometimes feudal nobles, sometimes the Emperor,
sometimes the Pope--the German cities had substantially one objective,
the protection of trade from the robber-knights. Thus, as early as the
year 1284, seventy cities of South Germany formed the Rhenish League, on
which followed that of the Swabian towns. The league of the Hansa
cities, like the other early "Hansa of London," which united cities of
Flanders and France with mercantile London, was a growth on all fours
with these.[714] Starting, however, in maritime towns which grew to
commerce from beginnings in fishing, as the earlier Scandinavians had
grown to piracy, the northern League gave its main strength to trade by
sea.
Its special interest for us to-day lies in the fact that it was
ultra-racial, beginning in 1241 in a pact between the free cities of
Lübeck and Hamburg,[715] and finally including Wendish, German, Dutch,
French, and even Spanish cities, in fluctuating numbers. The motive to
union, as it had need be, was one of mercantile gain. Beginning,
apparently, by having each its separate authorised _hansa_ or
trading-group in foreign cities, the earlier trading-towns of the group,
perhaps from the measure of co-operation and fraternity thus forced on
them abroad,[716] saw their advantage in a special league for the common
good as a monopoly maintained against outsiders; and this being
extended, the whole League came to bear the generic name.
See Kohlrausch for the theory that contact in foreign cities is the
probable cause of the policy of union (_History of Germany_, Eng.
tr., p. 260; cp. Ashley, _Introd. to Economic History_, i, 104,
110). As to the origin of the word, see Stubbs, i, 447, _note_. The
_hans_ or _hansa_ first appears historically in England as a name
apparently identical with _gild_; and, starting with a _hansa_ or
hanse-house of their own, English cities in some cases are found
trading through subordinate _hansas_ in other cities, not only of
Normandy but of England itself. Thus arose the Flemish Hansa or
"Hansa of London," ignored in so many notices of the better-known
Hanseatic League. Early in the thirteenth century it included a
number of the towns of Flanders engaged in the English wool-trade;
and later it numbered at one time seventeen towns, including
Chalons, Rheims, St. Quentin, Cambray, and Amiens (Ashley, _Introd.
to Economic History_, i, 109; cp. Prof. Schanz, _Englische
Handelspolitik_, 1889, i, 6, citing Varenbergh, _Hist. des
relations diplomatiques entre le comte de Flandre et l'Angleterre
au moyen âge_, Bruxelles, 1874, p. 146 _sq._). There is some
obscurity as to when the foreign Hansards were first permitted to
have warehouses and residences of their own in London. Cp.
Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, vol. i, §
68; and Ashley, i, 105, following Schanz, who dates this privilege
in the reign of Henry III, though the merchants of Cologne (_id._
p. 110) had a _hansa_ or gildhall in London in the reign of Richard
I. Under whatever conditions, it is clear that London was one of
the first foreign cities in which the German Hansard traders came
in friendly contact.
A reciprocal and normal egoism furthered as well as thwarted the Hansard
enterprise. Trade in the feudal period being a ground of privilege like
any other, the monopolied merchants of every city strove to force
foreign traders to deal with them only. On the other hand, the English
nobility sought to deal rather with the foreigner directly than with the
English middlemen; and thus in each feudal country, but notably in
England,[717] the interest of the landed class tended to throw foreign
trade substantially in foreign hands, which did their best to hold it.
In the reigns of the Edwards privileges of free trade with natives were
gradually conferred on the foreign traders[718] in the interests of the
landed class--the only "general consumers" who could then make their
claims felt--in despite of the angry resistance of the native merchant
class. For the rest, in a period when some maritime English cities, like
those of France and Germany, could still carry on private wars with each
other as well as with foreign cities,[719] a trader of one English town
was in any other English town on all fours with a foreigner.[720] When,
therefore, the foreigners combined, their advantage over the native
trade was twofold.
Naturally the cities least liable to regal interference carried on a
cosmopolitan co-operation to the best advantage. The Hansa of London,
being made up of Flemish and French cities, was hampered by the divided
allegiance of its members and by their national jealousies;[721] while
the German cities, sharing in the free German scramble under a nominal
emperor much occupied in Italy, could combine with ease. Cologne, having
early Hansa rights in London, sought to exclude the other cities, but
had to yield and join their union;[722] and the Hansa of London dwindled
and broke up before their competition. As the number of leagued cities
increased, it might be thought, something in the nature of an ideal of
free trade must have partly arisen, for the number of "privileged"
towns was thus apparently greater than that of the outside towns traded
with. To the last, however, the faith seems to have been that without
monopoly the league must perish; and in the closing Protestant period
the command of the Baltic, as against the Dutch and the Scandinavians,
was desperately and vainly battled for. But just as the cities could not
escape the play of the other political forces of the time, and were
severally clutched by this or that potentate, or biassed to their own
stock, so they could not hinder that the principle of self-seeking on
which they founded should divide themselves. As soon as the Dutch
affiliated cities saw their opening for trade in the Baltic on their own
account, they broke away.
While the league lasted, it was as remarkable a polity as any in
history. With its four great foreign factories of Bruges, London,
Bergen, and Novgorod, and its many minor stations, all conducted by
celibate servitors living together like so many bodies of friars;[723]
with its four great circles of affiliated towns, and its triennial and
other congresses, the most cosmopolitan of European parliaments; with
its military and naval system, by which, turning its trading into
fighting fleets, it made war on Scandinavian kings and put down piracy
on every hand--it was in its self-seeking and often brutal way one of
the popular civilising influences of northern Europe for some two
hundred and fifty years; and the very forces of separate national
commerce, which finally undermined it, were set up or stimulated by its
own example. With less rapacity, indeed, it might have conciliated
populations that it alienated. A lack of any higher ideals than those of
zealous commerce marks its entire career; it is associated with no such
growth of learning and the fine arts as took place in commercial
Holland; and its members seem to have been among the most unrefined of
the northern city populations.[724] But it made for progress on the
ordinary levels. In a world wholly bent on privilege in all directions,
it at least tempered its own spirit of monopoly in some measure by its
principle of inclusion; and it passed away as a great power before it
could dream of renewing the ideal of monopoly in the more sinister form
of Oriental empire taken up by the Dutch. And, while its historians have
not been careful to make a comparative study of the internal civic life
which flourished under the commercial union, it does not at all appear
that the divisions of classes were more steep, or the lot of the lower
worse, than in any northern European State of the period.
The "downfall" of such a polity, then, is conceptual only. All the
realities of life evolved by the league were passed on to its
constituent elements throughout northern Europe; and there survived from
it what the separate States had not yet been able to offer--the
adumbration, however dim, of a union reaching beyond the bounds of
nationality and the jealousies of race. In an age of private war,
without transcending the normal ethic, it practically limited private
war as regarded its German members; and while joining battle at need
with half-barbarian northern kings, or grudging foreigners, it of
necessity made peace its ideal. Its dissolution, therefore, marked at
once the advance of national organisation up to its level, and the
persistence of the more primitive over the more rational instincts of
coalition.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 711: Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, bk. ix, cap. 147;
Kohlrausch, _History of Germany_, Eng. tr., pp. 157, 162, 257; Dunham,
_History of the Germanic Empire_, 1835, i, 108; Sharon Turner, _History
of Europe during the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 13. The main authority is
the old annalist Wittikind.]
[Footnote 712: Heeren, _Essai sur l'influence des Croisades_, 1808, pp.
269-72; Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. 3.]
[Footnote 713: As to the process of evolution, see a good summary in
Robertson's _View of the Progress of Society in Europe_ (prefixed to his
_Charles V_), Note xvii to Sect. I.]
[Footnote 714: The Spanish _Hermandad_ was originally an organisation of
cities set up in similar fashion. E. Armstrong, _Introduction_ to Major
Martin Hume's _Spain_, 1898, p. 12.]
[Footnote 715: Lübeck was founded in 1140 by a count of Holstein, and
won its freedom in the common medieval fashion by purchase. Hamburg
bought its freedom of its bishop in 1225. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th
ed. iii, 324. Many Dutch, supposed to have been driven from their own
land by an inundation, settled on the Baltic coast between Bremen and
Dantzic in the twelfth century. Heeren, _Essai sur les Croisades_, 1808,
pp. 266-69, citing Leibnitz and Hoche. Cp. G.H. Schmidt, _Zur
Agrargeschichte Lübecks_, 1887, p. 30 _sq._]
[Footnote 716: "The league ... would scarcely have held long together or
displayed any real federal unity but for the pressure of external
dangers" (Art. "Hanseatic League" in _Ency. Brit._, 10th ed. xi, 450).]
[Footnote 717: Cp. Ashley, as cited, i, 104-112; Schanz, as cited, i,
331.]
[Footnote 718: Cp. W. von Ochenkowski, _Englands wirtschaftliche
Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters_, 1879. pp. 177-82, 221-31.
Cp. the author's _Trade and Tariffs_, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 1.]
[Footnote 719: Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 335. On private war in
general see Robertson's _View_, note 21 to § i.]
[Footnote 720: Ashley, i, 108, 109.]
[Footnote 721: Whereas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
England and Flanders had freely exchanged trading privileges, in the
fifteenth century they begin to withdraw them, treating each other as
trading rivals (Schanz, i, 7, 8).]
[Footnote 722: Ashley, i, 110.]
[Footnote 723: This principle may have been copied from the practice of
the Lombard _Umiliati_. The common account of that order is that when in
1014 the Emperor banished a number of Lombards, chiefly Milanese, into
Germany, they formed themselves into a religious society, called "The
Humbled," and in that corporate capacity devoted themselves to various
trades, in particular to wool-working. Returning to Milan in 1019, they
developed their organisation there. Down to 1140 all the members were
laymen; but thereafter priests were placed in control. For long the
organisation was in high repute both for commercial skill and for
culture. Ultimately, like all other corporate orders, they grew corrupt;
and in 1571 they were suppressed by Pius V. (Pignotti, _Hist. of
Tuscany_, Eng. trans. 1823, pp. 266-67, _note_, following Tiraboschi.)]
[Footnote 724: In such accounts as M'Culloch's (_Treatises and Essays_)
and those of the German patriotic historians the Hansa is seen in a
rather delusive abstract. The useful monograph of Miss Zimmern (_The
Hansa Towns_: Story of the Nations Series) gives a good idea of the
reality. See in particular pp. 82-147. It should be noted, however, that
Lübeck is credited with being the first northern town to adopt the
Oriental usage of water-pipes (Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, 1802,
i, 381).]
Chapter IV
HOLLAND
NOTE ON LITERATURE
The special interest of Dutch history for English and other readers led
in past generations to a more general sociological study of it than was
given to almost any other. L. Guicciardini's _Description of the Low
Countries_ (_Descrizione ... di tutti Paesi Bassi_, etc., Anversa,
folio, 1567, 1581, etc.; trans. in French, 1568, etc.; in English, 1593;
in Dutch, 1582; in Latin, 1613, etc.) is one of the fullest surveys of
the kind made till recent times. Sir William Temple's _Observations upon
the United Provinces of the Netherlands_ (1672) laid for English readers
further foundations of an intelligent knowledge of the vital conditions
of the State which had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the great commercial rival of England; and in the eighteenth century
many English writers discussed the fortunes of Dutch commerce. An
English translation was made of the remarkably sagacious work variously
known as the _Memoirs of John de Witt_, the _True Interest of Holland_,
and _Political Maxims of the State of Holland_ (really written by De
Witt's friend, Pierre Delacourt; De Witt, however, contributing two
chapters), and much attention was given to it here and on the Continent.
In addition to the many and copious histories written in the eighteenth
century in Dutch, three or four voluminous and competent histories of
the Low Countries were written in French--_e.g._, those of Dujardin
(1757, etc., 8 vols. 4to), Cerisier (1777, etc., 10 vols. 12mo), Le
Clerc (1723-28, 3 vols. folio), Wicquefort (1719, folio, proceeding from
Peace of Münster). Of late years, though the lesson is as important as
ever, it appears to be less generally attended to. In our own country,
however, have appeared Davies' _History of Holland_ (1841, 3 vols.), a
careful but not often an illuminating work, which oddly begins with the
statement that "there is scarcely any nation whose history has been so
little understood or so generally neglected as that of Holland"; T.
Colley Grattan's earlier and shorter book (_The Netherlands_, 1830),
which is still worth reading for a general view based on adequate
learning; and the much better known works of Motley, _The Rise of the
Dutch Republic_ (1856) and the _History of the United Netherlands_
(1861-68), which deal minutely with only a period of fifty-five years of
Dutch history, and of which, as of the work of Davies, the sociological
value is much below the annalistic. All three are impaired as literature
by their stale rhetoric. The same malady infects the second volume of
the _Industrial History of the Free Nations_ (1846), by W. Torrens
M'Cullagh (afterwards M'Cullagh Torrens); but this, which deals with
Holland, is the better section of that treatise, and it gives distinct
help to a scientific conception of the process of Dutch history, as does
J.R. M'Culloch's _Essay on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Commerce
in Holland_, which is one of the best of his _Essays and Treatises_ (2nd
ed. 1859). The _Holland_ of the late Professor Thorold Rogers has merit
as a vivacious conspectus, but hardly rises to the opportunity.
Of the many French, Belgian, and German works on special periods of the
history of the Low Countries, some have a special and general scientific
interest. Among these is the research of M. Alphonse Wauters on _Les
libertés communales_ (Bruxelles, 1878). Barante's _Histoire des Ducs de
Bourgogne_ (4th ed. 1838-40) contains much interesting matter on the
Burgundian period. The assiduous research of M. Lefèvre Pontalis, _Jean
de Witt, Grand Pensionnaire de Hollande_ (2 tom. 1884; Eng. trans. 2
vols.), throws a full light on one of the most critical periods of Dutch
history.
Dutch works on the history of the Low Countries in general, and the
United Provinces in particular, are many and voluminous; indeed, no
history has been more amply written. The good general history of the
Netherlands by N.G. van Kampen, which appeared in German in the series
of Heeren and Uckert (1831-33), is only partially superseded by the
_Geschichte der Niederlande_ of Wenzelburger (Bd. i, 1879; ii, 1886),
which is not completed. But the most readable general history of the
Netherlands yet produced is that of P.J. Blok, _Geschiedenis van het
Nederlandsche Volk_ (1892, etc.), of which there is a competent but
unfortunately abridged English translation (Putnams, vol. i, 1898).
Standard modern Dutch works are those of J.A. Vijnne, _Geschiedenis van
het Vaderland_, and J. van Lennep, _De Geschiedenis van Nederland_. For
Belgian history in particular the authorities are similarly numerous.
The _Manuel de l'histoire de Belgique_, by J. David (Louvain, 1847),
will be found a good handbook of authorities, episodes, and chronology,
though without any sociological element. The _Histoire de Belgique_ of
Th. Juste (Bruxelles, 1895, 3 tom. 4to) is comprehensive, but disfigured
by insupportable illustrations.
§ 1. _The Rise of the Netherlands_
The case of Holland is one of those which at first sight seem to flout
the sociological maxim that civilisations flourish in virtue partly of
natural advantages and partly of psychological pressures. On the face of
things, it would seem that the original negation of natural advantage
could hardly be carried farther than here. A land pieced together out of
drained marshes certainly tells more of man's effort than of Nature's
bounty. Yet even here the process of natural law is perfectly sequent
and intelligible.
One of the least-noted influences of the sea on civilisation is the
economic basis it yields in the way of food-supply. Already in Cæsar's
time the Batavians were partly fishermen; and it may be taken as certain
that through all the troubled ages down to the period of industry and
commerce it was the resource of fishing that mainly maintained and
retained population in the sea-board swamps of the Low Countries. Here
was a harvest that enemies could not destroy, that demanded no ploughing
and sowing, and that could not well be reaped by the labour of slaves.
When war and devastation could absolutely depopulate the cultivated
land, forcing all men to flee from famine, the sea for ever yielded some
return to him who could but get afloat with net or line; and he who
could sail the sea had a double chance of life and freedom as against
land enemies. Thus a sea marsh could be humanly advantaged as against a
fruitful plain, and could be a surer dwelling-place. The tables were
first effectually turned when the Norse pirates attacked from the
sea--an irresistible inroad which seems to have driven the sea-board
Frisians (as it did the coast inhabitants of France) in crowds into
slavery for protection, thus laying a broad foundation of popular
serfdom.[725] When, however, the Norse empire began to fail, the sea as
a source of sustenance again counted for civilisation; and when to this
natural basis of population and subsistence there was added the peculiar
stimulus set up by a religious inculcation or encouragement of a fish
diet, the fishing-grounds of the continent became relatively richer
estates than mines and vineyards. Venice and Holland alike owed much to
the superstition which made Christians akreophagous on Fridays and
fast-days and all through the forty days of Lent. When the plan of
salting herrings was hit upon,[726] all Christian Europe helped to make
the fortunes of the fisheries.
Net-making may have led to weaving; in any case weaving is the first
important industry developed in the Low Countries. It depended mainly on
the wool of England; and on the basis of the ancient seafaring there
thus arose a sea-going commerce.[727] Further, the position of
Flanders,[728] as a trade-centre for northern and southern Europe,
served to make it a market for all manner of produce; and round such a
market population and manufactures grew together. It belonged to the
conditions that, though the territory came under feudal rule like every
other in the medieval military period, the cities were relatively
energetic all along,[729] theirs being (after the Dark Ages, when the
work was largely done by the Church) the task of maintaining the
sea-dykes[730] and water-ways, and theirs the wealth on which alone the
feudal over-lords could hope to flourish in an unfruitful land. The
over-lords, on their part, saw the expediency of encouraging foreigners
to settle and add to their taxable population,[731] thus establishing
the tradition of political tolerance long before the Protestant period.
Hence arose in the Netherlands, after the Renaissance, the phenomenon of
a dense industrial population flourishing on a soil which finally could
not be made to feed them,[732] and carrying on a vast shipping trade
without owning a single good harbour and without possessing home-grown
timber wherewith to build their ships, or home-products to freight
them.[733]
One of the determinants of this growth on a partially democratic footing
was clearly the primary and peculiar necessity for combination by the
inhabitants to maintain the great sea-dykes, the canals, and the
embankments of the low-lying river-lands in the interior.[734] It was a
public bond in peace, over and above the normal tie of common enmities.
The result was a development of civic life still more rapid and more
marked in inland Flanders,[735] where the territorial feudal power was
naturally greater than in the maritime Dutch provinces. Self-ruling
cities, such as Ghent and Antwerp, at their meridian, were too powerful
to be effectively menaced by their immediate feudal lords. But on the
side of their relations with neighbouring cities or States they all
exhibited the normal foible; and it was owing only to the murderous
compulsion put upon them by Spain in the sixteenth century that any of
the provinces of the Netherlands became a federal republic. For five
centuries after Charlemagne, who subdued them to his system, the Low
Countries had undergone the ordinary slow evolution from pure feudalism
to the polity of municipalities. In the richer inland districts the
feudal system, lay and clerical, was at its height, the baronial castles
being "here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom";[736]
and when the growing cities began to feel their power to buy charters,
the feudal formula was unchallenged,[737] while the mass of the outside
population were in the usual "Teutonic" state of partial or complete
serfdom. It was only by burning their suburbs and taking to the walled
fortress that the people of Utrecht escaped the yoke of the
Norsemen.[738]
Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh is responsible for the statement that "it
seems doubtful whether any portion of the inhabitants of Holland
were ever in a state of actual servitude or bondage," and that the
northern provinces were more generally free from slavery than the
others (_Industrial History of the Free Nations_, 1846, ii, 39).
Motley (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, as cited, pp. 17, 18)
pronounces, on the contrary, that "in the northern Netherlands the
degraded condition of the mass continued longest," and that "the
number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the
number belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht enormous." This is
substantially borne out by Grattan, _Netherlands_, pp. 18, 34;
Blok, _Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk_, i, 159, 160,
305-11, Eng. tr. i, 203-8; Wauters, _Les libertés communales_,
1878, pp. 222-30. As is noted by Blok, the status of the peasantry
fluctuated, the thirteenth century being one of partial
retrogression. Cp. pp. 318, 319, as to the general depression of
the peasant class. The great impulse to slavery, as above noted,
seems to have been given by the Norse pirates in general and the
later Norman invaders, who, under Godfrey, forced every "free"
Frisian to wear a halter. The comparative protection accruing to
slaves of the Church was embraced by multitudes. In the time of the
Crusades, again, many serfs were sold or mortgaged to the Church by
the nobles in order to obtain funds for their expedition.
The cities were thus the liberating and civilising forces;[739] and the
application of townsmen's capital to the land was an early influence in
improving rural conditions.[740] But there was no escape from the
fatality of strife in the Teutonic any more than in the ancient Greek or
in the contemporary Italian world. Flanders, having the large markets of
France at hand, developed its clothmaking and other industries more
rapidly than the Frisian districts, where weaving was probably earlier
carried on;[741] and here serfdom disappeared comparatively early,[742]
the nobility dwindling through their wars; but the new industrial
strifes of classes, which grew up everywhere in the familiar fashion,
naturally matured the sooner in the more advanced civilisation; and
already at the beginning of the fourteenth century we find a resulting
disintegration. The monopoly methods of the trade gilds drove much of
the weaving industry into the villages; then the Franco-Flemish wars,
wherein the townspeople, by expelling the French in despite of the
nobility, greatly strengthened their position,[743] nevertheless tended,
as did the subsequent civil wars, to drive trade into South Brabant.
In Flemish Ghent and Bruges the clashing interests of weavers and
woollen-traders, complicated by the strife of the French (aristocratic)
and anti-French (popular) factions, led to riots in which citizens and
magistrates were killed (1301). At times these enmities reached the
magnitude of civil war. At Ypres (1303) a combination of workmen
demanded the suppression of rival industries in neighbouring villages,
and in an ensuing riot the mayor and all the magistrates were slain; at
Bruges (1302) a trade riot led to the loss of fifteen hundred
lives.[744] When later the weaving trade had flourished in Brabant, the
same fatality came about: plebeians rebelled against patrician
magistrates--themselves traders or employers of labour--in the principal
cities; and Brussels (1312) was for a time given up to pillage and
massacre, put down only by the troops of the reigning duke. A great
legislative effort was made in the "Laws of Cortenberg," framed by an
assembly of nobles and city deputies, to regulate fiscal and industrial
affairs in a stable fashion;[745] but after fifty years the trouble
broke out afresh, and was ill-healed.[746] At length, in a riot in the
rich city of Louvain (1379), sixteen of its patrician magistrates were
slain, whereupon many took flight to England, but many more to Haarlem,
Amsterdam, Leyden, and other Dutch cities.[747] Louvain never again
recovered its trade and wealth;[748] and since the renewed
Franco-Flemish wars of this period had nearly destroyed the commerce of
Flanders,[749] there was a general gravitation of both merchandise and
manufacture to Holland.[750] Thus arose Dutch manufactures in an organic
connection with maritime commerce, the Dutch municipal organisation
securing a balance of trade interests where that of the Flemish
industrial cities had partially failed.
The commercial lead given by the Hanseatic League was followed in the
Netherlands with a peculiar energy, and till the Spanish period the main
part of Dutch maritime commerce was with northern Europe and the Hansa
cities. So far as the language test goes, the original Hansards and the
Dutch were of the same "Low Dutch" stock, which was also that of the
Anglo-Saxons.[751] Thus there was seen the phenomenon of a vigorous
maritime and commercial development among the continental branches of
the race; while the English, having lost its early seafaring habits on
its new settlement, lagged far behind in both developments. Kinship, of
course, counted for nothing towards goodwill between the nations when it
could not keep peace within or between the towns; and in the fifteenth
century the Dutch cities are found at war with the Hansa, as they had
been in the thirteenth with England, and were to be again. But the
spirit of strife did its worst work at home. On the one hand, a physical
schism had been set up in Friesland in the thirteenth century by the
immense disaster of the inundation which enlarged the Zuyder Zee.[752]
Of that tremendous catastrophe there are singularly few historic traces;
but it had the effect of making two small countries where there had been
one large one, what was left of West Friesland being absorbed in the
specific province of Holland, while East Friesland, across the Zuyder
Zee, remained a separate confederation of maritime districts.[753] To
the south-west, again, the great Flemish cities were incurably jealous
of each other's prosperity, as well as inwardly distracted by their
class disputes; and within the cities of Holland, in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, while intelligible lines of cleavage between trades
or classes are hard to find, the factions of Hoek and Kabbeljauw, the
"Hooks" and the "Codfish," appear to have carried on a chronic strife,
as irrational as any to be noted in the cities of Italy. Thus in the
north as in the south, among Teutons as among "Latins" and among ancient
Greeks, the primary instincts of separation checked democratic growth
and coalition; though after the period of local feudal sovereignties the
powerful monarchic and feudal forces in the Netherlands withheld the
cities from internecine wars.
The most sympathetic historians are forced from the first to note
the stress of mutual jealousy among the cities and districts of the
Netherlands. "The engrained habit of municipal isolation," says
one, "was the cause why the general liberties of the Netherlands
were imperilled, why the larger part of the country was ultimately
ruined, and why the war of independence was conducted with so much
risk and difficulty, even in the face of the most serious perils"
(Thorold Rogers, _Holland_, p. 26. Cp. pp. 35, 43; Motley, pp. 29,
30, 43; Grattan, pp. 39, 50, 51). Van Kampen avows (_Geschichte der
Niederlande_, i, 131) that throughout the Middle Ages Friesland was
unprogressive owing to constant feuds. Even as late as 1670 Leyden
refused to let the Harle Maer be drained, because it would
advantage other cities; and Amsterdam in turn opposed the reopening
of the old Rhine channel because it would make Leyden maritime
(Temple, _Observations_, i, 130, ch. iii).
As regards the early factions of the "Hooks" and the "Codfish" in
the Dutch towns, the historic obscurity is so great that historians
are found ascribing the names in contrary ways. Grattan (p. 49)
represents the Hooks as the town party, and the Codfish as the
party of the nobles; Motley (p. 21) reverses the explanation,
noting, however, that there was no consistent cleavage of class or
of principle (cp. M'Cullagh, pp. 99, 100). This account is
supported by Van Kampen, i, 170, 171. The fullest survey of the
Hook and Cod feud is given by Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der
Niederlande_, i, 210-42. As to feuds of other parties in some of
the cities see Van Kampen, i, 172. They included, for example, a
class feud between the rich _Vetkooper_ (fat-dealers) and the poor
_Schieringer_ (eel-fishers). See Davies, i, 180.
Thus dissident, and with feudal wars breaking out in every generation,
the cities and provinces could win concessions from their feudal chiefs
when the latter were in straits, as in the famous case of the "Great
Privilege" extorted from the Duchess Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold
of Burgundy, after her father's overthrow by the Swiss; again in the
case of her husband Maximilian after her death; and previously in the
reaffirmation of the ill-observed Laws of Cortenberg, secured from the
Duke of Brabant by the Louvainers in 1372; but they could never deliver
themselves from the feudal superstition, never evolve the republican
ideal. When the rich citizens exploited the poor, it was the local
sovereign's cue, as of old, to win the populace; whereupon the
patricians leant to the over-lord, were he even the King of France; or
it might be that the local lord himself sought the intervention of his
suzerain, who again was at times the first to meddle, and against whom,
as against rival potentates, the cities would at times fight desperately
for their recognised head, when he was not overtaxing or thwarting them,
or endangering their commerce.[754] It was a medley of clashing
interests, always in unstable equilibrium. And so when sovereign powers
on a great scale, as the Dukes of Burgundy, followed by the Archduke
Maximilian, and later by the Emperor Charles, came into the inheritance
of feudal prestige, the Dutch and Flemish cities became by degrees
nearly as subordinate as those of France and Germany, losing one by one
their municipal privileges.[755] The monarchic superstition overbore the
passions of independence and primary interest; and a strong feudal ruler
could count on a more general and durable loyalty than was ever given to
any citizen-statesman. James van Arteveldt, who guided Ghent in the
fourteenth century, and whose policy was one of alliance with the
English king against the French, the feudal over-lord, was "the greatest
personality Flanders ever produced."[756] But though Arteveldt's policy
was maintained even by his murderers, murdered he was by his
fellow-citizens, as the great De Witt was to be murdered in Holland
three hundred years later. The monarchised Netherlanders were
republicans only in the last resort, as against insupportable tyranny.
Philip of Burgundy, who heavily oppressed them, they called "The Good."
At the end of the fifteenth century Maximilian was able, even before he
became Emperor, not only to crush the "bread-and-cheese" rebellion of
the exasperated peasantry in Friesland and Guelderland,[757] but to put
down all the oligarchs who had rebelled against him, and finally to
behead them by the dozen,[758] leaving the land to his son as a
virtually subject State.
In the sixteenth century, under Charles V, the men of Ghent, grown once
again a great commercial community,[759] exhibited again the fatal
instability of the undeveloped democracy of all ages. Called upon to pay
their third of a huge subsidy of 1,200,000 _caroli_ voted by the Flemish
States to the Emperor, they rang their bell of revolt and defied him,
offering their allegiance to the King of France. That monarch, by way of
a bargain, promptly betrayed the intrigue to his "brother," who
thereupon marched in force through France to the rebel city, now
paralysed by terror; and without meeting a shadow of resistance,
penalised it to the uttermost, beheading a score of leading citizens,
banishing many more, annulling its remaining municipal rights, and
exacting an increased tribute.[760] It needed an extremity of grievance
to drive such communities to an enduring rebellion. When Charles V
abdicated at Brussels in favour of his son Philip in 1555, he had
already caused to be put to death Netherlanders to the number at least
of thousands for religious heresy;[761] and still the provinces were
absolutely submissive, and the people capable of weeping collectively
out of sympathy with the despot's infirmities.[762] He, on his part,
born and educated among them, and knowing them well, was wont to say of
them that there was not a nation under the sun which more detested the
_name_ of slavery, or that bore the reality more patiently when managed
with discretion.[763] He spoke whereof he knew.
§ 2. _The Revolt against Spain_
That the people who endured so much at the hands of a despot should have
revolted unsubduably against his son is to be explained in terms of
certain circumstances little stressed in popular historiography. In the
narratives of the rhetorical historians, no real explanation arises. The
revolt figures as a stand for personal and religious freedom. But when
Charles abdicated, after slaying his thousands, the Reformation had been
in full tide for over thirty years; Calvin had built up Protestant
Geneva to the point of burning Servetus; England had been for twenty
years depapalised; France, with many scholars and nobles converted to
Calvinism, was on the verge of a civil war of Huguenots and Catholics;
the Netherlands themselves had been drenched in the blood of heretics;
and still no leading man had thought of repudiating either Spain or
Rome. Yet within thirteen years they were in full revolt, led by William
of Orange, now turned Protestant. Seeing that mere popular Protestantism
had spread far and gone fast, religious opinion was clearly not the
determining force.
In reality, the _conditio sine qua non_ was the psychological reversal
effected by Philip when he elected to rule as a Spaniard, where his
father had in effect ruled as a Fleming. Charles had always figured as a
native of the Netherlands, at home among his people, friendly to their
great men, ready to employ them in his affairs, even to the extent of
partly ruling Spain through them. After his punishment of Ghent they
were his boon subjects; and in his youth it was the Spaniards who were
jealous of the Flemish and Dutch. This state of things had begun under
his Flemish-German father, Philip I, who became King of Spain by
marriage, and under whom the Netherland nobles showed in Spain a
rapacity that infuriated the Spaniards against them. It was a question
simply of racial predominance; and had the dynasty chosen to fix its
capital in the north rather than in the south, it would have been the
lot of the Netherlanders to exploit Spain--a task for which they were
perfectly ready.
The gross rapacity of the Flemings in Spain under Philip I is
admitted by Motley (_Rise_, as cited, pp. 31, 75); but on the same
score feeling was passionately strong in Spain in the earlier years
of the reign of Charles. Cp. Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. i (Works,
ed. 1821, iv, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 77 78); and van
Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 277, 278. It took more
than ten years to bring Charles in good relations with the
Spaniards. See Mr. E. Armstrong's _Introduction_ to Major Martin
Hume's _Spain_, 1898, pp. 31-37, 57, 76. Even in his latter years
they are found protesting against his customary absence from Spain,
and his perpetual wars. Robertson, bk. vi, p. 494. Cp. bk. xii,
vol. v, p. 417, as to the disregard shown him after his abdication.
While it lasted, the Flemish exploitation of Spain was as shameless
as the Spanish exploitation of Italy. The Italian Peter Martyr
Angleria, residing at the court of Spain, reckoned that in ten
months the Flemings there remitted home over a million ducats
(Robertson, bk. i, p. 53). A lad, nephew of Charles's Flemish
minister Chievres, was appointed to the archbishopric of Toledo, in
defiance of general indignation. The result was a clerico-popular
insurrection. Everything goes to show that but for the Emperor's
prudence his Flemings would have ruined him in Spain, by getting
him to tyrannise for their gain, as Philip II later did for the
Church's sake in the Netherlands.
It is not unwarrantable to say that had not Charles had the sagacity to
adapt himself to the Spanish situation, learning to speak the language
and even to tolerate the pride of the nobles[764] to a degree to which
he never yielded before the claims of the burghers of the Netherlands,
and had he not in the end identified himself chiefly with his Spanish
interests, the history of Spain and the Netherlands might have been
entirely reversed. Had he, that is, kept his seat of rule in the
Netherlands, drawing thither the unearned revenues of the Americas, and
still contrived to keep Spain subject to his rule, the latter country
would have been thrown back on her great natural resources, her
industry, and her commerce, which, as it was, developed markedly during
his reign,[765] despite the heavy burdens of his wars. And in that case
Spain might conceivably have become the Protestant and rebellious
territory, and the Netherlands on the contrary have remained Catholic
and grown commercially decrepit, having in reality the weaker potential
economic basis.
The theorem that the two races were vitally opposed in "religious
sentiment," and that "it was as certain that the Netherlanders
would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards would be
uncompromising persecutors" (Motley, p. 31), is part of the common
pre-scientific conception of national development, and proceeds
upon flat disregard of the historical evidence. It is well
established that there was as much heresy of the more rational
Protestant and Unitarian sort in Spain, to begin with, as in
Holland. Under Ferdinand and Isabella the Inquisition seems to
have struck mainly at Judaic and Moorish monotheistic heresy, which
was not uncommon among the upper classes, while the lower were for
the most part orthodox (Armstrong, _Introd._ to Major Hume's
_Spain_, pp. 14, 18). Thus there is good ground for the surmise
that Ferdinand's object was primarily the confiscation of the
wealth of Jews and other rich heretics. (See U.R. Burke, _History
of Spain_, 1895, ii, 101; Hume's ed. 1900, ii, 74.) In Aragon,
Valencia, and Catalonia there was general resistance to the
Inquisition; in Cordova there was a riot against it; in Saragossa
the Inquisitor was murdered before the altar (Armstrong, p. 18;
Llorente, _Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition d'Espagne_, éd. 1818, i,
185-213; M'Crie, _Reformation in Spain_, ed. 1856, pp. 52-53. Cp.
U.R. Burke, as cited, ii, 97, 98, 101, 103, 111; Hume's ed. ii, 66,
70-71, 74-77, 82; as to the general and prolonged resistance of the
people). During that reign Torquemada is credited with burning ten
thousand persons in eighteen years (Prescott, _History of Ferdinand
and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 178, citing Llorente. But see p.
746, _note_, as to possible exaggeration. Cp. Burke, ii, 113;
Hume's ed. ii, 84). In the early Lutheran period the spread of
scholarly Protestantism in Spain was extremely rapid (La
Rigaudière, _Histoire des persécutions religieuses en Espagne_,
1860, p. 245 sq.), and in the early years of Philip II it needed
furious persecution to crush it, thousands leaving the kingdom
(Prescott, _Philip II_, bk. ii, ch. iii; M'Crie, _Reformation in
Spain_, ch. viii; De Castro, _History of the Spanish Protestants_,
Eng. tr. 1851, _passim_). At the outset, 800 persons were arrested
in Seville alone in one day; and the Venetian ambassador in 1562
testifies to the large number of Huguenots in Spain (Ranke, _Hist.
of the Popes_, bk. v, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 136).
Had Philip II had Flemish sympathies and chosen to make Brussels
his capital, the stress of the Inquisition could have fallen on the
Netherlands as successfully as it actually did on Spain. His
father's reign had proved as much. According to Motley, not only
multitudes of Anabaptists but "thousands and tens of thousands of
virtuous and well-disposed men and women" had then been "butchered
in cold blood" (_Rise_, p. 43), without any sign of rebellion on
the part of the provinces, whose leading men remained Catholic. In
1600 most of the inhabitants of Groningen were Catholics (Davies,
ii, 347). A Protestant historian (Grattan, p. 93) admits that the
Protestants "never, and least of all in these days, formed the
mass." Another has admitted, as regards those of Germany, that
"nothing had contributed more to the undisturbed progress of their
opinions than the interregnum after Maximilian's death, the long
absence of Charles, and the slackness of the reins of government
which these occasioned" (Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. v, ed. cited
of _Works_, vol. iv, p. 387). "It was only tanners, dyers, and
apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the
Netherlands" (Motley, p. 124). The same conditions would have had
similar results in Spain, where many Catholics thought Philip much
too religious for his age and station (Motley, p. 76).
It seems necessary to insist on the elementary fact that it was
Netherlanders who put Protestants to death in the Netherlands; and
that it was Spaniards who were burnt in Spain. In the Middle Ages
"nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless than in
the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 36; cp. p. 132). Grenvelle, most
zealous of heresy-hunters, was a Burgundian; Viglius, an even
bitterer persecutor, was a Frisian. The statement of Prescott
(_Philip II_, Kirk's ed. 1894, p. 149) that the Netherlanders
"claimed freedom of thought as their birthright" is a gratuitous
absurdity. As regards, further, the old hallucination of "race
types," it has to be noted that Charles, a devout Catholic and
persecutor, was emphatically _Teutonic_, according to the
established canons. His stock was Burgundo-Austrian on the father's
side; his Spanish mother was of Teutonic descent; he had the fair
hair, blue eyes, and hanging jaw and lip of the Teutonic Hapsburgs
(see Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, cap. 341), and so had his
descendants after him. On the other hand, William the Silent was
markedly "Spanish" in his physiognomy (Motley, p. 56), and his
reticence would in all ages pass for a Spanish rather than a
"Teutonic" characteristic. Motley is reduced to such shifts of
rhetoric concerning Philip II as the proposition (p. 75) that "the
Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have
evaporated." But his descendant, Philip IV, as seen in the great
portraits of Velasquez, is, like him, a "typical" Teuton; and the
stock preserved the Teutonic physiological tendency to gluttony, a
most "un-Spanish" characteristic.
It is true that, as Buckle argues, the many earthquakes in Spain
tended to promote superstitious fear; but then on his principles
the Dutch seafaring habits, and the constant risks and frequent
disasters of inundation, had the same primary tendency. For the
rest, the one serious oversight in Buckle's theory of Spanish
civilisation is his assumption (cp. 3-vol. ed. ii, 455-61; 1-vol.
ed. p. 550) that Spanish "loyalty" was abnormal and continuous from
the period of the first struggles with the Moors. As to this see
the present writer's notes in the 1-vol. ed. of Buckle, as cited.
Even Ferdinand, as an Aragonese, was disrespectfully treated by the
Castilians (cp. Armstrong as cited, pp. 5, 31, etc.; De Castro,
_History of Religious Intolerance in Spain_, Eng. tr. 1853, pp. 40,
41); and Philip I and Charles V set up a new resistance. An alien
dynasty could set up disaffection in Spain as elsewhere.
It should be noted, finally, that the stiff ceremonialism which is
held to be the special characteristic of Spanish royalty was a
Burgundo-Teutonic innovation, dating from Philip I, and that even
in the early days of Philip the Cortes petitioned "that the
household of the Prince Don Carlos should be arranged on the old
Spanish lines, and not in the pompous new-fangled way of the House
of Burgundy" (Major Hume's _Spain_, p. 127). Prescott (_Philip II_,
ed. cited, pp. 655, 659) makes the petition refer to the king's own
household, and shows it to have condemned the king's excessive
expenditure in very strong terms, saying the expense of his
household was "as great as would be required for the conquest of a
kingdom." At the same time the Cortes petitioned against
bull-fights, which appear to have originated with the Moors, were
strongly opposed by Isabella the Catholic, and were much encouraged
by the Teutonic Charles V (U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, 1895,
ii, 2-4; Hume's ed. i, 328 _sq._). In fine, the conventional Spain
is a manufactured system, developed under a Teutonic dynasty. "To a
German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her
national system and ancient freedom" (Stubbs, _Const. Hist._ 4th
ed. i, 5).
No doubt the Dutch disaffection to Philip, which began to reveal itself
immediately after his accession, may be conceived as having economic
grounds. Indeed, his creation of fresh bishoprics, and his manipulation
of the abbey revenues, created instant and general resentment among
churchmen and nobles,[766] as compared with his mere continuation of
religious persecution; and despite his pledges to the contrary, certain
posts in the Low Countries were conferred on Spaniards.[767] But had he
shown his father's adaptability, all this could have been adjusted. Had
he either lived at Brussels or made the Flemings feel that he held them
an integral part of his empire, he would have had the zealous support of
the upper classes in suppressing the popular heresy, which repelled
them. Heresy in the Netherlands, indeed, seems thus far to have been on
the whole rather licentious and anarchic than austere or "spiritual."
The pre-Protestant movements of the Béguines, Beghards, and Lollards,
beginning well, had turned out worse than the orders of friars in the
south; and the decorous "Brethren of the Common Lot" were in the main
"good churchmen," only a minority accepting Protestantism.[768] In face
of the established formulas concerning the innate spirituality of the
Teuton, and of the play of his "conscience" in his course at the
Reformation, there stand the historic facts that in the Teutonic world
alone was the Reformation accompanied by widespread antinomianism,
debauchery, and destructive violence. In France, Spain, and Italy there
were no such movements as the Anabaptist, which so far as it could go
was almost a dissolution of sane society.[769] From Holland that
movement drew much of its strength and leadership, even as, in a
previous age, the antinomian movement of Tanquelin had there had its
main success.[770] Such was the standing of Dutch Protestantism in 1555;
and no edict against heresy could be more searching and merciless than
that drawn up by Charles in 1550[771] without losing any upper-class
loyalty. Philip did but strive to carry it out.[772]
Had Philip, further, maintained a prospect of chronic war for the
nobility of the Netherlands, the accruing chances of wealth[773] would
in all likelihood have sufficed to keep them loyal. In the early wars of
his reign with France immense gains had been made by them in the way of
ransoms and booty. When these ceased, luxury continuing, embarrassment
became general.[774] But when Philip's energies were seen to be mainly
bent on killing out heresy, the discontented nobles began to lean to the
side of the persecuted commonalty. At the first formation of the
Confederacy of the "Beggars" in 1566, almost the only zealous Protestant
among the leaders was William's impetuous brother Louis of Nassau, a
Calvinist by training, who had for comrade the bibulous Brederode. The
name of "Gueux," given to the malcontents in contempt by the councillor
Berlaimont, had direct application to the known poverty or embarrassment
of the great majority.[775] There was thus undisguisedly at work in the
Netherlands the great economic force which had brought about "the
Reformation" in all the Teutonic countries; and the needy nobles
insensibly grew Protestant as it became more and more clear that only
the lands of the Church could restore their fortunes.[776] This holds
despite the fact that the more intelligent Protestantism which latterly
spread among the people was the comparatively democratic form set up by
Calvin, which reached the Low Countries through France, finding the
readier reception among the serious because of the prestige accruing to
its austerity as against the moral disrepute which now covered the
German forms.
[As to the proportional success of Lutheranism and Calvinism, see
Motley, pp. 132, 133; and Grattan, pp. 110, 111. (On p. 110 of Grattan
there is a transposition of "second" and "third" groups, which the
context corrects.) Motley, an inveterate Celtophobe, is at pains to make
out that the Walloons rebelled first and were first reconciled to Rome,
"exactly like their Celtic ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier." He
omits to comment on the fact that it was only the French form of
Protestantism, that of Calvin, that became viable in the Netherlands at
all, or on the fact that indecent Anabaptism flourished mainly in
Friesland; though he admits that the Lutheran movement left all
religious rights in the hands of the princes, the people having to
follow the creed of their rulers. The "racial" explanation is mere
obscurantism, here as always. The Walloons of South Flanders were first
affected simply because they were first in touch with Huguenotism. That
they were never converted in large numbers to Protestantism is later
admitted by Motley himself (p. 797), who thereupon speaks of the
"intense attachment to the Roman ceremonial which distinguished the
Walloon population." Thus his earlier statement that they had rebelled
against "papal Rome" is admittedly false. They had rebelled simply
against the Spanish tyranny. Yet the false statement is left
standing--one more illustration of the havoc that may be worked in a
historian's intelligence by a prejudice. (For other instances see, in
the author's volume _The Saxon and the Celt_, the chapters dealing with
Mommsen and Burton.)
It was the Teutonic-speaking city populations of North Flanders and
Brabant who became Protestants in mass after the troubles had begun
(Motley, p. 798). When the Walloon provinces withdrew from the
combination against Spain, the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges, and
Ypres joined the Dutch Union of Utrecht. They were one and all reduced
by the skill and power of Alexander of Parma, who thereupon abolished
the freedom of Protestant worship. The Protestants fled in thousands to
England and the Dutch provinces, the remaining population, albeit mostly
Teutonic, becoming Catholic. At this moment one-and-a-half of the
four-and-a-half millions of Dutch are Catholics; while in Belgium, where
there are hardly any Protestants, the Flemish-speaking and
French-speaking populations are nearly equal in numbers.
Van Kampen, who anticipated Motley in disparaging the Walloons as being
Frenchly fickle (_Geschichte_, i, 366), proceeds to contend that even
the Flemings are more excitable than the Dutch and other Teutons; but he
notes later that as the Dutch poet Cats was much read and imitated in
Belgium, he was thus proved to have expressed the spirit of the whole
Netherlands (ii, 109). Once more, then, the racial theory collapses.]
Thus the systematic savagery of the Inquisition under Philip, for which
the people at first blamed not at all the king but his Flemish minister,
Cardinal Granvelle, served rather to make a basis and pretext for
organised revolt than directly to kindle it. In so far as the people
spontaneously resorted to violence, in the image-breaking riots, they
compromised and imperilled the nationalist movement in the act of
precipitating it. The king's personal equation, finally, served to make
an enemy of the masterly William of Orange, who, financially embarrassed
like the lesser nobility,[777] could have been retained as an
administrator by a wise monarch. A matter so overlaid with historical
declamation is hard to set in a clear light; but it may serve to say of
William that he was made a "patriot," as was Robert the Bruce, by stress
of circumstances;[778] and that in the one case as in the other it was
exceptional character and capacity that made patriotism a success;[779]
William in particular having to maintain himself against continual
domestic enmity, patrician as well as popular. Nothing short of the
ferocity and rapacity of the Spanish attack, indeed, could have long
united the Netherlands. The first confederacy dissolved at the approach
of Alva, who, strong in soldiership but incapable of a statesmanlike
settlement, drove the Dutch provinces to extremities by his cruelty,
caused a hundred thousand artisans and traders to fly with their
industry and capital, exasperated even the Catholic ministers in
Flanders by his proposed taxes, and finally by imposing them enraged
into fresh revolt the people he had crushed and terrorised, till they
were eager to offer the sovereignty to the queen of England. When
Requesens came with pacificatory intentions, it was too late; and the
Pacification of Ghent (1576) was but a breathing-space between grapples.
What finally determined the separation and independence of the Dutch
Provinces was their maritime strength. Antwerp, trading largely on
foreign bottoms, represented wealth without the then indispensable
weapons. Dutch success begins significantly with the taking of Brill
(1572) by the gang of William van der Marck, mostly pirates and
ruffians, whose methods William of Orange could not endure.[780] But
they had shown the military basis for the maritime States. It was the
Dutch fleet that prevented Parma's from joining "the" Armada under
Medina-Sidonia,[781] thereby perhaps saving England. Such military
genius and energy as Parma's might have made things go hard with the
Dutch States had he lived, or had he not been called off against his
judgment to fight in France; but his death well balanced the
assassination of William of Orange, who had thus far been the great
sustainer and welder of the movement of independence. Plotted against
and vilified by the demagogues of Ghent, betrayed by worthless fellow
nobles, Teutonic and French alike; chronically insulted in his own
person and humiliated in that of his brother John, whom the States
treated with unexampled meanness; stupidly resisted in his own
leadership by the same States, whose egoism left Maestricht to its fate
when he bade them help, and who cast on him the blame when it fell;
thwarted and crippled by the fanaticism and intolerant violence of the
Protestant mobs of the towns; bereaved again and again in the
vicissitude of the struggle, William turned to irrelevance all
imputations of self-seeking; and in his unfailing sagacity and fortitude
he finally matches any aristocrat statesman in history. Doubtless he
would have served Philip well had Philip chosen him and trusted him. But
as it lay in one thoroughly able man, well placed for prestige in a
crisis, to knit and establish a new nation, so it lay in one fanatical
dullard[782] to wreck half of his own empire, with the greatest captains
of his age serving him; and to bring his fabled treasury to ruin while
his despised rebels grew rich.
As to the vice of the Dutch constitution, the principle of the
supremacy of "State rights," see M'Cullagh, p. 215; Motley, _Rise_,
pp. 794, 795 (Pt. vi, ch. ii, _end_), and _United Netherlands_, ed.
1867, iv, 564. Wicquefort (_L'histoire des Provinces-Unies_, La
Haye, 1719, pp. 5, 16), following Grotius, laid stress long ago on
the fact that the Estates of each province recognised no superior,
not even the entire body of the Republic. It was only the measure
of central government set up in the Burgundo-Austrian and Spanish
periods that made the Seven Provinces capable of enough united
action to repel Spanish rule during a chronic struggle of eighty
years. Cp. Van Kampen (i, 304), who points out (p. 306) that the
word "State" first appears in Holland in the fifteenth century. It
arose in Flanders in the thirteenth, and in Brabant in the
fourteenth. Only in 1581, after some years of war, did the United
Provinces set up a General Executive Council. In the same year the
Prince of Orange was chosen sovereign (Motley, pp. 838, 841).
§ 3. _The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce_
The conquest of Flanders by Alexander of Parma, reducing its plains to
wolf-haunted wildernesses, and driving the great mass of the remaining
artisans from its ruined towns,[783] helped to consummate the prosperity
of the United Provinces, who took over the industry of Ghent with the
commerce of Antwerp.[784] Getting the start of all northern Europe in
trade, they had become at the date of their assured independence the
chief trading State in the world. Whatever commercial common sense the
world had yet acquired was there in force. And inasmuch as the wealth
and strength of these almost landless States, with their mostly poor
soil and unavoidably heavy imposts, depended so visibly on quantity of
trade turnover, they not only continued to offer a special welcome to
all immigrants, but gradually learned to forego the congenial Protestant
strife of sects. It was indeed a reluctantly-learned lesson. Even as
local patriotisms constantly tended to hamper unity during the very
period of struggle, so the primary spirit of self-assertion set the
ruling Calvinistic party upon persecuting not only Catholics and
Lutherans, but the new heresy of Arminianism:[785] so little does
"patriotic" warfare make for fraternity in peace. The judicial murder of
the statesman John van Olden Barneveldt (1619) at the hands of Maurice
of Orange, whom he had guarded in childhood and trained to
statesmanship, was accomplished as a sequel to the formal proscription
of the Arminian heresy in the Synod of Dort; and Barneveldt was formally
condemned for "troubling God's Church" as well as on the charge of
treason.[786] On the same pretexts Grotius was thrown into prison; and
the freedom of the press was suspended.[787] It was doubtless the shame
of the memory of the execution of Barneveldt (the true founder of the
Republic as such),[788] on an absolutely false charge of treason, and
the observation of how, as elsewhere, persecution drove away population,
that mainly wrought for the erection of tolerance (at least as between
Protestant sects) into a State principle.
The best side of the Dutch polity was its finance, which was a lesson to
all Europe. Already in the early stages of the struggle with Spain, the
States were able on credit to make war, in virtue of their character for
commercial honour. Where the king of Spain, with all his revenues
mortgaged past hope,[789] got from the Pope an absolution from the
payment of interest on the sums borrowed from Spanish and Genoese
merchants, and so ruined his credit,[790] the Dutch issued tin money and
paper money, and found it readily pass current with friends and
foes.[791]
Of all the Protestant countries, excepting Switzerland, the Dutch States
alone disposed of their confiscated church lands in the public
interest.[792] There was indeed comparatively little to sell,[793] and
the money was sorely needed to carry on the war; but the transaction
seems to have been carried through without any corruption. It was the
suggestion of what might be accomplished in statecraft by the new
_expertise_ of trade, forced into the paths of public spirit and checked
by a stress of public opinion such as had never come into play in
Venice. Against such a power as Spain, energy ruled by unteachable
unintelligence, a world-empire financed by the expedients of provincial
feudalism, the Dutch needed only an enduring resentment to sustain them,
and this Philip amply elicited. Had he spent on light cruisers for the
destruction of Dutch commerce the treasure he wasted on the Armadas
against England and on his enormous operations by land, typified in the
monstrous siege of Antwerp, he might have struck swiftly and surely at
the very arteries of Dutch life; but in yielding to them the command of
their primary source and channel of wealth, the sea, he insured their
ultimate success. In the Franco-Spanish war of 1521-25 the French
cruisers nearly ruined the herring fishery of Holland and Zealand;[794]
and it was doubtless the memory of that plight that set the States on
maintaining predominant power at sea.[795]
Throughout the war, which from first to last spread over eighty years,
the Dutch commerce grew while that of Spain dwindled. Under Charles V,
Flanders and Brabant alone had paid nearly two-thirds of the whole
imperial taxation of the Netherlands;[796] but after a generation or
two the United Provinces must have been on an equality of financial
resources with those left under Spanish rule, even in a state of peace.
Yet in this posture of things there had grown up a burden which
represented, in the warring commercial State, the persistent principle
of class parasitism; for at the Peace of Münster (1648) the funded
public debt of the province of Holland alone amounted to nearly
150,000,000 florins, bearing interest at five per cent.[797] Of this
annual charge, the bulk must have gone into the pockets of the wealthier
citizens, who had thus secured a mortgage on the entire industry of the
nation. All the while, Holland was nominally rich in "possessions"
beyond sea. When, in 1580, Philip annexed Portugal, with which the Dutch
had hitherto carried on a profitable trade for the eastern products
brought as tribute to Lisbon, they began to cast about for an Asiatic
trade of their own, first seeking vainly for a north-east passage. The
need was heightened when in 1586 Philip, who as a rule ignored the
presence of Dutch traders in his ports under friendly flags, arrested
all the Dutch shipping he could lay hands on;[798] and when in 1594 he
closed to them the port of Lisbon, he forced them to a course which his
successors bitterly rued. In 1595 they commenced trading by the Cape
passage to the Indies, and a fleet sent out by Spain to put down their
enterprise was as usual defeated.[799] Then arose a multitude of
companies for the East Indian trade, which in 1602 were formed by the
government into a great semi-official joint-stock concern, at once
commercial and military, reminiscent of the Hanseatic League. The result
was a long series of settlements and conquests. Amboyna and the Moluccas
were seized from the Portuguese, now subordinate to Spain; Java, where a
factory was founded in 1597, was in the next generation annexed; Henry
Hudson, an English pilot in the Dutch Company's service, discovered the
Hudson River and Bay in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam about 1624. In
1621 was formed the Dutch West India Company, which in fifteen years
fitted out 800 ships of trade and war, captured 545 from the Spanish and
Portuguese, with cargoes valued at 90,000,000 florins, and conquered the
greater part of what had been the Portuguese empire in Brazil.
No such commercial development had before been seen in Europe. About
1560, according to Guicciardini,[800] 500 ships had been known to come
and go in a day from Antwerp harbour in the island of Walcheren; but in
the spring of 1599, it is recorded, 640 ships engaged solely in the
Baltic trade discharged cargoes at Amsterdam;[801] and in 1610,
according to Delacourt, there sailed from the ports of Holland in three
days, on the eastward trade alone, 800 or 900 ships and 1,500 herring
boats.[802] At the date of the Peace of Münster these figures were left
far behind, whence had arisen a reluctance to end the war, under which
commerce so notably flourished. Many Hollanders, further, had been
averse to peace in the belief that it would restore Antwerp and injure
their commerce, even as Prince Maurice of Orange, the republic's general
and stadthouder, had been averse to it as likely to lessen his power and
revenue.[803] But between 1648 and 1669 the trade increased by fifty per
cent.,[804] Holland taking most of the Spanish trade from the shipping
of England and the Hansa, and even carrying much of the trade between
Spain and her colonies. When the Dutch had thus a mercantile marine of
10,000 sail and 168,000 men, the English carried only 27,196 men; and
the Dutch shipping was probably greater than that of all the rest of
Europe together.[805]
This body of trade, as has been seen, was built up by a State which,
broadly speaking, had a surplus wealth-producing power in only one
direction, that of fishing; and even of its fishing, much was done on
the coasts of other nations. In that industry, about 1610, it employed
over 200,000 men; and the Greenland whale fishery, which was a monopoly
from 1614 to 1645, began to expand rapidly when set free,[806] till in
1670 it employed 120 ships.[807] For the rest, though the country
exported dairy produce, its total food product was not equal to its
consumption; and as it had no minerals and no vineyards, its surplus
wealth came from the four sources of fishing, freightage, extorted
colonial produce, and profits on the handling of goods bought and sold.
_Par excellence_, it was, in the phrase of Louis XIV, the nation of
shopkeepers, of middlemen; and its long supremacy in the business of
buying cheap and selling dear was due firstly to economy of means and
consumption, and secondarily to command of accumulated money capital at
low rates of interest. The sinking of interest was the first sign that
the limits to its commercial expansion were being reached; but it
belonged to the conditions that, with or without "empire," its advantage
must begin to fall away as soon as rival States were able to compete
with it in the economies of "production" in the sense of transport and
transfer.
In such economies the Dutch superiority grew out of the specially
practical basis of their marine--habitual fishing and the constant use
of canals. There is no better way than the former of building up
seamanship; and just as the Portuguese grew from hardy fishers to daring
navigators, so the Dutch grew from thrifty fishers and bargemen to
thrifty handlers of sea-freight, surpassing in economy the shippers of
England as they did in seamanship the marine of Spain. Broadly speaking,
the navies which owed most to royal fostering--as those of Spain,
France, and in part England--were the later to reach efficiency in the
degree of their artificiality; and the loss of one great Spanish navy
after another in storms must be held to imply a lack of due experience
on the part of their officers.
One of the worst military mistakes of Spain was the creation of
great galleons in preference to small cruisers. The sight of the
big ships terrorised the Dutch once, in 1606; but as all existing
seacraft had been built up in small vessels, there was no
sufficient science for the navigation of the great ones in stress
of weather, or even for the building of them on sound lines. The
English and Dutch, on the other hand, fought in vessels of the kind
they had always been wont to handle, increasing their size only by
slow degrees. In the reign of Henry VIII, again, nothing came of
the English expeditions of discovery fitted out by him (Schanz,
_Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 321), but private voyages were
successfully made by traders (_id._ pp. 321, 327).
In the seventeenth century, however, and until far on in the
eighteenth, all Dutch shipping was more economically managed than
the English. In all likelihood the Dutch traders knew and improved
upon the systematic control of ship-construction which the
Venetians and Genoese had first copied from the Byzantines, and in
turn developed. (Above, p. 197.) Raleigh was one of the first to
point out that the broad Dutch boats carried more cargo with fewer
hands than those of any other nation (_Observations touching
Trade_, in _Works_, ed. 1829, viii, 356). Later in the century
Petty noted that the Dutch practised freight-economies and
adaptations of every kind, having different sorts of vessels for
different kinds of traffic (_Essays in Political Arithmetic_
[1690], ed. 1699, pp. 179, 180, 182, 183). This again gave them the
primacy in shipbuilding for the whole of Europe (_Mémoires de Jean
De Witt_, ptie. i, ch. vi), though they imported all the materials
for the purpose. When Colbert began navy-building, his first care
was to bring in Dutch shipwrights (Dussieux, _Étude biographique
sur Colbert_, 1886, p. 101). Compare, as to the quick sailing of
the Dutch, Motley, _United Netherlands_, ed. 1867, iv, 556. In the
next century the English marine had similar economic advantages
over the French, which was burdened by royal schemes for
multiplying seamen (see Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 37).
The frugality which pervaded the whole of Dutch life may, however,
have had one directly disastrous effect. Sir William Temple noted
that the common people were poorly fed (_Observations upon the
United Provinces_, ch. iv: Works, ed. 1814, i, 133, 147); and
though their fighting ships were manned by men of all nations, the
tendency was to feed them in the native fashion. Such a practice
would tell fatally in the sea-fights with the English. Cp.
Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 123.
In addition to this expertness in handling, the Dutch traders seem to
have bettered the lesson taught them by the practice of the Hansa, as to
the importance of keeping up a high character for probity. At a time
when British goods were open to more or less general suspicion as being
of short measure or bad quality,[808] the Dutch practice was to insure
by inspection the right quality and quantity of all packed goods,
especially the salted herrings, which were still the largest source of
Dutch income.[809] And that nothing might be left undone to secure the
concourse of commerce to their ports, they maintained under almost every
stress[810] of financial hardship the principle of minimum duties on
imports of every description. The one notable exception to this policy
of practically free trade--apart from the monopoly of the trade in the
Indies--was the quite supererogatory veto on the importation of fish
from other countries at a time when most of the fishing of Northern
Europe was in Dutch hands.[811] Where imports were desirable they were
encouraged. Thus it came about that landless Amsterdam was the chief
European storehouse for grain, and treeless Holland the greatest centre
of the timber trade. Before such a spectacle the average man held up his
hands and confessed the incomparable ingenuity of the Hollanders. But
others saw and stated the causation clearly enough. "Many writing on
this subject," remarks Sir William Petty, "do magnifie the Hollanders
as if they were more, and all other nations less, than men, as to the
matters of trade and policy; making them angels, and all others fools,
brutes, and sots, as to those particulars; whereas," he continues,
giving a sound lesson in social science to his generation, "I take the
foundation of their achievements to be originally in the situation of
the country, whereby they do things inimitable by others, and have
advantages whereof others are incapable."[812] And Sir Josiah Child, of
the same generation, declared similarly against transcendentalism in
such matters. "If any," he roundly declares, "shall tell me it is the
nature of those people to be thrifty, I answer, _all men by nature are
alike_; it is only laws, custom, and education that differ men; their
nature and disposition, and the disposition of all people in the world,
proceed from their laws."[813] For "laws" read "circumstances and
institutions," adding reservations as to climate and temperament and
variation of _individual_ capacity and bias, and the proposition is the
essence of all sociology. Economic lessons which Petty and Child could
not master have since been learned; but their higher wisdom has hardly
yet been assimilated.
The sufficient proof that Holland had no abnormal enlightenment even in
commerce was that, like her rivals, she continued to maintain the system
of monopoly companies. Her "empire" in the East, to which was falsely
ascribed so much of her wealth, in reality stood for very little sound
commerce. The East India Company being conducted on high monopoly lines,
the profits were made rather through the smallness than the greatness of
the trade done. Thus, while the Company paid enormous dividends,[814]
the imports of spice were kept at a minimum, in order to maintain the
price, large quantities being actually destroyed for the purpose. For a
time they contrived to raise pepper to double the old Portuguese
price.[815] Such methods brought it about that when the republic had in
all 10,000 sail, the East India trade employed only ten or twelve
ships.[816] All the while the small class of capitalists who owned the
shares were able to satisfy the people that the merely monetary and
factitious riches thus secured to the Company's shareholders was a form
of public wealth.[817]
It is a complete error to say, as did Professor Seeley (_Expansion
of England_, p. 112), that Holland "made her fortune in the world"
because the war with Spain "threw open to her attack the whole
boundless possessions of her antagonist in the New World, which
would have been closed to her in peace. By conquest she made for
herself an empire, and this empire made her rich." In the first
place it was not in the New World that she mainly sought her
empire, but in the East Indies, in the sphere of the Portuguese
conquests. Her hold of Brazil lasted only from 1621 to 1654, and
was not a great source of wealth, though she captured much Spanish
and Portuguese shipping. But even her eastern trade was, as we have
seen, small in quantity, and as a source of wealth was not to be
compared with the herring fishery. In 1601 John Keymor declared
that more wealth was produced by the northern fisheries "in one
year than the King of Spain hath in four years out of the Indies"
(_Observations made upon the Dutch Fishing about the Year
1601_--reprint in _Phoenix_, 1707, i, 225). The Dutch takings in
six months' fishing were then reckoned at 3,600,000 barrels, valued
at as many pounds sterling (_id._ p. 224); the fishing fleet
numbered 4,100 sail of all kinds, with over 3,000 tenders, out of a
roughly estimated total of 20,000; while the whole Indian fleet is
stated at only 40 or 50, employing 5,000 or 6,000 men (_id._ p.
223), as against a total of some 200,000 of Dutch seafaring
population. Howell, writing in 1622 (ed. Bennett, 1891, vol. i,
205), also puts the Amsterdam ships in the Indian trade at 40.
Professor Seeley's statement cannot have proceeded on any
comparison of the European Dutch trade with the revenue from the
conquered "empire." It stands for an endorsement of the vulgar
delusion that "possessions" are the great sources of a nation's
wealth, though Seeley elsewhere (p. 294) protests against the
"bombastic language of this school," and notes that "England is
not, directly at least, any the richer" for her connection with her
"dependencies."
Against the class-interest behind the East India Company the republican
party, as led and represented by De Witt, were strongly arrayed. They
could point to the expansion of the Greenland whaling trade that had
followed on the abolition of the original monopoly in that adventure--an
increase of from ten to fifteen times the old quantity of
product[818]--and the treatise expounding their policy strongly
condemned the remaining monopolies of all kinds. But there was no
sufficient body of enlightened public opinion to support the attack; and
the menaced interests spontaneously turned to the factor which could
best maintain them against such pressure--the military power of the
House of Orange. The capitalist monopolists and "imperialists" of the
republic were thus the means first of artificially limiting its economic
basis, and later of subverting its republican constitution--a disservice
which somewhat outweighs the credit earned by them, as by the merchant
oligarchies of Venice, for an admirable management of their army.[819]
§ 4. _Home and Foreign Policy_
The vital part played by William the Silent at the outset of the war of
independence gave his house a decisive predominance in the affairs of
the republic, grudging as had often been its support of him during life.
As always, the state of war favoured the rule of the imperator, once the
institution had been established. Fanatical clergy and populace alike
were always loud in support of the lineage of the Deliverer; and with
their help William's son Maurice was able to put to death Barneveldt.
Then and afterwards, accordingly, war was more or less the Orange
interest; and after the Peace of Münster we find the republican party
sedulous at once to keep the peace and to limit the power of the
hereditary stadthouder. The latter, William II, aged twenty-four, having
on his side the great capitalists, tried force in a fashion which
promised desperate trouble,[820] but died at the crisis (1650), his only
child being born a week after his death.
It was substantially the pressure of the Orange interest, thus situated,
that led to the first naval war between Holland and England, both then
republics, and both Protestant. Orangeist mobs, zealous for Charles I,
as the father of the Princess of Orange, insulted the English republican
ambassadors who had come to negotiate on Cromwell's impossible scheme
for a union of the two republics; and the prompt result was the
Navigation Act, intended[821] to hurt Dutch commerce. It was really
powerless for that purpose; but the Dutch people in general believed
otherwise, and, being not only independent but bellicose, they were as
ready as Puritan England for a struggle at sea. While, however, they
held their ground in the main as fighters, they suffered heavily in
their trade. By 1653 they had lost over sixteen hundred ships through
English privateering; so that the two years of the English war had done
them more injury than the eighty years of the Spanish.[822] Accordingly,
though forced again to war by Charles II, the republican party put it as
a maxim of policy that Dutch prosperity depended on peace.[823] It is
nevertheless one of the tragedies of their history that John de Witt,
the great statesman who owed most heed to this maxim, was inveigled by
the English Government into an ill-judged alliance against France,[824]
and was then deserted by England, whereupon the republic was invaded by
France, and De Witt was murdered by his own people. Of all the nations
of Europe the Dutch were then the best educated; but no more than
ancient Athens had their republic contrived to educate its mob. The
result was a frightful moral catastrophe.
It is easy at this time of day to find fault with De Witt's policy of
two hundred years ago, but hard to reckon aright the practical
possibilities of his situation. Suffice it to say that the formation of
the Triple Alliance of Holland, England, and Sweden against Louis XIV
proved a ruinous mistake. France had supported the republic against
Spain; and Louis had stood by it when Charles II invited him to join in
dismembering it. Yet, after sending its fleet up the Medway and forcing
Charles to the humiliating Peace of Breda, and in the full knowledge
that he hated the republic which had harboured and criticised him, De
Witt was persuaded by Sir William Temple, the English ambassador, to
sign, albeit reluctantly,[825] a treaty of union (1668) which made
France a strenuous enemy, and from which Charles nevertheless instantly
drew back, making secretly a treacherous treaty with Louis, and leaving
Holland open to French invasion. It was the bane of the diplomacy of the
age to be perpetually planning alliances on all hands by way of
maintaining the "balance of power"; and De Witt, while justly suspicious
of England, could not be content to drop the system. His excuse was that
Louis was avowedly bent on the acquisition or control of the Spanish
Netherlands; and that after that there would be small security for the
republic. Yet he had better have remained the ally of France than leant
on the broken reeds of the friendship of Spain and the English king.
Charles needed only to appeal to the English East India Company, whose
monopoly was pitted against that of the Dutch Company, to secure a
parliamentary backing for a fresh war with Holland; and the sudden
invasion of the republic by France (1672) was the ruin of the De Witts.
It was an Orange mob that murdered them; and the young William of Orange
pensioned those who had formally accused them of treason.
The action of Charles in 1672 had been a masterpiece of baseness. After
secretly betraying his Dutch allies to Louis, he caused his own fleet,
before war had been declared, to attack a rich Dutch merchant fleet in
the Channel, with the worthy result of a capture of only two ships. His
declaration of war, when made, included such pretexts as that there is
"scarce a town in their territories that is not filled with abusive
pictures and false historical medals and pillars," which "alone were
cause sufficient for our displeasure, and the resentment of all our
subjects"; and he alleged breach of a non-existent article in the Treaty
of Breda.[826] It was in this disgraceful war that Shaftesbury gave out
as the true policy of England the maxim of Cato--_Delenda est
Carthago_--and the end of it was that in 1673, after a war without
triumphs, in which finally the English fleet under Rupert was defeated
by that of the Dutch while the French fleet stood idly by (1673), the
betrayed betrayer made peace with Holland once more (1674).
The hostility of France on the other hand practically ended Dutch
republicanism, though at the same time it brought about the wreck of the
"empire" of Louis XIV. Had he accepted the submission offered by De
Witt, he might have made a sure ally of Holland as against England. But
his policy of conquest, insolently formulated by his minister Louvois,
first put the Dutch Government in the hands of the Prince of Orange, and
then turned the English interest, despite the King, against France. It
may be taken as a law of European politics that any power which
arrogantly sets itself to overbear the others will itself, in the course
of one or two generations at furthest, be beaten to its knees. The end
of the insolent aggression of Louis came when, after William had become
King of England and set up a new tradition of Protestant union against
France, the military genius of Marlborough in the next reign reduced
France to extremities. Meanwhile Holland was past its period of
commercial climax, past the ideals of De Witt, past republicanism for
another era. Henceforth it was to be subservient to its stadthouder,
and to become ultimately a kingdom, on the failure of the republican
movement at the French Revolution.
§ 5. _The Decline of Commercial Supremacy_
It follows from what has been seen of the conditions of its success that
the Dutch trade could not continue to eclipse that of rival States with
greater natural sources of wealth when once those States had learned to
compete with Dutch methods. But it belonged to the culture-conditions
that the rival States should take long to learn the lesson, and that the
Dutch should be the first to adapt themselves to new circumstances. The
blunders of their enemies lengthened the Dutch lease. Louis XIV gave one
last vast demonstration of what Catholicism can avail to wreck States by
revoking the Edict of Nantes (1686), and so driving from France a
quarter of a million of industrious subjects, part of whom went to
England, many to Switzerland, but most to Holland, conveying their
capital and their handicrafts with them. The stroke hastened the
financial as well as the military exhaustion of France in the next
twenty-five years. England, on the other hand, maintained its trade
monopolies, which, with the system of imposts, drove over to the Dutch
and the French much trade that a better policy might have kept.[827] But
all the Dutch advantages were consummated in the command of money
capital at low rates of interest, and consequent capacity to trade for
small profits.
This accumulation of money capital was the correlative of the main
conditions of Dutch commerce. A community drawing its income--save for
the great resource of fishing--from its middleman-profits and
freightage, and from its manufacture of other nations' raw products in
competition with their own manufacture, must needs save credit capital
for its own commerce' sake. Thus, whereas the earlier Flemings were
luxurious in their expenditure,[828] the Dutch middle-class were the
most frugal in north-western Europe,[829] their one luxury being the
laudable one of picture-buying. But when, through mere increase of
population and consequently of trade, interest gradually fell[830] in
the rival communities, who in turn could practise fishing, who had
better harbours, who extended their marine commerce, began to
manufacture for themselves, and had natural resources for barter and
production that Holland wholly lacked, the Dutch trade slowly but surely
fell away. And as against the sustaining force of their frugality and
their systematic utilisation of their labour-power, the Dutch lay under
burdens which outweighed even those imposed on France and England by bad
government. Not only did the national debt force a multiplication of
imposts on every article of home consumption,[831] but the constant cost
of the maintenance of the sea-dykes was a grievous natural tax from
which there was no escape. Nor would the creditor class on any score
consent to forego their bond.
Thus it came about that after the Peace of Utrecht (1713), which left
Holland deeper in debt than ever, there was an admitted decline in the
national turnover from decade to decade. It is one of the fallacies of
the non-economic interpretation of history to speak of the United
Provinces as thenceforth showing a moral "languor";[832] the rational
explanation is that their total economic nutrition was curtailed by the
competing environment. Yet it must be admitted that the merchant class
themselves, when called on by the stadthouder William IV to compare
notes as to the decline, showed little recognition of the natural causes
beyond dwelling on the effect of heavy taxes, which had been insisted on
long before by the party of De Witt.[833] Dwelling as they do on the
value of the old maxims of toleration, which were now beside the case,
and failing to realise that the sheer produce of the other countries was
a decisive factor in competition, they seem to invite such a reaction in
economic theory as was set up by the French Physiocrats, who laid their
finger on this as the central fact in industrial life.
France, indeed, had learned other vital lessons after the great
defeat of Louis XIV. Nothing in the history of that age is more
remarkable than the fashion in which the immense blunder of the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was _pro tanto_ cured under the
Regency and under Louis XV by the infiltration of fresh population.
Dean Tucker noted, what the Dutch merchants apparently did not,
that "Flanders, all Germany on this side of the Rhine, Switzerland,
Savoy, and some parts of Italy, pour their supernumerary hands
every year into France" (_Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 27). At that
time (1750) there were said to be 10,000 Swiss and Germans in Lyons
alone, and the numbers of immigrants in all the commercial towns
were increasing (_id._ pp. 27, 28), the Government having become
"particularly gentle and indulgent to foreigners." At that period,
too, the French peasantry were prolific (_id._ p. 45).
Above all, the Dutch Provinces were bound to be outclassed in
manufactures by England when England began to manufacture by machinery
and by steam. Anciently well-forested,[834] they had long been nearly
bare of wood, so that their fuel had become, as it still is, scarce and
expensive.[835] They had done wonders with windmills; but when coal came
into play as driving power the coal-producing State was bound to
triumph. It must, however, be kept on record that when England's
commerce had thus begun to distance that of her old rival in virtue of
her mere economic basis, Englishmen were none the less ready to resort
to wanton aggression. Throughout the eighteenth century the ideal of
monopoly markets continued to rule in Europe; and that ideal it was that
inspired the struggles of France and England for the possession of India
and North America. In the course of those imperialist wars the
Government of the elder Pitt gave to privateers the right to confiscate,
as "contraband of war," nearly all manner of commerce between France and
other nations, and in particular that of Holland, Pitt's aim being to
force the Dutch into his alliance against France. The injury thus
wrought to their trade was enormous. "Perhaps at no time in history were
more outrageous injuries perpetrated on a neutral nation than those
which the Dutch suffered from the English during the time of the elder
Pitt's administration."[836] It was the method of imperialism; and the
usual sequel was at hand in the revolt of the American Colonies. In that
crisis also, because the Dutch Council of State, despite the wish of the
stadthouder, refused to take part against the Colonies, the English
Government as before gave letters of marque to privateers, and told the
plundered Dutch that if they increased their fleet to protect their own
commerce the action would be taken as hostile. "In 1779 the English
commander, Fielding, captured the Dutch mercantile fleet, with four
Dutch men-of-war; and in 1780 Yorke, the English Ambassador at The
Hague, demanded subsidies from the States, whom his Government had just
before plundered."[837]
Needless to say, Dutch wealth and power had greatly dwindled before this
insult was ventured on by the rival people. Holland's primary source of
wealth, the fisheries, had been in large part appropriated by other
nations, in particular by Britain, now her great competitor in that as
well as in other directions.[838] But all the while Holland's own
"empire" was a main factor in her weakening. Deaf to the doctrine of De
Witt, her rulers had continued to keep the East Indian trade on a
monopoly basis, ruling their spice islands as cruelly and as
blindly[839] as any rival could have done; and it was the false
economics and false finance bound up with their East India Company that
ruined the great Bank of Amsterdam, which at the French Revolution was
found to have gambled away all its funds in the affairs of the Company,
in breach of the oath of the magistrates, who were the sworn custodians
of the treasure. So situated, the Government could or would make no
effort in the old fashion against English tyranny. The State's economic
basis being in large part gone, and the capitalistic interest incapable
of unifying or inspiring the nation, Holland had, so to speak, to begin
life over again. But it would be a delusion to suppose that the
political decline meant misery; on the contrary, there was much less of
that in Holland than in triumphant England. There were still wealthy
citizens, as indeed always happens in times of decline of general
wealth. At that very period "the Dutch were the largest creditors of any
nation in Europe";[840] and Smith in 1776 testified that Holland was "in
proportion to the extent of the land and the number of its inhabitants
by far the richest country in Europe," adding that it "has accordingly
the greatest share of the carrying trade of Europe,"[841] and again that
its capitalists had much money in British stocks. But these were not as
broad foundations as the old; nor were they easily expansible, or even
maintainable. As soon, indeed, as the rise of other national debts
enabled them to invest abroad, they did so. Temple has recorded how,
when any part of the home debt was being paid off in his time, the
scripholders "received it with tears, not knowing how to dispose of it
to interest with such safety and ease." England soon began to relieve
them of such anxiety. But though Holland could thus gain from the
annual interest-tribute paid by borrowing States, as England does at
this moment, such income in a time of shrinking industry stands only for
the idle life of the endowed class, a factor neither industrially nor
intellectually wholesome. At the beginning of the seventeenth century
Keymor, an English observer who studied Dutch commercial life closely,
exclaimed: "And not a Beggar there; everyone getting his own Living is
admirable to behold."[842] This seems to have been an exaggeration,
since in 1619 we find Howell praising the "strictness of their laws
against mendicants, and their hospitals of all sorts for young and old,
both for the relief of the one and the employment of the other."[843]
Later there grew up, however carefully provided for,[844] a notably
large pauper population; and so late as 1842 Laing, who liked Holland,
wrote of it as "a country full of capitalists and paupers."[845] In the
main, modern Dutch life has of necessity had to find sounder bases; and
the chief feature in it during the past generation has been the new and
great industrial expansion.
§ 6. _The Culture Evolution_
From first to last the culture-history of Holland illustrates clearly
enough the importance of the freer political life to the life of the
mind. It is in the period of independence that Holland begins to play a
great part in European culture. Previously, the multitude of popular
"chambers of rhetoric,"[846] and so forth, yielded no fine fruits; but
in the stress of self-government the republic begins to produce
scholars, thinkers, and men of science, who affect those of surrounding
nations. Already in 1584, when nothing of the kind existed in France or
England, a Dutch literary academy published a Dutch grammar;[847] and
the republic was "the peculiarly learned State of Europe throughout the
seventeenth century,"[848] producing more of original classical research
and scholarly teaching in its small sphere than any other. Freedom and
endowment of university teaching brought in such Germans as Gronovius
and Graevius; and Leibnitz looked to little Holland as a model in many
things for backward Germany.[849] Printing became one of the industries
of the country; and the Elzevirs were long the great classic publishers
for Europe. Free universities and a free press, indeed, were the main
conditions of the Dutch classical renaissance.
The conditions of progress in _belles lettres_, on the other hand, being
less propitious, the development was inferior. All Europe could buy
Latin books printed in Holland; but few foreigners read Dutch, and the
finer native literature was sustained only by the necessarily small
class which had both leisure and culture. The very devotion to culture
which, as was claimed by Grotius, made the well-to-do Dutch in his youth
the greatest students of languages in Europe,[850] wrought rather for
the importation of foreign literature than the fostering or elevation of
the native. So that though the Catholic poetess Anna Bijns,[851] and
later the Catholic Spreghel, "the Dutch Ennius" (1549-1612), and Hooft,
"the Dutch Tacitus" (1581-1647), made worthy beginnings, there was no
great florescence. In the terms of the case, the two former represent
the general Catholic culture-influence; and Hooft, eminent alike as poet
and historian, owed his artistic stimulus to the three youthful years he
spent in Italy studying Italian literature.[852] Of the more celebrated
native poets, Cats is prosaic, though to this day highly popular,
suiting as he does the plane of taste developed under a strenuous
commercialism; and Vondel alone, by his influence on Milton, enters into
the blood of outside European literature.
Fanatical Calvinism,[853] again, was not primarily favourable to
philosophic thought; and it is to the influence of Descartes, who made
Holland his home for many years, that the possibility of the later great
performance of Spinoza is to be ascribed. But the impulse, once given,
and sustained by such an atmosphere as was set up by Bayle and other
French refugees, developed a new culture-force; and in the eighteenth
century the Dutch press was a disseminator of French and English
rationalism, as well as of the classic erudition which still flourished.
All along, though none of the supreme names in science is Dutch,
scientific culture was in general higher than elsewhere.[854] Such
influences made afresh for a revival of native literature, and
throughout the eighteenth century it is the foreign stimulus that is
seen at work. Thus Van Effen (1684-1725) read much English and wrote
much French, but was also the best Dutch writer of his time; the
brothers Van Haren (1710-79) were diplomatists, and friends of Voltaire;
and the two lady novelists, Wolff and Deken, produced their three
admired books (1782-92) under the influence of Richardson and Goethe.
But as against these debts to foreign example, the Dutch Republic in its
time of flower produced a great and markedly native body of art, which
to this day ranks in its kind with that of the great age in Italy. It
may have been the example set in the Spanish Netherlands by the Austrian
archdukes, after the severance, that gave the lead to the Dutch growth;
but there is no imitation and nothing nationally second-rate in their
total output. The Flemish Rubens (1577-1640) precedes by twenty-one
years his pupil Vandyck and the great Spaniard Velasquez, and by nearly
thirty years the Dutch Rembrandt; but no four contemporary masters were
ever more individual; and the Dutch group of Rembrandt, Hals, Van der
Helst, Gerard Dow, and the rest, will hold its own with the Flemish
swarm headed by Rubens and Vandyck. It is worth while in this connection
to note afresh how closely is art florescence bound up with economic
forces. Dutch and Flemish art, like Italian, is in the first place
substantially a product of economic demand, the commercial aristocracy
of the Netherlands commissioning and buying pictures as did the clerical
aristocracy of Italy. It has been denied that there is any economic
explanation for the eventual arrest of great art in the Netherlands; but
when we note the special conditions of the case the economic explanation
will be found decisive.
Great art, it is true, always tends to set up a convention, which is the
stoppage of greatness; but even great art can so arrest progress only
when the economic and social sphere is curtailed; and the Dutch economic
sphere, as we have seen, was practically non-expansive after the
disaster of 1672, which date also begins a new period of ruinous war for
Flanders. Rembrandt died in 1664. He and his contemporaries and their
pupils had produced a body of painting immense in quantity; and the
later and poorer generations, having such a body of classic work passed
on to them, naturally and necessarily rested on their treasure. The
population of the United Provinces, estimated to have reached a
million-and-a-half in the Middle Ages,[855] had risen in the great
period to three or three-and-a-half millions.[856] From this figure it
positively fell away in the eighteenth century.[857] Here then was a
shrinking population, loaded with old and new debt and overwhelmed with
taxes, consciously growing poorer, with no prospect of recovery, and
already stocked with a multitude of pictures[858] by great masters.
That it should go on commissioning new pictures with the old munificence
was impossible: it was more concerned to sell than to buy; and what
demand had elicited lack of demand arrested. There is no clearer
sociological case in history.
§ 7. _The Modern Situation_
After all that has come and gone, it is important to realise, in
correction of the megalomaniac view of things, that Holland is to-day
literally larger,[859] more populated,[860] and more productive than she
was in the "palmy days"; and that her colonial "empire," now
administered on just principles, includes a population of over
30,000,000. Over sixty years ago M'Culloch wrote that "though their
commerce be much decayed, the Dutch, even at this moment, are _the
richest and most comfortable people of Europe_."[861] The latter part of
the statement would not be very far out to-day, though popular comfort
perhaps does not now keep pace with population. Otherwise it no longer
holds. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there began a
vigorous revival of Dutch commerce and industry, Holland becoming once
more expansive. From 1872 to 1906 Dutch exports, measured by weight,
increased ninefold, imports sixfold, and transit trade over threefold;
and the expansion steadily continues; the value of the transit trade
rising from 9,392 million guilders in 1906 to 12,684 millions in 1910;
while imports increased by nearly 30 per cent and exports by 26 per
cent. Much of this expansion appears to be due to the advantages
accruing to Holland as a free-trade country alongside of protectionist
Germany, whose far greater natural resources redound largely to the gain
of the free-trading neighbour.
In detail, the commercial situation of to-day is curiously like the old
at many points. The debt is still relatively great--about £97,000,000
sterling;[862] and about a fourth of the whole expenditure is interest;
another fourth going for "defence." Always making the best of their
soil, alike with roots and cereals, the people go on increasing the area
under cultivation and the yield per hectare.[863] Still, as of old,
much food and raw material is imported to be exported again[864]--in
large part to Germany. Fishing now employs only 20,000 men with over
5,300[865] boats; the annual product is valued at under £1,000,000; and
of over 10,800 clearances of vessels from Dutch ports in 1910 only 4,533
were Dutch, representing a total mercantile navy of only 764.[866] But
of Dutch vessels engaged in the carrying trade between foreign ports
there were 4,383 in 1909,[867] with more than seven times the tonnage of
the home navy. Thus the nation still subsists largely by playing
middleman, partly by manufactures, partly by dairy and other produce,
little by fishing,[868] but still largely by freightage. Java does not
figure as a source of revenue for Holland, being administered in its own
interest,[869] with less taxation of the people than goes on in British
India.
Of the conditions which in Holland tell against increase of well-being,
the most notable is the large birth-rate resulting there as elsewhere
from the rapid modern expansion of industry. With a population less by
1,580,000 than that of Belgium, Holland has annually a larger surplus of
births over deaths. It may be interesting to compare Dutch statistics
with those of Portugal and Sweden, which have nearly the same
population, as regards birth-rate and emigration. Each of the three
States at 1895 had slightly over or under 5,000,000 inhabitants; and in
1909 slightly over or under 6,000,000. Their marriages and their
emigration were:--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Marriages. | Emigration.
----------------------------------------+----------------------------
|Portugal.| Holland.| Sweden.| Portugal.| Holland.|Sweden.
-----------+---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+-------
1895 | 33,018 | 35,598 | 28,728 | 44,746 | 1,314 |14,982
| | | | | |
1908, 1909,| | | | | |
or 1910 | 34,150 | 42,740 | 33,131 | 40,056 | 3,220 |23,529
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The emigration from Portugal in 1895 was abnormal; but in 1896 the
figures were 24,212, and in 1907 they reached 41,950. In Sweden in 1895
the excess of births over deaths was as high as 60,000. In Portugal it
was 47,997; a figure which in 1896 fell to 38,134; rising again to
64,312 in 1909. In Holland, the average excess in 1879-84 was 54,751; in
1897 it had risen to 77,586; in 1909 to 90,483. Under such circumstances
it needs the alleged doubling of Dutch commerce between 1872 and 1891,
and the subsequent continued expansion, to maintain well-being. As it
is, despite the tradition of good management of the poor, the number of
the needy annually relieved temporarily or continuously by the
charitable societies and communes[870] appears to be always over five
per cent. of the population--or about twice the average proportion of
paupers in the United Kingdom. The Dutch figures of course do not stand
for the same order of poverty; and there is certainly not in Holland a
proportional amount of the sordid misery that everywhere fringes the
wealth of England. But it is clear that Holland is becoming relatively
over-populated; and that the industrial conditions are not making
steadily for popular elevation, standing as they do for low wages and
grinding competition in many occupations.
Nor are these conditions favourable in Holland to general culture, as
apart from forms of specialism, any more than in England. Dutch experts
in recognised studies latterly hold their own with any--witness the
names of Kuenen, Tiele, van t'Hoff, de Goeje, de Vries, Dozy, Kern,
Lorentz, Waals--and the middle-class has probably a better average
culture than prevails in England or the United States; but the lapsed
Republic has yet to prove how much a small State may achieve in the
higher civilisation. Meantime, it is plainly not smallness but too rapid
increase in numbers that is the stumbling-block; and the possession of a
relatively great "empire" in Java does not avail, for Holland any more
than for England, to cure the social trouble at home.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 725: Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, 1-vol. ed. 1863, p.
18. For details of the different invasions see David, _Manuel de
l'histoire de Belgique_, 1847, pp. 37, 39, 41, 49. Cp. van Kampen,
_Geschichte der Niederlande_, Ger. ed. i, 82-89. Wenzelburger notes that
the "Norsemen" included not only Norwegians and Danes, but Saxons and
even Frisians (_Geschichte der Niederlande_, 1879, i, 61).]
[Footnote 726: Dutch writers claim the invention for one of their nation
in the fourteenth century (cp. M'Culloch, _Treatises_, p. 342; Rogers,
_Holland_, pp. 26, 27). There is clear evidence, however, that
fish-salting was carried on at Yarmouth as early as 1210, one Peter
Chivalier being the patentee (see Torrens M'Cullagh's _Industrial
History of the Free Nations_, 1846, ii, 29; Madox, _History of the
Exchequer_, ch. xiii, § 4, p. 326, cited by him; and Macpherson, _Annals
of Commerce_, 1802, i, 384, 385). The practice was very common in
antiquity; see Schürer, _Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, Eng. tr.
Div. ii, vol. i, p. 43.]
[Footnote 727: It is noteworthy that an English navy practically begins
with King John, in whose reign it was that fishing began to flourish at
Yarmouth. See Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, i, 374, 378, 384, 532.]
[Footnote 728: Originally the name Flanders covered only the territory
of the city of Bruges. It was extended with the extension of the domain
of the Counts of Flanders (David, _Manuel_, pp. 48, 49).]
[Footnote 729: Motley, p. 20; Grattan, pp. 38-40, 43, 56. At 1286 the
Flemish cities were represented side by side with the nobles in the
assembly of the provincial states. The same rights were acquired by the
Dutch cities in the next century.]
[Footnote 730: Dykes existed as early as the Roman period (Blok,
_Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk_, Groningen, 1892, i, 315; Eng.
tr. i, 211; Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, 1878, i, 52). In
the Middle Ages co-operative bodies took the work out of the Church's
hands (Blok, pp. 315-17; tr. p. 212).]
[Footnote 731: Cp. Torrens M'Cullagh, _Industrial History_, ii, 22, 33;
Motley, p. 18. The Counts of Holland seem to have led the way in
encouraging towns and population. But Baldwin III of Flanders (_circa_
960) seems to have established yearly fairs free of tolls (De Witt,
_Mémoires_, French tr., ed. 1709. part i, ch. viii, p. 34).]
[Footnote 732: Compare the so-called _Memoirs of John de Witt_, French
ed. (3e) 1709, ch. iii, p. 18; Petty, _Essays in Political Arithmetic_,
ed. 1699, p. 178; Torrens M'Cullagh, as cited, ii, 26, 113-15, 270-71;
M'Culloch, _Treatises_, p. 350. English corn was frequently exported to
the Low Countries, as against imported textiles, in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries and early in the fifteenth (Macpherson, _Annals of
Commerce_, i, 561, 644).]
[Footnote 733: Keymor, _Observations on the Dutch Fishing about the year
1601_, reprinted in _The Phoenix_, 1707, i, 223, 225; Temple,
_Observations upon the United Provinces_, cc. iii, vi (1814 ed. of
_Works_, i, 127, 163).]
[Footnote 734: Cp. De Witt, pp. 15, 16; Torrens M'Cullagh, _Industrial
History_, ii, 36, 37, 46, 59; Grattan, _Netherlands_, p. 18; Blok, as
above cited.]
[Footnote 735: As to the earlier development of the Flemish cities, cp.
Blok, _Geschiedenis_, as cited, ii, 3; Eng. tr. i, 252; A. Wauters, _Les
libertés communales_, Bruxelles, 1878, p. 746 and _passim_.]
[Footnote 736: Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, i, p. 15.]
[Footnote 737: See the charter of Middelburg in 1217, quoted by Motley,
p. 19, and by Davies, i, 65.]
[Footnote 738: Davies, _History of Holland_, i, 26.]
[Footnote 739: Cp. David, _Manuel_, p. 217; Wauters, _Les libertés
communales_, pp. 36, 287; Van Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i,
141, 142.]
[Footnote 740: M'Cullagh, ii, 42.]
[Footnote 741: De Witt (_i.e._ Delacourt), however, gives the priority
to Flanders (_Mémoires_, as cited, pt. i. ch. viii, p. 34).]
[Footnote 742: The majority of the serfs seem to have been freed about
1230; and by 1300 the chiefs of the gilds were "more powerful than the
nobles" (Grattan, p. 35; cp. p. 38, and Blok, as before cited).]
[Footnote 743: Cp. David, _Manuel_, pp. 78-88.]
[Footnote 744: De Witt, as cited, pp. 34, 35; M'Cullagh, p. 66; Grattan,
p. 38.]
[Footnote 745: David, _Manuel_, pp. 142, 143; Grattan, p. 38.]
[Footnote 746: David, pp. 154-57.]
[Footnote 747: De Witt, p. 35; M'Cullagh, p. 67.]
[Footnote 748: David, _Manuel_, p. 158.]
[Footnote 749: _Id._ p. 107.]
[Footnote 750: Grattan. p. 43.]
[Footnote 751: Earle, _Philology of the English Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 8,
9.]
[Footnote 752: On this and previous floods see Blok, _Geschiedenis_, i,
313, 314; tr. i, 209, 210; Davies, vol. i, note C.]
[Footnote 753: Motley, p. 20.]
[Footnote 754: Cp. David, pp. 77, 78, 85, 92, 99, 101, 105, 108, 149;
Motley, pp. 24, 28, 29; Grattan, pp. 42, 44, 46, 50, 54, 64.]
[Footnote 755: The town of Hoorn seems to have been virtually ruined by
the punitive exactions of Charles the Bold (Davies, i, 269, 312).]
[Footnote 756: David, p. 94.]
[Footnote 757: Davies, i, 314.]
[Footnote 758: Motley, pp. 28-30.]
[Footnote 759: Largely through the union between Spain and England under
the Tudor kings (Grattan, p. 66).]
[Footnote 760: Robertson, _Charles V_, b. vi; Motley, _Rise_. Histor.
Introd. § 11.]
[Footnote 761: Motley, p. 60, notes that the numbers have been put often
at fifty thousand, and sometimes even at a hundred thousand; but this,
as he admits, is incredible.]
[Footnote 762: And still the rhetorical historian, sworn to maintain the
Teutonic character for "liberty," declaims in his elementary manner that
that has been seen to be the "master passion" of the race from Cæsar's
time to Charles's (Motley, p. 49; compare pp. 25-29).]
[Footnote 763: Cited by Puffendorf, _Introduction to the History of
Europe_, Eng. tr. 7th ed. 1711, i, 240.]
[Footnote 764: Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. vi, ed. cited, p. 495;
Armstrong, as cited, pp. 78-82.]
[Footnote 765: Armstrong, as cited, pp. 83, 84.]
[Footnote 766: Motley, _Rise_, p. 138.]
[Footnote 767: _Id._ pp. 138, 139; Grattan, p. 87.]
[Footnote 768: Ullmann, _Reformers before the Reformation_, Eng. tr.
1855, ii, 14-17, 172-77.]
[Footnote 769: Cp. Hooker, _Ecclesiastical Polity_, Pref. ch. viii, §
12.]
[Footnote 770: Motley, _Rise_, p. 36.]
[Footnote 771: See it analysed in Motley, pp. 134, 135.]
[Footnote 772: Asked by his viceregent Margaret of Parma to introduce
the Spanish Inquisition, he pointed out that already "the Inquisition of
the Netherlands is much more pitiless than that of Spain" (Motley, p.
174; cp. p. 81).]
[Footnote 773: It was an old source of income (Davies, i, 617; cp.
Motley, p. 78).]
[Footnote 774: "The aristocracy of the Netherlands was excessively
extravagant, dissipated, and already considerably embarrassed in
circumstances" (Motley, p. 129; cp. pp. 125, 130, 131).]
[Footnote 775: Cp. Grattan, p. 106; Motley, as last cited.]
[Footnote 776: See the admissions of Motley, p. 131.]
[Footnote 777: Motley, p. 125.]
[Footnote 778: See Davies, ii, 149, 150, for a criticism of William's
development, worth considering as against the unmixed panegyric of
Motley.]
[Footnote 779: Cp. M'Cullagh, p. 211.]
[Footnote 780: Motley, pp. 462-67, 506, 527, 829.]
[Footnote 781: Van Kampen, i, 512. Camden (_Hist. of Elizabeth_, trans.
3rd ed. 1635, p. 369) states that Parma was unready to sail when called
upon, but adds that the Dutch ships of war lay so placed that he "could
not put from shore."]
[Footnote 782: While Charles V spoke all the languages of his empire,
Philip spoke only Spanish. Motley, p. 74. See the notes for a sample of
his cast of mind.]
[Footnote 783: Davies, ii, 199.]
[Footnote 784: M'Culloch (_Treatises_, p. 347) states that even in its
prosperous period Antwerp had little shipping of its own. He refers to
Guicciardini's _Descrizzione_, but I cannot trace the testimony; and
Guicciardini, while speaking of the multitudes of foreigners always at
Antwerp (French tr. ed. 1625, fol. p. 114), mentions that the population
included a great number of mariners (p. 95).]
[Footnote 785: Grattan, pp. 232, 233, 237; Davies, ii, 452-65, etc.;
Motley, _United Netherlands_, ed. 1867, iv, 537.]
[Footnote 786: Van Kampen, ii, 35.]
[Footnote 787: _Id._ p. 37.]
[Footnote 788: _Id._ p. 36.]
[Footnote 789: Motley, _Rise_, p. 149; Prescott, _Philip II_, ed. cited,
p. 659.]
[Footnote 790: Davies, ii, 304; Watson, _Hist. of Reign of Philip II_,
ed. 1839, p. 527, citing Grotius, lib. v. In 1600, however, Philip III
seems to have either acknowledged the debt to Genoa or borrowed anew to
a large amount; and at his death he is said to have doubled the debt
(Howell, _Epistolæ Ho-elianæ_, ed. Bennett, 1891, i, 138).]
[Footnote 791: Davies, ii, 32, 33. Cp. G. Brandt, _History of the
Reformation in the Low Countries_, Eng. tr. 1720, folio, bk. xi, i,
310.]
[Footnote 792: Cp. Motley, _Rise_, pp. 581, 646; _United Netherlands_,
iv, 558; M'Cullagh, p. 206 (where the chronology is inaccurate).]
[Footnote 793: See Motley, _Rise_, pp. 37, 38, as to the curtailment of
clerical wealth in the Netherlands from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
centuries by the feudal superiors, who, unlike their over-lords, did not
need to look to the Church for support.]
[Footnote 794: Grattan, p. 69; Davies, i, 294.]
[Footnote 795: Cp. the _Mémoires de Jean De Witt_, as cited, p. 101,
ptie. ii, ch. 2.]
[Footnote 796: Grattan, p. 71.]
[Footnote 797: Davies, ii, 636. Already at the death of Charles V the
debt of the entire Netherlands was five or six million florins. At the
armistice of 1609 the debt of the province of Holland alone was
twenty-six millions. By 1648 the war was reckoned to have cost Spain in
all fifteen hundred millions. M'Cullagh, ii, 330, 331.]
[Footnote 798: Davies, ii, 290.]
[Footnote 799: Of 250 Dutchmen who sailed, however, only 90 returned.]
[Footnote 800: _Description des Pays Bas_, ed. 1625, p. 319.]
[Footnote 801: Davies, ii, 328.]
[Footnote 802: _Mémoires de Jean De Witt_, as cited, p. 21.]
[Footnote 803: Davies, ii, 407. The clergy were of the war party.]
[Footnote 804: _Mémoires_ cited, p. 194.]
[Footnote 805: M'Culloch, p. 353; Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_,
1804, ii, 596; Petty, _Essays_, ed. 1699, p. 165; Keymor, _Observations
made upon the Dutch Fishing about 1601_, rep. in _The Phoenix_, 1707,
i, 223.]
[Footnote 806: _Mémoires_ cited, pp. 48, 50.]
[Footnote 807: Davies, iii, 556.]
[Footnote 808: Cp. Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 57.]
[Footnote 809: Latterly the regulations failed to check fraud, and even
hampered trade (M'Culloch, _Treatises_, p. 371). But for a long time the
effect was to sustain the business credit of the Dutch.]
[Footnote 810: Cp. _Mémoires of Jean De Witt_, p. 103, as to
exceptions.]
[Footnote 811: Keymor, as cited, p. 224. Hamburg about the same period,
as Keymor notes, enacted that foreigners should not be allowed to sell
herrings in the port until its own boats had come in and sold theirs.]
[Footnote 812: _Essays in Political Arithmetic_, ed. 1699, p. 170. Cp.
p. 181.]
[Footnote 813: _New Discourse on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 61.]
[Footnote 814: For the years 1605-10, an average of 36 per cent; for
1616, 62-1/2 per cent.]
[Footnote 815: M'Culloch, _Treatises_, pp. 366-67, and refs. It is told
in the _Mémoires de Jean De Witt_ (as cited, p. 52, _note_, ptie. i, ch.
xi) that cargoes of pepper were wilfully sunk near port.]
[Footnote 816: _Mémoires_ cited, pp. 24, 51, 52.]
[Footnote 817: M'Culloch, pp. 368-69. The Dutch ideal being almost
necessarily one of small consumption and accumulation of nominal or
money capital, there was no improvement in the popular standard of
comfort.]
[Footnote 818: _Mémoires_ cited, ptie. i, ch. x, xi, pp. 47, 48, 50.]
[Footnote 819: Motley, _United Netherlands_, iv, 561, 562.]
[Footnote 820: As to the stress of party spirit in Holland about this
period, see Davies, ii, 725, 726.]
[Footnote 821: See hereinafter, pt. vi, ch. ii, § 5.]
[Footnote 822: Davies, ii, 721; Van Kampen, ii, 149. Cp. Temple, _Essay
upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland_, Works, iii, 15, 16.]
[Footnote 823: _Mémoires de Jean De Witt_, ptie. ii, ch. ii, iii (iii,
iv). It is there noted (ch. ii, p. 113) that when in time of war the
States-General gave letters of marque to privateers there were always
bitter complaints that the Dutch privateers took Dutch goods as well as
the enemy's. Again it is asked (p. 163), "What plunder is there for us
to gain at sea when we are almost the only traffickers?"]
[Footnote 824: It is to be noted that De Witt diverged fatally from the
doctrine of his friend Delacourt in thus leaning to foreign alliances,
which Delacourt altogether opposed. See Lefèvre Pontalis, _Jean De
Witt_, 1884, i, 317-18, where an interesting account of the _Mémoires_
is given.]
[Footnote 825: Davies, iii, 68, 69; Rogers, _Holland_, p. 266. Temple
was of course the unconscious instrument of the treachery of Charles.
Cp. Lefèvre Pontalis, _Jean De Witt_, i, 451-55.]
[Footnote 826: See the Declaration and the Dutch reply, printed in 1674,
reprinted in _The Phoenix_, 1707, i, 271 _sq._]
[Footnote 827: Cp. Child, _New Discourse of Trade_, 4th ed. pref. pp.
xx-xxv; Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. pp. 28, 47-57.]
[Footnote 828: Cp. Grattan, p. 75.]
[Footnote 829: "Never any country traded so much and consumed so little;
they buy infinitely, but it is to sell again." "They furnish infinite
luxury, which they never practise, and traffic in pleasures which they
never taste" (Temple, _Observations_, 1814 ed. of _Works_, i, 176). Cp.
Motley, _United Netherlands_, iv, 559. Sometimes the citizens were taxed
fifty per cent on their incomes.]
[Footnote 830: M'Culloch's dictum that the low rate of interest in
Holland was wholly due to heavy taxation is an evident fallacy, framed
in the interest of _laissez-faire_.]
[Footnote 831: It was a common saying at Amsterdam in the seventeenth
century that every dish of fish was paid for once to the fisherman and
six times to the State. As early as 1619 taxes on goods were nearly
equal to their wholesale price (Howell, letter of May 1, 1619, in
_Epistolæ Ho-elianæ_, Bennett's ed. 1891, vol. i, 27). See _La Richesse
de Hollande_, 1778, ii, 21-42, for details of the extraordinary
multiplication of Dutch taxes from the war-period onwards. In Temple's
time a common fish-sauce paid thirty different duties (_Observations_,
in _Works_, i, 187). And still taxes increased. Cp. Smith, _Wealth of
Nations_, M'Culloch's ed. 1839, pp. 396, 397, 411.]
[Footnote 832: So Seeley, _Expansion of England_, p. 132.]
[Footnote 833: See the Dissertation drawn up on this occasion (1750),
Eng. tr. 1751. It is largely quoted from by M'Culloch, _Treatises_, pp.
354-62.]
[Footnote 834: Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 51.]
[Footnote 835: Laing, _Notes of a Traveller_, 1842, p. 15.]
[Footnote 836: Rogers, _Holland_, pp. 362, 363.]
[Footnote 837: Rogers, p. 365.]
[Footnote 838: See Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iv, ch. v, as to the
British encouragement of fisheries in the eighteenth century.]
[Footnote 839: Crawford, _Eastern Archipelago_, iii, 388; (cited by
M'Culloch, p. 365); Temminck, _Possessions Néerlandaises dans l'Inde
Archipelagique_, 1847-49, iii, 202-11.]
[Footnote 840: M'Culloch, p. 363.]
[Footnote 841: _Wealth of Nations_, bk. ii, ch. v, _end_.]
[Footnote 842: Keymor, _Observations on the Dutch Fishing_, in _The
Phoenix_, as cited, p. 231.]
[Footnote 843: _Epistolæ Ho-elianæ_, Bennett's ed. 1891, i, 25.]
[Footnote 844: Child, _New Discourses of Trade_, 4th ed. p. 88. Cp.
Menzel, _Gesch. der Deutschen_, cap. 491, _note_, citing Browne's work
of 1668.]
[Footnote 845: _Notes of a Traveller_, p. 10.]
[Footnote 846: As to these see Motley, _Rise_, pp. 46-48. He admits that
they were set up by French culture-contacts. But cp. Grattan, p. 75.]
[Footnote 847: Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 249.]
[Footnote 848: _Id._ iv, 1.]
[Footnote 849: Cp. Biedermann, as cited in the author's _Buckle and his
Critics_, pp. 169-73.]
[Footnote 850: Van Kampen, i, 608, 609.]
[Footnote 851: Her works were issued in 1528, 1540, and 1567.]
[Footnote 852: Cp. Mr. Gosse's article on Dutch literature, in _Ency.
Brit._ 10th ed. vol. xii.]
[Footnote 853: As to this see Cerisier, vi, 267.]
[Footnote 854: Van Kampen, i, 607, 608; ii, 106; Motley, _United
Netherlands_, iv, 570.]
[Footnote 855: Wenzelburger, i, 54.]
[Footnote 856: Motley, _United Netherlands_, iv, 556.]
[Footnote 857: At 1829 it was only 2,613,487.]
[Footnote 858: Some of course were destroyed by various causes. Rubens's
"Descent from the Cross" at Antwerp, though repeatedly retouched, was
ruined when Reynolds saw it; but the number of good pictures preserved
in the Low Countries is immense.]
[Footnote 859: In 1833 there were 2,270,959 hectares of land = 8,768
square miles. In 1877 there were 3,297,268 hectares = 12,731 square
miles--the result of systematic reclamation from sea and river.]
[Footnote 860: Population in 1897 slightly over 5,000,000; at the end of
1910, 5,945,155.]
[Footnote 861: Compare, however, the verdict of Laing, cited above, p.
325.]
[Footnote 862: An increase of some seven millions since 1900.]
[Footnote 863: Chief crops rye, oats, potatoes.]
[Footnote 864: The clear exports are chiefly margarine, butter, cheese,
sugar, leather, paper, manufactured woollen and cotton cloths, flax,
vegetables, potato-flour, oxen, and sheep. In 1891 Great Britain
imported from the Netherlands £3,093,595 worth of margarine and £770,460
worth of butter; in 1909, £2,782,636 worth and £843,318 worth
respectively; while sugar stood at £2,043,724. Oil seed rose from
£345,210 in 1909 to £721,266 in 1910; and condensed milk in the latter
year stood at £795,937.]
[Footnote 865: Increases of 5,000 men and 1,300 boats since 1900.]
[Footnote 866: An increase of 143 since 1900.]
[Footnote 867: An increase of 2,206 (over 100 per cent.) since 1891.]
[Footnote 868: This source of wealth, as we have seen, was much
curtailed in the eighteenth century by British competition. Laing
(_Notes_, pp. 7, 8) shows how small it had become at his time, but is
quite mistaken in assuming that it had never been great.]
[Footnote 869: About 60 per cent. of the revenue is from Government
produce and monopolies.]
[Footnote 870: The communes make provision only where charity does not;
there is no poor-rate.]
CHAPTER V
SWITZERLAND
The best general history of Switzerland available in English is Mr.
E. Salisbury's translation (1899) of the _Short History_ of Prof.
Dändliker. It has little merit as literature, but is abreast of
critical research at all points. For the Reformation period, the
older history of Vieusseux (Library of Useful Knowledge, 1840) is
fuller and better, though now superseded as to early times. The
work of Sir F.O. Adams and C.D. Cunningham on _The Swiss
Confederation_, 1880 (translated and added to in French by M.
Loumyer, 1890), is an excellent conspectus, especially for
contemporary Swiss institutions. As regards the first half of the
last century, Grote's _Seven Letters concerning the Politics of
Switzerland_ (1847, rep. 1876) are most illuminating.
Of fuller histories there are several in French and German. The
longer _Geschichte der Schweiz_ of Prof. Dändliker (1884-87) is
good and instructive, though somewhat commonplace in its thinking.
Dierauer's _Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft_
(1887), which stops before the Reformation period, is excellent so
far as it goes, and gives abundant references, which Dändliker's
does not; though his _Short History_ gives good bibliographies.
Zschokke's compendious _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_ (9te
Aufgabe, 1853) is lucid and very readable, but is quite uncritical
as to the medieval period. That is critically and decisively dealt
with in Rilliet's _Les Origines de la Confédération Suisse_, 1868,
and in Dierauer.
In more than one respect, the political evolution of Switzerland is the
most interesting in the whole historic field. The physical basis, the
determinations set up by it, the reactions, the gradual control of bias,
the creation of stability out of centrifugal forces--all go to form the
completest of all political cases.[871] Happier than those of Greece, if
less renowned, the little clans of Switzerland have passed through the
storms of outer and inner strife to a state of something like assured
republican federation. And where old Greece and Renaissance Italy and
Scandinavia have failed to attain to this even on the basis of a common
language and "race," the Swiss Cantons have attained it in despite of a
maximum diversity of speech and stock. As does Japan for Asia, they
disprove for Europe a whole code of false generalisations.
The primary fact in the case, as in that of Greece, is the physical
basis. Like Hellas, the Swiss land is "born divided"; and the first
question that forces itself is as to how the Cantons, while retaining
their home rule, have contrived to escape utterly ruinous inter-tribal
strife, and to attain federal union. The answer, it speedily appears,
begins with noting the fact that Swiss federation is a growth or
aggregation, as it were, from a primary "cell-form." From the early
confederation of the three Forest Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, and
Unterwalden, a set of specially congruous units, led to alliance by
their original isolation from the rest of Helvetia and their common
intercourse through the Lake of Lucerne, came the example and norm for
the whole. The primary influence of mere land-division is proved by the
persistence of the cantonal spirit and methods to this day;[872] but the
history of Switzerland is the history of the social union gradually
forced on the Cantons by varying pressures from outside. That it is due
to no quality of "race" is sufficiently proved by the fact that three or
four languages, and more stocks, are represented in the Republic at this
moment.
§ 1. _The Beginnings of Union_
In the union of the Forest Cantons, as in the rooting of several Swiss
cities and the cultivation of remote valleys, the Church has been held
to have played a constructive part. At the outset, according to some
historians,[873] Schwytz and Uri and Unterwalden had but one church
among them; hence a habit of congregation. But the actual records yield
no evidence for this view, any more than for the other early dicta as to
the racial distinctness of the people of the Forest Cantons, and their
immemorial freedom. Broadly speaking, the early Swiss were for the most
part serfs with customary rights. The first documentary trace of them is
in the grant by Louis of Germany to the convent at Zurich, in the year
853, of his _pagellus Uroniae_, with its churches, houses, serfs, lands,
and revenues.[874] This did not constitute the whole of the Canton; but
it seems clear that the bulk of the population were in status serfs,
though when attached to a royal convent they would have such privileges
as would induce even freemen to accept the same state of
dependence.[875] In the Canton of Schwytz, again, the people--there in
larger part freemen--seem to have been always more or less at strife
with the great monastery of Einsiedeln, founded about 946 by Kaiser
Otto, and largely filled by men of aristocratic birth seeking a quiet
life,[876] who held by the usual interests of their class as well as
their corporation.[877] It was a question of ownership of pastures, the
main economic basis in that region; and the descendants of the early
settlers were fighting for their subsistence. Unterwalden, finally (then
known only as the higher and lower valleys, _Stanz_ or _Stannes_ and
_Sarnen_ or _Sarnon_), was led in its development by Uri and Schwytz,
each of which possessed some communal property, the former in respect of
its beginnings as a royal domain, the latter in respect of the
association of its freemen.
Whatever earlier combinations there may have been,[878] it is in the
year 1291[879] that the first recorded pact was made between the three
Cantons; and it arose out of their making a stand for their customary
local rights as against the House of Hapsburg.[880] Uri had in 1231 been
granted by King Henry VII of Germany, son of the emperor Frederick II,
the cherished privilege of enrolment as an imperial fief, an act which
in theory withdrew it from its former feudal subordination to the Count
of Hapsburg; and in 1240 Frederick himself gave the same privilege to
Schwytz.[881] On the unhinging of the imperial system after Frederick's
death, the Hapsburgs, who even in his life had treated the Cantons as
contumacious vassals, fought for their own claims; whereupon in due
course was formed the Pact of 1291. Thus the Swiss Confederation broadly
began in the special strife which arose between the new order of higher
feudal princes and the civic or rural communes on the disintegration of
the Germanic empire in the thirteenth century.[882] The familiar story
of William Tell and the oath-taking at Rütli or Grütli in 1308 appears
to be pure myth. There is no historic mention till over a hundred years
later of any such acts by the Austrian bailiff as that story turns upon,
or of any strife whatever in 1308. A pact of confederation had actually
been made seventeen years earlier than that date; and a new and rather
more definite pact was made on the same general grounds in 1315; but the
romance of 1308 remains entirely unattested, and it bears the plainest
marks of myth.
The histories of J. von Müller, Zschokke, Vieusseux, and others of
the first half of the nineteenth century, are vitiated as regards
the early period by acceptance of the traditions; though the
untrustworthiness of the Tell story had been pointed out as early
as the year 1600 by Franz Guillimann of Fribourg, and again in the
eighteenth century by Iselin, and by Freudenberger in his
_Guillaume Tell: Fable danoise_, 1760. (See Dändliker's _Short
History of Switzerland_, Eng. tr. 1899, pp. 53, 54.) A full and
decisive examination of it will be found in Rilliet's _Les origines
de la Confédération Suisse_, 1868. Compare Dierauer, _Geschichte
der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft_, 1887, Buch ii, Kap. i, §
iii; Cox, _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_, ed. 1882, pp. 337-41,
and the essay _William Tell_ in Baring-Gould's _Curious Myths of
the Middle Ages_, 1888. Some very judicial attempts have been made
to show that there is reason to think _some_ fighting occurred in
1308. See, for instance, the pamphlets _Le Grütli_ and _La querelle
sur les traditions concernant l'origine de la Confédération
Suisse_, by Prof. H. Bordier, in reply to Prof. Rilliet, 1869.
Dierauer, again, declines to go the whole way in negation, and
stands for the view "not fable, but legend--on some basis of fact"
(as cited, i, 150). But even M. Bordier reduces Tell to a mere
"somebody"; and every student surrenders the apple story, which is
at least as old as the twelfth-century Danish version of it in Saxo
Grammaticus.
M. Rilliet holds that the Swiss reproduction was not a local
survival of the Teutonic myth, but a deliberate adaptation made in
Lucerne from the abridgment of Saxo Grammaticus produced by a
German monk, Gheysmer, about 1430 (_Les origines_, pp. 214-16, 327,
328). At Lucerne there was a local school of poetry of the kind
then common in Holland; and the old ballad, which closely follows
Saxo's tale, and which is the probable basis of the story as given
in the later chronicles, seems to have been composed by way of
securing for the Canton of Uri the main honours of the founding of
the Confederation, which were being claimed by the sister Cantons.
Whatever be the basis, the Tell legend is finally untenable, and
the tradition of an immemorial state of freedom in the Forest
Cantons is abandoned even by the conservative critics. See Bordier,
_La querelle_, p. 7. The only point on which a case against the
criticism of M. Rilliet seems to be made out is as regards his view
that the Forest Cantons were not colonised before the eighth
century. As M. Bordier contends, the grant of Louis of Germany
seems to describe a long-settled district. M. Rilliet also goes
somewhat beyond the evidence in assuming that Uri was mainly
colonised under royal influence, Unterwalden by lay and
ecclesiastical proprietors, and Schwytz by freemen (_Les origines_,
pp. 20, 21).
The rise of a durable federation in the central Swiss group is thus a
product of three main factors; the first being their primary physical
union through the Lake of Lucerne, their common highway. But for this
they would probably have been as hostile as were Uri and Glarus, which
had fought from time immemorial.[883] Next was needed the chronic
hostile pressure of an outside force, creating a common political
interest. The septs of pre-Norman Ireland and England, and of the
Scottish Highlands down till modern times, remained at strife long after
Christianisation, because within their own country they were so free to
struggle, and because the examples of forcible centralisation elsewhere
were so remote and so hard to assimilate. But when the Forest Cantons
emerge as such in history in the thirteenth century they are already
menaced by a power which, without undertaking or compassing the toil of
conquering them, habitually drives them to formal combination by its
interference. Its continued pressure evolves the definite political
agreement of 1315, after the victory of Morgarten, in which was made
clear the special difficulty of conquering a race of mountaineers with
the normal cavalry forces and armour-clad or servile infantry of
medieval feudalism[884]--a difficulty which must rank as the third
factor in the beginnings of Swiss independence.
Thus far the half-feudal, half-commercial city of Lucerne, though in
touch with the Forest Cantons through the uniting lake, was their enemy,
as being feudatory of the Hapsburgs; but as the chronic state of war was
ruinous to its trade with Italy, and peculiarly harassing to all
industry, the commercial element forced a coalition, and in 1332 Lucerne
joined the Confederation as Fourth Canton. Now emerges in the affairs
of the Confederation the element of civic class strife, so familiar in
the republics of Italy; for the accession of Lucerne is promptly
followed in that city by a conspiracy of nobles, which is put down by
the help of the allied Cantons; whereupon the nobles are exiled and a
civic council set up, the Duke of Austria being unable to hinder. The
same trouble arises in the case of Zurich, the next accession to the
union. In the ordinary medieval course there had there arisen an
oligarchic government of aristocratic citizens in place of the early
dominion of the Abbess; and the city was made an imperial fief by
Frederick II. On this basis it made commercial treaties in the manner
then common among the cities of Germany, joining the Swabian, Rhenish,
and South-German Leagues, and developing a large trade with Italy and
Germany, and even a silk manufacture. At length the large craftsman
class revolted (1336) under the leadership of a dissentient patrician,
Brun or Braun, who established a constitution in which he as burgomaster
held office for life, with a council of thirteen gildmasters and
thirteen aristocrats, six of the latter being named by Brun. For the
firm support of the gilds he duly paid them by laws checking foreign
competition in manufactured goods, and denying even to the rural
population the right to manufacture. The dispossessed oligarchs kept up
a raiding strife on the frontiers, till at length some who were
permitted to return formed a conspiracy against the burgomaster, which
he suppressed with slaughter. This leading to a league against the city
among the Hapsburgs and the surrounding nobles and the Cantons in treaty
with them, Zurich petitioned to join the Forest Confederation, and was
readily accepted (1351), finally triumphing by their help.
Zurich on its part enabled the Forest Cantons to protect themselves
against Austria by conquering Glarus (1351), which offered little
resistance, and was ranked as a protected territory under the
Confederation. This now formed a compact territorial group save for the
Canton of Zug, intervening between Lucerne and Zurich. As that could not
defend itself against its neighbours, it joined their Confederation
perforce (1352), being received as a full member. The same status was
readily granted to the city of Berne, which, imperially enfranchised in
1218, had carried on a remarkable independent policy on Italian lines,
acquiring territory from the decaying nobles around by mortgage,
purchase, and conquest, till in 1339 they combined against her. Succour
was then given by the Forest Cantons, securing for Berne the victory of
Laupen; and when in 1352 they invited her to join their union, her
rulers accepted. So tepid, however, was still the spirit of union that
at the Peace of Brandenburg in 1352, confirmed by that of Regensburg in
1355, Glarus and Zug consented to withdraw, returning for a time to the
Austrian allegiance;[885] and the confederation of the remaining six
Cantons was still one of the loosest cohesion, differing only in the
fact of its territorial continuity and its organic growth from the many
city-unions which flourished in Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.[886] Only the three original Cantons were pledged to make no
separate treaties; Zurich was specifically permitted to do so; in 1352
Berne was in alliance with the towns of Fribourg and Soleure; in the
next generation Lucerne made a compact with the towns of Sempach and
Richensee; and in 1393 a burgomaster of Zurich carried through a treaty
of alliance with the common enemy, the Duke of Austria.
In this case the mass of the citizens were induced to reverse the policy
and banish those who had planned it; but the right of the city to make
such an alliance was not technically challenged by the Confederation;
and even in Schwytz a few loyalists paid old feudal dues to Austria up
till 1394. A more serious ground of division was the jealousy duly
arising between the rural and the city Cantons, from which came about
the forcible intervention of Schwytz in a dispute between the town and
country sections of Zug. The remaining Cantons insisted on subjecting
the action of both Zug and Schwytz to the verdict of the union, thus
effectually establishing a precedent of federal practice; but in the
first decade of the fifteenth century the Cantons of Schwytz and Glarus
are found on their own account helping the men of Appenzell to win their
independence; and when the successful Appenzellers, who had developed a
turn for aggression and confiscation, sought to join the union, they
were accepted only as allies by the Cantons individually, Berne holding
aloof. Yet again, when the house of Austria (which had abandoned its
claims on the Cantons in 1412) was under the ban of the Empire in 1415,
and the city Cantons led a movement of attack upon its territories, Uri
and the Appenzellers took no part; while in 1422 Uri and Unterwalden
acted alone in their unsuccessful war with the Duke of Milan.
Thus far the Confederation, in its different degrees of union, had
included only German-speaking Cantons; but in 1420 the French-speaking
Valais (Ger. Wallis, from the Latin _Vallis Poenina?_ or foreigners),
in 1424 Upper Rhætia, and in the same year the Romance-speaking Engadin,
also in Rhætia, won their virtual independence. In all, three leagues
were formed in Rhætia, forming their own confederation, known as the
Grisons (="the Greys," the _Graubünden_ or Grey Leagues, from the colour
of the peasants' smocks).
As the sphere of self-government widened, new risks of strife arose. All
the while the older Cantons, in particular the cities, had been
acquiring lands in the feudal fashion; and in 1440 a general scramble
for an inheritance in Rhætia evolved first a war between Zurich on the
one hand and Schwytz and Glarus on the other, and next a joint coercion
of Zurich by all the other Cantons. This led to a fresh alliance between
Zurich and Austria, and a new and exceptionally ferocious war, lasting
for four years. Meantime Basle, assailed by the Armagnacs under the
dauphin of France, was succoured by the union and received into
alliance. Next came the Burgundian wars, whereafter, not without much
friction and quarrelling over booty, Soleure (Solothurn) and Fribourg
were taken into the union, and a new pact framed (1481), defining afresh
the general law of the Confederation. Lastly, after the Swabian war, the
last in which the Swiss had to defend themselves against German
aggression, the cities of Basle and Schaffhausen, become self-governing,
were received into the League; and in 1513 Appenzell followed. Thus was
rounded the number of thirteen Cantons, which constituted the Swiss
Confederation till the end of the eighteenth century. They were: Schwytz
(which gradually gave its name to the whole people), Uri, Unterwalden,
Zurich (the "Forest" group), Lucerne, Glarus, Zug, Berne, Fribourg,
Soleure, Basle, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell. Aargau and Thurgau,
conquered in the wars with Austria in 1415 and 1460, remained subject
lands, the property of the allied Cantons; and the Valais and the
Grisons remained outside the union as connections or _Zugewandte_, the
League proper being restricted to German-speaking Cantons. It will be
seen too that the territory of the Confederation remained a compact and
connected mass; the Vaud, the Valais, Ticino, and the Grisons forming a
long band of territory outside.
§ 2. _The Socio-Political Evolution_
The outstanding feature of the Swiss social evolution up to the end of
the fifteenth century is the acquisition of municipal estates by the
chief cities, after the manner of those of Italy. The lead given by
Berne was zealously followed by Zurich[887] and Lucerne, till nearly all
the old feudal lordships around them had fallen into their hands by
purchase, mortgage, or conquest; and by 1477 the Hapsburgs had not a
rood of land left in all Helvetia, even the family castle being lost. It
was impossible that the revenues thus acquired by the cities should fail
in that age to enrich the patrician or ruling class, no matter how
revolutions might alter its membership. Herein lay one of the effective
checks to the growth of the Confederation from 1513 onwards. The rural
Cantons and the aristocratic governments of the cities were alike
disinclined to enfranchise the rural populations they held in feudal
subjection; and the status of the mass of the townspeople and subject
peasantry, though probably better than in France and Germany, was that
of men without political rights,[888] save those secured by feudal or
civic custom.
Nor can it be said that in the pre-Reformation period the flourishing
Swiss cities did much for culture; a main part of the explanation
doubtless being (1) the chronic stress of war, which in such communities
tended to be borne by all classes alike.[889] When the Italian cities
had produced Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; when England had produced
Chaucer; and France the _Roman de la Rose_, Villon, Joinville,
Froissart, and Comines, Switzerland had a literature only of average
German lyrics and a few average medieval chronicles. But the comparison
will be quite misleading if it be not kept in mind (2) that the whole
Swiss population up till 1500 never amounted to a million, and that the
surplus males were being constantly drained off in the fifteenth century
in military service outside of Switzerland. The conditions which made
for military strength and independence were entirely unfavourable to
culture. There remains, however, to be noted in the case of German
Switzerland (3) the fundamental drawback of relative homogeneity of
race. The one important aspect of "race" in sociology is as a statement
of relative lack of intellectual variability; and this condition in
modern Europe can be seen to exist only at certain periods, in the case
of one or two peoples, chiefly the Germanic.
If the whole process of the renascence of civilisation be considered
_seriatim_, it will be found that the growth took place primarily in
virtue of degree of access to (_a_) the remains of Græco-Roman culture
and (_b_) to Saracen lore; and, secondarily, in virtue of degree of
admixture of physical type in the different communities. Thus (1) the
first great new-birth (before the age of the Renaissance so-called) took
place in Italy, in a population already highly mixed at the end of the
Roman period and repeatedly invaded thereafter by northern stocks, from
Odoaker down to the Normans. The reviving Italian culture, being
communicated northwards through the Church and otherwise, is next
developed by (2) the highly-mixed population of France and (3) that of
England after the Norman Conquest--the Welsh element being here
prominent. At the same time the literary germination set up in (4)
ancient Ireland, under stormy conditions, by the early missionaries of
the Græco-Roman Church, reaches after some centuries the Scandinavian
peoples by way of the Hebrides and (5) Iceland, where, however, after a
brilliant start, the evolution is arrested by the restrictive
environment, the main body of Scandinavian life being too homogeneous
(though constantly at strife) for any complex evolution. In the south,
again, the populations of (6) Spain and Portugal, mixed to begin with in
the Roman period and later crossed by Teutonic invasion, became
specially capable of variation after the subdual of the Moors, whose
reaction on their conquerors was extensive and important.
All this while the Teutonic stocks in their old homes are noticeably
backward, save where, as in (7) the Netherlands, they are in constant
contact with other peoples on land and by sea. Culture begins to be at
once original and brilliant in the Netherlands only in the period after
(_a_) special contact with Spain and (_b_) the large immigration of
Protestant refugees from other countries. At first strongly influenced
by classical scholarship, it is later affected by the influence of
France and England. All the more strictly Teutonic cultures were either
unprogressive or similarly vitalised from without; and Germany, after
the Thirty Years' War, begins almost afresh with an academic literature
in Latin, to be followed by new native developments only on French and
English stimuli.[890] But it is specially significant that (8) the
German renascence of the eighteenth century takes place after (_a_) the
large influx of French Protestant refugees at the end of the
seventeenth, and after (_b_) a fresh influx of French taste, French
teachers, and French literature under Frederick the Great, in whose
armies, it should be remembered, there fought no fewer than nine
generals of French Protestant descent, as well as others of alien
heredity.
The case of Switzerland is thus on this side tolerably clear. Swiss
intellectual life, long primitively Teutonic, begins to become notable
only at the period of the Reformation, when for the merely diplomatic
and military and commercial contacts of the past there is substituted a
fresh differentiation and interaction from Italian, French, and German
Protestantism--a new intellectual impulse--and from the influx of
refugees, as in Holland. And the French-speaking city of Geneva, not yet
a member of the Confederation, at once takes the lead. The Teutonic
population, from the fifteenth century onwards, had in large numbers
sought subsistence in mercenary soldiership. It was the medieval
analogue to the emigration of to-day, the opening even serving to
curtail the agricultural and pastoral life;[891] but the result, by the
common consent of historians,[892] was disastrous to the higher life at
home, the returning mercenaries being in many cases spoilt for steady
industry, rural or civic. Their military success and prestige in fact
tended to demoralise the Swiss as the success of Hellas against Persia
tended to demoralise Athens, making them, in the words of Aristotle,
unfitted to rest. Dwelling on past patriotic glories is never the way to
discipline the mental life; and the Swiss militia of the end of the
fifteenth century, wont to sell their services as fighters to French and
Italians, often thus opposing each other, and otherwise wont to
interpose arrogantly in other people's concerns,[893] were not on the
line of social or intellectual progress. Pensions to leading men from
the French and Italian courts wrought a further and even more sinister
corruption. But after their defeat by Francis I in 1516 at the desperate
battle of Marignano, becoming allies of France, the Swiss ceased to play
the part of holders of the balances between contending neighbours; and
after their heavy share in the loss of Francis at the battle of Pavia
they grew for a time loth even to play the part of auxiliaries on a
national footing, though individual enlistment continued. It is at this
stage that the Reformation supervenes, creating a new source of strife
between Canton and Canton, and so paralysing the Confederation for
centuries.
Nowhere is the study of the process of the Reformation more instructive,
more subversive of the conventional Protestant view, than in the case of
Switzerland. In the first place, it is not the old Forest Cantons, with
their ingrained independence and "Teutonic conscience," that do the
work. They remained obstinately Catholic. Swiss Protestantism, under the
independent lead of Zwingli, began indeed in Glarus and Schwytz, but
became an effective movement only in the city of Zurich, and it is
notable that in the primitive and poor Canton of Uri[894] there was as
little buying of indulgences as there was heresy. The two phenomena went
together in the richer Cantons, where the common desire to buy pardons
evoked the protest against them. Indeed, the special traffic in
indulgences in Germany and Switzerland, and the special laxity of life
of their priesthoods, were concomitants of the special grossness of
German life;[895] for in no other country did the Reformation proceed
nakedly on the basis of protest against indulgence-selling. There the
pardoners shamefully overrode all the official and accepted teaching of
the Church as to indulgences; and the protests of Luther and Zwingli
were properly demands for a reform on strictly orthodox grounds, as
against an abuse which was locally excessive. But it lay in the economic
and political conditions that when a movement of protest began it should
succeed in view rather of the economic and social impulses to break with
Rome than of the spontaneous desire for reform. In Germany in particular
the movement among the upper and educated classes was nakedly financial
as regarded the nobles, and to a large extent the reverse of ascetic
among the scholars, many of whom, however, were much more spontaneously
alive to the doctrinal crudities of the orthodox system than was Luther
himself. It was the facile combination, on socio-political grounds, of
the five forces of (1) moral indignation among the more conscientious
leaders, (2) gain-seeking on the part of nobles and ruling burghers, (3)
racial aversion to Italian priests and Italian revenue-drawing among the
people in general, (4) critical revolt against primitive superstitions
among the more learned, and (5) anti-clerical freethinking and licence
among many who had served in the Italian wars,[896] that made the revolt
proceed so rapidly in Germany and Switzerland. If the mass of the
people, in all save the most primitive Swiss Cantons, were grossly eager
to buy the indulgences so grossly offered by Samson and Tetzel, the
people clearly were not zealous reformers to start with. Of those who
most resented the traffic, many remained steady Catholics.
When, however, it became known that Samson carried away with him from
Switzerland to Italy 800,000 crowns, besides other bullion and jewels,
even the buyers of indulgences could share the general inclination to
stop the enrichment of Italy at Swiss expense. The intellectual revolt
of the educated supplied the basis of the revolution in church
management; but without the accruing financial gains the former could
have availed little; and while there was the usual violence on the part
of the mob, the city authorities were judicious in their procedure. To
the clergy they offered on the one hand freedom to marry, and on the
other hand a provision for life. Thus in Zurich, under the skilful
guidance of Zwingli, the whole chapter of twenty-four canons gave up
their rights and property to the State, becoming preachers, teachers, or
professors with life-allowances: a plan generally followed elsewhere,
save where the parties fell to blows.[897] In Zurich the further steps
were: 1523, ecclesiastical marriages; 1524, pictures abolished and
monasteries dissolved; 1525, mass discontinued.
In French-speaking Geneva, destined to become the leading Swiss city,
the process was more stormy. Having grown to importance under its
bishops, it had been made an imperial city in 1420, thereby finding a
foothold in its resistance to the constant claims of the House of Savoy,
which in 1519 forced it into a defensive alliance with Fribourg. There
were now two Genevan parties, the Savoyards and the republicans, which
latter, imitating Swiss usage, called themselves Eidgenossen, whence the
French corruption _Huguenots_, ultimately applied to the Calvinistic
Protestants of France. Out of the faction strife came the religious,
under the fanning of Farel; and in this case the anti-democratic leaning
of the Savoyards kept the rich pro-Catholic, while the common people
declared for Protestantism. In the end the latter took violent
possession of the churches, destroying the altars and images, whereupon
most of the Catholics fled, the city retaining the clerical lands; and
there immigrated many French, Italian, and Savoyard Protestants. To the
community thus made for him came Calvin in 1537.
Meanwhile, Berne, conquering the Pays de Vaud from the Duke of Savoy,
made it Protestant. Elsewhere, some communes and districts passed and
repassed between Catholicism and Protestantism as neighbouring
influences prevailed; in some districts the peasants, hoping for release
from tithes and taxes, welcomed the revolution, but renounced it when
they found it made no difference to their lot.[898] The magistrates of
Berne were prompt to make it clear that their Protestantism made no
difference as to their tithe-drawing from their rural subjects.[899]
When the period of transformation was over--with its bitter wars, which
cost the life of Zwingli, its manifold exasperations, its Anabaptist
convulsions, its forlorn and foredoomed peasant risings, its severance
of old ties, and its profound impairment of the half-grown spirit of
confederation--it was found that the old Cantons of Lucerne, Uri,
Unterwalden, Schwytz, and Zug stood fast for Catholicism; that Soleure,
after being for a time predominantly Protestant, had joined them, with
Fribourg, making seven Catholic States; that the city Cantons of Berne,
Zurich, Basle, and Schaffhausen were Protestant, as were Geneva and the
Vaud, not yet in the union; and that Glarus and Appenzell were mixed.
The achievement of the landamman OEbly of Glarus, in securing a
peaceful and lasting compromise in his own Canton--the two bodies in
some parishes actually agreeing to use the same church--was beyond the
moral capacity of the mass of the Swiss people, for Appenzell bitterly
divided into two parts, on religious lines. Each of the other Cantons
imposed its ruling men's creed on its subjects. They were still as far
from toleration in religion as from real democracy in politics.
While Protestantism, by dividing the realm of religion, doubtless
wrought indirectly and ultimately for the intellectual freedom of
Europe, it is clear that it had no such result for many generations in
Switzerland. Calvin's rule in Geneva, while associated with a new
activity in printing, chiefly of theological works,[900] became a byword
for moral tyranny and cruelty. To say nothing of the executions of
Servetus and Gruet for heresy, and the expulsions of other men, the
records show that in that small population there were between 800 and
900 persons imprisoned between the years 1542 and 1546, and 58 put to
death; no fewer than 34 being beheaded, hanged, or burned on charges of
sedition in three months of 1545. Torture was freely applied, and any
personal criticism of Calvin was more or less fiercely punished.[901]
The conditions were much the same in Zurich and Berne, where a press
censorship was set up (in Zurich as early as 1523), and zealously
maintained for centuries. It prohibited, under heavy penalties, the sale
of the works of Descartes, and in both places Cartesians were
prosecuted;[902] while in Protestant Switzerland generally the
Copernican theory was denounced as heresy, and the reformed Calendar, as
a work of the Pope, was furiously rejected. So high did passion run that
in Berne and Zurich any who married Catholics were severely
punished.[903] The Zurich criminal calendar of the sixteenth century
gives a sample of the Protestant city life of the period. There were 572
executions in all, 347 persons being beheaded, 61 burned, 55 hanged, 53
drowned. Only 33 were cases of murder; 2 were executed for abuse of
Zwingli, who thus appears to have given a lead to Calvin; 73 for
blasphemy, 56 for bestiality, and 338 for theft[904]--a clear economic
clue.
Broadly speaking, the settled Protestant period was one of relapse alike
from freedom and from union. Class division deepened and worsened
throughout the seventeenth century;[905] the people of the subject lands
were less than ever recognised as having rights,[906] Puritanism taking
to oppression as spontaneously in Switzerland as in England; the
stimulus given to culture and art in the controversial period died away,
leaving retrogression;[907] and in the personal and the intellectual
life alike clerical tyranny was universal.[908] The municipalities
became more and more close corporations, as the gilds had become long
before;[909] and at Berne in 1640 the city treasurer was put to death
for exposing abuses.[910] After the Peasants' War of 1653 the
aristocratic development was still further strengthened, till in Berne,
Soleure, and Fribourg--Catholic and Protestant cities alike--the roll of
burghers was closed (1680-90), Soleure stipulating that it should remain
so till the number of reigning families was reduced to twenty-five.[911]
The practice of taking pensions from France revived, for the old service
of supplying mercenary troops; so that "the Swiss were never more
shamelessly sold to the highest bidder" than in the seventeenth
century.[912] As of old, the municipalities amassed and invested
capital, Catholic Soleure lending great sums to France, while the still
wealthier city of Berne lent money in all directions;[913] but though
they raised handsome public buildings, it was the small ruling class and
not the workers that were enriched. In the rural Cantons even the small
economic advance made at the outset of the Reformation was lost.[914] It
seems difficult to dispute that as a force for social progress the
Reformation was naught.
One factor there was to its credit: the establishment of secondary
schools, which had not previously existed in Switzerland, and the
provision of better common schools;[915] and though the ecclesiastical
and religious forces, as in Scotland, prevented the common schools being
turned to any higher account at home than that of qualifying to read and
write and learn catechisms, even that small tuition gave the Swiss some
advantages in the neighbouring countries. All the while the higher
political evolution went backwards. In 1586 the Catholic Cantons of
Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zug, Fribourg, and Soleure ejected
from the League the Protestant State of Mülhausen; and, ignoring the
laws of the Confederation, proceeded to make a separate offensive and
defensive alliance among themselves, and with Spain and the Pope. As
late as 1656 war broke out between Berne and Schwytz, Lucerne
intervening, over a dispute about Protestant refugees; whereafter the
principle of cantonal sovereignty reigned supreme for a hundred and
forty years. It would seem difficult to maintain, in the face of all the
facts, that Protestantism had made for peace, freedom, or civilisation.
On the other hand, the distribution of Protestantism in the Swiss
Cantons disposes once for all of the theory that the "Teutonic
conscience" or anything else of an ethnic order was the determining
force at the Reformation. A rough conspectus of the language and
religion of the Cantons as at the year 1900 will present the proof to
the contrary:--
-------------------+----------------------------+------------------------
NAME. | LANGUAGE. | RELIGION.
-------------------+----------------------------+------------------------
Berne |Five-sixths German-speaking |Seven-eighths Protestant
Zurich |Nearly all German | " "
Lucerne | " " " |Nearly all Catholic
Vaud |Mostly French dialects |Nine-tenths Protestant
Aargau |Mostly German |Four C. to five P.
St. Gall | " " |Three-fifths Catholic
Ticino |Italian dialects |Nearly all Catholic
Fribourg |Half French, half German |Four-fifths Catholic
Grisons |Half Romansch, three-eighths|Five-ninths Protestant
| German, one-eighth Italian|
Valais |(?) Half German, half French|Nearly all Catholic
Thurgau |Nearly all German |Two-sevenths Catholic
Basle | " " " |One-third Catholic
Soleure |Nearly all German |Three-fourths Catholic
Geneva |Predominantly French |Half-and-half
Neuchâtel | " " |Seven-eighths Protestant
Schaffhausen | " German | " "
Appenzell (Rh. Ext)| " " |Nine-tenths Protestant
" (Rh. Int)| " " |Nearly all Catholic
Glarus |Nearly all German |One-fourth Catholic
Zug | " " " |Nearly all Catholic
Schwytz | " " " | " " "
Unterwalden | " " " | " " "
Uri | " " " | " " "
-------------------+----------------------------+------------------------
Here we have nearly every species of variation in terms of speech and
creed. The one generalisation which appears to hold good to any extent
in the matter is that Catholicism usually goes with an agricultural
economy and Protestantism with manufactures; but here, too, there are
exceptions, as Vaud, which, though Protestant, is predominantly
agricultural or vine-rearing; Glarus, which is mainly pastoral and
Protestant; the Grisons, agricultural and more than half Protestant; and
Geneva, where there is a large minority of Catholics in industrial
conditions. On the whole, we are warranted in assuming that in
Switzerland, as in most other countries, the town workers were the
readiest to innovate in religion; while race, so far as inferrible from
language, had nothing to do with the choice made. What differences of
life accrue to the creeds, as we shall see, depend on their one
important social divergence, that of bias for and against illiteracy.
§ 3. _The Modern Renaissance_
In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the Swiss Confederation
figured as "a weather-beaten ruin, ready to fall."[916] It would be hard
to point out, in the domestic conditions, any that made for beneficent
change, and there were many that rigidly precluded it; but some elements
of variability there were, and from other countries there came the
principle of fertilisation. Theological hatreds and disputations had in
a manner destroyed their own standing-ground by the very stress of their
barren activity; and even while press laws were banning new works of
thought and science, the better minds were secretly yearning towards
them. In cities like Geneva and Basle (the latter then the seat of the
only Swiss university), reason must to some extent have played beneath
the surface while all its open manifestations were struck at. At Basle,
in the old days, Erasmus spent the main part of his life; and he must
have had some congenial intercourse. But it is on the side of the
physical sciences that new intellectual life is first seen to germinate
in post-Reformation Switzerland. There, as elsewhere, inquiring men felt
that nature was kindlier to question than the self-appointed oracles of
Deity, and that the unending search for real knowledge brought more
peace than ever came of the insistence that the ultimate truth was
known. Refugee immigrants, chiefly French, seem to have begun the
ferment; and it is at the hands of their descendants that Swiss science
has grown.[917] Having reason to avoid alike politics and theology in
their new home, and living in many cases on incomes from investments,
they turned to the sciences as occupation and solace.
With this inner movement concurred the new influences from French and
English science and literature, and from the reviving culture of
Germany.[918] With the rest of Europe, too, Switzerland turned in an
increasing degree to industry, and in the latter half of the eighteenth
century had developed many new trades, involving considerable use of
machinery.[919] Agriculture, too, improved,[920] and mercenary
soldiering began to fall into disrepute[921] under the influence of the
new pacific thought. Still the rural economic conditions were bad, and
the country seemed to grow poorer while the towns grew richer.[922] The
population, in fact, constantly tended to exceed the not easily widened
limits of rural subsistence; and in place of foreign soldiering, the old
remedy, there began a peaceful industrial emigration into the
neighbouring countries, Swiss beginning to figure there in increasing
numbers as waiters and servants.[923] All the while the tyranny of the
city aristocracies was unmitigated, and the subject lands were steadily
ill-treated.[924] In Berne, in 1776, only eighteen families were
represented in the Council of Two Hundred; and there and in Zurich and
Lucerne the civic regulations were as flagrantly partial to the ruling
class as in France itself.[925] The new industrial conditions, however,
were gradually preparing a political change; and the intellectual
climate steadily altered. Voltaire tells in many amusing letters of the
spread of Socinian heresy in the city of Calvin. In Geneva arose the
abnormal figure of Jean Jacques Rousseau, descendant of a French refugee
immigrant of Calvin's day; and though his city in 1762 formally burned
his epoch-marking book on the _Contrat Social_, a popular reaction
followed six years later. Democratic disturbances had repeatedly
occurred before; but this time there was a growing force at work. An
insurrection in 1770 was suppressed; another, in 1782, though at first
successful, ended in the overthrow of the popular party by means of
troops from France, Berne, and Zurich; but in the fateful year of 1789
yet another broke out, and this time the tide turned.
With the interference of the French Republic in Switzerland in 1797 on
behalf of the Pays de Vaud, then subject to Berne, began the long
convulsion which broke up the old Confederation and framed a new. In
1798 began the wildly premature attempt of the more visionary
republicans to create a unitary republic out of Cantons which had
retrograded even from the measure of union attained before the
Reformation. It could not succeed; and the rapine inseparable from the
French revolutionary methods could not but arouse an intense resistance,
paralysing the aims of the progressive party. Out of years of miserable
ferocious warfare, ended by Napoleon's withdrawal of the French troops
in 1801, came the new Confederation of 1803, which, however, it needed
the friendly but authoritative mediation of the First Consul to get the
conservative Cantons to accept. For once the despot had secured, in a
really disinterested fashion,[926] what the Revolution ought to have
brought about. The old aristocratic tyrannies were subverted; the
subject lands were freed; to the thirteen Cantons of the old union were
added Aargau, Thurgau, St. Gall, Vaud, and Ticino; through all was set
up a representative system, modified in the towns by a measure of the
old aristocratic element; and the whole possessed what Switzerland never
had before, and could hardly otherwise have attained--a central
parliamentary system. In 1814 Berne would fain have resumed its tyranny
over the Vaud and Aargau, a step which would have initiated a general
return to the old _régime_. The Allies, however, brought about the
completion of the Confederation on the new principles; and by the
addition to its roll of Geneva, Neuchâtel, and the Valais, and the
cession to Berne of the Basle territory formerly annexed by France,
created a compact and complete Switzerland, bounded in natural fashion
by the Alps, the Jura, and the Rhine. And at this period, after so many
vicissitudes, the culture life of Switzerland is found fully abreast of
that of Europe in general. Sismondi, standing apart from France and
Italy, and writing impartially the history of both, is the greatest
historian of his day.
The later history of the Confederation, however, is one of the great
illustrations of the perpetual possibility of strife and sunderance in
communities. Sismondi lived to ban the democracy which would not be
content to be ruled by the middle class. At 1820 the old spirit of class
subsisted under the new institutions; the press was nearly everywhere
under strict censorship; and the ideals which ruled elsewhere on the
Continent seemed even more potent in Switzerland than elsewhere. There,
as elsewhere, the system inevitably bred discontent; and in 1830, on the
revolutionary initiative of Ticino, the most corruptly governed of all
the Cantons, there ensued almost bloodless revolutions in the local
governments, Radicals taking the place of Conservatives, and proceeding
to reform alike administration and education. Then came the due
reaction, the Catholic Cantons forming the League of Sarnen, while the
extremists again pressed the ideal of a military State. Though morally
strong enough to enforce peace in more than one embroilment of Cantons
and parties, the Federal Diet was dangerously weak in the face of the
new forces of religio-political reaction typified by the activity of the
Jesuits, as well as the old trouble of cantonal selfishness, which
affected even the tolls.[927] The resistance to Radicalism became a
movement of clerical fanaticism, led by the cry of "religion in danger";
Catholics using it to foment local insurrections; Protestants,
ecclesiastically led, using it to make a municipal revolution by
violence at Zurich on the occasion of the proposal to give Strauss a
university chair in 1839.[928] But the Jesuits--expelled from nearly
every Catholic State in the eighteenth century, yet latterly cherished
by the Swiss Catholics for their anti-Protestant services--were the
chief mischief-makers; and at length the violences promoted from the
headquarters at Lucerne led to Protestant reprisals which took the shape
of a beginning of civil war. The collapse, however, of the Catholic
"Sonderbund" or Secession-League in 1847, before the resolute military
action of the Diet, marked the turning-point in modern Swiss politics.
In 1848 was framed a new constitution, wholly Swiss-made, creating an
effective Federal government, on a new basis of a Parliament of two
Chambers. Now were definitely nationalised the systems of coinage,
weights and measures, posts and telegraphs; and the Customs system was
made one of complete internal free trade.
On this footing followed "long years of happiness, and a prosperity
without precedent."[929] Yet even this constitution has had to be
revised, to the end of guarding afresh against religious strifes and
conflict of cantonal jurisdictions. In 1872 the centralising reformers
carried in the Chambers a revision of the constitution; but under the
referendum (a specialty of Swiss democracy, instituted in or after 1831
by the Catholic Conservative party in St. Gall, the Valais and Lucerne)
it was rejected by a popular vote of 261,072 citizens to 255,609, and of
thirteen cantons to nine. With a few modifications, however, it was
carried in 1874 by a vote of 340,199 to 198,013, and of 14-1/2 Cantons
to 7-1/2. The whole process is a great lesson as to the superiority of
the methods of peace and persuasion to those of revolution and force.
The referendum itself, first set up locally with the most reactionary
intentions,[930] has come to be valued--whether wisely or unwisely--by
Radicals and Conservatives alike; and while it seems to offer a
possibility of appeals to demotic ignorance and passion[931] while these
subsist, and to be unnecessary where they do not, it is at least a
guarantee of the decisiveness of any great constitutional step taken
under it. Historically speaking, the consummation thus far is a great
democratic achievement, and the whole drift of Federal legislation is
towards an increased stability of union. On the other hand, despite a
characteristic menace from Bismarck,[932] the international position of
Switzerland appears to be as safe as that of any other European State,
great or small. Any attempt on its independence by any one Power would
infallibly be resisted by others.
As regards the true political problems, those of domestic life, the
Swiss case presents the usual elements. From dangerous religious strife
(the Jesuits being excluded) it seems likely to be preserved in future
by the rationalising force of the Socialist movement; but that movement
in turn tells of the social problem. A country of not readily extensible
resources, Switzerland exhibits nearly as clearly as does Holland the
dangers of over-population. The old resource of foreign enlistment being
done with,[933] surplus population forces a continual emigration,
largely from the rural districts, where the lands are for the most part
heavily mortgaged.[934] The active industrialism of the towns--with
their large manufacture of clocks and watches, cottons and
silks--involves a large importation of foreign food, with which native
agriculture cannot advantageously compete. Thus, as in the eighteenth
century, the pinch falls on the country, while the towns are in
comparison thriving. The relatively high death-rate of recent years
raises an old issue. Malthus has told[935] how in the eighteenth century
a panic arose concerning the prudential habits of the population in the
way of late marriages and small families, and how thereafter
encouragements to early marriage had led to much worsening of the lot of
many of the people. With a small birth-rate there had been a small
death-rate; whereas the rising birth-rate went with rising misery.[936]
Perhaps through the influence of his treatise, the movement of demand
for increase of population seems to have died out, and the practice of
prudence to have regained economic credit. It would appear, however,
that within the past half-century the conditions as to population have
again somewhat worsened. At 1850, when nearly half of all the men
married per year in England were under twenty years of age, the normal
marrying age in the Vaud was thirty or thirty-one; and there had existed
in a number of the old Catholic Cantons laws inflicting heavy fines on
young people who married without proving their ability to support a
family.[937] The modern tendency is to abandon such paternal modes of
interference; and it does not appear that personal prudence thus far
replaces them, though on the other hand there was in the first half of
last century a marked recognition by Swiss publicists of the
sociological law of the matter.
Thus M. Edward Mallet of Geneva pointed out before 1850 that the chances
of life had steadily gone on increasing with the lessening of the
birth-rate for centuries back.[938] His tables run:--
----------------------------+--------+---------+-------
LIFE CHANCES. | YEARS. | MONTHS. | DAYS.
----------------------------+--------+---------+-------
| | |
Towards end of 16th century | 8 | 7 | 26
In 17th century | 13 | 3 | 16
In the years 1701-1750 | 27 | 9 | 13
" " 1751-1800 | 31 | 3 | 5
" " 1801-1813 | 40 | 8 | 0
" " 1814-1833 | 45 | 0 | 29
----------------------------+--------+---------+-------
The statistician's summary of the case is worth citing:--
"As prosperity advanced, marriages became fewer and later; the
proportion of births was reduced, but greater numbers of the
infants born were preserved. In the early and barbarous periods the
excessive mortality was accompanied by a prodigious fecundity. In
the last few years of the seventeenth century a marriage still
produced five children and more; the probable duration of life was
not twenty years, and Geneva had scarcely 17,000 inhabitants.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were scarcely three
children to a marriage; and the probability of life exceeded
thirty-two years. At the present time a marriage produces only two
and three-quarter children; the probability of life is forty-five
years; and Geneva, which exceeds 27,000 in population, has arrived
at a high degree of civilisation and material prosperity. In 1836
the population appeared to have attained its summit: the births
barely replaced the deaths."
But in 1910 the population of Geneva (Canton) was 154,159;[939] and the
figures of Swiss emigration--averaging about 5,000 per annum--tell their
own tale. Increasing industrialism, as usual, has meant conjugal
improvidence. Once more the trouble is not smallness of population, but
undue increase.
As Protestantism appears to increase slightly more than Catholicism, no
blame can in this case be laid on the Catholic Church. But in
Switzerland, as elsewhere, Catholicism tends to illiteracy. In the
Protestant cantons the proportion of school-attending children is as one
to five; in the half-and-half Cantons it is as one to seven; and in the
Catholic it is as one to nine. This, and no tendency of race or _direct_
tendency of creed, is the explanation of the relative superiority of
Protestant to Catholic Cantons in point of comfort and freedom from
mendicancy; for the Cantons remarked by travellers for their prosperity
are indifferently French-and German-speaking, while the less prosperous
are either German or mixed.[940] The fact that the three oldest Forest
Cantons are among the more backward is a reminder that past-worship,
there at its height, is always a snare to civilisation. Describing these
cantons over half-a-century ago, Grote spoke severely of "their dull and
stationary intelligence, their bigotry, and their pride in bygone power
and exploits."[941] The reproach is in some measure applicable to other
parts of Switzerland, as to other nations in general; and it must cease
to be deserved before the Republic, cultured and well administered as it
is, can realise republican ideals. But the existing Federation of the
Helvetic Cantons, locally patriotic and self-seeking as they still are,
is a hopeful spectacle--for this among other reasons, that it is a
perpetual reminder of the possibility of federations of States, even at
a stage of civilisation far short of any Utopia of altruism.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 871: "To one whose studies lie in the contemplation of
historical phenomena [the Swiss Cantons] comprise between the Rhine and
the Alps a miniature of all Europe.... To myself in particular they
present an additional ... interest from a certain political analogy
(nowhere else to be found in Europe) with ... the ancient Greeks"
(Grote, _Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland_ [1847],
ed. 1876, pref.).]
[Footnote 872: "What the Cantons mostly stand chargeable with, is the
feeling of cantonal selfishness" (Grote, as cited, p. 20). Compare, in
the work of Sir F.O. Adams and C.D. Cunningham on _The Swiss
Confederation_ (éd. française par Loumyer, 1890, p. 29), the account of
how, after the most fraternal meetings in common of the citizens of the
different Cantons, "each confederate, on returning home, begins to yield
to his old jealousy, and thinks of hardly anything but the particular
interests of his Canton."]
[Footnote 873: Vieusseux, _History of Switzerland_, 1840, p. 39.]
[Footnote 874: Rilliet, _Les origines de la Confédération Suisse_, 1868,
pp. 26-28; Dierauer, _Geschichte der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft_,
1887, i, 84.]
[Footnote 875: Rilliet, pp. 21, 27, 28.]
[Footnote 876: J. von Müller, _Geschichte der schweizerischen
Eidgenossenschaft_, ed. 1824, i, 287.]
[Footnote 877: Müller, i, 288; Rilliet, pp. 39-42. The men of Schwytz
were associated as concurrers with the powerful Counts of Lenzburg in
disputes with the monastery.]
[Footnote 878: It seems just possible that a confederation of tribes
existed in the Alps at the beginning of the fifth century--on the
theory, that is, that the _Bagaudæ_ of that period were so called from a
Celtic word _Bagard_, meaning a cluster. See the editorial note in Bohn
ed. of Gibbon, iii, 379.]
[Footnote 879: Rilliet, pp. 88 _ff._; Dierauer, i, 78.]
[Footnote 880: Having sworn an oath to stand by each other, they called
themselves _Eidgenossen_=Oathfellows, Confederates. The old spellings,
_Eitgnozzen_ and _Eidgnosschaft_ (Dierauer, i, 265, _n._; Dändliker,
_Geschichte der Schweiz_, i, 636--in the old Tell song), show how easily
could arise the later French form "Huguenots."]
[Footnote 881: Dierauer, pp. 85, 90; Rilliet, pp. 50, 67, 68.]
[Footnote 882: Cp. Rilliet, p. 53.]
[Footnote 883: Rilliet, _Origines_, p. 33.]
[Footnote 884: At Morgarten the infantry of the Austrian force was in
large part furnished by the other Germanic towns and Cantons of Zurich,
Winterthur, Zug, Lucerne, Sempach, and Aargau. When the cavalry were
discomfited, the foot would not be very energetic.]
[Footnote 885: This fact, as well as the unequal status of Glarus, was
till recently slurred over in the patriotic tradition. See, for
instance, the account of Vieusseux, _History of Switzerland_, pp. 58-60.
Cp. the results of exact research in Dierauer, i, 217; Dändliker,
_Geschichte der Schweiz_, 1884, i, 480, and _Short History_, Eng. tr.
pp. 62, 63, 68, 69. Zug returned to the Confederation in 1368; Glarus,
as a connection only, in 1387, and as a full member in 1394.]
[Footnote 886: Cp. Dierauer, i, 265, and Freeman, _History of Federal
Government_, ed. 1893, pp. 5, 6.]
[Footnote 887: Zurich alone is said to have spent two million francs in
buying land between 1358 and 1408.]
[Footnote 888: Cp. Zschokke, _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_, Kap. 30,
9te Aufl., p. 147.]
[Footnote 889: Prof. Dändliker, in his _Short History_ (Eng. tr. p. 41),
has the odd expression that "in those times of the surging of party
strife the towns formed a quiet refuge for the cultivation of the
intellectual life." The whole of his own history goes to show that no
such quiet cultivation took place, or could take place.]
[Footnote 890: Cp. the author's _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 160-74.]
[Footnote 891: Zschokke, _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_, 9te Aufl.
1853, p. 149.]
[Footnote 892: Cp. Dändliker, ii, 620, 722; _Short History_, pp. 124,
125, 131; Dierauer, ii, 473; Vieusseux, pp. 119, 124, 211; Zschokke, as
above cited.]
[Footnote 893: Cp. Freeman, _History of Federal Government_, 2nd ed. pp.
272, 273.]
[Footnote 894: Vieusseux, p. 193.]
[Footnote 895: Cp. Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, Kap. 417;
Dändliker, _Geschichte der Schweiz_, ii, 623-26; Zschokke, _Des
Schweizerlands Geschichte_, Kap. 30, p. 148; Vieusseux, p. 118.]
[Footnote 896: On this see Vieusseux, p. 130.]
[Footnote 897: Vieusseux, pp. 128-32, 142.]
[Footnote 898: Zschokke, Kap. 32.]
[Footnote 899: Vieusseux, p. 140. Zurich, however, on Zwingli's urging,
restricted villenage and lessened tithes (Dändliker, _Short History_, p.
135).]
[Footnote 900: The number printed rose speedily to thirty-eight in a
year, then again to sixty. Two thousand men were employed in the
printing industry (Dändliker, ii, 560).]
[Footnote 901: Dändliker, ii, 558, 559; _Short History_, p. 157.]
[Footnote 902: Dändliker, _Geschichte_, ii, 743.]
[Footnote 903: _Id._ _Short History_, p. 192.]
[Footnote 904: _Id._ _Geschichte_, ii, 626.]
[Footnote 905: _Id._ _ib._ ii, 722.]
[Footnote 906: _Id._ _ib._ ii, 609-12; _Short History_, pp. 172, 203.]
[Footnote 907: _Id._ _Geschichte_, ii, 731, 742-45.]
[Footnote 908: _Id._ _ib._ ii, 556 _ff._, 622 _ff._, 728, 729.]
[Footnote 909: _Id._ _ib._ i, 569-71. Only masters were admitted to
membership.]
[Footnote 910: _Id._ _Short History_, pp. 169, 170, 179.]
[Footnote 911: _Id._ _ib._ p. 179.]
[Footnote 912: _Id._ _ib._ p. 192 The abuse was at its height in the
Catholic Cantons, but the Protestant participated, even soon after the
Reformation (_id._ p. 157; _Geschichte_, ii, 626).]
[Footnote 913: _Id._ _Short History_, p. 182.]
[Footnote 914: _Id._ _Geschichte_, i, 572; ii, 722; _Short History_, p.
169.]
[Footnote 915: Zschokke, as cited, p. 148; Dändliker, _Short History_,
p. 153.]
[Footnote 916: Dändliker, _Short History_, p. 193.]
[Footnote 917: See the extremely interesting investigation of M. de
Candolle in his _Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux
siècles_, 1873, p. 131 _ff._ Cp. Ph. Godet, _Histoire littéraire de la
Suisse française_, 1890, p. 170, as to the general influence.]
[Footnote 918: Cp. Dändliker, _Geschichte_, iii, 43-103; _Short
History_, pp. 194-99.]
[Footnote 919: _Id._ _Geschichte_, iii, 174-78.]
[Footnote 920: _Id._ _ib._ iii, 170-74. England is found learning from
Switzerland on this side. In the volume of translations entitled
_Foreign Essays on Agriculture and the Arts_, published in 1766, the
majority of the papers are by Swiss writers. Hume ("Of the Populousness
of Ancient Nations," _Essays_, ed. 1825, i, 410) writes that in
Switzerland in his day "we find at once the most skilful husbandmen and
the most bungling tradesmen that are to be met with in Europe."]
[Footnote 921: Dändliker, _Short History_, p. 199. Under Louis XIV there
had been 28,000 Swiss troops in the French service. In 1790 there were
only 15,000. But there were six Swiss regiments in the Dutch army, four
at Naples, and four in Spain (Vieusseux, p. 210).]
[Footnote 922: Dändliker, _Geschichte_, iii, 183,184.]
[Footnote 923: _Id._ _ib._ iii, 184.]
[Footnote 924: _Id._ _Short History_, p. 203.]
[Footnote 925: Dändliker, _Short History_, p. 204. In 1798 the French
found in the Bernese treasury thirty millions of francs in gold and
silver.]
[Footnote 926: Napoleon's sayings on Swiss politics, declaring in favour
of cantonal home rule and federation, are among his most statesmanlike
utterances; see them in Vieusseux, pp. 250-53. The originals are given
in Thibaudeau's _Mémoires sur le Consulat_, 1827.]
[Footnote 927: Cp. Grote's _Seven Letters_, 2nd ed. p. 21.]
[Footnote 928: See Grote's account, pp. 34, 35.]
[Footnote 929: Adams and Cunningham, _La Confédération Suisse_, éd.
Loumyer, 1890, p. 23.]
[Footnote 930: Thus the Catholic clergy between 1840 and 1850 used it to
reject measures of educational reform (Grote, p. 66; cp. p. 38). Adams
and Cunningham do not appear to recognise this conservative origin,
pointing rather (p. 87) to the fact that the Conservatives at first
opposed the application of the referendum to Federal affairs, and
attributing the first conception (p. 88) to the Radicals. There appears
to be a conflict of evidence. In any case the system is now accepted all
round.]
[Footnote 931: See the opinion of M. Droz concerning the drawbacks of
the facultative referendum--that is, the permissible demand for it by
30,000 votes in cases where it is not obligatory as affecting the
constitution--as cited by Adams and Cunningham, éd. Loumyer, p. 80.]
[Footnote 932: See M. Loumyer's note to his translation of Adams and
Cunningham's work, p. 269.]
[Footnote 933: In 1830 there were still Swiss regiments in the French
service, and a Swiss legion was enrolled by England for the Crimean War.
This seems to be the last instance of the old practice.]
[Footnote 934: Adams and Cunningham, as cited, p. 303.]
[Footnote 935: _Essay_, bk. ii, ch. v.]
[Footnote 936: _Id._ 7th ed. pp. 173-75.]
[Footnote 937: Kay, _The Social Condition and Education of the People in
England and Europe_, 1850, i, 67, 68, 74, 76. Kay unfortunately does not
go into history, and we are left to conjecture as to the course of
opinion between the issue of Malthus's _Essay_ and 1850.]
[Footnote 938: See Kay, as cited. Compare the earlier calculations to
similar effect cited by Malthus.]
[Footnote 939: An increase of nearly 63,000 in eleven years.]
[Footnote 940: Cp. Kay, as cited, i, 9-11.]
[Footnote 941: _Seven Letters_, p. 31.]
CHAPTER VI
PORTUGAL
§ 1. _The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire_
For European history Portugal is signalised in two aspects: first, as a
"made" kingdom, set up by the generating of local patriotism in a
medieval population not hereditarily different from that of the rest of
the Peninsula; secondly, as a small State which attained and for a time
wielded "empire" on a great scale. The beginnings of the local
patriotism are not confidently to be gathered from the old
chronicles,[942] which reduce the process for the most part to the
calculated action of the Queen Theresa (fl. 1114-28), certainly one of
the most interesting female figures in history. But the main process of
growth is simple enough. A series of warrior kings made good their
position on the one hand against Spain, and on the other conquered what
is now the southern part of Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) from the
Moors. Only in a limited degree did their administration realise the
gains conceivable from a differentiation and rivalry of cultures in the
Peninsula; but in view of the special need for such variation in a
territory open to few foreign culture-contacts, the Portuguese
nationality has counted substantially for civilisation. It would have
counted for much more if in the militant Catholic period the Portuguese
crown had not followed the evil lead of Spain in the three main steps of
setting up the Inquisition, expelling the Jews, and expelling the
Moriscoes.
On the Portuguese as on the northern European coasts, seafaring commerce
arose on a basis of fishing;[943] agriculturally, save as to fruits and
wines, Portugal was undeveloped; and the conquered Moorish territory,
handed over by the king in vast estates to feudal lords, who gave no
intelligent encouragement to cultivation, long remained sparsely
populated.[944] The great commercial expansion began soon after King
John II, egregiously known as "the Perfect," suddenly and violently
broke the power of the feudal nobility (1483-84), a blow which made the
king instantly a popular favourite, and which their feudal methods had
left the nobles unable to return. In the previous generation Prince
Henry the Navigator had set up a great movement of maritime discovery,
directed to commercial ends; and from this beginning arose the
remarkable but short-lived empire of Portugal in the Indies. That stands
out from the later episodes of the Dutch and British empires in that, to
begin with, the movement of discovery was systematically fostered and
subsidised by the crown, Prince Henry giving the lead; and that in the
sequel the whole commercial fruits of the process were the crown's
monopoly--a state of things as unfavourable to permanence as could well
be conceived. But even under more favourable conditions, though the
Portuguese empire might have overborne the Dutch, it could hardly have
maintained itself against the British. The economic and military bases,
as in the case of Holland, were relatively too narrow for the
superstructure.
What is most memorable in the Portuguese evolution is the simple process
of discovery, which was scientifically and systematically conducted in
the hope of sailing round Africa to India. The list of results is worth
detailing. In 1419 Perestrello discovered the island of Porto Santa; in
1420 Zarco and Vaz found Madeira, not before charted; and in the next
twenty years the Canary Islands, the Azores, Santa Maria, and St. Miguel
swelled the list. In 1434 Cape Bojador was doubled by Gil Eannes, and
the Rio d'Ouro was reached in 1436 by Baldaya; in 1441 Nuno Tristan
attained Cape Blanco; in 1445 he found the river Senegal; D. Dias
reaching Guinea in the same year, and Cape Verde in 1446. From Tristan's
voyage of 1441 dates the slave trade, which now gave a sinister stimulus
to the process of discovery; every cargo of negroes being eagerly bought
for the cheap cultivation of the Moorish lands, still poorly populated
under the feudal regimen.[945] The commercial and slave-trading purpose
may in part account for the piecemeal nature of the advance;[946] for it
was not till 1471 that the islands of Fernando Po were discovered and
the Equator crossed; and not till 1484 that Cam reached the Congo.[947]
But two years later Bartholomew Dias made the rest of the way to the
Cape of Good Hope, a much greater advance than had before been made in
thirty years; and after a pause in the chronicles of eleven years, Vasco
da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Calcutta. Meantime the Perfect king,
preoccupied with the African route, made in 1488 his great mistake of
finally dismissing Columbus from his court as a visionary. Had Portugal
added the new hemisphere to her list of discoveries, it would have been
stupendous indeed. As it is, this "Celtic" people, sailing in poor
little vessels obviously not far developed from the primary
fishing-smack, had done more for the navigation and charting of the
world than all the rest of Europe besides.
And still the expansion went rapidly on; the reign of Manuel, "the
Fortunate," reaping even more glory than that of his predecessor, who in
turn had rewards denied to the pioneer promoter, Prince Henry. In the
year 1500 Brazil was reached by Cabral, and Labrador by Corte-Real; and
in 1501 Castella discovered the islands of St. Helena and Ascension.
Amerigo Vespucci, whose name came into the heritage of the discovery of
Columbus, explored the Rio Plata and Paraguay in 1501-3; Coutinho did as
much for Madagascar and the Mauritius in 1506; Almeida in 1507 found the
Maldive Islands; Malacca and Sumatra were attached by Sequiera in 1509;
the Moluccas by Serrano in 1512; and the Ile de Bourbon in 1513 by
Mascarenhas. In eastern Asia, again, Coelho in 1516 sailed up the coast
of Cochin China and explored Siam; Andrade reached Canton in 1517 and
Pekin in 1521; and in 1520 the invincible Magellan, entering the service
of Spain,[948] achieved his great passage to the Pacific.[949] No such
century of navigation had yet been seen; and all this dazzling
enlargement of life and knowledge was being accomplished by one of the
smallest of the European kingdoms, while England was laggardly passing
from the point of Agincourt, by the way of the Wars of the Roses, to
that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, producing at that stage, indeed,
More's _Utopia_, but yielding no fruits meet therefor.
When, however, there followed on the process of discovery the process of
commerce, the advantages accruing to the monarchic impulse and control
were absent. Always as rigidly restrictive in its pursuit of discovery
and commerce as the ancient Carthaginians had been,[950] the Portuguese
crown was as much more restrictive than they in its practice as an
absolute monarchy is more concentrated than an oligarchy. Whatever
progress was achieved by the Portuguese in India was in the way of
vigorous conquest and administration by capable governors like
Albuquerque (_d._ 1515) and Da Castro (_d._ 1548), of whom the first
showed not only military but conciliatory capacity, and planned what
might have been a triumphant policy of playing off Hindu princes against
Mohammedan. But the restrictive home-policy was fatal to successful
empire-building where the conditions called for the most constant output
of energy. Though the Portuguese race has shown greater viability in
India than either the Dutch or the English, it could not but suffer
heavily from the climate in the first days of adaptation. The death-rate
among the early governors is startling; and the rank and file cannot
have fared much better.[951] All the while swarms of the more
industrious Portuguese, including many Jews, were passing to Brazil and
settling there.[952] To meet this drain there was needed the freest
opening in India to private enterprise; whereas the Portuguese crown,
keeping in its own hands the whole of the Indian products extorted by
its governors, and forcing them to send cargoes of gratis goods for the
Crown to sell, limited enterprise in an unparalleled fashion.[953] The
original work of discovery and factory-planting, indeed, could not have
been accomplished by Portuguese private enterprise as then developed;
but the monarchic monopoly prevented its growth. The Jews had been
expelled (1496), and with them most of the acquired commercial skill of
the nation;[954] the nobles had become as subservient to and dependent
on the throne as those of Spain were later to be; and already the curse
of empire was impoverishing the land as it was to do in Spain. As was
fully realised in the eighteenth century by the great Pombal,[955] the
mere possession of gold mines destroyed prosperity, the imaginary wealth
driving out the real; but before Portugal was ruined by her Brazilian
mines she was enfeebled by the social diseases that afflicted ancient
Rome. Slave labour in the Moorish provinces drove out free; the rural
population elsewhere thinned rapidly under the increasing drain of the
expeditions of discovery, colonisation, and conquest; and only in the
rapidly increasing population of Lisbon, which trebled in eighty years,
was there any ostensible advance in wealth to show for the era of
empire. Even in Lisbon, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the
negro slaves outnumbered the free citizens.[956] And over these
conditions of economic and political decadence reigned the Inquisition.
In Portugal, as in Spain, the period of incipient political decay is the
period of brilliant literature; the explanation being that in both cases
middle-class and upper-class incomes were still large and the volume of
trade great, there being thus an economic demand for the arts, while the
administration was becoming inept and the empire weakening. In both
cases, too, there was less waste of energy in war than in the ages
preceding. As Lope de Vega and Calderon build up a brilliant drama after
the Armada and the loss of half the Netherlands, and Velasquez is
sustained by Philip IV, so Camoens writes his epic, Gil Vicente his
plays, and Barros his history, in the reign of John III, when Portugal
is within a generation of being annexed to Spain, and within two
generations of being bereft of her Asiatic empire by the Dutch. At such
a stage, when wealth still abounds, and men for lack of science are
indifferent to such phenomena as multiplication of slaves and rural
depopulation, a large city public can evoke and welcome literature and
art. It was so in Augustan Rome. And the sequel is congruous in all
cases.
Mr. Morse Stephens in this connection affirms (_Portugal_, p. 259)
that "it has always been the case in the history of a nation which
can boast of a golden age, that the epoch of its greatest glory is
that in which its literature chiefly flourished.... It was so with
Portugal. The age which witnessed the careers of its famous
captains and conquerors was also the age of its greatest poets and
prose writers." The proposition on inquiry will be found to be
inaccurate in its terms and fallacious in its implications. As
thus: (1) Greek literature is, on the whole, at its highest in the
period of Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Aristotle; while the
period of "glory" or expansion must be placed either earlier or
later, under Alexander, when the golden age of literature is past.
(2) The synchronism equally breaks down in the case of Rome. There
is little literature in the period of the triumph over Cartilage;
and literature does not go on growing after Augustus, despite
continued military "glory." Trajan had neither a Horace nor a
Virgil. (3) In England the "glory" of Marlborough's victories
evokes Addison, not Shakespeare, who does most of his greatest work
under James I. And though Chaucer chanced to flourish under Edward
III, there is no fine literature whatever alongside of the
conquests of Henry V. (4) In Germany, Schiller and Goethe, Fichte
and Hegel, wrote in a period of political subordination, and Heine
before the period of Bismarckism. Who are the great writers since?
(5) In France, the period of Napoleon is nearly blank of great
writers. They abounded after the fall of his empire and the loss of
his conquests. (6) The great literary period of Spain begins with
the decline of the Spanish empire. (7) The great modern literature
of the Scandinavian States has arisen without any national "glory"
to herald it.
It is hardly necessary to bring further evidence. It remains only
to point out that in Portugal itself the brilliant literary reign
is not the period of discovery, since all the great exploration had
been done before John III came to the throne. It is true that the
retrospect of an age of conquest and effort _may_ stimulate
literature in a later generation; but the true causation is in a
literary _plus_ a social sequence, though the _arrest_ of literary
development is always caused socially and politically. Portuguese
and Spanish literature and drama alike derive proximately from the
Italian Renaissance. When both polities were in full decadence,
with the Inquisition hung round their necks, their intellectual
life necessarily drooped. But it is pure fallacy to suppose--and
here Mr. Stephens would perhaps acquiesce--that a period of new
conquest is _needed_ to elicit new and original literature. Homer,
Plato, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bacon, Molière,
Voltaire, Goethe, Leopardi, Poe, Balzac, Heine, Flaubert,
Hawthorne, Tourguenief, Ruskin, Ibsen--these are in no rational
sense by-products of militarism or "expansion." Given the right
social and economic conditions, Spain and Portugal may in the
twentieth century produce greater literature than they ever had,
without owning a particle of foreign empire any more than do Sweden
and Norway.
The causes of the decline of the Portuguese empire are very apparent. At
the best, with its narrow economic basis in home production, it would
have had a hard struggle to beat off the attack of the Dutch and
English; but the royal policy, reducing all Portuguese life to
dependence on the throne, had withered the national energies before the
Dutch attack was made. Hence the easy fall of the crown to Philip of
Spain when, the succession failing, he chose to grasp it (1581): the
nation had for the time lost the power of self-determination; and under
the Spanish dominion the Portuguese possessions in the Indies were
defended against the Dutch and English with but a moiety even of the
energy that a Portuguese king might have elicited. So the imposing
beginnings came well-nigh to naught, the Portuguese empire lasting in
its entirety, as a trade monopoly, for just a hundred years. Within the
first thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century Dutch and
English, Moslems, and even Danes, had captured from Spain-ruled Portugal
the Moluccas, Java, most of its Indian territory, its Persian and
Chinese settlements, and much of the coast of Brazil; and the two
former enemies harried at sea what Oriental trade it had kept. The rest
of the Indian settlements were lost in the next generation. "Empire" had
run for Portugal the usual course.
It was at this stage that the new life of the nation began. In 1640 came
the successful revolt against Spain; and the Dutch power in Brazil,
which had seemed decisively established under Prince Maurice of Nassau,
was entirely overthrown within ten years after his recall in 1644. In
Portugal the revolution was primarily the work of the nobility,
exasperated by Spanish arrogance and exclusiveness; but they were
effectually supported by the people for the same reason; and the state
of Spain, financially decrepit and embroiled in war abroad and rebellion
in Catalonia, left the new dynasty of Braganza able to maintain itself,
with French help, against the clerical and other elements of pro-Spanish
reaction. The overthrow of the Dutch in Brazil was almost against the
new king's will, for they had at first supported him against Spain; but
the movement there was as spontaneous, and fully as well justified, as
the revolt at home against Spain itself.
§ 2. _The Colonisation of Brazil_
Brazil was and is in fact for Portugal the analogue to the North
American colonies of Britain. Where "empire" was sought in the Indies as
a means of revenue, savage Brazil, after the gold-seeking rush of 1530
which first raised it above the status of a penal settlement, was a
colony, resorted to by men--many of them Jews--seeking freedom from the
Inquisition, and men driven from the soil by slave-labour seeking land
to till for their own subsistence.[957] All things considered, it has
been one of the soundest processes of colonisation in history. The low
state of the autochthonous inhabitants is sufficient proof of Buckle's
proposition that there the combination of great heat and great moisture
made impossible a successful primary civilisation, nature being too
unmanageable for the natural or primitive man.[958] The much higher
development of pre-European civilisation not only in Mexico and Peru but
among the North American Indians[959] can be explained in no other way.
But that science may not in time so exploit the natural forces as to
turn them to the account of a high tertiary civilisation is an
assumption we are not entitled to make, though Buckle apparently
inclined to it. When he wrote, the population of Brazil was computed at
six millions. To-day it stands at over twenty-three millions;[960] and
in Brazil the prospect has never been reckoned otherwise than hopeful.
The progress all along, relatively to the obstacles, has been so great
that there is no visible ground for anticipating any arrest in the near
future.
In Brazil, from the first, individual and collective energy had the
chance that the royal monopoly denied to the Asiatic settlements. There
was here no exigible revenue to arrange for; and the first colonists,
being left to themselves, set up local self-government with elected
military magistrates called captains[961]--an evolution more remarkable
than any which took place in the first century of English colonisation
in North America. The first governor-general sent out, Alfonso de Sousa,
had the wisdom to preserve and develop the system of captaincies;[962]
and colonisation went steadily on throughout the century. It was first
sought, as a matter of course, to enslave the natives; but the attempt
led only to a race-war such as grew up later in the New England
colonies; and in the Catholic as later in the Protestant colonies resort
was had to the importation of negroes, already so common as slaves in
Portugal. With a much slower rate of progress, the Brazilians have in
the end come much better than the North Americans out of the social
diseases thus set up.
In the first place, the Jesuits had a missionary success among the
aborigines such as the Puritans never approached in North America, thus
eventually arresting the race-struggle and securing the native stock as
an element of population--a matter of obvious importance, in view of the
factor of climate. And whereas the labours of the Jesuits in India had
been turned to naught by the Inquisition which they brought in their
train, Brazil was by the wisdom of the early governors saved from that
scourge.[963] Thus fortunately restrained by the civil power, the
Jesuits did a large part of the work of civilising Brazil. So long as
the stage of race-war lasted--and till far on in the seventeenth century
it was chronic and murderous[964]--they strove to protect the natives
whom they converted.[965] It is noteworthy, too, that just before
expelling the Jesuit order from Portugal in 1759, by which time it had
become a wealthy and self-seeking trading corporation in Brazil,[966]
the Marquis of Pombal secured the emancipation in Brazil[967] of all the
Indians who had there been enslaved as a result of the old race-wars,
thus giving effect to a law which the Jesuits had got passed in 1680
without being able to enforce it against the slave-owners.[968] And it
is apparently due in part to the culture they maintained[969] that,
though the emancipation of the negroes was to be delayed till late in
the nineteenth century, an energetic plea was made for them by a
Portuguese advocate of Batria at the time of the emancipation of the
Indians.[970] Their own degeneration into a wealth-amassing corporation
was an exact economic duplication of the process that had occurred in
Europe among all the monastic and chivalrous orders of the Middle Ages
in succession.[971]
In the eighteenth century Brazil, still limited, for its direct trade,
to Portugal, so prospered that the loss of empire in Asia was much more
than compensated even to the royal revenue of Portugal; the new
discoveries of gold bringing for a time as much as £300,000 a year to
the treasury under the system by which, the goldfields remaining free to
their exploiters, the crown received a fifth of the total export.[972]
The trouble was that the influx of gold in Portugal, as in Spain,
paralysed industry; and the country became poorer in a double ratio to
its bullion revenue;[973] and not till this was scientifically realised
could a sound polity be raised. But in Portugal itself, after the advent
of the anti-clerical Marquis of Pombal, there went on as striking a
regeneration of government (1750-77) as occurred in Spain under Charles
III; and though the storms of the French Revolution, and the tyrannous
reactions which followed it, fell as heavily on Portugal as on the rest
of the peninsula, its lot is to-day hopeful enough. In common with those
of Spain and Italy, its literature shows plenty of fresh intellectual
life; and, again as in their case, its worst trouble is a heritage of
bad finance, rather than any lack of progressive intelligence. With
sound government, the large outlet offered by Brazil to emigration
should make Portugal a place of plenty--if, that is, its burden of debt
be not too great. But herein lies a problem of special importance for
the people of Great Britain. Portugal, like Britain, began to accumulate
a national debt in the period of chronic European war; but between 1850
and 1890 the sum had actually multiplied tenfold, rising from
twenty-five to two hundred and fifty-eight millions of milreis; and at
the close of 1910 it stood at over one thousand millions, the interest
upon which constitutes two-fifths of the total national expenditure. All
the while, the balance of productivity is more and more heavily on the
side of Brazil. As a similar evolution may conceivably take place within
the next century or two in England, it will be of peculiar interest to
note how Portugal handles the problem. When the English coal supply is
exhausted, a vast debt, it is to be feared, may be left to a population
ill-capable of sustaining it; and the apparently inevitable result will
be such a drift of population from Britain to America or Australia as
now goes from Portugal to Brazil, leaving the home population all the
less able to bear its financial burden. It is difficult to see how any
arrangement, save a composition with creditors, can meet the Portuguese
case.[974] Yet within the last twenty years Lisbon has been enormously
improved; and if but the law of 1844 prescribing compulsory education
could be enforced, Portuguese resources might be so developed as to
solve the problem progressively. As it is, the nation is still largely
illiterate--a heavy handicap.
Meanwhile Brazil, after passing from the status of colony to that of
kingdom or so-called "empire," has become a republic, like the other
Iberian States of South America; and throughout the nineteenth century
its development has been comparatively fortunate. The flight of the
Portuguese king[975] thither in 1808 gave it independent standing
without its paying the price of war; whence came free trade with the
friendly States of Europe; and when on the return of the king it
insisted on maintaining its independence under his son, against the
jealous effort of the Portuguese Cortes to reduce it to a group of
dependent provinces,[976] the tradition of freedom set up by its past
prevailed. Thus the Brazilians effected peacefully what the English
colonies in North America achieved only by an embittering and exhausting
war; and so far as those of us can judge who are not at home in
Portuguese literature, the culture evolution in Brazil at the date of
the French Revolution had on some lines equalled that of the United
States.[977] But where the United States were in educative and enriching
contact with the relatively high civilisations of England and France,
Brazil could still draw only on the relatively small intellectual and
commercial stores of Portugal, with some addition from general commerce
with Europe. It was in the latter half of the century, when intellectual
influences from France had been prevalent, that Brazilian possibilities
began to emphasise themselves.
North American evolution has in the nineteenth century been especially
rapid because of several great economic factors: (1) the tobacco and
cotton culture of the period before the civil war; (2) the very large
immigration from Europe; (3) the rush for gold to California, hastening
the development of the West; (4) the abundant yield of coal and iron,
quickening every species of manufacture, especially after (5) a large
influx of cheap European labour in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. No one of these special factors has been potent in Brazil, save
for the latterly rapid increase of immigration; there is no great staple
of produce that thus far outgoes competition, unless it be caoutchouc;
the precious metals are not now abundant; and there is practically no
coal, though there is infinite iron. But these are conditions merely of
a relatively slow development, not of unprogressiveness; and the
presumption is that they will prove beneficent. The rapid commercial
development of the United States is excessively capitalistic, in virtue
largely of the factor of coal, and the consequent disproportionate
stress of manufactures. The outstanding result is a hard-driven
competitive life for the mass of the population, with the prospect ahead
of industrial convulsions, in addition to the nightmare of the
race-hatred between black and white--a desperate problem, from which
Brazil seems to have been saved. There the problem of slavery was later
faced than in the United States, partly, perhaps, because there the
slave was less cruelly treated; but the result of the delay was
altogether good. There was no civil war; the process of emancipation was
gradual, beginning in 1871 and finishing with a leap in 1885-88; and no
race-hatred has been left behind.[978] Those whose political philosophy
begins and ends with a belief in the capacities of the "Anglo-Saxon
race" would do well to note these facts.
In Brazil the process of emancipation, long favoured as elsewhere by the
liberal minds,[979] was peacefully forced on by economic pressure. It
was seen that slave labour was a constant check to the immigration of
free labour, and therefore to the development of the country.[980] When
this had become clear, emancipation was only a question of time. The
same development would inevitably have come about in North America; and
it is not a proof of any special "Anglo-Saxon" faculty for government
that the process there was precipitated by one of the bloodiest wars of
the modern world, and has left behind it one of the blackest problems by
which any civilisation is faced. The frequent European comments on the
revolutions of South America are apt to set up an illusion. All told,
those crises represent perhaps less evil than was involved in the North
American Civil War; and they are hardly greater moral evils than the
peaceful growth of financial corruption in the North. In any case, the
only revolution in Brazil since the outbreak of 1848 has been the no
less peaceful than remarkable episode of 1889, which dethroned the
Emperor Pedro II and made Brazil a republic. There was as much of pathos
as of promise in the event, for Pedro had been one of the very best
monarchs of the century; but at least the bloodless change was in
keeping with his reign and his benign example,[981] and may indeed be
reckoned a due result of them.
In fine, Brazil--in common with other parts of South America--has a fair
chance of being one day the scene of a civilisation morally and socially
higher than that now evolving in North America. What may be termed the
coal-civilisations, with their factitious rapidity of exploitation, are
in the nature of the case relatively ugly and impermanent. That cannot
well be the highest civilisation which multiplies by the myriad its
serfs of the mine, and by the million its slaves of the machine. In
South America the lack of coal promises escape from the worst
developments of capitalism,[982] inasmuch as labour there must be mainly
spent on and served by the living processes and forces of nature, there
so immeasurable and so inexhaustible of beauty. Fuel enough for sane
industry is supplied by the richest woods on the planet; and the
Brazilian climate, even now singularly wholesome over immense
areas,[983] may become still more generally so by control of vegetation.
It is a suggestive fact that there the common bent, though still far
short of mastery, is in an exceptional degree towards the high arts of
form and sound.[984] It may take centuries to evoke from a population
which quietly embraces the coloured types of South America and Africa
the æsthetic progress of which it is capable;[985] but the very fact
that these types play their physical and artistic part in the growth is
a promise special to the case. And if thus the "Latin" races--for it is
Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and French-speaking Belgians who
chiefly make up the immigrants, though there is a German element
also--build up a humanly catholic and soundly democratic life in that
part of the planet most prodigally served by nature, subduing to their
need the vast living forces which overpowered the primitive man, and at
the same time escaping the sinister gift of subterranean fuel--if thus
they build up life rather than dead wealth, they will have furthered
incomparably the general deed of man. But it is part of the hope set up
by the slower rate of a progress which overtakes and keeps pace with
nature, instead of forestalling the yearly service of the sun, that when
it reaches greatness it will have outlived the instincts of racial pride
and hate which have been the shame and the stumbling-block of the
preceding ages. Should "little" Portugal be the root of such a growth,
her part will surely have been sufficient. But in the meantime Portugal
and Brazil alike suffer from illiteracy, the bane of the Catholic
countries;[986] and that priest-wrought evil must be remedied if their
higher life is to be maintained.
Until this vital drawback is removed the possible social gain to
Portugal from the revolution of 1910 cannot be realised. A republic is
more favourable to progress than a monarchy only in so far as it gives
freer play and fuller furtherance to all forms of energy; and in the
still priest-ridden Peninsula the resistance of sacerdotalism to
democratic rule is a great stumbling-block. The Republic of Portugal
needs time to establish itself aright. Citizens of more "advanced"
countries are wont to criticise with asperity shortcomings of
administration in the "new" States of our time which were fully
paralleled in their own in the past. Englishmen who make comparisons
between their own political system and that of countries whose
constitutions have been reshaped within the present century would do
well to consider the state of English government in the latter part of
the eighteenth century, after a hundred years of constitutional freedom.
Nay, in a country where the great parties in our own time perpetually
accuse each other of gross and unscrupulous misgovernment,
disparagements of the politics of countries which only recently attained
self-government are obviously open to discount. Suffice it that
Portugal, albeit by a _via dolorosa_ of violence trodden by other
peoples before her, has reaffirmed her part in the movement of
civilisation towards a larger and a better life, thus giving the
hundredth disproof to the formulas which deny the potentiality of
advance to States which have known decadence.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 942: _The Story of Portugal_, by Mr. H. Morse Stephens, 1891,
is the most trustworthy history of Portugal in English, giving as it
does the main results of the work of the modern scientific school of
Portuguese historians.]
[Footnote 943: Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik_, 1881, p. 283.]
[Footnote 944: H. Morse Stephens, _Portugal_, 1891, pp. 53, 87, 102,
236.]
[Footnote 945: Stephens, _Portugal_, pp. 148, 149, 182.]
[Footnote 946: Many of the dates are to some extent in dispute. Cp.
Stephens, _Portugal_, pp. 144-56; and Mr. Major's Life of _Prince Henry
of Portugal_, 1868, _passim_.]
[Footnote 947: There is a dubious-looking record that at this time a
systematic attempt was made to Christianise the natives instead of
enslaving them. See it in Dunham, _History of Spain and Portugal_, iii,
288-91.]
[Footnote 948: Thus the second great expansion of geographical
knowledge, like the first, went to the credit of Spain through
Portuguese mismanagement, Magellan being alienated by King Miguel's
impolicy.]
[Footnote 949: I follow the dates fixed by Mr. Stephens, p. 175.]
[Footnote 950: See Dunham, iii, 286, as to the anger of John II at a
pilot's remark that the voyage to Guinea was easily made. An attempted
disclosure of the fact to Spain was ferociously punished.]
[Footnote 951: Cp. Stephens, pp. 181, 218.]
[Footnote 952: _Id._ p. 228.]
[Footnote 953: Stephens, pp. 177, 181, 192.]
[Footnote 954: _Id._ pp. 171-73.]
[Footnote 955: Conde da Carnota, _The Marquis of Pombal_, 2nd. ed. 1871,
pp. 72-77.]
[Footnote 956: Stephens, p. 182.]
[Footnote 957: Stephens, pp. 227, 228.]
[Footnote 958: _Introduction_, 3-vol. ed. i, 103-108; 1-vol. ed. pp.
60-61. The formula of heat and moisture, however, applies only
generally. One of the climatic troubles of the great province of Céará
in particular is that at times there is no wet season, and now and then
even a drought of whole years. See ch. iii, _Climatologie_, by Henri
Morize, in the compilation _Brésil en 1889_, pp. 41, 42.]
[Footnote 959: Cp. the extremely interesting treatises of Mr. Lucien
Carr, _The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley_ (Washington, 1893), _The
Position of Women among the Huron-Iroquois Tribes_ (Salem, 1884), and on
the _Food and Ornaments of Certain American Indians _(Worcester, Mass.,
1895-97).]
[Footnote 960: Increase of eight millions since 1890.]
[Footnote 961: Stephens, p. 225.]
[Footnote 962: Mr. Stephens (p. 226) states that there were created
three vast "chief captaincies." Baron de Rio-Branco, in his _Esquisse de
l'histoire du Brésil_, in the compilation _Brésil en 1889_, specifies a
division by the king (1532-35) into twelve hereditary captaincies. Both
statements seem true. The policy of non-interference was wisely adhered
to by later governors, though Thomas de Sousa (_circa_ 1550) introduced
a necessary measure of centralisation.]
[Footnote 963: Stephens, pp. 231, 232.]
[Footnote 964: Baron de Rio-Branco, _Esquisse_, as cited, pp. 127-32.]
[Footnote 965: _Id._ p. 149; Stephens, p. 231.]
[Footnote 966: Stephens, p. 359.]
[Footnote 967: By decree of June, 1755. Conde da Carnota, _The Marquis
of Pombal_, as cited, p. 40.]
[Footnote 968: Rio-Branco, p. 132.]
[Footnote 969: As to which see Rio-Branco, p. 149.]
[Footnote 970: _Id._ p. 148.]
[Footnote 971: As to this see the author's _Dynamics of Religion_, pp.
24-27; and _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 375 _sq._]
[Footnote 972: Stephens, pp. 348, 376.]
[Footnote 973: This is very trenchantly set forth in one of the writings
of the Marquis of Pombal, given by Carnota in his memoir, pp. 75-77.
Pombal was on this head evidently a disciple of the French physiocrats,
or of Montesquieu, who lucidly embodies their doctrines on money
(_Esprit des Lois_, 1748, xxi, 22; xxii, 1 _sq._). On the general
question of the impoverishment of Portugal by her American gold and
silver mines, cp. Carnota pp. 4, 72-73, 207.]
[Footnote 974: This has been repeatedly suggested. See the pamphlet of
Guilherme J.C. Henriquez (W.J. C. Henry) on _Portugal_, 1880.]
[Footnote 975: This had been several times proposed in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries (Rio-Branco, p. 154).]
[Footnote 976: Rio-Branco, p. 163.]
[Footnote 977: Cp. Rio-Branco, _Esquisse_, as cited, p. 151.]
[Footnote 978: F.J. de Santa-Anna Nery, "Travail servile et travail
libre," in vol. _Brésil en 1889_, pp. 205, 206; E. da Silva-Prado,
"Immigration," ch. xvi of same compilation, pp. 489, 490.]
[Footnote 979: Rio-Branco, p. 186, _note_.]
[Footnote 980: From 1857 to 1871, the fifteen years preceding the
process of emancipation, the total immigration was only 170,000. From
1873 to 1887 it amounted to 400,000, and it has since much increased.
Cp. Santa-Anna Nery, as cited, p. 212; and E. da Silva-Prado,
"Immigration" as cited, pp. 489-91.]
[Footnote 981: It is interesting to note that whereas he was, for a
king, an accomplished and enlightened philosopher, of the theistic
school of Coleridge, the revolutionist movement was made by the
Brazilian school of Positivists. It would be hard to find a revolution
in which both sides stood at so high an intellectual level.]
[Footnote 982: See, in _Brésil en 1889_, the remarks of M. da
Silva-Prado, p. 559.]
[Footnote 983: See the section (ch. iii) on "Climatologie," by Henri
Morize, in _Brésil en 1889_; in particular the section on "Immigration"
(ch. xvi) by E. da Silva-Prado, pp. 503-505.]
[Footnote 984: See, in the same volume, the section (ch. xviii) on
"L'Art," by da Silva-Prado. He shows that "Le Brésilien a la
préoccupation de la beauté" (p. 556).]
[Footnote 985: The probabilities appear to be specially in favour of
music, to which the native races and the negroes alike show a great
predilection (_id._ pp. 545, 546). As M. da Silva-Prado urges, what is
needed is a systematic home-instruction, as liberally carried out as was
Pedro's policy of sending promising students of the arts to Europe. Thus
far, though education is good, books have been relatively scarce because
of their dearness. Here again the United States had an immense
preliminary advantage in their ability to reproduce at low prices the
works of English authors, paying nothing to the writers; a state of
things which subsisted long after the States had produced great writers
of their own.]
[Footnote 986: In Portugal, "by a law enacted in 1844, primary education
is compulsory; but only a small fraction of the children of the lower
classes really attend school" (_Statesman's Year-Book_). In Brazil there
has been great educational progress in recent years; and in 1911 a
decree was issued for the reform of the school system, a Board of
Education being established with control over all the schools. Education
is still non-compulsory.]
PART VI
ENGLISH HISTORY DOWN TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD
CHAPTER I
BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION
It is after the great Civil War that English political development
becomes most directly instructive, because it is thenceforward that the
modern political conditions begin to be directly traceable.
Constitutional or parliamentary monarchy takes at that point a virtually
new departure. But we shall be better prepared to follow the play of the
forces of attraction and repulsion, union and strife, in the modern
period, if we first realise how in the ages of feudal monarchy and
personal monarchy, as the previous periods have been conveniently named,
the same fundamental forces were at work in different channels. The
further we follow these forces back the better we are prepared to
conceive political movement in terms of naturalist as opposed to
verbalist formulas. Above all things, we must get rid of the habit of
explaining each phenomenon in terms of the abstraction of itself--as
Puritanism by "the Puritan spirit," Christian civilisation by
"Christianity," and English history by "the English character." We are
to look for the causation of the Puritan spirit and English conduct and
the religion of the hour in the interplay of general instincts and
particular circumstances.
§ 1
At the very outset, the conventional views as to the bias of the
"Anglo-Saxon race"[987] are seen on the least scrutiny to be excluded by
the facts. Credited with an innate bent to seafaring, the early English
are found to have virtually abandoned the sea after settling in
England;[988] the new conditions altering the sea-going bent just as the
older had made it, and continued to do in the case of the Scandinavians.
Credited in the same fashion with a racial bias to commerce, they are
found to have been uncommercial, unadventurous, home-staying; and it
took centuries of continental influences to make them otherwise. Up to
the fourteenth century "almost the whole of English trade was in the
hands of aliens."[989] And of what trade the "free" Anglo-Saxons did
conduct, the most important branch seems to have been the slave
trade.[990] As to the mass of the population, whatever were their actual
life-conditions--and as to this we have very little knowledge--they were
certainly not the "free barbarians" of the old Teutonic legend. Unfree
in some sense they mostly were; and all that we have seen of the early
evolution of Greece and Rome goes to suggest that their status was
essentially depressed. In the words of a close student, English economic
history "begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population
under Saxon rule--a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years of
English economic evolution to set them free."[991] This is perhaps an
over-statement: serfdom suggests general predial slavery; and this
cannot be shown to have existed. But those who repel the proposition
seem to take no account of the _tendency_ towards popular depression in
early settled communities.[992] If we stand by the terminology of
Domesday Book, we are far indeed from the conception of a population of
freemen.
That the mass of the "Saxon" English (who included many of
non-Saxon descent) were more or less "unfree" is a conclusion
repeatedly reached on different lines of research. Long ago, the
popular historian Sharon Turner wrote that "There can be no doubt
that nearly three-fourths of the Anglo-Saxon population were in a
state of slavery" (_History of the Anglo-Saxons_, 4th ed. 1823,
iii, 255); and he is here supported by his adversary Dunham
(_Europe during the Middle Ages_, Cab. Cyc. 1834, iii, 49-52).
J.M. Kemble later admitted that the "whole population in some
districts were unfree" (_The Saxons in England_, reprint, 1876, i,
189). Yet another careful student sums up that "at the time of the
Conquest we find the larger portion of the inhabitants of England
in a state of villenage" (J.F. Morgan, _England under the Normans_,
1858, p. 61). (The interesting question of the racial elements of
the population at and after the Conquest is fully discussed by the
Rev. Geoffrey Hill, _Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest_,
1904, ch. i.)
Later and closer research does but indicate gradations in the
status of the unfree--gradations which seem to have varied
arbitrarily in terms of local law. (On this, however, see Morgan,
p. 62.) The Domesday Book specifies multitudes of _villani_,
_servi_, _bordarii_ (or _cotarii_), as well as (occasionally) large
numbers of _sochmanni_, and _liberi homines_. In Cornwall there
were only six chief proprietors, with 1,738 _villani_, 2,441
_bordarii_, and 1,148 _servi_; in Devonshire, 8,246 _villani_,
4,814 _bordarii_, and 3,210 _servi_; in Gloucestershire, 3,071
_villani_, 1,701 _bordarii_, and 2,423 _servi_; while in
Lincolnshire there were 11,322 _sochmanni_, 7,168 _villani_, 3,737
_bordarii_; and in Norfolk 4,528 _villani_, 8,679 _bordarii_, 1,066
_servi_, 5,521 _sochmanni_, and 4,981 _liberi homines_. (Cp. Sharon
Turner, as cited, vol. iii, bk. viii, ch. 9.) Thus the largest
numbers of ostensible freemen are found in the lately settled
Danish districts, and the largest number of slaves where most of
the old British population survived (Ashley, _Economic History_,
1888, i, 17, 18; Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and
Commerce_, 1891, i, 88). "The eastern counties are the home of
liberty" (Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, p. 23). The main
totals are: _bordarii_, 82,119; _villani_, 108,407; _servi_,
25,156; that is, 215,000 heads of families, roughly speaking, all
of whom were more or less "unfree," out of an entire enumerated
male population of 300,000.
The constant tendency was to reduce all shades to one of _nativi_
or born villeins (Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, 4th ed. i,
465); that is to say, the number of absolute serfs tends to lessen,
their status being gradually improved, while higher grades tend to
be somewhat lowered. Prof. Vinogradoff's research, which aims at
correcting Mr. Seebohm's, does but disclose that villenage in
general had three aspects:--"Legal theory and political
disabilities would fain make it all but slavery; the manorial
system ensures it something of the character of the Roman
_colonatus_; there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of
Saxon tradition" (_Villainage in England_, 1892, p. 137; cp.
Seebohm, as cited, p. 409; and Stubbs, § 132, i, 462-65). Even the
comparatively "free" socmen were tied to the land and were not
independent yeomen (Ashley, i, 19); and even "freedmen" were often
tied to a specified service by the act of manumission (Dunham, as
cited, iii, 51). As to Teutonic slavery in general, cp. C.-F.
Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, French tr. 1878, i, 41-44, and U.R.
Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. 1900, i, 116; as to France,
cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'Histoire de France_, édit. 1847, pp.
162-72; _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e édit. iii,
172, 190-203; and as to the Netherlands, see above, pp. 295-96.
There is a tendency on the one hand to exaggerate the significance of
the data, as when we identify the lot of an ancient serf or villein with
that of a negro in the United States of sixty years ago;[993] and on the
other hand to forget, in familiarity with scholarly research, the
inevitable moral bearing of all degrees of bondage. The _villanus_ "both
is and is not a free man"; but the "not" is none the less morally
significant: "though he may be _liber homo_, he is not _francus_";[994]
and his name carries a slur. An immeasurable amount of moral history is
conveyed in the simple fact that "slave" was always a term of abuse;
that "villain" is just "villein"; that "caitiff" is just "captive"; and
that "churl" is just "ceorl." So the "neif" (= _naïf_ = native) becomes
the "knave";[995] the "scullion" the "blackguard"; and the homeless
wanderer the "vagabond"; even as for the Roman "the guest," _hostis_,
was "the enemy." The "rogue" has doubtless a similar descent, and "rogue
and peasant-slave" in Tudor times, when slavery had ceased, stood for
all things contemptible. Men degrade and impoverish their fellows, and
out of the created fact of deprivation make their worst aspersions;
never asking who or what it is that thus turns human beings into
scullions, churls, blackguards, knaves, caitiffs, rogues, and villains.
The Greeks knew that a man enslaved was a man demoralised; but saw in
the knowledge no motive for change of social tactics. Still less did the
Saxons; for their manumissions at the bidding of the priest were but
penitential acts, in no way altering the general drift of things.
Green (_Short History_, ch. i, § 6, ed. 1881, pp. 54, 55), laying
stress on the manumissions, asserts that under Edgar "slavery was
gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church." But this
is going far beyond the evidence. Green seems to have assumed that
the laws framed by Dunstan were efficacious; but they clearly were
not. (Cp. C. Edmond Maurice, _Tyler, Bale, and Oldcastle_, 1875,
pp. 14-18.) Kemble rightly notes--here going deeper than Prof.
Vinogradoff--that there was a constant process of new slave-making
(_Saxons_, i, 183-84; cp. Maitland, p. 31); and in particular
notes how "the honours and security of service became more
anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom" (p. 184). There
is in short a law of worsenment in a crude polity as in an advanced
one. Green himself says of the slave class that it "sprang mainly
from debt or crime" (_The Making of England_, 1885, p. 192; cp.
_Short History_, p. 13). But debt and "crime" were always arising.
Compare his admissions in _The Conquest of England_, 2nd ed. pp.
444, 445. Elsewhere he admits that slaves were multiplied by the
mutual wars of the Saxons (p. 13); and Kemble, recognising "crime"
as an important factor, agrees (i, 186) with Eichhorn and Grimm in
seeing in war and conquest the "principal and original cause of
slavery in all its branches." A battle would make more slaves in a
day than were manumitted in a year. Some slaves indeed, as in the
Roman Empire, were able to buy their freedom (Maurice, as cited, p.
20, and refs.; Dunham, as cited, iii, 51); but there can have been
few such cases. (Cp. C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, French
tr. i, 41-44, as to the general tendencies of Teutonic slavery.)
The clergy for a time promoted enfranchisement, and even set an
example in order to widen their own basis of power; but as Green
later notes (ch. v, § 4, p. 239) the Church in the end promoted
"emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own."
Green further makes the vital admission that "the decrease of
slavery was more than compensated by the increasing degradation of
the bulk of the people.... Religion had told against political
independence"--for the Church played into the hands of the king.
During the Danish invasions, which involved heavy taxation
(_Danegeld_) to buy off the invaders, slavery increased and
worsened; and Cnut's repetition of the old laws against the foreign
slave trade can have availed little (Maurice, as cited, pp. 23-24).
Prof. Abdy, after recognising that before the Conquest English
liberties were disappearing like those of France (_Lectures on
Feudalism_, 1890, pp. 322, 326-27, 331), argues that, though the
tenure of the villein was servile, he in person was not bond (App.
p. 428). "Bond" is, of course, a term of degree, like others; but
if "not bond" means "freeman," the case will not stand. The sole
argument is that "had he been so [bond], it is difficult to
understand his admission into the conference [in the procedure of
the Domesday Survey] apparently on an equality with the other
members of the inquest." Now he was plainly not on an equality. The
inquest was to be made through the sheriff, the lord of the manor,
the parish priest, the reeve, the bailiff, and _six_ villeins out
of each hamlet (_Id._ p. 360). It is pretty clear that the villeins
were simply witnesses to check, if need were, the statements of
their superiors.
The weightiest argument against the darker view of Saxon serfdom is
the suggestion of the late Prof. Maitland (_Domesday Book_, p. 223)
that the process of technical subordination, broadly called
feudalism, was really a process of infusion of law and order. But
he confessedly made out no clear case, and historical analogy is
against him.
Finally, though under the Normans the Saxon slaves appear to have
gained as beside the middle grades of peasants (Morgan, _England
under the Normans_, p. 225; Ashley, i, 18), it is a plain error to
state that the Bristol slave-trade was suppressed under William by
"the preaching of Wulfstan, and the influence of Lanfranc" (Green,
_Short History_, p. 55; also in longer _History_, i, 127; so also
Bishop Stubbs, i, 463, _note_. The true view is put by Maurice, as
cited, p. 30). The historian incidentally reveals later (_Short
History_, ch. vii, § 8, p. 432, proceeding on Giraldus Cambrensis,
_Expugnatio Hiberniæ_, lib. i, c. 18) that "at the time of Henry
II's accession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been
kidnapped and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and
the spiritual menaces of the English Church." (Cp. Hallam, _Middle
Ages_, iii, 316, _note_.) He admits, too (p. 55), that "a hundred
years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was sometimes
said to spring from breeding slaves for the market." The "market"
was for concubines and prostitutes, as well as for labourers. (Cp.
Southey, _Book of the Church_, ed. 1824, i, 115, following William
of Malmesbury; and Hallam, as last cited.) Gibbon justifiably
infers (ch. 38, Bohn ed. iv, 227) that the children of the Roman
slave market of the days of Gregory the Great, _non Angli sed
angeli_, were sold into slavery by their parents. "From the first
to the last age," he holds, the Anglo-Saxons "persisted in this
unnatural practice." Cp. Maurice, as cited, pp. 4-5. Gregory
actually encouraged the traffic in English slaves after he became
Pope. (_Ep. to Candidus_, cited in pref. to Mrs. Elstoh's trans. of
the Anglo-Saxon Homily, p. xi.)
Thus, under Saxon, Danish, and Norman law alike, a slave trade
persisted for centuries. As regards the conditions of domestic
slavery, it seems clear that the Conquest lowered the status of the
half-free; but on the other hand "there was a great decrease in the
number of slaves in Essex between the years 1065 and 1085" (Morgan,
as cited, p. 225; cp. Maitland, p. 35).
In Saxondom, for centuries before the Conquest, "history" is made
chiefly by the primitive forces of tribal and local animosity, the
Northmen coming in to complicate the insoluble strifes of the earlier
English, partly uniting these against them, dominating some, and getting
ultimately absorbed in the population, but probably constituting for
long an extra source of conflict in domestic politics. A broad
difference of accent, as in the Scandinavian States down to our own day,
is often a strain on fellowship. In any case, the Anglo-Saxons at the
time of the Conquest, as always from the time of their own entry, showed
themselves utterly devoid of the "gift of union" which has been ascribed
to their "race," as to the Roman. No "Celts" were ever more hopelessly
divided: the Battle of Hastings is the crowning proof.[996] And in the
absence of leading and stimulus from a higher culture, so little
progressive force is there in a group of struggling barbaric communities
that there was only the scantiest political and other improvement in
Saxon England during hundreds of years. When Alfred strove to build up a
civilisation, he turned as a matter of course to the Franks.[997] The
one civilising force was that of the slight contacts kept up with the
Continent, perhaps the most important being the organisation of the
Church. It was the Norman Conquest, bringing with it a multitude of new
contacts, and an entrance of swarms of French and Flemish artificers and
clerics, that decisively began the civilisation of England. The Teutonic
basis, barbarous as it was, showed symptoms of degeneration rather than
of development. In brief, France was mainly civilised through Italy;
England was mainly civilised through France.
Bishop Stubbs, after admitting as much (§ 91, i, 269, 270) and
noting the Norman "genius for every branch of organisation,"
proceeds to say "that the Norman polity had very little substantial
organisation of its own, and that it was native energy that wrought
the subsequent transformation." His own pages supply the disproof.
See in particular as to the legislative and administrative activity
of Henry II, § 147, i, 530-33. As to the arrest or degeneration of
the Saxon civilisation, cp. § 79, i, 227, 228; Sharon Turner,
_History of England during the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 1, 73; H.W.
C. Davis, _England under the Normans and the Angevins_, 1905, p. 1;
Pearson, _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_,
1867, i, 288, 308-12, 321, 343, 346, 347; Abdy, as cited above. Mr.
Pearson's testimony, it should be noted, is that of a partisan and
eulogist of the "race."
Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population
"erscheint nicht übergross," admits that the dependent stratum of
the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land
system. In time of war the class increased through the ruin of the
small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the
landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new
acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the
possessing class" (_Geschichte des englischen Self-Government_,
1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the
Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only
in the multiplication of the dependent classes." Among the symptoms
of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings
and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth
centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.
In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there
had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their
lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible
cruelty.[998] William's enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need
among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition;
and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all
classes in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of
France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld
book"--a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old
Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion,
therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of
civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest
were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its
first social and psychological effect was to set up new class relations,
and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who
spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and
close class union. When the people's speech began to compete with that
of their masters, and the nobles separately began to be on good terms
with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as
between neighbouring nobles and their retainers; and in Scotland the
weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England,
especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early
baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the
strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing
itself, tended to unite the nobles as a class for their own
aggrandisement and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the
support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage
sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own
share of power and privilege.
The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the
light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much
property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002]
representing a special source of strife, although its non-military
character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to
throw in its lot with king or nobles, or with the democracy (as in
Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic
interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the
king's friend into the king's antagonist, is the most dramatic instance
of the Church's necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act
as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and
counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing
on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English
constitutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further,
being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their
own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its
celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces,
exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among
competing interests.[1003]
The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in
such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising
elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again
flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch
with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful
variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture
introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004]
could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry
I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but
the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the
Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of
French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure
from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the
nobles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative
methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a
French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort.
The assumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government
shaped the process is one of the superstitions of racial and national
vanity.
Dr. C.H. Pearson's reiteration of the old "race" dogma (_History of
England during the Early and Middle Ages_, i, 277) is its
sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_. In the English manner, he
connects with old _Welsh_ usages of revenge the late _Irish_
tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to
_America_"--as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes
in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast
of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow,
constitutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own
showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards
liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English
common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions.
In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and
Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the
rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the _sixth_ century
with Saxon usage of the _eleventh_, this while admitting the
lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should
require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to
prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the
_Faustrecht_, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century,
and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English
Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson's.
Mr. J.H. Round's way of taking it for granted (_The Commune of
London_, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently
and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought.
Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against
a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole
centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they
are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in
foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the
Anglo-Saxons.
One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of
reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his _England under the
Normans and Angevins_ (1905). After setting out with the avowal
that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches
(p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and
painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress,
from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after
soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are
inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... passed
by their more deliberate competitors." How a Teutonic race, given
these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpassed and finally
uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (_id._ p. 2), the theorist does
not attempt to explain.
To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the
political circumstances, was it due that there grew up in island
England, instead of an all-powerful feudal nobility and a mainly
depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of
classes, in which the king's policy against the nobility restrained and
feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making
sub-tenants king's liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of
barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king
is better for the people than the tyranny of nobles; and the destruction
of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal
prestige counts for something as against baronial self-assertion; but
aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king,
on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations,
originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008]
Even the class tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations
in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to
those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold
for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011]
What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to
foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the
aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the
English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry
and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important
military force, which has its own prestige.
Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end
aggrandise the upper as against the lower classes, developing as they do
the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper
class, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law.
In particular, the king's power is always aggrandised when nobility and
people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed,
had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to
procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his
reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014]
encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle classes; but all the
while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between
traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not
be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great
external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in
which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed class was
necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the
Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people
and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign
aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the
nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the
growth of class superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In
the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had
actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the
train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the
arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the
new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the
development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the
law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so
stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of
systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the
period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the
Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially
worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw
in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their
servitude.[1019]
An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is
the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the
auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this
departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later
historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without
inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a
matter of fact, Simon de Montfort's Parliament was the application by a
naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in
the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by
the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain.
There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat
together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de
Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may
well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century
the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at
least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in
Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the
effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and
Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of
justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons
forced him to make the most of the burgher class, who had stood by him
in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately
from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when
deputies from all the districts met in general assembly and bound
themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced,
under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the
civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it
was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the
power of the crown, the monarchic superstition availing to divide even
the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna
Carta by King John.
Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general
acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting
cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, _Histor. View
of the European Nations_, Crichton's tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to
the priority of the institution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, _History
of Spain_, Hume's ed. i, 370; and Prescott, _Hist. of the Reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its
existence in Sicily (_circa_ 1232), see Milman, _Hist. of Latin
Christianity_, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, _Considerazioni
sopra la Storia di Sicilia_, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap.
v); and Von Raumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen_ (Aufg. 1857-58,
B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, _The Carafas
of Maddaloni_, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick's
assemblies, too, were called _Parlamente_. He in turn had, of
course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least
of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.
As to Simon's object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (_Europe
during the Middle Ages_, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to
strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty,"
though the step was too congruous with general developments not to
be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53;
Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (_Wealth of
Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in
the states-general of _all_ the great European monarchies
originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support
against the barons. Freeman's statement (_General Sketch of
European History_, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole
English nation, nobles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together"
against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, _Geschichte des
Self-government in England_, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (_Student's
History_, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and
knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III,
writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been
possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish
practice.
As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative
prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent
age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new
risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus
sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own
special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has
generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that
they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston,
or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the
favourite's assailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the
inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad
government. Whether it is noble denouncing favoured noble or Pym
impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal
jealousy.
§ 2
A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is
that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war retards
civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some
sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare
yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the
Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between
peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could
not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as
before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West
without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phoenicians had contrived as
much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed
on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is
proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the
crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as
these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for
special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion
must have been small, and the political disintegration great.
Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which
Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the
Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church's code of
Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter
of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of
prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be
played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters
with other classes, or even their moral relations with each other save
in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only
brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that
direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a
minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate
which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold
degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.
It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been
different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the
possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a
laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them.
The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and
then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are
praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English
history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and
kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to retard
civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would
tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have
to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil
war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no
intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when
the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such
cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling
Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic
florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that
literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of
France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.
The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of
financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money
which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never
repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French
were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the
north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus
begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool
trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable
way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the
misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the
Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and
the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in
isolation and ignominy.
It may or may not have been a gain that Edward's victories over France
practically determined the adoption of the middle-class, gallicised
English speech[1032] by the upper classes, who had hitherto been
French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such
as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy
was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and
resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke
French, and so did his nobles. They had hitherto looked with true
aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie--"_rustici
Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam_," in the fashion satirised
in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and
superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the
language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon,
and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.
Cp. Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, pp. 222, 233. Prof. Earle's
quasi-theory of the cause of the recovery of the native tongue
(_Philology of the English Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 44, 66) is purely
fanciful. In the end, as he admits, it was not any native dialect,
but the artificial composite "King's English," much modified by
French, that survived. It is noteworthy that many locutions which
pass in the Bible for specially pure archaic English, as "fourscore
and ten," are simply translations of a French idiom, itself ancient
Celtic translated into Romance. (Cp. the _Introduction to the Study
of the History of Language_, by Strong, Logeman, and Wheeler, 1891,
p. 393.)
The Rev. W. Denton, in his learned and instructive survey of the
subject (_England in the Fifteenth Century_, 1888, pp. 1-7),
remarks that "from some cause, now difficult to trace, great
encouragement was given to French in the reign of Henry III.
Probably the foreign tastes and partialities of the king had
something to do with this" (p. 4). They certainly had. As soon as
he could wield power, "hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were
at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the
judicial and administrative posts about the Court" (Green, _Short
Hist_., ch. iii, § 5, p. 140), as had happened before under Henry
II. Mr. Denton rightly notes (p. 6) how "in the reign of Henry III
the descendants of Norman barons, and the sons of Anglo-Norman
fathers, were proud of the name of Englishmen, and took up arms
against the king's Norman and Angevin favourites, whom they
despised as foreigners." This is the true line of causation. There
is doubtless something in the theory that the general resort to the
use of English in the schools was a result of the Black Death--the
majority of the clergy being destroyed and the new teachers being
unable to instruct in French (Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_,
1893, p. 202); but there were certainly other causes involved. Mr.
de Montmorency (_State Intervention in English Education_, 1902,
pp. 19-23) develops Gasquet's argument with much force, noting
further that many of the foreign priests who survived forsook their
charges. It might be added that the native peasantry necessarily
counted for more in a social as in an economic sense, after the
great fall in their numbers. But the fact that the Death came in
the period of the successful French wars of Edward III is clearly
of capital importance. But for the moral reaction from these wars,
the tendency would have been to procure new relays of French
priests.
It is indeed conceivable that, but for hostilities with France,
French would have steadily gained ground through literature,
depressing and discrediting the vernacular. On this view it was the
continuance of resistance by the Welsh that probably prevented the
absorption of the Saxon speech by that of the conquered British;
and it is similarly arguable that it was the relation of hostility
between the Carlovingian Franks and the more easterly Germans that
determined the supremacy of the Romance speech in French. The point
is worth psychological investigation.
Though, however, Chaucer's own new-English work is part of the result,
the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from
Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by
destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less
injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars
which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively
to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is
always important to remember, were the result of the young king's acting
on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all
too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to
domestic sedition, foreign war unified the mass of the people and fixed
them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify
them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may
always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided
than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of
foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as
an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the
movement on its moral side.[1036] One man's egoism could thus sway the
whole nation's evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal
which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that
the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.
§ 3
In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth
century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The
great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the
depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)--a relation of cause
and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to
insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it
was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie,"
which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against
taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt
sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the
improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of
laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not
strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in
1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle class, now hardened in
class insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of
tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down
those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern
risings had been crushed, the men of Essex were told by Richard, who had
given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them,
inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their
masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain,
in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared
that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs,
"were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of
economics, that despite this temper serfage did gradually die out, the
people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason
of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the
grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade's rebellion, in
1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as
it did for the suppression of the system under which the nobles
plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.
The question as to the rate at which the population recovered from
the Black Death has been discussed by Prof. Thorold Rogers, Mr.
Seebohm, and Prof. Cunningham (see the latter's _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce_, 1891, i, 304). Prof. Rogers, on the one
hand, maintains that by 1377, when the tax rolls seem to give a
population of about two and a half millions (cp. Dunton, _England
in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 130), the population had recovered
all it had lost in the Plague, he being of opinion that the England
of that age could not at any time support more than two and a half
millions. Mr. Seebohm, with whom Dr. Cunningham substantially
concurs (see also Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, p. 249, and
Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_, 1893, p. 194), thinks that the
return of the Plague in 1361 and 1369, and the unsettled state of
the country, must have prevented recuperation; and, accepting the
loose calculation that the Plague destroyed half the population
(Mr. Pearson says "one-half or two-thirds"; Dr. Gasquet endorses
the general view that "fully one half" were destroyed), he
concludes that the population before 1348 may have been five
millions.
The truth surely lies between these extremes. That the population
should not at all have recovered in twenty-five years is extremely
unlikely. That it should have restored a loss of thirty-three per
cent in twenty-five years, which is what Prof. Rogers's position
amounts to, is still more unlikely (see his _Six Centuries of Work
and Wages_, pp. 223, 226, where the mortality is estimated at
one-third). It is besides utterly incongruous with Prof. Rogers's
own repeated assertion that "during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries the population of England and Wales was almost
stationary" (_Industrial and Commercial History of England_, pp.
46, 49; _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 337; _Economic
Interpretation of History_, p. 53). How could a medieval population
conceivably stand for half a century at a given figure, then,
having been reduced by one-third, replace the loss in twenty-five
years, and thereafter continue to subsist without further increase
for two centuries more?
On the other hand, there is a natural tendency in every suddenly
depleted population to reproduce itself for a time at a quickened
rate; and in the England of the latter half of the fourteenth
century the conditions would encourage such an effort. The lack of
house-room and settlement which normally checked increase (cp.
Stubbs, § 493) was remedied for a large number of persons; and the
general feeling would be all in favour of marriage and repopulation
(cp. Rogers, _Six Centuries_, p. 226, where, however, evidence
obviously bad is accepted as to multiplied births), though just
after the Plague there would be a great stimulus to the extension
of pasture, since that needed fewer hands than tillage.
On the whole, we may reasonably surmise that the population before
1348 was, not five millions, but between three and four millions
(so Green, ch. v, § 4, p. 241, who, however, takes the somewhat
excessive view that "more than one-half were swept away," and
further, p. 239, that the population "seems to have all but tripled
since the Conquest"), and that it was prevented regaining that
figure in the next century by the economic preference of
sheep-farming to tillage. Mr. Rogers expressly admits (_Six
Centuries_, p. 233) that "the price of labour, proclamations and
statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates," and
repeatedly asserts that "the labourers remained masters of the
situation." On his own principles, this goes to prove that their
numbers remained lower than of old. He infers a "considerable loss
of life" in the famine of 1315-16 from the immediate rise of
agricultural wages (from 23 to 30 per cent), of which on the
average 20 per cent was permanent. Here there is a presumption that
even before 1315 the population was greater than afterwards. Yet
again he states (p. 326, etc.) that "the _fifteenth_ century and
the first quarter of the _sixteenth_ were the golden age of the
English labourer"--a proposition which staggers credence. Cp. W.J.
Corbett, in _Social England_, ii, 382-84.
It is impossible, however, to attain demonstration either on that
head or as regards the numbers of the population in the periods
under notice. Mr. Rogers's claims to give decisive evidence show a
serious misconception of what constitutes proof; and there is
special reason to distrust his conclusion that population was no
greater at the end of Elizabeth's reign than in that of Henry IV.
Cp. Mr. Gibbins's _Industrial History of England_, pp. 107-108.
Prof. J.E. Symes (in _Social England_, iii, 128, 129) decides that
a "great increase of the population undoubtedly took place in the
reign of Henry VIII," adopting the estimate that the total at the
death of Henry VII was about two and a half millions, and at the
death of Henry VIII about four millions. As to the population at
the Conquest, see Sharon Turner's _History of the Anglo-Saxons_,
bk. viii, c. 9, vol. iii, and Dunton, as cited, pp. 128-29. It was
then probably below two millions; and in the reign of Edward II it
may well have been over three millions; for Bishop Pecock about
1450 (cited by Dunton, p. 130 _note_) speaks of a long-continued
decrease, such as would be caused by the wars in France and at
home. But the assertion of Tyndale in 1532 (_id._ _ib._), that the
population was then less by a third than in the time of Richard II,
must be dismissed as a delusion set up by the phenomena of agrarian
depopulation in certain districts. On this see below, p. 405.
It is important to note, finally, that it was in the age of raised
standard of comfort that there occurred the first wide diffusion of
critical heresy in England. Wiclif's popular Lollardry was one phase of
a movement that went deeper in thought and further afield in social
reform than his, since he himself felt driven to confute certain
opponents of belief in the Scriptures, and at the same time to repudiate
the doctrine that vassals might resist tyrant lords.[1041] Had he not
done so, he might have had a less peaceful end; but it is clear that
many men were in the temper to apply to lay matters the demand for
reform which he restricted to matters ecclesiastical.[1042] John Ball's
rising, however, promptly elicited the much superior strength of the
feudal military class; and though in 1395 there were still Lollards to
petition to Parliament for the abolition of "unnecessary trades," as
well as war and capital punishment and the Catholic practices afterwards
rejected by Protestantism, their Utopia was as hopeless as that of the
insurgent peasants. Even had the invasion of France not come about to
bribe and demoralise the nation at large, turning it from domestic
criticism to the plunder of a neighbouring State, the nobility of the
period were utterly incapable of an intellectual ideal; and any sympathy
shown by any section of them for Lollardry was the merest opportunism,
proceeding on resentment of Papal exactions or on a premature hope of
plundering the Church.[1043] The moment Lollardry openly leant towards
criticism of nobility as well as clergy, they were ready to give it up
to destruction; and the determining cause of the fall of Richard II was
that, besides alienating the nobles at once by maintaining a peace
policy, and by refusing to let them go to all lengths in oppressing the
labourers, he alienated the clergy by sheltering the Lollards.[1044] It
was the clergy who turned the balance, embracing the cause of Henry IV,
who in turn systematically supported them,[1045] as did his son after
him. Henry V, the national hero-king, and his father were the first
burners of "Protestant" heretics; and it was under Henry IV, in 1401,
that there was passed the Act suppressing the voluntary schools of the
Lollards.[1046] Doubtless it was a push of the Lollards that carried the
later Act of 1406, permitting all men and women to send their sons and
daughters "to any school that pleaseth them in the realm;"[1047] but the
limitation of school-keeping to the Church was an effective means of
limiting the education given; and "by 1430 the Church had recovered from
the Lollard revolt against her universal authority."
Mr. Lecky, in his theory of the English aristocracy, credits the
nobility with an "eminently popular character" from time
immemorial, and cites Comines as to "the singular humanity of the
nobles to the people during the civil wars" (_History of England in
the Eighteenth Century_, small ed. i, 212, 213). The nobility, in
the circumstances, had need to treat the people better than those
of France normally did (which was what Comines was thinking of).
Their own wealth--what was left of it--came from the people, to
whom, further, they looked for followers. And Comines in the same
passage (bk. v, ch. xx) notes that the English people were "more
than ordinarily jealous" of their nobility. Of course, the
difference between French and English practice dates further back,
as above noted.
Similarly misleading is Mr. Lecky's statement that "the Great
Charter had been won by the barons, but ... it guaranteed the
rights of all freemen." Mr. Gardiner expressly points out
(_Student's History_, p. 182; cp. his _Introduction to English
History_, pp. 66-67) that the Charter "was won by a combination
between all classes of freemen." London had harboured and aided the
barons' force; and the clergy were closely concerned. (Cp.
McKechnie, _Magna Carta_, 1905, p. 41.) The representative
assembly summoned by John in 1213 stood for the combination of the
three classes. Green (_Short History_, illust. ed. i, 242, 243)
uses language which countenances Mr. Lecky, but shows (pp. 235-43)
the need the barons felt for aid, and the influence of the Church
and the traders. Compare the language of his longer history (1885,
i, 244), and his express admission as to the depression the
baronage had undergone a century later (_id._ p. 300). Dr. Stubbs
(_Const. Hist._ i, 571, 583) also indicates that the people
co-operated, though he uses expressions (pp. 570, 579) which
obscure the facts in Mr. Lecky's favour. Guizot (_Essais_, p. 282)
recognises that the movement was national. Buckle, too, made the
point clear long ago (3-vol. ed. ii, 114-20; 1-vol. ed. pp.
350-54). But it is noted even in what he called "the wretched work
of Delolme," and was in Buckle's day a generally accepted truth.
Cp. Ch. de Rémusat, _L'Angleterre du 18ième siècle_, 1856, i, 33.
It is worth noting in this connection that the Magna Carta,
considered in itself, is a rather deceptive historical document.
Not only did it need the defeat of John and his German and Flemish
allies by the French at Bouvines to enable even the combined lords
and commons and clergy to extort the Charter, but the combination
was being progressively destroyed by John, by means of his army of
French mercenaries, when the barons in despair persuaded the French
king to send an invading force, which was able to land owing to the
ruin of John's fleet in a storm. Thereupon John's French troops
deserted him. Cp. Green, pp. 122-26; Stubbs, ii, 3, 9-16; and
McKechnie, pp. 53-57, as to the King's energy and the weakness and
inner divisions of the national combination. Thus it was indirectly
to French action that England owed first the Magna Carta and then
the check upon the King's vengeance, as it was to the Frenchman,
Simon de Montfort, later, that it owed the initiative of a
three-class Parliament. And, indeed, but for the King's death, the
constitutional cause might well have collapsed in the end.
§ 4
The Wars of the Roses, by destroying in large part the nobility,
relatively advantaged the middle class,[1048] as well as the king whose
reign followed. Already under Edward IV the powers of Parliament were
much curtailed, and indeed paralysed;[1049] this, which is charged as a
sin upon the monarch, being the natural result of his gain of power on
the ruin of the baronage. Edward IV only did what Edward I and III would
have done if in their situation it had been possible, and what Edward II
and Richard II sought to do, but were too weak to compass. The fourth
Edward's situation and his force of will together made his power. Not
only was the nobility half exterminated, but the trading and middle
classes alike desired a strong ruler who should maintain order, by
whatever straining of constitutional forms--the invariable sequel of
anarchy--at least up to the point of intolerable taxation.[1050] The
actual increase of commerce during the wars[1051] is a good proof of the
separateness of class interests, and of the decline of the military
ideal. Much of it would seem to have been due to the example set by the
Hansa merchants, who had factories at London,[1052] Boston, and Lynn,
and whose famous League was then powerful enough to force from Edward IV
a renewal of its English privileges in return for a concession of a
share in the Baltic trade.[1053] In any case, the new development was on
the old lines of energetic self-seeking; and already in the reign of
Edward IV the cloth manufacture was carried on by capitalists in the
modern spirit.[1054] And as the tyrannies of the king were less general
and oppressive than the tyrannies of the nobles, the erection of the
regal power on the collapse of the old class cohesion gave a new scope
for the strife of classes among and for themselves. No national ideal
existed (as apart from the readiness to unite in hate of a foreign
nation) in monarchic England any more than in old republican Greece or
modern republican Italy. The trade gilds were strictly self-seeking
institutions, aiming at keeping down the number of competitors in each
trade, without providing in any way for the aspirants. Unitary egoism
was the universal mainspring. The Church sought above all things to be
protected against heresy; the town and trade corporations sought
protection for their privileges; and the landowners sought to be
supported against the labourers, who from the time of Henry VI are found
revolting against enclosures of public land, and were temporarily
reinforced by the disbanded retainers of the barons. Every modern force
of social disintegration was already nascent.
Cp. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i,
395-96, 413, 425; Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, §§ 486-92 (iii,
586-616). "In every great town there was, every few years,
something of a struggle, something of a crisis ... between trade
and craft, or craft and craft, or magistracy and commons" (Stubbs,
iii, 616). Prof. Ashley (_Introd. to Econ. Hist._ i, 79) disputes
that there was "any such contest in this country between burghers
and artisans" as took place on the continent; and cites another
passage from Bishop Stubbs (§ 131; i, 453) partly suggesting such a
view. But Prof. Ashley goes on (pp. 79-84) to show that there _was_
a good deal of struggling even in England between burghers and
artisans. Cp. his conclusions, pp. 6-10, 42, as to the process of
evolution towards at least formal unity. It is to be noted that the
gilds dispensed charity (Stubbs, iii, 616, 619).
§ 5
Under Henry VII the same conditions subsisted. There was no sufficiently
strong body of aristocracy left to rebel effectually against his
exactions, though exactions had always been the great cause of
discontent; and, all rivals collapsing, there grew up round the new
dynasty that hedging superstition which had always counted for much, and
which was in England to become a main factor in politics. Henry VII
wrought assiduously and astutely to build up his power, seeking no less
to increase the merchant class than to depress the aristocracy. From
both he thus drew his revenue; from the latter by exaction; from the
former by customs duties on the trade he carefully encouraged (as
Richard had done before him), finding in such revenue his surest
income.[1055] Gradually the monarchic system was made firm. Richard III
owed his failure mainly to the sense of the illegality of his position;
and the same inversion of the superstition troubled Henry VII in turn,
as it had done Henry IV. It seems to have been his possession of the one
train of artillery in the kingdom that mainly preserved his power
against rebels.[1056] But with Henry VIII the dynasty was secure; and
from this point onward the monarchic spell can be seen very clearly in
English affairs. The instinct of "loyalty," a moral prepossession
religiously sanctioned, becomes a social force as truly as the simpler
instincts of self-seeking and class spirit. By virtue of it, and of his
own force of brute will, Henry VIII could commit violences of almost
every description, his own personality having some of the
characteristics most likely to intensify the spell. Energy such as his
hypnotised or terrorised all but the strongest. Even his crimes were not
such as revolted average sympathy: the suppression of the Church, as in
nearly all the "Teutonic" countries, was a direct bribe to many of the
nobles and landowners,[1057] and for the multitude meant the overthrow
of an alien jurisdiction; and his domestic procedure satisfied the
popular ethic which demurs to mistresses but respects bigamy, and finds
a wife's adultery more criminal than her husband's murder of her. For
the rest, he had at the beginning of his reign executed his father's
minions, and conciliated the scholars, who made opinion. Yet under Henry
VIII we find middle-class England, heavily taxed for war, beginning to
stand on its rights as upper-class England had done in earlier times;
and in the new England as in the old the weakest class went to the wall.
The ever-increasing mass of poor, thrown idle and hungry by the
continuous rise of sheep-farms in the place of tillage, were the natural
enemies of the governing class as well as of the landowners; and in
cruelly repressing them the monarchy strengthened the landowners'
allegiance.
Thus arose the typical personal monarchy, employing middle-class
ministers, who served it zealously and with increasing power, Thomas
Cromwell far outgoing Wolsey. The passing coalition of nobles and yeomen
in the north in the cause of the old religion was followed by the
crushing of the remains of the old nobility, now being rapidly replaced
by the new, established on the plunder of the Church. It is to be noted
that in England, as in so many other countries, the virtual subjection
of the old nobility to the crown was for a time followed by stirrings of
new life in all directions, as if feudalism had everywhere meant a
repression of possible energy. The process is seen in Spain under
Ferdinand and Isabella;[1058] in France under Richelieu and Mazarin; in
Sweden under Gustavus Vasa; and is thus plainly a product not of
doctrinal Protestantism, as some suppose, but of the comparative social
and political liberty that follows on the restriction of ubiquitous
feudal tyranny, so much more searching and pervasive a force than the
simpler tyranny of the feudal king. It may be doubted, indeed, whether
the Tudor suppression of the power of the old aristocracy was not as
vital a determination of the nation's course as the overthrow of the
Catholic Church.
As against Mr. Lecky's indiscriminate panegyric of the English
nobility, it is instructive to note Hallam's judgment on the
peerage under Henry VIII: "They yielded to every mandate of his
imperious will ... they are responsible for the illegal trial, for
the iniquitous attainder, for the sanguinary statute, for the
tyranny which they sanctioned by law, and for that which they
permitted to subsist without law. Nor was this selfish and
pusillanimous subserviency more characteristic of the minions of
Henry's favour than of the representatives of ancient and
honourable houses, the Norfolks, the Arundels, and the Shrewsburys.
We trace the noble statesmen of these reigns concurring in all the
inconsistencies of the revolutions; supporting all the religions of
Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth; adjudging the death of Somerset
to gratify Northumberland, and of Northumberland to redeem their
participation in his fault; setting up the usurpation of Lady Jane,
and abandoning her on the first doubt of success, constant only in
the rapacious acquisition of estates and honours from whatever
source, and in adherence to the present power" (_Constitutional
History_, 10th ed. i, 48).
§ 6
And now effectively arose the new political force of Protestant and
Bible-worshipping fanaticism, turning the democratic instinct into its
channel, and complicating afresh the old issues of classes. It is not to
be forgotten that this was a beginning of popular culture, inasmuch as
the desire to read the worshipped book must have counted for more than
anything else in making reading common.[1059]
Practically, however, the opposed causes of Lollardism and orthodoxy may
at the outset be regarded as the democratic and the conservative
instincts, taking these channels in the absence of political development
and knowledge.[1060] In imperial Rome, the spread of Christianity was
substantially a movement of class cohesion among the illiterate slaves,
aliens, and workers, the instinct of attraction taking this form when
political grounds of union were lacking. So it was in the England of the
period under notice; but whereas in imperial Rome the autocracy went far
to annul class distinctions, and so helped the slaves' cult to absorb
superstitious patricians, especially women, whose wealth maintained the
poor of the Church as the emperor's doles had maintained the poor of the
State, in England the vigour of class distinctions fostered differences
of sect. The phenomena of political Protestantism in the Reformation era
in England, as in Germany, offer many parallels to those of the French
Revolution. The revolt of many priests from the routine and restrictions
of their office is notable in both epochs. On the other hand, the mass
of the well-to-do classes, being unprepared for change by any educative
process, were as ready to restore Catholic usages as were those of
France later; and when the innovating forces, consisting in a little
reasoning and much rapine, had run to seed and to corruption under the
Protectorate and Edward VI, the reaction towards the old forms set in
powerfully. Nothing, however, could carry it to the length of restoring
the Catholic Church's property; and the failure of Mary was due not
nearly so much to Protestant dislike of the ceremonial of Rome as to the
grip of the new owners on the confiscated lands. In England as in
Scotland, in Germany, in the Scandinavian States, and in Switzerland,
though Henry stood for a special initiative, the driving forces of the
Reformation were mainly those of wealth-seeking; and the financial
records of the Protectorate show a conspiracy of plunder to which the
annals of monarchy could offer no parallel. The Protestant aristocracy
simply encouraged the new Lollardism by way of gaining their personal
ends, as they had crushed the old because it menaced their property.
"Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern money had
been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal
expenditure had mounted in seventy years to more than four times
its previous total" (Green, ch. vii, § 1, and p. 353). A system of
wholesale corruption and waste had grown up under Henry VIII, who,
after all his confiscations, was fain to seek funds by adulterating
his coin. So Edward VI, the church and college plunder being gone,
had to be granted taxes on manufactures which tended to stop them.
"Yet I cannot find," says Sir Roger Twysden, "all this made the
crown rich. Hayward observes Edward's debts were £251,000--at least
said to be so. Camden, that Queen Elizabeth received the crown
_afflictissima_ ... _aere alieno quod Henricus VIII et Edwardus VI
contraxerant oppressa_.... I cannot but reckon the treasure spent
in fifteen years, more than half the kingdom to be sold"
(_Historical Vindication of the Church of England_, ed. 1847, pp.
4, 5). So obviously had the treasure gone into the pockets of
courtiers and their hangers-on, that the fact gives some excuse for
the habitual miserliness of Elizabeth.
A new channel had thus been made for the forces of union and strife. An
instructive part of the process was the movement towards a new
sacerdotalism on the side of the new Calvinistic clergy--a movement much
more clearly visible in Scotland than in England. Whether or not it be
true that "it was by no means the intention of Knox and his
fellow-labourers to erect a new hierarchy upon the ruins of the
old,"[1061] it is clear that his immediate successors counted on
wielding a power strictly analogous to that of the papacy. Andrew
Melville, in haughty colloquy with King James and his councillors, threw
down his Hebrew Bible on the table as his authority for his demands.
Since all alike professed to accept it, the next step in the argument
plainly was that it lay with the presbyter to interpret the sacred
book;[1062] and Melville, who took the king by the sleeve and called him
"God's silly [= weak] vassal," was quite ready to play Gregory to
James's Henry had he been able. The effective check lay in the new
Church's lack of revenue, the lands of the old Church having of course
been retained by the nobles, who carried through the Reformation simply
in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent
nobility[1063] in possession of the feudal power, the Scottish clergy
were nearly as tyrannous socially as their teacher Calvin had been at
Geneva; and for nearly two hundred years Scottish life was no freer and
much more joyless, under the new presbyter, than under the old priest,
though the democratic machinery of the Kirk obviated any need or
opportunity for fiscal exaction.
§ 7
As it is with the Reformation period that the play of sheer opinion
begins to appear distinctly in English politics, so it is in this period
that the phenomena of reactions first begin to be in a manner traceable
as distinct from military fluctuations. All faction, of course, is a
form of the play of opinion; but after the fading away of feudalism the
opinion is more easily to be contemplated as a force in itself,
alongside of the simpler instincts; and the ebbing and flowing of causes
suggests a certain consequence of action and reaction in human affairs.
The gain-getting Protestant movement under the Protectorate was followed
by the Catholic reaction under Mary; which again bred reaction by
ferocity. Catholics grew cold in their allegiance when Romanism yielded
such bloody fruits. Protestantism, besides, flourished on the continual
poverty of the lower orders, and on the abeyance of international
strife--conditions which necessarily set up new movements of combination
and repulsion; and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, she served to
represent, however incongruously, the religious leanings of the
democracy, as well as to unite them in the name of patriotism against
Rome and Spain. She, again, profited by the monarchic superstition,
while she was menaced by its inversion; and it is to be observed that as
a woman she gained immunity with her subjects for flaws of character
which in a man would have been odious and despicable, where her rival,
Mary of Scotland, suffered deposition for actions of a kind which in a
man would have been almost spontaneously forgiven. Mary's complicity in
the assassination of a base and unfaithful husband was an unpardonable
crime from the reigning ethical point of view, which was purely
masculine; and the same ethic held in amused toleration the constant bad
faith and personal absurdity of Elizabeth,[1064] which rather flattered
than endangered the pride of sex. Thus could monarchic politics be
swayed by the prevailing psychology of a period, as well as by its class
preponderances and interests. The personality of the monarch always
counted for much in the determination of his power.
Where Elizabeth gained, however, James lost. Her power was consolidated
by the triumph over the Armada, which in the old fashion fused religious
strifes in a common warlike exultation, and definitely made England
Protestant by setting her in deadly enmity towards the great Catholic
power;[1065] just as the state of aggressive hostility towards France
under Edward I and Edward III drew Englishmen of all classes into the
habit of speaking English and discarding the hitherto common use of
French. At the same time the Queen's collisions with Parliament and
people were always the less dangerous because she was a woman, and so
could yield without indignity where a man would have been humiliated and
discredited--an advantage overlooked by the historians who praise her
sagacity. Such as it was, it was in large part the sagacity of
unscrupulousness; and her success is much more the measure of popular
infatuation than of her wisdom. All the while, she had wiser councillors
than almost any English monarch before or since; and much of her
sagacity was theirs, perhaps even down to some of the unscrupulousness;
though on the other hand her fickleness often put them in an evil
aspect. Burghley might say what he would, in the loyalist manner, about
her inspired judgment; but he knew that she imposed Leicester on the
Dutch expedition against his advice, then starved her troops, then upset
everything because of the easily predictable disobedience of Leicester
in accepting the title of Governor-General from the Dutch.[1066] To say
in the face of such methods, as does Mr. Green, that while she had
little or no political wisdom, "her political tact was unerring," is to
frame a spurious paradox. The more than countervailing admission that
"in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a
peer in Christendom" is perhaps overcharged: she could not lie more
habitually and systematically than did Philip; but in both alike the
constant resort to falsehoods for which their antagonists were more or
less prepared, is a proof of want of political tact, no less than of
want of wisdom.[1067] That she should have been idolised as she was is
one of the best proofs of the power of the monarchic feeling; for there
has rarely been a less trustworthy woman on a throne. In any circle of
sound human beings she would have been disliked and distrusted; yet
English tradition celebrates her as admirably English, in the act of
blackening by comparison foreign rulers who were at least not
conspicuously falser,[1068] meaner,[1069] or more egotistic. What is
true is that many of the forces with and against which she intrigued
were either unscrupulous or irrational, and that her home tyrannies were
no worse than those which would have been committed by Puritans or
Catholics or Churchmen had these been free to go at each other's throats
as religion bade. Her trickeries on the whole kept things in
equilibrium. But conscienceless trickeries they were, and, as such,
singular grounds for historical enthusiasm. And it cannot have been any
concern for her celibacy, or subtle intuition of its effects on her
character, that endeared her to her subjects; for her often alleged
virginity, despite the gross scandals to the contrary, was an element in
the hallucination concerning her. "Loyalty" haloed her personality.
When, however, she was succeeded by a man certainly not worse or more
ungenerous, the spell was for the most part broken. James was a
Scotchman--a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly
spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity;
and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously
headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal
ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying
Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to
her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's
prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of
criticism. And there can be no doubt that the psychological shrinkage of
the monarchy in public esteem in the person of James prepared the way
for the resistance to it in the reign of his son.
As against the foregoing views of Henry's and Elizabeth's
characters, note should be taken of the doctrine of Dr. Gardiner
(_History_, as cited, i, 43) that "Henry VIII must be judged by"
[_i.e._ in view of the merits of] "the great men who supported his
daughter's throne, and who defended the land which he set free when
'he broke the bonds of Rome.' Elizabeth must be judged by the Pyms
and Cromwells, who ... owed their strength to the vigour with which
she _headed_ the resistance of England against Spanish aggression.
She had cleared the way for liberty, though she understood it not."
It seems necessary to enter a demurrer to such moral philosophy,
of which there is too much in recent English historiography.
Considering that the action of Henry towards all who thwarted him
was one of brutal terrorism, and that, save as regards his bribes,
he cowed alike his peers and his people, the courage shown by their
descendants might as rationally be credited to Philip of Spain as
to him. And to credit Elizabeth personally with the defeat of the
Armada, and consequently with the strength of the later Pyms and
Cromwells, is not only to reiterate the same paralogism but to
negate common sense as regards the facts of the Armada episode, in
which the nation did one half of the work, and the storm the other.
Dr. Gardiner, like Mr. Froude, who preaches a similar doctrine,
overlooks the consequence that Catholicism on these principles must
be credited with the production of Henry and Elizabeth, and
therefore with their alleged services. As against such an unmeaning
theory we may note another verdict of Dr. Gardiner's (p. 33):
"Elizabeth has a thousand titles to our gratitude, but it should
never be forgotten that she left, as a legacy to her successor, an
ecclesiastical system which, unless its downward course were
arrested by consummate wisdom, threatened to divide the nation into
two hostile camps, and to leave England, even after necessity had
compelled the rivals to accept conditions of peace, a prey to
theological rancour and sectarian hatred." How then is the account
to be balanced? Dr. Cunningham, we may note, sums up as to the
preceding reigns that "the scandalous confiscations of Henry VIII
and Edward VI were fatal to rural economy and disastrous to
mercantile dealings. The disintegration of society became complete;
... with some exceptions in regard to shipping and possibly in
regard to the repair of the towns, there is no improvement, no
reconstruction which can be traced to the reign of the Tudor kings"
(_English Industry_, i, 433). Cp. Prof. Rogers's _Industrial and
Commercial History_, p. 12.
§ 8
While such changes were being wrought at one end of the political
organism, others no less momentous, and partly causative of those, had
taken place at the other. By economic writers the period of the
Reformation in England is now not uncommonly marked as that of a great
alteration for the worse in the lot of the mass of the peasantry.[1070]
The connection between the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the
agrarian trouble, however, is not of the primary character that is thus
supposed: it might be rather called accidental than causal. Suppression
of the monasteries could at most only throw into prominence the poverty
which the monasteries relieved, but which monasteries always tend to
develop.[1071] Wholesale eviction of husbandmen to make way for
sheep-farms had taken place, the Church helping, before Henry VIII began
to meddle with the Church; and vagabondage and beggary were common in
consequence.[1072] The distress was there to begin with, and was
increasing, from what period onward it were hard to say.
The early fifteenth-century riots against "enclosures," above mentioned,
arose out of the policy of systematically extending pasture, and point
to a distress set up by the gradual growth of gain-seeking methods among
landowners as against the common people,[1073] whose normal tendency to
multiply was a constant force making for poverty, though it was met
half-way by the aggression of landlords who found it more profitable to
raise and export wool than to farm.[1074] A fresh source of dislocation
was the enforcement of laws against the keeping of bands of retainers, a
process to which Henry VII specially devoted himself,[1075] thus
securing his throne on the one hand while intensifying the evil of
depopulation and decreasing tillage, for which on the other hand he
tried remedial measures,[1076] of the customary description. Laws were
passed forbidding the peasantry to seek industrial employment in the
cities--this course being taken as well in the interests of the trades
as with the hope of restoring agriculture. One outcome of the
circumstances was that sheep-farming, like the cloth manufacture, began
to be carried on by capitalists;[1077] the moneyed classes beginning to
reach out to the country, while the gentry began to draw towards the
towns.[1078] Thus we find in existence long before the Reformation all
the economic troubles which some writers attribute to the methods of the
Reformation; though the Protestant nobles who scrambled for the plunder
of the Church in the reigns of Henry and of Edward VI seem to have done
more sheep-farming and depopulating than any others, thereby disposing
the people the more to welcome Mary.[1079]
Even Prof. Thorold Rogers, who (overlooking the Act 4 Henry VII)
seems to hold that the enclosures in the fifteenth century were not
made at the expense of tillage, and that the earliest complaints
are in the sixteenth century (_History of Agriculture and Prices_,
iv, 63, 64 note, 109: cp. Cunningham, _English Industry_, i, 393
_note_), still shows that there were heavy complaints as early as
1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cc. 5, 6) of a general decay of towns and growth
of pastures--long before Henry had meddled with the Church. Bishop
Stubbs is explicit on the subject as regards the period of York and
Lancaster:--"The price of wool enhanced the value of pasturage; the
increased value of pasturage withdrew field after field from
tillage; the decline of tillage, the depression of the markets, and
the monopoly of the wool trade by the staple towns, reduced those
country towns which had not encouraged manufacture to such poverty
that they were unable to pay their contingent to the revenue, and
the regular sum of tenths and fifteenths was reduced by more than a
fifth in consequence. The same causes which in the sixteenth
century made the enclosure of the commons a most important popular
grievance, had begun to set class against class as early as the
fourteenth century, although the thinning of the population by the
Plague acted to some extent as a corrective" (_Constitutional
History_, iii, 630; cp. Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 251; ch. vi, § 3, p.
285).
The troubles, again, were fluctuating, the movement of depopulation and
sheep-farming being followed in due course by a revival of tillage,
while contrary movements might be seen in different parts of the
country, according as commercial advantage lay for the moment. In one
district it might pay best to rear sheep; in another, by reason of
nearness to town markets, it might pay best to grow corn; but the
competition of corn imported from the Baltic in return for English
exports would be a generally disturbing force. The very improvement of
agricultural skill, too, in which Holland led the way,[1080] would tend
to lessen employment in the rural districts. Peace and progress, in the
absence of science, always thus provide new sources of distress,
multiplying heads and hands without multiplying the employment which
secures for the multitude a share in the fruits, but always aggrandising
those who have contrived to become possessed of the prime monopolies.
What went on was a perpetual transference and displacement of
well-being, one class rising on another's distress; and after the
apparently steady decay of the towns under Henry VIII,[1081] the new
lead given to industry in the reign of Elizabeth, by the influx of
Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, went to build up an urban
middle class which for the time had no political motives to discontent.
Sir Thomas More, in the very passage of the _Utopia_ in which he
speaks of the wholesale eviction of husbandmen, tells how
"handicraft men, yea, and almost the ploughmen of the country, with
all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud new
fangleness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and
sumptuous fare at their table" (bk. i, Robinson's trans.). New
wealth and new poverty co-existed. "Cheapness and dearness, plenty
and scarcity, of corn and other food, depopulation and rapidly
increasing numbers, really co-existed in the kingdom. There were
places from which the husbandman and labourer disappeared, and the
beasts of the field grazed where their cottages had stood; and
there were places where men were multiplying to the dismay of
statesmen." Cliffe Leslie, essay on _The Distribution and Value of
the Precious Metals_, vol. cited, p. 268. The whole of this essay
is well worth study. Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to Economic
History_, ii, 50-54.
§ 9
Hence there was no continuous pressure of agrarian or industrial
politics, and the stress of the instinct of strife went in other
directions. The modern reader, seeking for the class politics of the
later Tudor period, finds them as it were covered up, save for such an
episode as the revolt of 1549, by the record of foreign policy and
ecclesiastical strifes, and is apt to condemn the historian for leaving
matters so. But in reality class politics was for the most part
superseded by sect politics. The new pseudo-culture of bibliolatry,
virtually a sophisticated barbarism, had made new paths for feeling; and
these being the more durable, the miseries of the evicted rural
populations, which forced a Poor Law on the administration, never set up
anything approaching to a persistent spirit of insurrection. By the
suppression of the old feudal nobility, as already noted, life in
general had been made freer; and the monarch for the time being was
become a relatively beneficent and worshipful power in the eyes of the
mass of the people, while the landowners were grown weak for harm. The
destructive passions were running in other channels, and religious hate
swallowed up class hate. For the rest, the new aristocracy was
thoroughly established; and in the life and work of Shakespeare himself
we see the complete acceptance of the readjusted class relation, though
we can also see in his pages the possibilities of a new upper class of
rich merchants. In his impersonal way he flashes the light of Lear's
tardy sympathy on the forlorn world of the homeless poor; and in many a
phrase he condenses an intense criticism of the injustices of class
rule; but even if, as seems certain, he did not write the Jack Cade
scenes in _Henry VI_, he has little of the purposive democrat in him:
rather--though here it is hard indeed to get behind the great humanist's
mask--some touch of the fastidious contempt of the noble, himself fickle
enough, for the changing voice of the ignorant populace.
On one point of current psychology, however, as on the great issue of
religion, Shakespeare's very silence is more significant than speech.
After the passionate outburst put in the mouth of the dying John of
Gaunt, and the normal patriotism of _Henry V_, utterances of his early
manhood, proceeding upon those of the older plays which he re-wrote, we
find in his dramas a notable aloofness from current public passion. This
would of course be encouraged by the regulations for the stage; but no
regulation need have hindered him from pandering habitually to popular
self-righteousness in the matter of national animosities. In 1596 the
multitude were all on the side of the fire-eating Essex and against the
prudent Burghley in the matter of aggressive war upon Spain; hope of
plunder and conquest playing as large a part in their outcry as any
better sentiment. The production of _Henry V_ in 1599, with its
laudatory allusion to Essex's doings in Ireland, whither he had been
accompanied by Shakespeare's patron Southampton, would suggest, if the
passage were of his penning,[1082] that the dramatist was one of Essex's
partisans. But whichever way he then leaned, no man can gather from his
later plays any encouragement to natural passion of any species. It is
not merely that he avoids politics after having been compromised by
contact with them:[1083] it is that he rises to a higher plane of
thought and feeling.[1084] He, if any man, could see the fatuity with
which Englishmen denounced cruelty in Spaniards while matching Spanish
cruelty in Ireland, and cursed the Inquisition while mishandling Jesuit
priests in the Inquisition's own temper. The story of English cruelty in
Ireland in Elizabeth's and James's day is one of the most sickening in
the history of the epoch.[1085] But no sense of guilt ever checked the
blatant self-sufficiency with which the general run of Englishmen of the
time inveighed against the misdeeds of the Spaniards: no twinge of
self-criticism ever modified their righteous thanksgiving over the
defeat of the Armada, which was manned partly to avenge their own
massacre and torture of Catholic priests. Their Drakes and Hawkinses,
playing the pirate and the slave-stealer, and holding with no qualms the
conviction that they were doing God service, made current the cant of
Puritanism in the pre-Puritan generation. Godly ruffianism could not
later go further than it did in "the Elizabethan dawn"; for Milton's
swelling phrase of "God and his Englishmen" did not outgo the
self-satisfaction of the previous age, any more than of the later period
of "Teutonic" self-glorification. To Shakespeare alone seems to have
been possible the simple reflection that God's Spaniards, equating with
God's Englishmen, left zero to the philosopher.
It seems clear that the mass of the people, and such leading men as
Essex and Raleigh, desired a continuance of the state of war with
Spain because of the opportunities it gave for piratical plunder.
The queen, who had shared in the loot of a good many such
expeditions, might have acquiesced but for Burghley's dissuasion.
It was an early sign of predilection to the path of imperialism, on
which Cromwell later put one foot, on which Chatham carried the
nation far, and which it has in later days at times seemed bent on
pursuing. In Elizabeth's day enterprises of plunder, as one writer
has pointed out, "became the usual adventure of the times, by which
the rich expected to increase their wealth and the prodigal to
repair their fortunes"; and the general imagination was fired with
similar hopes, till "the people were in danger of acquiring the
habits and the calculations of pirates." (J. M'Diarmid, _Lives of
British Statesmen_, 1820, i, 239, 240; cp. Furnivall and Simpson in
the latter's _School of Shakespeare_, 1878, i, pp. x, 32-40; and
see Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 12, as to the
contemporary lack of commercial enterprise.) Cecil, in his
opposition to the war policy of Essex, remarkably anticipates the
view of rational historical science (see Camden's _Annales_, ed.
1717, iii, 770-71, as to the conflict.) Burghley had equally been
the resisting force to the popular desire for an attack on France
after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His remarkable hostility to
militarism is set forth in his _Advice_ to his son, on the head of
the training to be given to his children: "Neither, by my consent,
shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to
live by that profession can hardly be an honest man or a good
Christian." Yet he planned well enough against the Armada. Cp.
Creighton, _Queen Elizabeth_, pp. 236, 237.
§ 10
The culture history of the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare is perhaps
clearer than the political. It is in the first great lull of the Wars of
the Roses, under Edward IV, that we find printing established in
England. Original literature had virtually died out, as in northern
Europe, in the long stress of physical strife; but the love of reading
took a new growth when peace intervened, and a printer found a public
for reproductions of the literatures of the past. This culture proceeded
under Henry VII, till at the advent of Henry VIII there was a mature
movement of scholarship, a product of classical study and reflection,
yielding for England the singular and memorable fruit of More's
_Utopia_. That was truly a "Pallas of the brain," not "wild" as in the
phrase of the conservative poet, but well-nigh pure of the blind passion
of normal life,[1086] and therefore no more than a radiant vision for an
age in which blind passion was still plenipotent. More's mind had
ripened as it were independently of his temperament; and his life is the
tragedy of an intelligence, more haunting and more profoundly
instructive than any _Hamlet_. The serene spirit that dreamed and
planned the _Utopia_ grew to be capable of a bitterness of dogmatic
fanaticism on a level with the normal passions of the time.[1087] It is
matter for surprise that he has not ere now been studied or cited as an
apparition of the "Celtic" mind on the arena of brutal English
life,[1088] a prematurely penetrating intelligence thrust back upon and
enveloped by a temperament kept passionate by the shocks of an animal
environment. From his eyes, limned by the great Holbein, there looks out
the sadness of flawed and frustrate wisdom; even as blood and passion
and fleshly madness are written in the beastlike face of the king, whose
little son, ruddy and hardy in his babyhood, pales and pines away
through portrait after portrait to puberty and death, the victim of some
secret malady.
Neither on the psychological line of More nor on that of Henry could the
national culture proceed. It went on naïvely, being for long neither
Puritan nor anti-Puritan, though the loquacious and commonplace
utterance of preachers already abounded before the accession of
Elizabeth. The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter
of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is
more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth
than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to
be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered
forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit;
the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were
being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to
new exercises of mind and speech; the swarming life of the capital
raised the theatre to fecund energy in a generation; and transformed
feudalism survived in the guise rather of a guardian to art and letters
than of organised class oppression. A new economic factor, conditioned
by a new resource, was at work. In More's day there was no such thing as
a professional writer, and there were few printed books. The great
controversy between Protestants and Catholics gave a new and powerful
stimulus to printing, and printing in turn invited literary effort,
books finding multiplying purchasers. Then came the growth of the new
theatre, an apparent means of livelihood to a crowd of poet-dramatists.
No such sudden outcrop of manifold literature had ever before occurred
in human history; the mental distance between Elyot and Bacon, between
the old interludes and Shakespeare, is as great as that between Hesiod
and Euripides. But the secret of continuous progress had not yet been
found: it lies, if anywhere, with the science of the future: and the
development after the reign of Elizabeth necessarily began to take new
lines.
The later profusion of the poetic drama was the profusion of decay.
Artistic abundance must mean artistic change or deterioration; but in
the drama there was no recasting of the artistic formulas, no refining
of the artistic sense, because there was no progress in general culture
sufficient to force or educe it. Rather the extraordinary eloquence of
the earlier and greater dramatists, and in particular of the greatest,
bred a cultus of conventional rhetoric and declamation in which the
power and passion of the masters were lost. Powerful men could not go on
attending to an infinity of such blank-verse dramas; powerful men could
not go on producing dramas, because the mind of the time made no
progress complementary to the great flowering of the Elizabethan peace.
That was essentially a late rebirth of the classic or bookish culture of
the Renaissance. New germinal ideas, apart from those of religion, were
yet to come. Already the spell of Bibliolatry was conquering the average
intelligence, unprepared to digest Hebraism as the _élite_ of the
previous generation had digested classicism; and the Protestant
principle led the Protestant peoples in the mass into the very attitude
needed for a social hypnotism such as that of Jewry, the fatal exemplar.
Bibliolatry is the culture of the ignorant; church government, the
politics of the unenfranchised and the impractical; their conditions
exclude them from a truer culture and more vital political interests.
Already in Henry's time the newly-translated Scriptures were, to his
wrath, "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and
alehouse"; the very stress of his own personal rule being a main part of
the cause. Under the Protectorate of Somerset the gross rapacity of the
Protestant nobles identified the new Church with upper-class selfishness
as completely as the old had ever been; and the Norfolk revolt of 1549
avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the gentry. When that was stamped out
in massacre, the spirit of popular independence was broken, save in so
far as it could play in the new channel of personal religion and
ecclesiastical polemic, always being dug by the disputation of the new
clergy. And when in the reign of Mary crowds of Protestant refugees fled
to Geneva, of which the polity had already been introduced to the
students of Oxford by Peter Martyr, there was set up a fresh ferment of
Presbyterian theory among the educated class which the ecclesiastical
conditions under Elizabeth could not but foster. The new dramatic
literature and the new national life of anti-Spanish adventure kept it
all substantially in the background for another generation; but the lack
of progressive culture and the restriction of expansive enterprise at
length gave the forces of pietism the predominance. Thus, in ways in
which the historians of our literature and politics have but imperfectly
traced, the balance of the nation's intellectual activity shifted
towards the ground of religion and the ecclesiastical life. And only
this change of mental drift can account for the new energy of resistance
incurred by Charles when he took up with greater obstinacy the lines of
policy of his father, meddling with church practice and normal
government on the same autocratic principles. Religion and worship were
not the sole grounds of quarrel, but they commanded all the other
grounds.
The decadence of English poetic drama after the death of Shakespeare is
one of the themes which elicit illustrations of the snares of empirical
sociology. An able and original literary critic, Mr. G.C. Macaulay, at
the close of a very competent study on Francis Beaumont, has formulated
a theory of that decadence which calls for revision. He pronounces that
by 1615 "the impulse which had moved the older generation was ... almost
exhausted. This, as we have already seen, came in the form of an
enthusiastic patriotism, ennobling human life, so far at least as
Englishmen were concerned in it, and producing a united and national
interest in the representation of its problems and destiny" (_Francis
Beaumont_, 1883, p. 187).
Error here emerges at once. It was not national patriotism that evoked
either the pre-Shakespearean or the Shakespearean drama. The rude
foundations had been laid by many "interludes," by such homespun comedy
as _Ralph Roister Doister_, and by the stilted tragedy of _Ferrex and
Porrex_. The chronicle-plays of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, worked
over by Shakespeare, are far from being the best of the
pre-Shakespearean drama. Just after the Armada, Marlowe revealed his
powers, not in patriotic plays, but in _Tamburlaine_, followed by _The
Jew of Malta_, and _Faustus_. The best of the pre-Shakespearean plays on
English history was Marlowe's _Edward II_, in which there was and could
be no appeal to patriotic fervour. The best episode in _Edward III_
stands out entirely from the "patriotic" part, which is nearly
worthless. The superior episode is probably the work of Greene, whose
best complete play, _James IV_, turns on fictitious Scottish history,
and is only momentarily touched by patriotic feeling. Peele's _Edward I_
is inferior as a whole to his _David and Bethsabe_. Kyd made his
successes, literary or theatrical, with _The Spanish Tragedy_, _Arden of
Feversham_, and the original _Hamlet_. Shakespeare's best work, from the
start, is done not in the chronicle-plays but in his comedies, in his
Falstaff scenes, and in his tragedies, from _Romeo and Juliet_ onwards.
These had nothing to do with patriotism, enthusiastic or otherwise. And
_Henry V_, which had, is not a great play.
The chief florescence of Elizabethan drama is to be understood in the
light of economic causation; and the decline is to be understood
similarly. The rise of the London theatres, a process of expansion
following on the maintenance of separate companies of players by
noblemen and by the court, meant a means of livelihood for actors and
playwrights, and of profit for _entrepreneurs_. Greene and Peele, and
Kyd and Marlowe, and Jonson and Chapman, wrote not to evoke or respond
to national patriotism, but to provide plays that would sell and "draw."
The original genius of Marlowe stimulated the others, who nearly all
imitated him. _Orlando Furioso_, _Selimus_, _Alphonsus King of
Arragon_, _David and Bethsabe_, and even _The Battle of Alcazar_, have
nothing to do with patriotism; and the touches of that in _Friar Bacon
and Friar Bungay_ are subsidiary to the story. There is no extant play
on the Armada.
It is pure supererogation, then, to argue that "everything had been done
by the first Stuart king to cool down patriotism, and to diminish the
self-respect and pride of Englishmen; while at the same time, by his
insolent hitherto unheard-of (?) divine-right pretensions, he alarmed
them for their political liberties, and by his ecclesiastical policy he
exasperated theological controversy; thus contriving, both in politics
and in religion, to destroy unity and foster party spirit to an extent
which had been unknown for nearly half-a-century. The condition of
things," adds Mr. Macaulay, "was unfavourable to everything national,
and above all things to the national drama, which became rather the
amusement of the idle than the embodiment of a popular enthusiasm." Need
it be pointed out that all of Shakespeare's greatest work, after
_Hamlet_, which was anything but "national," was produced after the
accession of James? What had popular enthusiasm to do with _Othello_,
_Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _The Tempest_,
and _The Winter's Tale_?
The really explanatory factors are (1) the economic, (2) the trend of
popular culture. Shakespeare alone of the dramatists of his day made
anything like a good income; and he did so in virtue of being an actor
and a prudent partner in the proprietorship of his theatre. Kyd, Greene,
and Peele all died in misery; and Marlowe must have lived his short life
from hand to mouth. Jonson subsisted chiefly by his masques and by the
gifts of patrons, and by his own avowal was always poor. Chapman can
have fared no better. The concurrence of the abnormal genius of
Shakespeare with his gift of commercial management is one of the rarest
things in literary history: take that away, and the problem of the
"decadence" is seen to be merely part of the statement of the "rise."
When men of superior power, taught by the past, ceased to defy poverty
by writing for the theatre--and even the vogue of Fletcher and Massinger
represented no solid monetary success--plays could less than ever appeal
to the "serious" and sectarian sections of the London public. Popular
culture ran on the sterile lines of pietism, Puritanism, and the strifes
engendered between these and sacerdotalism. All this had begun long
before James, though he may have promoted the evolution. Literary art
perforce turned to other forms. A successful national war could no more
have regenerated the drama than the wars of Henry V could generate it.
There was plenty of "national enthusiasm" later, in the periods of
Marlborough and Chatham: there was no great drama; and the new fiction
had as little to do with patriotism as had Shakespeare's comedies and
tragedies. Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ was not inspired by his politics.
It is well to recognise, finally, that in the nature of things æsthetic,
every artistic convention must in time be "played out," the law of
variation involving deviations or recoils. Blank-verse drama is a
specially limited convention, which only great genius can vitalise. Even
in this connection, however, there is danger in _a priori_ theorising.
Mr. Macaulay quotes from Schlegel the generalisation that "in the
commencement of a degeneracy in the dramatic art, the spectators first
lose the capability of judging of a play as a whole"; hence "the harmony
of the composition, and the due proportion between all the various parts
is apt to be neglected, and the flagging interest is stimulated by
scenes of horror or strange and startling incidents." The implication is
that the Jacobean drama degenerated in this way. Again the facts are
opposed to the thesis. If we are to believe Shakespeare and Jonson and
Beaumont, the audiences never appreciated plays as wholes. Scenes of
"comic relief," utterly alien to the action, come in as early as
_Locrine_. Scenes of physical and moral horror, again, abound in the
pre-Shakespearean drama: in _The Spanish Tragedy_ and _Arden of
Feversham_, in _David and Bethsabe_, in _Titus Andronicus_ (a
pre-Shakespearean atrocity), in _Selimus_ and _Tancred and Gismunda_,
and _Alphonsus Emperor of Germany_ (a Greene-Peele play wrongly ascribed
to Chapman), they are multiplied _ad nauseam_. Rapes, assassinations,
incest, tearing-out of eyes and cutting-off of hands, the kissing of a
husband's excised heart by his wife, the unwitting eating of her
children's flesh by a mother, the dashing out of a child's brains by its
grandfather--such are among the flowers of the Elizabethan time. On
Schlegel's theory, there was degeneration before there was success.
Webster's "horrors" do not seem to have won him great vogue; and Ford's
neurotic products had no great popularity. Doubtless weak performers
tend to resort to violent devices; but they did so before Shakespeare;
and Shakespeare did not stick at trifles in _Lear_ and _Othello_.
Decadence in art-forms, in short, is to be studied like other forms of
decadence, in the light of the totality of conditions; and is not to be
explained in terms of itself. Mr. Macaulay's thesis as a whole might be
rebutted by simply citing the fact that the florescence of Spanish drama
at the hands of Lope de Vega and Calderon occurred in a period of
political decline, when "patriotic enthusiasm" had nothing to live upon.
Vega began play-writing just after the defeat of the Armada; and his
_Dragontea_, written in exultation over the death of Drake, is not a
memorable performance. Velasquez, like Calderon, flourished under Philip
IV, in a time of national depression and defeat.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 987: "The distinctive characteristics of the Saxon
race--talents for agriculture, navigation, and commerce" (T. Colley
Grattan, _The Netherlands_, 1830, p. 2).]
[Footnote 988: A.L. Smith, in _Social England_, i, 201, 202. When Alfred
built ships he had to get "Frisian pirates" to man them. It was clearly
the new agricultural facilities of England that turned the original
pirates into thorough landsmen. Cp. Dr. Cunningham, _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce_, 3rd ed. 1896, App. E. pp. 640, 641.]
[Footnote 989: H. Hall, in _Social England_, i, 464. Cp. ii, 101; Prof.
Ashley, _Introduction to English Economic History_, 1888-93, i, 111;
Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 327; Schanz, _Englische
Handelspolitik_, 1889, i, 1. When the Jews were expelled by Edward I,
Lombards were installed in their place. Later, as we shall see, the
Hansards seem to have tutored natives up to the point of undertaking
their own commerce.]
[Footnote 990: Cp. A.L. Smith, as cited, p. 203.]
[Footnote 991: Seebohm, _The English Village Community_, 3rd ed. 1884,
pref. p. ix. Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to English Economic
History_, i, 13-16.]
[Footnote 992: Prof. Maitland, the most circumspect opponent of the
"serf" view, did not consider this when he asked (_Domesday Book and
Beyond_, ed. 1907, p. 222) how either the Saxon victors could in the
mass have sunk to serfdom or the conquered Britons, whose language had
disappeared, could be so numerous as to constitute the mass of the
population.]
[Footnote 993: That the serf or villein was not necessarily an abject
slave is noted by Kemble (_Saxons in England_, as cited, i, 213) and
Stubbs (_Const. Hist._ 4th ed. i, 466).]
[Footnote 994: Maitland, _Domesday Book_, pp. 43, 46.]
[Footnote 995: This seems a more probable etymology than the derivation
by spelling from _Knabe_.]
[Footnote 996: Cp. the Rev. G. Hill, _Some Consequences of the Norman
Conquest_, 1904, pp. 60-61.]
[Footnote 997: Green, _History_ (the longer), 1885, i, 79.]
[Footnote 998: Thierry, _Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre_, édit.
9e, 1851, i, 152-55; Duruy, _Hist. de France_, ed. 1880, i, 289.]
[Footnote 999: Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, 1907, pp. 3-5.]
[Footnote 1000: Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 116, 1-vol. ed. p. 351;
Stubbs, _Const. Hist._ i, 280; Sharon Turner, _History of England during
the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 213. "The princes who lived upon the worst
terms with their barons seem accordingly to have been the most liberal
in grants ... to their burghs." Adam Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk.
iii, ch. iii.]
[Footnote 1001: The Conqueror himself not only took pains to protect and
attach native freemen who accepted his rule, but sought to retain their
laws and usages. Cp. Stubbs, i, 281, 290, 298. The statement that he
aimed specially at the manumission of serfs (Sharon Turner, as last
cited, i, 135, 136) proceeds on a fabricated charter. That, however, is
not later than Henry I.]
[Footnote 1002: Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, bk. xiv, ch. i.]
[Footnote 1003: _E.g._ the rivalries of mendicant friars and secular
priests and monks, and of the different orders of monks and friars with
each other. Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ix, 145, 146, 155,
156; Sharon Turner, _History of England during the Middle Ages_, iii,
123-26, 137, etc. The strifes between popes and prelates are
innumerable, in all countries.]
[Footnote 1004: As to this see Dr. Cunningham, _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce_, 3rd ed. 1896, Appendix E. Cp. Green, _Short
History_, ch. ii, § 6, p. 88.]
[Footnote 1005: As to which see Earle, _Philology of the English
Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 54-66.]
[Footnote 1006: This is explicitly admitted by Buckle (3-vol. ed. ii,
118; 1-vol. ed. p. 352), though he does not thereafter speak
consistently on the subject.]
[Footnote 1007: Cp. Buckle, as last cited; Green. _History_ (the
larger), 1885, i. 300.]
[Footnote 1008: Stubbs, iii, 606.]
[Footnote 1009: Karl Hegel notes (_Städte und Gilden der germanischen
Völker im Mittelalter_, pp. 33-34) that the Anglo-Saxon gilds seem to
have had no connection with towns or communes, and that their societies
might serve as a type for any class-association.]
[Footnote 1010: Cp. Green, _Short History_, ch. iv, § 4, pp. 192, 193;
ch. vi, § 3, p. 285; Prof. Ashley, _Introd. to English Economic
History_, 1888-93, i, 71, 75, 85, 87, 89; ii, 12, 14, 19, 49. Prof.
Ashley notes a great change for the better in the fifteenth century
(work cited, ii, 6), and a further advance in the sixteenth (ii, 42).]
[Footnote 1011: Cp. J.H. Round, _The Commune of London_, 1899, p. 224.]
[Footnote 1012: "After Crécy and Calais, Edward felt himself strong
enough to disregard the Commons.... His power was for the most part
great or small, as his foreign policy was successful or disastrous"
(Pearson, _English History in the Fourteenth Century_, pp. 224, 225).
See also Stubbs, iii, 608; and compare the case of Henry V.]
[Footnote 1013: Cp. Prof. Ashley, i, 88.]
[Footnote 1014: As to Flemish influence on early English progress, see
Prof. Thorold Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History of England_,
1892, pp. 10, 11, 301-303.]
[Footnote 1015: Hallam. _Middle Ages_, iii. 321, 322.]
[Footnote 1016: Gardiner, _Student's History of England_, p. 69; Gneist,
as cited above, p. 376. Cp. Gardiner's _Introduction to the Study of
English History_, p. 91: "Even the House of Commons, which was pushing
its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The
labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation.
Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down
upon those beneath them without trust or affection." Magna Carta itself
was a protection only for "freemen."]
[Footnote 1017: Cp. Gibbins. _Industrial History of England_, pp. 36,
37; Pearson, _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_, ii,
378.]
[Footnote 1018: See Pearson's _English History in the Fourteenth
Century_, pp. 23, 228, 253, etc.; cp. p. 225. In the thirteenth century
Frederick II had enfranchised all the serfs on his own domains (Milman,
_Latin Christianity_, vi, 153); and a similar policy had become general
in the Italian cities. Louis VI and Louis VII of France had even
enfranchised many of their serfs in the twelfth century, and Louis X
carried out the policy in 1315. Cp. Duruy, _Hist. de France_, i, 291,
_note_. England in these matters was not forward, but backward.]
[Footnote 1019: Froissart, liv. ii, ch. 106, éd. Buchon, 1837. The
southern counties, however, were perhaps then as now less democratic,
less "free," than the northern.]
[Footnote 1020: Compare Mackintosh's rhetoric as to Magna Carta
constituting "the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind"
(_History of England_, 1830, i, 222), and as to Simon de Montfort, whom
he credits with inventing the idea of representation in Parliament for
cities (p. 238).]
[Footnote 1021: Duruy, _Hist. de France_, i, 289.]
[Footnote 1022: Cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'histoire de France_, 7e édit.
p. 322.]
[Footnote 1023: This had, however, been employed as early as 1246.]
[Footnote 1024: Cp. Pearson, as last cited, p. 8.]
[Footnote 1025: As to what traffic actually took place in the Dark Ages,
cp. Heyd, _Histoire du commerce de Levant_, Fr. tr. 1886, i, 94-99.]
[Footnote 1026: Cox, _The Crusades_, p. 146.]
[Footnote 1027: Pignotti, _History of Tuscany_, Eng. trans. 1823, iii,
256-62.]
[Footnote 1028: _Hist. de la Civ. en France_, ed. 13e, iii, 6e leçon.]
[Footnote 1029: Down even to the points of chastity and "training."]
[Footnote 1030: This is now pretty generally recognised. Among recent
writers compare Green, _Short History_, ch. iv, § 3; Pearson, as last
cited, p. 220; Gardiner, _Student's History of England_, p. 235; and
_Introduction to the Study of English History_, p. 91. See also Buckle,
3-vol. ed. ii, 133; 1-vol. ed. p. 362. The sentimental view is still
extravagantly expressed by Ducoudray, _Histoire sommaire de la
civilisation_, 1886.]
[Footnote 1031: Pignotti, as cited, iii, 279; G. Villani, _Cronica_,
xii, 54-56.]
[Footnote 1032: Cp. Thierry, _Histoire de la Conquête_, iv, 210. As
Thierry notes (p. 247), John Ball's English is much less Gallicised than
that which became the literary tongue.]
[Footnote 1033: "Depuis les dominateurs de l'Orient jusqu'aux maîtres de
Rome asservie ... quiconque détient la liberté d'autrui dans la
servitude, perd la sienne...." (Morin, _Origines de la démocratie_, pp.
137-38).]
[Footnote 1034: Cp. Busch, _England unter den Tudors_, 1892, i, 6.]
[Footnote 1035: Stubbs, _Const. Hist._, iii, 632, 633; Busch, _England
unter den Tudors_, i, 81; Green, ch. vi, § 3, pp. 267, 268, 287, 288.]
[Footnote 1036: Cp. Gardiner, _Student's History_, p. 330.]
[Footnote 1037: The clergy and the Parliament seem to have applauded the
project of an invasion of France instantly and without reservation
(Sharon Turner, _History of England during the Middle Ages_, ii, 383).
And already in the minority of Henry VI "the Parliament was fast dying
down into a mere representation of the baronage and the great
landowners" (Green, ch. vi, p. 265). "Never before and never again for
more than two hundred years were the Commons so strong as they were
under Henry IV" (Stubbs, iii, 73).]
[Footnote 1038: Pearson, _English History in the Fourteenth Century_,
pp. 250, 251. Among the minor forms of oppression were local vetoes on
the grinding of the people's own corn by themselves in their handmills.
Thus "the tenants of St. Albans extorted a licence to use querns at the
time of Tyler's rebellion" (Morgan, _England under the Normans_, 1858,
p. 161).]
[Footnote 1039: As to the failure of these laws see Gasquet, _The Great
Pestilence_, 1893, p. 196 sq.]
[Footnote 1040: _Id._ p. 200.]
[Footnote 1041: Lewis's _Life of Wiclif_, ed. 1820, pp. 224, 225;
Lechler's _John Wycliffe and his English Precursors_, Eng. tr. 1-vol.
ed. pp. 371-76; Prof. Montagu Burrows, _Wiclif's Place in History_, p.
19.]
[Footnote 1042: Green, _Short History_, ch. v, § 4; Gardiner,
_Introduction_, pp. 94-98; Rogers, _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p.
272.]
[Footnote 1043: Cp. Sharon Turner, _England during the Middle Ages_, ii,
263; iii, 108; Milman, _Latin Christianity_, viii, 213, 215.]
[Footnote 1044: Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 255; Stubbs, iii, 609-10. He
further refused the petition from the Commons in 1391, demanding that no
"neif or villein" should be allowed to have his children educated. Cp.
de Montmorency, _State Intervention in English Education_, 1902, p. 27.]
[Footnote 1045: Green, p. 258; Stubbs, iii. 32. It is plain that among
the factious nobility, and even the courtiers, of the time there was a
strong disposition to plunder the Church (Stubbs, iii, 43, 48, 53).
Doubt is cast by Bishop Stubbs on Walsingham's story of the Lollard
petition of 1410 for the confiscation of the lands of bishops and
abbots, and the endowment therewith of 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,000
esquires, and 100 hospitals (Stubbs, iii, 65; cp. Milman, _Latin
Christianity_, viii, 214; ix, 17-18); but in any case many laymen leant
to such views, and the king's resistance was steadfast. Yet an
archbishop of York, a bishop, and an abbot successively rebelled against
him. On his hanging of the archbishop, see the remarkable professional
reflections of Bishop Stubbs (iii, 53).]
[Footnote 1046: Act 2 Hen. IV, c. 15. Cp. de Montmorency, _State
Intervention in English Education_, 1902, p. 36.]
[Footnote 1047: Stubbs, iii, 626; de Montmorency, p. 29; Act 7 Hen. IV,
c. 17.]
[Footnote 1048: Schanz (_Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 349, 350) decides
that the middle class was the only one which gained. The lower fared as
ill as the upper. Cp. Stubbs, iii, 610.]
[Footnote 1049: Hallam (_Constitutional History_, 10th ed. 1, 10) doubts
whether Henry VII carried the power of the Crown much beyond the point
reached by Edward. Busch, who substantially agrees (_England unter den
Tudors_, i, 8, _note_), misreads Hallam in criticising him, overlooking
the "much." Edward had so incensed the London traders by his exactions
that it was by way of undertaking to redress these and similar
grievances that Richard III ingratiated himself (Green, pp. 293-94).]
[Footnote 1050: Cp. Green, pp. 285-86.]
[Footnote 1051: Stubbs, iii, 283; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 326, 328;
Green, ch. vi, § 3, p. 282. This, however, did not mean the maintenance
of English shipping, which declined. See Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; and cp.
Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry_, § 121. "France seems to have
had a considerable share of foreign commerce near a century before
England was distinguished as a commercial country" (Adam Smith, _Wealth
of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iv). Yet fishing and seafaring ranked as the
main national industries (Busch, _England unter den Tudors_, i, 251).]
[Footnote 1052: See Stubbs, i, 675, as to the large foreign element in
the London population, apart from the Hansa factory; and cp. Ashley,
_Introd. to Economic History_, ii, 209.]
[Footnote 1053: The fact that the Scandinavian kings were eager to
damage the Hansa by encouraging English and Dutch traders would be a
special stimulus.]
[Footnote 1054: Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,
i, 392.]
[Footnote 1055: Busch, _England unter den Tudors_, i, 250-65. Edward had
actually traded extensively on his own account, freighting ships to the
Mediterranean with tin, wool, and cloth Green, p. 287; Henry, _History
of Great Britain_, ed. 1823, xii, 309, 315-16; Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10;
Hall's _Chronicle_, under Henry VII.]
[Footnote 1056: Green, p. 295.]
[Footnote 1057: "Something like a fifth of the actual land in the
kingdom was ... transferred from the holding of the Church to that of
nobles and gentry" (Green, ch. vii, § 1, p. 342).]
[Footnote 1058: Cp. E. Armstrong, _Introduction_ to Martin Hume's
_Spain_, 1898, pp. 13, 19, 29; Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and
Isabella_, pt. i, ch. vi, _end_; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 331.]
[Footnote 1059: See Stubbs, iii, 626-28, as to the extent to which
ability to read was spread among the common people. As to the general
effect on mental life see the vigorous though uncritical panegyric of
Hazlitt, _Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_, ed. 1870,
pp. 12-17.]
[Footnote 1060: As to the democratic element in Calvinism, which
develops from Lollardism, see the interesting remarks of Buckle, 3-vol.
ed. ii, 339; 1-vol. ed. p. 481. Prof. Gardiner sums up (_Introduction to
the Study of English History_, pp. 97, 98) "that as soon as Lollardism
ceased to be fostered by the indignation of the labouring class against
its oppressors, it dwindled away." Compare the conclusions of Prof.
Thorold Rogers, _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 272, and see
above, p. 390. Prof. Rogers (p. 273) traces the success of the
Reformation in the Eastern counties to the long work of Lollardism
there. In the same district lay the chief strength of the Rebellion.
Compare his _Economic Interpretation of History_, pp. 79-91.]
[Footnote 1061: Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed. 1893, i,
45.]
[Footnote 1062: Cp. Pulszky, _The Theory of Law and Civil Society_, p.
206. "Theocracy in itself, being the hierarchical rule of a priestly
class, is but a species of aristocracy." And see Buckle's chapter, "An
Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Seventeenth Century"
(3-vol. ed. iii, 211, 212; 1-vol. ed. pp. 752-53; and notes 36, 37, 38)
for the express claims of the Scotch clergy to give out "the whole
counsel of God."]
[Footnote 1063: Dr. Gardiner writes:--"Nor was it indifference alone
which kept these powerful men aloof; they had an instinctive feeling
that the system to which they owed their high position was doomed, and
that it was from the influence which the preachers were acquiring that
immediate danger was to be apprehended to their own position" (last
cit.). One is at a loss to infer how the historian can know of or prove
the existence of such an instinct.]
[Footnote 1064: In her partialities she was fully as ill-judging as Mary
of Scotland. To the eye of the Spanish ambassador Dudley was "heartless,
spiritless, treacherous, and false" (Bishop Creighton, _Queen
Elizabeth_, ed. 1899, p. 65). Essex in turn was a furious fool.]
[Footnote 1065: As to the change in English feeling between 1580, when
the Catholic missionaries were widely welcomed, and the years after
1588, see _The Dynamics of Religion_, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.). Cp.
Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed. 1893, i, 15: "Every threat
uttered by a Spanish ambassador rallied to the national government
hundreds who in quieter times would have looked with little satisfaction
on the changed ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church."]
[Footnote 1066: Cp. Motley, _History of the United Netherlands_, 1867,
i, 391 _sq._]
[Footnote 1067: In his _Introduction to the Study of English History_
(1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of
Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once
mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that
"the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary
beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the
consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and
vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from
the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that
the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually
made out.]
[Footnote 1068: "There was no truth nor honesty in anything she said"
(Bishop Creighton, _Queen Elizabeth_, p. 60; cp. pp. 76, 91, 112, 181,
216, 228-31).]
[Footnote 1069: Her practice of leaving her truest servants to bear
their own outlays in her service, begun with Cecil (Creighton, p. 63),
was copied from Charles V and Philip II, but was carried farther by her
than ever by them. All the while she heaped gifts on her favourites.]
[Footnote 1070: _E.g._, Mr. Gibbins's _Industrial History of England_,
pp. 84-89, 105. The point of view seems to have been set up by Cobbett's
_History of the Reformation_.]
[Footnote 1071: Cp. Ashley, _Introd. to Economic History_, ii, 312-15.]
[Footnote 1072: Cp. More's _Utopia_, bk. i (Arber's ed. p. 41; Morley's,
p. 64); and Bacon's _History of Henry VII_, Bohn ed. p. 369. More
expressly charges certain Abbots with a share in the process of
eviction.]
[Footnote 1073: Cp. Green, ch. vi, § 3. Green goes on to speak of the
earlier Statutes of Labourers as setting up the "terrible heritage of a
pauper class" (p. 286, also p. 250). This is a fresh error of the same
sort as that above dealt with. A pauper class was inevitable, whatever
laws were made.]
[Footnote 1074: Bishop Stubbs puts it (iii, 283) that the increase of
commerce during the Wars of the Roses was "to some extent a refuge for
exhausted families, and a safety-valve for energies shut out of their
proper sphere." The proposition in this form is obscure.]
[Footnote 1075: On this see Stubbs, ch. xxi, §§ 470, 471.]
[Footnote 1076: Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 12, preamble, and c. 19.]
[Footnote 1077: Cp. Moreton on _Civilisation_, 1836, p. 106; Cunningham,
_English Industry_, i, 392.]
[Footnote 1078: Cp. Cliffe Leslie, _Essays in Political and Moral
Philosophy_, p. 267; Toynbee, _The Industrial Revolution_, pp. 63, 66;
Gibbon's _Memoirs_, beginning.]
[Footnote 1079: Gardiner, _Introd. to Eng. Hist._ 1881, p. 118;
Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i, 434.]
[Footnote 1080: Rogers, _Story of Holland_, p. 217, and _Six Centuries_,
p. 184; W.T. McCullagh's _Industrial History of the Free Nations_, 1846,
ii, 42, 272; Gibbins, pp. 104, 109.]
[Footnote 1081: Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, iv, 106,
108, citing Acts 6 Hen. VIII, c. 6, and 32 Hen. VIII, cc. 18, 19.]
[Footnote 1082: It is in the prologue to Act v, 11. 30-34. I affirm
without hesitation that the prologues to all five Acts are
non-Shakespearean, and plainly by one other hand. Compare the chorus
prologues to Dekker's _Old Fortunatus_, which are in exactly the same
style. In the latest biography, however (Lee's, p. 174), there is no
recognition of any such possibility. It is surprising that Steevens and
Ritson, who pronounced the prologue to _Troilus and Cressida_
non-Shakespearean, should not have suspected those to _Henry V_, which
are so signally similar in style. Dekker's connection with _Troilus and
Cressida_ is indicated by Henslowe's Diary. The style is a nearly
decisive clue to his authorship of the _Henry V_ prologues.]
[Footnote 1083: Lee's _Life_, pp. 175, 176.]
[Footnote 1084: A theory of this is suggested in the author's _Montaigne
and Shakespeare_.]
[Footnote 1085: Cp. Froude, _History of England_, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507,
508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser's _View of the Present State of Ireland_,
Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky's _History of Ireland in the
Eighteenth Century_, i, 8; Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed.
1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox, _Key to the Irish Question_,
1890, ch. xxix; and the author's _The Saxon and the Celt_, pp. 148-54.]
[Footnote 1086: Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, §
4, p. 311.]
[Footnote 1087: See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character
of Sir Thomas More," in the _Amenities of Literature_.]
[Footnote 1088: Compared with Henry VIII, More might be pronounced a
specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry
seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!]
CHAPTER II
THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH
§ 1
Nearly all the conceivable materials of disaffection, save personal
misconduct on the king's part,[1089] went to prepare the Great
Rebellion. Religious antipathies, indeed, no longer rested on the naked
ground of lands taken and in danger of being re-taken;[1090] but there
had been developed an intense animus of Protestant against Catholic, the
instinct of strife running the more violently in that channel because so
few others were open, relatively to the store of restless brute force in
the country. Perhaps, indeed, Presbyterians hated Episcopalians and
Arminians, at bottom, nearly as much as they did Catholics; but the
chronic panics, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, the mythology of the
Marian period, and the story of the massacres of Alva and of St.
Bartholomew's Day, served to unite Protestants in this one point of
anti-Papalism, and had set up as it were a new human passion in the
sphere of English politics. And to this passion James and Charles in
turn ran counter with an infatuated persistence. James, who was so much
more annoyed by Puritans than by Papists, planned for his son, with an
eye to a dowry, the Spanish marriage, which of all possible matches
would most offend the English people; and when that fell through,
another Catholic bride was found in the daughter of the King of France.
The pledges, so natural in the circumstances, to "tolerate" Catholics
in England, were a standing ground of panic to the intolerant
Protestants, even though unfulfilled; and the new king stood in the
sinister position of sheltering in his household the religion for which
he dared not claim freedom in the country. Such a ground of unpopularity
could be balanced only by some signal grounds of favour; but James and
Charles alike chose unpopular grounds of war, and failed badly to boot.
To crown all, they exhibited to the full the hereditary unwisdom of
their dynasty in the choice of favourites;[1091] and the almost
unexampled animosity incurred by Buckingham could not but reflect
somewhat towards Charles, whose refined and artistic tastes, besides,
made him the natural enemy of the text-worshipping and mostly art-hating
Puritans.
Thus everything made for friction between king and subjects; and when
Charles, to raise necessary funds, resorted to measures of no abnormal
oppressiveness as compared with those of the Tudors, he was doggedly
resisted by Parliaments professedly standing on law, but really actuated
by a fixed suspicion of all his aims. Teeth were on edge all round. When
a merchant, mulcted in a heavy customs duty, happened to be a Puritan,
he resisted with a special zest; and one such declared before the Privy
Council that "in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the
merchants so screwed and wrung as in England."[1092] The King, unhappily
for himself, conciliated nobody. Not content with alienating nobles by
imposing huge fines in revival of the forest laws, he incensed the
Corporation of London by confiscating their estates in Ulster, conferred
by his father, and levying a fine of £70,000 to boot, for alleged
breaches of Charter.[1093] Besides selling many trade monopolies, he
passed vexatious sumptuary laws, fixing the prices of poultry, butter,
and coals, and insisting on the incorporation of all tradesmen and
artificers.[1094] The friction was well-nigh universal; and but for the
remarkable prosperity built up by the long peace,[1095] the trouble
might have come much sooner. But it is idle to keep up the pretence that
what was at stake was the principle of freedom. The first demand of the
Parliamentary Opposition was for the more thorough persecution of the
Catholics. Parliamentarians such as Eliot were more oppressive in
religious matters than Laud himself. He sought only uniformity of
worship, they uniformity of doctrine; and they punished for heresy more
unpardonably than did the Star Chamber for gross libel.
See Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-1642_, small ed. v, 191, as
to Eliot's plans to fit out the fleet by means of "those penalties
the Papists have already incurred"--a proposal which, says Dr.
Gardiner, "if it had been translated into figures, would have
created a tyranny too monstrous to be contemplated with
equanimity." And Eliot was all for a persecution of the Arminians
(_id._ vii, 42-43). In 1645 the Corporation of London petitioned
Parliament to suppress "all sects without toleration."
Nor were they less oppressive in their fiscal policy. After beginning a
revolt against illegal taxation, Pym secured the imposition of taxes on
beverages (1643), on flesh, salt, textile goods, and many other
commodities, "at the sword's point," against the general resistance of
the people.[1096] There were at work a hundred motives of strife; and it
was only the preternatural ill-luck or unwisdom of Charles that united
Parliament against him so long. It needed all the infatuation of an
express training in the metaphysics of divine right to enable a king of
England, even after James I, to blunder through the immense network of
superstition that hedged him round; indeed, the very intensity of the
royalist superstition best explains the royal infatuation. So fixed was
the monarchic principle in the minds of the people, who, then as later,
swore by monarchy but hated paying for it, that in the earlier years of
the struggle not even the zealots could have dreamt of the end that was
to be. Regicide entered no man's mind, even as a nightmare.
§ 2
On Charles, as the greatest "architect of ruin" in English political
history, psychological interest fastens with only less intensity than on
his great antagonist. The astonishing triple portrait by Vandyke
reveals, with an audacity that is positively startling when we think of
the other effigies by the same artist, a character stamped at once with
impotence and untruth. One slight suggestion of strength lies in the
look of grave self-esteem--a quality which would in Charles be fostered
from the first by his refined revolt from the undignified ways of his
father; but it is withal the very countenance of duplicity. Puritan
prejudice could not exaggerate the testimony of the daring artist. We
seem to understand at once how he deceived and alienated Holland and
Spain as well as the parties among his own subjects. And it was the very
excess of duplicity, or rather the fatal combination of duplicity with
infirmity of purpose,[1097] that destroyed the man. As the war wore on,
and above all after it was closed, the discords of the Parliament and
the army were such that the most ordinary practical sagacity could have
turned them to the triumph of the king's cause. This is the most
instructive phase of the Rebellion. The Presbyterian majority which had
grown up in Parliament--a growth still imperfectly elucidated--represented
only one of the great warring sects of the day; and if, after
Independency, led by Cromwell, had come to daggers drawn with the despots
of the Commons, Charles had only agreed to any working settlement
whatever, he might with perfect confidence have left the conflicting
forces to throttle each other afterwards. Any arrangement he might have
made, whether with the Presbyterians or with Cromwell, would
have broken down of itself, and he might have set up his own polity in
the end. But he so enjoyed his intrigues, as it were indemnifying
himself by them for his weakness of will, that he thought to triumph by
them alone, and would not wait for the slower chemistry of normal
political development; so that the Independents, driven desperate by his
deceits, had to execute him in self-preservation.
§ 3
As it was, the history of the Rebellion remains none the less the
tragi-comedy of the old constitutionalism. Parliament, resisting as
illegal the supremacy of the king, went from one illegality to another
in resisting him, till his tyrannies became trivial in comparison. And
Cromwell, who must have set out with convictions about the sanctity of
law, although doubtless fundamentally moved by the all-pervading fear of
Popery, was led by an ironical fate, step by step, into a series of
political crimes which, if those of Charles deserved beheading, could be
coped with only in the medieval hell.
Cp. Hallam, ii, 252; and Cowley's _Essays_, ed. 1868, p. 139 _et
seq._ To say nothing of Cromwell's illegal exactions, his selling
of at least fifty Englishmen into slavery in the West Indies (on
which see Cowley, p. 168; Hallam, ii, 271, _note_; and Carlyle,
_Letters and Speeches_, ed. 1857, iii, 100--where the victims are
put at "hundreds")--albeit no worse than the similar selling of
Irish and Scotch prisoners--was an act which, if committed earlier
by any king, would have covered his name with historical infamy.
Prof. Firth points out that the practice began under James I, but
it was then applied only to felons and vagrants. Cromwell's example
was followed under Charles II with regard to the Covenanting rebels
in Scotland; and the plan was again followed in the cases of
Monmouth's rebellion and that of 1715. (Cited in note on Lomas's
ed. of Carlyle's _Cromwell_, ii, 438.) As regards Ireland, the
selling of prisoners into slavery was not restricted to the case of
the survivors of Drogheda (Carlyle's _Cromwell_, as cited, ii, 53;
ed. Lomas, i, 469). It is proved that Cromwell's agents captured
not only youths, but girls, for export to the West Indies
(Prendergast, _The Cromwellian Settlement_, 2nd ed. p. 89); and
that the slavery there was of the cruellest sort (Cunningham,
_Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, ii, 109), though it has
to be kept in view that it was not perpetual; the victim being
strictly an "indentured labourer," only for a certain number of
years at the mercy of his owner (Gardiner, _Commonwealth and
Protectorate_, small ed. iii, 309-10, _note_; iv, 111-13). Of
course the limitation of the term made the servitude all the more
severe (Lomas's note cited).
In the end, the Protector terrorised his own law courts as Charles
had never dared to do. See Clarendon, bk. xv, ed. Oxford, 1843, p.
862, and Hallam, ii, 253, 271, 272, _note_. Cromwell's language, as
recorded by Clarendon, would startle some of his admirers by its
indecency if they took the trouble to read the passage. Cp.
Vaughan, _Hist. of England under the Stuarts_, etc., p. 524 (citing
Whitelocke and Ludlow), as to the law courts. Vaughan overlooks the
selling of royalists as slaves.
It was small wonder that posterity came to canonise the king; for in
terms even of the Roundhead principles of impeachment he was a political
saint in comparison with the "usurper." And royalists might well imagine
Cromwell as haunted by remorse; for nothing short of the "besotted
fanaticism" of which, as Hallam pronounces, he had sucked the dregs,
could keep him self-complacent over the retrospect of the Civil War when
he was governing by the major-generals, after failing to govern with
farcically packed Parliaments. His fanaticism was, of course, in the
ratio of his will-power, but each supported the other. The modern
exaltation of his character, as against the earlier and rather saner
habit of crediting him with great powers, relatively high purposes, and
great misdeeds,[1098] has tended to throw in the shade the blazing
lesson of his career, which is that, like most of his colleagues, he had
set out with no political insight or foresight whatever. His
conscientious beginnings are so utterly at issue with his endings that
it is indeed almost superfluous to condemn either--as superfluous as to
denounce the infatuation of Charles. But it is of importance to remember
that his very success as a Carlylean ruler only emphasises the failure
of his original politics. He succeeded by way of repudiating nearly
every principle on behalf of which he had taken up arms. Even apart from
the invigorating spectacle of his executive genius,[1099] he may well
stir our sympathy, which is more subtly and deeply exercised by his
inner tragedy, by the deadliness of his success in the light of his
aims, than by the simpler ill-fortune of Charles. But as politicians our
business is not to divide our sympathies between the powerful pietist
who was forced to give the lie to his life to save it, and the weak liar
who lost his life because he was at bottom faithful to his life's creed.
The superiority of Cromwell in strength of will and in administrative
faculty is too glaring to need acknowledging; and the lesson that a
strong man can tyrannise grossly where a weak man cannot tyrannise
trivially, is not one that particularly needs pressing. What it is
essential to note is that the course of events which forced and led
Cromwell into despotism was for the next generation a strong argument
against free Parliamentary government.
Our generation, proceeding mainly on the work of Carlyle, who never
really elucidates or even seeks to comprehend political and social
developments, has in large part lost sight of the fact that Cromwell was
more and more clearly becoming a military despot; and that with twenty
more years of life he might have established a new military and naval
empire. Yet at the time of his death his financial position was that of
a military adventurer at his wits' end, and his unscrupulous attack on
Spain was plainly planned by way of coming at money.[1100] Dr. Gardiner,
who has been the first English[1101] historian to handle the case with
comprehensive insight, rightly compares the position of Cromwell with
that of Napoleon. He was in fact just another sample of the recurrent
type of the military ruler establishing himself as despot on the ruins
of faction. "Except for four months ... the whole of the Protectorate
was a time either of war or of active preparation for war; and even
during those months the Protector was hesitating, not whether he should
keep the peace or not, but merely what enemy he should attack."[1102]
Finally he made war on Spain, by the admission of the friendly
historian, "after the fashion of a midnight conspirator," deceiving the
other side in order to gain a mean advantage.[1103] To such a policy
there was no limit in national conscience, any more than in his. He had
a standing army of 57,000 men, an immense force for the England of that
day; his revenue stood at two millions and a quarter, nearly four times
the figure of twenty years before; and still he was in desperate
financial straits, his outlays being nearly half a million in excess of
the income.[1104] The result was "a war for material gains"; and it
consists with all we know of history to say that with continued success
in such undertakings during a lengthened life he would have won the mass
of his countrymen to his allegiance.
A few dates and details make the process dramatically clear. Admiral
Blake won his first notable victory over Van Tromp in February, 1653;
and in April Cromwell felt himself in a position to expel the
recalcitrant Parliament, though that had always specially favoured the
navy. In this act he had the general approval of the people;[1105] but
he took care to change some of the naval commanders.[1106] The next
Parliament was the nominated one called the "Barebones," wherein none
were elected, and which went to pieces in the strife of its factions,
since even nomination could not secure concord among Puritans. Then came
the Parliament of 1654, elected from purged constituencies. From this
were excluded a hundred members who refused to sign an engagement not to
alter the system in force; and finally the remnant was angrily
dissolved, and military rule established under the major-generals. Yet
again, in 1656, driven by need of money, the Protector called another
packed Parliament, from which he nevertheless lawlessly excluded 102
elected members; and on their protesting there was a distinct increase
of the already obvious public displeasure at such repeated acts of
tyranny. This was in September; but in October came the news of
Stayner's capture of the Spanish treasure-ships; and in November the
treasure arrived--what the naval officers had left of it. On this the
Parliament promptly voted everything that its master asked for;[1107]
new taxes were laid to carry on the wanton war with Spain; and in
January 1657 it was proposed to offer him the Crown. Yet when, after a
six months' adjournment, that Parliament debated points on which he
wanted submission, he furiously dissolved it as he had done its
predecessors.
Such is the process of imperialism. With a few more years of ostensibly
profitable conquest, Cromwell, acclaimed and urged on in the career of
aggression by such different types of poet as Waller[1108] and
Marvell,[1109] would as a matter of course have been made king, with the
final consent of the army, and would have ruled as the crowned
imperator. In that case his Puritanism, instead of putting any
conscientious check on his egoism, would have fed it as Mohammed's faith
did his.[1110] Thus his early death was one of the important "accidents"
of history.[1111]
§ 4
As it was, Cromwell lived only long enough to create an intellectual as
well as a conservative reaction. Surprise has been sometimes expressed,
and must have been oftener felt, at the virtual High Toryism of the
doctrine of Hobbes,[1112] who was so little conservative in his general
habit of mind. The truth is that in 1651, or at least in 1660, the
monarchism of Hobbes was the ostensible Liberalism of the hour.
Parliamentarism had meant first sectarian tyranny, then anarchy, then
military despotism; and there was not the slightest prospect of a
parliamentary government which should mean religious or intellectual
freedom all round. Hobbes would infallibly have been at least thrown
into prison by the Long Parliament if in its earlier time of power he
had published his remarks on the Pentateuch. They punished for much
milder exercises of critical opinion. A strong monarchy was become, from
the point of view of many enlightened men, positively the best available
security for general freedom of life, at a time when the spirit of
religion had multiplied tenfold the normal impulses to social tyranny
and furnished the deepest channel of social ill-will compatible with
national unity. It lay in Christianity, as it lay earlier in Judaism, to
breed an intensity of religious strife such as the pagan world never
knew. Various countries had seen sects arise and grapple with each other
on the score of this or that interpretation of the Hebrew sacred books,
and men of conservative bias felt that they were face to face with
insane forces incompatible with a democratic system. Religious lore,
above all other learning, could make men more "excellently foolish," as
Hobbes put it, than was possible to mere ignorance, making new and
uncontrollable motives to disunion.
It is not to be assumed, indeed, that a revolution begun on any motive
whatever would have maintained itself at the then developed stage of
political intelligence; for the English people, which constantly accuses
others of lack of faculty for union, had never shown itself any better
fitted for rational compromise than the Irish, given conditions of equal
stress. Scandinavian, German, Dutch, English--all the Teutonic sections
alike had in all ages shown in the fullest degree the force of the
primary passions of self-assertion and mutual repulsion, cordially
uniting only, if at all, for purposes of aggression. But in the case
under notice it was the religious passions that dug the channels of
strife; and they must be held to have added to the volume of blind
emotion. Thus intensified, the principle had shown itself potent to
wreck any commonwealth; and there remained only the choice between a
usurper governing through an army and a "legitimate" monarch governing
as of old by way of Parliament and a civil service. Parliament had been
the most offensive tyrant of all, for while making most parade of
legality it had been the most self-seeking,[1113] and perhaps even the
least respectable as regards its _personnel_. The Liberals of the
latter time had their cue given to them by the memorable Falkland, who,
grievedly "ingeminating Peace, Peace," had recoiled from the intolerant
Puritans, and sadly joined the intolerant Royalists. Macaulay's thrust
at him for this,[1114] if technically just, was hardly seemly on the
critic's part, for Falkland represented exactly the temper of Macaulay's
own politics. He was an ideal Whig of the later school--the very saint
of moderation. Falkland had indeed special ground for withdrawal from
the Puritan party, in that he was convinced that Hampden and Pym had
deceived him as to the king's complicity in the Irish Rebellion and
other matters. He had been "persuaded to believe many things which he
had since found to be untrue."[1115] But in most things the Puritans
must have jarred on him.[1116] Where he had consented to go, albeit
deliberately to his death, as a Cavalier, his disciples might well
become theoretic monarchists when the whole torrent of public opinion
went for the Restoration.
Of course, the hope of social freedom was destined to frustration under
the restored monarchy just as before, since there was still no culture
force sufficient to purify the animal instinct of antagonism. The
Restoration only meant that the Episcopalian dog was uppermost and the
Nonconformist under. But all the same, Commonwealth principles were
profoundly discredited; and it is notable that never since has
Republican principle ostensibly regained in England the stature it had
reached in the hotbeds of the Great Rebellion and the Protectorate. The
long struggle against the king had educated many of the strivers into
democratism, as did the later struggle of the American colonies against
George III. Even in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell, after Republican
hopes had been so blasted, there were forty-seven avowed
Republicans,[1117] the remnant of the breed. With the return of the
monarchy it virtually disappears from English politics for a hundred and
thirty years;[1118] when again it rises for a moment in the hot air of
the French Revolution, only to disappear again for nearly another
century. It was after the Rebellion, and not before, that the dogma of
divine right became completely current orthodoxy in England.[1119]
§ 5
The collapse of Republicanism meant the collapse of the class politics
that had grown up in the war and in the Commonwealth alongside of the
creed politics. The creed politics itself, when carried to the lengths
of the doctrine of the Independents, meant a challenge to the political
system; and among the more advanced reasoners of the period were some
who saw that to put down kingly tyranny was of little avail while class
inequalities remained. The Long Parliament, though not going this
length, went far in the way of putting down some established abuses; and
there are many records of a more searching spirit of innovation. It is
important to realise that alike under Charles I and Cromwell the
Parliaments tended to be partly composed of and ruled by the more
audacious spirits of the time, simply because these had the advantage in
discussion wherever they were. The incapacity for speech which in later
times has made the Conservative party welcome adventurers as its
mouthpieces meant the partial obliteration of the conservative class in
the early days of unorganised parliamentary strife; and Cromwell's own
Parliaments baffled him in virtue of their large elements of upstart
intelligence. He himself, having entered the war from a mixture of
motives in which there was no idea of social reconstruction, was merely
irritated by the ideals of the more radical agitators, which he could
not out-argue, but on which he promptly put his foot. It is true that in
the immense ferment set up by the Rebellion impracticable ideas
abounded, and that they suggested risks of civil anarchy, even as the
multitude of sectaries threatened chaos in religion. We find indeed an
express affirmation of anarchism in the literature of the period;[1120]
and generally the English Revolution had in it most of the subversive
elements which later evolved the French, the determining difference
being that the English was not attacked from the outside. But there were
practical plans also. Lilburne had a really constructive scheme of
popular enfranchisement,[1121] which might have built up a democratic
force of resistance to royalism as such; but Cromwell, while ready to
overthrow any part of the constitution that hampered him, would build up
nothing in its place. He would have no alteration of the social
structure, save in so far as he must protect his Independents from the
Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. And of course, when his polity
fell, the ideals of the independents of politics--who had represented
only a tribe of scattered intelligences, much fewer than the mere
religious sectaries, who were themselves but a vigorous
minority--speedily disappeared from English affairs. The standards of
the average orthodox class became the standards of public life.
On the side of international relations, finally, Cromwell and the
Commonwealth did nothing to improve politics. Commerce began to spread
afresh; and commercial and racial jealousy, under the Puritan as later
under the Restoration rule, bred war with the Dutch, just as religious
hatreds had made war between England and Spain. The final proof of
Cromwell's lack of political wisdom is given in his utterly fantastic
scheme for a constitutional union of the English and Dutch republics, a
scheme which could not have worked for a week. When this proposal was
declined by the Dutch States-General, he seems to have been as ready as
any filibuster in England to go to war with the States;[1122] and it is
evident that the Navigation Act of 1651 was at once an act of revenge
for the insults put upon the English ambassadors by the Dutch Orangeist
populace, against the will of the Dutch Government, and a wanton effort
to punish the States for declining the Protector's absurd
proposals.[1123] The two Protestant republics thereupon grappled like
two worrying dogs; and for their first ostensible victory the English
Parliament publicly thanked God as unctuously as for any of the
victories of the Civil War.[1124] In their hands and Cromwell's
international politics sank at once to the normal levels of primitive
instinct.
Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Cromwell_, ch. xiii) glorifies Cromwell's
foreign policy on the score that it made England great in the eyes
of foreign countries. Exactly so might we eulogise the foreign
policy of Louis XIV or Philip II or Napoleon--so long as it
succeeded. Cromwell, up to the time when he began to scheme an
empire of naval aggression, simply aimed at a Protestant
combination as other rulers aimed at Catholic combinations. There
was nothing new in the idea; and it would have been astonishing if
he had _not_ maintained the naval power of the country. It was to
this very end that the luckless Charles imposed his ship-money,
which Hampden and his backers refused to pay. As regards home
politics, again, Mr. Harrison praises Cromwell for preserving order
with unprecedented success, making no allowance for the fact that
Cromwell was the first Englishman who governed through a standing
army, and making no attempt to refute Ludlow's statements (cited by
Hallam, ii, 251, _note_; cp. Vaughan, p. 524, _note_) as to the
gross tyranny of the major-generals, or to meet the charge against
Cromwell of selling scores of royalists into slavery at Barbadoes.
Mr. Harrison finally justifies Cromwell's policy in the main on the
score of "necessity," despite the proverbial quotation. It was
exactly on the plea of necessity that Charles justified himself in
his day, when Cromwell joined in resisting him. Mr. Harrison again
extols the "generosity" and "moral elevation" of the intervention
for the Vaudois, when on the same page he has to admit the infamy
of the Cromwellian treatment of Ireland. He sees no incongruity in
Milton's emotion over the "slaughtered saints" of Protestantism,
while Catholic ecclesiastics were with his approval being slain
like dogs. Moral and social science must hold the balances more
evenly than this.
§ 6
While thus showing that in his foreign relations in general he had no
higher principle than that which led him to protect the Protestant
Vaudois, Cromwell himself could not or would not tolerate Catholicism in
England. What was immeasurably worse, he had put thousands of Irish
Catholics to the sword, and reduced tens of thousands more to the life
conditions of wild animals. His policy in Ireland, if judged by the
standards we apply to the rule of other men, must be pronounced one of
blind brutality. He had helped to make a civil war in England because
his class was at times arbitrarily taxed, and had fears that its worship
would be interfered with; and in so doing he felt he had the support and
sanction of Omnipotence. When it came to dealing with Irishmen who stood
up for their race ideals and their religion, he acted as if for him
principles of moral and religious right did not exist.[1125] His most
ferocious deeds he justified by reference to the Ulster massacre of
1641, as if all Irishmen had been concerned in that, and as if the
previous English massacres had not been tenfold more bloody. Under his
own Government, by the calculation of Sir William Petty, out of a
population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the
sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. Of these, 504,000
were reckoned to be of Irish and 112,000 of English descent. And it was
planned to reduce the survivors to a life of utter destitution in
Connaught and Clare. By the settlement of 1653, ten of the thirty-two
Irish counties were allotted to the "Adventurers" who in 1641 had
advanced sums of money to aid in putting down the Irish Rebellion;
twelve were divided among Cromwell's soldiers; seven, with all the
cities and corporations of the kingdom, were reserved for the
Commonwealth; and three of the most barren counties--for the most part
unreclaimed--were left for the natives. The settlement could not be
carried out as planned by the Government, and as evidently desired by
Fleetwood, the Lord Deputy, and many of the officers. The very greed of
the soldiery defeated the project of a "universal transplantation," for
they were as eager for Irish labour as for Irish land.[1126] But the
confiscation of the land was carried out to the full, and multitudes
were forced into Connaught. The worst tyranny of Charles is thus as dust
in the balance with Cromwell's expropriation of myriads of conquered
Irish. For them he had neither the show of law nor the pretence of
equity. They were treated as conquered races had been treated, not by
the Romans, who normally sought to absorb in their polity the peoples
they overcame, but by barbarians in their mutual wars, where the loser
was driven to the wilderness. Far from seeking to grapple as a statesman
with the problem of Irish disaffection, he struck into it like a
Berserker, on the same inspiration of animal fury as took him into the
breach at Drogheda; and his or his officers' enactments, providing for
the slaughter of all natives who did not carry certificates of having
taken the anti-Royalist oath, are to be matched in history only with the
treatment of the conquered Slavs by the Christianising Germans in the
Dark Ages.
Dr. Gardiner and Mr. Harrison partly defend the massacre of
Drogheda as justified by the "laws of war" of the time. It is true
that for the period it was not very much out of the way. The
Royalist Manley, describing it, says only (_History of the
Rebellions_, 1691, p. 227): "I would not condemn the promiscuous
slaughter of the Citizens and Souldiers, of Cruelty, because it
might be intended for Example and Terror to others, _if the like
Barbarity had not been committed elsewhere_." But Manley seems to
have forgotten the friars, whose slaughter neither laws of war nor
European custom exonerated. There were really no "laws of war" in
the case. Dr. Gardiner (_Student's History_, p. 562; _Commonwealth
and Protectorate_, small ed. i, 118) puts it that these laws "left
garrisons refusing, as that of Drogheda had done, to surrender an
_indefensible_ post ... to the mercy or cruelty of the enemy." But
it is unwarrantable to call Drogheda an "indefensible post." Dr.
Gardiner's thesis that any captured post, however hard to take, is
_ipso facto_ proved to have been indefensible, may be dismissed as
a very bad sophism. Elsewhere he himself puts it (p. 132, _note_)
that men "defending a fortified town _after the defences had been
captured_" were liable to be slain--a very different thing.
Drogheda contained 3,000 foot, mostly English, "the flower of
Ormond's army," as Dr. Gardiner avows.
Mr. Harrison (_Oliver Cromwell_, p. 136) perhaps errs in saying
that its commander, Sir Arthur Aston, an officer of "great name and
experience ... at that time made little doubt of defending it
against all the power of Cromwell." Cp. Gardiner, _Com. and Prot._,
small ed. i, 128, as to Aston's straits. It had, however, actually
resisted siege by the Catholics for three years, and it was only by
desperate efforts that Cromwell carried it. He went into the breach
with the forlorn hope, and he gave the order for slaughter, as he
himself admits, in the fury of action. The first order, be it
observed, was to slay all "in arms _in the town_"--this at a time
when men commonly carried arms in time of peace, and members wore
their swords in Parliament. It simply meant a massacre of the male
inhabitants. The garrison was not so slaughtered: when the
surrender of the garrison came, Cromwell's blood-lust was slaked,
and he spared all but every tenth man--for slavery in the
Barbadoes. Nor did his men merely slay those taken in arms. He
tells that "their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously";
and it is impossible wholly to refuse to believe the royalist
statement of the time, that men, women, and children were
indiscriminately slaughtered. Dr. Gardiner, on somewhat
insufficient grounds (_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 135, 136,
_note_), entirely rejects the personal testimony of the brother of
Anthony à Wood (Anthony's _Autobiography_, ed. Oxford, 1848, pp.
51, 52) as to Cromwell's men holding up children as shields when
pursuing some soldiers of the garrison who defended themselves. Dr.
Gardiner is himself in error in respect of one charge of
improbability which he brings against the narrative, as quoted by
himself. But in any case his own narrative, as he evidently feels,
shows the Cromwellian troops to have been sufficiently ferocious.
Quarter was promised, and then withheld (Gardiner, i, 117, _note_,
118); and by Dr. Gardiner's own showing the "Parliamentary" account
itself avows that the final surrender of the defenders on the
"mount" was obtained by sheer treachery--a fact which Dr. Gardiner
gloses even while showing it. A Puritan drunk with the lust of
battle is a beast like any other. Cromwell himself had to quiet his
conscience with his usual drug of religion. But if this act had
been done by Cavaliers or Catholics upon a Puritan garrison and
Independent priests, he and his party would have held it up to
horror for ever.
The only defence he could make was that this was vengeance for the
great Irish Massacre--that is to say, that he had shown he could be
as bloody as the Irish, who on their part had all the English
massacres of the previous generation to avenge--a circumstance
carefully ignored by clerical writers who still justify Cromwell in
the name of Christianity, as seeking to make future massacres
impossible. All the while, there was not the slightest pretence of
showing that the garrison of Drogheda had been concerned in the old
massacre. Compare, on this, the emphatic verdict of Dr. Gardiner,
_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 139. Mr. Harrison (p. 145) quotes
Cromwell's challenge to opponents to show any instance of a man
"not in arms" being put to death with impunity--this after he had
avowed the slaughter of all priests and chaplains! His general
assertion of the scrupulousness of his party was palpably false;
and it is idle to say that he must have believed it true. That
Ireton's Puritan troops slew numbers of disarmed and unarmed Irish
with brutal cruelty and treachery _against Ireton's reiterated
orders_, is shown by Dr. Gardiner; and he tells how Ireton hanged a
girl who tried to escape from Limerick (_Commonwealth_, ii, 48,
53). Is it then to be supposed that Cromwell's men were more humane
when he was hounding them on to massacre? As to the further
slaughter of natives, there stands the assertion of Father French
(_Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of
Ireland_, Dublin, rep. 1846, p. 86) that under the Proclamation
which commanded the soldiers to slay any men met on the highway
without a certificate of having "taken the engagement" abjuring the
monarchy, "silly Peasants who out of Ignorance or want of care ...
left their tickets at home, were barbarously murdered." In the
circumstances the statement is only too credible.
There remains to be considered the old plea that the massacre of
Drogheda made an end of serious resistance, and so saved life. Thus
Carlyle: "Wexford Storm followed (not by forethought, it would
seem, but by chance of war) in the same fashion; and there was no
other storm or slaughter needed in that country" (_Cromwell_,
Comm. on Letter CV). This is one of Carlyle's innumerable
misstatements of fact. Even on his own view, the Wexford slaughter
had to follow that of Drogheda. But, as Gardiner shows, Cromwell's
bloodshed at Drogheda and Wexford, "so far from sparing effusion of
blood," though "successful at Ross and at a few lesser strongholds,
had only served to exasperate the garrisons of Duncannon, of
Kilkenny, and of Clonmel; and in his later movements Cromwell,
always prepared to accept the teaching of events(!), had discovered
that the way of clemency was the shortest road to conquest" (_Com.
and Prot._ i, 157; cp. p. 137). The laudation here too is
characteristic; but it disposes of Carlyle's.
Carlyle would never be at pains enough to check his presuppositions
by the records. As Gardiner tells (p. 123, _note_), he denounces an
editor for printing a postscript in which Cromwell admitted the
slaughter of "many inhabitants" of Drogheda. This, said Carlyle,
had no authority in contemporary copies. "It appears," writes Dr.
Gardiner, "in the _official_ contemporary copy in _Letters from
Ireland_." What is more, the editor in question had given the
reference!
There are men who to-day will still applaud Cromwell because he quenched
the Irish trouble for the time in massacre and devastation; and others,
blenching at the atrocity of the cure, speak of it with bated breath as
doing him discredit, while they bate nothing of their censure of the
arbitrariness of Charles. Others excuse all Puritan tyranny because of
its "sincerity," as if that plea would not exculpate Torquemada and
Alva. The plain truth is that Cromwell in no way rose above the moral
standards of his generation in his dealings with those whom he was able
to oppress. He found in his creed his absolution for every step to which
blind instinct led him, in Ireland as in England; and it seems to be his
destiny to lead his admirers into the same sophistries--pious with a
difference--as served to keep him on good terms with his conscience
after suppressing an English Parliament or slaughtering an Irish
garrison.
Take, for instance, the fashion in which D'Aubigné shuffles over
the Irish massacres, after quoting Cromwell's worst cant on the
subject: "This extract will suffice. Cromwell acted in Ireland like
a great statesman, and the means he employed were those best
calculated promptly to restore order in that unhappy country. And
yet we cannot avoid regretting that a man--a Christian man--should
have been called to wage so terrible a war, and to show towards his
enemies _greater severity than had ever, perhaps, been exercised by
the pagan leaders of antiquity_. 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for
they shall be called the children of God'" (_The Protector_, 3rd
ed. p. 159).
It is too much even to say, as a more scrupulous critic has done, that
the phenomenon of the Commonwealth represented a great attempt at a
higher life on the part of men nobler and wiser than their
contemporaries.[1127] It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men
of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others
were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it--men
bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose
failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to
their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral
principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the
wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of
unscrupulous conquest. Both men were religious; both as ready to sing of
"Divine Love" as of human hate; and both in their degree were good types
of the supporters of Cromwell. The leaders from the very outset are
visibly normal agitators, full of their own grievances, and as devoid of
the spirit of fellow-feeling, of concern for all-round righteousness, as
any of the men they impeached. Their movement went so far as it did
because, firstly, they were vigorous men resisting a weak man, and later
their own natural progress to anarchy was checked by the self-assertion
of the strongest of them all. Thus their and his service to progressive
political science is purely negative. They showed once for all that an
ignorance guided by religious zeal and "inspiration" is more surely
doomed to disaster than the ignorance of mere primary animal instinct;
and that of the many forms of political optimism, that of Christian
pietism is for the modern world certainly not the least pernicious. The
Puritan name and ideal are in these days commonly associated with high
principle and conscientiousness; and it is true that in the temper and
the tactic of the early revolutionary movement, despite much dark
fanaticism, there was a certain masculine simplicity and sincerity not
often matched in our politics since. But as the years went on,
principles gave way, dragged down by fanaticism and egoism; and the
Puritan temper, lacking light, bred deadly miasmas. Milton himself sinks
from the level of the _Areopagitica_ to that of the _Eikonoklastes_, an
ignoble performance at the behest of the Government, who just then were
suppressing the freedom of the press.[1128] In strict historical truth
the Puritan name and the ideal must stand for utter failure to carry on
a free polity, in virtue of incapacity for rational association; for the
stifling of some of the most precious forces of civilisation--the
artistic; and further for the grafting on normal self-seeking of the
newer and subtler sin of solemn hypocrisy.
This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible,
however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given
section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the
case when he says (_Student's History_, p. 567) of the Barebone
Parliament: "Unfortunately, these godly men [so styled by Cromwell]
were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought
together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery
without providing a substitute, _and to abolish tithes without
providing any other means for the support of the clergy_." It seems
clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an
equivalent for the tithes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam,
ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears
to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it
engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the
proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr.
Gardiner's _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 241, 262; and as to
the tithes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.
It would be hard to show that either Cromwell or the men he used and
overrode were, under trial, more conscientious than the average public
men of later times. Well-meaning he and many of them were; but, then,
most men are well-meaning up to their lights; the moral test for all is
consistency with professed principle under changing conditions. And
hardly one was stedfastly true to the principles he put forward. They
prevaricated under pressure--under harder pressure, no doubt--like other
politicians, with only the difference that they could cite random texts
and "the Lord" in their justification. And inasmuch as their godly
strifes were as blind and as insoluble as those of any factions in
history, they furnished no aid and no encouragement to posterity to
attempt anew the great work of social regeneration. If that is ever to
be done, it must be with saner inspiration and better light than theirs.
It is time that, instead of extolling them as men of superior moral
stature and inspiration, we now realise they brought to a bewildering
problem a vain enlightenment.
On this view, it may be noted, we have a sufficient explanation of
the dissimulations of which Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty.
Between the antiquated asperity of Villemain, who, while extolling
his capacity, charges him with _fourberie habituelle_ (_Hist. de
Cromwell_, 5e édit. p. 272), and the foregone condonations of
Carlyle, there is a mean of common sense. Cromwell was a man of
immense energy and practical capacity, but with no gift for
abstract thought, and spellbound by an incoherent creed.
Consequently he was bound to come to serious confusion when he had
to deal with tense complexities of conduct and violently competing
interests. Coming into desperate positions, for which his religion
was worse than no preparation, and in which it could not possibly
guide him aright, he must needs trip over the snares of diplomacy,
and do his equivocations worse than a more intellectual man would.
Cromwell's lying sounds the more offensive because of its constant
twang of pietism; but that was simply the dialect in which he had
been brought up. Had he lived in our day he would have been able to
prevaricate with a wider vocabulary, which makes a great
difference.
§ 7
Lest such a criticism should be suspected of prejudice, it may be well
to note that a contemporary Doctor of Divinity has at some points
exceeded it. It is Dr. Cunningham who argues that, in consequence of the
Puritan bias leading to a cult of the Old Testament rather than the New,
there occurred under Puritan auspices "a retrogression to a lower type
of social morality, which showed itself both at home and abroad."[1129]
He traces Puritan influence specially "(_a_) in degrading the condition
of the labourer; (_b_) in reckless treatment of the native [= coloured]
races; (_c_) in the development of the worst forms of slavery."[1130]
The present writer, who rarely finds it necessary to oppose a Protestant
clergyman on such an issue, is disposed to think the charge overdrawn,
for the following reasons: (1) The English treatment of Ireland was to
the full as cruel in the Elizabethan period, before Puritanism had gone
far, as under Cromwell; (2) the Catholic Spaniards in Mexico and Peru
were as cruel as the Puritan colonists in New England. It is true that
"in all the terrible story of the dealings of the white man with the
savage there are few more miserable instances of cold-blooded cruelty
than the wholesale destruction of the Pequod nation--men, women, and
children--by the Puritan settlers"[1131] of Connecticut. But when
Catholics and pre-Puritan Protestants and Dutch Protestants act
similarly, the case is not to be explained on Dr. Cunningham's theory.
The fallacy seems to lie in supposing that the New Testament has ever
been a determinant in these matters. Mosheim confesses that in the wars
of the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the
Saracens;[1132] and Seneca was at least as humane as Paul.
There is distinct validity, on the other hand, in the charge that
Puritanism worsened the life of the working classes, first by taking
away their ecclesiastical holidays and gild-festivals, and finally by
taking all recreation out of their Sunday. The latter step may be
regarded as the assertion of the economic interest of the Protestant
clergy against the social needs of their flocks. It was not that the
labourers were well off before the Rebellion--here again we must guard
against false impressions[1133]--but that "Puritan ascendancy rendered
the lot of the labourer hopelessly dull."[1134] There is reason to
believe, further, that the Stuart administration, applying the
Elizabethan Poor Law, took considerable pains to relieve distress,[1135]
and that the Commonwealth, on the contrary, treated the lapsed mass
without sympathy;[1136] and it is not unlikely that, as has been
suggested, this had something to do with the popular welcome given to
the Restoration.[1137] The conclusion is that "neither the personal
character nor the political success of the Puritans need lead us to
ignore their baleful influence on society,"[1138] which was, in the
opinion of Arnold, despite his passion for their favourite literature,
to imprison and turn the key upon the English spirit for two hundred
years. Here again the impartial naturalist will detect exaggeration, but
much less than in the current hyperboles to the contrary.
For the rest, the commercial and industrial drift of England, the resort
to the mineral wealth[1139] that was to be the economic basis of later
commerce and empire, the pursuit of capitalistic manufacture, the
building up of a class living on interest as the privileged class of the
past had lived on land monopoly--all went on under Puritanism as under
Catholicism,[1140] Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism. The early
Puritans, taking up the Catholic tradition, denounced usury; but the
clergy of industrial and burgher-ruled States, beginning with Calvin,
perforce receded from that veto.[1141] Even under Elizabeth there was a
good deal of banking,[1142] and under Cromwell English merchants and
money-dealers had learned all the lessons the Dutch could teach them,
weighing the Protector's borrowing credit in the scales of the market as
they would any other. The spirit of pitiless commercial competition
flourished alike under Roundhead and Cavalier,[1143] save in so far as
it was manacled by invidious monopolies; the lust of "empire" was as
keen among the middle class in Cromwell's day as in Elizabeth's and our
own; and even the lot of the workers began to approximate to its modern
aspect through the greater facility of transfer[1144] which followed on
the old rigidity of feudal law and medieval usage. The industrial age
was coming to birth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1089: Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would
perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to
ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton's _Defensio_ and Warburton's
_Notes on Clarendon_, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were
more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the
palace reserved for persons of higher rank (_id._, citing Carte's
_Ormond_, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness
with his son's accessibility (see _Pepys' Diary_, _passim_). Hallam sums
up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes
softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).]
[Footnote 1090: That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite
clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and
attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the tithes that had
been appropriated by the nobility. (Compare Burton, _History of
Scotland_, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet, _Own Time_, bk.
i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-1642_, vii, 278;
Laing, _History of Scotland_, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour,
_Annals of the Stuart Kings_, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley, _History of the
Rebellions_, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally
never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637,
which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are
explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry's
_Memoirs_, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony
on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of
English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.]
[Footnote 1091: It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's
sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at
Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the
nobility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (_id._ ii,
86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set
up the civil war of the Fronde.]
[Footnote 1092: Hallam, _Const. Hist._ ii, 7.]
[Footnote 1093: _Id._ ii, 10-11.]
[Footnote 1094: _Id._ p. 25. Cp. p. 35.]
[Footnote 1095: As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.]
[Footnote 1096: Cunningham, _English Industry and Commerce_, ii, 219.]
[Footnote 1097: Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's
two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was
tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason
than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of
his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited,
ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once
observes how bad his judgment generally was.]
[Footnote 1098: It is an error to assert, as is often done, that before
Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly
hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with
their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before
Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell
and the Historians" in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. 2.]
[Footnote 1099: It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all
the constitutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he
kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the
army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation.
But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic
taste and practice of the nation.]
[Footnote 1100: He had, indeed, proposed to the Dutch a joint campaign
for the conquest of Spanish America (Gardiner, _History of the
Commonwealth_, ii, 478). But even in that case he would have counted on
plunder.]
[Footnote 1101: Villemain, however, had previously made some approach to
such a view; and Sir John Seeley has left record of how Sir James
Stephen suggested to students a research concerning "the buccaneering
Cromwell" (_Expansion of England_, p. 115).]
[Footnote 1102: _Cromwell's Place in History_, pp. 89, 90.]
[Footnote 1103: Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate_
(1897), ii, 475-76. It is startling to contrast this explicit avowal of
Dr. Gardiner with the assertion of Dr. Holland Rose (art. in the
_Monthly Review_, July, 1902), that the historian averred to him that
English foreign policy _always_ came out well on investigation.]
[Footnote 1104: _Cromwell's Place in History_, p. 97. Cp. p. 101;
Burnet, _History of his Own Time_, bk. i, ed. 1838, pp. 44, 49, 50;
Thurloe, _State Papers_, 1742, vii, 295.]
[Footnote 1105: Letter of De Bordeaux to Servien, May 5, 1653, given by
Guizot, _Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell_, tom. i,
_end_.]
[Footnote 1106: Letter cited.]
[Footnote 1107: Guizot, _République d'Angleterre_, éd. 1854, ii, 216.]
[Footnote 1108: _On a War with Spain._ Cp. the poem, _Upon the Death of
the Lord Protector_.]
[Footnote 1109: _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland._
Dryden's _Heroic Stanzas_ on the death of the Protector show how he
would have swelled the acclaim.]
[Footnote 1110: A similar idea, I find, is well expressed by Seeley,
_Expansion of England_, p. 114.]
[Footnote 1111: As to the element of historic "accident," cp. MM.
Langlois and Seignobos, _Introduction aux études historiques_, 2e éd. p.
253.]
[Footnote 1112: Hallam, discriminating the shades of opinion, lays it
down that "A favourer of unlimited monarchy was not a Tory, neither was
a Republican a Whig. Lord Clarendon was a Tory: Hobbes was not; Bishop
Hoadly was a Whig: Milton was not" (_History_, as cited, iii, 199). But
though Hobbes's political doctrine was odious to the Tory clergy, and
even to legitimists as such, it certainly made for Toryism in practice.
In the words of Green: "If Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal
despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one." Cp. T. Whittaker, in _Social
England_, iv, 280, 281, as to the conflict between "divine right"
royalism and Hobbes's principle of an absolute sovereignty set up by
social consent to begin with.]
[Footnote 1113: As to the "high pretensions to religion, combined with
an almost unlimited rapacity" (Petty) on the part of many leading
Puritans, cp. Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 167, 172,
187, 194, 302, 358, etc.]
[Footnote 1114: In the essay on "Hallam's _Constitutional History_"
(1828). In the _History_ the verdict is more favourable.]
[Footnote 1115: _Lives of the Friends of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon_,
by Lady T. Lewis, i, 70; cited in _Falklands_, by T.L. (Author of _Life
of Sir Kenelm Digby_), 1897, pp. 121-22.]
[Footnote 1116: On the general question of his course see the defence of
T.L. (work cited, p. 129 _sq._), and that by Mr. J.A. R. Marriott, _Life
and Times of Viscount Falkland_, 2nd. ed. 1908, p. 331 _sq._]
[Footnote 1117: As against from 100 to 140 "neuters" and Royalists, and
170 lawyers or officers (Hallam, ii, 269, _note_, citing the Clarendon
Papers, iii, 443).]
[Footnote 1118: Republicans there still were in the reigns of William
and Anne (see Hallam, iii, 120, 230; cp. the author's essay on "Fletcher
of Saltoun" in _Our Corner_, Jan., 1888), but they never acted openly as
such.]
[Footnote 1119: See below, ch. iii, § 2.]
[Footnote 1120: _E.g._, Richard Overton's pamphlet (1646) entitled _An
Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, wherein the Original, Rise,
Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights,
Freedoms, and Properties of Mankind, are discovered and undeniably
maintained_. Its main doctrines are that "To every individual in nature
is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped
by any"; and that "no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I
over no man's." See a long and interesting extract in the _History of
Passive Obedience since the Reformation_, Amsterdam, 1689, i, 59. As to
the other anarchists, of whom Lilburne was not one, see Gardiner,
_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 47, 48.]
[Footnote 1121: Cp. Gardiner, _Cromwell's Place in History_, pp. 37-50;
_History of the Great Civil War_, 1889, ii, 53-55, 310-12; iii, 527.
While grudgingly noting his straightforwardness, Dr. Gardiner assumes to
discredit Lilburne as impracticable, yet is all the while demonstrating
that Cromwell's constructive work utterly collapsed. Lilburne explicitly
and accurately predicted that the tyrannies of the new _régime_ would
bring about the Restoration (Guizot, _Histoire de la république
d'Angleterre et de Cromwell_, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 52).]
[Footnote 1122: Dr. Gardiner says he was not, but does not explain away
Cromwell's acquiescence. As to the war-spirit in England, see van
Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, ii, 140, 141.]
[Footnote 1123: Guizot, _Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de
Cromwell_, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 202-11; van Kampen, _Geschichte der
Niederlande_, ii, 150, 151; Davies, _History of Holland_, 1841, ii,
709.]
[Footnote 1124: Guizot, as cited, i, 243.]
[Footnote 1125: There is a hardly credible story (Gardiner, _History of
the Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 30) that in supporting Owen's
scheme for a liberal religious establishment he declared: "I had rather
that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's
children should be persecuted." If the story be true, so much the worse
for his treatment of Catholics.]
[Footnote 1126: Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, small ed. iv,
118. Dr. Gardiner actually praises Cromwell for "good sense" (p. 98) in
seeing that the general plantation decreed by the Declaration of 1653
"was absolutely impracticable." It had been his own decree!]
[Footnote 1127: Mr. Harrison, as cited, p. 210. Mr. Allanson Picton, in
his lectures on the _Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth_, has
with more pains and circumspection sought to make good a similar
judgment. But the nature of his performance is tested by his contending
on the one hand that the ideal of the Commonwealth was altogether
premature, and on the other that Cromwell governed with the real consent
of the nation.]
[Footnote 1128: Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, i, 193-96;
cp. Whittaker, in _Social England_, iv, 288, 289.]
[Footnote 1129: _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i, 106.]
[Footnote 1130: _Id._ p. 107.]
[Footnote 1131: _Id._ p. 108, 109, citing Bancroft, i, 401, 402. Seeley
ignored these and many other matters when he pronounced that the annals
of Greater Britain are "conspicuously better than those of Greater
Spain, which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity." In
the usual English fashion, he left out of account, too, the horrors of
the English conquests of Ireland.]
[Footnote 1132: _Ecclesiastical History_, 12 cent., pt. i, ch. ii, § 2.]
[Footnote 1133: See Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 13,
as to the distress about 1630.]
[Footnote 1134: Cunningham, as cited, p. 107.]
[Footnote 1135: Redlich and Hirst, _Local Government in England_, 1903,
ii, 361; and Miss Leonard's _Early History of English Poor Relief_, as
there cited.]
[Footnote 1136: See Child's testimony, cited below, p. 467. That,
however, specifies no superiority in the methods of the monarchy.]
[Footnote 1137: Redlich and Hirst, as cited, ii, 363, _note_.]
[Footnote 1138: Cunningham, p. 109.]
[Footnote 1139: See Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 4,
as to the iron trade.]
[Footnote 1140: As to usury in the reign of Henry VII see Busch,
_England unter den Tudors_, i, 257, 389. On the general canonist
teaching there is a very thorough research in Prof. Ashley's
_Introduction to Economic History_, vol. ii, ch. vi.]
[Footnote 1141: Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,
vol. ii (_Modern Times_), pp. 74-87.]
[Footnote 1142: _Id._ p. 100.]
[Footnote 1143: _Id._ pp. 87, 88, 102.]
[Footnote 1144: Cunningham, _op. cit._ p. 90. As to the upset of gild
monopolies in the sixteenth century, see p. 76.]
Chapter III
FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE
§ 1
The broad outcome of the monarchic restoration under Charles II is the
intensifying of the royalist sentiment by way of reaction from the
Rebellion and the autocracy of the Protector. It has been held that had
Richard Cromwell had the energy of his father he might easily have
maintained his position, so quietly was his accession at first accepted;
and no doubt his irresolution made much of the difference between
success and failure; but nothing can be clearer than the leaning of the
mass of the people to the "lawful" dynasty. It is a proof of Cromwell's
complete dislocation of the old state of touch between the official
classes and the public,[1145] that the army leaders had no misgivings
when they commenced to intrigue against Richard, and that Monk was so
slow to declare for the king when the event showed how immense was the
royalist preponderance. During the Rebellion, London, led by the
Puritans, had dominated the country; under the Protectorate, town and
country were alike dominated by a selected official and military class,
representing a minority with military force to impose its rule. As soon
as this class began to disrupt in factions, the released play of common
sentiment began to carry all forward on a broad tide towards a
Restoration; the only footing on which the English people could yet
unite being one of tradition and superstition. The anarchy of a State
still unfitted for republican government had before brought about the
Protectorate: it now led back to the monarchy. And that the new monarchy
did not become as absolute as the contemporary rule of Louis XIV was
solely owing to the accident of the later adhesion of the restored
dynasty to the Church of Rome, which the mass of the people feared more
than they did even the prospect of another Civil War. It was the memory
of the Fronde that enabled Louis to override the remains of the French
constitution and set up an autocracy; and the same force was now at
work in England. It was the memory of the Civil War that made the
people so much more forbearing with the new king, when his private
adhesion to the Catholic Church became generally suspected,[1146] than
their fathers had been with his father. By temperament and from
experience they were disposed to do anything for the throne; but the
general fear of Popery on the one hand, and the special royalist
aversion to the Puritan sects on the other, plunged the State into a new
ferment of ecclesiastical politics, the strifes of which so far absorbed
the general energy that ill-luck in the commercial wars with Holland
seems to have been almost a necessary result, even had the king ruled
well. Not that the generation of Charles II was a whit less bent on
dominion and acquisition than the decade of the Protectorate.
In this new situation, under a king too little devoted to his trade to
choose really sagacious courses, but too shrewd to ruin himself, occur
the beginnings of parliamentary statesmanship, in the modern sense of
government in harmony with the Crown. The powerful administration of
Strafford had been a matter of helping the Crown to resist Parliament.
The very capable though unforeseeing statesmanship of the Pyms and
Hampdens of the Long Parliament, again, was a matter of resisting the
Crown; and with Shaftesbury such resistance recurred; but the indolence
of the king, joined with his sense of the dangers of the old
favouritism, gave rise to the principle of Ministerial Government before
partisan Cabinets had come into existence. Clarendon had in him much of
the constitutionalist temper. Shaftesbury, however, was better qualified
both by training and parts for the task of statesmanship in a stormy and
unscrupulous generation. Read dispassionately, his story is seen to be
in the main what his careful vindicator would make it--that of a man of
average moral quality, with exceptional energy and resource. The legend
of his wickedness[1147] is somewhat puzzling, in view of his staunch
hostility to Romanism, and of his political superiority to the famous
Deist statesman of the next generation, Bolingbroke, who has been so
little blackened in comparison. A reasonable explanation is that
Shaftesbury was damned by the Church for resisting the king, while
Bolingbroke's services to the Church covered his multitude of sins. But
the idle rumours of Shaftesbury's debauchery[1148] apparently damaged
him with the Protestant Dissenters, and his wickedly reckless policy
over the Popish Plot might easily secure him a share in the infamy which
is the sole association of the name of Titus Oates. Here also, however,
he has been calumniated. Burnet, though plainly disliking him, says
nothing of debauchery in his life, and declined to believe, when Charles
suggested it, that he had any part in trumping up the falsehoods about
the Plot.[1149]
There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury honestly believed
there was a great danger of the re-establishment of Popery, and it is
not at all improbable that he credited some of the tales told, as Lord
Russell solemnly testified at the scaffold that he for his part had
done. To acquit Russell and criminate Shaftesbury is possible only to
those who have made up their minds before trying the case. It is
practically certain, moreover, that some vague Catholic plotting really
did take place;[1150] and in the then posture of affairs nothing was
more likely. Shaftesbury, like the other capable statesmen of the
Restoration, was in favour of toleration of the Dissenters; but like all
other Protestant statesmen of the age, he thought it impossible to
tolerate Catholicism. Nor can it well be doubted that had Charles or
James been able to establish the Roman system, it would have gone hard
with Protestantism. It is true that the only exhibition thus far of the
spirit of tolerance in Protestant and Catholic affairs in France and
England had been on the part of Richelieu towards the Huguenots,
themselves intensely intolerant; but it could not reasonably be supposed
that an English Catholic king or statesman, once well fixed in power,
would have the wisdom or forbearance of Richelieu. The two systems, in
fine, aimed at each other's annihilation; and Shaftesbury simply acted,
politically that is, as the men of the First Rebellion would have done
in similar circumstances. Instead of dismissing him as a mere
scoundrel, we are led to realise how imperfectly moralised were all the
men of his age in matters of religion and racial enmity. The friend of
Locke can hardly have been a rascal.
For the rest, he was admitted even by the malicious and declamatory
Dryden to have been a just Chancellor; it is proved that he opposed the
Stop of the Exchequer; and he sharply resisted the rapacity of the royal
concubines. In his earlier policy towards Holland he conformed odiously
enough to the ordinary moral standard of the time[1151] in politics, a
standard little improved upon in the time of Palmerston, and not
discarded by those Englishmen who continue to talk of Russia as
England's natural enemy, or by those who speak of Germany as a trade
rival that must be fought to a finish. His changes of side between the
outbreak of the Rebellion and his death, while showing the moral and
intellectual instability of the period, were not dishonourable, and are
not for a moment to be compared with those of Dryden, most unstable of
all men of genius, whose unscrupulous but admirably artistic portrait of
the statesman has doubtless gone far to keep Shaftesbury's name in
disesteem. It may be, again, that his sufficient wealth takes away
somewhat from the merit of his steadfast refusal of French bribes; but
the fact should be kept in mind,[1152] as against the other fact that
not only the king and some of the Opposition but Algernon Sidney took
them.[1153] On the whole, Shaftesbury was the most tolerable of the
Ministers of his day, though his animus against Catholicism made him
grossly unscrupulous toward individual Catholics; and his miscalculation
of possibilities, in clinging to the scheme of giving Monmouth the
succession, finally wrecked his career. He had almost no alternative,
placed and principled as he was, save to call in the Prince of Orange;
and this would really have been at that moment no more feasible a course
than it was to declare Monmouth the heir, besides being more hazardous,
in that William was visibly less easy to lead. Of Shaftesbury, Burnet
admits that "his strength lay in the knowledge of England"; and when he
took a fatal course, it was because the whole situation was desperate.
His fall measures not so much the capacity of Charles as the force which
the royalist superstition had gathered.
§ 2
This growth can be traced in the clerical literature of the time. The
conception of a "divine right" inhering in kings by heredity--a
conception arising naturally as part of the general ethic of feudal
inheritance--had been emphasised on the Protestant side in England[1154]
by way of express resistance to the Papacy, which from the time of
Gregory VII had been wont in its strifes with emperors and kings to deny
their divine right and to assert its own, formally founding the latter,
however, on the "natural" right inherent in masses of men to choose
their own rulers, even as the citizens of Rome had been wont to elect
the Popes.[1155] The total effect of the English Rebellion was to give
an immense stimulus to the high monarchic view, not now as against the
Papacy, but as against Parliament. When the learned Usher drew up at the
request of Charles I his treatise[1156] on _The Power communicated by
God to the Prince, and the Obedience required of the Subject_, he
proceeded almost wholly on arguments from the Scriptures and the
Fathers; not that there were not already many deliverances from modern
authorities on the point, but that these evidently had not entered into
the ordinary stock of opinion. On the papal side, from Thomas
Aquinas[1157] onwards, the negative view had been carefully set forth,
not merely as a papal claim, but also as an obvious affirmation of the
ancient "law of nature." Thus the Spanish Jesuit Suarez (1548-1617) had
in his _Tractatus de Legibus_, while deriving all law from the will of
God, expressly rejected the doctrine that the power of rule inheres by
succession in single princes. Such power, he declared, "by its very
nature, belongs to no one man, but to a multitude of men,"[1158] adding
a refutation of the patriarchal theory which "might have caused our
English divines to blush before the Jesuit of Granada."[1159] At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, again, while leading Englishmen
were affirming divine right, the German Protestant Althusius, Professor
of Law at Herborn, publishing his _Politica methodice digesta_ (1603),
declares in a dedication to the States of Friesland that the supreme
power lies in the people.[1160] Hooker, too, had stamped the principle
of "consent" with his authority, very much as did Suarez.[1161]
But the compiler of _The History of Passive Obedience since the
Reformation_,[1162] after showing that the tenet[1163] had been held by
dozens of Protestant divines and jurists after the Reformation, and even
strongly affirmed by Nonconformists, is able to cite nearly as many
assertions of it in the reign of Charles II as in the whole preceding
period. The clergy were, indeed, able to show that the principle of
non-resistance had been a common doctrine up to the Great Rebellion;
and, though the contrary view was on the whole more common,[1164] it
well illustrates the instinctive character of political movement that
the democratic doctrine had followed the course of action step by step,
and not preceded it. There had been resistance before the right to
resist was formulated in the schools. And Bishop Guthry records that at
the General Assembly in Edinburgh in January, 1645, "everyone had in his
hand that book lately published by Mr. Samuel Rutherford, entitled _Lex
Rex_, which was stuffed with positions that in the time of peace and
order would have been judged damnable treasons; yet were now so idolised
that, whereas in the beginning of the work Buchanan's treatise, _De Jure
Regni apud Scotos_, was looked upon as an oracle, this coming forth, it
was slighted as not anti-monarchical enough, and Rutherford's _Lex Rex_
only thought authentic."[1165] So Milton's answer to Salmasius,
vindicating the right of rebellion as inherent in freemen, marks the
high tide of feeling that sustained the foremost regicides. But in the
nature of the case the feeling swung as far the other way when they had
touched their extreme limit of action; and when the royalist cause came
in the ascendant, the monarchical principle was perhaps more
passionately cherished in England than in any of the other European
States.[1166] How it normally worked may be seen in Dryden's sycophantic
dedication[1167] of his _All for Love_ to Lord Danby (1678), sinking as
it does to the extravagant baseness of the declaration that "every
remonstrance of private men has the seed of treason in it." It was in
this very year that Charles and Danby made the secret treaty with
France, the revelation of which by Louis soon afterwards brought Danby
to the Tower; and Danby it was who three years before carried through
the House of Lords a bill to make all placemen declare on oath that they
considered all resistance to the king unlawful.
The handful of remaining republicans and political Liberals, appealing
as they did to tradition in their treatises against the traditional
pleadings of the Churchmen and royalists, could have no appreciable
influence on the public, because the mere spirit of tradition, when not
appealed to as the sanction of a living movement of resistance, must
needs make for passivity. Algernon Sidney's posthumous folio on
Government in answer to Filmer's _Patriarcha_, arguing the question of
self-government _versus_ divine right, and going over all the ground
from Nimrod downwards, point by point, is a far greater performance than
Filmer's; and Locke in turn brought a still greater power of analysis to
bear on the same refutation; but it is easy to see that Filmer's is the
more readable book, and that with its straightforward dogmatism it would
most readily convince the average Englishman. Nor was the philosophy all
on one side, though Filmer has ten absurdities for the other's one, and
was so unguarded as to commit himself to the doctrine that the
possession of power gives divine right, no matter how come by. Sidney
himself always argued that "Vertue" entitled men to superior power; and
though he might in practice have contended that the choice of the
virtuous should be made by the people, his proposition pointed rather
plainly back to Cromwell, acclaimed by Milton as the worthiest to bear
rule. And to be governed by a military autocrat, however virtuous and
capable, was as little to the taste of that generation as it was to the
taste of Carlyle's. Even a clergyman could see that the political
problem was really one of the practical adjustment of crude conflicting
interests, and that there could easily be as much friction under a
virtuous monarch as under a dissolute one. The conscientiousness of the
first Charles had wrought ruin, where the vicious indolence of the
second steered safely.
As Filmer and Sidney, besides, really agreed in awarding "the tools to
him who could handle them," and as the most pressing practical need was
to avoid civil war, the solution for most people was the more clearly a
"loyal" submission to the reigning house; and no amount of abstract
demonstration of the right of self-government could have hindered the
habit of submission from eating deeper and deeper into the national
character if it were not for the convulsion which changed the dynasty
and set up a deep division of "loyalties," keeping each other in check.
In the strict sense of the term there was no class strife, no democratic
movement, no democratic interest; indeed, no ideal of public interest as
the greatest good of the whole. Thus Harrington's _Oceana_, with its
scheme of "an equal Commonwealth, a Government established upon an equal
Agrarian, arising into the Superstructures of three Orders, the Senat
debating and proposing, the People resolving, and the Magistracy
executing by an equal Rotation through the suffrage of the People given
by the Ballot"[1168]--this conception, later pronounced by Hume "the
only valuable model of a commonwealth that has yet been offered to the
public,"[1169] although the same critic exposed its weakness--was in
fact as wholly beside the case as the principle of the Second Coming. No
man desired the proposed ideal; and the very irrelevance of the
systematic treatises strengthened the case for use and wont. The
political discussions, being thus mostly in the air, could serve only to
prepare leading men to act on certain principles should events forcibly
lead up to new action. But the existing restraints on freedom did not
supply sufficient grievance to breed action. The dissenters themselves
were almost entirely resigned to their ostracism; and the preponderance
of the Church and the Tory party was complete.
Luckily the political fanaticism of Charles I reappeared in his son
James; and that king's determination to re-establish in his realm the
Church of his devotion served to break a spell that nothing else could
have shattered.[1170] The very Church which had been assuring him of his
irresistibility, having to choose between its own continuance and his,
had perforce to desert him; and the old panic fear of Popery, fed by the
spectacle of Jeffreys' Bloody Assize, swept away the monarch who had
aroused it. He would have been an energetic king; his naval Memoirs
exhibit zeal and application to work; and he had so much of rational
humanity in him that in Scotland he pointed out to the popes of
Presbyterianism how irrational as well as merciless was their treatment
of sexual frailty. But his own fanaticism carried him athwart the
superstition which would have sufficed to make him a secure despot in
all other matters; and when the spirit of freedom seemed dying out in
all forms save that of sectarian zealotry, his assault on that brought
about the convulsion which gave it fresh chances of life.
§ 3
While practical politics was thus becoming more and more of a stupid war
of ecclesiastical prejudices, in which the shiftiest came best off, and
even theoretic politics ran to a vain disputation on the purposes of God
towards Adam, some of the best intelligence of the nation, happily, was
at work on more fruitful lines. The dire results of the principles which
had made for union and strife of late years, drove thoughtful men back
on a ground of union which did not seem to breed a correlative
malignity.[1171] It was in 1660, the year of the Restoration, that the
Royal Society was constituted; but its real beginnings lay in the first
years of peace under Cromwell, when, as Sprat records, a "candid,
unpassionate company" began to meet at Oxford in the lodgings of Dr.
Wilkins, of Wadham College,[1172] to discuss questions of natural fact.
"The University had, at the time, many Members of its own, who had begun
a free way of reasoning; and was also frequented by some gentlemen, of
Philosophical Minds, whom the misfortunes of the Kingdom, and the
security and ease of a retirement amongst Gowns-men, had drawn
thither."[1173] In constituting the Society, the associates "freely
admitted men of different religions, countries, and professions of
life," taking credit to themselves for admitting an intellectual
shopkeeper, though "the far greater number are Gentlemen, free, and
unconfined."[1174] Above all things they shunned sectarian and party
feeling. "Their first purpose was no more then onely the satisfaction of
breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another,
without being ingag'd in the passions and madness of that dismal
Age;"[1175] and when they formally incorporated themselves it was
expressly to discuss "things and not words."
It is noteworthy that the French Academy, which gave the immediate
suggestion for the constitution of the English Royal Society,
contained almost no authors save belletrists and ecclesiastics. In
the list of members down to 1671 (_Relation_ cited, p. 336), I find
no writer on science save De la Chambre, the King's physician. And
the first important undertaking of the Academy (projected about
1637) was a _Dictionary_. Sprat (p. 56) suggests that the Royal
Society has usefully influenced the Academy in the direction of the
study of things rather than words. (Compare the avowed literary
ideal of the authors of the _Relation_, p. 373.) But although the
French group from the first tended mainly to literary pursuits,
they too aimed at a "free way of reasoning," "et de ce premier âge
de l'Académie, ils en parlent comme d'un âge d'or, durant lequel
avec toute l'innocence et toute la _liberté_ des premiers siècles,
sans bruit, et sans pompe, et sans autres loix que celles de
l'amitié, ils goûtoient ensemble tout ce que la société des
esprits, et la vie raisonnable, ont de plus doux et de plus
charmant" (_Relation_, p. 7).
And even while Sprat was writing, the French were making up their
scientific leeway. In 1664-65 there was published in English a
translation of _A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi
of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy and other_
(sic) _Natural Knowledge made in the Assembly of the_ Beaux Esprits
_at_ Paris, _by the most Ingenious Persons of that Nation_ (2 vols.
sm. folio), wherein, though the scientific discussions are
distinctly amateurish, there are many speculations likely to
stimulate both French and English experiment. There is indeed
little to choose in point of solidity between the early themes of
the English Royal Society and those of the French Academy. On the
other hand, the French Government specially promoted exact study.
In 1666 Colbert established the _Académie Royale des Sciences_, for
the promotion of Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry,
building a laboratory and an observatory, and inviting to France
Cassini and Huygens (Life of Colbert by Bernard, in ed. of
Colbert's _Last Testament_, 1695). Colbert further founded the
_Académie Royale d'Architecture_ in 1671; and had set up what came
to be the _Académie des Inscriptions_ in his own house. All three
bodies did excellent work. (See the acknowledgment, as regards
science, in Lawrence's _Lectures on Comparative Anatomy_, etc.,
1819, p. 13.) In France, besides, the philosophy and science of
Descartes made way from the first, and it was his works that first
gave Locke "a relish for philosophical things." On the other hand,
Sprat, who was not without an eye to literature, and made a
reputation by his style, acutely notes (p. 42) that "in the Wars
themselves (which is a time wherein all Languages use, if ever, to
increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busie and active
times there arise more new thoughts of some men, which must be
signifi'd and varied by new expressions)" the English speech
"received many fantastical terms ... and with all it was enlarg'd
by many sound and necessary Forms and Idioms which it before
wanted"; and he proposes an authoritative dictionary on the lines
of the French project.
The English naturalists would have nothing to do with theology, "these
two subjects, God and the Soul, being only forborn."[1176] Reasoning
from the development of military faculty in the Civil War, they decided
that "greater things are produced by the free way than the
formal"[1177]--a principle already put forth by Renaudot, in the preface
to the reports of the French Academy, as the guide of their procedure.
By attending solely to results and questions of concrete fact, the
inquirers were "not only free from Faction, but from the very causes and
beginnings of it";[1178] and in the language of the time they held that
"by this means there was a race of young Men provided against the next
Age, whose minds receiving from them their just Impressions of sober and
generous knowledge, were invincibly arm'd against all the inchantments
of Enthusiasm"[1179]--that is, of religious fanaticism. And with this
recoil from fanaticism there went the stirring and energetic curiosity
of people habituated to action by years of war, and needing some new
excitement to replace the old. While many turned to debauchery, others
took to "experiment."[1180] Says Sprat:--
"The late times of Civil War and confusion, to make some
recompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage
with them, that they stirr'd up men's minds from long ease and a
lazy rest, and made them active, industrious, and inquisitive: it
being the usual benefit that follows upon Tempests and Thunders in
the State, as well as in the skie, that they purifie and cleer the
Air which they disturb. But now, since the King's return, the
blindness of the former Age and the miseries of this last are
vanish'd away: now men are generally weary of the Relicks of
Antiquity, and satiated with Religious Disputes; now not only the
eyes of men but their hands are open, and prepar'd to labour; Now
there is a universal desire and appetite after Knowledge, after the
peaceable, the fruitful, nourishing knowledge; and not after that
of antient Sects, which only yielded hard indigestible arguments,
or sharp contentions, instead of food: which when the minds of men
requir'd bread, gave them only a stone, and for fish a
serpent."[1181]
Here too, then, there was reaction. It could not suffice to lift the
plane of national life, which was determined by the general conditions
and the general culture; nor did it alter the predominance of _belles
lettres_ in the reading of the educated; but it served to sow in that
life the seed of science, destined to work through the centuries a
gradual transformation of activity and thought which should make
impossible the old political strifes and generate new. Out of experiment
came invention, machinery, theory, new scepticism, rationalism,
democracy. It is difficult to measure, but not easy to over-estimate,
the gain to intellectual life from even a partial discrediting of the
old preoccupation with theology, which in the centuries between Luther
and Spinoza stood for an "expense of spirit" that is depressing to think
of. Down even to our own day, the waste of labour and learning
continues; but from the time when two-thirds of Europe had been agonised
by wars set up or stimulated by theological disputes, the balance begins
to lean towards saner things. The second generation after that in which
there arose a "free way of reasoning"[1182] saw the beginnings of
"Freethinking" in those religious problems which were for the present
laid aside, and the foundation of a new experiential philosophy. New and
great reactions against these were to come; reactions of endowed
clericalism, of popular sloth, of new "enthusiasm" generated in new
undergrowths of ignorance, of recoil from terrific democratic
revolution. But the new principle was to persist.
§ 4
It is not easy, at this time of day, to accept as a scientific product
the confused theory of constitutionalism which gradually grew up in
English politics from William the Third onwards. The theory in all its
forms is in logic so invertebrate, and in morals so far from satisfying
any fairly developed sense of political justice, that we are apt to
dismiss it in derision. In so far, indeed, as it proceeds on a
formulation of the "social contract" it is always severely handled by
the school of Sir Henry Maine, which here represents the anxiety of the
upper classes since the French Revolution to find some semblance of
rational answer to the moral plea that all men are entitled to political
enfranchisement and social help on the simple ground of reciprocity,
supposed to be canonised for Christians in the "Golden Rule." Locke, of
course, was not thinking of the working mass when he wrote his Letters
on Government, any more than when he helped to draw up a constitution
for South Carolina endorsing slavery.[1183] But he was at least much
nearer rational morals than were his antagonists; the provisions for
liberty of conscience in the South Carolina Constitution are notably far
in advance of any official view ever previously promulgated; and in
subsuming the "social contract" he was but following Hooker and Milton,
and indeed adapting Aristotle, an authority whom Locke's later critics
are wont to magnify.
Sir Frederick Pollock, in his _Introduction to the History of the
Science of Politics_ (p. 20), assumes to have saved Aristotle from
the criticism which assails the "social contract" theory, by saying
that Aristotle regards a "clanless and masterless man" as a monster
or an impossibility, whereas the "theorists of the social contract
school" take such a man to be the social unit. There is really no
reason to suppose that Aristotle would have denied a pre-political
state of nomadic barbarism such as is vaguely figured by Thucydides
(i, 2); and as a matter of fact he does expressly posit a process
of society-making by compact, first by the utility-seeking
combination of families in a village, later by the villages
_joining themselves_ into a State, whose express purpose is "good
life" (_Politics_, I, ii). It does not cancel this to say that
Aristotle also makes the State "prior" in the rational order to
man, for his "prior" (I, ii, 12-14) is not a historical but a
metaphysical or ethical proposition. In the third book, again (c.
9), he endorses a proposition of Lycophron which virtually affirms
the social contract.
And just as the school of Maine attacks the social contract theory
for giving a false view of the origin of society, so did Bodin long
ago, and at least as cogently, attack Aristotle and Cicero for
defining a State as a society of men assembled to live well and
happily. Bodin insists (_De la République_, 1580, l. i, c. i, p. 5;
l. i, c. vi, p. 48; l. iv, c. i, _ad init._ p. 350) that all States
originated in violence, the earliest being found full of slaves. It
is true that Aristotle at the outset implies that slavery is as old
as the family, but he still speaks of States as voluntary
combinations for a good end. As to the first kings he is also vague
and contradictory, and is criticised by Bodin accordingly.
Aristotle was doubtless adaptable to the monarchic as well as to
the democratic creed; but Bodin's criticism suggests that in the
sixteenth century he was felt to be too favourable to the latter.
It may be worth while to remark that the notion of an unsociable
"state of nature" prior to a "social contract" was effectively
criticised by Sir William Temple in his _Essay upon the Origin and
Nature of Government_ (1672). With a really scientific
discrimination he points to food conditions as mainly determining
gregation or segregation among animals, observing: "Nor do I know,
if men are like sheep, why they need any government, or, if they
are like wolves, how they can suffer it" (_Works_, ed. 1814, i, 9,
10). In the next generation, again, the ultra-Hobbesian view was
keenly attacked and confuted by Shaftesbury within a few years of
Locke's death (_Characteristics_, early edd. i, 109-11; ii,
310-21). As I have elsewhere pointed out (_Buckle and his Critics_,
p. 395), the "contract" theory lent itself equally to Whiggism and
to High Toryism.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find the Radical
Bentham (_Fragment on Government_, 1776) deriding it as held by the
Tory Blackstone. But Rousseau himself (preface to the _Discours sur
l'inégalité_) avowedly handled the "State of Nature" as an ideal,
not as a historical truth; and Blackstone did the same. It is
therefore only a new species of abstract fallacy, and one for which
there is no practical excuse, to argue as does the school of Maine
(cp. Pollock, as cited, pp. 63, 75, 79, etc.) that the theories in
question are responsible for the French Revolution in general, or
the Reign of Terror in particular. Revolutions occur for reasons
embodied in states of life: they avail themselves of the theories
that lie to hand. The doctrine that "all are born equal" or "free"
comes from the Institutes of Justinian, and is laid down in so many
words by Bishop Sherborne of Chichester in 1536, and by the
orthodox Spanish Jesuit Suarez early in the seventeenth century
(_Tractatus de Legibus_, l. ii, c. ii, § 3). The first-mentioned
passage is cited by Stubbs, iii, 623-24, and the second by Hallam,
_Literature of Europe_, iii, 160.
The derivation was bound to warp the theory; but such as it is, it
represents the beginning of a new art, and therefore of a new science,
of representative government. A variety of forces combined to prevent
anarchy on the one hand, and on the other the fatal consolidation of the
monarch's power which took place in France.[1184] The new English king
was a Protestant, and therefore religiously acceptable to the people;
but he was a Dutchman, and therefore racially obnoxious; for fierce
commercial jealousy had long smouldered between the two peoples, and war
had fanned it into flames that had burned wide. Further, he was a
"latitudinarian" in religious matters, and zealous to appoint
latitudinarian bishops; and the retirement from London forced on him by
his asthma deepened tenfold the effect of his normal coldness of manner
towards all and sundry. In the very Church whose cause he had saved, he
was unpopular not only with the out-and-out zealots of political divine
right, but with the zealous Churchmen as such, inasmuch as he favoured
the Dissenters as far as he dared. So hampered and frustrated was he
that it seems as if nothing but his rare genius for fighting a losing
battle could have saved him, despite the many reasons the nation had for
adhering to him.
One of these reasons, which counted for much, was the political effect
of a National Debt in attaching creditors as determined supporters to
the Government. The highest sagacity, perhaps, could not have framed a
better device than this for establishing a new dynasty; albeit the
device was itself made a ground of hostile criticism, and was, of
course, resorted to as a financial necessity, or at least as a resource
pointed to by Dutch example, not as a stroke of statecraft. What
prudence and conciliation could do, William sought to do. And yet, with
all his sanity and enlightenment, he failed utterly to apply his
tolerant principles to that part of his administration which most sorely
needed them--the government of Ireland. Even in England he could not
carry tolerance nearly as far as he wished;[1185] but in Ireland he was
forced to acquiesce in Protestant tyranny of the worst description. The
bigotry of his High Church subjects was too strong for him. On the
surrender of the last adherents of James at Limerick he concluded a
treaty which gave the Irish Catholics the religious freedom they had had
under Charles II when the Cromwellian oppression was removed; but the
English Parliament refused to sanction it, save on the condition that
nobody should sit in the Irish Parliament without first repudiating the
Catholic doctrines. This was not the first virtual breach of faith by
England towards Ireland; and it alone might have sufficed to poison
union between the two countries; but it was only the first step in a
renewal of the atrocious policy of the past.[1186]
At the Restoration the ex-Cromwellian diplomatists had contrived to
arrange matters so that the monstrous confiscations made under the
Commonwealth should be substantially maintained; though the settlement
of 1653 had been made in entire disregard of the Act of Oblivion by
Charles I in 1648; and though Charles II avowed in the House of Lords in
1660 that they had "showed much affection to him abroad." So base were
the tactics of the Protestants that many Irish were charged with having
forfeited their lands by signing under compulsion the engagement to
renounce the House of Stuart; while those who had compelled them to the
act now held the lands as royalists. But the decisive evil was the base
indolence of the King. As Halifax said of him, he "would slide from an
asking face";[1187] and what Clarendon called "that _imbecillitas
frontis_ which kept him from denying"[1188] made him solve the
intolerable strife of suitors by leaving possession in the main to those
who had it. The adventurers and soldiers finally relinquished only
one-third of their estates;[1189] and only a few hundreds of favoured
Irish were restored to their old lands, under burden of compensation to
the dispossessed holders.[1190]
When the resort of James II to Ireland gave power to the oppressed
population, it was a matter of course that reprisals should be
attempted. The English historian glibly decides that they should not
have been permitted; that the King "ought to have determined that the
existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable"; and that
"whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not
been committed, _was immaterial_. That transfer, just or unjust, had
taken place so long ago that to reverse it would be to unfix the
foundations of society."[1191] Thus does the race which claims to be
civilised prescribe a course of action for that which it declares to be
uncivilised.[1192] It is further suggested that the English interest in
the Irish Parliament would have "willingly" granted James a "very
considerable sum" to indemnify the despoiled natives for whom during a
quarter of a century it had never moved a finger. There is not the least
reason to believe in any such willingness; and it was in the ordinary
way of things that the wronged race should not exhibit a moderation and
magnanimity of which the wrongers had never for a moment shown
themselves capable. The Irish Parliament of 1689, indeed, took care to
indemnify all purchasers and mortgagees, while dispossessing original
holders under the Cromwellian Settlement;[1193] but it passed an Act of
Attainder in the fashion of the age; and when the Protestant cause
triumphed, the revenge taken was a hundredfold greater than the
provocation.
It was the legislature, not the crown, that did the work. Under the
tolerant and statesmanlike King, the Irish Protestant Parliament
proceeded to pass law after law making the life of Catholics one of
cruel humiliation and intolerable wrong. There is nothing in civilised
history to compare with the process by which religious and racial hatred
in combination once more set the miserable Irish nation on the rack. The
extreme political insanity of the course taken is doubtless to be
attributed to the propagandist madness of James, who had just before
sought to give all Ireland over to Catholicism. Fanaticism bred
fanaticism. But the fact remains that the Protestant fanatics began in
the reign of William a labour of hate which, carried on in succeeding
reigns, at length made Ireland the darkest problem in our politics.
Hassencamp (pp. 117, 125) insists that the penal laws "were not
dictated by any considerations of religion, but were merely the
offspring of the spirit of domination," citing for this view Burke,
_Letter to a Peer_ (_Works_, Bohn ed. iii, 296), and _Letter to Sir
Hercules Langrishe_ (_Id. ib._ p. 321). But this is an attempt to
dissociate religion from persecution in the interests of religious
credit, and will not bear criticism. Burke, in fact, contradicts
himself, assigning the religious motive in an earlier page (292) of
the _Letter to a Peer_, and again in the _Letter to Langrishe_ (p.
301). When the Protestants went on heaping injuries on the
Catholics in the knowledge that the people remained fixed in
Catholicism, they were only acting as religious persecutors have
always done. On Burke's and Hassencamp's view, persecution could
never take place from religious motives at all. No doubt the race
feeling was fundamental, but the two barbaric instincts were really
combined. Cp. Macaulay's _History_, ch. vi (2-vol. ed. 1877, i,
390-93).
As regards Irish trade, commercial malice had already effected all that
religious malice could wish. Even in the reign of Henry VIII a law was
passed forbidding the importation of Irish wool into England; and in the
next century Strafford sought further to crush the Irish woollen trade
altogether in the English interest, throwing the Irish back on their
linen trade and agriculture, which he encouraged.[1194] Strafford's
avowed object was the keeping Ireland thoroughly subject to the English
crown by making the people dependent on England for their chief
clothing; and to the same end he proposed to hold for the crown a
monopoly of all Irish trade in salt.[1195] Cromwell, on his part, was
sane enough to leave Irish shipping on the same footing as English under
his Navigation Act; but in 1663 the Restoration Parliament put Ireland
on the footing of a foreign State, thus destroying her shipping trade
once for all,[1196] and arresting her natural intercourse with the
American colonies. In the same year, a check was placed on the English
importation of Irish fat cattle: two years later, the embargo was laid
on lean cattle and dead meat; still later, it was laid on sheep, swine,
pork, bacon, mutton, and cheese. In William's reign, new repressions
were effected. The veto on wool export having led to woollen
manufactures, which were chiefly in the hands of Dissenters and
Catholics,[1197] the Irish Parliament, consisting of Episcopalian
landlords, was induced in 1698 to put heavy export duties on Irish
woollens; and this failing of its full purpose, in the following year
the English Parliament absolutely prohibited all export of manufactured
wool from Ireland.[1198]
To this policy of systematic iniquity the first offset was a measure of
protection to the Irish linen trade in 1703; and this benefaction went
almost solely into the hands of the Scotch settlers in Ulster.[1199]
Even thereafter the linen trade of Ireland was so maimed and restricted
by English hindrances that it was revived only by continual bounties
from 1743 to 1773. And this twice restored and subsidised industry, thus
expressly struck out of native and put in Protestant and alien hands,
has been in our own age repeatedly pointed to as a proof of the
superiority of the Protestant and non-Celtic inhabitants over the others
in energy and enterprise. As a matter of fact, many of the Scots who
benefited by the bounties of 1703 in Ulster had recently immigrated
because of the poverty and over-population of their own country, where
their energy and enterprise could do nothing. Irish energy and
enterprise, on the other hand, had been chronically strangled, during
two hundred years, by English and Protestant hands, with a persevering
malice to which there is no parallel in human history; and the process
is seen at its worst after the "glorious Revolution" of 1688.
Modern English writers of the Conservative school, always eager to
asperse Ireland, never capable of frankly avowing the English
causation of Irish backwardness, think it a sufficient exculpation
of their ancestors' crimes to say that Irishmen have not taken up
the old industries since they have been free to do so. Thus the
late Mr. H.D. Traill meets Irish comment on Strafford's treatment
of the Irish woollen trade by saying that the complainants "in
these days prefer other and less worthy industries to those which
they have now been free to practise, if they chose, for
generations" (_Strafford_, 1889, p. 137). This is a fair sample of
the fashion in which racial and political prejudices prompt men
otherwise honourable to devices worthy of baseness. It should be
unnecessary to point out, in reply, that when the Irish industries
had been so long extirpated as to be lost arts, it was simply
impossible that they could be successfully restored _in
competition_ with the highly developed machine industry of England.
Other countries set up new industries under high protective duties.
This Ireland could not do. But the most obvious considerations are
missed by malice.
The beginnings of modern parliamentary government thus coincide with the
recommencement, in the worst spirit, of the principal national crime
thus far committed by England; and this not by the choice of, but in
despite of, the king, at the hands of the Parliament. In the next reign
the same sin lies at the same door, the monarch doing nothing. The fact
should serve better than any monarchic special pleading to show us that
the advance towards freedom is a warfare not merely with despots and
despotic institutions, but with the spirit of despotism in the average
man; a warfare in which, after a time, the opposing forces are seldom
positive right and wrong, but as a rule only comparative right and
wrong, evil being slowly eliminated by the alternate play of
self-regarding instinct. Gross and wilful political evil, we say, was
wrought in the first stages of the new progress towards political
justice. But that is only another way of saying that even while gross
political evil was being wrought, men were on the way towards political
justice. A clear perception of the whole process, when men attain to it,
will mean that justice is about to be attained.
§ 5
Even while the spirit of religion and the spirit of separateness were
working such wrong in Ireland, the spirit of separateness was
fortunately defeated in Scotland, where it had yet burned strongly
enough to make perpetual division seem the destiny of the two kingdoms.
We learn how much political institutions count for when we realise that
in Scotland, just before the parliamentary union with England, there was
as furious an aversion to all things English as there has ever been
shown in France of late years to things German. The leading Scots
patriots were not only bitterly averse to union, but hotly bent on
securing that the line of succession in Scotland after Anne should not
be the same as that in England; this because they held that Scottish
liberties could never be secure under an English king. The stern
Fletcher of Saltoun, a Republican at heart, had to play in part the game
of the Jacobites, much as he abominated their cause. But both alike were
defeated, with better results than could possibly have followed on any
separation of the crowns; and the vehement opposition of the great mass
of the Scots people to the Parliamentary Union was likewise defeated, in
a manner hard to understand. The heat of the popular passion in Scotland
is shown by the infamously unjust execution of the English Captain Green
and two of his men[1200] on a charge of killing a missing Scotch captain
and crew who were not even proved to be dead, and were afterwards found
to be alive. The fanatical remnant of the Covenanters was as bitter
against union as the Jacobites. Yet in the teeth of all this violence of
feeling the Union was carried, and this not wholly by bribery,[1201] as
was then alleged, and as might be suspected from the analogy of the
later case of Ireland, but through the pressure of common-sense instinct
among the less noisy. There was indeed an element of bribery in the
English allowance of liberal compensation to the shareholders of the
African Company (better known as the Darien Company), who thus had good
cash in exchange for shares worth next to nothing; and in a certain
sense the reluctant English concession to Scotland of freedom of trade
was a bribe. But it is by such concessions that treaties are secured;
and it needed a very clear self-interest to bring round a Scotch
majority to union in the teeth of a popular hostility much more fierce
than is shown in our own day in the not altogether disparate case of
Ulster, as regards Home Rule. Burton and Macaulay agreed[1202] that the
intense wish and need of the Scottish trading class to participate in
the trade of England (as they had done to much advantage under Cromwell,
but had been hindered from doing after the Restoration) was what brought
about the passing of the Act of Union in the Scots Parliament. No doubt
the moderate Presbyterians saw that their best security lay in
union;[1203] but that recognition could never have overridden the
stiff-necked forces of fanaticism and race hatred[1204] were it not for
the call of plain pecuniary advantage. A transformation had begun in
Scotland. The country which for a hundred and fifty years had been
distracted by fanatical strifes, losing its best elements of culture
under the spell of Judaic bibliolatry, had at length, under the obscure
influence of English example, begun to move out of the worst toils of
the secondary barbarism, not indeed into a path of pure
civilisation--the harm had gone too deep for that--but towards a life of
secular industry which at least prepared a soil for a better life in the
centuries to come; and even for a time, under the stimulus of the new
thought of France, developed a brilliant and various scientific
literature. The Darien scheme may be taken as a turning-point in
Scottish history; an act of commercial enterprise then arousing an
amount of energy and sensation that had for centuries been seen only in
connection with strokes of State and sect. It is not agreeable to
idealising prejudice to accept Emerson's saying[1205] that the greatest
ameliorator in human affairs has been "selfish, huckstering trade"; but,
barring the strict force of the superlative, the claim is valid. It is
the blackest count in the indictment against England for her[1206]
treatment of Ireland that she deliberately closed to the sister nation
the door which the Scotch, by refusing union on other terms when union
was highly expedient in the view of English statesmen, forced her to
open to them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1145: Armand Carrel (_Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en
Angleterre_, ed. Bruxelles, 1836, p. 8) notes the "apathetic
indifference" to which Cromwell's imperialist rule had reduced the
middle classes.]
[Footnote 1146: It is to be noted in this connection that at first the
secret was very well kept. There can be no reasonable doubt that
Shaftesbury and Lauderdale were kept in the dark as to the Treaty of
Dover, in which Charles agreed with Louis to introduce Catholicism in
England. Macaulay's suggestion to the contrary comes of his
determination to hear nothing in Shaftesbury's defence.]
[Footnote 1147: This is accepted by Armand Carrel, who calls him
(_Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre_, p. 6) "homme d'une
immoralité profonde."]
[Footnote 1148: It is to be regretted that Green, while admitting that
Mr. Christie was "in some respects" successful in his vindication of
Shaftesbury, should have left his own account of Shaftesbury's character
glaringly unfair. Verbally following Burnet, he pronounces Ashley "at
best a Deist" in his religion, and adds that his life was "that of a
debauchee," going on to couple the terms "Deist and debauchee" in a very
clerical fashion. And yet in the previous paragraph he admits that "the
debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact, _temperate by
nature and habit_, and his ill-health rendered any great excess
impossible." The non-correction of the flat contradiction must
apparently be set down to Green's ill-health. As a matter of fact, the
charge of debauchery is baseless. Long before Mr. Christie, one of the
annotators of Burnet's _History_ (ed. 1838, p. 64, _note_) defended
Shaftesbury generally, and pointed out that "in private life we have no
testimony that he was depraved." Cp. Christie, _Life of Anthony Ashley
Cooper_, 1871, i, 316.]
[Footnote 1149: _History of His Own Time_, ed. 1838, p. 290.]
[Footnote 1150: My old friend, Mr. Alfred Marks, whose masterly book,
_Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?_ (Burns and Oates, 1905),
decisively establishes the suicide theory, and disposes of the
counter-theory of Mr. John Pollock, did not dispute the fact of the
vague plotting of Coleman. No one can say how much of such loose and
futile scheming there was.]
[Footnote 1151: How odious it was may be gathered from Dryden's _Annus
Mirabilis_ and Marvell's _Character of Holland_, pieces in which two men
of genius exhibit every stress of vulgar ill-feeling that we can detect
in the Jingo press and poets of our own day.]
[Footnote 1152: Dryden's charge, in _The Medal_, of "bartering his venal
wit for sums of gold" during the Rebellion, is pure figment. It is an
established fact that even as Councillor of State, to which office there
was attached a salary of £1,000, Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley
Cooper, received no salary at all. See note to Mr. Christie's (Globe)
ed. of Dryden's poems, pp. 127, 128.]
[Footnote 1153: Christie's _Life of Ashley Cooper_, ii, 293, _note_.
Perhaps it is not sufficiently considered by Mr. Christie that Sidney
regarded France as a possible ally for the overthrow of monarchy in
England. Cp. Hallam, ii, 460-61. His position was not that of an
ordinary Parliamentary bribe-taker. See Ludlow's _Memoirs_, iii, 165,
_et seq._ And the English Government had sought to have him
assassinated.]
[Footnote 1154: In 1603 Lord Mountjoy in Ireland laid it down as the
doctrine of the Church of England that his master was "by right of
descent an absolute king," and that it was unlawful for his subjects
"upon any cause to raise arms against him." These words, says Dr.
Gardiner (_History 1604-43_, i, 370), "truly expressed the belief with
which thousands of Englishmen had grown up during the long struggle with
Rome." For earlier discussions see Stubbs, i, 593, More's _Utopia_, bk.
i, and Hooper's _Early Writings_, ed. 1843, p. 75.]
[Footnote 1155: As Hallam notes (_Middle Ages_, 11th ed. ii, 157), the
French bishops in the ninth century had claimed sacerdotal rights of
deposing kings in as full a degree as the Popes did later. In that
period, however, bishops were often anti-papal; and the papal claim
practically arose in the Roman and clerical resistance to the nomination
of Popes by the Emperor, though Pope John VIII had in his time gone even
further than Gregory VII did later, claiming power to choose the
Emperor. _Id._ pp. 165-83.]
[Footnote 1156: Buckle is wrong (i, 394) in dating the beginning of the
revival of the doctrine "about 1681." Saunderson's edition of Usher was
first published in 1660.]
[Footnote 1157: The words of Thomas are extremely explicit: "Si
[principes] non habeant justum principatum sed usurpatum, vel si injusta
præcipiant, non tenentur eis subditi obedire." _Summa_, pt. ii, q. civ,
art. 6. The right of the Pope to depose an apostate prince was, of
course, constantly affirmed.]
[Footnote 1158: _Tractatus de Legibus_, lib. ii, c. ii, § 3.]
[Footnote 1159: Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 161.]
[Footnote 1160: Hallam, as last cited, p. 162. Bayle notes (art.
"Althusius," and _notes_) that the treatise was much denounced in
Germany.]
[Footnote 1161: _Ecclesiastical Polity_, bk. i, ch. x, § 8.]
[Footnote 1162: Amsterdam, 1689-90, 2 vols.]
[Footnote 1163: It is to be noted that "Passive Obedience" had different
degrees of meaning for those who professed to believe in it. For some it
meant merely not taking arms against the sovereign, and did not imply
that he was entitled to active obedience in all things. See Hallam, ii,
463.]
[Footnote 1164: Filmer begins his _Patriarcha_ (1680) with the remark
that the doctrine of natural freedom and the right to choose governments
had been "a common opinion ... since the time that school divinity began
to flourish." Like Salmasius, he fathers the doctrine on the Papacy;
and, indeed, the Church of Rome had notoriously employed it in its
strifes with kings, at its own convenience; but it had as notoriously
been put forward by many lay communities on their own behalf, and had
been practically acted on in England over and over again. And it is
clearly laid down in the third century by Tertullian, _Ad Scapulam_,
ii.]
[Footnote 1165: _Memoirs_, 2nd ed. p. 177.]
[Footnote 1166: Though it is substantially maintained by Grotius, _De
Jure Belli et Pacis_, 1625, I, iii, 9-12.]
[Footnote 1167: Johnson was moved to pronounce Dryden the most excessive
of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical
adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to
"Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse
samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (_Life_, in
vol. i of _Prose Works of Dryden_, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate
the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist
atmosphere.]
[Footnote 1168: Toland's ed., 1700, p. 55.]
[Footnote 1169: Essay (xvi of pt. ii) on the _Idea of a Perfect
Commonwealth_. Cp. Essay vii, on the tendencies of the British
Government, where Harrington's unpracticality is sufficiently
indicated.]
[Footnote 1170: Cp. Carrel, _Contre-Révolution_, p. 212, as to the
"profound discouragement" that had fallen on the people in 1685. Cp. p.
213.]
[Footnote 1171: "Our late Warrs and Schisms having almost wholly
discouraged men from the study of Theologie." W. Charleton, _The
Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature_,
1657, p. 50. (Cp. Baxter, _The Reformed Pastor_, 1656; ed. 1835, pp.
95-100.) Charleston, as his title and that of his previous work on
Atheism show, uses no ecclesiastical arguments.]
[Footnote 1172: The French Academy, formally founded in 1635, had in a
similar way originated in a private gathering some six years before
(Olivet et Pelisson, _Relation concernant l'Histoire de l'Académie
Françoise_, ed. 1672, p. 5). There may of course have been many such
private groups in England in the period of the Commonwealth.]
[Footnote 1173: _History of the Royal Society_, 1667, p. 53.]
[Footnote 1174: P. 67. Sprat mentions that many physicians gave great
help (p. 130).]
[Footnote 1175: P. 53.]
[Footnote 1176: _History of the Royal Society_, 1667, p. 83. The French
_beaux esprits_ were not afraid to discuss now and then the soul, or
even God, contriving to do it without theological heat. See the
_Collection_ cited, Conferences 6, 16, 79, 87, 142, etc.]
[Footnote 1177: _History_, p. 73.]
[Footnote 1178: P. 91.]
[Footnote 1179: P. 53.]
[Footnote 1180: So too with the non-combatants. Note, for instance,
Locke's recoil from the scholastic philosophy, and his early eager
interest in chemistry, medicine, and meteorology. Anthony à Wood records
him as a student "of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and
never-contented"--that is to say, argumentative.]
[Footnote 1181: _History of the Royal Society_, p. 152.]
[Footnote 1182: Sprat, of course, carried the "free way of reasoning"
only to a certain length, feeling obliged to deprecate "that some
Philosophers, by their carelessness of a Future Estate, have brought a
discredit on knowledge itself" (p. 367); and "that many Modern
Naturalists have bin negligent in the Worship of God"; but he still
insisted that "the universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a
rational Religion" (p. 366). Compare the _Discourse of Things above
Reason, by a Fellow of the Royal Society_ (1681), attributed to Boyle,
and published with a tract on the same theme by another Fellow.]
[Footnote 1183: If, that is, the section providing for slavery be his.
It probably was not. See Mr. Fox Bourne's _Life of Locke_, 1876, i, 239.
His influence may reasonably be traced in the remarkable provisions for
the freedom of sects--under limitation of theism. _Id._ pp. 241-43. Mr.
Fox Bourne does not deal with the slavery clause.]
[Footnote 1184: Thoughtful observers already recognised in the time of
James II that if England developed on the French lines religious freedom
would disappear from Europe. See the tractate _L'Europe esclave si
Angleterre ne rompt ses fers_, Cologne, 1677.]
[Footnote 1185: This may be taken as certain; but it is not clear how
far he wished to go. Ranke (_History of England_, Eng. tr. iv, 437) and
Hassencamp (_History of Ireland_, Eng. tr. p. 117) are satisfied with
the evidence as to his having promised the German emperor to do his
utmost to repeal the penal laws against the Catholics, and his having
offered the Irish Catholics, before the Battle of Aghrim, religious
freedom, half the churches in Ireland, and half their old possessions.
For this we have only a private letter. However this point may be
decided, the Treaty of Limerick is plain evidence. On the point of
William's responsibility for the breach of that Treaty, see the
excellent sketch of _The Past History of Ireland_ by Mr. Bouverie-Pusey
(1894).]
[Footnote 1186: Cp. the author's _Saxon and the Celt_, 1897, pp.
146-56.]
[Footnote 1187: _A Character of King Charles II_, ed. 1750, p. 45.]
[Footnote 1188: _Continuation of the Life of Clarendon_, in 1-vol. ed.
of _History_, 1843, p. 1006.]
[Footnote 1189: Hallam, iii, 396, following Carte and Leland.]
[Footnote 1190: Bishop Trench (_Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's
Settlement and Sale of Ireland_, Dublin rep. 1843, pp. 84-93) declares
that not only were all re-appropriations to be compensated, but the 54
nominees added to the original list of 500 loyalist officers to be
rewarded had not received an acre of land as late as 1675. Hallam sums
up on Anglican lines that the Catholics could not "reasonably murmur
against the confiscation of half their estates, after a civil war
wherein it was evident that so large a proportion of themselves were
concerned." In reality, much more than half the land had been
confiscated; and all the while the bulk of it remained in the hands of
men who had themselves been in rebellion! The settlement was simply a
racial iniquity.]
[Footnote 1191: Macaulay, ch. vi, Student's ed. i, 393.]
[Footnote 1192: _Id._ _ib._]
[Footnote 1193: For a full account of the procedure see Thomas Davis's
work, _The Patriot Parliament of 1689_, rep. with introd. by Sir C.
Gavan Duffy, 1893.]
[Footnote 1194: Cp. the author's _Saxon and Celt_, pp. 160, 161, and
_note_.]
[Footnote 1195: H.D. Traill, _Strafford_, 1889, p. 81.]
[Footnote 1196: Lecky, _History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century_,
i, 174.]
[Footnote 1197: See Petty, _Essays in Political Arithmetic_, ed. 1699,
p. 186.]
[Footnote 1198: The checking of the Irish wool trade was strongly urged
by Temple in the English interest (_Essay on the Advancement of Trade in
Ireland_, Works, iii, 10).]
[Footnote 1199: See Dr. Hill Burton's _History of the Reign of Queen
Anne_, 1880, iii, 160-63. This measure seems to have been overlooked by
Mr. Lecky in his narrative, _History of Ireland_, i, 178.]
[Footnote 1200: Green's ship and crew were first seized without form of
law in reprisal for the seizure in England, by the East India Company,
of a Scotch ship belonging to the old Darien Company, whose trade the
India Company held to be a breach of its monopoly. The charge of slaying
a Scotch captain was an afterthought.]
[Footnote 1201: On this see Burton, viii, 178-85; and cp. Buckle, 3-vol.
ed. iii, 160, as to the rise of the trading spirit.]
[Footnote 1202: Burton's _History of Scotland_, viii, 3, _note_.]
[Footnote 1203: _Id._ viii, 168.]
[Footnote 1204: "It is a marvel how the Edinburgh press of that day
could have printed the multitude of denunciatory pamphlets against the
Union" (Burton, viii, 131). "The aristocratic opponents of the Union did
their utmost to inflame the passions of the people" (_id._ p. 137, cp.
p. 158, etc.).]
[Footnote 1205: Following Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 327.]
[Footnote 1206: Properly speaking, the action of "England" was the
action of the merchant class, which in this case most exerted itself and
got its way.]
CHAPTER IV
INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
At all times within the historic period trade and industry have reacted
profoundly on social life; and as we near the modern period in our own
history the connection becomes more and more decisively determinant. In
the oldest culture-history at all known to us, as we have seen, the
commercial factor affects everything else; and at no time in European
annals do we fail to note some special scene or area in which trade
furnishes to politicians special problems. Thus the culture-history of
Italy, as we have also seen, is in past epochs inseparably bound up with
her commercial history. But as regards the north of Europe, it is in the
modern period that we begin specially to recognise trade as playing a
leading part in politics, national and international. The Mediterranean
tradition is first seen powerfully at work in the history of the Hansa
towns: then comes the great development of Flanders, then that of
Holland, then that of England, which gained so much from the influx of
Flemish and Dutch Protestant refugees in the reign of Philip II, but
which was checked in its commercial growth, under Elizabeth and James
alike, by their policy of granting monopolies to favourites.
Sir Josiah Child puts "the latter end of Elizabeth's reign" as the
time when England began to be "anything in trade" (_New Discourse
of Trade_, 4th ed. p. 73). Cp. Prof. Busch on English trade under
Henry VII, _England unter den Tudors_, i, 71-85, with Schanz,
_Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 328, where it is stated that in the
latter part of the sixteenth century there were 3,000 merchants
engaged in the sea trade. This seems extremely doubtful when we
note that the whole foreign trade of London was stated in
Parliament in 1604 to be in the hands of some 200 citizens
(_Journals of the House of Commons_, May 21, 1604), and the total
customs of London amounted to £110,000 a year, as against £17,000
from all the rest of the kingdom. As Hume notes (ch. 45, _note_), a
remonstrance from the Trinity House in 1602 declared that since
1588 the shipping and number of seamen in England had decayed about
a third. (Cit. from Anglesey's _Happy Future State of England_, p.
128.) This again, however, seems doubtful.
Broadly put, the fact appears to be that after a considerable
development of woollen manufacture in the towns during the Wars of
the Roses (above, p. 393), when sheep-rearing must have been
precarious and wool would be imported, there was a general return
to pasturage under the Tudor peace, the towns falling away, with
their manufactures. Attempts were made under Henry VIII and Edward
VI to develop the English mining industries by means of German
workmen and overseers, but apparently with no great success
(Ehrenberg, _Hamburg und England im Zeit. der Kön. Elisabeth_,
1896, pp. 4-6). It was after the persecution of Protestants in the
Netherlands under Charles V had driven many tradesmen to England
for refuge that manufacturing industry notably revived; and in
1564-65 we find the year's exports of England reckoned at £68,190
for wool and £896,079 for cloths and other woollen wares; the whole
of the rest of the export trade amounting only to £133,665 (Brit.
Mus. Lansdowne MS. 10, fol. 121-22, cited by Ehrenberg, p. 8; cp.
Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, ii, 82-83; Gibbins,
_Industrial Hist. of England_, 3rd. ed. pp. 132-33.) After the fall
of Antwerp, again, much of the commerce of that city fell to the
share of England, some of her commercial and artisan population
following it (Froude, _Hist. of England_, ed. 1872, xii, 1-2).
In the same period the commercial life of north Germany, which had
hitherto been far more widely developed than that of England
(Ehrenberg, pp. 1-11), was thrown back on the one hand by the
opening of the new ocean route to the East Indies, which upset the
trans-European trade from the Mediterranean, and on the other by
the new strifes between the princes and the cities (_id._ pp.
34-49); and here again English trade came to the front.
The "Merchant Adventurers," ready enough to accept monopolies for their
own incorporations, were free-traders as against other monopolists;[1207]
and not till all such abuses were abolished could England compete with
Holland. And though they were never legally annulled even under the
Commonwealth, "as men paid no regard to the prerogative whence the
charters of those companies were derived, the monopoly was gradually
invaded, and commerce increased by the increase of liberty."[1208]
France at times promised to rival both Holland and England; but she at
length definitely fell behind England in the race, as Flanders fell
behind Holland, by reason of political misdirection. In the middle and
latter part of the seventeenth century, all the northern States had
their eyes fastened on the shining example of Holland;[1209]
and commerce, which as an occasion of warfare had since the rise of
Christianity been superseded by religion, begins to give the cue for
animosities of peoples, rulers, and classes. The last great religious
war--if we except the strifes of Russia and Turkey, which are
quasi-religious--was the Thirty Years' War. Its very atrocity doubtless
went far to discredit the religious motive,[1210] and it ranks as the
worst war of the modern world. Commerce, however, for centuries supplied
new motives for war to men whose ideas of economics were still at the
theological stage.[1211] The eternal principle of strife, of human
attraction and repulsion, plays through the phenomena of commerce as
through those of creed. The profoundly insane lust for gold and silver,
which had so largely determined the history of the Roman Empire,
definitely shaped that of Spain; and Spain's example fired the northern
nations with whom she came in contact.
Prof. Thorold Rogers is responsible for the strange proposition
(_Economic Interpretation of History_, p. 186; _Industrial and
Commercial History of England_, p. 321) that the chief source of
the silver supply of Europe, before the discovery of the New World,
was _England_. He offers nothing but his own conviction in proof of
his statement, to which he adds the explanation that the silver in
question was extracted from sulphuret of lead. It seems well to
point out that there is not a shadow of foundation for the main
assertion. That the argentiferous lead mines were worked seems
clear; but that they could produce the main European supply without
the fact being historically noted is incredible. On the other hand,
silver mines were found in Germany in the tenth century and later,
and there is reason to attribute to their output a gradual rise of
prices before the fifteenth century (Anderson's _History of
Commerce_, i, 67). In any case, there is no reason to doubt the
statement of the historians of the precious metals, that what
silver was produced in Europe in the Middle Ages was mostly mined
in Spain and Germany. See Del Mar, _History of the Precious
Metals_, 1880, pp. 38-43 and refs.; also Ehrenberg, _Hamburg und
England im Zeitalter der Königin Elisabeth_, 1896, pp. 4, 9;
Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, Cap. 276, _end_; and
Kohlrausch, _History of Germany_, Eng. tr. 1844, p. 261.
The direct search for gold as plunder developed into the pursuit of it
as price; and wealthier States than Spain were raised by the more
roundabout method which Spain disdained.
This was soon recognised by Spanish economists, who probably
followed the French physiocrats, as represented in the excellent
chapters of Montesquieu on money (cited above, p. 363). See the
passage from Bernard of Ulloa (1753) cited by Blanqui, _Hist. de
l'écon. polit._, 2e édit. ii, 28. Cp. Samber, _Memoirs of the Dutch
Trade_, Eng. tr. 1719, pref. Apart from the habits set up by
imperialism, the Spaniards were in part anti-industrial because
industry was so closely associated with the Moriscoes (Major Hume,
_Spain_, p. 195); and the innumerable Church holidays counted for
much. Yet in the first half of the sixteenth century Spain had a
great development of town industrial life (Armstrong, Introd. to
same vol. pp. 83-84). This is partly attributable to the new
colonial trade; but probably more to the connection with Flanders.
Cp. Grattan, _The Netherlands_, pp. 66, 88. About 1670, however,
manufacture for export had entirely ceased; the trade of Madrid,
such as it was, was mainly in the hands of Frenchmen; the Church
and the bureaucracy alone flourished; and although discharged
soldiers swarmed in the cities, what harvests there were had to be
reaped by the hands of French labourers who came each season for
the purpose. Hume, as cited, p. 285. This usage subsisted nearly a
century later (Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, ed. 1756, p. 25)
Holland in the seventeenth century presented to the European world, as
we have seen, the new and striking spectacle of a dense population
thriving on a soil which could not possibly be made to feed them.
"Trade" became the watchword of French statesmanship; and Colbert
pressed it against a froward nobility;[1212] while in England a
generation later it had acquired the deeper rooting that goes with the
voluntary activity and self-seeking of a numerous class; and already the
gentry freely devoted their younger sons to the pursuits which those of
France contemned.[1213]
The turn seems to have been taken in the most natural way, after
Parliament was able to force on James I a stoppage of the practice of
granting monopolies. At his accession, the King had sought popularity by
calling in and scrutinising the many monopolies granted by Elizabeth,
which constituted the main grievance of the time.[1214] Soon, however,
he conformed to the old usage, which had in some measure the support of
Bacon;[1215] and in 1621 it was declared that he had multiplied
monopolies twentyfold.[1216] The most careful historian of the period
reports that though they were continually being abused,[1217] they were
granted on no corrupt motives, but in sheer mistaken zeal for the spread
of commerce.[1218] It would be more plausible to say that when interests
either of purse or of patronage lay in a certain direction, those
concerned were very easily satisfied that the interests of commerce
pointed the same way. At length, after much dispute, the Lords passed,
in 1624,[1219] a Monopoly Bill previously passed by the Commons in
1621;[1220] and though some of the chief monopolies were left standing,
either as involving patents for inventions or as being vested in
corporations,[1221] mere private trade monopolies were for the future
prevented.
It was a triumph of the trading class over the upper, nothing more. As
for the corporations, they were as avid of monopolies as the courtiers
had ever been; and independent traders hampered by monopolist
corporations were only too ready to become monopolist corporations
themselves.[1222] Under Charles I, for instance, there was set up a
chartered company with a monopoly of soap-making, of which every
manufacturer could become a member--a kind of chartered "trust," born
out of due time--the price paid to the crown for the privilege being
£10,000 and a royalty of £8 on every ton of soap made. For this payment
the monopolists received full powers of coercion and the punitive aid of
the Star Chamber. After a few years, in consideration of a higher
payment, the King revoked the first patent and established a new
corporation. Similar monopolies were granted to starch-makers and other
producers; the Long Parliament pursuing the same policy, "till
monopolies became as common as they had been under James or
Elizabeth."[1223]
Part of the result was that about 1635 "there were more merchants to be
found upon the exchange worth each one thousand pounds and upwards than
there were in the former days, before the year 1600, to be found worth
one hundred pounds each."[1224] The upper classes, as capitalists and
even as traders, were not now likely to remain aloof. But all the while
there was no betterment of the lot of the poor. "That our poor in
England," writes Child after the Restoration, "have always been in a
most sad and wretched condition ... is confessed and lamented by all
men."[1225] Child's theory of the effect of usury laws in the matter is
pure fallacy; but his estimate of men's fortunes is probably more
accurate than the statement of the Venetian ambassador in the reign of
Mary, that "there were many merchants in London with £50,000 or £60,000
each."[1226] Howell, in 1619,[1227] expresses a belief that "our
four-and-twenty aldermen may buy a hundred of the richest men in
Amsterdam." Yet, though it was also confessed that among the Dutch, and
even in Hamburg and Paris, the poor were intelligently provided
for,[1228] no such necessity was practically recognised in
England,[1229] either by Puritan or by Cavalier, though before the
Rebellion the administration of Charles had not been apathetic;[1230]
and a century later there were the same conditions of popular misery and
vice, with a new plague of drunkenness added.[1231] By that time, too,
the corporation monopolies were strangling trade just as the private
monopolies had formerly done;[1232] while France, which in the latter
part of the seventeenth century gave such a stimulus to English and
Dutch industry by the suicidal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had
recovered both population and trade,[1233] and was on a commercial
footing which, well developed, might have given her the victory over
England in the race for empire.
Everywhere in the seventeenth century, however, the new development
meant new strife. Protestant England and Holland, Catholic France and
Protestant Holland, flew at each other's throats in quarrels of trade
and tariffs; and for the monopoly of the trade in cloves, Dutch and
Spanish and English battled as furiously as for constraint and freedom
of conscience. The primitively selfish and mistaken notion men had
formed of commercial economy was on a level with the religious impulse
as it had subsisted from the beginning of Christendom; and even as each
Christian sect had felt it necessary to throttle the rest, each nation
felt that its prosperity depended on the others' impoverishment. To
spite the Dutch, the Cromwellian party in 1651 passed the Navigation
Act, prohibiting all imports of foreign goods save in English ships or
those of the nations producing them. In practice it was a total failure,
the effect being to injure the English rather than the Dutch trade; but
the Dutch themselves, who were fanatical for their own Asiatic monopoly
trade, believed it would injure them, and went to war accordingly.
The eulogy of the Navigation Act as "wise" by Adam Smith (put, by
the way, with a "perhaps") is one of his worst mistakes. Roger Coke
in 1672 testified (_Treatise on Trade_, p. 68, cited by M'Culloch)
that within two years of the passing of the Act England lost the
greater part of the Baltic and Greenland trades; and Sir Josiah
Child's _New Discourse of Trade_ shows in detail that the English
by about 1670 or 1690 had lost to the Dutch even much of the trade
they formerly had. (See Preface to second and later editions, and
compare M'Culloch, note xi to his edition of the _Wealth of
Nations_, and McCullagh, _Industrial History_, ii, 340.) The one
direction in which the Act seems to have been successful was in
stimulating shipbuilding and seafaring in the American colonies.
(See Prof. Ashley in the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, Boston,
November, 1899, pp. 4-6.) Joshua Gee, in his _Trade and Navigation
of Great Britain Considered_ (1730, 6th ed. p. 113), expressly
ascribes a "prodigious increase of our shipping" to "the timber
trade between Portugal, etc., and our plantations," one result
being that English ships have "become the common carriers in the
Mediterranean, as well as between the Mediterranean, Holland,
Hambro', and the Baltic." He says nothing of the Navigation Act,
but lays stress on the cheap building of ships in New England, and
notes (p. 114) that the Dutch habitually hire English ships "to
transport their goods from Spain, etc., to Amsterdam, and other
places."
Even among expert merchants there was no true economic science, only a
certain empirical knowledge, reduced to rule of thumb. Hence the traders
were for ever tending to strangle trade, and the ablest administrators
fell into the snare. Everywhere they tended to be possessed by the gross
fallacy that they could somehow sell without buying,[1234] and so heap
up gold and silver; and to secure at least a balance in bullion was
considered an absolute necessity. This was the most serious error of the
policy of Colbert, who secured a balance of social gain to France by
stimulating and protecting shipping and new industries,[1235] but failed
to learn the lesson that foreign commerce in the end must consist in an
exchange of goods. Thus, though he resisted the ruinous methods of Louis
XIV,[1236] he lent himself to the theory which, next to the hope of
making the Netherlands a province of France and so an arm of French
naval strength, stimulated the policy of war. By repeatedly raising his
tariffs he forced the Dutch to raise theirs; whereupon France went to
war. Had he known that the Dutch could not sell to France without buying
thence, and _vice versa_, he would have rested content with establishing
his new industries.
M. Dussieux (as cited, p. 127) frames a deplorable demonstration
that Holland was impoverishing France and destroying all industry
there by selling more articles than she bought. As if any country
could go on buying in perpetuity without selling in payment. M.
Dussieux goes on to admit that France before Colbert had some great
industries, and a great agricultural export trade, as must needs
have been. His argument shows the survival of the mercantilist
delusion that trade can drain a productive country of its bullion.
It is evident that Colbert helped trade more by checking fiscal
abuses and promoting canals and roads than by protecting new
industries. On the whole he seems to have gravely injured
agriculture (_id._ pp. 89, _note_, and 133); and Adam Smith's
criticism (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. ii; bk. iv, ch. ix)
remains valid. He was "imposed upon by the sophistry of merchants
and manufacturers, who are always demanding a monopoly against
their countrymen," and by prohibiting export of grain he depressed
agriculture, the natural and facile industry of France, and so
promoted the rural misery which at length inspired the Revolution.
It was essentially by way of reaction against his error that the
Physiocrats fell into theirs--the denial that any industry was
productive _except_ agriculture. Even if he had not prohibited
export of grain, his import duties, in so far as they excluded
foreign products, would have checked the grain exports which had
formerly paid for these. Thus, as M. Dussieux admits, Colbert
failed to secure prosperity for the peasantry while he was helping
industry. (Cp. Brandt, _Beiträge_, as cited.) Colbert in the
nineteenth century had the benefit of the doctrine that monarchism
prepared for democracy in France, and there is some truth in the
protest of Morin that on this and other grounds he became the
object of "un culte ridicule qui brave les notions les plus
élémentaires de l'économie publique" (_Origines de la démocratie_,
Introd.--written in 1854--p. 48). Morin goes so far as to charge on
Colbert equally with Louvois the misfortunes of France under Louis
XIV (_id._ pp. 88, 120).
Of course the rival nations were equally self-seeking. Prohibitive
tariffs were necessarily lowest with the most specifically commercial
State, the Dutch; and the free trade doctrine began early to be heard in
England.
_E.g._, from Dudley North. Macaulay, ed. cited, i, 253. See the
quotations in M'Culloch, as above cited. Pepys, in his _Diary_,
under date 1664, February 29, tells how Sir Philip Warwick
expounded to him the "paradox" that it does not impoverish the
nation to export less than it imports. For earlier instances of
right thinking on the subject see the author's _Trade and Tariffs_,
p. 65 _sq_. The repeal in 1663 of statutes against exporting
bullion was carried in the interests of the East India Company, and
apparently on a false theory; see it in Child, _New Discourse_, p.
173. Cp. Shaftesbury, _Characteristics_, Treatise II, pt. i, § 2,
_end_, as to the advantage of a "free port." This had been
partially insisted on, as we have seen, by the Merchant Adventurers
in the days of Elizabeth and James; and Raleigh strongly pressed it
in his _Observations touching Trade and Commerce with the Hollander
and other Nations_, presented to James. Works, ed. 1829, viii,
356-57. Raleigh, however, was a bullionist.
But whether rulers leant in the direction of free trade or strove to
heap up import duties as did France, they went to war for monopolies and
for imposts. Holland had as determinedly sought the ruin of Antwerp as
England did that of Holland. And as the race-principle embroiled nations
on the score of trade, so the class-principle set up new feuds of class
in all the nations concerned. The new trading class fought for its own
hand as the trade gilds of the Middle Ages had done; and the fact of its
connections with the gentry did not prevent animosity between gentry and
traders or investors in the mass. Thus were the old issues complicated,
for good or for ill.
Prof. Cunningham (_English Industry and Commerce_, ed. 1892, ii,
16-17) offers an unexpected defence of the "Mercantile System,"
under which bullion was striven for as "the direct means of
securing power." "The wisdom of the whole scheme," he writes, "is
apparently justified by the striking development of national power
which took place during the period when it lasted. England first
outstripped Holland and then raised an empire in the East on the
ruins of French dependencies." After this argument Dr. Cunningham
falters, observing: "But even if the logic of facts seems to tell
in its favour, there is a danger of fallacy: success was attained,
but how far was it due to the working of coal, and the age of
mechanical invention, and how far to the policy pursued?" There is
really no need to suppose such an antinomy between "the logic of
facts" and any other logic. The only legitimate logic of facts is
that which takes in all the facts. Now, seeing that France was as
much devoted as England to the Mercantile System, and that in the
terms of the case she failed, it cannot have been the Mercantile
System that secured success to England. The logic of facts excludes
the hypothesis. As for the "outstripping" of Holland, a country
with perhaps a fourth of England's population in the eighteenth
century, we have seen that the Mercantile System, as operating in
the Navigation Act, totally failed to attain its purpose, and that
Dutch decadence was largely due to monopolies--_i.e._, to
acceptance of the Mercantile System. The working of coal, on the
other hand, was a real wealth-making force, certainly conducive to
naval and other empire. But more allowance is to be made for the
fact that France had heavy continental quarrels on hand while she
was fighting England in Asia and America.
If at this stage we seek to discover the manner of life of the working
class in England, we shall find it hard to reach a confident conception.
Many phrases in Shakespeare remind us that as towns grew there grew with
them a nondescript semi-industrial class, untrained for any regular
industry and unable to subsist without industry of some sort. In the
latter part of the seventeenth century we seem to see a process of
elimination at work by which the organisms capable of enduring toil are
selected from a mass to which such toil was too irksome. In 1668 Sir
Josiah Child writes that the English poor in a cheap year "will not work
above two days in a week; their humour being such that they will ...
just work so much and no more as may maintain them in that mean
condition to which they have been accustomed." That, accordingly, a high
price for bread was a good thing, as forcing the poor to industry,
became the standing doctrine of such publicists as Petty.[1237] In the
next generation, Mandeville puts as indisputable the statement that "the
poor" will not work any more than they need to maintain bare existence.
When, late in the eighteenth century, we find Adam Smith, with French
testimony to support him, denying that the pinch of poverty makes for
industry, we are left in doubt as to whether the improvement came by a
positive dying out of the lazy types through the new plague of
alcoholism, or through the gradual exemplary force of a higher standard
of comfort as seen among the more industrious. Probably both influences
were at work. But it was at best in a grimy under-world of degeneracy
and hunger, squalor and riot, that there were laid the roots of the new
mechanical industries which were to make England the chief mill and
counter of Europe.[1238] And when we find one of the acutest observers
of the next generation arguing that a large body of the needy poor is
the right and necessary basis of industry and public wealth,[1239] we
realise that the new life was to be as hard for the toilers as that of
any earlier age.
_Conclusion_
It is in the reign of the last of the Stuarts, whose sex made her
perforce rely on ministers to rule for her, and whose unenlightened
zeal[1240] thus missed the disaster which similar qualities had brought
upon two of her predecessors--it is in the reign of Anne, swayed by
favourites to an extent that might have made monarchy ridiculous[1241]
if monarchists had gone by reason and not by superstition--that there
begins recognisably the era of government by parliamentary leaders,
representing at once, in varying degrees, monarch and people; and it is
at this point that we begin the biographical studies[1242] to which the
foregoing pages offer an introduction. But under new conditions and
phases we are to meet for the most part repetitions and developments of
the forces already recognised as at work from time immemorial. Thus
early have we seen in action, on the field of English history, most of
those primary forces of strife whose play makes the warp of politics,
ancient and modern; and the distinct emergence, withal, of that spirit
which, rare and transient in ancient times, seems destined to inherit
the later earth--the spirit of science, which slowly transmutes politics
from an animal to an intellectual process, raising it from the stage of
mere passional life to the stage of constructive art, and from the
social relation of rule and subjection towards the relation of mutuality
and corporate intelligence. Politics, we formally say, is the process of
the clash of wills, sympathies, interests, striving for social
adjustment in the sphere of legislation and government. The earlier
phases are crude and animalistic, and involve much resort to physical
strife. The later phases are gradually humanised and intelligised, till
at length the science of the past process builds up a new phase of
consciousness, which evolves a conscious progressive art. That is to
say, the conscious progressive art develops in course of time: it had
not really arisen in any valid form at the period to which we have
brought our bird's-eye view. It had transiently arisen in the ancient
world, as in Solon and, far less effectually, in the Gracchi; but the
conditions were too evil for its growth, and the course of things
political was downward, the animal instincts overriding science, till
even when there was compulsory peace the spirit of science could no more
blossom. In English politics, soon after the beginning of the eighteenth
century, the conditions brought about civil peace under a new dynasty,
which it was the function of the statesmanship of the dynasty to
maintain. At the same time the spirit of science had entered on a new
life. It remains to trace, under successive statesmen and in the
doctrine of successive politicians, the fluctuations of English progress
towards the great Utopia, the state of reconciliation of all the lower
social antipathies and interests, and of free scope for the inevitable
but haply bloodless strifes of ideals, which must needs clash so far as
we can foresee human affairs. The progress, we shall see, is only in our
own day beginning to be conscious or calculated: it has truly been, so
far as most of the actors are concerned, by unpath'd waters to undream'd
shores. The hope is that the very recognition of the past course of the
voyage will establish a new art and a new science of social navigation.
To make a new aspiration pass for a law of progress merely because it is
new would, of course, be only a fresh dressing of old error. There is no
security that the scientific form will make any ideal more viable than
another; every ideal, after all, has stood for what social science there
was among its devotees. The hope of a moral transformation of the world
is a state of mind so often seen arising in human history that some
distrust of it is almost a foregone condition of reflection on any new
ideal for thoughtful men. A dream of deliverance pervades the earliest
purposive literature of the Hebrews; a fabled salvation in the past is
made the ground for trust in one to come. Wherever the sense of present
hardship and suffering outweighs the energetic spirit of life in the
ancient world, the young men are found seeing visions, and the old men
dreaming dreams; and the thought of "the far serenity of Saturn's days"
becomes a foothold for the Virgilian hope of a golden age to come. A
hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident
rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In
our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have
seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes an ideal of peaceful
transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons
save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has
widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new
science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. In the
fulfilment or non-fulfilment of that hope lies for the coming age the
practical answer to the riddle of existence.
Without such a hope, the study of the past would indeed be desolating to
the tired spectator. Followed through cycle after cycle of illusory
progress and conscious decline, all nevertheless as full of pulsation,
of the pride of life and the passion of suffering, as the human tide
that beats to-day on the shores of our own senses, the history of
organised mankind, in its trivially long-drawn immensity, grows to be
unspeakably disenchanting. Considered as a tale that is told, it seems
to speak of nothing but blind impulse, narrow horizons, insane
satisfactions in evil achievement, grotesque miscalculation, and vain
desire, till it is almost a relief to reflect how little we know of it
all, how immeasurable are the crowded distances beyond the reach of our
search-light. Alike the known and the unknown, when all is said, figure
for us as fruitless, purposeless, meaningless moments in some vast,
eternal dream.
Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa
Girando senza posa,
Per tornar sempre là donde son mosse;
Uso alcuno, alcun frutto,
Indovinar non so.[1243]
The untranslatable cadence of Leopardi has the very pulse of the wearied
seeker's spirit. Yet, through all, the fascination of the inquiry holds
us, as if in the insistent craving to understand there lay some of the
springs of movement towards better days. We brood over the nearer
remains, so near and yet so far, till out of the ruins of Rome there
rise for us in hosts the serried phantoms of her tremendous drama; till
we seem to catch the very rasp of Cato's voice, and the gleam of Cæsar's
eye, swaying the tide of things. Still, the sensation yields no sense of
fruition; Rome the dead, and Greece the undying, drift from our reach
into the desert distance. Beyond their sunlit fragments lies a shoreless
and desolate twilight-land, receding towards the making of the world;
and there in the shadows we dimly divine the wraiths of a million
million forms, thronging a hundred civilisations. The vision of that
vanished eternity renews the intolerable burden of the spirit baffled of
all solution. For assuredly, in the remotest vistas of all, men and
women desired and loved, and reared their young, and toiled unspeakably,
and wept for their happier dead; and the evening and the morning, then
as now, wove their sad and splendid pageantries with the slow serenity
of cosmic change. Great empires waxed to the power of wreaking infinite
slaughter, through the infinite labour of harmless animal souls; and
seas of blood alternately cemented and sapped their brutal foundations;
and all that remains of them is a tradition of a tradition of their
destruction, and the shards of their uttermost decay. Not an echo of
them lives, save where perchance some poet with struggling tongue
murmurs his dream of them into tremulous form; or when music with its
more mysterious spell gathers from out the inscrutable vibration of
things strange semblances of memories, that come to us as an ancient and
lost experience re-won, grey with time and weary with pilgrimage. But to
what end, of knowledge or of feeling, if the future is not therefore to
be changed?
Save for such a conception and such a purpose, the civilisations of
to-day could have no rational hope to survive in perpetuity any more
than those of the past. The fullest command of physical science, however
great be the resulting power of wealth-production, means no solution of
the social problem, which must breed its own science. The new ground for
hope is that the great discipline of physical science has brought with
it the twofold conception of the reign of law in all things and the
sequence of power upon comprehension, even to the controlling of the
turbulent sea of human life. With the science of universal evolution has
come the faith in unending betterment. And this, when all is said, is
the vital difference between ancient and modern politics: that for the
ancients the fact of eternal mutation was a law of defeat and decay,
while for us it is a law of renewal. If but the faith be wedded to the
science, there can be no predictable limit to its fruits, however long
be the harvesting.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1207: Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 332 ff. The
Merchant Adventurers were incorporated under Elizabeth (_id._ i, 350).]
[Footnote 1208: Hume, _History of England_, ch. 62, near _end_.]
[Footnote 1209: Dr. Cunningham (ii, 101, 102, 104) notes the feeling
under the first Stuarts.]
[Footnote 1210: See Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 42, 1-vol. ed. pp. 308-9, and
his citations, as to the anti-ecclesiastical character of the Peace of
Westphalia.]
[Footnote 1211: Cp. Storch, quoted by M'Culloch, _Principles of
Political Economy_, Introd., and Schoell's addition to Koch, _Hist. of
Europe_, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 110. On the tendency of economic science to
promote peace, see Buckle, i, 217, 218; 1-vol. ed. pp. 120-25.]
[Footnote 1212: See the so-called _Political Testament of Colbert_, Eng.
tr. 1695, p. 351.]
[Footnote 1213: Petty, _Political Arithmetic_, ch. x (_Essays_, ed.
1699, p. 273). Even noblemen are mentioned as sometimes putting their
younger sons to merchandise. Cp. Toynbee, _Industrial Revolution_, p.
63; and Josiah Tucker, _Essay on Trade_ (1751), 4th ed. p. 43.]
[Footnote 1214: Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed. 1893, i,
100.]
[Footnote 1215: _Id._ iv, 2.]
[Footnote 1216: _Id._ iv, 1.]
[Footnote 1217: See Gardiner, as cited, iv, 8, for a sample, and in
particular pp. 41-43 for the notorious case of Sir Giles Mompesson and
the inn licences.]
[Footnote 1218: _Id._ iv, 6, 7.]
[Footnote 1219: _Id._ v, 233.]
[Footnote 1220: _Id._ iv, 125.]
[Footnote 1221: _Id._ vii, 71.]
[Footnote 1222: _Id._ viii, 74, 75.]
[Footnote 1223: Hallam, _Constitutional History_, ii, 11.]
[Footnote 1224: Sir Josiah Child, _New Discourse of Trade_, 4th ed. p.
9.]
[Footnote 1225: _Id._ p. 87.]
[Footnote 1226: Lingard, _Hist. of England_, 6th ed. v, 262.]
[Footnote 1227: _Epistolæ Ho-elianæ_, ed. 1891, i, 25.]
[Footnote 1228: Child, _New Discourse of Trade_, p. 88. As to the good
management of the Dutch in this regard, cp. Howell, as cited above, p.
334.]
[Footnote 1229: Child, whose main concern was to reduce the rate of
interest by law, proposed (p. 98) to sell paupers as slaves on the
plantations, "taking security for ... their freedom afterwards." An
antagonist (see pref. p. xi) proposed a law limiting wages.]
[Footnote 1230: Above, p. 434.]
[Footnote 1231: Josiah Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. pp. 46, 105.]
[Footnote 1232: _Id._ pp. 28, 50, 51; Richardson's _Essay on the Decline
of the Foreign Trade_ (often attributed to Decker), ed. 1756, pp.
46-64.]
[Footnote 1233: France also, of course, still kept up trade monopolies
(Tucker, p. 36).]
[Footnote 1234: The fallacy was indeed soon exposed as such by the more
enlightened economists. Thus the French writer Samber, in his _Memoirs
of the Dutch Trade_ (Eng. tr. ed. 1719, p. 75), speaks of the French
rulers of Colbert's day as having "entertained a notion that they could
carry on trade after a new unheard-of method: they proposed to sell
their goods to their neighbours, and buy none of theirs." But this was
none the less the prevailing ideal of the age. Cp. Jansen's _General
Maxims of Trade_, 1713, cited by Buckle, i, 217.]
[Footnote 1235: Cp. A. von Brandt, _Beiträge zur Geschichte der
französischen Handelspolitik_, 1896, pp. 25-28.]
[Footnote 1236: L. Dussieux, _Étude biographique sur Colbert_, 1886, ch.
vi, § 2.]
[Footnote 1237: Cp. Child, _New Discourse_, p. 17; Petty, Essays, p.
205; Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. pp. 45-57. For a general view of
the discussion see Schulze-Gävernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, 1892,
Einleitung.]
[Footnote 1238: As early as 1641 the Manchester woollen industry is
noted as flourishing. Early in the next century it had immensely
increased. Schulze-Gävernitz, as cited, pp. 26, 27.]
[Footnote 1239: Mandeville, _Fable of the Bees_, Remarks _Q_ and _Y_.]
[Footnote 1240: "That narrow and foolish woman." Hallam, _Constitutional
History_, iii, 124, _note_. Cp. Buckle, i, 419: "a foolish and ignorant
woman."]
[Footnote 1241: "It seems rather a humiliating proof of the sway which
the feeblest prince enjoys even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes
of Europe should have been changed by nothing more noble than the
insolence of one waiting-woman and the cunning of another. It is true
that this was effected by throwing the weight of the Crown into the
scale of a powerful faction; yet the house of Bourbon would probably not
have reigned beyond the Pyrenees but for Sarah and Abigail at Queen
Anne's toilet" (Hallam, iii, 210).]
[Footnote 1242: A work in course of preparation.]
[Footnote 1243: "Then as to all this activity, so many movements of all
things celestial and all things earthly, turning without ceasing, only
to return forever there whence they set forth, I can divine no use and
no fruition" (Leopardi's _Nocturnal Song of a Nomad Shepherd in Asia_).]
INDEX
Aargau, 338, 346, 349
Abbott, Dr. E., 37, 106 _n._
Abderrahman I, 154
---- III, 153
Abdy, Prof., 201, 373
Abortion in Greece, 102, 117
Abyssinia, 179
Academy, the French, 444 _n._, 445
Achaian League, 51
Adams and Cunningham, 331, 351 _n._
Adrian IV, 235
Æschines, 50
Æschylus, 136
Aetius, 96, 185
Ætolian League, 51
_Ager publicus_, 77
Agis, 51, 104
Agrarian distress, 403-5
Agriculture, 88;
Egyptian, 56;
Roman, 76, 79, 82 _sq._, 94;
Greek, 99, 108, 117;
Feudal, 202;
Italian, 221;
Dutch, 328;
English, 88, 348 _n._, 403;
Scandinavian, 270, 283;
Swiss, 347, 348
Alaric, 185
Alba Longa, 14
Alboin, 188, 194
Albuquerque, 358
Alcibiades, 46, 50
Alcuin, 189
Alexander the Great, empire of, 111
---- of Parma, 307, 309, 310
Alexandria, 133, 134
Alfonso de Sousa, 362
Alfred, 370 _n._, 375
Algiers, French. 57 _n._, 156-7, 177
Alkman, 132
Allen, C.-F., 264 _n._
Almohades, the, 155
Almoravides, the, 155
Althusius, 441
Alva, 308
Amalfi, 194, 204
Ambrose, 194
Amphictyonic Councils, 53
Amsterdam, 315;
bank of, 324
Anabaptism, 306, 307
Anarchism, 424
Anastasius, 96 _n._
Anaxagoras, 46
Anglo-Saxons, 275, 369-76
Anne, 468
Anskar, 267
Antioch, 133
Antonines, 89, 113, 117, 166, 167
Antony, franchise policy of, 4 _n._
Antwerp, 308, 310, 311, 313
Anund Jakob, 267, 272
Anytus, 50
Appenzell, 337, 338, 344, 347
Apuleius, 167
Aquinas, Thomas, 118 _n._, 212, 235, 440
Arab character, 146 _sq._
Architecture, 150, 151, 192, 205, 220
Arianism, 97, 168
Aribert, 206
Ariosto, 230
Aristocracy, Roman, 17, 21, 22 _sq._, 29-30, 78;
and culture, 62, 166;
and politics, 70;
Greek, 42, 49, 98, 109;
Feudal, 200, 202, 209;
Italian, 236, 245, 255;
English, 288, 376, 379, 385, 390 _sq._, 396, 403, 410;
Dutch, 306;
Scandinavian, 275, 276, 277, 281;
Portuguese, 355;
Swiss, 336, 348;
French, 391, 415 _n._, 461
Aristotle, 50, 127, 448 _sq._;
on militarism, 45;
on slavery, 98, 133 _n._;
on Sparta, 101 _n._;
on population, 102;
on education, 126;
and Aquinas, 212
Aristophanes, 50, 135
Armada, 308, 311, 314, 399, 408
Arminianism, 310
Arnold of Brescia, 235, 246
Arnold, M., 434
Arnold, W.T., 78
Artaxerxes, 113
Art, evocation of, 63, 122, 134, 150, 159, 220, 327, 409;
in Athens, 48-49, 106;
in medieval Italy, 220-21, 225;
in Holland, 327;
in Portugal, 359;
in England, 409
Arteveldt, J. van, 299
Ashley, Prof., 379 _n._, 394
Asia Minor, 55, 123
Associations, religious, 113, 115
Assyria, 135
Aston, Sir A., 428
Astronomy, 149, 150, 151
Athaulf, 186
Athens, variety of stock in, 16;
social problem in, 40, 107;
reforms of Solon in, 40 _sq._, 99;
morals in, 47-48, 50;
superstition and ignorance in, 45 _sq._;
art and letters in, 48-49, 106, 124;
imports of, 84;
commerce of, 99;
buildings of, 105;
silver mines of, 105-6;
citizenship of, 124;
retrogression of, 134
Attila, 185, 191
Attraction and repulsion in politics, 5-7, 23, 28, 202, 207, 210,
257 _sq._, 299, 369, 377, 386, 460;
modes of, 70
Augustine, 34, 118 _n._, 168, 261
Augustus, 81, 83, 164
Australian aborigines, 128
Aurelian, 87 _n._, 184, 185
Autocracy. See _Despotism_ and _Tyranny_
Avitus, St., 187
Babylonia, 68
Bacchic mysteries, 164
Bacon, 461
Bagaudæ, the, 175
Bagehot, cited, 23 _n._, 57 _n._
Bain, R.N., 264 _n._, 277 _n._
Balfour, A.J., 72 _n._, 171 _sq._, 180 _n._
Ball, John, 390
Banking, 218, 435
Barante, 292
Barneveldt, 310, 318
Barros, 359
Basle, 338, 344, 346, 348
Bayle, 326
Beaconsfield, 72
Becker, cited, 9
Becket, 377
"Beggars," Confederacy of, 306
Beghards, 305
Behn, Aphra, 442 _n._
Belgium, 260, 307
Belisarius, 96, 184, 191, 194
Bent, J.T., 181
Bentham, 449
Berbers, 154 _n._, 155
Berlin, University of, 139
Berne, 336, 337, 338, 343, 344, 345, 346, 349
Bertrand, A., cited, 64
Bibliolatry, 152, 154, 157, 396, 405, 410
Bijns, Anna, 326
Bikélas, cited, 143, 144
Bishops and Italian cities, 198, 206
Black Death, 380, 384, 386, 387, 388
Blackstone, 449
Blake, 420
Blok, P.J., 292, 296
Blossius of Cumæ, 81
Boccaccio, 226
Bodin, 449
Boeckh, 37, 41, 107, 108, 109
Boissier, cited, 159 _n._, 162
Bolingbroke, 437
Bologna, 205, 208, 211, 212
Bordier, 334, 335
Borghini, 217
Borgia, Cesare, 233, 253
Botta, cited, 229 _n._
Boulting, 195 _n._, 196, 202 _n._
Boyle, 447 _n._
Brazil, 317, 361-68;
population in, 362;
prospects of, 366-67
Brethren of the Common Lot, 305
Bribery in Rome, 22
Britain, economic basis of, 59, 79
Browning, O., 181
Bruce, 308
Bruges, 297
Brun, 336
Brunehild, 186
Brussels, 297
Brutus, 79
Bryce, cited, 4, 58, 189 _n._, 199, 201
Buchanan, 441
Buckingham, 415
Buckle, on national character, 1 _n._, 4;
on Montesquieu, 28 _n._;
on food and life conditions, 55;
on Spanish fanaticism, 155, 304;
on climate and civilisation, 361;
on Magna Carta, 392;
on Delolme, 392;
on Divine Right, 440 _n._;
on Anne, 468 _n._
Bullion delusion, 80, 464 _sq._
Burckhardt, 182;
as sociologist, 36;
on Greek happiness, 47;
on Sparta, 130;
on Spain and Italy, 230, 233 _n._
Burghley, 400, 406, 407
Burke, 453
---- U.R., cited, 119, 169, 191, 192
Burnet, 438, 439
Burrows, Prof., 123
Bursian, C., 65
Burton, Hill, 11, 414 _n._, 456
Bury, 38;
on Roman Empire, 34 _n._;
on Solon, 43;
on Christian disunion, 97 _n._;
on Heraclius, 116 _n._;
on Greek Art, 122 _n._;
on the Dorians, 130-31;
on Byzantine superstition, 145 _n._;
on Roman currency, 175 _n._
Busch, 392 _n._
Butler, W.F., 181, 196, 197 _n._, 206, 211
Byzantium, 34, 93, 95, 96, 114 _sq._, 143 _sq._, 152, 186
Cade, Jack, 388, 406
Cæsar, franchise policy of, 4 _n._;
revenue policy of, 73;
policy of doles of, 82;
policy in Campania of, 91;
and Corinth, 110
Calderon, 359, 413
Calvin, 301, 343, 344, 398, 435
Calvinism, 306, 310, 326, 344, 396 _n._, 398
Camden, 398, 407
Camoens, 359
Cantù, 181
Capitalism, in antiquity, 86, 104, 108;
in Florence, 218, 248 _sq._;
in Holland, 316, 318, 324; in America, 365;
in England, 393, 403, 434-35, 462
Caracalla, 4, 175
Carlyle, 264 _n._, 419, 429-30
Carmagnola, 249
Carrel, A., 436 _n._, 437 _n._, 444 _n._
Carthage, 28 _n._, 30, 86
Castruccio Castracani, 243, 255
_Cathari_, 220
Cato, 32
Cats, 307, 326
Catullus, 165, 166
Celibacy, Sacerdotal, 235
Celts, 187, 190, 192, 258, 279, 375, 378
Chancery, Court of, 432
Chapman, 412, 413
Charlemagne, 188, 189, 191, 192, 267, 295
Charles I of England, 410, 414 _sq._, 426, 443
---- II of England, 319, 320, 437, 438, 442, 443, 451
---- III of Spain, 363
---- IV, 246
---- V, 300, 301, 302, 304, 309 _n._, 311
Charleton, W., 444 _n._
Chasles, Ph., cited, 74
Chastity, barbaric, 184
Chaucer, 384, 386
Chemistry, 149, 150
Chievres, 302
Child, Sir J., 316, 458, 462, 463 _n._, 464, 467
Chilperic, 186
China, polity of, 56, 57, 59-60, 67, 73, 180, 260;
secret societies of, 26 _n._
Chinese and Europeans, repulsions of, 6
Chivalier, 294 _n._
Chivalry, 383
Christian II, 276
---- III, 277
Christianity, conditions of success of, 27, 114-15, 165;
effects of, 28;
and progress, 34-5, 179, 205, 272, 431;
and Roman Empire, 95, 96, 97, 265;
and heresy, 97, 115, 168, 300, 303, 344;
spread of, 112, 114-15;
and infanticide, 117-18;
and slavery, 118 _sq._, 214 _sq._, 372-73;
and culture, 142, 144, 168, 280;
and Islam, 149, 157;
in Gaul, 167;
and morals, 186, 210, 272, 431, 434;
and Italian disunion, 210;
in Scandinavia, 265 _sq._, 272, 274;
and fish eating, 293;
in modern Holland and Belgium, 307;
strife of sects in, 422
Chrysostom, 118
Church in politics, 96, 145, 152, 168-69, 198, 203, 206, 210, 223, 234,
235, 265, 274, 377, 391
Cicero, on Roman politics, 20-21;
on manumission, 215
Cimabue, 220
Cincinnatus, 12, 19
City States, 29, 38 _sq._, 52, 53, 124, 179, 198, 202 _sq._, 209 _sq._,
286 _sq._, 295
Civilisation and superstition, 46;
modern, roots of, 169
Civilisations, primary and secondary, 55 _sq._
Clans, Highland, 11, 67
Clarendon, 437, 451
Class degradation, effects of, 62, 68, 372;
relations in England, 376, 379;
as political factor, 70
Classes, strife of, in Rome, 17 _sq._;
in Greece, 38, 45;
in Florence, 229 _sq._;
in Flanders, 296-97;
in Switzerland, 336, 350;
in England, 393-94, 405
Claudian, 167
Claudius II, 185
Clémenceau, 271
Cleomenes, 51, 104
_Clientes_, Roman, 11
Climate and race, 193, 361
_Cloacæ_, the Roman, 14
Clothaire, 186
Clovis, 187
Coal civilisations, 79, 88, 365, 366
Coinage, alleged debasement of, by Solon, 41;
Roman debasement of, 175;
Papal debasement of, 223;
debasement of, by Henry VIII, 397.
See _currency_
Colbert, 140, 315, 445, 446, 461, 464, 465
Cologne, 288
Colonies, Greek, 39, 48, 100;
and culture, 63 _n._;
Roman, 86;
Scandinavian, 271;
Dutch, 312
Comines, 391
_Comitia_, Roman, 9 _sq._
Commerce, Roman, 76-7, 80;
Athenian, 99, 108;
Greek, under Roman Empire, 113;
Byzantine, 117;
Italian, 211, 218-19, 221, 256, 383;
Danish, 273;
Norwegian, 284;
Medieval, 288;
Dutch, 297, 310 _sq._;
Portuguese, 357 _sq._;
Anglo-Saxon, 370;
English, 380, 393, 404, 459;
Irish, 453;
Spanish, 461;
and civilisation, 70, 99, 104, 109, 113, 205, 211, 221, 287, 315,
457, 458;
and war, 297, 460
Compass, the, 205
Competition of societies, 58, 70
Comte, A., 2 _n._, 4
Conrad the Salic, 203
Conradin, 241
Conservatism and isolation, 56, 144;
Chinese, 60;
Egyptian, 125;
and militarism, 132-33;
English, 424
Constantine, 27 _n._, 114, 117, 215
Constantinople, evolution of, 116 _sq._
Consuls and Italian cities, 198, 203, 207
Corinth, 105, 110, 131 _n._
Corporations, religious, 160, 235, 377
Cox, Sir G., cited, 66, 161
Creed politics, 405, 415, 424
Creighton, Bishop, 401 _n._
Cremona, 216
Crete, polity of, 59 _n._, 131-32, 133
Crichton and Wheaton, 264 _n._, 272, 273, 275
Cromer, Lord, discussed, 177 _sq._
Cromwell, Oliver, 318, 417-21, 424-33, 453;
Richard, 436;
Thomas, 395
Crusades, effects of, 69;
and slavery, 214, 296;
and civilisation, 383
Culture, Greek, 46 _sq._;
and the sexes, 61;
importance of diffusion of, 62
Culture-contacts, effects of, 57, 63;
conditions of success of, 57, 58;
and Greek civilisation, 64, 122;
in Christendom, 69, 150;
in Japan, 69, 70;
in modern Europe, 138 _sq._;
and Saracen civilisation, 146;
and Roman civilisation, 158, 163, 164;
and post-Roman civilisation, 189, 193;
and medieval Italy, 211, 219, 254;
and England, 212 _n._;
and Scandinavia, 279;
and Holland, 326;
and Renaissance, 340;
and England, 375
Cunningham, Dr., on Greek civilisation, 36, 129;
on Roman expansion, 67;
on Roman wars, 76 _n._, 78 _n._;
on Roman decline, 93-4;
on Athenian expenditure, 106 _n._;
on Greeks and Phoenicians, 129, 150;
on Black Death, 388;
on the Tudors, 402;
on Puritanism, 433;
on the mercantile system, 466
_Curiæ_, the Roman, 8 _sq._, 203
Currency, Roman, 80, 175;
Byzantine, 96;
Dutch, 311
Curtius, E., 130
Cybele, cult of, 163
Dahn, F., cited, 188 _n._
Danby, 442
Dändliker, 331, 339 _n._
Dante, 213, 217, 226, 233, 240 _n._
Daremberg, Dr., cited, 147-48
Darien Company, 456
Daru, 255 _n._
D'Aubigné, 430-31
David, J., 292
Davies, 291
Davis, Sir J., 67
---- H.W. C., 378
"Death," political, 33-4, 59
Decay, social, 22, 25, 32, 59, 69, 170 _sq._;
socio-physiological, 186;
socio-psychological, 61, 112, 141, 280, 411-13
Defoe, 413
Dekker, 406 _n._
De la Chambre, 445
Delacourt, 313
Delaunay, cited, 10, 11
Della Torre, 241
Democracy, Roman, 19 _sq._;
Greek, 38 _sq._, 46 _sq._;
French, 72;
American, 38 _n._, 365, 366;
Scandinavian, 276, 278;
Flemish, 300;
Dutch, 306, 310, 311;
English, 388, 414 _sq._;
Italian, 209 _sq._, 225;
Swiss, 350 _sq._;
conditions of success of, 52;
and intellectual life, 139
Demosthenes, 50, 105, 136
Denmark, structure of, 265;
political evolution of, 268, 271, 273, 273-74;
religion in, 268;
slavery in, 273, 274;
commerce of, 273;
Reformation in, 276-77;
culture of, 280-81
Dennis, G., 185
Denton, Rev. W., 385
Descartes, 326, 446
Despotism, and food supply, 55-6;
as political factor, 70;
and art, 135 _sq._, 166, 220, 224 _sq._;
and culture, 141, 153, 224 _sq._;
and decadence, 173;
in Holland, 299;
in Portugal, 357-58;
spirit of, 455
Deutsch, cited, 149 _n._, 157 _n._
De Witt, 291, 317, 319, 324
Dicæarchus, 105
Dierauer, 331, 334
Diocletian, 96, 113, 175
Dionysos, cult of, 164
Diophanes, 81
"Divine Right," 440 _sq._
Doge, the title, 204 _n._
Dogma and intellect, 61
Doles, Roman, 26, 82, 87;
Byzantine, 116
Domesday Book, 371, 376
Domitian, 166
Dorians, 130 _sq._
Dozy, cited, 154 _n._, 155 _n._
Drama, Greek, 126-27, 135;
French, 140;
Elizabethan, 140, 406, 409-13;
Roman, 165;
Spanish, 359, 413
Draper, 34, 56, 67
Drogheda, siege of, 427-30
Droysen, 135 _n._, 148 _n._
Droz, E., cited, 3 _n._
Druidism, 266
Drunkenness, English, 463, 467;
Scandinavian, 278
Dryden, 439, 442
Duccio, 220
Duffy, Miss, 182
Dunham, 187, 195, 197 _n._, 264 _n._
Dureau de la Malle, 24, 91
Dussieux, 465
Earle, Prof., 385
East Indies, 312, 324
Ecclesia, Athenian, 41
Economic causation, ix, 71;
Roman, 75 _sq._;
Greek, 98 _sq._, 133 _sq._;
Italian and other, 212, 215 _sq._, 221;
Scandinavian, 270, 277;
Dutch, 293, 295, 306, 313 _sq._, 324;
Portuguese, 359-60;
Brazilian, 366;
English, 397, 411, 412
Education and democracy, 63;
Greek, 123, 126;
Saracen, 153, 154 _n._;
Italian, 231, 247 _n._;
Scandinavian, 276;
Dutch, 319, 325-26, 330;
Portuguese, 364, 365;
Swiss, 346, 353-54;
Brazilian, 367;
English, 391, 396, 419 _n._
Edward III, 380, 384, 394 _n._;
IV, 392, 393;
VI, 397
Effen, Van, 326
Egypt, effect of Nile on polity of, 56;
civilisation of, 64;
culture of, 68;
art of, 125, 135;
human sacrifice in, 129;
modern, 177;
Moslem, 222
Eichhorn, 191
Eleusinia, the, 132
Eliot, 415, 416
Elizabeth, 398, 399-402
Emerson, 457
Emigration, Greek, 100;
Scandinavian, 270-71;
Swiss, 348, 353
Emilius, Paulus, 78
Empire, sociological process of, in Rome, 25 _sq._, 33, 87 _sq._, 92,
166, 170 _sq._;
in Byzantium, 115 _sq._;
in Greece, 133 _sq._;
in Turkey, 176;
in Florence, 249, 252;
in Scandinavia, 265, 271;
in Holland, 316, 324;
in France, 320;
in Britain, 323, 384, 386;
in Portugal, 356 _sq._;
and literature, 359
Enclosures, 393, 403
England, evolution of, in Anglo-Saxon times, 61, 191, 192, 204, 370,
374-75;
after Conquest, 69 _n._, 212, 288, 371 _sq._, 376, 384;
in Tudor period, 392 _sq._;
process of Rebellion, 414-17;
Cromwell's rule, 417-23;
Restoration politics, 423, 436 _sq._;
influence on French culture, 138;
influence on German culture, 139;
and Spain, 406-7, 420;
in eighteenth century, 229;
Reformation in, 238, 396 _sq._;
Industrial evolution of, 458 _sq._;
present polity of, 72, 79, 87 _sq._, 261;
and Holland, 318, 319, 320, 323, 425, 463;
and France, 320, 384, 392
Ennius, 158, 165
Epicurus, 135
Epimenides, 133
Equality, schemes of, 104
Equilibrium, social, 71, 114
Erasmus, 348
Erik I and II, 268
Essex, 399 _n._, 406, 407
Etruscans and Romans, 16, 158, 159 _n._;
civilisation of, 25, 185;
unity of, 68
Euripides, 46, 131
Europe, political variety of, 59
Exposure of infants, 100, 270
Ezzelino, 239
Falkland, 423
Fatalistic reasoning in politics, 178
_Faustrecht_, 286, 378
Favourites, royal, 382-83, 415, 468
Federalism, in Greece, 51-52;
in Italy, 233;
in Netherlands, 295, 309;
in Switzerland, 331, 332 _sq._
Ferdinand, Duke, 224
Ferguson, cited, 14
Ferrero, on Roman character, 8 _n._;
on Roman trade, 11 _n._, 76 _n._, 79 _n._, 83 _sq._;
as sociologist, 75;
on Roman civilisation, 176
Feudalism, 199 _sq._, 295, 335, 371, 374, 395
Filmer, 441 _n._, 442, 443
Finance, Roman, 77 _sq._, 92 _sq._, 119-20, 175;
Byzantine, 96, 116;
Greek, 106 _sq._;
Spanish, 309, 311;
Papal, 221, 223;
Dutch, 310-11, 328;
Portuguese, 363, 364;
English, 88, 397-98, 419, 420
Finland, 278, 283 _n._
Finlay, as sociologist, 38;
on Roman finance, 78;
on Roman decline, 94;
on Byzantium and Lombard invasion, 95;
on Eastern Empire, 97, 115, 119-20, 143;
on Greece under Roman Empire, 113 _n._;
on Christianity and slavery, 118 _n._;
on philosophic schools at Athens, 143
Fisheries, Danish, 273-74;
Dutch, 293, 311, 313, 317, 329;
Portuguese, 355
Flanders, 288 _n._, 294, 295, 296, 302, 309, 311, 321, 380
Fletcher of Saltoun, 455
Flint, Prof., cited, 73, 74
Floods in Netherlands, 298
Florence, constitutions of, 202, 211, 240, 241, 243, 245;
political evolution of, 206-7, 243 _sq._;
factions at, 202, 207, 213, 236 _n._, 239 _sq._;
and her allies, 208;
industry of, 211, 218;
wealth of, 217, 219;
interest at, 217 _n._;
art in, 220, 226, 227 _n._;
and papacy, 223;
under Duke Ferdinand, 224;
literature of, 226;
causes of eminence of, 229;
commercial development of, 231;
militarism at, 231;
and Pisa, 237, 248, 252-53;
and Venice, 243, 249;
under Medici, 249 _sq._;
taxation in, 251;
collapse of, 254
Food and polity, 11 _n._, 55, 65, 73, 293, 315
Ford, 413
Fowler, W. Warde, 37; cited, 23 _n._, 29 _n._, 66, 161 _n._
France, intellectual evolution of, 138, 140, 212;
and Holland, 319, 464-65;
and England, 320, 323, 377-78;
empire in, 320;
religion in, 321;
population in, 322-23;
and Switzerland, 349
Franks, polity of, 186, 188, 192, 197
Frederick Barbarossa, 210, 216, 235
---- II, 211, 216, 219
---- the Great, 139
---- of Denmark, 276
Freedom of the press, 310, 344
Freeman, on Greek federation, 51-52;
on Greek history, 66;
on Athenian citizenship, 124 _n._;
on Simon de Montfort, 382
Free trade, 284, 465
French politics, 1-3. See _France_
---- Academy, 444 _n._, 445
---- Revolution, 72, 149 _n._, 397, 449
Fribourg, 337, 338, 344, 346
Fronde, the, 415 _n._, 436
Fronto, 167
Frontiers, theories of, 178
Froude, 402
Fustel de Coulanges, 52, 67, 265 _n._
Fyffe, cited, 66
Gaeta, 204 _n._
Galileo, 227
Galton, 121
Gardiner, on House of Commons, 380 _n._, 382;
on Lollardism, 396 _n._;
on Scotch Calvinism, 398;
on Elizabeth, 400 _n._, 401, 402;
on Henry VIII, 401;
on Eliot, 416;
on Cromwell, 419-20, 425 _n._, 427 _n._;
on Lilburne, 424 _n._;
on Drogheda, 428-30;
on Barbone Parliament, 432
Gasquet, Dr., 388
Gaul, Roman and Christian, 94, 167, 173, 192
Gaultier de Brienne, 244
Gee, 464
Geijer, 264 _n._, 272
Gelasius, 194
Geneva, 341, 343, 344, 347, 349, 350, 353, 410
Genius, in politics, 15;
evocation of, 63, 121 _sq._
Genoa, 204, 211, 218, 225, 229, 248; modern, 255-56
Geographical causation, 28, 124, 293, 295, 332, 335
Germany, effects of subdivision of, 58;
trade of, 79;
intellectual evolution of, 138-9, 340;
political and social evolution of, 184 _sq._, 222, 286, 378;
medieval, 216;
Reformation in, 238, 239, 342
Ghent, 295, 296, 300
Ghibelines and Guelphs, 209-10, 226, 239 _sq._
Gibbon, on Byzantium, 144;
on population of Roman Empire, 172 _n._;
on pestilence in the Empire, 174;
and Sismondi, 187;
on Theodoric, 188 _n._;
on the Lombards, 196;
on Roman slavery, 374
Giddings, 5
Gilds, German, 199;
trade, 207, 379, 393, 394
Giles, H.A., cited, 6 _n._, 73 _n._
Gillies, 38
Glarus, 336, 337, 338, 344, 347
Gneist, 375
Godkin, L., cited, 38 _n._, 62
Gold-mining, 80, 92-3, 358, 363, 460
Gondebald, 187
Gontran, 187
Gospels and slavery, 118
Goths, 184, 186, 192
Gouraud, C., 28 _n._
Gray, 56
Gracchi, 20, 21, 24, 81, 82 _n._
Gratian, 90
Grattan, T.C., 291
Greece, superstition and ignorance in, 46 _sq._;
structure of, 53, 64, 65;
population in, 101 _sq._;
industry in, 109, 113;
conquests of, 78, 98, 110;
under Roman Empire, 112-14;
evocation of art in, 123 _sq._;
literature in, 126 _sq._
Greek civilisation, 64, 68, 121 _sq._;
in Italy, 29;
evolution of, 36 _sq._, 98 _sq._, 159;
modern, 156-57
"Greek fire," 116
Green, Captain, 455
Green, J.R., on Anglo-Saxons and Christianity, 266 _n._, 372;
on English slavery, 372, 373, 374;
on Reformation, 397;
on Elizabeth, 400;
on English poverty, 403 _n._;
on Hobbes, 421 _n._;
on Shaftesbury, 438 _n._
Greene, 411, 412
Greenidge, cited, 12, 14 _n._
Gregorovius, 182, cited, 188 _n._, 189 _n._, 210, 212 _n._
Gregory the Great, 197, 212 _n._, 374
---- VII, 212 _n._ See _Hildebrandt_
---- X, 240
---- XIII, 223
Grenvelle, 304
Grisons, 338, 346
Grote, 37, 331;
on Solon, 41;
on Greek polity, 44;
on Athenian Imperialism, 47 _sq._;
on Pericles, 49;
on culture contacts, 58, 64;
on "race," 64, 66, 131-32;
on Lycurgus, 99;
on Greek infantici de, 101;
on Lesbos, 126;
on Athenian drama, 127;
on Sparta, 131;
on Crete, 131-32;
on Switzerland, 331 _n._, 332 _n._, 354
Grotius, 309, 310, 326, 442 _n._
Grundy, Dr. G.B., 36, 65
Gubbio, 225
Guicciardini, F., 232 _n._
---- L., 291, 313
Guilliman, 334
Guizot, on Roman Empire and Christianity, 26 _n._, 96;
on European progress, 58;
on Gaulish monasteries, 167;
on Christian persecution, 168 _n._;
on Teutonic barbarism, 184 _n._;
on Charlemagne, 189;
on France and Germany, 192 _n._;
on decline of slavery, 213-14, 215;
on the Reformation, 238
Gustavus Vasa, 274, 277
Guthry, Bishop, 441
Hadrian, 113
Hakam I, 154
---- II, 153
Halifax, 451
Hallam, on genius, 121;
on the Lombards and Italy, 198;
on feudalism, 201;
on Venice, 229;
on Simon de Montfort, 382;
on Henry VII, 392 _n._;
on English nobility under Henry VIII, 396;
on Anne, 468 _n._;
on Ireland, 451 _n._;
on Whigs and Tories, 421 _n._;
on Charles I, 417 _n._;
on James I, 414 _n._
Hamburg, 287
Handel, 140
Hannibal, 30
Hansa, 274, 286-90;
of London, 287, 288, 393
Harald Bluetooth, 268
Harald Klak, 268
Hardwick, 266, 267
Haren, Van, 326
Harold Fairhair, 268
Harrington, 443
Harrison, F. 425-26, 428-30
Hartmann, L.M., 182
Hassencamp, 450 _n._, 452
Hawkwood, Sir J., 248
Hazlitt, W., cited, 396 _n._
---- W. C, 181
Heeren, cited and discussed, 37, 39 _n._, 234, 237
Hegel, cited and discussed, 5 _n._, 58
---- Karl, 199, 379 _n._
Hegewisch, 138
_Hektemorioi_, the, 41
Henry the Fowler, 197 _n._
---- the Navigator, 356
---- IV of England, 391
---- V of England, 386, 391
---- VII of England, 394
---- VIII of England, 395, 401, 402
Heracleia, 104
Heraclius, 115-16
Heredity, official, 120, 199, 235
_Heredium_, the Roman, 12 _sq._
Heresy, 97, 115, 168, 300, 303, 390
Herodotus, 127, cited, 44, 129
Hertzberg, 38, 67, 113 _n._
Heyd, W. von, 183, 222
Hiero, 136
Hildebrandt, 59 _n._, 203, 206, 235
Hill, Rev. G., 371
Hippocrates, 127
Hippodamus, 104
Hisham, 154
Historiography, modern, viii, ix;
Greek, 127
Hobbes, 421-22;
on communism, 13
Hochart, on Constantine, 27 _n._
Hodgkin, T., 181, cited 184 _n._, 202 _n._
Holbein, 408
Holberg, 281
Holland, primary conditions of, 293;
slavery in medieval, 295-6;
empire of, 312;
political evolution of, 294 _sq._;
historiography of, 291-2;
industry in, 294, 296, 310 _sq._;
factions in, 296-7, 298, 299;
despotism in, 300;
revolt of, 301 _sq._;
religious distribution in, 307;
constitution of, 309;
commerce of, 310 _sq._, 328-9;
finance and currency of, 310-11;
public debt of, 312, 328;
and England, 318, 320, 323, 425, 463;
and France, 319, 320, 464-65;
decline of, 321 _sq._;
capitalism in, 324;
culture evolution of, 325 _sq._;
art in, 327-28;
population in, 327, 328-30
Holm, 37, 134 _n._, 136 _n._, 141
Homer, 126
Honorius, 94, 173, 185
Hooft, 326
Hooker, 441
"Hooks and Codfish," 298
Horace, 165, 166
Houses, Athenian, 105; Italian, 205
Howell, 325, 463
Hudson, H., 312
Huguenots, 272, 303, 321, 343, 438
Humanists, Italian, 227
Hume, cited, 58, 102, 109, 133 _n._, 348 _n._
Huns, 184, 185, 197
Hunt, W., 181
Huxley, cited, 61
Hygiene, ancient, 91
Ibn Khaldun, 155-56
Ibsen, 282
Iceland, 270, 271, 278 _sq._, 340
Ihne, cited, 16 _n._
Illyria, 194
Image-worship, 145
Imperialism, Roman, 25 _sq._, 89;
Athenian, 47 _sq._;
Greek, 50 _sq._;
Ancient and modern, 177 _sq._;
Barbaric, 189;
Danish, 269, 271;
Dutch, 318;
British, 323, 384, 407, 420-21
India, evolution of, 74;
British, 57 _n._, 177, 179;
Portuguese, 358, 362
_Indigitamenta_, 160 _n._
Indulgences, Catholic, 342
Industry, in Greece, 109;
in Italian cities, 205, 211, 218-19;
in Netherlands, 294, 296;
in Iceland, 454;
in Spain, 461;
modern, 467
Infanticide, 26, 38, 100, 117
Innocent III, 236
---- IV, 210
Inquisition, 303, 308, 362, 406
Interest, Roman limitation of, 20;
Roman, 79 and _note_;
Florentine, 217 _n._;
in Holland, 313, 321
Ionia. See _Asia Minor_
Ireland, 189, 192, 378;
English misgovernment of, 406, 418, 426-33, 450 _sq._
Ireton, 429
Islam, 61, 149, 153, 154, 179
Isocrates, 50
Isolation and polity, 56, 144
Italy, structure of, 28;
Greek cities of, 29;
modern, economics of, 85;
post-Roman, evolution of, 85, 183 _sq._;
medieval, culture evolution in, 90, 152, 209 _sq._;
republican collapse in, 233 _sq._
See _Rome_
Jacquerie, 387
James I, 398, 401, 414, 415, 461
---- II, 444, 452
Japan, evolution of, 69-70, 74
Java, 312, 329
Jeffreys, 444
Jesuits, 350, 362-63
Jewry, 67, 125, 146
Jews, modern, 358, 361
John II of Portugal, 355, 357
John, King, 392
Johnson, 442 _n._
Jonson, Ben, 412, 413
Julian, 57 _n._, 94
Juste, 292
Justice, in Greece, 48
Justin, 95
Justinian, 96, 116, 118, 143, 449
Juvenal, 166
Kampen, J. van, 292, 307
Kant, 138; cited, 5
Keightley, 161
Kemble, J.M., 371, 372, 373
Keymor, 317, 325
Kings, Roman, 18
Kleisthenes, 44
Kleon, 50
Knox, 398
Knut, 268, 271
Koran, the, 154
Kyd, 411, 412
Ladislaus, 249
Lætus, P., 227
Laing, 281 _n._, 325
_Laissez-faire_, 135
Lamprecht, viii, ix
Land question, in Rome, 11 _sq._, 77;
in Greece, 40, 104;
in Anglo-Saxon England, 375
Lane-Poole, S., cited, 151, 155
Langlois and Seignobos, 421 _n._
Language, in politics, 158 _n._, 191, 258, 385;
and culture, 221, 326
Lanzone, 206
Larroque, cited, 214 _n._
Laud, 415 _n._
Laurium, mines of, 106-7
Law, Roman, 112, 197, 205;
Teutonic, 195-96, 197;
schools of, 212
Leagues, Greek, 51;
Italian, 207;
German, 286, 287, 336;
Swiss, 334, 336 _sq._, 350
Lecky, 391
Leclerc, L., cited, 150
Leghorn, 224
Leibnitz, 325
Leicester, 400
Lennep, J. van, 292
Leo the Isaurian, 145
---- X, 221, 223, 253
---- H., 182, 199, 204 _n._, 206, 209 _n._
Leopardi, 470
Le Play, 1 _n._, 34
Lesbos, 126, 136
Leslie, Cliffe, 405
Liberalism, 421, 423
Licinian laws, 19, 80
Lilburne, 424
Lisbon, 312, 358, 364
Literature, evolution of, in Greece, 126 _sq._;
in Rome, 165 _sq._;
in Italy, 212-13, 226;
in Sicily and Provence, 219-20;
in Scandinavia, 278 _sq._;
in Holland, 326;
in Germany, 340;
in Portugal, 359, 363;
in England, 384, 408-13;
and empire, 359
Livy, 164
Locke, 442, 446 and _note_, 448
Lollardism, 305, 390-91, 396
Lombards, polity of, 188, 194 _sq._, 203, 204
Long, G., 79 _n._
Lope de Vega, 359, 413
Louis the Fat, 214
Louis XIV, 319, 320, 321, 436
Louvain, 297
Louvois, 320
Lübeck, 287
Lucan, 166
Lucca, 218
Lucerne, 334, 335, 338, 339, 346, 349
Lucretius, 165
Lucullus, 79 _n._
Luther, 342
Lyall, Sir A., 177
Lycurgus, 44, 99
Lynch-law, 378
Macaulay, Lord, 76, 133 _n._, 255, 419 _n._, 423
---- G.C., 411-13
Mackintosh, 381 _n._
McCrie, 238
McCullagh, 38, 292, cited 295
McCulloch, 292;
on Roman doles, 83;
on the Dutch, 328
McDiarmid, 407
Machiavelli, 226, 254;
on the Lombards, 188 _n._;
on the Papacy, 210;
on Florence, 217;
ideal of, 233;
on Guelphs, 239
Magellan, 357
Magna Carta, 380 _n._, 381, 391, 392
Mahaffy, as sociologist, 37;
on prehistoric civilisation, 15;
on Greek infanticide, 101;
on Greek population, 102;
on Greek commerce, 109;
on Cilician pirates, 110;
on Greek
art, 123;
on Sparta, 132, 133 _n._
Mahon, 34
Maine, Sir H., 56, 448, 449
Maisch, 42
Maitland, F.W., 370 _n._, 371, 374
Malaria in Italy, 90-1
Malone, 442 _n._
Mallet, E., 353
Malthus, cited, 26 _n._, 100, 273, 282-84, 352
Mandeville, 467, 468
Manley, 427-28
Marck, W. van der, 308
Marcus Aurelius, 167
Margaret of Norway, 275
Marignano, 341
Marius, 24
Marks, Alfred, 438 _n._
Marlborough, 320
Marlowe, 411
Marvell, 421, 439 _n._
Mary of England, 397
---- of Scotland, 399
Maspero, cited, 125 _n._
Mathematics, 149
Matilda, Countess, 206, 207
Maurice (Emperor), 96, 115
Maurice of Orange, 310, 313
Maximilian I, 300
Mazarin, 415 _n._
Mazdeism, 125
Medicine, evolution of, 127, 147 _sq._;
schools of, 212
Medici, the, 225, 227, 249 _sq._
Megalomania, 261
Megara, 124 _n._
Melville, Andrew, 398
Menander, 118, 135
Ménard, cited, 132
Mencius, 73-4
Mental development in Greece, 46
Menzel, 139 _n._
Mercantile system, 460 _sq._
Merchant Adventurers, the, 459, 466
Merimée, 3
Merovingian Kings, the, 187, 191
Mexico, 361
Meyer, Ed., on Quirites, 9 _sq._;
on Roman land law, 12;
on Greek taxation, 42;
on Solon, 43 _n._;
on Greek civilisation, 64;
on _ager publicus_, 77 _n._;
on Roman culture, 158 _n._
---- Ernst von, cited, 150
Michel Angelo, 254
Milan, 194, 199, 206, 210, 211, 218, 219, 225, 241, 249
Militarism, and democracy, 21 _sq._;
Roman, 25, 55, 76;
and culture, 61, 131, 153, 341;
Spartan, 131;
Saracen, 153, 154;
Turkish, 157;
Florentine, 231;
Dutch, 318;
Swiss, 341;
English, 425
Mill, J.S., 58, 121
Milman, 146 _n._, 197
Milton, 426, 431, 441, 448
Mining, Roman, 80;
Greek, 105-6;
Brazilian, 363;
medieval, 460
Ministerial Government, 437, 468
Mitchell and Caspari, 41, 42, 44 _n._, 136-37
Mitford, 37, 38
Mithraism, 27, 113, 165
Mommsen, on Quirites, 9;
on the plebs, 10;
on Roman land law, 12, 13;
on Roman city life, 14 _n._;
on Roman taxation, 77;
on the Antonines, 89;
on Roman religion, 158, 160, 162;
on antiquity of writing, 160 _n._;
on the Celts, 190, 192
Monasteries, 167, 402-3
"Money economy," 80
Monk, 436
Monopolies, trade, and civilisation, 59;
Athenian, 108;
Byzantine, 117;
Dutch, 313, 315, 316, 463;
English, 320, 321, 323, 404, 415, 459, 461 _sq._;
Flemish, 296;
Papal, 223;
Portuguese, 356, 358;
Spanish, in Italy, 223;
Hanseatic, 289
Montaigne, vii, 230
Montesquieu, on civil war, 25;
as sociologist, 28 _n._;
on Hannibal, 30;
on soil and polity, 56
Montmorency, 386
Moors. See _Saracens_
Morals, Greek, 47 _sq._;
Byzantine, 118;
Frankish, 186-87;
English, 395, 433
More, Sir T., 403 _n._, 405, 408
Morgarten, 335
Morin, F., cited, 3 _n._, 118 _n._, 465
Morley, Lord, cited, 66
Mosheim, 265-66, 434
Motley, 291;
on Celts and Teutons, 187, 238, 300 _n._, 304, 307;
on the Reformation, 238;
on Dutch slavery, 295;
on Spain and Holland, 302
Mountjoy, Lord, 440 _n._
Müller, K.O., cited, 130, 131 _n._
Mummius, 110
Murray, Gilbert, 129
Mysteries, religious, 160
Mythology, Greek and Roman, 124, 159 _sq._
Names of abuse, 372
Nantes, Edict of, 321
Napier, Capt., 181
Naples, 195, 204 _n._, 211, 224, 225, 249
Napoleon, 349; Prince, cited, 3 _n._
Narses, 185 _n._, 188, 194
National character. See _Race_
National Debts, 312, 322, 364, 450
Nationality, notion of, 257 _sq._
Navigation Act, 318, 425, 453, 463, 464
Navy, English, 294 _n._, 314;
Spanish, 314;
Dutch, 314
Nerli, 227 _n._
Nero, 186
Netherlands. See _Holland_
Neuchâtel, 347, 349
Newman, F.W., cited, 9
Niebuhr, cited, 11 _n._, 108
Nöldeke, 149 _n._, 151
Normandy, 376, 381
Normans, 191, 211, 375
North, Dudley, 466
Norway, structure of, 269;
political evolution of, 268-69, 274, 277;
religion in, 268-69;
Reformation in, 277;
population in, 282, 284, 285
Oates, Titus, 438
Odoaker, 185, 194
Odour in races, 6
Oebly, 344
Olaf the Lap King, 267:
Tryggvason, 269;
St., 269
Oligarchy, 255
Oman, cited, 117, 118
Orange. See _William of_
Orosius, cited, 186
Ortolan, cited, 10 _n._, 11
Otté, 264 _n._
Otto I, 188, 189, 198, 201
Overton, R., 424 _n._
Padua, 212
Pæderasty in Greece, 103
Painting, Italian, 220-21, 223, 225, 288-89
Pais, Prof., 15
Palermo, 225
Papacy, and Italian disunion, 210, 234-35, 240 _sq._, 253;
and culture, 212, 227, 237;
and slavery, 215;
and trade, 223;
finance of, 223;
and art, 225, 226;
and celibacy, 235;
and Rienzi, 246;
and Florence, 246;
and Divine Right, 440
Paparrigopoulo, 36
Parliaments, 378, 380 _n._, 381
Parma, 216, 240 _n._
Parthian empire, 113
_Paterini_, 220
Patricians, the Roman, 17
Patriotism, 258, 262, 308, 406, 407;
and art, 411
Patterson, W.R., 36, 76
Paul, 118
Paul the Deacon, 270
Pauw, De, 142
Pavia, 199
Pearson, C.H., 74, 378, 380 _n._
Pecock, Bishop, 390
Pedro II, 366
Peele, 411, 412
Peisistratos, 42, 43-4, 137
Pelham, Prof., cited, 10
Pepys, 466
Pequods, the, 433
Pericles, 46, 48, 49, 105, 106, 124
Perrens, F.T., 181, 182, 226 _n._, 227 _n._, 249, 252 _n._
Persia, 113, 115, 125, 156
Pertinax, 87 _n._
Peru, 56, 361
Perugia, 225
Petit, cited, 101
Petronius, 166
Petty, 314, 316, 427, 467
Phaleas, 104
Pheidon, 104
Philip II, 301 _sq._, 309, 311, 312
---- IV, 304, 359, 413
Philip of Macedon, 50-1
Philippus, Lucius Marcus, 21
Philosophy, Greek, 47, 113, 127, 135
Phocas, 115
Phoenicia, 127, 129, 150-51, 159 _n._
Physiology and sociology, 27 _n._, 71
Picton, J.A., 431 _n._
Pignotti, 182
Pindar, 136
Piracy, Cilician, 110;
Algerine, 223;
Scandinavian, 270, 272, 293, 296
Pisa, 178, 205, 211, 224, 225, 226, 231, 237, 242, 248, 252
Pitt, 323
Plato, 50, 102, 109, 127
_Plebs_, the Roman, 9 _sq._, 15, 17 _sq._, 77, 163;
privileges obtained by, 19 and _n._
Pliny the elder, 86, 91
Pluquet, 270
Plutarch, 128, 133 _n._
_Podestà_, the title, 240 _n._
Poetry, Greek, 126;
English during Commonwealth, 421, 439 _n._
Pöhlmann, R., 183
Poisoned weapons, use of, 129
Politics, definition of, 1, 468;
theories of, 52, 62, 104, 233, 448
Pollock, Sir F., 448
Polyandry, 101
Polybius, cited, 103
Polytheism and politics, 266
Pombal, Marquis of, 281 _n._, 358, 363
Pompeius, 110
Pontalis, 292
Popish Plot, 438
Population in Rome, 19, 24, 26, 91;
in Greece, 38 _sq._, 100 _sq._, 111, 117, 172;
in Scandinavia, 270, 273, 329;
in Roman Empire, 172 _sq._, 194;
in Holland, 294, 327, 328-30;
in Switzerland, 339, 348, 352 _sq._;
in Portugal, 329, 358;
in Brazil, 362;
in feudal England, 371 _sq._, 388-90;
in France, 322-23;
in Ireland, 427;
control of, 52, 53
_Populus_, the Roman, 10 _sq._
Portugal, evolution of, 355-68;
exploration by, 221, 356 _sq._;
population in, 329;
finance of, 363, 364
Positivism, 366 _n._
Pott, cited, 9
Poverty in Rome, 17, 19 _sq._, 76 _sq._
(see _Doles_);
in Greece, 39 _sq._, 98;
and culture, 63;
in Scandinavia, 272-73;
in England, 380, 395, 390, 402-403, 404, 405, 434, 462-63, 467;
in Holland, 325, 330
Powell, Prof. York, quoted, 279
Presbyterianism, 398, 410, 417, 444
Priesthoods, 125, 142, 160, 235, 266
Printing, effects of, 221, 226
Privateering, 319 _n._, 323
Procopius, 144
Procter, Colonel, 181, 197 _n._
Progress, 469 _sq._;
European, factors in, 35;
nature of, 54;
in the East, 73, 180
Proletariate, Roman, 17, 80;
Greek, 39 _sq._;
Flemish, 297;
Dutch, 315;
Italian, 244, 247 _sq._;
English, 380, 387, 434, 467
Protection, evocative, 135, 140, 224 _sq._; 283, 314, 315
Provence, 219, 220
Prudentius, 35 _n._
Publilius, 20
Puchta, 12
Pulszky, 398 _n._
Puritanism, 343-46, 418 _sq._; 430 _sq._
Pym, 416
Pythagoreanism, 190 _n._
Quirinus, 9
_Quirites_, the name, 9
Race, theories of, 1 _sq._, 23 _n._, 29, 31, 60, 64, 66, 123,
128 _sq._, 146 _sq._, 158, 183, 190, 193, 209, 233-34, 237,
257, 271, 275-76, 300 _n._, 304, 307, 339, 369, 378;
crosses of, 50, 148, 164, 184, 271, 377;
homogeneity in, 56, 184, 339;
function of, in politics, 70
Raleigh, 314, 466
Ranke, 182, 184 _n._, 198, 450 _n._
Rashdall, Dr., 212 _n._
Rationalism, Greek, 46;
Saracen, 155;
medieval, 220;
modern, 326, 422, 447
Ratzel, 59
Ravenna, 195, 204, 212
Reade, Winwood, cited, 64
Reber, 123
Redskins, civilisation of, 361
Referendum, 351
Reformation, 221, 237;
in Italy, 237 _sq._, 306;
in Spain, 238, 303, 306;
in France, 238, 306;
in Germany, 192, 238, 239, 305-6, 342;
in Holland, 238, 301 _sq._;
in Scandinavia, 276 _sq._;
in Switzerland, 341 _sq._;
in England, 238, 395, 396-98;
in Scotland, 398;
in Iceland, 280
Religion in politics, 70, 177, 265 _sq._;
at Rome, 17, 19 _n._, 159 _sq._;
as substitute for politics, 26 _sq._, 397;
paralysis of intellect by, 61, 237;
and monarchy, 265 _sq._
Rembrandt, 327
Renaissance, 220, 225, 227, 339-40
Renan, 147
Republics, Italian, 183-256
Republicanism, Portuguese, 367-68;
English, 423, 442
Reumont, A. von, 182
Revolutions, South American, 366
Rhodes, 104, 140, 228
Richard II, 387, 390
---- III, 394
Richards, E., 192 _n._
Richelieu, 140, 438
Rienzi, 233, 245-46
Rilliet, 331, 334, 335
Rio-Branco, 362 _n._
Robertson, E.W., on Roman _heredium_, 12
---- W., 303
Rodogast, 185
Roger II, 218
Rogers, Prof. Th., 292;
and economic interpretation of history, 75 _n._;
on trade in sixteenth century, 221-22;
on Holland, 298;
on population in medieval England, 388-89;
on Lollardism, 396 _n._;
on enclosures, 404;
on medieval production of silver, 460
Rolf, 271 _n._
Rome, political evolution of, 4, 8 _sq._, 16 _sq._, 28 _sq._, 67;
early civilisation of, 14, 15;
economic life of, 11 _n._, 75 _sq._;
land system of, 11 _sq._;
effects of war in, 21 _sq._;
bribery in, 22;
army finance in, 25;
Pagan, religion of, 27, 159 _sq._;
and Carthage, 30;
deterioration of, 31 _sq._, 69;
barbarian invasion of, 57, 95-6;
slavery in, 76;
commerce in, 76-77;
finance in, 77 _sq._, 172-73, 175;
doles in, 82;
agriculture in, 76, 79, 82 _sq._;
fever in, 90 _sq._;
confiscation of Pagan revenues in, 90;
collapse of, 92 _sq._;
Church of, 95, 96, 168-69, 204, 206, 209, 212, 214 _sq._, 221, 234,
235, 399;
and Greece, 110 _sq._, 134 _sq._, 158;
law of, 112, 197, 205;
art and letters in, 125, 158, 165 _sq._;
and Lombards, 195;
influence of, on Italian cities, 204;
in thirteenth century, 208;
under Rienzi, 245-46;
German conquest of, 254
Roscoe, 182, 223, 227 _n._
Round, J.H., 378
Rousseau, 349, 449
Royal Society, 444-46
Royalism, 299, 300, 381, 394, 399, 416, 436
Royer-Collard, 2
Rubens, 327
Russia, culture-conditions of, 135, 139-40;
and the Far East, 178
Rutherford, S., 441
Sabines and Romans, 9, 14, 15, 16
_Sacra_, Roman, 9
Sacrifice, human, 129
St. Gall, 346, 349
Saint-Simon, 2 _n._
Salerno, 212
Salimbene, 240 _n._
Salmasius, 441 _n._
Salting, 294
Salvation Army, 28 _n._
Salverte, cited, 5, 56
Salvian, 35 _n._, 119, 214
Samber, 464 _n._
Sappho, 126, 136
Saracens, and Christendom, 69;
and Byzantine trade, 117;
civilisation of, 146 _sq._;
and Italy, 197, 211, 212 _n._;
and Sicily, 219;
and Provence, 219
Savigny, 191, 203
Savonarola, 252
Saviour Gods, 115, 164
Scandinavia, prospects of, 260-61, 285;
evolution of, 264 _sq._;
histories of, 264 _n._;
religion in, 266 _sq._, 272;
population in, 270, 273, 282 _sq._;
social conditions in, 272-73, 278;
Reformation in, 276 _sq._;
separatism in, 275-76, 278;
culture evolution of, 278 _sq._
Schaffhausen, 338, 344, 347
Schanz, 392 _n._, 458
Scherer, H., cited, 222
Schlegel, 413
Schwegler, cited, 10, 12, 13
Schweitzer, 264 _n._, 273 _n._
Schwytz, 332, 333, 337, 338, 344, 347
Science, evolution of, 127, 145 _sq._, 281, 326, 348, 444 _sq._
Scotland, intellectual evolution in, 61, 398, 414 _n._, 456;
union with England, 455-57
Sculpture, evolution of, 125 _sq._, 135, 142, 161, 162
Seebohm, 370 _n._, 388
Seeley, on decadence, 174-75;
on small nations, 259;
on national greatness, 261;
on Holland, 317;
on England and Spain, 433 _n._
Selim I, 222
Semites, evolution of, 67, 146 _sq._
Senate, the Roman, 18, 87, 163
Seneca, 434
Senior, N., cited, 65
Separatism, 132, 209, 231-32, 275, 276, 298, 335, 422
Servius Tullius, 15, 16
Sexes, equality of, 61, 142, 143, 150
Sextus Empiricus, 100
Sforza, 225, 249
Shaftesbury, First Earl, 437 _sq._
---- Third Earl, cited, 5-6, 281 _n._, 449
Shakespeare, 405-7
Sheep farming, 403, 404
Sherborne, Bishop, 449
Shipping, Dutch, 313, 314, 315, 329;
French, 315;
English, 370, 402, 458, 464;
Irish, 453
Shuckburgh, cited, 29, 31, 77
Sicily, taxation of by Rome, 31;
and Saracens, 219;
literature of, 219;
revenue of, 224;
medieval invasions of, 241 _sq._;
Parliament in, 381
Sidney, Algernon, 439, 442, 443
Siena, 220, 225
Silk manufacture, 116, 120, 218, 255
Silver, Greek production of, 105-6;
medieval production of, 460
Simon de Montfort, 378, 381, 382
Simonides, 136
Sismondi, 182, 350;
on the Merovingians, 187;
on the tenth century, 189, 197;
on the Lombards, 195, 198;
on feudalism, 202;
on Italian Republics, 205 _n._;
on Provence, 220 _n._;
on Papal rule, 223;
on despotism and letters, 230;
on Gaultier, 245;
on Italian proletariate, 247;
on the Medici, 249;
on national egoism, 259 _n._
Sixtus V, 223
Slave-trade, Portuguese, 356;
English, 374, 407
Slavery, and civilisation, 62-63, 176-77;
Roman, 23-24, 76, 81, 94, 110, 112-13;
Greek, 39 and _note_, 43, 101, 110, 133 and _note_;
Christian, 118 _sq._, 213 _sq._;
Brazilian, 362, 363, 365;
Scandinavian, 273, 274;
Dutch, 293, 295;
Portuguese, 356, 358;
Swiss, 332;
English, 370-74, 380, 388, 418;
decline of, 213 _sq._
Slavs, 115, 117, 264
Smith, Adam, 59 _n._, 215, 324, 382, 464, 465, 467
Snobbery, national, 261-62
"Social contract," 349, 448
Socialism, 352
Sociology, course of, 60, 147;
in seventeenth century, 316
Socrates, 46, 102, 127
Soleure, 337, 338, 344, 345, 347
Solon, 40 _sq._, 99, 100
Somaliland, 129
Sousa, Alfonso de, 362
Spain, Roman, 23, 24, 80, 92, 173;
Christian, evolution of, 156, 221, 222-23, 305;
Parliament in, 382;
and Portugal, 360-61;
and Italy, 223-24;
and Holland, 301 _sq._;
Inquisition in, 303;
finance of, 311;
and England, 406-7;
prospects of, 156, 260;
stagnation of, 222-23, 230, 311, 361;
industry in, 461;
Gothic, 191;
Saracen, 150 _sq._
Spalding, 136, 181, 224
Sparta, polity of, 51, 98, 101, 103-4, 130 _sq._;
women in, 130 _n._, 142
Spencer, H., 2 _n._
Spiegel, 146 _sq._
Sprat, 444 _sq._
Spreghel, 326
Sprengel, cited, 150
"State," the word, 309
Staley, E., 182
Stephen, King, 377
Stephens, H.M., 355 _n._, 359, 362 _n._
Stilicho, 96, 185
Stoics, 118-19
Strabo, 103
Strafford, 415 _n._, 437, 453
Strife, modes of, 6-7, 70
Struensee, 281
Stubbs, Bishop, on Teutons, 196;
on feudalism, 200, 201;
on Spain and Germany, 305;
on Normans, 375;
on Parliament, 387 _n._;
on Magna Carta, 392;
on English commerce, 403 _n._;
on enclosures, 404
Suarez, 440-41, 450
Sulla, 21, 25, 82, 86, 110
Sumptuary laws, 415
Superstition, Roman, 27;
Greek, 46;
Byzantine, 145;
and natural phenomena, 304
Sweden, structure of, 265;
political evolution of, 267, 274, 275;
religion in, 267;
polygamy in, 272;
slavery in, 274;
population in, 283-84, 329
Switzerland, 260-61;
structure of, 67;
evolution of, 331 _sq._;
histories of, 331;
population in, 339, 352 _sq._;
culture evolution of, 339, 341 _sq._;
Reformation in, 342 _sq._;
modern, 350 _sq._
Sybaris, 39 _n._
Symes, Prof., cited, 389
Symonds, J.A., 182, cited 96, 197 _n._, 210, 224-25, 238;
discussed, 225-32
Synthesis, 5
Syracuse, literature at, 136
Tacitus, 118 _n._, 184
Taine, 1-3
Tanquelin, 306
Tasso, 230
Taxation, Roman, 31, 77, 110;
Athenian, 42;
Byzantine, 119-20;
Moslem, 152;
Dutch, 321 _n._, 322;
English, 395, 404, 415, 416;
Spanish, 223, 300, 311;
Florentine, 251;
Papal, 223;
Venetian, 228;
Scandinavian, 278
Tell, myth of, 334-35
Temple, Sir W., 291, 315, 319, 321 _n._, 324, 449
Testa, 215 _n._
Teuffel, on Roman degeneration, 32-3
Teutomania, 183, 187, 190, 192, 238, 300, 304, 307, 378
Teutonic evolution, 184 _sq._, 306, 340
Tertullian, 441 _n._
Theodoric, 187-88, 191, 194
Theognis, 40
Theresa of Portugal, 355
Thessaly, 132, 133
Thierry, 385 _n._
Thirlwall, 37; cited, 103, 106 _n._, 136 _n._
Thirty Years' War, 460
Three, the number, 8
Thucydides, 45, 49, 128
Thurgau, 338, 346
Ticino, 338, 346, 349
Tocqueville, De, 1 _n._, 62
Toleration, 438, 450
Torquemada, 303
Totila, 187
Traill, H.D., 454
Trench, Bishop, 451 _n._
Trollope, T.A., 181, 236 _n._
Troubadours, 219, 220
Tübingen, 139
Tucker, Dean, 322-23
Turkey, religion in, 154;
prospects of civilisation in, 157, 176, 260;
empire in, 176
Turner, Sharon, 370
Tyndale, 390
Tyranny, effects of, 51, 173;
and art, 135 _sq._;
Greek, 137;
at Florence, 244;
in England, 392 _sq._;
in Scotland, 398
Twysden, 398
Ulster, 454
_Umiliati_, 218, 289 _n._
United States, civilisation of, 88, 119, 365
Universities, 139, 211, 325, 348, 419 _n._
Unterwalden, 332, 333, 337, 338, 344, 347
Urban II, 215
Uri, 332, 333, 337, 338, 342, 344, 347
Usher, 440
Usury, Roman, 76, 78, 79;
Roman legislation against, 20;
in Greece, 39-40;
medieval, 217;
in England, 435
Utopia, 469
Utrecht, 295
Valais, 337, 338, 346, 349
Valentinian, 90, 93
Valla, L., 227
Vandals, 92, 191
Vandyck, 327, 416
Variation, social, 144
Varro, 161 _n._
Vaud, 338, 346, 349, 352
Vaughan, 418
Velasquez, 135, 327, 359, 413
Venice, evocation of art in, 63, 225, 226, 228;
trade of, 120, 222, 228, 293;
rise of, 195, 254;
and Byzantium, 204, 254;
and Turks, 222;
social conditions in, 227-28;
and Florence, 241;
and France, 253;
polity of, 254-55
Verity, Dr. R., cited, 27 _n._
Verres, 32
Vespasian, 166 _n._
Vicente, 359
Vico, 11, 227
Vieusseux, 331
Viglius, 304
Vijnne, 292
Villainage in England, 371 _sq._
Villani, G., 217, 247 _n._
Villari, Prof., 182, 218, 226, 236 _n._
Villemain, 420 _n._, 433
Vinogradoff, 371, 372
Virgil, 165, 166
Viscontis, 241, 245, 246, 248, 249
Visigoths, the, 119, 191
Volney, 34
Voltaire, 59, 349
Vondel, 326
Wagner, 140
Waitz, 200
Walckenaer, 34, 56, 74, 121
Wales, 258, 384
Waller, 421
Walloons, 307
War, persistence of, 6-7;
and democracy, 21, 24, 45, 72;
private, 202, 286, 290;
in medieval Italy, 216, 237;
and class relations, 379-80;
and civilisation, 383, 386;
alleged benefits of, 383
Ward, Lester, 121
Wealth, adventitious, effects of, 59
Weaving, 205, 294
Webster, 413
Wends, the, 266, 272
Wenzelburger, 292
Whigs and Tories, 421 _n._
Whitney, 59-61
Whittaker, T., 52
Whistler, cited, 122
Wiclif, 390
Wicquefort, 309
William of Orange, 301, 308, 309, 318
---- the Conqueror, 376
---- III, 450
Wissowa, 160 _n._
Wittich, 185
Women, status of, 61, 141-42, 143, 150, 151
Woollen trade, 218, 289 _n._, 294, 380, 403, 453, 459
Writing, antiquity of, 160 _n._
Xenophon, 105, 107
Ypres, 296
Zeno, 135
Zimmern, Miss, 289 _n._
Zola, on war, 6
Zschokke, 266 _n._, 331
Zug, 336, 337, 338, 347
Zurich, 336, 337, 338, 339, 342, 343, 344, 345
Zwingli, 342, 343
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